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).
“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.”
