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Today’s Red Pen of Justice edition is brought to you by the clueless parvanimity of Neil Macdonald. Mr. Macdonald has many important opinions on Rape Culture and, shockingly enough, they are completely out-to-fucking-lunch-brain-gone-fishing, wrong.
“For people my age, the freedom to get drunk or high and then have sex with someone was a right guaranteed by the sexual revolution of the Sixties.”
Oh!! So you valued have available female fuck-toilets to bang when you were getting crunked in name of peace, luv and rock and roll. Wow, funny how the ‘sexual revolution’ that gave dudes more peentacular access to women is lauded while the current battle for female bodily autonomy and consensual relations is slandered.
One paragraph in and you need a machete to cut through the misogyny. Awesome!
“Heaven knows that much of the world, beginning with Islamic societies, still discourages or forbids such behaviour. Oh, and also Yale University.”
Ah yes, because Islamic religion and Yale are completely the same.
Idiot.
Islam is all about protecting women’s modesty from the phaser-like dick beams that emanate from Islamic men. Women’s bodies drive Islamic men around the jizz-tastic bend (tru-fax!!) therefore its into the gunny sack for Islamic women and most of their rights. No misogyny here, move along, move along please.
Yale is attempting to ensure that people are not unwilling participants in sexual and social encounters within their institution. Here is what the Yale Policy says:
“Sexual activity requires consent, which is defined as positive, unambiguous, and voluntary agreement to engage in specific sexual activity throughout a sexual encounter. Consent cannot be inferred from the absence of a “no”; a clear “yes,” verbal or otherwise, is necessary. Consent to some sexual acts does not imply consent to others, nor does past consent to a given act imply present or future consent. Consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual encounter and can be revoked at any time.
Consent cannot be obtained by threat, coercion, or force. Agreement under such circumstances does not constitute consent.
Consent cannot be obtained from someone who is asleep or otherwise mentally or physically incapacitated, whether due to alcohol, drugs, or some other condition. A person is mentally or physically incapacitated when that person lacks the ability to make or act on considered decisions to engage in sexual activity. Engaging in sexual activity with a person whom you know — or reasonably should know — to be incapacitated constitutes sexual misconduct.”
Whoa. You go Yale! Treating people with bodily autonomy and safeguarding their rights. Let us see what McShitstain, err… Mcdonald thinks about a treating people with dignity and respect…
“A person who is incapacitated by alcohol or drugs cannot by definition consent to sex, and is therefore a rape victim if sex occurs. If both parties are drunk, presumably, it would be up to Yale administrators to decide who was the rapist and who was the victim. This may all sound beyond the realm of common sense, but it is real.”
Do take note and sample the fine airs of special pleading that is happening here. The only case mentioned were both parties are drunk. McShitstain, you and other entitled man-children like you can fuck right off forever. If both parties are drunk then no action between either is predicated by the rules set out. This isn’t rocket science – the default action when consent is in question is to back off and not do anything.
Did you feel that that? As a matter of fact, I felt it – a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of man-bonerz suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
TL;DR – Your entitled man-attitude and fucking stiffy does not trump women’s right to be treated as a human beings. I feel like I’m giving shit-stains a bad name by associating them with you… Onward turd-lord!
“American universities are under serious pressure by federal authorities to do something about the “campus rape culture,” as some call it – 55 U.S. colleges and universities are currently under investigation for failing to protect students from sexual harassment or assault.”
Protecting your students from rape? GTFO! The nerve of some schools trying to provide a safe environment for their students. It must be a communist plot or even worse – a socialist one. And why is protecting students a bad thing? How is a raging sac of bollocks like yourself even allowed near a keyboard when it comes to this issue is completely beyond me.
“Alarmed at the growing perception that they’re becoming havens for rapists, the schools are coming out with codes of sexual behaviour that go far beyond criminal law.”
Good. Good, good, goodly-good. Because the law isn’t doing enough to combat the sexual abuse and harassment in our culture. This is what setting the bar higher looks and feels like – sorry about the bruise on your forehead, asshat.
“Therefore, if a college administrator thinks that you more likely than not violated a lengthy, highly detailed set of sexual rules, you’re not just expelled, you may also be shamed in the media as a sexual predator and stained for life.”
But, but, but, the ‘peen was meant to run FREE! Oh woe! The onerous burden of consent you must really know how Atlas feels eh? The president of Shitistan just called, he wants you to stop ruining his country’s good name…
We are not done with you yet, douche-nozzle in training. How dare you compare the shaming of sexual predators with victims of rape. How the ever loving frack do you do this? Have you discovered some sort of dark energy that requires you to have your head firmly embedded in your ass?
“Presumably, the government has decided that the need to avoid further traumatizing victims trumps an accused’s right to question the accuser. The intent behind all this is laudable. I say that as the father of a daughter who just graduated from university. But what the universities are doing is also frightening, and I say that as the father of a son who is going into his senior year.”
Shorter Douche McAsshat: My male right to a woman’s body is being violated, changing behaviour to make people aware of boundaries and personhood infringes on my right to be a dude.
“Not only are universities all over America substituting their administrators for police and courts, they are attempting, with the best of intentions, to parse and regulate human behaviour down to the least gesture and syllable.”
Overcoming patriarchal constructs is HARD, dipshit. If it was a walk in the park, unlike now because of your whinge-baby-mantrums dressed up as a noble defence of the status-quo keep getting in the way of progress, we’d be over the idea that consent is some sort of weird idea requiring two Rosetta stones and the wisdom of the ancients to decipher.
“[…]”
“Alas, this is not a public debate that encourages critical writing.”
You don’t say.
“After a White House task force declared in April that one in five women on campus has been sexually assaulted, and that only 12 per cent of sexual assaults on campus are reported, Dr. Mark Perry, an economics prof at the University of Michigan, ridiculed Washington’s math by using actual sexual assault figures from three schools.”
Too bad Dr. Mark Perry screwed up the analysis.
“Another key fact Perry’s analysis misses is that colleges only track certain types of sexual assault in their numbers. Typically colleges only report assaults that occurred on campus and/or assaults in which the accused perpetrator was also a student at that university. So, again, we expect the numbers tracked by a university to be smaller than the number of assaults their students actually experience and report to local police.
The take home point is that the number tracked by the college would only be a fraction of the assaults that George and Mark are using as a comparison. The mismatch doesn’t mean the prevalence figures are wrong — it’s that they have compared a select group of cases that are tracked by a university to a wider group of assaults that their students experience and report to local police.”
Whoops – hate to deflate your confirmation bias Neil.
“Conservative commentator George Will, a sober analyst if there ever was one,[…]”
As long as you’re into mostly irrelevant arch-conservative altiloquent drivel. His level of poisonous bullshit is an post unto itself. See the Michigan Chronicle for rebut of his asinine diatribe.
“[…] then cited Perry’s critique in a column, suggesting that colleges, with their extra-legal sexual conduct rules, and their “trigger warnings” about offensive languages in textbooks, and their campus speech codes, are treating students like fragile hothouse flowers, rather than preparing them for the world.”
Ah yes, the real world where, you know, patriarchy and misogyny are the gold standards and you just need to abide by them. Treating Patriarchy as some sort of inevitable force of nature is bullshit Neil, stop it.
“Four U.S. senators promptly blasted Will as an antique who trivializes and legitimizes sexual assault, perpetuating myths created by victimizers.”
See, we do have progress in society.
“There was similar blowback last year, when journalist Emily Yoffe had the temerity to suggest that while sexual assault must be punished young women might also want to avoid getting blind drunk Yoffe quoted Anne Coughlin, a professor at the University of Virginia and an expert on feminist jurisprudence, as saying more or less the same thing. Those who believe there is a rape culture on American campuses have called that “blaming the victim.”
Because blaming the victim totally doesn’t happen… Neil saying shit like this that puts you into multiple facepalm territory, your ignorance is dangerous and you should stop spreading it around.
“But every parent should certainly consider this: If the complications of human sexuality and its often ambiguous mating dance defy consistent definition by the intellectual candlepower of entire university faculties, what advice should you give children who might still be in their teens as they head off to college?”
What, exactly, is ambigious about consent? If you have it great, if you don’t, stop proceedings immediately. If you’re not sure, stop proceedings immediately. My God, the epic complexity of this notion – we need more SCIENCE on this one dudes…
“his would be mine if my son or daughter were ever to ask: If you feel the need for a sexual adventure, seek it off campus, where police have expert investigators and courts guarantee your rights. Due process, in other words.”
Because expert investigators and the courts are always so darn sympathetic to the victims of rape. I have no words for the sheer amount of stupid you’re doling out in your ‘advice’.
“And avoid sex with fellow students, period. It’s just too risky nowadays.”
Because changing the misogynistic ground rules of society is much much much MUCH too hard, so take your balls on go your own way. If this perchance helps exclude your type of thinking from the next generations gene pool, I think we can call your strategy a win for everyone.
RPOJ out.
Nice of Deep Green Resistance to illustrate what Patriarchy is for women.
“Female socialization in patriarchy is a process of psychologically constraining and breaking girls—otherwise known as “grooming”—to create a class of compliant victims. Femininity is a set of behaviors that are, in essence, ritualized submission.
We see nothing in the creation of gender to celebrate or embrace. Patriarchy is a corrupt and brutal arrangement of power, and we want to see it dismantled so that the category of gender no longer exists.
… Patriarchy facilitates the mining of female bodies for the benefit of men – for male sexual gratification, for cheap labor, and for reproduction. To take but one example, there are entire villages in India where all the women only have one kidney. Why? Because their husbands have sold the other one. Gender is not a feeling—it’s a human rights abuse against an entire class of people, “people called women.”
Warning – Crusty Second Wave Analysis ahead :>
OK, let’s say your plane crashes on a desert island, where a mysterious group of Others brings you to a temple. They give you two options: One, you can stay with them and have all your needs met, as long as you wear a little bikini and feed them grapes. If you don’t like that, you can go back out into the jungle. You’ll probably survive, but life won’t be easy; you’ll be cast out from the only society existing on the island, and you’ll miss out on a lot of comforts, and you might get eaten by a polar bear.
One castaway, Claire, has genuinely always wanted to wear a tiny bikini and feed people grapes. She’s hot, she’s maternal: it’s perfect. She still doesn’t really get to make that choice freely, because it’s the only one available that lets her stay in society — when the options are “cake or death,” it doesn’t really matter how much you like cake. But at least she lucked out! She’s not just making the best of a bad situation; she’s actually enjoying it.
Sun, on the other hand, didn’t spend the whole first season becoming self-actualized just to take a job at Dharma Hooters. She flips the Others the bird and goes back out to the jungle, and once she’s there, she joins forces with other jungle-dwellers to destroy the Temple and its unfair restrictions.
Guys, this would be a WAY better show than “Lost” ended up being! But that’s not the point. The point is, it’s not fair for Sun to judge Claire — the problem isn’t her, it’s a society whose main rule is “You must be decorative and servile or be cast out.” Claire’s just trying to get by, and enjoy her luck at actually liking the thing she’s supposed to do anyway.
But if Claire rolls her eyes at poor humorless Sun — “I love wearing bikinis, you buzzkill” — she’s missing the point. Wearing a bikini because you love it is great, but that choice is diminished when it’s the only one available. Making it OK to wear other kinds of clothes and do things besides serve fruit won’t keep Claire from passing out grapes in a bikini, if that’s what she likes. It’ll just mean that she gets to do it solely because she wants to.
The real world, being many times the size of the island and also not magic, is significantly more complicated. But the same basic principles pertain: If there are only a handful of options available to you, then it’s damn fortunate if you like one, but that doesn’t make it OK that there aren’t more. If your favorite pastimes are dieting, getting shiny hair, and having your legs looked at, hallelujah: You will receive plenty of support in doing the things you like best. But liking your limited options doesn’t mean your choice is free. It’s still constrained — you just happen to be lucky.
So you should go ahead and do things that are patriarchy-approved, if you want to.
But don’t fool yourself that you’re doing so of your own unconstrained free will. Until the woman who doesn’t want to be seen as sexually available can go out with certainty that she won’t be harassed or ogled, your choice to turn heads and revel in attention is a privileged one. Until the woman who doesn’t prioritize appearance gets taken just as seriously in just the same contexts, it’s a privileged choice to achieve certain standards of beauty. You may be doing what you love, but you’re also doing what you’re told.
[Source]
Damn women getting all uppity and full of agency, the nerve…
“Men celebrated our sexual liberation — our willingness to freely give and enjoy blow jobs and group sex, our willingness to experiment with anal penetration — but ultimately many males revolted when we stated that our bodies were territories that they could not occupy at will. Men who were ready for female sexual liberation if it meant free pussy, no strings attached, were rarely ready for feminist female sexual agency. This agency gave us the right to say yes to sex, but it also empowered us to say no.”
— bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love
This message brought to you on behalf of entitled, scared men everywhere… (see more on the ‘equality trap’)
I do love my subscription to the OED word of the day mailing list, and metagrobolize is just too good a word to forget; thus I need to use it a bunch and get it implanted into my vocabulary, pardon my logophilia.
I’ve been reading with much more frequency as late definitions of feminism in which the stated goal of feminism is for women to achieve equal rights with men and then, once this goal has been achieved, *poof* the need for feminism is over. It would seem a large proportion of male commentators (and some females as well) believe that we have reached this post-feminist age and women should just STFU already and revel in how damn good it is for them.
I find this analysis of feminism problematic because if focuses on the individual struggle rather that the broader struggle women face as class in patriarchal society. Bell Hooks does an admirable job of describing exactly what is problematic with the focus of much of what liberal feminism is all about.
“Like revolutionaries working to change the lot of colonized people globally, it is necessary for feminist activists to stress that the ability to see and describe one’s own reality is a significant step in the process of self-recovery, but it only a beginning. When women internalized the idea that describing their own woe was synonymous with developing a critical political consciousness, the progress of feminist movement was stalled. Starting form such incomplete perspectives, it is not surprising that theories and strategies were developed that were collectively inadequate and misguided. To correct this inadequacy past analysis we must now encourage women to develop a keen, comprehensive understand of women’s political reality. Broad perspectives can only emerge as we examine both the personal that is political, the politics of society as a whole, and global revolutionary politics.
[…] By repudiating the popular notion that the focus of the feminist movement should be social equality of the sexes and by emphasizing eradication of the cultural basis of group oppression, our own analysis would require an exploration of all aspects of women’s political reality. This would mean that race and class oppression would be recognized as feminist issues with as much relevance as sexism.”
-Bell Hooks: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, p.26-27
The equality trap is quite endemic in liberal feminism, it is easily derailed by dudes into making feminism about them and their problems (many a precious male tear has been shed about specific instances where they happen to get the short end of the stick, thus proving that if you were *really* about equality you would fix this problem too). Past the problem of dudes (MRA’s in particular, whose goal seems only to be a race to sully as many comments sections as possible with their misogyny) that other problem is that much of liberal feminism largely ignores the structural features of society that reinforce, replicate, and promulgate the patriarchal norms of society that what are causing the problems in the first place.
How does one achieve ‘equality’ when the normative features of society intrinsically promote systemic inequality? Ignoring the power gradients and class structure of society in feminist analysis is essentially reinforcing the status quo. Dudes love much of what liberal feminism offers as their power and status in society is not threatened in the very least by much of what liberal feminism advocates. Grrl ‘power’ and exercising your ‘right’ to express your femininity may feel very empowerful as an individual, but does it advance the cause of women as a class (see also much of the dude positive, sex-positive ballyhoo that’s floating around)? This is not intended as a smackdown of any particular brand of feminism because engaging in any sort of feminist activity is in itself a revolutionary act.
However, sometimes a different tool-set is required to identify, undermine. and ultimately smash the toxic patriarchal constructs our society is based on – reading people like Bell Hooks, Gail Dines, Andrea Dworkin are a great place to start.
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The Arbourist
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