Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts. – Christopher Lasch
Every freethinking woman has heard some form of it: “You’re setting the cause of women’s rights back a century”. I’ve heard it upon getting boyfriends’ coffee for them, letting it be known that I was a stripper or escort, being seen with a Camille Paglia book in my hand, etc. But as with so many pronouncements deriving from belief rather than from logic, it’s exactly backward; it’s the neofeminists and their stooges who have set women on course for a return to Victorian paternalism by enshrining in law the principle that women are delicate, innocent, asexual little flowers who must be protected from beastly men and their carnal lusts at all costs. “Mandatory prosecution” laws deny a woman’s right to decide whether to press charges on an abusive husband, on the grounds that she can’t be trusted to make the “right” decision. The “Swedish model” denies that women can consciously choose to have sex for reasons other than lust, loneliness or childish fantasies of romance, and establishes men as women’s moral superiors by holding them liable for women’s actions. Women who deny being coerced, raped, abused, “trafficked” or whatever by men are said to be suffering from “false consciousness”, the neologism for “weak-mindedness”. And though majority-male legislatures and government agencies enact these policies, it’s women who propose them in the first place and then lobby tirelessly for their implementation.
And now, thanks to lawyers on the lookout for new sources of blood, American universities are being forced to implement the male-crushing schemes of neofeminists via threat of ruinous lawsuits and the loss of government funds on which nearly all of them depend. And when given the choice between senselessly destroying a young man’s academic career and losing money, I don’t need to tell you what they’ll do every time. Consider this article from Philadelphia magazine:
U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Russlynn Ali…[has] disseminated a…letter to all colleges and universities that receive federal aid—which is all but two in the country—detailing how they’re required to combat [what Ali calls “a terrible, alarming trend of campus sexual violence”]…While women’s rights advocates have lauded Ali…a quieter groundswell of protest has charged her with trampling on the rights of young men accused of sexual assault…deans say she’s stripped their ability to deal with delicate he-said-she-said cases in fairer, more nuanced ways…[and her] guidelines impose a paralyzing “nanny state” on…campuses…across the country. At precisely the time in their lives when young men and women should be exploring what sexuality means, the new rules choke off their freedom, limit their choices, and encourage the canard that all males are unrepentant predators. What’s more, they position women as helpless victims who require bureaucratic protection from those males—victims with no responsibility for their own behavior. Heaven help those women when they graduate.
Those who read my column of July 25th will no doubt recognize this as the same “campus rape crisis” hysteria that’s been aggressively marketed by radical feminists since the 1980s, complete with bogus statistics and support from Joe Biden. But while the government was previously content to throw money at what dispassionate observers recognize as a fairly rare problem, now schools will be required to expel young men on the basis of evidence too flimsy to convict them in court:
…consent [as defined by Ali] has to be active, not passive. And [a man] has to get [clear verbal] consent every time he wants to move up another base—a policy first instituted at Ohio’s Antioch College in the early 1990s…“If you want to take her blouse off, you have to ask. If you want to touch her breast, you have to ask. If you want to move your hand down to her genitals, you have to ask. If you want to put your finger inside her, you have to ask.” Reaction to Antioch’s policy…was wildly derisive; eventually, the college closed down. The policy, however…lives on all over the country…even [if a man has] no way of telling…[how much a woman has been drinking it is] his responsibility to determine if she [is] “incapacitated” [because]…if she [is], any fondling they [do], no matter how great her zeal, [is] sexual assault. She doesn’t even have to lodge a complaint; the college has to investigate if…[a witness] sees her…and suspects she’s drunk…and then there’s the new…requirement that has raised the most alarm among civil libertarians: the lowering of the evidentiary standard to that used in civil-rights litigation…a “preponderance of the evidence” is now all that’s required…not the more familiar “beyond a reasonable doubt” of criminal cases or the intermediary “clear and convincing evidence” standard many schools used to employ…Samantha Harris, of the…Foundation for Individual Rights in Education…says the new standard violates accused students’ due process rights…the Supreme Court’s precedents demonstrate that evidentiary standards should be higher, not lower, when so much is at stake, as FIRE argued in a lengthy letter to…Ali. “We’re not sending these students to prison…but…they’re found guilty of serious criminal offenses.” Perpetrators are subject to expulsion, which affects their employment and social prospects…Why don’t colleges just turn sexual assault cases over to police to prosecute? Because there’s rarely enough evidence to convict in a real court of law.
…the 2007 Justice Department report…researchers didn’t ask the 5,446 female students who took their online survey if they’d been sexually assaulted. They decided for the young women, who…were deemed too ignorant to know…when researchers asked the young women themselves if they considered what happened to them “rape,” three-quarters… didn’t. Only three percent said they’d experienced physical or psychological harm. Only two percent reported what happened to campus security or police. Asked why they hadn’t, the women said they didn’t consider the incident serious enough (66 percent) and/or that it wasn’t clear a crime or harm was intended (36 percent). Half said they themselves were partially or fully responsible for what had happened…But the fact that the victims didn’t think of themselves as victims, [university risk management consultant Brett] Sokolow says, misses the point: “They have to learn to say, ‘This is something that was done to me’”…I tell Sokolow that if [my college-age daughter] got drunk and had sex with someone, I’d jolly well expect her to take responsibility. He isn’t buying it: “She should have the right to strip naked and run through the streets and be unmolested. She didn’t make that happen; the molester did.”
This is the catechism being preached to young American women: You are NEVER responsible for your own actions. No matter how irresponsibly you act, no matter what you say to or do with a man, if someone later convinces you that you were “assaulted”, or if “authorities” rule that you were despite your protests, then you are a helpless, powerless victim without adult agency or volition, no better than an infant. Heaven help them, indeed.
One Year Ago Today
“A Whore in the Bedroom” explores the implications of my philosophy that “When one has a living creature under one’s care, it is one’s responsibility to take care of that creature’s needs, or else to arrange for someone else to do so. And if you shirk that responsibility, you only have yourself to blame for the inevitable and foreseeable consequences.”