The UVA Story Unravels: Feminist Agitprop and Rape-Hoax Denialism

Article here. Excerpt:

'The uncritical rush to embrace of Rolling Stone story attests to the toxic climate created by this crusade. Erdely’s article should have quickly set off alarm bells (mine went off on the second reading). The preplanned initiation-ritual gang rape in which “Clockwork Orange”-level ultraviolence meets “Silence of the Lambs” (“Grab its motherf-----g leg,” yells one of the men); the reaction of the victim’s friends who see her disheveled and bloodied yet talk her out of going to the police or to the hospital because being “the girl who cried rape” would carry a social stigma; the nonchalance of the frat boy who casually chats her up shortly after engineering the attack—it all seems highly implausible, reading more like a rape-culture morality tale than a factual account. And that’s not even to mention the fact that Jackie supposedly endured three hours of rape while lying on sharp shards of glass from a smashed coffee table; or that later, when she had become an anti-rape activist on campus, a man supposedly threw a beer bottle at her as she walked past a bar and it broke on the side of her face but left only a bruise.
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Even if people were initially swept up in the story’s emotion and in Erdely’s dramatic narration, their critical faculties should have kicked back in once Bradley and other skeptics such as began to raise uncomfortable questions—and feminists such as Slate’s Hanna Rosin and Allison Benedikt began to voice concern about Erdely’s shoddy reporting. Instead, the New York Times tried to circle the wagons, finding a couple of journalism professors who were willing to defending Rolling Stone’s methods. And the feminist media set about shooting the messenger. On Twitter, Amanda Marcotte blasted “rape apologists” attempting to “derail” the conversation with their talk of a hoax at UVA and asserted that Erdely’s story would have been attacked no matter how thorough a job she had done. (She even not-so-subtly insinuated that the “rape denialist movement” is driven by men who are themselves rapists.) The same themes were echoed in a rant by Katie McDonough in Salon, who grudgingly acknowledged that Erdely’s article was flawed but still denounced the criticism as “rape denial” and expressed resentment at “being expected to treat every person who says hey no fair when a survivor speaks or a damning report is published as if these are all serious and credible concerns.” On a slightly more moderate note, New York’s Kate Stoeffel fretted that all the questioning feels like “presumed innocence is a privilege reserved for purported rapists and not their purported victims” and asked, “To what end are we scrutinizing?”

That was before the Post debunked the story and Rolling Stone disowned it. And after that? Well, there’s this tweet from Marcotte: “Interesting how rape apologists think that if they can ‘discredit’ one rape story, that means no other rape stories can be true, either.” Needless to say, she does not give an example of a single person who believes that rape never happens.
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Yes, rape happens—on campuses and elsewhere. Methodologically sound surveys by the Bureau of Justice Statistics have found that from 1995 to 2002, an average of about six per 1,000 female college students a year became victims of sexual assault. Assuming that a woman’s risk of being assaulted is the same in every year of college, that means two to three percent of female students become victims over the course of their school years. That’s nothing to be dismissive about. But it is hardly an epidemic, or a pervasive “culture of rape.”

Let us by all means have victim advocacy—fact-based, and capable of supporting women or men who report sexual assaults without trying to destroy the presumption of innocence. But let’s say no to the witch-hunts. If the UVA debacle brings back some sanity on the subject of rape, the hoax will have actually served a good cause—just not the one its promoters intended.'