St. Louis Post-Dispatch drops George Will from rotation

MisterCreosote · Jun 19, 2014

I believe it can be considered rape, yes.

And I believe a huge part of the problem is that a lot of people put a lot of effort into finding something or someone other than the rapist to blame.

doctorquant · Jun 19, 2014

That the young man mentioned in Will's column even attempted to have sex* -- without getting a clear go-ahead in advance -- was, by the Swarthmore handbook, rape.

More in line with the thread, however, is the question of how long Philadelphia Magazine is going to allow Sandy Hingston to stay on the slut-shaming beat:

http://www.phillymag.com/news/2014/03/24/nations-largest-rape-victim-advocacy-group-sez-rape-culture-duh/

http://www.phillymag.com/news/2014/01/31/football-players-college-sexual-violence-title-ix-temple/

*I'll refresh your memory:

Soon, he was putting his arm around her and taking off her clothes. ‘I basically said, “No, I don’t want to have sex with you.” And then he said, “OK, that’s fine” and stopped.
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doctorquant · Jun 19, 2014

I always liked Megan McArdle until it was pointed out to me that she's a slut-shamer:

Title IX was written just as colleges were emerging from the old “in loco parentis” model, in which they could have parent-like rules about things such as being drunk or alone in your room with a member of the opposite sex. That gave their disciplinary systems the capacity to punish these cases, because even if the victim couldn’t testify as to what had happened, the mere fact that he’d hosted her in his room was against the rules.

I’m not saying that they did prosecute these cases, or did so well: The woman was often blamed for her predicament, the man let off with a slap on the wrist on the grounds that “boys will be boys.” I’m just saying that when in loco parentis was the rule, the Title IX rules made a certain amount of sense. Now they make no sense at all. On the one hand, colleges are supposed to treat their students as full-fledged adults who cannot be told where and when to drink, or with whom they can have sex … but we also want to say that colleges have the responsibility for ensuring that nothing bad ever happens. And that in pursuit of this goal, colleges should punish the accused with the speedy and sometimes arbitrary fiat of parental authority, rather than the ponderous and sometimes unsatisfying protections of due process.

But parental authority can be arbitrary because it is not particularly harsh. Each of us undoubtedly still smarts from some ancient injustice done by a parent or teacher who took the wrong side, but comparatively few of us could say that this permanently altered their lives. Schools are being asked to apply very serious penalties with the weak evidence claims required to send one of two fighting children to their room.

We need to pick one. If college students are children, then the college should have much wider latitude to control and punish their behavior, including taking steps to prevent these assaults, such as requiring students to live in single-sex dorms where no one else is allowed to be and imposing strict consequences for being caught drinking.

This doesn’t strike me as desirable (though perhaps it would, if I had a 19-year-old kid). However effective it might be at preventing assaults, treating women and men like children is not something I want to do. But if students are adults, and the college is not supposed to be in charge of their sex lives, then the correct place to adjudicate sexual crimes is in the courts, not the campus judiciary system.
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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-05-05/rape-on-campus-belongs-in-the-courts

MisterCreosote · Jun 19, 2014

You can create a cogent argument about college-campus jurisdiction without slapping rape victims in the face like George Will did.

doctorquant · Jun 19, 2014

Sheesh, and here's another of these slut-shamers ... at Slate, of all places:

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/10/sexual_assault_and_drinking_teach_women_the_connection.html

Let’s be totally clear: Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes, and they should be brought to justice. But we are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them. Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.

Experts I spoke to who wanted young women to get this information said they were aware of how loaded it has become to give warnings to women about their behavior. “I’m always feeling defensive that my main advice is: ‘Protect yourself. Don’t make yourself vulnerable to the point of losing your cognitive faculties,’ ” says Anne Coughlin, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, who has written on rape and teaches feminist jurisprudence. She adds that by not telling them the truth—that they are responsible for keeping their wits about them—she worries that we are “infantilizing women.”
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When is the media going to clean up its act re: slut-shaming?

doctorquant · Jun 19, 2014

Wondering if we should start a new slut-shaming thread ... might be warranted in the Journalism section ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/opinion/sunday/douthat-rape-and-the-college-brand.html?_r=0

But the modern university’s primary loyalty is not really to liberalism or political correctness or any kind of ideological design: It’s to the school’s brand, status and bottom line. And when something goes badly wrong, or predators run loose — as tends to happen in a world where teens and early-twentysomethings are barely supervised and held to no standard higher than consent — the mask of kindness and community slips, and the face revealed beneath is often bloodless, corporate and intent on self-protection.

I glimpsed this face, and saw it reflected in my friends’ eyes, at various moments of crisis during my own four years in higher education; I doubt that anything has changed for the better in the 12 years since. This seems to be what the anti-rape activists — victims, friends, sympathizers — are reacting against so strongly: the realization that an institution that seemed to make one set of promises had other priorities all along.

That the activists’ moral outrage is justified does not mean, again, that their prescriptions are correct. Their fatal conceit in many cases is the idea that by sweeping away misogyny they can resolve the internal contradictions of social liberalism, and usher in a world where everyone can be libertines together, and a hard-drinking, sexually permissive culture can be experienced identically by male and female, rich and middle class and poor.

This is a utopian, ahistorical vision, and its pursuit is fraught with peril: like many revolutionaries, today’s campus activists might well end up toppling a corrupt order only to install a kind of police state in its stead.

But the regime they’re rebelling against still deserves — richly — to eventually be overthrown.
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MisterCreosote · Jun 19, 2014

That is ridiculous.

A common denominator in these cases is alcohol, often copious amounts, enough to render the young woman incapacitated.
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You know what THE common denominator in EVERY rape case is? A fucking rapist.

But a misplaced fear of blaming the victim has made it somehow unacceptable to warn inexperienced young women that when they get wasted, they are putting themselves in potential peril.
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No one, anywhere, at any time has ever mentioned that getting drunk impairs judgement. :

And, even though it does, bringing that up as a primary factor in sexual assaults once again takes the blame off the assaulter (as if men can't fucking control themselves around drunk vulnerable women).

The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.
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Actually, that's pretty much the textbook definition of blaming the victim.

“I’m not saying a woman is responsible for being sexually victimized,” says Christopher Krebs, one of the authors of that study and others on campus sexual assault. “But when your judgment is compromised, your risk is elevated of having sexual violence perpetrated against you.”
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The old, "I'm not saying ... but ..." routine!

What none of this bullshit you're posting addresses is that part of sexual assault is not just force, but the threat of force, which is omnipresent for women in ways that men simply cannot understand.

Since men cannot understand it, they apparently turn themselves into the "real" victims, or deflect blame elsewhere.

LongTimeListener · Jun 19, 2014

MisterCreosote said:

That is ridiculous.

A common denominator in these cases is alcohol, often copious amounts, enough to render the young woman incapacitated.
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You know what THE common denominator in EVERY rape case is? A fucking rapist.
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You are making an assumption that every one of these cases is a rape, because one side says it is a rape (often many weeks or months after the fact).

Not sure if that's what you believe, but that's how you come off.

MisterCreosote · Jun 19, 2014

LongTimeListener said:

MisterCreosote said:

That is ridiculous.

A common denominator in these cases is alcohol, often copious amounts, enough to render the young woman incapacitated.
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You know what THE common denominator in EVERY rape case is? A fucking rapist.
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You are making an assumption that every one of these cases is a rape, because one side says it is a rape (often many weeks or months after the fact).

Not sure if that's what you believe, but that's how you come off.
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I'm inclined to believe that more often than not because very few rape accusations are dismissed for being false. They're dismissed on technicalities. Also, see my comment above about the THREAT of force.

And, I'm a man. I know how men think, feel and sometimes act. The difference is I can fucking control myself, even if (GASP!) a woman is drunk in my vicinity.

LongTimeListener · Jun 19, 2014

Whew. Well, I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on that.

You're working under an idea of what rape is that I don't think matches the reality from college activists anymore.

BTExpress · Jun 19, 2014

And, even though it does, bringing that up as a primary factor in sexual assaults once again takes the blame off the assaulter (as if men can't fucking control themselves around drunk vulnerable women).
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You know, it is possible for someone to shoulder part of the blame WITHOUT removing it from someone else.

Let's say my kid is an unbuckled passenger in my car and another car runs a red light, slams into us and throws my kid out of the car, killing him. The car who ran the red light IS RESPONSIBLE for the accident. But I'M RESPONSIBLE for my kid's death for not seeing to it that he was buckled up.

MisterCreosote · Jun 19, 2014

Right. We all know car crashes are activities meant to be consensual.

Also, would stricter seat-belt laws get people to stop running red lights?

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St. Louis Post-Dispatch drops George Will from rotation

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St. Louis Post-Dispatch drops George Will from rotation

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