The Association of American Universities (AAU), a nationally recognized research organization, arranged last Spring to have a Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct taken by undergraduate and graduate and professional students at 27 colleges and universities.
The results at Yale were more spectacular than merely impressive. The survey’s results apparently demonstrate that “By senior year, 34.6 percent of female undergraduates reported experiencing nonconsensual penetration or sexual touching by force or incapacitation.” These are sexual assaults that meet criminal standards.
“Among female undergraduates, 28.1 percent experienced this type of assault since entering Yale University and 14.3 percent experienced this type of assault during the current school year.”
So roughly 5% of German women were successfully sexually assaulted in 1945 by a hostile invading army of primitives bent upon revenge, while in 2015 at Yale almost three times as many (14.3% ) of the young ladies suffer the same fate worse than death. Goodness gracious!
Not because the model is too scantily-clad, but because she is too slender and attractive. Daily Beast:
Sharpie-wielding political activists have overtaken London Underground, writing outraged slogans on posters featuring a svelte, bikini-clad model next to an innocuous question: “Are you beach body ready?â€
They’ve scribbled “NOT OKAY†and “Fuck Your Sexist Shit†over the model’s cleavage, signing their work with a now-viral hashtag, #eachbodysready.
A Change.Org petition calling for the removal of Protein World’s campaign on the grounds that it aims “to make [people] feel physically inferior to the unrealistic body image of the bronzed model†has received nearly 60,000 signatures.
And on Saturday, 750 people (and counting) will attend a “Take Back the Bikini†rally in Hyde Park to protest Protein World’s body-shaming ad campaign.
Well, good on them! Their vandalism, hashtag activism, and protests have made international headlines and prompted the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to scrub the weight loss supplement campaign from Underground stations and ban it from appearing again “in its current form.â€
The advertising watchdog has been investigating the “beach body ready†campaign, responding to some 360 complaints that it objectifies women and promotes unhealthy body standards.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, the ASA said they are pulling the ads “in the next three days.†(Protein World told The Daily Beast that the campaign’s three-week run in tube stations was already scheduled to end next week.)
The ASA will now determine if the campaign “breaks harm and offense rules or is socially irresponsible.â€
So the feminist and body-image activists triumphed over the evil, patriarchal corporation, effectively censoring what they deemed an “unrealistic†and “unhealthy†body standard. …
Protein World’s ad campaign went up in London’s tube stations several weeks ago, prompting a scathing, widely-shared editorial in The Guardian.
Writer and co-founder of the Vagenda blog, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, had returned from Cuba to jarring reverse-culture shock in the “dark, putrid bowels of London’s underground system.â€
It was only after visiting Cuba, a totalitarian country where there are no advertisements, that she realized “how much my field of vision is occupied without my consent by images and messages that want to sell me stuff (and, being a woman, it’s usually based on claims that it will make me look better).â€
Latham Hunter (No, she’s not kidding) hates Christmas because Christmas is all about the patriarchy.
Pity the poor mother who wants to enjoy the holiday season and pass along the delight and warmth of various yuletide traditions but who doesn’t particularly want to put the Christ back in Christmas, as it were, or reinforce the notion that men are the foundation of the most important things in the world, like school vacations and presents.
It’s impossible to “do” Christmas without running into one patriarchal construct after another. Aside from singing the praises of a man who rules over everything (there really are the most gorgeous choral renditions out there), even the secular Christmas songs are ubiquitous in their praise of male characters: “Frosty the Snowman,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and of course, Santa Claus. Santa Claus, a white male who, by the way, gets all the credit for labour overwhelmingly done by women (I’m picturing my friend Kathleen, for example, describing her Plan A and Plan B for getting Minecraft Lego in her hands by Christmas Eve, hoping like hell that one plan works out, wondering if she should instigate a Plan C).
The holiday feminist challenge extends to every Christmas category. Sure, I have fond memories of watching movies of the season with my brother and my mother but now? Now I realize that Maria from “The Sound of Music” finds her true calling as a nurturing caregiver and ends up responsible for a man’s emotional rehabilitation.
Similarly, “White Christmas” resolves with the Hanes sisters teaching Bob and Phil that what they need is the love of a good woman to be happy — enough already with the emptiness of workaholism and playing the field! On its own, this might not be so problematic, but when you run into the same thing in myriad other classics, you wonder if it’s possible for kids to grow up NOT believing that girls should be men’s emotional handmaidens.
Zerlina Maxwell appears regularly on Fox News, MSNBC, and is a commentator and guest host on Sirius radio’s XM Progress program. She writes as a political analyst for the New York Daily News, the Washington Post, and CNN.com. She has a B.A. in International Relations from Tufts, and J.D. from Rutgers.
Yesterday, Zerlina Maxwell argued, in the Washington Post, that we must always, as a default position, and regardless of due process, automatically believe that women who make accusations of sexual assault are telling the truth.
Many people (not least U-Va. administrators) will be tempted to see [the collapse of Rolling Stone’s UVA rape story] as a reminder that officials, reporters and the general public should hear both sides of the story and collect all the evidence before coming to a conclusion in rape cases. This is what we mean in America when we say someone is “innocent until proven guilty.†After all, look what happened to the Duke lacrosse players.
In important ways, this is wrong. We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist. Even if Jackie fabricated her account, U-Va. should have taken her word for it during the period while they endeavored to prove or disprove the accusation. This is not a legal argument about what standards we should use in the courts; it’s a moral one, about what happens outside the legal system.
The accused would have a rough period. He might be suspended from his job; friends might defriend him on Facebook. In the case of Bill Cosby, we might have to stop watching his shows, consuming his books or buying tickets to his traveling stand-up routine. But false accusations are exceedingly rare, and errors can be undone by an investigation that clears the accused, especially if it is done quickly.
The cost of disbelieving women, on the other hand, is far steeper. It signals that that women don’t matter and that they are disposable — not only to frat boys and Bill Cosby, but to us. And they face a special set of problems in having their say.
Maxwell’s perspective that the supposed injuries of female victims awards them a morally privileged status which supersedes principles of due process, fair play, and objective justice is really just a version of the subjective moral reasoning of the lower-class criminal, who argues to himself that he is entitled to attack and rob other people in the street, because some people were born richer than himself, because of how much he has suffered, and because nobody ever gave him the breaks he believes he deserved.
The idea of Affirmative Action surely was to take people from the welfare-dependent and criminal underclass and give them the kind of elite education that would make them into responsible citizens subscribing to conventional morality with a rational sense of justice and assimilated into ordinary American society. What has obviously happened in Zerlina Maxwell’s case is that she has brought with her from the Hood the simple-minded, narcissistic, and self-entitled perspective of the congenitally stupid and the habitually immoral and is making a profession of persuading the establishment intelligentsia that they should share the mental habit patterns of the mugger, the gang banger, the heroin dealer, and the pimp. She is assimilating them, rather than vice versa.
The Washington Post, however, found it had, in publishing Maxwell’s editorial, gone just a bit too far for the interests of its own credibility. After being mocked all day on Twitter, they changed the editorial’s headline from “No Matter What Jackie Said, We Should Automatically Believe Rape Claims” to “No Matter What Jackie Said, We Should Generally Believe Rape Claims”. SooperMexican
Last year, a Yale student couple broke up during Spring Break. A few days later, the girl texted her former boyfriend, informing him she was drunk, inviting him to her room, and telling him: “Don’t let me try to seduce you though, because that is a distinct possibility.â€
Sex ensued (of course). And, over a year later, upon returning to Yale after taking a year off, the young lady filed a complaint with the University accusing her former boyfriend of rape. He had taken advantage, she said, of her being drunk, and seeing him around campus made her “want to cry or vomit.”
After initiating formal procedures and supplying the complainant with her former boyfriend’s class schedule (so that she could avoid seeing him and therefore crying or throwing up), an independent fact-finder was hired. The two parties were interviewed four times along with some witnesses to the young lady’s drinking on the night in question. Statements were exchanged. All the majesty of Yale marched up to the top of the hill and then down again, and a 3-and-1/2 hour hearing was finally conducted, with all the technical facilities and formality of a Nuremburg war crimes trial.
As the result of the hearing, a faculty panel voted and wrote a report, concluding (reasonably enough) that “the preponderance of the evidence” proved that the male student had not violated university policy by taking advantage of the young lady while she was incapacitated. They then formally advised the two young people to avoid one another.
It appears that, in the end, it all came out alright, since the panel’s report was confirmed by the Dean of Yale College, and the complainant decided to forgo appealing the decision.
Ruth Marcus, at the Washington Post, thought that this incident should alarm everyone.
This seems the just outcome, but one that, given the low “preponderance of evidence†standard of proof and Yale’s stringent consent rules, could have gone the other way.
And at what a traumatic cost. To a young woman who sincerely believes she has been raped but seems, at least from afar, to have been pushed by the prevailing culture into viewing a bad choice as a quasi-criminal event. To a young man who lived under the shadow of accusation and expulsion.
This is a cautionary tale about a still-evolving, still-uneasy balance in dealing with sexual assault on campus. The Yale episode demonstrates: Parents of boys should be every bit as nervous as parents of girls about what can happen to the not-quite-adults they send off to college.
Boris Johnson (who typically dresses better) defends poor Matt Taylor against the Social Justice Warriors.
The other day the brilliant space scientist Dr Matt Taylor was asked to give a report on the progress of Philae, the astonishing little landing craft that has travelled, in all, four billion miles to become the first representative of humanity to visit the surface of a comet. Dr Taylor leant forwards. He started to speak. Then his voice went husky, and it became painfully obvious to viewers that he was actually crying. And of course he has many very good reasons to feel emotional. The London-born astrophysicist has been part of a mind-blowing success. …
Except, of course, that he wasn’t crying with relief. He wasn’t weeping with sheer excitement at this interstellar rendezvous. I am afraid he was crying because he felt he had sinned. He was overcome with guilt and shame for wearing what some people decided was an “inappropriate†shirt on television. “I have made a big mistake,†he said brokenly. “I have offended people and I am sorry about this.â€
I watched that clip of Dr Taylor’s apology – at the moment of his supreme professional triumph – and I felt the red mist come down. It was like something from the show trials of Stalin, or from the sobbing testimony of the enemies of Kim Il-sung, before they were taken away and shot. It was like a scene from Mao’s cultural revolution when weeping intellectuals were forced to confess their crimes against the people.
Why was he forced into this humiliation? Because he was subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.
Sane people marveled world-wide as Social Justice Warriors ignored the fascinating story of mankind successfully landing a spacecraft on a comet and instead focused angry attention on the content of Astrophysicist Matt Taylor‘s Hawaiian shirt.
Atlantic tech writer Rose Eveleth: “No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt.” Astrophysicist Katie Mack: “I don’t care what scientists wear. But a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn’t appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in science.†New York blogger, James DiGioia: “Technology advances while society remains decidedly retrograde.â€
To remind you, Mr DiGioia is writing about a shirt. Not forced marriages in rural Pakistan but a guy wearing a tacky shirt with some ladies on it firing guns. And while that shirt was brutally occupying Mr DiGioia’s television screen like Germany invading Poland, a rocket was quietly touching down on a comet and making our dream of conquering the stars a little closer to reality. Wood? Trees? “You say potato, I say patriarchy.â€
But Taylor was, of course, reduced to tearful apologies.
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But the Washington Post’s Rachel Feltman was not satisfied with Taylor’s tears. She thinks he should come back and apologize some more and repeat publicly the politically correct message he has learned.
Of course, I personally hope that one day (when he’s a little less busy) Taylor will say a bit more on the subject, and show that he understands why the shirt wasn’t okay. Science is not a welcoming place for women, even today, and the only people who can truly make it more welcoming are the men who run the show. If a stellar scientist walks into work — and then says hello to the whole world — wearing a sexist shirt, what kind of message are we sending to future scientists?
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Myself, I think it is appalling that an adult employed professionally as a scientist finding himself responsible to appear in public to address an international audience in connection with a historic scientific achievement has grown to adult years without any sense of personal dignity or knowledge of conventional etiquette, and thinks it proper to appear on television with a Hawaiian shirt (pretending to be a coat or sweater) layered over a polo shirt. And to top all this off, he is so far removed from the older model of the British gentleman, his upper lip is so lacking in stiffness, that he cries publicly over being criticized by crackpots. Jesus wept.
I will add, on the positive side, though, that though I don’t own or wear Hawaiian shirts, and would not be caught dead wearing one of them to a dogfight, as Hawaiian shirts go, I thought his was relatively cool.
When 24-year-old aspiring actress Shoshana Roberts was filmed with a hidden camera walking around New York in a plain T-shirt, jeans and trainers she received 108 “catcalls”.
Roberts’ social experiment has spawned many spoof videos since it came out, but recently, a model from Auckland, New Zealand, decided to conduct Roberts’ experiment in her native land.
The results are shockingly different.
Unlike Roberts who was stopped over 100 times, Simpson was only stopped twice. But how she was stopped in these situations were completely different.
The first time Simpson was stopped, an Italian man chased after her to ask if she was from Italy. The man then proceeded to apologize for stopping her. The second time was simply a man asking her for directions.
New York City is home to 8.4 million people, while Auckland only has a population of 1.3 million. That may have something to do with the difference in reactions, but it definitely doesn’t explain all of it. As you can probably tell, there’s just a culture difference at play.
