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:
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.”
Damned if you do, damned if you don't:
Guys being polite to women is "rape culture," too.
https://t.co/G9ePUS53NX pic.twitter.com/Lnh7jpqZrw
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) January 13, 2016
Footnote on p. 192 pretty much tells you what feminist ideology is about. https://t.co/G9ePURNspn pic.twitter.com/bqilFEKHA3
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) January 13, 2016
Heterosexuality is now just a social construct created to oppress women (and all female mammals apparently) pic.twitter.com/RqaMivkCMY
— Þe Political Hat (@ThePoliticalHat) January 13, 2016
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.
So @azbrodsky admits the phony "campus rape epidemic" hysteria is really about politics? https://t.co/xSWybmsYzb pic.twitter.com/Q8T4McR5nQ
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) January 13, 2016
To a feminist like @azbrodsky, everything men do is "rape culture." When a man breathes, he's raping the sky. @ak4mc
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) January 13, 2016
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”).
What Bernie Sanders doesn't get about Title IX: https://t.co/457z48DJRk pic.twitter.com/xYcfo9lNMM
— Libby Nelson (@libbyanelson) January 12, 2016
It cannot be repeated often enough:
NEVER TALK TO A COLLEGE GIRL.
Warn your sons, America. #FeminismIsCancer
@DateOffCampus @libbyanelson
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) January 13, 2016
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.
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