WSJ: Feminists Cause Rape...

[Triana]

Run Date: 04/26/06
By Jennifer L. Pozner
WeNews commentator

A recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal promotes the idea that men are essentially violent and women just have to learn to deal with it. Media critic Jennifer L. Pozner calls it a dangerous response to the problem of sex assault.

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Naomi Schaefer Riley declares women "moronic" for "engaging in behavior" that makes them rape-magnets and feminists responsible for turning women into morons in the first place. She bashes rape and murder victims as too stupid to prevent their attacks and paints an entirely false picture of campus feminist education and advocacy programs.

Learning that DNA evidence links Darryl Littlejohn--the bouncer charged in the high-profile rape and murder of New York graduate student Imette St. Guillen--to a prior sexual assault, Schaefer Riley concludes not that serial rapists must be stopped, but that women should "use a little more common sense" lest they get themselves attacked.

"Ms. St. Guillen was last seen in a bar, alone and drinking at 3 a.m. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan," Shaefer Riley writes, and "more than a few of us have been thinking that a 24-year-old woman should know better."

It's hard to imagine that many intelligent adults would look at that brutal rape and homicide and think, "Wow, what a stupid dead girl." But that's the company she keeps. Schaefer Riley's early writing on religion was subsidized by the John M. Olin Foundation, which--before it closed in 2005--gave hundreds of thousands to help female writers such as Christina Hoff Sommers, author of "Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women," produce highly inaccurate polemics and media programs foment the idea that feminists whine too much about rape, that date rape is a "myth" and that the Violence Against Women Act is unnecessary.

Dismisses the Duke Controversy

The author also dismisses the controversy surrounding the 27-year-old African American student and exotic dancer who alleges she was raped by white Duke University lacrosse players as simply "much hand-wringing about the alleged rape of a stripper."

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http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm?aid=2718