Spinning our Wheels on 'Date Rape': Time for a New Approach

Literally billions of dollars have been pumped into the war on rape over the past three decades, and it's been an utter waste.

The sexual grievance industry insists that when it comes to rape, our college campuses are more dangerous places than the Tadmor Prison in Syria, where the bloodthirsty guards butcher inmates with axes for the fun of it.

Yet they keep spinning their wheels, telling us the rape problem won’t go away. To attack it, they do the same things year after year after year, and nobody seems notice, or care. When it comes to "date rape,” we are at a sort of permanent and institutionalized stalemate, and the sexual grievance industry is just fine with that.

To attack the rape “epidemic,” they push for one loopy reform after the next, supposedly to make it easier for all those hypothetical women out there who must have been raped to come forward.

They change the student disciplinary codes to engorge the definition of sexual assault to snag more “sex abusers.”  They even try to flip the burden of proof for rape to force the accused male to prove consent. They enact rules that excuse drunk women from being charged with underage drinking so long as they report they've been raped (so what do you think drunk women are doing?).

No idea is too extreme, too kooky, or too unjust to foist on presumptively innocent young men in the interest of getting these phantom women to "come forward."

They hold rallies where our daughters are urged to "take back the night" even though the night has always been theirs. Our sons are at far greater risk of harm at the hands of deviant sociopaths than our daughters.

They sponsor "clothesline projects" where young women supposedly too scared to report their rapes to the proper authorities are empowered enough to scrawl the names of their alleged attackers on t-shirts along with empowering slogans like "keep your dick to yourself!" They hang ceramic penises on a clothesline as a symbolic assault on "patriarchy."

Paid speakers travel from college to college with slick PowerPoint presentations to shame Freshman men who would never dream of raping a woman into believing masculinity is inherently flawed, and that fantasizing about a hot classmate in Economics 101 is "rape lite."

They plaster posters in dorms saying that "only men can stop rape," even though virtually all men are as innocent as the most innocent woman. And they tacitly, and not so tacitly, encourage women to engage in risky behaviors with even deviant sociopaths.

They pump tuition and tax dollars into chronically underutilized campus rape crisis centers, which Heather MacDonald described as follows: "It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic—but no one calls." See here: http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_campus_rape.html

And when the inevitable false rape claim occurs, which, truth be told, is far more likely in college than a legitimate rape claim, the campus becomes Salem, Massachusetts, 1692. When the claim is finally revealed as a lie and the witch hunt ends, first they refuse to accept it, then they use it as an occasion to teach students about the dangers of -- you guessed it -- rape.

After all that, they have the chutzpah to insist rape is still rampant, even though it isn't. Despite all the reforms, all the shaming, and all the resources dumped into the toilet, all these supposedly raped women still aren't reporting; young women still find it's easier to pretend they've been slipped a date rape drug than to admit they regret having had sex the night before; the supposed recipients of white male privilege are still decent people; and the sexual grievance industry still insists it needs more and more funding even though it's all a waste.

It's Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day.” Nothing changes. And like all the characters Mr. Murray encounters every day (which is really the same day), everybody is just fine with it.

The ones who pay the price for the manufactured rape hysteria are the innocent young men unlucky enough to be falsely accused. They are dragged before a constipated disciplinary hearing board whose mission in life is to rebuke the undeservedly privileged (i.e., white, heterosexual males). In these forums, which resemble the Star Chamber without as much fairness, the presumptively innocent are presumed guilty, addressed in scolding tones, and offered virtually no support while their accusers are treated as if they were Holocaust survivors. And the parents of boys who might be next tolerate this because the mainstream media never told them it goes on.

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Even if you buy into the lie that rape is rampant, how on earth can you continue to let these goofs lead the war against it? We keep giving them money, and we let them do whatever pops into their heads to our sons, and every year it's the same thing: "Rape is rampant, and hardly any women are reporting their rapes."

If you went to your boss every year and reported what a failure you've been, how long would you last? We all know the definition of insanity, don't we? This is insane.

But, of course, the reason they keep telling us rape is rampant and women aren't reporting is obvious. If they told us the truth, they'd be out of business. They've invented a scare to keep them employed, and they're going to ride it for as long as we don't blame them. When we finally start blaming them, they will start to paint a rosier picture -- "rape is still a problem, but we've cut it in half." Trust me, I'd bet my left testicle on it.

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By any measure, the "war" on rape isn't working. So what’s the answer? It’s simple. Open the windows and let the truth in.

First, acknowledge something nobody can plausibly deny: "he said/she said" date rape claims place an impossible burden on the people investigating them. Stop pretending otherwise. Even true believer feminists, like prominent feminist legal scholar Aya Gruber, admit that the criminal justice system is not equipped to deal with date rape. See here: http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2010/04/feminist-legal-scholar-to-feminists.html

“He said/she said” disputes over rape need to be summarily dealt with. If the guy has a plausible explanation and there’s no real evidence beyond her claim, it gets dropped immediately. Such claims usually are declared “unfounded” now, but not before the police or the college stage a sadistic passion play, a game of “humiliate-the-male” to appease the man-hating nitwits. Like Christ declared innocent by Pilate – “take him out and flog him before you release him.”

And let’s add one other thing: if there’s evidence beyond his word that she lied, she gets prosecuted. No questions asked.

Second, we need to end the Chicken Little, lock-the-doors-and-hide-the-daughters hysteria because it is encouraging young women to construe bad romps in the hay as rape that deserve to be sanctioned by the college, law enforcement, or both.

This means firing everyone who works in the sexual grievance industry (no loss -- even if there were a rape problem, they are incapable of solving it), shutting down the rape counseling centers, and telling our college administrators to stop paying speakers to come on campus to humiliate almost half of the school’s paying customers. (How on earth do parents of young men put up with that?)  Time to try something different, like honesty.  See the third point, below.

Third, focusing on so-called “date rape” skirts the real issue and ignores the elephant in the room. Men and women are looking for different things in sex. Men want sex, and women want men. Studies show that women experience far greater after-the-fact regret than men. See here: http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2008/07/teach-our-sons-not-to-rape-but-teach.html. Instead of Freshman orientation where young men are shamed for daring to have a penis, we need to start educating our young women that feelings of regret are natural – and that they need to think more carefully about having sex in the first place.

A female law professor in London named Helen Reece – see here: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10165/ -- recently wrote a provocative piece positing that "police have succumbed to campaigners’ pressure to treat every allegation of rape with the utmost seriousness." But, she cautioned, "treating all rape complaints seriously means treating all false allegations seriously." She continues: "The nightmare scenario is approaching where every rape complaint is seen as pointing to a prosecution, if possible for rape, and if that’s not possible, for a false allegation. Instead, we should save prosecutions for only the most heinous sexual crimes, and drag the law back out of teenagers’ messy sex lives."

Ms. Reece candidly explains: "I remember the day when one of my best friends burst into tears on the bus on the way to school, before revealing to me and another friend that one of our classmates ‘had tried to rape her’. A box of tissues later, it became clear that what had happened was that he had made a very direct pass at her, which she had responded to up to a point but felt awful about afterwards. We didn’t brand our classmate a rapist, but nor did we think that our friend was a liar. We understood that this was her way of telling us that she felt really rubbish about what had happened, particularly because it meant that she had been ‘unfaithful’ to her long-term boyfriend. It never occurred to any of us to involve teachers or parents, let alone the police."

It’s not the boys who need to change, it’s the young women. In every other sphere of life, women insist that they not be portrayed as helpless pawns waiting to be rescued by the handsome Disney prince. But when it comes to alleged date rape, all of those lofty empowering sentiments go sailing out the window. Anyone who has the temerity to suggest that women who drink are free moral agents capable of making decisions for themselves is a misogynist and a rape apologist. In the bedroom, women are not doers but victims, damsels in more distress than the most passive Disney princess.

We cannot empower our daughters by pretending they are powerless. It’s time we insist our daughters grow up and start taking personal responsibility for their actions.

Here endeth the sermon.