Dr. Ruth and the Evil Warnings

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the mildly scandalous sex therapist, now in her mid-80's, has suddenly managed to turn the entire feminist movement against her. Oh dear. What on earth did she manage to say to rattle them so much?

"I know it’s controversial, but for your program, I’m going to stand up and be counted and, like I do in the book, be very honest. I am very worried about college campuses saying that a woman and a man or two men or two women, but I talk right now about woman and man, can be in bed together, and at one time, naked, and at one time, he or she — most of the time they think she can say, I changed my mind. No such thing is possible."

 Aye, that's relatively controversial as stated, However, in subsequent tweets, she clarified what she meant - and didn't mean - to say:

I am 100% against rape. I do say to women if they don't want to have sex with a man, they should not be naked in bed w/him.
That's risky behavior like crossing street against the light. If a driver hits you, he's legally in the wrong but you're in the hospital.

So what's the problem?

Apparently, the naysayers insist that Dr. Ruth is claiming that the man's action is no longer rape and should no longer be prosecuted as such, that the man has no responsibility over his actions whatsoever, and that she is basically placing the full fault of rape on the woman. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be able to refute her position without resorting to the bizarre, possibly because her position is quite reasonable. One commenter on an American Thinker article claimed that "blaming women for the rape", as Dr. Ruth was supposedly doing, was like "saying that if a dog humps your leg, it's your fault for having a leg." Others have brought up the old "asking for it by wearing a skirt that exposes her knees" claim. I find it strange that feminists are so bent on their goals of "free sex" that they cannot bear the thought of a woman engaging in any sort of selective behavior in her sex life without having to come to the bizarre conclusion that men are incapable of being responsible for anything they do.

But that isn't, at the core, what is bothering me about this "controversy".

What the naysayers are doing, at the core, is claiming that a private individual, however notable, cannot give advice to women in order to minimize the chances of them becoming victimized without somehow affecting the legal responsibility of the perpetrator of the crime. The reason this bothers me is because it depends upon the belief that we cannot simply choose how to regulate our own behavior; it must be unregulated entirely or under government control.

It seems that people are losing sight of the excellent "third way" between regulation and deregulation, the way upon which this country was founded. John Adams said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Putting aside the question of Christianity and religion in morality for the moment, I would hope that we can all agree that the intent of structuring the Constitution such that the government should not regulate us was to allow us to take up the responsibility of regulating ourselves. If we lose sight of that, we may deserve the tyranny we risk bringing upon ourselves.

Women should have every right to take control over their own sexuality by setting boundaries, starting with the very simplest and easiest to understand: if you don't want to have sex with a man, it will be much, much easier to avoid doing so if you do not climb naked into bed with him.