In Lies, Damn Lies, and Rape Statistics a college newspaper does a little digging through U.S. crime statistics and finds that the trendy “anti-rape” movement is exaggerating the rape risk of college women by two full orders of magnitude – as it concludes, “the ‘one in four’ chant should be abandoned and replaced with the more appropriate, albeit less catchy, 1 in 400.”It's always easy to identify a white knight. He cannot refer to rape in any context without working into the conversation how much he hates it, how it is the worst crime in the human arsenal, and how he would never, ever rape a woman, no matter how much she deserves it, followed by desperately apologizing for suggesting that it might be possible for a woman to deserve being raped.
What can explain such gross distortion? I’ve looked into this issue myself and discovered a lot of flim-flam. Still, even the the best-case figures I arrived at apparently overestimated the actual risk on campuses by a factor of 50. (Barbarian zones – like, say, inner-city Detroit – might be a different story.)
If the rape panic runs parallel to the the now nearly forgotten drugs-and-rock panics of the 1950s and 1960s (and many others like them, before and after) we should expect it to actually be be rooted in an attempt to assert control of or cultural dominance over some threatening Other. And there is indeed evidence that points in that direction.
Recently, Meg Lanker-Simmons, a left-wing activist at the University of Wyoming, faked a rape threat. The agenda seemed obvious: smear Republicans, confirm feminist narratives about male hostility to ‘uppity’ women, confirm women as morally superior creatures who rightfully dictate the content and style of male behavior.
This, together with the crazy inflation of rape statistics, suggests that the campus “anti-rape” movement has little or nothing to do with preventing rape. It has become an instrument of the sort of political warfare in which truth is most likely to be the first casualty.
But why are women crying rape more and more often in environments where it is increasingly hard to even find a man to rape them?
College campuses are far from a threatening environment for feminists. Nowadays women outnumber men in every department outside STEM fields. At many colleges mandatory ‘sensitivity training’ heavily privileges female and feminist perspectives. By federal encouragement, female students can now accuse men of rape and expect the claim to be evaluated under circumstances that deny the man any right to due process and the presumption of innocence.It all comes back to rape fantasies in the end. As ESR puts it, "female hypergamic instinct and the ideology of sexual equality are inevitably in collision".
On campus, the Other seems so thoroughly controlled that some academics now attribute declining male enrollments to an unwillingness to enter a hostile work environment. What are women like Meg Lanker-Simmons really pushing against? What in their environment do they not already own?
I think the answer is…themselves. The increasing intensity level of the campus-rape panic seems well correlated with the erosion of college womens’ position in sexual bargaining.
28 comments:
Rape fantasies for women...turn into nightmares for men.
Truly bizarre.
Maybe it is time to return to men only colleges. You know, to protect the women. Maybe even remove one of the biggest distractions for most students, that of pursuing sex instead of knowledge at school. Not to say that most men get much of either there any more.
Is it the case that being "raped" will become a new rite of passage for women?
Such as the mother in a group of women will shame the others with "you're not a mother yet, you don't know the pain/agony/love/etc" .
Basically another way for them to hold court and moral superiority over other women?
Like Orion's idea, single sex education. It could be marketed as protection for women, keep all the evil men away from the pure women.
The whole article and many of the comments are worth the read - ESR points out with sex as no longer the trophy for winning but the opening bid, women have lost any bargaining power. They instinctively want to hook-up "up", but they are the ones bidding for a small pool.
He hasn't noticed the phenomenon of "Pick-Up Artists", that women aren't even being rational about seeking alpha (e.g. asking for the CV), just letting their feelings say the PUA who is behaving alpha is sexually attractive, as opposed to someone who has actual high status but acts beta or lower.
One commenter complained "there is no script". Oh yes there is, and the women and men who give into feminism are being played by it, having rejected the script from tradition.
Interestingly "Women .. dictate the content and style of male behavior". They just become victims of their own success in doing so since they are dictating men become PUAs who the women bed (and yak about how awful they are), or the gammas who listen and do what hey SAY but who the women act contemptuously toward.
There may be some cycle here. Feminism unleashes Hypergamy which disempowers women (and many men!), and they die out either genetically or memetically. The poles aren't Mascuism and Matriarchy (as motherhood is disrespected), but Patriarchy v.s. Feminism. The horizontal equality destroys respect for elders who become "equals" even though they usually have greater wisdom.
The increasing intensity level of the campus-rape panic seems well correlated with the erosion of college womens’ position in sexual bargaining.
That's an excellent point. In more conservative times, a woman was a gate-keeper of sexuality, and a man who wasn't interested in waiting for engagement or marriage to have sex was seen as a cad. Now that women have all this sexual freedom and "equality," they no longer have that position of power and the status it conferred. Instead, it's "I'm a rape survivor" or "I'm a victim of threats," which are parlayed into virtuous holy martyr / perpetual get-out-of-jail-free status.
"Is it the case that being "raped" will become a new rite of passage for women?
Such as the mother in a group of women will shame the others with "you're not a mother yet, you don't know the pain/agony/love/etc" .
Basically another way for them to hold court and moral superiority over other women?"
I've had similar thoughts before. I think it certainly could fit Tumblr feminists and the like (probably feminists in general really).
Good post.
Here's an example of a feminist who, according to police, anonymously posted an online threat to hatefuck Meg Simons Lanker, who, as it turns out, is none other than herself.
http://conservativehideout.com/2013/05/01/liberal-blogger-meg-lanker-simons-accused-of-embracing-letist-tradition-stages-own-rape-threats/
Combine this with the kangeroo courts that some men face as accused rapists on college campuses and you can see why some good men feel a little more leary. (And, I'm not excusing or trying to deflect from the problem of rape.)
The FBI shows that in an era of increased encouragement to report that rapes and attempted rapes have decreased a lot:
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4594
From 1995 to 2010, the estimated annual rate of female rape or sexual assault victimizations declined 58%, from 5.0 victimizations per 1,000 females age 12 or older to 2.1 per 1,000.
Completed rape (not attempted or threatened) fell by 68%, from about 3.7 to 1.2 per 1,000.
This is great news for women, men and society at large.
Joan Didion saw all this as far back as 1972. It's all about women wanting to imagine themselves as being more valuable and in demand than they are. Inflating the sexual bargaining position, so to speak:
Even the brightest movement women found themselves engaged in sullen public colloquies about the inequities of dishwashing and the intolerable humiliations of being observed by construction workers on Sixth Avenue. (This grievance was not atypic in that discussion of it always seemed to take on unexplored Ms. Scarlett overtones, suggestions of fragile cultivated flowers being "spoken to," and therefore violated, by uppity proles.)
On woman as the übervictim:
This ubiquitous construct was everyone's victim but her own. She was persecuted even by her gynecologist, who made her beg in vain for contraceptives. She particularly needed contraceptives because she was raped on every date, raped by her husband, and raped finally on the abortionist's table.
Poor, poor, put-upon creature... Will no one just *leave her alone*??
That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news, but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.
I posted the link to Meg before getting to that part in the post. Anyway, read the link to get the story about Meg, the radfem that threatened to rape, or at least, hate-F herself.
Here's what will happen if you segregate schools. Everyone knows this and no one will admit it. The female only schools will quickly turn into humanities schools turning out the next generation of teachers, book writers, and baristas. And the male only schools would produce more....Do I even need to say it? That's how easy it is to know what will happen. The fact is that I don't need to point out what is obvious, what will emerge from male only schools. And because of that difference, which everyone knows without being told, the feminists will never support it.
It is cultural worship thing, worship victim hood and make up stories. Women at college and work will get raped; http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-02/warren-buffet-long-america-women-terms
I've never believed the 1-in-4 ratio. (I've also had "experts" drop a 1-in-3 ratio.)
That this vast amount of fibbing and exaggeration is going on is troubling on a number of levels, not the least of which is the impact on men.
Making matters worse, there are people--of both sexes--who have been assaulted, and their cases are undermined by all these feminist self-important smokescreens.
Han Solo,
Something like half of women have 'forced sex' fantasies and generate erotic pleasure from them. E.g.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22544306
I can imagine that a substantial fraction of the women who rationally try to adopt a feminist ideology also have said fantasies. This sort of internal conflict is bound to create hypocritical behaviour.
Rational mind: rape and rapists are awful.
Emotional mind: I want a forceful man to take me.
This is the sort of contradiction that neurosis are born from. You have this toxic swamp of secret shame that cannot admit to having because it would rupture their world view. A similar example would be how so many of the staunchest anti-gay legislators have turned out to be bisexual men. So the result is all this cognitive dissonance.
The issue of erotic rape fantasy coupled to the general drive to put rape a single notch below murder on the crimes list makes false rape accusations inevitable. If you read the article by Bivona you'll probably get the same impression I did: that most fantasies are pretty tame but there's a big female population (> 10 %) that is really kinky in their fantasy life. That's the group that I feel is dangerous because they might substitute their fantasy life for reality, especially if they suppress it and it causes them a lot of guilt.
It's hard to believe women are so blind to their idiosyncrasies.
So men are such a dastardly bunch that one in four women endure the borrows of rape, clearly without much consequence since prison and conviction rates do not reflect a situation where 1/8 of the.population is victim of a felony.
Then, I ask, why do women interact with men with an attitude of immunity? They go home with tatooed strangers, assault us, provoke us, without fear or consequence while saying a quarter of then have been raped by us.
Cuz it's horse shit. Period.
-Trust
@Mr. Nervous Toes
It is interesting that so many women fantasize about forced sex. It's interesting to speculate about how many feminists might have neurosis that leads to making false rape claims.
It's interesting to see how if you take the 5 per 1000 per year rape, attempted rape and sexual assault figure from 1995 and multiply that by, say, 40 years you would get 20% of all women having experienced that. That's not taking into account repeat victims, false reports, underreporting etc.
Fastforward to 2010. With 2.1. Times 40, that would give a 8.4% lifetime chance, subject to all the caveats above. That's 1/12 instead of the 1/4 claim.
Here's an outright lie:
http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/02/25/newlon-14-5-dont-rape/
"According to reports by the U.S. Department of Justice, an estimated one out of every four college-aged women has experienced an assault that meets the criteria of rape or attempted rape, and one out of five college-aged women is raped during her college years."
That might have been the case of lifetime rates of rape or attempted rape, using the figures from 1995 but definitely not the level experienced by a college-age woman, and especially not 1/5 during her college years.
Eventually, people look into the claims and find they're all full of shit.
Han Solo,
The Brown Daily Herald article you cite is mixing and matching sexual assault and rape. Sexual assault is a very broad classification.
ESR also said:
I leave the reader to imagine the screams of rage that would issue from feminists if any of these were even seriously proposed, let alone attempted. And I am not actually advocating any of them, just pointing out that women like Meg Lanker-Simmons are caught in a trap that has nothing to do with (mythically) rape-minded men and everything to do with the world easy contraception and feminist ideology have given us.
I think that underneath the obvious political maneuvering, screaming about a nonexistent rape pandemic is a displacement activity. Campus feminists do it because confronting their actual powerlessness and the jaws of the dilemma that created it would be too painful for them to face.
The jaws of the rationalization hamster can be a powerful thing. ESR is quite intelligent and manages to ALMOST get many things the Manosphere has known by more careful research and experimentation. He gets the diagnosis right.
Feminism's fatal flaw is that one of its key teachings is that the women are to have sex, but in a way that denies (there is a joke in here) their frontal lobes or neo-cortex, so lets their limbic system and below run the show. So even hypergamy is self defeating since it is the limbic system and NOT the neo-cortex that gets to decide what is "alpha". Bad boys with alphatude, not the "nice" MBA. The neo-cortex is only called upon to invent shit-tests or to rationalize the desired outcome the limbic system comes up with.
I looked around and found that the fantasy rates for men are about in line with those of women:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01542159
About 45 % of men fantasize about sex where a women pretends to resist, 30 % fantasize about raping, and 45 % fantasize about being raped by a women in the above study. That compares to 50 % of women having forced sex fantasies and 30 % having violent rape fantasies. In other words, all arguments about rape are likely to be circular.
@Mr. Nervous Toes
Yes, they do confuse things.... Interesting how the confusion is always in the direction of making men look worse, in this case probably about 40x worse. Instead of 1/5 chance (20%) being raped during college it's more likely to be 0.5% (1/200) if you assume about 1.2rapes/1000women/year and multiply by 4 years, from my stat above about completed rape.
If rape was as truly prevalent as the stats supposedly show, you wouldn't see drunk half naked women stumbling out of clubs 2 o'clock in the morning.
Apart from the obvious feminist agenda I think it has more to do with average women protecting their egos from being undesireable.
Any woman that thinks she might be ravished by a sexual brute at any given moment must assume she is desireable. I guess it's better than being ignored.
Hey Vox, your link is broken.
In response to Dr. Faust's post
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/colleges-with-biggest-bang-for-the-buck-161521362.html
1 in 400, still maybe not right. Feminists have a different definition of rape, one that includes horny drunk women who wake up the next morning and regretting the sex.
I'm pretty sure that when a man forces his penis inside an unwilling female, it's rape. Not a fantasy, guys.
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