This is a guest post by Thomas Macaulay Millar. Thomas regularly blogs at Yes Means Yes, where this post originally appeared.
The title is wrong, here. Since Allen is (In Amanda Marcotte’s words) a “professional concern troll,” she has no interest in the “memo,” as it were. She’s not interested in accuracy or research. She’s interested in insulting feminism for fun and profit, which is a whole career for some writers.
There have been lots of responses to Allen’s curt, scolding missive in the LA Times. Jill Filipovic responded, and Lindsay Beyerstein, and Hugo Schwyzer. They’re all worth reading and I won’t repeat what they have to say.
What I have to add is this: Allen’s idea is that rape is merely a sexual urge men cannot control. Leaving aside all the other evidence, this ignores the recent research into who the rapists are: they are not out of control. They are very much in control. Allen’s puritanical finger-wagging cannot hold up to the actual evidence.
I’ve written on this. I’ve written on this a great deal, in fact. The work of David Lisak from University of Massachusetts, and Stephanie McWhorter, whose independent work confirms his results, tell us a great deal that previously was only the subject of speculation from non-representative samples. I covered the major papers (Lisak’s is here) at length in Meet The Predators, and their implications in Predator Redux, and then the National Public Radio follow-up, with the story of a real college rapist, in Predators Again: NPR Cites Lisak. Then I summarized all of it more concisely in Predator Theory. I’ve done all I can to popularize this work and make it part of the conversation about rape, because it’s really important. It changes what we know and how we should look at rape and rapists. It’s groundbreaking and foundational.
So what do we know? Here’s the elevator pitch:
Most rapes are committed by a single-digit portion of the population. They use the methods that produce the least evidence and are least likely to get them prosecuted: they use alcohol and fear rather than overt force, they target acquaintances rather than strangers, and they employ careful methods to test boundaries and select victims who are least likely to be able or willing to resist or seek redress. Each such serial rapist has an average of six victims.
What does that mean for Allen? Well, her theory is totally at odd with that. Careful, planning predators are not overcome with urges they can’t control. They don’t test and see, plot to isolate and intoxicate. That takes hours, or even days. That is the work of a cold, calculating predator. It means rapists are not just the average guy, and the average guy is not a rapist. It means that rape is not the result of miscommunications, and since it’s not the result of miscommunications, sending “mixed signals” isn’t the problem.
What is the problem? Well, in the first instance, the rapists are the problem. They need to stop raping people. But they’re not doing it by accident, so no program of education will make them stop. Instead, we as a culture need to clear the underbrush they hide in: the tangle of sexist crap and conventional wisdom that results in a practical inability to enforce laws against rape except in cases that fit a very narrow paradigm. Make no mistake, the culture is the problem.
And that means that Allen is the problem, or a part of it anyway. Her evidence-free spewings are that underbrush. She may or may not think she’s on the rapists’ side (she’s so hateful that in her heart of hearts she probably is). But that is the effect. Even though there’s no evidence to link, say, wearing revealing clothing with rape, Allen is telling the whole world that there’s a link. She can’t really prove it, but she’s sure. She’s exactly the person I was talking about in How To Be Part Of The Problem when I wrote:
It never fails. They never fail. Somehow, some way, whether talking about the specific circumstances or in the aggregate, the “yes but” apologist always posits some magical risk-reduction maneuver. If only she had X, they insists, it wouldn’t have happened. Like X is easy. The list gets longer every year… the goal of putting the focus on the woman’s conduct is to make sure that when it happens again, the excuse is in place. “She didn’t X!” they can say. She did it wrong, they can say. And then, they always say, “I’m not saying she deserved to be raped, BUT …”
Charlotte Allen isn’t saying that women who dress in ways she disapproves of deserve to be raped the same way the Republican candidates are not saying that people without health insurance1 deserve to die: she’s not saying it outright, but it’s no accident that readers come away with that. She’s not saying it, the way that contraception opponents are not saying that unwanted pregnancy and infection are god’s chosen punishment for sluts: she’s not coming out and saying it, but that’s the subtext that is clearly conveyed.
It is the Charlotte Allens of the world who determine what happens when a woman gets raped in the way it usually happens: without visible injuries, by a man she knows. The voice that asks, “well, what were you wearing?” is Charlotte Allen’s, coming from the LA Times, though the mouth of someone whose support the survivor needs. “What was he supposed to think?” Allen asks, through the surrogates who read her words. These are the voices that chill and shut down survivors until they sit on their beds, not eating or eating constantly and wearing every piece of clothing they can get on and telling their friends that they don’t want to talk about it when what they mean is they need more than anything to talk about it but can’t trust anyone to listen without judgment. Charlotte Allen is the reason they sometimes track me down and email me or PM me and tell me they’ve never told anyone, not even their mom, and it’s been two years, or ten.
Charlotte Allen is the problem. Charlotte Allen personifies the rapists’ social license to operate.
Notes:
1. This post was truncated at this point when originally published due to a technical glitch. Apologies for any confusion.