This completely awful New York Observer article has been making the rounds on the twittersphere today, with most of my feminist and ally friends observing that the article boils down to, as Spencer Ackerman says, “adult women should not ever have sex with any men ever, and especially not with us.” And frankly, how can one look at an article headlined “Rrrowl! Beware Cougar’s Young Niece, the Cheetah,” and think anything else? Clearly, the article is all about slut-shaming women into retreating to demure ladyhood.
And clearly, that’s what the article is about, which is why I’m breaking my reaction to this post up into two parts. Because while the article is about slut-shaming, the anecdote given to shame sluts is an anecdote about something else entirely.
The piece opens with an anecdote about “Seth,” one of the writer’s friends, who’s been at a party and had a few too many.
“I can barely stand,” Seth said, swaying innocently on the soggy sidewalk. (Seth’s a gentleman and asked that I change the names and obscure certain details in unfurling the horrors that so thoroughly furled him that night, in order to protect the honor of a woman.) He was 24 at the time, a magazine writer.
Joel said, “O.K., I think he needs to go home.”
Dana, who was 29, said, “Let’s go get another drink!”
“I wanna go home,” Seth warbled.
“O.K., I’ll take him home,” Dana said.
Joel gave Seth a “WTF?” look and said, “I’ll take him home.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dana said, hailing a cab and then bundling Seth inside.
“I woke up with a condom still on my dick,” he told me.
[…]
Dana’s hunting methods and psychology bear no resemblance to the cougar. As Seth aptly points out, “A cougar would fuck and then leave and not feel bad.”
Instead, Seth awoke to Dana’s limpid eyes, followed by an awkward kiss in broad daylight as the two parted ways on the street. The cheetah stays the night.
Now, you may see the problem here, but you may be thinking to yourself, “Jeff, that’s just a story about a girl having a one-night stand. What’s wrong with that?” Well, to illustrate, let’s turn to Amber at Prettier than Napoleon:
“I can barely stand,” Sabrina said, swaying innocently on the soggy sidewalk. … She was 24 at the time, a magazine writer.
Jennifer said, “O.K., I think she needs to go home.”
Dave, who was 29, said, “Let’s go get another drink!”
“I wanna go home,” Sabrina warbled.
“O.K., I’ll take her home,” Dave said.
Jennifer gave Sabrina a “WTF?” look and said, “I’ll take her home.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dave said, hailing a cab and then bundling Sabrina inside.
“I woke up with a condom still in my vagina,” she told me.
Precisely. Flip the genders around, and we have what is clearly a case of date rape. Not a borderline case, not a questionable case — a clear-cut, no-question, over the line case of date rape.
Now, we don’t know all the details here, and frankly, we don’t have to. We know 1) Seth was extremely drunk to the point of being barely able to stand, and 2) Dana knowingly took advantage of Seth in that condition. Anything beyond that is going to take us straight to Blame Town, where we can talk about what the victim did to cause his victimization.
So why is it that otherwise sensible people like Megan Carpentier respond by saying, not that this was rape, but that, “Everyone should be disgusted by a one night stand with any of the dudes quoted in the piece, imho.”?
The other day, in comments to a post of mine excoriating Bernard-Henri Lévy for his fawning support of Roman Polanski, a commenter named Politicalguineapig came up with a novel solution to the problem of rape:
Maybe setting up restrictions on men’s movements and disallowing men from gathering in groups would stop the problem. But a bill like that wouldn’t have a hope of passing.
This, of course, thoroughly derailed the thread, ((Which, of course, led Mandolin to write her fine rejoinder.)) causing people to debate whether men having their movements legally restricted would be worse than the present situation, where women are pressured to restrict their own movements out of fear of men. The answer, of course, is that the argument was an apples-and-unicorns debate — the idea that men should be prohibited from gathering in groups, for example, is the exact opposite of what we tell women, which is that they should be in groups at all times.
But that’s neither here nor there. The reason I cite this argument is that it stems from the same place that has people completely miss the rape in the NYO article. It is, quite simply, a gender essentialist argument: men are predators, women are victims.
Now, that is the case more often than the reverse. And one shouldn’t pretend that the number of men being raped by women is in the same statistical universe as the number of women being raped by men — it isn’t. But if you believe, as I do, that one woman being raped is one too many, one man being raped is one too many, too.
Women are capable of being victimizers, just as men are. They’re capable of being abusive. They’re capable of sexual assault. They’re capable of rape. Not all women, mind you. Not even most women. Not even a sizable minority of women are capable of assaulting someone else. But some women are, just as some men are.
The proper response when a story such as this is not to minimize or ignore it, not to bury it by saying, “Well, it’s an outlier, and women are the victims of rape far more, and that’s the real problem.” It may be an outlier, but that doesn’t make it okay. Rape is evil, no matter who perpetrates it.
Is the fallout different? Of course it is. I doubt Seth thinks he was raped, and most people — even most feminists — seem to think that it’s all okay, because he got laid, and that’s what men want most in the whole world. But quite frankly, men don’t want to get laid by anyone, and not all the time. And the fact that Seth was taken advantage of, and that so many people who I consider allies don’t see it — or worse, use the incident as reason to attack the victim — saddens me greatly.
Men commit more crimes against women than women do against men. That has its roots in a number of causes, most societal, some having to do with sexual dimorphism — men are on average bigger and stronger than women, and it’s easier for a man to use force against a woman than vice versa. But that doesn’t mean that men have a unique seed of evil planted inside of them, nor that women are pure. Women and men are both human, and all of us are capable of doing great good, and great evil. We are far more alike than different, and that goes for the bad as well as the good.
Later tonight: Part the Second: In which I discuss slut-shaming.
So as you know, yesterday we found out that there’s a new kind of woman out there: the “cheetah,” a girl who dates guys slightly younger and/or hotter than herself, or possibly a date-rapist, or maybe just someone with low self-esteem, or maybe a cow giving the milk away for free. I’ve 
Bay Cats – Women age 24 to 29 who enjoy sex, surfing, and dating men either age 18-27 or older than 29, but never, under any circumstances, 28-year-olds. 28-year-old guys totally suck. 
Fisher Cats – Women over the age of 70 who enjoy threesomes with male gymnasts and/or models, but also secretly have a crush on the late Chris Farley.
Wildcats – Ironically, wildcats are actually pretty calm most of the time, unless you get them started on how bad Two and a Half Men is. Do not get them started on how bad Two and a Half Men is. You will never hear the end of it. Trust me.
So 
I could write paragraphs and paragraphs about Bernard-Henri Lévy’s bizarre and disgusting HuffPo article, in which he does a 
It is inevitable that people will detransition – no medical treatment has a 100% satisfaction rate. But 94% of trans…