If there is no objective reality in our brave new post-modernist world, then rape is whatever women say it is. At least, that’s the current PC line.
If a woman has sex with a man and regrets it, that’s rape. If a woman is ambivalent at the time but yields because it’s the path of least resistance, that’s rape. If a woman is thinking “no” but doesn’t say it, that’s rape. The “yes means yes” law that was recently passed in California is such an obviously dreadful idea that I feel a sense of exhaustion even contemplating writing about it.
This is what the sexual revolution plus feminism hath wrought: Puritans and Victorians were Bacchanalian revelers compared with sex on the modern campus, where it might soon be necessary to bring a pair of lawyers into the room every time a couple wants to engage in a little hanky-panky (even the word “hanky-panky” is way too frivolous for these grim killjoys).
That anyone can continue to have sex at all under these circumstances, so fraught with peril (particularly for the young male), is a testament to the strength of the sexual urge in the young. No wonder a lot of men have decided to forego real live women and deal with computers or sex dolls.
The PC feminist/leftist forces behind this seem to want it both ways. Woman are strong, independent, responsible. There’s nothing they can’t do. But they are weak, susceptible to the slightest pressure, and not responsible for their own decisions where sex is concerned.
Remember those strange Virginia Slim cigarette ads of the late 60s/early 70s that featured the slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby”?
The phrase perfectly encapsulates the contradiction inherent in modern feminism. It congratulates the woman on her supposed progress from the bad old days of dependence, and yet it infantilizes her by calling her “baby.” Of course, there are other ironies as well, including the fact that independence is defined as the right to smoke cigarettes, and the modern woman in the ad is featured because of her beauty.
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I wrote the above post before I had read this article by Emily Yoffe in Slate. It is both disturbing and essential reading, describing how very far colleges now go to deprive the accused of his rights in their kangaroo court proceedings, and how the current federal government has pushed hard for this.
The following excerpt describes what’s happening at Harvard, but it could be anywhere:
More than two dozen Harvard Law School professors recently wrote a statement protesting the university’s new rules for handling sexual assault claims. “Harvard has adopted procedures for deciding cases of alleged sexual misconduct which lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process,” they wrote. The professors note that the new rules call for a Title IX compliance officer who will be in charge of “investigation, prosecution, fact-finding, and appellate review.” Under the new system, there will be no hearing for the accused, and thus no opportunity to question witnesses and mount a defense. Harvard University, the professors wrote, is “jettisoning balance and fairness in the rush to appease certain federal administrative officials.” But to push back against Department of Education edicts means potentially putting a school’s federal funding in jeopardy, and no college, not even Harvard, the country’s richest, is willing to do that…
Much of what’s happening on campuses today regarding the handling of sexual assault is due to the rise of a small, once-obscure arm of the federal government. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights dictates to colleges the procedures they must follow in regard to campus sexual complaints.* It also examines schools for violations of Title IX, the law that forbids discrimination in education on the basis of sex. In recent years, OCR has used Title IX, best known for tackling imbalances in athletics, as a tool to address sexual violence. When OCR issues findings against a school, if the school declines to admit wrongdoing, the office has the power, as yet unexercised, to essentially shut the school down.
I’ve been concerned about campus rape accusations for many years now as I’ve watched the situation worsen. After the accused men in the Duke rape case were exonerated in 2007, I wrote a post describing how the situation constitutes an “overcorrection” (the same word Yoffe uses in her current article), and a dangerous overcorrection at that:
I’m all for female freedom. But the checks and balances of the society in which I was raised, restrictive and limiting though they undoubtedly were, kept the behavior of most of us more reasonable. In other words, we learned the art of self-protection and even something known as good judgment, all in all not bad things to learn in this imperfect world.
Because the law isn’t able to prevent all bad things from happening. It can only try to punish the perpetrator after the fact, and that doesn’t mend a broken life or repair a deep trauma.
And sometimes, it doesn’t even punish the guilty. Sometimes the law affords an opportunity to ruin the reputations of the innocent.
In this case, justice triumphed and has exonerated the lacrosse players, although not early enough to have spared them and their families terrible suffering. And perhaps it will even discourage future false accusations if this woman’s name is made public.
There’s no easy solution to these problems. We can’t go back to the days of the three feet on the floor of the public rooms of the unisex dorms, much less the duenna. All of this would be on a continuum where, somewhere down the line, we might end up with the chador and purdah. In the end, the only thing to do is to try to teach young people good judgment, and try to balance the law so that both accuser and accused are protected from the twin evils of blaming the victim and false prosecution.
Over seven years have passed since I wrote those words, and the scales have tipped even further in the direction of favoring the accuser and depriving the accused of due process (at least, in the extra-judicial proceedings on college campuses), and false accusations certainly do not seem to have been discouraged. And why on earth would they be, if the mantra “accusers almost never lie” is repeatedly chanted?
Here’s another quote from the Yoffe article, discussing one professor’s reaction to the fact that some accused men are beginning to fight back with lawsuits:
Caroline Heldman, an associate professor of politics at Occidental College and co-founder of End Rape on Campus, said of the men who are turning to the courts, “These lawsuits are an incredible display of entitlement, the same entitlement that drove them to rape.”
Professor Heldman is an incredible display of the tyrannical totalitarian impulse, alive and well and living on the American campus today.
Read the whole Yoffe article; it’s much too long to summarize. It will chill your blood. One can only conclude that the Salem witch trials are back, but the penalty this time is not death; it’s merely the destruction of a young man’s future.
[Hat tip: Commenter Mrs Whatsit.]
