I can absolutely see Bill Clinton doing this (then, not now) and not even thinking of it as rape, but thinking of it as dominant, alpha sex. I can see a LOT of men doing that during that time period, before we started telling them in the ’80s, “hey, that is rape, do not do that.” I can see YOUR NICE GRANDPA doing that, back then…I think good men can rape, and be sorry, and not do it again. This is very bad feminism…To sum up, I think Bill Clinton could very well have raped Juanita Broaddrick; that it doesn’t make him an evil man, or irredeemable (I’m Catholic; we’re all forgiven, if we’re sorry, and Broaddrick says Bill Clinton personally called her up to apologize). It doesn’t even necessarily make him a bad feminist — you know, later, once he stops doing that.
—Rebecca Schoenkopf, writing in the progressive blog Wonkette, talking about Juanita Brodderick’s rape accusation against Bill Clinton
Broaddrick’s claims are back in the news, now that it was noticed that the Hillary Clinton website quietly pulled its statement about the victims of sexual assault having “the right to be believed,” Clinton’s jaw-dropping assertion—given her despicable role in silencing and discrediting Bill’s various victims—that Ethics Alarms discussed when it was first made.
I awoke to multiple rightish blogs, and Ann Althouse, who is dead center, going bonkers over this piece, and rightly so. My initial query is, why only right wing and moderate blogs? Is the left this corrupted by Bill and Hillary? (Okay, that’s rhetorical: the answer is “Damn right they are.”) When did it become progressive to argue that “good men can rape”?
I thought that was a misogynist pig position scrawled on the walls of a troglodyte’s cave.
Good men do NOT rape. Ever. Rape—do I really need to say this?—is signature significance. It was in the 80s, it was in the 60s, it has always been. If you rape (and if you defend rape), you’re not good, you’re not ethical, and you’re not trustworthy. And–do I really have to say THIS?–you’re not just a bad feminist, you’re a phony feminist. (By the by way, you gotcha-masters out there: I am not saying that there is anything wrong with a lawyer defending an accused rapist, like Hillary Clinton did. That is not defending rape itself.)
So why aren’t the indignant, politically correct, feminist, war-on-women-deriding left-leaning web sites, commentators and bloggers collectively retching at the Wonkette post? Explain that to me, someone. Explain why it isn’t evidence that integrity hasn’t died in their skulls, and is stinking up their ethics like a dead rat under the floor-boards.
I have one theory. The Obama administration, cowardly university administrators and militant feminists have collaborated to make “rape” a vague, punitive and easily-proven offense on campus that includes the situation where two drunk students have sex and the woman involved–only the woman, now!– wakes up with a hangover and regrets, and then claims she was “raped” because she couldn’t consent to sex while drunk. Schoenkopf‘s logic gives such men, when they are ejected from college, libeled in Rolling Stone or followed around on campus by a Fury carrying a mattress, a shot at redemption by saying that being rapists need not blight their reputations and character forever. The flaw in that reasoning is that such men aren’t rapists. I love the Mobius strip reasoning, though, don’t you? Crying rape is used as a political weapon on campus, and “good feminists” like Schoenkopf try to avoid accountability for the damage to fairness, due process and justice by distinguishing between good rape and bad rape. As long as you don’t engage in bad rape, you can still be good.
You know, like Bill Clinton! That poll under the title is, believe it or not, from Wonkette, with its overwhelmingly feminist, Clinton supporting readership..
Oh-oh, here it comes!
KABOOM!
If you are sane, rational and fair, I shouldn’t have to explain why the Wonkette post is a new low that shows the moral and ethics rot among Hillary’s ranks. Here are some samples from all of those non-progressive sites that have done a good job of that already:
The Federalist (which, unfortunately, confounds Hillary’s ethical criminal defense of an accused rapist with what Schoenkopf is doing):
“No, Bill Clinton was not convicted for raping Broaddrick, but Schoenkopf’s rationale (he is probably a rapist, but who cares) is really quite stomach-churning. Hate to break it to ya, Rebecca, but raping a woman results in the automatic termination of one’s feminist card. A man who sexually violates a woman doesn’t have the right to be considered a feminist, let alone a decent human being, because he’s clearly demonstrated that he doesn’t have women’s best interests in mind.Saying you’re sorry isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card, either. It’s good if you do that, but it shouldn’t mean giving your victim no justice. Rape is rape, after all.”
“I don’t have the words to analyze this unspeakable rot. We’ve been listening to feminists for 40 years tell us that even consensual sex on the marriage bed is rape, that the woman is always to be believed, that rape is about power not sex, and that men are beasts. But apparently at least this one feminist can throw all that under the bus to get Hillary Clinton elected.”
Daily Kos, ThinkProgress, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Jezebel, Rolling Stone, Alas! et al.:
Finally, here’s Professor Althouse, spot on…she has already posted three times deriding the Wonkette post, here and here as well as the initial slam dunk:
… it was just this one time… I got carried away… Bill is so dreamy… he’s not a bad man… he just does very bad things some times — just that one time! — I’m still a good girl — good feminist — I just engaged in very bad feminism that one time… and I’ll never do it again… unless Bill needs me… oh, that Bill…
And this is why we can’t have good feminism. Women — the majority of humanity — who could come together and demand respect and protection for our bodies are susceptible to getting peeled off individually by a man they feel powerfully drawn to and simply must make an exception for. He’s not really bad. He said he was sorry and he’d never do it again. And there she is, the erstwhile feminist, mouthing the biggest domestic violence cliché in the world.
But it’s not a cliché, not this time, because my guy is so special, mama. If you only knew his heart like I do.
Ethics Alarms 
Was she talking about “rape rape?” English is so confusing these days!
This is a sincere question, from a well-schooled crypto-feminist who understands today’s crypto-fascist dictates: Sex is about power, and power is about sex; power (and goodness) is about having a platform, and not being censored while using it (because if you have a platform, and are censored for using it, then you might not be good, might not be entitled to that platform, or the use of it, or the power to have it…); power is about being entitled, and who you are, and therefore what you are entitled to because of who you are…[I get lost in all the twists and turns of meanings and valuations of meanings, but…I’ll still call myself a crypto-feminist.]
If you mean raping the same woman twice, then no. Unfortunately for this bimbo, there are no degrees of rape, it either is or it ain’t.
I was asking because of a vague memory of some guy in Missouri, whose political fortunes were destroyed as a result of some comment about “rape rape.” I never saw a translation of what he meant, either. Ah, but a little more of the memory just came back to me…the guy in Missouri was talking about abortion, and about rapes that cause (or don’t cause, or can’t cause) pregnancy…surely Bill Clinton has never had to worry about making anyone but Hillary pregnant. (that last part was sarcasm)
dragin_dragon: I evidently confused something Whoopi Goldberg said with something a guy named Todd Akin said. Akin made a remark about “legitimate rape,” while Whoopi made some comment about “rape rape.”
https://ethicsalarms.com/2012/08/21/the-akin-affair-a-brief-note-on-being-fair-to-idiots/#more-13499
“I was asking because of a vague memory of some guy in Missouri, whose political fortunes were destroyed as a result of some comment about “rape rape.””
That idiot you’re talking about is Todd Akin, he was the guy that said that if a woman was ‘legitimately’ raped, her uterus would reject her rapist’s seed and she wouldn’t become pregnant in response to the question of abortions in the case of rape.
“Rape rape” was Whoopie Goldberg’s idiotic distinction between Roman Polanski’s statutory child rape (of a 13 year old seeking a role) and forcible rape.
Google this and not only does the wonkette.com article (a ‘disabled’ comments section prevented my reasoned and even-keeled response) NOT come up in the first 5 pages, but the only references to it, that I saw, were the “Conservative” news sites.
To self-styled ‘crypto-feminist’ luckyesteeyoreman above: any odds that “The View” will give this the time of day?
My sect of crypto-feminism holds that these days, a man can’t stay married to a decent woman unless he is SOME kind of feminist.
As for “The View,” which I avoid watching like “bad porn” (with one particular “Chive” website excluded [or excepted]), I am almost tempted to see if the gabbers on that show will mention anything about what Rebecca Schoenkopf* said. After all, said gabbers are in the tank for Hillary – so anything to exonerate Hillary from her enabling of her husband’s personal war on women is a possible topic for the vaginatorship-enablers’ discussion (or cussion).
*Her surname means “pretty head” in at least one German translation. Gad, with all this talk of sex and power, and no previous mention of – not even any contextualization of – BEER in connection with this discussion, I’m not even going to try to make another comment about THAT person…I’ll just go on drinking to crypto-feminism – and to remembering to take my meds.
I saw this on the Facebook threads and had to search it out to find it. It is not on Wonkette’s main page – perhaps they are trying to bury it. I have read Wonkette and figured it was some tongue-in-cheek, snarky rejoinder to the Hillary/Bill rape allegations, a tone very common on that blog. I was surprised.
As I read it, this statement jumped out at me:
“I can absolutely see Bill Clinton doing this (then, not now) and not even thinking of it as rape, but thinking of it as dominant, alpha sex. I can see a LOT of men doing that during that time period, before we started telling them in the ’80s, ‘hey, that is rape, do not do that.’ I can see YOUR NICE GRANDPA doing that, back then.”
Read more at http://wonkette.com/605513/lets-talk-about-juanita-broaddrick#9sj1IJ0uj06c0lil.99
No, Rebecca. I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, and I can’t see my nice grandpa (or father or brothers, for that matter) doing that. Ever. I learned from a very early age (from my father, Rebecca) that rape was/is not only a crime, but it was/is morally wrong to force a woman to do something against her will. I didn’t need Gloria Steinem or the ERA to teach me that. It would never occur to me that forcing a woman to do something against her will is just some sort dominant, alpha male sex.
The blatant hypocrisy was startling. I guess the most important thing is to elect Hillary, facts and history be damned.
jvb
Again, common sense reigns on Ethics Alarms. Thank you all for saying what needs to be said. I’ve been arguing against this progressive position for almost a decade now. It’s nice to see other people speak up, this post and comments thread reminds me again that I’m not howling in the wilderness. This line of thought just enrages me! Our fathers, grandfathers, and brothers didn’t rape, they knew it was wrong. Every man is NOT a potential rapist. There is nothing nice about a rapist (‘even nice guys can rape’, uh, no!), he’s not the decent boy next door.
But, these **are** the same women who think Mad Men is a documentary. I have always been interested to know how many of the women who think like this came from intact normal homes…when I was reading feminist blogs regularly as a ‘know thine enemy’ sort of thing (I can’t stand much of it now) I remember Amanda Marcotte saying her parents were divorced . A few other fem bloggers have mentioned in passing that they were raised by their mothers. The only one of that bunch that had a normal relationship with her father was Jessica Valenti. She had her father walk her down the aisle at her wedding, for which she was viciously excoriated by the feminist mainstream, along with the sin of wearing a traditional white bridal gown, or so they thought. It was pearl grey but photographed white, and they were off! ‘Pandering to the patriarchy’ etc, bash, bash, bash to the point that she wrote an article in the Washington Post to explain/justify her choices about her own wedding ceremony. It’s my guess that none of the mainstream feminists has had a normal male role model growing up, and this is the origin of much of man-hate. They don’t understand men at all.
Amen, Crella. “[T]he same women who think Mad Men is a documentary” took the words right out of my mouth. And then there’s “Revolutionary Road” and “The Ice Storm.” Having grown up in the ‘sixties, I find these kids’ treatment of the ‘sixties hilarious to verging on delusional. And I’m not sure what it’s all about.
And Amen again: “It’s my guess that none of the mainstream feminists has had a normal male role model growing up, and this is the origin of much of man-hate.” Check out Gloria Steinham’s father in her autobiography. A philandering flim-flam artist/dreamer as a single example of your point. I always wiki Hollywood types when they come up in the “consciously uncoupling” columns. Their parents invariably divorced when they were young.
Anyway, great comment.
“And I’m not sure what it’s all about.”
It’s an act of marginalization…if we ( roughly my age cohort-I’m 58) lived in a barbaric, misogynistic era clearly ruled by men that ran roughshod over women, a big nasty boy’s club, then we have no place giving our opinions on current male/female relationships and how young people see the world. We’re not fit to sit at the table of current opinion. It’s a rather tidy way to shut up a generation that could actually debunk most of their lies.
I never researched Gloria Steinem’s father, wow!
Thank you for your kind comments.
You’re more than welcome. Interesting idea on kids romanticizing the ’60s. I thought it was just a combination of naivete, i.e., glamorizing something they know nothing about, and simply giving the set and costume designers and make-up artists a chance to use all sorts of neat mid-century modern props and styles. Hah! I do like your marginalization/neutralization analysis though.
She seems to think that everyone was just raping everyone else until the 80’s, when apparently feminists taught men that rape is wrong. So if you raped before then, it’s cool, no one knew any better.
(You can’t just naturally be that kind of deluded. You have to pay good money for it at university.)
“(You can’t just naturally be that kind of deluded. You have to pay good money for it at university.)”
Heh! Let’s toss it over to the late Bea Arthur:
If the idea that rape was wrong did not come from feminists, then where did that idea come from?
The answer, of course, is the Word of HaShem, Creator and Lord of the Universe.
God is great!
‘So why aren’t the indignant, politically correct, feminist, war-on-women-deriding left-leaning web sites, commentators and bloggers collectively retching at the Wonkette post? Explain that to me, someone.’
Because contemporary third wave feminism isn’t about equality, like the first wave, and it isn’t about empowerment, like the second wave, it’s about power and control. They want the power to ruin lives, to control behaviours, to feel safe in an unsafe world by being able to micromanage microagressions (TYSRL). And ideology be damned! Ideology is the framework, but it certain facts become inconvenient they’ll wrap SEMTEX around the pillars of their faith and watch them burn. Hillary in the White House is a Good Thing, and it would be even if she was a closeted transsexual and was caught raping Juanita again herself.
You owe me a keyboard for those final few clauses.
Rebecca Schoenkopf’s reasoning makes me want to throw up. I really wonder what she’d be writing now if dear Billy Boy had raped her instead of Brodderick.
The “he said he was sorry” rationalization is especially maddening. Though it had the positive side-effect of reminding me of Belushi smashing the guitar in Animal House and then apologizing to the guitar owner.
The perfect example, and the one I always think of when this rationalization is used.
By the way, “Animal House” is an example of “rape culture”…
It was her fault for having a vagina.
Pazuzu? http://wonkette.com/605656/lets-try-talking-about-juanita-broaddrick-again It’s definitely in the “Sorry you misunderstood me” range of apologies, with “I’m sorry to readers who thought I was saying rape is just dandy (though I don’t think it’s a fair reading of the post).”
Everyone knew what Bill Clinton was like when we hired him on to lead this magnificent country – a pure hound dog with a poor selective process in what he choose to dabble with. So with Monica he lived up to his end of the bargain and did what he had always done. Why get pissed? Why now over a rape? As Dr. Phil would say “Past and present behaviors are indicative of future behaviors.”
Now just among us “boys” the fact is I suspect the driving force behind Bill’s Lady Macbeth was power and power anyway it could be obtained. For Willie it was – and I will be blunt – pussy. That was it. What always riled me is this is the freaking POTUS or Governor and he is taking on babes that are what’s left when last call rings out at the bar. If he truly admired JFK he would elevate his standards that that level. JFK had class with who he ponied up with.
Putting aside Bill Clinton for a moment, I do think it is possible for an otherwise good man to commit a rape.
I think this happens a lot — especially with young men in peer pressure situations and if there are drugs or alcohol involved. Society is evolving for the better on this issue, but there was a time when “no” didn’t always mean “no,” and sex with an underage girl or a drunk woman was deemed okay or even desirable. And while I think someone who commits a rape should go to prison, I am also willing to acknowledge that “but for” immaturity, drugs, alcohol, stupid friends, etc., that man may never have committed a rape or another violent crime in his entire life.
As for politicians, executives, teachers, professors, policemen, etc. who abuse their positions to rape women or put them in a position where they don’t think they can say no (final exams might be right around the corner) — to hell with them.
I don’t know if Bill Clinton ever raped anybody, but he definitely abused his position of trust as a public servant.
That’s the kind of after the fact rape I mentioned though. Social norms dictate what is consent. It’s not rape without mens rea. No good man had sexual intercourse with a woman knowing that she doesn’t consent.
That’s an important point, and one I don’t think gets enough attention. People will point to the low conviction rates for rape as a symptom of a society that condones rape. Well, no. We don’t condone rape, it’s just hard to prove. Why is it hard to prove? Because the base act, sex, is a normal activity performed millions (billions?) of times daily… The only thing that differentiates the act of sex from the act of rape is the lack of consent of one party, and the cognition of that lack of consent in the other.
We don’t condone theft, it’s just hard to prove. Why is it hard to prove? Because the base act, giving someone else money, is a normal activity performed millions (billions?) of times daily…The only thing that differentiates the act of loaning someone money from the act of theft is the lack of consent of one party, and the cognition of that lack of consent in the other.
Here is the thing.
A thief who claims that he had consent to take the item in question can simply give it back.
How do you unrape someone?
Money. Obviously.
Uh…. huh…. I mean, you’re obviously right. Sex and financial transactions are so similar it’s hard to tell them apart. Sometimes when I’m distracted I accidentally get the two mixed up, and boy is that embarrassing. Could you imagine, instead of a hug and some cuddling afterwards, just slipped him a couple of Franklins and took a shower. But honest mistake, right?
And why IS it that finances are so simple and sex is so complicated… I mean, really, it’s not like there are entire floors of law firms specifically designated for financial transactions. And it’s not like there are countless benches dealing with small or petty transactions. Money is easy! Sex should be too! Obviously, we should make sex just as simple as money! We should issue receipts and draw up contracts, standardise acts as if they were monetary denominations. Hey! Just think: Especially promiscuous people should have counsel on hand, because you never really know when you might get the itch to spend some ass bucks. And better safe than sorry, am I right?
What???
[this was intended to follow Chirs’s weird opening statement.]
“Social norms dictate what is consent.” Ahh, but those lines can be blurry and there may be no meeting of the minds.
In any event, I am talking about something slightly different. I’m talking about an otherwise perfectly normal guy who snaps one night and commits a rape because drugs, alcohol, and/or peer pressure. He has committed a heinous act and should go to prison, but isn’t it possible that but for those circumstances, he never would have committed a crime? If so, does that make him a good man who otherwise never would have committed a bad act OR a bad man who had never before committed a bad act because he did not have the opportunity?
Good men don’t “snap” and commit rape any more than they “snap” and eat babies. Talk about a mythological stereotype.
What’s easier for a guy than telling whether a girl or woman is or isn’t interested? Sheesh. I’d say the default setting is “not interested.” Certainly was in my earlier days.
I can see gang violence or other influences turning a young man bad overnight. Rape — to this day — is used as a tool during war.
How’s that relate to this discussion, Sparty? You’re saying being a state AG or a governor or POTUS can turn a young man bad over night? Hmmm.
I am specifically talking about living in extreme conditions (war, violence, etc.) turning a good man bad.
The far left/socialists/etc absolutely excoriated Schoenkopf for this piece and indeed are critical of a lot of the sillier and incoherent/hypocritical aspects of liberal feminism and identity politics in general.
I believe what you think of as “left” is really just mainstream liberalism, i.e, not left wing at all. The left despise this kind of liberalism probably more so than it does the right, who are at least ideologically consistent for the most part.
If mainstream liberalism isn’t the Left, what is your definition? The Far Left?