The more helpless the victim, the more defensible the violence



Right now there are two cases of groups of college students acting out of control and possibly violent that are burning up the blogosphere. First you have the students from Santa Cruz that blocked military recruiters from entering their school in a confrontation that seems to have had some violent overtones to it. Then of course you have the Duke rape case, which even with the caveat that thereÂ’s a slim chance a rape didnÂ’t happen, itÂ’s clear that the lacrosse team members did something to scare the shit out those women and that shared fantasizing about violence against women was part of the fun.

Suffice it to say, the two cases are being received much differently by the right punditry. The Santa Cruz peace group is being called “seditious” and had Michelle Malkin release their private information on her blog so they could get death threats from her readers. As I mentioned yesterday, Kathleen Parker compared the Duke lacrosse team to lynching victims (missing the much more apt comparison of them to lynchers due to the whites-ganging-up-on-one-black-person aspect) and even vaguely implied they were martyrs like Christ. Charlotte Allen is running a series on the Duke rape case called “Crying Rape”, which she says means “accusing someone of rape”, but for some reason she felt that the phrasing that implies to most of us that the victim is lying worked better. The good news is so far I haven’t seen any right wingers fantazing about another Kent State at UC Santa Cruz, and believe me, I looked.

But what strikes me about the two incidents is that they are both good examples of how violent acting out is derived from feelings of entitlement. The Santa Cruz kids felt entitled to run the recruiters off campus because they feel the campus belongs to them and they should have the right to run people off their property. At bare minimum, the Duke lacrosse team felt entitled to humiliate the strippers they hired because they were women and they were even paid for. At worst, they felt entitled to gang rape a woman for those reasons.

IÂ’m inclined to think that the Santa Cruz students might have a right to do what they did, because IÂ’m convinced that they, as the actual students at the school, are entitled to their claim to the school, and especially that they have a stronger claim to it than the military recruiters. ItÂ’s hard for me to quarrel with people in the age group thatÂ’s being targeted to fight BushCoÂ’s colonialist adventures when they resist that recruitment, even to the point of violence. Since their motivations are understandable to me, itÂ’s hard for me to be anything less than half-hearted in my condemnation of it.

Which is what makes language like Parker’s or David Brooks’ rape apologies–they argue that it’s quite understandable that boys will go bananas and rape someone if they are exposed to a woman shaking her ass, which makes any condemnation of such things come across as half-assed and shallow. Just as my disinclination to jump all over the Santa Cruz students speaks volumes about my agreement that they’re entitled to claim campus space for the students instead of the military, conservatives who white wash the Duke rape case are speaking volumes about what entitlements they are willing tolerate, in this case, white male entitlement to abuse women and get away with it, especially if they are of the wrong sex class or wrong skin color.


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