Barbara Kay: ‘Rape culture’ fanatics don’t know what a culture is

Article here. Excerpt:

In today’s National Post, there is a very thoughtful and serious discussion of whether the phenomena of “rape culture” even exists. It will no doubt receive the usual stream of invective — accusations of trivializing rape, denying that sexual assaults occur, implying that women who drank too much deserved to be raped. Hardly real criticisms in any intellectual sense, but they will come.

These critics — that seems almost too kind a descriptor for them, but alas — don’t seem to understand that a denial of rape culture is not a denial that rape exists or an expression of indifference to the pain it causes its victims. The world is imperfect. Bad or disturbed people commit crimes, including rape; good, well-adjusted people don’t. My heart breaks for children killed by their guardians, and in a perfect world none ever would be, but even 100 children dead at the hands of their parents does not make Canada a child-killing culture, or anyone who’d say so a child-murder denier.
...
Here, where women are socially and legally equal to men, official sympathy for rape victims at every institutional level has created a climate so overwhelmingly sympathetic to female victims of sexual abuse that the emerging cultural danger is injustice to falsely alleged perpetrators. We are gripped by a baseless, but pandemic, moral panic in which significant collateral damage is beginning to pile up.

Moral panic fuelled by ideology and righteous indignation quickly corrodes the critical faculties and blinds even otherwise intelligent people to objective facts. The numbers on campus rape don’t even come close to the famous “one in four” [women on campus are victims of rape or attempted rape], even taking into consideration unreported rates (i.e. multiplying reported rapes by 10, or even 100).

Where did that figure come from anyway? From bowdlerized research.

It began in1982, when Mary Koss, then a professor of psychology at Kent State University in Ohio, published an article on rape in which she expressed the orthodox — and remarkably misandric – feminist theory that “rape represents an extreme behavior but one that is on a continuum with normal male behavior within the culture.”'