All men are potential rapists. This is an old and well worn chestnut. You don’t often hear men say it. No, it’s women who tend to trot this one out. A principal reason for this is that it is a technically true statement which can be used to shame and silence men, and against which it is hard to argue. Another use for this statement is to inculcate in women a fear and mistrust of men; to separate men and women and prevent them from cooperating as each other’s natural compliments.
“All men are potential rapists” is such a troubling statement for most men who have no desire or urge to commit rape. And its troubling because it is, on it’s surface, true. True, but incomplete. Men do have the capability to rape. Yes, we do. But to just say that without some additional context is misleading. In fact, it’s deceptive.
There are more ways to lie than the simple utterance of incorrect statements of fact. So to make the claim “all men are potential rapists” into a complete, and thus, not a deceptive statement, I’d like to do a little filling in. All men are also potential murderers, all men are potential robbers, all men are potential child molesters, all men are potential chicken fuckers.
There’s undoubtedly other things which I could add to that list. It’s still a true statement, but it’s now more complete. Unfortunately, it is still deceptive. No, to make the statement that all men are potential rapists complete and no longer deceptive, we need to add something else.
All women are also potential rapists.
Did the room just go silent?
Women are also all potential murderers[1], child rapists[2], and robbers. Nobody likes to talk about rape when its committed by a women, though. Some apologists for feminist theory will condescend to explain that women cannot commit rape because they lack the requisite protuberant sexual appendage. This is a nonsense argument, rape is a crime of violence and imposed control, and can, and often does employ foreign objects such as bottles, brush handles and so on. I won’t belabour the fact that women can and do commit assault, robbery, child abuse and other crimes, in some cases at rates of offence exceeding those of men. [3]
All humans are potential rapists[4], but if you’re a radical feminist that won’t give you the warm glow of satisfaction to be had by only accusing males. The “all humans” argument is true, considerably more so than the misleading mention of only men, but even stating all humans are potential rapists is misleading. We know from FBI uniform crime reports [5] that only a very small fraction of humans in civil society participate in violent crimes. This is the great lie of omission used with so little resistance against men in our society.
The statistic that some number of women are subject to a particular violent crime – given by the media, in the absence of context or comparative victimization rates for men is another way to lie to the public. The number most often given for rape against women is 1 in 4. The source for this number is never provided, of course, because it’s a lie fabricated by sloppy advocacy research. [6]
The study which turned up the 1 in 4 number was funded by MS magazine, and conducted by the same Mary Koss who declared the crime of rape to be simply an escalated expression of normal male behavior.
Koss questioned 3000 college women in 1982 – and determined they had been raped if they answered yes to one of the following three questions:
- Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?
- Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man threatened or used some degree of physical force (twisting your arm, holding you down, etc.) to make you?
- Have you had sexual acts (anal or oral intercourse or penetration by objects other than the penis) when you didn’t want to because a man threatened or used some degree of physical force (twisting your arm, holding you down, etc.) to make you?
15 percent of the women surveyed answered yes to at least one of those questions. This translates to 1 in 6. Koss added an additional 12 percent to this number for individuals who reported an “attempted rape” as defined by affirmative answer to one of the three questions, the total of 27 percent then translated to a nice, inflammatory claim of 1 in 4.
Interestingly, Koss herself reported that only 27 percent of her “victims” identified their own experience as “rape” even under the influence of her highly questionable methodology. Even accepting Koss’s questionable identification of what constitutes a “rape” a simple calculation indicates the rate of offence to be 1 in 14, not 1 in 4.
How telling is it that some radical feminists are now throwing around the number 1 in 3? That’s an claimed increase of 32% over the previous 1 in 4 number which was false to begin with. Are we expected to not notice these mobile “facts”?
All these numbers are meaningless of course, because they are never given in any context. [7] The UK home office produced advertising reporting that 2 women die each week from injuries sustained in domestic violence incidents. That’s 104 women killed each year, and it is shocking and inflammatory. It’s an emotionally charged number. But it’s meaningless, because what they do not say is how many men die from the same cause. Neither do they give any context by providing the sample size that this 2 per week actually means in terms of deaths within a population.
Being reasonable people, we might assume that no men die violent deaths at the hands of their spouses. According to Erin Pizzey, founder of the women’s shelter movement in the UK, in reality, for every 2 women who die, so does 1 man [8]. Bearing in mind men’s normal size and strength when compared to women – this fits neatly with stats showing coequal rates of offence between women and men in issues of domestic violence [9].
It is unacceptable to publicly declare all members of an ethnic demographic as criminal, or evil. In fact doing so is defined in some countries as a hate crime. All Germans are not nazis, all Jews are not greedy, all Muslims are not terrorists.
Where it applies in law, hate speech is any speech, writing, or display calculated to incite violence or prejudicial action against members of a group based on identity such as sexual orientation, religious affiliation, sexual identity or ethnicity.
It seems that this applies unless the group targeted happens to be the 48% of the population of this planet who are male. The term to describe this sexism has become unfortunately misunderstood to mean only a negative attitude towards women, and in western societies, that negative attitude generally doesn’t lead to state-sponsored murder – almost all victims of the death penalty in the United States being male.
Nor is sexism understood to lead to our society’s endemic male suicide rate, 4 times higher for men than women in Canada[10], and the United States[11] . Sexism also isn’t understood as a factor in the overwhelming majority of work related deaths belonging to only one sex, 93% of which are male[12]. So calling the hateful lie “that all men are potential rapists” simply sexist lacks the impact it should have. It is a phenomena so ugly, antihuman, and inexcusable that it deserves to be called that ugliest of words; racism – the hatred of one group, by another.
[1] http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/homicide/gender.cfm
[2] http://www.child-abuse-effects.com/female-sex-offenders.html
[3] ~page 68 http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cm08/cm08.pdf
[4] http://www.canadiancrc.com/Female_Sex_Offenders-Female_Sexual_Predators_awareness.aspx
[5] http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offenses/violent_crime/index.html
[6] http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9502/sommers.html
[7] http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs04/dpr30.pdf
[8] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG12QLmWow
[9] http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
[10] http://www.suicideinfo.ca/csp/assets/alert30.pdf
[11] http://fathersforlife.org/health/who_suicide_rates.htm
[12] ~page 10 http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfch0008.pdf
