A Rape Victim's Lament

In the aftermath of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's decision to end the unjust Obama policy that removed sexual assault from the criminal justice system and assigning it to the tender mercies of lefty college administrators, we are getting the response you would expect from the national victim community.

A rape victim writes to NYT columnist Bret Stephens to complain that:

I’ve seen many pieces by sensible people on the violated rights of accused rapists. I have seen zero pieces from the center-right on the rights of sexual-assault victims. I have seen zero pieces that take the problem of sexual assault seriously.

Then this young head full of mush goes on to share her story. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

In college, I once blacked out drunk at a party and someone offered to walk me home. I don’t remember what happened after that, but when I woke up my clothes were on inside out. I started screaming.

This young lady may have seen "zero pieces that take the problem of sexual assault seriously," but then she is young and foolish, and she talks in the language of left-wing "rights" so we know that she knows nothing about the world because, through no fault of her own, we assume, she has heard nothing, and learned nothing, about anything except tendentious rubbish filtered through the distorting filter of left-wing propaganda in her government schooling.

Contra this unfortnate young woman, I would say that the basic attitude of the center-right on sexual assault, particularly as it relates to college campi, is that the problem begins and ends with the "hookup" culture, in which young people get themselves blind drunk. In which the idea of courtship and dating goes out the window. In which young women are treated like meat. In which foolish young women find out, too late, that they are not cut out for the hookup scene. Because, as this young woman relates, "some part of me had died forever, and that I had been violated."

OK, now let's fill in the holes in that young woman's sexual education; let's talk about sexual assault down the ages.

In the hunter-gatherer era, according to War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by Lawrence H Keeley, a tribe could only exist while the men existed to defend the borders. If there weren't enough men to defend the border the tribe dissolved and the women and children got picked up by other tribes. And you know what that means.

In The Iliad the whole story revolves about the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon about who gets to keep Briseis, the princess Achilles captured when he sacked the city of Lyrnessus. If you read The Iliad, you will note that there is not the least mention of what Briseis thought about all this.

In the Odyssey the plot turns on Odysseus returning to Ithaca from the Trojan War. Along the way he is pursued by numerous hot immortal babes, goddesses and whatnot, and enjoys their favors. But his faithful wife Penelope is stuck at home being harassed by The Suitors. No fun and games for her. There is not the least whisper in the Odyssey about how this double standard is a monstrous demonstration of the power of the patriarchy.

If you read about the Vikings you will discover that their modus operandi was to sail their longships up the rivers of France and Britain and raid the villages and kill the men and sell the women and children into slavery. If these Vikings were selling their slaves on the great rivers of Russia, they might refresh themselves on the slaves they had for sale while waiting for a likely customer.

If you read about the end of World War II you will discover that it is reckoned that probably every German woman caught in the path of the Red Army was raped. Then there were the lucky ones, as told in A Woman in Berlin. They were able to survive by taking Russians, preferably officers, as lovers in the lawless month when Berlin was occupied by the Red Army and normal civilian government and civilian policing had collapsed.

Then there is the modern campus where, in the interest of sexual liberation, the whole culture of bourgeois courting has been thrown onto the dustheap of history, and the old rules, where men were expected to treat women with respect and women were expected to avoid being alone with a man, were abolished and replaced in due time with the absurd bureaucratic rules currently in force at universities which treat sexual encounter as a multiple-choice test.

The old rules, as suffocating and bourgeois and patriarchal as they were, were based on the eternal truth that men are beasts and will couple with anything that moves, and also on the eternal truth that women are suckers for any man that shows up and makes love to them. So the old rules put roadblocks in the way of beastly men, and insisted that young women be very careful about bestowing their favors.

We now know also that the value of the old rules lay not just in protecting women from sexual assault, after which something inside them would die. They also protected women from the scourge of sexually transmitted disease. We have found, in the aftermath of the sexual revolution, that STIs run rampant in a population where many people have multiple sexual partners. And the burden of STIs fall heaviest upon women, because many STIs make women infertile.

So the silly old culture in which young women "saved" themselves for the man of their dreams turns out to have a practical value, arising out of the basic science of epidemiology. A disease, any disease, needs "vectors" to infect others in order for the disease to multiply. The fewer the vectors the less chance there will be for an epidemic. So if the STI vectors stop dead before the implacable chastity of the vast majority of young women, so much the better for posterity. Settled science, old chap.

Unfortunately, the young woman that wrote to Bret Stephens probably doesn't know any of this stuff. I wonder why.