St. Louis Post-Dispatch drops George Will from rotation

[LongTimeListener]

I am not at liberty to say why.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/06/18/3450722/st-louis-post-dispatch-drops-george-will-rape-victims/

 

[MisterCreosote]

 

[RickStain]

Because pro-rape.

 

[Joe Williams]

Haven't read the offending column but have been unable to avoid the shrill reactions to it.
People are kidding themselves if they think there hasn't been a vast broadening in the definition of "sexual assault," especially on college campuses, where there is a veritable war-on-men taking place.
Our culture does elevate victimhood on multiple fronts, too.
Turn the page, people. Change the channel. Chocolate vs. vanilla and all. Choice.
Squelching voices is not tolerant.

 

[MisterCreosote]

Increases in rape reporting are part of The War on Men? Now I've heard it all.

 

[cranberry]

Haven't read the offending column but have been unable to avoid the shrill reactions to it.
People are kidding themselves if they think there hasn't been a vast broadening in the definition of "sexual assault," especially on college campuses, where there is a veritable war-on-men taking place.
Our culture does elevate victimhood on multiple fronts, too.
Turn the page, people. Change the channel. Chocolate vs. vanilla and all. Choice.
Squelching voices is not tolerant.

Sweet ****ing Jesus.

In what way has the definition of sexual assault been vastly broadened? Victims should turn the page? War on Men? Really?

Will and others are suggesting that by offering improved support and services to female students who have been sexually assaulted we are elevating victimhood to a privileged, coveted status. It's basically reverse **** shaming.

 

[MisterCreosote]

It'd be nice if men retaliated to "The War on Men" by waging their own war on misogynistic scumbag would-be rapists instead of would-be victims.

 

[Dyno]

It'd be nice if men retaliated to "The War on Men" by waging their own war on misogynistic scumbag would-be rapists instead of would-be victims.

Duh. Bros before hos.

 

[LongTimeListener]

In what way has the definition of rape been vastly broadened?

Without getting into the Will column specifically, this is happening for sure. Here is a Philly Mag follow-up piece on the Swarthmore incident at the heart of Will's column.

http://www.phillymag.com/news/2014/04/28/sexual-assault-campus-rape-swarthmore/#disqus_thread

It talks to the lawyer who has been at the vanguard of the new policing of sexual-assault claims (victim's advocate type). Here's what he said (not necessarily about Swarthmore case but about the pattern):

Okay, so I’m all fired up again. In the last two weeks, I’ve worked on five cases all involving drunken hook-ups on college campuses. In each case, the male accused of sexual misconduct was found responsible. In each case, I thought the college got it completely wrong. … Some boards and panels still can’t tell the difference between drunk sex and a policy violation. … Surely, every drunken hook-up is not a punishable offense. … ”

And here's the student handbook:

Relying on non-verbal communication can lead to misunderstandings. Consent may not be inferred from silence, passivity, lack of resistance, or lack of an active response alone. A person who does not physically resist or verbally refuse sexual activity is not necessarily giving consent.

That sounds like a vastly broadened definition of rape -- she doesn't say "no," she just doesn't have a whole lot of enthusiasm toward "yes."

That link is a good one.

 

[Michael_ Gee]

If there's a bigger waste of space and money in newspapers than syndicated op-ed columns, I don't know of it.

 

[MisterCreosote]

Maybe the definition is being broadened because the vast majority of accusations deemed "unfounded" are found to be so due to inconsistent legal definitions (one might even say "loopholes") rather than false accusations.

 

[LongTimeListener]

Maybe the definition is being broadened because the vast majority of accusations deemed "unfounded" are found to be so due to inconsistent legal definitions (one might even say "loopholes") rather than false accusations.

Do you agree with the Swarthmore handbook that it can/should be considered rape when a woman passively goes along with sex?

 

[MisterCreosote]

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.

 

[User 11148]

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 ****-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.

 

[User 11148]

I always liked Megan McArdle until it was pointed out to me that she's a ****-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.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-05-05/rape-on-campus-belongs-in-the-courts

 

[MisterCreosote]

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

 

[User 11148]

Sheesh, and here's another of these ****-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.”

When is the media going to clean up its act re: ****-shaming?

 

[User 11148]

Wondering if we should start a new ****-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.

 

[MisterCreosote]

That is ridiculous.

A common denominator in these cases is alcohol, often copious amounts, enough to render the young woman incapacitated.

You know what THE common denominator in EVERY rape case is? A ****ing 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.

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 ****ing 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.

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.”

The old, "I'm not saying ... but ..." routine!

What none of this bull**** 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]

That is ridiculous.

A common denominator in these cases is alcohol, often copious amounts, enough to render the young woman incapacitated.

You know what THE common denominator in EVERY rape case is? A ****ing rapist.

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.