George Will: Women Lie About Sexual Assault!

There was a time when George Will seemed a moderate conservative who comported himself with gravitas and reason. Or maybe I just remember it that way from his days at ABC with Cokie Roberts, David Brinkley and Sam Donaldson. Over the past several years, I have found myself less and less impressed by the rather facile and antiquarian arguments he writes with great flourish and fury. His right-wing mania seems to manifest itself in a world purely of his own invention, where everyone that disagrees with him is either part of a grand liberal conspiracy or simply not paying enough attention. And so it was little surprise to find him weighing in on the question of sexual assault with the aplomb that only an older, white, self-deluded American male seems capable (Salon).

Will has the audacity to not only question the findings of a recent study that one in five college women suffer sexual assault, but to question their motives for reporting these crimes that he apparently finds a mere trifling of the new feminist wave; that’s only been around for 50 years or so. Apparently, liberals, feminists and other nefarious forces have conspired to transform sexually-assault victimhood into a “coveted status that confers privileges.” He further believes that nonconsensual sexual touching and forcible penetration being conflated is an egregious example of the proliferation of victims in American culture.

Ironically, I agree with him on this last point. We do live in a culture that privileges victimhood, for everything from the Fast Food industry to “liberal-biased” media. Rather than people taking the appropriate blame for their own actions, everyone is a victim of something else. This is, of course, not the case with rape and sexual-assault victims, but it does appear to be the case with conservatives, who are victims of, among other things, feminists, affirmative action, socialists, liberal-media, “illegal immigrants,” liberals in general, Obamacare, Noble Prize Winning scientists, the EPA, “government overreach,” the very debts they created, gays, the Clintons and a host of other groups and people that seem intent on demanding equality. Never included, as one would expect, are the corporations, elite monied class or right wing pundits that support them. Will is a dinosaur and really part of a conservative punditocracy trying to stay relevant as the winds of demographic change make their perspective less and less palatable to the masses they either ignore or attack on a daily basis. One hopes these wind bags soon choke on the smog-infested air they are apparently so fond of breathing in.