Are you even serious, right now:
Will offers an anecdote from a student at Swarthmore College, in which a woman reported a rape after a former sexual partner wouldn't take no for an answer. Will implies that because the incident occurred "with a guy with whom she’d been hooking up for three months," she wasn't sexually assaulted.
Right. Once you have slept with a guy once, he has unrestricted access to your vagina for life. It is physically impossible for him to rape you. The female body has no way of shutting that down.
"I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything — I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep," the woman wrote about the encounter.
"Six weeks later, the woman reported that she had been raped," Will wrote about the Swarthmore student. "Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of 'sexual assault' victims. It vows to excavate equities from 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."
"The ambiguities of the hookup culture," writes George Will, who last had sex during the Eisenhower administration, and is convinced that Jersey Shore is a documentary about the lives of young people today. Just what does he imagine "the hookup culture" to be? Possibly the kids are smoking the dope, and listening to the hippity hop.
Plenty of people have already had a go at him for his idea that being a rape victim is TEH AWESOM (like, you admit to being raped first, George, if it gets you all the sweet rewards), so let's talk about how "especially privileged" young adults are today, in their "prolonged adolescence." I suppose if young ladies would demonstrate sufficient maturity, we could be properly sympathetic when they are raped, instead of wondering if their short skirts had anything to do with it.
A prolonged adolescence. What a gaping asshole. Yeah, it's totally a sweet swingin' time when you're thousands of dollars in debt for a degree that's only going to get you a job at $25,000 which is not enough to make rent anywhere you really want to live, a job for which you are expected to be slaveringly grateful and from which you are never allowed to take a sick day, lest you be accused of an insufficent work ethic in comparison to the Greatest Generation.
On the nights and weekends, you're expected to be joining a bowling league, going to church, working on your novel, paying slavish attention to every word uttered by your elders, reading the Great Books and Major Newspapers of Our Nation, worshipping at the altar of musicians who are mostly dead and weren't that good when they were alive, and otherwise proving yourself Worthy to a generation of columnists who will hate you no matter what you do.
If you earn your first million the year you graduate, you are Programmed and Overachieving and Lack Romance in Your Soul. If you take a year off to backpack around Europe, you are Avoiding Responsibility. If you wonder in print about whether a life lived as a miserable wage slave is what you really want, you are Entitled, and if you can't find a job in the field for which you studied your ass off for six years, you need to Lower Yourself to Work at McDonald's Because That's What We Did Back in My Day.
And after all that, if you get raped, it's probably because of the hookup culture and your privilege, and not because someone ignored you when you told him to get off you.
The conservative columnist then disputed certain aspects of the definition of sexual assault.
"Combine this 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," he wrote. "Then comes costly litigation against institutions that have denied due process to males they accuse of what society considers serious felonies."
Will then links sexual assault to other attempts to "create victim-free campuses."
I'm sorry, what's the alternative here? Victim-filled campuses? Is he advocating for more rape victims, so as to teach the hookup culture of privileged extended adolescents a lesson of some kind? If college students were all poor, could we feel sorry for them when they were raped? Would their accusations be more readily believed, then?
A.