Debating Camille Paglia's on Date Rape
Kayla Landry Landry 1
Jennifer Dorhauer
Eng 1020 L23
February 04, 2013
Debating Camille Paglia’s “On Date Rape” Date rape is a forcible sexual intercourse by an acquaintance, where one resists sexual advances either verbally or physically. The perpetrator of this crime varies from boyfriends to casual acquaintances. The Centers for Disease Control reported that eight out of ten rape or sexual-assault cases were carried out by people of these relationship statuses. Sometimes rapists claim they are given given mixed signals, or even misread simple flirtation as a woman’s sexual advance. In any situation, a woman is not responsible for the rape. Rapists tend to use these excuses to try and shift attention from their heinous crime, on to their victim. Oftentimes, when a woman is raped by someone she knows, it is not a spur of the moment incident. Their attacker has planned out or even fantasized about the act before actually committing the crime. Camille Paglia’s editorial “On Date Rape” gives a glimpse into the mind of an extremely biased opinion on date rape. Her general belief is that if a woman gets raped while on a date, she is at fault. Paglia’s article is defective due to hasty generalization, false analogy, and false cause. Landry 2 Paglia’s view is that in her day and age, women understood the risks associated with dating, while today’s generation does not. Her thought is made evident when she wrote, “Still, we understood in the 60’s that we were taking a risk. Today these young women want the freedoms that we won, but they don’t want to acknowledge the risk.” Her hasty generalization of young feminists as “protected, white, middle-class, who expect everything to be safe”, is presumptuous;
Jennifer Dorhauer
Eng 1020 L23
February 04, 2013
Debating Camille Paglia’s “On Date Rape” Date rape is a forcible sexual intercourse by an acquaintance, where one resists sexual advances either verbally or physically. The perpetrator of this crime varies from boyfriends to casual acquaintances. The Centers for Disease Control reported that eight out of ten rape or sexual-assault cases were carried out by people of these relationship statuses. Sometimes rapists claim they are given given mixed signals, or even misread simple flirtation as a woman’s sexual advance. In any situation, a woman is not responsible for the rape. Rapists tend to use these excuses to try and shift attention from their heinous crime, on to their victim. Oftentimes, when a woman is raped by someone she knows, it is not a spur of the moment incident. Their attacker has planned out or even fantasized about the act before actually committing the crime. Camille Paglia’s editorial “On Date Rape” gives a glimpse into the mind of an extremely biased opinion on date rape. Her general belief is that if a woman gets raped while on a date, she is at fault. Paglia’s article is defective due to hasty generalization, false analogy, and false cause. Landry 2 Paglia’s view is that in her day and age, women understood the risks associated with dating, while today’s generation does not. Her thought is made evident when she wrote, “Still, we understood in the 60’s that we were taking a risk. Today these young women want the freedoms that we won, but they don’t want to acknowledge the risk.” Her hasty generalization of young feminists as “protected, white, middle-class, who expect everything to be safe”, is presumptuous;