In a spirited diatribe entitled "Dealing With AU's anti-sex brigade" published yesterday in the American University Eagle, AU's resident anti-feminist thinker, Alex Knepper, argues that feminists who rally against rape are turning act of sex into a sorry ritual in which "two amorphous, gender-neutral blobs ask each other 'Is this OK with you?.'” According to Knepper, age 20, feminists are also responsible for stamping out the "yin and yang of masculinity and femininity [that] makes sexual exploration exciting," abolishing passion, and also somehow discouraging "inherently gendered thrills" like erotic cross-dressing. Knepper ends the column by providing a helpful reading list for his misguided peers, including works by Camille Paglia, the Marquis de Sade, and Christina Hoff Sommers.
But I think she has gotten lazy and lost her moral compass as well, so we get a lot of lies out of her as she tries to take a short cut to creating her utopia
What is interesting to me Hawkeye is that the college newspaper then apology for the column and removed the gentleman from the paper
and removed the gentleman from the paper.
Given that they fired him after he quit seem strange also if I understand you correctly.
I love it that the damn newspaper ended up apologizing to barbarians
In Defense of Alex Knepper
Alex Knepper wrote an article for The Eagle, American University Washington DC’s student newspaper (link below, check out the “rants”) that has caused outrage, prompted an apology from the “adults” in charge, culminated in a newspaper retraction and has been called upon to defend his opinion as to drunken college females and date rape.
Mr. Knepper, I am happy to defend your position.
I watched you on the Early Show this morning as you held your own against the trite oxymoronic skewed “feminist” rhetoric which is ironically and overwhelmingly responsible for the perpetuated subjugation of women under current law and current opinion, to wit: anytime date sex with a man is involved, the woman is not responsible if she changes her mind (a woman’s prerogative, true?), and that to hold her accountable for her own bad decisions and regret is victim blaming and to be abhorred in civilized society.
Get ready for what’s coming your way my young friend. Your sophisticated and progressive views on culpability with regards to – consensual and cosmically wonderful when drunk turned rape when you wake up the next morning, can’t find your panties and have to take the walk of shame across campus back to your own room or to search for your car - sex are neither popular nor politically correct. I hope you stay strong, do not buckle, do not second guess yourself and do not apologize for your opinion. The law with regards to consent, sex and inebriation should be taught to young men on every college campus in America. Ironically, a young woman’s inebriation is no defense if she kills a family of four with her car after leaving the party – she consented to the drinking.
I am certain that some of those who curse you today will change their tunes once they grow up to raise sons who do not receive the same benefit and protection of law as do daughters. Sons, who are saddled with the burden of not only being responsible for their own youthful sex and drinking decisions but also with those of every female with whom they come into contact while inebriated. Check out virgin protection statutes which some states still carry on their books and your view may change as to how the fair gender is still actually perceived. Touting a view that a girl is not as culpable as a boy for her actions while drunk is not only dark ages but damned idiotic. You who look down on those who ask, “What in God’s name were you doing drunk in a boy’s room, naked and in his bed at two o’clock in the morning??” – as if this question is not relevant – I don’t know what to say about you except that I wish there was a pill you could take.
Mr. Knepper was not championing the position that a drunken young woman who sloppily and willingly follows a wine and spirits manifested inamorato back to his room in the wee hours of the morning at any frat house or dorm room on any college campus in America deserves to be raped. He was absolutely NOT minimizing the victimization of women by sexual predators. It is shameful, dangerous and offensive that in modern times Mr. Knepper’s view on female culpability was met with such paternalistic and brainwashed backlash.
I have one son and one daughter. We have culpability discussions frequently with regards to these issues. We’re old school in our house – play with fire, you may get burned. My daughter is about to begin college, I tell her there is no need to drink the “jungle juice” follow a boy back to his room at two in the morning to discuss philosophy and politics. Save it for daylight. I tell my son who is four years younger - discuss philosophy and politics at two in the morning alone with a girl when you go to college if you’ve both been drinking “jungle juice” and you are going to jail. I figure if I brainwash him now, it may save him from his own bad decisions and the female prerogative later.
No worries Mr. Knepper, you didn’t set “the movement” back – to be sure, you may have started one. And certainly in the area of date rape prosecutions, where the State often chooses to err on the side of female chastity, perpetuating a paternalistic view of the weaker sex – the disservice done young men subjected to an archaic double standard as well as victims of rape in American deserve nothing less.
You have begun a dialogue. Kudos Mr. Kneppere]
1. When threatened by sexual assault, ovulating women display a measurable increase in physical strength. In 2002, SUNY-Albany psychologists Sandra Petralia and Gordon Gallup had 192 female undergraduate students read a story about either a female character being stalked by a suspicious male stranger in a parking lot (ending with: "As she inserts the key into her car door she feels his cold hand on her shoulder …") or a similar story in which the female character is surrounded by happy people on a warm summer's day (ending with: "She starts her car, adjusts the stereo, and as she pulls out of the parking lot those nearby can hear her music blasting"). The researchers measured the handgrip strength of each participant before and after she read the story, and compared the scores. Petralia and Gallup also knew from the results of a urine-based ovulation test kit where in their reproductive cycles each participant was, so the researchers could differentiate among women in the menstrual, follicular, ovulatory, and luteal phases. A fifth group consisted of those women who were on contraceptives at the time of the study. The results were unambiguous: Only the ovulating women who read the sexual assault scenario exhibited an increase in handgrip strength. Ovulating women who read the control passage and nonovulatory women who read the sexual assault material grasped with the same intensity as before.
2. Ovulating women overestimate strange males' probability of being rapists. Add this one to a growing list of adaptive cognitive biases—evolved psychological distortions that orient people toward strategic decision-making. These findings come from a 2007 report by Christine Garver-Apgar and her colleagues. "When the costs of being sexually victimized are highest," reason these investigators, "women should shift their perceptions to decrease false negative errors at the expense of making more false positive errors. Thus, we predicted that women perceive men as more sexually coercive at fertile points of their cycle than at non-fertile points." The researchers showed 169 normally ovulating women videotaped interviews with various men and asked them to rate the men on several dimensions, including their tendencies toward sexual aggression, kindness, or faithfulness. The more fertile the woman was at the time of her judging, the more likely she was to describe the men as "sexually coercive." Ovulating women didn't see these men as being less kind, faithful, or likely to commit—only more inclined to rape them.
3. Ovulating women play it safe by avoiding situations that place them at increased risk of being raped. Fending off would-be rapists and pigeonholing strange men as potential sex fiends sounds exhausting—wouldn't it make more sense to avoid dangerous places and unknown males altogether? That is exactly what ovulating women tend to do. At least two studies have demonstrated that women at the peak of their fertility are less likely than their peers to have engaged in high-risk activities such as walking alone in a park or forest, letting a stranger into the house, or stopping their cars in a remote place over the preceding 24 hours. Importantly, as German investigators Arndt Bröder and Natalia Hohmann established, ovulating women are not less active in general—they're still busy shopping, going to church, visiting friends, and so on—but they avoid doing those things that make them sexually vulnerable.
4. Women become more racist when they're ovulating. At least white American ovulating women do when it comes to thinking about black American men. Those are the jaw-dropping, politically incorrect findings of Michigan State University's Carlos Navarrete and colleagues. White, undergraduate females were evaluated for race bias using several variants of an implicit association test, which asks participants to perform a word-matching task that indicates the relative accessibility of certain stereotypes. The women who happened to be ovulating scored especially high when it came to fear of black (as opposed to white) men, a fact that the authors interpret as reflecting an evolved disposition to avoid so-called "out-group males," who "may not have been subject to the same social controls as in-group members and would have constituted a threat in antagonistic situations." In this case, skin color serves as a convenient marker of group identity. (The authors concede that people of different skin colors came into contact with one another only in recent times, evolutionarily speaking, but propose that any physical trait that serves to demarcate an out-group member would be processed by ovulating females as a sort of "hazard heuristic.") Stereotypes about the particular out-group being prone to violence may also play a role, so, at least in American society, cultural transmission works alongside evolutionary biology in promoting racism. It remains unclear if the same race bias occurs in ovulating women from other races: Do black women show heightened fear of white men?
I don't know about you, but I'm riveted, and convinced, by much of the logic in this anti-rape area. And researchers are just getting started. Above is a set of astonishing truths that, had an evolutionary approach to studying complex social behavior not been adopted so rigorously over the past quarter-century and applied to human sexuality, would have gone entirely unnoticed—not least of which by a Kinsey-6 gay man who wouldn't know what to do with an ovulating woman if she came with instructions.
Oy vey. For my last piece here at Slate ("Darwin's Rape Whistle"), I described a diverse set of scientific studies that were motivated by what I deem to be a very reasonable hypothesis: that women's social cognition and behavior have been shaped by natural selection to pre-empt rape, and that these adaptations are likely to come into play at precisely the time when a woman's mate choice and genetic interests would be most undermined by sexual assault. That is to say, the studies are predicated on the idea that women have evolved to avoid being raped when they're ovulating. The article caused quite a stir.
This included a flurry of critical posts disputing the validity of the data I reported, my wide-eyed acceptance of them, and questioning—even if the data were valid—their ability to rid the world of the anathema that is rape. Jerry Coyne, biologist and author of Why Evolution is True, jumpstarted the debacle; Rob Kurzban, psychologist and author of Why Everyone Else is a Hypocrite, then responded in defense of his field. Then P.Z. Myers, prominent science blogger and professional firebrand, became nauseated by my essay and got all worked up about the evolution of penises. Kurzban did a one-two punch back at Myers. Amanda Marcotte, Emily Yoffe, and Amanda Schaffer of Slate's DoubleX blog jumped into the ring, all of them weighing in on rape research by evolutionary psychologists. Coyne had some more to say, and John Rennie, former editor at Scientific American, agreed with the critics, and then he agreed some more. And that's just part of the storm that's followed in the wake of my anti-rape essay.
I must say, the whole affair has given me a bit of a headache, but I also realize that this prickly reaction presents a great opportunity for discussion. Strange, is it not, that such grievous concerns about the science of evolutionary psychology—in particular, whether its central hypotheses are falsifiable, whether reporters should be so enthusiastic in reporting its results, and whether its methods are adequate—seem to appear at some times but not others? Where were these same outraged critics, I wonder, when I wrote enthusiastically about the evolutionary psychology of humor, blushing, athletics, male body odor, suicide, and cannibalism? Yet whenever the issue at hand relates to female sexuality—whether it's the prevention of rape or the evolution of female orgasm, the field's most outspoken opponents turn up in droves. We do need to clear up a few misunderstandings about the science. But I would like to know what we are really, truly, talking about here. Is this a debate over quality control in a particular academic field or a battle over politics and ideology? I wish I could believe it were only about the science. When the skeptics chime in, I suspect they are egged on by politicized reactants.
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It's rather unfortunate that folks like P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne think evolutionary psychologists are doing substandard work. But that's about the extent of it. It's just unfortunate. After all, my sympathies are aligned with theirs, and those of many of our readers, in the battle against general stupidity and ignorance. I cannot recommend strongly enough that anybody wishing to explore the subject of rape from an evolutionary perspective go straight to the primary literature. As one of my colleagues, Loyola Marymount University psychologist Michael Mills, told me recently: "When other scientists put forward a model of how the world works, it is called a 'theory.' When evolutionary psychologists do it, it is called 'story telling.' " That is an unfortunate situation indeed, because anyone who swallows up the anti-evolutionary-psychology rhetoric will end up missing out on some extraordinarily innovative, important, and clean science
Richmond gang-rape victim, school district reach $4 million settlement
By Shelly Meron
Contra Costa Times
01/21/2011
A teenage girl settled for $4 million a civil claim over a 2009 gang rape during the Richmond High School homecoming dance, attorneys said this week.
The victim came to an agreement with the West Contra Costa Unified School District to avoid drawn-out legal proceedings.
"We were very pleased to resolve the case for her on such favorable terms without her having to endure depositions, a trial or any further legal reminders of what happened to her," said Richard Schoenberger, an attorney representing the victim and her family.
"We had a very strong case against the school district," he added, "but felt that they were genuine in their attempts to resolve this case for her without putting her through a trial."
The victim will get an immediate payment of $2.5 million, while an additional $1.5 million will be paid out as a structured settlement over the next 40 years.
The West Contra Costa school district will pay $100,000 of the settlement; the rest is covered by a joint powers authority in which the district is a member. A JPA is a group of public agencies, such as school districts or cities, that pool money to cover losses incurred by members.
The girl left the homecoming dance at Richmond High School about 9:30 p.m. Oct. 24, 2009, intending to call her father for a ride home. A classmate called to her from a dark courtyard on the north side of campus as she passed by, and she went with him to hang out with a group of young people drinking there.
She became heavily intoxicated, police said, and was then beaten, stripped, robbed and repeatedly raped by several men and teen boys while others watched.
Several people in the neighborhood heard of the attack and police were called. Officers arrived just before midnight, finding the girl unconscious and partially clothed under a picnic table. She had a blood alcohol level of .355 and was suffering from a concussion, hypothermia, brain and facial swelling, and head-to-toe scrapes and bruises.
The victim has since moved away from Richmond.
West Contra Costa Superintendent Bruce Harter didn't comment on the settlement, but said, "Our hearts go out to the victim and her family."
Tim Murphy, an attorney representing the school district, said his clients are "pleased that the parties were able to come to an expedited and fair resolution of the case because that was clearly in the best interest of all concerned. We worked very closely with the victim's attorneys to make sure she receives all the appropriate care, now and in the future."
After a 20-day preliminary hearing that ended last month, a judge ordered six people to stand trial in the rape case while charges were dismissed against the seventh and youngest defendant.
The six are Elvis Torrentes, 23, of Richmond; Ari Morales, 17, of San Pablo; Marcelles Peter, 18, of Pinole; Jose Montano, 20, of Richmond; Manuel Ortega, 20, of Richmond; and John Crane, 44, of Richmond. All but Torrentes are facing life in prison; Torrentes faces a maximum of eight years in prison.
Though the victim has avoided a trial in the civil claim, Contra Costa County prosecutors say she would be called on to testify at any criminal trial associated in the case.
http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_17162363?nclick_check=1
