The ‘Rape Epidemic’ That Isn’t

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Heather Mac Donald:

The most common statistic thrown out these days by President Obama, Vice President Biden, on down is that one in five women will be the victims of sexual assault during their college careers. Detroit is America’s most violent city. Its violent crime rate for all four violent felonies — that’s rape, murder, aggravated assault, and robbery — is 2%. Its rape rate is 0.05%. A 20% crime rate for any crime, much less one as serious as rape, is virtually unheard of… And yet despite a rape rate that is allegedly 400 times that of Detroit’s, sophisticated, highly educated baby boomer mothers are beating down the doors of campuses to try to get their daughters in. . . . If the rape epidemic was going on as claimed . . . there would be no more campuses. You would have had a massive exodus of girls from college campuses years ago, and a demand to create actually safe environments for student learning. Why hasn’t that happened? Because the campus rape epidemic does not exist.

Read the whole thing at Minding the Campus, and then do this: Go to Google News and search for “teacher + arrest + sex.” How many times a week are public school teachers in America charged with illegally having sex with their underage students? My guess is that it happens more commonly than college students getting raped. So why aren’t feminists marching into your local Board of Education meeting and demanding that something be done about the “rape epidemic” in public schools?

Think about that.

 

63 comments

  1. Truth is raped on a regular basis. I certainly feel that epidemic daily.

    The fact that Hillary Clinton is being seriously considered to be in the White House rather than facing prosecutors for a trip to the big house is an assault on my sense of justice in the world.

  3. There is no evidence to suggest an explosion in sexual violence at universities. Instead, the current talk of a university ‘rape culture’ is merely the product of female students being encouraged to interpret the messy, uncomfortable and perhaps regrettable processes that are involved in negotiating relationships and sex through the prism of rape.

  4. The Rape Epidemic, as with Rape Culture, is not about rape, or any other crime for that matter. Like all progressive movements and programs, it’s about the sheer lust for power. These people want power so badly that they will literally do anything to get and keep it.

    Anyone who can shrug off mass murder, genocide and slavery with fatuous aphorisms about eggs and omelets is a profoundly dangerous person. In aggregate, they are a hazard to civilization. Russia is still damaged from these people’s seventy year reign there. Who knows how long it will take China or Cuba or North Korea to recover once freed?

  5. They may never recover, at least not in the near term.
    We often forget that one of the advantages we have is, including our English heritage we’ve had more than half a millennium developing our political culture, our reverence of liberty. No nations outside the anglosphere have that. The advantage we have over the rest of the anglosphere is the almost two centuries of relatively unimpeded self government we enjoyed before 1776.

  6. You’ve nailed it; I’m pretty sure that’s the rape epidemic they’ve been alluding to…the rape of truth.

  7. Amazing that the people who push this myth haven’t noticed that there are precious few right-wing young men on college campuses.

    So, if there IS a rape epidemic (as they claim), then it’s left-wingers doing it all.

    …Or it’s that one Republican that raped Lena Dunham. He’s crisscrossing the country raping 1 out of 5 women.

  9. Damn it. I was saying almost the same thing yesterday to a coworker, that when the colonists revolted in 1776 they were heirs to a long Enlightenment tradition and had plenty of theory behind them on the subject of freedom and liberty. It was practically in their DNA.

    Just look at what happened in France less than a quarter century later. A revolution using similar rhetoric and claiming similar goals led to a dictatorship and then an empire.

  11. 1 in 4. That’s like a 25% casualty rate across four years just for attending college. Who would ever believe just going to school would entail that sort of risk other than insane feminists and their goofy water carriers. If it was a serious disease in play with that sort of attrition rate, would any woman even go to college?

  15. Actually the evidence is that rape, as well as other violent crimes, is decreasing in frequency over the past two decades.

    Same goes for gun crimes too. Oops. But that’s why the statist scolds of the left won’t talk about numbers and facts, but prefer to build a platform of the bodies of dead children.

  16. Oh hell, there’s no upper limit. Why not ten in five? Every woman will be raped twice before graduation!

    You have to ask, as has been done here already, why any woman would subject herself to such an environment. Either they are enjoying the rape, which I very much doubt, or some people are doing some serious heavy duty lying. Hmmm… which is more likely, I wonder?

  18. Yeah, well, aren’t we all? I mean, somebody’s got to pick up the slack for Lena Dunham’s neutered boyfriends.

  19. Reminds me of the graffiti I saw years ago:

    In America, a woman gives birth every 30 seconds. She must be found and stopped!

  20. I favor the theory that he’s immune to their crazy, due to already having his own good kind, like Murdock on the A-Team.

  21. Okay, you’re on to something there. As Instapundit has said repeatedly, it’s a losing battle to try to out-crazy RSM!

  23. The revolution in France failed for the precise reason so feared by our forefathers concerning America: Balkanized states constantly at war with shifting alliances. That is why Lincoln preferred to maintain slavery rather than pursue the war. Halfway through there was no turning back, but he would have earlier.

  24. That was my 2010 argument with Little Miss Attila, which began with the attempt of some well-meaning people to claim Sarah Palin as a “feminist.”

    That raised the question of, “What do we mean when we say ‘feminist’?” It’s a question that most people have never seriously studied. There is a tendency to take the feminist movement’s own publicity at face value, or else not to take the movement seriously in terms of its underlying philosophy. Very few people with the proper skill set — historians and journalists — have ever examined the feminist movement in a critical way. Instead, the movement’s history has been written entirely by people sympathetic to the movement. Usually, critics of the movement have ignored even these available histories which clearly show that feminism as we know it arose from the anti-American pro-Communist New Left of the 1960s. That matters. It matters a lot.

  25. Now, admittedly, if they even attempted to adhere to Christian standards of sexual conduct, there would be a lot less of these “regret rape” cases, which would be a big improvement. But those cases are not anything like criminal rape.

  28. That site says this: “Misandry is not only a problem of the relation of the sexes that has been further compounded by chivalry (male enablers)…”

    Now that is completely false! Chivalry is a wonderful thing, and a thing that I expect from men, because as a woman I rely upon them.

    I am the very flower of Southern womanhood, you see, and I require assistance with doors, up steps, and carrying things. And in return, I reward my benefactor with a dazzling smile, and a “thank you, sir”. Because I expect chivalry, I get it.

    This, it seems to me, is the way things ought to be.

  29. Nope. Everyone knows that Republicans are sexless prudes. That’s their whole problem. They’re too uptight to get laid.

  30. Chivalry was wonderful, but not because women needed it. (You’re continuing your tradition of ambiguity, but I know you better by now.) It gave men an opportunity return the respect that they were also shown.

    Unfortunately, oughts are fraught with conditions. Once there was a balance of equal-but-different privileges and responsibilities. Women have won more privileges over time, and it would be hard to argue that they should give them back.

    So, the only way forward that I can see is to free men (ergo my name) from their own sex roles. However, the symmetry means that there will be a cost.

    Equal privileges means that male suffering will be taken as seriously. Equal responsibility means that female wrongdoing will be taken as seriously.

    Chivalry will be dead, but the only realistic alternative now is some weird chivalry/feminism hybrid that just turns men into slaves. The clock isn’t turning back.

  32. I disagree. Gentlemen, by nature, want to protect ladies. And ladies, by nature, want to be protected. That is the foundation of chivalry. Men want to be my knight in shining armor, and I want them to be that, and I treat them that way. And I believe that despite a strata of imbeciles in society, it will ever be so among decent men and women.

    And here’s the reason: if I were to ask you, Daniel, a nice guy, how it makes you feel when you help someone, you will say “good”. So it’s appropriate that I let someone, especially a man, assist me, because I’d be a jerk to prevent someone from feeling good, wouldn’t I, especially to score some sort of idiotic political point.

    And it adds to the “good” when the person being assisted is weaker, and I don’t give a rip what psychotic feminists say, women are weaker. On top of which, in these shoes, are you kidding me?- I can use a man’s support when I step off a curb. And since I’m carrying an 80-pound handbag, why should I try to muscle open a door, when a nice man will hold it for me? And then my beautiful smile conveys my gratitude for his help. He feels good about himself, I receive assistance: this is a win-win, and I’m not willing to believe it’s over yet. Not by a long shot.

  33. “What do we mean when we say ‘feminist’?”
    1. Someone who examines social relations with the assumption that women have options, and men have obligations.
    2. Someone who examines history and social relations oscillating between the assumption that men and women are interchangeable and the one that men have distinguishing features, just none which are beneficial to anyone.
    3. Someone who fancies boys are defective girls.
    4. Someone who evaluates conflicts and crimes with the assumption that women must never be held accountable — except by other women.

  34. All of which are symptoms of someone living in a fantasy world. Someone so detached from reality that she ought to be institutionalized for her own good, and for the good of society.

    The fact that they aren’t marginalized just goes to show how far we’ve fallen.

  35. Institutional continuity in France has since 1860 been interrupted only by foreign occupation. It’s had several constitutions as it groped for an institutional architecture which would provide for some continuity of policy and personnel and found a passable solution in 1958. (We could use extensive constitutional revision ourselves in this country).
    It’s surprising when you think about it, but you only have about a half-dozen countries in the world with a discrete and explicit charter of government enacted prior to 1860 (the U.S., the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Argentina).

  36. There’s a 73 min. talk in Australia on youtube called “How To Be a Feminist” which included Germaine Greer, Anita Sarkeesian, Tara Ross, etc.

    On the Colbert Show Anita Sarkeesian said “Do you believe women should have equal rights to men…?”

    On the youtube talk Sarkeesian says “we don’t want equality within these oppressive systems.” She further cites bell hooks as an influence.

    You know from your readings gender feminists state right out time and again they have no interest in mere equality with men and that is bell hooks’ view as well.

    You also know gender feminists tend to talk differently to each other than when addressing the mainstream. If Sarkessian gets on Colbert and says what she said in Australia that’s not going to work. Sarkeesian doesn’t want equal games – games that women can create in their own style – Sarkeesian wants to abolish games she sees as oppressive and maintaining the “system.”

    The idea of communism may matter a lot when it comes to bell hooks, but generally speaking gender feminists are obsessed with sex, not the economic source of their despair. All things will follow the abolition of gender, not the abolition of capitalism. Gender feminists say time and again Marxism and communism are not a proper fit for them.

  38. The Fifth Republic is the result of coup and counter-coup, though change to a semi presidential system appears to be an improvement. However France has never recovered from it’s proto Marxist beginnings.
    Of the six nations on your list only the U.S. and Argentina are Republics, the other four are some variant of parliamentary systems and therefore must be flawed.

  39. Something I didn’t realize at first: the guy that played Murdock in the A-Team movie was the same guy that played Lt. Barclay in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Very similar characters.

  40. “Do you believe women should have equal rights to men…?”
    I doubt you could find many examples of the gamut of bankruptcy law, guild law, commercial law, contract law; estates powers, and trusts law; insurance law, admiralty law, natural resources law, land use regulations, real estate law, anti-trust law, tax law, election law, vehicle and traffic law, or penal codes which conferred ca. 1942 enforceable entitlements on male parties not available to female parties. There were residual obligations from which women were commonly exempt (e.g. military and jury service). You probably still found some hire bars and discharge bars in public employment (including state colleges) which injured married women. That was about it. I suppose you could add that survivors benefits under Social Security were truncated for widowers, but that’s not a benefit conferred on women.
    The import of ‘equal rights’ was to confer on female plaintiffs a franchise to harass private employers over their hiring and promotion practices, not that male plaintiffs had ever had a right to use legal process to second-guess personnel decisions not agreed to by the employer via contracts. A side car passenger could not be subsumed under the heading of equal rights but was important to creatures in organizations like NOW: unilateral divorce on demand. This franchise is not formally ‘unequal’, but it’s primarily beneficial to the lesser sort among married couples, especially women who have difficulty adjusting to the disappointments of leaving their youth behind.

  41. There was no coup nor any counter-coup. There was a great deal of unrest due to the situation in Algeria, but no coup. Legal process was followed at all stages.

  43. You make a compelling argument for courtesy, which I practice and enjoy in the manner you describe. Chivalry has a lot more baggage with it than just that, coming out of a romantic tradition in which women were treated with the subservience due to a feudal lord, and enjoyed legal immunity from liability to match.

    I agree on the narrower point, but hold by the larger one.

  44. Heather Mac Donald is an important voice because she usually has her stuff wired pretty tight. She does her homework, puts things in context and doesn’t go in for scare quotes and straw men like our daffy gender feminists who start at shadows.

  45. It would be hard to argue all the women at that NUS Women’s Conference in the jazz hands U.K. were suffering from mental health issues. It’s a good example of why mainstreaming hate speech is so dangerous and gives us an insight into how all of Germany went nuts in the ’30s.

  46. I in turn appreciate a good gun moll when robbing lemonade stands or smuggling children and cigarettes across the Sudanese border. There’s nothing like a good sidekick.

  47. Good point. I should’ve said the mentally ill, the hopelessly stupid, and the easily mind-controlled. For that matter, feminism could probably legitimately be described as a cult.

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