"Asking for It"

Naomi Schaeffer Riley, The Wall Street Journal's "Taste" editor, weighs in on the Duke rape story. Is it an examination of the racial and social tensions in Durham between residents and students? Is it a thoughtful look at how race, class, and privilege play out in college towns across the nation? Dream on. Here's her title: "Ladies, You Should Know Better: How feminism wages war on common sense."

If you have attended college any time in the past 20 years, you will have heard that if a woman is forced against her will to have sex, it is "not her fault" and that women always have the right to "control their own bodies." Nothing could be truer. But the administrators who utter these sentiments and the feminists who inspire them rarely note which situations are conducive to keeping that control and which threaten it. They rarely discuss what to do to reduce the likelihood of a rape. Short of re-educating men, that is.

Why do we have to hear again that women have more culpability in rape than men? What are you possibly adding to the discourse on rape, Ms. Riley, by trotting out once again the old saw that feminists have caused rape by telling women that they have the right to as much freedom as their male counterparts? What in the hell is wrong with re-educating men, Ms. Riley?

Riley quotes from the book Binge:

The odd thing is that feminism may be partly to blame. Time magazine reporter Barrett Seaman explains that many of the college women he interviewed for his book "Binge" (2005) "saw drinking as a gender equity issue; they have as much right as the next guy to belly up to the bar." Leaving biology aside--most women's bodies can't take as much alcohol as men's--the fact of the matter is that men simply are not, to use the phrase of another generation, "taken advantage of" in the way women are.

So because men aren't as vulnerable to rape, women have to curtail their social lives? Because women are so easy to take advantage of, they cannot trust their male friends and colleagues on campus?

One in 20 college women has reported being raped in the past seven months, according to the Harvard Public School of Public Health. Riley reports that statistic herself. She also attributes rape to "sociopaths." Are there really that many sociopaths on college campuses? Or is time that we start thinking seriously about re-educating men, that concept the editorial page dismisses so readily?

Can anyone explain why it's more important for women to "learn common sense" in conducting their daily lives than for men to learn that they have absolutely no right to violate another human being's body without consent?