What’s most startling to me about this story of rape denialism coming from the University of the Pacific was not that a school official is trying to protect some male athletes by downplaying the reality of rape, but that he did so by actually using language so cliched that it’s like from the mouth of a cartoon sexist, drawn to illustrate a major rape fallacy.
“We would consider it date rape,” says University spokesman Richard Rojo, noting that he believes that “outright rape” only involves “a rapist jumping out of bushes and attacking people randomly.”
I can feel the auto-sympathy that our society generates for assailants over their victims that kicks in even in those of us who know better. Surely the confusion stems from it being one of those situations you hear so much about, those “gray” rapes. You know, where she lays there stiff and terrified, but she doesn’t say anything, and the doofus male only figures out that he raped her after waking up to find her quietly crying, and gosh, it’s her fault for not speaking up because men are daft, you know—-right? Well, no, it wasn’t that situation at all.
A woman identified in court papers as Jane Doe claimed in a March lawsuit that two basketball players raped her at a May 2008 party at Townhouses, campus housing on Pershing Avenue, and that a third player came into the room where she was and assaulted her as the first two players were leaving.
Don’t let all that “claimed” language confuse you and give you an excuse to dodge the issue—-the school official acknowledge that this rape did happen. So, it wasn’t a “jump out of the bushes” rape, but it’s the other kind that most people will, even if they don’t want to, admit is a brutal rape—-the drunken gang rape of a woman cornered in a room at a party. Really, if you don’t think that’s a rape, you probably don’t think the jumping out of the bushes rape is a rape either.
In other news on the WTF front, Susannah Breslin wants you to know that if you didn’t find Guy Cimbalo’s “hate fuck” screed that Jesse wrote about yesterday funny, it’s because you’re a humorless feminist bore. I suppose now I’ll have to make fun of the victim in the University of the Pacific story to get my cred back, since if even a hint of sexual violence is so funny that it actually works as a substitute for having a proper wit. Really, you don’t even need to attend to the joke part when making rape jokes. Just say, “Boy, I really think about raping some ladies sometimes,” and we’re all contractually obligated to laugh indulgently, or else be tarred with the dread word “feminist” or, if male “pussy-whipped”.