Or maybe you didn’t enter the Roiphe echo chamber but just read one of the many recent features that deem acquaintance rape a nonproblem and paint feminists as “neo-Victorian” prudes terrorizing gals with rape tall tales. What you probably missed was the coverage that viewed acquaintance rape as legitimate. Not your fault; it went by in a flash. When the media discover a feminist concern, it gets less than five minutes of serious consideration; then comes a five-year attack. Most stories have raised a doubting eyebrow: “Crying Rape” or “Date Rape, Part 2: The Making of a Crisis” (complete with cartoons).
Roiphe and others “prove” their case by recycling the same anecdotes of false accusations; they all quote the same “expert” who disparages reports of high rape rates. And they never interview any real rape victims. They advise us that a feeling of victimization is no longer a reasonable response to sexual violence; it’s a hallucinatory state of mind induced by witchy feminists who cast a spell on impressionable coeds. These date-rape revisionists claim to be liberating young women from the victim mind-set. But is women’s sexual victimization just a mind trip–or a reality?
Roiphe’s book says the feminist assertion that one in four women is a victim of rape or attempted rape can’t be right because, “If 25 percent of my women friends were being raped–wouldn’t I know it?” Roiphe must’ve skipped Statistics 101: one’s friends don’t constitute a scientific sample. She then bases her entire argument on the “findings” of University of California professor Neil Gilbert. Gilbert has actually never done any research on rape, but he’s denounced feminist scholarship on rape in such conservative periodicals as The Public Interest. And he’s not a neutral academic; he successfully campaigned to cancel a California school sex-abuse prevention program and is now crusading against federal funds for rape prevention. He argues that the one-in-four rape/attempted rape figure is based on a “radical feminist” study that labeled anything from “the slightest pressure” to “sweet talk” as rape. The real number, he says, is one in 1,000.
Gilbert gets this figure from the National Crime Survey (NCS), a poll that even its own researchers fault for undercounting rape. Until recently, the NCS asked the people polled if they had experienced just about every crime but rape; victims had to volunteer it on their own. The survey uses an old definition of rape that doesn’t fit current laws; for instance, the NCS doesn’t term forced oral or anal sex as rape. And the one-in-1,000 figure is based on rapes and attempted rapes in a six month period; the one-in-four figure reflects how many occurred since a college-age woman turned 14.
Despite Gilbert’s claim, the one-in-four figure does not include women who felt sweet-talked into sex. It’s true the survey (funded not by a feminist cabal but by the National Institute of Mental Health) asked women if they ever felt pressured into sex, but that data was not included in the final count. Numerous other studies bear these figures out. The bottom fine: the number of sexual assaults in the FBI files has risen four times as fast as the total crime rate in the last decade.
The date-rape revisionists claim a feminist-provoked rape hysteria is causing young women to “wallow in victimhood.” According to a Senate report, at least 84 percent of rapes go unreported. So where exactly have these chroniclers of “rape hype” spied hordes of victim-emoting gals anyway? Maybe in Hollywood films or on TV where “women in jep” clot the screen. Maybe in the fashion ads featuring wan, cowering waifs. But not in feminist circles where the most striking recent development has been a massive influx not of hanky-clutching neo-Victorians but of such stand-tall feminist groups as Riot GRRRL, Guerrilla Girls, WHAM, YELL, and, my personal favorite, Random Pissed Off Women. These new feminists use wit, not whining, megaphones, not moping, to deliver their point.
There is indeed a national “hysteria!’ over this new forceful feminism–but it’s male hysteria. The real cultural fear is not that women are becoming too Victorian but that they’re becoming too damn aggressive–in and out of bed. Let’s recall where this victimhood argument first surfaced: in conservative journal articles by men. Nearly two years before the Times printed Roiphe’s “Rape Hype,” Commentary published Norman Podhoretz’s seven-page denial of date rape. This “brazen campaign” by feminists, he warned, will deny men their privilege of “normal seduction” and “male initiative.” “The number of ‘wimps’…will multiply apace,” as will–drum roll–“the incidence of male impotence.”
Now I ask you, just who’s spouting hype?
