The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

What ‘Rape Culture’ Really Means: Your Male Heterosexuality Is Problematic

Posted on | October 27, 2015 | 110 Comments

“[T]he curse of having been born a heterosexual male . . . meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.”
— Scott Aaronson, Dec. 14, 2014

The Internet erupted in controversy last year over “Comment 171,” in which MIT Professor Scott Aaronson responded to a discussion of “sexual harassment” by describing the sexual fears he experienced as a nerdy Ivy League student in the late 1990s. Professor Aaronson’s specialty is computer science, but in describing how he was driven to suicidal despair by the terroristic campus crusade against “harassment,” he performed award-worthy work as a psychologist or sociologist, exposing to the world what goes on inside the mind of a socially awkward heterosexual male when confronted by feminism’s pre-emptive accusations of wrongdoing. Because he is a male, and because he is attracted to females, such a student is made to feel as if his interest in the opposite sex is a shameful secret that he must be careful never to reveal.

If by any word or gesture he signifies his attraction to a female — or if he even makes a joke that discloses his heterosexuality in a general way — the male student could be accused of “harassment.” When your parents are spending big bucks to send you to an elite school like Cornell University (annual tuition $49,116), the possibility that you could be accused of “harassment” must be a frightening thing, and the risk of a “sexual assault” accusation is the Nightmare Scenario From Hell.

Feminist rhetoric defines both “harassment” and “sexual assault” in terms of experiences that the female deems “unwelcome” or “unwanted.” If a college boy thinks a girl is cute and starts talking to her with the hope that she might reciprocate his interest, his conversation could be considered “harassment” if she dislikes him. Read enough feminist blogs, and you see countless variations of this theme, The Clueless Unattractive Male Who Won’t Take a Hint. His behavior is offensive — “creepy” or “stalkerish” — because (a) he likes her, (b) she doesn’t like him, yet (c) he dares to speak to her without permission, and (d) he doesn’t seem to notice her signals of disinterest. We can easily imagine how a sensitive and intelligent young man like Scott Aaronson circa 1997, being lectured about harassment and rape in a freshman orientation session, must have been stricken with fear upon learning how loathsome his heterosexual orientation made him in the eyes of his fellow students.

How dare this disgusting nerd find women sexually attractive?

“All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. Men’s world is like a vast prison or concentration camp for women. This isn’t a metaphor, it’s reality. Each man is a threat. We can’t escape men.”
— Radical Wind, August 2013

In describing feminism’s characteristic anti-male/anti-heterosexual paranoia as “Fear and Loathing of the Penis,” I do not mean merely to make a hyperbolic joke, but rather to call attention to the strange and savage hostility toward normal male behavior that is the fundamental basis of feminist theory. My original guide to this was Professor Daphne Patai’s 1998 book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism. Until I read Professor Patai’s book, I had no idea how far feminists had gone in their demonization of heterosexuality, especially in the context of “harassment” charges in academia. During my own youth, we understood “sexual harassment” in the sense of the quid pro quo, in which a male authority figure — an employer, a supervisor, or a teacher — expected females to provide him with sex in exchange for favorable treatment. Everyone understood this kind of harassment to be a wrongful abuse of power. The professor was hired to teach English, not to seduce his students, and the manager was hired to run a restaurant, not to have sex with waitresses. While sex between co-workers might be entirely consensual, everyone understood the problems that could arise in a situation where a female employee was having sex with her male supervisor. Because that kind of quid pro quo harassment was widely understood to be wrong, most people didn’t pay much attention when the definition of “harassment” was expanded to include behaviors that were nothing like the (clearly wrongful) quid pro quo. The feminist legal theorists who pushed this expanded definition of “harassment” — now construed as meaning damned near anything a man did that any woman decided was “unwelcome” or “unwanted” and “offensive” or “sexist” — created a workplace environment where everyday interactions between male and female employees could become the basis of a federal discrimination lawsuit unless males were always strictly and formally professional in their behavior. An easygoing, informal workplace atmosphere — men joking around with their female colleagues in the way they would joke with their male colleagues — was a recipe for disaster, if any woman ever got her feelings hurt, or believed that she was in any way discriminated against in her employment.

A series of high-profile cases in the 1990s — the Clarence Thomas hearings, the “Tailhook” scandal and the Bill Clinton impeachment imbroglio — brought widespread attention to the issue of sexual harassment, so that everyone began to interpret workplace interaction between men and women in a new way. As more and more women succumbed to the feminist sexual paranoia that Professor Patai dubbed Heterophobia, suddenly “harassment” was everywhere, and it was amid this climate of pervasive sexual fear that Scott Aaronson attended Cornell University in the 1990s:

Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years — basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s — feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. And furthermore, that the people who did these things to me would somehow be morally right to do them — even if I couldn’t understand how.
You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

You should read the whole thing, if you didn’t read Comment 171 when it went viral last year. Professor Aaronson’s very personal account of his experiences was quite risky. As he said, he was “giving up a privacy that I won’t regain for as long as I live, opening myself to ridicule” and, predictably, feminists began dogpiling him with mockery. I have described how feminism enables deliberate cruelty, rationalizing the sadistic impulses of women who are afflicted with a hateful desire to inflict punitive revenge on males, and the way Professor Aaronson was mocked by feminists (including the execrable Laurie Penny and the hideous Miriam Mogilevsky) was certainly proof enough of that.

Feminists are very bad people — dishonest, selfish and cruel — and only a fool would ever trust them. Every word they speak or write is a deception, because they will never admit the vile hatred that motivates their anti-male politics. In Comment 171, Professor Aaronson made a statement I heartily endorse:

I’ve read at least a dozen feminist books, of which my favorite was Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (I like howls of anguish much more than bureaucratic boilerplate, so in some sense, the more radical the feminist, the better I can relate).

Indeed, the shrieking lesbian rage of Andrea Dworkin is vastly preferable to the Foucauldian academese of Judith Butler, as far as getting to the actual point of feminist theory. Feminists do not like men, feminists do not like sex, and feminists especially do not like sex with men. Why? Because men enjoy having sex with women, and anything that men enjoy is wrong, because they are men. Feminism is a movement dedicated to depriving men of pleasure. Anything that brings a smile to a man’s face must be oppressive to women. This spiteful campaign to eradicate every potential source of male happiness is what has inspired the “campus rape epidemic” hysteria. Nowhere does feminist power more nearly approach totalitarianism than at American colleges and universities, where women are 57% of the students, and every male on campus knows he could be expelled if any female classmate ever accuses him of wrongdoing.

If you believe what feminists say (in other words, if you are a goddamned helpless fool), then you must believe that the only reason any boy goes to college is because he wants to rape the girls who go to college. Every male student on campus is a suspected rapist, and every female student on campus is his would-be victim. The absence of actual evidence to prove this feminist claim (“The Campus Rape Shortage”) is explained away by the assertion that female students don’t report being raped because they are afraid no one will believe them. (Circular logic is circular; the conclusion and the premise of a feminist argument are always the same thing, except when they are completely contradictory, but logic is an oppressive tool of the patriarchy.) Statistics showing that the rate of sexual assault has declined, and that female college students are less likely to be raped than non-college women of the same age, raise the question of why feminists have devoted so much effort to portraying the 21st-century campus as a Rape Factory, an assembly line staffed by violent misogynists engaged in the production of sexual victims.

Once we understand that (a) the vast majority of male college students are not rapists, and (b) the vast majority of rapists and rape victims are not college students, we realize feminist discourse about “rape culture” represents an effort to demonize male college students as “privileged.” The eagerness with which feminists leapt onto the 2006 Duke lacrosse team rape hoax and the 2014 University of Virginia rape hoax betrays the real motive behind this crusade. In both of those cases, the falsely accused males were white and belonged to campus organizations where membership conferred high status. To be a varsity lacrosse player at Duke (annual tuition $49,341) is to occupy a very lofty position in the hierarchies of “male privilege” that are targets of feminist criticism. Likewise, the members of Phi Kappa Psi at the University of Virginia are quite likely beneficiaries of the kind of upper-middle-class privilege that feminists condemn as the essence of oppression.

The higher a man’s socioeconomic status, the greater his exercise of male power, according to feminist theory, so that any success a man achieves (or any benefit he receives from his parents’ success) condemns him as an oppressor. If his parents worked hard to provide him with advantages, and if he made the most of his opportunities to excel in school, then the very fact that he is attending a prestigious university marks the male student as a living symbol of social injustice. His mere existence is oppressive to women, and if he adds to this indictment by being (a) white and (b) heterosexual, then anything that feminists can do to harm him is justified in the name of “equality.” The male student branded a rapist and expelled from college now is one less “privileged” male competing with women for high-status jobs in the future. The false accuser who destroys a young man’s educational opportunities today deprives him of career opportunities tomorrow. If campus activists can destroy enough young men this way, eventually the systematic process of destruction will bring about the Progressive Utopia of Gender Equality that feminists have been promising women for more than 40 years.

When we begin examining the “rape culture” discourse in detail, we are struck by how little it takes for a male student to be branded a perpetrator on the 21st-century campus. The “regret equals rape” case at Virginia’s Washington and Lee University and the John Doe lawsuit against Brown University are but two of the data points in an emerging pattern. If we can believe what the male plaintiffs allege in complaints like these, it is obvious that nothing like an actual rape was involved in the cases that resulted in their being punished in campus “Title IX” proceedings where they were deliberately deprived of due-process rights that would be accorded to any common criminal in a court of law.

We may contrast this obsession with accusing “privileged” male college students of rape with the way feminists habitually ignore news of violence against women committed by common criminals:

  • MIDLAND, Texas, Oct. 22: Aurelio Luna Sr., 55, was senteced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after a jury found him guilty of continuous sexual assault of a child. Luna committed multiple acts of sexual assault against a female family member over a period of at least two years. The girl’s mother contacted the Midland Police Department after she found text messages regarding the abuse.
  • OMAHA, Neb., Oct. 23: Reginald Briggs, 31, was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Teresa Longo. Police say Briggs is a pimp and that Longo was one of his prostitutes. Longo’s body was fund Oct. 2. An autopsy showed she was killed by a single gunshot wound to the back of her head. Briggs reportedly bragged about killing her, and another one of his prostitutes told police she went with Briggs to dispose of the shotgun he used to murder Longo on Sept. 17.
  • MILWAUKEE, Wisc., Oct. 27: Jose Ferreira Jr., 50, was charged with the murder of a seventh-grader more than 30 years ago. Carrie Ann Jopek disappeared in March 1982. According to prosecutors, Ferreira and Jopek were at a party at a house when he pushed her down the steps into the basement. The fall broke her neck, killing her. Ferreira, who reportedly believed the girl was only unconscious, had sex with her corpse. He then buried Jopek’s body under a neighbor’s porch, according to prosecutors. When he recently told his wife about the 1982 murder, she turned him in to police.
  • NEW BRITAIN, Conn., Oct. 26: Luis Velez, 43, was sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to murdering his wife, Johana Gallego, 33. She and Velez had been married less than a year when he strangled her to death. He had previously been convicted of another killing in Puerto Rico.
  • ST. LOUIS, Mo., Oct. 23: Keith L. Ivy, 41, is charged with kidnapping after police say he and an accomplice abducted Ivy’s ex-girlfriend from her workplace. Ivy, who had been recently released from prison in Georgia and was also on probation for a separate drug conviction, allegedly told the ex-girlfriend they were “going to die tonight.” She managed to escape.
  • SUFFOLK COUNTY, N.Y., Oct. 26: Justin Suarez, 27, was arrested on 34 charges, after police say he raped his ex-girlfriend twice, stalked her, threatened her with a sledgehammer and shot a dog to death in front of her. “He told her that if she told anyone, he would kill her, too,” the district attorney said.
  • WACO, Texas, Oct. 22: Emmanuel Emil Bailey of Ft. Smith, Ark., faces trial on federal charges connected to an interstate child sex trafficking ring. Bailey is charged with transporting persons for prostitution and other violations of the Mann Act. Bailey was among more than 40 suspects arrested during an Internet prostitution sting orchestrated by the McLennan County Sheriff’s Office.

You will never find Jaclyn Friedman or Jessica Valenti or Amanda Marcotte discussing cases like that, because none of the men accused in those cases are “privileged” white male college students. The reason feminists ignore crimes committed by perps like Emmanuel Bailey, Aurelio Luna, Keith Ivy, and Justin Suarez is very similar to the reason that feminists never call attention to any crime committed by a woman or a gay man. The hierarchies of privilege determine who is an oppressor deserving condemnation and who is a victim deserving sympathy. A black pimp who murders a prostitute, a Hispanic pedophile who rapes a teenager, female teachers having sex with their students — none of these crimes are of interest to a feminist, because publicizing such crimes does not help promote the “social justice” worldview in which the “privileged” white heterosexual male is the epitome of evil.

If you have a son attending college, or if you have a teenage son who is about to finish high school, he must be warned. Every feminist seeks to destroy him, and therefore every woman he encounters on a college campus is his enemy. No female he meets can be trusted, because all college women are being actively encouraged to accuse male students of rape. Anything your son says to a woman on campus can be interpreted as “harassment,” and any active expression of heterosexual interest puts your son at risk of an accusation of “sexual assault.” The only way a male student can safely attend college in the 21st century is to avoid any contact with female students on campus.

Warn your sons, America. It would be best, if possible, for your son to consider a field of employment that does not require a college education. Let him become a truck driver or a carpenter, rather than subjecting him to the risk of being falsely accused of rape by college feminists.

Wake up, America! It’s 2015! The only reason any girl goes to college nowadays is to seize her opportunity for advancing the feminist cause of “gender equality” by accusing a boy of rape.

Feminism is a movement that seeks to eliminate “male privilege” by preventing men from having any opportunity for success. Because feminists now exercise unlimited authority at American colleges and universities, a young man seeking success in life should contemplate how best to pursue a career path that permits him to avoid attending college, where his presence on campus is considered offensive by the monstrous man-hating fanatics who call themselves feminists.

Academia is now so tightly controlled by radical ideologues that it would be better for your child to have no education at all, rather than to be corrupted by 21st-century “higher education.” Millions of young minds are being permanently warped by the godless perverts who have seized power on campus and are using that power to destroy our civilization.

Dann them all. Damn them all to Hell.

(Incidentally, Scott Aaronson said his purpose in writing Comment 171 was to ensure “no one will ever again be able to question the depth of my feminist ideals.” Some people just never learn . . .)




 

Category: Sex Trouble

Comments

110 Responses to “What ‘Rape Culture’ Really Means: Your Male Heterosexuality Is Problematic”

  1. Daniel Freeman
    October 30th, 2015 @ 8:04 am

    You’re doing it backwards. First crush the dividers, then unite everyone. It is impossible to do in the opposite order.

  2. NeoWayland
    October 30th, 2015 @ 9:20 am

    Not impossible, just very difficult. The worthy choices are never the easy ones.

    Your way just means trading one tyranny for another.

  3. NeoWayland
    October 30th, 2015 @ 9:23 am

    Let me give you an example. Assume that you and I agree that teaching Islam in public schools is a really bad idea.

    My solution would be that no religion or faith should be taught in public schools.

    Your solution might be that good Christian values should be taught instead of Islam. Leaving aside the question of which Christian values (Baptist? Catholic? Mormon?), that still leaves a problem

  4. NeoWayland
    October 30th, 2015 @ 9:27 am

    Once something is taught in public schools, it’s only a short step to The Officially Sanction Vertsion®, which may or may not match it’s inspiration.

    So from teaching Christianity in public schools, we move to proclaiming and celebrating The Officially Sanction Vertsion® and teaching against any other religion or faith.

  5. NeoWayland
    October 30th, 2015 @ 9:33 am

    Is your argument here against feminism and equality, or is it against the radical feminists with their twisted shouts against heterosexuality?

    Do you want to stop the RadFems or do you want to control the culture?

    Put your culture and beliefs above all others by force of law and you are no better than they are.

    Competition keeps us honest. If you have to force your ideas on others and you’re doing it wrong.

  6. Quartermaster
    October 30th, 2015 @ 3:48 pm

    Wouldn’t be surprised.I went through the EIT program when Croft Merritt was still around. I landed in District 10 after that. That was ’92. I left in ’98. I’m in WNC now.

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