Comments Elsewhere

Amanda:

Of course, even the “can’t count intoxication” argument strikes me as being really disingenous. I would say that raping drunk women happens all the time. There’s borderline cases, of course, but plenty of men prey on drunk women full well intending to rape and then try to pass it off as bad drunk sex.

Good points. I definitely agree with you that this line of criticism is bunkum. For one, it rules out a lot of indisputable non-borderline cases of rape in which men rape women after they have passed out or been physically disabled by alcohol or date-rape drugs. For two, the criticism is usually based on distortions of Koss’s question—which was not whether the woman ever had sex while she was drunk / intoxicated, but whether a man had ever had sex with her when she didn’t want to, after he had given her drugs or alcohol. That’s pretty clearly a predatory dynamic, but Koss’s critics prefer to whitewash it by changing the question. And for three, it seems to be part of a larger pattern of acting as if feminists have to rule anything that passes for normal het male dating behavior as therefore out of bounds for criticism. To hell with that!

It’s just also worth pointing out, I think, that even if you concede all the cases they complain about, the numbers stay very close to what they were, whether in Koss’s study or in later studies such as the National Violence Against Women Survey, and that these numbers are very easy to find, and that the Men’s Rights bully-boys and professional antifeminists don’t bother to even look around for 5 minutes to check them out. Not everyone who’s skeptical of Koss’s findings acts like this, but many of them are very clearly interested in dismissing entirely by innuendo and armchair speculation, rather than looking at the readily available data. And that’s pretty indicative of how they are approaching the subject.