Tina Korbe, a columnist at the conservative site HotAir, recently wrote a very ill-advised post about rape. It was the latest in what, with Christine O’Donnell walking off the Piers Morgan show, has been a bad week for conservatives who want to talk openly and intelligently about our modern sexualized culture.
Korbe cited the case of a police officer in England who claimed that girls who did not want to be sexually assaulted were not doing their case any good by dressing like street walkers. The officer’s remark led to marches called “slut walks,” where women dressed like hookers and marched.
The point of the slut walk is to show people that rape is never excusable: that a woman, no matter what, is never “asking for it.”
Here is part of what Korbe wrote:
The police officer was not excusing rape — and neither am I. It is never, never OK. Nor is it ever, ever deserved: The rapist is always the perpetrator, the victim always the victim. But he was pointing out the obvious — that by taking care to dress in a self-respecting manner and by not putting themselves in potentially compromising situations, women reduce the likelihood that they will be that victim in the first place.
As a college coed, I sat through my fair share of women’s safety lectures. No presenter ever wanted to say it, but it had to be acknowledged as true: No way a girl who stays in her secured dorm room or heads to the local movie theater with friends on a Friday night runs the same risk of date rape as a girl who dances on the tables or falls down drunk at a college kegger. That’s just common sense.
So in other words, no girl deserves to be raped, but if a girl is dumb enough to go to a party and get drunk and dance on tables — well, you can kinda see how she would get what she was asking for.
But if a women is more likely to be raped because she danced on a table at a party or fell down drunk, the problem is with the person who rapes her. Period.
Both Korbe and the liberals she criticizes seem to have trouble getting their heads around the idea that two things can be equally true. The first is that men — and many women, by the way — will look down on women who dress like prostitutes. As human beings, we simply have an innate, God-given sense of our own divinity, our own dignity, and we can tell when something has sullied it. Women who dress like trash just have to accept that.
The second is that there is a huge difference between a women dressing poorly — and the judgement of said woman — and rape. One is a judgement. The other is a violent crime.
Conservatives are always advocating self-mastery, control over the passions, so that you are in charge and not given to every impulse. We preach that poverty is not excuse for crime. That frustration is no excuse to do drugs. That the discipline of work is better than the lassitude of welfare.
Yet faced with a hammered coed in a skimpy outfit, we are simply not capable of acting like decent men, and we cannot expect the same of others. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.
I also don’t like how Korbe disses girls who like to throw down and party with the boys instead of barricading themselves in their dorms.
I grew up around Irish Catholic girls, many of whom could drink my ass under the table. I saw more than a few pass out, and danced with many, both on tables and in clubs. It’s a terrible kind of repression to suggest that a woman who likes to have fun — or enjoys “the craic,” as we Irish call it — should somehow feel compelled to stifle herself for fear that some neanderthal will assault her.
Again, our task as conservatives, and as people of good will in general, is to raise men who would rather die than violate a woman. A real man, when faced with a situation where he finds himself losing control of his libido, has alternatives.
When I was growing up I took enough cold showers to float the USS Reagan. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough.
Which brings us to Christine O’Donnell. I met her a few weeks before her fateful semi-appearance on the Piers Morgan show, the one where she famously walked off after being asked about masturbation and gay marriage. I told O’Donnell that I was a supporter as well as a fellow Catholic.
Then I talked to her about the book “The Exorcist.” It came out 40 years ago, but it’s still relevant, I said, to what she was going to come up against when her own book came out.
The point of The Exorcist is that the demon tries to convince us that we are not worthy of God’s love, that we are merely animals. Thus the attacks come not in the form of grand geopolitical debates about famines and wars, but in degrading sexual comments. The pornographic language that dehumanizes us. The Dan Savaging of the soul.
When Christine O’Donnell walked into the studios of CNN, a demon was waiting for her. Again, I’m not talking about some smoke-and-laser-lights monster who laughs like thunder. Rather, it is the insistent, gently mocking juvenile voice that degrades by inches. And she wasn’t ready for it.
The answer is to do what the priests in “The Exorcist” do: calmly respond with the truth. We are more than animals. Of course the teachings of the Catholic Church are sometimes hard to live up to. But in the end, a genuine type of freedom can be achieved.
Like a virtuous man who knows there is never any excuse for rape, we can become masters of our own domain.
Mark Judge is the author of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.
