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Pop Culture
May 13, 2009, 11:12AM

The Anti-Feminism of Jezebel?

Linda Hirshman's delicate sensibilities and the case of Megan Carpentier. 

I completely agree with Megan. Sexual assault is horrible. The aftermath of sexual assault is horrible. (I'd tell you a story here, but since, as we all know, "a personal, revelatory anecdote tends to abort what is supposed to be a political conversation", I'll refrain. Except to say that it involves being told by a police officer: Just walk down the beach tomorrow in a bikini and maybe he'll try again. Reporting is not all it's cracked up to be.)
When you have been sexually assaulted, you get to let your emotions work themselves out in whatever peculiar way they see fit, and unless you're working through it by doing something truly awful, like shooting random strangers or cutting off your limbs, people who tell you that you are responding to it in the "wrong" way are as completely out of line as someone who tells someone who has just lost her spouse or her child that she's grieving in the "wrong" way. 
There are people like that -- people whose heart is two sizes too small, who have no more empathy than your average tin can. I have never understood them. It's especially odd when they go out of their way to lecture people about their responses, or to tell them they're hurting feminism. As Linda Hirshman did.
It's also completely unclear to me why not having reported one's own rape is inconsistent with urging the military to do a better job of controlling it. It would be one thing if we knew that the military was doing the absolute best it could to control rape, and the only thing that stood in the way of a completely successful response was the fact that not all victims report rape. In that case, I don't know anyone who would criticize the military. But we don't know any such thing. And as long as there are other problems with the military's (or any other organization's) response to rape -- the fact that some people in the military don't take allegations of rape seriously when it is reported, or think that rape victims are whiners who ought to just suck it up (no pun intended), etc. -- I can't see why someone who didn't report her own rape is in any way inconsistent for pointing those problems out.
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