The Middle Class Campus Rape Craze

We seem to be going through a period of hysteria around the phenomenon of the purported rapes of middle class girls on co-ed college campuses.

Less than 40 years after feminists broke down gender segregation in the academy, lowering standards and blowing up the doctrine of in loco parentis, many of those feminists have come to decrying their unique project, the co-ed institution of higher learning, as a place where rape is endemic.

In the words of activists, these aren’t typically violent rapes. They are instead rather more rapes via intoxication and seduction, which are not necessarily obviously rape for everyone involved until later on, when there is no evidence or eyewitness testimony to corroborate the reports. It is a subjective conception of rape that never meets the evidentiary standard that American courts require to convict someone of a crime.

UVA: Educating the a future generation of leading group sex fans and permanently damaged therapy patients

The latest article on the topic is a feature for Rolling Stone about a ‘gang-rape’ at one of the most prestigious public universities in the country, the University of Virginia. UVA was founded by Thomas Jefferson.

The article recounts a scene of the dean responsible for investigating rape complaints:

If Dean Eramo was surprised at Jackie’s story of gang rape, it didn’t show. A short woman with curly dark hair and a no-nonsense demeanor, Eramo surely has among the most difficult jobs at UVA. As the intake person on behalf of the university for all sexual-assault complaints since 2006, it’s her job to deal with a parade of sobbing students trekking in and out of her office. (UVA declined to make Eramo available for comment.) A UVA alum herself, Eramo is beloved by survivors, who consider her a friend and confidante – even though, as only a few students are aware, her office isn’t a confidential space at all. Each time a new complaint comes through Eramo’s office, it activates a review by UVA’s Title IX officer, is included in UVA’s tally of federally mandated Clery Act crime statistics, and Eramo may, at her discretion, reveal details of her conversation with the student to other administrators. (Jackie was mortified to learn later that Eramo had shared her identity with another UVA administrator.) After all, a dean’s foremost priority is the overall safety of the campus.

…

When Jackie finished talking, Eramo comforted her, then calmly laid out her options. If Jackie wished, she could file a criminal complaint with police. Or, if Jackie preferred to keep the matter within the university, she had two choices. She could file a complaint with the school’s Sexual Misconduct Board, to be decided in a “formal resolution” with a jury of students and faculty, and a dean as judge. Or Jackie could choose an “informal resolution,” in which Jackie could simply face her attackers in Eramo’s presence and tell them how she felt; Eramo could then issue a directive to the men, such as suggesting counseling. Eramo presented each option to Jackie neutrally, giving each equal weight. She assured Jackie there was no pressure – whatever happened next was entirely her choice.

Like many schools, UVA has taken to emphasizing that in matters of sexual assault, it caters to victim choice. “If students feel that we are forcing them into a criminal or disciplinary process that they don’t want to be part of, frankly, we’d be concerned that we would get fewer reports,” says associate VP for student affairs Susan Davis. Which in theory makes sense: Being forced into an unwanted choice is a sensitive point for the victims. But in practice, that utter lack of guidance can be counterproductive to a 19-year-old so traumatized as Jackie was that she was contemplating suicide. Setting aside for a moment the absurdity of a school offering to handle the investigation and adjudication of a felony sex crime – something Title IX requires, but which no university on Earth is equipped to do – the sheer menu of choices, paired with the reassurance that any choice is the right one, often has the end result of coddling the victim into doing nothing.

“This is an alarming trend that I’m seeing on campuses,” says Laura Dunn of the advocacy group SurvJustice. “Schools are assigning people to victims who are pretending, or even thinking, they’re on the victim’s side, when they’re actually discouraging and silencing them. Advocates who survivors love are part of the system that is failing to address sexual violence.”

We ought to perhaps consider, that whether or not these sexual acts are actually rape, whether or not this is the kind of culture that is capable of maintaining a global empire of any significance, or really a country of any significance at all.

These are what, in the historical context, we would call show trials. There is no evidence presented beyond hearsay. In many cases, as with the recent charges leveled against Bill Cosby in the media, there’s nothing but a long parade of hearsay, with no evidence presented, amid an ideological climate that states that the testimonies of women should be trusted no matter what, whether or not it meets the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard.

The press has also become comfortable repeating thin non-evidence in a libelous manner, and the government does not seem to care that major television stations, magazines, and newspapers are making a mock of American laws around libel and defamation.

What do we really get out of co-education?

Given that co-education has not delivered the promised results, as with all socialist programs, there must be a set of wreckers to be blamed for the institutional failures. In this case, the failure of co-education to do anything but deliver vastly damaged standards of public intellect and lowered public morals, the wreckers blamed for this failure are young male pseudo-rapists, who are really more accurately termed fornicators.

Having driven out older norms and rituals around sexual behavior, the left expresses shock that the result has been widespread unhappiness. Having lost the language to call women ‘ruined’ with fornication, or for calling promiscuous young men rakes, or for even distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate sex, there is only the language of therapy and trauma to take its place.

Regrettable, morally-damaging sex falls into the only legal category that seems to hold the moral weight that contemporary liberals haven’t destroyed: rape.

Whereas before there was a wide taxonomy describing different forms of sexual misbehavior, today, we only have ‘harassment’ and ‘rape.’

Women are supposedly strong and independent, but even the girls who attend some of the most selective institutions in the country are neither strong nor independent enough, apparently, to enforce their own consent, or to make intelligent decisions about protecting themselves from unseemly sexual encounters.

If so among the most intelligent and socially well-positioned young women, what does that say for the gender as a whole? These are students that are at least in the top 5%, IQ-wise. It is perhaps more likely that the ancient philosophers were more correct about the limitations of this sex than we tend to give them credit for today, even by the piously trumpeted admissions of the feminists.

This has always been a major philosophical problem for assigning legal rights to women: it makes a whole lot less sense when someone else always has to enforce the rights of that entire class of human being. Almost any man can clobber any woman in a physical struggle, and given the vulnerability of their sex, the law before the revolution had different expectations for women.

Going back 60 or 70 years, this set of consequences was foreseeable and was foreseen.

Diminished standards, diminished morals, and ruined graduates

‘Jackie’ from the article was most likely not raped. But the damage done to her is certainly real, as is the emotional ball of screw-up-edness that she and whomever is stuck marrying her is going to wind up having to clean up.

“Everything bad in my life now is built around that one bad decision that I made,” she says. “All because I went to that stupid party.”