I’m all for this. It’s an article by Helen Rittlemeyer - she whose name seems to be so up-and-coming amongst the conservative ashes - called “Jezebels with a Cause.” And it’s about reacting to date rape, so you know it’s a can o’ worms.
The take is novel, but it shouldn’t be. To sum up quickly, Rittelmeyer notes without explicitly saying so that date rape has been going on as long as there’ve been frat boys and drunk girls, and girls have been coping that whole time. That a couple of them recently went on a(n internet) radio show and casually mentioned having been date raped - treating it as annoying, but not really a big deal - turns out to be the proverbial canary in the coalmine. This mythology about date rape as huge emotional trauma was bound to come crashing down at some point, and we’re seeing the beginnings.
“Jezebel” here is … well, one of a great many faintly obscure references, actually. I had to look it up: it turns out it’s pretty much a catchall for any kind of woman the speaker doesn’t like. Here it’s used in a way that squares pretty nicely with its biblical roots, though: as a woman who does something she hasn’t been explicitly forbidden to do, but which nevertheless has the effect of upsetting a delicate social arrangement, and in any case who gets blamed all out of proportion to the “crime.” In this case, the idea is that yeah, sure, it’s bad in some sense to let guys off the hook for date rape. But in another sense, can anyone who’s taken an honest look at Third Wave Feminism not have seen this coming?
The truth is that Third Wave Feminism is riddled with all kinds of contradictions about sex. The biggest, most glaring, hardest-to-ignore of all these contradictions is its double standard regarding sexual responsibility. On the one hand, sex is a positive thing, and we’ll know a woman is liberated when she is freed from parochial attitudes about how women should view it. In short, that she should be able to enjoy sex for sport just like a man if she so desires, that her sexuality is hers alone, not the property of society in general. So far so good: it’s impossible to deny that the old stud/slut dichotomy was unfair. On the other hand, rape remains the cardinal sin under this system because it denies a woman control over her sexuality. But herein lies the problem - because you see, the idea that a woman is vulnerable - etymologically “able to be wounded” - by sex was the mainstay of the old puritain morality. Men could pursue with abandon because sex isn’t internal to them - they aren’t “violated” by it. Women, however, are, and so must keep themselves “pure” for their husbands. Putting rape at the top of the totem makes logical sense from one point of view: because if returning control over women’s bodies to the women themselves is our central political concern, then rape is a clear violation. From another point of view, though, it’s a retrenchment, and that’s because it reaffirms the idea that sex can be a (uniquely male) weapon.
Out of this contradiction comes the completely bizarre campus sex culture - whereby men are always and in all ways responsible for any sexual encounter that takes place, but girls are free to drink themselves into a stupor without having to worry about a goddamned thing. Any attempt to explain the dangers brings charges of “blaming the victim.” Any attempt to mention the all-too-obvious potential for abuse is “failing to take the problem seriously.”
Actually, I suspect a lot of Third Wave Feminists aren’t as clueless as they seem. I’ve always imagined they privately raise gin and tonics to toast having foisted a double standard on men - as a kind of affirmative action payback for the stud/slut double standard that women dealt with for so long. A woman is free to get drunk and there’s nothing irresponsible about that - but you, sir, must behave yourself no matter how much you’ve imbibed. HA! That’ll learn ya about calling us “sluts” for doing what you (say you) want! It isn’t the most mature approach, but then, no one has ever accused Third Wave Feminists of reaching adulthood. (Or the fratboys who held to the goddess/whore double standard, for that matter.)
Rittelmeyer’s column is meant to defend the girls who went on the radio and talked about date rape as though it were not the end of their healthy emotional lives. Her reasoning is that this is not only more rational, but also much more “empowering” than the route of constantly worrying about one’s reputation that Third Wave Feminism offered.
Before the interview turned to date rape and pulling out, Winstead told a story about how her group of college friends used to find men the night before moving apartments and sleep with them in order to get help moving furniture. This doesn’t undermine her argument that sex without consent should be illegal, but it makes it difficult for her to say straight-faced that gray rape should be an emotional catastrophe.
Quite. Rape of any kind is clearly a violation of bodily integrity and therefore clearly is and should be a crime. But it’s just silly to go on and on as though girls who casually throw themselves around at parties are so uptight about sex that the man who slept with her while she was passed out has somehow stolen something precious from her. People take precautions to avoid having precious things stolen from them. Leaving my car unlocked wouldn’t make stealing it OK, but it would certainly make it more likely - and so I lock my car. It isn’t that I’m worried I would condone stealing by leaving it open - it’s more just that I can’t afford to buy a new car right now, so… We take care of things we value.
Then came a new generation, one more willing to entertain the idea that, when a man takes an already sexual encounter one specific step too far, it’s a violation of self-ownership only to the extent that stealing a woman’s copy of The Feminine Mystique is a violation of book-ownership: criminal, but nothing to get into therapy over.
Again, right. The strangest aspect of the whole “rape-as-ultimate-crime-against-humanity” culture has always been the attempt to equate a guy not pulling out on command with some kind of depraved viking pillaging. They just aren’t the same thing. No matter how many seminars you hold to say they are, they’re not. If you go into a guy’s room and get naked with him and blow him and then suddenly decide that you don’t want to have sex - well, clearly that’s your right, but you’re not gonna be able to convince any clear-thinking person that sex at that point would’ve been a life-changing trauma for you. Getting clubbed over the head and dragged off to a dungeon - fine. But this clearly isn’t that.
Either sex is mundane or it isn’t. If it is mundane, then it doesn’t make sense to get so riled about men who seize marginally more intimacy than they were offered. If it isn’t mundane, then feminism will have to undo two decades’ work and resurrect words like ’slut.’
Perfect. We should all be able to agree, I think, that it’s up to the individual woman to decide whether sex is “mundane” for her or not. It’s easy to see how that would be a matter of individual preference. Those girls who think of sex as something special and sacred will obviously be traumatized by almost any kind of rape - even the drunken frat party kind where she sent some signals she regrets and decides midway through she wants out. But to the extent that sex is sacred, of course, she’ll take steps not to be in that situation twice. For those girls for whom sex is mundane, then finding date rape annoying - infuriating even - but not traumatizing is simply a logical inevitability. If your bodily integrity can be sacrificed for mere momentary pleasure, then it’s hard to see why shrugging off a drunken roll in the hay that you didn’t necessariy ask for would be supernaturally difficult.
I suppose we could do Rittelmeyer one better and say that sex is both sacred and profane, and that which it is depends on the partner. If it’s the first time with someone you’ve been lusting after for years, then of course it’s going to have big significance for you. If you’re in a committed relationship and swear off all others, then ditto. But if you’re out on the town in search of a good time - well, there’s that kind of sex too, and the point is that people can pick and choose between them as suits their needs at a particular point in their lives. What shouldn’t be controversial is that sex is never “trauma” if it’s just one baby step further than the woman was willing to go anyway. To maintain that it is requires you to build up a whole edifice of mystique around sex and women that is no more liberating and no less ridiculous than what we inherited from the Victorians. Since it is artificial, it was inevitable that society would see through it. Rittelmeyer defends these two girls as heralding the beginning of that process, and I see no reason to disagree with her.
Go read the whole article. It isn’t the best-written bit of internet polemic you’ve ever seen. Indeed, it comes across as sort of jumbled - a signature product of rushing something out but simultaneously wanting to be thoughtful. I’m betting the author clacked it out at lightning speed and then revised it about a thousand times, never able to decide exactly how far she wanted to take it. She’s no Camille Paglia. But it’s a brave thing to put out there all the same, given today’s political climate, and it’s in any case impossible to disagree with the conclusion. I suspect she’s right: we’re seeing the crest of the Fourth Wave Feminism just starting to form.
The interesting question is whether there will be a Fifth Wave at all?