Earlier this month ex-Bush speechwriter Meghan Clyne took to the New York Post to pin Yale's sexual harassment problem on a counterintuitive culprit: campus feminists. The feminists, apparently, have turned our alma mater into a "sexual cesspoolâ" and "drenched students, faculty and administrators in images and vocabulary of graphic sexuality."
Reading Clyneâs piece would leave you with the sense that the main problem with sexual harassment is that it means people are talking about sex. She suggests feminists are hypocrites for hosting events discussing drag and Dworkin and then complaining about rape threats. "These are the shrinking violets," she writes, "shocked that a bunch of frat guys would gather around their front door crassly chanting about sex." In other words, if you're not embarrassed about sex, you shouldn't be bothered by men threatening to force it on you.
Describing screams of “No Means Yes!” as “crassly chanting about sex” is like describing “Give me your wallet or I’ll shoot” as “rudely discussing money.” Either Clyne is being willfully obtuse, or when she imagines walking out of the Yale Women’s Center into a throng of men chanting “No Means Yes!” she thinks “It’s disgusting to be this sexually explicit amongst college students,” not “It’s disgusting to tell people you would force them to have sex with you.”
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