Why Is ‘The Hunting Ground’ Driving a Campus Rape Activism Backlash?

Article here. Excerpt:

'Even as new documentary The Hunting Ground gets activists fired up to combat the problem of rape on campuses, there’s a backlash brewing. Emily Yoffe has published a long piece excoriating what she sees the film’s one-sidedness at Slate, in line with her longstanding efforts to brand anti-rape activists as hysterics. “Sexual assault is a serious problem on campus, and activists are to be applauded for bringing attention and resources to it,” she writes. “But the atmosphere of alarm that pervades The Hunting Ground does not serve accusers, the accused, or their classmates, young people who are still learning how to think about sex.”

And today, essayist and op-ed writer Meghan Daum praised the film, but qualified her praise with concern that there’s a growing “grievance culture” on campus that obscures the real issue with rape.

"In grievance culture, sexual assault and victimhood exist as absolutes, independent of context or gray areas. The woman who gets drunk at a party and has sex she neither exactly consented to nor exactly resisted is just as much a victim as the clearly brutalized woman. The undergraduate at an elite college who continues to hang out with her alleged rapist long after the deed supposedly occurred is said to be suffering the same syndrome as the woman who lacks the resources flee a domestic batterer on whom she may be psychologically or financially dependent."

This latter example seems like a veiled dig at Emma Sulkowicz, who remained friendly with the student she later accused of rape after the alleged assault occurred. I find it a strange declaration that men don’t have the social capital in elite Ivy League circles that they do elsewhere. There’s nowhere men are more powerful.'