“Women aren’t crying rape. Rape crisis phones don’t ring. Cut the funding. No argument there. That should be the end of it.”
Did you read the article? That base was covered: it’s been decreed that the actual rate of reported rapes is immaterial. Women are counted as having been raped even when they don’t believe it themselves; rape is underreported because we live in “a rape culture, which condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as a norm”; the numbers don’t matter “because the movement is political, not empirical.” MacDonald goes where you say she should, and shows why the numbers argument is not — is not permitted to be — the end of it.
“Just don’t pretend to be concerned about rape, that’s all. Admit it: nice girls don’t get raped.”
You insist on conflating rape with the actual subject of the article. I wonder why.
Women of all sorts get raped. Rape is a situation over which women have no control, and therefore one’s niceness has nothing to do with it.
Also, apparently, some women go to bed in strange places with strange people and wake up not knowing if they had sex, who they had it with, whether they wanted it or not, and whether or not it was safe — and not because somebody slipped them a rufie, but because they put themselves in a rufie-like condition of their own volition. For women who enjoy that, no problem. For those who don’t, it’s a situation — unlike rape — that is entirely in their power to avoid. You call that being “nice,” I call it common sense and self-respect. Either way, I think it’s empowering.
