It's an Impossible Job, But Someone Needs to Do It

It might as well be Stacy McCain: Internet Douchebag Patrol

Look, it’s not as if there were a shortage of actual news for me to blog about today. For example, my friend Shaun McCutcheon won a landmark Supreme Court decision today, and there’s all kinds of commentary about McCutcheon v. FEC.

Here is a guy from Alabama who has bought me beers whose name is forever destined to be cited as a legal precedent and yet, I feel myself constrained merely to make brief notice of the decision, because the Internet is swarming with douchebags today.

I’m talking about you, Gregory Bernstein of Vanderbilt University.

Do I need some overprivileged college freshman to lecture me about “rape culture”? No, I most certainly do not. I’ll quote your ridiculous Huffington Post sermonette only briefly:

Rape culture is a culture in which we allow responsibility for sexual violence to be shifted from the rapist to the victim. Rape culture is a culture in which our first reaction upon learning about an alleged assault is to doubt victims, to ask what they were wearing, or what they were drinking. Rape culture is a culture in which myths and misconceptions about rape are allowed to be taught as truth.

Two words for you, Greg: Individual responsibility. Cultures don’t rape people. Rapists rape people. What is objectionable about these endless “rape culture” lectures is that they represent an effort to demonize all men, to create a collective responsibility for crimes committed by individuals. Or, allegedly committed, as the circumstances in some cases are strongly disputed.

“Reasonable doubt” was all the rage after O.J. Simpson’s wife and her boyfriend got their throats cut, but let two drunk college kids get into an argument about whether she was sober enough to consent to sex last night, and anyone who mentions “reasonable doubt” is condemned as a slut-shaming, victim-blaming misogynist.

Stop preaching, Greg, as if we were ignorant fools in need of your enlightenment. Everybody is against rape, except rapists. . .