If You Like MRA Rape Apologias But Generally Find Them Too Coherent, It’s Your Lucky Day!

Forgotten but oddly not gone, Camille Paglia has arranged a large number of very poorly chosen words on a virtual page. It contains stuff like this:

Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

We have cultural references for people who find Hi And Lois a little too cutting edge — these kids today with their phones that aren’t even plugged into the wall and their portable music machines that Apple has recently discontinued because they’re horrible people and don’t care about old people like me — that also don’t mean anything. We have an assertion-without-evidence that the problem of sexual violence on campus is overblown. And we have a made-up and reprehensible category called “not felonious rape,” so apparently the problem of sexual violence on campus is “overblown” so long as we erroneously define some kinds of sex without consent as not being rape — or misdemeanor rape? — because brute force or drugs were not involved. This argument hasn’t improved since Katie Roiphie made it all those many years ago.

In other words, we have appalling ideas expressed in prose to match. It can’t get worse from there, I guess, but:

The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.

Not only a strawman, but an incredibly lazy and cliched one.

Misled by the naive optimism and “You go, girl!” boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

This is a lot of words and 90s catchphrases to say “if you get raped it’s your fault for not going to class dressed in a burlap sack.” Again, Paglia seems to realize that the only thing that could be more revolting than her prose is her ideas. Oddly, evidence that sexual violence didn’t exist before people starting saying things they mostly stopped saying during the Bush administration is uncited.

I could go on, but just read this golden oldie from The Editors instead. Now there was a guy who could write.