One in four college women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape. One in four. I remember standing outside the dining hall in college, looking at the purple poster with this statistic written in bold letters. It didn't seem right. If sexual assault was really so pervasive, it seemed strange that the intricate gossip networks hadn't picked up more than one or two shadowy instances of rape. If I was really standing in the middle of an "epidemic," a "crisis"- if 25 percent of my women friends were really being raped- wouldn't I know it?Ms Roiphe, a student at Princeton at the time, plumped herself down in the middle of the culture wars by not only finding that statistic dubious, but by drawing out wider conclusions about the credulousness with which many women greeted it:
The posters were not presenting facts. They were advertising a mood. Preoccupied with issues like date rape and sexual harassment, campus feminists produce endless images of women as victims-- women offended by a professor's dirty joke, women pressured into sex by peers, women trying to say no but not managing to get it across.Now, it would have been sufficient to raise feminist ire had she merely doubted the extent of the problem of rape. In the most widely cited refutation of the book, the feminist warhorse Kathy Pollit, first concedes that the one in four number drops to one in five in the cited study if you exclude alcohol related incidents, but then asks:
This portrait of the delicate female bears a striking resemblance to that 50's ideal my mother and other women fought so hard to leave behind. They didn't like her passivity, her wide-eyed innocence. They didn't like the fact that she was perpetually offended by sexual innuendo. They didn't like her excessive need for protection. She represented personal, social, and intellectual possibilities collapsed, and they worked and marched, shouted and wrote to make her irrelevant for their daughters. But here she is again, with her pure intentions and her wide eyes. Only this time it is the feminists themselves who are breathing new life into her.
ONE in five, one in eight- what if it's "only" one in ten or twelve? Social science isn't physics. Exact numbers are important, and elusive, but surely what is significant here is that lots of different studies, with different agendas, sample populations, and methods, tend in the same direction.Except, of course, that the number matters, specifically the purported enormity of the number. Yet Ms Pollit is herself headed in the opposite direction--towards rape being less and less prevalent--as even she extends the odds. And, having conceded the sketchiness of the evidence, why stop there? What about one in 100 or one in a thousand? As Ms Roiphe notes, in the decade before her book came out there were only two reported rapes at Princeton. Surely that's two too many, but only in utopian fantasy is it possible to imagine a world without rape, murder, violence of every kind. The persistence of rape, it is apparent, is a function of the human condition, not of any new "epidemic" or "crisis". Ultimately then, in trying to turn a real but minor, and inevitable, problem into a rallying cry, an organizational tool, and a political weapon Ms Pollit, the makers of the Princeton posters, the organizers of "Take Back the Night" marches, and other feminists must either be completely deluded or must have other interests in mind than actual rape.
It is here that Ms Roiphe's mere disbelief turned towards intellectual critique. Though she denied that the intent of this book was political polemic, that's precisely what it is. After all, it's not really possible to reconcile her disavowal with what she stated as her purpose:
In the pages of this book, devoted to the idea of women taking responsibility for their actions, I am writing against the grain. Moral and legal responsibility are not in vogue for anybody these days--it is never our fault or our responsibility, it is always low esteem or social oppression or our family or patterns of abuse. If we cannot trust ourselves to be responsible, we have to rely on courts and on ever-more-elaborate codes of conduct. Once the individual is not held accountable for his or her behavior, it makes a certain amount of sense that we should look to new, stringent rules of sexual conduct to keep order.In holding, or at least trying to hold, women accountable for their own actions, Ms Roiphe unleashed a firestorm of criticism, the tenor of which suggested that she was a traitor to her gender and an apologist for rape. But such attacks fail to address her broader point, that the obsessive focus on a bogus rape "crisis" could only reinforce an image of women as helpless victims and was completely incompatible with the idea of women as responsible, empowered, and prepared to compete with men as equals in all walks of life.
One metaphor from the book will be especially memorable for many folks who live in a college town, as I happen to. One of the images Ms Roiphe summoned is of the system of emergency phones that dot the Princeton campus, readily identifiable at night by the eerie blue lights mounted over them. Spaced about a hundred yards apart, they convey the obviously doubtful notion that women are at risk with nearly every footstep they take around campus. Here in New Hampshire, we're a bit behind the times, so Dartmouth only got its blue phones this past year and many of us townies were perplexed by them and the K-Mart effect they lend the campus. Little did we know that their function is mostly political, a concession to the gender warriors, rather than an actual safety necessity.
Even setting aside the fact that we're in one of the quieter regions in one of the more crime free states in one of the safest countries in the world. It just happens that as Dartmouth has expanded its property holdings, the college built a set of apartments across the street from campus, backing up against a residential neighborhood. Since the half of this block that hosts the apartments is now a part of the campus, there's a blue phone on the corner. But then, as you drive down the increasingly empty and poorly lit street and into the more thickly wooded and less densely settled neighborhood, there are no more phones. The implication, that women are less safe on a well-lit, heavily-trafficked, security-patrolled, Ivy League campus than they are in the rest of the surrounding area, whether these presumably unfamiliar side streets or, in the other direction, heading towards the downtown area, simply defies comprehension. If nothing else, this being New England, you're much more likely to slip and fall on the ice once you leave the well-tended Dartmouth grounds. This does stand though as an ideal example of what Ms Roiphe found in her college experience, that what's been created is an artificial sense that the campus is a particularly dangerous place for women, a place where men lurk around every corner, just waiting to take advantage of inherently helpless females.
One would hope that this patent absurdity is or was just a temporary phenomena of the hothouse politics of academia and that its recent appearance here is a reflection of how slowly the trend spread rather than an indication of any continuing strength. Violence against women is too serious an issue to be exploited for political reasons. Surely this must be the last dying ripple from a stone thrown years ago. At any rate, no one who reads Ms Roiphe's book will have an easy time taking seriously the claims of the activists and that seems all to the good. Young women have enough genuine concerns without folks fabricating phantoms to scare them and young men have enough problems without folks seeking to demonize them.
(Reviewed:14-Dec-02)
Grade: (B)
