Advice

“Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.” ......Gildor to Frodo.

Kasich was apparently asked what he as President would do about the problem of campus rape. After some of the usual bullshit about laws and rape kits, he added this bit of fatherly advice:

I’d also give you one bit of advice,” Kasich went on. “Don’t go to parties where there’s a lot of alcohol.” The crowd applauded him.

Cristina Cauterucci, writing in Slate, was offended.

Kasich’s viewpoint is a cynical, victim-blaming, finger-wagging perspective. Former Dear Prudence columnist Emily Yoffe once made a similar argument to Kasich’s in the pages of Slate, when she wrote that “the rise of female binge drinking has made campuses a prey-rich environment.” If women didn’t get drunk, the thinking goes, they would be able to resist the advances of men waiting in dark corners, ready to prey on easy, intoxicated targets. And if they just stayed away from men who can’t control their alcohol-amplified sexual impulses, they wouldn’t become the victim of such heinous crimes.

Let us just note that Cauterucci is not one of the wise. She is in fact an idiot. (So is Kasich, only not on this particular subject.) She continues with the following irrelevant twaddle.

It would make just as much, if not more sense to tell men to stop drinking so much so they don’t rape women. But rape and sexual assault are just as much about power and violence as they are about sex, and alcohol is not the root cause of rape. Kasich should blame misogyny, poor sex education, and toxic male behavior, not women, for the scourge of campus sexual assault. Women don’t need paternalistic counsel from politicians—they need men to learn about consent, respect for boundaries, and the swift punishment that awaits them when colleges and courts do their jobs. ...

Kasich had offered some practical advice on how to avoid being raped. Similarly, parents warn their children not to cross the street without looking both ways instead of going on irrelevant rants about careless drivers and insufficient penalties for failure to yield. Yes, the world might be made safer for chinchillas if frogs had fur, and women could get safely drunk at frat parties if men would be re-engineered to feminist specifications. Perhaps that will happen someday when the CRISPR-CAS9 system is perfected, but in the meantime, people are advised to check traffic before crossing streets, to watch their footing when on precarious mountain trails, and to not get so drunk that they can't figure out what is happening to them. And if they do, they bear some moral responsibility, even if no legal responsibility, for what happens to them.