Because no one knows what really happened that night, anything I write below is purely speculative. But what is certain is that a bunch of drunken college boys at an elite university hired an exotic dancer as a way of entertaining themselves. And I am, unfortunately, used to scenes like that with male students. You see, I served for 11 years as rabbi at another elite university, Oxford, and witnessed firsthand the growing misogyny that has become a central staple of university life.
Even when I read the e-mail the police released that was sent out at 1:58 a.m., directly after the alleged rape by one of the players on the team, and which read, "To whom it may concern, tomorrow night, after tonights show, ive decided to have some strippers over to edens 2c. all are welcome… I plan on killing the bitches as soon as they walk in and proceding to cut their skin off while [ejaculating] in my duke issue spandex…,” my reaction was one of resignation and recognition. University men in the Western world view going to college as an opportunity for the fulfillment of their unbridled lust. And, sadly, it is these ostensibly exalted educational institutions that one finds the greatest contempt for women. Saddest of all, unless these activities lead to some terrible tragedy, like rape, nobody cares.
At Oxford during the rowing “Eights Week” that took place every June, I used to listen in astonishment as the male students chanted:
“A-bor-tion, A-bor-tion…
Lay that lady on her back. Pull that baby from her crack.
A-bor-tion, A-bor-tion….”
Then there were the “panty-raiders” at Eight’s Week, the male students who would steal women’s underwear and hoist them up the boat house flag pole.
It is time for the Western world to accept the sad truth that universities are becoming bastions of female-hating lechers who spend four years trying to bed as many women as possible, while making the word “bitch” one of the most used in their vocabularies. Tom Wolfe’s newest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, chronicles the unbelievable scorn for women that permeates the American campus, and depicts how women have lost all dignity, becoming complicit in their own degradation, as they stop at nothing to become the male plaything.
The greatest cultural story since the 1960’s is the decline and fall of the Western male, and how women have accommodated that fall by allowing themselves to be treated like garbage by men. It’s now 40 years since the second wave of feminism, and yet to be a guy today is to have your pick of hundreds of women who will sleep with you and expect not only no commitment, but not even courteous treatment. You can burp in their presence, break wind, and they will still go to bed with you. To be a guy is to have women move into your apartment and cook and clean for you, even as you endlessly push off the question of marriage, which you have no intention of addressing anyway.
Once, when I lectured at Yale, a female student perfectly identified for me how it is a man’s world and how it all begins at university: “When it comes to love and relationships the men here sit and pick us out, like a man sifting through a jar of jellybeans for the colors and tastes that he likes, leaving behind all the ones that don’t appeal to his taste buds at the moment.”
If you’re a man, and a woman can no longer excite you, what will? A bunch of guys hitting a ball with a bat? Watching race cars go in a circle for 500 miles? Do men realize just how pathetic they have become as they endlessly pursue cheap substitutes for a lost sense of erotic excitement? Most of the men I meet aren’t even that attracted to their wives and live in predictable and monotonous drudgery in their marriages as a result. Yes, there is a price to pay for disrespecting women.
Male overexposure to women has even led to the death of the heterosexual man as we know him. If the definition of a heterosexual man is a male who is attracted to women, then most men today are barely heterosexual.
Think about it. Nearly all the men I know are only attracted to about one in 10 women, that is, the 10 percent of women they consider "hot." The other 90 percent leave them cold. Doesn’t that mean that they are ninety percent asexual? And I’m not trying to be funny. If a man is not attracted to a woman, then he is not heterosexual. Period. And if he only attracted to a small fraction of the women he meets, then he is fractionally heterosexual.
The second great tragedy of the contemporary Western man is that since women no longer strongly attract him, he cannot separate himself from his male buddies and truly attach himself to a female soul mate. Everywhere I go in the Western world I meet husbands whose real confidantes are still their drinking and card-playing buddies, and who are lonely in their marriages as a result. Alternatively, they are single men who are addicted to dating but who never fall in love.
Both of these factors were in operation that terrible night at Duke. Again, I emphasize that we do not know whether the alleged sexual attack occurred, and anything I write is purely speculative. Having said that, we do know that the lacrosse team Neanderthals paid the alleged victim $400 to excite and arouse them. And she arrived as the perfect obedient male fantasy, wearing, according to The New York Times, a “negligee and shiny white strappy high heels.”
According to a witness, when the alleged victim refused to participate in degrading acts that might finally give these over-exposed and desensitized men some excitement, the men ganged up on her as a pack. Perhaps they did, perhaps they didn’t, and let us not forget that the young men in question are adamant about their innocence. But we should be having a national conversation about the kind of woman-hating sentiment that would have men maintain that, after all, if the bitch doesn’t serve the purpose of turning us guys on, what on earth else could she be possibly be good for?
It is time that we begin to reform American men and inspire them to become gentlemen. And there’s no better place to begin that than on our college campuses.
