Rant of the Week

The Rape Culture

The Pentagon poll defined sexual assault broadly enough to include a slap on the behind-and half of its self-reported victims were men. Cathy Young, Reason.com

It is such a touchy topic.  Why?  Because there is a very well documented history of men dismissing rape as something trivial and victims as complicit.  If a professor or an employer or a soldier was accused, his colleagues and compadres rallied to his defense.  Defense lawyers were allowed to make suggestive forays into a woman's sexual history.  There was a cultural adherence to the idea that it was impossible to rape a truly unwilling woman, and the shame of it all.  In conservative nations today, that attitude yet prevails.

There has been progress, though not enough, on these issues,  But there also been excess, to the point where some feminists openly assert that any woman who claims to have been sexually assaulted should automatically be believed, which, in defiance of the facts, many seem to insist on in the Sinclair case (left).  And yet we continue to have cases where women clearly lied and men have been falsely accused, reputations destroyed, lives upended.  And too often, these lies have been excused and the women or girls who made the false accusations have suffered no consequences.

I am more than a little perplexed by the number of women, including prominent politicians like Kirsten Gillibrand, who continue to insist that the woman in this affair must have been assaulted, no matter what her credibility issues. Some even insist that, whether she was "assaulted" or not, any relationship between two people who have unequal power or authority is inherently abusive. Does this mean that it is impossible that two people in such positions can be mutually attracted to each other or have a mutually consensual relationship?

Or is this all about the adultery? Our moral repugnance at the thought of two adults having consensual sex.

These peoples' jobs, by the way, is to kill people. When pilots recklessly bombed their own (and Canadian) troops in Afghanistan, all was forgiven, even when other soldiers warned them that the target was questionable. When they bombed a wedding by mistake killing more than a dozen old men, women, and children... It was understandable. Boys will be boys. War is hell. And when helicopter pilots murdered a group of civilians in Iraq, including a Reuters reporter: well, you just don't understand the pressures these boys are under. They were just doing their job. We'll give each victim's family 2000 big U.S. dollars. But when two of them touch each other and kiss and bring each other to physical ecstasy? THIS must be stopped.

And when it is revealed that the affair was more than consensual-- well, it can't be consensual, really, because he was her commanding officer. She couldn't possibly have said no, or reported him immediately. She could wait three years (until it became apparent that he was not going to leave his wife for her, and that he had other girlfriends).

One letter writer in the New York Times says: "Excuse me? Wives are raped by their husbands all the time." I'd be curious to know what she means by "all the time".

This is a model of "justice" which essentially works out to this: a woman can start an affair with a superior officer any time she pleases and, no matter how she behaves in this relationship, always retain the option of suddenly deciding that she has been assaulted and forced. She thereby is able to excuse her own behavior, which, under the Military Code of Justice is also illegal (if the sexual partner was married) and destroy her lover, economically, socially, and psychologically.

This is obscene, but it appears to be the standard that Gillibrand and others are demanding.

All Contents Copyright © Bill Van Dyk 2014 All Rights Reserved