I’m not a rapist, and you probably aren’t either unless you don't respect your partners.

Everyone is different, but I think a guy I’m into telling me what he wants to do with me is pretty hot. Not for everyone, sure, but I don’t think it hurts. That said I’m getting real concerned that The Washington Post has all but stopped even pretending they value women as consumers. David Bernstein has another column that proves The Washington Post will print anything by a white dude if it is about rape. Because, let me tell you, there is nothing, nothing in this world I like better than a hetro-cis-white man to mansplain rape to me. *Feel the sarcasm and witness the epic sideeye.*

Bernstein and Cathy Young, who wrote a column for Reason.com, are very concerned about how out of control this whole consent thing is. See California is thinking about instituting an “affirmative consent” standard for evaluating sexual assault complaints in campus disciplinary actions when complaints are made against students. Bernstein has two questions: 

1. "“Why just on campus? If this is a good idea, why not make it part of the tort system?” He goes on about maybe starting smaller. 
2.  “If we’re limiting things to campus, why just students? Why should students be judged under this standard, but not faculty and administrators?” This second one is a good point. It should be the standard for everyone.

Bernstein is real relieved that the “affirmative consent” standard leaves some room for those accused to defend their actions because of clear non-verbal ques. Of course, the Office on Violence against Women defines “sexual assaults is any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the *explicit consent) of the recipient.” You know, all I can think is if this is scary definition for you then you probably are a rapist.

Obviously, Bernstein thinks explicit consent is absurd and only something prostitutes have with clients because that’s the way to convince people not to do something compare it to prostitution. He claims most sexual contact is initiated with “implied consent”. That very well maybe true, but here is the thing for me. Maybe we should be putting the burden of consent on the perpetrator. Afraid of being accused of rape? Then you better get explicit consent. If you’re not afraid of being accused of rape because you have a good relationship with your partner then there is nothing to worry about with implied consent. Bernstein’s logic isn’t too far from the idea that you can’t rape your partner because they consented once or a prostitute for that matter because it is a profession. 

Consent isn’t a finite thing, you can consent to one sex act and not another or even in one act, which is why I favor the “hey, want to try this” method  or the “hey, is this working for you” method verses SURPRISE! I think this is challenging for a lot of dudes to get because they don’t really know what it is like to be with someone who can easily overpower them. Then again, a good friend of mine over the weekend pointed out that she doesn’t find affirmative consent as sexy as I do. Instead, she favors something more subtle, which is fine. However, that seems to work best in a committed long-term relationship.

The Washington Post might need to attend that Republican seminar on how to talk to women

The second time in a week, the Washington Post publishes something that is ridiculous and offensive. W. Bradford Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson published a piece (do not link) originally entitled “One way to end violence against women? Stop taking lovers and get married.” With the subheading “The data show that #yesallwomen would be safer hitched to their baby daddies.” Yeah, we’re throwing in racism with the sexism. Well played Washington Post.

First, Wilcox and Fretwell don’t seem to know what marital rape is or intimate partner violence or that women are more likely to be killed by their partners than anyone or thing else. Just saying. Additionally, the article uses the phrase “some men” in regards to men posing a threat to women because NOT ALL MEN! I can’t make this shit up. The article claims “The bottom line is this: Married women are notably safer than their unmarried peers, and girls raised in a home with their married father are markedly less likely to be abused or assaulted than children living without their own father.”

I love the idea that once you marry someone they fundamentally change so an abuser is no longer an abuser because marriage license. This is the real bottom line: men who see women as property will continue to see women as property and men who abuse women will continue to abuse women. The article parades out some studies on families, but they are very selective, and I’d argue not very well interpreted. For example, the article notes abuse rates, but not relationship to the child or identity characteristics of those in question. So, sexual abuse is often a crime of convenience so fathers, uncles, or brothers who are pedophiles might abuse children they are related to because these children are available.  The article also doesn’t mention the phenomenon of women single parents not dating while their children live at home to deter opportunities for the exploitation of their children. Yeah, that’s a thing. The article concludes with a head nod to women who experience violence at the hands of their husbands, but it is briefly at the end of the article.

The underlying theme of the article is this: marriage saves women because other men respect women as property of men. This is the “I’m in a relationship” or “I’ve got a man” excuse when a dude hits on you and won’t take not interested for an answer. The Washington Post is arguing that is women got married violence against women would stop…maybe we should just tell people we’re married? Same idea right?

Bonus round:

Original title of the article

Revised title of the article

It is almost like the Washington Post doesn’t have an editor or any women or people of color on staff.

Being sexually assaulted in a privilege according to George Will, columnist for the Washington Post.

George Will is an awful little person, but this isn’t news. Also, I’m coming a little late to this party, but that doesn’t really matter either. Sophia Tesfaye has a piece up at Media Matters on Will’s shitty column.  Will dismisses the rampant sexual assault on campuses because the definition of sexual assault is too board. The feds are trying to get up to speed on sexual assaults by way of issuing mandates. Will isn’t particularly interested in the best interests of students or you know facts.

A few choice excerpts from Will’s piece:

“They [colleges and universities] are learning that they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (‘micro-aggressions,’ often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privilege, victims proliferate.”

So in the world according to Will victims have some kind of privilege, right, right we get cards to carry that make us even more likely to be assaulted again. Must be it. Fuck this guy.

He then laments that sexual assault is too board because it includes incidents where the victim was dating her attacker…*headdesk* Will seems to believe women who don’t fight back during an assault are liars. Maybe the conservative right can let us know what is the appropriate response to an assault because when I was in school we were told surviving was the most important thing, and no one fucking mentioned the fine print that if a rapist doesn’t kill you then it doesn’t count and what were you wearing. I hate ALL THE THINGS!

Will continues to dismiss sexual assault stats because he doesn’t like math or women. He also seems under the impression that all women report their assaults. *side eye*.

“Combine this [Dept. of Ed mandates] with capacious definitions of sexual assault that can include not only forcible sexual penetration but also nonconsensual touching. Then add the doctrine that the consent of a female who has been drinking might not protect a male from being found guilty of rape.”

Don’t touch people without consent. Don’t have sex with drunk people. You know if people are having trouble with these then 1. They are guilty of assault, and 2. They are fucking stupid. Will is worried these fine young men will be convicted of “serious felonies”, but Will, most rapists serve less than three days in jail.

“This entitlement [being raped] has already bred campus speech codes that punish unpopular speech. Now the codes are begetting the soft censorship of trigger warnings to swaddle students in a ‘safe,’ ‘supportive,’ ‘unthreatening’ environment, intellectual comfort for the intellectually dormant.”

NO ONE IS TAKING YOUR RIGHTS AWAY. We are trying to protect the rights of others like say not being raped. That’s a right, right? But damn, if someone puts a trigger warning on something, think of the consequences.

George Will is a fucking joke. Moreover, he is a rape apologist trying to make it safe for rapists on college campuses.

The Washington Post wants everyone to know they really like rape.

Actually, this might be like sexual assault awareness month, but in reverse, so like “Rape is great week” brought to you by the Washington Post. We going to go over two pieces in the Washington Post from the last few days. The first, Richard Cohen’s piece on Cyrus and Steubenville, and the second by Betsy Karasik on how a 14 year old girl was in control during her rape.

Richard Cohen, the man who brought you that god awful piece on Trayvon Martin is at it again, but this time he’d like to blame, and try to follow because I’m not sure how he makes these leaps, Miley Cyrus’ cultural appropriation’s impact on teen culture for the Steubenville rape. So he’s blaming consumed black culture for rape in a roundabout way. Well, there you have it. Feminists, take down the tents, Cohen has solved the mystery of rape culture by blaming a population that has been targeted by white fears of sexual dominance since slavery. Now, I’m going to link to his article, but I encourage you not to click on it, because the Washington Post doesn’t deserve the page views.

Cohen begins by trying to make himself endearing after all he’s just an old man who didn’t even know what trewking was. Then in grandpa like fashion he dismisses the Steubenville rape:

“The first thing you should know about the so-called Steubenville Rape is that this was not a rape involving intercourse. The next thing you should know is that there weren’t many young men involved—just two were convicted. The next thing you should know is that just about everything you do know about the case from TV and the Internet was wrong. One medium fed the other, a vicious circle of rumor, innuendo and just plain lies. It made for marvelous television.”

Cohen continues to dismiss Ariel Levy’s piece in The New Yorker on the Steubenville rape. Claiming, that Levy immersed the reader in “teenage culture that was stupid, dirty and so incredibly and obliviously misogynistic that I felt like a visitor to a foreign country.” I call shenanigans. After all, in what world would Cohen not be familiar with misogyny? Cohen doesn’t believe the rape was a rape, though I’m not sure how he gets there, wait for it…”Illegal is sort of beside the point. Right, proper, nice, respectful, decent—you choose the word—is more apt.” I choose legality.

Cohen wants his readers to separate the legality of the rape in order to view it as something wrong, but not in fact a rape, which is rape apology. A rape was committed, by the legal definition regardless of Cohen’s attempts to rebrand the issue. Cohen then compares the rape in Steubenville to the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed in Queens, NY while many of her neighbors looked on and did nothing. But of course this is “This was an urban legend that arose out of fear of urban living.” Urban, hmmm, I wonder what imagery that is supposed to invoke? Don’t worry, Cohen has us covered, this is when he decided to bring Cyrus’ cultural appropriation of trewking back, “But let me also suggest that acts such as hers not only objectify women but debase them. They encourage a teenage culture that has set the women’s movement back on its heels. What is being celebrated is not sexuality but sexual exploitation, a mean casualness that deprives intimacy of all intimacy.”

Richard Cohen, mansplaining rape, sexual exploitation, and the women’s movement. I do want to take a moment to point out the awfulness of Cohen's piece by saying he is invoking white fears about black sexuality, specifically the notion that black women are always sexually available. If one believes this then black women are to blame for any sexual assaults that happen to them, and by extension if we are to believe black culture is mainstream all sexual violence. It also implies that men's sexuality is completely uncontrollable. This is also a notion that invokes racism when thinking about how black men are portrayed as constant threats, specifically to white women. I won't bother bringing up Cohen's piece on Martin or Zimmerman's defense being "protect the [white] women."

Moving on to an example of when we don't care about protecting women, particularly women of color. A brief background on Karasik’s piece, a teacher, Stacey Dean Rambold, raped his 14 year old student in Montana. The victim killed herself, and Rambold was given a 30 day sentence. In addition to that tragedy, Judge G. Todd Baugh asserted the victim was “as much in control of the situation.” He later apologized.

Karasik begins her piece by invoking Louie CK’s thoughts on child molesters might not kill their victims if the punishments for molesting weren’t so severe. I’m not familiar with Louie CK’s television show or the context this was presented. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, assuming like all things the retelling of a joke, thought, etc is always flawed. Plus, there is an uncomfortable truth to Louis CK’s statement, though sexual assault is about power and so is murder so I’m not convinced fewer victims would be killed. However, what is troubling it this statement, “I don’t believe that all sexual conduct between underage students and teachers should necessarily be classified as rape, and I believe that absent extenuating circumstances, consensual sexual activity between teachers and students should not be criminalized.” Say what?

She does clarify that she thinks teachers who engage in sexual activity with their students should be removed from teaching unless able to prove complete rehabilitation. However, I have to ask, if Karasik is claiming there isn’t a problem then what is with the rehabilitation?

Perhaps the most troubling thing Karasik writes is the victim blaming:

“I’ve been a 14-year-old girl, and so have all my female friends. When it comes to having sex on the brain, teenage boys got nothin’ on us. When I was growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, the sexual boundaries between teachers and students were much fuzzier. Throughout high school, college and law school, I knew students who had sexual relationships with teachers. To the best of my knowledge, these situations were all consensual in every honest meaning of the word, even if society would like to embrace the fantasy that a high school student can’t consent to sex. Although some feelings probably got bruised, no one I knew was horribly damaged and certainly no one died.”

See, no one died, which is obviously how we should measure whether any sexual contact is bad or unwanted. She goes on to talk about sexual harassment back in these good old days, but I guess that wasn’t so good. Karasik would have rather her former boss be taken through the legal system than any of her teachers. I guess it is because she was the victim that time. Karasik completely ignores the power in these relationships. Teachers have power over their students in addition to the age differences. While, I’m not opposed to age differences or teenagers having sex, we should probably address the differences between two consenting adults or two consenting teenagers having sex vs. a teenager and an adult. There are differences in the power each has in the relationship. Assumedly, two adults have the same power and agency (though with IPV we know this isn’t always the case), and two teenagers would have similar agency and power. However, a teenager would have less agency and power in a relationship with an adult, then add the power issues from the adult being a teacher. This isn’t sexual exploration and experimentation. That is exploitation.

In the end we can all agree to disagree because the law is the law. But perhaps the Washington Post should stop printing pieces blaming the victims. That is what both of these pieces really do. Cohen wants to blame teenage culture for rape, but doesn’t want to call it rape. While Karasik calls it rape, but thinks we’re all being too hard on the teacher for raping his student after all teenage girls think about sex and want to have it. Which translates into a willingness to have it with anyone? Teenage girls are not responsible for their rapes as much as Cohen, Karasik, and the Washington would like us all to believe. This is misogyny, rape apology, and rape culture.