Critics of George Will’s Column on Rape and Higher Ed Misrepresent his Arguments
Professor Jacobson recently reviewed conservative pundit George Will’s experiences with the “Shut-Up Culture,” after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch dumped him for a column that addressed concepts related to the campus victimhood mentality.
In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf analyzes Will’s piece and shows where the critics have misrepresented his arguments in an effort to suppress the facts (hat-tip, Instapundit).
…The column is about higher education. Universities are learning “that when 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 privileges, victims proliferate,” Will argues. “And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.”
That isn’t the best beginning for a man whose prose is crystalline at its best. It’s more difficult than it should be to discern that Will is distinguishing “the status of victimhood” from actual victimhood. When he says that colleges are causing “victims” to proliferate, he is referring to a category of people who he doesn’t regard as actual victims but who have either declared themselves to be victims or have been declared victims by others within the subculture of elite academia.
The distinction is core to the column and consistent throughout.
In the section on sexual assault, for instance, he recounts a hotly debated incident at Swarthmore that many regard as rape and many others, like Will himself, characterize as embodying “the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults.” Elsewhere, Will makes it abundantly clear that he is talking about people who are said to be victims but aren’t actually victims by putting scare quotes around “sexual assault victims” and “survivors.”
Comments
I saw so many commenters that so typified the feminist mindset:
When it’s pointed out that many men are raped, maybe even more than women, when you add in the prison population … what is her response?
Empathy? Nah. To then cite facts to support it and show understanding? Ya, right. No, she says a dismissive “well, I meant everyday life” and moves on.
IOW – if you’re not a woman, it’s really not a problem. Women being raped in prison, or college, or any other category, and she’s a statistics and anecdote producing machine – men being raped in prison .. not so much.
Victimhood DOES confer status and power. There’s an entire industry devoted to “social justice” based on victimhood.
I recently attended an EO (Equal Opportunity) class where we were told, it has now been CODIFIED into military doctrine, that all sexism and racism in the Army come from “white male privilege.” You can’t make this up.
What I find morally reprehensible is the complete DISHONESTY of the PC crowd. They lionize victimhood, but deny they do it. They ignore male victims of DV, rape, and injustice at every turn, but claim to be about equality. And when proven that they are not, they then immediately justify the very thing they deny they were doing.