If you want to see how inane the public discourse about college rape has become, look no further than the student newspaper of Claremont McKenna College, The Forum. A woman college student recounts an incident where she found herself in a man’s dorm room after a party. He asked, “is this ok?” — meaning, was she okay with having sex. She admits that she said “yes” and that there wasn’t any coercion or imminent threat of violence, and “not a lot” of inebriation.
But now she says she secretly didn’t want to have sex, even though the young man would have no way of knowing that, so she declares in the student newspaper that she was — wait for it — “raped by rape culture.”
Inspired by the recent performance of The Vagina Monologues at CMC, this piece is part of a series of Forum articles by women at CMC about women and sexuality. Check out the first piece in the series here. If you’re interested in contributing an article on these topics, contact us at [email protected] – from the introduction to the article “Why Yes Can Mean No.“
You read that right: “raped by rape culture.” It’s a term coined by the young woman and her friends to describe the purported experience where a woman’s agreement to have sex is “coerced by the culture that had raised us and the systems of power that worked on us . . . .”
If you think that makes no sense, just wait, she’s not finished. “Consent is a privilege, and it was built for wealthy, heterosexual, cis, white, western, able-bodied masculinity,” she posits.
Can it get any loopier? Keep reading.
What forced this poor soul to say “yes” when she secretly meant “no”? Among other things, she explains that “there was obligation from already having gone back to someone’s room, not wanting to ruin a good friendship, loneliness, worry that no one else would ever be interested . . . an understanding that hookups are ‘supposed’ to be fun.”
Get it? It is the fault of evil white straight men that she had sex because she’s lonely, didn’t want to ruin a friendship, has low self-esteem, and/or believed that hook-ups are supposed to be fun.
In days long gone, when rationality, literacy, and logic were still valued even a little, this sort of writing would be called exactly what it is–idiotic. But on our modern, vaunted American college campuses, it’s “well-written and so important,” “beautiful,” and “so perfect,” as several comments put it.
Actually, a couple of comments beneath the article did nail it. One guy wrote: “There’s a fella out there for you: Mongo the Mind-Reader.” Another reader explained: “Modern feminism has taught generations of young women (and young men) that . . . women should ’embrace’ their sexuality and have casual sex with as many partners as they like, without any consequences. . . . . Who taught you to say yes? It wasn’t some wealthy, heterosexual, cis, white, western, able-bodied boogeyman. It was the very movement you now align yourself with who ‘coerced’ you into believing that ‘hookups are supposed to be fun.'”
And those responses are far more than this piece of idiocy deserves.
If feminists wonder why their movement isn’t widely embraced in middle America and why so few people (including so few women) identify as “feminists,” they need look no further than extreme silliness like this. Add it to the misandry hall of fame.