Imagine that there were a “terrible and alarming trend” of sexual violence on college campuses against female students. Imagine that 20 percent of college women were victims of rape or attempted rape — a rate of sexual assault astronomically higher than anything seen in America’s most violent cities (in Detroit, for example, there were 36.8 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants in 2009, a rate of 0.037 percent). If 18-year-old girls were in fact walking into such a grotesque maelstrom of sexual violence when they first picked up their dormitory room key, parents and students alike would have demanded a radical restructuring of college life years ago. There would have been a huge surge in all-girls colleges to protect female students from these outrageous levels of sexual violence; those colleges that did still admit boys and girls together would have been forced to prove to worried parents that the boys they were admitting were not rapists — perhaps allowing parents to interview these aspiring monks before they were accepted. Just to be on the safe side, administrators would provide round-the-clock protection for their female students.
Instead, over the last decade or so, the proportion of female students in co-ed colleges has skyrocketed, so that there are now more girls than boys in most of the nation’s co-ed schools. Parents relentlessly push their daughters into the most prestigious schools they can get into; competition among female students to enroll in co-ed colleges has never been higher. None of those girls demand bodyguards as a condition of acceptance; instead, their parents feel fortunate to cough up tens of thousands of dollars a year to keep their daughters on campus, where they are free to boogie through as many drunken frat parties as they can before passing out from overinhalation of Kahlua and Crème.
Advertisement
And yet, according to Vice President Joe Biden, the Justice Department, and the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, college is in fact a nightmarish gauntlet of sexual violence and abuse. “There is a terrible and alarming trend in the country of sexual violence [on campuses],” Russlynn H. Ali, assistant secretary of education, told the New York Times. Ali’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating Yale for maintaining a “sexually hostile environment.” Somehow that sexually hostile environment did not discourage thousands of the country’s most academically gifted females from beating down the doors to get in; the acceptance rate at Yale this year was 7.35 percent, the lowest rate ever.
The White House claims that one in five female students has been victims of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault while at college. Such bogus statistics have been the mainstay of campus-rape-epidemic propaganda for years. They are generated by a variety of clever techniques, but the most important is this: The survey-taker, rather than the female respondent, decides whether the latter has been raped or not. When you ask the girls directly whether they view themselves as victims of rape, the answer overwhelmingly comes in: No.
Biden has just announced more college red tape on the laughable ground that schools ignore sexual violence. In fact, virtually every campus has a robust sexual-violence bureaucracy which sits idle, waiting for the shell-shocked casualties of rape to crawl through their doors. The victims never come — because they don’t exist. But pressure from the feds will undoubtedly give those lonely college rape counselors further clout to push for increased funding, even as schools cut their German and Latin programs for lack of money. Meanwhile, the parallel campus sex bureaucracy — the Sex Toy Dispensary and Good Vibe Advice Office — continues to do record business, while the occasional professor even offers live XXX shows.
Here is the reality on campuses, which the free-love baby-boomer college deans and provosts will never acknowledge: The sexual revolution and the disappearance of adult moral authority on campus have resulted in a booze-filled sexual free-for-all, in which testosterone-charged boys act boorishly, and the girls compete to match them in reckless promiscuity. (Only disrespect for “diversity” causes the deans and provosts to exercise any moral oversight over their students.) Yes, there are plenty of drunken hook-ups that result in the proverbial “roll and scream”: “You roll over the next morning so horrified at what you find next to you that you scream,” as Laura Sessions Stepp reported in Unhooked. A small percentage of those next-day regretters view themselves as having been raped; most think that they acted stupidly and irresponsibly.
There are a few, simple antidotes to the alleged campus-rape crisis: Don’t drink yourself blotto. Don’t get into bed with one of your fellow drunken revelers. Keep your clothes on. If every girl practiced those elementary rules, poor Ms. Ali might be out of a well-paying government job.
As the author probably knows, in the most famous study on campus rape, some ridiculously high percentage of women who were reported as having been raped subsequently had consensual relations with the same guy. That's a heck of a way to begin a relationship!
Th feminist movement of earlier decades certainly liberated women from their chains. Now they drink like guppies, dress like prostitutes, and and say yes to anything that talks. Way to go.
This is a lie that has been out there for a very long time. Like the gender pay gap (brought up by Obama several weeks ago), it is feminist claptrap that has no basis in reality or fact. It's only purpose is to demonize men, and white men in particular. (Does anyone remember the Duke lax case?) Such misinformation is like a go to club for the left when nothing else in the bag is working. It's not enough just to pit black against white, Arab against Jew, poor against rich, young against old, but even woman against man. But Obama's a uniter, right?
I doubt that the VP has that correct facts, yet somehow I believe it is probably true. But the hypocrites from the left have never stood up for strong moral values. That's not only the politicians, but the parents they have brainwashed who pass it on to their kids. Oh yes, perhaps vocally the politicians have voiced their moral values, but never in their vote. So of course the country has it's "moral compass" and young men and women have little compunction in this matter. But then, it has now begun in middle school.
I have an even simpler solution that would pretty much end r-word if the statistics are true.
Currently 18 million women 18-24 are enrolled in college in the US. According to the statistics 1 in 5 will be r-wordd while there or 1 in 20 every year.
That means every year 900,000 women in college are r-wordd at college.
FBI crime statistics for r-words are 102,000 forcible r-words in 2009.
Thus even if reporting rates are 10% nearly 90% of r-words are of women in college. At the more common 16% reporting rate half again more college women are r-wordd then women are r-wordd.
If we have even half this correlation in any other thing the course would be obvious: we'd end the correlating activity in hopes of ending the undesirable activity.
So, end r-word. Keep women out of college. It's the logical outcome of the numbers.
For those saying keep men out of college, men went to college forever without r-word levels hitting this high. It's only when we introduced more women that the problem arose.
I teach my son that "no" means "no." That "maybe" means "no." That everything means "no" except an unequivocal "yes" plus the passage of sufficient time for contemplation and verification of the initial answer.
This is the worst article I have ever read. I am disgusted by your ignorance. Quit blaming the victim. Only YES means consent, even if you are naked and drunk in bed together. Come on!!!
This nonsense was going on back when I was in college, in the early 90s. I'd hoped it died out by now. I went to a small liberal arts college in the midwest that had hardly any crime, but after dark, campus safety officers walked coeds a couple hundred yards from the library to their dorms. The odds of a guy leaping out of the bushes with a knife were about the same as the odds of being struck by a meteor, but no matter: the administration was determined to combat "rape." They simply refused to notice that every single complaint of rape on campus came from coeds who passed out in a frat house. The administration could have cracked down on alcohol on campus, but that probably would have led to have the students transferring, so let's just step up security patrols and call it a day. Sounds like nothing's changed.
@MikeB: You forgot the ability to create a retroactive 'no'.
Teach your son every time he touches or approaches a woman regardless of what she says at the time if she regrets it she can claim she said 'no' and the entire educational-industrial complex will back her.
"Here is the reality on campuses, which the free-love baby-boomer college deans and provosts will never acknowledge: The s****l revolution and the disappearance of adult moral authority on campus have resulted in a booze-filled s****l free-for-all, in which testosterone-charged boys act boorishly, and the girls compete to match them in reckless" promiscuity.
**************
Yes, if we could only just get back to the wholesome, monochrome goodness of the Eisenhower epoch....
Then again, maybe MacDonald's account of "reality" is an utter parody.
Davisc, You are right: it doesn't mean they deserve it. But it certainly will ensure that more of them experience it. Drinking a quart of whiskey and careening down the Interstate doesn't mean you deserve to get in a fiery auto accident, but it sure increases the likelihood. The smarter types avoid the dangerous situation.
HerbN hits it right on the head. The problem isn't ignoring "no", it's the morning after "no". I had a buddy caught up in one of those when I was in school. The standard for the male in such a case is guilty until proven innocent, and even then he's probably guilty, so let's get right to the punishment phase.
I would be willing to bet that the author does not blame the victim in true rape cases. I would also be willing to bet that she believes that No means No. However, that is not the point of the article. The point of the article seemed to be that those who have something riding on a higher rape statistic are those who are "collecting" those statistics: that the wording of the questions and the answer coding requirements are suspicious at best, and are most likely purposely misleading. The statistics, the stats-keepers, and those who make their living from these stats are culpable for inflated numbers.
Those young women who are forcibly raped- drunk, naked, or otherwise - deserve our support. But as long as no one is sure who they really are, or where they are really occurring, how can we help them????
Ms. MacDonald's column is as evidence-free as she claims Vice President Biden's claim is.
I'm always a bit baffled by our national tendency to focus bizarrely on the goings-on on campus (and it doesn't seem to matter whether the campus is public or private). There are 18-22 year-olds risking life and limb in the military and others holding down jobs and taking care of families.
But we constantly get atwitter over the fate, lifestyle, exposures and actions of one of the most coddled groups in American society: the 18-22 year-old who is attending college and spending much of his free time on campus.
Bart,
Excellent comment, but you missed one point. "One of the most coddled groups in American society: the 18-22 year-old who is attending college and spending much of his free time on campus."
Its the 18-TWENTY FIVE year old.
Then when they finally leave school with a degree in some non-subject and can't land their choice of 80k jobs, they move in with Mom & Dad for a few more years. No one understands that knowing how to have fun and having a lot of self esteem is not a marketable skill.
I have a suggestion: a real ban on drinking especially since so many college students are under the age of 21. I keep hearing of keg parties and the colleges encouraging them. Stop the drinking! And make it clear that health services is not a branch of Planned Parenthood.
