As the shocking allegations of a fraternity party gang rape at the University
of Virginia come unraveled, progressives whose cause is to condemn America for
a so-called “rape culture” have chosen to double down in defense of the
apparent falsehood. The Washington Post
even ran an astoundingly un-American piece that suggests we should believe rape
accusations, regardless of whether they
are true.
Rolling Stone, the music and politics magazine that can
stay relevant only by sexualizing everyone (including terrorists – remember its
dreamy cover photo of Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?), broke
the lurid story only to have it fall apart thanks to unconscionably sloppy journalism. But progressives cannot let the truth get
in the way of the agenda, so Zerlina Maxwell rushed to fill the breach with the
aforementioned WaPo piece
initially entitled “No
matter what Jackie said, we should automatically believe rape claims”
(“Jackie” is the victim’s pseudonym).
The thrust of Maxwell’s piece is
that “the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of
calling someone a rapist.” She begins by saying that many people
will be tempted to
see [the collapse of the UofV gang-rape allegation] as a reminder that
officials, reporters and the general public should hear both sides of the story
and collect all the evidence before coming to a conclusion in rape cases. This
is what we mean in America when we say someone is “innocent until proven
guilty.” After all, look what happened to the Duke lacrosse players.
Exactly
– look at what happened to them. But then she goes on to reject that reasonable
restraint: “In important ways,” she wrote, “this
is wrong. We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says” [emphasis
added] – after all, false accusations are “exceedingly rare,” she claims. But
then she quotes an FBI statistic that 2-8% of allegations are false; that is
not “exceedingly rare.”
In any case, it wouldn’t matter if
the figure were only 1% - in this country we don’t suspend the presumption of
innocence just “to offer our hand of support to survivors.” Maxwell disagrees:
“The time we spend picking apart a traumatized survivor’s narration on the hunt
for discrepancies is time that should be spent punishing serial rapists.”
It should go without saying,
especially to someone with a law degree like Maxwell, that we shouldn’t be
“punishing serial rapists” if they haven’t yet been proven to be serial rapists. She has created a
false choice between believing and disbelieving the accused. It is not the job
of law enforcement to believe or disbelieve a victim’s story; it is their job
to determine if a crime has been committed, to investigate it, to examine the
evidence, and then to act accordingly. Maxwell wants to reverse that process; too
bad if the accusation falls apart under later scrutiny.
And what of the man she’s willing
to falsely if temporarily accuse of the ugly crime of rape? Well, he would have
“a rough period” for the duration of the investigation, Maxwell generously
concedes. For example, he might lose some Facebook friends – yes, she actually
wrote that. But when his name is cleared everything will return to normal.
Certainly no one would suggest that a real rape victim’s trauma is not
significant, but Maxwell is willfully ignoring the damage done to a man falsely
smeared as a sexual predator.
Her op-ed was so stunningly and
self-evidently wrong that it incurred
a wave of Twitter wrath and negative comments, resulting in either Maxwell
or the WaPo editors backing off and replacing
“automatically” in the headline with “generally,” which is little improvement.
“Democratic strategist” Maxwell is of the school of thought, and I use
that word loosely, that we live in a rape culture and if only we taught men not
to rape, then women would be relieved of the burden of having to protect
themselves from it (“strategist,” by the way, is the title given to someone has
no official authority or function except to serve as a media mouthpiece for
talking points).
Rape culture is the theory that
sexual assault becomes normalized when a culture condones the objectification
and trivialization of women. Radical feminists have managed to push the term to
the forefront of our conversations about the sexes today, promoting the ugly
notion that all men are literal or latent rapists who need to be deprogrammed
out of their acculturated misogyny.
As I’ve
written before for FrontPage, America doesn’t have a rape culture any more
than we have a murder culture. We have a culture that considers both to be heinous
violent crimes. We have a culture so unforgiving of rape that even false accusations of it ruin men’s
lives. We don’t “teach” men to rape, and the vast majority of American males
would never even consider such a depraved act.
According to 2013 Bureau of Justice
statistics,
the estimated annual rate of female rape or sexual assault victimizations in
this country declined 58% from 1995 to 2010. To cite this is absolutely not to
trivialize the terrible violation that is rape; it is not to suggest that
anything more than zero sexual assaults is acceptable; and it is not to
encourage complacency. It is only to emphasize that not only are we not
enmeshed in a rape culture, but things seem to be improving significantly.
However, there are violent deviants
who will and do rape, and the world will never rid itself of that evil minority.
That’s just reality, but it’s not the utopian reality that progressives insist
upon. To believe that we can simply teach that rape is unconscionable – which
we already do – and that the crime will then disappear is a childish and useless
utopian fantasy.
When a pregnant teenager in the
Sudan faces
death by stoning for being gang-raped, that
is a rape culture. But a privileged Western woman like Zerlina Maxwell is
insanely focused on smearing innocent men in order to peddle the myth that
American culture is little better.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 12/8/14)
