In honor of International Women’s Day, President Obama’s State Department used the occasion to tout a litany of liberal talking points on the subject of women, including a parade of misleading college rape stats, a lecture on career inequality, and a sobfest regarding the plights of LGBT people.
Speaking at the Organization of American States, Sarah Sewall, undersecretary for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights, spent a good chunk of time decrying the slew of problems faced by women in the United States, beginning in their perilous college years:
In the United States, one in five women is sexually assaulted during her college years, though just one in ten incidents are ever reported.
Unfortunately for Sewall, this statistic, despite being parroted by the Obama administration for the past couple of years, has been widely debunked – even by uber Left-leaning media outlets like the Daily Beast. A deeper look into this “one-in-five” stat (which some claim is as high as one in four) shows many of the women who said they’d been “assaulted” during college said they’d been the victims of unwanted advances, or simply touched inappropriately.
Not cool, but not sexual assault.
Additionally, of those who said they’d actually been raped, about half of these alleged assaults occurred when the woman was self-admittedly, and quite voluntarily, drunk as a skunk.
But it doesn't stop there. Sewall also took a shot at sexual violence in the U.S. military during her speech:
In 2014, there were over 19,000 sexual assaults in the U.S. military, 86 percent of which went unreported.
Excuse us, but we have a question. If 86 percent of these incidents weren’t reported, how do you know they happened? Are we just guessing, now? Shaking a Magic 8 ball? And considering only about 15 percent of the U.S. military is female (by the most recent estimate), are we sure all these assaults were against women?
According to Sewall, your chances only get worse if you’re gay:
Similarly, women of different sexual orientations and gender identities in the region face higher rates of violence and a harder path to justice. South of here in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a lesbian student was strangled to death just one day after she took part in a vigil to oppose bullying and harassment against the LGBTI community.
The problem is, the murder Sewall’s referring to had absolutely nothing to do with the victim’s sexuality, or her activism. Grace Mann, a Mary Washington student, was killed by a roommate last year under very odd and tragic circumstances, which you can read about in articles like this one from the Washington Post.
However, nothing in any of the reports of her death suggested that she had been murdered because she was a lesbian.
But if you’re a woman and you can make it through the gauntlet of higher education and/or military service without being assaulted, chances are you’ll just run nose-first into Life’s Great Glass Ceiling. According to Sewall:
On average, women in the region are still paid less than men for the same work. And women remain dramatically underrepresented at the highest levels of business and government. Of the top 500 companies in the United States, women lead just twenty-four. They hold a mere 20 percent of all seats in our Congress. We have to close these gaps between men and women in all manner of public life.
We're not even going there with the women-are-paid-less argument, which has been debunked more times than global warming.
But it’s not enough that women can climb to the top of the corporate ladder just like a man can. It’s not enough that women can and do regularly get elected to public office, or become attorneys general or secretaries of state or CEOs or police chiefs. Now we have to shame those who don’t as underachievers, because God forbid you have a child and want to raise it yourself, or choose a career that doesn't put you in the upper echelon of suit-wearers.. It’s not good enough until women are just as plugged in to the business world as men are – and we’ll enlist them into it, if we have to.
Perhaps, if she wished to observe of something as seemingly laudatory as “International Women’s Day,” Ms. Sewall could spend less time making up reasons why women have been victimized by everything under the sun, and more time commending their achievements.
In the meantime, the rest of us will just be over here, actually contributing to the world.