Ladies! National Review's Rich Lowry Will Jam His Tongue Down Your Throat, For Freedom!

National Review editor Rich Lowry would just like everyone to calm down, because there is no problem with sexual assault on college campuses. In an appearance on ABC's This Week yesterday, he was just delighted to announce that, because there were problems with some of the reporting in Rolling Stone's story on rape at University of Virginia, there is now actually no problem whatsoever with that fine institution. Lowry explained,

 Rolling Stone didn’t do basic fact-checking here, I believe because they had an agenda to portray UVA as this bastion of white male privilege, where basically rapists rule the social life, and the damage will never be undone. And I think that if there's any justice in the world, I think Rolling Stone would have to give up covering music and become the alumni magazine of the University of Virginia.

After all, it's not like UVA is also the target of a federal investigation into sexual assaults on campus or anything. Because there were flaws in one story, apparently the feds have gone home and all the other UVA women in the article magically became liars, too.

Others on the panel weren't going to let Lowry's comment go; Van Jones worried that the flawed Rolling Stone story -- and attacks on "Jackie," the victim it focused on -- will "[embolden] people who want to attack young women’s credibility when they come forward." Campus sexual assault is still a much larger problem than one story, said Jones, citing estimates thatone in five college women experience a sexual assault.*

Lowry was far too smart for such unfair generalizations, though, insisting that the 1 in 5 figure was "not a real number. That is an advocacy number.” You see, the survey that the estimate came from is totally invalid, he explained, because it “includes attempted forced kissing as sexual assault.” Hey, looks like Rich Lowry at least reads his own writers -- he's basically echoing points made in a September column (though not in National Review) by NRO editor Jonah Goldberg, who took pains to define large categories of sexual assault statistics out of existence. Van Jones, ever the gentleman, offered to forcibly kiss Lowry and see how he liked it, but no, don't be silly, someone holding you down and forcing their tongue into your mouth is just foreplay, not sexual assault. And most rape isn't rape either. There are legions of men on the internet ready to explain that, as well.

Silly feminazis, why won't you see reason and stop all the whining about a bit of fun?

*Is it an absolutely verified number? Hey, guess what -- thanks to women's fear of reporting assaults, the statistics actually are hard to pin down, but surveys do suggest that something like 20 percent of women experience some form of sexual assault during their college careers. Or maybe it's zero, since women just lie all the time.

[ MediaMatters / TPM / WaPo ]