It’s hard being a feminist. Every time you settle down for some good green tea and Ani Difranco, another wicked patriarch comes along and harms another poor innocent piece of masculine objectification. Summoned by the spirit of envy and resentment fairness and equality, you take up your formidable guns: cliché-heavy rants on Twitter, Facebook, and Jezebel, impassioned letters to persons of authority (mostly greedy white men), and, when spaces fairly accommodating of obesity are available, hearty marches—hearty because they engender such an appetite, and even occasional squabbles over Wheat Thins.
Still, the feminist cause is not without certain deep satisfactions. On especially productive days, for example, all the writing, blogging, and tweeting, all the whining, neighing, and squawking, is crowned by Instagram shots of delighted duck faces, the natural product of seeing so many “likes” obtained by your heroic efforts to speak truth to power.
Yet all the Rocky Road in the world cannot compensate for the latest injustice, the following evil words by that old patriarch Robert R. Jennings, President of Lincoln University:
We have, we had, on this campus last semester three cases of young women who after having done whatever they did with young men and then it didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to turn out, guess what they did? They went to Public Safety and said ‘He raped me.’
By way of clarification, Jennings said later that “my message was intended to emphasize personal responsibility and mutual respect.” In other words, ladies, have the “personal responsibility” and “mutual respect”—you who are so ardent about receiving it yourself—for men not to cry rape just because you got pumped and dumped, or because the guy turned out to be a jerk, or whatever.
Of course, feminist watchdogs are far too enlightened and diligent to let a man get away with emphasizing personal responsibility and mutual respect. Thus, Robert Langley—chemistry professor, president of the faculty union, and, above all, Mangina—opined: “Women are not partly responsible for rape,” and in case you are obtuse, he repeated (perhaps with a child-like pout): “They’re not.”
Now, if you are one of those rare people today who is afflicted with a logical mind, you may wonder how it is that condemning false rape accusations can lead anyone to indignantly respond that women are not responsible (whether wholly or partly) for rape. For clearly, to say that women should not falsely accuse men of rape—as in the Duke Lacrosse scandal, for instance—in no way implies that, with respect to rape in general, women are to blame.
But feminism, today, is not a matter of logic. It is a matter of power at any cost, and driven by resentment. Here Robert R. Jennings is a rather pesky figure, having stood up for men. Consider his Good Sense: “Men treat you, treat women, the way women allow us to treat them…We will use you up if you allow us to use you up.” His cruelty reached its summit when he remarked that men “marry the girl with the long dress on.”
It is easy to see the red pill background behind Jennings’s words. Here is a man of Good Sense, speaking frankly and offering wisdom—that dreaded thing—about how the world really is. Women who give it up right away, Jennings knows, will be pumped and dumped and passed around. (Feminists call this “sexual empowerment.”) Virtuous women—those who don’t subscribe to the narcissistic maxim “if you’ve got it, flaunt it”—get men’s respect. These are also the women we want to marry.
With the hindsight of age, Jennings doubtless knows well that young men in particular are hornballs who want nothing so much as easy sex with a variety of attractive women. Certainly he also knows that most women do not want to be pumped and dumped; that they want a more significant connection.
What about the feminist notion of the “double standard? It misses the point, because notwithstanding what feminists say about “sexual empowerment,” the reality is that men do not respect and are not attracted to women whose sexuality is as given to variety as our own. The reason, as many feminists have rightly pointed out, is that male heterosexuality has a possessive element: we want women for ourselves; we don’t want to share them with other men, who are our natural competitors for women. And it is precisely in this way, precisely by having a sexuality that is not subject to a double standard, but rather simply different, that women—who, as the source of life itself, are fundamentally objects of desire—can complement men and vice versa.
The double standard claim depends on the assumption that men and women are the same, so that it’s hypocrisy for us not to want women to sleep around. But just as we don’t want our girlfriends and wives attention-whoring in person or on social media for other men, so we men don’t want to be partners in a lady player’s rotation. And the double standard dissolves once we realize that, because they really are different, men and women have different functions in the sexual sphere.
In that sphere attractive women possess a great deal of power, which corresponds to and is one with that sexual objectification against which feminists revolt. It’s often noticed that feminists are not attractive. No wonder. If they were, they’d be too busy getting attention (and material benefits) from men to complain about catcalls and microagressions.
One never meets a sexy young feminist. The reason is that, as life goes for human beings, no one has it so good as a sexy young woman, with her army of obliging orbiters. With respect to power, the middle-aged professor of women’s studies lives in a very different world from the young stunners in her classroom. She actually has far less power than her attractive students, and her feminist “revolt” would have no reason to be if she were a star in the sexual marketplace. Miranda Kerr is a far more powerful and doubtless happier woman than the feminist professor whose life is an eccentric obsession with “patriarchal gender norms.”
Anyway, like the faculty of Lincoln University, parents of students were vexed at the president. They too thought he was blaming women for sexual assault. Under much pressure, Jennings issued an apology: “I apologize for my choice of words. I certainly did not intend to hurt or offend anyone. I will choose my words more carefully in the future.”
Sharon Roseboro, whose daughter is a student at Lincoln, didn’t buy it: “I think it was the political thing to do,” she said. “If it didn’t run in The Philadelphia Inquirer, I’m not sure that apology would have been written.” With further sagacity, she added that Jennings—mind you, a university president—should not have addressed students on the subject of personal responsibility in sexual matters. That is the job of a “counselor.”
Final Analysis
In a more reasonable society, a university president would be respected and appreciated for trying to guide young women to be personally responsible when it comes to sex. Referencing specific instances in which women falsely accused men of rape, would by no means seem to imply that women are to blame with respect to rape per se. Such a clear logical fallacy is not possible if one relies on disinterested reason, rather than on a resentment-driven ideology whose chief goal is power at any cost.
It is a sign of the times that Robert R. Jennings has been widely condemned for doing what a man in a position of authority should do above all: trying to lead the young to make wise decisions. Instead of being thankful, parents and students, feminists and manginas grossly misunderstood Jennings, then pressured him to “apologize” for his Good Sense, which they were too dim-witted and touchy to understand.
So here is where we are in America in 2014. People want nothing to do with wisdom and authority. Where wisdom and authority could be perceived, people are fiercely blind and “think” with only their emotions. Now in the case of women, this is quite ironic. Far from contradicting the stereotype that men are more logical while women are more emotional, the response to Jennings only serves to reinforce it.
Faced with certain discomfiting realities of intergender relations, with the sort of hard truths from which it is necessary (though not easy) to learn, the people cry foul, then ask to be coddled: “I certainly did not intend to hurt or offend anyone. I will choose my words more carefully in the future.”
And so America’s proudly deluded decline continues.
Read More: How Liberals Neglect Contexts When Crying Discrimination
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