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challenging the old rape myths, the feminist movement has created a set of new ones. For instance, as contrarian feminist Wendy Kaminer wrote in a 1993 essay, “It is a primary article of faith among many feminists that women don’t lie about rape, ever; they lack the dishonesty gene.” On a somewhat less extreme note, much feminist literature, including “rape myth” explainers, assert that only 2 percent of rape reports are false, same as for any other crime.As Massachusetts-based attorney Edward Greer demonstrated in an exhaustive analysis in 2000, this claim has no basis in fact and appears to be a “fictoid” circulating among various ideologically aligned sources.A more modest assertion is that 2 to 8 percent of rape reports are false.But even this claim is based on fuzzy data and rooted in an almost literal presumption of guilt: the belief that in every case in which the truth or falsehood of the accusation cannot be established with full certainty, the accused — even if tried acquitted in court — is guilty.

There are other feminist rape myths — for instance, that only one to three percent of rapists are ever punished. The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker,” hardly an anti-feminist source, rated this claim as mostly false (with “three Pinocchios” out of a maximum of four). It is based on faulty statistics that not only lump together rape and other forms of sexual assault including threats of sexual violence but disregard the fact that one assailant may have multiple victims.

But the overarching feminist rape myth is the myth of “the rape culture,” at least insofar as this term is applied to contemporary liberal democracies in North America and Western Europe.

Feminist scholars and authors have offered a variety of definitions of “rape culture.” The foreword to the 1993 volume of essays, Transforming a Rape Culture, offers the following:

[Rape culture] is a complex set of beliefs that encourage male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm.

As one can see, this definition is quite broad, ambiguous, and debatable. Does “male sexual aggression” refer to violent and coercive actions, or to sexual pursuit and initiation? Can modern Western societies be said to support violence against women? Does all sexualization of violence, including consensual rough sex and BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism), amount to “rape culture”? Do most women see sexual remarks as part of a “continuum of threatened violence” (and how can rape itself, which is not threatened but actual violence, be considered part of such a continuum)? What is “emotional terrorism”?

The concept of “rape culture” goes back to the mid-1970s. Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape portrayed rape as the ultimate act of male terror against women. Brownmiller argued that rape had played a “critical function” in patriarchal history as a form of deliberate terrorism: “It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”

The same year, Cambridge Documentary Films, a small outfit run by activist filmmakers Margaret Lazarus and Renner Wunderlich, released a 35-minute film titled Rape Culture. One of its stars was radical feminist theologian and philosopher Mary Daly, who discussed discussing America’s “rapism,” “phallocentric society,” and “unholy trinity of rape, genocide and war.” (In later years, Daly explicitly stated that she is entirely uninterested in men, that she sees males as inherently deadly and destructive in contrast to life-loving women, and that the only hope for the planet’s survival lies in its “decontamination” by means of a “drastic reduction of the population of males.” She also chose to retire from her post at Boston College rather than admit male students to her classes.)

Reviewing the documentary for the journal Women & Health, Judy Norsigian of the Boston Women’s Health Collective summed up its message as follows:

In a society where men are taught to be sexually active and aggressive, while women are taught to be sexually passive, it comes as no surprise that rape is a problem. Rape is almost the logical consequence of the extreme acting out of these split sexual roles. We need to learn and re-learn that rape is not primarily the act of an aberrant individual who is behaving in conflict with the predominant values of society. Rape is a pervasive cultural problem, a social ideology regularly sustained and perpetuated by the TV-movie-radio-newspaper-popular culture network.

The feminist critique of attitudes toward rape had some resonance in part because there is no question that the abhorrence of rape in Western society coexisted, for a very long time, with undeniably ugly attitudes. We react with horror today to stories of young women in Third World countries being pressured or even forced to marry their rapists; but similar practices once existed across Europe, and survived into the 1970s in Italy. In the United States, as recently as forty years ago, juries could be formally instructed to consider evidence of a woman’s “unchaste character” — from extramarital liaisons to the use of birth control — as detracting from her credibility as the complainant in a rape case, and the failure to fight back in a demonstrably threatening situation was not uncommonly treated as consent. Some of these practices were related to the legitimate difficulties of sorting out the facts in cases based on conflicting accounts, with little or no physical evidence of force; but they also reflected prejudice against women who were seen as less worthy victims.

Feminist claims about rape culture have been further fueled by cultural tropes that sometimes legitimized or romanticized coercive sex, blurring the lines between male sexual conquest/female “token resistance” and forcible violation. It is worth noting, however, that the most prominent examples of romanticized sexual violence in fiction — from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and its famous film version to pulp romances such as the 1974 best-seller Sweet Savage Love by Rosemary Rogers — come from female authors and, in many cases, have been popularized largely by female audiences.This suggests that these scenes represented, more than anything else, a female ravishment fantasy that allows women raised with traditional moral codes to imagine illicit sex without guilt and to feel “swept off their feet” in a safe setting.

 

In any case, even in less enlightened times, the idea that rape was “a social ideology” in Western culture is absurdly exaggerated and oversimplified. One reason evidentiary standards for rape were so high was that rape carried extremely harsh penalties (for most of American history, it was a capital crime).

 

 

In popular culture, depictions of rape — including acquaintance rape — as a despicable crime certainly predate modern feminism; acclaimed films such as Johnny Belinda”(1948) and Peyton Place (1957) are among the examples. In the 1959 film Compulsion, a young man’s attempt to force himself on a female friend on a picnic date is unequivocally treated as an assault that he himself knows is wrong and criminal.

As for 21st Century civilization, arguments intended to demonstrate a pervasive rape culture in modern Western societies typically rely on dubious assertions and badly distorted or out-of-context facts.

Thus, the Vancouver, Canada rape crisis center Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) lists “kids who call losing a sports game ‘getting totally raped’” as evidence of “rape culture.” Of course, kids also call losing a sports game “getting slaughtered” or “getting murdered,” and the words “kill” and “torture” are routinely used in a metaphorical sense. Few would argue that this means society condones torture and murder.

In a January 2013 column on the website of the American left-wing magazine, The Nation, feminist pundit Jessica Valenti rattles off a catalogue of examples purporting to show that “rape is as American as apple pie.”Among them:

 

 

 

Ÿ “We live in a country where politicians call rape ‘a gift from God.’” This refers to a notorious comment by 2012 United States Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who said in explaining his opposition to abortion even in rape cases that “life is [a] gift from God … even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape.” Besides misrepresenting Mourdock’s remark, Valenti also fails to mention that it sparked widespread outrage and likely cost him the election in a strongly Republican district. Ÿ “[Y] oung men in high school think so little of sexual assault that they thought it was fine — hilarious, even — to post pictures online of a passed out rape victim, and to live-tweet the rape, joking about the victim being urinated on.” Valenti is referring to the notorious 2013 rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, in which two teenage boys were found guilty of digitally penetrating an unconscious or near-unconscious girl at a drunken party. Yet, aside from the fact that her summary is based on highly sensationalized and unreliable accounts, there is nothing new about adolescents flaunting socially unacceptable behavior. Thus, teenage girls have made videos beating up other girls to post them on the Internet.Even as the Steubenville case grabbed headlines, an incident in Homer, Alaska in which a passed-out teenage boy at an alcohol-soaked party was sodomized with a beer bottle while other teens of both sexes watched (and some took pictures) received only scant media attention, perhaps because a case with a male victim does not fit easily into the “rape culture” paradigm. “[A] woman’s rape case falls flat because she isn’t married.” That sounds positively medieval — but a look at the story Valenti cites shows a peculiar case hindered by an outdated law and prosecutorial error. The victim, an 18-year-old California woman, fell asleep next to her boyfriend while there were guests at her house; after her boyfriend left, the defendant came in, got in bed with her and initiated sex while she was asleep. Half-awake, the young woman initially responded positively, mistaking the defendant for her boyfriend, then realized that it was another man and tried to resist. Prosecutors charged the defendant with rape by fraud based on his impersonation of the victim’s boyfriend; however, the law on the books at the time, originally crafted in 1872, applied only to impersonating a husband. Because of this, the California Supreme Court reversed the conviction; however, it sent the case back for a retrial, recommending that the defendant be charged with rape based on lack of consent due to unconsciousness. The court also recommended that the statute be revised to include impersonation of a lover, not just a spouse. (The defendant was eventually convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. The law was changed.)

 

Another writer and activist, Soraya Chemaly, sees evidence of rape culture in the alleged fact that 31 states allow rapists who impregnate their victims to sue for custody or visitation if she carries the pregnancy to term.But in reality, these states simply don’t have laws on the books explicitly barring such suits. Even attorney Shauna Pruitt, an activist fighting for such legislation, has written that the problem is not a belief that rapists should have parental rights to children born from the rape, but lack of awareness that this is an issue. Ironically, this is in part due to the assumption that rape victims who conceive will terminate the pregnancy.

 

Finally, consider some examples offered by feminist writer and activist Zerlina Maxwell in a Time column responding to the argument that rape culture is a mythical moral panic.Rape culture is when survivors who come forward are asked, “Were you drinking?”

Crime victims who are intoxicated may be viewed as partially responsible for putting themselves in harm’s way. However, far more prominent recently has been the reverse tendency: “rape-culture feminists” seeking to redefine consensual drunk sex as rape. Thus, in the fall of 2013, activists at the University of Ohio-Athens rallied in support of a female student who accused a male student of rape after the two were caught on camera engaged in a late-night drunken public sex act (the man performed oral sex