COLUMBUS, Ohio — Victoria’s Secret, the lingerie company that introduced the Very Sexy bra, the Fantasy Bra, and the Internet server- crashing fashion show, has become “too sexy” for its own good, its top executive said.
Isn’t this like an actress who is in all kinds of horrible movies to collect a paycheck, then gets pissed off when no one takes them seriously?
Meanwhile, Wikipedia (naturally) has an extensive article on the history of leap day.
(Added: I’ve decided to move this back up to the top of the page, since it’s a very important and complicated piece … please read.)
A female Rutgers student expressed a common sentiment in a university sexual-assault survey: “When we go out to parties and I see girls and the way they dress and the way they act and just the way they are, under the influence and um, then they like accuse them of like, ‘Oh yeah, my boyfriend did this to me’ or whatever, I honestly always think it’s their fault.”
So notes an opinion piece that ran in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times about rape on college campuses — and has bounded across the blogosphere, mostly with indignation. Let’s pick out a few passages that encapsulate the argument of noted writer Heather Mac Donald (biography here):
It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic — but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No. It means, according to campus sexual-assault organizations, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering. It is a central claim of these organizations that between a fifth and a quarter of all college women will be raped or will be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years…. And who will be the assailants of these women? Not terrifying strangers who will grab them in dark alleys, but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria. If the one-in-four statistic is correct, campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No felony, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20% or 25%.
Essentially, this amounts to an appeal to Occam’s Razor, doesn’t it? Ms. Mac Donald essentially asks us, if this many women were being raped, wouldn’t it be more obvious? Wouldn’t there be thousands of police reports every year? Wouldn’t the social fabric of adolescence be frayed beyond recognition? It’s an interesting argument as far as it goes, which is only to present an a priori notion. She goes on to nitpick the methodology of the 1980s study that generated the one-in-four figure (maybe it’s time for an update?) …
But the most powerful refutation came from her own subjects: 73% of the women whom the study characterized as rape victims told the researchers that they hadn’t been raped. Further, 42% of the study’s supposed victims said they had had intercourse again with their alleged assailants — though it is highly unlikely that a raped woman would have sex again with the fiend who attacked her.
I’m sure any psychologist could concoct a dozen plausible scenarios for that second bit, her non sequitur not withstanding. (Apparently I’m on a bit of a Latin phrase kick.) As for the first, well, that’s rather interesting. And … well, let’s just say that my anecdotal personal experience certainly doesn’t contradict a statistic like that. Mac Donald takes this as evidence that rape is too broadly defined or generally misconceived, but there may in fact be mass denial out there. It seems to me that a lot of women have bought into the “boys will be boys” defense, willing to excuse what can only be described as sexual assault slide as collateral damage of a night out. Anyway, let’s get to the core of this:
So what reality does lie behind the rape hype? I believe that it’s the booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the ’60s demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, promiscuous behavior that gets cruder each year.
Yeah, when you say something like this, you may want to duck. This implies two major notions about the nature of adolescents: (1) boys can’t control themselves sexually, i.e. given an environment full of uninhibited nubile women, they will take what they can’t coax out of their prey, and (2) said prey are leading themselves to a less than figurative slaughter by participating in the Charlotte Simmons carnival of flesh that is modern college life. The first of these is sadly not too distant from the truth, though it ultimately paints a picture with too broad a brush, while the second is dubious at best (and proves that the mock 1950s headline from this book — “Sexual Double Standard Neatly Divides Female Population Into Virgins, Whores” — still lives on). Mac Donald continues:
College women — as well as men — reportedly drink heavily before and during parties. For the women, that drinking is often goal-oriented…. It frees the drinker from responsibility and provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn’t. Nights can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know. In all these drunken couplings, there may be some deplorable instances of forced and truly non-consensual sex. But most campus “rape” cases exist in the gray area of seeming cooperation and tacit consent, which is why they are almost never prosecuted criminally.
Wait a second. The set of young women who get drunk at parties is a pretty broad group of people. Some are just looking to loosen up and have a few too many, losing their ability to process what may be happening to them. Others intentionally drink to excess, often with the purpose of hooking up. It seems like she just lumped them all together, saying that they neither desire nor do not desire sex. The actual intent of these myriad women — altered perception is a means, not an end — appears to be rather irrelevant in her mind. As for the last part, yes, it’s clear that for anyone to go to jail for rape, there almost always has to be a deliberate malevolent intent that countervails the woman’s active wishes. That doesn’t necessarily mean that rape is too broadly defined, but rather merely that we live in a system where criminal convictions require proof beyond a reasonable doubt to be found guilty. Her next target is what she perceives as colleges’ cultural hypocrisy:
Even as the campus rape industry decries alleged male predation, a parallel campus sex bureaucracy sends the message that students should have recreational sex at every opportunity. New York University offers workshops on orgasms and “Sex Toys for Safer Sex” in residence halls and various student clubs…. Why, exactly, are schools offering workshops on orgasms? Are students already so saturated with knowledge of the evolution of constitutional democracy, say, that colleges should reroute their resources to matters available on porn websites?
Okay, the last sentence is pretty sensible, though I don’t think that any history department’s budget is being cut into so a student group can hand out condoms. But how is there a contradiction between suggesting that rape is a widespread phenomenon and encouraging safe, enjoyable physical relations among consenting adults? This suggests th
at colleges are somehow encouraging rape by broadening students’ knowledge about sex. Call me crazy, but I don’t think rapists are too concerned with working sex toys into the act to increase their pleasure. I’m really not following how this is all so complex: If a woman doesn’t want to have sex (or a related act) and is forced into it — either through physical force or threats and intimidation — it’s rape. It happens a lot. You won’t be able to put all the guys that do it in jail. This doesn’t mean that there’s anything horribly wrong with the girl who goes to the party because she wants to have sex, nor does it mean that she’s a victim if she gets what she wanted. Finally, and somewhat predictably, she gets all after-school special on us:
Remarkably, many students emerge from this farrago of mixed messages with common sense intact. [University of Virginia student] columnist Katelyn Kiley offered some practical wisdom to the women trooping off to Virginia’s fraternity row: “It’s probably a good idea to keep your clothes on, and at the end of the night, to go home to your own bed. Interestingly enough, that’s how you get [the guys] to keep asking you back.” Maybe such young iconoclasts can take up another discredited idea: College is for learning. Fighting male dominance or catering to the libidinal impulses released in the 1960s are sorry substitutes for the pursuit of knowledge.
Apparently, sex and learning are mutually exclusive. Interesting. Honestly, I think her rant sheds light not on her point, but instead on the fact that college is now simply grades 13-16 of lectures and memorization, another hurdle between Americans and a decent job. (Let’s be honest: Do most jobs REALLY require a college education? Not really. More than anything else, it’s a signal to employers that you’re willing to sit through four years of drills to get a bigger paycheck. I could draw up a full-blown model from Economics 819, but let’s move along.) Perhaps if students were actually learning something that had meaning to them, they wouldn’t be running off to frat row every weekend to kill their brain cells and forget about the drudgery that simply marked the time between parties. Ms. Kiley’s suggestion is advisable as far as it goes, though it misses two obvious points: (1) Women are allowed to want to be used and sometimes do. (2) Most guys at such parties don’t have patience for girls that don’t put out. Based on women I know, they don’t meet their future serious boyfriends when intoxicated. It’s usually the quiet guy that listens and treats them with respect and kindness. (Right? If not, well, it’s going to be a lonely life for me.)
Here’s the punchline. It’s time to take a cue from the ubiquitous mana of our time, the Internet, and realize the obvious: There is no normal. (Further, as The Matrix taught us, there is no spoon.) Back when the only mass entertainment out there was AM radio and three TV channels, society seemed to have a more cohesive vision of what the standards of social behavior were; those who did not comport were marginalized. Now that literally anyone with a video camera or a compelling opinion can become a media outlet, everyone has their own vision of normal. This should be seen as something to revel in, not hide from.
More relevantly to the topic at hand is the fact that, outside of provable criminal acts, the definition of rape is just as subjective. I’ve had friends whom, based on what they told me happened to them, I believe were raped, but they believe differently — not out of denial, but a combination of refusing to become a victim and an alternate perception of events that is internally immutable. Some will have very broad conceptions of what rape is and others will not. Indeed, no one should be trying actively to label vague encounters as attacks, but I don’t believe that’s the majority of what is happening; the counselors and professionals of the so-called “campus rape industry” are making sure that women have the resources to fully able to consider in their own minds whether an incident was rape. That seems to be, at least from an outsider’s point of view, what true female empowerment is about.
Alternately, no one should be deriding women’s lifestyle choices, as long as they do not actively harm those around them. Contrary to Mac Donald’s closing, there is indeed learning to be found in the most base of our human impulses. If alleged recklessness or immorality leads to undesirable outcomes, then the person in question grows and adapts, finding their own path in life. Imposing some set of puritanical (or, if we were to be more timely, Wahhabist) standards will only bottle up those impulses, not remove them. Ultimately, they become like nitroglycerin: if the bottle is shaken, the contents explode. One may even create more victims than are saved.
As always, insights would be greatly appreciated.
Clinton and Obama, mano a womano, tonight at the Wolstein Center! Check back throughout the debate for another damn live blog event.
9:00 PM: Here it is, the twentieth Democratic debate of the season on the stage where I picked up my high school diploma. Let’s get it on!
9:03 PM: Startlingly, it’s snowy in Cleveland! Anyway, Question 1: Senator Clinton, why the hell have you been such a bitch the last few days?
9:05 PM: Hillary: I’m getting verklempt because Barack is … pointing out my policy positions? Apparently we’re gonna talk even more about health care, as if we haven’t done that recently. She tries to backpedal from the whole “Hey, here’s a picture of Obama in Muslim clothes!” thing. That was less exciting than it should have been.
9:08 PM: Obama: Why the hell can’t you let us just make our pitches without getting all bent out of shape about it? Mandates are mandates. And really, someone named Clinton complaining about negative campaigning? I’m a big boy and don’t complain.
9:10 PM: Good fucking God. We get the difference between your plans! Shut the hell up!
9:11 PM: Really, Hillary? Obama’s plan sounds Republican? Seriously? I’m not sure who she thinks she can win over with this whole “Barack is totally like Bush” line of attack that she’s latched onto. Barack stands firm despite Hillary’s Terminator stare.
9:13 PM: Obama: No, Hillary, YOU’RE the one cozying up to big business! And then Hillary still fails to grasp that mandating insurance for kids and not for adults isn’t hypocritical and tries to draw some horrible analogy with other entitlements.
9:15 PM: They’re sniping back and forth about whose plan cuts costs more and, honestly, does anyone know?
9:16 PM: Obama tries to get all conciliatory at the end, saying the two of them can work together on this. Good luck with that. But Clinton is NEVER going to let Obama get the last word in, is she? The audience starts looking for its cyanide pills.
9:18 PM: Hillary says, as we again attempt to move on, that health care is the most important issue. Well that’s red meat for the neocons … Question 2: Start ripping on NAFTA! But first, Hillary goes off the rails, thinking the SNL skit was real, and rips the press for stacking the deck for Barack.
9:20 PM: Hillary: NAFTA is flawed. We need a trade timeout! Because trade is totally like a rebellious toddler. And I guess we need to make Mexico adopt OSHA and EPA standards before we go full speed ahead with it. (Weren’t we just saying in Texas that we need to develop the Mexican economy? How do you plan to do that without free trade??)
9:22 PM: Obama: NAFTA fucked Youngstown over. (Well, I think it had enough issues before that, but okay.) Basically, I totally agree with everything she just said, but my spouse didn’t sign this thing in the beginning.
9:25 PM: Russert challenges Clinton with highly pro-NAFTA comments she made and they get all snippy and he pretty much accuses Hillary of pandering to Ohio. Not that she would ever do such a thing. She says it’ll be drastically renegotiated or we’ll rip it up.
9:27 PM: Russert basically asks Obama a softer version of the same question, given that his record is more “ambivalent,” and says that he’ll do everything Hillary just said.
9:30 PM: Then this gets a little bit all over the place due to Russert’s odd question, and we start talking about the green jobs and R&D that’s government-funded and blah blah blah …
9:32 PM: Hillary pledges to create five million jobs, because presidents can totally do that with a magic wand. Turns out she did the same thing in New York and no jobs materialized, so she blames it on Bush. Here’s a hint: Jobs are created by businesses, not the government! Novel concept. But whatever.
9:35 PM: Question 3: Barack, tell us why you’re not a foreign policy neophyte. Obama: I was right on Iraq. And that’s all I have to say. And it’s ANOTHER John McCain 100-year war reference! Take a shot. But then he goes on to suggest we shouldn’t have coddled Musharraf, though it remains to be seen whether things will get better or worse once parliament impeaches him.
9:37 PM: Hillary pontificates about how she fixed Northern Ireland and stopped African genocides and other things she never did. She then criticizes him for allegedly supporting the war in 2004 when, y’know, she supported the war. Then she tries to offer another mangled position on Pakistan and mocks him for being willing to talk to enemies. Y’know, the things Bush won’t do. Okay.
9:39 PM: Oh, I think Hillary’s about to lose it. I can see the flames of hell in her eyes. Meanwhile, Obama assures us he’s not about to go firebombing Pakistan and says Bush is actually following his advice. Well, hey, a broken clock is right twice a day, right?
9:42 PM: Question 4: If the Iraqis tell us to get everybody out (i.e. without a residual anti-terrorist force), will you? Obama: I’m just going to say yes, then outline my withdrawal plan again rather than actually answer your question.
9:44 PM: Russert: If we pull everyone out and Iraq blows up, will we go back in? Hillary: I’m not going to deal in highly plausible hypotheticals. And somehow Obama is incompetent because he hasn’t single-handedly fixed Afghanistan. Who knew he even WAS the subcommitee chair responsible for NATO?
9:47 PM: Obama: We can fix Afghanistan once we get out of Iraq! And yeah, if al-Qaeda builds a base in Iraq, we’ll deal with it militarily.
9:48 PM: Shut up, Hillary! We need to go to commercial!
9:51 PM: Apparently she’s going to keep up the Jekyll-and-Hyde routine of civility at the debate and vitriol on the trail.
9:53 PM: And we’re back … with a video Daily Double, I guess. Hillary has to look at her mockery of Obama’s hopeful campaign. Barack is actually pretty affable about the whole thing. He tries to meld messages together: Hope through solutions and bipartisanship. Average people apparently expect a hell of a lot of things to be given to them, based on his sound bite.
9:56 PM: Hillary: Come on, it was a joke! But “it takes a fighter.” You need to punch big business in the mouth and steal their money!
9:58 PM: Toledo and Youngstown sure have been mentioned a lot. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, right? Oh. Turns out there is.
10:00 PM: Obama makes the obvious point that Hillary is trying to get all the good of the 1990s and none of the bad. Meanwhile, Barack is a fighter too. An inspirational fighter. Or something. Also, Hillary loves special interests and I don’t.
10:03 PM: Russert hammers Obama over maybe backing out of a commitment to accept public financing. He says he’ll talk with McCain on setting up a fair deal. And from here things get incredibly dull.
10:05 PM: Hillary, why the hell won’t you release your tax return? Gov. Strickland (D-OH) insulted his election opponent in 2006 over this. Who’s bankrolling you? Hillary: America is! Visit my website!
10:07 PM: Your husband is in possession of the records from the Office of the First Lady. Why aren’t they being released? Hillary: I’ll do it as fast as I can, which is never.
10:08 PM: Russert: You’re endorsed by Louis Farrakhan! How do y’like them apples? Obama: Hey, I didn’t ask for his support. He sucks. Deal.
10:10 PM: Tim shoots back: Your pastor likes him. What’s up with that? Barack: I love the Jews! Blacks love Jews! Or something.
10:12 PM: Hillary barges in out of left field and accuses New York’s Independence Party of being anti-Semitic back in 2000 and notes that she went out of her way to denounce them at the time, even if it cost her votes (among, apparently, the vast anti-Jew vote in New York). Okay? Basically, she wants to pander to Jews too. Or something.
10:15 PM: The audience applauds over semantics and that everyone hates bigots. Awesome. Commercial!
10:18 PM: And we’re back. Question 7-ish: Are you really that electable in November when your voting record is insanely liberal? Obama has a startlingly sharp awareness of the rating system in the questio
n, picking it apart, and saying that voters should just look around and see which of them are supported by most independents.
10:21 PM: Question 8: What can you guys tell me about the guy to be elected president of Russia on Sunday in a sham election (Medvedev)? Hillary throws some platitudes out there and can’t pronounce his name very well. Obama takes the obvious shot at Bush for trusting Putin.
10:24 PM: Russert: What does President Obama do if Medvedev sends troops into Kosovo? Well, he’ll talk to the international community. Wonderfully vague, no?
10:26 PM: Wrap-up question: Have any regrets? Hillary’s up first and she kinda sorta apologizes for voting to authorize the war and talks about stuff Bush botched around the world, but basically says it’s time to look at the future … and her past. I guess. It’s a good closing.
10:28 PM: Obama’s turn. He says he should have stood up and stopped the Terri Schiavo mess. Interesting choice. He tries to put together a kumbaya moment, copying what Hillary did at the last debate, and says that they’re both fighting for the same thing, but that he’ll change how things are done.
10:30 PM: Okay, that wasn’t the last question. Brian Williams is begging for an attack from somebody. Obama says Hillary would be a fine nominee as is, but that he brings a “unique bias in favor of opening up government.”
10:33 PM: Hillary just comes out and says that you should vote for her because she’s a woman. That might work if you weren’t, y’know, running against a black guy. Hillary’s unique bias is, apparently, knowing how to take care of business, like single-handedly getting health insurance to 140,000 Ohio children. Or something. But she rocks.
10:35 PM: It’s done! Y’all rock, Cleveland State and WKYC. Peace out.
Well that was probably a waste of my time. What does it take to get a substantive argument on something that’s not health care nuances, hm?
The first paragraph of a story from the Associated Press:
WASHINGTON – Gen. George Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, said Tuesday he has no reason to doubt Barack Obama‘s recent account by an Army captain that a rifle platoon in Afghanistan didn’t have enough soldiers or weapons. But he questioned the assertion that the shortages prevented the troops from doing their job.
Because, y’know, why would a rifle platoon need … rifles?
A piece on 60 Minutes last Sunday chronicled how Karl Rove led a campaign to unseat the Democratic governor of Alabama, Don Siegelman. After allegations of infidelity failed to do the trick, he was later convicted on ridiculously trumped-up charges by blatantly politically motivated federal prosecutors. Here is the segment in full — chilling viewing, certainly leading credence to the notion that we have not yet reached the bottom of the rabbit hole when it comes to the damage the Bush Administration has done to American governance.
But it gets worse: it seems that WHNT, the CBS affiliate in northern Alabama that happens to be owned by a major GOP donor, just happened to go off the air for a period of time that matches perfectly with the airing of that segment. They chalked it up to transmission difficulties in a statement that is so blatantly ridiculous that one would expect to see it in some sort of third world dictatorship instead of the United States. There’s so much outrage here that I’ll just let all this sit without further comment. Just consider that, if you act like a banana republic enough times in enough ways, you’ll eventually end up looking like one.
(8:37:29 PM): question 4: pontificate about how bad the border fence is.
The NY Times has taken flak, and rightly so, for running this story that seems a bit light on verifiable facts, especially for a paper of record.
Someone out there is searching every single pic ever taken of the presumed GOP nominee looking for a snapshot of him with this woman …
Top stories:
Democratic primary results are due tonight in Wisconsin.
Fidel Castro goes out not with a bang, but a whimper.
Kosovo declares its independence; Serbs get all pissy.
Delta and Northwest are poised to announce a merger.
And the rest:
Turns out Long Islanders like their suburban sprawl.
We’ve found out who’s really advising President Bush.
Who’s creepier: Dateline’s “predators” or their staff?
Someone finally says it: People are getting dumber.
Added (2/20):
I guess the NYT is now on the subway grammar beat.
After a 17-point loss: “Is it time for Clinton to panic?”
(Yes. Yes it is.)
