Cathy Young, “Last Call for “Rape-Crisis” Feminism?”:
[…] When it first made headlines, the Duke rape case was widely treated as an ugly tale of racism and misogyny, of white male jocks brutally asserting their sexual dominance over a black woman. Now the story represents a very different paradigm: a rush to judgment based on politically correct dogmas about race, gender, and victimhoodâ€â€not just on the part of the prosecution but also on the part of the media and the academic community. The exoneration of the accused may prove to be a turning point in social attitudes toward false accusations of rape. It may also be a major defeat for a certain kind of feminist politics.
The feminist anti-rape movement emerged in the 1970s for very good reasons. At the time, the belief that women routinely “cry rape” out of vindictiveness or morning-after regrets often caused victims to be treated as if they were the criminals.
But “rape-crisis feminism” (as the writer Katie Roiphe dubbed it) replaced one set of prejudices with another, such as the notion that women virtually never lie about rape. As the radical feminist law professor Catharine MacKinnon wrote in her 1987 book, Feminism Unmodified, “Feminism is built on believing women’s accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.”
If this sounds familiar to some of you, there is no doubt you’ve been reading your Amanda Marcotte, whose brand of radical establishment feminism pivots precisely on this illiberal fulcrum: for Marcotte and self-styled “feminists” of her stripe, “feminism” is marked by the constant battle against historical anti-women biases; from this worldview springs the need for constant vigilance against those responsible for past injustices: “the patriarchy” (headed by the Church and by Judeo-Christian religion more generally), conservatives, Republicans, and, to a certain extent, all men into whose soul she hasn’t peered and deemed them provisionally exorcised. It is, thus, an activist feminism; and when one feels that as a condition of feminism, one must constantly agitate for or against something, it follows that the fight can never—nay, must never—cease.
Which is why self-styled feminists like Marcotte or Samhita or even Jill at feministe, for instance, are so openly hostile to feminists of the Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young stripe (among whose number I count myself)—liberals, in the strictest sense, who believe the feminist struggle should concern itself with equality before the law and equality of opportunity for women, and who make the heretical observation that, once some of those goals have already been reached, agitating for special dispensation for women is likely to cause resentment and diminish support for feminism as a politically viable movement. Which is precisely what the early fallout from the Duke case suggests.
I’ve argued before that the desire to label post-establishment feminists like Young or Hoff-Sommers “anti-feminists” is yet another instance of the not infrequent battles within the paradigm of identity politics: warring factions compete over control of the “orthodox” identity narrative, with the “winner” then able to marginalize those who break from the orthodoxy. In the case of establishment feminism—which has subsisted largely through academics and political action groups, and which has maintained its relative vigor thanks to an identity-politics born PC culture used to “punish” the “intolerant” (defined, conveniently, as those who don’t countenance the orthodox narrative) —has long been ascendant. But the Duke case—which has proven to be a major embarrassment to those who early rushed to outline their doctoral theses around the tripartite evils of white male privilege—is perhaps one of the most high-profile public exposures we’re likely to see of the anti-liberal assumptions underlying establishment feminism’s master narrative.
Which is why people like Marcotte or Samhita or Jill are so intent on keeping the focus away from the illiberal attitudes underpinning a movement that must always be pushing for gains—particularly insofar as it is only by way of such agitation and “activism” that you can, under the current prevailing narrative, continue to identity yourself as an authentic feminist—and keep the focus on the “bigger picture”: “Truth” trumps truth; and the greater “Struggle” mustn’t be derailed by unfortunate miscalculations made in the service of the greater good.
Which is to say, to establishment feminists, the Duke 3 must necessarily be viewed as mere collateral damage in a culture war with no end; less 3 individuals than they are an instance of plugging the wrong variables into a still viable theory of white male privilege and power disparity, the Duke players cannot be apologized to, except provisionally, less they be granted the kind of victim status to which, given the social position of their “type,” they must never be allowed to lay claim.
Because once they are humanized—and their individualism returned—the illiberal aspects of establishment feminism are laid bare:
Making the credibility of women’s accusations against men a cornerstone of your belief system is a sure prescription for bias. The Duke case amply illustrates this. As [North Carolina Attorney General Roy] Cooper pointed out at his press conference, there were serious questions about the woman’s credibility from the start. Her claims were not corroborated by any physical evidence, or by the other stripper who was with her at the party. She herself gave contradictory accounts of what happened. Yet for a long time these questions were swept aside.
The Duke case also makes it clear that the feminist dogma on rape is far from benign. It is hostile both to men and to basic principles of justice
—Principles, as I’ve noted, that to traditional feminists redound to equality before the law and equality of opportunity.
Traditional feminism, then, is nothing more than classical liberalism properly applied: which means that once classical liberalism is allowed to work—and there is no denying that the struggle to get it working properly has quite reasonably given rise to dedicated movements, from the civil rights movement to the feminist movement—the need for the special identity designation should, in theory, evaporate.
But to admit the kinds of gains that define traditional feminism’s goals is to admit that the movement you’ve allowed to define you, and that you’ve allowed to hinge upon the need for a perpetual activism born of perpetual grievance, may one day define you out entirely. Because while under truly liberal social conditions—those that promote individual equality—holding a female identity makes perfect sense, holding a “feminist” identity would prove redundant.
And when the Struggle is the thing, allowing that it may one day prove unnecessary—that the struggle for equality might end successfully—is anathema to the sense of self that has come to define establishment feminists.
But back to Young:
Consider the hateful rhetoric of Wendy Murphy, a former sex crimes prosecutor who is now an adjunct professor at the New England School of Law in Boston. She appears frequently as a legal analyst on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and other channels. On the air, Murphy made numerous false statements about the Duke case (documented by K.C. Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College who blogs about the Duke case at Durham-in-Wonderland) and repeatedly referred to the accused men as rapists. On one occasion, she fumed: “I’m really tired of people suggesting that you’re somehow un-American if you don’t respect the presumption of innocence, because you know what that sounds like to a victim? Presumption you’re a liar.â€Â
Even when the case began to unravel, the witch-hunters remained steadfast. After the most serious charges against the young men were dismissed, the prominent feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte, who briefly served as blog coordinator for John Edwards’ presidential campaign, opined that they were still “not angels” and that their defenders were “rape-loving scum”â€â€because a different lacrosse team member had sent out an email with a nasty joke about killing strippers [one he’d based that on Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho]. Meanwhile, on the website CommonDreams.org, Gail Dines, professor of American Studies at Wheelock College in Boston, argued that the focus should be brought back to the young men’s misbehavior because “they saw the hiring of two black women to strip as a legitimate form of male entertainment.”
In other words, the same feminists who rightly tell us that a rape victim should not have to be an angel to deserve support apply such a different standard to men who may be falsely accused of rape.
At the press conference after the charges were dismissed, one of the accused, Reade Seligman, said that the case had opened his eyes to “a tragic world of injustice that I had never imagined” and added, “We all need to take a step back from this case and learn from it.” This has been happening already. By the time the case was over, many mainstream liberals and feminists, such as University of Southern California law professor Susan Estrich and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff, had publicly said that the accused men were the true victims. A presumption of guilt against affluent white males, Kristoff wrote a few months ago, is no better than a presumption of guilt against poor black malesâ€â€the Scottsboro boysâ€â€in the 1930s.
The past 30 years’ progress in the treatment of rape victims needs to be balanced by better safeguards against unjust prosecutions. The Duke case, which has given a face to the plight of the falsely accused, may well turn out to be the start of such a change. If feminists want to retain their credibility as advocates for victims of rape, they need to drop the habit of knee-jerk support for every accuserâ€â€and to show decency and compassion toward the victims of false accusations.
Indeed. But I’d go even further and say that if feminism itself wishes to remain viable as social a movement—if it is to fight whatever remains of institutionalized sexism—it would do well to avoid embracing the very kinds of stereotyped biases it claims to be combating.
Unfortunately, this cannot happen, because to do so would lead, inexorably, to the very equality that would make “feminism” unnecessary. And the current feminist orthodoxy is less concerned with the ends than it is with an indefinite perpetuation of the means—from which all its political power derives, and from which its proponents derive their personal identities.
****
update: More from Ace, who eschews the academese for some good ol’ fashion sneering.
Bravissimo. And this is exactly why I argued that Marcotte should not have been fired for her vile comments regarding Christians and Catholics in particular (though I am one, of the practicing variety), but OUGHT to be made to apologize for his outrage if she wished to remain on Edwards’s staff.
It’s sometimes called the “Tar-baby Principle”, Jeff. Though generally not where the MSM can hear, these days.
“You become attached to the thing you oppose”
I think I call that the My Brother Tim principle.
r because “they saw the hiring of two black women to strip as a legitimate form of male entertainment.â€Â
Which begs the question being, of course, why these two women saw “stripping” as a legitimate form of employment.
Or, are the men more responsible for their life choices because they are male, white, or something? Men are always bad, and women are always victims of their circumstances.
The inherent sexism of this line of thinking is one of the reasons I stopped calling myself a “feminist” in college.
Kristoff wrote that??? Wow. I am stunned, and impressed.
That’s the key (far more than any political power, I’d argue). You guys know I’ve raged about my experiences working at non-profits, but one of the things that drove me nuts was that the longer people worked at an institution, the more constricted was their tunnelvision. Their world view eventually revolved solely around their work, and consumed their personalities, to the point where conflicting information met with rage (rather than analyzed, debated, and countered with fact-based arguments).
The phrase “to a man with only a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is so, so true.
TW: “soviet15” Are your f***** kidding me?
Outstanding missive Jeff.
I wanted to focus in on this statement especially:
Exactly right, it’s always been my theory that once a particular activist scores some victory and become completely defined by their well…activity, they’re hooked, often for life. I mean let’s say that all instances of overt racism is erased in America (I’d argue most of it is, and any ACTUAL Racism that is exposed is usually swiftly condemned and dealt with), once that happens does ANYBODY believe that Sharpton and Jackson will just retire? Not likely, instead, once they achieve a victory, they just redefine what is racism. Same the with radical feminists. They just move the goalposts. What about the anti-smoking crowd, think they’ll just disband once smoking is illegal all over America? No, they’ll take Cheetos next, or snuff. Same with the anti-gun lobby. Think when all handguns and automatic weapons are outlawed they’ll all just go away? Think about it, what do these people do for a living? What they are defined as – Activists. They get caught up in it, and end up being defined by it. But in order to be defined in this way, you need something to be AGAINST. Hence you are always looking for the next enemy. The next dragon to slay, whether it be drunken frat boys or radio personalities with bad hair.
It’s not unlike how some organizations are created in the military.
An action team is formed to work a specific problem. It’s temporarily staffed. Desks, computers etc. come out of someone else’s extras. They work on the specific problem and staff possible solutions until they either fix the problem or…more’s the likely…they start adding other problems to their list of things to do because other offices are overworked and stretched too tight. If anyone asks about the original problem, they can produce all sorts of staff work and say, quite honestly, that higher headquarters is coordinating on the issue. Budget time rolls around and since they now have other work to do, they submit a five year plan based on their current, and possibly future work load. Somehow or another the Officer in Charge has convinced the higher ups that he and his staff are now necessary to the mission and get manning and supply money and travel funds. The original project? Who cares? The empire has been built. The original team with be reassigned. Eventually that office will become overworked and a NEW action team will be formed for a specific problem…
Carin-
“Which begs the question being, of course, why these two women saw “stripping†as a legitimate form of employment.”
They had no choice whatsoever, no agency over their vocation, etc.
Oh and stripping (as some of the hipper pro-sex feminists wish to argue) is an art-form rooted in pagan goddess-worship rituals which women have every right to pursue if they please.
But the men who pay to sustain stripping as an art-form are perverted scum who should be hounded into Siberian exile. (In order to keep the art-form pure & economically unviable, I presume?)
…
Jeff, this is rapidly becoming one of my favorite blogs.
A minor matter, but it would seem the feminists, in their horror at men hiring women to gawk at their naked bodies, would deny women the right to seek out the oportunity to take money for removing their cloths. Which is it, ladies? You canot have your victim and eat it too. Well, maybe Rosie can.
The problem with this logic is that if our opinion of the men is supposed to be colored by the fact that they hired a stripper, then it would also be reasonable to make negative inferences about the woman based on the fact that she is a stripper.
I don’t see how the feminists can have the one and disallow the other with any kind of logical consistency.
Furthermore, the feminist mantra on rape says that it is a crime of violence, not sex. If this holds water, then why should we assume any linkage between a strip show and a rape?
Hmmm.
What we men need to fight this is our own kind of movement.
I vote we start the Penis Party!
‘Cause anytime there’s a penis around, there’s definitely a party!
Woot!
Good post. What also needs to be exposed is that the Identity Politics movements are all Marxism at their core.
Because of American societies fluid class boundaries, classical Marxism is nakedly proven to be wrong to the vast amount of citizens in their every day lives, so not very many people buy into it.
So the Cultural Marxists use the Oppressor/Oppressed model and replace the narrative of “class” conflict with “gender” or “race” or even the “environment” and uses all the attendant Marxist claptrap and lies in order to advance the goals of the particular cultural Marxists niche.
Timmer,
I’d argue your post makes more sense if you refer to the government as a whole, rather than the military.
But there is hope, we are getting refunds of the excess telephone excise taxes collected to fund the Spanish-American War.
Jeff, this is rapidly becoming one of my favorite blogs
Welcome to the
cultclub.Dan,
It’s not an unfounded assumption given the woman’s mania that that was an option for her. She couldn’t bring herself to take it. I argued at the time that in her mind it was better to bask in the antihero status the left side granted her than work at a low key within the system.
All of this raises the question, what to do about it? “It” being the religion of our appearances-centric leftist brethren, routinely sacrificing practical outcomes to images and broken theories. Had a bit of a row with a liberal friend recently, who, being not of insignificant mental ability, flatly informed me at the end that what stuff looks like is indeed more important than what it actually is—we’ll promote our little religion as long as it takes to overcome fact and reason.
What to do about it? Beats me as I fear Twain was right: A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. For this reason left and right are not equal combatants in the political arena and for this reason accountability will not penetrate the “feminist” cesspool.
Surely there’s too much good to be done to worry about all that damage.
I understand that they actually requested white strippers, the racists, rather than a loony drunk compulsive liar woman of color.
JPT: I was pretty sure she wasn’t going to grab the lifering, either. If the Christianistophobia hadn’t gotten her, the Duke stuff would have.
I hope the cancer hasn’t spread to Elizabeth Edwards’s brain.
There really isn’t any value to having a self to begin with, is there? So why not dedicate one’s sad life to destroying everyone’s [self]. It seems to have worked out well in the case of Islamofascism, no?
Aldo, this isn’t about logic; this is about feeling. And any feeling can be rationalized if you invest enough time into it.
Too true. A lot of other “social ills” groups are that way. In the sense that, they serve the same function as decomposers in the biosphere. They live off the very crap that society hates but are always the first to show up at it’s appearence because that’s their niche. Just like energy or food in nature, political power hates a vacuum so something will find a way to fill it.
I understand that they actually requested white strippers, the racists.
Well, that certainly cannot be true. As we all learned in our gender/black lit courses, the white man’s desire for black women goes back to the slavery days. You have that jungle fever.
Not wanting to have sex with black women=you’re racist.
Wanting to have sex with black women = you’re racist.
You white men are fucked. Not literally. Obviously.
The most plausible account I’ve heard has the guys not having thought of it, but, being asked, responding that they wanted “at least one” (not a quote) of the girls to be white.
I’ve never called out for a stripper, but I have friends in the biz, and by their accounts, the dispatcher, so to speak, always asks. Except for fetishists, of which there are fewer than you’d imagine, guys won’t specify race without prompting, and their answers are always wishy-washy, because they don’t really care.
But women–both customers and workers–do. Very much.
But that’s the thing. they’re not interested in combating biases, aside from anti-woman ones. They live, they breathe, they stake their very identity on anti-male bias.
As is so often the case with strident campaigners, there have become exactly what they claim to despise.
And black men who only want to fuck white women? I’m afraid to guess, as I really don’t have time for reeducation camp.
Sgt. Ted, JHoward —
No, Sergeant, you give them too much credit. Marx, for all his faults and wrongheadedness, was a “classical liberal” in Jeff’s terminology. He was, to a first approximation, describing what he saw, and his prescriptions are a cynical perversion of liberalism—he argues that people have to give up some of their autonomy, in order to combine into large enough organizations to combat capitalism effectively. His contemporaries, the Fabian Society, were not “liberals” in that view—they can best be understood as usurpers: they argue for a form of governance based on “kindness” and promise to govern based on that, but are just as much a self-selected elite as any member of the nobility. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Fabianists were scions of the Nobility and members of the privileged classes.
The United States is a slap upside the head of Marxism, and has always been. It reveals Marxism as being not classless but mono-classist, demanding the elimination of all classes but the Proletariat. In America, class exists but is flexible—one’s class depends primarily on how much money one has, and one can go up or down in class with relative ease. The result is enormous productivity, and that directly contradicts Marx.
Lenin’s solution was the “cadre” or “Vanguard of the Proletariat”, a new elite class devoted to improving the well-being of the Masses. Having thus accepted the basic tenet of Fabianism as an organizing principle, Lenin and his followers delved into Marx to come up with snippets and excerpts to justify it, much as cultists tend to grab verses out of context from the Bible to support their lunacies. The modern Leftist is “Marxist” in precisely the same way as some of our noisier preachers are “Christian”—they use the Prophet’s writings to justify actions that the Prophets themselves would decry.
Eliding some of the intervening steps—it would make this essay too long to leave them in—the ultimate result is what we see today. The heirs of Lenin had to justify their activities in Marxist terms, and constructed their propaganda on that basis: it was intended to establish that setting up a McDonalds was “Imperialism” and sending a division of troops to seize a country’s Government was not, and as a result is rife with internal contradiction. As long as the original propagandists were in place, they could police the system and keep it from going too far off the rails—but the socioeconomic system that supported them came apart from a different but related set of internal contradictions, with a strong push from outside, and they are no more, or at least have minimal influence.
The result of that is that Leftist thought is spinning harder and harder, with no governance. It keeps throwing off absurdities and reductia ad absurda, and splintering into squabbling subcategories (as it always had, but the toilers on Nevskiy Prospekt used to be able to shove it back into line when it got too ridiculous). It’s a crash in slow motion, but a crash nevertheless. That doesn’t mean it can’t do more damage. There’s a lot of momentum built up there.
Eventually the process will complete, the bits will stop flying, and the flames will subside, leaving wisps of smoke curling up from the shattered fragments. Unfortunately that won’t happen soon, and a lot of people are going to get blindsided by flying debris in the process. It isn’t a pretty prediction, but it’s the best hope we’ve got at this point.
Regards,
Ric
The military organization metaphor above applies to bureaucracies and corporations, too. And it seems aptly applied to this.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the self-appointed leaders of an activist movement would try to protect their bailiwick. With it comes attention. And attention from the right quarters leads to TV appearances and cocktail parties. Once they taste it, they like it, just like “maverick” Congressmen and “evolving” Supreme Court justices.
carin, stop your flunky theorizing and do what I did- hard science. Being in Las Vegas, I scientifically visited the four strip bars closest to my domicile, and found two black stippers on duty. Out of how many I can not recall, my mind being dulled by the…….music. Nor did I see black men expressing discontent for that lack of representation, as we certainly would expect. Quite the contrary, they appeared enthusiastic with the product- caucasian women degrading themselves for five dollar bills. Well, I gave ‘em five.
Perhaps it is only that black women will not so easily engage in this behavior with their consciences having been raised by tenured professors of womens studies. My pig can’t fly, but what do I know?
I used to occasionally work as a “chaperon” (read “muscle”) for some strippers doing private parties. I’ve never heard of a stripper doing a private engagement without such backup. Except this one, that is. Curious, ain’t it?
And yes, I was armed. Bet your ass.
They’re called hookers.
industry38
Ric,
I have to say I’m not as optimistic. But I’m not as well read either, so let me offer this.
If I extend my view of leftism as a religion or yours of it as being analogous to bad religion—cant, dogma, subscription, exclusivity, the god of state—and if we take an example from the American nobility and examine it for parallels to said historical collectives, do we eventually arrive at a means for the collapse of our brand of American socialism, or perhaps the thinking, such as it is, behind it?
Here’s my point: To assuage it’s tormented soul, elitist America and huge swaths of its lesser economic progeny offer their consciences on the altar of mindless statist benevolence—if I subscribe to the policy of the State’s gifting prosperity to the masses, I’m saved. Beyond that I need not look, or be accountable. The message is overwhelmingly superior to the effect; the motive to the end result.
Case closed; I’ve been saved. I, as a horizontal thinker, believe that if I can simultaneously penance my way to social acceptance and pillory a charictured rightist estabishment, then I’m on the correct, politically approved side of history. My appearances are all over my effects, if I even see the latter. In fact, I’d prefer not to.
I’m not sure where in that psychology awakening eventually occurs. I’d like your thoughts.
Actually, they like to be called “dancers”, Aldo.
You asshole.
Well, Aldo, hookers have backup also. They are not present at the party, but they are not far. Everybody seems to have been on a budget here. Isn’t that the only moral of this story? You get what you pay for.
My garbageman likes to be called a “sanitation engineer”
carin, stop your flunky theorizing and do what I did- hard science. Being in Las Vegas, I scientifically visited the four strip bars closest to my domicile, and found two black stippers on duty.
I salute, James, for your dedication to hard science.
Or,hard something …
RIc Locke
Well, I’m not giving them credit really. I am just describing what they are by showing what they do and how they operate, which is essentially the same things their proto-Marxoid brethren have been doing since the turn of the century. They are merely another mutant strain of the same cultural pathology born of Marx’s envy of others productivity and success.
It is instructive that the “Prophet” Karl was an unproductive loser who couldn’t keep a job, despite his talent at writing. The biographies I have read of Marx describe a mindset that is continued by the present day adherents of his philoso-religion. He thought himself an unrecognized genius and dismissed those who disagreed with his theories as idiots. One can easily see the offspring memes of his attitude in how “progressives” describe their intellectual adversaries on the right to this very day.
Stripping is an art-form. Dancing naked, not so much.
It has been years since I have seen a real stripper, do they even have those anymore?
Of course they do, B Moe. I teach classes.
I also give tatting lessons.
Are you trying to get me to make another tit-for-tat joke, Dan? Well it is not going to happen!
KEEP YOUR PATRIARCHY OFF THEIR NUDITY!!!
Jeff
I read this earlier and then was distracted and forgot to comment…I wanted to say this was an excellent post and just wanted to tell you. Thank you.
If an empowered womyn strips in an empty club and there’s no patriarchal males to see it, does she make the five dollar tips?
No, Ghost, men tip strippers because (good) strippers at least provide the illusion men are welcome.
Illusions can be a good thing, considering the alternative. It’s almost like being….polite.
Thank you, carin, for appreciating my dedication to hard science, but I bitterly resemble your remark. The first time a scholar, the second a pervert. Truly, it was better than 72 virgins.
My god, why would a man ask for 72 virgins when he might ask for two or three women who knew their way around the dance floor?
Ric,
You mention the notion of an impending crash. What do you think such a thing would look like?
BRD