Comments Elsewhere

“the vast, overwhelming majority of men (and women) DO NOT RAPE.”

The Koss survey on sexual victimization on college campuses found that about 1 in 12 male respondents admitted to committing acts that met the legal definition of rape.

Now, if we just grant the measure as representative of the general population (it’s probably not, but the factors that would change it—e.g., the number of men who commit rape after leaving college—would mostly tend to make it an underestimation rather than an overestimation), that means that 8% of men are rapists, and about 92% are not. Does that mean a “vast, overwhelming majority” of men aren’t rapists? I don’t know; that depends on what you’re considering “vast” and “overwhelming” for a particular purpose. I mean, look, 92:8 is a big ratio, but it 8% of men is still a lot of men. In a country of about 115,000,000 men over the age of 16, that means about 10,000,000 rapists. It means that if you put 12 average men in a room together, the probability that at least one of them is a rapist is about 92%. (I am given to understand that most women will encounter at least 12 men on an average day.)

Most men are not rapists. But 1 in 12 is not a marginal population of freaks; it’s a hell of a lot of men, a hell of a lot of dangerous men who are not easy to pick out, who look more or less like “ordinary” men by any measure. And the notion that that’s a small enough minority that it doesn’t or shouldn’t make a difference to most women’s lives, or how most women react to men on a day to day basis, or to their political commitments and priorities, is frankly nuts.