Camille Paglia and the modern campus

If we must force men to become feminists, then sign me up for the Camille Paglia school of feminism. While I still don’t agree with her on a lot of things, she brings more common sense to the table than most anyone else I’ve heard. Her latest editorial in Time is no exception. Read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:

Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

I recently read an analysis of the statue in California the governor is pushing the state’s universities to adopt. According to a post from Ann Althouse:

The statute proceeds to speak of “the accused” and “the complainant.” The accused is not permitted to use intoxication as an excuse for misperceiving the existence of affirmative consent and there can be no affirmative consent when the complainant was “incapacitated” by drinking or drugs.

What if both are drunk? The smartass answer to that question is: It depends on who’s the accused and who’s the complainant. It seems as though, beyond the gender-neutrality of the statute, there is an assumption that only women will complain. The statutory scheme would collapse if men complained too. But social conditioning and convention keep men quiet… at least so far. Perhaps in the future, they will complain defensively after a night of ambiguity.

Colleges–at the behest of militant feminists–are increasingly adopting the notion that men, when drunk, must be held responsible for their actions as though they were sober at the time, while women, when drunk, bear no responsibility for anything. Oddly enough, the notion of gender equity doesn’t seem to be raised here. Clearly the goal is “equal results”, not “equal opportunity”, and definitely not “equal responsibility.” And don’t anyone dare suggest that women who are drunk or bent on becoming so are a liability issue and should be proactively kicked out of parties. The fool who wrote such an article must be sacked.

Such nonsense is the sort of thing Paglia seems to oppose. If so, I’m with her. My only complaint (albeit small) with this article is that she doesn’t make it clear enough that the animalistic rapist-murderer is still a vast minority. The majority of men don’t do that. Replacing the glowing eyes from the frat-house window with glowing eyes in the bushes is still as much a disservice to men as the “you shouldn’t have to know how to protect yourself” message is to women. The reason those savage eyes are hiding in the bushes is because they fear the vast majority of men who would beat the crap out of them for even trying to harm a woman, even though that’s an out-dated, chivalrous notion that assumes the women want or need their help, and therefore should be stamped out.

I wish I could find it now, but not long ago I read a fairly long article outlining the details of a particular college campus sexual assault case in which a young man and young woman, both drunk at the time, met at a college party. The young woman repeatedly suggested they have sex. Eventually she escaped her friends and went to the young man’s dorm room. Several days later she had second thoughts about the whole thing and filed a complaint. What was most telling, however, as the timeline of events is revealed, is just how many college men, some only acquaintances, were trying to look out for this girl, realizing she was too drunk to make those kinds of decisions. The young man also had male friends trying to keep him out of trouble. The two connected in spite of the efforts of around half a dozen male friends. Little mention is made of the female friends trying to stop it. It was the young men who were constantly trying to be responsible, ultimately failing because the girl lied to several of them and dodged another while he was in the bathroom.

To quote Cyndi Lauper, “Girls just wanna have fun”, and responsibility is such a drag. Continuing to discourage young women from taking any responsibility for themselves is not the way to promote gender equality, and it’s far from promoting their general safety. Putting the responsibility all on men is not the answer, and as Althouse suggests, it could backfire. While the California statute is worded in a gender-neutral manner, I suspect California feminists are going to come to regret it. That, or those colleges are going to get eaten alive with lawsuits when they try to enforce that statute in the manner intended, insisting that men are always the perpetrator and women always the victim.

The funny thing is that my religion is continually mocked as being out of touch and restrictive. And yet living their religion is my boys’ (and daughter’s) best hope for ever getting through college unscathed. The only way to avoid trouble in such a paranoid, hostile, anti-male environment is for them to never drink and never have sex. You know progressivism is getting off course and out of control when it starts inadvertantly promoting religion as the only safe course.