It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive…we must not resort to the flame where only light is required. – Victor Hugo
I’m sure many of you saw this “infographic” earlier this week:
It was passed all over the internet by well-meaning people with sonorous pronouncements about “rape culture”, and nobody bothered to ask the obvious question: If all those rapes are unreported, how do we know about them? Furthermore, what statistics did the compilers use to determine how many are false? The thing defies both facts and logic, and because it’s politically incorrect to question anything feminists say about rape, virtually nobody challenged it. I criticized it Monday on Twitter and was considering how I might go about debunking it, then law blogger Mark Bennett saved me a great deal of trouble:
…The numbers, particularly the last one—only two false accusations for every 100 true reports—are very interesting to me. Where did the illustrator get them? According to Sarah Beaulieu, who published it, “Statistics from Justice Department, National Crime Victimization Survey: 2006-2010 and FBI reports.” Sounds good. But wait: “…This infographic…combines data from several sources, both domestic and international…Some reports suggest that only 5-25% of rapes are reported to authorities. Other suggest that close to half are reported. We assumed 10%, which is dramatic, but possible. Of the rapes that are reported, approximately 9 are prosecuted..[and] 5 result in felony convictions…Assuming that 2% of reported rapes are false…” No links, nothing. We have to trust Beaulieu that this is what the statistics show…
Of those reported cases, how many are prosecuted (“faced trial”)? Nine?…The infographic shows 30% of the reported cases being prosecuted, assuming that someone has to be prosecuted to be jailed…[it also shows] that 1/3 of rapists who face trial are jailed…[which also] does not match the number provided…If you assumed, instead, that Harris County [Texas] is typical, you would find that in 2012, 172 sexual-assault-of-an-adult cases ended in dismissal or acquittal, and 382 ended in conviction or deferred-adjudication probation—2/3 held responsible, near as dammit…Finally, where does the 2% number come from?…You can find a bigger and more credible number, 5.9%, here—certainly not a hotbed of rape apologists…If you wanted a credible reason to assume that the number was even bigger—25%—you could find it here: “Forensic DNA typing laboratories…encounter rates of exclusion of suspected attackers in close to 25 percent of cases…”
Since I believe in statistics more than some supposed moral and psychological superiority of my own sex, I find 25% to be a far more credible number than 2%. People seem to imagine that the term “false accusation” implies malice, but it does not; while some fraction of false accusations are undoubtedly malicious, a far larger fraction result from panic at being caught in illicit sex by parents or boyfriends, and the largest fraction by far are almost certainly incorrect identifications arising from trauma and suggestion or even pressure from cops and prosecutors. And while people can lie, DNA doesn’t; if a properly-conducted test excludes a suspect he was falsely accused, no matter what rape panic-mongers may claim.
As for that “only 10% of rapes are reported” nonsense, I call your attention to Mary Koss and other “researchers” like her, who not only use absurdly-broad definitions but also ignore the opinions of the women they survey. Only 27% of the women Koss labeled “rape victims” agreed that they had indeed been raped, and 42% of them later chose to have sex with their “rapists” again; later “studies” produce similar (or even lower) results, so I think it’s fair to presume that only 27% of the “rapes” on that “infographic” would actually be called rapes by the victims (or anyone else without an agenda to advance). For the sake of simplicity I’m going to assume that all of the reported rapes were perceived as such by the victims (though that may not be so); furthermore, since a criminal defense attorney found no fault with the 30% prosecution figure I won’t, either. Finally, I’m going to use Bennett’s Texas conviction rate; the final “infographic” looks like this:
I think we can all agree that mine looks a lot more like something that might occur in the real world, and less like something dreamed up in the fearful, hate-poisoned minds of neofeminists. Exaggerating the number of rapes and downplaying the number of convictions and false accusations does not help rape victims; it undermines their credibility and thus makes it much harder for women who aren’t “perfect victims” (such as sex workers) to report real and sometimes violent rape.
..and not to mention the fact that rape can often happen with no witnesses so if it’s a case of ‘he said, she said’ then of course the conviction rate will be low. You can prove with DNA evidence that sex happened, trying to prove a lack of consent is a lot trickier.
The conviction rate would be low if the system presumed innocence, like it’s supposed to. In reality, of course, that doesn’t happen, and there are no consequences for women who lie or prosecutors who won’t let them back down on pain of perjury charges.
This is one of several reasons we should all be celebrating the non-renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.
> trying to prove a lack of consent is a lot trickier.
In the forensics TV shows, bruising of the vagina = rape.
I would point you to this article from the American Journal of Nursing : http://journals.lww.com/ajnonline/Abstract/2013/05000/Genital_Injury_After_Forced_or_Consensual.29.aspx
Which basically debunks the “vaginal injury = rape” myth. Maggie may have referenced this herself, as it rang a bell.
Remember : TV shows are *made up stuff for entertainment* unless you can prove otherwise.
Note that the “Jailed” figures in that infographic are smaller than the other figures! This makes the number look smaller than it is, because they are packed in more closely.
There’s just no limit to the dishonesty.
I don’t believe the figures are actually smaller, though their color may make them appear so; when I was copying and pasting to make my version, the red ones fit pretty neatly over those they were replacing. What is smaller is the word “Jailed”, and smaller still the words “Falsely Accused” at the bottom; in my version all of the category labels are the same size, 16 points.
If we take Maggie’s redone graphic as more accurate, (and I think it is) it still shows a sorry state of affairs.
Not necessarily. The only REAL numbers up there are “Reported”, “Faced Trial” and “Jailed”. Everything else up there is a speculative number – including “falsely accused” because just because a case wasn’t actually prosecuted, or the defendant wasn’t convicted doesn’t mean he was actually innocent of the crime.
All the “rapists” up there who aren’t reported and don’t face prosecution – I completely dismiss those because individuals (yes, even women) have a responsibility to report crime. If my car is stolen and I don’t report it – I should be dismissed as an idiot for bitching about it to some statistician later. I certainly shouldn’t be given enough credibility to be included in any “thinking” statistics.
The act of sex has the physical appearance of male domination – but that’s simplistic when you consider ALL of the interpersonal interactions riding underneath it. Most of the women in my life have gotten EXACTLY what they wanted out of me by giving something that is very easy for them to give. I don’t think I’m stretching here by saying that, in a NORMAL culture, women are dominated by men in the bedroom but men are dominated outside of it. My wife lets me make most of the decisions – surprise, I usually always decide to do what I think she wants to do.
But – because of the single-dimension of the appearance of male domination – it’s easy for a woman to “twist” the encounter into something it wasn’t. I don’t know how many times a girl has told me … “He had his way with me, I didn’t want to do it but it was just easier for me to go along.” Any woman can treat such an experience as a “rape” later if that’s how her mind chooses to deal with it.
Of course its a “sorry state of affairs”……. and any kind of violence is nasty ….but like magg said “this does not help the folks who need the help”. this is about again trying to keep the “battle of the sexes going” men are bad girls are good, neofim stuff. the vast maj of men are NOT rapist. haveing Sex in NOT the problem. ……….and driving a wedge between men and women will not solve the ” sorry state of affairs”.
I agree to a point. While I agree that it’s a shame that people have so little regard for one another that they violate each others’ rights, liberty and bodies, at the same time I respect the decisions of the women who choose not to report (as I chose not to every time I was raped). People have reasons for acting or failing to act, and when the victim of a crime chooses not to report, it may be because, like me, she wished to re-establish control over her life from that minute on rather than allowing it to be controlled for months or years by cops and prosecutors who don’t give a tinker’s dam about her, but just want to increase their “score”.
Furthermore, I don’t think we should be happy about a 68% conviction rate when only 75% of the accusations are correct in the first place; unless we believe the injustice system is 91% efficient (an assertion as ludicrous as anything in Creationism), that means an awful lot of innocent men are rotting in jail for crimes they not only did not commit, but which will brand them as social pariahs (“sex offenders”) for the rest of their lives. Though I consciously imitated the form of the first chart, they are both highly inaccurate in one very important respect: in real life, that 25% wrongly accused are not tucked away neatly at the bottom; they are more or less equally represented in all the “reported” groups (reported, tried and jailed), and their protests of innocence are totally ignored unless the accuser recants…and often not even then. So much for the sick neofeminist fantasy of “rape culture”.
I see I should have gone on at more length about what sorry state of affairs I was talking about. But it was early, and my hands were stiff.
It’s a sorry state of affairs that so many women feel the need to falsely accuse a man of rape, because of fear of admitting they had sex willingly.
It’s even a sorrier state of affairs that so many women hesitate to report a rape for fear of how they will be treated by the “justice” system (Sadly, they are accurate in their judgement), society, and even their families.
It’s perhaps the saddest state of affairs that we live in such a sex hating, shaming society that rape is kept secret, and so much shame is put upon sex, and having it as one likes.
Another thing that has to go is the “it couldn’t happen to me” mentality. I was on the jury of a rape case in December 2010, and the only holdout juror was a young woman with that mindset.
She was seemingly desperate to imagine that the victim was somehow at fault, or had led him on. After sentencing, the judge informed us that the defendant had convictions in this area. Quelle surprise.
I agree. It’d be great if no one hurt each other and no one made mistakes in judgment. Though, that’s not reality regardless which graphic you use.
I’ve never reported anything done to me without my consent because it would have never stood up in court. It would have seemed I was falsely accusing them — and I was (mostly) ok it — so why bother?
I’m just glad that infographics like the original exist because it spawns further discussion about rape, consent, and culture (like this one). Ignorance is the real enemy, and a culture of not supporting victims (both men and women who get trapped in a broken criminal justice system).
From today’s Independent:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/100000-assaults-1000-rapists-sentenced-shockingly-low-conviction-rates-revealed-8446058.html
And from the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jan/10/sex-crimes-analysis-england-wales
And from the Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9788265/Teenager-falsely-accused-of-rape-beaten-to-death-by-gang.html
Why do neither of the infographics make it clear that the “falsely accused” are not only obviously “reported”, but also frequently “put on trial”, and of course sometimes “jailed”. When the innocent are much more likely to be imprisoned than actual perpetrators the solution is not making arrest and conviction more easy, as the graphic is intended to be interpreted. What the graphic really reveals is a problem with women’s reporting, which rape activists actually discourage by dramatizing rape and inventing “rape culture” mythologies.
You’re exactly right; I addressed that issue in my reply to Comixchik above. I wanted the two to be visually comparable, so I consciously imitated the design flaw.
I think the most telling infographic would be the 80% decline we have seen over the last 40 years, which tells us we’re doing something right on this subject.
It’s funny. Amanada Marcotte had a rare display of lucidity when she criticized the plot but couldn’t resist saying ignorant things like this:
She completely missed that slut-shaming is one of the problems that creates false accusations: i.e., women who claim to be raped because they are ashamed of having been caught having sex or having sex with someone not “permitted”.
What you said about DNA is particularly relevant. We have seen, thanks to the Innocence Project, men cleared of rapes they served decades in prison for. And think about this: while those men were serving, the real rapist was out there raping other women. False accusations should be something any rational person would be very concerned about, feminist or no.
Thank you for the redo on the infographic and the links to others who have questioned it. As soon as I saw people passing it about on Facebook and Twitter, I had questions. But heaven forbid I say anything about it. I just wasn’t in the mood to argue such points online.
The original chart was bad, I admit. But your statistical work is terrible.
Like, that’s not Texas’ conviction rate, it’s Harris County’s which Mark Bennett assumed was “typical”.
It’s certainly an improvement, but it’s doesn’t raise the bar very much.
Since “bad” is better than “terrible” – I’m assuming your position is that the original chart is CLOSER to the truth?
No, my position is that Maggie’s chart is more accurate but neither chart is actually based on sound research.
I think that the point that Maggie was making – and that of the original blogger from which she gleaned her information – was that even with a very slight amount of effort, a better outcome was generated. What does this say about those who posted the original bad outcome? That they weren’t interested in the truth, but in acting in support of a culturally pervasive “Big Lie.”
There was an “if” in there, not an assumption.
According to neo-feminists, a woman can not give consent if she fears severe consequences for denying consent. While that is true in some cases, they think that also applies when a wife fears losing economic or emotional support from her husband if she doesn’t give him sex. A similar reasoning is used to explain why escorts can never consent to clients. With an understand of rape that is as broad as that, it doesn’t surprise me why they are so reckless with statistics.
That said, I am disturbed by how blindly people tend to defend a man accused of rape if he is in a position of trust or authority, such as a police officer or politician. So, I can believe there is a culture that sometimes protects some men, but it isn’t as wide-spread as neo-feminists want us to believe.
“According to neo-feminists, a woman can not give consent if she fears severe consequences for denying consent.”
That’s not just neo-feminists. It’s a principle of fairness that “consent” to any agreement, if given under duress, is not a true consent. There are obviously specific requirements to the claim of duress, such as threat to life or limb or confinement. Fear of losing economic or emotional support obviously doesn’t qualify.
@Maggie: “If all those rapes are unreported, how do we know about them?”
That is really at the crux of the matter regarding all these “statistics.”
I think there are at least two distinct issues concerning the numbers touted by the neofeminists and the compliant media.
First, given the current hysteria over rape, where some acts that would have passed for normal sexual interaction in my generation (coming of age in the ’60s and ’70s) are now categorized as rape (no, I am not diminishing the seriousness of rape nor defending coercive or non-consensual behavior, just saying that given interactions are subject to a range of both personal, contextual, and cultural interpretations that change over time, place, and perspective), it strains credulity to believe that only 5-10% of rapes are even reported.
Second, if such a low proportion of rapes are in fact reported, does this not actually encourage commission of rape, especially among borderline people who might otherwise be deterred by the threat of being reported and prosecuted? And if so, does this not work counter to the intents of those who promote these “statistics”? Of course, that is to dismiss the possibility that their real intent is to create hysteria and thereby further their own political and power agenda.
But that couldn’t be . . . could it?
Instead of the actual epigram, I got more reminded of Churchill’s “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”.
I may, and there’s is great chance the I am, be misunderstanding your point, but Churchill’s epigram is specifically and only about wartime, as he points out.
If you mean that others apply that epigram to further their particular agenda, dishonestly without any integrity, I can’t disagree. I abhor our use of “War on…” because it so easily lends itself to Churchill’s epigram, and too often adheres to it.
Yes, my point was that the prohibinists view this as a war and thus feel justified in warping statistics (or making it up out of whole cloth).
(Especially since, in this case, the Truth is their Achilles heel.)
…”Truth is mighty and will prevail”– the most majestic compound fracture of fact which any of woman born has yet achieved. For the history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sewn thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie well told is immortal.
Mark Twain – “Advice to Youth,” 15 April 1882
And more Twain on the flip side…
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
– Following the Equator, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar
Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.
– Notebook, 1898
Devil’s Advocate here:
I say we DO have a rape culture, as long as women are afraid to go certain places by themselves, or participate in certain activities due to fear of being raped. So in this particular area, I agree with neofeminists. Rape is a tool to limit women’s space, i e make space off-limits to women.
The few men who rape don’t do it as part of some grand plan to win the “war of the sexes”. They do it because they want sex, and a lone woman incapacitated by drugs or alcohol is an easy target for them to get it. Saying this means there’s a “rape culture” is a bit like saying there’s “shark culture” because humans can’t swim freely with seals at the beach without fear of being eaten by a great white.
You’re exactly right … they teach us guys this in our “He-Man’s Woman Haters” curriculum that we secretly receive at the age of 13. The goal is to keep women OUT of certain places so we’re encouraged to rape any gal who dares trod her feet there.
No. There is no “conspiracy” by men (in the Western World) to “limit” a woman’s space.
I hate to say this – but there are really two types of women. Women who have no sense of reality and constantly play the “victim card” and the other category being hearty women who realize we live, and will always live, in an “imperfect” world.
The latter is MUCH MORE attractive than the former.
Say, I feel “limited” even though I’m a 6’2″ 235 pound white male because I don’t feel I can safely walk the streets at night in a housing project. I’ll alledge right here and now that there’s a conspiracy by BLACKS to keep big WHITE guys out of their “space”.
You’re right, there is no “grand conspiracy” by men to limit women’s space. But that is the net effect of men taking advantage of women when they are drunk, stoned, or alone. Women have to be careful not to put themselves into situations where the potential of rape can occur, and THAT is what limits women’s space. No “conspiracy” is needed to do this.
Ironically, I can use the example of Maggie being attacked by Chicken and a gang of other boys when she was younger. Maggie “learned” she could no longer take a short-cut to the store to buy her comic books, and therefore, her space was limited. And the question I ask in response to this is: Why should Maggie have to limit her space when clearly she was the innocent party? Why shouldn’t she be able to take the short-cut to buy her comics? Well, it’s because we have a rape-culture.
http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/stranger-danger/
But VIOLENCE is not an issue that only affects women – it affects men too. It appears that some women think that men can just move about freely without the slightest fear whatsoever. That is not true. Even though I’m capable of defending myself I am very careful not to put myself into situations where I might get hurt. No – the attacker probably isn’t interested in my ass … more likely my wallet … or my car …
Then again – I DID have to flee from a group of five Korean gay guys in Chin Hae once when I was the lone Caucasian inside a Karaoke club. I was with two Korean hookers and they said something, obviously bad, in Korean to the gay guys at a nearby table. When the girls refused to back down the guys started looking at me like I needed to control the women? WTF? No GI can control a drunk Korean whore! Anyway – I drug the women outside and the gay guys followed – I told the chicks to “RUN!” and one of them said … “You big boy – you kill all homos!” And I’m like … “Yeah I think I can take them but what is the penalty for LOSING a fight a small gang of pissed off Korean gay guys?”
A chance I wasn’t willing to take. 😛
I think that Broken Arrow and Emily Hemingway comprehensively answered this construct, here
Quote:
If I felt like it, I could lease a top of the line red Mercedes convertible, put on my most expensive clothes, bedeck myself with jewels, withdraw $10,000 in cash from the bank, and then drive to the worst part of my local city blasting the radio and flashing my bling.
When I got robbed, mugged and/or beat up it wouldn’t be my fault, of course. It would be because of the city’s “culture of violence.”
Close-quote
This is absolutely a false equivalency. I was born with tits and vagina. I can’t put them on and take them off like “bling”. Really, really dumb analogy.
But you can choose how you present them. And that’s the point.
I’d like to visit some of the National Parks in Canada. But given the fact that bear attacks are a problem, the Park Service won’t do anything about them, and they refuse to let me arm myself, I don’t go. And I don’t make any claims about there being a “Bear Culture” to keep me from going there. I evaluate the risk and decide it isn’t worth it.
And you get to do the same thing. This idea that if I can’t just go anywhere I please on a whim without taking into account the real world issues at hand somehow constitutes oppression is what Maggie, and Paglia and other strong feminst types are talking about. You’re an individual and you get to take responsibility for yourself.
There were places in Japan where it was ill-advised to go as a Gaijin. If I went – and sometimes I did – I was fully aware that I was taking a risk. A friend of mine works in China and has the same restraints. Is this a result of a certain anti-Western bias in China? Yup. Was it the same in Japan? Nope. Just that certain criminal elements figured that they could target a gaijin with relative impunity. And yes, I was born with blond hair and white skin. I suppose I could have dyed my hair and darkened my skin…
Just because risk factors exist that make specific phenotypic attributes dangerous in certain contexts does not give you license to indict the entire population as a culture of rape, black violence, xenophobia, etc. I’ve had this argument with white supremacists who make the same argument about black culture – masquerading as evolutionary psychology – that you’re making about male culture. And neither one is true or valid, partaking, as it does, in the fallacy of composition. Some men rape. This is true. Some black men assault white people. This is true. But it does not follow, therefore, that all black men are violent or that all men are rapists or that black culture – in its entirety is violent or that male culture is “rape culture.”
I’m not saying that all men are rapists. I’m saying that because some men rape, this limits women’sspace, and becausethis happens, we have a rape-culture. If Maggie cannot take the short-cut to get where she needs to go, then that is an exampleof rape-culture.
I know you’re playing devil’s advocate, but what I think the others are pointing out is that it’s fallacious to limit that to rape. Everyone has to limit his or her movements to varying degrees due to fear of crime or assault; therefore you either have to say we have a “crime culture” – without singling out rape or any other crime – or simply admit that this is just reality, with no need to apply some artificial label which would describe every single culture of more than 400 people since the Dawn of Civilization, and is therefore wholly useless as a descriptor.
Yes, exactly. What Maggie said. Though I think Susan really believes what she is saying and is not just playing devil’s advocate.
Yes, everyone experiences violence, including men. Violence has unfortunately been with us for a long time. And everyone, including men, has to limit their space to protect themselves. But, for the sake of argument, rape can be put into a special category. For example, how many female taxi drivers are there? Driving a car is something both men and women are capable of doing easily, so why the disparity? Because it is quite easy for a woman to get raped in this situation. Just from this example alone, you can argue that rape far exceeds any other type of violence in terms of its effect on victims. Women suffer economically due to the limitation of space that rape creates.
Now, I am sure that male taxi drivers are assaulted and robbed. But, male taxi drivers are not quitting in droves because of it. And you can bet that if they went on strike because of this, we’d do something about it, or at least talk about. But we accept this type of limitation of space when it comes to women, and this ACCEPTENCE of limitation versus the much smaller limitation of space that men experience is what I define as rape-culture.
Huh? There are not more women taxi drivers because they are afraid of being raped? Where do you get this stuff from?
I stand by what I said yesterday. You are coming from a specific mindset in which you view the entire world in terms of rape, and no amount of cogent argument will change that view. What a way to live. Fortunately, I think this is an anomaly and most women don’t view the world or their lives this way.
Sorry for back-to-back posting, but just to see if I was not crazy, after my previous posting I googled “rape of women taxi drivers.” Going five pages deep, since that’s all I have time for right now, the ONLY links I found concerning the rape of a taxi driver concerned the rape of a MALE taxi driver by a FEMALE passenger, in Romania:
http://www.whatsonningbo.com/news-10258-romanian-taxi-driver-raped-twice-by-woman-resembling-angelina-jolie.html
http://www.bucharestherald.com/dailyevents/41-dailyevents/36318-amazing-case-in-tulcea-cab-driver-raped-by-a-female-client
http://www.celebdirtylaundry.com/2012/woman-luminita-perijoc-resembling-angelina-jolie-rapes-stabs-taxi-driver-nicolae-stan-photos-0826/
http://www.inquisitr.com/317683/angelina-jolie-lookalike-stabs-cab-driver-for-refusing-sex/
There also is a story about a non-profit company of all-female taxi drivers in London. They will only pick up female passengers, which seems patently discriminatory (imagine if there were a company that would only pick up male passengers), and they are responding to the fears of women passengers and, obviously, not women drivers:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/road-safety/9573645/Women-only-taxi-firms.html
True, there are lots of stories (from all over the world) of reports of rapes of women passengers by male drivers (but given the millions of cab rides by women every day of the year, even 100 Google pages of such reports, many duplicates, is statistically a very small percentage). Many of those are committed by Muslim cab drivers against non-Muslim women, and many by bogus cab drivers — men posing to be cab drivers who are not. And there are a number of reports of false accusations and exonerations as well, not surprising considering that dealing with the public opens one to all sorts of false accusations, a fear that male cab drivers might have.
No one denies that rape is a reality or that there are men that rape (and apparently, some women, too). This does not establish that a “rape culture” exists, nor that women are not choosing taxi driving as a profession for fear of being raped.
I stand by my “Huh?”
@Hotlix
I don’t think you know enough about my “mindset” to make judgments about me, but thanks for your input regardless 🙂
Maggie, you hit it on the head. I think women (I do not mean all women) too often don’t or can’t understand that men suffer similar limits, but we recognize them as normally occurring human interaction and not something laws can change. If I talk to the wrong woman at a bar, or walk down the wrong street in NY or Chicago (done that both cities), or simply voice an opinion too strongly at the wrong time, I open myself to violence. We, men, are careful in where we go and often on heightened alert even if the locale seems safe.
Like some of the other guys here I was in the military. Bases are seldom in the safe parts of town.
Susan,
men who are drunk and alone often get robbed. Go ask ANY man who, like me, has traveled all over the world whether he would be drunk and alone late at night is places like London, New York, Moscow, Cape Town Johannesburg, Sydney, Melbourne, San Franciosco, LA, Toronto etc.
Almost NO MAN will tell you it is a good idea to be a MAN and drunk and alone late at night because some men might steal money or valuables off us. Yet you women think that you should somehow be magically protected by someone paid for by men so that you can be drunk and alone late at night.
Pay for it yourself. You said you needed men like fish need bicycles. Is there ANY group of women more dependent on MEN than sex workers? Duh?!
I’m going to enter into this discussion against my better judgment. I think Susan’s mind is made up and no amount of cogent argument is going to change it, and most of the countervailing arguments have already been made.
I’m going to say — as has been said — that I am a man, and there are plenty of places I would be afraid to go, and certain activities in which I would be reluctant to participate. And one of those places and activities, speaking from experience of having been there a couple of times too many, is divorce court in this country. There, for no other reason than he has male genitalia and not female, a man will be defamed, defrauded of his money and property, denied access to his children, sometimes imprisoned, and generally reminded of his worthless and powerless status in life. And it is all done “legally.”
Most men who have been to that place and participated in that activity will tell you that there is a culture, promoted by the neofeminists and their imperative to infantilize women, implemented by prejudiced and mindless judges and legislators, and misrepresented and furthered by toady and misinformed media, that limits men’s space and makes them wonder about the sanity of entering into marriage or having children.
Other examples of places and activities unsafe for men have already been covered by other posters, but I love the reference to shark and bear culture. Those are real, too!
No, my mind is not “made up”. It’s up to you to convince me that I’m wrong. So, try to explain to me that there is no such thing as a rape-culture?
Okay, Susan. So what exactly is a rape culture? You yourself said there is no great conspiracy:
“You’re right, there is no ‘grand conspiracy’ by men to limit women’s space.”
As Gordon’s posting below, and others, have said, anyone who puts themselves into a dangerous situation is likely to face the consequences of that. But to say that in most societies, including our own, there is a culture of rape with the intent of confining women’s movement is a gross misinterpretation at best, an absurdity at worse.
Are there men who rape women? Of course. Are there women who do evil things against men? Of course. Are there incidents of rape as an instrument of war or terrorization, such as what is going on in Congo right now, such as existed in West Africa, in Bosnia and Kosovo, and other places? Absolutely. And rape as an instrument of war has existed throughout history. It is only in modern times where it is abhorred, rooted out, and prosecuted, indicating that in the civilized world today there is, if anything, a “grand conspiracy” to stamp out rape.
I don’t know if that proves anything, and it is a logical impossibility to prove a negative anyway, but I just don’t see how, other than making the claim, you have demonstrated that a rape culture exists.
“Okay, Susan. So what exactly is a rape culture? You yourself said there is no great conspiracy:”
Good Lord. When did “culture”and “conspiracy” become the same thing?
That’s all you have to say? Where have you even defined what a “rape culture” is, much less offered any proof of it? That some women are afraid to go some places for fear of being raped proves nothing.
Good lord. When did “fear” and “culture” become the same thing?
When do “fear” and “culture” become the same thing? When we accept that “fear” as normal and inevitable, and make no attempt to change it.
Fear is a normal human (and animal) response. It is part of the survival instinct. Without it, our life expectancy would be significantly shortened. That’s healthy. Letting it rule our lives is not. The world is a dangerous place, always has been, probably always will be. If one wants to live in a world without danger, without fear, that is what fantasy is for. Enjoy it while it lasts, because sooner or later reality intervenes. And that’s my last word on the subject.
And you’ve still avoided his main and most salient question: rape-culture means what? The one where men are willing to beat or kill the rapist of their daughter, sister, or mother? (An aside: it’s a female fantasy that extra-legal punishment for rape is dealt with by women, or that women care more, women go to men and men beat or kill the rapist).
Before you define rape-culture, define rape. That is the starting point for understanding what rape-culture means. Please give us that beginning.
Yes, there are places that are unsafe for MEN to go to. But that also begs the question: What are MEN doing to change this? Anything? Or, do they just accept the violence?
As a woman, I may have no choice but to alter my behavior to minimalize my chances of getting raped, but under no circumstances do I consider this a normal state of affairs. In fact, it is quite abnormal. Because unlike sharks and bears, men and women are of the same species, despite our physical differences.
Case in point: in many parts of the world, women can’t even leave their houses due to violence, or they can’t travel without a close male relative accompanying them. Is this acceptable to everyone here? I think not. So why should we accept limitations on women here in Western culture just because they are comparatively fewer than elsewhere in the world?
@Susan: ” . . . or they can’t travel without a close male relative accompanying them.”
Yes, and in those countries rape is almost non-existent. Is that how anyone wants to live? And is that liberating to women?
I don’t know about the women you know (and let’s see if we can limit our discussion to our own society and not every diverse culture on the face of the earth), but I don’t know any that are afraid to go anywhere, at least not anywhere that anyone would not be reluctant to go to. Your argument proves zipola.
“Because unlike sharks and bears, men and women are of the same species, despite our physical differences.”
And your point is? There are animal species where rape is the normal way of having sex. Oh, and some where the female eats the male after sex. And this proves what exactly?
“What are MEN doing to change this? Anything? Or, do they just accept the violence?” Uh, laws, VAWA for example? Really, you missed those patriarchal laws? Codes of conduct amongst civilized males? We have been doing things for centuries to change this…even before the Enlightenment. It had to be men, after all it was a patriarchy, with women having no influence because no man listens to his mother, sister, wife, or daughter. Nor cares.
We teach our sons and daughters that violence is only justified in self-defense against violence, but not all do of either sex. And some children are just left to the Lord of the Flies.
It’s not just women who will be taken advantage of if they are drunk, stoned or alone in a dangerous area. Granted that being raped is probably more traumatic than being mugged, robbed or beaten, but that is only because of modern American society’s abhorrence of sex.
Read some of the Greek myths. Now that was a REAL rape culture. And much more frequently resulted in pregnancy. But the rape wasn’t seen as any more traumatic than robbery or any other assault, even by the women involved. The rape was seen as economic by the entire society. The woman was robbed of her virginity, dowry, marriage prospects, or ability to enjoy economic success.
I don’t advocate this view, either–I’m only pointing out that modern American social assumptions are far from universal. It’s the puritanical fear/hatred of sex that makes rape so traumatic in this society.
Well said. And the most damaging rape myth of all is the one (shared by all fundamentalists, especially neofeminists) that rape is a trauma virtually on par with death, from which a woman can never ever ever recover. And as the victim of several rapes (the first at gunpoint) and friend of several women who have been raped (one at gunpoint), I can tell you that’s utter, 100% bullshit.
Dare I say this comes from a culture that created the term hysteria?
Violence is humiliating and destructive to one’s view of oneself. It isn’t any different for a male, but we express that humiliation differently. And, trust me, being kicked in the balls is a violation, they’re just as important to me as your ovaries or uterus or vagina is to you. But being kicked in the balls is funny…
Maggie, I have no doubt you understand context. We’re two sexes of the same species, we should view both sexes as “us”. Shame is too many of either don’t.
That’s a good point Gordon. In the late medieval period, a woman was more likely to subject a rapist to a “bastardy bond” than to insist on his incarceration or death. A bastardy bond essentially bound him to her as an indentured servant to support the the child that his rape forced upon her. Now that’s a punishment that fits the crime.
Oh, thank you for that. I’ve read on medieval concepts of public nudity (bathing in particular), sex, marriage, incest, and “bastard”. It’s like I’ve been lied to over and over again whenever I read books on the Medieval Period. The “Decameron” is but a start.
Pre-pubescent, at least the very young, children ran around naked. Horrors. To be unfair, praise be to Queen Victoria and to Paul.
To clarify, using Shaw’s Caesar’s apology for Britanius: “Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.” We too often take our customs today and think they go back to the beginning of time. When reading the “Decameron”, or history books on social customs of Medieval Ages or earlier (or even post Medieval) I am struck by how our customs aren’t theirs. Yet we think they are.
Public bathing and needed nudity, not in a bath house but in the bazaar, was common. Nipple slips were fashionable at one time; breasts weren’t equated with genitalia; sex in the same room with children was normal (in a hovel how else?); underwear for women was scandalous (there’s a great British quote where a woman fell ass up and the reply was glad to see she hadn’t yet taken up the French custom); brothels were common, acceptable, and often taxed; and the age of consent was 11 to 13 (the biggest change in that IIRC was Britain moving to 16 around 1600). Even incest, as in Hamlet, isn’t definitionally the same; in many states today it’s not the same as in FDRs day (first cousins and all that).
It just isn’t what you see in the movies, but then screenwriters aren’t historians. It isn’t what your mother told you either, unless she was a historian on that period.
Britannus, damn it, Britannus. I always do the “i” before the “u”.
Think of all the stories where a modern person is transported back in time. Probably wouldn’t a one of us last a week if we did anything other than hide out in the woods.
Bah. We have a nanny-statist culture, as long as women with pathological fears are able to pervert the justice system to deny due process to men and get them blamed and punished without cause. If a woman really has cause to fear attack, she should learn to use a gun and start packing it.
“Rape is a tool to limit women’s space, i e make space off-limits to women.” But that leads to some great conspiracy by men to limit women, which isn’t the case, if only because men have mothers, sisters, and daughters. We get really pissed about rape, and not just about immediate family members, but also about friends of our mothers, sisters, and daughters. Rapists are not held in high-esteem in the extreme environment of prison, yet if there was a conspiracy by males it should show there.
The first issue is to define rape clearly without ambiguity. “Regret” after sex, if used as a definition, means men suffer rape at a 1:2 ratio by regret. Trust me we have regret, and it isn’t just because we sober up the next morning. Women are sexually aggressive too, I’ve paid attention to the sexual side of feminism, just less so in frequency to men. Put “regret” aside. Put “coy”, put your made-up reality about sex aside. The only test is did you have sex because you agreed to it, a few drinks withoutstanding (dead drunk withstanding, but then what if he was too?).
I see too much infantilizing of females on this subject; you’re adult actors unless physically forced. If women are incapable of being adult actors in this area, then they need help. You may mature earlier, but it doesn’t mean you mature further (there is at least one study that says women as a group fall behind men in maturity by the late 30s, maturity being a process over time, not set by menarche or penis growth).
Men define rape as forced. If you need to use “regret” or “I gave in”, then there are men that have been raped too. Oh, I’m sorry, that doesn’t fit the latest cultural paradigm.
Violence is the tool used to limit both men and women, i.e. to make space off-limits. I crossed from Little Italy to Little Puerto Rico in NY, and crossed back, something about “muerte”. Men suffer violence at a magnitude above women, but it’s meaningless because it’s men on men so it’s within the group. Only meaningful if across groups, I suppose.
“There is a world of solitary adventure I will never have. Women have always known these somber truths. But feminism, with its pie-in-the-sky fantasies about the perfect world, keeps young women from seeing life as it is.”
“In dramatizing the pervasiveness of rape, feminists have told young women that before they have sex with a man, they must give consent as explicit as a legal contract’s. In this way, young women have been convinced that they have been the victims of rape.”
Camille Paglia, “It’s a Jungle Out There
And from our very own proprietress, commenting on one of her commenters here:
“There is a world of solitary adventure I will never have. Women have always known these somber truths.”
With this statement, Camille Paglia is effectively admitting that there such a thing as rape-culture. That’s the “somber truth” women have always known.
“But feminism, with its pie-in-the-sky fantasies about the perfect world, keeps young women from seeing life as it is.”
It’s feminism that has allowed Camille Paglia to publish her books and become a public figure. So I guess feminism made her world a little more “perfect” than it would have been without it.
You’re missing the point here Susan. It is an imperfect world. There are places I might like to go that I won’t go because of the risks involved. You’re trying to posit a world without risks and anything that falls short of that ideal world is deficient and indicative of some conspiracy to violence against whatever protected group happens to be the flavor of the day.
And if you knew anything about Paglia, you ‘d know that she has a great deal of respect for the feminists that took on the male dominated culture and made their own way in that world and no respect at all for muling, puling types that think that society owes them a nice life without consequences like daddy would have provided for them in that nice safe suburban world where they “grew up.” And neo-feminism, as Maggie calls it, has far more examples of the puling type than of the Wollestonecraft types.
And you’re missing the point. Paglia is telling women to merely accept a limitation of space, rather than try to find ways of overcoming that limitation.
Yes, Andrew, I can accept a limitation of space because I have no choice to, but please don’t insult my intelligence by calling this “feminism”, because it’s not.
Nope, it’s called realism. I, for one, don’t have to have the Panglossian notion that “this is the best possible in the best of all possible worlds” before I recognize that I still have freedom to act even while there are reality-based constraints on that action. Paglia merely points out that crying about the imperfections you face and arguing that those exempt you from personal responsibility is a hallmark of personal immaturity. No one is arguing that a person who is raped should not have her attacker prosecuted. We just reserve the right to point out that doing an unsafe thing while oblvious to the possible outcome is a very stupid thing to do.
Well, it was “realism” that Blacks had to sit at the back of the bus, until a Black woman finally sat down in the front of the bus and changed things.
Women don’t need Paglia to tell them to watch for rape; they do it every day of their lives. I would be more impressed with Paglia as philosopher/cultural critic if she at least tried to address rape-violence in terms of how to combat them, rather than simply giving Victorian chaperone advice that anyone could give.
Try harder, Paglia.
Wrong; it’s that there were CONSEQUENCES for not sitting at the back, not that she “had to”. Rosa Parks was brave and hardheaded enough to do what she wanted and take the consequences.
The point is that she changed things,and not merely accepted them as “realism”.
Right, but you’re forgetting that it was THE LAW, i.e. state action, that she was fighting, not some nebulous “culture”.
Hi, Maggie,
I have to nit-pick here because it was the LAW but also the culture. Jim Crow was cultural with sanction of law in that the to-be Jim Crow states wanted blacks to be lower in status socially but needed approval after the Reconstruction Amendments, which gave no such approval. They found it in Plessy v. Ferguson when SCOTUS created “Separate but Equal” out of whole cloth as SCOTUS is wont to do. I can’t find anything previous to1896 in the Constitution that gives “separate but equal” yet SCOTUS found it between the lines. Nothing like a “Living Constitution”, and Plessy v Ferguson is the poster child.
As for Rosa Parks, she was defying the law. Such a miscreant for making trouble.
Exactly, Maggie. Ultimately we are individuals, not merely some cultural artifacts, victims, or actors, and we are responsible for our own actions, happiness, liberation, or repression and fear. And there are consequences, whether we sit dutifully at the back of the bus or defy law and convention and move to the front. No pain, no gain, and yer pays yer money and yer takes yer chances.
Life’s just like that, and it doesn’t fit neatly into some pat theoretical belief system or ideology.
“Exactly, Maggie. Ultimately we are individuals, not merely some cultural artifacts, victims, or actors, and we are responsible for our own actions, happiness, liberation, or repression and fear.”
My last name is an Ellis Island abbreviation of a long Italian name. Given the extreme prejudice against Italians beginning in the 1880s, I must still be a victim whether or not I suffered it personally. I’m also German, and boy that wave of hatred for German that was WWI and WWII must make me a victim too. Yet, I’ve not suffered anything like either of my Great-Grandfathers, nor my daughters what their Great-Grandmothers suffered (I most identify with my German Great-Grandmother so much more by far than I do with all my other family members, so much so may I claim her suffering, a highly intelligent 5 ft 9 inch woman in 1918, as my own? Do the genitals have to match?). To claim their suffering as my own would be narcissism
Right now, Universities are about 60% female in undergraduate studies (the percentages in post-graduate studies will rise accordingly but with time lag). Do we need to stop this inequity? Shouldn’t we? We needed to when it was 60/40 male/female. Shouldn’t we now?
(My hyperbole on education comes from my short time on an elementary school committee 12 years ago, where I and a female Kindergarten teacher kept saying “you’re rules aren’t about bad behavior but about what boys do”. The sexism was so apparent as to be sickening. It has given it’s fruit.)
“It’s feminism that has allowed Camille Paglia to publish her books and become a public figure.”
Really? Then what was it that allowed Simone de Bouvoir or Margaret Meade or Mary Shelley to do so before feminism?
None of these authors that you’ve mentioned lived before feminism. The idea of feminism started during the Enlightenment in the 18th century.
Sounds like you’re reifying the abstract here. So there was some immanent social construct called “feminism” before Wollstonecraft? And that is what empowered her to write? It had nothing to do with her personal intelligence and courage?
How many female authors existed in Western culture before the Enlightenment who weren’t courtesans? Yeah, Wollstonecraft had to have courage, to do what she did.
It started at the Enlightenment, but by how we’ve used the term since the late 1800s it was so nascent that labeling it feminist does injury to the word. If anything, the Enlightenment was trying to come to terms with the idea of individual rights and worth versus society and government. It was still constrained by societal norms with regard to the sexes, while trying to break out of those constraints. Men and women are different, too many proofs to say contrary (even the bell curve on IQs), but we are still just two expressions of the same species. The species is made of the whole of both, neither is the only expression or the correct or better expression. If women think theirs better, take the bullet for the man and quit expecting him to take it for you. Die for him, without thought, do it for him. Put your body in front of his. Protect him.
If you want to talk violence, I’ve had to go to both middle school and high school admins to stop the most vile, vicious, and unrelenting verbal violence done to my daughters by other girls (I had to involve the police at one point, it got that bad). I’ve had to put my youngest daughter last month into a treatment center because she couldn’t cope and tried suicide (had she been a son I’d likely be writing after a funeral because I would have told him to “man-up”, something women expect of men while so seldom expecting it of themselves); all from what girls did to her, let me repeat, what girls did to her relentlessly. So I am sick and tired of “women are victims of men”. Women are as vile, vicious, and sick as men. We are two sexes of the same species.
It’s a 19th Century patriarchal concept to think otherwise.
The species is made of the whole of both, neither is the only expression or the correct or better expression. If women think theirs better, take the bullet for the man and quit expecting him to take it for you. Die for him, without thought, do it for him. Put your body in front of his. Protect him.
It is the bodyguard that should die to protect the president, not vice versa. In evolutionary terms, children are most valuable, then women, then men; and what we see is that men will die to protect women, just as women will die to protect children.
If it were that simple. BTW, the President’s Secret Service are hired for that purpose, among others, and are subordinate to the President so your analogy falls flat. Unless you believe spouses are subordinate.
As for the hierarchy, that’s just a variation of “biology is destiny” which you’ve too rigidly applied. We’re not constrained by that; the experience of Roman foot soldiers when dealing with Germanic tribes is an easy example, though you may still claim that the women fought alongside the men but not for the men, I differ. The women had a substantial self-interest in the survival of the male, if only “for the children”.
In “evolutionary terms” is a nice phrase, but in evolutionary terms the breeding pair or harem is the most important and the survival of any one off-spring is secondary because as many children are produced to ensure the survival of some. The death of the breeding pair, or harem, ends that.
To repeat: we aren’t constrained by “evolutionary terms”. If we were then females would be set to certain roles as would males (like chimps and bonobos, though even there the roles have flux but less than in our species). Give weight to the terms “natural” and “artificial”.
As for, in human terms, women protecting men: my step-mother had a wicked right-cross, hit my father and suffer….
Since females are the ones that choose in natural circumstances, then yes, males are subordinate to them.
Tribal warfare has nothing to do with self-sacrifice; it is a collective effort to survive. There are times when not resisting results in annihilation, so it is necessary for everyone to fight.
It depends what you mean in by “constrained” since instincts will always be there. Propaganda can only do so much.
There are some women who are violent in defense of men, but they tend to do so safe in the knowledge that their death is unlikely; and that society considers violence against women unacceptable.
And just in case you missed it “The species is made of the whole of both, neither is the only expression or the correct or better expression. If women think theirs better, take the bullet for the man and quit expecting him to take it for you….” was “put your money were your mouth is”. Although I do understand that there are those who think others should die for them because, well, they are worth so much more than those others. A variation on “Animal Farm”.
I was pointing out that superiority does not imply sacrifice, quite the opposite in most circumstances.
Neofeminists believe themselves to be superior, and they clearly hate the idea that any man would not serve as a defensive barrier. In writing about the Aurora shootings; they ignore the three men (Jonathan Blunk, Alex Teves and Matt McQuinn) that laid down their lives in defense of their girlfriends, instead focusing their attention on attacking the one who ran away, Jamie Rohrs.
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I’ve run into the whole “for every {insert evil deed} reported, there are X that remain unreported” thing before. It’s very useful when there isn’t enough of whatever one wants us all to be scared about.
And of course, when anybody points this out, there is the risk of going too far in the other direction, as if it isn’t important if “only” ten thousand women are raped each year, instead of fifty thousand. Yes, those ten thousand, or fifty thousand, or however many it is DO matter, but they aren’t served by phony numbers.
And on the other side, it certainly matters if one percent of men are rapists, instead of eighty percent. Men who are NOT rapists are ABSOLUTELY not served by inflated numbers.
So thank you, Maggie, for injecting some critical thought and reality into an emotional and often distorted issue.
Women also aren’t served by “women never lie about rape” or that accused men are de facto guilty (mothers, sisters, daughters, anyone?), or that if women do lie it’s only 2% (when it’s at least 5-9%, with estimates going towards 50%) or by not prosecuting women who do lie because it’ll scare women into not reporting (with all the mid-early-20th Century excuses as if they apply today). No one is served by phony numbers such as 90% of rapes aren’t reported (that leads to all sorts of crazy rape numbers if you back-calculate), or only 2% of rape claims are false. However, if innocent men are accused of rape it is a learning moment for them as to the how of their part of the rape-culture (count the minutes until you get the full import).
Rape today is not your grand-mother’s shame to be hidden…
I even mentioned that women who really are raped are not served by phony numbers.
Did you hear the BBC Radio 4 programme from a couple of years ago about rape conviction statistics? It is an episode of ‘More or Less’. It comes to the same conclusions as you but for different reasons. You can still hear it here:-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/more_or_less/8213670.stm
This is good too:-
http://www.straightstatistics.org/article/how-panic-over-rape-was-orchestrated
Hi ! Where can we have the sources for your image (the 25%) ?
If you’d actually read the article rather than expecting to be spoon-fed, you’d already have your answer.