George Will extols benefits of being raped (she says)
Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2014 7:45 am
George Will’s distasteful conclusions about sexual assault
By Alyssa Rosenberg
The Washington Post
My colleague George Will has become the subject of wide-spread outrage for a column published online last Friday that seems undergirded by a pair of deeply troubling assumptions.
First, he says in the lead of the piece that “when [colleges and universities] make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.” Second, Will suggests that the Obama administration’s initiative on campus sexual assault is an attempt 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,” arguing that young men will be railroaded in order to confirm young women’s sense that they are victims.
It saddens me that Will would think so poorly not just of American institutions of higher learning, but of young women, who he seems to see as simultaneously precocious and irresponsible. His column, though, is a useful example of beliefs about sexual assault that persist despite evidence to contradict them. And it is an opportunity to examine why some of those beliefs are so powerful and persistent.
It is not clear what Will believes to be the benefits that would make being a sexual assault survivor a “coveted status.”
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