Glenn Beck's The Blaze Aired a Horrifying Rape Sketch
LatestSince the White House outlined its strategy to combat sexual assault on campuses late last month, right-wing pundits have been champing at the bit to discredit the WH report’s findings that 1 in 5 female students are sexually assaulted during their time at college. Unsurprisingly, these “truthers”‘ facts and arguments are total bullshit, but that doesn’t stop them from repeating them ad nauseam.
On The Blaze (Glenn Beck’s online show), Burguiere takes particular issue with the idea that any sex influenced by drugs and alcohol is rape:
“Newsflash: I hate to say it, but it is possible to have consensual sex while drunk or high. Watch any beer commercial. What you’ll see is a bunch of hot women and good-looking dudes drinking beer with a strong insinuation that they will soon be hooking up. Yes, it’s true, it’s true. When you drink alcohol, you lose your inhibitions. That is also why you drink alcohol. If you eliminate sex while drunk or high, you eliminate about half the sex in the entire United States.”
I don’t think that most people would argue that it’s impossible to have consensual sex while mildly inebriated, but there’s a pretty huge difference between hooking up while a little tipsy and having someone have sex with you when you’re too drunk to say yes. And this probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: If the only way you can make an argument is by citing beer commercials, the fight is already lost.
but it only gets worse from there. Burguiere’s real ax to grind is with the Center for Disease Control’s 2007 Campus Sexual Assault Report and 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. He says that these, along with the White House’s report, were “designed to massively inflate the number of [sexual assault] victims.” And to prove how supposedly flawed the surveys were, he has two men, one of whom is in wildly offensive drag, act out the situations that the surveys have allegedly called rape.
“Pressuring someone to have sex with you by telling them lies is the same as rape,” he mocks. “…Threatening to spread rumors to get sex is the same as rape…Repeatedly asking for sex to get sex is the same as rape. That’s persistence rape.”
One thing (among many) that Burguiere either purposefully ignores or is too stupid to notice is that the 2010 CDC survey on intimate partner violence was not only about rape, but also sexual coercion — and lying, threatening and badgering someone into sex is all coercion.
Since I’ve already spent too much time talking about Beck and his team of assholes, I leave it at this: If Burguiere is really so offended that certain methods of hooking up with women (getting them drunk, lying to them and pressuring them) have been condemned, then I invite him to forgo sleeping with women entirely and go fuck himself.