Tuesday, January 06, 2015

The Right-Wing Take on College Rape: Limbaugh and Schlafly, Sitting in A Tree.


Serendipity gave these two stories in one day. 

First Rush Limbaugh tells us that feminazis* teach on college campuses that all sex is rape, and that's why people think there is a rape epidemic on US campuses

Fuckin hilarious, our old friend Rush is (while slowly circling the drain of history).  Indeed, I've been taught (to my great surprise!) by various types of MRAs that feminists want to kill all men and teach that all sex is rape.  That first is because of a 1970s rant (The Scum Manifesto) by a woman called Valerie Solanas who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.   The second is something taken from Intercourse,  a book by Andrea Dworkin, another 1970s radical feminist.  Wikipedia tells us:

In 1987, Dworkin published Intercourse, in which she extended her analysis from pornography to sexual intercourse itself, and argued that the sort of sexual subordination depicted in pornography was central to men's and women's experiences of heterosexual intercourse in a male supremacist society. In the book, she argues that all heterosexual sex in our patriarchal society is coercive and degrading to women, and sexual penetration may by its very nature doom women to inferiority and submission, and "may be immune to reform".[59]

....

Such descriptions are often cited by Dworkin's critics, interpreting the book as claiming "all" heterosexual intercourse is rape, or more generally that the anatomical mechanics of sexual intercourse make it intrinsically harmful to women's equality. For instance, Cathy Young[61] says that statements such as, "Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women,"[59] are reasonably summarized as "All sex is rape".
Dworkin rejected that interpretation of her argument,[62] stating in a later interview that "I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality"[63] and suggesting that the misunderstanding came about because of the very sexual ideology she was criticizing: "Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I do not think they need it."[63]
What's hilarious in Limbaugh's take is also hilarious in those teaching moments I was given:  Two women talk for everyone who believes in gender equality.  We should apply the same norm to MRA articles, indeed, to any politics.  Find the most extreme comments and assign them to everyone in a group.  Then make the person you are talking to responsible for those comments.  I didn't even know about Valerie Solanas existing, and I'm responsible for what she wrote almost fifty years ago.

The point that Limbaugh chases, naturally, is to make everything the fault of people who want gender equality.  Or more precisely, to turn everything against women.  The caller-in the video depicts doesn't get that, sadly.  But sancta simplicitas and all that.

Mmm.




The second story about what's wrong with college campuses today is by a very old and veneered female misogynist, Phyllis Schlafly. 

She tells us that there are far too many women on college campuses and suggests that all sorts of problems could be avoided by putting an upper quota of fifty percent on women.  That would make the world a better place for men (more men in college) who, in any case, are smarter than women whatever school grades might show.  It would also be a better place for those women Schlafly would allow into college, because they could then dictate the terms on which they will have heterosexual sex.  Demand and supply, my friends!

Wonderful stuff. But wait!  It gets even better.  Schlafly actually wrote this:

The imbalance of far more women than men at colleges has been a factor in the various sex scandals that have made news in the last couple of years.
What on earth could she mean by "sex scandals?"  Is that a euphemism for campus rape cases?

Why do I bother to write about the opinions of this conservative couple?  Because by putting the stories together you can see the connecting thread, and that is an attempt to keep women down in the basement.  It doesn't matter which hare-brained theory the person applies, the outcome is the same, and that's probably because the outcome was the starting point in these stories.


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*Us feminazis really run this world, with Islamic State -type developments abroad and Republican Congress in the US and so on.  Don't ask me to explain why we would do that.  I didn't invent that phantasmagoria.