Barbara Kay: A bump in radical feminism’s control of the gender agenda

The CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi is the most amiable, open-minded guy in the world, with a good sense of humour to boot. The perfect radio host. His weekly show, Q, frequently provides proof of his willingness to explore both sides of a gamut of issues in the classic liberal tradition.

Unfortunately, amongst doctrinaire feminists, amiability, intellectual curiosity and even (especially?) a sense of humour don’t cut it when their pet theories fall into Q’s crosshairs. Ghomeshi had the temerity on Monday to host a debate about the veracity of “rape culture,” between Lise Gotell, chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta, and conservative researcher Heather Macdonald of the Manhattan Institute.

A storm of indignation erupted, describing Macdonald as a “rape apologist” for expressing the perfectly sensible view that if girls did not “drink [themselves] blotto” at parties, the entire phenomenon called rape culture would virtually disappear. She is not wrong, but it is politically incorrect to “blame the victim.” No, the only correct view is that “Drinking doesn’t cause rape, it’s the decision of rapists that cause rape,” in Ms Gotell’s words.

The rape culture myth had its origins in a September 1992 questionnaire in Seventeen magazine, called “What’s Happening to you?” Among the questions posed after an introductory “Did anyone do any of the following to you when you didn’t want them to in the last school year”: “touch, pinch or grab you” “lean over or corner you,” “give you sexual notes or pictures,” “ “make suggestive or sexual gestures, looks, comments or jokes,” and “pressure you to do something sexual”? Only one – “force you to do something sexual”-  related to actual rape.

Seventeen had 1.9 million subscribers at the time. They received 4,200  responses– or  0.2% of their market. Of the 4,200, 10% reported they had been forced to do something sexual.

Not only were the respondents not representative of the U.S. population, they were those who felt most strongly about the issue. But, with manipulation from women’s groups, this entirely unscientific SLOP (self-selected listener opinion polls) transmogrified into headlines like “A U.S. survey shows wide harassment of girls in school.”

By contrast, a credible survey conducted by Louis Harris polling took a random sample of 1,500 boys and girls in grades eight through 11, and asked them about harassment. Four out of five students, male and female, reported being harassed. What? Boys being harassed as well as girls? Gee, that doesn’t fit feminist theory. Some intrepid media people nevertheless dug a little deeper than was their feminism-indulgent wont and published skeptical stories about the original survey. An expert on sexual harassment, Billi Dziech, noted the imprecision of terminology, stating “There is a difference between something I would call ‘sexual hassle’ and ‘sexual harassment’.”

The rape culture meme always harks back to bad methodology, linguistic legerdemain and moral-high-ground entitlement. In the spring of 1993, nine women, art students at the University of Maryland distributed posters and fliers around campus, naming dozens of male students with the heading: “Notice: These men are potential rapists.” The women had chosen the names at random from the university directory as part of an art project. How did they get away with such irresponsibility? If you have to ask, you don’t know your feminist history.

We’ve made progress of a sort. (By “we” I mean objective, reasonable observers of the culture wars.) Those innocent men would not take such egregious defamation lying down today. And if the CBC isn’t afraid to touch this third rail of feminist dogma, there is reason to believe we have turned the corner on radical feminism’s control of the gender agenda. We’ve come a long way, baby.

National Post