False rape claims have "silver lining," according to local newspaper (via Community of the Wrongly Accused)

via Community of the Wrongly Accused

"Last Sunday morning at Union College in New York, an official emails alerted students about an atrocity that never happened. It stated that a female freshman had been sexually assaulted by three "males" (one of whom might have been approximately 16-years-old) at 1:41 a.m. The alleged victim refused any medical treatment, and did not seem traumatized. Police investigated for two days until finally the alleged victim retracted her statement and left the school. A video camera reportedly had captured the young woman on her phone at the time she said the assault occurred. After she ended the phone call, she jumped into a clump of bushes, and stayed there until her friends arrived and pulled her out, the sources said."

[Note 1/11/2014 - COTWA, for whatever reason, has taken their article down since my posting, so I have changed the below link to SAVE Services, which reprinted the COTWA article on their site.]

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Survivors Manchester excluded from Rape Support Fund (via Toy Soldiers)

via Toy Soldiers

"One of the main barriers male survivors of sexual violence face is a lack of services. Most existing sexual violence services only assist women and girls. Of the services that do assist men and boys, most provide limited counseling and referrals.

"Male survivors need services,  however, even when those organizations are created, they face dismissal by the existing female-only groups...."

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Finding common ground

Just wanted to take time and space to thank @Lancestrian for taking the time over the last five or six days to have a dialogue over Twitter, of all media, about the gendering of rape. Earlier today she posted:

@ConversiveBlog 1) I am coming around to your view on this. It's not possible to accurately determine what proportion of the population are
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 2) perpetrators based on victimhood stats (my revelation of last night) and no research has been done into how many perps
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 3) are female and how many are male. We can't even infer that women don't sexually assault other women because a woman might
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 4) not recognise another women's unwanted contact as being sexually-motivated (man stroking my hair is assumed to be sexual,
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 5) woman stroking my hair isn't). So in the absence of clear evidence like a Lisak and Miller type of study, we simply don't
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 6) know what proportion of women perpetrate sexual assaults and it's unfair to presume that more men are perps than women
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 7) without evidence. Also on reflection, I realise that framing sexual violence as something men do to (usually) women harms
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 8) the feminist goal of eliminating all sexual violence, by encouraging misogynists to see it as a "women's problem" and
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 9) hence ignorable. I would welcome research into the prevalence of female perpetration.
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

Baby steps. But still felt good to find common ground.

Equality? I think you missed that exit about a mile back

Since I started actively blogging as an anti-feminist, I've seen a lot of feminists criticizing anti-feminism with variations of "How can you be against feminism? Feminism is about equality." We're told that a lot. The dictionary backs them up. But when you look at issues, you quickly see that equality is just not good enough.

For instance, we are told women need affirmative action initiatives in higher education in order to level the playing field against historical, systemic sexism in admissions. It's not enough to accept women, to treat them the same as men, universities and colleges must actively encourage and incentivize women to enroll, to excel, to graduate. The latest data shows that this approach seems to have been successful: women at all levels of higher education have been earning the majority of degrees since 2009. We were already out-graduating men at all levels short of doctorates since 1999, and I saw one article that women started outpacing men around 1982. So that's it, right? The women in education people can pack it in; they won. Set up a smaller watchdog organization to make sure there's no backsliding, and go celebrate.

Instead, in an inspired burst of goal-post shifting, the new complaint is that women are under-represented in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields. Meanwhile, all the incentives and scholarships and grants and benefits that were set up to correct the female under-representation in higher education are still going strong, even though women are no longer generally under-represented.

When women surge ahead of men in STEM fields, next year, or five years from now, or ten, or twenty, I wonder what the new goal will be? 

Oppressive patriarchy is oppressive

Feminism is built on the concept that historically, women have been institutionally oppressed by men, and that that oppression continues through today, visible in our male-dominated and male-controlled society (a.k.a., The Patriarchy).

Because any disagreement with a feminist over patriarchy theory usually starts with accusations that the dissenter doesn't understand what patriarchy is and/or is deliberately misdefining patriarchy and/or privilege to support their argument, and generally ends with the feminist ordering the dissenter to come back when they've "educated themselves," let me demonstrate my working understanding of patriarchy as put forth by feminism. We're talking institutional discrimination, not individual; things like executive glass ceilings, the wage gap, and abortion rights. Systemic stuff. It's not a conscious, intentional conspiracy by men to keep the wimmins down, but a system of male domination and female subordination largely benefiting men and limiting and/or disadvantaging women. I invite corrections in the comments.

The elephant in the room is the question of why, if women are so strong, smart, capable, competent, and all around equal to men, then how have they been oppressed by men since the dawn of time? Other groups commonly accepted to face institutional discrimination are overwhelmingly outnumbered. For example, blacks are 13% of the population in the United States. Jews are 2%. Gays are 1.8-10%, depending on who you ask, and transgenders just 0.3%. But women are roughly half the population, and always have been. So either women are so weak and fragile and incompetent that they took literally thousands of years to rise up against their oppressors and even begin to finally demand equality, or, the idea that women are oppressed is a new one that is being applied retroactively.

The New Chivalry, Feminist Style

Let’s get one thing straight. I think women are equal to men. I don’t hold any quaint notions of a “woman’s place,” or believe that men and women are obligated to fulfill prefabricated roles, in the home or anywhere else. And while there are certain physical advantages and brain chemistry differences that, on average, cannot be denied, I believe each man or woman should be judged on his or her own individual merits, and not those of their gender.

Which is why it drives me nuts when well-intentioned people try to protect women from themselves.

Rape is as rape does: Epilogue

In my last post, I discussed the findings "National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey" (NISVS 2010). I compared the figures on rape and sexual violence for men and women over the 12 months previous to the survey, and I promised I'd get back to why I was using the 12-month figures rather than the lifetime figures (which were the figures significantly more emphasized by the CDC in the introduction and press releases and so forth).