Time Immortal

During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results — very few women said that they had been. So Ms. commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then classified as rape. Koss’s method produced the 25 percent rate, which Ms. then published.

Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further — though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her — 42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

All subsequent feminist rape studies have resulted in this discrepancy between the researchers’ conclusions and the subjects’ own views. A survey of sorority girls at the University of Virginia found that only 23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped — a result that the university’s director of Sexual and Domestic Violence Services calls “discouraging.” Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of what the feminist researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report.” The “victims” in the study, moreover, “generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries,” report the researchers.

Just as a reality check, consider an actual student-related rape: in 2006, Labrente Robinson and Jacoby Robinson broke into the Philadelphia home of a Temple University student and a Temple graduate, and anally, vaginally, and orally penetrated the women, including with a gun. The chance that the victims would not consider this event “serious enough to report,” or physically and emotionally injurious, is exactly nil. In short, believing in the campus rape epidemic depends on ignoring women’s own interpretations of their experiences — supposedly the most grievous sin in the feminist political code.

By now, it ought to come as no surprise whatsoever that hardcore leftists and professional feminists are willing to lie their faces off in pursuit of an ideological goal. It’s a pity that the rest of us have to fork over our dollars because of their lies, but I suppose that in the final summation all of that dishonesty and extortion will be sorted out.

I’d always thought that the claim that one in four women at my university had experienced a sexual assault was a dubious claim, especially since I became friends with quite a few women (more than just four) during that time, and only one ever reported having been raped — and in that singular instance, the assault was in no way connected with the university or another student thereof, and had happened several years before her enrollment at said institution. Even allowing for the fact that on campus, men and women perhaps do live and work in closer proximity to each other than in the “real” world (an assumption which itself is fairly dubious to begin with), the idea that the rate of sexual assaults on campus would be twenty to twenty five times higher than in normal society seems absurd.

At any rate, the article goes on to explore the strange world of casual sex and promiscuity that is modern college/university student life, and if anything I think reading the whole thing has convinced me of two important things: 1) my daughters will learn how to beat the living snot out of an attacker, and 2) my daughters and sons will not be allowed to join sororities or fraternities (respectively), or (at least) will be actively discouraged from doing so).