Like teenage Vine stars, singing competition shows, and the man who I sometimes see with his dong casually out on the subway, I usually ignore Washington Post columnist and living Republican stereotype George Will. I figure everything he says will just irritate me, and life is irritating enough with morality lectures from a guy who won’t live long enough to see just how hard his generation screwed everything up forever. But when he started running his mouth on campus rape, classifying it as a status symbol that women seek out, when he claimed in a column for which he ostensibly got paid money that the real victims of campus sex assault are college administrations, I feel like I have to say something.
That something is a sincere and heartfelt Fuck you, George Will.
Will got his toupee in a twist over what he classifies as LIBERALISM RUN AMOK at America’s colleges and universities. He cites, as a case in point, the college sexual assault epidemic. He does this by mocking the sexual assault of a woman who attended Swarthmore. You can tell he’s mocking it because he puts “sexual assault” in quotation marks in much the same way that people who aren’t smart enough to be effectively mean will derisively put the word “writer” or “actor” in YouTube comments. So-called sexual assault. Quote unquote sexual assault. Lolrape.
Will further argues that quote sexual assault unquote is a “a coveted status that confers privileges,” because rape victims know in this day and age that there’s nothing more fun and cool and glamorous than publicly accusing someone of rape and then dealing with the ensuing social fallout. Has Will considered the fact that perhaps feminists and allies rally around sexual assault survivors because authorities and universities and every other body that’s supposed to protect people from harm routinely fail to help survivors feel safe? That maybe if victims were protected, uninvolved members of their university communities wouldn’t feel the need to stand up for them and with them?
But the dingleberry flower garnish atop the shit-frosted layer cake of steaming shit of a column Will wrote is this paragraph, which is one of the most doddering, idiotic things I’ve ever read. And I was once on a bus trip with only a large print copy of Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons to keep me company.
The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent — too high but nowhere near 20 percent.
Rape is underreported, here is how many women reported being raped, therefore rape is overreported. These reports are flawed! Can’t you tell by these flawed reports? Your honor, I rest my case.
With that, it’s not clear what, exactly, Will is arguing, besides what Salon’s Katie McDonaugh calls “I Am Mad That We Are Now Talking About Sexual Assault And Sexual Entitlement. These Conversations Make Me Uncomfortable And Threaten Me. Please Make Them Stop.” He begins his piece claiming that namby pamby wimpy pants liberals are turning colleges into victim factories because being a rape victim is kind of like being prom queen in Obama’s America (TM), but then goes on to acknowledge that rape is underreported because REASONS. If victimhood is so coveted, wouldn’t it stand to reason that rape would overreported? And where are the male victims of sexual assault in all of this? Where is the stigma they face, the fear and humiliation they must confront if they come forward to people with antique social attitudes like Will’s?
Maybe inside of derisive quotation marks, firmly outside of George Will’s ability to comprehend.