Campus sexual assault, rape culture, false accusation and the like have been big topics the last few years, especially 2015 itself.
Because I believe good statistics are more important that good advocacy, and that the rights of real individuals are more important than group impressions of where the culture is and where it's going, it should be clear where my views are going to land. But there's another side to this that I think is getting missed.
Older and wiser heads have looked at college party/hookup culture for years and said this is a very bad situation for everyone, but most especially for women. This is not sustainable. While there is overlap between how women and men react to sex - both sexes are from the same species, and youth is programmed to enormous amounts of display and sexual energy, after all - there are general differences. there are simply a lot of things in life where women have a range of 20-50 while men have a range of 40-70. All still normal, but the difference bears noticing.
College feminists are noticing Hey, this whole campus alcohol/recreational sex situation is not working for women - it seems to be enabling predators, and they also tend to have the courage to speak up about it. I think their prisms distort reality and some of their proposed solutions are dangerous on more than one level. The temptation to say "Well, yeah, we told you so" may seem justified, but is largely unfair. People told me so about a dozen things in college that I just couldn't hear.
Say that they've got it 10% right, 25% right, or 50% right, I don't care. I can't imagine that they will ever acknowledge that folks like me had any prescience about this anyway. But we can acknowledge the part they've got correct, even if it's not reciprocated.
4 comments:
Not sure why this one is spam bait
What are they going to do about it? They will be in the same situation as blacks. They can see the problem, but they'll blame it on someone else, because their Masters are not allowed to be questioned.
My own personal theory is that the Catholic Church scandals were the major driver for this. Institutional responsibility for enabling predators was not nearly the hot topic it is today prior to that. I say that as a girl who was in college in Boston while that story was breaking, and I saw the change immediately. Saw a prominent faculty member or two retire quite suddenly with no fanfare, and gossip and rumors always pinned it on the administration realizing they could be held liable.
I suggest this as an alternative overlooked hypothesis, because Christian schools with no party culture have not been immune to this debate:
http://prospect.org/article/report-bob-jones-university-responded-rape-claims-woeful-ignorance-law-often-blaming-victims
Also, the "hookup" culture among college students hasn't increased, and has slightly decreased, since the 80s:
http://www.boston.com/life/relationships/2014/07/16/the-myth-college-hookup-culture/rBdoVnwt71wBIMPG5nlHQM/story.html
How many stories have I read where warnings to women are then called "enabling rape culture"?
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