Le Rapists and Le Pervs
Posted by Anu in 
SWAN’s case study of the Strauss-Kahn debacle continues. As if it wasn’t disappointing enough to hear the media report all week long that Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape of a hotel maid was a sex scandal (just think of The Daily News’ cover story: “LE PERV”), the media has dragged Arnold Schwarzenegger into the mix, implying that the IMF Chief was just a simple philandering scumbag while the ex-Governing Terminator was an actual sexual predator. And we wonder why Americans are so confused about rape.
Kate Zernike in the New York Times conflates sex and rape by celebrity men for us in this gem of a story on Ah-nold and the IMF Chief, in Harsh Light on Two Men, but Glare Falls on Women, in which she quotes Columbia Professor Suzanne Goldberg:
“It is part of a fascination with the man,” said Suzanne Goldberg, director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia. “What sort of woman could this powerful man have been attracted to? I think as a society, we care about the lives of powerful celebritylike figures.”
It’s too bad the New York Times wasted Goldberg’s expertise on this story in which ex-governors with roaming eyes who can’t stay faithful to their wives are compared to vicious sexual predators. So let’s say again, with emphasis: extra-marital sex is not the same as rape. Apparently our society doesn’t know this.
As the media continues to blur the lines between right and wrong in the bedroom, society lets our young men down in frightening ways. At a Gender and Justice conference at the US Military Academy at West Point last month, a cadet stood up before a large audience of his peers and admitted that he was frightened about having sex with women cadets for fear of being accused of rape. Was he being overly-paranoid? Maybe not. Military leadership’s piss-poor messaging on rape is to blame for this cadet’s crisis of conscience.
To understand more about why military education on women and sex is so bad, let’s turn to one officer who wears a lot of bling on his collar. In defending his base’s handling of sexual assault cases after pressure by Senator Claire McCaskill, Maj. Gen. David Quantock, the commanding general at Fort Leonard Wood, was famously quoted by Alan Scher Zagier in the AP:
“Young kids make mistakes,” he said. “But they have to understand that in the Army, those mistakes . . . will not be tolerated.”
Mistakes? It’s a good thing for Strauss-Kahn’s alleged victim that MG Quantock isn’t prosecuting Strauss-Kahn, and a shame that the General is endowed with any authority whatsoever over the handling of military rape cases. Seems the only mistakes being made here are by officers who take their cues from rape mythology 101. We have yet to see if military leadership will learn anything from Strauss-Kahn’s case.
Harsh Light on Two Men, but Glare Falls on Women – New York Times
General: Army Probing Sexual Assault Complaints – Military.com
