Posted on 08/18/2003 1:15:06 PM PDT by Bob J
"Feminist Version of Rape"
by Cathryn Crawford
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.
© 2003 Cathryn Craweford All rights reserved.
The elusive "True Feminism". Does such a thing exist? Is there such a thing as a Conservative Feminism? Wouldn't that be like a Free Market Communist?
Feminism and Antifeminism
"Feminism" means so many different things that it appears to mean very little. Its advocates constantly contradict each other and themselves; in casting off feminine reserve and modesty they seem to have learned intellectual shamelessness as well. Rather than damaging feminism, its incoherence offers an easy defense against criticism: whatever the complaint, the response is that it misses the mark because feminism is really something else.
It appears, however, that nothing can be called feminism that is not radically antitraditional and antinatural. What feminists call "gender"--the system of attitudes, expectations and customs that distinguishes men from women--has always and everywhere been basic to human life. Grammatical gender is one sign among many that masculinity and femininity are central to how we understand the world. That centrality is what it means to say that they are "deeply rooted social stereotypes." Although their detailed content has varied somewhat the general outlines of sexual distinctions have been stable. The men and women in ancient and non-Western literatures are immediately recognizable to us today as men and women like ourselves. Yang strikes us as masculine, Yin as feminine, just as they did the ancient Chinese.
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