Now that I have only three columns left before my contract with Fairfax Media runs out, I had better use them to raise important issues. These columns won't be much fun, I'm afraid. The issues they deal with are important and unpleasant. This, the first of the three, deals with rape. Rape and the law of rape are issues I have dealt with regularly over 40 years. My position, though often misunderstood and consequently refined and restated, has never changed. The very concept of rape is mediaeval and misogynist; sexual outrages are inflicted on males and females, on children and on elders. There is no justification in ethics or in common sense for elevating unwanted penile-vaginal penetration to the status of the gravest of all sexual offences.

Rape, as historically defined, can only be committed by insertion of a penis into the vagina, that is, by a male on a female. Semantically ''rape'' is descended from the Latin verb ''rapere'', to carry off. The word ''rapt'' still means ''carried away''.

The word ''rapine'' refers to the forcible seizure and removal of goods, chattels or animals from their rightful owner. The rapist commits a crime not against the woman whose vagina he penetrates but against the men who own her, be they male kin or her husband; in prosecuting him, the patriarchal state represents their rights in her.

She is merely exhibit A, which is why her credibility has to be challenged by the person defending the alleged rapist. If the female victim betrayed her menfolk by conniving with her rapist, she was guilty of an offence against them.

Now that rape is thought to be an offence against the woman herself, the issue has become hopelessly confused. The problem is to establish whether or not the victim consented, when the only person who can know this is the victim herself. Men have been acquitted of rape because they were too drunk to perceive whether or not the woman was consenting, which is clearly ridiculous. The victim's clothes, her demeanour, her past history, the setting, all are mined to show evidence of consent. Evidence of violent constraint is usually taken to be evidence of withholding of consent, even after women have been softened up for sadistic interaction by having their brains beaten into Fifty Shades of Grey.