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The pages of Scragged have often discussed the damage done to men by false accusations of rape or sexual assault.
As we do for clear injustice of any kind, we deplored Mr. Obama's commanding federally-funded colleges to ignore due process when judging whether or not assault occurred. But there's another side to the rape story.
Bret Stephens, a New York Times columnist, praised Betsy DeVos for pledging to end the Obama Administration's "war on men" whereby a man's academic life and future career could be destroyed by a deeply flawed campus "fact finding" mechanism that ignored traditional rules which protect the rights of the accused.
Mr. Stephens' next column said:
A young friend wrote me a personal note to share her experience of being raped in college. Her letter is so detailed, devastating, honest and thoughtful that I thought the best thing to do was give her the full stage of an Op-Ed column in the Times.
Her letter said that she "blacked out drunk at a party," a young man walked her home, and the next day she woke up with her "clothes on inside out." She started screaming. She said, "I didn't know what had happened, but I did know that some part of me had died forever, and that I had been violated." It went on to say that she was so upset that she lost 30 pounds and often contemplated running into traffic in order to end it all.
Our first thought was that this letter suggests, perhaps a bit too subtly for committed ideologues to pick up, that men and women differ at least a little bit in their reactions to sex. Can anyone imagine a man being traumatized by presumably having had sex while drunk, even while not being able to remember any such thing and apparently without the presence of any direct physical evidence that any sex actually occurred? So long as his wallet remained in place, would a man be upset, or even notice, if he woke up with his clothes on inside-out?
As Mona Charen pointed out,
90 percent of unwanted sex, including rape, happens during hook-ups, and in 76 percent of cases, excessive alcohol consumption is involved.
The old saying, "candy is dandy but liquor is quicker" applies equally
before and after college. One unfortunate teenager was
photographed being taken
from
behind as she
was barfing out the window at a party after drinking
far too much vodka. The public ridicule and contempt eventually
led to her suicide, but despite the debauchery of the scene and a
police investigation, there was no prosecutable evidence of force or
nonconsent found.
We've previously shown that the alcohol-fueled Rape Culture so prevalent at modern institutions
of "higher" education was enabled by an unintended
consequence of well-meaning efforts to reduce deaths due to drunk
driving. The left is fond of saying that there's no point in
enforcing laws against things that people are going to do anyway, like
illegal drugs and underage sex, so why are they so committed to
laws forbidding underage drinking that clearly have made these problems
worse by driving it underground?
One of the obstacles to reducing incidents of unwanted sex is that leftists insist on saying that men and women are identical with respect to emotions and sexual behavior. If that's so, why are women 95 percent of the victims of rape? Why isn't sex as traumatic for men as for women? The book Unprotected by Dr. Miriam Grossman explains biological reasons why being discarded after sexual involvement hurts women so badly even when the sex itself was always by consent.
Biological research is shedding light on why sexual activity can have such a profound effect on a woman's feelings. Googling "female hormone seminal fluid" or "seminal signaling" without the quotes takes you to many research papers which explain the extreme complexity of the biology involved.
Psychology Today points out:
...sperm comprise only about 3 percent of semen. The rest is seminal fluid: mostly water, plus about 50 compounds: sugar (to nourish sperm), immunosuppressants (to keep women's immune systems from destroying sperm), and oddly, two female sex hormones, and many mood-elevating compounds: endorphins, estrone, prolactin, oxytocin, thyrotrpin-releasing hormone, and serotonin.
Vaginal tissue is very absorptive. It's richly endowed with blood and lymph vessels.
Other research suggests that there are hundreds of potent chemicals in human seminal fluid which have many effects which are easily explained by nagtural selection. Some of these compounds make the woman's immune system less likely to reject the sperm; others affect the woman's brain, either triggering ovulation or the production of other hormones by other organs. Still more research suggests that these hormones can strengthen her bond with her partner.
It's obvious why natural selection would have promoted these effects over the generations, and we ignore the science at our peril. These mood-affecting chemicals can affect a woman's emotions for ill, of course, if she's under coercion or feeling bad about her sexual partner. Even if there's no coercion, when a woman lets her emotions get really involved with a particular man, these hormones make her feelings stronger. This makes breaking up really hard on her as Dr. Grossman has amply documented.
In addition to insisting that men and women react to sex in the same way, feminists are also opposed to warning women about the dangers of getting themselves falling-down drunk.
When Emily Yoffe advised, in a piece for Slate, that "the campus culture of binge drinking is toxic," Feministing.com denounced what it called her "rape denialism manifesto." Feminists scoff at the idea that women should take precautions, be aware of their surroundings, and keep their wits about them. "We should teach men not to rape, period" they insist.
If a woman suffered financial trauma when she left her purse on her car seat with the windows down and it wasn't there when she returned, we can all agree that we should teach people not to steal, period, but would we have much sympathy for her loss? Expecting men to change their attitudes toward the pursuit of women is about as constructive as trying to persuade the sky to turn green of its own accord.
It is perfectly true that, as the now-common SlutWalks argue, women do not deserve to be raped even if they are dressed in marketing mode. It is also perfectly true that, on average, sober women dressed as nuns or in concealing garments like the Amish are raped less frequently than drunk naked chicks barfing out of party-house windows. Is it anti-feminist to point out the obvious?
We're not agreeing with Muslims in saying that all women must wear burkhas because men are so easily tempted, but there is a continuum in the level of temptation from an alert woman in a burkha to a passed-out drunk coed lying semi-naked in the grass. At what point does a woman's behavior become contributory negligence?
The refusal to admit that men and women might react differently to
sexual experiences means that it's impossible for many feminists to
even think about how natural selection has operated differently on men
and women. It's no surprise that men and women would have
differing
attitudes toward sex because men and women have radically different
reproductive strategies. These have nothing to do with culture;
they are entirely the result of natural processes, inherent in the way
nature has
crafted sexual reproduction.
Because forming, birthing, and raising a baby to sexual maturity
requires such a vast amount of time and effort, females have only one
reproductive strategy, "be kept." It is extremely difficult for a
single mother to successfully raise a child even with the financial
assistance of a paternalistic government; we see the bad results every
day on our streets and in our courtrooms. In contrast, as many
observers have noted, successful people tend to operate their families
along traditional lines, with marriages that at least last until the
kids are grown.
On the other hand, males have two viable reproductive strategies: "love 'em and keep 'em" or "love 'em and leave 'em." A man, like a woman, can effectively ensure his genes survive for future generations by being faithful to one wife and contributing to the care of his natural children, thus increasing the probability that they too will be successful in sexual reproduction down the road.
Unlike
women, men have another path: to spread DNA as widely as
possible, investing the minimum amount of effort into any individual
liaison. The children resulting from these meaningless ruttings
will individually have a far lower chance of success than kids whose
fathers help raise them, but there will
likely be significantly more of them. The textbook example is serial rapist and world conqueror Genghis Khan:
research shows that as
many as half a percent of the entire world male population, and 8% of
the Asian male population, is genetically descended from him, and
presumably a similar proportion of women.
"Natural Selection" and "Courtship" show why this is so. Unfortunately for women, natural selection favors the man's "love 'em and leave 'em" strategy that makes life hard on women. A man who's charming or powerful enough to have sex with many women has far greater reproductive potential than a monogamous man who's limited to the number of babies one wife can safely produce.
The Khan's technique lives on - the Daily Mail described three men who fathered at least 78
children by at least 46 women.
Very few single mothers are able to earn enough money to support themselves and their abandoned children. Welfare departments got so much business from these men who engaged so successfully in serial concubinage that they were able to track them down and identify their progeny. Each of them has fathered even more children than the much-married and vastly more wealthy Donald Trump!
The masculine charm which enabled these men to make women favor them will be passed on to their sons, and the mothers' willingness to have children by men who won't marry them will be passed on to their daughters.
Is this good for society? We know that fatherless men are strongly associated with lives of crime.
This has nothing to do with race! "Downfall of a Decent Clan" describes the life of a white welfare mother who's had 7 children by 5 different men. None of these men take any responsibility for what the British call "feral children." Fatherless mobs set fires in London, burned down Detroit, and are starting on Baltimore.
Most men are happy to have sex whenever and with whomever they can. From a natural selection point of view, this gives a man a chance to spread his genes with essentially no effort at all - she's the one who's stuck with the baby. Genghis Khan's dating style was a bit abrupt for modern tastes, but his "love 'em and leave 'em" technique has given him tens of millions of living descendants. This is world-class reproductive success by any standard; the three men described by the Daily Mail are pikers by comparison.
Women used to say, "Not unless we're married, and I won't marry you unless you grow up and get a job." If a woman says she wants to marry but lets a man have her without marrying her, he feels that she's a liar. Marriage clearly means nothing to her or she'd insist on it instead of just giving herself. If she gives herself to him without marriage, how can he trust her not to give herself to someone else?
A man who marries is going to be quite possessive, and for good reason. If a man wasn't possessive, if he didn't keep other men away from his woman, he might raise other men's children and be bred out of the gene pool. Only possessive men passed on their genes via "love 'em and keep 'em."
If he already has her, what would marrying her give him that he doesn't already have? Men know very little about women, so how does a man know whom he should marry? If he can have her without marriage, she isn't worth marrying. If he can't, he'll marry her if he wants her badly enough.
Intimacy without commitment is like icing without the cake. It can be sweet, but it's going to end up making someone sick. A woman sets her price by what she does. If her price is a few dinners or movies, she isn't worth much.
But if her price is that he dedicate his life to taking care of her before getting her, she can be a priceless treasure. What a woman does shouts so loudly that nobody can hear what she says.
There are only two possible modes when a girl interacts with a guy:
1)
she can be his toy or 2) she can be his treasure. You've all seen
a
little boy play with a truck. He pushes it this way and that,
then,
when he gets tired of it, he throws it away and grabs another
toy. We're teaching girls to dress in marketing mode and undulate
around in a manner that shrieks, "Come play with me!" Why are we
surprised when boys play with the toys and throw them away?
The real harm of the hookup culture is that it treats women as toys and forces them to act like toys. Any woman who prefers to be treated as a treasure will be accused of having hangups no matter how badly playing boy-girl games works out for most women.
To be fair to colleges, it's clear that their students are a lot less mature than freshmen of earlier eras. Market Watch reports:
The number of teenagers who tried alcohol between 2010 and 2016 dropped to 67% from 93% between 1976 and 1979. And the number that had earned money from working dropped from 76% to 55% over the same period.
If kids haven't tried alcohol before arriving at college, it's no surprise that they don't know how to handle it and end up in unfortunate situations. Some of our older readers may have friends whose dads allowed them to smoke a cigarette when they first expressed curiosity.
These inexperienced kids, not knowing the "right" way to smoke, inhaled as fast as they could and threw up. They learned that tobacco tasted foul and was expensive, and decided that smoking wasn't "cool" no matter what their friends said - exactly as their father had intended. Today, this bit of prudent and effective parental education would get dad sent to prison for giving tobacco products to underage persons.
The same is true, or more so, of alcohol: modern American parents
are legally forbidden from teaching growing teenagers how to maturely
cope with liquor on pain of imprisonment.
If we don't let parents teach their kids how to handle alcohol, smoking, and other dangerous but legal substances, should we be surprised that they learn the hard way through the School of Hard Knocks? If we aren't encouraging high school kids to get jobs, how are they going to learn to show up on time, dress neatly, be polite to even unreasonable customers, and all the other rituals of college attendance and adult employment?
Colleges bear some of the blame for sexual catastrophe. They used to limit male access to female dorms; now dorms have gone coed. Shouldn't adults know better than to facilitate sexual experimentation, regardless of the harm it does?
The whole point of parenting and education is to create adults who understand reality. Thanks to the new politically-correct puritans who misrule our colleges and misgovern our laws, we're bringing forth a generation of grown-up children who have no ability to handle adult beverages, adult activities, or anything else requiring maturity and good judgment.