Okay, NPR. You are my favorite liberal-communist-fascist-propaganda machine. I like you. I think Ira Glass is cute and everything. But seriously? You’re kind of being douchebags.
See, there was this episode of This American Life. It was about attending a “party school”, with the focus on Penn State. And in the course of this episode, there was talk of a certain thing that often happens at every school: sexual acts are performed without someone’s consent. You and I call this thing “rape”.
But NPR doesn’t call this rape. They call it “unwanted sexual contact”, a WTF?!?worthy term if there ever was one. And even after they were called on the stupidity of using “unwanted sexual contact” to describe rape, they still wouldn’t concede that they were wrong. Instead, producer Sarah Koenig decided to explain the nuances of actual rape and sex that is merely “unwanted”:
To be clear, our intention was in no way to speak of rape euphemistically, or to sidestep the issue.
Except that’s exactly what you did.
Rather, we used the term “unwanted sexual experience” because it duplicates the language used by Penn State University in its own annual student surveys.
Okay? And? Penn State has decided to speak of rape euphemistically and sidestep the issue of their students being raped and raping; why does NPR feel the need to do the same?
Here’s the question students of both sexes were asked: “Have you been a victim of an unwanted sexual experience?” (Six percent of those surveyed in 2009 said yes.)
So six percent of said students were raped.
A narrower survey, of just the first two months of 2009, asked these questions: Have you: “Had sex when you didn’t really want to?” (9.4% said yes)
Raped.
Been pressured or forced to have sex with someone when you were too drunk to prevent it?” (3.4% said yes)
Also raped.
Pressured or forced someone to have sex with you after you had been drinking?” (1.5% said yes).
Committed rape.
While some of these incidents the students reported likely are rape, it’s also safe to say that some of them aren’t, and we wanted to be very careful not to misconstrue the data.
“It’s safe to say that some” occasions wherein a student was pressured or forced to have sex after drinking, who may or may not have been to drunk to either consent or not, WEREN’T RAPE?
This is the only data on sexual consequences/violence, as it relates to alcohol, that the university collects, so these were the only numbers, and terms, we felt we could use responsibly enough to broadcast.
Yes, ladies. Even NPR thinks that if you slatterns drink too much, you get what you deserve. (You were probably asking for it, anyways.)
I do know that the majority of sexual assaults at colleges do involve alcohol, and maybe we should have said that. And perhaps I should have looked nationally to see if there’s good, specific data linking drinking and rape on campuses. However, since we were mostly concentrating on stats at Penn State, we used what they had.
Penn State: where only 6% of students are raped, except for that other 12.8% that might have been raped, except they had a drink or something, so they just had sex they couldn’t or didn’t consent to, but that’s not rape-rape, okay?
