Posted on 09/24/2014 6:26:17 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Last Friday, the White House announced its “It’s On Us” initiative aimed at combating sexual assaults on college campuses. I’m all in favor of combating sexual assault, but the first priority in combating a problem is understanding it.
That’s not the White House’s first priority. Roughly six weeks before Election Day, its chief concern is to translate an exciting social-media campaign into a get-out-the-vote operation.
Accurate statistics are of limited use in that regard because rape and sexual assault have been declining for decades. So the Obama administration and its allied activist groups trot out the claim that there is a rape epidemic victimizing 1 in 5 women on college campuses. This conveniently horrifying number is a classic example of being too terrible to check. If it were true, it would mean that rape would be more prevalent on elite campuses than in many of the most impoverished and crime-ridden communities.
It comes from tendentious Department of Justice surveys that count “attempted forced kissing” and other potentially caddish acts that even the DOJ admits “are not criminal.”
According to one Department of Justice survey, more than half the respondents said they didn’t report the assault because they didn’t think “the incident was serious enough to report.” More than a third said they weren’t clear on whether the incident was a crime or even if harm was intended. But President Obama uses these surveys to justify using the terms “rape” and “sexual assault” interchangeably.
And yet those who question the alleged rape epidemic are the ones who don’t take rape seriously? I would think conflating a boorish attempt at an undesired kiss with forcible rape is an example of not taking rape seriously.
The “It’s On Us” PR stunt is not an exception; it is par for the course. To listen to pretty much anyone in the Democratic party these days, you’d think these are dark days for women. But by any objective measure, things have been going great for women for a long time, under Republicans and Democrats alike.
Women earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 63 percent of master’s degrees, and 53 percent of doctorates. They constitute the majority of the U.S. workforce and the majority of managers. Single women without kids earn 8 percent more than single men without children in most cities. Women make up almost half of medical-school applicants and nearly 80 percent of veterinary-school enrollees.
The recession — a.k.a. the “mancession” — hit men much harder, and women recovered from it much more quickly. When you account for hours worked and job choices, pay equity is pretty much here already. Sure, this is a snapshot, but few serious people think it isn’t a snapshot of a race in which women are surging ahead.
A broad coalition of feminist groups, Democratic-party activists, and the journalists who carry water for them refuse to recognize the progress women have made unless it is in the context of how “fragile” these victories are. Going by the endless stream of fundraising e-mails I get from the Democratic party, EMILY’s List, and other usual suspects — never mind New York Times editorials — we’re always one election away from losing it all. If Harry Reid isn’t the majority leader next year, it’s back to wearing corsets and churning butter for you.
Obviously, this isn’t all about elections. There’s a vast feminist-industrial complex that is addicted to institutionalized panic. On college campuses, feminist- and gender-studies departments depend almost entirely on a constant drumbeat of crisis-mongering to keep their increasingly irrelevant courses alive. Abortion-rights groups now use “women’s health” and “access to abortion on demand” as if they are synonymous terms. The lack of a subsidy for birth-control pills is tantamount to a federal forced-breeding program.
Sure, women still face challenges. But the system feminists have constructed cannot long survive an outbreak of confidence in the permanence of women’s progress. The last thing the generals need is for the troops to find out that the “war on women” ended a long time ago — and the women won.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
So, the democrats are the ones that have the real War on Women, abusing them for their own political purposes. I asked my wife what rights do I have that you don’t have. She laughed and said she actually has more rights than I do. She explained that so many things that men do are criminal acts, while if women do them they are not. So she said too bad for you guys. I asked her about the socalled war on women. She said 2 left leaning women in her horse riding group keep talking about how persecuted they are as women. But she laughs as their husbands work hard all day so those women can get into their 25K trucks and their 40K gooseneck trailers to take their thousands of dollars worth of horses and gear to the beach to ride each day, and spend hundreds in fuel money to do it, and weak their designer clothes while riding. The only persecution they have, she said, is their waiting for their manicures and pedicures after riding. But she said she knows there is a war on women. Its from men, not political parties, that drink and beat their women. Mostly she said it’s in the ghettos and barios that are traditionally democrat strongholds. So it’s a democrat problem within their own people.
There is a young woman Emma Sulkowicz making rounds on MSNBC and PBSs Democracy Now (Amy Goodman) for carrying around a bed mattress to her classes at Columbia to protest that the male student she accused of rape was determined to be innocent by the school and the police. She claimed that she was raped in her own bed and that the police made a determination that the engagement was consensual.
I saw her interviewed at least twice on this, to totally sympathetic Amy Goodman and Melissa Harris Perry,(not a real interviewer) and the scant details that she offers on the incident are not very convincing.
She doesn't describe exactly how she got in HER bed with him or what led to the alleged rape act(or what the act she calls rape was) .
Recall the case that liberals called a rape where the woman changed her mind in the middle of the act (i mean during the actual sex). That makes me skeptical of these assertions.
Regardless, she is getting sympathy with this flimsy story.
Columbia Student Will Carry a Mattress Everywhere Until Her Alleged Rapist Is Expelled
Emma Sulkowicz: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know (Published 10:49 am EDT, September 3, 2014/)
Its amazing how libs will jump past proof right to accusation=conviction for certain types of accusations.
Why do you think the average life span of an American woman is about five longer than a man?
I live in an old folks home and out of 240 people, only 40 or so are men.... reason... dead or can not afford to live here.
“War on woman”:
Just another Liberal lie.
It used to be the case that a woman could look forward to marriage, home, family, and social deference. She ruled the roost, called the shots, and did things her way.
Now she can look forward to workplace exhaustion, sexual exploitation, disrespect, rape, soaring divorce rates, and a lonely old age.
Now... tell me, who has won what?
Universities and colleges used to require all mixed gender social events to have a faculty chaperone. Every single one. And if anything bad happened, that faculty member would be fired.
Returning WWII veterans put an end to that, because after a college education, they wanted to immediately get married, get a good job, mortgage a home and raise a family. The same with coeds of the time. And being delayed in this for as long as four years, they were impatient. So college meant courtship at the same time.
However, what is needed is for universities and colleges to again *offer* *some* chaperoning at social events. Likely campus police and administrative staff instead of professors. Along with a ban on campus events having alcohol.
This would accomplish two things.
1) There would be social events on and off campus that “good kids” could attend without fear or hazard.
2) Events involving alcohol, drugs, and bad behavior would be off campus, with a “caveat emptor” (let the buyer beware) warning. So if little precious went there, was given a tall glass of Jack Daniels with Roofies in it, then was gang raped by the football team, it would not be the universities or colleges fault.
Must be a foam mattress. Weird girl.
Weird is the new normal.
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