his health care law against a chorus of disingenuous critics who are suddenly very concerned that people are having trouble signing up through healthcare.gov. >> obama care is, indeed, a train wreck. i mean, a visit to the website is kind of like a trip to the department of motor vehicles in your state. >> i've heard that they've had over 8 million hits, and so far, they have people in the single digits that have signed up. >> i've been online waiting on hold virtually for 89 straight hours, still can't get signed up. >> i'm hearing firsthand the frustrations from my constituents. one constituent said "the program freezes up when i try to enter your tax filing status." >> this is the same political movement that just a few months ago was encouraging people to cripple obama care by not signing up. >> there's a grassroots effort sweeping the nation to encourage young people to opt out of the law. >> most young people don't realize, they have the opportunity to opt out of obama care. >> did you know obama care may be hazardous to your health? >> may be. ♪ >> ah! >> the burn your obama care campaign is about telling young people that this is bad for you. >> you know, there's only one small problem with this burn your obama care card plan, there are no such things as obama care cards. >> conservatives have gone from anti-obama care hysterics to complaining about people not being able to use the law in question. yes, the very same people who said obama care was going to hurt americans -- >> these are hard, working class americans who are on the verge of being punished, because as you said, this law was built on broken promises. >> -- are now saying it's a shame the government can't get its website to work. >> in the 21st century, setting up a website where people can go on and buy something is not that complicate complicated. >> republicans who said the president's health care law will literally kill people -- >> repeal this failure before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens. >> those republicans are still skeptical, but now they're much more reasonable. >> so, let's make this voluntary for people. if it's great, people will sign up. if not, people will find another way. >> and it's not surprising, given the governance record of their last president that republicans seem eager at the opportunity to level the score politically. jonathan strong tweeted "is obama care president obama's iraq war"? a conservative columnist with the "new york post" tweeted "this obama speech could be the equivalent of bush speaking from new orleans two weeks after katrina." 4,489 american service members and over 100,000 civilians died during the iraq war. 1,833 people died in the waters of katrina. three weeks into the launch of obama care and the website is indeed buggy. so, next time you hear concern from conservatives about obama care implementation, remember, it's best not to take medical advice from an undertaker. joining me now, former congressman barney frank, democrat from massachusetts. congressman, i imagine you were quite touched by the out pouring of concern and technical critique and acumen being exhibited by the center right in these days of the obama care rollout. how do you see this as someone who has gone through the health care battles over a set of numerous decades? >> well, first, i wish it was coming to the center right. i wish we had a center right. i spent most of my time in politics working with people who are in the center right, whether it was mike oxley when he shared the committee or senator alan simpson. the sad fact of american politics today is that the right has eaten up its center. secondly, obviously, it is hypocrisy, but i do want to be clear, the obama administration should be severely krit criesed for this, and i frankly resent it. i worked hard for this health care bill. i had some initial doubts about the political staging. i think we finally got it right. and i regret very much that they're giving the right wing this kind of ammunition. having said that, i should note that one of the things they did do, which people should give them credit for, was to start this months before it takes effect. the fact is that this will not have any negative effect on anybody until january 1st. so, while it's regrettable that they did a lousy job of getting this, it's good that they gave themselves some time. secondly, having been in the financial services area for a while, the notion that the government is somehow pe kueculy unable to do this is ridiculous. we've seen the high speed platform mess-ups, we've seen ipos go very badly. so, yeah, they should have done a better job and i'm critical of them, but i believe that it will be fixed in plenty of time before it hurts anybody. and yeah, there is great hypocrisy. and you know, you also have to say this notion of taking over medical care, we can't get the government take this big role in medical care. actually, it is medicare. >> right. >> we ought to stress, again, the government role in medicare, which not even the most right wing republicans are ready to get rid of these days. they thought about it and backed off, is far greater than it will be under the affordable health care act. in medicare, there is much more government involvement in the actual delivery of services. >> not only that, i mean, one of the great ironies here is, of course, that the paul ryan plan for medicare, or the most recent iteration of it, would be something that looks a lot like the obama care exchanges. essentially would be, yes, that's what he wants to do for medicare. in fact, that's what the republican party has voted in lock-step partisan line for is essentially government running an exchange that medicare would be phased into. and so, i think that -- >> and i'll tell you this. >> please. >> when i was in office and i got a complaint from someone who felt that he or she was being treated unfairly with regard to health insurance, we and my staff of great people learned right away, if they were people who were on medicare, if they were people who there was government involvement, we would have likely been able to help them if they were treated badly. if they were dealing with the private insurance sector where there wasn't a government role, there wasn't anything we could do for them. the people being mistreated by the private health sector, whether out of malice or more often out of incompetence, we couldn't help them. with regard to medicare, we could do a much better job. >> finally, congressman, do you think we're going to see members of congress, republican members of congress come around to actually being genuinely invested in fixing the affordable care act, in getting it working as opposed to investing in destroying it, the longer it goes on? >> no. look, let's be clear, people ask me, when did bipartisanship end in america? it ended on january 21st, 2009. when george bush came to the democratic congress in 2008 and said, you know, as a result of these deregulatory policies -- he didn't admit that, but, we're in a terrible situation, we worked with him. 2009, mitch mcconnell announces that his number one goal is to defeat obama, and no, they haven't been constructive about anything. they didn't cooperate with us, forget about health care, which you may say is a big ideological problem for them. we couldn't get them to work with us in either the house or the senate constructively on financial reform or trying to regulate derivatives, on setting up a consumer bureau. >> my favorite example, the office of the printer of the united states, which had to be recess appointed because he was being stone-walled by republicans. former congressman barney frank, thank you so much. joining me now, michael dyson, professor of sociology at georgetown university. medicare funding gets approval, more ohioans through the medicaid expansion, which has gotten less coverage, but is doing a lot more than anything we're seeing on the exchanges right now. >> absolutely right, and it's part of the hypocrisy here, because it's been an accepted governmental program that the republicans dare not now offer a program, then they support it silently, and the irony is, you won't even let this fledgling program -- yes, bugs aside, get buggy with it on the will smith tip. but the reality is, once they get those bugs out, as the president said today, the stuff is good. what it's leading to is great, and it's comparable to what you're now defending on the other side here. so, you know, it's not a matter of apples and oranges. it's apples and apples, and one of them, one set of green, one set of red, but let it go up, so to speak. let it mature. >> this is the argument from democrats. 20 years from now, it will be unthinkable for republicans to oppose obama care. >> that's a great way of putting it and that's absolutely right, because it will benefit the very people that they ostensively are protecting. their populous out there that they say, we're speaking on behalf of those people, those people will be so ingratiated, so to speak, with this program that they will be the most ardent defenders. >> i want to play something that senator james inhofe had to say recently about obama care. >> okay. >> take a listen. >> a person can find out here in the united states that he has this emergency situation where he's got to have immediate heart surgery. and if you're in a country other than the united states, a lot of them, you can't get it done. in my case, with my age, it would have been about a six-month wait, because i hadn't had a heart attack. and so, the message there is that, you know, i say this to all your american listeners, let's hold on to what we've got here. you're talking to someone right now who probably wouldn't be here if we had socialized medicine in america. >> that's inhofe, who just survived a quadruple bypass. that zombie argument that, a, we're socializing medicine, and that b, it's terrible everywhere else in the world, refuses to die. >> oh, my god, and it flies in the face of logic, because first of all, the exact opposite is true. to talk about obama care as socialized medicine, those of us on left and progressives, hey, where is it? we'd love to see it, but it ain't here. >> medicare expansion's a lot more like socialized medicine. that's the one doing well. >> that's right. that's what they're riding on, and they keep suckling from it, but they cannot give acknowle e acknowledgement on the other side. and the flip side is people from all over the world, hey, you know, we're over here, if something happens to us, we're able to get care immediately. >> right. >> so, this argument about socialized medicine being wrong, on the flip side of that argument is, people in other countries that have access to health care in a broad fashion much more likely are to prevent themselves from getting the emergency kind of treatments that were mandated by his -- >> and what's fascinating to me here is the fact that what you end up with is republicans and everyone in the political conversation having to take a hard look at the fact that this thing is here now and people are wrestling with it because the status quo of what a lot of people have is so terrible. >> it's bad. >> that i think is what we'll see develop more politically as this rollout continues. msnbc contributor michael eric dyson. thank you so much. >> thank you. coming up -- >> i hope washington, in all seriousness, is listening, because this is impacting people in every state, from every corner of this country, and yet, they are tone-deaf. they will not listen to what the reality is, and that is the shame of all this. >> well, at least one person was listening and he took it upon himself to rereport the stories of each of sean hannity's guests, and he found -- drum roll -- they were completely misleading, and that is being nice about it. he'll be here with me, ahead. back. which means it's never been easier to get a new passat, awarded j.d. power's most appealing midsize car, two years in a row. and right now you can drive one home for practically just your signature. get zero due at signing, zero down, zero deposit, and zero first month's payment on any new 2014 volkswagen. hurry, this offer ends october 31st. for details, visit vwdealer.com today. you know we love hearing from you on facebook and twitter. republicans are all of a sudden so genuinely upset and concerned about the glitches on obama care's website, so my question for you tonight is, what right-wing issue are you concerned about and think should be trolled the way republicans are trolling obama care? tweet your answers to allinwithchris. i'll share a couple at the end of the show. 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"after which he said he'd call me back. he never did." next, he called up kurt and alison, who said this. >> we don't have insurance for our daughter, who has a pre-existing condition, so we're looking at probably $20,000 in premiums next year. >> $19,000. >> yeah. >> which is how much higher than what it was? twice as high? >> well -- >> twice as high. >> stern reported that, assuming the couple didn't smoke and was eligible for subsidies, they would get a plan for less than $8,000 a year through obama ca, which would include their daughter and her pre-existing condition. finally, stern spoke to the last of three couples, robbie and tina robinson. >> our new policy that we can have won't have the same benefits to it. anything similar, though, is going to rise between like 50% to 72% and it will have things in it that we have no choice, like we'll have to have maternity benefits, and we're not planning on having any more kids. >> after that couple told eric stern they had no plans to go on healthcare.gov and actually look for a better deal because they oppose obama care in principle, want nothing to do with it, stern found them a plan that's more than 60% less than their current bill. i'm pleased to be joined by eric stern from salon.com, also deputy secretary of state for montana, senior counsel to former governor of montana, democrat brian sweitzer. eric, you write in the piece that something about watching this did not sit right with you. what was it? >> you know, based on what i know about the act, about the affordable care act, it just didn't sound right. nothing that these people were saying sounded like they were really, like, it really would matter come january 1st. and basically, so, i just -- it just had a funny smell to it, and so, i basically just googled them and i searched them and i picked up the phone and i had a series of conversations with them. and generally, they were pretty helpful. and you know, i want to make clear, they believe -- they are pessimistic about the upcoming affordable care act. they believe it's going to be a train wreck, for lack of a better expression. and so, i don't know that they were being dishonest. paul cox, maybe, but generally speaking, i think they're just afraid. and the real fault lies with hannity for trying to claim that these people represent the train wreck. >> right. >> it's ridiculous. >> well, what you have to do if you're producing that show is you have to vet the stories of the people that are coming on your show to tell you this are actually what they say they are and actually fit under something that obama care changes or would make worse. >> right. and obviously, you know, they didn't -- hannity's producer didn't do his homework. hannity obviously didn't ask basic questions of anybody prior to running the story and i think it's inexcusable. i think you have to do basic work if you're going in front of however many viewers he has, 2, 3 million. you've got to do your homework. >> here's the thing i found fascinating about the episode is i remember this period of time where dick cheney was sort of planting seeds about weapons of mass destruction in iraq and he was running this crazy information laundering operation, which he would plant a story, you know, through judith miller, appear on "the new york times" have, go on "meet the press" and then report in "the new york times." and a lie would repeat itself. these are conservatives, they're fox news viewers, they're getting a lot of information about obama care from watching fox, reading the conservative media, then they're going on fox to give their real-life testimonials based on not information about how they're actually interacting with the law but based on the tales they've been told on fox itself. >> yeah, that's correct. in other words, they're in an echo chamber and there's a fenced-in garden around the whole thing, and there is this enormous section of america that basically just wants to listen to fox and want to be up in arms about something and they want to be outraged about obama. and it gets to the point where it's not even -- it's no longer advocacy. if hannity wanted to be an advocate against obama care, there's a lot of arguments he could make, there's a lot of research he could do. he could do stories about, for example, why the exchange crashed or why it wasn't working. i think there's a lot of -- i would be interested in that story if he did that, because i would like to see somebody who is sort of, you know -- i like adversarial journalism, but this is not even -- this is just a made-up thing. it's not even -- it's not even advocacy journalism. it's literally just made up out of whole cloth and it's nonsense, and he ought to be ashamed of it. >> you said one of the people you if you canned to, mr. cox, i believe, you feel he did kind of know that what was happening didn't actually com port with what was being communicated on the program. >> no, i mean, i think he said he doesn't want to hire -- he's keeping his workers part time. he doesn't want to go full time with them. he has four employees. because he is concerned about costs. now, he could argue that he has some sort of global concern about the sort of general costs to everybody about obama care coming down the pike. >> right. >> but it's not really -- >> and what that points out, too, is employers having keeping people part time are not growing for years, and now they have this wonderfully convenient excuse in obama care which they are invoking any chance they can get and i have heard that up and down the line. salon.com's eric stern, thank you for joining us. it's homecoming night for senator ted cruz, welcomed back into the arms of conservatives in texas. there are signs of buyer's remorse in the lonestar state. that's ahead. i have low testosterone. there, i said it. see, i knew testosterone could affect sex drive, but not energy or even my mood. that's when i talked with my doctor. he gave me some blood tests... showed it was low t. that's it. it was a number. 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[ phillips' lady ] live the regular life. phillips'. any moment, senator ted cruz will take the stage at his big homecoming party in houston, texas. you see a live shot of that right there. just two days ago, senator cruz received a standing ovation from texas federation of republican women's state convention in san antonio, texas. >> thank you. that is a slightly different reception than i get in washington, d.c. and having spent the past month up in d.c., it is really great to be back in america. >> get it? earlier the same day, cruz spoke to the texas medical association in austin, texas. just a quick recap, in case you found that confusing. senator cruz, having flown in from the foreign country of washington, d.c., to his home state of texas, is right now celebrating his great big homecoming in his home state of texas. the houston tea party is more than willing to offer up its adoration, but cruz has become one of the most polarizing figures in national politics. he almost single-handedly shut down the government. and this weekend he showed no regret and no recalibration. >> the house republicans marched into battle courageously, and the senate republicans should have come in like the cavalry to support them. unfortunately, a significant chunk of senate republicans instead came like the air force and began bombing the house republicans, our own troops. >> however, even on the home front, there are signs that all is not well. as "the houston chronicle" notably unendorsed the senator. "when we endorsed ted cruz in last november's general election, we did with many reservations and one recommendation that he follow senator kay bailey hutchison's example in conduct as a senator. obviously, he has not done so. cruz has been part of the problem where hutchison would have been part of the solution." evan smith, "the texas tribune," is it the case that the more rerivaled ted cruz is by fellow republicans in the senate, the less popular he gets nationally -- and the polls show his national approval rating just absolutely plunging -- does that solidify his support in the independent-minded state of texas? >> oh, most definitely. the more that washington hates him, the more that texas loves him. the more that the liberal jackles of the media attack him it makes him stronger. when "the new york times" or the "washington post" or msnbc attack him, that is spinach and he is popeye. it makes him stronger. >> okay, but here's the question. the attacks from cruz have been coming from, you know, people such as myself, it also come from sort of more mainstream or beltway publications. it's come from a lot of conservatives, too. and my question is, the texas donor class, the folks in texas that are writing the checks, the folks in texas who run big oil companies that don't want to see the government default, for instance, okay, how is this affecting their relationship to ted cruz, their understanding of him? >> well, if it is affecting their relationship, they're not talking about it publicly. privately, some republicans may grumble. some republicans say, gee, by the standards of ted cruz, i must be a liberal. these are people who have been republicans for a long time, who bank-rolled mainstream conservative republicans for some time, but that's what they say privately. publicly, they can't possibly speak out against this guy. publicly, the republicans support this guy. publicly, he gets standing ovations like the one you showed in san antonio, an eight-minute standing ovation from the texas federation of republican women. the republican party of texas loves this guy. he said he would do the things he went to washington to do. he's done them. and of course, he's getting the kind of welcome that a conquering hero gets when he returns back from the battle. >> we were doing the series during the shutdown called "these are the people who are running the country," looking at the house republican caucus. and i couldn't help but notice how many of the folks that signed on to this defund obama care letter were in texas. >> that's right. >> the texas delegation seems to be -- it really seems to be the epicenter of the kind of politics that we saw that brought us to the shutdown. >> yeah, well, you know, louis gohmert and steve stockman are the most extreme examples in the texas delegation, but the reality is, the vast majority of the republicans in the texas delegation, dare i say all the republicans, were right there alongside ted cruz. they didn't see any difference between their position and his. now, again, privately, some of them may roll their eyes and say, well, we're not sure that his tactics would be our tactics, but everybody in the texas delegation is in sync. this is the federal republic of anti-obama. >> right. >> we may not have seceded literally, but we may as well have, at least in the mind of many of these guys. washington, d.c., could be a million miles away, for all this know. >> here's the question, is there a tipping point? we've seen other states in which we've had unified republican governance, a lurch to the right, often on the backs of a 2010 victory and then redistricting. we're seeing this in north carolina, we saw it in florida, in which there is backlash, right? >> right. >> there is too far you can go, even in a fairly conservative state. texas is quite a conservative state. is there a sense from the electorate that you might be edging towards that point? >> well, wendy davis's candidacy for governor and the fact that democrats have something to rally around for the first time in about 20 years gives some hope to people on the left that they can fight back against this. but the key bloc is not the democrats, it's the few remaining moderate republicans who up to this point have cast their lot with the conservatives. and the question going into the next election and the next legislative session is whether the moderate republicans are able to speak up and say, at whatever risk it poses for them, we've had enough, we're going to join with the other guys and try to reset the pendulum. so far, very little evidence, at least publicly, that they're willing to do that. >> well, and they can all look at what happened in the ted cruz senatorial primary in which the person coded as moderate, who himself was quite conservative, got his butt kicked handily. evan smith from "the texas tribune," thank you so much. we'll be right back. 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"i not only survived, i didn't give up," daisy wrote upon the prosecutor reopening the case. she add aid "this is a victory for me and every other girl." sonia is the president of the national organization for women and co-founder of a long walk home, non-profit organization that oozes art to end violence against girls and women. and journalist rebecca tracer of author of "big girls don't cry: the election that changed everything for american women." this case has blown up, i think it's fair to say. it's blown up in the way no case has blown up i think since steubenville. why do you think it has captured something in the national attention, because these kinds of incidents, it's horrifying to say, happen far more often than they end up on the front pages. >> they happen all the time, and i think it's really important that we look at what's different about this case. this case, there was a witness in the friend, paige parker, there was reportedly an iphone video taken, there was a family that was willing to come forward and a mother who was empowered enough and recognized the signs of rape the morning that she found her daughter and took her straight to a hospital. despite all of these things that make this case seem so horrifying to us, still with all that behind it, it literally didn't get prosecuted. so, imagine -- and all those things are very unusual, because in most cases like this that happen all the time all over america to all kinds of people, there aren't sober witnesses, there aren't iphone videos, there are far greater areas and late reporting and anxiety about coming forward. and so, i think we should really consider what is so unusual about this case and then multiply it by how many times we don't have those things. >> i would also add to all of the things that rebecca just said, it's also the ripple effect of the case, right, so that the mother lost her job, that the house that was on sale was burned down. so, one of the things that we do know -- >> it burned. we don't know if it burned down. >> burned, right. >> under mysterious circumstances. >> that may or may not be connected to the case. and her attempted suicide, that's part of my argument here. one of the things we do know is that violence against girls and women begets more violence, so that it's also unusual in the sense of how much violence we see used against the mother, the daughter, the brother, the kind of emotional and maybe physical terror that they're experiencing. >> and also, i think, the way which is similar to the steubenville case, the way in which it seems like there are a significant portion of the community that has taken a position that from the outside seems just completely morally abominable, right, which is the defense of these alleged assailants and not the survivors. >> you know, one has to wonder if, because it seems so just out of character, and so many people are compassionate, caring people who think rape is terrible. >> yes. >> is it a coping method that we have? because if we deal with reality, the fact that 1.3 million women, 1.3 million were raped or fended off rapists in 2010, according to the cdc, who has named this a national health crisis in this nati nation. the reality that then would be that, basically, women are just randomly raped all the time, is it a way to think of, well, this is the way it won't happen to me or my daughter. >> compartmentalize. i want to talk about this case and steubenville and the phenomenal with a high school student actress who is playing the role of the 16-year-old sexual assault survivor in an off broadway play that is getting a lot of attention here in new york. stay with us. weekdays are for rising to the challenge. they're the days to take care of business. when possibilities become reality. with centurylink as your trusted partner, our visionary cloud infrastructure and global broadband network free you to focus on what matters. with custom communications solutions and responsive, dedicated support, we constantly evolve to meet your needs. every day of the week. centurylink® your link to what's next. earlier in the show, we asked you what right-wing issue are you concerned about. we got a lot of answers posted to our facebook and twitter. cassy said "gun control. every time the tea party held a vote to repeal or defund obama care, threatening to shut down the government over it, the senate should send the house a gun control bill." and debra says "do you want the list numerically or alphabetically?" thanks, we'll be right back. but they didn't fit. customer's not happy, i'm not happy. sales go down, i'm not happy. merch comes back, i'm not happy. use ups. they make returns easy. unhappy customer becomes happy customer. then, repeat customer. easy returns, i'm happy. repeat customers, i'm happy. sales go up, i'm happy. i ordered another pair. i'm happy. (both) i'm happy. i'm happy. happy. happy. happy. happy. happy happy. i love logistics. avo: sales event is "sback.hen drive" which means it's never been easier to get a new passat, awarded j.d. power's most appealing midsize car, two years in a row. and right now you can drive one home for practically just your signature. get zero due at signing, zero down, zero deposit, and zero first month's payment on any new 2014 volkswagen. hurry, this offer ends october 31st. for details, visit vwdealer.com today. we're back. i'm here with sonia ossaria and rebecca tracer, joined by winnie, who plays the lead character joey in the off-broadway production of "shut the play" about a high school rape whose details were hauntingly similar to those at issue in the maryville case. and if i'm not mistaken, you and the other folks in the play wrote this together as high school young women engaged in living the reality of this. >> right. i mean, a lot of what we aim to do in the production of "slut the play" is to basically just present a reality, and we're high school girls, we live it every single day. and although i might not have the same experiences as the character i play, what our play aims to do is give a voice to even every girl living in a slut shame and culture. >> there is a detail that's in the play, and that is a detail that is common to the play and to the steubenville case and to the maryville case, and that is drinking to excess, right, that in all cases, the survivor was very drunk, black-out drunk. >> right. >> do high school students understand in your world consent and someone being black-out drunk as being something that by definition denies the possibility of consent? >> you know, i think if you ask that question to your average high schooler, i'm sure they'd say, yeah, we understand the meaning of consent. but when you're put in a scenario where there is a lot of alcohol and most everybody should probably be beyond the realm of consent -- >> right, that's a good point. >> -- i think, actually, the lines are really heavily blurred by some of the most smart and on the ball students, especially where i go to school. >> that's a really interesting point. i think the flip side of that argument is do adults understand this? because it's not clear that they do. it's not clear that the lack of affirmative consent from someone who is inebriated past the point of being able to affirmatively give it is definitionally non-consensual sex. that's at issue here, and it's not just the case of it's just teenagers who have this sense. >> no, of course not. when feminists talk about rape culture, one of the things we're talking about is a culture in which rape is assumed as a kind of norm, and it assumes that men out there are just waiting -- >> animals, predators. >> waiting to rape and that women are by definition rapable and that it is in fact up to them to make choices and engage in behaviors to prevent themselves from this normal activity. and to me, this is, too often when we talk about rape and sex, we confuse the two. and i think that one of the things that we lose is that rape and sex are very different things and rape is about power, whereas sex in an ideal world should be about connection, demand connection is consent. >> but i want to add, because i feel like the alcohol conversation oftentimes, it's really important when we talk about sexual violence in rape culture, but i sometimes think it kind of clouds the real rape culture that we exist in. i was sexually assaulted in college. i wasn't drunk. i wasn't incapacitated, and i'm pretty certain that i would have been blamed for my sexual assault. so, it's the only crime in which we overidentify with the perpetrator and automatically victim blame. >> why is that? >> why do we do that? i think it's part of what you were saying earlier not wanting to identify with the helplessness or powerlessness of a victim on one hand. but i think because it disproportionately affects women, because it's part of how patriarchy reproduces itself, i think it's normal, and people now think it's kind of a natural expression of male aggression or male sexuality pch so, i just think there are so many components to our -- go on. >> our legal system has really b buttresses what she said. if you look at the evolution of rape laws, it wasn't that long ago where, you know, a woman's private sex life was completely open to be scrutinized in court. >> it was also not long ago that it was legally impossible for a woman to be raped by her husband. >> absolutely. >> those laws are still being changed week by week, those laws are being overturned. >> and if you look globally, you have countries in peru, if the rapist asks for the victim's hand in marriage, he's absolved himself because he's given her back her dignity. just one example. >> one of the things i think is striking about this case and these cases is the presence of the publicness of social media combined. so, like, teenagers drinking is not a new phenomenon. it has been going on for a long time. sexual predatory behavior by young men towards young women is also not new. >> right. >> which is not to excuse in any way, but it is not new. part of what makes this so combustible is the presence of social media, the fact that in this case, we think that there was an iphone video. the fact from the staub steuben case, there was an iphone video. how do you understand the way that social media, the way that the publicness of an average teenager changes, like, how people in your generation are thinking about each other and sex? >> right. i think especially with this, like, overpresence of social media and where we're always being told our mistakes are permanent, the things that we do online can carry offline. i think that's one thing that's so ludicrous about this case is that should be used to the advantage of the victim, and the people fighting for her. if there was a permanent mistake made by the rapists in the video, that should be something that's taken advantage of, so yeah -- >> that is a great point, right? that, like, the mistake you make of posing in some photo is permanent, but the mistake you made of allegedly committing a sexual assault and having it recorded, that somehow ends up expunged. >> right. >> and i also think it proves how literally, actually -- or how literal we take rape seriously, right? so that people can record evidence that can be used against them in the court of law and do it so willingly and so carelessly and then circulate it to the point where her brother can see it. so, i think if we actually took rape -- if rapists understood that they could actually be prosecuted for it, they could go to jail for it, if there were actual punishments consistently meteed out to rapests -- >> there is clearly no fear of rekrimsion. i wanted to get the statistic as we know them. it's a hard thing to quantify, it's something that's underreported, incidents of rape, sexual assaults. this is just incidents from the department of justice, 243,800 sexual assaults in 2011. that is far below the estimate you gave, based on a survey methodology. my question is, is it getting better or worse? it feels sometimes like it's getting worse, but then i wonder if it's just because we're hearing about more cases. >> i think we're hearing about more cases and i do think that there are -- i think that one of the slow ways in which contemporary feminist conversation is making progress is that we are having conversations like this. the slut walks movement, which i was critical of, i think has done a lot to advance the conversation. young feminists, young women talking about their experiences, perhaps social media bringing it to the attention, cases like steubenville, now maryville. the conversation where at least cultivating a new awareness at the fact that it happens, i don't think it's making the behavior better. i think the behavior is consistent. >> there is also a very public and present voice to say, going to the house of older boys and drinking does not mean that you deserve what you get afterwards or that there is nothing, that there are no recriminations, that all the rules for consent go outlook the win