It’s still rape when a man is the victim

From Pajamas Media, Helen Smith brings us an example of a man who was raped by a woman:

On a Friday night in 1990, after hanging out with a friend for several hours at a club — said friend disappeared for the night and left his female friend (stranger to me) without a ride and about 35 miles from home. I was plastered, and not going to drive as the club was next to a motel. She asked for a ride and I offered to drive her home in the morning as she was about 6 months pregnant, but I was going to have to get a motel room for the evening as I was drunk and not driving in such a state. We decided to split the cost of the room and both agreed that sleeping was all that was going to take place. She was pregnant and also not my type in the slightest. At the time, I thought I was in love with a woman attending a local college. I seem to recall we even had separate beds.

I woke up about 2 hours later — still destroyed by the alcohol — to find my clothes removed from the waist down and the girl on top of me wailing like a banshee and quite roughly enjoying herself. She had apparently brought me to erection — not hard as I’m one of those men who can hold one for hours, awake or asleep, sober or drunk. She told me everything was okay and to go back to sleep and despite my best effort to the contrary, I was unable to move or speak coherently in my still very inebriated and half-conscious state and did fall asleep again quickly.

After most of my drunken stupor wore off around 7 am or so, I awoke again to find her on top of me — this time with a more menacing attitude as she knew I was in a better position to respond physically this time. I had began to wiggle out from under her (taking care not to hurt her baby) when she sternly warned me to “be quiet” and “not be forceful” and made it clear that she would cry rape if I tried to stop it. I was stunned to say the least and not sure how to respond. I could easily have thrown her across the room and off of me, but was concerned for her child and took her threat very, very seriously. She said it so easily that I doubt I was her first.

I weighed my options for a moment and came to the conclusion that a sober, 6 or 7-month pregnant college student of 24 was far more likely to be believed by the authorities than a drunk 19-year old Marine in the best shape of his life. I frequented that club a lot and I’m sure several people saw me leave with her. I was pretty much f*cked — in more than one way — at that point.

I complied by lying still while she continued to warn and threaten me and she eventually orgasmed again and got off me. I don’t know how long the second rape transpired as I tried to disconnect my mind from that scene. Further, I have no idea how many times she had actually raped me that night (at least twice), but I was extremely sore for a few days. As a small favor, she turned out to be disease free.

This seems to me like a fairly clear cut case of rape: the victim did not have the power to consent, first because he was drunk and passed out, and therefore physically unable to say “yes,” then the second time under the duress of psychological coercion.  Pretty distressing to read, as are all first-hand accounts of rape.

Even more disturbing to me, though, were some of the comments that followed:

Zero sympathy, Blunderbrain. Get plastered, then get a hotel room with a total stranger, and later you’re ‘raped’.

Stupid people deserve the pain they afflict upon themselves.

First of all, the scare quotes around raped indicate that the writer doesn’t believe the situation was rape - but under a simple definition were rape is sex without consent, it sure as hell was.  Then there’s the idea that springs up when dealing with women that being stupid means you deserve what you get.  It may be a dumb idea for me to walk home alone in the dark, but that doesn’t mean I deserve for someone to attack me.  The same is true here.

That being said, get over it already. It’s been 17 years and you did nothing at the time. You’re a man an should not react as women do - crying and feeeeling so bad, that’s the women’s domain. You could have pressed charges long time ago, now all you can, and should, do is to get over it.

This is where feminists have it right: strict gender roles hurt men too.  Crying and feeling bad are not traits unique to women; where did we get this idea that men who experience the full range of human emotion are acting like women?  More of the same from another commenter named 360Annie:

I’m sorry Helen, but this is silly. Men ARE supposed to be different than women. I don’t want to see men crying and sharing their feelings….I hate the whole metrosexual thing, it’s part of what is wrong with the whole landscape…we need men to be men…

Tell you what Annie - I’ll let you date the androids, and you can leave the men who share their feelings to girls like me who prefer our boyfriends and husbands to be human.

Does anyone really believe this. There is zero chance this happened. Only a fool would believe this. The only way a woman can rape a man is if she straps one on and ties him up.

And here, rape is equated only with penetration and physical restraint.  Which is ridiculous, because it isn’t the sex act performed which determines whether it is rape - it’s the lack of consent.  We also see a lot more of this idea that coercion must be physical:

Rape must surely include physical force or threat of physical force. That is why women raping men is virtually a non-issue - most men, including this one, are stronger than most women.

Isn’t the threat that you could be sent to jail (because I have to agree with the victim about the likelihood that a jury would buy his story), and have your career and life essentially ruined enough?  Isn’t that also force?

Luckily for my faith in humanity, later comments sided with the victim here as well.

Not even the most ardent feminists will argue that there aren’t physical differences between men and women. But those differences don’t mean that men can’t also be victims.

 

No babies, no welfare state

From the New York Times, an article on population decline in Europe:

The spiritual concerns aside, though, the main threats to Europe are economic. Alongside birthrate, the other operative factor in the economic equation is lifespan. People everywhere are living longer than ever, and lifespan is continuing to increase beyond what was once considered a natural limit. Policy makers fear that, taken together, these trends forecast a perfect demographic storm. According to a paper by Jonathan Grant and Stijn Hoorens of the Rand Europe research group: “Demographers and economists foresee that 30 million Europeans of working age will ‘disappear’ by 2050. At the same time, retirement will be lasting decades as the number of people in their 80s and 90s increases dramatically.” The crisis, they argue, will come from a “triple whammy of increasing demand on the welfare state and health-care systems, with a decline in tax contributions from an ever-smaller work force.” That is to say, there won’t be enough workers to pay for the pensions of all those long-living retirees. What’s more, there will be a smaller working-age population compared with other parts of the world; the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Database projects that in 2025, 42 percent of the people living in India will be 24 or younger, while only 22 percent of Spain’s population will be in that age group. This, in the wording of a Demographic Fitness Survey by the Adecco Institute, a London-based research group, will result in a “war for talent.” And the troubles for Europe are magnified by other factors in the existing welfare states of many of its countries. Europeans are used to early retirement — according to the Adecco survey, only 60 percent of men in France between the ages of 50 and 64 are still working.

So take a culture that promotes childlessness and/or small families, add a bloated welfare state reliant on constant income transfer which encourages early retirement and little personal savings, and what do we get?  Serious demographic crisis.

Note to my fellow Americans: could we please try not to replicate their mistakes?

 

Wednesday WaPo Linkage

Three items from the Washington Post today well worth a read. The first is an analysis of why people are so much gloomier about the economy than the data on inflation and unemployment really merit.  Several explanations are put forward by economists, and probably all of them contribute.  My experience discussing the economy with people tends to lend credence to this one:

The biggest reason for people’s gloom might be because of what they’re used to. In the 1980s and ’90s, memories of the double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation from the 1970s were still fresh.

“People expected very little out of the economy,” said Richard Curtin, who has administered the University of Michigan’s survey of consumer sentiment for 35 years. “Compared to what their frame of reference was, the performance of the economy was absolutely tremendous.”

But now, coming off two decades of prosperity and low inflation, Americans have come to treat low unemployment and inflation as givens. We have gotten so used to things being good, in other words, that even when conditions become somewhat bad, it feels terrible.

This is especially true of my fellow young people.  We didn’t live through Jimmy Carter and sky-rocketing inflation and rationing of gasoline, so to us, the current situation seems terrible.

Speaking of gas, Robert J. Samuelson, in addition to having the best mustache of all the WaPo columnists, has some great ideas for how to reduce the political and economic consequences of $135 a barrel oil:

The first thing is to get out of denial. Stop blaming oil companies and “speculators.” Next, we need to expand domestic oil and natural gas drilling, including in Alaska. Although we can’t “drill our way” out of this problem, we can augment oil supplies and lessen price strains. It might take 10 years or more, because new projects are huge undertakings. But delay will only aggravate our future problems.

How commonsensical.

Meanwhile, my love/hate relationship with Michael Gerson continues apace.  In today’s column, he takes on Al Franken’s so-called satire:

The whole op-ed is really worth a read, because it lists some of Franken’s greatest hits, but I think these two paragraphs really cut to the heart of the problem with people like Franken.  Satirists like Jonathan Swift were certainly hard on their objects of ridicule, but there was a wicked intelligence to their work that someone like AL Franken lacks.  The Left is hard on our pundits, but Al Franken makes Ann Coulter look like Miss Manners.

As for Gerson, here’s what I’ve decided: he shouldn’t write about anything that has to do with actual policy.  Especially if there is money or numbers of any kind involved.  But as a critic of the culture, he has a lot of potential.

Our popular culture, of course, violates even these expansive boundaries of tastelessness with regularity. We laugh at comedies featuring the C-word and at cartoons of foul-mouthed third-graders. In the cause of relevance and realism, our common life is already decorated with excrement. Why should political discourse be any different?

For at least one reason: Because vulgarity is often the opposite of civility. This is not, of course, always true. I know a brilliant and large-hearted academic with roots in south Philly who uses the F-word with the frequency of “like” or “and.” But the vulgarity of “The Jerry Springer Show” or misogynous rap music — the cultural equivalents of Franken’s political “satire” — generally expresses contempt and cruelty. Franken is not content to disagree with Karl Rove; he calls him “human filth.” He is not satisfied to criticize Ari Fleischer; Franken terms him a “chimp.” The objects of Franken’s humor — including political opponents and women — are not merely mocked but dehumanized. His trashiness is also nastiness. Rather than lampooning the emptiness and viciousness of our political discourse — a proper role for satire — Franken has powerfully reinforced those failures.

 

Just when I thought I was done for the night

Judith Warner has to go and set me off again. Once more bemoaning the patriarchy, Warner manages to misdirect her anger and make the sort of vaguely absurd comparisons that liberals are so fond of:

And there, beneath a report showing paid family leave to be on the decline, beneath a Newsweek article on a new children’s book, “My Beautiful Mommy,” that tells the story of a mom who becomes even prettier after a nose job and a tummy tuck, I found the story that the hymen news had immediately brought to mind.

It was also from The Times, from May 19, and featured 70-odd girls, of “early grade school to college” age, with their fathers, stepfathers and fathers-in-law-to-be, at the ninth annual, largely evangelical “Father-Daughter Purity Ball.”

“The evening, which alternated between homemade Christian rituals and giddy dancing” – and which culminated, for at least one father and his daughters, with a dreamy walk in the night around a lake, “was a joyous public affirmation of the girls’ sexual abstinence until they wed,” said the Times article.

“From this, it’s only a matter of degree to the man in Austria,” I’d scribbled across the first page.

The man in Austria she refers to is the one who has been in headlines recently for imprisoning his daughter in the basement and sexually abusing her for her entire adult life. Then she compares Josef Fritzl’s words with those of a Purity Ball organizer:

Fritzl, a self-described “man of decency and good values,” had imprisoned his daughter after she began staying out all night and drinking. “I had to create a place where I could keep Elisabeth by force if necessary, away from the outside world,” he confessed.

“Fathers, our daughters are waiting for us,” Randy Wilson, one of the ball’s organizers, said at the Colorado Springs “Purity” event. “They are desperately waiting for us in a culture that lures them into the murky waters of exploitation. They need to be rescued by you, their dad.”

Oh, now I get it. The natural human urge to protect your daughter from sexual exploitation is just like carrying on an incestuous relationship with your daughter. Warner even seems to see the absurdity of her comparison and backs off from it slightly, just before delving right back in and trying to make the same point again:

I don’t want to take this analogy too far. I don’t mean to imply that there’s any equivalency between Josef Fritzl’s acts and the Purity Ball. Fritzl’s actions were uniquely horrific, and I am not accusing the men who danced in Colorado Springs of any crimes. But there is nonetheless a kind of horror to their obsession with their daughters’ sexuality. There is a dangerous boundary violation contained in their vow “before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.” And there is even greater danger to the fact that this particular aspect of the nationwide “abstinence movement” has not been broadly denounced as the form of emotional violence against girls that it indisputably is.

This is a particularly pernicious strain of modern liberalism which sneers at attempts by parents to protect their children and guide them in the development of moral values.  So it is emotional abuse for fathers should step in, be a part of their daughters’ lives, and try to teach them the value of chastity?  Of all the terrible messages about sex that young women are bombarded with, this old-fashioned notion of waiting until marriage to have sex is probably one of the most positive they’ll hear.

Yes, this message, when taken to extremes, can have the wrong effect, convincing young women that their worth lies in their virginity.  And I would like to see similar efforts aimed at boys, because even a good message loses its value when the responsibility is placed entirely on half the population. But overall, the intent and the content are both worthy of more respect than Judith Warner is willing to cede them.  Especially when she devolves into hyperbole with her “horror” and her “dangerous boundary violations” and her Josef Fritzl comparisons.

Note to Judith Warner: You raise your kids the way you want, and let the Abstinence Ball-attending fathers raise theirs, and we’ll compare them in a decade or two.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see even the totally chaste ones grow up to wonderful, emotionally healthy women.

 

A Few Pieces of Absurdity for Your Friday Evening

File this first one under “News of the Obvious.”  The story is on the fact that AIDS isn’t really as big a threat to heterosexuals as it was hyped up to be at the height of the panic.  The priceless pull quote:

But the factors driving HIV were still not fully understood, he said.

“The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such differences?”

Two words, my friend: Adams Morgan.

In other news, Timothy Egan at the New York Times thinks we need to take religion out of our politics.  Wait, did I say news?  Regardless of what it is (”olds”?), his entire article is the typical liberal blathering all about how religion makes politics wretched without any mention of the positive effects.  But we’re all used to that, so no big deal.  Here’s the part that really stuck out:

Obama has been the more overtly God-centric candidate in this campaign, perhaps because of the whispers that falsely paint him as a Muslim, or interchangeable blondes on Fox News who interpret playful hand gestures with his spouse as “a terrorist fist jab,” as E.D. Hill said on air.

We get it, you don’t like Fox News.  But there’s no need to be a misogynist asshole about it.  Seriously?  Interchangeable blondes?  Something makes me think he’d never refer to people like Dan Rather as one of those interchangeable old white guys.  The real kicker here is that he didn’t actually have Hill’s name in that sentence when I first read the column.  You’ll have to take my word for it, because I didn’t get a screen-capture.  So she said a dumb thing (her and everyone else on television).  That doesn’t make her an interchangeable blond.

Moving right along, I’ve always believed that New York has all the best elected officials, and Diane M. Gordon seems to have set out to prove me right:

Calling her actions “an outrageous breach of trust,” a judge sentenced Diane M. Gordon, a former state assemblywoman from Brooklyn, to two to six years in prison on Thursday for offering to help a developer acquire city land if he would build her a house free.

I’d like to see a world where all of our rent-seeking politicians meet the same end, but I don’t see it happening any time soon.  For now, I’ll have to be content with the amusement I derived from her lawyer’s defense:

In court on Thursday, Ms. Gordon wore a white blazer, black pants and white tennis shoes. She sat calmly as her lawyer, Bernard H. Udell, delivered an impassioned, appeal to Justice McCann for a lenient sentence. He spoke of Ms. Gordon’s work finding jobs for her constituents and handing out Christmas gifts. He also said that Ms. Gordon cared for her ailing mother.

“At sentencing, you get to see some bad people,” Mr. Udell said. But Ms. Gordon, he said, was a “a good person who stands convicted of doing a bad thing.”

As a matter of jurisprudence, it’s the crime that matters, not the other good deeds you’ve done.  There is no carbon offset program for right and wrong.  And as for empathy and her ailing mother, a lot of criminals have people depending on them.  That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve and shouldn’t get jail time.

My verdict?  Good riddance.

 

But I LIKE my thermostat at 72 degrees

As a young conservative at an arts school in Manhattan, I can only imagine the parade of “Hope” and “Change” stickers, buttons and t-shirts I will witness my painfully uninformed peers display when the semester begins. Though I have been fairly apathetic about politics (so I can’t judge my fellow actors too much) the last 9 months, I think it actually will give me a leg up in the race to sway my friends and classmates to a reasonable cause (Anything but Obama’s) as I’m well placed to be the voice of reason, rather than the token conservative*. My resolve to start showing people the light has been steadily strengthing as I’ve been visiting home in DC; that’s what living with Head Amazon Marianne will do to you. It just strikes me how completely oblivious young liberals tend to be to the reality of Obama’s presidential campaign. A little frightening. I won’t pull a typical lefty “this is the worst thing EVER,” line, but still.

Anyway, enough about me, here’s a piece by WashTimes contributor Tony Blankley, from today’s OpEd section.

The part that I found most fascinating:

“A much more recent example of the media not even going through the motions of being responsible is their almost complete avoidance of his recent statement that:

‘We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.’

Is there absolutely no curiosity at The Washington Post, the Associated Press or even the New York Times about the assertion by the man who is considered likely to become president of the United States at noon on Jan. 20, 2009, that letting Americans eat as much as they want is ‘not going to happen?’ Doesn’t that shockingly dictatorial assertion deserve comment and inquiry?

Yes, it is true that Mr. Obama was explicitly saying that what wasn’t going to happen was ‘other countries [saying] OK’ to Americans eating as much as we want. But a fair reading of the whole passage suggests that Mr. Obama agrees with those other countries. And as president, what exactly would he try to do regarding Americans who want to eat as much as they want (or drive SUVs or set their own thermostat)?”

Not that that is the first statement of its ilk from Mr. Obama, but it’s certainly one that bears repeating.

A little something to entertain.

-Bean

Molon labe

*(not that there’s anything wrong with being a token conservative, it just isn’t always the most effective route, especially where I am. I’d be more of a joke than someone to take seriously. As sad as that is.)

 

Pessimism: It’s Fun and Easy!

There’s nothing a lazy blogger loves more than a wild-eyed lunatic, and I have found mine.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I present Josh Silver of Free Press, and his opening remarks to the National Conference for Media Reform.  Talking about how “government and corporate propaganda have laid waste to journalistic integrity,” Mr. Silver has this to say:

Without the facts, we followed the flag into a disastrous war in Iraq.

Without the facts, our economy crumbles and 37 million Americans live in poverty.

Without the facts, our nation’s infrastructure is in tatters, and victims of Hurricane Katrina have been abandoned.

Without the facts, our climate crisis may have moved beyond repair.

Without the facts. Without a critical, accountable, fearless media system, we’ve arrived at one of the darkest moments in our nation’s history.

This is what I love so much about American liberals: every bad thing that happens is not just a disaster, but the worst disaster.  Every blip of the economy is not just part of a cycle, it’s part of a catastrophe.

The war in Iraq certainly hasn’t been a cakewalk, but you’d have to be using a pretty expansive definition of disastrous to count it as such, especially considering the recent progress.

Our economy is in a slump, yes, but it certainly hasn’t crumbled.  Last time I checked, we were only looking at a 5.5 percent unemployment rate, still low compared to both historic lows and the unemployment our European friends deal with in a good year.  And yes, people who took out loans they couldn’t afford are now losing their homes, but there are winners here too: namely, people trying to buy homes who couldn’t afford the bubble prices of years past.  And as for the 37 million in poverty, living in poverty in America in 2008, while undoubtedly unpleasant, is hardly akin to living in, say, America circa 1908 or Haiti.

As for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, this may be my cold, withered Republican heart at work, but I still don’t think that taxpayers owe the citizens of New Orleans a rebuilt city or hotel rooms while they wait.  Nor do I think that the lack of media coverage is to blame for any reduction in efforts to help.

As for climate change, has Silver not been reading the news for the past few years?  Because we have been up to our eyeballs in coverage of climate change this, and global warming that.  The problem is that we lack effective policy solutions to control greenhouse gases (seriously, Congress, cap-and-trade is the best you can do?), because they all assume a level of technology that we don’t have.  Of course, rising gas prices may take care of that problem for us, by encouraging efficient investment in alternate energies.

But that last line is so terribly overwrought that all the others pale in comparison.  Typical self-absorbed young liberal, turning what are truly minor problems in the grand scheme of history into “one of the darkest moments.”  How is it possible to be an educated adult in this country and lack the perspective to bear our generation’s relative burdens with equanimity?

 

More on infidelity

One of my recent incoming search terms was “goddamn men,” probably prompted by my post on men and infidelity.

As it turns out, men aren’t the only ones who think cheating is just fine. I was listening to the radio on Friday night (my first mistake), tuned to Hot 99.5 (that bastion of moral values), and the DJ was asking female listeners to call in and say why they were cheating on their man that weekend.

Well, the only caller I caught before I turned off the radio in total disgust was a girl who said that she was going to be cheating on her boyfriend because they had been dating for nine months and he hadn’t put out. The DJ helpfully hypothesized that if he wasn’t interested in having sex, he was either very religious or gay.

Here’s a fun idea: maybe not everyone is interested in jumping in the sack right off the bat. Maybe there are still people out there who believe (whether for religious reasons or not) that sex should be saved for serious, committed relationships.

It’s all the more annoying because to me, cheating on someone you are dating seems like such a cowardly thing to do. On the one hand, you aren’t breaking a promise before God the way cheating in a marriage is. On the other hand, if you aren’t married, it’s a lot easier to part ways and find someone more compatible. An honest person who really wanted to get laid would break up with the significant other and find someone with a more closely matched sex drive. Only a complete jerk would hold onto the one guy while having sex with another on the side.

On the bright side, Gallup’s 2008 Values and Beliefs Survey shows that only seven percent of respondents think that married men and women having an affair is morally acceptable. I wonder what the percentages would be if the question did not specify marriage - would more people find it acceptable if neither party were married?

 

Eye-Roll of the Day

You know what I’m really getting sick of this election year?  Obama’s campaign’s nauseatingly endless self-righteousness.  For example, Obama recently referred to a great-uncle who helped liberate Auschwitz.  Republicans called him out for the gaffe, noting that it wasn’t the American army that freed Auschwitz.  The Obama campaign’s response?

Obama campaign aides were indignant that Republicans had pounced on what they called an innocent mistake in relating his family history. Tommy Vietor, an Obama spokesman, decried “using the Holocaust and concentration camps as a political football.”

Look, you pansies.  If your candidate brings up the Holocaust and concentration camps in an obvious effort to dispel the anti-American, elitist aura which currently clings to him, the Republicans have every right to call him out when he screws up and says that a member of his family helped liberate Auschwitz.  Look at how Democrats pounced on John McCain when he said he would be willing to stay in Iraq for 100 years, then twisted his words to make him sound like a war-monger.  If you can dish it out, be prepared to take it.

 

Something is rotten in the state of publishing and politics

I got a real kick out of the Washington Post article on Scott McClellan and his new tell-all memoir.  A couple pieces in particular stood out as making McClellan a little more questionable of a character.  Starting from the beginning of the article, we learn that:

one publishing industry insider described his early concept as “a not-very-interesting, typical press secretary book.”

So we start with a really boring concept, unlikely to be a commercial success.  Then we have McClellan’s explanation for how his mind changed:

“Over time, as you leave the White House and leave the bubble, you’re able to take off your partisan hat and take a clear-eyed look at things,”

Convenient, isn’t it, that taking off your partisan hat correlates so strongly to wearing your profitability hat?  Then we get the perspective from the publisher:

“First we had to ascertain what kind of book he wanted to write,” said Osnos, a former Washington Post reporter and editor. “We are journalists, independent-minded publishers. We weren’t interested in a book that was just a defense of the Bush administration. It had to pass our test of independence, integrity and candor.”

Isn’t it amusing that integrity and independence are set up as the opposites of a defense of the Bush administration?  Anyone who knows me could tell you that I’m not our president’s biggest fan, but that doesn’t mean that defense of his motives and/or some of his policy choices is diametrically opposed to candor.

So what we have hear is a man with a boring book idea, in a time when it is profitable to write about how much President Bush sucks, with a publisher who believes that independence and defending Bush are mutually exclusive.  Are we really surprised at the outcome?

When are people going to learn that:

A) People who go into politics often do it for their own gain; therefore,

B) People in politics shouldn’t be entirely trusted; therefore,

C) Political memoirs ought to be taken with a grain of salt.