Steubenville Rape
The one positive thing that the Steubenville rape story did was convince hard cases like me that there really is an increasing problem with rape culture.
I'm not calling myself a 'hard case' because I'm close-minded or mysogynistic; I've just been an extreme skeptic. I spent a good part of the 1980s volunteering and doing odd jobs for organizations like Women Against Rape and the local Domestic Abuse Council. I always thought that experience made me something of an authority on the topic. And I thought we were going in the right direction. Things did seem to be getting slowly better. So when I saw stories about growing rape culture peppering the internet, I thought, "Hey, it's great that awareness is growing, but you guys don't know what it was like back in the day." I was extremely skeptical about anything getting worse.
I was wrong. After three decades of what I thought was improvement, the major news networks lamented that raping may have cost some rapists their their football careers. That was a complete non-sequitir in what I had assumed was our country's baseline moral narrative. I can't remember anything like that happening before, and I couldn't imagine that story breaking back in the Reagan years. The media hinted at a whole new moral direction, and it is a backwards direction.
Guys have taken advantage of drunk girls before; that's not new. The media going to bat for them - that's the new part. Hopefully, the outrage over this will be a big splash of cold water for the media, and will wake them up from whatever the hell they were thinking. But I don't know about the rest of the country, and I'm worried about what moral pits may be hidden in our culture.
I'm not calling myself a 'hard case' because I'm close-minded or mysogynistic; I've just been an extreme skeptic. I spent a good part of the 1980s volunteering and doing odd jobs for organizations like Women Against Rape and the local Domestic Abuse Council. I always thought that experience made me something of an authority on the topic. And I thought we were going in the right direction. Things did seem to be getting slowly better. So when I saw stories about growing rape culture peppering the internet, I thought, "Hey, it's great that awareness is growing, but you guys don't know what it was like back in the day." I was extremely skeptical about anything getting worse.
I was wrong. After three decades of what I thought was improvement, the major news networks lamented that raping may have cost some rapists their their football careers. That was a complete non-sequitir in what I had assumed was our country's baseline moral narrative. I can't remember anything like that happening before, and I couldn't imagine that story breaking back in the Reagan years. The media hinted at a whole new moral direction, and it is a backwards direction.
Guys have taken advantage of drunk girls before; that's not new. The media going to bat for them - that's the new part. Hopefully, the outrage over this will be a big splash of cold water for the media, and will wake them up from whatever the hell they were thinking. But I don't know about the rest of the country, and I'm worried about what moral pits may be hidden in our culture.