After the 2016 election results, I listened to a podcast about the effect that the election had on Clinton supporters. I listened carefully to the women's concerns. I didn't understand the emotions these women were having. I wanted to understand them. I can sympathize with the feelings they professed. I have these feelings myself. Yet I could not connect emotionally, though I bent my mind to it and searched my heart to discover the tender feelings of sympathy with one who has been wronged.
Then the podcast host told the story of a woman in Utah. I live in Utah. I grew up here, moved away after college, and recently returned. I had heard of the woman being interviewed. I was sure she was truly concerned about the status of women in our culture.
Then the host said some things that turned a key in my mind. I don't care to recall the exact words, as I do not care to cite the podcast. The idea being put forth was that women in Utah are oppressed by a patriarchal society and an oppressive religious majority that limits women's freedoms.
Whether or not those claims are true is not my current focus.
The key that turned in my head was that the podcast producers had designed their stories to garner sympathy for victims of oppressive male domination. As a woman living in Utah, having received a modest college education, having traveled the world and around the United States, and then having returned to the state of Utah, I am assured that I am not a victim. Nor do many of my fellow women living here feel like victims. Even those who agree that we live in a paternalistic, oppressive, religiously-dominated culture do not feel like victims.
Why, I questioned, were the podcast hosts, not to mention the feminist-minded women in Utah, trying to make victims out of people who do not feel like victims? Do they believe that the rest of us educated, world-travelled women are blind to our victimhood? What do they hope that we will gain by accepting that we are victims?
I wrote an email to this effect to the general email listed on the homepage for the podcast. I didn't expect to hear back from them, and I moved on.
Today, however, I read something that brought my previous experience into a little clearer focus. The article was about women who claim they have been raped, their cases have been evaluated, and their claims of rape have been dismissed. Here's one of the author's conclusions:
"The damaged credibility of fake victims tends to undermine the credibility of real victims."
This is relevant to how I felt about the post-election podcast. I am not a victim of a paternalistic religion. Trying to make me into one is damaging to those women who actually are.
At the end of the article, the author theorized that some of these "fake victims" are influenced by people with an "anti-rape culture" agenda. The conclusion of the article could be the conclusion of my own experience with the podcast:
"It’s a system which systematically preys on and exploits the emotional vulnerability of young women in order to use them as publicity fodder for an ideological agenda."
Quotes from "'Rape Culture' and Feminism's Sexual Exploitation of Women" by Robert Tracinski. http://thefederalist.com/2015/02/10/rape-culture-and-feminisms-sexual-exploitation-of-women/
Another view of this situation:
"I agree with William Layne that broader societal trends shouldn’t excuse what is often, plain and simple, malicious behavior. He is certainly correct that false accusers are not “cogs in a cultural machine.” They are individuals with agency—whether they admit it or not—with a wide range of complex motivations. However, I do think the larger sexual confusion on campus causes young women to engage in an activity they truly are not ready for and, even worse, don’t fully comprehend, with disastrous results." -- Heather Wilhelm, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/feminism-and-rape-culture/
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