Summary: America’s colleges are petri dishes in which the Left brews viruses to release into America, and indoctrinates young people into becoming their carriers. Here is a look into the cutting edge innovations of the West’s social justice warriors to fight the campus “rape culture.” Reconstructing romance in 21st C America, without spontaneity but heavy on procedures and regulations.
Ezra Klein asked for it and the market delivers: tools to make fears of sexual assault — and false reporting of sexual assault — normal aspects of life in America, starting with our campuses.
“We Consent” – An app suite for the modern college woman
“…We-Consent records students agreeing to sexual activity. A breathy female voice with a British accent asks the user to ‘say the name of the person with whom you would like to have sexual relations.’ Then the app announces to the other person, that so-and-so ‘would like to have sexual relations with you’ and asks for consent. If all goes well, the app ends with the sultry female voice announcing, ‘Have Fun!’
— “Curbing Sexual Assault Becomes Big Business On Campus” by Toia Smith at NPR. About the rapidly growing industry of courses and sex-restraint tools to help young people.
See these descriptions of the We-Consent apps, perhaps soon to be soon the iPhone of every feminist co-ed. It’s something for men to consider before asking them out (or accepting their invitations). Click to enlarge.
If the answer is “no”, there is another app to record that.
An if things go badly — days, weeks, or months later — then a woman can push a button and sent the guy to Title IX hell.
What is rape?
Women’s Studies texts make fascinating reading, so journalists see that the public does not learn about them. But we have feminist leaders’ statements to see the origins of what women are taught in college.
”Perhaps the wrong of rape has proven so difficult to articulate because the unquestionable starting point has been that rape is definable as distinct from intercourse, when for women it is difficult to distinguish them under conditions of male dominance.”
— “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence” by Catharine A. MacKinnon (Prof of Law, U MI; bio) in Signs, Summer 1983. Open copy here.
“Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.”
— From MacKinnon’s Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law(1987).
(1987).“Compare victims’ reports of rape with women’s reports of sex. They look a lot alike. …the major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it.”
— From MacKinnon’s “Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: ‘Pleasure under Patriarchy’” in Ethics, January 1989. Open copy here.
“Asking whether or not a victim is telling the truth is irrelevant. It’s just not important if they are telling the truth.”
— Sophie Hess, general manager of the Oberlin College radio station WOBC. Source here.
A common element of the odder stories about campus sexual assault accusations is that the accusation has been made after she attended a women’s studies class of some kind. In these the definition of “assault” is broadened beyond any commonplace sense of the term — and women are trained to consider themselves victims. And even “survivors” of life in a patriarchal society with its rape culture.
A woman must always be prepared to be sexually assaulted
“{Nancy} Schwartzman is the CEO of Tech 4 Good, the tiny three-person startup behind Circle of 6, an app that makes it easy for users to choose six trusted friends who they can automatically alert in the event of an emergency. Users preprogram their contacts into the app, and with the press of a button, the app will automatically text those contacts. Users can choose a text that asks members of their circle to come get them, to call them, or to give them advice. The app also connects users to national rape support lines.
“Now, the startup is in the process of rolling out custom apps for colleges, which Schwartzman refers to as ‘petri dishes’ for sexual assault.” {From Wired.}
For the low-tech woman: paper consent forms
.
Affirmative Consent =
“Yes Means Yes.”
The Affirmative Consent Project produces a
consent game changer: the Consent Conscious Kit.
About the campus rape epidemic and rape culture
There is no reliable evidence that the rate of rape has increased; still less that there is a “rape epidemic” or “rape culture”. The long-term data suggests the rate of rape has decreased by ~one-third since its peak in the 1990s (see recent numbers for colleges).
Prosecution of rape has certainly been handled poorly in many areas, no surprise given our dysfunctional criminal justice system. Why expect rape to be handled better than other crimes?
For details see It’s time to forcibly re-shape America to fight the campus rape epidemic! Even if it’s fake.
Looking to the future
How might this play out in America? The damage to people’s live in the next generation might be severe. But let’s consider the broad social trends.
This might result in a return to some forms of traditional morality and behavior. Already sexual activity by teens has decreased. People do respond to incentives (always a surprise after gurus loudly deny the possibility), and casual sex might become perceived as too risky for many men and women — men fearing a woman they barely know getting pissed off and pushing a button to cast them into the campus kangaroo courts, women fearing every man as a potential Jekyll and Hyde rapist. Especially as increasing rates of obesity decreases the pool of potential partners.
More broadly, this might poison the always potentially fraught relations between men and women. Perhaps both will widen the distance between them. Early meetings conducted only in public places (no rooms with closed doors); even better with a third person present. Conversations more guarded, least something inappropriate said to prompt a complaint to the campus or corporate HR Stasi. Relationships bloom more slowly, only when trust overcomes fear.
Or there might be a counter-revolution. African-Americans discovered this. After generations of slow progress, activists’ claims shifted from justice to seeking advantages. This reached an extreme with advocacy for reparations (e.g., Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article in the The Atlantic, June 2014), and then outright folly as Black Lives Matters defended criminals (often with long records of violence) who had attacked police. This helped create the resurgence of white racism (endemic in America since the Founding).
Might a counter-revolution start a rollback of feminism? We can only attempt to understand current events and guess about what strange future lies ahead for America.
Understanding the big picture
For a larger perspective, in Closing of the American Mind
…Now we have arrived at one of the ultimate acts in our drama, the informing and reforming of our most intimate private lives by our principles. Sex and its consequences …have finally become the theme of the national project, and here the problem of nature, always present but always repressed in the reconstruction of man demanded by freedom and equality, becomes insistent. …
… {Feminism} ends, as do many modern movements that seek abstract justice, in forgetting nature and using force to refashion human beings to secure that justice. …Just as smoking and drinking overcame puritanical condemnation only to find themselves, after a brief moment of freedom, under equally moralistic attacks in the name not of God but of the more respectable and powerful names of health and safety, so sex had a short day in the sun before it had to be reined in to accommodate the feminist sensibility. …
What sensitive male can avoid realizing how dangerous his sexual passion is? Is there perhaps really original sin? Men had failed to read the fine print in the Emancipation Proclamation. The new interference with sexual desire is more comprehensive, more intense, more difficult to escape than the older conventions, the grip of which was so recently relaxed. The July 14 of the sexual revolution was really only a day between the overthrow of the Ancien Regime and the onset of the Terror.
For More Information
Even some Leftists at The Guardian are appalled at the latest activities of America’s social justice warriors: “Sexual paranoia on campus – and the professor at the eye of the storm” by Rachel Cooke.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more information see all post about society and gender issues, about feminism, about rape, and especially these…
- It’s time to forcibly re-shape America to fight the campus rape epidemic! Even if it’s fake.
- The University of Virginia shows how change comes to America: through agitprop and hysteria.
- Forms to sign before having sex. Progress or madness?
- False rape accusations tell us something important about America.
- Feminist revolutionaries seized control of colleges. Now come the tribunals…
To learn more about this see…
Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus
“From a highly regarded feminist cultural critic and professor comes a polemic arguing that the stifling sense of sexual danger sweeping American campuses doesn’t empower women, it impedes the fight for gender equality.
“Feminism is broken, argues Laura Kipnis. Anyone who thinks the sexual hysteria overtaking American campuses is a sign of gender progress is deranged.
“A committed feminist, Kipnis was surprised to find herself the object of a protest march by student activists at her university for writing an essay about sexual paranoia on campus. Next she was brought up on Title IX complaints for creating a “hostile environment.” Defying confidentiality strictures, she wrote a whistleblowing essay about the ensuing seventy-two-day investigation, which propelled her to the center of national debates over free speech, “safe spaces,” and the vast federal overreach of Title IX.
“In the process she uncovered an astonishing netherworld of accused professors and students, campus witch hunts, rigged investigations, and Title IX officers run amok. Then a trove of revealing documents fell into her lap, plunging her behind the scenes in an especially controversial case. Drawing on investigative reporting, cultural analysis, and her own experiences, Unwanted Advances demonstrates the chilling effect of this new sexual McCarthyism on higher education. Without minimizing the seriousness of campus assault, Kipnis argues for more honesty about the sexual realities and ambivalences hidden behind the notion of “rape culture.” Instead, regulation is replacing education, and women’s hard-won right to be treated as consenting adults is being repealed by well-meaning bureaucrats.
“Unwanted Advances is a risk-taking, often darkly funny interrogation of feminist paternalism, the covert sexual conservatism of hook-up culture, and the institutionalized backlash of holding men alone responsible for mutually drunken sex. It’s not just compulsively readable, it will change the national conversation.”
Reblogged this on Utopia – you are standing in it!.
A very interesting display of ideology vs. nature. We know which will win in the long run, but in the short run the damage being done is incalculable.
alfin,
Perhaps (certainly so about the damage being done). But I wonder if that is correct. Look at the variation in men-women relations — from Saudi Arabia to Sweden, from classical China (foot binding!) to Polynesia. What is natural for our species?
I can’t think of a better way to completely kill the romantic mood: “Let’s sign a contract for sexual relations!” It’s ludicrous, no it’s more than that it’s an updated essay of Swift’s.
Why should I even go out on dates or even shoot for a one night stand if the girl can wake up the next morning or even six months from now and decide that suddenly I raped her? What about the girls I’ve been with in the past are they going to decide that because we broke up on a bad note that I’m a rapist?
Applause to Laura Kipnis for having the audacity and the brains to call out this stupidity. But it’s not like if a man complained anyone would listen…
BWF,
Other than sexbots, what do you see as the likely response of US society to this?
Editor,
Well, speaking only as a well-read white male citizen with no degree.
We’re already seeing alot. But I’ll extrapolate. Less marriage. Maybe the upper classes will stick to marriage but the vast majority wont. Lots of guys retreating into whatever substitute they can find. Alpha males getting more and more (Clinton and Trump grope whoever they want and what are the consequences? nothing. Football players stage entire orgies and nobody bats an eye) Since it looks like women are getting more degrees, maybe there’ll be alot more women managers and high status people. Maybe that’ll mean they don’t want anything to do with ‘peter pan’ men, therefore less children (or they’ll look to science to get the dna they want)
Or maybe the degree mills will implode and all these feminist/art history degree people will have to go somewhere else. In any case it doesn’t look like the culture has any sympathy for young men. As long as the distractions, the video games, the football games, the fishing holes and hunting cabins, NASCAR and all the rest, as long as young men can retreat to these things they will. Unless the distractions are no longer affordable. Or unless a cultural movement arises that emphasizes, well, what I would call Game and Strength rather than leisure.
BWF,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about this! Here are some posts exploring the issues you raise.
Ach. I think wordpress ate my first comment. Oh well.
Anyway, I agree with alot of what this blog has argued already. Less men willing to date or marry. Women flock to high status (alpha) men. Since more women will have degrees in the next generation, maybe they’ll continue to avoid lower status men, therefore less kids. (unless they run to science to give them the dna they want. Or maybe polygamy? alpha harems?)
I think as long as the proverbial bread&circuses (NASCAR, video games, football, VR, the hunting/fishing cabin) are around more men will avoid women rather than deal with their stupidity. I know that’s my inclination.
Maybe one day the loans will come due and the USA will default and we’ll have nothing left. Then men will have to deal with life rather than hiding from it. Or maybe a movement will arise that will emphasize Game&Strength rather than leisure or slaving away for shrieking harpies.
“…deal with women’s stupidity.”
“…shrieking harpies.”
I can’t imagine why women wouldn’t be flocking to certain men. LOL
Loki,
Discussions of human sexuality boil over fast, for both men and women. Try to look past the froth to see the underlying perspectives. Otherwise you are watching with blinders on, seeing only what you already believe.
bfriendshuh,
“Maybe one day the loans will come due and the USA will default and we’ll have nothing left.”
You are reading too many right-wingers. That’s not how economics works. Nor is it a likely scenario for the US.
“Then men will have to deal with life rather than hiding from it.”
What? Who is “hiding from life”?
“Why should I even go out on dates or even shoot for a one night stand if the girl can wake up the next morning or even six months from now and decide that suddenly I raped her? ”
It looks like this app would remove that worry as consent is recorded and retained, and I find it hard to imagine that two consenting adults who are excited about being physical with each other can’t get themselves back in the mood after a few minutes of fiddling with an app.
Sounds like much fuss about nothing. College classes will continue to dissect the minutiae of social interactions, gender studies, sexuality and the like with every unique student taking away different ideas from them. Young adults will continue to explore relationships and sexuality. The world will continue turning while the birds still chirp and the bees still buzz.
Loki,
“I find it hard to imagine that two consenting adults who are excited about being physical with each other can’t get themselves back in the mood after a few minutes of fiddling with an app.”
That looks to me like quite a failure of imagination, as well as missing the point. Going thru those legalities changes the nature of the engagement. The two parties are now potentially hostile individuals, taking steps to protect themselves from each other. Quite a downer.
“Sounds like much fuss about nothing.”
The most common basis for people’s comments about the future of society is Zeno’s “change is impossible.” That’s quite odd, since the West’s history is one of ongoing revolutionary change on a generational basis. Sometimes successful. Sometimes catastrophic failure (e.g., the attempt to create “new men” in the French and Russian revolutions).
Time will tell if you are correct.
I am more concerned with the principle of the thing rather than the practicalities of fiddling with an app. Why the devil is it the business of the state or school administration be so concerned about what goes on in the bedroom?
Are women so helpless that they can’t decide for themselves when to have sexual relations? If they are not helpless, that is to say if they are consenting adults, then they can’t just wake up and decide that because she and him were drunk, it’s rape; She’s just as guilty of a string of decisions that led to the bedroom.
Furthermore the minutiae that is quoted here being studied at these classes on campus is asinine and lays all the blame at mens feet. At MY feet. The birds and the bees may still sing and the world may go on but if it’s a world that presumes my guilt of rape I want no part of it.
bwf,
Your questions go to the heart of the matter, revealing the irrationality of this issue and pointing to the political intent hidden inside it. As so many people have written, the Left advocates two incompatible ideas about women. They are Wonder Woman, kick ass women as (or more capable) than men. We see this in countless films and TV shows when a man warns about a threat (often dangers that would worry a platoon of Marines). The answer is always “I can take care of myself.” And she usually can.
The other mode is the passive, easily cowed, flower girl. She must be protected from bad men — especially authority figures — who can override she will without visible effort, even in the middle of a crowded room. She has no agency, and can decide she was taken advantage of months later — irrespective of her behavior subsequent to the incident.
Of course this confuses men. I get countless complaints from guys that women who have grown up with this training can flip from one mode to another, without warning — rendering the man’s behavior inappropriate if not evil.
The political intent is obvious. We’ll leave that discussion for another day. Here we’re focused on stage one — description (which must precede analysis and prescriptions).
bwf,
The extreme example of the current situation was the sexual assault epidemic at the Air Force Academy. From the press coverage you might believe guys were putting guns to the women’s heads and raping them. In fact they were mostly two students getting drunk, going to a room, and having sex. These were women training to become warriors for the US military. But apparently they were incapable of controlling their drinking or managing the results — and so needed protection from young men.
How such weak people woud survive in combat was never discussed. To ask was doubleplusungood, if not actual thoughtcrime.
This to me appears to be just one of the many axeblows against the connection between men and women. I think the need for this sort of rule governed behaviour control is best articulated by Jordan Peterson. He argues that moral behaviour is learned experientially by children as a negotiation on what to play and how to play. The lastest generation consist of kids from small families, where they are overprotected because there is too much at stake with each child, and they spend their time in structured activities where they do not learn to play with others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID_Q-VtPUUM
I see this leading to three major developments. Men will be less responsible and engage women less, escaping reality and sacrificing less for the society and the family. Because why should they, there is porn, video games and prostitutes. They will have less children, and ever greater portion of those will be in broken families.
Cultures with large families treat death and such with far less concern than we do, and traditionally people are considered to belong to their families and communities. Most people in the Western Europe would not fight for their countries, and the fertility rate is very low. These cultures are ripe for conquest, via violence or ourbreeding. If a man can fight, he might not because converting to the conquering culture affords you new privileges. White America seems similar, with some religious exceptions.
Tony,
“Men will be less responsible and engage women less, escaping reality and sacrificing less for the society and the family.”
I have written about this in these posts. You might find them of interest.
“Most people in the Western Europe would not fight for their countries, and the fertility rate is very low. These cultures are ripe for conquest, via violence or ourbreeding.”
Many of us have had similar concerns. Worth watching.
“If a man can fight, he might not because converting to the conquering culture affords you new privileges.”
Yes. Women are the first to defect. We might be seeing this begin to happen in Europe right now.
“White America seems similar, with some religious exceptions.”
I don’t understand. White Americans are very willing to fight for America, both at home and overseas. And our fertility rate is among the highest in the developed world.
Women are do not seem to be the first to defect. Men are the ones giving up responsibilities and marrying to foreigners, at least around here in rich Europe. I understand the same is true in the US. Similarly, should Islam take over in France, men with resources and ability have the most to gain from converting. They gain all kinds of actual privileges over women, while women gain only safety from Muslim aggression.
You are right about white America. I originally thought about liberal white America, and I suspect the argument holds with them. It is hardly fair to consider white America a singular entity, considering its size and diversity.
Tony,
“Women are do not seem to be the first to defect.”
Historically women are the first to defect to conquerors, and joining their culture. See the nasty history of the post-WWII years in Europe, when women were punished for doing so.
“Men are the ones giving up responsibilities and marrying to foreigners, at least around here in rich Europe.”
That is interesting! What responsibilities are they giving up? What foreigners are they marring? Eastern European, north african, Middle Easterners?
A case in point?
NY Post: “FBI translator married ISIS terrorist she was supposed to investigate“.
McCloud,
That’s another in the long tradition of female prison guards having affairs (and babies) by prisoners, and women falling in love with imprisoned serial killers. Odd times we’re in.
Even in Sweden men are more likely to marry a non-Swede than women despite the mass of male immigrants.In Finland that was used to be the case, although it has evened out last few years.
About responsibilities, I might consider becoming a man to be to voluntarily take responsibility for other people. For boys to become useful people, to take care of their families, to defend their country and community and to engage politically. I perceive a lot of men having given up, either not dating, not becoming very useful or sometimes not having long term relationships since it is easier to keep replacing the women. Think players, dudes who just live at home playing video games and engaging in hobbies, etc. Women might date those guys, but starting a family with them is a risky proposition.
The conquest comparison does not work, because the natives are the ones in better positions and thus desirable as partners and converts. Not so with Nazi conquest. Women marry up and across dominance hierarchies.
Tony,
Thank you for the info from Europe. Still, I’m confused.
(1) Europe gets immigrants from many places. Are Swedish women marrying educated men from Eastern Europe or uneducated refugees from Syria?
(2) “Men are the ones giving up responsibilities and marrying to foreigners”
What is the relationship between these two actions? Do they marry foreigners and drop out of the job market, or the “rat race” as we call it in America?
(3) Women defect first. Your point about conquest is cogent. Another example: women tend (just tend, not an iron law) to convert first to foreign religions (it is a sign that they are ascendent). Clearly seen in, for exmaple, Acts.
Women prefer to marry Americans and other nationalities, where they can get useful men with status. The Arab and African immigrants are rarely married by attractive women. I perceive a relationship between men marrying foreigners and being useless because it allows men to not strive to become useful while still having an attractive wife.
My thought about defecting are more about who will fight back. Women seem to assume men will provide and protect no matter what, but why would men do that when there is nothing to gain by doing so? Conversion gives you less duties and more privileges in relation to women, and this becomes relevant only once the rising religion is challenging the status quo.
I could be wrong, of course.
As Bloom asks….Is there perhaps original sin?
A very old idea worth considering.
” eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which God had forbidden. After doing so, they became ashamed of their nakedness and God expelled them from the Garden to prevent them from eating from the tree of life and becoming immortal.” Thus describing a time before self consciousness, self reflection and what we know as basic consciousness. Are dogs worried about there sexual life or nakedness? Bonbos or chimps plagued by feminist anti rape edicts?
What is natural for our species? When in the history of this species are you referring to? We once lived in a garden and still do but something changes in us. This old story, the Fall, seems to describe a time when humans were not so plagued by the knowledge of good and evil. Did not Nietzsche pen a later book on just that subject ?
Tell me how you can use the term Natural in referencing the current madness described in this particular post. Is unnatural a meaningful counterpoint? Nature might be a key here. Natural…surely a twist leading to no where. Best to stick with Bloom, eh?