Monday, 16 October 2017

Bernie Sanders Wrote An Essay In Vermont Freeman About A Woman Fantasizing About Rape By 3 Men


Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders once wrote an essay in 1972 about a woman fantasizing about being raped by three men simultaneously. Sanders’ work was published in the alternative newspaper Vermont Freeman and was titled “Man — and Woman” in which there was horrific rape reference.


At a time when Harvey Weinstein is being accused of sexual harassment claims by many in Hollywood, the essay by Sanders is once again receiving attention. The essay previously gained awareness in a profile of Sanders published by Mother Jones when Sanders was part of the Democrat presidential race.


What Sanders did share with the young radicals and hippies flocking to Vermont was a smoldering idealism forged during his college years as a civil rights activist — he coordinated a sit-in against segregated housing and attended the 1963 March on Washington — but only a fuzzy sense of how to act on it. Sanders bounced back and forth between Vermont and New York City, where he worked at a psychiatric hospital. After his marriage broke up in the late 1960s, he moved to an A-frame farmhouse outside the Vermont town of Stannard, a tiny hamlet with no paved roads in the buckle of the commune belt. He dabbled in carpentry and tried to get by as a freelance journalist for alternative newspapers and regional publications, contributing interviews, political screeds, and, one time, a stream-of-consciousness essay on the nature of male-female sexual dynamics.




As a result of the essay’s content, many questioned Sanders and his views on women. Such conservative outlets like Young Cons reproduced a portion of the essay to show the hypocrisy for liberals to demonize Republicans for waging a “War on Women” when Sanders had written about a rape fantasy:


According to liberals with IQs smaller than their sock size, conservative presidential candidates absolutely LOATHE women, hate them with a passion even.


Those mean, old, white guys — which is a hilarious stereotype given there’s latinos, blacks, and women in the top spots for the GOP — want nothing more than to destroy women’s health care by defunding the ghoulish Planned Parenthood, and encourage rape culture with their antiquated views on gender roles.


None of this is actually true, of course, but when have facts ever got in the way of the liberal agenda?


What should really make you scratch your head is how lefties will rake conservatives over the coals for the things mentioned above, yet say absolutely nothing about this atrocious Bernie Sanders quote.



Not just conservative websites talked about the essay’s content. NPR, for example, reported that:


One way to read the essay is that Sanders was doing (in a supremely ham-handed way) what journalists do every day: draw the reader in with an attention-getting lede, then get to the meat of the article in the middle.


You can draw divergent conclusions from the article itself. On the one hand, he’s talking about liberating people from harmful gender norms. On the other, with his nameless hypothetical “man-and-woman” characters, he also seems to imply that men fantasize about raping women or that women fantasize about being raped.


The Sanders campaign quickly tried to distance itself and the candidate from the essay. Campaign spokesman Michael Briggs called the essay a “dumb attempt at dark satire in an alternative publication” in an interview with CNN, adding that it “in no way reflects his views or record on women.” He added, “It was intended to attack gender stereotypes of the ’70s, but it looks as stupid today as it was then.”


The Women’s Convention announced that Sanders would speak on the opening night of its national conference in Detroit later this month. The Women’s Convention is run by the leaders of January’s Women’s March movement, which saw five million women join protests around the world.


Here are some reactions on social media to people discussing Sanders’ essay.
















Critics had protested on social media that Sanders not only had run a negative campaign against Hillary Clinton in last year’s Democratic presidential primary, but that he and his supporters are pushing the Democratic Party away from its base of women and people of color toward the concerns of white working class voters. Many women were simply disappointed that a man was chosen for the event.


What did you think of Sanders’ essay that contained a reference to a rape fantasy? Did you find it distasteful for Sanders to have published? Let us know in the comments section.


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