There was a long thread at Kiwipolitico a month or two ago, when Anita (feminist) made what was to me an entirely unremarkable statement, that we all know rapists.

It’s a statement that seems unremarkable if you’re used to the issues at hand, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s a very, very difficult statement for a lot of people to process.

Rape is a very emotive term. It’s pretty much the first thing that anybody reaches for when they’re looking for an example of an absolutely unforgivable act. This is a broadly positive thing. It is also a broadly positive thing that date rape is increasingly widely accepted as a “real” crime. However, the more seriously we take the idea of rape in general the less willing many people (particularly men) are to label things rape in specific.

For a man who generally considers himself to be sympathetic to feminist issues, the idea that there are guys out there who rape women is a comfortable one. It’s always nice to think that there are bad people out there who aren’t you. The idea that things you or your friends have done may actually be rape is as scary as hell. Genuinely accepting that rape really is the way the statistics say it is involves looking at yourself and saying “I might actually be a rapist or attempted rapist” and that’s territory most people just don’t want to go into.

The hurdle a lot of people can’t get over is always going to be the point where you look at somebody who is accused of rape and realise that you, yourself, might have done the same thing in that situation. At that point the temptation to say “well actually I can see that it wasn’t really rape in that situation” is overwhelming, because the alternative is horrible. So we wind up with a situation where everybody condemns rapists in general, but makes excuses for them in every specific case.

Or something. Sorry, that’s probably all really obvious to you guys.

I was just pointing out that, even following screwed-up MRA “logic”, there would still be no way that the number of men falsely accused would be anything close to the number of women who are actually raped. I was using the 1 in 4/1 in 6 figures because I wanted to compare the liklihood of any rape accusation at all against men to the liklihood of rape for women. I in no way meant to imply that 1 in 4 or 1 in 6 men are actually rapists.

This is why the 1 in 4/1 in 6 figures of women who have been attacked is NOT (and never has been) an accusation that 1 in 4/1 in 6 men are rapists.

Because it strikes me that even if there was any truth to the ridiculous claim bandied about by MRAs that 40% of sexual assault accusations made to the police are false, the number of men facing false accusations would still be a lot less than the number of women who actually have been raped — and this would be true even if 1 in 6 or 1 in 4 men could expect to face sexual assault allegations in their lifetime. Even going by the faulty logic of those who claim that false accusations are rife, rape is still a bigger, more pervasive problem.

I’d also like to know why, if false allegations are so pervsaive, men aren’t constantly being told not to drink, not to spend time alone with women or go up to their hotel rooms, not to put themselves in situations that would give women a chance to make a false accusation. I mean, isn’t that what our society generally does when we want to blame someone for something that isn’t their fault?