The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

As Real as Rape: How Bad Journalism Advances Feminism’s Anti-Male Agenda

Posted on | December 16, 2014 | 35 Comments

“Campus activism about rape provides a means of disseminating the core message of feminist ideology, i.e., that men are evil and dangerous and that male sexuality is inherently violent and oppressive to women.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Aug. 10, 2014

Glenn Reynolds demolished the phony “college rape epidemic” meme in his USA Today column Monday, and little remains but dimly glowing cinders of smoldering lies amid the cold ashes of Rolling Stone‘s incinerated fraternity gang-rape tale.

Christina Hoff Sommers, who spent months trying to get journalists to stop using the phony “1-in-5” statistic, notes that the authors of the study from which that statistic was derived say that it is “inappropriate to use the number as a baseline” for the prevalence of rape at colleges. If you read between the lines of their careful caveats, and if you know anything about how surveys can be biased, you realize how asking college women multiple questions about “unwanted” sexual behavior could produce a lot of “false positive” responses.

When you collect survey answers about “unwanted” kissing and touching, or even attempted kissing and touching, and make such a survey the basis of claims about the prevalence of rape — a violent felony — what you are doing is not journalism, it’s propaganda.

“Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.”
— Rush Limbaugh

Although I hesitate to say that Rolling Stone story was entirely a hoax, Sabrina Rubin Erdely and her editors have utterly discredited themselves and, in the process, exposed both the falsehood of feminist rhetoric and the reckless irresponsibility of liberal media. Eric Owens at the Daily Caller recounts eight separate rape hoaxes at colleges and universities, including the bizarre 2013 case of a transvestite student at UC-Santa Cruz who placed a Craigslist ad seeking someone to beat “her” up so “she” could claim to be a victim.

Owens highlights what Rolling Stone did wrong at UVA:

Why did Erdely commit career suicide? Writing at Slate, Hanna Rosin provides the likely answer: Erdely hoped her wildly implausible 9,000-word, agenda-driven excuse for journalism would emphasize “the larger theme of a university culture and social scene indifferent even to the most brutalized victims of rape.”

That is to say, Erdely believed the hype — feminists claim that many rapes on campus go unreported because victims are afraid to report these crimes to “indifferent” college officials — and she set out to find a story that would prove feminists are right.

Oops.

Stipulate that what is usually called “date rape” happens far too frequently on campus. Young people — mostly teenagers, 18 or 19 years old — get drunk out of their minds and, under such circumstances, boys have sex with girls who are not in a condition to resist. Unless universities are willing to crack down on underage drinking, however, there are limits to what can be done to prevent these incidents from occurring, and it is notoriously difficult to prosecute a rape charge in the typical “he said, she said” situation where this happens.

Bad journalism does not improve this kind of problem, and bad journalism seems rampant nowadays. Jessica Pressler of New York magazine reported a story last week about a teenager, Stuyvesant High senior Mohammed Islam, who said he made $72 million as an investor.

A complete fiction — the kid made it up from thin air.

Fake rape. Fake teen millionaire. To-may-to, to-mah-to.

What is the feminist agenda on university campuses? To demonize men, to stigmatize heterosexuality and to promote lesbianism. This agenda has been made explicit by radical theorists whose works are foundational to the anti-male/anti-heterosexual doctrines taught in Women’s Studies courses at nearly every college and university in America.

“That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe, for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness born of harmful intent. . . . Rather than society’s aberrants or ‘spoilers of purity,’ men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.”
— Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975)

“A lesbian society pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one . . .
“[O]ur survival demands that we contribute all our strength to the destruction of the class of women within which men appropriate women. This can be accomplished only by the destruction of heterosexuality as a social system which is based on the oppression of women by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference between the sexes to justify this oppression.”
— Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman” (1981)

“Fucking is a large part of how females are kept subordinated to males. It is a ritual enactment of that subordination which constantly reaffirms the fact of subordination and habituates both men and women to it, both in body and in imagination. . . . A great deal of fucking is also presumed to preserve and maintain women’s belief in their own essential heterosexuality, which in turn (for women as not for men) connects with and reinforces female hetero-eroticism, that is, man-loving in women. It is very important to the maintenance of male-supremacy that men fuck women, a lot. So it is required; it is compulsory.”
— Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983)

“Radical feminists have examined the institution of heterosexuality, the social construction of desire and the links between rape and ‘consensual’ sex. These analyses question the existence of ‘truly chosen’ and ‘egalitarian’ heterosexual relations by focusing on the compulsory enforcement of heterosexuality; they are suspicious of appeals to some ‘authentic female sexuality,’ hidden deep within ourselves and uncontaminated by the rule of heteropatriarchy.”
— Jenny Kitzinger, “Sexual Violence and Compulsory Heterosexuality,” in Heterosexuality: A Feminism & Psychology Reader, edited by Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger (1993)

“Why is much of men’s aggression against women sexual in nature? . . .
“If the superiority of the penis over the vagina is being established through male sexual violence against females, then males benefit from this violence in their everyday interactions with females if they remind females that they, males, have a penis, and the women have a vagina. The more frequently females (and males) are reminded of the dominance of the penis over the vagina, the more rewards all men reap from some men’s sexual violence against women. . . .
“By compulsively sexualizing their interactions with females, males remind both themselves and females that males are dominant.”
— Dee Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives (1994)

“Far from being ‘natural,’ phallic sexuality is a moral and political activity. . . . Men’s sexual behaviour is not caused by hormonal dictates. It is because the penis serves the ideological function of symbolizing ‘human’ status that it is so heavily charged with erotic energy, and not because it is driven by testosterone. Men must keep using it because they need to keep proving that they exist, that their ‘humanity’ is inextricably entwined with penis-possession; women must be constantly used by it to prove that men exist, that the sum total of a man is his penis. . . . Anything and everything must be subordinated to penile activity if men are to be what phallic ideology requires them to be.”
— Denise Thompson, Radical Feminism Today (2001)

If you know what feminists actually believe — the anti-male hate propaganda taught to the tens of thousands of college girls who sign up for Women’s Studies classes annually — it is not surprising that rape hysteria is being promoted as a way of popularizing the characteristic attitude of radical feminists: Fear and Loathing of the Penis.

Does anyone suppose that Rolling Stone would be interested in reporting that Feminist Frontiers, the most widely assigned anthology of feminist literature, is edited by three lesbian professors? Do you think Sabrina Rubin Erdely might follow up on the (perhaps-not-entirely-coincidental) fact that Carmen Rios, communications coordinator for the Feminist Majority Foundation, describes herself as a “raging lesbian feminist” and referred to Women’s Studies programs as “Lesbo Recruitment 101”? Does Rolling Stone editor William Dana, who was so eager to publish unverified gang-rape claims against a University of Virginia fraternity, think his magazine’s readers might like to know why Women’s Studies professors condemn Disney cartoons as “heteronormative”?

No, those vicious swine won’t pay anyone to report the truth about feminism, because they don’t want anyone to know the truth.

The only people who will pay me to report the truth are my readers who hit the freaking tip jar. It’s almost Christmas, you know.




 

 

 

Category: Crime, Education, Fear. Loathing., Feminism, Media Bias, Sex Trouble

Comments

35 Responses to “As Real as Rape: How Bad Journalism Advances Feminism’s Anti-Male Agenda”

  1. jakee308
    December 16th, 2014 @ 11:28 am

    It’s not just bad journalism, it’s advocacy and agenda driven agit-prop.

    None of what they do is meant to address a problem. Most all of what most all of them do seems to be aimed at exacerbating a problem or even creating one out of whole cloth.

    “Journalists” no longer report the news, they help CREATE the news.

  2. Political Rift » As Real as Rape: How Bad Journalism Advances Feminism’s Anti-Male Agenda
    December 16th, 2014 @ 11:28 am

    […] Robert Stacy McCain “Campus activism about rape provides a means of disseminating the core message of feminist […]

  3. RS
    December 16th, 2014 @ 11:38 am

    I was just sitting down to make the same comment. The problem is not “bad” journalism; the problem is that journalism, i.e. disinterested reporting of facts, no longer exists. We’ve moved from the five “W”s with commentary reserved for the editorial page, to argumentative essays camouflaged with the the occasional factoid, which may or may not be factual. Stated differently, today’s “journalists” believe that they serve a didactic purpose, not an informational one.

  4. Kiran Buenafe
    December 16th, 2014 @ 11:53 am

    The thing is, these kinds of ultra-radical, anti-male feminists don’t even make things better for women. They just increase the hostility between the genders and indoctrinate all who follow them into a lifestyle of fear and anger. Radfems aren’t happy. They’re perpetually unhappy, fueled only by bile and rage that is artificially created through propaganda and misrepresented, and often fraudulent, statistics and narratives. Why would anyone, man or woman, want to live that way? And with all this pomp the LGBT community creates with “People are born gay”, to have the gall to think they can recruit women into lesibianism is just utterly disgraceful. It shows a wreaking hypocrisy that undermines everything the gay rights movement is trying to achieve. Way to arm conservatives with more ways to keep your equality out of the picture. “Raging lesbian feminists” are their own worst enemy, as well as the enemy of anyone LGBT, because they counter any logical or valid arguments the LGBT community comes up with to defend their stance. Even conservatives can smell feminist hypocrisy from light years away, and know that their arguments are so transparent that matter could pass through them.

  5. Loren
    December 16th, 2014 @ 12:02 pm

    The bottom line: If you have been raped on campus, you need to report it to the police, not college administrators.

  6. Pablo
    December 16th, 2014 @ 12:06 pm

    Erdely hoped her wildly implausible 9,000-word, agenda-driven excuse
    for journalism would emphasize “the larger theme of a university culture
    and social scene indifferent even to the most brutalized victims of
    rape.”

    You’d have a tough time convincing the members of Phi Kappa Psi at UVA of this rape indifferent culture and social scene. So even if Erdely had succeeded in selling her fable, she still would have failed.

  7. Matthew W
    December 16th, 2014 @ 1:05 pm

    Not surprising at all
    The basic tenet of Liberalism is the false narrative

  8. Kirby McCain
    December 16th, 2014 @ 1:13 pm

    Amazingly, all these indifferent university authorities exist in these Uber liberal institutions. Crazy, huh? On my blog I noted Vassar College has a Bias Incident Response Team and OMFG they were complicit in a fake hate crime. I’m sure you are shocked. I’ve also noted that the lack of interest by the anti-rape groups in the case of Jameis Winston. FSU finally opened a hearing into his alleged sexual misconduct after it was first reported two years ago. Those hearings have since stalled and it’s apparent he will be in the NFL before they conclude. Where are the protesters? I saw where Jessica Valenti believes feminism would be more popular if it weren’t synonymous with excessive body hair. I wonder how that came about?

  9. Fail Burton
    December 16th, 2014 @ 1:50 pm

    “I am not angry because I am struggling with mental illness. I’m struggling with my mental illness because I am angry.”

    That quote could be considered the defining core of radical feminism from Simone de Beauvoir to Andrea Dworkin to Judith Butler. It is how madness and hatred is formed into a formal ideology to reconcile their own identity-crisis and phobias with reality and mark reality and Mother Nature as a Jim Crow-like oppressor.

    With the addition of race by way of “intersectionalism” in the ’90s, it is how Butler can call Hamas and Hizbollah “progressive” and how the self-admittedly mentally troubled intersectional gender feminist who wrote that quote above can start the hashtag #illridewithyou before the Sydney Siege was even over. In radical feminist eyes Islam’s Crusader-oppressed full-house trumps Western white colonialism’s three-of-a-kind victims of terror.

    The whole thing is seamlessly inserted into genuine anti-oppression movements with genuine legacies when in fact all intersectional gender feminism is is a supremacist disdain for men, heterosexuals and whites.

    It is how the woman who wrote that quote can use her skills at poker rules and write “Here is a white western man in a western country doxxing a WoC in a non-western country,” use the word “white” 82 times and add “you, white person, probably straight cishet and able-bodied, have put everyone in their place and are left standing atop a pile of bodies… I doubt there is anything that will ever be enough to satisfy you, white person.”

    It is how people across America can be gulled into mass protests over the anomalous deaths of Eric Garner in N.Y. and Mike Brown in Ferguson while ignoring children beheaded by Muslims in Pakistan and Iraq. There will be no hashtags about #saveourchildren from the social justice warriors because within their insane hierarchy of race and gender, black women kidnapped in Nigeria have a crucial edge over mere children who have an at best murky politicized identity to rally around.

    There might be too many boys, too few “WoC” beheaded as in Pakistan or they might be Christian boys as with ISIS in Iraq. That is how law and equal protection work within the radical feminist-inspired face of liberalism we see today. In short, there is no law or equal protection. There is only race and gender as their Constitution using the rules of poker.

    Don’t think for one minute the woman who wrote all that is an anomaly. It is core radical feminism and intersectionalism 101.

  10. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 16th, 2014 @ 1:52 pm

    http://batshitcrazynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Capture.png

  11. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 16th, 2014 @ 1:53 pm

    Sort of like Communists did not improve the lives of the peasants and workers they supposedly championed?

  12. Fail Burton
    December 16th, 2014 @ 1:59 pm

    Erdely, Amanda Marcotte, Laurie Penny and Jessica Valenti probably reside at the white-washed other end of the spectrum from ’60s gender feminism. They are unfamiliar with the root original dogma but have nevertheless latched on to the fake oppression part until they think they are fighting an analogy to Jim Crow. They are the classic useful idiots who somehow think radicalized gay phobia equals equal rights.

  13. Fail Burton
    December 16th, 2014 @ 2:05 pm

    See: Andrea Dworkin, body hair.

  14. Daniel Freeman
    December 16th, 2014 @ 2:06 pm

    I assume that was photoshopped, as I can’t imagine anyone in power caring about males.

  15. Audie Bakerson
    December 16th, 2014 @ 2:23 pm

    “LGBT community” has been a joke since the T was added. Not only does it have completely separate legal and social “issues”, but it fused LGB at the hip to something it tried to get away from for decades, if not centuries or more (no, a tomboy liking girls does NOT mean she wants to be male. I’m sure there are gay men who have had to deal with people who think they are like the goo chins ).

    And these women who claim to be lesbians because they hate men? Even for a sociopath feigning attraction isn’t easy and people can tell they are being led around. They aren’t real lesbians.

  16. RKae
    December 16th, 2014 @ 2:27 pm

    Don’t have sex drunk and/or stoned.

    Don’t have sex with strangers.

    You’re in college. Study.

  17. Matt_SE
    December 16th, 2014 @ 2:31 pm

    The left never improves the lives of the aggrieved. If problems were solved, there would be less reason for SJWs to exist.

  18. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 16th, 2014 @ 2:44 pm

    Actually they do care, boys can be thrown under the bus for additional traction when needed.

  19. Elizabeth Warren is not ‘Currently’ Running for President… | Regular Right Guy
    December 16th, 2014 @ 3:05 pm

    […] As Real as Rape: How Bad Journalism Advances Feminism’s Anti-Male Agenda […]

  20. Fail Burton
    December 16th, 2014 @ 3:17 pm

    I have no idea how well Mr. McCains’ book on feminism will do but based on his research I’d say it will be the most important book on what’s driving liberalism in the last 6 years.

    That’s because this is a thing that has only really risen into wide-screen prominence in the last 6 years.

    There are certainly many signs the media is catching on, and why wouldn’t they with the almost unbelievably racist remarks feminists make based on the weird idea we’ll excuse their own reasoning.

    Less than a year ago people laughed at the idea this was driven by feminism and treated people who used the word “intersectionalism” as themselves being kooks. That’s all changed.

  21. RS
    December 16th, 2014 @ 3:20 pm

    Some weeks ago, on one of these threads, I called it “pathology transforms to politics.” It’s simply a coping mechanism, albeit a particularly malignant one.

  22. RS
    December 16th, 2014 @ 3:23 pm

    Amazingly, all these indifferent university authorities exist in these Uber liberal institutions.

    As to quite a few of these hoax hate crimes and rapes. It would seem to me that the Leftists keep trying to find their own “Reichstag Fire*” to create the transformation they so desperately
    seek.

    (*Bugger off, Godwin.)

  23. Bob Belvedere
    December 16th, 2014 @ 3:32 pm

    They are servants of an Ideology.

  24. Fail Burton
    December 16th, 2014 @ 4:06 pm

    Based on the writings of these women, I think you’ve hit it right on the head.

    “The dogged effort to ‘denaturalize’ gender in this text emerges, I think, from a strong desire both to counter the normative violence implied by ideal morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic discourses on sexuality.” – Judith Butler

    Translation: normal people aren’t very nice or normal and I am.

  25. Fail Burton
    December 16th, 2014 @ 4:10 pm

    “Rape culture” is one giant Gulf of Tonkin.

  26. concern00
    December 16th, 2014 @ 5:46 pm

    #illrideyou

  27. Squid Hunt
    December 16th, 2014 @ 6:33 pm

    Forgive me for reiterating the stupidity involved in declaring that heterosexual intercourse is against nature. This is the simplest demonstration that feminists are disconnected from any form of logic or rational thought.

  28. Squid Hunt
    December 16th, 2014 @ 6:34 pm

    Don’t forget, pumped up when the neocons need to beat the war drum to get their base warmed up.

  29. Squid Hunt
    December 16th, 2014 @ 6:35 pm

    I disagree. Dead is much better than starving and resorting to cannibalism.

  30. Squid Hunt
    December 16th, 2014 @ 6:35 pm

    End justifies the means.

  31. RobinDTaxpayer
    December 16th, 2014 @ 7:27 pm

    Brendan O’Neill over at Spiked Online Dot com posted a great takedown on this subject earlier today.

  32. Daniel Freeman
    December 16th, 2014 @ 10:16 pm

    Reading it now. Looks like a keeper. link

  33. Adjoran
    December 17th, 2014 @ 1:17 am

    There is creating, and creating.

    In Erdely’s case, this is the FOURTH shaky story she’s published, the third about rape. Her college paper retracted her story because it was a complete fabrication. Her first rape story for Rolling Stone was also withdrawn when the ‘victim’ recanted. The second was about a female US soldier raped in Iraq, and there have been serious questions about that one. UVA is #4 – that we know about.

    Also, she was working on a screenplay before the piece even saw print.

    Checking ANY of the facts would have alerted her the story was bogus – the perps, the frat, the friends. But she chose not to check any of them.

  34. Greg
    December 17th, 2014 @ 5:31 pm

    Feminists have their panties up in a bunch over Glenn’s article. http://college.usatoday.com/2014/12/17/viewpoint-sexual-assault-survivors-are-people-not-statistics/

  35. Sailing the ‘Sea of Misogyny’ : The Other McCain
    December 17th, 2014 @ 9:30 pm

    […] months (you will find six particularly frightening quotes in yesterday’s installment, “As Real as Rape: How Bad Journalism Advances Feminism’s Anti-Male Agenda“) simply because clear expressions of feminism’s core ideology seldom appear in […]