Feminism’s New Enemy: ‘Rape Truthers’

Posted on | December 20, 2014 | 73 Comments

Speak of @AmandaMarcotte, and madness doth appear:

No, the real reason [the Rolling Stone UVA rape story] is turning into such a big deal is there are a surprising number of people who want to deny that rape is a serious social problem and who want to push the idea that many rape cases are just a matter of women lying because they are crazy or vindictive. For these folks — call ‘em rape truthers — this whole incident is like a second Christmas, an opportunity to take an extremely rare and strange case and pretend it should be reason to dismiss the reality that rape is a crime that happens with some frequency.

“Rape truthers.” Where shall we begin dismantling this straw man?

Let’s start by noticing how Amanda Marcotte obscures the sequence of events in how this became “such a big deal.” She begins her column by saying there has been “a shocking media feeding frenzy over the discovery that one of the young women claiming to be a rape victim in Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s recent Rolling Stone piece might be exaggerating about her experience or even lying about it.” Yet this was not the original “media feeding frenzy,” which was caused when Erdely’s story “A Rape On Campus” was published online Nov. 19. And we now know, as we did not know on Nov. 19, the motives and purposes behind Erdely’s story. She had shopped around looking for the perfect rape:

Magazine writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely knew she wanted to write about sexual assaults at an elite university. What she didn’t know was which university.
So, for six weeks starting in June, Erdely interviewed students from across the country. She talked to people at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. None of those schools felt quite right. But one did: the University of Virginia, a public school, Southern and genteel, brimming with what Erdely calls “super-smart kids” and steeped in the legacy of its founder, Thomas Jefferson.

As Tim Graham of Newsbusters pointed out, Erdley mocked the lack of radical feminist activism at UVA, and said female students there were “sickened by the university’s culture of hidden sexual violence.”

The quest that led Erdely to Charlottesville was part of a campaign by feminists to exaggerate the prevalence of rape on campuses, a campaign in which officials of the Obama administration were actively involved.

“It is estimated that 1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there — 1 in 5.”
— Barack Obama, Jan. 22, 2014

“We know the numbers: one in five of every one of those young women who is dropped off for that first day of school, before they finish school, will be assaulted, will be assaulted in her college years.”
— Joe Biden, April 29, 2014

Having re-elected President Obama in a campaign that claimed Republicans were waging a “War on Women,” Democrats were clearly exploiting this “rape epidemic” narrative for political purposes. Feminist activists, Democrat politicians and liberal journalists strove to promote this message which, among other things, resulted in Title IX investigations by the Department of Education and California enacting an “affirmative consent” law that applies only to college students.

Even as this politicized “rape epidemic” campaign rolled forward, however, critics pointed to clear evidence that this narrative was false. Federal data show that the incidence of rape has declined significantly in the past 15 years, and there are obvious problems with the survey from which the “1-in-5” statistic is derived (see “Statistical Voodoo and Elastic Definitions,” June 15). Yet those who called attention to facts that contradicted the “rape epidemic” myth were excoriated for telling the truth, with one MSNBC commentator saying victims were “re-raped” and “re-traumatized” by a George Will column.

Facts are rape. Truth is trauma. And what is obviously at work here is a totalitarian effort to suppress truth, so that the truth is whatever feminists say it is, and anyone who questions feminist rhetoric is a thought criminal. “Shut up, because rape.”

It was amidst this bizarre Orwellian climate that Sabrina Rubin Erdely told the tale of Jackie’s alleged gang rape, a tale that specifically implicated members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at the University of Virginia, and accused UVA officials of indifference to pervasive sexual violence on campus. Megan McArdle explains why the factuality of Jackie’s gang-rape tale is crucial to what Erdely was attempting to do:

[Defender’s of the Rolling Stone story] have argued that focusing on Jackie’s story is getting us “sidetracked” from “the real story,” which is about the rape culture at UVA and the slothful institutional reaction to Jackie’s story. The story was headlined “A Rape on Campus.” The first thousand words are devoted to Jackie’s horrifying story, and much of the rest of the story is devoted to Jackie’s descent into depression and her interactions with the deans. If the story is so irrelevant to the real point of the article, then it should have been pulled out when the victim refused to provide details that would have permitted the author to contact the accused for comment.
But of course, if Jackie’s story had been pulled out, the article wouldn’t have received anything like the attention it got. The story was so electric precisely because it was about the premeditated gang rape of an innocent girl, in a way that suggested that such callous and criminal treatment of women was commonly viewed by the university community as not really worthy of comment, much less punishment — and that this view afflicted even the administrators charged with protecting students from rape. Without that element, this would have been a dull-but-worthy chin-stroker about institutional bureaucratic processes that probably wouldn’t have been shared 170,000 times on Facebook.

In other words, Erdely told the horrifying story of what allegedly happened to Jackie — an 18-year-old freshman gang-raped by seven fraternity members — in order to dramatize “rape culture” which feminists insist is responsible for a “rape epidemic” on America’s college and university campuses. Yet when doubts arose about the truth of this dramatic narrative, feminists claimed that the truth didn’t matter.

Facts were irrelevant, feminists said, because the narrative about campus rape was true, and those who want facts risk being “sidetracked” from that political narrative. Now we have Amanda Marcotte smearing as “rape truthers” those who insist that facts matter:

[M]any people stand behind the myth that women routinely lie about being raped, which justifies preserving a status quo where men’s word is considered more authoritative and trustworthy just because they are male.

Well, then, who are these “many people” who say “women routinely lie about being raped”? Marcotte names Rich Lowry, Chuck C. Johnson, Kevin Williamson, George Will, Tammy Bruce, Patrick Howley and Susan Patton as promoters of a “misogynist fairy tale about false rape accusations.” Readers are invited to examine the evidence and determine whether Marcotte is telling the truth about these “rape truthers.”

We must be clear about what is happening and why it is happening. Feminists are determined to silence their critics, and they are exploiting victims of rape for that purpose. Neither I nor anyone I know of wishes to “deny that rape is a serious social problem,” nor do we dismiss “the reality that rape is a crime that happens with some frequency.” Yet anti-male hate-mongering by feminists like Amanda Marcotte is also “a serious social problem,” and deliberate dishonesty by Democrats promoting political propaganda also “happens with some frequency.”

Amanda Marcotte does not merely hate men, she hates truth. She is such a hater, she hates Christmas because she hates Baby Jesus.

You may think Amanda Marcotte’s atheism is irrelevant to her hateful dishonesty, but me and Baby Jesus think otherwise.

Category: Crime, Education, Feminism, Sex Trouble

Comments

73 Responses to “Feminism’s New Enemy: ‘Rape Truthers’”

Political Rift » Feminism’s New Enemy: ‘Rape Truthers’
December 20th, 2014 @ 4:28 pm

[…] Robert Stacy McCain Speak of @AmandaMarcotte, and madness doth appear: No, the real reason [the Rolling Stone UVA rape […]
Evi L. Bloggerlady
December 20th, 2014 @ 5:00 pm

If Ms. Marcotte gave a $#*& about women, she would be calling out the rape culture in the Muslim world. Her silence is acceptance. Amanda Marcotte is a racist hipster from Brooklyn and does not care about darker skinned people unless they can be exploited for some political end.
Juliette Akinyi Ochieng
December 20th, 2014 @ 5:26 pm

Ever since Marcotte publicly blasphemed the Holy Spirit, the spirit of lies has been heavily on her…more than usual for Leftists.
Daniel Freeman
December 20th, 2014 @ 5:41 pm

If she were to talk about an actual, documented rape culture — like the one in our prison system — the stark contrast with mainstream Western culture would reduce the effectiveness of her lies about us, thereby reducing her power over us. When feminists say that rape is really about power, they are accidentally revealing a truth about themselves.
joethefatman
December 20th, 2014 @ 5:42 pm

I guess it would be wrong to write that the Marcotte woman is a woman that would have been completely safe walking naked through an 18th century dockside dive. On the Barbary Coast.

Rape is real and I’ve never met anyone that says it isn’t. So is some percentage of fake rape reports, there have been too many people cleared after DNA testing to say otherwise. Too bad she can’t figure that out.
Fail Burton
December 20th, 2014 @ 5:53 pm

Leni Riefenstahl you magnificent bitch I WATCHED YOUR MOVIE!!!!! THE SUDETENLAND MUST NOT BE RAPED AND MALE GAZED!!! It is Holy Dworkin Motherland and the scene of 184 million witch-burnings by the Morlock Love-Frat Houses of the Unterrapemenschen.
Adobe_Walls
December 20th, 2014 @ 6:03 pm

The depiction of a ”rape culture and epidemic” on American campuses sounds more like Soviet occupied Berlin in 45 than American colleges in the 21st century America.
Any reference to the UVA hoax as relevant to rape on campuses absolutely discredits those who do so. There is no evidence that Jackie’s story is not a complete fabrication starting from the night she spun that yarn to her friends. It appears that the only character in that nights events who actually exists is Jackie. A hoax has no lessons to teach other than to beware of hoaxers.
Art Deco
December 20th, 2014 @ 6:03 pm

At least use a photo with more versimilitude to illustrate these posts

http://skepticon.org/speaker/amanda-marcotte/
concern00
December 20th, 2014 @ 6:33 pm

Exploitation of victims is a significant aspect of liberal activism. Victims are literally sacrificed on the altar of the liberal narrative and when the supplies start to run short, they’ll create yet another class of victim to whet their voracious appetites.
RS
December 20th, 2014 @ 7:01 pm

In Marcottes’ world, the is even if there is no evidence. Thus, she is justified in punishing men upon accusation alone. In fact, why bother with an accusation. Simply grab one or two at random now and again and line them up for execution, pour enourager les autres
RS
December 20th, 2014 @ 7:03 pm

And BTW, it’s curious that Marcotte does not name the Departnment of Justice as one of villains, given the most recent released statistics.
Kain Yusanagi
December 20th, 2014 @ 7:07 pm

Was going great, until you decided to smear atheists as a group because of one person’s shitty beliefs. Mate, please.
WarEagle82
December 20th, 2014 @ 7:19 pm

The feminists have their numbers wrong. The mere existence of men means that ALL women have been “sexually assaulted” in their definition of “rape.” It is not limited to campus. It starts in the nursery at your local hospital seconds after birth…
From Around the Blogroll | The First Street Journal.
December 20th, 2014 @ 7:54 pm

[…] Robert Stacey Stacy McCain on The Other McCain: Feminism’s New Enemy: ‘Rape Truthers’ […]
Jim R
December 20th, 2014 @ 8:04 pm

Questions: Does Marcotte actually believe what she says? Or is she willfully, knowingly lying in the service of the democrat party, which relies upon victim groups (of which women is perhaps the largest)? And which is worse?
kilo6
December 20th, 2014 @ 8:16 pm

She drank the Kool Aid from John “Silky Pony” Edwards campaign.

OH YEAH!!!

http://i.imgur.com/hmR2QEj.jpg
McGehee
December 20th, 2014 @ 9:16 pm

I guess she told you, you veracity bombers.
Adobe_Walls
December 20th, 2014 @ 9:39 pm

I think for her and those like her, truth is that which serves their ends, lies are whatever does not. The concept of objectively true or false exceeds their comprehension skills.
Fail Burton
December 20th, 2014 @ 9:55 pm

Which am I to believe is more prone to prejudice, tens of millions of faceless people or the actual single person with an actual name who accuses those millions? This is a woman who starts the day out with women are good and men bad and then arranges words to suit. No surprise those words don’t make sense.
RS
December 20th, 2014 @ 10:06 pm

Whether she believes it or not is irrelevant. The purpose of her propaganda is not to inform. As Theodore Dalrymple said, the purpose is to humiliate. The listener is required to affirmatively agree with the propaganda or face sanction. In fact, it’s better if the propaganda is false, and all parties know that. That makes the humiliation and subjugation more profound.
TiminAL
December 20th, 2014 @ 10:36 pm

Yet it’s fine to paint all Christians with that “Fundamentalist” broad brush, right?
TiminAL
December 20th, 2014 @ 10:37 pm

Yes
RobinDTaxpayer
December 20th, 2014 @ 11:01 pm

Amanda Marcotte should make a sammich.
Gleep Glop
December 20th, 2014 @ 11:21 pm

If we truly lived in a “rape culture” wouldn’t rape be legal?

The last time I checked, it is illegal and we expend a non-trivial amount of resources prosecuting this particular crime.
K-Bob
December 20th, 2014 @ 11:58 pm

Well of course it has to be illegal. That way you can rape the law, too. Just like Obama.
Daniel Freeman
December 21st, 2014 @ 12:29 am

You know, most people that are plain work on some other aspect of their personality, such as being smart, funny, and/or nice. She probably thinks that she’s smart, but she apparently never learned how to guard against being consistently wrong — which implies that her atheism is merely a different faith. Any fool can question someone else’s belief; real skepticism is self-skepticism.
Daniel Freeman
December 21st, 2014 @ 1:21 am

Atheism and Christianity can’t both be true. I’m on a questioning path right now, but I respect our host’s faith for being such a powerful force for good in the world, strengthening local communities by bringing people together in weekly meetings in a way that agnosticism is simply incapable of.

I take his digs at other faiths in much the same way as sports teams. You can be a Trailblazers fan or you can be wrong, but hardly anyone defended the “Jail Blazers” when that was a thing — even though it was unfair to the other players — because your associations do reflect on you.

It isn’t fair to people like Thunderf00t, but she’s put herself forward as a thought leader, and you have to expect a fan of an opposing team to take advantage of that.
Adjoran
December 21st, 2014 @ 3:32 am

Of course ‘feminists’ include many leftists who don’t care about women or rape at all, they use such issues to accumulate more power of individuals like the totalitarians they are.

The ability to punish without due process is a very powerful tool.
Adjoran
December 21st, 2014 @ 3:35 am

The one thing the Marcottes and Erdelys and Dworkins will never address is: IF ‘rape culture’ is so widespread, if the false accusations are so very rare, why is it so hard for you to find true stories?

Because so far, you bitches are like 0-fer.
Adjoran
December 21st, 2014 @ 3:36 am

But even Edwards fired her – she didn’t meet his standards.

When you don’t meet that low-life scum’s standards, you are down with the worst of the world’s vermin.
Adjoran
December 21st, 2014 @ 3:38 am

No, the ‘rape deniers/truthers’ are just a straw man. She makes an argument no one is making, and refutes that so she doesn’t have to address the valid arguments many make which she has no answer for.

It’s a sign of a weak mind.
Adjoran
December 21st, 2014 @ 3:43 am

And Jackie only wanted to use her story to get the sympathy of ‘Randall’ (actually Ryan as we now know), a guy she really liked who only wanted to be friends. She was pressured into making an administrative complaint a year later, which administrators sympathetic to sexual assault victims chose not to pursue, she also did not select any option to proceed, and never made a police report.

Then Erdely comes along and promises her the story will be ‘part of the background info on rape culture at UVA’ and no one will be identified. When Jackie figures out she was lied to she tries to back out and Erdely won’t let her.

This is Erdely and Rolling Stone’s fraud, and the feminists who defended it.
Adjoran
December 21st, 2014 @ 3:48 am

You’re getting there. This one is only 1 1/2 years old: http://bit.ly/1wQTjSk

I understand the painting in her attic gets better and younger looking all the time. Odd . . .
Adjoran
December 21st, 2014 @ 3:51 am

Good points, but these people – all leftist ‘thinkers’ as they describe themselves – live in an echo chamber. Their whole world is other leftists, anyone who dissents is shunned and banned, the feedback 100% positive no matter how stupid the thesis.

When people tell you over and over again that you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and – doggone it – people LIKE you, you begin to believe that, and never notice all that positivity comes from a bunch of your fellow goosesteppers.
Adjoran
December 21st, 2014 @ 3:52 am

Those statistics do not exist. You won’t find them on any feminist or leftist site, and media sites will also ignore or bury it for the most part.

And they can photoshop Eric Holder out of pictures easily these days, if necessary.
Adjoran
December 21st, 2014 @ 3:55 am

If you think Richard Dawson and his ilk are not hateful and dishonest, you are the one with shitty beliefs.
Adjoran
December 21st, 2014 @ 3:57 am

To the left, truth is irrelevant and equal to a lie. Which one favors the narrative at this moment? Don’t worry, it can be repudiated or denied later, only what helps now is permitted.

Truth is a cis-heteronormative capitalist patriarchal construct used to oppress the people, etc.
Adjoran
December 21st, 2014 @ 3:58 am

Exactly. As designed and practiced by Lenin, perfected by Stalin and Mao, and followed by Obama and Marcotte.
Fail Burton
December 21st, 2014 @ 3:59 am

And white supremacies elect black Presidents because…

Funny how Egyptians don’t elect women or Christians for President. Must be a law or something. Somehow out of all that Muslims are noble and we are an apartheid regime.
Fail Burton
December 21st, 2014 @ 4:02 am

Typical Nazi cocktail waitress at the Blue Angel.
Adobe_Walls
December 21st, 2014 @ 4:07 am

True but Jackie created the initial hoax and therefore bears some responsibility. You’re probably correct about her reason for telling the original lie, but it seems to me she and/or someone in her circle must have continued talking about the original hoax or nobody would have pressured her to make the complaint. It would be interesting to know how she described the supposed event when she made the complaint a year later. That information is no doubt confidential and we’ll never know. Apparently Erdely was warned off another hoax she was writing about by one of her editors shortly before this one. Not sure where I read the copy of that email perhaps at ACE’s.
Adobe_Walls
December 21st, 2014 @ 4:16 am

I doubt Macotte requires that much positive reinforcement. For that matter I doubt she gave atheism much thought. She probably decided atheism was edgy and that was that.
Jim R
December 21st, 2014 @ 7:28 am

I’m not so sure. She is clearly trying not to humiliate but rather (in a clumsy, hateful fashion) to persuade. In the same manner, Goebbels wasn’t out to humiliate Jews and communists: he was out to persuade other Germans that those people caused their problems and, unless Germans gave Schikelgruber and his merry men the power to (ahem) deal with them, they’d cause even more. I would add that a “humilated” enemy isn’t going to excite nearly as much fear as a potent, powerful enemy.
Jim R
December 21st, 2014 @ 7:44 am

Good point.

Hard as it can be (and I know I’m a serial offender, for shame) we’ve got to get past seeing people as groups but instead see them as individuals. Al Sharpton is a corrupt, hateful, bad man; not all blacks are. Fred Phelps was a mean, stupid, bitter, hateful, disgusting, reprehensible, contemptible little bug of a waste of a human life; not all Christians are (not even close). &c.
Jim R
December 21st, 2014 @ 8:51 am

The sad fact is that they COULD find rape stories. Lots of them. However, their interest is not is rape qua rape, but in the “right kind” of rape, i.e. one with the political parties implications they want.

It’s the same with MiniTru covering only certain kinds of black shootings. Blacks can gun each other down by the score; MiniTru couldn’t care less. But let a white guy (even a “white Hispanic”) do it…
RS
December 21st, 2014 @ 10:17 am

It’s not humiliation of the target, i.e. men, in this case, it is the humiliation of those who are required to agree with unsubstantiated, if not absolutely false, assertions. By requiring affirmation of patently false narratives, they demonstrate their power. Think, “the chocolate ration has been raised from 3.75 to 3.5 oz.”
Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove
December 21st, 2014 @ 10:21 am

[…] The Other McCain discusses feminists new enemies, “rape truthers” […]
Fail Burton
December 21st, 2014 @ 11:10 am

You’ve put your finger right on it. It’s why no solutions are ever proposed. Just that men stop acting like men and whites like whites. It’s just a smear campaign of hate speech.
Fail Burton
December 21st, 2014 @ 11:13 am

That’s right. Our problems are people with names, not a sex and a race. It’s an ideology, but people subscribe to that ideology can be singled out as individuals and challenged for their views.
Dana
December 21st, 2014 @ 12:36 pm

Even if we ignore the alleged rape story, and focus on the University’s response to the rape claim, the obvious point is that the University’s officials ought not to be the people to investigate these things. They have neither the time nor the training nor the inclination to investigate criminal cases.

Uncomfortable as it may be for victims, they must take their cases to the police; only the police and prosecutors have the experience and the means to handle properly a criminal case.

But, that is not, and will never be, sufficient for Miss Marcotte and the feminists, because criminal charges must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and so many rape cases involve he said/ she said dichotomies. Miss Marcotte and the feminists are primarily concerned not with actual criminal cases but shifting the burden of proof, to where the word of the alleged victim is sufficient for conviction and punishment.

This is, of course, Miss Marcotte’s second venture into this morass; she was very famously wrong about the Duke lacrosse case as well, something which happened right around the time that she was hired by John Edwards’ presidential campaign. That did not end well for her either.