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Broad City on holiday parties

Why didn’t UVA investigate a gang rape claim?

UVA getting serious about rape

Elizabeth Lauten resigns over Obama daughter criticism

Eugene Robinson on the Obama daughter story

Laura Ingraham pulls the “silent majority” line

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll speak to a former virginity pledger about why she changed her mind. The University of Virginia rape story gets huge and what was the deal with that congressional staffer who attacked Sasha and Malia Obama?

Y’all, I am so excited about the next season of Comedy Central’s Broad City, which debuts in January. To help advertise it the two main characters, Abbie and Ilana, did a guide to holiday parties.

• Broad *

The show is really raunchy but that is why it’s so brilliantly feminist. It shows women can do the same kind of raunchy humor as men, but it never feels forced or trying too hard. Plus, the satirical stuff about being young in the big city is dead on. You can watch the first season on Hulu Plus.

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The campus rape issue just seems to be getting bigger and bigger. Last month, the Rolling Stone published an article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely about the campus rape problem at the University of Virginia, which is getting the highest level of investigation for purported Title IX violations that you can get. Erdely went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to talk about her article.

• UVA 1 *

At this point I must break in and acknowledge that the rape apologists have gotten involved, and because there is no such thing as a rape story they will believe, they are accusing the anonymous girl in this story of trying to frame the unnamed men who she describes raping her. But even on the exceedingly rare chance that this woman is lying for whatever reason, it doesn’t even matter. The story wasn’t about this particular rape and whether it happened or not. The story was about the school refusing to even investigate it. Unless rape apologists are actually willing to come right out and say they think that rape reports should never be investigated, hand-wringing about this case is a red herring. In those exceedingly rare cases where victims are lying, an investigation will likely show that to be the case. It’s funny how rape is the one crime where the fact that a small percentage of complainants are lying is wielded to support the idea that we shouldn’t even investigate the complaints at all.

And the lack of any interest in investigating is what Erdely was interested in.

• UVA 2 *

The issue here isn’t whether this is the exceedingly rare case where a woman is falsely accusing a man. The issue here is that a girl is standing in front of you, telling a story that is 99% likely to be true, and you, the university officials, are pushing her in the direction of just dropping the whole thing. The university is on the hook for this regardless of what the actual facts of the case are, which weren’t flushed out because of the lack of investigation. Which is why, after this whole story came out, UVA apologized to the student in question. Indeed, the public shaming has created quite the reaction, as the school also, in an effort at getting good PR, shut down the frats until January. Of course, as many students pointed out, that means that most of that time is during the holiday break, meaning that it’s barely a blip. But it’s more than just a brief break to try to buy good will with the public, according to NPR.

• UVA 3 *

I went in feeling skeptical, but these comments make me feel better. A lot of the time, the discussion of alcohol and rape centers around scolding women not to drink so much. While drinking too much isn’t good, of course, that scold suggests women are bringing this on themselves while ignoring the way that sexual predators deliberately use alcohol in order to incapacitate women. Which includes behaviors like pressuring women to drink more, deliberately obscuring how much alcohol is in a beverage, or targeting freshmen girls who have little to no experience drinking, knowing that it’s likely their inexperience will lead to overdoing it. In many of these cases, telling women to watch it is ineffective. How can you “watch” how much you drink if you don’t know how much you’re drinking? Beyond that, of course, it’s just ridiculous to think that the price someone should pay for a victimless misdemeanor crime like overdrinking should be violent sexual assault. A hangover, okay. A ticket for public intoxication, sure. But not rape.

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Interview

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Okay so here’s a story that seemed like a silly little thing to me at first but gradually I began to realize speaks to much bigger issues that it might seem at first. Elizabeth Lauten, the comms director for Republican Rep. Stephen Fincher (TN), decided to get all judgmental on Sasha and Malia Obama for how they were dressed and acting at the Thanksgiving turkey pardon. For those didn’t see the pardon, let me be clear the girls were acting and looking just fine. They were wearing skirts and sweaters and looked like normal teenage girls of 16 and 13, which is their ages. There were occasional moments of eye-rolling, which is expected because this is a very stupid tradition that really deserves more than a little eye-rolling. To normal people, it was cute to see our president get the dad-is-a-dork treatment from his kids. Wholesome family fun. But to Lauten, it was a travesty.

• Lauten 1 *

My initial take on it is simple: Part of the conservative mindset is that there’s nothing more satisfying than lecturing teenagers to stand up straight and wipe that smirk of their face. Lauten may only be in her early 30s, but she is really getting that church lady act a-going. But reading some takes on Twitter and elsewhere, especially from women of color, I was really educated in how this had many layers below that surface. After all, the girls were dressed in exactly the kind of modest dresses and sweaters you expect kids to wear to a family holiday event. They looked like they were straight out of a Thanksgiving spread in Martha Stewart’s magazine. The only way you see their sweaters and skirts and think “bar skank” is if your racist assumptions about black women’s sexuality overwhelms your ability to accurately assess even something as simple as what a sweater looks like. So it’s true that Lauten is someone who really loves scolding teenagers, it seems that there’s a deeper, even more troubling angle to it all.

Which is why I was glad to see this story get the full blown Rachel Maddow treatment, because I do think that it speaks a lot about race, gender, and conservative attitudes about female sexuality.

• Lauten 2 *

I’d like to take a moment and reflect on how far we’ve all come that this is even happening, that the discussion is getting deeper on this level. Just a few years ago, it was a truism in most media circles that in-depth political analysis was impossible on cable news, and yet here we have Rachel Maddow inviting Eugene Robinson on to explain, in no uncertain terms, exactly how this attack was both racist and misogynist. But, of course, you usually don’t get that kind of discourse because the second you start to point this stuff out in most places, you get the defensive nuh-uh reactions from people who refuse to see racism or sexism unless someone is being so overt it’s undeniable. So in most media spaces, the line was that Lauten had to go because she was rude to children.

• Lauten 3 *

I think that’s part of it. Dehumanizing minor children simply because they belong to a different political party than you is really bad form for a congressional staffer. But I am a cynical person and frankly, I think there’s more to it than this. Right now conservatives are doing everything in their power to take away women’s reproductive rights, often in attacks that disproportionately affect women of color. Make no mistake; this is due entirely to the belief that women generally, but especially women of color, are out of control sluts and that we need to have our rights taken away to get us under control. But they know they can’t say that out loud, because they’re already fighting off the “war on women” narrative. So they claim that these attacks are about “compassion” or “religious freedom” or whatever, anything but admitting it’s all about their paranoid fear that women are out there being all sexy. Lauten, by spinning her bizarre racist and sexist fantasy about Sasha and Malia Obama, gave the game away. So she had to go away. I think that’s what happened more than the hands-off-the-kids thing.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, self-serving racist denial of obvious reality edition. Which of course means that the conservative du jour is Laura Ingraham, who is a real champ at just making crap up.

• Ingraham *

This is the classic “silent majority” nonsense, where you swear up and down that millions of people agree with you but the only reason they aren’t saying so is because they’re scared or busy or whatever. It’s about puffing up your numbers with invisible people. It’s also nonsense, as anyone who has tangled with conservatives can tell you. They are not a group that is prone to keeping their opinions to themselves. And they love protesting! Ask anyone who has heard the term “Tea Party.” Or anyone who has tried to walk into an abortion clinic.