Dec. 16, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:07:08
2866 The Truth About Rape Culture
What is rape culture? Rape culture describes the cultural makeup of a society where rape is pervasive and – due to people's views on gender and sexuality – normalized. Feminists apply this term to societies throughout the world – and Western societies in particular – arguing that the issue of rape is downplayed or outright ignored – an attitude that significantly contributes to the vilification and revictimization of people who are raped. But what is the truth about rape culture? Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/rape-culture
Hi everybody, my name is Stefan Molyneux and I'm the host of Free Domain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world with about a hundred million downloads.
I hope that you will join me as we sail into the heart of darkness known as the truth about rape culture.
Just before we begin though, the information that you're going to see over the next little while will be absolutely shocking to you.
I say this because I'm no stranger to shocking and surprising and exasperating at times material.
We talk frankly about race and gender and politics, economics, self-knowledge, relationships, and so on at Freedomain Radio.
This information I found shocking.
So take that for what it's worth, but I think that it's important to know that before we dive into the truth about rape culture.
In January 2014, the subject of rape culture gained national attention after President Barack Obama remarked in a speech, quote, today we're taking another important step with a focus on our college campuses.
It is estimated that one in five women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their lifetime there.
One in five.
These young women worked so hard Just to get into college.
Often their parents are doing everything they can to help them pay for it.
So when they finally make it there only to be assaulted, that is not just a nightmare for them and their families.
It's an affront to everything they've worked so hard to achieve.
It's totally unacceptable.
According to a United States Department of Justice study released in December 2014, on average, one person In 164 college-age women reported experiencing rape or sexual assault, which includes unwanted touching, between 1995 and 2013.
How can we balance these appallingly opposed perspectives?
One in five, one in 164.
Why was President Obama's figure off by such a significant factor?
And what is the truth about rape culture?
Well, let's start with a definition.
It's somewhat of an amorphous term, but in general, rape culture describes the cultural makeup of a society where rape is pervasive and, due to people's views on gender and sexuality, normalized.
Feminists apply this term to societies throughout the world, and Western societies in particular, Arguing that the issue of rape is downplayed or outright ignored, an attitude that significantly contributes to the vilification and re-victimization of people, in general women, who are raped.
It is part of a system of oppression against women.
The threat of rape keeps women in their place, keeps them subservient to generally white Western European male patriarchy and is normalized through a variety of cultural methods.
Feminist writer Jessica Valenti wrote, Rape is as American as apple pie.
And many, many other feminists have echoed these kinds of sentiments.
The term rape culture gained widespread popularity after a documentary of the same name premiered in 1975.
Two years later, in 1977, the United States Supreme Court declared the death penalty to be a disproportionate punishment for the rape of an adult woman, thus forbidding it under the Eighth Amendment.
Yes, you heard that right.
In a society, and a lot of this will have to do with the United States, though, it also applies to most Western European-based cultures and countries, In the United States, until 1977, a culture that supposedly promoted and enabled rape actually sanctioned and approved of the execution of men who committed it.
In 1971, 16 states plus the federal government authorized capital punishment in cases of rape.
That is not a very smart move on the part of the patriarchy.
To enable the death penalty for rapists.
It's hard to see how that is compatible with a culture that promotes and sanctions rape.
Now, the practice of executing rapists, which dates back to antiquity, was thus ended fairly recently in Western history.
Rape was punishable by death in both Babylon and ancient Egypt.
In Roman law, which is the foundation, of course, of modern-day Western law, rape was a capital crime.
And thus, it's hard to see that in Western culture, rape has been promoted as a cultural ideal.
Now, back in the 1970s, feminist-like attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued that, quote, What does she mean by this?
Well...
Her argument generally meant that a woman's sexuality is bought and paid for by the man in marriage, and therefore, if another man rapes his wife, then he is stealing the property of the man, and therefore, therefore, therefore.
Of course, the fact is that men were obliged to pay for women and children, and also rape was a capital crime even when a woman was unmarried, and so on, or infertile or old.
So it's a bit hard to maintain that as pure patriarchy.
But how can you explain the idea that patriarchs behind rape culture thought, hey, it's a great idea to get executed if we're caught being rapists.
So let's jump back to the 1977 case.
The U.S. justice system decided to stop Executing rapists.
The law literature documenting this decision provides an additional clarification for the term rape.
You may have seen it.
The rape of an adult woman.
No mention whatsoever of a man getting raped.
In fact, up until...
Are you ready for this?
Up until the year 2013, the FBI defined rape as, quote, the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.
This definition was adopted in 1927, while the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports program was under development.
In other words, for as long as the United States has had a countrywide statistics on reported rape, men have been excluded from those numbers.
Bad patriarchy.
To define rape, and we'll see the statistics on rapes where males are the victims in a moment, but to define rape solely as the rape of a woman gives men no voice, no visibility, and no capacity for social sympathy and understanding, and precious little capacity for legal redress for being victims of rape until 2013.
So how prevalent is rape?
To understand the controversy that surrounds this question, one of the most prevalent rape statistics in society, one in four women, has been the victim of rape or attempted rape.
Let's look into where that came from.
It is the official figure on women's rape victimization cited in women's studies department, rape crisis centers, women's magazines, and on protest buttons and posters, wrote feminist Christina Hoff Summers in 1994.
Where did this statistic come from?
In a 1985 survey of college campuses conducted by Professor of Psychology Mary Koss, just over 3,000 women were asked three questions to determine how many had experienced rape or attempted rape.
And the results were shocking.
15.4% had been raped and 12.1% had been victims of attempted rape.
Of course, the media, gender-baiting as it always does, picked up on this story immediately.
But scholars questioned the results because there was a fairly major deviation, as we saw in the first slide, from previous estimates.
So it turned out one of the three questions was, quote,"...have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?" This is a challenging question, to say the least.
As Christina Hoff Summers points out, quote, that question opened the door wide to regarding, as a rape victim, anyone who regretted her liaison of the previous night.
If your date mixes a pitcher of margaritas and encourages you to drink with him, and you accept the drink, have you been, quote, administered?
An intoxicant?
And has your judgment been impaired?
Certainly if you pass out and are molested, one would call it rape.
But if you drink, and while intoxicated, engage in sex that you later come to regret, have you been raped?
Kos does not address these questions specifically.
She merely counts your date as a rapist and you as a rape statistic.
If you drank too much with your date and regret having had sex with him.
These are very important questions.
Because only 25% of the quote raped women describe the incident as rape.
And 40% chose to have sex with their quote rapist afterwards.
Correcting for biased data interpretation, the actual number of victims fell to 3 to 5 percent, well within the norms of the official statistics.
Now, Koss, when questioned or criticized on these definitions, said there's an Ohio statute on rape which says, quote, No person shall engage in sexual conduct with another person when for the purpose of preventing resistance the offender substantially impairs the other person's judgment or control.
By administering any drug or intoxicant to the other person.
Now, I'm certainly no lawyer, but just as somebody who can think, this is a very challenging co-joining of two different situations.
Look, if a man slips a date rape drug or a roofie into a woman's drink, and then she then passes out, and he has sex with her, clearly that's rape, no question.
However, if I offer you a drink, am I administering a drug or intoxicant?
I think to me, administering would be, you don't know that it's there.
And so, it's hard to say that the man is fully responsible for the woman getting drunk if the man offers a drink and the woman accepts it.
Now, what we do when we're drunk has always been a pretty clear-cut case within the law.
So, for instance, if I crash my car while I'm sober, Well, it may be bad driving, it may be a lot of things, but it's not a DUI. It's not driving under the influence.
If I get drunk and drive a car, because let's say I was at a party and someone offered me some drinks and then I took those drinks, went out while drunk and crashed my car, I am not a victim at that point.
I am not outside the realm of moral agency.
In fact, it's worse.
Because I crashed my car when I was drunk and therefore I'd be charged with driving while impaired as well as whatever recklessness or mistakes led to the crash.
So the idea that alcohol removes moral responsibility I don't believe has been very well established.
There have been situations as far as I understand it in US law where bar owners who serve drinks to ridiculously intoxicated people have been held at least partially liable for whatever happens afterwards So there's one possibility as far as that goes.
But the idea that a woman who drinks too much is not passed out, that somehow an intoxicant has been administered to her, which to me indicates without her knowledge, and she's then not responsible for what happens afterwards, seems problematic to say the least.
That's number one.
Number two, of course, is that it's impossible to understand How this definition does not also apply to men.
We end up with a rationally and morally absurd situation, I mean Kafkaesque absurd situation, where if the man and the woman have been drinking, let's say the man offers the woman two drinks and the woman offers the man two drinks, oh, I'll get this round, oh, you get that round, and then they have sex.
They are both raping each other.
And it's hard to imagine how that could be logically or morally sustained.
Now, this woman, Kasp, quickly became one of the most influential scholars in the field of rape research.
And while her classification of female rape were, let's say, flawed, her views on male rape were chilling.
Kasp wrote in a 1993 paper, quote, Although consideration of male victims is within the scope of the legal statutes, it is important to restrict the term rape to instances where male victims were penetrated by offenders.
In other words, generally raped by other men.
It is inappropriate to consider, as a rape victim, a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman.
Ah, the magical word inappropriate.
Doesn't that just solve all kinds of moral and legal conundrums?
I mean, imagine if...
Somebody, I mean, if it was a patriarchy, we would put forward that definition that only men can be raped and it wouldn't matter if women were raped.
Everybody would go howling to the skies in justified resentment and outrage at such a statement.
But when one of the most influential researchers in the field of rape research specifically excludes men being raped by women, it doesn't even show up on the social radar because men are just so powerful, don't you know?
So let's see how the legacy of Mary Koss and her supporters is still influencing social and academic views on male rape.
In 2010, a reputable study founded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, came out with a very familiar, if not eerily familiar, conclusion.
Nearly 1 in 5 women, 18.3%, and 1 in 71 men, 1.4%, in the United States have been raped at some time in their lives, including completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol-slash-drug-facilitated completed penetration.
So, the high estimates for women was achieved by counting drunken sex as rape.
Respondents were first told, quote, Please remember that even if someone uses alcohol or drugs, what happens to them is not their fault.
They were then asked questions, such as, When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you?
An answer other than zero was counted as rape.
Now, This is a significant challenge.
First of all, vaginal sex completely excludes men from the equation.
And can we ever imagine a woman offering a man drinks to the point where he has sex with her that he later regrets?
Well, of course.
Of course that can happen, but this is specifically excluded.
Now, when you bundle, look, passed out and unable to consent, if someone has vaginal sex with you when you're passed out and unable to consent, that is rape, clearly.
If you're drunk, drunk is a pretty subjective term.
I am a ridiculously cheap date.
I can never have more than one beer at a time.
Some people can drink more.
What is, you know, in the bell curve of tipsy to blacked out, where are you on that?
High?
Again, as far as I understand it, people take mind-altering drugs to enhance sexual pleasure.
Drugged.
Well, what does drugged mean?
Did you drug yourself?
Did somebody else drug you?
Was it against your will and knowledge or was it with your consent?
So when you bundle being drunk or having smoked a joint or maybe taking some E with somebody who roofied you, when you bundle all of those together, you're going to end up with a much wider net than I think would be rational or defensible. you're going to end up with a much wider net So even if we discard these significant flaws, there is a sample size of over 16,000 adults.
The study is a landmark examination of sexual violence.
Sadly, we at Free Domain Radio are not allowed to access the raw data, so we can only comment on the summary report of the survey, which should raise people's alarm spells.
By now, I'm sure you understand how important it is to check the definitions used in these rape and rape culture studies.
So here's an excerpt from the CDC's rape definition.
Quote, Among men, rape includes oral or anal penetration by a male using his penis.
It also includes anal penetration by a male or female using their fingers or an object.
The study then defines a special Category called, quote, being made to penetrate someone else, which provides the following clarification for cases involving men, quote, among men, being made to penetrate someone else could have occurred in multiple ways, being made to vaginally penetrate a female using one's own penis, orally penetrating a female's vagina or anus, anally penetrating a male or female, Or being made to receive oral sex from a male or female.
It also includes female perpetrators attempting to force male victims to penetrate them, though it did not happen.
So, an attempt.
How does that shake out?
According to the CDC, a woman coercing a man into having sex with her is not considered rape.
This is how men are treated by sexual violence researchers.
A woman coercing a man into having sex with her is not considered rape.
Where is the outrage of the inequality?
Well, you don't hear it.
I mean, imagine if the CDC put out a research study on sexual violence and it didn't define women coerced into having sex with men as rape victims.
Everybody would go completely mental.
But men, because of the awesome power of our patriarchal hierarchy, get to be completely excluded from these.
It might not surprise you to learn that the aforementioned researcher Mary Cass was an expert consultant and advisor for the CDC between 1996 and 2004, And also directed one of the Institute's programs.
So, as we mentioned before, one of the problems with defining drunken sex as rape is that women are not the only ones who engage in it.
What if both the women and the man are drunk?
What if only the man is drunk?
Of course, people square this circle has solved this problem by defining rape to exclude male victims of women.
Gosh, how convenient.
According to feminists, drinking or getting high impairs one's cognitive performance and therefore renders the women unable to consent to sex, turning any man who has sex with her into a rapist.
Interestingly enough, recent studies have found that unlike heterosexual women, heterosexual men's cognitive performance is actually impaired.
You are lust- Drunk after an interaction with someone of the opposite sex.
In fact, the impairment of cognitive performance occurs even if a man thinks he's talking to a woman or merely anticipates an interaction with her.
So if cognitive impairment resulting in rape is the result, then, in a weird way, they're right.
All heterosexual.
Sex is rape.
What about male victims of rape?
So the CDC study, and this is where you're really going to need to hang on to your shock helmet.
The CDC study found that in the 12 months prior to administering the survey, 1,270,000 females were raped and 1,267,000 males were, quote, made to penetrate.
Approximately 1 in 21 men were made to penetrate another person during their lifetime.
And about 80% of them reported a female perpetrator.
Going to go over those numbers again.
In the 12 months prior to the survey, 1,270,000 females were raped and 1,267,000 males were raped.
A difference, of course, of 3,000 in close to 1.3 million.
This is the first large study to estimate male victims of rape, and it did so unintentionally by creating a special separate category.
Now, as far as male victims of rape goes, a large percentage of men think that they can't actually be raped by a woman.
Even male rape victims will often question themselves.
Well, I had an erection, so I must have wanted it, right?
Wrong.
Physiologically and psychologically, wrong.
Both men and women can experience sexual arousal and even orgasm during non-consensual stimulation.
And if you can imagine, a rape kit would somehow be able to figure out whether a woman's body had lubricated her vagina or whether there were any other signs of sexual arousal during a rape.
And if there were, then it would never be considered rape.
Well...
That would be appalling and wrong.
Involuntary physiological responses do not a crime make or unmake.
It is the imposition of aggressive or violent will against another human being that makes the crime.
If we say, well, the woman had an orgasm, therefore it wasn't rape, people would recognize that as horrendous.
As medical researchers wrote in the archives of sexual behavior, quote, The belief that it is impossible for males to respond sexually when subjected to sexual molestation by women is contradicted.
Previous research indicating that male sex response can occur in a variety of emotional states, including anger and terror, are corroborated.
The presence of an erection does not mean that the man was not raped.
This is as primitive as saying, well, if the woman was raped, she must have been asking for it.
She must have secretly wanted it.
She's just into the rough stuff.
She's 50 shades of grey.
No.
And the fact that a man has an erection, or even an ejaculation, in no way indicates that it was not rape if he was forced to penetrate.
This is just another example of how male rape, the rape of men by women, is enabled and minimized by society.
So how often are men raped and sexually assaulted compared to women and how prevalent is female on male sexual violence?
So the CDC survey provides some reasonably good answers to these questions.
We can also take a look at available research to learn more about this topic.
A 2010 analysis of Bureau of Justice Statistics data found that 46% of male rape and sexual assault victims reported a female perpetrator.
An analysis of 2001 to 2005 data from FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System reveals That about 90% of reported sexual assault cases with a male victim were experienced by men under the age of 19.
Of course, it's much easier for women to assault men while they're developing physically, which is, of course, one of the reasons why, although, of course, rape or child abuse by priests in religious institutions is horrendous, sexual abuse by teachers in the public school system is hundreds of times more likely, not just by numbers but by ratio.
A Bureau of Justice statistics report on sexual victimization in juvenile facilities states, quote, approximately 95% of all youth reporting staff sexual misconduct said that they had been victimized by female facility staff.
Now, of course, the elephant in the room, which everyone tries to ignore, is prison rape.
Why is there not more outrage about prison rape?
Because of course the vast majority of inmates are men.
In 2008 an estimated 209,400 inmates were victims of sexual abuse.
For the same year the estimated number of rapes and sexual assaults in the United States as a whole including threats of rape and sexual assault was 203,830.
So more...
Inmates in American prisons are victims of sexual abuse, then rapes and sexual assaults in the United States as a whole.
A 2011-2012 US study found that 3.7% of the 91,000 surveyed inmates reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization in the past year, or since admission to the facility.
This is over 46 times the national estimate of sexual victimization for 2012.
What happens to these people when they're released back into society after experiencing sexual victimization 46 times the national average?
Now, in general, rape is associated with male on female, specifically white men.
CDC study, however, reported that approximately 13% of lesbians, 46% of bisexual women, and 17% of heterosexual women have experienced rape in their lifetime.
Assuming, of course, that lesbians were mostly raped by their female partners, given the prevalence of intimate partner violence when it comes to rape, which we'll get to in a bit, the percentage of female-on-female rape is very close to male-on-female estimates, suggesting that women are perfectly capable of committing rape.
American journalist Philip Cook highlights another study on sexual violence among lesbians.
Researcher Claire Renzetti has been a pioneer in examining abuse of all types in lesbian relationships.
48% of the respondents in a survey she helped conduct said they had experienced sexual abuse in their relationships and had experienced forced sex, with 16% saying it was forced upon them frequently.
4% of the respondents had suffered a gun or knife being inserted in their vagina, we can assume, of course, vast majority by another woman.
Now, before we get into this slide, I wish to reiterate that legally, morally, and philosophically, all mentally competent adults are responsible for their own actions.
So this is not designed to take away the moral responsibility of rapists of either gender.
The fact remains that researchers have estimated that between 60 and 80% of rapists, sex offenders, and sexually aggressive men were sexually abused by a woman in their childhood.
This is part of the cycle of violence that we really need to focus on.
There is, of course, a role for punishment and isolation of rapists within society.
There is a very significant role for prevention.
A study from 1989 found that male adolescent incest offenders abused by females only Targeted female siblings 93.3% of the time, compared to 32.5% for offenders abused only by males.
So if you were sexually abused as a child, when you were an adolescent, you will target female siblings three times more often than if you were sexually abused by a male.
A meta-analysis, which is the aggregation and consolidation of data from a variety of studies, a meta-analysis of 17 studies found that sex offenders were 3.4 times more likely to have experienced sexual abuse in their childhood compared to non-sex offenders.
And there was no difference between the two groups in terms of physical abuse.
In other words, childhood sexual abuse was significantly correlated with becoming a sexual offender later in life.
Teach men not to rape, in other words, doesn't work.
Empathy cannot be taught.
It is developed in childhood and shaped by parents.
It is now time to answer the question we asked earlier.
How prevalent is rape?
Feminist lawyer Catherine McKinnon famously proclaimed that, quote, by conservative definition, rape happens to almost half of all women at least once in their lives.
What does the data say?
Before we dive into the actual numbers, we of course have to point out, I have to point out, that men are significantly underrepresented in the data we're going to cite and use for our estimates.
We of course have already highlighted the unbelievable sexist prejudice as to why that is the case.
As of 2013, the FBI defines rape as, quote,"...penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus, with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim." Well, do you see what is missing here?
It's the usual thing.
Men cannot be raped.
Now, gender references are removed in this definition, and the wording is more accurate, but penetration No matter how slight of the vagina or anus, with any body part or object, vagina is women only.
Nobody thought to include being made to penetrate or envelop as rape categories.
Again, it's still very early.
We have, as men, yet to achieve what ancient law extended as protections to women, which is the recognition of rape and the evils of being subjected to rape.
Sooner or later, maybe in the 22nd century, we will catch up with, say, 5000 BC for men.
So, there's a more inclusive definition in place, so activists, of course, expected a dramatic rise in the number of reported rapes.
According to the legacy definition, there were about 80,000 rapes in America in 2013.
Using the new revised definition, the number of rapes increases to approximately 109,000.
Which is a rate of one rape per 2,900 persons, both male and female.
Of course, the increase is not insignificant, but this number, these data, does not support the notion of pervasive rape or rape culture in the United States.
However, since the agency calculates its estimates based only on reported crimes, the Bureau of Justice Statistics supplements the FBI's data with the largest crime survey in the U.S., the National Crime Victimization Survey.
So let's take a look at the survey's report on rape for 2013.
The survey defines rape as, quote,"...forced sexual intercourse and includes both psychological coercion as well as physical force." Forced sexual intercourse means vaginal, anal, or oral penetration by the offenders.
This category also includes incidents where the penetration is from a foreign object such as a bottle.
So in this way, really, the major weapon is the penis.
It cannot be the vagina in terms of major penetrate or envelopment.
Missing, missing, missing every single time.
Out of a random sample size of over 180,000 people, how many would you imagine would report being raped or being victims of attempted rape?
Out of a random sample size of over 180,000 people, 27 reported being raped and 10 were victims of attempted rape.
So based on these reports, we calculate that in 2013, there were about 91,000 incidents of rape and about 30,000 attempted rapes.
This number of rapes is lower than the FBI estimate, which is problematic.
Given how few people report sexual violence, the statistical significance of one or two incidents is actually quite large.
However, the survey also estimates that on average, between 2008 and 2012, about 60% of rapes were not reported.
Using FBI's data and accounting for unreported incidents, we calculate that there were a little over 270,000 rapes in the United States in 2013.
This means that in total, about 0.1% of the US population experienced rape or attempted rape for that year.
Now, since, of course, all surveyed people were 12 years of age or older and the average lifetime expectancy in the U.S. is 79, we can estimate a 6% probability of being raped in a 67-year period.
And this correlates.
A national telephone survey in the U.S. conducted between 2001 and 2003 found that about 6.7% of U.S. adults have been forced to have sex during their lifetime.
Now, Of course, the calculated probability is exaggerated because it assumes an equal likelihood of being raped for a person in his twenties or her twenties and another in his or her seventies.
It also assumes that people never ever lie about being raped.
Furthermore, since sexual violence rates have been declining for the last few decades, the rape probability will be lowered over those 67 years going forward.
It's also important to point out that these risks of rape are not spread evenly across the population.
People coming from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds will not experience the same rate of rapes and rape attempts.
So as a final measure of rape prevalence, we're going to average the results from the National Crime Victimization Surveys between 2008 and 2013 to account for variation in rape estimates.
The average rate of rape victimization for this six-year period is 25.3 per 100,000 people.
For comparison, the FBI reports a 2013 rape rate of 25.2 under its legacy definition and 34.4 under its revised definition.
Using this new estimate, the lifetime probability of experiencing rape or attempted rape is 2.5%.
Once again, this probability is subject to the previously outlined limitations.
Now, according to the CDC study, 92% of female rape victims were raped by an intimate partner or an acquaintance.
92% of female rape victims were raped by an intimate partner or an acquaintance.
You need to stick this number in your head because we'll be using it going forward.
Now, even if we assume only one offense per rapist, this means that the lifetime probability of being raped by a stranger is 0.1%.
There are some estimates that say that the average rapist commits several offenses.
Of course, that would be most likely.
The other thing, of course, is that A man who is willing to rape, and there's not enough data to figure out what the case is with women, but a man who is willing to rape is almost invariably associated with other kinds of violence, domestic abuse, abuse of others, fights, assaults, and so on.
And so it's not like nice boys who then turn dark and weird in the middle of nowhere.
In general, rapists have other markers of violence and histories of, let's just say, brushes with the law, to say the least.
So which rape estimate is the most accurate?
It's important to highlight the fact that in the 08-13 period, the National Crime Victimization Survey counted only 118 reports of rape and 60 reports of attempted rape after surveying nearly 1.1 million people.
Let's remind you of those numbers.
1.1 million people surveyed 118 reports of rape and 60 reports of attempted rape.
The sample size of this survey is over 10 times the sample size of the CDC study, and it doesn't count instances of sex while intoxicated as rape.
On the other hand, the CDC study attempted to maximize the possibility of disclosure through practices such as conducting phone instead of in-person interviews.
However, its methodology, when reporting rape, and male rape in particular, is questionable, to say the least.
As one author put it, quote, Up until this report, the CDC could be relied upon to present such data in an unbiased, non-sexist manner.
Now, with this report, summary statements must be examined as possibly suspect.
So, what about lying?
Or, to put it more charitably, being mistaken?
Before we dive into this, it's important to remember, since 9 out of 10 women are raped by someone they know, then it's not likely that they're going to be mistaken, right?
If you've known a guy named Bob, and then you say that Bob rapes you, and it turns out that you're wrong or mistaken or whatever, there's probably a lie.
Now, some guy jumps you in the bushes, he's got a balaclava on, and you want to hear his voice and whatever, right?
And then you make a mistake, pick him out of a lineup or whatever.
That's a different matter.
But since the vast majority of female rape victims know their rapist, in fact, in one survey, the use of violence outside of knowledge of the victim was almost non-existent.
In other words, the only time that a roofie was used was when the rapist did not know his victim.
And every time the rapist knew his victim, that's when violence was used or intoxicants.
Since the 1970s, one of the most prevalent claims is that only 2% of rape accusations are false.
One researcher decided to investigate the origin of this statistic and found that the primary source was a popular book written by American feminist Susan Brownmiller called Against Her Will, Men, Women, and Rape.
It turned out that Brownmiller got the number from a judge's speech, where the commander of New York City's rape analysis squad was quoted with this figure.
Not only is there no data or report available as the source of this information, but the squad itself appears to have lacked any training in statistical analysis.
At best, the 2% statistic is unverifiable.
However, that didn't stop it from becoming one of the official estimates of false rape accusations that feminists use.
Another popular estimate comes from a 1996 FBI report, which reads, quote, the unfounded rate or percentage of complaints determined through investigation to be false is higher for forcible rape than for any other index crime.
8% of forcible rape complaints in 1996 were unfounded, while the average for all index crimes was 2%.
Unfounded accusations aren't necessarily false, so this report is rather useless in establishing the truth.
However, the FBI's estimates are too low.
As Newsweek reported back in 1993, quote, a third of the DNA scans now routinely done in new rape investigations are non-matches.
In other words, DNA samples from hair, semen, or blood found on the victim didn't match the DNA of the suspect.
Again, it is impossible to establish how often the women lied or were mistaken.
What is interesting is that in the 1960s, the FBI reported that 20% of rape reports were unfounded.
A decade later, that number dropped to 15%.
By the 1990s, it was below 10%.
So as the feminist movement grew, the numbers just changed.
Given how controversial the topic of false rape allegations is, very few independent studies have been conducted to establish the percentage of women who lie about being raped.
Back in the 1990s, Alan Dershowitz, a lawyer and prominent scholar in U.S. law, was, quote, Dershowitz later refused to give lectures on rape without videotaping them and remarked that, quote, legal experts in the field had just decided not to teach rape law rather than take the risk.
Attorney Jonas Spielbauer provides a good argument for why we shouldn't ignore false rape accusations.
Quote, falsely reporting any crime is shameful.
Falsely reporting a rape is especially heinous.
The liar who files the false rape claim dishonors and makes life all the more difficult for the many true victims who file genuine rape claims because they have been terribly violated and seek justice for it.
At the same time, and perhaps even more seriously, the false report begins to destroy the reputation and sometimes the life of the accused from the very moment it is made, a fact of which many accusers are keenly aware.
In the recent report, Allegations that one was published in Rolling Stone about a reported rape by seven men in a frat house against a woman who apparently was hit on the head, smashed down on a glass table and repeatedly raped with broken glass cutting into her back and so on.
It appears that the story has significant problems in that there was no party that weekend and the details that were provided don't match anyone there.
And Lena Dunham in a recent book that she wrote is under some legal heat for identifying a prominent campus conservative named Barry in her book without putting the asterisk which she uses elsewhere to say that it's a pseudonym.
And what I've read in the reports of these incidents is that it makes life more difficult for women who come forward with allegations.
I've not actually read once about how difficult it's made life for the men.
This, again, is why the idea of patriarchy is so ludicrous.
Over the years, many researchers, of course, have found that if they want to keep their jobs, they should stay away from the topic.
I mean, if a feminist could accuse them of sexual harassment or worse, this is why most of the research on the topic is several decades old.
In the 1970s, when the anti-rape culture feminist movement was taking off, a group of researchers who had observed the clash between feminists and authorities decided to investigate the prevalence of false rape accusations as opposed to unfounded ones.
The head of the research group noted, quote, The two main identifiable adversaries involved in the false rape allegations controversy are the feminists and the police.
The feminists are by far the most expressive and prominent on this issue.
Some feminists take the position that the declaration of rape as false or unfounded largely means that the police do not believe the complainant.
That is, the rape charges are real reflections of criminal assault, but the agents of the criminal justice system do not believe them.
Some feminists virtually deny the existence of false rape accusations and believe the concept itself constitutes discriminatory harassment toward women.
On the other hand, police are prone to say the reason for not believing some rape complainants resides in the fact that the rapes never occurred.
Between 1978 and 1987, some researchers investigated rape reports in a small metropolitan area with a population of about 70,000 people.
Over the course of nine years, they found that in 41% of rape cases, the complainant admitted that no rape had occurred, and the accusation was false.
The average age of women who made false accusations was 22, and the majority came from lower socioeconomic and educational backgrounds.
The researchers determined that the, quote, False rape charges were able to serve three major functions for the complainants, providing an alibi, a means of gaining revenge, and a platform for seeking attention slash sympathy.
What is also interesting is that in those nine years there were only 109 rape accusations.
Even if 45 of the 109 accusations were proven to be false, that doesn't necessarily mean that the rest were all true.
However, if we assume that they were, the women in this town, experienced on average, about seven actual rapes per year.
Based on our previous calculation, this amounts to an exaggerated 0.7% lifetime probability of being raped, or 1.7% if we assume only 40% of rapes get reported.
The researchers followed up this study with an examination of two large Midwestern state universities and found that 50% of rape allegations were false.
Their report stated, quote, Approximately one-half, or 53%, of the false charges were verbalized as serving an alibi function.
In every case, consensual sexual involvement led to problems whose solution seemed to be found in the filing of a rape charge.
The complaints motivated by revenge, about 44%, were of the same seemingly trivial and spiteful nature as those encountered by the city police agency.
These unanticipated but supportive parallel findings on university populations suggest that the complications and conflicts of heterosexual involvements are independent of educational level.
In fact, we found nothing substantially different here from those cases encountered by our city police agency.
In other words, women from all backgrounds can lie about being raped.
In the 1980s, researchers in the United States Air Force Special Studies Division examined 1,218 reports of rape that were made on Air Force bases throughout the world in the 1980-1984 period.
Quote, proven allegations due to, quote, overwhelming preponderance of the evidence comprised 38% of reported rape, 460 allegations in total.
Of the remaining cases, 212, or 17%, were deemed disproved after the accuser convincingly admitted to lying about being raped.
The researchers then investigated the remaining 546 unresolved rape allegations, examining evidence and having the accusers submit to a polygraph test.
In total, 27% of investigated accusers admitted to fabricating their accusations prior to taking the polygraph test or after failing it.
If there was any doubt, the case was classified as proven.
Ultimately, the study found that 45% of rape allegations were false.
Accusers who lied were also asked why they did it.
Here's a breakdown of the replies.
Spite or revenge, 20%.
To compensate for feelings of guilt or shame, 20%.
Ooh, thought she might be pregnant.
13% To conceal an affair.
12% To test husband's love.
9% Mental or emotional disorder.
9% To avoid personal responsibility.
4% Failure to pay, or extortion.
4% Thought she might have caught a venereal disease.
3% Other 6%.
Since 1988, no new studies on the subject have been conducted.
To demonstrate women's capacity or propensity to lie, let's take a look at divorce cases where women lie to gain advantage in court, or to get back at their husbands, or to win custody rights.
In the 1980s, when divorce rates were skyrocketing, this started in the 1970s, the percentage of US divorce cases where the woman accused her husband of child sexual abuse increased from 7% to 30%.
It was such a phenomenal explosion of sexual violence accusations that the practice became known in legal circles as SAID, Sexual Allegations in Divorce.
Estimates for false accusations in those cases range from 20 to 80 percent.
In a 1991 paper, two psychologists noted, Of the divorce and custody cases that have been adjudicated,
in three-fourths, in 75%, in three-quarters, there was no legal finding of abuse.
That is, charges were dropped, never filed, the person was acquitted in criminal court, or there was a finding of no abuse in family or juvenile court.
I'll tell you something, my friends.
People wonder about the sexodus, about men not wanting to get involved in women, in relationships with women.
Look, a lot of men grew up in these timeframes and saw what happened to their fathers at the hands of mothers and a criminal or family law court system.
They have seen what happens.
And this unbelievable fiery sword that is cleaving the which should be united one heart of the genders.
Men and women are designed to be compatible more than physically, emotionally, intellectually.
A lot of these boys who went through these kinds of divorces where perhaps their fathers were falsely accused of sexual molestation by their mothers.
How keen do you think these men are, after growing up, to get married?
Here is a chilling parallel.
I'll just leave you to mull this one over.
I'll simply provide the facts and the correlation.
Sorry if you're just listening to the audio.
This is the reported rape rate per 100,000 from 1960 to 2011.
As you can see, of course, from the peak in the early 90s, it has declined significantly from 5.5 to 3.5, so almost 40% down.
That is the rape rate per 100,000.
Let's also look at the divorce rate per 1,000.
As you can see, it tracks very closely.
The correlation, 1.0 being a perfect correlation, the correlation between reported rapes and divorces is 0.85, which is a very, very strong correlation.
What about accountability for false rape accusations?
Bruce Gross, director of the University of South Carolina's Institute of Psychiatry, Law and Behavioral Science, points out the lack of accountability for making a false rape accusation.
Essentially, there are no formal negative consequences for the person who files a false report of rape.
Although there are grounds for bringing legal action against the accuser, it's virtually never done.
Even should a charge be filed in most jurisdictions, filing a false report is only a misdemeanor.
My particular way of thinking is that if you accuse someone of a crime and it turns out that you lied, you should get the punishment that the other person would be subject to.
But that's just me, perhaps.
Quote, when rape cases go to trial, alleged victims are protected by rape shield statutes.
In brief, these statutes are designed to prevent defense attorneys from using the accuser's sexual history, quote, against her.
At the same time, these rape shield laws may suppress evidence related to the woman's history that is relevant to the issue before the court.
In particular, rape shield statutes have been used to exclude prior false accusations of rape filed by the alleged victim.
So, if you are the fifth man that this woman has falsely accused of rape, in some cases, her prior admitted false rape accusations cannot be admitted to the court.
How is it possible, really, if feminism is focused on equality between the genders?
If feminism is focused on female responsibility and accountability, how is it possible, after a century of feminism, you could go even further?
Back to vindication of the rights of women.
How is it possible that the rape of men is still so unrecognized?
How is it possible that after a century of feminism striving for equality between the genders, it was only in 2013 that the FBI even began expanding its definition of rape to include male victims?
Why is it that major studies in the 21st century gloss over male rape or outright refuse to define it as rape?
How is it possible that major feminist scholars on the issue of rape can say, basically, that men cannot be raped, except by other men?
Feminists are supposedly fighting rape culture, but male victims of rape still have no voice.
Why?
Rape culture is supposed to be, of course, that which denies a voice to rape victims and normalizes rape.
I mean, the anti-rape movement of the 1970s and 1980s, they were foundational to the rise of second wave feminism and all of its associated political and legal power.
Victimhood and the leverage it provides was how this power was achieved.
There's a reason why the rape of women is an elemental and primal part of wartime propaganda.
Feminist Marilyn French wrote in a novel that became a New York Times bestseller in the late 70s and sold over 20 million copies.
She wrote, All men are rapists and that's all they are.
Come on.
Come on.
Some black men steal.
If we were to say, all black men are thieves and that's all they are, would we consider that fair and just?
Of course not.
That would be shockingly racist.
Men are now obliged to, when they go to college, they are obliged to sometimes attend compulsory don't rape seminars, consent seminars.
Again, some black men steal.
Should then all black men be singled out to take mandatory don't steal courses when they come to university?
How welcome.
Would that make blacks feel in such a racist environment?
It's appalling.
Absolutely shocking and appalling.
Now, of course, a number of, quite recently, a number of states have begun enacting policies wherein a man must get explicit verbal approval for every step in the seduction process.
Can I kiss you?
Can I touch your ear?
Can I unhook your bra?
And you have to get yes for every single step of the way.
But how is it not that women are also told that they must get verbal assent from men for every step of their seduction process?
Again, and this doesn't really solve anything because it simply becomes a...
you could get verbal assent when you're alone from the woman and then the next morning she might choose that it was not.
She was too drunk.
She was thinking about something else.
She was stressed.
She was distracted.
She was unwell.
And then the fact that you got verbal ascent is still not proven unless you're gonna wear some body cam and record everything you do, which I understand is also illegal.
So this is a horrendous mess in gender relations.
And the reasons for that we can go into perhaps another time.
It's a very specific targeting of a very specific group for very specific political purposes, which we've gone into before, and we don't have to extend this presentation in this way.
But I will say that men are not dumb.
We have a very good capacity to look at odds and statistics and to weigh the cost benefits of penis placement.
Many of us grew up in divorced households and saw mothers, vengeful, bitter, angry, deceitful mothers, eviscerate our fathers through the court process, through the legal process, or through simply spreading wicked tales.
Men know that the innocent until proven guilty standard of Western law, of common law, of Roman law is largely thrown out particularly in tribunals regarding rape that are conducted on college campuses.
We know that almost every time you see a rape accusation portrayed in art or in the media that it is accepted and foundational that the woman is telling the truth and that the men are evil.
And therefore, when it comes to succumbing to the charms of women, it is a very dangerous business for men.
A very dangerous business for men.
Having sex with a woman, particularly a young woman, who has been indoctrinated into believing that she is literally surrounded by well-armed stuka penises designed to blow her to smithereens at a moment's notice, is a very dangerous business.
And that if she regrets the sex, or has a problem with it, or turns out she has a boyfriend who finds out she has sex, she may, she may run to the authorities, and his life is destroyed.
Destroyed.
There are, of course, a small proportion of men and women who rape.
This is terrible, this is horrifying, this is an evil crime as can be imagined, and in many ways, many people think that it's worse than murder.
And, of course, these people should be vigorously identified, prosecuted, incarcerated, opposed, ostracized through whatever methodology can be developed.
However, men and women who are biologically evolved to be compatible, to get along, We fit together not just physically but emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.
We should be the greatest team.
Romantic love, married love is one of the greatest gifts that nature, history and biology has to offer men and women and should be the firm foundation upon which children are raised into benevolent and happy and win-win negotiating productive people in the world has been taking unbelievable blows.
Over the past half century or so.
This is to the detriment of society as a whole.
It is to the detriment of children.
It is to the detriment of happiness.
And it scarcely can be said that women, middle-aged women in America, 40% of them are on antidepressants.
It can scarcely be said that this has been beneficial to women's happiness as a whole.
It certainly has made the relationship between the genders tense and fraught and confrontational and fearful and And this is a huge, unspoken, unacknowledged tragedy in the increasing politicization and political correctness of sexual relations.
Women have of course generally been portrayed as mere helpless victims in this interaction.
However, if 92% of women know they're rapists, Then it's hard to say that they are pure victims in the matter, given that rapists, genuine rapists, come with a wide variety of markers for dysfunction and violence in other areas.
This is not to blame women, but to say that women have no responsibility in protecting themselves against rape, do not get drunk to blackoutness with people you don't know.
If I go to some party in a bad neighborhood...
With $100 bills hanging out of my pocket.
And I get drunk.
And I pass out.
And I wake up to find that some of my money is gone.
Of course the people who took it are wrong.
Yeah, of course they should go to jail.
Absolutely.
Or be prosecuted.
But come on.
If I told that story, wouldn't people say, well that wasn't very smart now, was it?
There are predators in the world, both male and female.
And you need to take care of yourself.
As Camille Paglia has pointed out, if a man or woman leaves his or her wallet on a park bench in Central Park for a week and come back and it's gone, of course the person who took it was wrong.
But come on.
Some elemental and basic self-protection is in order here.
I am very keen that fewer men and women get raped.
Call me a radical.
I am very keen, very keen on helping people to not be raped.
But if they are pure victims of randomness, if rape is lightning out of a clear blue sky that reaches you in the basement while you're napping, then you can't do anything to oppose it.
You can't do anything to reduce its prevalence.
And there are ways to reduce the prevalence of rape.
There are very sensible things that people can do to reduce the prevalence of rape.
Surely that is what we all want.
And the portrayal of women as victims and the exclusion of men as even a category of rape victims does nothing to help reduce the prevalence of rape.
So, I think it is tragic.
I think it is horrifying.
I think that the cloud of suspicion, paranoia, and hostility that has been sowed between the genders may very well be the literal undoing of Western civilization.
But by getting the truth out, by finding out the truth about these situations, we can begin to undo the damage that radicals have done to naturally compatible hearts of men and women and begin to love one another again as genders.
While being fierce about those who violate the personhood of others, we can divide rationally, empirically, men and women into good and evil.
Love the good, shun the evil.
But if we willfully blind ourselves by exaggerating the prevalence of evil in either gender, we can no longer differentiate between who is our friend and who is our enemy, between who will love us and who will violate us.
So we need the facts about prevalence.
We need the facts about self-protection.
Because we can only love when we feel safe and secure.
And exaggerating rape and minimizing false rape allegations means that we cannot feel secure.
And this robs us of one of the greatest birthrights of being a human being, of being alive, which is the capacity for loving, deep, intimate, and secure love and attachment.
Let's fight back against these divisive elements, find the facts, fall in love, and be happy.
