Hyperbolic Mendacity

Updated.

It isn't often that big words can be spoken properly after a few pints in the Tavern's many bars. But at least they make sense. But just what sense can be made of the tsunami of hyperbole (or as ex-PM Juliar Gillard would say it, 'Hoiperbowl') that has infected even the supposedly intellectual Ivory Towers.

The occasional exaggeration can be expected from almost any quarter, and anticipated with some timely chortles and guffaws. But when the exaggeration turns to howls and spittle and is designed to manipulate and intimidate, coerce and punish, the line has to be drawn and the mendacity exposed.

Take crime for instance. I mean really wicked crime that every civilised society today holds to be abhorrent. You would think it would be with some pride that we have a society where crime rates are tiny compared to one to two hundred years ago; Where vicious crime like say, rape, is universally condemned and everyone is in agreement that it is next to Murder on the list of 'worst'.

Not so.

There is a continual media hype about the prevalence of rape, and rape 'victims' are the next best public performers to 12 year old girls on American Idol. And any talentless female can enter the game, announcing her candidacy with a pointed finger at some bloke. Mostly quite innocent.

The rewards in revenge for personal slight, attention from peers, and financial 'compensation' from the taxpayer are huge.

Apparently there is so much rape happening that some people (of similar leanings to the aformentioned ex PM) say, in all seriousness, that we have a Rape Culture: that in fact our society considers rape to be normal.

Amongst men, that is, Of course.

So, into the Pin and Balloon Bar came two fine ladies who were seething with indignation. They could see what so many of their educated peers refuse to see or at the least refuse to speak out about.

The 'Rape Culture'.

 

 

First to take a red hot pitchfork to the idea was Heather MacDonald. She outlined a part of the problem.

 

 

Heather can hold an audience for quite a long time, so just a bit of her account here.

It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic—but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No: it means, according to the campus sexual-assault industry, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering. 

Wonderful phrase that: Break the silence.

Everything that gets screamed about continually in the media seems to be 'silent'.

The campus rape movement highlights the current condition of radical feminism, from its self-indulgent bathos to its embrace of ever more vulnerable female victimhood.  

But the movement is an even more important barometer of academia itself. In a delicious historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university’s intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both.  

While women’s studies professors bang pots and blow whistles at antirape rallies, in the dorm next door, freshman counselors and deans pass out tips for better orgasms and the use of sex toys.  

The academic bureaucracy is roomy enough to sponsor both the dour antimale feminism of the college rape movement and the promiscuous hookup culture of student life. The only thing that doesn’t fit into the university’s new commitments is serious scholarly purpose. 

The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two).  

The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria. 

This claim, first published in Ms. magazine in 1987, took the universities by storm. By the early 1990s, campus rape centers and 24-hour hotlines were opening across the country, aided by tens of millions of dollars of federal funding.  

Victimhood rituals sprang up: first the Take Back the Night rallies, in which alleged rape victims reveal their stories to gathered crowds of candle-holding supporters; then the Clothesline Project, in which T-shirts made by self-proclaimed rape survivors are strung on campus, while recorded sounds of gongs and drums mark minute-by-minute casualties of the “rape culture.” A special rhetoric emerged: victims’ family and friends were “co-survivors”; “survivors” existed in a larger “community of survivors.”

Heather expounded a long history of how this hysteria spread. And the involvement of 'Authorities'.

I can totally recommend you see it all at:

HEATHER MAC DONALD
The Campus Rape Myth
The reality: bogus statistics, feminist victimology,

and university-approved sex toys

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_campus_rape.html

As Heather points out, the incidents of rape on University Campuses is extremely low.

As one might expect. But not as we are told.

Federal law requires colleges to publish reported crimes affecting their students. The numbers of reported sexual assaults—the law does not require their confirmation—usually run under half a dozen a year on private campuses and maybe two to three times that at large public universities.  

You might think that having so few reports of sexual assault a year would be a point of pride; in fact, it’s a source of gall for students and administrators alike.

 Certain rigidities MUST be adhered to in our strange new world.

Heather says:

The scarcity of reported sexual assaults means that the women who do report them must be treated like rare treasures.  

New York University’s Wellness Exchange counsels people to  

“believe unconditionally”  

in sexual-assault charges because “only 2 percent of reported rapes are false reports” (a ubiquitous claim that dates from radical feminist Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 tract Against Our Will).  

As Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson point out in their book Until Proven Innocent, however, the rate of false reports is at least 9 percent and probably closer to 50 percent. Just how powerful is the “believe unconditionally” credo?

And the hypocricy in even the reporting astounds a person of even average intellectual grasp. Heather mentions....

Strange Bedfellows at William and Mary 

Anyone who still thinks of sorority girls as cashmere-clad innocents, giggling as they wait by the phone for that special someone to call, won’t understand much of the campus “date rape” scene. A few incidents at the College of William and Mary, a pioneer in sexual-assault awareness, may correct lingering misconceptions. 

In October 2005, at a Delta Delta Delta formal, drunken sorority girls careened through the host’s house, vomiting, falling, and breaking furnishings. One girl ran naked through a hallway; another was found half-naked with a male on the bed in the master suite. A third had intercourse with her escort in a different bedroom. On the bus back from the formal, she was seen kissing her escort; once she arrived home, she had sex with a different male.  

Later, she accused her escort of rape.  

The district attorney declined to prosecute the girl’s rape charges. William and Mary, however, had already forced the defendant to leave school and, even after the D.A.’s decision, wouldn’t let him return until his accuser graduated. The defendant sued his accuser for $5.5 million for defamation; the parties settled out of court. 

The incident wasn’t as unusual as it sounds. A year earlier, a William and Mary student had charged rape after having provided a condom to her partner for intercourse. The boy had cofounded the national antirape organization One in Four; the school suspended him for a year, anyway.  

In an earlier incident, a drunken sorority girl was filmed giving oral sex to seven men.  

She cried rape when her boyfriend found out.  

William and Mary found one of the recipients, who had taped the event, guilty of assault and suspended him. 

But in the fall semester of 2005, rape charges spread through William and Mary like witchcraft accusations in a medieval village.  

In short succession after the Delta Delta Delta bacchanal, three more students accused acquaintances of rape. Only one of these three additional victims pressed charges in court, however, and she quickly dropped the case. 



All that taxpayer funding has to be spent - on building the hysteria and breaking the 'silence'
Duct Tape supplied by the Dept of Women's Studies.

A fifth rape incident around the same time followed a different pattern. In November 2005, a William and Mary student woke up in the middle of the night with a knife at her throat. A 23-year-old stranger with a prior conviction for peeping at her apartment complex had broken into her apartment; he raped her, threatened her roommate at knifepoint, and left with two stolen cell phones and cash. The rapist was caught, convicted, and sentenced to 57 years in prison.
 

Guess which incident got the most attention at William and Mary?  

The Delta Delta Delta formal “rape.”  

Like many stranger rapists on campus, the knifepoint assailant was black, and thus an unattractive target for politically correct protest. (The 2006 Duke stripper case, by contrast, seemingly provided the ideal and, for the industry, sadly rare configuration: white rapists and a black victim.) 

Stranger rapes also provide less opportunity for bureaucratic expansion. After the spate of “date rapes,” William and Mary’s vice president for student affairs announced that the school would hire a full-time sexual-assault educator, in addition to its existing sexual-assault services and counseling staff and numerous sexual-assault awareness organizations. Freshmen would now have to attend a gender-specific sexual-assault awareness program.  

None of this new apparatus—for instance, the “Equality Wheel,” which explains the “dynamics of a healthy relationship”—has the slightest relevance to stranger rapes. 

However, the cross-currents of campus political correctness are so intense that they produce some surprising twists.  

William and Mary’s sexual-assault resources webpage invites visitors to “listen to what people affected by sexual assault are sharing.” It then offers ten audio accounts of sexual assaults, exactly half of which are male. “My experience came very close to killing me,” one man reports.  

One would need the skills of a Kremlinologist to interpret this gender lineup, and the site doesn’t explain who exactly these voices are—but it’s hard to escape the impression that William and Mary has admitted either a huge gay community or some very beefy women. Diversity politics, gay politics, and the sexual-assault movement produce strange bedfellows. 

The further down the spiral of neuroticism one goes, the more bizzare the world appears. And we have to understand that beyond the hedges around the Tavern a very neurotic world flounders around.

Our dumbed-down society, with the universities actually Leader in Dumbing and employing the sour cream of the modern 'intelligensia' - the very same culpably blind sort that saw Communist Russia of the twenties and thirties as a 'splendid vision of progress' while ignoring the stench of the bodies,  have ..

a certainty amid the normal moral uncertainties.

They decry 'absolutes' in the name of tolerance and diversity, while systematically coercing, intimidating and punishing anyone who still struggle with discriminating between 'good' and 'bad. Indeed Good, Bad, Truth and judging between them has been rendered almost criminal and in some cases pursued as though they were.

In their place is the new certainty that only one world-view - the neurotic one - can be held.

But some brave people still speak out, as Heather does.  They can see.

Barbara Kay in Canada is another and she too tackled this 'rape culture' cant.

Barbara Kay:  

‘Rape culture’ fanatics don’t know what a culture is

In today’s edition of the 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. 

Indeed, the more closely one follows the increasingly hysterical volleys of rhetorical fire back and forth on this issue, the more apparent it becomes that those who speak of a rape culture don’t understand what the word “culture” actually means.  

To result in a “culture,” a phenomenon must be widely accepted as the norm. It is culturally normal in some countries for women to be virtual chattels, governed by patriarchal standards of honour; to be married against their will; to meet blame from their kinsmen and indifference or even hostility at law enforcement and court levels when reporting sexual assault; to be shunned as unmarriageable — or worse — for the “shame” of having been raped, and so forth. There we can legitimately speak of a “rape culture.” 

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.

I have spoken of this before, of course, as have several others in the bar from time to time. It bears repeating.

It began in 1982, 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.” 

Koss undertook a survey whereby she arrived at the one-in-four figure. To get there, Koss mischaracterized responses. For example, 73% of those she characterized as rape victims said they had not been raped. And 43% of the alleged victims said they had continued to date their alleged rapists.  

Nevertheless, the one-in-four meme took hold. The survey was published in Ms Magazine in 1987 and “took the universities by storm,” producing what can rightly be termed  

a rape-culture industry:  

expensive, over-staffed rape-crisis centres, hotlines, rallies, conferences, sexual-assault procedures consultancies and inter-collegiate sexual-assault networks. 

You can produce any culture you like if you dumb deviancy down.  

If you change “against her will” to “without her consent,” as we have, that is a huge paradigm shift from what we used to think of as rape: i.e. forced sex. And if a drunk woman can’t give her consent, another moved goalpost, she is ipso facto raped. 

Last word to brilliant feminist (the kind I like) Camille Paglia:  

“The feminist obsession with rape as a symbol of male-female relations is irrational and delusional. From the perspective of the future, this period in America will look like a reign of mass psychosis, like that of the Salem witch trials...

 

The fantastic fetishism of rape by mainstream … feminists has in the end trivialized rape, impugned women’s credibility, and reduced the sympathy we should feel for legitimate victims of violent sexual assault.” 

Amen to that, sister.

 You can say hello to Barbara at:

National Post
bkay@videotron.ca   

There IS a 'Rape Culture'. It is carefully cultivated in the Godless  'Women's/gender Studies' Departments of Universities where young people's minds are systematically poisoned.

It is paid for by taxpayers.

**Update: 26/4/14


BOB UNRUH stopped by to tell of a case in the USA where a lad was branded a rapist and sacked from college.

He is suing.

It is all too easy for a woman to accuse a man of a crime of assault and even rape and find every support for herself and an automatic assumption of guilt for him.

It HAS to be fought.

College facing trial for branding innocent student 'rapist'

A federal judge has ruled that a series of claims by a student-athlete against his school will go to trial after he was branded a rapist during a campus hearing even though a local prosecutor who investigated said the case should be dropped. 

A ruling from U.S. District Judge Arthur Spiegel rejected the request by Xavier University to toss the entire case. It ordered a trial on claims by Dezmine Wells regarding breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional distress, libel through injury to his personal reputation, his profession reputation  

and with malice, negligence and discrimination. 

The school released only a statement on the dispute. 

“We’re pleased that the court dismissed a number of the claims at this point,” the university said. “The court’s decision was based solely on the facts as alleged by Mr. Wells and his lawyers in their amended complaint, as is required by court rules at this early stage in the litigation. After the actual facts are disclosed to the court, we are confident that the result will vindicate Xavier.” 

Catherine Sevcenko, an attorney, commented on the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education that Wells was expelled for sexual assault “in spite of the local prosecutor’s public statements that the evidence did not support the accuser’s allegations.” 

“The underlying theory of Wells’ case is that Xavier used him as a scapegoat to prove to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) that it was cracking down on sexual assault claims after OCR investigated the university for violations of Title IX in 2012,” she said. 

WND has reported several times on the federal campaign to have campus disciplinary boards determine guilt based on a preponderance of the evidence, which is far lower that the “beyond a reasonable doubt” in America’s criminal justice system. 

A high-profile case that has been used to illustrate the problems created by the lower standard is the case of student Caleb Warner from the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. 

Warner was found guilty of sexual assault by a campus court in 2010, despite the facts established at the time by city police.  

Officers not only refused to charge him in the case but also alleged his accuser made a false report.  

Police issued a warrant for her arrest. 

Even so, the university process found Warner guilty, and it took 18 months. During that time, Warner not only was banned from the UND campus but also from all college campuses in the state. 

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/03/college-facing-trial-for-branding-innocent-student-rapist/#Rl2F7Su5YvX78xvL.99

It is not surprising that fewer young men are going to University these days. Their reputation and future can be ruined by Kangaroo Courts stacked with feminists and feminist rhetoric.

The Hyperbole is deliberate and Mendacious.

Drink clarity. Drink Truth.

Break the Silence.


Pax.