A reader writes:
Your reader’s shock about the study that found 6 percent of college men had attempted or successfully raped might be lessened if he looked at the study’s methodology. The study defines a man as a rapist if he answers yes to one of four questions:
1) Have you ever been in a situation where you tried but for various reasons did not succeed in having sexual intercourse with an adult by using or threatening to use physical force (twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.) if they did not cooperate?
2) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances (e.g., removing their clothes)?
3) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.) if they did not cooperate?
4) Have you ever had oral sex with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.) if they did not cooperate?
The first, third, and fourth options would be probably be considered rape or attempted rape by most people, but the second is much less clear. Obviously, having sex with someone who is drunk to the point of unconsciousness is rape, but the phrasing of the second option casts a much broader net.
It seems that a drunken hookup where one participant expressed regret after the fact would qualify even if he or she appeared to be consent at the time. I’m not trying to blame the victims of rape; I am simply pointing out that determining consent in the presence of intoxication is difficult, and broadly defining sex while intoxicated as rape would likely over count substantially given how linked sex and alcohol tend to be in a college environment.
The paper shows that question two is where the vast majority of the tallied rapes come from: 80.8 percent of the 120 who answered “yes” to any of the four questions answered “yes” to question two, compared with only 17.5 percent for question one, 9.2 percent for question three, and 10 percent for question four. If you exclude question two, you end up with somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent of respondents being rapists. This is still a high number, to be sure, but nowhere near the 6 percent your reader was so concerned about.
Lots of readers were concerned that the study “broadly defined sex while intoxicated as rape,” which might be the case if question two didn’t specify that the intoxicated person did not want to have sex. Still, it’s worth noting violent rape, at least, is relatively rare. Another writes that “Marcotte’s piece was actually more brave than you give it credit for”:
In the past few years, there’s been a consistent, concerted effort to reorient the discussion about sexual assault towards blaming the perpetrators (which, in many cases, are “men” as a class) and not the victims (“women”).
A good portion of this is because, per feminist theory, “men” are the oppressor class and “women” are the oppressed class. Therefore, because most rapists are men and too many women get raped, we can safely use “men” as a shorthand for “the rapey class of people.” From my angle, I’ve long believed that making “men” and “rapists” semi-coterminous is seriously bad for young men’s mental health, especially as they’re coming to discover what “man” and “masculinity” are in high school and college. It reinforces all the worst, most negative, most damaging stereotypes about how they should see themselves: they’re violent, scary, and unambiguously threatening.
Marcotte may seem to be stating the obvious when she says that “men” don’t rape, but look at what happened when RAINN, among other mild statements, suggested that the over-focus on men as perpetrators “has led to an inclination to focus on particular segments of the student population (e.g., athletes), particular aspects of campus culture (e.g., the Greek system), or traits that are common in many millions of law-abiding Americans (e.g., “masculinity”), rather than on the subpopulation at fault: those who choose to commit rape.” They got massacred by the gendersphere.
So unfortunately, even though (as RAINN’s report states) only 3 percent of college men are responsible for more than 90 percent of rapes, any discussion about rape is almost universally framed as “men vs women” instead of “normal people vs the minority of sociopathic people who commit rape.”
Amanda Marcotte – as popular a feminist blogger as any – is quite familiar with all this background, and she chose to poke holes in the conversation anyway. That takes guts.
Recent Dish on campus rape here, here, and here.
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