The sadistic torment of a teenage boy with autism caught nationwide attention. A 16-year-old autistic boy, only being identified by his middle name of Michael, started writing love letters to a 15-year-old girl at his high school. She, along with 17-year-old cheerleader Lauren Bush, started spending time with Michael. While Michael thought that the 15-year-old was his girlfriend, the two girls had far more disturbing things in mind.
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The girls assaulted and tormented Michael. They put a knife to his throat while he begged them to stop. They kicked him in the groin, dragged him by his hair, and tried to force him to have sex with his family dog. On Valentine’s Day, they took him to a frozen pond and convinced him to fetch a basketball for them. He fell through the ice, and as he struggled to climb out, neither girl tried to help. On the way home, they made him ride in the trunk, because they didn’t want to get the inside of the car wet. Michael nearly froze to death. And they recorded all of it on their cell phones.
Understandably, people around the country were outraged. Bush is being charged as an adult with first-degree assault, false imprisonment, and child pornography solicitation. The 15-year-old pled guilty to second-degree assault and displaying an obscene photograph of a minor. Michael, though, is an avid defender of his tormentors. According to him, it was just a sick joke that went too far, that they never truly intended to hurt him. He doesn’t want them to get jail time, and is angry that someone ratted the girls out. This was worrying to his father, who said, “My son is a staunch defender of his tormentors; it’s embarrassing. He may be more disabled than I convinced myself that he was and maybe more lost than I realized. That’s something I am going to have to deal with on a later day. Right now, I am trying to get justice for him and others like him.”
While the story is outrageous on its own, one so-called feminist, Hanna Rosin, has made it even more despicable. The founder of Slate’s Double X calls it a case of “bullying”, not assault, and dismisses the notion that Michael is a victim. To Rosin, this was a case of bad judgment — on the part of Michael, not the two girls who repeatedly physically and sexually assaulted him. Rosin brushes it off as something that an average frat boy might do and laments that Michael is being painted as “the perfect victim”. Rosin claims that what Michael did in the pursuit of winning over the 15-year-old girl took “courage”, even though it was something that made him “uncomfortable”. She describes all of it as a prank gone wrong.
Because, sure — repeatedly assaulting a boy and allowing him to practically freeze to death is just a prank that made Michael uncomfortable.
Gee… doesn’t this sound an awful lot like victim-blaming? The very thing that the so-called feminists constantly rail against? It would be extremely interesting to see if Rosin took the same position about this case if the genders were reversed, and it had been two boys tormenting an autistic teenage girl. Would it still have been an uncomfortable prank that took courage? Or would she have been calling for the boys’ heads? Rosin’s column is truly despicable, because she is literally excusing physical and sexual assault purely based on the gender of the perpetrators.
Part of Rosin’s argument relies on the fact that Michael defends his two attackers. How bad could it have been if he still wants to be friends with them, right? Of course, this is by no means uncommon among victims of rape and abuse. Women excuse the behavior of their abusers all the time, brushing it off as unintentional and insisting that “he didn’t mean it”. By Rosin’s standards, we should just take them at their word and let it go. Or is that only the case when the victim is a male? She is justifying truly sadistic behavior of two girls that took advantage of, assaulted, and almost killed a boy with a disability, solely because he is a boy, questioning whether or not they should even be prosecuted.
This sickening logic is what passes for feminism today, apparently. Girls can feel free to viciously attack and assault someone and the feminists will excuse and defend it — so long as the victim is a boy.