Colleges: Women Have a Role to Play in Ending Rape. Feminine Modesty holds the key.

Before circumstances and Providence brought me to a small, Christian liberal arts college in a sleepy northern Virginia town, I spent three years studying at the University of Illinois followed by a two year stint in the Army. Needless to say, I spent much of my early twenties participating in American party culture, and I'm lucky I made it through those years relatively unscathed. Looking back, I made a lot of foolish decisions. I put myself in a lot of compromising situations that could have easily taken a dark turn. What I have to say in the following paragraphs, then, does not come from a place of ignorance or unsympathetic idealism. It comes from a woman who's played the game, learned many lessons, and come to realize exactly what's at stake for America's young people if something major doesn't change. It comes from a mother who knows in her heart that it's her daughter, even more than her son, who has a role to play in the change that needs to happen.

Rape is terrible. It is something that no person should ever have to experience. The way the issue is being politicized and sensationalized by feminists and their sympathizers in the media, however, is not helping matters. It is eclipsing the true nature of the problem and preventing authentic dialog from occurring. The hysterical and sometimes supremely irresponsible media coverage of this issue has created the impression that America has a rape epidemic on its hands, and hordes of feminist activists have mobilized to combat it. On college campuses across America, students are protesting what they see as institutional indifference to an extremely serious problem. A group of students at the University of Virginia participated in a "SlutWalk" protest to draw attention to the problem of rape. Protest organizer Maria Dehart explained the origins of the provocative name. "[Slut Walk]," she said, "is trying to fight against this victim-blaming, slut-shaming culture we have that sexualizes women, yet shames them for being sexual. So we were trying to take the word slut, and the movement tries to turn it around and take the shame out of it."

With virtually any other public health crisis, Progressives are more than eager to examine the causal factors at play. Think of how they addressed the AIDS epidemic, or how they discuss the problem of obesity. "Why is this happening? What behaviors increase the risks of this happening? What can people to do avoid it?" Not so with the public health crisis that is rape. On this issue Progressives stop short of critical analysis and resort to the infantile tactic of indiscriminate male bashing. Anyone who dares ask these basic questions and ventures to connect the dots between behavior and consequences when it comes to rape is pilloried as a foot soldier in the so-called War on Women.

Professor Harvey Mansfield incurred the wrath of feminists when he suggested that feminism itself shares much of the blame for campus "rape culture" and that a return to standards of feminine modesty and gentlemanly honor holds the key to combating it. From his letter:

"In return for women's holding to a higher standard of sexual behavior, feminine modesty gave them protection while they considered whether they wanted to consent. It gave them time: Not so fast! Not the first date! I'm not ready for that! It gave them the pleasure of being courted along with the advantage of looking before you leap. To win over a woman, men had to strive to express their finer feelings, if they had any. Women could judge their character and choose accordingly. In sum, women had the right of choice, if I may borrow that slogan. All this and more was social construction, to be sure, but on the basis of the bent toward modesty that was held to be in the nature of women. That inclination, it was thought, cooperated with the aggressive drive in the nature of men that could be beneficially constructed into the male duty to take the initiative. There was no guarantee of perfection in this arrangement, but at least each sex would have a legitimate expectation of possible success in seeking marital happiness. They could live together, have children, and take care of them.

Without feminine modesty , however, women must imitate men, and in matters of sex, the most predatory men, as we have seen. The consequence is the hook-up culture now prevalent on college campuses, and off-campus too (even more, it is said). The purpose of hooking up is to replace the human complexity of courtship with "good sex," a kind of animal simplicity, eliminating all the preliminaries to sex as well as the aftermath. "Good sex," by the way, is in good part a social construction of the alliance between feminists and male predators that we see today. It narrows and distorts the human potentiality for something nobler and more satisfying than the bare minimum."

Feminists reject Mansfield's analysis wholesale. They scoff at the misogynistic notion that women have a responsibility to protect themselves from unwanted sexual advances by conducting themselves in a ladylike manner. On the contrary, they insist that women should be able to act however they please. They should let their libidos run free and wild. They should be able to participate in the popular hookup culture. They should be able to dress provocatively, and party and drink and flirt without any thought for the compromising situations this behavior might lead to, the dangers they might find in dark dorm rooms and frat houses, their reason and their inhibitions weakened by alcohol. And men should stand ready to respond to the whims of the feminine libido... but they must also be responsible for navigating the gray and foggy world of "consent." The "SlutWalk"ers don't explain exactly how this would look or should work, other than to suggest that we program our boys to be able to determine "conscious consent" without error, and that if in any way a woman is unhappy with the way an encounter plays out, it's 100%, without question always the man's fault.

This all speaks to the feminist's refusal to acknowledge reality, reality about their own nature as women and that of their male counterparts. And as Mansfield suggests, this refusal bears significant responsibility for increasing rates of sexual violence on college campuses. Feminist and cultural commentator Camille Paglia recently discussed the terrible danger of feminine obliviousness to their innate vulnerability and their cavalier attitude about the sexual power they wield. In the wake of UVA student Hannah Graham's disappearance, Paglia wrote:

"Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women's modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.

The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism – toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light...

The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men. . . .

Misled by the naive optimism and "You go, girl!" boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature."

Paglia, in discussing the pathology of sex crime, articulates precisely the problem with prevailing feminist attitudes about sex. In rejecting the notion that women have a responsibility of personal vigilance and self-defense, they are exposing themselves to grave dangers. For some, like Hannah Graham, the price paid is their very lives. For others, it is the trauma of rape or the embarrassment of an early morning "walk of shame."

If indeed American college campuses are experiencing an epidemic of rape, then women must be willing to consider how their attitudes and behavior might be contributing to the problem. This would likely mean a radical transformation of college party culture, including a female-led rejection of the hookup culture that has and continues to damage so many young lives. Would such a change eradicate all instances of rape? Certainly not, but in the case of the alcohol-soaked, consensually-murky encounters plaguing America's institutions of higher learning, it would go along way towards solving the problem.

Yet again, I am not disputing the fact t that false allegations of rape happen.

The author of the original post here, blames women being raped on their lack of modesty. That is a bunch of crap. Nobody I know has ever raped a woman.

Rapists are criminals. The notion that the way a woman dresses or talks or her being drunk in any way contributes to her being raped is moronic.

This notion is akin to a liberal justifying a poor person robbing because they are poor.

Young single women decide to do whatever it takes to gain the attention of men

They do whatever it takes to gain the attention of DESIRABLE men, and are then shocked and upset when they are noticed by men they find undesirable. Or when the desirable man is content to spend a night with them, but not to commit.

There are different kinds of “rape” these days.

There is the “knife to the throat” kind, what we used to think of as “real” rape.

Then there’s the “I would not have said yes if sober” kind that seems to come up a lot on campus.

Perhaps these women should spend less time drunk, and take responsibility for bad decisions while drunk.

Back to blame the victim mentality. Great.

Not even close. Why is it considered "blaming the victim" to point out that certain behaviors increase the risk of becoming a victim, and to recommend that those behaviors should be changed to minimize that risk?

The fact is that for a young woman to dress in a manner intended to attract the sexual attention of men, go to a party filled with young men (who already aren't the best at impulse control) and then add alcohol to the mix places her at increased risk for a sexual encounter she may later regret. Now this may or may not constitute "sexual assault" - many of the incidents regarded as rape appear to be the result of regret of a drunken encounter rather than actual rape. But even in the case of an actual assault, to argue that the woman did not increase her risk by her behavior is ludicrous. That does not mitigate the seriousness of the crime or reduce the culpability of the perpetrator. It just recognizes a reality.

“The best at impulse control”. Really

I couldn’t help but rape her, your honor, she was drunk and scantily clad.

If your daughter was raped while drunk, I suppose you would say that, hey she was asking for it.

If your daughter was raped while drunk, I suppose you would say that, hey she was asking for it.

You really don't bother reading what people are saying, do you?

My point, which I made quite directly, is that anyone who commits an assault is responsible for their actions, and that responsibility is not mitigated by the behavior of the woman in how she dresses or if she is drunk.

HOWEVER, the behavior of the woman can and does affect how much risk she exposes herself to. And she should be made aware of the risk and how she can minimize or reduce that risk by changes in her behavior.

Just how does a desire to teach women how to minimize their risk of becoming a victim equate to "blaming the victim"?

And recognizing that young men having impulse control problems increases the risk of bad behavior does not equate to absolving them of responsibility for that bad behavior.

Perhaps a man shouldn’t take advantage of a drunk woman.

And perhaps a man should be safe walking obliviously through an welfare neighborhood at 3am counting a wad of cash.

Often, it's just better to convince people to stop doing foolish things. Being drunk is a foolish thing.

You’re missing the point.

It’s not false accusations of rape that are the issue, but a false definition of rape foisted on the world, and especially on academe, by feminism. Call what you and I would call rape, rape 1.0, and what the feminists use as the basis of their statistic that a quarter of college women will be raped, rape 2.0.

All your objections are quite valid as regards rape 1.0: you’ve never done it, I’ve never done it, neither of us knows anyone who has, it is not actually occasioned by women dressing provocatively or getting drunk, . . .

Now, realize that rape 2.0 includes a drunken young man and a drunken young woman having sex, even with the young woman expressing enthusiastic consent in the moment, at least of the woman later regrets the encounter (think Lena Dunham’s account of her “rape” which doesn’t meet the definition of the Ohio statute and contains elements that in a court of law would suffice to prove consent), and reread the article.

I’m not happy with some of the comments I’m seeing here.

Look, I know not everybody on Free Republic shares my moral values. But this is a conservative forum and the author of this article is apparently a female Army veteran. Surely that carries some credibility here.

Taking advantage of a woman while drunk is not conservative. If she’s really drunk, even if she asks for sex she’s not able to consent because her judgment is impaired. If she’s not allowed to drive, surely she shouldn’t be making decisions about going to bed.

What is conservative is saying that not having sex before marriage prevents lots of problems. If you’re not going to follow that standard, you’re going to risk lots of consequences, some of them really bad. The consequences are bad for both men and women.

Men with zipper problems need to learn their decisions have consequences. And women need to learn that not every man who acts nice to them is actually nice.

A woman can help her chances of not getting raped, but no matter what she does or how she dresses, the rapist is 100% to blame.

So in your world, that girl holds ZERO responsibility? Well, we are going to have to disagree in this situation. In my world, the rapist is 100% guilty of rape, and the girl is 100% guilty of acting in a very stupid and reckless manner. While I will put the rapist away (personally forcible rape should be capital offense like it used to be back in the day, IMO), I will not shirk away from pointing out that what the girl did led directly to her placing herself in a position that allowed it to happen.

Also, only a fool would say that the increased sexualization of our society has not increased the problem of rape over the past decades. This whole idea the left pushes of "I can do anything I want without repercussions" is what is killing our country.

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