Anti-Rape Culture Rally Accused of Promoting Rape Culture

Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2014-10-25 18:39

Story here. Excerpt:

'An Arizona State University rally against rape culture has been criticized for actually promoting rape culture because it encourages men to respect women — and respect for women should be “a given” and not have to be encouraged.

Two organizations, a women’s group named “WOW Factor!” and a men’s group named “Man Up,” have hosted the “Rally for Respect” at the university annually — but an opinion column in the school newspaper last week raised troubling concerns about the rally and the groups involved.

In the column, student Kaelyn Polick-Kirkpatrick said she had been listening to video statements from the 2013 event and was disturbed to hear things such as, “That 300 men have pledged to respect women on campus is something really great” and “when the men were doing the pledge to respect women, I was thinking wow, this is really cool.”

“Are we really rewarding men for respecting women?” she wrote, comparing the rally to “handing out gold stars to mildly decent human beings who probably don’t even realize the organizations they are part of are full of sexism and misogyny."'

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Comments

My comment to the article on the site:

Eventually, all causes based on untruths become caricatures of themselves.  After all, if you start with a falsehood as the basis of your cause, and look to negate the status quo so a positive end is reached, you'll in essence be supporting a negative end, contrary to the stated aim of your cause.  Thus you are working to fulfill the opposite of what you seek done, oddly, bringing into existence the undesirable state you didn't want because you thought it existed before-- when in fact it didn't.

But in this case I think their efforts are less likely to bring about an actual "culture of rape" at ASU rather than simply reinforce a culture of ludicrousness and misandry, the victims of which are now and will continue to be the male students, fewer and fewer of which will remain as they decide living in such a toxic/risky environment isn't worth a hugely overpriced diploma from an average box store university in the desert. (Apologies to ASU alums and current matriculants. But let's be real, here. I'd've written the same thing about my own alma mater under the same conditions.)

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2014-10-25 18:44