George Will is a victim: a victim of a particular thing he calls “victimhood,” which comes with “privileges,” nice things that George Will, or people like George Will, don’t get to have. And this thought, in a column that Will published this past weekend in the Washington Post, is not just attached to a standard rant about, say, affirmative action. Colleges and universities have now learned, he writes, “that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate”; he sees this quite plainly in “the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. ‘sexual assault.’ ” Students and educators, in Will’s world, are being swarmed by covetous young women.
Why might one covet the “status” of a survivor of sexual assault, and what are these “privileges” that Will sees? Does he worry that he will be asked to give up his seat for some eighteen-year-old girl who has reported a rape? Or is it that she will be allowed to go to the front of the line in the dining hall at her college, or be deferred to in a way that strikes him as unseemly? Perhaps what he calls a privilege is a young woman such as that being listened to by her elders and having her story taken seriously. That counts as a privilege—an extra benefit—only if a girl, in the normal course of things, wouldn’t and needn’t be heard. “Privilege” suggests puzzlement with the very idea of a voice like that mattering, and, potentially, changing the life of a young man. The image Will is conjuring up is of deceptive or “hypersensitive, even delusional” women clamoring for attention, and deliriously pleased to have found a way to get it.
Will’s is a confused and contemptuous accounting of female desire. By the logic of his “proliferation” narrative, there was some small number of rapes, and when women saw how attentive everyone was being to the survivors, and the “privileges” they got, they wanted a piece of the action, too. What does he think led those initial victims—the patient zeros—to come forward? Where does he think their rape stories came from, and how would he have preferred that they be treated? Should they have been told to keep as quiet as possible, or be shamed or ignored, lest other women get funny ideas about complaining? Will, one presumes, thinks that the assaults and rapes that he keeps hearing about aren’t real. (Either that, or he has some scenario in which he thinks that sympathy for victims causes more rapists to attack women, or more women to walk in dark alleys.) It is an odd variant on an old sort of dismissiveness about women’s accounts of rape: But she liked it, didn’t she? If her distress and pain afterward were inescapable, in that telling, maybe she just felt ashamed about being a bad, immodest woman. Will takes it a step further: what she really liked was the aftermath, too.
If Will thinks that being known as someone who reported a sexual assault causes one to be greeted with general awe, he is mistaken; the looks one gets, and the gossip, are likely quite different, particularly in the situations involving students in the same social circle. (Will seems to think that these are the only ones in question; he offers as his main exhibit an anecdote from Philadelphia magazine about two students who’d had a prior relationship, and who got into bed consensually, but disagree about what happened next.) There is, at the moment, a national conversation about sexual assaults on campus—how to adjudicate cases involving them, how to prevent them, how to make sure that women’s education is not disrupted or compromised. That last point—that neglect of sexual-assault cases might make a campus so hostile that women are denied fair access—is why federal lawsuits, citing Title IX, have recently come into play. There is also a legitimate debate about due process for all parties involved. All of this deserves a serious discussion, not Will’s sour gloating about colleges and their real failures to young women.
Those women are, really, just fodder for Will—crushable things. The true target of his column is “progressivism,” which he seems to regard as an engine for the mysterious elevation of people whom he doesn’t feel should call themselves victims. In that, his column is of a piece with a general conservative complaint (one also heard in some recent Supreme Court decisions). The White House has made addressing sexual assault on campus a priority. This means, in Will’s terms, that
And Will has a problem with that. “Excavate equities”—does that mean looking for fairness, or for a way for women to go to school? We also get a glimpse not only of the privileged but the “especially privileged.” When reading that, it might be useful to remember, as the Times noted earlier this week, that “71 percent of those who graduated with a bachelor’s degree carried debt, which averaged $29,400.” “Faux sophistication”—and that is quite a charge for Will to be lobbing—is a term that might be better applied to the glib explanations given to students about how it is a privilege to pay interest for decades.
Will assumes, too, that the colleges are as put out by the Obama Administration as he is, and that the sexual-assault initiative means that “progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.” And this, he says, “serves them right,” because American institutions of higher learning have themselves been too tolerant of progressivism. He is neither sorry for them nor shy about saying what one can expect if one does not value, in the manner that he does, one’s “autonomy, resources, prestige and comity.” Colleges are being assaulted, too, Will says; but, he thinks, they “asked for this.”
Photograph by J. Scott Applewhite/AP.
