Date Rape Camille Paglia

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According to statistics provided by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, the largest anti-sexual violence organization, every 109 seconds another person experiences sexual assault, and more than half of these cases are categorized as date rape (1). What’s even more startling is that most of these cases go unreported, which leave perpetrators free to commit additional assaults rather than be prosecuted for their crimes (RAINN 2). In her article “On Date Rape,” Camille Paglia focuses on the issue of date rape among young feminists and discusses her argument that the prevention of date rape is the responsibility of women and that incidents of date rape are the result of women who are not vigilant. While Paglia makes valid points about the need for personal responsibility and risk assessment, her argument, which fully blames women for incidents of date rape, is wrought with fallacies like hasty generalizations, false analogies, and appeals to fear, which significantly reduces the validity and logic of her argument. Paglia utilizes an appeal to fear almost immediately in her argument …show more content…
She claims that if she ever were in a dating situation in which she was overpowered or raped, she would take personal responsibility and not press charges because ultimately it would mean that she misread the signals of the man (Cooper & Patton 145). In appeals to authority, writers often use their power to persuade readers of their argument, but this only holds true when the authority is an expert in the field being argued or specializes in the subject of the argument (Cooper & Patton 123). Paglia’s attempt is fallacious because she is neither an expert in sexual assault, nor a specialist in the field of date rape, yet she tries to use authority to persuade readers that she knows what causes date rape and what victims of this crime should do in
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