Thank you, Ann Coulter, for this wonderful insight:
And if you are a girl in Aruba or New York City, among the best ways to avoid being the victim of a horrible crime is to not get drunk in public or go off in a car with men you just met. While we’re on the subject of things every 5-year-old should know, I also recommend against dousing yourself in gasoline and striking a match.
That’s right: If only these women wouldn’t go out in public and drink, they wouldn’t be physically harmed.
Now, obviously, all people should do what they can to prevent themselves from being the victim of a crime. In fact, the vast majority of us already do that. But how come when a guy gets killed, no one is saying, “Well, he really shouldn’t have gone to a bar”? Because men are entitled to live their lives like normal human beings, in the public sphere. Women, apparently, are not.
I probably take special offense to Coulter’s comments here because I can relate to the New York grad student who was brutally murdered. She was out in a neighborhood that I frequent. I also go out with my friends, often, around Manhattan. She was about my age, and probably lived a similar lifestyle. What she was doing when she was abducted and killed — hanging out with her friends at a bar — isn’t all that much different from my average Friday night.
The implication, then, is that I’m stupider than a five-year-old for going out and doing what just about every other 22-year-old in this city does to unwind after a long week. But because I’m a vagina-owner, I’m somehow courting fate.
Whenever a gun is used in a crime, there are never-ending news stories about how dangerous guns are. But these girls go out alone, late at night, drunk off their butts, and there’s nary a peep about the dangers of drunk women on their own in public. It’s their “right.”
Um… do you really not see the difference here, Ann? People use guns to kill other people. People aren’t using drunk women to kill other people — they’re killing the women. Perhaps we should be a little more upset at the murderers and the rapists than at the women who had the audacity to go out into public alone.
Yes, of course no one “deserves” to die for a mistake. Or to be raped or falsely accused of rape for a mistake. I have always been unabashedly anti-murder, anti-rape and anti-false accusation — and I don’t care who knows about it!
But these statements would roll off the tongue more easily in a world that so much as tacitly acknowledged that all these messy turns of fate followed behavior that your mother could have told you was tacky.
In other words, sure, I don’t think anyone should be raped or murdered, but I’m having a hard time saying that because, well, they kinda do deserve that. Sluts.
It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that girls shouldn’t be bar-hopping alone or taking their clothes off in front of strangers, and that young men shouldn’t be hiring strippers. But we live in a world of Bill Clinton, Paris Hilton, Howard Stern, Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman,” Democratic fund-raisers at the Playboy Mansion and tax deductions for entertaining clients at strip clubs.
This is an age in which the expression “girls gone wild” is becoming a redundancy. So even as the bodies pile up, I don’t think the message about integrity is getting through.
Yes, it’s the girls’ fault that female bodies are piling up. Not the fault of, say, the people killing them. I mean, what do you expect when you go out at night?
Speaking of doing really dangerous stuff and courting death, I can’t wait for Ann Coulter’s column next week where she criticizes Roman Catholic nun Sister Karen Klimczak, who operated a halfway house for recently released convicts and was murdered by one of them last week. Because that’s just stupid.