Last week I read my very first Remnant article, and I didn’t quite like it. I resolved not to read things that bothered me so often, and moved on. But then several of my friends were sharing another Remnant article around Facebook, and I found myself reading this.
The article in question is published on a Remnant newspaper blog called “Fetzen Fliegen,” which according to my research is a German idiom meaning “to quarrel with someone harshly.” It’s penned by a real sweetheart named Anna Priore, whom I’m grateful I’ve never heard of; she doesn’t provide any credentials for herself except that she “graduated college within the past year.” With a sentence construction like that, I hope she wasn’t an English major. The name of the article is “Feminism’s War on Men: The Campus Rape Culture.” Read the whole thing yourself, if you haven’t had anything to eat recently.
The article starts with a very long and unnecessarily wordy “Editor’s note” signed “MJM,” so apparently Michael Matt couldn’t help sticking his mansplaining finger in this particular pie. Matt writes a rambling paragraph which begins:
Here’s yet another example of liberals trying to fix that which wasn’t broken in the first place, and then blaming everything and everyone but themselves for the resulting chaos that ensues. Modesty in dress, for example, especially where women are concerned, was for a thousand years an effective barricade against sexual assault and men disrespecting women.
Oh, really?
Modest clothes have historically been an effective barricade against assault and general disrespect?
Let’s assume that by “modest” he means, say, floor-length skirts, long-sleeved bust-concealing tops and a veil. Like something a nun would wear. Has that garment been an effective deterrent against rape? Because I can think of a few counterexamples. Not just nuns, but all kinds of women modestly dressed. Rape is not a new problem, you see. It’s been going on throughout history; even the Bible has some notable examples. Modest clothing doesn’t stop it; demure behavior doesn’t stop it; staying at home and cooking lunch for your family doesn’t stop it.
Has wearing body-concealing clothing stopped men from disrespecting women? I can think of some historic counterexamples. Lots, as a matter of fact. All over the world. The fact is, nothing a woman wears can protect her from rape or just general disrespect. Most grown-ups understand this. But last week, as I’ve already reported, Michael Matt was praising the Lord for dead babies, so I don’t expect a normal level of understanding from him.
I had hoped for better from Ms. Priore, whom I presume to be a genuine woman and who might have had something interesting to say. But there’s nothing praiseworthy in this piece, from its rambling nature to its clumsy syntax to its shocking thesis. Anna Priore believes that women who get raped on campus by and large bring it upon themselves by immodesty, sexual immorality and (mostly) binge drinking. She claims that at the secular college she attended “for undergrad,” students were required to take classes in sexual consent but never taught that women shouldn’t get drunk on dates, and that this is the fault of “feminists.” I myself am a feminist. I find her claims about the classes a little hard to believe, personally. I went to very liberal and sexually libertine college myself, for undergraduate, yet I remember that along with the condom-0-grams and the general bad advice, we women were also warned that drinking too much could put us in danger. But it could be that her college was different.
Ms. Priore relates with great ire that:
…we all learned from Day One that it was our right to match men drink for drink, wear whatever we wanted, and go to whatever wild party we wanted: in other words, to act like men, which is the underlying principle of the radical feminist movement. We also learned that “rape is never the victim’s fault.” This popular little phrase is thrown in the faces of anyone who dares to suggest that perhaps the woman who was drunk, scantily clad, and partying at a frat house should have a little responsibility to protect herself.
Well, Dearie, that’s correct.
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