George Will Loses The Plot, Ctd

A reader goes out on a limb:

Never have I been more grateful for your anonymous reader-contributor policy …

George Will is wrong in many of the ways people are saying, but he does have a point that no one wants to really face: the power to silence other potential participants in a discussion is a privilege and a powerful one. In our post-Civil Rights era culture, grievance is the optimal position to be in while in argument. Victimhood is desirable when it allows you to win the narrative.

I am not saying this privilege is worth being raped for and that people are intentionally getting raped to win their arguments about gender, but given how often people are silenced by the victimhood of their verbal sparring partner (maybe I see it more because I live in liberal California?), I see why Will had this thought.

I’ll go further:

the story he excerpts, at least in excerpt form, doesn’t sound like rape. The guy is being an asshole for not respecting his recent ex’s wishes but she ultimately cooperated. It’s shitty, yes. It should be discouraged, yes. But “rape”? The point Marcotte and many bloggers make is that it doesn’thave to be “forcible” to be rape; even the absence of consent is rape. Well, okay yes but don’t be surprised when people stop taking “rape” as seriously when it is no longer defined as physically forcing yourself on someone.  I think that’s also one of Will’s two or three somewhat valid points amidst his mountain of old-school BS: the self-proclaimed fighters-of-rape-culture want us to conflate these more ambiguous “absence of consent” situations with the more conventional understanding of rape as a forcing of oneself on another. I think that’s probably a legitimate goal but I don’t think Will is out of line for calling folks on it.

The fact that there are men who are falsely accused of rape doesn’t “cancel out” that women are raped but when one considers the intense fear many men have of being falsely accused of rape, one starts to understand the origins of Will’s thinking as more than just enforcing patriarchy.

I have more on this in the form of anecdote, but I think I’ll wait to see where the discussion goes before I share it.

Another voices a very different view:

Hook-up culture IS rape culture.

There is no place on Earth more progressive than Swarthmore. Every far-left piety is accepted without question, much less criticism. (You’d think that students would be challenged with contrary views to help them burnish their intellectual armor so that when they left Swarthmore they’d be equipped to grapple with people who disagree with them, but you’d be mistaken). “White Male Privilege” means that white guys are automatically wrong, “Rape Culture” is Serious You Guys, and sex is only consensual if the woman has no regrets about it. If under these conditions, women are still getting raped – and not by the College Republicans or Future Patriarchs of America, but by members in good standing of the Privileged-Oppressed Alliance – then the fundamental underpinnings of the college model are completed fuçked, and need to be scrapped.

You want to see “Rape Culture”? Take hundreds of 17 to 22 year-olds, remove them from their parents, give them unrestricted and unsupervised access to alcohol and each other’s bodies, tell them that they’re mature enough to handle adult choices, and teach them that there’s no virtue in sexual restraint. Sprinkle some talk about condoms and consent, and send them back to their coed dorms. THAT is “Rape Culture.” Women are going to get raped, because many eighteen-year-old men aren’t mature enough to understand what “no” means or manage their urges, and many 18-year-old women aren’t mature enough to spot red flags. For all practical purposes, Hookup Culture IS Rape Culture.

You want to get serious about preventing rape? Single-sex dorms, no visitors after ten, doors ajar when there are visitors, room checks by RAs, consumption of alcohol banned, sexual contact beyond first base punished by warning, then formal reprimand, then suspension, then explusion. Yeah, college will be less fun. But you’ll learn more, and there’s no chance that progressive, sensitive, feminist men will ever rape you in your dorm room.

Things may change at Swarthmore. I hope rape victims get better support, because it does sound like the administration’s first instinct has been to wish the problem away when confronted with a rape allegation. (That goes for allegations that are fatuous on their faces; it’s not up to some dean to decide). Regardless, my advice to a relative or friend attending Swarthmore would be to walk down the hill to the police station, and not to trust a system designed to adjudicate academic offenses to competently handle criminal offenses.

But they’re not going to adopt my idea. In loco parentis isn’t coming back, because Swarthmore would never dream of telling eighteen-year-olds who were smart enough to be admitted that they don’t know everything (this being a campus where the prevailing belief is that someone who holds the same position on same-sex marriage that Barack Obama did until May of 2012 is too bigoted to be allowed to speak), or that they’re not yet mature enough to manage decisions about what goes into or comes out of their pelvises.