Posted on 12/17/2014 6:04:04 PM PST by Morgana
About a month ago, Rolling Stone Magazine published a savage story that made headlines across North America, detailing a brutal gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. Controversy erupted almost immediately, with the same tiresome lines being trumpeted: Feminists declaring that this assault was evidence of the prevalence of “rape culture,” and conservatives arguing that rape culture didn’t exist. As the UVA rape story began to unravel, feminists got rather shrill, justifiably worried that this could result in other anti-rape measures being taken less serious. Conservatives were a bit triumphant, rather ironically stating that this was another example of moral panic.
I fall somewhere in between these two camps. I’ve both written and lectured on the idea of rape culture, which I believe exists—however, I dodge the campus sexual assault debate altogether, highlighting the fact that pandemic rates of porn addiction combined with the dominance of vicious and violent porn are creating a new rape culture right before our eyes. It’s pretty intuitive: If over 80% of males are looking at porn at least several times monthly, and the vast majority of this porn features the worst verbal and physical abuse and degradation of women, then the result is a culture viewing sexual assault as entertainment.
That said, I generally don’t like the way conservatives deal with the rape culture issue. The tone is often too dismissive: “Okay, there’s not that many rapes. Calm down.” I love conservative commentator George Will, but hated his article on rape culture. I found Nathan Harden’s Sex and God at Yale as well Wendy Shalit’s A Return To Modesty much more even-handed and thoughtful in their approach to the campus sexual assault discussion. However, I’ve found the most recent responses to the debate fascinating.
Mona Charen writes in the conservative National Review :
“We don’t need ‘Jackie’ [the victim in Rolling Stone’s story] to be honest to know that campus rape is real. We have reports throughout the nation, lawsuits, complaints, and word of mouth. One study put the number of sexual assaults at 100,000 a year, which may be high, but good data are elusive for crimes that nearly always entail he said/she said and are accompanied by shame…
For centuries, western civilization recognized that women were vulnerable to sexual violence and abuse. Painstakingly, we erected a complex architecture of mores and laws to protect women from the worst kinds of men. Some of those protections now seem ridiculous — such as the notion that a lady would never permit herself to be alone with a strange man, not even in an elevator. But no one should be surprised that when the guardrails of sexual behavior were swept away in the flood of the sexual revolution, predatory men were handed a golden opportunity. A 2002 study by David Lisak of the University of Massachusetts and Paul Miller of the Brown School of Medicine found that 90 percent of rapes on college campuses are committed by serial offenders. A small percentage of men is committing most of the crimes. There is a rape culture — it’s the hook-up culture that the Left invented and celebrated as liberation. Until it’s reversed, the rapes will continue.”
Bang-on, I think. Hook-up culture and binge drinking are a phenomenally bad mix—especially when you throw the pervasive consumption of violent porn and the idea among campus males that since the Sexual Revolution enabled them to abandon any concept of chivalry, women “play the game” too. What the idea of “hook-up culture” ignores, of course, is any differences between males and females. Ironically, one prominent feminist who has been pointing this out is Camille Paglia, who once compared the trauma of rape to being beaten up, unless “she doesn’t have a proper attitude about sex.” Paglia’s analysis of the campus situation in TIME recently was markedly different:
“Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.
The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.”
Paglia, too, hits on something essential: The secularists have tried to ban the very idea of evil, and instead have found them struggling with manifestations of evil that past generations never had to deal with. They banned all sexual moral codes as antiquated and repressive, and then discovered that those codes served a very essential purpose. Now, they’re attempting to re-impose codes as fast as they can—but instead of it being the built-in idea that men should treat women with respect, and that sex is a beautiful and intimate human experience created for a very specific context, they have to appeal to the reductionist and lack-lustre idea of “consent” as the new standard by which to judge behavior, no matter how repulsive.
In The Weekly Standard, Heather MacDonald tackles that very idea:
Sexual liberation is having a nervous breakdown on college campuses. Conservatives should be cheering on its collapse; instead they sometimes sound as if they want to administer the victim smelling salts…
The ultimate result of the feminists’ crusade may be the same as if they were explicitly calling for a return to sexual modesty: a sharp decrease in casual, drunken sex. There is no downside to this development.
Let us recall the norms which the sexual revolution contemptuously swept away in the 1960s. Males and females were assumed on average to have different needs regarding sex: The omnivorous male sex drive would leap at all available targets, whereas females were more selective, associating sex with love and commitment. The male was expected to channel his desire for sex through the rituals of courtship and a proposal of marriage. A high premium was placed on female chastity and great significance accorded its loss; males, by contrast, were given a virtual free pass to play the sexual field to the extent that they could find or purchase a willing partner. The default setting for premarital sex was “no,” at least for females. Girls could opt out of that default—and many did. But placing the default at “no” meant that a female didn’t have to justify her decision not to have sex with particular reasons each time a male importuned her; individual sexual restraint was backed up by collective values.
And now, campuses are returning to authority-oversight of campus sexual activity, albeit in a flimsy and often ridiculous way. But I think that conservatives should take this opportunity to point out that those who warned against the Sexual Revolution knew this would happen. Instead of dismissing the very idea of rape culture, we should come to terms with the fact that there is a very real possibility that such a thing is developing, the result of our cultural commitment to abandon all restraint—especially on university campuses. University is now about “being true to yourself,” not being true to others, or putting the good of others above yourself, or sacrificing any of your desires. Is it honestly surprising to anyone that sexually carnivorous students, fueled by alcohol and set free by hook-up culture, might engage in sexually predatory behavior?
Our culture no longer has a moral code, and as we witness the destruction and collapse that were always sure to result from that, we should be sure to point out why this happened—and point to those long abandoned virtues of chastity and modesty and restraint. After all, if we dusted them off and began to create more than a culture of consented-to-casual-fluid-swaps, but a culture of respect and self-sacrificing love and the beauty that results from that—then we might finally see something that could be referred to as “progress.”
Good for her. She’s a teenager who thinks for herself.
“Rape Culture” Think Bill Clinton and there you have the reason why everyone thinks it’s OK
“Before I allow my daughter to go to college, I will first google “party colleges”.”
I’ll save you the trouble on this one. ASU. Forget that one.
You may think that was a lie dreamed up by some radical feminist but that is not true. There is a lot of rape on college campuses today.
Go to Annapolis or to one of our other service academies. I happen to know some at Annapolis. There is a lot of rape that happens there.
Daughter of Doomonyou went to Biola in So Cal.
She wasn't raped. The students sign a contract that includes "no drinking."
Granted, I don't know if any girls/women were raped there but she had a great college experience without getting hammered every weekend.
ahahaha No EVERYWHERE!!...more bogus settled science...ya know
Nah. It’s true. The pervasiveness of wanton sex permeates colleges.
My daughter lives with two girls and one of the them has been sexually assaulted.
Why shouldn’t a guy grab a girl’s breasts? It works in porn.
And yet I will wager that 95% of all parents on this site have no problem will sending their kids away to live at the school of their choice. Parents are sending their kids into a major battle for their souls/lives/bodies with no care at all.
I know what I did in college, and now, as an older adult with children, I can recognize that I would have been better off without many of the experiences I had. I feel for our kids today and our country which promotes such lewd behavior.
I only pray that the so called Christians of this country decide that enough is enough and that they will counsel their children to not “go off” to college.
Signed,
A fuddy duddy Daddy.
I read something recently which detailed how they came up with the 20% number. If I recall correctly, it was based on a few hundred women completing a survey from two colleges. Two.
Among other things was that all of the things they detailed were considered “rape”. Things like an unwanted kiss on the cheek, a guy fondling a woman while her clothes were on, touching her arm, as well as oral sex and vaginal intercourse. It included as rape when a girl became intoxicated, but wasn’t unconscious.
Then the results were multiplied to cover certain aspects, like students didn’t go to college year-round, so they doubled the number so it would be a “yearly” number. Then they multiplied by 5, because many kids these days are graduating in 5 years time, instead of 4. So the “researchers” used different ways of manipulating their data to make it seem like “rapes” are happening to practically every girl attending college.
It’s a dishonest number. When you reduce it back to their initial findings, it was about 2% or less for actual rape.
“Get thee to a nunnery. Go” —Hamlet
You’re going to have to provide better stats than what radical feminists and liberals provide.
Yes, there’s lots of sex, but rape is something different.
Excellent article.
I would first and foremost google city-data.com and check the demographics of the town where the school is located.
Sexual Assault isn’t necessarily rape. It can be other forms.
My comment was based on students at a large urban campus. The first thing the freshmen learn is never put their drink down. BTW - their drink could be ginger ale but it’s still likely to be tampered with if they set it down.
Talk to any LEO in a big college town, especially where there are a lot of foreign students, e.g., middle eastern. Sexual assault is common and it’s not just he said, she said. Exception: if you are a parent of a student talking to the campus police you won’t get the real statistics.
Re Annapolis, first hand report from a high level admiral whose child went to Annapolis. It’s a problem there as well as at the other service academies. His child wasn’t assaulted (they wouldn’t dare if they wanted a career in the Navy) but her good friend was.
Decent men find it difficult to believe stories about rape on campus. Rape is something they would never do and can’t imagine what kind of mind-set would allow it.
By the way, I'm a college grad myself. But I was not a frat member nor did I frequent bars to entice coeds into squalid sex orgies. After classes were over, I was too busy either studying or working. The college I went to had an enrollment of over ten thousand. If rape or sexual assault was a common event on campus, you can bet I would have heard about it.
You'll have to come up with solid facts to support your statements. Anecdotal evidence is just that...anecdotal.
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