In a thoroughly documented piece, “Yellow Journalism and the Meme of Rape Culture,” a blogger takes apart Rolling Stone magazine’s coverage of the University of Viriginia “gang-rape” story to show the incredibly shoddy standards of investigation of many elite (read, left-liberal) news outlets and the biased advocacy that passes itself off as objective reporting.
Rolling Stone has retracted the story and issued an apology but no one has been fired for what amounts to criminal libel.
The agenda behind this, as admitted by the reporter herself, was to find a rape story that was “emblematic” of the rape culture that feminists declare is threatening women on campus.
But as I’ve blogged many times, this isn’t so.
To find a “rape culture” on American campuses, you would need to use a broad definition of rape that included seduction with alcohol, fraud, or other means.
I tend to agree with the broadening of what we define as rape, while disbelieving that the criminal justice system is the best place to address any of it.
Both Heather McDonald and Emily Yoffe named the beast that nobody wants to confront: an alcohol-lubricated hookup culture that begins in high school (if not earlier) and turns colleges and universities into rape traps for both women and men.
U-VA President Teresa Sullivan didn’t mention alcohol – not even once – in her November 22 statement about the Rolling Stone report of a gang rape at a fraternity house and her intention to quell sexual abuse on campus.
Yet a 2004 study by the Harvard School of Public Health (Correlates of Rape while Intoxicated in a National Sample of College Women) of almost 24,000 women at 119 colleges found that 72% of campus rapes happened when the victims were so intoxicated they were unable to consent or refuse.”
In this broad sense (but not in the narrow one) there is a “rape-culture”.
Only, today it victimizes men as much, or more, than women, as is the case elsewhere in the world .
“If any unwanted or not fully consensual sexual activity is defined now as rape, then more men then women are victims of rape and most of their victimizers are women.
An article about college students published in the Journal of Sex Research Vol. 31, No. 2 (1994), noted that Muehlenhard and Cook (1988) found that 46% of women and 63% of men had acquiesced to unwanted sexual intercourse, while Muehlenhard and Long (1988) also found that more men (49%) than women (40%) had engaged in unwanted sex. Muehlenhard and Rodgers (1993) found that 34% of women reported having engaged in token resistance to sex, in which they said “no” when they really desired to have sex. US women acknowledge a 55% rate of consent to unwanted sex, which is consistent with the findings of 50% false rape allegations in university studies.
[Charlene L. Muehlenhard, PhD, the author of all those studies, is a Professor of Psychology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Fellow in Three Divisions of the American Psychological Association (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Society for the Psychology of Women, Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues), and a Fellow in the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality]
According to a 2014 paper published in the American Psychological Association journal, Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 43% of high school and college-aged men say they’ve had “unwanted sexual contact”, and 95% of those say a female acquaintance was the aggressor.
Researchers found that 18% reported sexual coercion by force (including by use of weapon), 31% said they were verbally coerced into sex, 26% said they’d experienced unwanted seduction, and 7% said they were compelled after being given alcohol or drugs.
Dr. Bryana French, who teaches counseling psychology and black studies at University of Missouri and co-authored the study, says that male victims are often less willing to describe sexual coercion in detail, “but when asked if it happened, they say it happened”.
French said, “Seduction was a particularly salient and potentially unique form of coercion for teenage boys and young men when compared to their female counterparts.”
The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions is co-authored by Lara Stemple, Health and Human Rights Law Project, UCLA, and Ilan H. Meyer, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law.
The authors assessed 12-month prevalence of sexual victimization from five federal surveys conducted, independently, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2010 through 2012. The review of these surveys provides an unprecedented wealth of new data about male victimization, challenging long-held stereotypes about the sex of victims.
In one of the studies included in the analysis, the CDC found that an estimated 1.3 million women experienced nonconsensual sex, or rape, in the previous year.
Notably, nearly the same number of men also reported nonconsensual sex. In comparison to the number of women who were raped, nearly 1.3 million men were “made to penetrate” someone else. The CDC data reveal that both women and men experienced nonconsensual sex in alarming and equal numbers.
The study also included the 2012 National Crime Victimization Survey, which found that 38% of all reported rape and sexual assault incidents were committed against males, an increase over past years that challenges the common belief that males are rarely victims of this crime.
“These findings are striking, yet misconceptions about male victimization persist. We identified reasons for this, which include the over-reliance on traditional gender stereotypes, outdated and inconsistent definitions used by some federal agencies, and methodological sampling biases.”
The 2011 CDC analysis referred to in the 2014 report found that 6.7% of men (7.6 million) reported that they were made to penetrate someone else, and that 82.6% of male victims of “made to penetrate” events and 80% of male victims of sexual coercion reported female perpetrators, meaning they were raped by a woman, according to the current and broadly accepted definition of rape as any unwanted sexual encounter.
The CDC report’s statistics for the preceding 12 months showed that a higher percentage of men were “made to penetrate” (1.7%) than women were raped (1.6%), such that if you properly include “made to penetrate” in the definition of rape, men were raped by women at least as often as women were raped by men.”