Emma Sulkowicz, the rape-culture icon, with her mattress

IN JANUARY 2014, President Obama announced he was establishing a special White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. He justified what would turn out to be his assault on the constitutional liberties and moral status of male college students by saying, “It is estimated that one in five women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there. … It’s totally unacceptable.”

What a liar.

To call this one-in-five figure, which quickly achieved cult-like legitimacy, an exaggeration is an understatement. In her new book Rape Culture Hysteria: Fixing the Damage Done to Women and Men (Vulgus Press, 2016), Wendy McElroy, a Canadian author and longtime skeptic of the feminist narrative on rape, addresses this falsehood. Not only is the incidence of sexual assault among college women much lower, it has been declining in recent years.

McElroy is a libertarian feminist who does not accept some of feminism’s more extreme claims. In her book, she heroically wades into the intensely ugly and fanatical debate over college rape and the notion that a “rape culture” exists. Though I do not share some of her basic premises and go beyond her solutions, I recommend McElroy’s book for anyone who wants to know more about this particular area of mob psychology and state-sponsored Bolshevism.

The scene at the University of Virginia in 2014 after a fraternity was falsely said to be the scene of a vicious gang rape. The university never apologized to the fraternity for accepting the accusations without adjudication.

McElroy writes:

On December 11 [2014], the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released its report, “Rape and Sexual Assault Among College-Age Females, 1995-2013.” [17] The report’s findings contradicted the claims of the White House and of rape culture zealots. For one thing, it indicated that campuses were not the most sexually dangerous places for women. The BJS found, “[ t] he rate of rape and sexual assault was 1.2 times higher for nonstudents (7.6 per 1,000) than for students (6.1 per 1,000)…. The rate of completed rape for nonstudents (3.1 per 1,000) was 1.5 times higher than for students (2.0 per 1,000).”

The claim that 20% of female students would be raped on campus was also debunked. Female students from 18 to 24 years old experienced 6.1 rapes and sexual assaults per year per 1,000 students. This is 0.61 percent and it reflects the mean; that is, 0.61 percent is the average of all numbers for the years 1995 to 2013.

As noted, the general rate of rape fell to a 40-year low in 2013. As a percentage, it fell even more sharply over the last several years. According to the BJS report, if you view the years between 2010-2013, then the mean rate was 4.75 per 1,000 per year for females students aged 18 to 24. Assuming a female student attends university for four years, then multiplying 4.75 by four approximates her overall risk between 2010-2013. That number is about 20 per 1,000 or approximately one in 50. More accurately, it is 1-in-52.6, not 1-in-4 or 1-in-5.

The study from which Obama obtained his figure was an online survey of students at two public universities. The survey had a 42 percent response rate and included “forcible kissing” and touching as a sexual assault.

McElroy reviews many other studies and concludes that a college-age woman has about a one percent chance of being raped in any given year and a five percent chance if she is prone to becoming incapacitated by alcohol in the presence of men. That’s still way too high, especially for a college environment, but it is far less than the popular myth. Grossly distorting the facts, Obama inflamed fear and distrust of men among women who are just at the age when they have especially positive and romantic feelings toward them. But that’s exactly the goal. There are many negative effects to the rape agenda. McElroy writes:

“The claim that America is a rape culture is a particularly vicious lie for at least four reasons. It brands all men as rapists or rape facilitators. It reverses the glaring truth that women are a legally and socially protected class with privileges, such as affirmative action. It obstructs the truth about rape and so prevents the healing of individuals as well as the ability of society to address the crime. It shuts down real discussion of a burning issue.

The fact that McElroy was raped herself as a young woman living on the streets should lend credibility to her arguments, but unfortunately in the eyes of many feminists it only makes her all the more a woman-hating traitor. In general the debate is reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984:

“She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her.”

Rape culture hysteria is part of the general decline in thought at colleges, caused by a lack of belief in objective truth. All is opinion — and thus all is emotion and friction.The debate is characterized by such high emotion, infantile behavior, mob bullying and illogic that questioning statistics about rape is almost as criminal as committing a rape. When the skeptic Christina Hoff Sommers spoke to a crowd of collegiate apparatchiks at Oberlin College, female students showed up with their mouths taped shut in protest because their efforts to prevent her from speaking were unsuccessful. Is there anything more indicate of a cover-up than the protesting of open and free debate?

McElroy is appropriately outraged. Rape fanatics, she writes, even oppose women taking safety measures to avoid danger because they believe that this notion shifts the blame onto themselves. The ideologues exploit fear:

Rape culture ideologues not only engender a climate of fear but also thrive upon it. Female students are afraid to walk across a campus in full daylight because they falsely believe they have a 1-in-5 or 1-in-4 chance of being raped. The anxiety created turns them into activists who tolerate no contradiction or questions from peers or experts. Professors watch as colleagues are terminated or slammed against a career wall for teaching incorrect ideas. They self-censor to avoid a similar fate, which means using only correct books, thoughts and words. Parents and the public do not question sensational headlines about rape on campus and so are outraged by and so are outraged by the “epidemic”; they rush to endorse the passage of drastic laws. Critics who demand accurate data or freedom of speech are accused of being rape deniers or rape facilitators. The fear of slander and attack silences many.

Common sense can seem powerless against such crusading fear. More plausible findings on the rate of sexual assault are dismissed in favor of ones that cause a rush of righteous anger. Professors do not listen to logic but to the inner voice of caution about their own job security. It is useless to point out that no business or institution could survive if 20% of its customers were raped while using its services. Who would walk into Walmart if 1-in-4 shoppers would be sexually attacked in the aisles? But rape culture critics who raise such objections find that their characters become the topic of debate rather than the facts of rape.

Rape in college happens. It happens too often. It is traumatic and should be viewed with sympathy and seriousness. Rape hysteria goes much further, seeing a potential rapist in every young man — or rather every young white man. Black men are not targeted or shamed by academic rape warriors even though blacks commit a disproportionate number of rapes, including some of the most vicious assaults.  That omission tells you something about the ultimate goal of the rape war. McElroy describes some of the damage done to men who have been falsely accused or denied due process. She delves into the famous false accusations perpetrated by Rolling Stone against a University of Virginia fraternity and cases like that of Emma Sulkowicz, who publicized a “rape” at Columbia University that the police refused to prosecute.

No one more than Obama has ratcheted up institutionalized feminism. Not only did Obama establish his Orwellian task force but he increased investigations of colleges by the federal government and pushed for violations of due process. McElroy writes:

On April 4, 2011, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) circulated a letter. It instructed every college and university that accepted federal funds – virtually every institution of higher learning – to change the standards by which complaints of “sexual assault” were adjudicated. Administrators were to determine the guilt of students accused of rape – a felony assault. It did not matter if the adjudicators had no investigative or judicial background. It did not matter if the rape had not been reported to the police or had been dismissed by them. The university process was to be independent of traditional criminal and judicial procedures. Indeed, the campus procedures departed sharply from Western judicial standards that have been safeguards of justice for centuries.

It was a call to suspend due process for those who were accused. The 19-page set of instructions, called the “Dear Colleague” letter, was an attempt to address both a genuine problem and a manufactured one. The genuine problem is that sexual assault occurs on campus. The manufactured problem is the rape culture contention that there is an epidemic of rape which requires extraordinary political and legal remedies.

Much more about Obama’s actions can be found in McElroy’s book.

McElroy unfortunately is a feminist and believes there was a good feminism that has now gone astray. So while I applaud her critique in many ways, I do not accept a number of points she makes. She writes:

At the 19th century suffrage convention, privileged men heckled women who dared to dissent; privileged men told women they needed the protection of the opposite sex. Today, it is PC feminists who view dissenting women, like me, and dismiss them as mistaken, deluded or worse.

Actually, many women opposed the suffragists’ agenda, which was adamantly anti-male and socialist from the start. Those early opponents of feminists were called traitors to their sex by their radical counterparts, just as McElroy is.  (See These Noble Ladies: A Study of the Anti-Suffragette Movement by Rev. Fr. Christopher Hunter, SSPX, which can be found here.)

She also writes:

Decades ago, assaulted women were hideously attacked by those who should have helped them – the police, the courts, the media, society itself. In the 1960s, however, liberal feminism changed social attitudes toward raped women.

This suggests that men as a group did not take rape seriously. In fact, rape was a capital offense at some point in 18 states and the death penalty for it was not struck down until the 1970s. Men took rape so seriously that they designed laws for prosecuting it and seriously punishing offenders. These laws were not devised by women. Men took rape so seriously that they even formed mobs to apprehend and punish those who had raped women. It is not true that men as a group did not view rape seriously until women enlightened them with modern feminism.

McElroy also believes that “sexual freedom” has been good for women. Therefore she does not argue that the incidence of rape might be significantly lessened if there were completely separate dorms for men and women (as well as more single-sex colleges), curfews and rules against all coed visits in dorms. Have their been studies of the incidence of rape at the few Christian colleges that pursue these practices? I would bet rape is virtually non-existent at these places.

“Sexual freedom” has created sin, guilt, confusion, chaos and a loss of idealism that leads students right into the rape warriors’ agenda. Take it from those of us who have lived it, it’s not liberating. Virtue is freedom. Sin is oppression. McElroy’s book has affirmed my view that many more women should not go to college at all. They should spend those years in pursuing their own interests, forming their own minds and personalities away from the Thought Police, in studying, leisure, small jobs, so that they have energy to develop minds of their own, to be helpmates to men, to remain chaste before marriage and form families in their early 20s, to pursue mastery of many skills and talents within their own organic societies, with a lifetime of possibilities before them. They are being intellectually and spiritually exhausted by institutions with twisted intellectual standards and unreal expectations. Two plus two equals five.

McElroy rightly believes that things will not improve significantly with the feminist rape agenda until the federal government has gotten out of higher education.  Her comments on this subject are very good. But, as she admits, there isn’t the slightest chance of this withdrawal anytime soon. Neither of the major political parties in the United States is even close to considering things like closing down the Department of Education. Our governments are controlled by those using feminism to destroy the sovereignty of nations.

McElroy writes:

“The rape culture is a popular delusion, a madness of the crowd. But it is important not to ignore a Big Lie. A popular delusion can inflict great harm upon individuals and society unless it is vigorously opposed. The most effective weapons are to make individuals shoulder responsibility for their own acts – to break up the mob – and to persist in the reasoned dissent that exposes truth. Ask questions of those who spread rape hysteria and include a demand for evidence at every turn.”

But there is an intellectual-rape and a soul-rape culture. In 1984, the character Winston receives a note from Julia:

“At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid.”

It’s that love that the rape-culture police want to lessen and undermine. The demonizing of men gives women the incentive to detach themselves from their deeper instincts and commit themselves to ambition and careerism, to the collective instead of the personal. That’s the goal of “rape culture hysteria,” whether its dupes are conscious of it or not — to destroy the woman as trusting helpmate, to undermine human solidarity, truth, beauty and, most of all, the rights of God, so that the cryptocracy with their creepy, fanatical utopianism can rule. Utopianism seeks a world free from pain, to correct all cosmic injustices (the rape warrior cannot assimilate or explain the existence of evil) and so by its nature is fanatical and politically totalitarian. When a world free from pain is said to be possible, it must be possible. It must be achieved — or else. The ends justify the means. Feminism is at war with reality and becoming more extreme and illogical because the controllers who use it for control are closing in. As in the prophetic 1984,

War is Peace.

Freedom is Slavery.

Ignorance is Strength.

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