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“Feminists” say that young women can’t make up their own minds.

Everyone on Feminist Internet is outraged because national sorority chapters banned University of Virginia members from going to fraternity parties last weekend out of concern that they would get raped.

And they should be. After all, as one female student explained in an online petition, the ban “sends the message that we are weak.”

But what many of those outraged might not realize is that they’ve been sending the same message through their own campus causes for quite some time now.


Look at California and its “affirmative consent” law . This “feminist” law demands that state-funded schools have a policy clarifying that any sex without “affirmative,” “ongoing” consent can be considered assault. After all, defining rape as forcing sex on someone who said no or who is unable to say no is not enough — we must assume that a woman, in general, is unable to say no. It’s too hard.

“Feminist” professors in Canada are pushing for policies that would require professors to call on women first in class. Without this mandate, women will apparently be too afraid to speak up before a man has already spoken.


Some law professors stopped teaching rape law after “feminist” activists cried out that it could be too “triggering” for some women to learn about it. (The irony that this would result in fewer people capable of putting away rapists has apparently gone unnoticed.)

And the list goes on and on.


If we have so-called feminists out there who believe that female students are too weak to say no to sex, too terrified and inept to answer a question in class unless a man has answered first, and too sensitive to learn the things they need to know to succeed in their careers — why is it surprising that some activists might say young women can’t handle a party?

This sorority incident provoked so much criticism largely because officials fell into the trap of what modern feminists decry as “victim-blaming.” That is, the sorority officials focused on women as potential victims and aimed to teach them how to avoid that fate. The preferable course, these critics say, is to teach rapists to not rape.


In any case, as many in the feminist movement have pointed out, banning women from frat parties assumes that women are too stupid to make their own decisions and too weak to live their own lives without intrusive intervention. That criticism is exactly right.

Now, if only the same women who are angry about this could recognize how many of their own causes give women the same treatment.


— Katherine Timpf is a reporter at National Review Online.