Posted on 04/24/2005 9:54:39 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Perhaps Desiree Nall, the president of the Brevard, Florida, chapter of the National Organization Of Women thought she was being helpful by reporting that she was raped in a campus bathrum when she really wasn't. (Or maybe she was just looking for attention.) Wendy McElroy writes:
Instead of publicizing sexual violence against women, Nall has spotlighted the problem of false accusations against men. Her case also raises the question of whether NOW-style feminists encourage false accusations when they flatly insist that women must be believed. In the '60s, feminists fought to have rape taken seriously. But taking an accusation seriously is not the same as granting it automatic validity. Rather, it means investigating the facts and weighing them in an unbiased manner that favors no one and nothing but the truth.
A lot of ugly truth may surface in the coming months. The state of Florida seems determined to pursue its case against Nall, who seems determined to fight back.
Winter Park Sgt. Pam Marcum explained to the Orlando Sentinel that bringing charges against Nall had taken so long because the police department sought a second opinion from the State Attorney's office. It is rare for those who file false reports of sexual abuse to be prosecuted. In short, the prosecution is carefully constructing a case; the defense is loudly crying 'political persecution!' In the process, the definition and legal status of rape within our society continues to evolve.
Where it comes to rest depends largely upon the honesty -- not the NOW-like silence -- with which women confront the problem of false accusations.
And then there's the date rape arena. What some would call "date rape," I call bad judgment. Kate Roiphe writes eloquently on the "one-in-four" statistic; the notion that one in every four women has been raped. Come on, isn't that an outrageous statistic, just if you think about it in terms of the women you know? There are four women in my family. So, statistically, one of us should have been sexually assaulted? You see a restaurant filled with a few tables where there are four women out to lunch. One of them has been raped? Come on. In Roiphe's words:
Is there a rape crisis on campus? Measuring rape is not as straightforward as it might seem. Neil Gilbert, professor of social welfare at the University of California at Berkeley, questions the validity of the one-in-four statistic. Gilbert points out that in a 1985 survey undertaken by Ms. magazine and financed by the National Institute of Mental Health, 73 percent of the women categorized as rape victims did not initially define their experience as rape; it was Mary Koss, the psychologist conducting the study, who did. One of the questions used to define rape was: "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs." The phrasing raises the issue of agency. Why aren't college women responsible for their own intake of alcohol or drugs? A man may give her drugs, but she herself decides to take them. If we assume that women are not all helpless and naive, then they should be responsible for their choice to drink or take drugs. If a woman's "judgment is impaired" and she has sex, it isn't always the man's fault; it isn't necessarily always rape.
As Gilbert delves further into the numbers, he does not necessarily disprove the one-in-four statistic, but he does clarify what it means-- the so-called rape epidemic on campuses is more a way of interpreting, a way of seeing, than a physical phenomenon. It is more about a change in sexual politics than a change in sexual behavior. Whether or not one in four college women has been raped, then. is a matter of opinion, not a matter of mathematical fact.
That rape is a fact in some women's lives is not in question. It's hard to watch the solemn faces of young Bosnian girls, their words haltingly translated, as they tell of brutal rapes; or to read accounts of a suburban teen-ager raped and beaten while walking home from a shopping mall. We all agree that rape is a terrible thing, but we no longer agree on what rape is. Today's definition has stretched beyond bruises and knives, threats of death or violence to include emotional pressure and the influence of alcohol. The lines between rape and sex begin to blur. The one-in-four statistic on those purple posters is measuring something elusive. It is measuring her word against his in a realm where words barely exist. There is a gray area in which one person's rape may be another's bad night. Definitions become entangled in passionate ideological battles. There hasn't been a remarkable change in the number of women being raped; just a change in how receptive the political climate is to those numbers.
The next question, then, is who is identifying this epidemic and why. Somebody is "finding" this rape crisis, and finding it for a reason. Asserting the prevalence of rape lends urgency, authority to a broader critique of culture.
In a dramatic description of the rape crisis, Naomi Wolf writes in "The Beauty Myth" that "cultural representation of glamorized degradation has created a situation among the young in which boys rape and girls get raped as a normal course of events." The italics are hers ["as..." in italics in original]. Whether or not Wolf really believes rape is a part of the "normal course of events" these days, she is making a larger point. Wolf's rhetorical excess serves her larger polemic about sexual politics. Her dramatic prose is a call to arms. She is really trying to rally the feminist troops. Wolf uses rape as a red flag, an undeniable sign that things are falling apart.
But, things are falling apart -- but not because of some imaginary increase in rape, but because of feminist propaganda about what horrible creatures men are. Why do some women need to feel like victims to feel good about themselves? In my line of work, I get letter after letter from these poor, dateless men and women in their 20s and 30s, and even in their 40s, who are really hedgy on their gender roles, and can't begin to fathom that this might be having an effect on their being able to get a partner or even a date.
While it's tempting to laugh off radical feminists as shrill nuts, there was a trickle-down from the radical feminists, that sick, pathetic, evil Andrea Dworkin (ding-dong the witch is dead!) and Dworkin's evil twin sister in victimism, Catherine MacKinnon, to the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. I wrote about that here, recently, in my article, "Victims Gone Wild: How Feminism Has Messed Up Relationships."
In reality, what they were fighting wasn't male oppression, but maleness of any kind—based on the erroneous feminist notion that equality means sameness. In their eyes, male sexuality isn't just different. It's WRONG. Penetration is a form of rape, don'tcha know? Ultimately, these femi-fascists sought to re-create men in their own image and to reshape sexual expression into something kinder, gentler and more "egalitarian." (Personally, I have no idea what more "egalitarian" sex is—and I hope I never find out.)
*
To Liberals Rape is all rape is rape, but everything else is a gray area.
Really, either there is a difference between men and women, or there isn't. The Feminazis are going to have to make up their minds.
My problem with people calling sex where the participants are drunk rape, is that what if the guy is drunk, which if they met at a party he probably is. Does that mean that he was raped? Calling that date rape is demeaning, in my opinion, to the women who were raped after a "date rape drug" was put in their drinks, who literally had no choice, not that they made a stupid choice that they regret because they were drunk.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Bump
I suspect consistency is the last thing on their minds, Lauralee.
Actually, I think decent guys wait until they are married.
Okay guys wait until they have at least dated a girl for awhile and they plan a nice evening together.
Then there are the one night stand guys, and I don't really like those kinds of guys.
and then to top it off by having endless societal discussion about why it wasn't really rape, and he probably enjoyed it.....
""Women tend to tell guys that they like to be pursued and convince to give it up. So damned if you don't , and damned if you do.""
What?
I don't think they mean consensual sex. I think they mean if a woman is unable to fight back or has passed out and the man still attempts intercourse.
You make a valid point about the choice the woman made by being intoxicated. But it brings us back to the age old scenario,does a woman in a short skirt walking down a dark ally deserve to be raped? No, she's pretty stupid but rape is not a suitable punishment for stupidity. Same with intoxication, just because the girl was stupid enough to become intoxicated, does not give the right to some guy to rape her while she’s passed out or unable to fight back. This happens a lot more than you would think, a friend of mine passed out at a party and when she woke up her underwear was missing, she had been raped while she was passed out.She cried for days and didn’t tell anyone until years later. I don’t know how many of you would call that rape, but I certainly would.
I don't think they mean consensual sex. I think they mean if a woman is unable to fight back or has passed out and the man still attempts intercourse.
You make a valid point about the choice the woman made by being intoxicated. But it brings us back to the age old scenario,does a woman in a short skirt walking down a dark ally deserve to be raped? No, she's pretty stupid but rape is not a suitable punishment for stupidity. Same with intoxication, just because the girl was stupid enough to become intoxicated, does not give the right to some guy to rape her while she’s passed out or unable to fight back. This happens a lot more than you would think, a friend of mine passed out at a party and when she woke up her underwear was missing, she had been raped while she was passed out.She cried for days and didn’t tell anyone until years later. I don’t know how many of you would call that rape, but I certainly would.
"As for date rape. Well, I wouldn't go up to a boy's room who I barely knew, or get completely plastered so that some stranger could take me home. But telling women to have common sense is politically incorrect. Yes, it is the rapists fault but putting yourself into a position where you could be date raped is foolish. It's like leaving your car unlocked in a bad neighborhood"
No, its like leaving your car in the street in a bad neighborhood - with the door open and the engine running.
You mean like a catholic priest raping a 9 year old?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.