Well whadaya fucking know

Women are blamed for everything especially when we're raped and killed by someone else because we didn't exercise common sense. What-thefuck-ever.

Take the author of this enlightening op-ed piece found in the Wall Street Journal recently, which was written by a woman:

A police investigation has confirmed that on the night of her murder, Ms. St. Guillen was last seen in a bar, alone and drinking at 3 a.m. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It does not diminish Mr. Littlejohn's guilt or the tragedy of Ms. St. Guillen's death to note what more than a few of us have been thinking--that a 24-year-old woman should know better.

It's the same argument really: I'm not blaming the victim, but....

Of course the woman should have known better since she's the weaker of the two sexes and can't adequately defend herself against a more powerful adversary. Of course it's the woman's fault for a man raping, mutilating and eventually brutally murdering her even though she most certainly can't control anyone else’s actions other than her own. Of course it was Imette's fault because, damn it, women should know better than to freely associate in public especially at 3am. And *gasp* she was drinking, too.

If you have attended college any time in the past 20 years, you will have heard that if a woman is forced against her will to have sex, it is "not her fault" and that women always have the right to "control their own bodies."

Sadly no, I really don't hear this enough and I work right here on campus. There are phones everywhere with yellow flashing lights above them, but there is no education about rape and sexual assault. We just get help afterward.

Nothing could be truer.

I'm just pointing this out because I want to scream, "Nothing could be more true you dumbass. Truer is not a word." I understand that dictionary.com says it is, but I think someone was smoking something that day.

Yet I digress. It only gets better from here on out, I promise.

But the administrators who utter these sentiments and the feminists who inspire them rarely note which situations are conducive to keeping that control and which threaten it. They rarely discuss what to do to reduce the likelihood of a rape. Short of re-educating men, that is.

I am unaware of any differences. Isn't it rape when someone forces you to have sex regardless of when or where it happened or who the perpetrator was? We feminists discuss what to do to reduce the likelihood of rape all the time. We also talk about how it's unfortunate that we have to *at-risk* ourselves because the other half of society refuses to control themselves and then take responsibility when they lose that control. In an ideal world women and men would be trusted at all times. But damn if its mostly men who rape and she (the author) apparently believes re-educating them would be just silly.

(about the Duke rape case)Which explanation is most credible? Perhaps it doesn't matter. Whatever the problem is, it won't be fixed this year or possibly ever, even with best sorts of attitude adjustment. Perhaps the law of averages says that, with 14 million men in U.S. colleges today, a few of them will be rapists. What to do? For starters: Be wary of drunken house parties.

The law of averages also suggests that a woman is raped and/or sexually assaulted every 7 minutes or that 1 out of 7 women will be raped and/or sexually assaulted in her lifetime. And that, on college campuses, those numbers get higher. No number is set in stone, however, because so many rapes/sexual assaults go unreported because of the social stigma placed on a woman's supposed responsibility. You know, that we should have known better and utilized our common sense function.

I would like to address the beginnings of a double standard in that paragraph. Why is it men can go to drunken house parties, knowing or unknowingly, yet its women who need to be careful? Again I ask how on this fucking planet can I control another man's action toward me regardless of my sobriety level. I've been in plenty more sticky situations sober than drunk doncha know. Especially since most rapes/sexual assaults are committed by someone the victim knows. Horny uncle's anyone? Brothers? Grandfathers? Step-dads?

The odd thing is that feminism may be partly to blame. Time magazine reporter Barrett Seaman explains that many of the college women he interviewed for his book "Binge" (2005) "saw drinking as a gender equity issue; they have as much right as the next guy to belly up to the bar." Leaving biology aside--most women's bodies can't take as much alcohol as men's--the fact of the matter is that men simply are not, to use the phrase of another generation, "taken advantage of" in the way women are.

Feminism is to blame for women getting raped while intoxicated because my foremothers told them they could do anything a man could do, including getting drunk in public. Feminism is to blame because my foremothers have given us all a false sense of security.

Jeebus fucking crispus. Can we get anymore off the wire?

Why can't a woman head out to a bar for a few drinks like the men do? Because our common sense should tell us that a guy might try to rape us. Doesn't this argument, spurious as it is, seem to come full circle and disprove Naomi’s own, mostly illogical, point?

Naomi essentially offers up the notion that men can't be trusted to control themselves so women need to exercise enough common sense and self-control for both genders. Sounds a little like double-consciousness to me, eh? We, as women, have to know what a man is going to do at all times in order to be ready for something like rape. Add to that the notion of black/hispanic/asian women needing to be aware of themselves not just as women, but as women of color. Fun. No free association for us because we have to watch the men in the dark corner of the room all night just to be sure!

I would also like to ask: What about a man's common sense? At what point is he implored to exercise his own critical thinking skills when approaching a woman? And at what point should he begin recognizing sobriety levels in both himself and the woman along with her cognizant ability to say yes?

(For another rebuttal to Ms. Naomi's asinine argument, see Women's ENews. It's a good and one that directed me to the op-ed to begin with. It was so preposterous I needed to write up a reply on my own. Here's an interesting article written back in 2003 on why, In sexual assault cases, athletes usually walk which is highly relevant in the Duke case.)