Peter Paul Rubens, Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618)

“Feminism is, among other things, a totalitarian attempt to tell us what to think by controlling what we are allowed to say.”

— Robert Stacy McCain, May 4

Who is turning rape into a joke? Feminists, by their counterfactual insistence that American university campuses are now plagued by an epidemic of sexual violence unprecedented in human history. When an unfortunate incident between between a girl and her ex-boyfriend is rhetorically magnified into a horrific crime — a U.S. Senator goes on national TV to claim Dan Kopin “brutally raped” and “nearly choked to death” Lena Sclove — it cheapens the meaning of the word “rape.”

Yet the totalitarian Thought Police tolerate no criticism of feminist tactics, which is why George F. Will cannot be allowed to say this:

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.

Consider the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. “sexual assault.”

From that beginning, Will went on to examine the “rape culture” phenomenon both anecdotally and statistically, considering it in terms of law and policy, focusing on how the Obama administration is using this as an excuse to impose new federal mandates on universities. But it was his opening paragraphs which made him a Thought Criminal.

First, Will observed that the campus climate “make[s] victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges,” and then he referred to “the supposed campus epidemic of rape.” In doing so, he violated a 21st-century commandment: Thou Shalt Not Doubt a Feminist.

The privileges conferred by the Cult of Victimhood are never to be skeptically examined, no matter how many examples — hello, Meg Lanker Simons! — of the phenomenon we may observe. And if feminists say rape is an “epidemic” on campus, we are all supposed to nod in agreement, rather than doing what George Will did, namely calling attention to evidence that this “epidemic” is a matter of statistical voodoo and elastic definitions. Rude gestures and clumsy hugs are categorized as “sexual assault,” and the claim is made that 1-in-5 college girls suffer sexual assault, despite data indicating that the real number is probably less than 1-in-30 — “too high,” Will hastened to add, “but nowhere near 20 percent.”

Creating a phony “epidemic” by statistical inflation and rhetorical exaggeration is dishonest, yet liberals always expect us to accept their lies at face-value, bristling with indignant outrage that intelligent people refuse to be bullied into mute acquiescence.

On MSNBC — America’s Least Trusted News Source™ — professional outrage peddler Michael Eric Dyson leaped atop the barricade:

“When he used phrases like so-called rape epidemic, doesn’t that trivialize the trauma that women have to endure in the face of the rape that they’ve endured, and then they’re re-raped, they’re re-traumatized again verbally and rhetorically by insensitivities like the ones Mr. Will exhibited?” Dyson asked, in typical absurdly leading fashion.

For her part, liberal guest Zerlina Maxwell said Dyson was “absolutely 100 percent” correct in that assessment.

Victims are “re-raped” and “re-traumatized” by newspaper columnists! One imagines thousands of teary-eyed women, bruised and disheveled, brought in for the police line-up. They peer at the suspects on the other side of the one-way mirror and then, pointing the accusatory finger at the septuagenarian pundit in owlish glasses, the victims scream: “That’s him! He’s the columnist who re-raped us!”

If mocking this feminist nonsense is “rape,” the sarcastic commenters at Ace of Spades HQ are turning it into a gang-bang.

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