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Rape was defined as an event that occurred without the victim’s consent, that involved the use or threat of force to penetrate the victim’s vagina or anus by penis, tongue, fingers, or object, or the victim’s mouth by penis. The definition included both attempted and completed rape. The following questions were used to screen respondents for rape victimization:

• [Female respondents only] Has a man or boy ever made you have sex by using force or threatening to harm you or someone close to you? Just so there is no mistake, by sex we mean putting a penis in your vagina.

• Has anyone, male or female, ever made you have oral sex by using force or threat of force? Just so there is no mistake, by oral sex we mean that a man or boy put his penis in your mouth or someone, male or female, penetrated your vagina or anus with their mouth.

• Has anyone ever made you have anal sex by using force or threat of harm? Just so there is no mistake, by anal sex we mean that a man or boy put his penis in your anus.

• Has anyone, male or female, ever put fingers or objects in your vagina or anus against your will or by using force or threats?

• Has anyone, male or female, ever attempted to make you have vaginal, oral, or anal sex against your will, but intercourse or penetration did not occur?

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Exhibit 1: Persons Raped or Physically Assaulted in Lifetime by Sex of Victim

	Percentage		Number
Type of Assault	Women (n=8,000)	Men (n=8,000)	Women (100,697,000)	Men (92,748,000)
Total rape	17.6	3.0	17,722,672	2,782,440
Completed	14.8	2.1	14,903,156	1,947,708
Attempted only	2.8	0.9	2,819,516	834,732

17.5% of women is a little more than 1:6. 3.0% of men is a little more than 1:33.

Please note that this is not based on police reports. A good thing, too. Since over 90% of rapes are never reported to police, there is no serious research on sexual assault that you could possibly base on police reports. The research is based on carefully constructed anonymous telephone surveys of a (very large) random sample (N=~16,000) of men and women. There is no particular incentive for people to lie about it or conceal their experiences, as far as I can tell.

Sexual abuse against men and boys is appalling, and it happens to a lot more men and boys than people think. But it is very infrequent compared to sexual abuse against women and girls. I’d really urge you to make some serious effort at reading some of the social science research on this topic before you start trying to make up ways to get around what seems to be the obvious conclusion of that research.

About 1 out of every 6 women in the United States has been sexually assaulted at some point in her life.

That’s pretty fucking normal.

P.S.: There is no such thing as the “fallacy of constitution.” Maybe you are thinking of the fallacy of composition. If so, you’re misapplying the term. (The fallacy of composition is the fallacy of presuming that properties possessed by each of the parts of a whole severally must be possessed by the whole as well.) Perhaps the phrase you’re looking for is “hasty generalization?” Ben’s comments don’t commit that fallacy, either, but at least the term would match the charge you’re making.

Incidentally, this is one of my major problems with the kind of Old Republic nostalgia that gets peddled at, for example, LewRockwell.com. DiLorenzo and the rest of the gang have convinced themselves that American nationalism and imperialism both effectively started in 1861, and that antebellum pro-slavery blowhards like Calhoun were the true guardians of an imperiled decentralist republic. In fact it was the Southern slavocracy that was the constant driving force behind American expansionism and military adventurism from 1789 up to 1860, including the Louisiana purchase, the war of 1812, the Creek war, the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee, the Seminole Wars, the seizure of Florida, the annexation of Texas, the war on Mexico, and repeated attempts to expand the slave empire into Cuba and other potential Latin American colonies, either through “purchase” or conquest. Just to mention a few. It was those Yankee millenialists like Garrison and Wendell Phillips who consistently opposed the predatory engorgement of the country and who denounced it as a travesty against liberty and republican principles.

I’ve always thought libertarianism would gladly sacrifice man to the economy instead of the reverse. That just confirms it for me.

… which just goes to show that you don’t know anything in particular about libertarianism.

Have you read any of the (extensive) literature, by even the most emphatically “capitalist” of libertarians, defending the rights of the homeowners against the corporate State in Kelo? Are you aware that the plaintiffs were represented by a libertarian legal nonprofit (the Institute for Justice), or that libertarian think-tanks like the Cato Institute filed amicus briefs on behalf of the plaintiffs?

Hell, did you read any of the other comments on the post?

Just curious.

Well, there’s nothing unusual about it. The problem is that the blowhards with the loudest bullhorns in the Democratic Party — liberal educated professionals and college students — tend to combine a sanctimonious sense of self-worth with a lack of any real class consciousness. So they tend to use their privileged position to spread idiot notions like the idea that college campuses, of all places, have been the center of antiwar sentiment in the past few decades (in fact, likelihood to support both the Vietnam War and the Iraq occupation has been directly proportional to the level of educational attainment), or that poor people (in the South, particularly) are responsible for Bush’s win in 2004 (whether through their own depravity or through the Democrats’ failure to “reach out” to them and mainline enough of the opiate of the masses). The thing is it’s all claptrap, and it’s destructive claptrap that may satisfy comfortable liberals’ sense of embattled superiority in enclaves like Portland or Ann Arbor, but actually cripples any chance at offering a serious alternative to the Republican Moloch. Pointing this out was the major point of the post.

“actually it seems like you’re both fucking republicans”

Then you ought to expand your political horizons. I’d point out that lots of people on the Left have ripped into Clinton over his 8 years of dirty little wars around the world (as, in fact, they have), and start naming some names, but the problem is this would only pander to the idea that team-loyalty rather than truth is the appropriate criterion for judging a policy.

Democrat bombs kill people just as surely as Republican bombs do. They killed tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands all told, in Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sudan, among others. If you want to give some kind of argument that his belligerence toward the Third World was justified (I don’t think that it was, any more than I think Mr. Bush’s is), you’re free to do so. But then you’d better give an argument that either (a) gives principled reasons to support Clinton’s policy while condemning Bush’s, or (b) give up and support Bush’s war policy too. I don’t think there’s any good argument on offer, but you might give one and persuade me. But it will take just that—an argument. Not calling your opponents names.

C’mon Ben. This is not a meme. There are no such things as memes. This wasn’t some bit of information that magically spread itself through your passive mind. It’s an idea that you liked (because it’s silly fun) and that you chose to show other people.

Take some responsibility for your mind! Crush the anti-concept!

Well, I have trouble disliking the sentiment, but can’t help but think that part of the problem is the same fetishism of the (mostly ineffectual, then as well as now) white counterculture “movement” (you can think of the movement involved as sprawling down on the grass, rather than marching forward…) rather than some of the serious organizing and activism that occurred in flashpoints such as the mid-to-late 1960s.

Rather than learning “new rules” from scratch, I think that today’s organizers might be better served studying some actual history, rather than the television rockumentary form of “the 60s”–like, say, picking up a book and reading about what Black organizers were doing on the ground in Nashville and Montgomery, in towns in the backwoods of Mississippi and Alabama, through SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and so on. Or what women were doing through New York Radical Women, Jane, etc. You’ll come out with a very different picture of the era and how the people who lived in it won some incredible battles. (Hint: it wasn’t by getting a bunch of people together in one space to be rallied at. A gargantuan march was then, and is still now, at best a tool to be used in the middle of organizing–not the beginning, or the end, and certainly not both.)