With a bizarre, masked home invader scaring the bejesus out of half the citizenry, rape has become perhaps the top topic of discussion in workplaces, at dinner tables, in bars and coffeehouses, and pretty much everywhere else females gather here in Bloomington.
Now, if we were to eavesdrop on any type of male-only pow-wow we likely wouldn’t hear the first reference to the punk who’s sneaking into homes of late and trying to rape lone women therein. And isn’t that an awfully big part of the problem? Why wouldn’t men be just as outraged as Bloomington’s women are?
The answer: Men don’t have vaginas. They have no skin in the game. So they couldn’t care less. In fact, too many of them — far, far, far too many of them — think the women who’ve been victimized by this weasel probably deserved their fate. Hell, they shoulda locked their doors or had a gun in the nightstand or shouldn’t’a dressed so alluringly — even though, I might remind you, the women were home alone, not expecting a masked psychosexual felon to barge in.
Most men simply don’t get rape. Tons of males think women secretly want to be raped, would love to be raped, and would swoon for the strongman who has the gumption and the guts to take what he wants from them by force.
Most men are idiots.
And now rape, for the umpteen-zillionth time, has become national news. A female student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has claimed UNC football player Allen Artis raped her in February. The incident, student Delaney Robinson says, took place in an apartment on campus early Valentine’s Day morning. Robinson says she was drinking but insists, rightly, that does not give anyone license to commit a violent or forceful crime upon her person.
The Best Defense Is A Good Offense
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Nevertheless, Robinson says, when she reported the rape at a local hospital, officials in charge of protecting the university from rape accusers, AKA the school’s Department of Public Safety, peppered her with questions about her sexual history, her sexual proclivities, and whether or not she had led Artis to believe he’d strike gold that early morning. “I was treated like a suspect,” she says.
Odd — isn’t it? — that school Public Safety officials would grill her rather than console her and assure her justice would be done. That’s what they’d have done had she accused Artis of swiping her smartphone. Now, that’s a crime that can’t be tolerated.
Then again, the way they treated her wasn’t odd at all.
It gets worse. Robinson says she and her attorney have viewed videotapes of the question-and-answer session DPS had with Artis after the incident was reported.
She told reporters yesterday:
Rather than accusing him of anything, the investigators spoke with him in a tone of camaraderie. They provided reassurances to him when he became upset. They even laughed with him when he told them how many girls’ phone numbers he had managed to get on the same night he had raped me. They told him, “Don’t sweat it. Just keep on living your life and keep on playing football.”
Artis, a junior, plays defense for the Tarheels. On the Tarheel Times‘ football team depth chart, he’s listed as the third strong side linebacker. Depth at linebacker is of vital importance for any football team’s defense. It’s certainly more important than the fragile feelings of some drunken little slut. How much do you want to bet that’s how Delaney Robinson is being described in the Tarheels’ locker room these days?
Anyone who isn’t outraged by the investigators chuckling and chortling with Allen Artis as he bragged about how many bitches’ phone numbers he collected that night simply doesn’t get rape. Maybe because they don’t get raped.
Rape, to them, is somebody else’s problem. The real problem, I’m sure too many UNC officials must feel, is finding a way to beat the James Madison University Dukes at Chapel Hill Saturday afternoon.
Life’s problems sure are simpler when you don’t have to worry about getting raped.
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