“Me too” — women of America unite as victims of men *UPDATED*

The Me Too meme on Facebook encourages a sense of victimhood in women, and is part of the way we deny biological reality and cultural anti-rape bulwarks.

Facebook Me too memeIf you’ve checked out Facebook in the last 24 hours, you’ve probably seen a lot of your female friends post two words: “Me too.” This is a shorthand version of a meme that started yesterday:

Me too.

If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too.’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

Please copy/paste.

As you’ve surely noticed, the meme jumbles together harassment and assault, which are entirely different things. Assault is a criminal act. It involves any unwanted physical touches on the person, from the butt grabbing Ben Affleck apparently enjoys, to the pussy-grabbing that President Trump noted rich guys get away with (without ever saying he’d done it himself), to out-and-out rape. Harassment, on the other hand, doesn’t involve physical contact. It involves mental contact, with the man using words or touch-free motions to impose his power or sexual desires on an unwilling female.

Just about every woman I know who routinely appears on Facebook has put up a “Me too” post. I suspect, though, that few of them have actually been raped, something for which I am grateful. One of the virtues of life in America is that women aren’t raped often, even on college campuses.

In addition to rape, of course, there are other sexualized (not sexy) touches that men visit on unwilling women. I once had a guy twerk on me on a crowded bus, years before twerking was a thing. Technically, this was probably an assault, but I simply ignored it. In my mind, it wasn’t a “guys are animals, I’ve been assaulted” moment. Instead, I took it as a “there are way too many crazy people wandering around San Francisco” thing and got on with my life.

From what I gather reading my female friends’ posts and comments, many of the “Me too” women had that type of interaction — unwanted touches that were fleeting, offensive, and part of life in a world with men — and characterize it as an “assault.”

What most seem to have experienced, though, is some form of non-physical sexual harassment. That’s the kind of contact between men and women that is purely a head game — the man doesn’t lay hands on a woman, but he speaks or behaves in a way that’s purely sexual and can range from scary to offensive to (yes) funny, depending on how pathetic their genitals are when the raincoat opens to how genuinely funny their dirty, or slightly risque, jokes in the workplace are. (Yes, I will laugh at a clever, and not too dirty, dirty joke.)

Thus, the women I know have been writing about flashers and masturbators, whistlers and hustlers, dirty joke tellers and close talkers. In other words, these are men who, if they were behaving physically (masturbators and flashes) used to be called perverts, and if they were merely using words used to be (and in Hollywood still are) called “boss” or “that awful James in the film editing room.” I’m not excusing these men, but what they’re doing is not the same as physical assault. (Or, as Whoopie Goldberg so delicately put it when exonerating Roman Polansky, who had drugged a 13-year-old and sodomnized her, it’s not “rape-rape.”)

I’ve never actually experienced the above type of mental harassment. I can’t figure out if I’ve been so locked in my own head that it happened around me and I didn’t notice or if I simply give off vibes that tell the would-be pervert that, whatever he’s looking for, I’m not it.

Having read about Weinstein, having read my friends’ narratives, having paid attention to O’Reilly, and Cosby, and Trump, and Allen, and generally having lived a few years, I have come to a few conclusions about what’s going on. Here they are, in no particular order.

1. Men are predatory. It’s their nature. They are hardwired to spread their seed. In broken cultures (i.e., the Muslim world and too much of Africa), they simply rape women — and by rape I mean the actual crime of using superior strength or weapons to fornicate with an unwilling woman.

In my home, I’ve tried to teach my daughter to be wary, without instilling in her any dislike or disrespect for men. Most, I say, readily control those lizard brain urges. But it’s her responsibility too to protect herself from those who haven’t subdued their lizard brain. If these men act, they may be criminally and morally guilty, but it’s her life that will be affected, so she should behave sensibly: Don’t wear overly provocative clothes, don’t get drunk, don’t hook-up with strangers. End of story.

[UPDATE: One other thing I meant to add earlier but forgot, is that men and women have very different responses to overt displays of sexuality. If a man flashes a woman, she’s usually disgusted and sometimes afraid. If a woman flashes a man, he’s titillated.  Men and women are wired differently. Men therefore need to be socialized to respect women’s wiring. Calling men names, as the Left likes to too and as the Pajama Boys do to virtue signal (and, apparently, to hide their own disgraceful conduct towards women) is not helpful.]

2. Culture matters when it comes to rape. The West has long tried to protect women from Whoopi’s “rape-rape.” In the Middle Ages, two narratives arose — chivalry and the cult of the Virgin — that elevated women’s status. That women were still raped is separate from the fact that cultural norms were changing in such a way as to protect women from assaults. The problem with these narratives was that they allowed men to determine which women were deserving of the narratives’ protective umbrellas.

So as centuries passed, the West added something else to the arsenal: It kept men and women separate. It didn’t go the full Muslim way of imprisoning women, either in their homes or in tent-like clothing. It simply insisted that women and men should never be left alone together unless married. This allowed women to engage in society, without being at the mercy of a man with bad intentions. It’s still a good rule today, for both men and women. Women can prevent being raped and men can prevent being wrongly accused of rape by staying out in the public when they’re with the opposite sex.

In addition to mechanical methods for separating men and women, the West did do what feminists keep demanding: It taught men not to rape. Rape is a criminal act in the West. If a woman is raped, it’s not her father or brother who kills her for bringing shame on the family. Instead, it’s society as a whole that punishes the rapist. That’s a strong message to men.

And you know what? That message — “do not rape” — still works well in the West. Despite a culture of hook-ups and Tinder and drunkenness and slut walks, all of which appeal to men’s predatory sexual instincts, rapes in America are statistically fairly low. In America, in 2010, the last year for which Wikipedia offers neatly organized statistics, only 27.3 out of every 100,000 women were raped. That was 27.3/100,000 rapes too many, but it was still lower than Sweden’s rate (63.5/100,000) or South Africa’s (132.4/100,000).

As of 2010, most European countries had fewer rapes than America. I rather wonder what those statistics look like now, two years after Angela Merkel’s immigration experiment. An article from a year and a half ago suggests that there have been big changes in Western Europe (and England) and none have been for the better. Those changes are a reminder, as if we need one, that Western culture worked well in the 20th century to protect women. When Western culture breaks down, women are less protected.

3. Feminists have encouraged rape. I know I’m going to catch hell for this one, but it’s true. As I point out above, when it comes to rape, culture matters.

But even culture can do only so much. There are still men who will rape. They’ll rape because, like Clinton and Weinstein, they can get away with it. They’ll rape because they’re too drunk or drugged out to listen to the voices in their heads telling them forced sex is a bad idea. They’ll rape because they’re narcissists or sociopaths or psychopaths, or whatever other type of garden-variety criminal is out there. They’ll rape because, even though they live in a Western culture, they have a non-Western view of women. They’ll rape because they’re insane.

There’s no way to protect against all of the above types of rapes. However, it is possible to protect against some of these rapes, the opportunistic ones, just as a homeowner, by locking the door, protects against opportunistic robbers.

Clothes: American women don’t need to wear burqas to prevent rape. They simply need to choose clothes that, in American culture, do not have prostitute connotations. (I don’t know how else to say that.) Any American looking at the two outfits below, each of which shows a woman’s legs, hips, waist, and cleavage, can tell immediately which, by American, not Saudi, standards, is selling sex and which isn’t:

There’s a difference between sleaze and elegance in our culture and feminism refuses to recognize it. Hence the Slut Walks that encourage women to dress like Miley Cyrus:

Photo credit: Studio5Graphics’ Slut Walk 2013. Creative commons license; some rights reserved.

Those clothes may feel empowering when parading down a city’s streets in the presence of other women wearing equally ugly sex costumes, but those clothes are not meant to stand up to the lizard brain that functions in a small percentage of men who enjoy coerced, violent sex.

This is not to say that a woman dressed in clothes that would work at a Soviet-era fashion show cannot be raped by men with evil intentions. It’s just to say that part of keeping safe is to highlight your beauty, not your f**kability.

Conduct: Feminists also encourage rape by insisting that women should be able to behave as men do: Getting drunk and/or engaging in impersonal sex with people they’ve only just met. Men can do that because they are not wired the way women are (fewer regrets about cheap sex) and because they are stronger than women are.

Life isn’t fair, and it’s not fair that women are generally weaker than men, handle liquor less well, and prefer an emotional connection to a merely physical one. Pretending otherwise simply places women in the path of men who are perverts, predators, and temporarily incapacitated, all of whom are likely to do bad things.

In other words, feminists have taken centuries of carefully established Western bulwarks against rape and just thrown them away.

4. The whole victim thing. I know this “me-tooism” is supposed to be empowering, but it strikes me as just another attempt for women to regain the victim status they’ve lost recently to transgenders, Muslims, and illegal immigrants.

I don’t like being a victim. That’s why, when that one guy twerked on me on a bus, I placed it all on him. I was neither assaulted nor harassed in my mind, because I’m not a victim. He was a perv. End of story.

I’ve also worked hard for decades not to be a victim. I’ve read books (I highly recommend this one), taken self-defense classes, and practiced martial arts.  When I go out on the street, I’m not the weakest gazelle; in my mind’s eye, I’m the biggest, strongest wildebeest and predators would do well to leave me alone — and, so far, they have.

All of which is to say I find the “me-tooism” of the “Me too” meme kind of disturbing. It doesn’t speak to me of power; it reeks to me of victimhood.

I’d rather see a Facebook meme going around saying, “Next time some pervert exposes himself to me, I’m going to grab his balls and twist until he’s a permanent soprano.” Or one saying, “If my boss ever suggests sexual favors in exchange for a raise, I’m going to leave the room and announce in a loud voice to everyone in the office that the boss just pulled a Weinstein.”

I’m sure you too can think of other empowering memes a lot better than “Me too. I’m a victim too.”

UPDATE: Here’s Reason 6 why I find it hard to get on board with feminists and their me-tooism — they’re all anti-gun. As Katie Pavlich reminds people, guns protect women:

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