On the face of it, this is a shocking story.
http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/19/female-student-said-im-fine-and-i-wasnt
Reason reports that two young athletes at the Colorado State University-Pueblo in the USA, had a romantic relationship, but the administrators at the university, and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights made the assumption that the male had raped the female, and expelled the male from the university. This was despite the female repeatedly making it clear that she was not raped, and that the relationship was mutual. The male student is now suing the university and the Office for Civil Rights.
On the other hand, I find glimmers of hope in this story for several reasons:
Firstly, I am regularly struck by the difference between how a real, regular woman, (I use these adjectives without a hint of irony,) thinks, speaks, and acts, and the way women are assumed to be helpless victims by a combination of the pseudo-academic campaigns and faceless bureaucratic tyranny which has led to such a bizarre injustice as this. The fact that the woman in this case, (and the strong women in my own life,) is so grounded is a reality check. Marxism and third wave feminism have attempted to poison the relationship between the sexes, but the woman involved in this case would have nothing of the sort.
Secondly, this article appears in Reason. Not in Breitbart, or the Herald Sun or the Conservative Tribune (not that I know of.) An understanding of just how out of hand the political correctness of our times has become, and the tangible negative effects it is having on people in real life, is not something which is confined to the conservative sphere.
Thirdly, and building on this last point, the article, and the lawsuit, frames the issue in terms of denial of due process to the male, and denial of agency to the woman. This gets to the moral core of my own opposition to feminism. One could talk about the Cultural Marxist ideology which forms the basis of Feminism, but this is not really necessary. Whether we are talking about the wage gap myth – where women are denied agency in terms of the career decisions they make; the way domestic violence is presented – where the male is often assumed to be the perpetrator, (in some places it is mandatory to arrest or remove the male); or this latest example of a beat up over “rape culture”; the moral and logical building blocks, the prinicples on which a broad section of people can agree, is that feminist ideology denies agency to females by the assumption of victimhood, and denies due process and the assumption of innocence to males by assuming that they are the criminal.
Fewer more black-and-white examples than this exist.
Photo by be creator 