Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Feminist Rape Constructs

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

January 21, 2015

Let us first review the facts.

Mount Holyoke College is an all-women’s college that recently began admitting male students who self-identify as female. And then, in a spasm of self-righteousness, there was a successful student-led effort to get a college performance of The Vagina Monologues cancelled because that play was insufficiently sensitive to those women who were vagina-less. We know that such creatures exist because we recently began admitting them to our college.

At American colleges, The Vagina Monologues is traditionally — ah, tradition! — performed on Valentine’s Day because, and this is important to note, American colleges generally don’t have a clue. But, and this is also important to note, if ever you think that this vapid cluelessness has disappeared down Alice’s rabbit hole forever, up it pops again later, right in your news feed, still chattering at us about gender constructs.

We need to recognize that some rapists self-identify as tender, sensitive, and thoughtful caregivers. What is more of a social construct than violence? We need to raise awareness of that, people.

So then, speaking of gender constructs, let us pursue the will of the sexual revolution all the way out to the end. Unless it is endless, of course, but we can still make some pretty good time. I think. After a while you lose track because the outer darkness doesn’t keep their mile markers maintained very well. And the roads are really bad.

The Vagina Monologues — that sexist throwback to earlier misogynistic times — was performed the way it was by the thoughtless feminist minions in order “to raise awareness of gender-based violence.” But if we have now gotten to the place in our absurdist theater review where we are laboring to avoid offending all the women-without-vaginas out there, I don’t know why we shouldn’t follow this to the utter frozen limit. We need to recognize that some rapists self-identify as tender, sensitive, and thoughtful caregivers. What is more of a social construct than violence? We need to raise awareness of that, people.

Of course, I hasten to break satiric voice here because we live in a time when satire has become virtually impossible. Someone might think that I am the one urging that we go easy on rapists, when it is I who want to deal with rapists with actual biblical justice. It is feminism that is laying all the intellectual — heh, so to speak — groundwork for a robust defense of both rape and rapists.

Do you doubt what I say? What, then, are the limits of self-identification? When does a poor lost soul bump into nature as it is, the world the way it is, the eternal law of Almighty God as it actually is? When do we say, and on what authority, that we don’t care about your stupid self-identifications? If a man with a penis can get sympathy on a modern college campus because his womanhood has been insulted, bringing a blush to the maidenly cheeks of us all, then what isn’t possible? What can’t self-identification do? I ask this question indignantly, going so far as to toss my curls at you.

And you can’t just tell me that there is such a limit. You have to tell me why it is there, who put it there, why the rapist needs to obey it, and why we need to obey it. Obey? Obey? There’s that misogynistic word again.

Be careful how you answer the question though. We are up against nature, and nature’s God, the Father of Jesus Christ, who through the Spirit gave us the books of Deuteronomy and Matthew both. When we come before Him, we find all our self-identifications going up in a blaze, like tissue paper in a wood stove, and we discover that we must answer to the name He has given us, and we must answer for the way we behaved in the natural world He gave us. For feminism this will be, I trust you have noticed, problematic.