Feministing Friday: Analytically Inept
Meet Ann, a 27 year-old college-educated woman. She looks like this:
Ann has a little problem. Her problem is that she doesn’t know how to think. She proves it with this piece.
Ann is a prime example of an idealogue whose mission in life is to derive one of a number of foregone conclusions that feminists before her have ingrained in her vacant and impressionable mind even from which no such conclusion could be reasonably derived unless the conclusions were known in advance, as is the case with everything in the entire world in which Ann lives, namely, the world of feminism.
Take, for example, relatively benign and meaningless statistics such as these:
Among females aged 18-24 whose first sex was before age 20, 10% “really didn’t want it to happen at the time” …
For those who had 1st sex at 14 years or younger, 18% really didn’t want it to happen..
Among those whose first partners were 3 or more years older, 19% reported that they didn’t really want it to happen at the time, compared with 5% among those whose first partners were the same age or younger.
These statistics, in the mind of Ann, reveal widespread Sexual Assault!
I don’t have to ask the questions you’ve already asked yourself because Ann muses for us, stating:
We don’t know a lot about this 10% and 18% and 19%. Based on this study, we can’t say whether or not these girls verbally said no or otherwise resisted. We don’t know whether they personally consider what they’ve experienced to be rape or not.
But, according to Ann, it’s rape irrespectively. In Ann’s mind, a woman who in reflecting upon her first sexual experience as a young teenager, who was probably to an extent pressured into it in an earnest desire to please her boyfriend with whom she probably no longer consorts in any meaningful way concludes that she “really didn’t want it to happen at the time” was raped, even if that same woman would not call it rape and never at any time physically or verbally resisetd to sex. No, in all likelihood, said woman has a few regrets about some choices she made when she was a dumb teenager.
Lack of consent means it was assault, and it’s important that the CDC explicitly classify it that way.
Come on, Ann. Is it looking in the mirror every morning that gave you such a glass-half-empty outlook on life? If the girl herself won’t call it rape, why do you need to? Why do we need to invent a crime where none existed? Why do we need to make a victim out of her and a rapist out of him? To please your ideological view that women do no wrong, are not responsible for their vaginas, and that men exist to take advantage of girls who evidently are not allowed to make decisions they might someday regret unless they are allowed to blame it on someone else?
How can you possibly call yourself a feminist, Ann? You’re in effect saying that women shouldn’t be responsible for their choices, good or bad.
If Ann were in charge of the CDC, she’d change the survey around to include some loaded questions, like this one, for example:
Yet the wording of this question leaves little doubt that the women who answered yes were actually raped:
“Would you say then that this first vaginal intercourse was voluntary or not voluntary, that is, did you choose to have sex of your own free will or not?“
Those that answered “no” should not have been categorized as having had “first sex.” If they did not make the chose of their own free will, it was rape.
First, Ann, I’m pretty sure rape still qualifies as sexual intercourse, regardless of whether it’s voluntary or not. But more importantly, the legal qualification for rape is pretty clear. In order for sex to be considered rape the woman has to demonstrably resist the act, verbally and physically. She must prove that her attacker used superior force to subdue her into sex against her will. That is a lot different than a girl who, years later, said offhand on an anonymous survey that yeah, she really didn’t want it to happen.
I’m sure if you asked my first girlfriend that question she would have said the same thing. Why? Because she came from a rather conservative family, we are no longer speaking, etc. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to discover that she lied to her current husband and told him that she never had sex, although since we had some mutual friends and we dated for almost 5 years I think that might be a hard one to sell. I admit it: I pressured her into it. I made it pretty clear that I wanted to get laid and at the time I had several other options and she knew it. She (correctly) determined that if she didn’t put out, I’d break up with her and date a younger, looser, and probably more attractive girl. As this was not an outcome she wanted, she conceded to the inevitable.
The study that Ann is referencing gave three options of responses to the “degree to which first intercourse was wanted by the respondent.” Those options were “really did not want”, “mixed feelings”, and “really wanted.” I could rephrase this quesion rather easily:
“When you had sex for the first time, was it something you wanted?” Answers are yes, no, maybe.
By Ann’s reasoning, if my girlfriend answered “no” - which I suspect she would – then I qualify as a rapist and, additionally, my girlfriend did not have sex with me because she didn’t really want to have sex. Instead, it was rape. So, in Ann’s world, my girlfriend was a virgin when she married her husband. Well, probably not. I suspect that she cheated on me that summer in Atlanta, you know, for that internship which I helped her get from which she failed to secure a full time offer 3 months later… but that’s another story…
But what does that even mean? Did she want to have sex? No, if she had her way, she would have kept her precious little vagina free of my penis because good little indian girls don’t have sex with white boys in high school. If her father knew definitively that I was boning her he probably would not have sent her to college with me (we went to the same school). One time we stayed out until 12:00am and he was so pissed at her that he didn’t speak to her for like a month and a half. But I pressured her and ultimately she chose that appeasing me was more important to her than bearing the guilt of disappointing her parents, were they ever to know. Let me repeat that because it bears repeating: she chose. She got naked and spread them. She didn’t say no or try to stop me. If she had taken this survey 15 minutes before I popped her, she might have answered that she “really didn’t want to” have sex, but that didn’t stop her from doing it. And it certainly was not, by no stretch of the imagination, any kind of rape. Neither was it particularly good, but it never was with that girl, even 3 years later… but I digress…
The problem with women in general when it comes to things like this is that in the mind of a woman she can both want to have sex and not want to have sex at the same time, and if you were to ask her the same question twice: “Do you want to have sex”, she could say yes the first time and no the second time and neither time would she be lying. How does that work, exactly? Because it depends on who asked her the question, under what circumstances, who the asker is likely to repeat her answer to, et cetera.
Compound that with the fact that this CDC survey is asking women about their desire for sex long ex post facto, long after they’ve grown old enough to possibly regret it, long after they’re old enough to live with the consequences of these decisions, and so on… how can you possibly derive any meaning from the answers these women give? You pretty much have to take these responses with a grain of salt.
Not Ann, apparently. No, because her agenda calls for all sex to be somehow demonstrative of a power dynamic and all men to be rapists, she’ll derive meaning where there is none as long as it furthers her cause.
You think a few thousand rapes per year is a blight upon society? You think a few battered wives too weak to leave the son-of-a-bitch they married is a blight upon society? No, Ann. This ideological bullshit is the blight on society. You’re the blight on society. I hate people like this. I hate Ann. I like to imagine a world without douches like Ann, but they’re everywhere. Oh well. At least they give me material for my invective diatribes. Happy Friday, folks.
Yikes. Looking at her, I think her response to the survey would be “N/A.”