Female columnist promotes rape, slut-shaming, lies about PP
Victim-blaming, slut-shaming, and feminist-bashing are abhorrent coming from men, but they are exponentially worse coming from women. This column from The Daily Collegian, the college newspaper for the University of Massachusetts, was actually briefly taken offline because it was so offensive. (I'll throw out a trigger warning right now.) The author is a young woman who believes that sometimes women deserve rape, contraception doesn't affect abortion rates, and "feminist liberation" has turned everyone into nymphomaniacs. Shall we chronologically take a look at some of the claims?
1a. Planned Parenthood isn't a charity
Author Yevgeniya Lomakina jumps right in, making blatantly wrong claims about Planned Parenthood and its services:
It is a business. It is not, however, a charitable organization, as it is portrayed by its many supporters. Their services are not free, although they may be cheaper than regular hospitals.
Actually, it is a charitable organization. A section 501(c)(3) organization that files tax forms in accordance with its tax-exempt, charitable status. I can see how this information would be difficult to find, considering it's on the Planned Parenthood website, alongside the actual tax forms they file.
Also, did you know that "charitable organization" doesn't mean that you just give stuff away for free? You see, it's charitable because it offers low-cost services to people who otherwise couldn't afford them. It's actually really helpful, because low-income women can get cancer screenings, prenatal care, pap tests, and contraception at reduced prices. I'm pretty sure the condoms are free, though.
1b. Planned Parenthood posts misleading/false information on its website
After proving that Planned Parenthood is in fact a business because it doesn't do everything for free, the author next points out a glaring error in the numbers on the Planned Parenthood website:
According to the American Life League, Planned Parenthood performed 289,750 abortions in 2006. The number rose to 324,008 in 2008. However, the organization’s website misleads in reporting that abortions constitute only 3 percent of its services. In reality, it performs about 23 percent of all abortions performed each year in the U.S.
Now the numbers here are right (see the 2006-2007 annual report and this 2008 fact sheet), but they aren't misleading or contradicting each other. The difference is that the 23 percent is Planned Parenthood's abortion services compared withother abortion providers' -- the 3 percent is Planned Parenthood's abortion services compared with other services within itself.
2. Sex is now shameless
The author writes:
Sex has become a service, like any other, but without fiscal exchange or shame. It is no longer associated with love, marriage or a committed relationship.
Really? Because I'm pretty sure that sentence is 100 percent slut-shaming, as is the entire column.
3. If you wear a short skirt, you deserve to get raped
By far, this assertion makes my blood boil more than anything:
If a young woman wears a promiscuous outfit to a party, then proceeds to drink and flirt excessively, she should not blame men for her downfall. She made a decision to dress a certain way, to consume alcohol and should be prepared to deal with the consequences. Far from being a victim of rape, she is a victim of her own choices.
Pardon my French, but that is fucking ridiculous. There is NO scenario in which a woman deserves to be raped. There is no time when a man has the right to force a woman to have sex with him against her will. There is no skirt length, alcohol level, or flirtation level -- nothing. And it's this kind of bullshit that blames women for wearing the wrong thing or saying the wrong thing or drinking the wrong amount instead of pointing the finger at the rapist.
But our author is not the cold-hearted person she seems, as she does think rape is bad:
This is not to say that rape is inexistent. Sexual crimes should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
Rape exists, just not if you're sexually active or flirtatious or wearing clothes that show too much skin. It's only a crime when it happens to someone who has made good, moral choices, and then the rapist is a criminal. This makes me want to slam my head into my desk about 348 times.
4. Having sex with men is giving them the "upper hand"
The author writes:
With the easy accessibility of noncommittal sex, men have gained or recaptured the upper hand in relationships. Women, instead of acclaiming “sexual liberation” have received, at the least, a bad reputation.
Read my recent post about this idea of men having an "upper hand" because women will have casual sex with them. Also, let's note the additional slut-shaming. You know, the "bad reputation" only comes because people associate women having casual sex as bad, and men having casual sex as good -- they have the "upper hand" when they get it.
And why is women trading commitment for sex any better than women trading sex for sex? Why are people so attached to the notion that men won't commit unless you withhold sex from them? Why is this entire article blaming women for wanting to have sex and giving men a pass for wanting to having sex?
5. Abortion and the morning-after pill are the same thing
An often-used political ploy is juxtaposing two things in hopes that the reader or listener begins to associate them with each other, without the speaker ever directly linking them:
Abortion is also viewed in a different way. For many, it is no longer a last resort for victims of rape or in other emergencies. It is simply regarded as “Plan B.” In a Planned Parenthood YouTube advertisement for the “morning after” pill, a woman states the scenarios in which the product may be useful.
Note the transition from abortion as a "Plan B" to the morning-after pill, commonly called "Plan B." This is likely an attempt to lump together morning-after pills with abortion, but the morning-after pill is not the abortion pill. They are completely separate, and the morning-after pill doesn't terminate pregnancies. The morning-after pill is over-the-counter; the abortion pill is not.
6. Birth control doesn't prevent abortions
The author says it plain and simple:
More contraception does not translate to fewer abortions.
If you look in the aforementioned Planned Parenthood data (1b), there could be a correlation between less contraception and more abortions -- in 2008, more abortions were performed but less contraception was given out at Planned Parenthood. Also, I can guarantee that less contraception will not translate to fewer abortions.
And actually, the abortion rate generally has been going down in recent years:
1980: 1,297,606
1985: 1,333,521
1990: 1,429,577
1995: 1,210,883
2000: 857,475
2005: 820,151
2006: 846,181
2007: 827,609
And considering contraceptive use has increased over this time frame, I'd say more contraception does translate to fewer abortions.
__________________
I'm glad the newspaper apologized for the article, and I'm also glad they put it back online. Even though their apology covered that it was reprehensible to suggest women are responsible for being raped and that other claims were inaccurate, I couldn't help but expand on that further. Because despite the editors' apology, it still somehow managed to get published, so we can't gloss over the content that was originally deemed passable, and we have to look at it a little more critically.
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Comments
Amen!
I'm a guy and I have NEVER EVER thought a woman deserves to get raped.
Sure, some women/gorls/broads, etc behave in extremely risky ways butt, rape is a crime of violence, not sex so, this idioette doesn't even have that correct.
Go0d post and rightly outraged.
I took a class on jury psychology one time and according to the instructor (who was a rape prosecutor himself), if you're the prosecutor, you don't necessarily want women on your jury. Ideally you want an entire jury made up of fathers of daughters. I don't know whether or not or to what extent that's true, but it resonates with me based on my experiences.
(1) The fact that Jessica Cutler was fired for writing about her sexual escapades supports the original author's opposite point of view; firing someone for that shows that promiscuity does still carry a social stigma.
(2) Consuming alcohol is, in most jurisdictions, dispositive of the "consent" element of forcible rape. A person who is impaired cannot give consent. This is irrespective, of course, of jurisdictions (like New Jersey) where affirmative authorization is required to show consent, and any lack of affirmative authorization is considering a lack of consent.
At common law, forcible rape was a general intent crime, meaning the defendant must have "honestly and reasonably" believed that the victim were giving consent. This means that the defendant must have subjectively believed, by the victim's words and acts, that she was giving consent, *and* a reasonable, objective third-party would also have so believed.
That a woman dresses a certain way may satisfy the subjective component of mens rea, but not necessarily the objective one.
(3) In the Planned Parenthood ad, rape is not implied to be a conclusion in the absence of forgetfulness (i.e., "I can always claim I was raped!"); they are two non-exclusive possibilities for the use of Plan B. But I agree that abortion and Plan B have been conflated.
(4) The "family structure" cannot always be relied upon to address sex education. Family structures often act as a barrier to sex education, resulting in undesirable outcomes. In Catholicism, for example, premarital sex, contraception, and abortion are all forbidden, so none of them is ever discussed. The "proper and moral" context for premarital sex is: "You won't have it."
(5) "Throwing condoms at the public" is *extremely* effective at preventing pregnancies (and thus obviating the need for abortion). There are data to support this.
(6) You mention "slut-slamming" as an undesirable outcome, but it's treated as a conclusion. *Why* is it an undesirable outcome? This may be outrageously obvious to you and me, but effective persuasion requires that you talk about why it's bad.
Why is it worse? Why aren't men held to the same standards as women? Can you please explain?
False information is to be expected, but focusing into onto one (already misinformed) audience is close to criminal.
Otherwise, the article is what the author of this blog very aptly and concisely points out: misleading at best, outright lies most of the time, and really poorly written.
My organization is planning a response. I'll let you know!
@ Cathy W. : Great point by point takedown - I hope to share it with my colleagues.
"[Sex] is no longer associated with love, marriage or a committed relationship."
So, whenever my husband and I are intimate, it's because we're just practicing our mating skills? Or am I just whoring myself to a man that I love for the rest of my life in exchange for shelter, food, clothes, and his last name?
I've decided it's ridiculous. Great post Cathy.
Other than that, I agree with everything you say. The column was, first, poorly researched and written. Second, it conveys not merely a traditional perspective but an outrageous focus on women as the problem for both society's increasingly open attitude toward sex and their own victimization in sex crimes.
Maybe our young lady will learn something in college.
But at her age she seems too much of a twit. / R
Then the rest of it is a reanimation of 1950's era double standard morality. It took a generation or two to squash that bundles of views down to the point of extinction but like some aberrant virus it reawakens. Was the paper running some contest for how many ways can you be wrong in one article? Great takedown Cathy. Too bad it needed doing.
It's easy to comment on the site: no big registration process. So I did.
BADDABING!
In regards to Planned Parenthood, the young author of the college newspaper is right again – it is a business, no matter if it has a non-for-profit status or not. And it’s a big one and an ugly one. They promote abortions to young girls and don’t even report these crimes to authorities. They are CRIMINALS. But “Cathy -- a recent college graduate” doesn’t think so. She feels differently on all the things that Yevgeniya wrote about and probably cares deeply about – casual sex, abortions, responsibility, etc. “Cathy -- a recent college graduate” has all the rights to express her points of view, as I have my rights not to agree with any of them (and I don't), as Yevgeniya Lomakina has to express her feelings and thoughts without being humiliated, abused, and punished - she was fired from the newspaper. Everything “Cathy -- a recent college graduate” wrote makes me sick to my stomack. The only one thing “Cathy -- a recent college graduate” suggested and I agree with is about her slaming her head into her desk for at least 348 times. Although, I don't think that it will change anything.
"If a young woman wears a promiscuous outfit to a party, then proceeds to drink and flirt excessively, she should not blame men for her downfall."
The author here is obviously using "downfall" as a euphemism for sexual assault or rape. She is telling women they should blame themselves, not men, if anything bad happens to them -- meaning if a man sees you in a short skirt, he's not to blame for forcing you into having sex, the woman is to blame for enticing the man.
Sorry, but this is bullshit plain and simple. Doesn't matter if her "tits [are] hardly covered, her ass opened to everyone to enjoy, she drinks like a horse, flirts with the boy, or two, or three," this does not automatically give a man the right to have sex with her. And you can't straddle the fence here and say that you aren't blaming women either, just their "stupidity." It shouldn't be an accepted rule of society that a woman needs to watch what she wears because men are sex-crazed and can't control their animalistic urges.
The author's article does promote rape, because it gives a free pass to men who rape women who were drunk/flirtatious/wearing revealing clothing -- it says those women are to blame for their own "downfall," which is excusing rape in those circumstances.
And Planned Parenthood, if it's a "business" trying to lure young girls in to get abortions, is a really shitty one, considering only 3 percent of their services of abortions. Contraception -- which prevents pregnancies and abortions -- is a much larger percentage of their services, but people seem to ignore that, along with their other health services.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/07/the-daily-collegian-apolo_n_831525.html
In regard to Planned Parenthood, I don’t even want to discuss this “organization”. As I said in my previous remark – they are CRIMINALS who do ugly things for money!!
Here's my question, in response to this comment: "Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and young women should know that." So how do we fix this? How do we make it so that women can look in their closet and not think, "Gee, I better not wear that or I might get raped"? Are young women supposed to just come to terms with the fact that they might get raped so they better not drink alcohol, wear skirts, or do anything that could be perceived as flirtation, because rape is just a fact of life?