The Silencing (28 page)

Liberal journalist Hanna Rosin blasted the statistic at
Slate
in 2014. She asked, “How many times have you heard that ‘women are paid 77 cents on the dollar
¹⁵⁴
for doing the same work as men’? Barack Obama said it during his last campaign. Women’s groups say it every April 9, which is Equal Pay Day . . . I’ve heard the line enough times that I feel the need to set the record straight: It’s not true.”
¹⁵⁵
The data, she wrote, show that women earn 91 percent of what men do.

This does not mean that there isn’t a debate to be had on these issues. There are plenty of women who could share horror stories about experiencing wage discrimination or domestic abuse. The problem is the willful deception in presenting thoroughly debunked statistics as gospel. Even worse is trying to silence people who question the statistics. One
Forbes
writer, for example, was accused of “victim-blaming”
¹⁵⁶
for discussing how differing life decisions between the sexes might affect the pay gap.

Best of all, though, is the Center for American Progress, which dismisses facts altogether, calling the “77 cents” figure a “colloquialism—shorthand for expressing a complex economic truth.”
¹⁵⁷

It’s not true but it represents truth. Got that? And don’t you dare question it.

NINE

FEMINISTS AGAINST FACTS, FAIRNESS, AND THE RULE OF LAW

              
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”

              
—
ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

A
Chicago-area seventh-grader returned home from school in the spring of 2014 upset about an announcement made by her middle school’s principal that day. Students had been informed of a revised dress code policy. Yoga pants were no longer allowed, the girl recounted, as they were too “distracting” to boys. The girl’s parents—both educators, she at Columbia College and he at New Trier High School—wrote to the principal to express their outrage and urged the school to consider how a yoga pants ban “contribute[d] to rape culture.” Blaming girls for distracting teenage boys—an allegation the school later vigorously denied—was a “message . . . squarely on a continuum that blames girls and women for assault by men.”

Eliana Dockterman declared in
Time
that the school’s argument that the pants created a distraction “is not that distant from the arguments made by those who accuse rape victims of asking to be assaulted by dressing a certain way.”
¹
The feminist website Jezebel asked why “the solution
is to make girls cover up instead of . . . teaching boys to not be gross sexist pigs?”
²
A feminist writer tweeted, “#RapeCultureIsWhen we tell 13-year-old girls they can’t wear leggings because it’s ‘distracting’ to the boys.”
³
School administrators say they never claimed that the form-fitting pants were distracting to boys, though they no doubt are.
⁴
Saying so does not promote rape culture or “blame” girls for anything, because boys noticing girls’ bodies is not an offense unless it is done in a harassing or intimidating way, which was never alleged. It turns out all the principal asked was that the teen girls wear a shirt or skirt over their bum-hugging yoga pants.
⁵
A parent reported that the principal told her the school was merely “trying to figure out a way to tamp down the sexualization of middle-school girls,” which seems like something feminists might support if they weren’t so busy promoting the idea of a “rape culture.”
⁶

Rape is a heinous crime. Feminists invoking the term “rape culture” to condemn actions they perceive as a slight is a stark misuse of the word. In
Transforming a Rape Culture
, Emilie Buchwald defines rape culture as “a complex set of beliefs that encourage male sexual aggression and supports violence against women.” She wrote, “A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm. . . . In a rape culture both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable.”
⁷
Does this sound like the United States of America to anyone? How many people who live in this country today actually condone “physical and emotional terrorism” against women?

Yet illiberal feminists hurl the horrific accusation of being a “rape apologist” or supporting “rape culture” with abandon to demonize anyone who has offended them or won’t affirm their ideological or partisan worldview.

Even trying to prevent rape can be labeled part of “rape culture.” Students at Arizona State University who had organized an anti-rape rally were accused of “perpetuat[ing] sexism and rape culture”
⁸
by campus newspaper columnist Kaelyn Polick-Kirkpatrick. The groups—Man Up ASU and WOW Factor!—were created, according to their mission
statement, “to build a culture of respect between men and women at ASU.” All Polick-Kirkpatrick could see was a stew of toxic misogyny. As she wrote in the school’s paper, the name “Man Up” was offensive because “the phrase . . . is one of the most common, and most misogynistic, expressions of patriarchy.” The problem with “Wow Factor” was that it stood for “Women of Worth,” sending a message that if a woman didn’t belong to their group, she had no worth, Polick-Kirkpatrick said. The columnist was also upset that a video for the 2013 rally featured someone applauding the fact that, “300 men have pledged to respect women on campus.” She wrote, “Are we really
rewarding
men for respecting women? Shouldn’t that be a given? And why should women have the responsibility of ensuring they obtain the respect of men? Together, Man Up and WOW Factor! are handing out gold stars to mildly decent human beings who probably don’t even realize the organizations they are a part of are full of sexism and misogyny. Ignorance must be bliss.”

In 2014, four male college students invented a nail polish that would detect if a date rape drug—known as a “roofie”—had been slipped into a woman’s drink. They explained it was meant to “empower women to protect themselves from this heinous and quietly pervasive crime” of rape. Women wearing the polish could test their beverages by dunking a finger and seeing if the polish reacted. Liberal blog
ThinkProgress
published a story that explained the nail polish “actually reinforces a pervasive rape culture in our society” by putting the onus on women to take steps to protect themselves.
⁹
Rebecca Nagle of FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture complained, “I don’t want to f--king test my drink when I’m at the bar. That’s not the world I want to live in.”
¹⁰
Alexandra Brodsky, a law student at Yale University and a founding co-director of Know Your IX (a “student-driven campaign to end campus sexual violence”), said that the nail polish could end up “fueling victim blaming.” Truly, no good deed goes unpunished.

Roofie-detecting nail polish, middle-school dress codes, and anti-rape rallies are all proof of “rape culture” but when an actual rape culture was
uncovered in Rotherham, England, in 2014 the illiberal feminists mostly yawned. Authorities discovered that between 1997 and 2013, some 1,400 girls had been raped, abused, and trafficked in the northern English town. “Some children were doused in gasoline and threatened with being set on fire if they reported their abusers,” the
New York Times
reported, “and others were forced to watch rapes and threatened with the same fate. In more than a third of the cases, the victims appear to have been known to child protection agencies, but the police and local government officials failed to act.”
¹¹
The reason officials turned a blind eye? They did not want to be called racists. The girls who were systematically raped were underprivileged white girls and the perpetrators were mostly Pakistani-British men.

Against this real rape culture, the illiberal feminists were mostly silent.
Salon.com
ran one story on the issue: a brief Associated Press report about how Muslims were outraged by the Rotherham report. Jezebel and
Feministing
—two prominent illiberal feminist websites—each provided one post. Perhaps they didn’t know what to do with a real “rape culture” because it doesn’t fit into their parochial, imagined dystopia of America, a land where privileged white boys, the junior patriarchy, relentlessly assault female college students.
¹²

ILLIBERAL FEMINIST “FACTS”

Illiberal feminists have injected a variety of sketchy statistics into the mainstream media’s bloodstream. The most potent is that women on American campuses are living amidst a “rape epidemic” that their uniformly liberal college administrators have chosen to ignore (for what reason is unclear). Illiberal feminists frequently claim one in five women will be a victim of a sexual assault by the time they graduate from college. So, college campuses are “havens for rape and sexual assault,” where “women are at a higher risk of sexual assault”
¹³
as New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has said. The data allegedly proving this comes
from the “Campus Sexual Assault Study,”
¹⁴
a survey of two public universities done over the period of January 2005 to December 2007.
¹⁵
The narrow web survey was not meant to be proffered as a national statistic, yet politicians and activists have attacked and maligned those who dare to question it.

Indeed, the one-in-five statistic has repeatedly been shown
¹⁶
to be inaccurate.
¹⁷
If it were true it “would mean,” as Emily Yoffe pointed out in
Slate
, “that young American college women are raped at a rate similar to women in Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war.”
¹⁸
Even Christopher Krebs, who led the Campus Sexual Assault Study, has said, “The one-in-five statistic is not anything we trotted out as a national statistic. But it has certainly been used in that way.”
¹⁹

Still, to publicly question any of the illiberal feminist rape statistics is to be demonized as a defender of rape. In June 2014, Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist George Will was widely excoriated, as we saw, for asserting in his
Washington Post
column that on college campuses victimhood has become a “coveted status.” He called the “rape culture” mantra into question and specifically expressed skepticism about the “one-in-five” statistic.
²⁰
At no point did he argue that rapes did not occur on campus or that a woman who had been raped played any role in her attack. No matter: the illiberal feminists wanted his head.

National Organization for Women President Terry O’Neill said in an interview that “
The Washington Post
needs to take a break from [Will’s] column, they need to dump him.” She added menacingly, “We want him to back off . . . and we want the
The Washington Post
to stop carrying his column.”
²¹
Another women’s group, UltraViolet, started a petition to pressure the
Post
into firing Will.
MoveOn.org
started another petition with almost identical language that garnered 45,000 signatures.
²²
The group wrote, “By publishing George Will’s piece,
The Washington Post
is amplifying some of the most insidious lies that perpetuate rape culture. It’s not just wrong—it’s dangerous. Tell
The Washington Post
: ‘Rape is real. No one
wants
to be a victim. Fire George Will.”
²³
Four Democratic U.S. Senators—
Senators Tammy Baldwin, Richard Blumenthal, Robert Casey, and Dianne Feinstein—accused the iconic conservative columnist of “contribut[ing] to the exact culture that discourages reporting and forces victims into hiding and away from much-needed services” in a harshly worded letter.
²⁴
Naturally, the senators did not take the time to refute any of Will’s statistics or arguments, or have any good answer to Will’s subsequent point that by broadening the definition of rape one risks trivializing it.
²⁵

HAZY STATISTICS AND ALCOHOL

As if the one-in-five statistic isn’t bad enough, some feminist groups claim that one-in-four women will be raped by the time they graduate from college. Yoffe debunked that statistic as well.
²⁶
This one comes from a Justice Department study “The Sexual Victimization of College Women.”
²⁷
Yoffe explained that the actual study “found a completed rape rate among its respondents of 1.7 percent.” From this six-month sample, the researchers extrapolated that 20–25 percent of female college students “might” be raped. To get from 1.7 percent to up to 25 percent, they included the 1.1 percent of women who reported “attempted rape” and then engaged in conjecture
²⁸
that should not be part of serious statistical research.

Yoffe noted that in a footnote in the study
²⁹
“the authors acknowledge that asserting that one-quarter of college students ‘might’ be raped is not based on actual evidence.” “These projections are suggestive,” the note says. “To assess accurately the victimization risk for women throughout a college career, longitudinal research following a cohort of female students across time is needed.”

Following her article, Yoffe was attacked on Twitter as a “longtime rape apologist,” and MRA (Men’s Rights Activist). She was accused of “perpetuating rape culture” while one user asked if her son was “a serial rapist or something.”
³⁰
Alexandra Brodsky, the founding co-director of Know Your Title IX, wrote at
Feministing
that Yoffe was a “rape denialist”
³¹
and tweeted, “There is a special place in hell for women who are Emily Yoffe.”
³²