Feminism’s ‘Rape Culture’ Insanity

Posted on | April 29, 2015 | 152 Comments

Does anyone else remember the “Culture War” of the 1990s? Conservatives like Bill Bennett and Robert Bork argued at the time that the decadence of popular culture — as evidenced in everything from gangsta rap to video games to Quentin Tarantino movies — was corrupting morality, inciting violence and sexual perversion. Here we are, two decades later and feminists are saying basically the same thing.

This is part of what the whole “rape culture” discourse is about. Whereas most of us think of rape as a criminal act perpetrated by individuals, feminists want to indict culture — or “misogyny” or “male supremacy” or some other way of blaming larger societal forces beyond the act of the individual rapist. Therefore, feminists now adamantly insist, it’s the way we talk about sex, or the way sex is depicted in advertising, movies and TV shows, which causes rape. So now the Speech Police patrol the Internet, ready to denounce as a “rape apologist” anyone who contradicts the feminist narrative. No one can be permitted to express doubt toward the Scientific Truth of the Feminist-Industrial Complex. After Christina Hoff Sommers spoke at Georgetown University, the student newspaper published an editorial that accused the College Republicans (who hosted Sommers’ lecture) of having “knowingly endorsed a harmful conversation on the serious topic of sexual assault.”

Merely to have a conversation is harmful on the 21st-century campus.

What sort of conversations are students permitted to have? Feminists apparently had no problem with the Foucault-influenced postmodern gibberish spewed by Emma Sulkowicz in a “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” event at Brown University:

“There does not exist a scientific way to prove non-consent. . . . When it comes to sexual violence, scientific proof is impossible. . . . If we use proof in rape cases, we fall into the patterns of rape deniers. . . . When a person claims that their theory is a science, they disqualify other types of knowledge. . . . Let’s change the question from ‘Did she consent that night?’ to ‘Did she have the power to consent that night?’ . . . This is not about physical strength. . . . This is about historical power. . . . Seeing is the origin of interpretation. Interpretation is the origin of knowing. . . . If truth is scientific, then art cannot access truth. But perhaps there is something beyond the truth.”

Uh, “something beyond the truth”? Something we might call a lie?

This is pretty much what Paul Nungesser’s federal lawsuit says: “Emma Sulkowicz Is a Vindictive, Dishonest and Crazy Slut — Allegedly.”

Far be it from me to presume to know what transpired between Nungesser and Sulkowicz on the night of Aug. 27, 2012. She claims he held her down, choked her and forcibly sodomized her. There is no evidence at all to support her claim, however, while Nungesser says that everything between them was consensual and quotes Facebook messages from her that would appear to suggest that Sulkowicz was quite enthusiastic about sodomy (see paragraph 16 on p. 5 of Nungesser’s lawsuit). As for a possible motive for Sulkowicz to lie, Nungesser’s lawsuit offers a credible explanation in paragraphs 30-31, p. 10:

As is evident from Emma’s Facebook messages to Paul during the summer prior to their sophomore year, Emma’s yearning for Paul had become very intense. Emma repeatedly messaged Paul throughout that summer that she loved and missed him. She was quick to inquire whether he was in love with the woman he was seeing abroad.
Thereafter, she continued pursuing him, reiterating that she loved him. However, when Paul did not reciprocate these intense feelings, and instead showed interest in dating other women, Emma became viciously angry.

“Hell hath no fury,” etc. This is an entirely plausible scenario, if you are familiar with a certain kind of high-maintenance young woman — what I call the “Daddy’s Precious Darling” type — who believes herself to be so special that she deserves to have whatever she wants. If Sulkowicz thought her hookups with Nungesser were about love, and if he treated this as just something casual? Yeah, you could see how she would feel herself to be “the woman scorned” and decide to avenge herself by falsely accusing him of rape seven months after the night in question.

Student targeted by anti-rape mattress-carrying protester sues university. http://t.co/uUdNGg0MKK pic.twitter.com/Y6gDJGjyfE

— The Independent (@Independent) April 25, 2015

Starting to come around to the idea that a woman who became famous for carrying a mattress around campus isn't the picture of mental health.

— Jim Treacher (@jtLOL) April 25, 2015

All of that, however, was a preamble to this: Robby Soave at Reason magazine wrote an article with the following headline:

Student Accused of Rape By ‘Mattress Girl’ Sues
Columbia U., Publishes Dozens of Damning Texts

A fair summary of the case, but when it was posted to Tumblr.com, a certain segment of feminist readers went berserk, including one 22-year-old who unleashed this:

Okay, I have something to f–king say about this sh*t, as someone who was raped and isn’t the “ideal” victim.
Like, yes, they had an ongoing sexual relationship.
However, he forced her to have anal sex against her will. Rapist seems to think that previous discussion of anal sex = consent. It is f–king not. You can be having sex with someone and if you start to do something to them they didn’t consent to, that they don’t want, that’s f–king rape.
She still texted him afterward? With “yearning” messages? Oh, wow. I can’t believe real humans who experience emotions are pegging this as evidence that she’s a filthy liar. When you have an established relationship with your rapist, it’s very f–king complicated. I allowed my rapist to torture me for 2½ years. We were dating. I loved him! Maybe, just f–king maybe, this woman continued to care about the man who raped her. That is NOT uncommon at all. And society tells women that when you care about a man, you have to please him. I would send my rapist “sexy” messages because I thought that’s what I had to do to get him to continue caring about me so I wouldn’t have to keep thinking about the rapes and have to cope with it.
f–king f–k all of you, holy f–king SH*T

Do you see the problem here? This anonymous Tumblr blogger says she was tortured by a rapist because she “loved him!”

Maybe I’m hopelessly naïve. Maybe I’ve led a sheltered life.

Maybe the world has changed in the past 30 years, and maybe there are lots of young women who date rapists and let themselves be tortured for 2½ years. “I loved him!”

Or maybe these women are crazy.

Also, maybe, conservatives were right about the Culture War. Maybe raising young people with no religious faith, letting them fill their minds with violence, noise and graphic sex is a bad idea.

Furthermore, the British Independent reported in August 2014:

A study on why teenage heterosexual couples may engage in anal sex has revealed a climate of coercion, with consent and mutuality not always a priority for the boys who are trying to persuade girls into having it.
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine interviewed 130 teenagers aged 16-18 in three sites across the country to “explore expectations, experiences and circumstances of anal sex among young people”.
The qualitative study found that anal heterosex appeared to be “painful, risky and coercive, particularly for women”, while males spoke of being expected to persuade or coerce reluctant partners.
“Anal sex is increasingly prevalent among young people, yet anal intercourse between men and women—although commonly depicted in sexually explicit media—is usually absent from mainstream sexuality education and seems unmentionable in many social contexts,” the study, published on BMJ Open, says.
It found that some young people normalised “coercive, painful and unsafe anal sex,” in an issue that needs to be addressed by health workers and schools in sex education.

Guys: DON’T DO THIS. Stop watching “sexually explicit media” (i.e., porn) and remember that sexual fantasy is called “fantasy” for a reason. All that weird and kinky stuff — especially stuff that is painful, degrading and unsanitary — is not what she wants.

Or if she does want it, she’s probably so crazy you don’t want her.

See paragraph 16 on p. 5 of Nungesser’s lawsuit.

Also, notice the footnote at the bottom of p. 7: Chlamydia.

Feminism and porn are both bad ideas. Butt sex? Bad idea. False rape accusations? Bad idea. You know who likes bad ideas? Crazy women.

Just in case you haven’t been persuaded yet:

A woman diagnosed with herpes at the age of 20 has written an emotional essay about living with the common condition to fight the stigma surrounding it.
Ella Dawson, now 22, said she had never had unprotected sex and thought she “wasn’t the sort of person STDs happened to” when the symptoms first appeared during her time at university in the US.
She found the diagnosis days later devastating, feeling a “tidal wave of shame” hit her in the student health centre. . . .
Six months after being diagnosed, she decided to start telling more people she had herpes to help herself get over the mental block.
Ms Dawson says she never had a negative reaction dropping the “herpes bomb” at parties and in class discussions at the Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

Wesleyan University, annual tuition $47,972. Ella Dawson graduated last year with a bachelor of arts in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a concentration in feminist media analysis.

There is a word for this, and the word is crazy.

"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools …" Romans 1:22 (KJV) https://t.co/cdkP3qkJJV

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) April 29, 2015

 

Comments