It's On Us Plays Women for Fools

The left’s vaginal obsession has evolved into a genuine embarrassment to American women.  Its latest lunacy is playing out in California, where feminists seek a unique government intervention into a crisis of college culture that radical liberal-progressives are largely responsible for creating in the first place.

A recent government study found that 1 in 5 women can be expected to be sexually assaulted during their college years.  That is shocking if true, but not surprising.

For years, radical feminists have insisted on coed dormitories and bathrooms, free condoms, Sex Fairs, Vagina-Day, sex-themed coursework, and a campus hook-up culture that teaches responsibility-free sex as a form of casual entertainment for both men and women. 

With female students suffering more consequences of this culture than male students, liberals are calling on government to step in and fix the problem.  California’s state legislature sent to Gov. Jerry Brown a bill requiring their taxpayer-funded colleges to mandate that students give “active consent” to one another before and during all sexual activity, including kissing … and including sexual activity between married partners.

What, exactly, “active consent” means is anyone’s guess.  An advisor at UCLA’s freshman orientation this fall urged partners engaged in sexual activity to ask each other “Are you ok?” every few minutes because, you know, women can change their minds in a moment’s notice.  “You’re the one at risk of committing sexual violence or sexual assault,” she warned. “If your partner goes silent at any point, just stop.”

With amazing coincidence, the White House last week launched an anti-campus assault campaign of its own.  Called It’s On Us, the campaign, which targets men in particular, will organize a nationwide sign-up to combat the campus rape culture. One supporter praised the campaign for inviting men, not indicting them, to join the conversation.

The White House campaign is rich in ironies. Those signing up for It’s On Us will have their names, emails and zip codes collected by Generation Progress, the youth outreach arm of the liberal Center for American Progress advocacy group, just in time for the 2014 mid-term elections. 

Moreover, college administrators responsible for creating the assault-rich campus environment will be the beneficiaries of yet another pool of federal dollars – $6 million in grants offered by the Justice Department’s Office of Violence Against Women “to develop comprehensive campus sexual assault prevention and response programs.” Presumably, such comprehensive programs will not include reversing colleges’ failed gender cohabitation policies or sex-drenched courses, fairs, plays and other programs.

The greatest irony, though, is feminists’ appeals on behalf of this campaign. Radical feminists, of ‘women need a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ fame, vowed to throw off the chains of enslavement to the patriarchy – “the man” – and they’ve successfully depreciated men and destroyed the heterosexual marriage culture. Today, more than half of all U.S. adults over age 16 are single (50.2 percent), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, compared to 37.4 percent in 1976.

Yet as It’s On Us launched, one outspoken feminist played a laughable little-lady-victims-in-need-of-big-strong-men card.  Under the headline, “Good men don’t let women get raped. So why aren’t you guys doing enough,” the feminist appealed to men, their goodness and their chivalry to “do a little more … Not just because we women need all the help we can get, but because, deep down, I think you want to.”

“As far as we’ve come,” President Obama remarked during the campaign launch, “the fact is that from sports leagues to pop culture to politics, our society still does not sufficiently value women.”

It’s clear that President Obama and his liberal-progressive allies don’t value women enough to listen to them. In a focus group of women we commissioned earlier this year, respondents (58 percent of whom had voted for Obama in 2012) named the economy/jobs, immigration and healthcare as the biggest issues on their minds.  They are struggling in their daily effort to balance quality of life with economic reality.  They are deeply concerned about their own and their nation’s financial situation, they believe government waste and corruption is rife, and they have an overall distrust of Washington. 

With shallow campaigns like It’s On Us, the left continues to play women (and men) as fools, cheapening women in virtually every possible way.

In the 1940s, women sung along to the pop hit, “Hey, Daddy, I want a diamond ring, bracelets, everything ..."  Today’s left asks women to sing an even more degrading tune, “Hey, Government, I want free birth control, abortion-on-demand, and a new definition of rape.”