Outrage is flowing anew over the so-called Princeton Mom, the outspoken alumna who last year advised female students to add
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Outrage is flowing anew over the so-called Princeton Mom, the outspoken alumna who last year advised female students to add finding a husband to their list of college goals. On Sunday a group of more than 100 alumni in the Class of 1978 wrote a letter to the campus newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, criticizing her comments about sexual assault in a CNN interview aired in December.
The alumna, Susan Patton, a member of the Class of 1977, said in the interview that some incidents of rape are nothing more than “clumsy hookup melodrama,” and that women should treat those incidents as “a learning experience.”
“To fail to challenge such views damages decades of efforts to help women come forward after being sexually assaulted,” the group wrote in response. “It suggests to college women—indeed to all women—that it is really their fault that they were raped.”
Ms. Patton responded by telling The Washington Post that her comments had been misunderstood. “I have never said that rape is a learning experience. What I said is when women drink a little bit, get a little tipsy, have consensual sex with a man they know they shouldn’t have had sex with, and wake up in the morning and think, ‘Oh, my God, what did I do?'—that is not rape. It’s a learning experience. It’s a wake-up call to use better judgment moving forward. To call it rape is an insult to victims of actual rape.”
