There is no 'rape culture.' Period.

"Judge, I looked at both the women and told them they were lying, that they knew they had not been raped and they just laughed at me. ..."

Dr. Marvin Lynch, relating discussion with Scottsboro Boys false accusers

The Big Lie

There is a kind of  untruth that is so colossal, that is told on such a grand scale, and is so flat-out audacious, that it is widely accepted as fact by a lot of people precisely because they "would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." 

So said Adolf Hitler, referencing what he called "the big lie" in Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X (James Murphy translation).

Hitler should know.

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." Here is the fact: there is no "rape culture."  It is a purposefully offensive, gender-divisive, and monstrous lie repeated with zombie-like repetition by members of what can aptly be called the sexual grievance industry.

Ours is far less a "rape culture" than it is a "burglary culture" or a "robbery culture."

There is a reason that the term "rape culture" means nothing to the vast majority of Americans and that the term is scarcely ever uttered outside the rarefied halls of Women's Studies classes, or the cubicles of  angry feminist bloggers: it holds reality up to a fun house mirror.  That's right. The notion that sexual violence against women is normalized, rationalized, and excused, principally by men, is not just ludicrous on its face, it is diametrically opposed to any reasonable person's version of reality. 

This lie is promulgated by persons financially dependent on the counterfeit perception that rape is a massive, unresolved problem that only they can solve.  Their financial dependence on this awful bogeyman taints their every pronouncement with an odious patina of untrustworthiness.

Rape occurs more often than any of us would like.  But men, as a class, do not accept, rationalize, or excuse it.  It is men who are most outraged by it. 

Read that again. Men, as a class, loathe and detest rape more than women do.

Those of us who closely follow the false rape phenomenon find unmistakable patterns of gendered reactions to rape claims. Based on a fair review of the reported cases, it is reasonable to assert that men, as befitting their status since the beginning of time as women’s protectors, typically express greater outrage over rape claims than do women. Rape of women often elicits a visceral reaction of outrage in men exceeding the actual harm inflicted by the crime.

A History of Overreaction

One need not look to the hanging trees of the old South to know that  rape accusers who tell even far-fetched rape lies are nearly universally believed while men and boys accused of rape are nearly universally vilified.  "The trials of black men accused of raping white women were all too often mere 'legal lynchings.' . . . .  Between 1930 and the early 1970s, the Southern states executed 405 black men convicted of rape." B. Holden-Smith, The Martinsville Seven: Race, Rape, and Capital Punishment, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, June 22, 1996.  While it is impossible to say what percentage of the convictions that led to these executions were based on actual guilt, it is fair to assert that it was nearly impossible for black men to get a fair trial for the alleged rape of a white woman in the old South.

America has a long and shameful history of rape hysteria, predating the feminist revolution. President Theodore Roosevelt's December 3, 1906 State of the Union address spent an inordinate amount of time discussing a problem peculiar to black men: lynchings for allegedly committing rape that too often took the lives of innocent men.  He also warned: "'The mob which lynches a negro charged with rape will in a little while lynch a white man suspected of crime.'" In that speech, Roosevelt declared without equivocation (and without explanation) that rape is a crime "even worse than murder" that deserves the death penalty.

That might strike modern readers as astonishing, but during the oral argument of the Kennedy v. Louisiana, 2008 U.S. LEXIS 5262 (June 25, 2008), Justice Ginsburg offered an explanation. Ginsburg noted that the historical imposition of the death penalty in rape cases stems from a tradition "when a woman was regarded as as good as dead once she was raped; and the crime was thought to be an offense against her husband or her father as much as it was to her." Treating rape as akin to murder, and thus warranting the death penalty, did "no kindness to women" she noted.

The "legal" executions of men for rape, and the illegal lynchings for rape that President Theodore Roosevelt decried, were carried out almost exclusively by men. Against men. Indeed, as we relate on this site, the killings, the beatings, and virtually all the other physical atrocities perpetrated against men falsely accused of rape are carried out by men.

John White

Last week, New York Governor David Patterson commuted the sentence of John White, a 50-something black father, who was serving a two-to-four year sentence for manslaughter in the shooting death of 17-year-old Daniel Cicciaro, who was white. Never heard of it? If you lived in New York you probably have. The tragic shooting stemmed from a false rape claim.

At his trial, Mr. White testified that late in the evening of August 9, 2006, his 19-year-old son, Aaron, woke him up to tell him that he had just come from a party where a young woman wrongly accused him of threatening to rape her on a MySpace posting. Aaron told his father that a group of angry white youths were headed to their house to beat him up because they wrongly believed the young woman. Mr. White and his son walked to the end of their driveway to confront the youths, and in the heated confrontation that followed, young Mr. Cicciaro was killed. Mr. White claimed his gun accidentally discharged.

The girl later recanted the rape claim.

Mr. Cicciaro's mother, Joanne Cicciaro, said her son was trying to protect the girl. "The thing is, that night, Daniel believed Aaron threatened to rape a girl that was like his little sister."

One boy is dead, and a father was imprisoned after a racially charged trial that divided a city. But the girl, apparently, escaped unscathed.

The scope of the tragedy is Shakespearean. But young Mr. Cicciaro's reaction underscores the rage men typically feel over rape claims.

This is in contrast to the significant number of women who treat the notion of rape so cavalierly that either they tell rape lies in order to serve some ulterior, selfish purpose (only a small percentage of women actually tell rape lies, just as only a small percentage of men actually rape), or they minimize, excuse, or rationalize false rape claims (a far more significant percentage of women do this).

Recent Tragedies

Mr. Cicciaro’s death is just one of many tragedies stemming from male outrage over false rape claims. A 15-year-old girl falsely told her boyfriend that Sumbo Owoiya, 18, raped her. The girl, the boyfriend, and another man then drove to the innocent youth’s apartment. While Mr. Owoiya was looking through a peep hole, the other man shot him to death through the door. The boyfriend was sentenced to seven years imprisonment, but the girl was given a suspended sentence. We wrote about it here: http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=3316

Last year, two teenage girls lied to a 19-year-old man that another 19-year-old, Cory Headen, had raped one of them, so the man broke into Mr. Headen’s home and beat him to death with a baseball bat while he was sleeping. At the man’s trial, the judge described the teens who accused Mr. Headen of rape as "stupid, drunken, immature girls" who delivered a vile message. The judge sentence the man who did the beating to seven years in prison. One young man was dead, another’s life was destroyed, all because of a false rape claim, and the girls who ignited the fire apparently escaped unscathed. We wrote about it here: http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2009/08/awful-price-of-false-rape-claim-one-man.html

John Chalmers, a 47-year-old prominent businessman, suffered devastating brain injuries in a vicious attack after a woman's brother was wrongly convinced that Mr. Chalmers had raped his sister, so the brother thrashed Mr. Chalmers. So terrible was the beating that Mr. Chalmers has had to “learn everything again.” We wrote about it here: http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2009/03/man-viciously-attacked-suffers.html

Darrell Roberson had come home unexpectedly from a trip when he found his wife, Tracy Roberson, and her lover, Devin LaSalle, together in Mr. LaSalle's truck. To cover up her affair, Mrs. Roberson falsely told her husband she had been raped, and Mr. Roberson shot and killed Mr. LaSalle. In a rare switch, a grand jury refused to indict Mr. Roberson, but Ms. Roberson was charged, convicted, and imprisoned for five years for involuntary manslaughter. "The wrong person went to prison," fumed Jill Davis, Roberson's attorney. Read about it here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2008/05/05/623920/arlington-mom-who-cried-rape-gets.html

And we could go on and on and on. Men, far more than women, typically are the ones who act out their rage when it comes to rape claims. They usually don’t go so far as to murder the accused, but they manifest their vitriol in any number of other ways.

Are these men who are shooting, beating up, and becoming outraged the same men who "normalize," excuse and rationalize rape?

Newsflash: the only ones "normalizing," excusing, or rationalizing rape are a tiny group of felons who, thank you very much, are not just like the decent guy next door. They are rapists.

A False Rape Culture 

The Cicciaro death, and the other tragedies stemming from false rape claims, raise a more sinister question: what role do men play in fostering our false rape culture? While rape liars must always assume principal responsibility for their falsehoods, and while the sexual grievance industry pumps out a steady diet of Chicken Little propaganda to foment good old fashioned lock-the-doors-hide-the-daughters rape hysteria, men and boys falsely accused of rape are mostly directly harmed by the overreactions of other men.

It is mostly men who beat them to death, who fire them from their jobs, who splash their names all over the newspaper, and who are too quick to arrest and charge them on the basis of an unsubstantiated claim before an investigation has been concluded.

If the false rape crisis is to end, we must ask whether men, acting out their roles as women’s chivalrous protectors, have become the unwitting tools of the politicized purveyors of misandry, who are all too happy to see men overreact at the slightest whiff of rape.

Modern feminism, with its twisted and misandric take on rape, dominates the public discourse on the subject precisely because its punitive attitudes toward "rapists" are acceptable to chivalrous men, who haven't paid much attention to the details of feminism's war on rape. If they did, perhaps they would realize that modern feminism doesn't much care if innocent men and boys are snagged along with the guilty, and that even chivalrous men are at risk of being falsely accused.