Rhinocrisy

Strangely enough, boredom was never an issue, because he always had something to think about. In fact, his urge to ponder the question became terrifying at times, and he would emerge after a five-hour binge of scribbling in his notebooks sweating, his mind still buzzing with prospects, with outlandish visions for the future.
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In this article in the LA Times, one Heather MacDonald contends that there is no “rape crisis” on college campuses and the idea that a significant number of young women in college are raped every year is a ridiculous myth advanced by crazy feminists. Her evidence for this claim is that college rape crisis centers don’t receive many calls. Using similar logic, I have deduced that no one actually uses this new-fangled “Internet” contraption because our blog readership still hovers in the low single digits.^*

MacDonald spends a good deal of time critiquing the methodology of one Mary Koss, who did some pioneering work in the late 1980s on the subject of date rape on college campuses. MacDonald finds Koss’s methodology suspect and concludes it is designed to inflate the numbers and manufacture a “rape crisis” so that feminists can get on with the program of reducing men to castrated tote-bag holders and baby-nappy changers. Rah rah rah!

It may surprise you to learn, however, that Koss’s paper was not the only one on the subject! Using my favorite methodology, “a few minutes of careless searching”, I found one of these papers, which you can read here (but only with a JSTOR subscription). The authors are quite careful about their methodology (which is relatively unambiguous in its manner of questioning), and they find 20% of women reporting unwanted attempted intercourse and 10% reporting unwanted intercourse (rape - 71% said “no” explicitly) out of a sample of 518 college women. Female alcohol use was present in the majority of cases (65% in the third category), but even if this puts rape in a “gray area” (as MacDonald suggests), this only eliminates 65% of incidents, still leaving a substantial number of rape incidents going on every year. Criticisms could be made of this methodology, of course, but we shouldn’t expect the numbers to change by an order of magnitude. Shockingly, MacDonald presents no studies that manage to knock down the basic claim.

Most interesting to me, however, was who the women described unwanted incidents to:

Saaaayy… do you think that might explain why no one is ringing up rape crisis centers? Because talking to a stranger is like, the hardest possible way to deal with a rape? Surely no…

The real problem, as Heather MacDonald tells us, is that women are tarting it up instead of keeping their chastity belts on:

Many students hold on to the view that women usually have the power to determine whether a campus social event ends with intercourse. A female Rutgers student expressed a common sentiment in a university sexual-assault survey: “When we go out to parties and I see girls and the way they dress and the way they act … and just the way they are, under the influence and um, then they like accuse them of like, ‘Oh yeah, my boyfriend did this to me’ or whatever, I honestly always think it’s their fault.”

And that, my friends, is evidence you can take to the fucking bank.

^* Hi Bob!

From yesterday’s Hawaii primaries:

One would-be vote at Kawananakoa Middle School said he and his wife turned around after being unable to find a parking space and seeing police ticket illegally parked cars near the school.

Yes, an orderly parking regimen clearly outweighs the import of the democratic process.

I got my PhD!

That is all.

William Kristol is one of the pre-eminent neo-conservative mouthpieces. He was one of the most consistent defenders of Bush administration policy in the leadup to the war, supported unequivocally the idea that Saddam’s WMDs proposed a threat, claimed that we’d be greeted as liberators, and to this day asserts that the outcome in Iraq will be roses and custard pie, resulting in a strong, stable democracy and an American ally emerging in the Middle East.

Needless to say, William Kristol is frequently wrong. And not just wrong, like, “I forgot to add the fabric softener,” or “I chose the wrong drapes to go with this wallpaper,” but catastrophically wrong, like, “Nearly every important factual claim I’ve made in the past five years is incorrect, and the policies I advocated resulted in a million deaths.”

The correct thing to do when someone’s entire worldview has been discredited and the president whose policies they’ve supported is a laughingstock with an abysmal approval rating is, of course, to give them a column in the nation’s most prominent newspaper, the New York Times.

But, before you stab your eyes out, you should read this excellent article by Jon Schwarz dissecting Kristol’s idiocy.