Protocols of the Young Men of the Frat House

Every movement needs and enemy. Enemies that conspire against the good, the true and the just. They need to be exposed. So the people who hated Jews and blamed them for all the trouble in the world wrote an expose that was quite popular for a while: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Of course it was made up, but it served its purpose.

Jews still have their enemies, but women have discovered a new enemy that’s even more evil than Jews: men. Men represent the patriarchy. Men are tyrannical.  Men wish to dominate women, keeping them barefoot and pregnant, in the kitchen, making sandwiches. Men conspire to keep women down and pay them less for the same job. And men rape. All men rape. Sex is rape. A slap on the bottom is rape. Copping a feel is rape. Sex without a condom is rape. President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and every Democrat in elected office will swear that one in five college coeds is raped. Rape is so prevalent in college that parents who send their female children to college should be charged with child abuse.

But while the horrible, terrible, violent subjection of all women by all men is simply a fact – and if you deny it you’re a rape enabler, a Nazi and a DENIER - a lot of this is abstract, conceptual, statistical. It needs a narrative. To bring the narrative home, evil has to have a face and live in a place. And it found the author of the definitive narrative in Sabrina Rubin Erdely in Rolling Stone.

Ms. Erdely spent weeks, months, searching for just the right tale to illustrate the horror that men visit on women. They had to be just the right men; men who stood for the all the oppressors of women throughout time. They had to be white, which left out lots of juicy stories. They needed to be rich, and what better example of rich, white heteronormative oppression than frat boys at a University in a southern state. Duke had already been taken, with unfortunate results for feminists. But the University of Virginia, seat of “Southern aristocracy,” a school hailed for parties by Playboy itself, was perfect. Established by a wealthy slave-owner – Thomas Jefferson - accused of fathering children by his female slaves, what could be better?

And the story was perfect. A young innocent girl, selected for dastardly despoliation by a two-faced Snidely Whiplash, seduced by the promise of romance, ravaged by seven savage rapists, rolling in agony on glass shards, penetrated not just by male penises but beer bottles, for endless hours.

The evil that was rich, white men had been dragged out of the shadows by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. The conspiracy of silence, the conspiracy of DENIAL was exposed for the entire world to see.

And the feminists ate it up. And the media, herald of the feminists, reveled in the exposure of the conspiracy. The college administrators, Liberals to the bone condemned men individually and collectively. Politicians howled for blood. This was The Protocols of the Young Men of the Frat House and their evil was exposed for all to see. To become ‘brothers” men had to gang rape virgins. It was too good not to believe.

And today, even as the story unravels and the MSM turns the page, even the comments by people like Megan McArdle who questions the story but still believes in the evil college man. Here’s how college life for young men and young women is represented:

Rape is horrible, and it is indeed a problem on college campuses. I applaud the reporters who press for justice in these cases, the activists who are trying to curtail this criminal behavior, and the administrators who are looking for better ways to protect their students. Stories like Jackie's should certainly be reported, and so should the less extreme, more common, but still horrible attacks that countless women live through every year. Administrations should refer these cases to police when they happen on campus, and the government should prosecute them as vigorously as possible.

So this story may not be true, but countless women are raped by men on college campuses every year. Countless women!

As one woman wrote in response to McArdle’s column:

Megan, as the mother of a daughter who is in college, I appreciate the thoughtfulness of this article, and agree that the repercussions of this drama would make it harder for her if, God forbid, she should be in a situation anything even remotely like the Jackie story.

But as the mother of a son in college, I am worried about the apparent lack of concern in the mainstream, and less ideological new media (of which there is not much), for HIS rights. I consider you to be a very reasoned author who is not prone to pushing any agenda, and would appreciate it if you would take the time to consider writing on that topic.

As it stands, my third child, also a boy, will not be attending a liberal arts university, both by his preference, and increasingly, his parents. I never thought I'd be glad that my sons are both nerds who are awkward around girls and likely to spend their college years in classes that are nearly devoid of women. But, increasingly, it seems like the safest, if loneliest, path.

Further, I predict that the ratio of men to women at liberal arts schools, which is already about 40/60, is going to plunge even more- though given the rush to judgment and punishment by the UVA faculty and administration, one wonders if that is actually the desired result.

I wonder if this is what feminists were aiming for fifty years ago when they told young women to throw off their tired old Victorian morals and live large. Why should men be the only ones to have all those notches on their bedposts? Women were now free to do the same. So we teach grade school kids how to put condoms on their sexual partners. College is for sexual exploration and the more enlightened are giving seminars on better sex.

We live in a strange world where “enlightened” attitudes change fast enough to give you whiplash. Where not just attitudes but genders are multiplying faster than rabbits. And nobody seems to be having fun.