162.5 - Clown Award: George Will

Clown Award: George Will

Now for our other regular feature, the Clown Award, given weekly for meritorious stupidity

The winner of the big red nose this week is the man who puts the "p-u" in "pundit," the man who became the go-to intellectual for the right wing by proving you can be polysyllabic and still be a complete moron: George Will.

In his syndicated column on June 6 - though it's a wonder that this guy even has a syndicated column, but nevertheless - in his syndicated column on June 6, George Will addressed what he called "the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. 'sexual assault.'" Oh no, it's not sexual assault, a term he more than once in the course of this slime puts in quotation marks, it's actually, quoting him now,

the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults.

The problem isn't sexual assault, oh no no no. The problem is all the "ambiguities." Apparently a man taking advantage of a woman too drunk to know what's going on actually isn't really sure of what it is he's doing - it's just so ambiguous, y'know? How's he supposed to tell if he's sexually assaulting her or not? How's he supposed to tell if it's rape or not? I mean, c'mon! It's, y'know, ambiguous!

That's the real problem, according to Will: Colleges just are not recognizing "the ambiguities of the hookup culture." Instead they are letting (as the theme from "Jaws" rises in the background) progressivism run roughshod over their administrative policies.

And here is where it gets really disgusting, because Will argues that the result of that progressivism is that, quoting again,

they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges.

That's right: George Will says that being the victim of sexual assault is "a coveted status" at colleges and universities, complete with "privileges." Being sexually assaulted is something to be desired, a status people hope to achieve.

That's why the number of reported sexual assaults on college campuses increased by 50 percent between 2001 and 2011, from 2,200 to 3,300 cases: All those women just wanted to get in on the goodies.

Now, I will say that personally, I have to disagree with those who say there is an "epidemic" - a term I've seen used several places - an "epidemic" of sexual assault on campuses, because that implies that there is a lot more assault now than there used to be. I believe, rather, that there has always been an issue of sexual assault at colleges but in recent times women have finally just gotten sick and tired of being expected to put up with it, to put up with the grabbing and groping and to keep silent about the brutalizing attacks.

But that's exactly what George Will does expect. George Will expects women to continue to put up with it, to put up with the routine violations, the affronts, the assaults, the humiliations. He surely would protest he means no such thing, he certainly does not condone rape, but he does, he condones it by trivializing it and trivializing the issue as just "the ambiguities of the hookup culture."

On top of everything else, his argument is not only callous, it is dishonest. He tells the story of a student at Swarthmore College, who in 2013, this was just last year, got into bed with an ex-boyfriend after he fell asleep on her bed in her dorm room. After a while, he woke up and started trying to undress her. She told him no, he'd stop for a while, then go back to it. Finally, just wanting to be able to go to sleep, she let him do it just to get it over with. Later, she reported she'd been raped.

Will found that absurd, mocking that "Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of 'sexual assault' victims."

First off, as one observer said, "that was sexual assault - not 'sexual assault.'" But the point here is that the very next part of the story Will quoted tells how the school counselor to who she went refused to believe her. The counselor told her that the male student was “such a good guy” and that she had to be mistaken. The purpose of the original story, the one of which Will told only the part he thought he could mock, was the difficulty women had and still have in reporting sexual assaults to administrators that are all too often incompetent or callous or, often, more interested in protecting the school's image than in justice or even simple human decency.

So to sum up, George Will is callous, ignorant, and dishonest, locked into a past that never actually existed to avoid a present he can't deal with. In other words, a true right-winger.

You may be able to string together phrases like "excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture," but it doesn't change the fact that George Will, you are a complete and total clown.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/09/george-will-sexual-assault-colleges_n_5473357.html?ir=Media
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-college-become-the-victims-of-progressivism/2014/06/06/e90e73b4-eb50-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/opinion-columnist-questions-sexual-assault/372475/?google_editors_picks=true
http://www.vox.com/2014/5/9/5696162/6-facts-about-sexual-assault-on-campus