A New and Exciting Approach to Higher Education: "Don't Rape"

You ever see something that you know should make you angry, but makes you laugh so hard that you just don't have the energy to be outraged after the giggles stop? That's exactly what happened to me when I saw the picture to the left on a friend's Facebook page.

Don't get me wrong, it's a very earnest message but it's also a compelling argument that the great P.J O'Rourke was right when he said that "Earnestness is stupidity sent to college."

As hilarious as I think that this is, I'm also of the opinion that it's also somewhat dangerous in so far as it tends to trivialize something as serious as rape. In all seriousness, if a man is of university age and still a monster, I'm not comlpetely convinced that a lecture from a tenured professor is going to do a whole lot to change that.

I'm not going to discount entirely the possibility that I'm just a hyper-conservative whackjob and genetically wrong about everything, but it seems to me that the socialization process regarding sexual assault should start a lot earlier than when you're eligible for our first federal student loan. Again, I could be way off about this. I just don't think I am.

Look, I get that statements like this make everybody feel good, but I reckon that it's well past time that we recognize that things that make you feel good are often pretty stupid. Take cocaine as just one example. It makes you feel awesome, but it's a really poorly considered lifestyle choice unless, of course, you're me. Always remember that these are professional tricks, performed by a professional and not intended for home use.

The basic premise of this message is silly for practical reasons, as well. For those of you who spent too much time in school, I think it's necessary to point out that feminism is a philosophy. It might well be that it is among the finest philosophies ever devised, but that misses an essential point. So far as I'm aware, no philosophy is going to overwhelm a violent oaf with a hard cock that outweighs you by as much as 80 pounds. I have yet to see that in a mixed martial arts class. There comes a point when things like reason are pretty much useless.

Here's something else you might not know. Carrying around the collected works of Satre never prevented anyone from being shot to death, either. Just sayin'.

Having said that, a philosophy will make you feel better about yourself after you've already been victimized. I get that. Maybe I'm an oddball, but I'd emphasize preventing your victimization in the first place. I know, crazy, right?

I understand that you have the right to get drunk and pass out in the dorm room of some horny bastard that you barely know at 3 am, but that right doesn't necessarily immunize you from the consequences of your exercise of said right. You have the right to be free from rape, but you also have the right to vote. The only problem is that less than half the population chooses to exercise it.

Statistics show that nearly three out of four women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. However, attacks by a stranger are relatively rare, which is why they keep winding up in the newspaper. Assaults are always unforgivable and unjustified and, in some cases, unavoidable.

My point is that they're not always unavoidable. The odds are that you will be raped, and it'll be by someone you know. Rape is also, in most circumstances, a crime of opportunity. Deny the victimizer the opportunity and your chances of being a victim decrease dramatically. That's not always true, but it's true enough of the time that it should really be considered.

Just as the aforementioned Mr. O'Rourke implied, earnestness often carries the day, particularly in politically correct institutions such as universities. That being the case, I can pretty much guarantee you that common sense is going to go right out the fucking window and "Don't rape" is going to taught in college.

It therefore stands to reason that there's going to be a test of some kind. I can't be the only one who really looks forward to the questions on it, can I?

Please complete the following sentence. "It's right to force yourself sexually on a woman after a date .."

a) Never
b) Always
c) When dinner and the movie cost over $200.

Is that going to prevent a single act of sexual violence? Probably not. But it will make any number of dumb people feel better.

And if you ever wondered why I cheer the asteroid squashing the Aerosmith guy's kid in the great Bruce Willis movie that is life, now you know.

I'd be remiss if I didn't leave you good folks without a life lesson from the master of common sense, Adan Carolla.




But what about girls who aren't of college age yet? Doesn't popular culture have a message for them?

A Good Day To Clear Something Up

I like words. I guess being an internationally famous blogger would be a challenge if I didn't. There are certain words that are constantly misused and it does nothing short of drive me up a fucking wall.

For example, today is December 8th. The thirtieth anniversary of John Lennon's murder in New York City. For anyone my age, it's hard to believe that it's been nearly a decade since Ringo officially became the coolest living Beatle.

But what I'd like to point out is that Lennon was murdered. He decidedly wasn't "assassinated".

Back when words actually meant something, assassination was considered an inherently political act. It was meant to effect public policy in some way. While John Lennon was a very important musician - certainly one of the most important in modern popular music - he was not a political figure, his desire to give peace a chance notwithstanding.

Mark Chapman was a deranged loser with a Salinger fetish, but his crime of thirty years ago wouldn't meet the traditional definition of an assassination. It might have spared us from the biggest of disappointing reunion tours, but it didn't change history the way that, say, the Kennedy assassination's elevation of Lyndon Johnson to the presidency did. It wasn't the predicate to throw Europe into a huge, pointless war in the way that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand did.

A guy who played guitar and wrote some memorable songs was brutally murdered in front of his wife. He was not assassinated.

And you know what? It used to be that being brutally murdered in the street was bad enough.

A Note on Terms: Teabagger

So I was watching Rachel Maddow's hour-long interview with Jon Stewart (which I recommend that you all watch here if you're allergic to the MSNBC website) last night, and he pointed out that her giddy use of the phrase "teabagger" to describe the Tea Party movement might undermine her journalistic credibility, at least somewhat.

Stewart noted that the word can't be taken as anything other than derogatory. Maddow asked if he didn't find it funny that the word originated with the movement itself when they chanted "teabag Washington before Washington teabags you, obviously ignorant of its sexual connotation. Jon replied, "Yeah, for about a day" but he stopped using the term almost immediately thereafter.

The basic point was that as a comedian, Stewart doesn't have the same limitations that Maddow, as a journalist-serious media commentator, should. Moreover, Stewart asserted that when the news media moves closer to what he does, it diminishes itself. It was a pretty shrewd point and it was interesting to watch him debate with Maddow, who I actually like, despite my political disagreements with her.

You'll have likely noticed that I don't call Tea Partiers "teabaggers." In fact, I doubt that I ever have in this space, although I'm entirely too lazy to check. That's not out of kindness or because I believe the easily disprovable Teapublican talking point that they didn't coin the term before the professional left appropriated it. As a matter of fact, as soon as Republican tools started saying that, I debated using the term myself. After all, few things infuriate me as much as the blatant dishonesty of people like Andrew Brietbart and Sean Hannity.

I'm decidedly not above using derogatory terms to describe those I disagree with. Frankly, I can't remember the last essay I wrote without calling someone an idiot. Moreover, I don't even dislike the Tea people, per se. I think that they're sincere, if wildly misinformed and bewilderingly ignorant of things like basic mathematics. But the rank and file of the movement aren't bad people, for the most part. Besides, I think that it's kind of quaint that they really didn't know the other, more dubious, meaning of teabagging.

But that's not the reason I don't use it. I don't use the term "Islamofascist" simply because it would indicate that I don't know what Islamism or fascism actually are, but that has little to do with my reluctance to call populists teabaggers.

It really just boils down to one thing: I would never want to sully the beauty and innocence of something as wonderful as lowering my testicles into someone's mouth by associating the practice with something as ugly, vapid, and ultimately pointless as Republican primary politics.

I guess that makes me an idealist, which is funny because I despise idealism.