Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

An Israeli graduate student writes a paper explaining the lack of raping by IDF soldiers as a political tactic and wins an award, proving once and for all that the academic world is pretty much nuts

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences - just as organized military rape would have done.

In other words, it's dehumanizing not to rape someone, and the IDF can't win. I knew this student was a woman before I even read through the rest of the news article, because only a woman could conceive of a scenario in which a man is guilty no matter what he does. Unfortunately, as the rest of the article indicates, the bias of this student and her professors goes much deeper than this.

The other problem with the paper is that the author apparently sees rape, as most women do, in sexual terms while rapists see it in terms of exerting power. In a woman's mind, someone she regards as a potential rapist refusing to rape a woman must mean that he finds her unworthy of sexual relations. In other words, she is unappealing in the extreme or less than human. In that sense, not raping is viewed as an insult. This line of reasoning, compounded with the author's bias, led to the illogical conclusion that not committing a crime is an injustice in itself.

The student's advisor should have had a long, sincere talk with her after reading a draft of this paper, but instead she publishes and gets an award. Welcome to academia, where up is down, black is white, and, where there are such things as right and wrong, right is wrong.

[h/t: The Sundries Shack]

Update: Analysis of my analysis by Tiny Cat Pants.