Who, Whom?
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From the police blotter:
New York City police have arrested a man wanted for raping a woman after forcing his way into her Upper Manhattan apartment. Jean Rodriguez … allegedly raped the 20-year-old woman Tuesday after pushing his way into her Washington Heights apartment when she answered the door.
Sounds nasty. In this or any other particular case there may be circumstances we don't know; but there is no doubt that rape happens. The law codes of civilized countries consider it a heinous crime, and rightly so. If events transpired as reported, Mr. Rodriguez should do serious time.
Now consider the late Arthur Koestler, whose style of sexual approach was somewhat … forthright. After conquering Mamaine Paget in early 1944, he wrote her an apologetic note:
I know that I behaved in a rather swinish way … but I still believe that is permissible if the result is enjoyed by both. Without an element of initial rape there is no delight.Did Ms. Paget call the cops on Koestler? File a civil lawsuit against him? Tell him never to darken her door again? Commit honorable suicide? No: She commenced an affair with him, and six years later they were married.
So while the word "rape" names a dreadful crime, it covers a wider territory than just that: a territory well watered by the soggy uncertainties of subjectivity.
Most of the subjectivity is on the female side of the transaction. If Ms. Paget's 1944 counterparty had been some other male with a feebler personality and a less skilful approach, she would indeed have cried rape. Every man understands this, though few women do.
That is especially the case with the youngest generation of adult women, who have been steeped all their lives in a warm soak-bath of victimology. The resulting mentality was on display in the July 12th New York Times story I passed comment on in last week's podcast.
The story concerns 18-year-old Anna, a student at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York. Anna got drunk at a frat party, went with a football player to his room, and was later found "bent over a pool table as a football player appeared to be sexually assaulting her from behind in a darkened dance hall with six or seven people watching and laughing."
After sobering up, Anna cried rape. The college investigated, but the football players she accused were cleared.
Anna admits to having been insensibly drunk. She seems not to have been chained to that pool table, nor to have screamed for assistance at any point. So … was this rape? You may say it was piggish behavior on the part of the males present — on which point I'd agree with you — but was it rape?
The Cultural Marxist take on the story is that since Anna is female and the footballers male, of course it was rape. Female = victim.
Fitting stories like this into the CultMarx narrative is no simple matter, though. There may, for example, be the confounding factor of race. Oddly — although it would not seem odd to New York Times editors or readers — there was no mention in all that long article of the race of the males involved.
Might they have been black? I can't find a picture of the entire Hobart and William Smith football team, but here are some of the star players at an awards ceremony. Half of them are black; so if that's representative of the whole team, we're talking probability fifty-fifty.
Given the state of our culture, two things can be said with perfect certainty.
First: If Anna had been black and the males involved white, this would have been a colossal news story, as the Duke lacrosse team pseudo-rape pseudo-story was. There would have been marches, demonstrations, candlelight vigils, and angry manifestos mass-signed by the college faculty.
As a black and a female, Anna would have been a twofer victim. If she'd also been a lesbian, the entire editorial staff of the New York Times would have been raptured up into Heaven before they could do any reporting.
Second: If any of the accused males is black, the authorities would have done their utmost to minimize the case, if they couldn't bury it completely.
It is now a cardinal axiom of our culture that any accusation of any crime committed by a black against a nonblack must be false; or, if the evidence is irrefutably overwhelming, the perp's blackness must not be spoken of.
It might be thought that when default black victimhood clashes with default female victimhood, the CultMarx commentator finds himself in difficult terrain. Who's oppressing whom?
In practice this is a no-brainer: black still trumps female in the hierarchy of victimology.
You could ask the Central Park Jogger about that. That what happened to her on April 19, 1989 indisputably was rape, and that she was white while four of the five rapists were black (the fifth was Hispanic), threatened to cause an almighty rip in the spacetime continuum.
A vastly improbable conspiracy theory was duly assembled; and before the tottering edifice could collapse under the weight of its own implausibility, it was signed off on by the mayor himself — the present, communist one, not the previous, neocon one, who for all his grating nannyism at least had some common sense about plain evidentiary matters and some loyalty to his law enforcement professionals.
In fact, black male even trumps black female. In the news recently was black male gynecologist Nikita Levy, who was found to have taken intimate photographs of his patients, most of them black, at a Baltimore medical center. Hewing close to the CultMarx protocols, the Baltimore Sun reported the story without mentioning Levy's race; and they decorated it with a photograph of two white lawyers!
Did Dr. Levy's offense amount to rape? For a ruling on that, you need someone far better versed in victimology than I am: a New York Times editor, perhaps.