The Only Winning Move

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?

TOWM quote of the day comes from this welcome article in the City Journal about campus “rape:”

The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it’s not a reinstatement of the patriarchy. Each would be perfectly content if his partner for the evening becomes president of the United States one day, so long as she lets him take off her panties tonight.

Nicely put. There’s nothing so ridiculous as the campus “rape” alarmists’ claim that drunken men having sex with drunken girls at parties has anything whatever to do with politics, let alone some kind of shadowy conspiracy to keep women “in their place.” I’ve blogged enough about campus “rape” culture (specifically, the extent to which the IDS subscribes to the nonsense: here, here, and here, for starters) that there’s no need to go into it all again. I’ll just say that the linked article is a welcome breath of fresh air.

Wasting time this morning I read through the Wikipedia entry on Rod Serling and hit a gem.

Serling was also progressive on matters of gender, with many stories featuring quick-thinking, resilient women, although he also wrote stories featuring shrewish, nagging wives.

What a great, unintentional encapsulation of what’s wrong with feminism. Specifically, there are two problems with it.

(1) Why is there a conflict between writing about quick-thinking, resilient women and also nagging, shrewish wives? Both types of women exist in reality, right? Women are people too, possessive of good as well as bad qualities, are they not? Picking out only the good is not “progressive,” it’s propaganda.

(2) We’re overlooking the possibility that the shrewish wives may also be a feminist social commentary. Making women miserable by confining them in the house has the indirect consequence of making men miserable too. The system fails both sexes.

In a nutshell, that’s what’s wrong with feminism. First, it’s so unsophisticated that it can only see “progess” where women are unambiguously good and men unambiguously bad. The less polished of us might call that “sexism” (or “reverse sexism,” if we’re being polite, but I see no reason to be), but apparently we’re just not “progressive” enough. Second, this tunnel vision robs it of its ability to see social commentary that’s beneficial to it where that commentary would implicate men as co-victims of oppressive gender roles.

It kind of reminds me of something I read yesterday on the Feminist SF blog. They’re having a poll currently to make a list of underappreciated gems - with the catch being that these gems have to be feminist. The link goes to some of the suggested entries. Here’s a description of one:

The Psalms of Herod by Esther Friesner - It’s a feminist dystopian novel like THE HANDMAID’S TALE, on crack. Set in a postapocalyptic world in which food is scarce and the human race has mutated bizarrely, and a deeply-warped version of fundamentalist Christianity has become the dominant faith. Like animals, women are only capable of reproducing once a year or so, “in season” - if they have sex outside this time, they die horribly. Alpha males rule small homesteads in which they control the lives of their people utterly. Abortion is the highest sin possible - but unwanted babies are put out on a hillside to die of exposure. Women who refuse to obey are beaten or raped to death; men who show any hint of homosexuality (even if they’re raped) are stoned; people of color are killed on sight; and the most evil creature ever rumored to exist is the Jew.

In other words, reality as it is isn’t oppressive enough, so we’ve written a fantasy world where we can dream about being victims for real. How can you help such people?

In a Sociolinguistics class this semester, our professor - a gender equality advocate (well, have YOU ever met a Sociolinguist who wasn’t?) - asked the class for examples of systematic discrimination against men. The answer she was looking for, as it turns out, was that men are hugely less likely to get equal custody (or custody at all) of their children in divorce cases. But I raised my hand to give a different answer: there is discrimination against men in public health concerns. To quote the most obvious example - men are disproportionately (1.5 times) likely to die of heart disease, and yet there is a national campaign to stamp out breast cancer and comparatively little concern about hearts. The American Heart Association’s take on this? See for yourself:

Coronary heart disease age-adjusted death rates for women have dropped 26.9 percent since 1999. But, age-adjusted stroke death rates among women are down by only 23.7 percent, lower than the overall age-adjusted stroke death rate reduction and the age-adjusted stoke death rate reduction for men, which is 25.8 percent.

No one at the AHA seems to consider it relevant that male rates have much more room to fall than female rates, since they remain higher overall. And this is symptomatic of the trend in general. Everywhere you look, there is more concern for women’s health than men’s - odd, considering that men in general are less healthy and die earlier than women.

My particular gripe in class had to do with eating disorders. Nearly every time you switch on the television, there is some talk show on some channel somewhere lamenting all the damage women do to themselves trying to look good for men. What no one considers is that men probably do more damage to themselves trying to look good for women. Indeed, a new book by Dr. Marianne Legato - who has made explaining the discrepancy in the male-female death rates a professional focus - concludes that a good portion of the difference owes to the fact that men are trained to “suck it up” and ignore their health problems, missing out on the ounce of prevention that would save them from a pound of cure.

For Dr Legato, part of the solution is that men need to live more like women. “Men are told from an early age to ’suck it up’,” she says. “They are socialised to get on with it and it is left to women to urge them to go to the doctor, usually ineffectively.”

It is extraordinary, as the opening sentence of her book says, that in a society where health is an obsession, we are not investigating in more detail the most fundamental question of all - why one sex should die before the other.

The reason, put simply, is that people do not care. For all the talk of liberation coming out of feminists, the truth is that they are only interested in “liberating” themselves from those aspects of the old system that they find inconvenient. Consider, for example, that US Vital Statistics show that men are 2.2 times as likely to die from accidents and injuries and 4.1 times as likely to kill themselves. Granted that some of these injuries have to do with a general male preference for physically demanding recreational activities as compared to women. Rockclimbing and soccer are more dangerous than knitting and shopping. But I’m equally certain that a lot of these fatal injuries are sustained on the job. It’s telling where feminists are most concerned about “equality.” They want it for scientists and CEOs. I have never heard a feminist complaining that there are not more female electric linemen, or oil rig workers, or highrise window washers. The closest they come to advocating for dangerous jobs for women involves affording them equal status in the military - but of course they draw the line at including women in the Selective Services Registry, and are as likely as not to object to trivia like hair regulations and workout routines once women do muscle their way in. All of which is consistent with a middle-class princess entitlement mentality. Men take these kinds of dangerous and dirty jobs mostly because they have to - because finding a working woman to support them is generally not an option - certainly not socially. And as for suicide - one can chalk that up to hormones if one likes, but at least some of that discrepancy owes to the fact that men are generally under more pressure than women.

Men have it hard. Period. Women may complain more loudly - but then, that is the whole problem. The stoicism that is trained into men from birth, and which is absolutely necessary to attracting a suitable mate, is every bit as harmful to us as extreme diets are to women. Listening to talk shows, you would think that women spent all their waking moments torturing themselves just to get a glance from largely indifferent men. But nothing could be further from the truth. Men do just as much - nay, probably more - damage to themselves cultivating the rugged self-sufficiency that is a sine qua non to getting the best chicks as women do watching their waistlines.

I don’t have any solutions to offer, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m part of the problem. I strongly dislike going to to the doctor and being dependent on people. I like meat rather a lot, and for that reason eat a lot more fat than I probably should. My primary form of exercise is running, which is bad on the joints and back. And I drink WAY too much black tea. I’m aware that a lot of my need for self-sufficiency comes from societal expectations of how men should behave, but what can I say? I like being this way and would consider it weak to change. My point here is simply that … well, I read the Legato article linked above and thought I would mention it. For all the talk of the oppression of women, I think it’s fair to say that there is an equally good case that the system was always biased against men too, if in different and more subtle ways.