Conservative Pundit Doubles Down On Offensive Rape Comments, Says Only ‘Real Victims’ Deserve Treatment

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Scores of men and women reportedly came out to protest a speaker at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, this week, and with good reason. The speaker was George “Rape is Privilege” Will, and while the speech gave him the opportunity to explain his previous comments about survivor privilege and how sexual assault confers “a coveted status,” he just made it worse by talking about how medical resources should only go to “real victims of real rape” instead of all those Fakey McSlutterfakes out there.

Will’s comments are appalling. And to rub salt in the wound, he made $48,000 for the speaking engagement. According to The Huffington Post, that money reportedly came from a private donation, but there were almost certainly some professors on campus looking at their pay stubs and wanting to throw their Ph.D.s out the window on the day Will’s talk was announced. (A school administrator said Will was actually the least expensive speaker in the lecture series.)

Will has been a columnist for The Washington Post for decades, and this June he sparked a huge amount of outrage over an article in which he  said, “when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.” According to The Huffington Post, Will has stood by those statements in the months since his column came out. And last night one survivor asked him point-blank to clarify comments he had made about the financial cost treatment for rape victims.

“He replied in a series of non-finished sentences at which point I said, ‘I have specifically received treatment and is it worth it?’ and he said, ‘Yes, it is, but only for real survivors of real rape,’ and it was very diminishing and deterring my ability to talk about it,” she said to WLWT NBC 5.

She’s brave, and not just because she stood up and confronted him directly, but because she had to sit through this garbage without vomiting or flipping tables. She has a stronger stomach than I.

 

This kind of talk about “real rape” silences survivors with implicit suspicion. Not only have they already been victimized terribly, now Will thinks that if they want counseling or medical treatment they should have to stand in front of an old troll like Will to relive horrors while he grills them about skirt lengths and if they had anything to drink and if they were “good” girls to begin with. That must be one of those coveted survivor privileges he was talking about.

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