Quote of the Day for Saturday, September 12th, 2013:
Pete Jermann, writing on-line last week for Crisis Magazine, anticipates that the new school year will see the resurgence of the phony “college rape crisis” narrative that became de rigeur of late, especially last year. Except that Jermann sees that it is not phony at all, but simply a disordered expression of a genuine response to violation, but a violation that encompasses (and implicates!) the entirety of modern “sexual” culture:
The crisis is not in the competing true/false allegations of the parties involved, nor in the inability to define rape, but in the underlying hopelessness of lives denied authentic sexual meaning. The real crisis is the forlorn cry of a generation lost in the wilderness of the Sexual Revolution. The alleged rape is real, but it is the rape of sexuality itself.
An excuse for feminist outrage, the manufactured campus rape crisis is a facade behind which lies a ghostly terrain where not only “man,” and “woman,” but “sex,” and “love” are empty shadows of an earlier time. …
The campus rape movement is an outcry of this emptiness. It is the cry of those trapped in a world without meaning, a world seeking love without knowing love. It is not the oft heralded number of one in five college girls that have been raped. It is an entire generation, both male and female.
The campus rape movement is not a continuation of the Sexual Revolution but an inadvertent counter-revolution. It is inadvertent because its proponents consider themselves part of the revolution they challenge. It is a counter-revolution because it seeks meaning in a revolution that destroys meaning. Without help it will fail because it cannot see itself for what it is, for what all lies are, a mass of contradictions. The demand that women be respected falls flat in a culture that has already condemned respect as patronizing male chauvinism. A generation raised on the love of self, a “love” based on feelings of one’s own goodness, cannot understand a “respect” that begins with the denial of self and the consideration of the other. Nor can it understand what it means to respect a “woman” when there is no concept of woman larger than any particular woman, or, in the new transgendered world, even any particular man. The aggrieved women of the campus rape movement demand a recognition of womanhood they themselves do not acknowledge. They seek love without definition of either love or the object loved.
In such a world, one where love has no meaning and feelings are all-meaning, a woman who awakes with bad feelings, whether the morning after or any morning after, has indeed been raped. With sex reduced to good feelings there is no accounting for bad feelings. …
Rape is the crime of sex forcefully taken. The Sexual Revolution is an act of rape that has taken our sexuality itself.
Jermann is simply spot-on. Read the whole article – it’s only 1,500 words. His comments (final paragraph of article – not quoted above) on the sad Columbia “Mattress Girl” saga from last year struck me as exactly true to my almost-despairing thoughts on the matter at the time: there was no side to take in the conflict, no good actors to be found. There was only a poisonous social context, in which these hapless fools were submerged, in which there is simply no readily available option to do good, in which no one remains with a sense even for what virtue is, never mind what it consists of, or how to embrace and embody it.
When I consider what concerns me most about sending my daughter off to college next year, it is precisely that toxic stew of moral imbecility that I fear: not my daughter’s judgment, and not even so much the judgment of others, but the vacuum created by the relentless lies about what it means to be human.