Rabbi Smuley Boteach doesn't know what happened in the alleged rape of a stripper by members of the Duke Lacrosse team. His Beliefnet column has some pointed comments:
Because no one knows what really happened that night, anything I write below is purely speculative. But what is certain is that a bunch of drunken college boys at an elite university hired an exotic dancer as a way of entertaining themselves. And I am, unfortunately, used to scenes like that with male students. You see, I served for 11 years as rabbi at another elite university, Oxford, and witnessed firsthand the growing misogyny that has become a central staple of university life.
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It is time for the Western world to accept the sad truth that universities are becoming bastions of female-hating lechers who spend four years trying to bed as many women as possible, while making the word “bitch” one of the most used in their vocabularies. Tom Wolfe’s newest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, chronicles the unbelievable scorn for women that permeates the American campus, and depicts how women have lost all dignity, becoming complicit in their own degradation, as they stop at nothing to become the male plaything.
He then makes a startling suggestion:
Male overexposure to women has even led to the death of the heterosexual man as we know him. If the definition of a heterosexual man is a male who is attracted to women, then most men today are barely heterosexual.
Think about it. Nearly all the men I know are only attracted to about one in 10 women, that is, the 10 percent of women they consider "hot." The other 90 percent leave them cold. Doesn’t that mean that they are ninety percent asexual? And I’m not trying to be funny. If a man is not attracted to a woman, then he is not heterosexual. Period. And if he only attracted to a small fraction of the women he meets, then he is fractionally heterosexual.
The second great tragedy of the contemporary Western man is that since women no longer strongly attract him, he cannot separate himself from his male buddies and truly attach himself to a female soul mate. Everywhere I go in the Western world I meet husbands whose real confidantes are still their drinking and card-playing buddies, and who are lonely in their marriages as a result. Alternatively, they are single men who are addicted to dating but who never fall in love.
I could ask precisely what he means by "attracted to a woman". Presumable there are a wide range of attractions. Still, he has a point.
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