The Savage Republican

I've written a couple of times now, about the silence of the so-called "womens rights groups" when it came to the rights of women under Islamic regimes and when it comes to the rights of women trapped in sexual slavery. Now we have the story of Imette St. Guillen, a NYC graduate student who was violently raped and murdered after a night of drinking. What this 24 year old graduate student was doing drinking alone at 3am stuns me.

The Wall Street Journal ran this piece that suggests that we women need to be a little more responsible for our own actions (there's a radical thought!). Rather than depend on platitudes of "a woman should be always able to say no to sex, no matter what" we should depend on our own wisdom - on common sense to keep up safe from harm.

"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."

It seems like such basic advice. Be wary of drunken house parties. Don't go out at 3am drunk and alone. Don't be a victim....and yet every day, young women put themselves in just this kind of situation.

"The odd thing is that feminism may be partly to blame. Time magazine reporter Barrett Seaman explains that many of the college women he interviewed for his book "Binge" (2005) "saw drinking as a gender equity issue; they have as much right as the next guy to belly up to the bar." Leaving biology aside--most women's bodies can't take as much alcohol as men's--the fact of the matter is that men simply are not, to use the phrase of another generation, "taken advantage of" in the way women are.
Radical feminists used to warn that men are evil and dangerous. Andrea Dworkin made a career of it. But that message did not seem reconcilable with another core feminist notion--that women should be liberated from social constraints, especially those that require them to behave differently from men. So the first message was dropped and the second took over.
The radical-feminist message was of course wrongheaded--most men are harmless, even those who play lacrosse--but it could be useful as a worst-case scenario for young women today. There is an alternative, but to paraphrase Miss Manners: People who need to be told to use their common sense probably didn't have much to begin with."

Truer words were never spoken. This may be where feminism has hurt women the most. We have traded our common sense away for "gender equity". I don't want to be "equal" to men, I want to be respected by men - there is a very big difference.