Assumptions

I've been catching up with one of the latest feminist battles in the progressive blogosphere over the Natalee Holloway disappearance. Below I mentioned how tired I was of the media's fascination with missing white women. Television media just can't resist decorating their newscasts with pictures of beautiful blonde women whenever they get the chance. Since I am neither beautiful, nor blonde, nor young, I am damn sure that, should I turn up missing, my pictures wouldn't make the cut.

So I was almost prepared to applaud when I began to read a postfrom Steve Gilliard about the class issues the media is using to their benefit. But then I kept reading. Boy did he get it wrong. A great response. has been posted by Pinko Feminist Hellcat. And I'm following her excellent lead in my response.

Gillliard wrote:

I don't think it's not so much that "she got what she deserves", but a media refusal to look at their conduct and say these girls were placed in a less than optimal situation. I would also bet no one had an honest discussion with them about acting like adults and making adult choices. Of course not. It was a "Christian" school.

This is such a fascinating assumption. I'm damned if I can figure out how anyone could talk herself into it. And I use the female pronoun purposely. What planet does he think this woman lived on?

Women are bombarded with fear mongering by our friends, our families, our teachers and our media every single day. We constantly read and hear about rape, murder, sexual and domestic assault. It is in our newspapers, on the radio, in our songs, on the internet, in our soap operas, in our movies, in books and in our families. We hear it from the people we know who have survived attacks. They are everywhere: our family, our co-workers, our friends and ourselves.

We are taught techniques and sold products that might protect us. We lock ourselves into our cars, our homes and at work. We take self-defense courses and hold our keys splayed between our fingers. Women in this country almost never walk alone at night, enter an alley even in broad daylight or go to a bar alone.

And yet, somehow, Gilliard believes that there are 18-year-old women in this country who have somehow missed all this and need a man like Gilliard to explain it to them.

There's a lot more to Gilliard's post that you can read for yourself. But he comes around to the same ridiculous assumptions in his conclusion:

Because Natalee Holloway only had limited tools to deal with the adult situation she placed herself in. By drinking, she lowered those odds, but it is likely that her parents, school and chaperones did little to increase her awareness or decision-making skills.

Sure, she made bad decisions, but they shouldn't have the death penalty attached to them. And frankly, she was placed into a situation which she could not handle and her family and friends did not equip her to deal with. You could say she was a victim of American sexual schizophrenia, but that would never make the papers or CNN.

Gilliard has absolutely no evidence to back up his assumptions. None of us has a clue about what actually happened in Aruba. But he is sure that Halloway was "ill-equipped."

I want to know why in the hell he thinks he can say anything about Holloway's life, her abilities or her decision-making skills. In what kind of a world does a man feel he can define the life experience of a woman he's never even met?

Oh, I know. That would be a sexist world.

Is Gilliard blaming the victim? Well … not exactly.

But he is living in a dream world if he thinks that women will benefit from having yet another man explain how she isn't properly prepared for the world.

As Amanda says in her entry into this fray:

Women cannot stop rape. We cannot do it. It's not fucking possible. In order to stop rape in our current climate we would have to sequester ourselves from men completely….

There are men out there doing the hard work to try to change our culture. They aren't doing it by making assumptions about how women lead their lives. They are doing it by making decisions about how men should lead theirs.