Posted on 08/15/2003 7:38:41 AM PDT by Scenic Sounds
There is a movement in this country to push women towards a victim status, towards an attitude that implies that a woman is simply a passive person, someone whom men can and will always take advantage of, both in public and private life. This movement is fomented and spearheaded by the liberal feminists, who believe that men are monsters and women are powerless victims against them (a clear contradiction to true feminism).
The symptom of this movement is that the liberal feminists have taken hold of the word rape and its connotations and associations and twisted it to mean something that it was never meant to. Rape, by definition, is anyone forcefully, through harm or threat of harm, forcing another person to have sex with them - there must be a clearly expressed lack of consent and/or coercion by force or threat of force. According to New York law, "forcible compulsion" ( i.e. rape) is defined as "to compel by either the use of physical force or a threat express or implied which places a person in fear of immediate death or physical injury to himself, herself, or another person."
However, this definition, which is widely mirrored in all fifty states, has been watered down. According to Dr. Andrea Parrot, a psychiatry professor at Cornell University who specializes in studying date rape, "Any sexual intercourse without mutual desire is a form of rape. Anyone who is psychologically or physically pressured into sexual contact is as much a victim of rape as the person who is attacked on the streets."
Now university counselors can convince twenty year old girls that since their boyfriend whined until they finally had sex with them, they’ve been raped. After all, under Dr. Parrot’s definition, that is classified as psychological pressure.
In many studies performed, especially those that focused on date rape or acquaintance rape, the women who were interviewed said that they did not realize that they had been raped until the interviewer described rape scenarios involving psychological pressure. These women did not feel violated, and the counselors and interviewers have to convince them that they have, indeed, been raped.
For example, the most comprehensive and most widely stated study for on-campus sex crimes is Mary Koss’s Ms. Campus Project on Sexual Assault. It was conducted through surveys, and it speculates that 1 in 4 women have been sexually assaulted. However - Koss obtained her data concerning the "incidence and prevalence of sexual aggression" with a 10-item survey featuring questions such as, "Have you given in to sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because you were overwhelmed by a man's continual arguments and pressure?" and "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man threatened or used some degree of physical force to make you?". Questions 9 and 10 (which also refer to the use of force or threats of violence) seem to fit the conventional picture of rape, but consider question 8: "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?" According to psychiatry, this question would be "double-barreled": What, exactly, is it asking? The meaning could change simply by what questions were asked leading up to this specific one. Does this mean that after a man buys you a drink and then you have sex with him, he has raped you? Did the girl express that she “didn’t want to,” or did the “didn’t want to” feelings come after the fact?
There has to be a clear boundary between what is and isn’t rape. Rape is not confusion or negative feelings after sex. Rape is not feeling that you don’t want to have sex, but giving in to please your boyfriend. That simply isn’t rape. Rape is when you are forced to have sex with someone, against your will, and when you clearly express that you are not complying with the situation.
This new way of defining rape, the feminist version of rape, gives women a way to simply be a passive victim, externalizing any feelings of guilt and shame about the sexual encounter and forcing responsibility onto the other person involved. Sadly, because of this attitude, rape is becoming just another everyday occurrence, something that some girls say with a shrug, as though it’s a normal part of life and is no big deal. Date rape has become the new campus hot button, and it has become so normal that girls discuss it as though it’s a trivial, almost normal thing to experience.
This attitude not only cheapens the value and independence of women, it sets women up for failure, and teaches them that they are victims of predatory men. More importantly, it trivializes sexual violence by making it something that is no longer horrible, but something that is typical and representative of the whole of society. It has become an expectation, and when true sexual trauma occurs, it gets swept away in the tide of indifference that this attitude has fostered.
Cathryn Crawford is a student from Texas. She can be reached at feedback@washingtondispatch.com.
You two are really trying, aren't you?
I agree. Rape is a question of consent. Rape is not, however, negative feelings after sex, feeling guilty after sex, or giving in to someone who is pestering you for sex. It's simply not.
Agreed.
"Liberal Clitorati" - that is such a cool term that I actually Googled it to see where it came from. I learned only that you've used it before.
Did you originate it? If so, good for you!! ;-)
It's also interesting to note that some of the women who took part in these campus surveys had to be convinced by the interviewers that they had been raped.
Actually, if it's an explicit exchange, it might technically be treated as prostitution. Who would prosecute it, though?
If it's not an explicit exchange (i.e., if a woman is incapacitated by drugs/alcohol), there is no consent and it is rape.
Sure, if the man says, "Have sex with me and I'll give you this keg of beer," and she does it, it's prostitution.
However, the phraseology of the question ensures that it can be interpreted in many different ways. Does this mean that if a man buys a woman several drinks and she gets drunk and sleeps with him, it's rape? The feminists would say that if she regrets it, it was.
For evidence I offer two demonstrable tendencies in the women insisting on this power - first, the element of simple envy that some women are enjoying a perfectly congenial relationship with men and that they are not; and second, the resolute insistence that the lack of a satisfactory relationship in their own lives is due to their own higher standards and not to their higher disagreeability. These are not happy people, and they like it that way, and they don't really think anyone else has the right to happiness on any terms but their own. They are not the first, the only, or the last people to attempt to substitute power over others for glaring inadequacies in their own lives.
That is interesting, but I think that's due in part to confusion on the part of interviewers as to what rape actually means in a legal sense and in part to the ambiguous fact patterns that can emerge when males and females interact.
It then becomes a function of the legal system to sort these situations out and, for the most part, I think the legal system does a pretty good job.
I agree - however, as I said the other night, repetition leads to lethargy. The more women claim to be raped (of course, I am not trivializing true rape), the more use that word will get, and the more common and everday it will become.
That, in fact, trivializes the trauma of true rape victims.
Any woman that can't figure out how to say NO and mean it should not be able to claim rape. Rape is violence or threatened violence.
Not necessarily, but it is rape if the woman becomes unconscious and it can get pretty ambiguous if the woman gets close to that state. The issue remains the same - consent - and a woman who passes out cannot be said to have consented to anything.
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