On Date Rape Camille Paglia Analysis

Female personal safety has always been in heated discussion. As there have been more and more news reports about date rape and female personal safety brought by online date, people may feel concerned about the risks faced by females today, especially the potential threats to female personal safety, including the potential for physical or psychological harms. In her article On Date Rape, Camille Paglia proposes her advices to young females with regard to personal safety. However, in spite of her good intention, there is little in this article that can be convincing and reasoning in demonstrating the conditions of women today.
In the first and second paragraph, Paglia makes her first mistakes of double standard. Paglia claims that her generation …show more content…
For one, false dilemma happens when Paglia claims that the minute going out with a man or going to a bar to have a drink there is a risk. According to this opinion, the act of going out with a man or going to a bar while having the risk, and the act of not going out with a man or not going to a bar while having no risk, are two and only alternatives for consideration; young women will either go to the bar for a drink with risks or choose to not go to the bar without risks. In this claim, Paglia obviously forgets the other possibilities that also exist, for example, going to the bar without risks. For another, hasty generalization happens in this claim too. It is clearly not reasonable to generalize from the individual cases of going for a drink and meeting danger, because this condition cannot represent all the situation of women having a drink in a bar or going out with a man. This overgeneralization is lack of the support of data and resources, and it leads to wrong way of reasoning. In the meantime, Paglia also claims young feminists are from pampered, white, middle-class family and they expect everything to be safe, while black Hispanic women come from fully sexual culture; this argument depending on hasty assumption and individual cases of some white women and some black women is lack of …show more content…
Paglia argues getting drunk and staying in a guy’s room is as same as leaving a car with keys on the hood in NYC. Drinking and staying in a man’s room and leaving a car with keys on the hood do have similarities to some degree, but the two things have essential difference. Raping and theft are crimes of different levels, and the girl’s condition cannot be compared to the car. Although they are both possibly get assaulted, the argument provides no evidence to support this