We are in the midst of a war on rape. From American campuses to British courthouses, from newspaper op-ed pages to the weird world of online petitions, ‘zero tolerance’ of rape has been declared. And who could possibly be against it? No one is ‘pro-rape’. So surely everyone will cheer a war on rape. Not so fast. Wars on rape have been declared before, and often for deeply reactionary reasons, having the effect of harming society rather than helping women. Consider the ‘war on rape’ declared in America’s Deep South in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the KKK and other racists likewise declared zero tolerance of rape – rape committed by black men, that is – and signalled their determination to wipe out this ‘ultimate transgression’. There was little positive in that crusade. And here are five ways in which today’s non-racist feministic ‘war on rape’ echoes the lynch-mob logic of yesteryear’s racist ‘war on rape’
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The alleged rape epidemic is just another excuse for intolerant liberal types to indulge themselves in three of their favourite pastimes – claiming victim status, demanding obedience from the rest of us and being offended when we don’t obey.
O’Neill may be associated the Revolutionary Communist Party, and may consider himself part of the Left, but I’ve not often come across one of his pieces when I haven’t thought he was someone libertarians could do business with. OK, so his opposition to gay marriage was wrong-headed, but hey, no one’s perfect.
Sorry, but I’m not buying it.
This whole campus rape hysteria has recently been blown to pieces by the latest Department of Justice statistics which categorically prove that rape just isn’t that common, has been declining for decades and the 1-in-5 campus sexual assault statistics touted by the Rad Fems is bullshit.
Even with the current distortions of the legal system over what constitutes sexual assault, the DoJ statistics show the figure to be 0.03-in-5, which is not just “somewhat off” the Rad Fem’s fantasy figure, but “orders of magnitude off”
When they stop lying, I might start listening…might…
Apologies – Link to DoJ study
Latest Bureau of Justice Statistics report
It’s an interesting piece, and what I thought at first was a rather facetious comparison to the KKK turns out to be surprisingly accurate. The same problem again – classifying people by a single aspect of their being (skin colour/gentialia) and then seeking reason for the prejudices that are built around this differentation. Mr O’Neill also has a very good article on how American ‘liberals’ are actually emphasising racial division, so there is a coherent body of thought here.
Ironic really, that those who claim to be against sexism and racism are actually those promoting it. They have become the mirrors of what they hate, presumably as their hatred has overcome cognitive ability.
Watchman, while I certainly agree with the thrust of your comment, I must point out the obvious: genitalia is much less unrelated to the issue of rape than skin color is.
…and now that I think about it some more, I realize that maybe my last comment misses the point…oh well, discuss if you feel like it 🙂
I was in Ann Arbor Sunday night, at the Arbor Brewing Company on Washington. In honour of the season, I broke down and had my first beer for about 2 years. It were good.
But I heard a very interesting question from one of the solons at the bar. Remember, Ann Arbor is a deep-dyed liberal town, and the radical feminism is strong there.
The prediction was that all of this hysteria about ‘an epidemic of rape on campus’, and the unstoppable tide of reaction that is building up behind it – more rules, more laws, less freedom, less liberty, less justice (for men, that is) – combined with the ever-increasing imbalance between male and female undergraduates (now more than 60% female, and climbing), is going to lead, very soon, to a situation where all of the college girls who subscribe to this nonsense are going to wake up one morning and find that there are no college boys to play with.
Because they’ve all either a) gone off-campus or b) found out (in the immortal words of Billy Gibbons) that ‘she won’t do it, but her sister will’, and are focussing their attention exclusively on those college girls who do not subscribe to this nonsense. And, since the boys will be in a serious minority, it seems that they will not have any problem finding enough young women so inclined.
The question that commenter at the bar was posing was this – what will the reaction of the radical feminists be to this development? Their continued hatred of men will likely not abate much, but the question is – what will be their reaction to that cohort of the sisterhood that discounts their nonsense and chooses to consort freely with the few college boys that remain?
Her prediction (for it were a she) is that there will come a rift in feminism of geologic proportions, with the true believers damning the rest to a purgatory too awful to imagine, and that (on campus at least) women will split into two rigid groups – the ones that Do, and the ones that Don’t, and that there will come to be a perpetual state of hatred by the second group of the first.
Discuss?
llater,
llamas
Interesting post.
llamas,
That rift already occurs – look at the split between the radical feminists and the feminists who support sex workers. One lot see these activities as rape, the other as free choice.
I always see this as a dispute between those who would replace the perceived patriarchy with a matriarchy and those who see feminism as being about their freedom from being what told what they can do just because they are a woman.
Alisa,
I did see a nice figure recently (Tim Worstall’s site I think) that more men are raped than women in the US, due to prison culture, so this is maybe not really a genitalia issue anyway. I always tend to consider the best thing to do is to treat any issue up to and including prostate cancer and child birth as something that is not gendered to be honest – that way it is more difficult for the special interest groups and the tribalists to colonise and use in the way the idiot feminists are doing with rape (indeed, their ongoing beating of the drum on this may risk normalising what is a horrible and exceptional act).
John Galt: “the DoJ statistics show the figure to be 0.03-in-5, which is not just “somewhat off” the Rad Fem’s fantasy figure, but “orders of magnitude off”
Related, I found a discussion about debunking and a comparison of those two studies. The explanation: differently worded survey questions. The two studies are measuring different things. As usual we have to take care with the semantics.
Watchman, I think the point that I missed earlier was that: while the racists of the Old South claimed that black men were inclined to rape simply by the virtue of being black men, our contemporary feminists attribute this inclination to all men in general.
Bluntly speaking, the feminists, the government, the media and academia in the West are not in the midst of a war on rape. They are in the midst of a war on men and to be specific about it in some instances, war on white men and the institutions were they can be found such as fraternities and the military among others. Notice that the same group ignore men and women being raped in prisons, men and boys being raped by women and women raped by the protected class that can do no wrong.
The wording on the CDC survey is terrible: “when you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you?”
I read this as either:
when you were (drunk, high, drugged, or passed out) and unable to consent
OR
when you were drunk, high, drugged, or (passed out and unable to consent)
I assume they survey is assuming people will only answer positively for instances where they were unable to consent but I suspect some people will answer positively if they had sex but were drunk or high but were able to consent.
This is all part of a scheme to paint Republicans as being involved on a “War on Women”. I’m no fan of the republicans but this is a pretty shoddy tactic.
The only war going on here is a war against intelligence, waged by those too bloody thick in the head to understand what they’re doing.
Perhaps the eternal war on “reward” for actual demonstrable merit, to be deemed “in charge” at whim, and “excused” from actually laboring and producing in exchange for a “lifestyle to which they MAY become accustomed to”?
GOSH, it must SUCK to be treated like a princess, and “suddenly” DEMAND to be pronounced “strong, smart, independent, and have folks toss phrases like “personal responsibility”, delayed gratification investment, “you ain’t all that!”, and “a jury of ones peers” thrown in…against their will.
As usual, I could be wrong.