There is a typical rapist, and he's not the upper middle class college boy next door

Those who harbor delusions of "rape culture," where attitudes of sexual aggression and dominance are supposedly normalized (yes, "normalized" is the word they always use) in constructions of masculinity, go to great pains to insist that there is no such thing as a typical rapist. They suggest that the handsome, white, blue-eyed, hetero, upper middle class, Christian, college athlete down the street is just as likely to be a rapist as the underprivileged kid from the inner city who grew up without a father.

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."

Those of us who follow the rape phenomenon closely know that this is stardust feminist wishfulness. Certainly, sometimes the rapist does fit the image of the "undeservedly privileged" male who figures so prominently in the feminist metanarrative. Those instances make for compelling Lifetime movies, I am sure, but in the real world, they are far from the norm.

The vast majority of rape offenders come from lower socioeconomic classes and are under-educated, under-employed, and under-skilled. See, among many others, Thornhill and Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion; Batten, Sexual Strategies: How Females Choose Their Mates. In Against our Wills, Susan Brownmiller demonstrated that disadvantaged blacks comprise a greatly disproportionate percentage of rapists.

So why don't we hear about, much less focus on, this socioeconomic aspect to rape?  For the answer to that question, you need to follow the money. For the past thirty years, the sexual grievance industry has learned that their shtick pays best on our college campuses, where there is a decided shortage of socioeconomically disadvantaged young men but plenty of tuition and tax money to spread around on progressive causes. So they man underused but resource-draining rape crisis centers, they put on seminars to shame freshmen males for having penises, and they insist in a thousand ways that our college campuses are cisterns of predatory male sexual violence even though they aren't.  It's "The Music Man" all over, and only Professor Harold Hill can save River City from the terrible trouble that Professor Harold Hill has concocted out of whole cloth.

The fact is, every social pathology known to mankind, including rape, is far more prevalent in the inner city than on the typical college campus.

But there's another reason the folks who are supposed to do something about rape ignore the elephant in the room, the socioeconomic aspect to rape:  the underlying problem doesn't fit their official narrative. You see, there is an unmistakable correlation between the absence of fathers from inner city homes and the prevalence of every social pathology that affects inner city kids, including rape.

It turns out that when it comes to rape, "masculinity" isn't the problem at all. The problem is the absence of male role models from young men's lives. We've removed male role models from the lives of our inner city sons, then when those boys act up, we have the audacity to blame it on “patriarchy.”

You want to greatly reduce rape -- and every other social pathology known to modern society?  Then give inner city families incentives to be together. Get fathers back in the lives of their kids.

My guess is that the sexual grievance industry won't ever address the real issue. They'd prefer to keep convincing impressionable young white college women that they should fear their male classmates. And they'd prefer to keep convincing young college men who are very unlikely ever to rape to strut around in heels to help "raise awareness" about a problem that, truth be told, isn't much of a problem at all.