The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Courtesy Is Now ‘Rape Culture’

Posted on | January 13, 2016 | 89 Comments

In an astounding leap of feminist logic, Berkeley law student Courtney Fraser condemns chivalry as “benevolent sexism,” blaming “sexual violence against women” on “the perpetuation of rape culture, which normalizes this violence.” Of course, “the age of chivalry is gone,” as Edmund Burke observed in 1790, but feminists are fiercely determined to eradicate whatever vestiges of the “unbought grace of life” yet remain. Men’s obligation of courtesy toward women is patriarchal oppression, and any sense a man may have of a duty to protect women against insult or injury must be abolished, Ms. Fraser insists:

“[R]ape culture, or the complex of images and ideologies
in society that normalize sexual violence,
depends on chivalry for its existence. More precisely,
it depends on the attendant ideologies that place women
on a pedestal and strip them of agency in the process.”

This assertion is perhaps as startling to most readers in the 21st century as it would have been to Edmund Burke more than 200 years ago, but this is where feminist ideology must inevitably lead. The pursuit of radical “equality” requires lunatic madness, and everyone who climbs aboard the feminist bandwagon must understand that the movement’s ultimate destination is Bedlam.

What is perhaps most interesting in Ms. Fraser’s argument is her sources. Her first cited source is Susan Griffin, whose 1971 article “Rape: The All-American Crime” was first published in the radical journal Ramparts. A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Griffin portrayed rape as a political crime — a manifestation of women’s oppression under the sexist regime of male supremacy — and asserted that “rape and the fear of rape are a daily part of every woman’s consciousness.” To support her claim that “forcible rape is the most frequently committed violent crime in America today,” Griffin engaged in what has since become a well-known feminist tactic, statistical creativity:

In 1968, 31,060 rapes were reported. According to the FBI and independent criminologists, however, to approach accuracy this figure must be multiplied by a factor of ten to compensate for the fact that most rapes are not reported; when these compensatory mathematics are used, there are more rapes committed than aggravated assaults and homicides.

The use of this kind of “compensatory mathematics” to exaggerate the prevalence of rape is necessary to the feminist project of blaming all men for “violence against women.” Feminists employ a deceptive rhetoric that generalizes responsibility, so that wrongdoing is always blamed on a collective group (males) rather than on the individual. While this collectivist worldview amounts to an unjust accusation against law-abiding males, it also simultaneously empowers feminists to assert their authority to speak as victims of collective oppression.

“Women are an oppressed class. . . .
“We identify the agents of our oppression as men. . . . All men have oppressed women.”
— Redstockings, 1969

Feminism divides humanity into two groups — men (the oppressors) and women (the oppressed) — and thereby establishes a double-standard wherein no woman is ever responsible for her failures or disappointments, and everything men say or do is condemned as tainted by “male supremacy.” A critical student of feminist discourse notices their use of jargon terms (“sexism,” “misogyny,” “objectification,” “patriarchy,” etc.) all of which are more or less interchangeable synonyms, pejorative ways of labeling the ordinary behavior of normal men. Any man who admires a woman’s beauty is a sexist who has objectified her with the male gaze, according to feminist ideology, so that men are subject to denunciation merely for looking at women.

A key function of this rhetoric is to allow extraordinary privileged women to assert that they are actually victims of oppression. We are not surprised to learn, for example, that Courtney Fraser is an alumna of Reed College (annual tuition, $47,760) and that at this elite private college in Oregon, Ms. Fraser majored in linguistics and wrote her senior thesis on the “Construction of Gender in Instant Messaging.” Learning how to pursue social justice is a very expensive endeavor, and the secret ingredient of feminist ideology is Daddy’s money.

Among the sources cited in Ms. Fraser’s anti-chivalry treatise, in addition to Susan Griffin (from Rape: The Politics of Consciousness, 1978), are Sandra Lee Bartky (from The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, a Women’s Studies textbook edited by Rose Weitz and Samantha Kwan) and bell hooks’ notorious anti-male treatise deceptively titled Feminism Is for Everybody. Ms. Fraser also cites such eminent “Second Wave” feminists as Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, 1970), Susan Brownmiller (Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, 1975), Andrea Dworkin (Pornography: Men Possessing Women, 1981) and Catharine MacKinnon’s 1989 Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.

However, the work most often cited by Ms. Fraser is Judith Butler’s 2004 book Undoing Gender. Professor Butler is the leading proponent of feminist gender theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — and one gathers that Ms. Fraser’s plan to end “rape culture” is simply to eliminate all differences between men and women. She contends (p. 141) that “gender norms, and the rigid binary division of gender, must be broken down if the rates at which rape is committed and acquitted are to decrease.” Ms. Fraser claims (p. 190) that Professor Butler’s writing on butch/femme lesbian roles “presents a compelling argument that identities that queer the gender or sexuality paradigm have the potential, if legitimized, to undermine  the hegemony of the normative status quo.” In a footnote (p. 145), Ms. Fraser laments “cultural narratives and stereotypes . . . based largely on heteronormative and cisgender categories and relationships,” and she finally concludes (p. 203):

Feminist advocates should seek to shape the law to accommodate and protect those with nonnormative genders and sexualities — not only as an end in itself, but as a means of delegitimizing the gender-based norms that support rape culture through destabilizing gender in the first instance.

Feminism Is Queer, as Professor Mimi Marinucci says, and Ms. Fraser’s insistence that “gender-based norms . . . support rape culture” reflects the anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology now taught in university Women’s Studies programs. Feminism promotes an attitude of sexual paranoia (“Fear and Loathing of the Penis”) which reflects a belief that heterosexual intercourse is so inherently harmful that no woman should ever consent to participate in it. Feminists argue that “heterosexuality as an institution and an ideology is a cornerstone of male supremacy” (to quote Professor Charlotte Bunch), that “men have forced women into heterosexuality in order to exploit them” (to quote Professor Celia Kitzinger), that “patriarchal domination” is based on “the coercive power of compulsory heterosexuality” (to quote Professor Stevi Jackson) and, to quote a popular Women’s Studies textbook by Oregon State University professors Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee, “Heterosexism is maintained by the illusion that heterosexuality is the norm.”

In the 21st century, it would be considered an insult to accuse a feminist of heterosexuality. One notes the use of first-person plural pronouns in a 2013 comment Courtney Fraser wrote at an Oregon newspaper’s website in support of same-sex marriage, as well as Ms. Fraser’s use of the phrase “us queer folks” in a blog post about the 2013 Windsor decision. We may take this as signifying Ms. Fraser’s refusal to participate in “the normative status quo” of “heteronormative and cisgender categories and relationships.” While her non-participation in heterosexuality is entirely her own private choice, however, who is Courtney Fraser to present herself as an authority fit to pass judgment on the choices of those who do participate in heterosexuality? That is to say, why must the rest of us be lectured in this manner by a law school student who proclaims that chivalry is the cause of “rape culture,” which Ms. Fraser proposes to eliminate by “destabilizing gender”? And speaking of insane feminists obsessed with rape, Alexandra Brodsky (Yale Law, Class of 2016) is angry at Democrat Bernie Sanders for saying this:

“Rape and assault is rape and assault. Whether it takes place on campus or on a dark street. And if a student rapes a fellow student, that has got to be understood to be a very serious crime. It has got to get outside of the school and have a police investigation. And that has to take place. Too many schools are seeing this as well it’s a student issue, let’s deal with it. I disagree with that. It is a crime and it has to be treated as a serious crime. And you are seeing now the real horror of many women who have been assaulted or raped, sitting in a classroom alongside somebody who raped them. Rape is a very, very serious crime and it has to be prosecuted. It has to be dealt with.”

What’s wrong with that? Well, campus rape is a “civil rights issue,” Ms. Brodsky says: “To treat gender violence as only a crime is to give up on the project of campus sex equality.” This is why Ms. Brodsky and other feminists demand the use of campus Title IX proceedings — where accused students are denied due-process rights that would be guaranteed to any common criminal in a court of law — to punish males based upon the mere accusation of sexual misconduct. More than 100 male students have filed lawsuits against universities, claiming they were falsely accused and unjustly punished in these campus kangaroo courts.

Ms. Brodsky and her feminist comrades have used a non-existent “rape epidemic” to incite a climate of sexual hysteria, which has resulted in male students being expelled from universities because of accusations that are not only unsubstantiated, but actually contradicted by evidence and testimony. The kind of “campus equality” Ms. Brodsky advocates turns out to mean that heterosexuality is effectively criminalized on college campuses, because no male student can ever be certain that the girl who says “yes” tonight won’t change her mind tomorrow and accuse him of rape (because “regret equals rape”).

Feminism is a totalitarian movement that promotes anti-male hate propaganda in law, in politics, in media and especially in education. No honest person could support such a movement, which is why “feminist” has become a synonym for liar.




 

Category: Sex Trouble

Comments

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  • Steve Skubinna

    Apparently the patriarchy is an oppressive institution devoted to the perpetuation of the human species.

    Those bastards!

  • DeadMessenger

    Honestly, I think it’s just that people don’t really care anymore. Not just about this, and not only women, but everyone. Stuff happens in DC every…single…day, that in the not-so-distant past, would’ve resulted in prosecutions at the very least, but now…..[crickets chirping].

    Is it that people are now too stupid and/or complacent to realize that when bad stuff happens, you have to literally MAKE it stop, ’cause evil ain’t gonna stop on it’s own? I don’t know, but it seems culturally and globally pervasive, and I think it’s only going to get worse until Jesus comes back.

  • DeadMessenger

    The majority of the “nice” boys just didn’t want to hear the griping. Then when the teacher was not around, they made up for their lack of prior rowdiness in spades. I knew lots of boys in school like this, and some of them could be big bullies.

  • DeadMessenger

    True, that.

  • DeadMessenger

    Agree 100%.

  • DukeLax

    lol

  • Benschachar

    “One reason feminists seldom criticize the notorious misogyny of gay male culture…”
    Really? I would like to know more if you could send a link.

  • RS

    Well, it certainly consists of a typical Leftist/Progressive belief that all human interaction is zero-sum. What benefits me is a detriment to you and vice versa.

    Ms. Fraser also seems to suffer from the delusion that, by definition, all social structures of whatever nature need to be deconstructed in favor of some mythical state of perfection the composition of which is left unspecified.

    Consider: She rails against “chivalry” and claims it is somehow a necessary condition, or at least a sufficient condition, for a so-called “rape culture.” If we assume there is something called “rape culture,” and if we further assume that “chivalry” only moderates male behavior, how does its elimination aid females? Indeed, try treating a female employee just like “one of the boys” and see how that works out. My guess would be a trip to H.R. if one is lucky or a trip to the unemployment line, either of which would happen at the speed of light. Or, in keeping with the current campus rape-a-thon meme, how does removing taboos on taking advantage of drunk girls facilitate the feminists’ desired end result.

    We can thus conclude Ms. Fraser is either a) incredibly stupid or b) disingenuous or c) a combination of both. Most likely it is the latter, as these feministas have been steeped in the idea that life is all about attaining and maintaining power, (see “zero-sum” discussion above) and feminism seeks arbitrary power over males in all circumstances.

  • concern00

    I have always tried to eschew the use of a qualifier, such as heterosexual, when describing sex. To me there is sex, and then there are other perverse things people chose to do with their genitals.

  • robertstacymccain

    If all of us evil men are oppressors, how did we ever let the wimminfolks ever go to college or publish blogs or vote?

    Our patriarchal ancestors made these mistakes — let women vote? what were they thinking? — and we are forced to deal with the tragic consequences. By the way, have I mentioned lately that Barack Obama in 2012 won by the largest “gender gap” Gallup has ever recorded? If you analyze the exit polls, you find that the key demographic for Obama was unmarried college-educated women under 40. Analyze enough election data, and you realize that without feminism — including the “Killing Babies Is a Human Right” crowd — the Democrat Party would never have elected a president in the past 40 years.

  • Matt_SE

    Don’t worry, as soon as the feminist Marxists get word to him he’ll reverse his position.

  • Ilion

    I don’t think it’s that people are too stupid to realize this about evil. I think it’s that they think they can work evil to their own advantage.

  • Ilion

    What? A link to one of the non-existent feminist critiques of the “notorious misogyny of gay male culture”? or a link to the “notorious misogyny of gay male culture”?
    Hell! Just watch some publically available gay-themed movies, and I don’t mean overt pornography.

  • Ilion

    Exactly.
    A sex act is open to the possibility of procreation, as that is the telos of sex.

    Acts that aren’t even in principle capable of engendering a new human being are not sex acts.

  • Valerie Stewart

    Correct.

    What baffles me sometimes is some people (I.e., proglibs) can’t grasp the connection between the normalization of perverted acts (mainly via corrupt media/pornography) and the increasing perversion in personal relationships: the proliferation of Tinder, prostitution, pornography addiction, unwanted pregnancies, and the like.

    But of course, they blame it on conservatives or The Patriarchy, when they should really be blaming themselves for condoning such immorality.

  • Valerie Stewart

    Letting women vote was not a mistake; letting the proglibs infest academia and the expansion of public schools in the 60s were.

  • concern00

    I am continually surprised with how the MSM discusses and promotes Tinder, Grindr et al, as though that were simply dating apps and not enablers of mass perversion.

  • Valerie Stewart

    Also, the implication that sex is little more than a fun, good hobby.

    I visited a scientific proglib blog once, and one commenter tried to justify promiscuity by stating that the brain is hardwired for sex and that the reward stimulus is often too powerful to resist.

    But wait a minute: isn’t that all the more reason to learn impulse control and abstain from sex until marriage?

  • concern00

    “…too powerful to resist.”

    Yet another catch cry of the progressives. This is just a euphemism for a total lack of any restraint, responsibility or self control.

  • Valerie Stewart

    Also, super lazy parenting.

    “Oh, those teenagers; they’re going to do it anyway. Might as well put them on birth control … That they’ll forget or don’t want to take, because they think that unwanted pregnancies or STDs can’t happen to them.”

    Might as well teach them how to not get caught from academic cheating or how to hide a drug-induced high, by that logic.

  • Joe Guelph

    And bear in mind, folks: this is not some rainbow-haired teenaged Tumblrina having an angst-attack and demanding validation from her similarly immature peers. This insanity is courtesy of a J.D. candidate, and was published in the official journal of one of the most respected law schools in the country.

  • Fail Burton

    One of the oddest things about this cult is the fact its own oddity protects it. Basically no one who opposes gay feminism reads their mail so to speak, they’re just seeing the bizarre end games of safe spaces and gender issues. They don’t like it but they’re not sure of exactly what it is or where it came from.

    Third Wave Feminism as currently constituted within its infiltration into the mainstream is so insane that if you try and explain it to someone coming in cold to the subject they think it’s you who are odd, even if they are on your side.

    Much of this is the laziness of journalists in doing research, most of it is the understandable reluctance of the mainstream public to read the insane and obscure foundational texts of Third Wave Feminism and connect the dots to Title IX and “diversity” extortion rackets.

  • Benschachar

    the notorious misogyny part

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  • Quartermaster

    Telos? Such words you use. 🙂

  • Quartermaster

    Except among hymenoptera. There the big girl things.

  • Quartermaster

    Part of the White Man’s burden was teaching rape culture to world. It was, evidently, the good part of colonialism.

  • Quartermaster

    “Duty is the most sublime word in the English language.”
    – Robert E. Lee, General, CSA

  • Quartermaster

    Boys will be boys. That’s just how it is.

  • Ilion

    … and those pretentious italics, too!

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  • Quartermaster

    Next thing you’ll be doing is bolding them too!

  • Quartermaster

    Can’t they just hold their breath or something?

  • Quartermaster

    Google is owned by useful idiots. They point to the definitions they like, and leave the truth aside for the diligent to discover.

  • Quartermaster

    Somewhere I have a comic of two cavemen and one cavewoman. One caveman points to the woman and says to the other caveman, “I’m going to teach her to speak. What harm can it do?”

  • Quartermaster

    It was Women’s Suffrage that led to those things. With it, it is inevitable.

  • Valerie Stewart

    It was only inevitable because of the proglibs infesting not only academia, but also the MSM in the 60s and 70s.

    If common sense conservatives had owned the MSM for 60+ years, radfeminism would be known as the hate-filled insanity as it is.

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  • Lord Indra

    “A woman is primarily a reproductive cell-organism, a womb structurally embastioned by a protective, defensive, osseous network; and surrounded with the antennae and blood vessels, necessary for supplying nutriment to the growing ovum or embryo. Sexualism and maternity dominate the lives of all true women.To such an extent is this so, that they have little time left(or inclination) to ‘think’ and therefore they’ve never been fitted ab-initio with reasoning organs.”

    – Ragnar Redbeard, Might is Right

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