scale imbalance men woman false equivalence 750

The myth of rape myths

Are we are all living in a world of mythical delusion? Is the world that you subjectively experience so far removed from reality that you can’t be trusted to sit on a jury? This is the question that vexed Helen Reece, a Reader in Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Feminist discourse asserts that “rape myths” are rampant in society to the effect that they disable the average person from being able to either understand or ascertain the seriousness of the crime of rape. According to feminists, the public is so deeply immersed in “rape culture” or “rape supportive attitudes” that we have trouble recognizing when a crime has been committed. This suggestion is a serious accusation and Helen is a very serious woman willing to tackle this question with logic instead of just agreeing for the sake of getting along.

In July, 2013, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies published a summary article of Helen Reece’s paper entitled “Rape Myths: Is Elite Opinion Right and Popular Opinion Wrong?” In the article Helen Reece presents a challenge to how feminists are corrupting logic, law, and language.

The claim that rape myths are widespread may be challenged on three grounds: first, some of the attitudes are not myths; secondly, not all the myths are about rape; thirdly, there is little evidence that the rape myths are widespread. To a troubling extent, we are in the process of creating myths about myths, or ‘myth myths’.

While the feminist rhetoric currently shaping the existing “rape myth” studies have had significant influence upon the court system thus far, feminists simultaneously declare that their efforts have had no impact on a “rape supportive” society. By denying their results feminists are able to avoid responsibility for the negative impact that their changes may have caused and to decry anyone, like Helen Reece, who questions the reasonableness of feminist demands upon the legal system as a comprehensive institution that also has a duty to protect the accused.

When the Rape Myth Attitude (RMA) surveys were administered they did not yield the high results expected so researchers decided to “expediate” their process of proving “rape culture” by manipulating the questions. It was their assumption that people taking the test were recognizing the politically correct answers and responding in the presumed “correct” manner, thereby skewing the results. To make the test results match their expectations, RMA surveys made their questions more ambiguous and bell curved the results.

Helen points out that “This is as fallacious as making the driving test practically impossible to pass, then treating the resulting failure rate as evidence of appalling driving.” While bell curves can be useful at times they are particularly problematic in determining “the awfulness of people’s attitudes.”

Academic studies require peer review and RMA surveys have not been properly scrutinized because the manipulated results adhere to popular myths about rape myths. If we are to let these studies influence the legal system, as they demand we do, Helen presents important concerns to be addressed about the research being submitted as fact.

A specific point of RMA survey questioning involves asking people if a woman inviting a man to have coffee means sex. Not only is the wording a key element to the absurdity of this question it begs the question of what normal, every day people use as an indication of sexual receptivity.

Helen suggests that the more people who respond to state that asking someone to have coffee with you is a sign of sexual interest, the more weight it gives to the social norm of an invitation of coffee being a legitimate pickup line.

Surely Skepchick would agree.

The media attention given to “elevatorgate” and Rebecca Watson’s insistence that a man asking her to have coffee with him was sexual harassment, lends to the credibility that asking someone to have coffee with you is an understood euphemism for wanting to fuck. The public should now agree that coffee invitations are, in fact, a sexual invitation. Interestingly, the only people who agreed with Watson were the feminists, seeking to demonize the man who offered the coffee.

The public rejection of this feminist notion, that coffee equals sex, indicates that feminists are more likely to believe this rape myth than anyone else and they have projected their own absurd ideas onto the general public.

Despite the effort to make consent appear black and white, Helen argues that signs of consent in the real world are very messy and that considering the context around a person’s actions is much more important to legal analysis than we are being asked to believe. Due to a lack of proper research in what consent looks like when it goes right and exclusive focus on what it is like when it goes wrong, she feels that “participant’s answers should be treated with respect: the best evidence we have of how women show consent to sex is how people say women show consent to sex.”

Context is everything.

One of Helen’s concerns with feminist methodology in “rape myth” research is the removal of the requirement that rape myths needed to be “demonstrably false.” Without this stipulation we end up with “the oxymoronic ‘true myth’.” This is a case where something is oddly declared to be a myth but it may be factually accurate.

Problematic to the RMA studies is that the surveys purport to show how many people “blame the victim” when, in fact, none of the surveys use the word “blame”. The moral judgements inferred onto the results are actually just a result of researchers injecting their own moral values onto the responses. The only thing determined by the surveys is that a number of people, who may be factually correct, did not hold the same ethical opinions as the researchers.

The law, by design, is intended to deal with facts.

This slippery slope of interpretation by moral comparisons was tobogganed into our narrative by researchers riding on surrogate words for blame, such as “responsibility”. Helen questions whether or not “responsibility” is a good substitute for the word “blame.” Some of the public, including rape victims themselves, will attribute a portion of their actions as having contributed to the circumstances that led to a rape. This is fact. It is quite established that drinking excessively in public contributes to vulnerability. What the survey doesn’t establish is whether or not the public feels that a responsibility factor attributes blame to the victim or whether they were merely agreeing it contributed to vulnerability.

Where the studies report that people hold myths about “real rape,” defined as stranger attacks with weapons involved, Helen Reece queries “What does this even mean? Does it mean that people believe ‘real rape’ is the only sort of rape, the most common sort of rape, or the most serious type of rape? The only strong evidence for any of these propositions is that ‘real rape’ is more likely to lead to a conviction at the end of a trial. But this doesn’t mean that jurors believe the ‘real rape’ myth — they might just find it easier to convict when the evidence doesn’t boil down to whose story they believe.”

When rape attitude surveys are more interested in judging other people on their personal moral scales than in actually establishing fact for the pursuit of justice it is important for people, such as Helen Reece, to defend the institution of the law. As it currently stands, the law has an interest in making sure defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty and making sure they are granted the right to a fair trial.

These surveys declare that the public, the judges, the police, and all individuals involved in the court process are too steeped in myth to be capable of judgement due to “rape supportive attitudes.” That is a big accusation and only people within the legal system are in a position to defend against these accusations.

Helen Reece proposes that proving immorality in mass popular culture is not as cut and dried as feminists would like to pretend. If comparative analysis is done, conviction rates for rape are not actually out of scale with other crimes. She remarks that feminist studies do not even bother to compare their myth myths to attitudes about other types of violations.

The myth that many people believe “women cry rape” is unsupportable because “there needs to be a discrepancy between the proportion of women who people believe ‘cry rape’ and the proportion of women who do in fact ‘cry rape’. A problem is the lack of precision in the data on both these proportions.” Until such data is acquired, the “cry rape myth” might actually be a fact.

Quite often, and for good reason, the law is very focused on the meaning of words and how to enforce those meanings. As much as the law is designed to be followed, the law is also intended to be understandable. Feminist inspired changes to the law have introduced ambiguous words that undermine the clarity of what is expected from the public in order to comply with the law.

Feminists have succeeded in increasing reported rapes but the failure to increase convictions is not due to “rape myths” it is due to an inability to be sure “beyond a reasonable doubt” where the complex sexual behaviour of human beings meets the dubious wording of the new laws about consent.

Of the many reforms made to the legal system, rape is now defined by a lack of active consent instead of the presence of sexual rejection. These changes have been made without acknowledgement or research into how people interact with each other in real life. This does not seem either progressive or productive.

Helen Reece has expressed her concern that where the line between sex and rape in drawn is not as simple as feminists purport, not as mythical as they project, nor as dire as they propose. Her line of questioning is not misogynistic, or even anti-feminist, it is the reasonable doubt presented by people who seek to keep the legal system in line with reality. Helen Reece just seems to love the law, and what it represents.

Feminists claim we live in a rapey dystopia. If you don’t agree with them and fail to convict every man accused of a crime against women, you have an “attitude” problem.

Someone needs to explain to feminists how the legal system was designed and for what purpose. Perhaps that person will be Helen Reece.


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  • Robert St. Estephe


    Feminists are people who are addicted to rape fantasies of the mixed (aversive/erotic) variety. They are histrionically offended by their own rape fantasies and they absolutely adore this feeling of outrage. Thus they engage in it over and over and over again.

    Feminist love their own rape fantasies and they invite all men to join in their erotic/aversive drama. They will not be happy until they can be assured that not a single man is left who says “no.”

    “Welcome to my rape fantasy”

  • Jay

    Wow, some really insightful analysis here Diana. So many ‘academic studies’ from these sociology PhD’s are not research at all, but rather ‘advocacy research’ designed simply to support their ideological position. From now on, I declare any person with a PhD in sociology et al to be given the title Id. for Ideologue. Therefore, for example rather than saying Dr Weber we now say Id Weber.

    • dejour

      I think their ideas should be scrutinized, but a lot of reasonable people have PhDs in psychology (eg. Baumeister, Tara Palamtier, Angry Harry)

  • Sanguifer


    I find it interesting that the judicial system is labeled as incompetent when it suits them… but they have no problem arguing for things like DV being overwhelmingly a male-perpetrator thing by citing… conviction rates.

  • OldGeezer

    When it comes to properly understanding the new feminized world in which males now exist on sufferance as barely tolerable adjuncts, men really are stupid. Or confused. Or most likely a bit of both.

    This is NOT any kind of myth that you’re dealing with. It’s simply a new world based on the “feelings” of women, and only women, wherein both criminality and acceptable behaviour are no longer defined by the application of old-school male logic and the dispassionate examination of evidentiary inputs. That silly old masculine “live and let live” idea of your freedom of action “ending at my nose” has long since been replaced by the new limits of any woman’s hurt feelings. Infringement of same is criminal behaviour with specifications of the indictment to be provided by the offended woman on her say-so alone.

    If you hurt a woman’s feelings in any way at all, you’re a criminal. If she says that it felt like rape to her and/or that it should be punished as if it were rape, then IT WAS RAPE, dammit! And any argument that suggests the application ANY standard other than the woman’s own feelings, especially any silly male suggestions about evidence and logic and suchlike, is tantamount to”rape culture”.

    Do please try harder to understand the new world of matriarchal “justice”. Failure to do so is going to land you in an ocean of trouble. They were handed that new feminized legal system on a silver platter, along with the cession of all other “patriarchal” turf and traditions of masculine fair play, in the name of “equality”. And please don’t say that you were never warned by past generations about the probable consequences of caving in to their progressively hypocritical demands. You’re now long past the point where begging and pleading with the victorious beneficiaries of the male surrender will recover any lost territory. To the contrary, they see it as weakness and demand more still.

  • AXJ

    Rape or an allegation of rape is a very serious crime and a felony in the USA and must be proven by a Jury beyond a shadow of a doubt.

    • OldGeezer

      Yeah, sure. You mean like all those men “in the USA” and elsewhere found guilty of rape “beyond a shadow of a doubt” and subsequently released based on later DNA findings?

      As for the current legal system “in the USA” generally, maybe you missed the latest presidential memo repealing Magna Carta and asserting his unilateral prerogative to decree the execution of any “military age male” anywhere in the world, including US citizens. How’s that for getting rid of the nasty imperial tyranny of monarchical rule? If mad old George III of England were still around, he’d be green with envy. But of course it’s entirely worthy of and consistent with the highest principles of the self-declared “greatest democracy on earth”. Not!

      A more recent presidential addendum also declares Superman’s fight for “Truth, Justice and The American Way (TM)” to be a totally patriarchal concept and, like the obsolete US Constitution itself, no longer operative in the new imperium. Old fairy tales are for children. The new realities are much scarier.

  • dejour

    Thanks for drawing my attention to this article. I plan to read it in full.

    Having peer-reviewed articles like this is invaluable to MRAs. The fact that it was a woman who wrote this will make it harder for feminists to rebut

  • LostSailor

    Feminists need Rape Culture, which is why they invented it.

    Most women are actually horrified by being called “feminist” even while they generally agree with societal changes that benefit them. I’ve had exchanges with women who spout feminist lines where I point out that they are doing so and the reacting is absolute vehement denials that they are in fact feminists. This presents the self-identified feminists with a problem. They can’t keep the “movement” going without gaining more recruits. (And we all know that “movements” are never-ending, since generally there is too much money, not to mention privilege, involved, so the goal-posts are always moving.)

    So the current Rape Culture strategy is the answer to the problem and provides two benefits. The first is that it provides feminists with yet another cudgel to hold over men by which they can punish and try to control us. But that’s really just a side-benefit, albeit a powerful one for them. The main benefit of advancing Rape Culture is to keep women in a constant state of fear; the more fearful women can be made to be, the more likely they are to support feminism. Feminism used to provide positive reinforcements to gain support: “equality” in law and in economic opportunity, which gradually morphed into increase financial support stripped from men or provided by government. But that’s not enough anymore. Now they have to rely on negative reinforcements, keeping women fearful of men.

    It will only get worse…

    • East1956

      I am not so sure that the Rape Myth or any other political tactic used by feminists is about engendering fear so much as creating polarisation in society, and providing a largely homogenous enemy. It is a well used strategy throughout the history of mankind. The expansion of the definition of rape provided the rationale for an inflated figure for the incidence of rape.

      Once we have been through this process, then sanctions against those inherently predatory individuals (men) are insignificant in relation the perceived level of victimisation by these individuals.

      It provides an avenue for anger. Anger that is a convenient diversion to facing up to uncomfortable home truths elsewhere. (Again a pattern of behaviour seen throughout human history)

      As rightly stated above this a highly manipulative strategy by feminists, that ultimately diminishes the quality of women’s lives as a whole over the long term.

      • LostSailor

        I don’t necessarily disagree, but I still think that Rape Culture, especially on college campuses is about creating fearful women and as many “victims” and “survivors” as possible. It’s where the next generation of feminist activists will come from. Fear is often, if not usually, the generator of anger. I do agree it’s about creating a homogenous enemy.

        The purpose of feminism hasn’t been to better the lives of women for a long time, if it ever really was. Which is why women who bought into the feminist lie are finding that the promised land isn’t all that promising, with a littered landscape of childlessness, single motherhood, and exhausted and empty lives. Feminism is about the diminishment of men and the “empowerment” of women. Some women are discovering that “empowerment” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…

    • MGTOW-man

      I am not so sure feminists know what they are doing. I question if they have made it passed their own inner feelings…letting feelings skew perceptions of reality. (How do they WANT reality to be, etc). Perhaps this is why they are so driven and resistant to logic…because they just do not KNOW or objectively understand how wrong, destructive, and harmful they are. I suspect some of them really believe the stuff they pass off as “truth” because it feels correct to them and they can’t understand it any other way. This is also why we may never “fix’ them. Are they capable of grasping this anomaly of theirs? Likely, but they seem to also be gravitating from agency.

      This is why I harp on excessive feelings (not from BEING a female, but something else separate—letting those feelings ruin everything, particularly stability). Despite the stereotyping and negativity, the danger is too great for us to ignore it.

  • oldfart


    Does the law have an interest in protecting the innocent,or is it more interested in the hundreds of billions of dollars in misandrist Federal grants?

    Half the ex-parte PPO’s are overturned because they have no basis in fact,yet judges sign them like autographs.

    Read recently that only %9 men accused of rape are taken to trial, and only %3 are convicted.

    That indicates to me at least %91 of rape claims have no basis in fact,and %97 of them of unprovable,as in HAVING NO EVIDENCE.

    What the ideologues want is indeed convictions upon accusation,and “bending the law to fit the mandate of the fems” is what got us this far down the fascist star chamber system.

    No one cares about men,they are expendable.
    If it pays well to expend them, it will be a done deal.

    All it takes is a woman crying on TV,and voila,”done for the betterment of society.”

    College guys now have no legal recourse to rape accusations,how can the police allow colleges to handle criminal cases?

    Is that not against the law,to cover up a crime by not reporting it to police?

    None of that matters, the police claim to be helpless,yet they DID manage to pass “The Law Enforcement Bill of Rights” that protects them by keeping due process for them,no ex-parte orders issued against police,judges,or anyone else participating in throwing other men under the bus.

    That is why they do not care,they have immunity of a sort.

    “The laws are for the little people.”

  • Jim Thompson

    This is a good find and report Diana.
    I just read Hellen’s blog. What stands out immediately about the survey is the poor syntax and grammar of the questions asked in the survey she reports on. Truncated colloquial expression such as “believe in” are relied upon without sufficient clarification. Are the researchers asking does the reader “believe” something happens? Or are they asking does the reader “believe” the practice to be ok in any moral or legal sense? They are more like the kind of questions asked by a political party to support a foregone conclusion or idealogy than those of a honestly motivated researcher.
    Myths of myths seem to pervade our contemporary zeitgeist and require constant scrutiny and critical appraisal.
    This is what Helen’s work exemplifies.

  • Billy

    I haven’t heard about rape so much in my life until I came to this website as well feminist websites. Although I’am a MRA. All this talk about rape is starting to make my head spin lol.i just hope the statistics get set right one day. So those crazy feminist stop spreading rape hysteria and the ridiculous so called rape culture.

  • Angry Harry

    Great piece!

    Much appreciated.

  • MGTOW-man


    —Heck, this happened with the entire feminist movement. Now, look at the fallout to the stability of our societies. But of course, since women are larger than the world itself and certainly larger than our species, (wink, wink) why would we question experimenting with our species? If you do, you must “hate women”—so goes the manipulation.

    I am glad you said that because it helps show justification for soooo many things I say here on this wonderful site. Thank you.

  • donzaloog

    Feminists are the ones with the rape obsession. They see it everywhere and insert it into places where it never was before.

  • graham strouse

    The data in rape studies is just so, so bad. Rape is easily the most under-reported AND the most over-reported major crime. Everyone has a different definition. Everyone (and by everyone, I mean the DV industrial complex and academic feminists) loads the questions they use to gather the data to get the results they want. Men are terrorized and persecuted ( and ignored). Genuine rape victims of both sexes are also ignored because of the Cry Wolf Syndrome.

    There is no reasonable way to process the data when various studies determine that somewhere between 2% and 90% of rape accusations are false. False accusers are not held accountable for their crimes (and this is a heinous crime) & actual victims are too often ignored because there are so many false accusers.

    And let’s try to get the stats on male rape within the Catholic Church. That might be handy if you’re trying to establish the scope of the crime. We don’t have a lot of raw data but the stuff under the surface effectively unseated a sitting Pope.

    • Kendall

      Even if the data somehow became available, and it showed men were more often on the receiving end, it still might not change the status quo. Just look at general violence against men and murder rates. There is no violence against men act, even though the great majority of murder victims are men. Feminism in a ‘pure’ sense says that its goal is women and men being treated as equal, and yet “Feminist” organizations treat women as a protected, even handicapped class.

      VAWA is gendered, yet it is lobbied for by groups who claim to be “Feminist”, either they must change the label, or end steps that hurt progress, but it seems they are currently only ignoring these issues, because it benefits the organizations short term progress. It is a crutch that will leave those that use it crippled if they truly seek equality as a final goal. Those who use is righteously, most likely, have lost sight of their stated goal, or lost faith. The “feminism” being used as a crutch is an excuse, separate from the ideal once held.

  • LostSailor

    Feminists have succeeded in increasing reported rapes but the failure to increase convictions is not due to “rape myths” it is due to an inability to be sure “beyond a reasonable doubt” where the complex sexual behavior of human beings meets the dubious wording of the new laws about consent.

    Well, there are “Rape Myths” and there are rape myths.

    Such as feminist rape myths. Such as the feminist rape myths that see rape where there is none. One version of this is the Skepchick type of rape myth, where an invitation to coffee is sexual harassment and a prelude to rape.

    The other is the myth known as “rape statistics.” I’ve spent a little time delving into the studies and surveys used to generate rape statistics, the most important of which are Justice Department/CDC surveys such as the National Crime Victimization Survey, the relatively new National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, and several related surveys specifically on “victimization” of college/university women (since the vast majority of reported rapes occur in the cohort of women under age 25).

    The myth involves not only the “statistic” that 1-in-4 (or 1-in-5, depending on who you ask) women will be raped in their lifetime. Not true, and not what the surveys say. But a more interesting myth is the “fact” that some 60% of rapes are unreported. Since it’s a crucial feminist myth and a primary pillar supporting the “rape culture” meme, I wanted to see how it was derived.

    The answer lies in how the surveys are constructed and conducted. The first thing to note is something we’re all aware of: the expansion of the definition of what constitutes rape and sexual assault. In the surveys, these are general broken out into different categories, but in practice, they are conflated when reported in the media and when used as feminist ammunition. Two of the more astonishing things I discovered were that a “verbal threat of rape” is included in the definition of rape for the purposes of the survey and any “unwanted touching” is often included in the survey definition of sexual assault.

    The second thing to note is that there have been several studies on methodology that concluded that using a series of “cues” and specific questions related to specific incidences revealed in the course of a survey interview resulted in a much higher number of “unreported” rapes/sexual assaults than just asking the respondents to describe their experience. And, of course, the former methodology is what is used in current surveys. There’s also a difference between general surveys and surveys focused on “criminal” rape or assault, which show far lower incidences and are, of course, not favored anymore.

    The third item of note is that when these interviews are conducted, it is not the respondent that determines whether an incident is recorded as rape or sexual assault, it is the interviewer.

    And the most important point to note conflates items two and three. Respondents are usually asked whether they regard the incident under discussion as rape or sexual assault and over 50% of the interviewees answer “no.” But they are included in the final statistics nonetheless.

    So, the myth that the vast majority of rapes go unreported is inflated artificially. If reason and reality were applied, the statistics would be that a third of rapes are reported, a third are not reported, and a third aren’t rapes at all and never happened. (We’ll leave aside for the moment that the surveys use “cues” to elicit “reports” of rape and sexual assault.)

    So, the surveys that report these statistics are founded on the fundamental assumption that women are either too ignorant or too stupid to recognize when they’ve been raped or assaulted, so the women (and all the interviewers are women) conducting the survey will make that determination and decision for them.

    Both myths are designed to further the perception that rape is rampant in society when the truth is quite the opposite. I guess the feminist idea that women have complete “agency” doesn’t apply when sexual decision are involved.

    Anyone who wants to look further can Google “national victimization survey sex violence,” but you’ll have to dig to find the truth, looking especially at definitions and the methodology, rather than the summaries of results.

    It also shows how deeply feminists and feminist thinking have infiltrated the government and how vested feminists are in doing whatever it takes to further the deception…

    • SlantyJaws

      Have you got any links to the methodology studies, I’d like to read up on those?

  • crydiego

    Diana, I’ll keep this simple, -Thank you.

  • Janet Bloomfield (aka JudgyBitch)

    Evidence that coffee does, in fact, mean sex. And not just any sex, but rape. And not just any rape, but male on female rape.


    Star – an allusion to orgasm and how it feels
    Bucks – rhymes with “fucks” and refers to male deer at the reproductive prime

    Case closed. Coffee = rape

    I “feel” this is true, so it is.


    You’re welcome.

    • Daniel

      No wonder I get an erection every time I drink coffee.

  • Redfield


    Not only does this convey the writer of this survey’s own bias on what is understood of a societal norm in inviting sexual behaviour it also shows a bias in gender and a predetermined outcome for the research! Simply by stating this question on the survey in a gendered format has biased the results! If you make these questionaires too obvious to the recipient you will build in bias for the results … It’s like a lawyer asking a leading question of a witness for a predetermined answer in front of a jury! Even if you are solely looking for attitudes of one gender the question should not show bias!

    Not a good start …. Inferential statistics is all about removing bias, and the hardest part is not in running statistical models to examine results, it starts with the population you want to sample … for instance this particular survey may have surveyed Uni students where it could be said the coffee thing is more normalised behaviour!! Even the wording is problematic on another level …. Having coffee probably is an indicator of sexual receprocity it has been for me, but not on initial contact with a woman! So you will have some respondents saying yes without thinking this through, because the question is not concise enough to get any useful inference from it!

    Finally when looking at someone’s research I found it useful to go to the end to read their limitations on that particular research doc …. It will give sample size, response rate, and more often than not limitations to the sampling … I make my decisions from there. I think the biggest factor in all this so called “research” are the survey questions. This is where you can get the result you’re looking for without really trying! One of my lecturers had a consultancy with gov and business just in writing unbiased (as close as you can get) survey questions, it is a skill not many researchers have! Mark Twain thought inferential stats was horse shit and he probably was right. Most if not all of the hard science research communities never rely on inferential stats …and for good reason! It rarely proves anything concrete but is presented to an unsuspecting public as fact or truth …. TOTAL BS!!

  • captive

    Even if the coffee incident was sexual innuendo – it doesn’t constitute “harassment” which needs a level of directed hostility and persistence that is not embodied by refusing an unwanted proposition. There’s no way to stop these feminist terrorists as they are absolutely convinced that any of the male people in power actually care whether or not they take revenge on the lower class males. Most males in power couldn’t care less if the subordinate males are trampled on yet feminists seem to think this teaches some sort of lesson to “The Patriarchy.”

    • Fredrik

      We’re a Borg collective, dontcha know. We have a hivemind. That’s why it makes complete logical sense to punish third-world black men for the sins of first-world white men, and cut off all of their foreskins. Because we’re all the same.

    • Frosty2013

      The feminist agenda seems to be an attempt to create a social and legal structure which never hurts their feelings, because that’s bad. If you ask for coffee, whether sexual harassment or not, whether it even be an innuendo or not, doesn’t matter, her jimmies were rustled and that’s the point.

      This is why feminists are pushing for laws that essentially allow them to have sex under any circumstance, feel bad or shameful afterwards and then post-sex declare they didn’t consent, to them they literally believe that if you simply feel like you’ve been raped, then you have as a matter of fact been raped. When the truth is that the law defines the parameters for rape and we can objectively judge if a rape occurred or not, it cannot be decided afterwards depending on how you feel.

      The problem with having the expectation that everyone has the right to never be emotionally distraught at the hands of someone else, is that some people are so sensitive that society would grind to a halt trying to maintain this goal.

  • NewMHRA

    It seems as though everything a man does is some form of rape…

    I rode a bus with a female bus driver: Rape!
    I ordered lunch from a waitress: Rape!
    I greeted a woman with a neighborly, “Hi” as she passed me on the sidewalk: Rape!

    I sometimes wonder if feminist ideologues are trying to separate men and women because of some sort of jealousy or spite. The types of messages imposed on society by these forceful brutes is just too ridiculous to be prompted by anything else (aside from an all-consuming hatred of men, or course.)

  • wgone

    Rape is sexist – its purely defined from a womans advantage. Its not a genuine ‘crime’ the way its defined. Current definitions are based on stereo types. Today whats making it worse is that feminism wants to broaden rape to include anything that a woman feel is rape, while completely ignoring the rape of men and boys. If i had to define it – it would be “sexual activity with a non consenting person”. NO GENDER. Rape cannot be determined the following day – it can be reported the following day though. The current discussion about rape and genital mutilation prove that feminism is NOT about equality but purely getting the best possible advantage for women even at the cost of everyone else.

    I no longer consider rape to be a serious crime purely from this perspective – i.e. UNTIL its properly defined in a non sexist manner and I shall be commenting as such in all the regular places where i comment until this changes. Rape is a JOKE. #RapeIsAJoke

    • Emilio Lizardo

      The reality is that Feminist are using the statutory ‘rape’ of young men to justify the statutory ‘rape’ of young women. to be fair it’s not just Feminists but other sexual moralists. Inabiliity to consent is also foisted upon older adults depending upon the ‘power differentials’ of the individuals. It’s truly insidious.

      Unfortunately many men’s rights advocates fall into this trap by way of demanding equally harsh penalties for female ‘perpetrators’, which while it has the virtue of fair treatment what we would really like is not to have any one persecuted for consensual sex.

      Then there is the absurdity of prosecuting underage people for having sex with underage people.

  • Emilio Lizardo

    One of the reasons we see so many preventative measures being demanded by woman’s groups is their assumption that there is an infinite supply of sex. The view is that no matter how many barriers to sex we erect (pun intended) there will always be a sufficient supply of sex, a view that is not entirely unjustified.

    Sans being in the upper 20% of men sex is rare and difficult to come by. It requires skill and persistence. So it’s absurd for men to demand additional barriers to sex. When these sexual barriers are applied to women, it simply reduces men’s opportunities. A feminist and a great disappointment to all men.

    The Feminist answer to rape in prison has been to pass laws making all sex in prison by anyone felony rape. Here perhaps is the ultimate Feminist solution to rape in the gen pop of society as a whole.

  • Mr Happy Face

    First, read @LostSailer’s comment below, which explains how in most surveys which determine rape report rates, it is up to the interviewer to determine whether a case was rape and whether it should have been reported (rather than the interviewee, who’s opinion doesn’t actually count for shit). After the figures pass through the gates of maximum bias and manipulation, we find that only 40% of ‘rapes’ will ever be reported.

    Asserting that every single rape accusation is indeed correct and valid and absolutely not untrue in any way. That is: if there are 100 rape allegations, then 100 people committed rape, while only nine people will be taken to court, and only 3 will be convicted (because there’s not already something innately wrong if 9/10 rape allegations are not significant enough, or pushed hard enough, to actually make it past a “false” arrest and utter reputation-fuck.

    But wait, there’s actually a little more.

    “Factoring in unreported rapes”

    So… actually, the 3% of rapists who get convicted and 9% which go to trial, you actually mean that , of all REPORTED rapes, aka the real world, we have nearly a quarter going to trial, with 7.5% being convicted (so now, just under 1/15 reported rapes are pushed hard enough or have enough substance to actually get past a judge).

    Of course, some women are too traumatized to push their case all the way. Some women don’t bother pushing their case all the way. Some real rapists no doubt do manage to pull a fast one and get away with no conviction. The point is that if all 100% of rape charges were true, then no amount of logic can explain to us how or why 75% don’t even make it to trial. In fact, given that only 10% are convicted, we could probably push as hard as to say that perhaps not even a quarter of rape convictions have enough substance to even conclude that a crime was committed in the first place, let alone by the actual accused. Of course, we have to consider that if 25% make it to court, then it’s highly likely that at least 20-30% of cases were true.

    Regardless, unless you want to sustain the argument that “the majority of women just walk out halfway through the legal process and don’t pursue justice”; while these figures tell a good story for a dude who gets falsely accused of rape, they don’t say much good for all the guys who accidentally piss an entitled feminist off.

  • Emilio Lizardo

    The silver lining of the ‘yes positive’ standard is that it will be so easy to make a rape accusation that men can accuse women. Unfortunately, men will rarely if ever take advantage of that.

  • Anders

    The paper is excellent, had it not been for sentences like this:

    Without a shadow of a doubt, historically attitudes to rape both reinforced and reflected women’s subordinate societal role.6

    If we still do not question the assumption that rape is an outgrowth of overall subordination of women, we are, I think, missing important insights and not changing the parameters of the discussion – to the detriment of all parties. Sure, sexual violence has been and is a serious problem, but it has always been taken seriously – often punished more severely and with less burden of proof than capital murder. This, coupled with the complete historical neglect of male victims of rape, is a sign of the immense value we attach to female sexuality, not the other way around.

    To a certain extent, we should maintain this value. Females do need more protection than men in many areas, in particular given the immense responsibility of procreation. But, as we all know, such a privileged status has its downsides, for male victims and falsely accused in particular, but for women as well. Imagining that there is a rampant rape culture does not make anyone feel better.

    What I think we should emphasise, rather, is transparency. Let us publicly state that we as a society want to afford additional protection to females, and why. This will help us have a reasoned discussion about where that status is warranted, and where not.