At 28:45, Christina Hoff Summers says “If you want to help rape victims... rape kits, police having better training...” I completely disagree with this statement. If you want to help rape victims, teach every woman women’s self-defense and jujitsu.
At 32:40, Ian Dunt says “the only thing that encourages rape in society is the prevalence of bastards and the lack of sex education that we have.” The Prevalence of Bastards should be a slogan for the eventual downfall of society, methinks. Great tagline!
At 33:18, Kaitlynn Mendes says that “Women live on a rape schedule... women walk with keys between our fingers at night, or we take certain precautions, like making sure that you watch your drink, or your friend watches your drink...” This isn’t a symptom of rape culture, this is common sense. Because I’ve extensively trained in and taught women’s self-defense, I’m hypervigilant of my surroundings. I usually choose to not go wondering around alone at night on deserted streets. Again, I don’t think I’m abiding by a rape schedule, but instead, I’m implementing common sense.
At 39:30, Christina Hoff Summers says “You have these beautiful young women (who come into colleges) they read these victim statistics... and turn them into suspicious creatures who don’t trust men, and want to see the worst in men.” My above statement might be construed in opposition to this, so let me clarify. Be prepared for the worst, expect the best. Women should go around learning self-defense and jujitsu, because there are “bastards” as Ian Dunt says, but women should not treat every man they meet like they will rape her, only that they could (and she prevents this through common sense tactics by not running alone on the beach at dawn or dusk).
At 50:15, an audience member says “I think part of the problem... is I think the current generation of students has a real problem with risk, and I think risk is inherent in intimacy...” I think this is probably connected to young adults’ obsession with socialism – they want the state to take on all the risk and all the responsibility.
At 51:27, an audience member says “I think we do live in a rape culture, and I wanted to comment that saying that other countries it’s [worse off], we’re actually better off... that doesn’t mean things are good here. Do the numbers really matter? One in five, one in 50, it’s still bad.” Well, yes, numbers do matter. Humans are inductive, that is, we are a narrative species. We must put things in a narrative to make sense of our reality, and comparisons are one of the things we understand best. When you are teaching somebody, the best thing to do is to make an analogy to something they already understand or something that is easier to understand. Also, most people would say that 1000 murders are worse than 1 murders, so yes, numbers absolutely do matter.
At 53:53, Christina Hoff Summers says “This whole idea of consent and then regulating that in law courts is so misguided because it is metaphysically impossible to know what goes on between two people when there are no witnesses...” This is a very important point, and I’m going to rephrase what she said: it’s metaphysically impossible to regulate consent in the courts through one definition and not by individual, case-by-case, judges’ rulings.
At 104:09, Ian Dunt says, “I hate it whenever anyone says this, but it happens to be true in this case, but it (the solution to rape) happens to be education.” It seems that everyone invokes (better/ideal) education as the solution to everything, and I can’t help but agree. I mean, raising the next generation “right,” or at the very least, better than we were raised, does seem to be the logical conclusion to our current problems. On the other hand, it also seems to me somewhat of a copout answer, that is, we can’t fix our own problems now, we just have to set up the next generation to fix/eliminate them. Of course, then the next two comments from the audience (from women) severely criticized Mr. Dunt’s claim that sex education is what’s needed to stop rape.
At 125:46, Christina Hoff Summers says, “As a result of this panel, I’m now beginning to think that another word for ‘rape culture’ is actually a ‘free culture,’ and they are defining everything that can happen in a free society... off-color jokes, people will sexualize bodies...” She goes on to say that a society that is highly puritanical or authoritarian, you can control this (although you actually can’t, even in those societies), but of course we all want to live in a free society, not a puritanical or authoritarian one, right? Right? She advocates, more so than Mr. Dunt’s sex education, for moral education in the home, stable homes, and good father figures. In fact, she says “Without that, we’re all lost.” Sobering words indeed.
