Ladies, You Should Know Better (WSJ/Duke) [View All]

[katty]

(now an attack on femin"ism")
excerpt/cont'd: http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110008237

Ladies, You Should Know Better
How feminism wages war on common sense.

BY NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY
Friday, April 14, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT



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." Nothing could be truer. 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.
But just as sociopaths exist on the Lower East Side, they exist on college campuses. One or two might even be playing lacrosse for Duke University. The past few weeks have brought much hand-wringing about the alleged rape of a stripper at a team party in Durham, N.C. Understandably so: An email from one team member, just after the party, suggested that he was aroused by the idea of skinning a woman and killing her. Though the investigation is still under way, commentators have already blamed the event on everything from racism (the stripper was black, the accused players white) to the lack of moral instruction in colleges today.

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.

Now, readers may well assume that this advice is obvious and that no Duke coed would ever do what the stripper, by her own account, did: Upon finding 40 men at the party instead of the four for whom she agreed to "dance," she stayed and performed anyway. When the partygoers began shouting what she described as racial epithets and violent threats, she left but returned after an apology from a team member. A stripper with street smarts is apparently a Hollywood myth.