From 365Gay.com:

Assuming the story is accurate, that something like this occurred is disgusting and unacceptable.

And from later in the article….

Reports of homophobic and sexist abuses by Palestinian authorities have greatly cooled my enthusiasm for “free Palestine” politics (you may have noticed I’ve posted a lot less about Israel lately). It’s become increasingly clear, I think, that a free Palestine will not provide freedom for Palestinian lesbians, gays, and other sexual minorities; and will not provide freedom for many Palestinian women. So what do we mean, when we say we want to “free Palestine”? Is all this effort just to free straight, male Palestinians, while other Palestinians will have to be content with having one fewer boot upon their necks?

This is one reason I’m attracted to the “one Israel” solution some radical leftists are advocating - the idea that Israel should accept that it now effectively owns and rules the West Bank and Gaza, and give everyone living there full citizenship and equal rights, including the right to vote in Israeli elections. Unlike the two-state solution, the one-state solution promises some degree of freedom for even lesbian and gay Palestinians, freedom they’d be unlikely to experience under a government derived from the PLO.

For the time being, however, the PLO is desperately dependant on support from Western liberals. That support should be contingent on the PLO ceasing to violate the rights of its gay citizens.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, Google will soon be launching its own free internet e-mail service along the lines of Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail but, ostensibly, better. As part of my having recently signed up for an account with Blogger, I was offered an opportunity to test Google’s Beta version of Gmail. (A side note about that: I read a news item this evening about how Gmail accounts are being sold on eBay for around $70. Why are people scrambling to buy Gmail accounts? Why not just stop by Blogger? Or, for once, am I actually special?) As I’m still looking for a good e-mail service provider, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to experiment with the new service.

So, here’s how you can help: Send me e-mail at pink.dream.poppies - at - gmail.com. Also, comment on this thread as all comments to posts I’ve written automatically get kicked over to my mailbox. I don’t mean to mail bomb me with a million two word messages, just send me little notes to tell me how wonderful I am. It’ll make my day. Also, supposedly, GMail has a 1,000 MB storage capacity per account, so why don’t a few of you send along you favourite MP3 of the moment. I don’t know if I’ll actually receive any 3-5 MB messages, but it’s worth a shot.

Happy mailing. I’ll post comments and observations on their mail system as they occur to me.
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It’s Thursday, so the third page of my Girlamatic comic book, Hereville, is up.

I would have had today’s cartoon up hours earlier, but I kept on falling asleep at the computer while coloring the page, which really slowed me down. Oy.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, “Alas” is loading very slowly nowadays (since the sidebar is the last thing to load, that in particular may take forever to show up). Our host is working on the problem, and I hope it’ll be solved soon.

On his own blog and reprinted on Marriage Debate, Justin Katz suggests that gay-friendly laws are associated with high abortion rates.

Justin doesn’t give his source, so perhaps I’m missing something. But as far as I can tell the USA only has a lower abortion rate than Sweden’s using the CDC’s numbers, which undercount abortions significantly. The Alan Guttmacher Institute (which surveys abortion providers directly, for a more accurate count) reports that the USA had an abortion rate of 21 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2000. In contrast, Sweden’s abortion rate in 1999 was 18 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44.

So unless we use a statistical source known for undercounting US abortions, Sweden has a lower abortion rate than the USA.

Even if Justin were correct about Sweden (perhaps he has a more recent data source that I don’t know about), that would only make Sweden the exception to the rule. The Netherlands - which are also very gay-friendly - has the lowest abortion rate of any country in the world (6.5 per 1,000) - much, much lower than in the USA. Belgium has extremely pro-gay laws and an abortion rate nearly as low as The Netherlands (6.8 per 1,000). The other countries in the world with gay-marriage or marriage-lite laws - Germany (7.6), Denmark (16.1), Norway (15.6), France (12.4), and Canada (15.5) - all have significantly lower abortion rates than the USA (and also lower than most countries in the world).

Meanwhile, Eastern Europe - the least gay-friendly place in the developed world - has an incredibly high abortion rate: 90 abortions per 1,000 women age 15-44. Overall, it’s clear that gay-friendly countries have fewer abortions.

Of course, correlation is not causation; it seems unlikely that gay-friendly laws cause lower abortion rates. My theory is that more sexually liberal attitudes are associated with both gay-friendly laws and widespread use of contraceptives, which would account for the correlation. (A relatively generous safety net for unwed mothers probably also lowers demand for abortion in Belgium, Germany, France and the Netherlands).

It’s also notable that in recent years, as the laws in the USA have become significantly more gay-friendly, abortion rates here have declined.

It really could. But it’s really cool - or, to be more precise, trippy - anyway.

From the January/February issue of Dollars and Sense…

The second page of my Girlamatic comic book, Hereville, is up. There’s a new page every Thursday! (Assuming I don’t mess things up.)

I’m contemplating switching to a two-pages-a-week schedule. I’m very deadline-driven, so it’s possible that I won’t be able to produce two pages a week unless I have two deadlines a week. We’ll see.

So here’s how it works: Let’s imagine two cops spot a negro driving a flashy car (one of the cops later testified that he was made suspicious by seeing a “luxury” car which “stood out a great deal in the area”). The negro then made a turn but activated his turn signal only 30 feet in advance, rather than 100 feet, so the cops decided to pull him over. (I’m sure white people get pulled over for things like that all the time.)

Once pulled over, the negro (who may have been on drugs, which justifies everything the cops did) is acting weird and is slow to respond to orders. One cop opens the car door and grabs him. Then, the negro jams his hand into his pocket. The other cop orders him to take his hand out of his pocket. But when the negro starts taking his hand out of his pocket, the cop panics and shoots. From Willamette Week:

So he shot the negro three times in the chest from six feet away, and then his partner tasered the corpse. But then it turns out that the now-dead negro was unarmed.

So then the cop enters our justice system. And now the DA’s office has a problem. The last thing Portland DAs want is to prosecute hardworking, honest cops for shooting unarmed negros to death - cops won’t be able to do their jobs if they’re punished for every little thing, after all.

Of course, the DA could refuse to press charges, but that would mean admitting in public that he favors cops shooting unarmed negros, and that sort of openly taking responsibility might piss off voters. It’s the 21st century; politicians aren’t allowed to obviously favor killing negros, like they could in the good old days.

No problem! A smart DA can just play games with the judicial system to protect a cop’s god-given right to shoot unarmed negros to death. So the DA goes to the grand jury. Normally, a DA presents his best case against the defendant to the grand jury, which then decides if there’s enough evidence to justify a trial. But if you’re a Portland DA, and if the victim is only an unarmed negro, then what you do is present the case for the defense.

(Mike Schrunk, by the way, also doesn’t appear to take statutory rape very seriously - at least, not when it’s committed by one of his pals. Jack Bog has the details.)

Since the grand jury hears only the evidence the DA chooses to present, a DA who presents the defense case to the grand jury is guaranteeing that the cop will get off. And best of all, the DA gets a free pass from the public for his whitewashing the shooting of an unarmed negro, since no one really gives a fuck. Sure, it’s a perversion of justice and a severe abuse of the grand jury system, but that’s not worth reporting on. It’s only a dead negro, for God’s sake! No need to make a fuss.

* * *

God damn it. You know, I’m not sure if the flip tone of this post is appropriate, but the truth is I’m trembling with fury about this, and if I try to write about it without being flip I’d just end up posting a string of swear words, so deal with it.

I did a nexus search; no major paper in Oregon even reported on the rather astounding fact that the DAs put an expert witness for the defense in front of the grand jury.

There’s no way a white person would have been shot the way James Perez (or Kendra James before him, or Jose Poot before her) was shot. And if by some miracle a white person was shot on a pretext pull-over, there’s no way the Portland DA’s office would cheat the grand jury system to make sure that the cops were spared the discomfort of a trial. And if that did happen, the mainstream papers would at least report it.

Mike Schrunk and his boss John Bradley looked at the color of the victim’s skin and said, “screw it! Blacks aren’t human; the shooting of an unarmed black person doesn’t require a trial, because black lives aren’t worth that much.” A hundred years ago Schrunk and Bradley would have gotten their rocks off participating in lynch mobs, but since they can’t have that pleasure nowadays, they have to settle for gaming the justice system to make it legal for cops to shoot blacks.

It drives me up a wall that Schrunk and Bradley are still being treated with respect. Why aren’t they spit on by every decent person, everywhere they go? Why aren’t they turned away from restaurants and stores? Why aren’t their houses and cars vandalized every day? Why isn’t the mayor - or any of the folks running for mayor - calling for them to resign or be thrown out of office?

Because, truth be known, the mayor and the Oregonian and everyone else hates black people just as much as Schrunk and Bradley themselves do. Because, in the final analysis, the dead guy was only a negro, and that means that his life has no value in our society. Why make a fuss?

Politically, I’m against the idea that people should be for peace “as mothers”; I don’t beleive that women have some innate liking of peace that men lack. (The best essay on this is Katha Pollitt’s “Marooned on Gilligan’s Island,” which - alas - doesn’t seem to be available online). Nonetheless, it’s good to remember that Mother’s Day actually stood for something, once upon a time.

So was everyone who watched this past Wednesday’s Angel as irritated by the ending as I was?

Don’t get me wrong, it was a fun episode. And I like the basic idea of showing that Andrew has actually grown up a bit.

But what’s with the ending, in which the visual representation of Andrew’s growing up is that he’s going out for a night on the town with two gorgious babes (female variety)? The implication is that “growing up” consists of a movement from not-very-closeted homosexuality to the adolescant vision of heterosexuality represented by James Bond - and, in the sixth season of Buffy, represented by Warren.

As my housemate Charles ponted out, Andrew wasn’t overtly sexual with the two women; so the creators left themselves an “out” (as it were). Andrew hasn’t turned straight, and the point of the ending wasn’t to imply a three-way; he was just getting dressed up to go bar-hopping with two model-looking female friends of his. But that isn’t how most of the viewers will read the scene, and the creators of the show know that perfectly well.

Would it have killed them to show Andrew going out with a young man who seemed to treat Andrew decently? No, no - two hot blondes is much more mature.

* * *

In a completely unrelated rant, I just watched an episode of My So-Called Life. It was a pretty interesting episode; all the plotlines - even the English class reading The Metamorphosis - converged on being about girl’s and women’s insecurities about their appearances.

My favorite part was a scene in history class, which had no dialog aside from a video of a Malcolm X speech, which the class was watching. As the camera panned across the room (which seemed to have more black students than other classes in this episode) and settled on the main character, obsessing over a zit on her chin, Malcolm X’s speech said:

It was a very effective moment; what had been presented pretty much as personal hang-ups among the girls suddenly became politicized. Who taught these girls to hate the shape of their noses, the shape of their lips?

But then I got to thinking: Why is it that we can’t seem to get away from viewing the black civil rights struggle as the Platonic civil rights struggle, the struggle that all other struggles must resemble or else be illegitimate?

Think of the debate, in recent months, over if same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue. It’s almost always presented in the same way: as a question of if the gay rights movement is similar to or different from the black civil rights movement (those who are pro-SSM say “similar,” those who aren’t say “different”). It’s rarely presented as a question of if justice and equality are being denied to same-sex couples, taken on their own terms.

It’s like a perverse variation of the “model minority myth,” which is so often used to attack blacks (e.g., “if Jews and Asians made it despite discrimination, why can’t blacks?”). This time, it’s the “model civil rights movement” myth. We need to get over it.

Hey there!

For those of you wondering why I’m blogging less, my new online comic at Girlamatic is the reason. The comic is called “Hereville” - I’ve posted about it before.

Here’s a bit of how the series was described in the Hereville proposal:

There will be a new Hereville page posted in Girlamatic every week, always on Thursday. As I understand it, you can see each new page for free for the week of its release, but to be able to read the archives you’d have to subscribe to Girlamatic (which gives you access to all the Girlamatic comics, not just mine).

If you do subscribe, please consider selecting “Hereville” when you’re asked “what convinced you?” - it’ll make me look good to my editor, and put a few extra cents in my pocket.

[This is a reprint of a post from 2002, following up on the previous post, which is also a reprint from 2002.]

In the comments for my earlier post discussing rape, Rob Lyman wrote:

I did say, at the start of that post, that I was discussing Mary Koss’ survey of college men. But in retrospect, I should have emphasized that there are problems generalizing from a college population to a general population.

However, I’m leery that “we don’t know for certain, because we lack data” sometimes becomes an excuse to ignore the data we do have. (This is an “in general” comment, not a criticism of Rob). To my knowledge, only three U.S. studies have used behaviorally-specific questions to ask how many men commit rape, and only one - the Koss study I cited, which surveyed college students - had a national sample. (I haven’t read the other two yet, but I’m told they found similar results). In other words, the Koss study is the best information we currently have on this subject. And considering how under-studied this area is, it may be the best information we ever get.

From an academic point of view, that’s not good enough. One cannot say in an academic journal, “from the data we have, the number of rapists among college men is pretty damn terrifying, which makes it seem plausible that the number among the general male population may be terrifying as well.”

That’s a reasonable point of view - for academic journals. Outside the academic world, however, it’s sometimes necessary to draw the best inferences we can from imperfect data. It is not reasonable or possible to postpone drawing conclusions and addressing problems until perfect data exists, because it is likely that perfect data will never exist.

So I think Rob was right. I have to admit, it’s theoretically possible that men who go to college are enormously more likely to have committed rape since turning 14, than those who don’t go to college. But - speaking as a non-academic - it doesn’t seem likely.

Also in the comments, Ardinger asks “if 4.5% of men are rapists, what percentage of the women you meet are rape victims?”

According to Dr. Koss’ study (which was conducted in the early to mid eighties), about 12% of college women have been victims of completed rape at some point since age 14.

This result of Koss’ study has been frequently criticized by anti-feminists. But at least three other nationwide studies of lifetime rape prevalence came to similar conclusions; the National Women’s Study found 13% (not available online, sorry), the Centers for Disease Control study found 14.8%, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics study of college women found 10%.

I don’t think there will ever be a single number that people can point to and say “this is the right answer.” Unreported rape is inherently difficult to measure; there will never be a study that someone can’t find reason to doubt, and every new study will raise new questions. But from the best studies currently available, somewhere between 10% and 15% of American women have been raped in their lifetimes.

My conclusion: Maybe the “real” number is that 2% of men commit rape sometime in their life, and 8% of women are raped. Maybe it’s more like 8% and 20%. We’ll never know for sure. But from the data that’s currently available, we can say this: Rape is a scary, serious, widespread national problem. It is not something committed by a freakishly small minority of men (unlike, say, serial killing); it is not something that happens to a small number of women.

Feminists want a society in which rape is rare (or nonexistent), and rapists are freakishly unusual deviants. But the first step in building that society is realizing we’re not there yet; we’re not even close. We’ll never change if we can’t even admit the scope of the problem.

In the comments to Monday’s post about Mary Koss’ rape prevalence research, Donald Johnson asks:

Donald’s question (and that I’ve been posting so much about Koss lately) makes this seem like a good time to reprint this (slightly edited) post from 2002.

* * *

(I swiped the idea for this post, and many of the stats, from this Tim Wise article on racism. The statistics in this post that didn’t come from Tim Wise’s article, came from either the Statistical Abstract of the US 2001 or from the American Jewish Year Book 2001).

Mary Koss’ much-discussed 1987 study of rape prevalence is famous mostly for its fidning that 1 in 8 college women have been victims of rape at some point in their lives. What’s not as well known is that the same study also surveyed thousands of college men, asking them about if they had ever forced a woman to have sex against her will. About 4.5% reported that they had.

It seems to me that we can draw two conclusions from this number (assuming it’s somewhat accurate - see the next post for more discussion of that). First - as even anti-feminists will agree - we can say that the overwhelming majority of men are not rapists. That’s good. Nonetheless, it’s also true that a terrifyingly high number of men have committed rape.

4.5% of the men in the United States is an incredibly high number - that translates into over six million men.

If you added up every US citizen who was officially unemployed or looking for work in 2001, that would be less than the total number of rapists.

If you added up every US citizen who is Jewish, that would still be less than the total number of rapists.

If you added up every teenage boy who had any sort of job - an afterschool job, a summer job, working full-time after dropping out, including all of those - you’d still have over a million fewer people then the total number of rapists.

There are twice as many rapists in the USA as there are single mothers.

For every drunk driver who is in a fatal accident this year, there are over 500 rapists.

If you take every doctor and nurse in the United States; and you added them to every librarian, every cashier, every cop, every postal clerk, and every bank teller in the whole country; you still wouldn’t have as many people as the number of rapists in the United States.

(Think of that a second - think of how often, in your daily life, you’ve seen cops and cashiers and all those other folks. Odds are, you’ve run into rapists more often than that).

To paraphrase Tim Wise: In short, “only” 4.5% of the male population is a lot of people, so that even by the most optimistic assessment of how many men are rapists, there are literally millions out there who not only would but have raped a woman. When combined with those who are less vicious - those who haven’t raped, but would be willing to in the right circumstances, and those who would make excuses for why other men rape, it becomes clear just how real a widespread a problem rape and rape-supportive attitudes are among men today.

As I understand it, the feminist theory is not that every men, or most men, are rapists. It’s that rape is a commonplace enough thing so that at some level most women are to some degree kept in fear of rape, because the possibility is always there.

When I’ve spoken to men, I’ve tried using this example:

4.5% is not a small number of men.

[edited a bit to reflect nobody.really's criticism in the comments]

An anonymous IWF author, criticizing Mary Koss’ famous study of rape incidence (there’s more info in this post, for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about), wrote:

Although the IWF doesn’t say what the purpose of presenting this statistic is, most readers will take it as an indication of how outrageously high Koss’ numbers are. (Indeed, if that isn’t the point, why on earth include the statistic in a critique of Koss at all?)

Such a comparison is wildly unscientific and irresponsible. No legitimate comparisons can be made between a lifetime prevalence self-report survey and the numbers of such incidents that occur on campus in one year. But for the purpose of rebutting the IWF’s bad methodology, I’m going to pretend they can be compared. And unlike the IWF, I’m going to do the math. How far apart are this stat and the numbers given in Koss’ report?

To start with, we need to ask “how many female undergraduates are on an average college campus?” (Koss’ statistic about rape victims included only female undergrads). According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, in 2000 there were 12,450,587 undergrads in the USA. Of those, 55.9%, or 6,959,878, were women. There are 4,096 colleges and universities in the US, which works out to an average of 1,699 female undergrads per college campus.

So of those 1,699 women on a college campus, how many will be victims of rape in a typical year, according to Koss’ numbers? The famous “1 in 4″ figure is a lifetime figure that includes both rape and attempted rape; the “less than one per campus” figure, on the other hand, is about completed rapes within a single year. So we can’t compare those two numbers directly.

Fortunately, Koss’ report includes a calculation of annual incidence of completed rapes only - out of 3,187 undergraduate women Koss surveyed, 207, or 6%, were victims of rape in the past year. Since the average US campus has 1,699 female undergrads, and 6% of 1,699 is 102, according to Koss’ study we’d expect 102 undergraduate women at an average college to be victims of rape each year.

Look again at the statistic the anonymous IWF author is comparing Koss to: “…campus police reported 1,310 forcible sex offenses on U.S. campuses in one year.” So we’re not talking about all the rapes that happen in a single year; just the rapes that happen “on U.S. campuses.”

Koss’ survey asked rape victims if the rape had taken place on or off campus. 14% reported that it had taken place on campus. So out of 102 rapes happening to undergraduate women in a year, according to Koss’ results, we’d expect 15 to actually take place on campus.

But we can’t assume that all 15 reported the incident to campus police. According to Koss, only 5% of rape victims said they had reported the incident to the cops at all. And 5% of 15 is 0.75.

So according to the statistic the IWF offers - a statistic that, clearly, is meant to discredit Koss’ results - there is “an average of fewer than one rape per campus” per year that campus police know about. And according to my calculations, based on Koss’ numbers we’d expect to see - less than one rape known to the cops per college campus per year.

In other words, Koss’ study found exactly what it should have, according to the statistic the IWF author supplied. So how, exactly, does that disprove Koss?

I need to focus more time on a cartooning project I’ve got going (more about that later). So I’m sort of going on “Alas” hiatus for a while.

I don’t mean that I won’t be posting. But I’ll be posting much less often. And I’ll definitely be doing many fewer “list of links” posts (those are more time-intensive than you might imagine!).

I’m not really sure how long this will last; maybe just a week or two, maybe it’ll be permanent. We’ll see what happens, okay?

A recent Wendy McElroy column cited this IWF critique of rape prevalence research by Mary Koss. (For those of you who don’t know it, the IWF - or Independent Women’s Forum - is a right-wing anti-feminist think tank.)

Here’s what the IWF has to say:

Here’s a bit of fun trivia: Shortly after the IWF released this piece, I had a debate with an IWF flunky about it on one of their discussion boards (they’ve since taken the debate offline). At the time, I wrote this:

Sometime since then, some enterprising IWF person has stuck in a few citations to works by Mary Koss (otherwise the piece is unchanged). How funny.

Anyway, let’s get on with the fisking, shall we? The IWF wrote:

“Commissioned” implies that Ms. thought up the idea for the study, found a researcher to implement it, and funded it. None of that is true. Koss thought of the study in the 1970s and presented a preliminary paper in 1980, years before Ms’s involvment began (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, v 50 n3 455-457, 1982). Although Ms donated office suffort to help make the 1987 national version of Koss’ study possible, Koss’ approach and design were set in place and published before Ms’ involvement. The study was funded by a grant from the Natinal Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), not by Ms. (The NIMH had more to do with Koss’ study than Ms - they approved of the design and of which tasks Ms was allowed to participate in).

(Curious that the IWF doesn’t mention that Koss was at the time a professor at Kent State, or that her study design was approved by the NIMH, or that it had gone through the peer-review process at the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.)

Again, Koss was doing her research long before Steinem or Ms had heard of Koss.

This is a mis-statement of what the study actually found.

73% answered no to the question, “it was definitely rape”; it’s not safe to conclude from that they’re sure it was not rape!

We have to consider context: we’re talking about young women, most of whom were raped by someone they knew (usually someone they were dating and had already been sexually fooling around with), who were in high school over 20 years ago, when discussions of date rape were extremely rare. It is any surprise that most of them weren’t positive that their experience was “definitely” rape?

We should also look at the implications of deciding, as the IWF in essence does, that “if the victim doesn’t say it was ‘definitely’ rape, it’s not.” 70% of the alleged rape victims in Koss’ study resisted by physically struggling with the man, and 84% tried to reason with him to no avail. The large majority reported having sex when they didn’t want to due to force or threat of force.

The IWF’s argument is essentially that “it doesn’t matter if the woman resisted physically, tried to reason with the man, and felt they had unwanted sex due to force or threat of force; if they didn’t check ‘yes’ next to the words ‘it was definitely rape,’ then it wasn’t rape.” Should anyone be comfortable with that logic?

Really? The article writer must know this because of her strange mental powers, because nothing in Koss’ study supports this statistic.

All we know from the study is that 43% had intercourse with their rapist (or “rapist”) at some later date. We don’t know anything else; we don’t know how many of those later occasions were voluntary and how many were repeat rapes, for example. We do know, however, that the typical rapist is very often a boyfriend - someone the victim is dating before the rape.

So what does this 43% figure really tell us? IMO, it could show that girls who are violently abused (and rape is a form of violent abuse, no less than battery) by boyfriends don’t always immediately break off the relationship. Is that really a shocker, or anything that we should accept as proof that a girl or women can’t really have been raped? (Over 50% of the rape victims in Koss’ study were raped by someone they were dating - and had gone at least as far as “petting above the waist” with them before the rape.) (Also, keep in mind that we’re hardly talking about a group of experienced, sexually confident woman here; over 40% of the rape victims were virgins at the time of the rape.)

This critique of Koss just restates the old “a woman who stays must not really have been abused” myth. It’s bullshit when said regarding battered women, and it’s bullshit when said regarding raped women, too.

Koss’ study (”Scope of rape: Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Higher Education Students”) can be found in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology v 55 (2) p. 162-170, 1987. The research, while not perfect (no study is flawless), is sober and responsible, and certainly not “hysteria.” Don’t take my word for it - or the IWF’s word for it - read it yourself.

I agree. But if the IWF was interested in “truth,” why not give the full information about the study - both that Ms was involved and that it was supervised by the NIMH and peer-reviewed, the stat about later sexual intercourse and the stat about struggling to get away - and let readers judge the truth for themselves? Why didn’t she mention the other studies - including ones by the U.S. Government - which have found results similar to Koss’?

Of course, I have nothing against advocates giving only one side of the story - by and large, that’s what advocates do. But to self-rightiously mouth pieties about “truth” while giving only one side of the story is a bit much. IF you’re seriously going to search for truth, you have to give readers both sides of the story. The IWF critique doesn’t do that.

* * *

Enough with the fisking. Let me just state what I consider the core issues.

The main findings Dr. Koss made about rape (as opposed to about sexual coercion in general) are: One, that many women - somewhere in the general range of 1 in 8 - have been victims of rape at some point in their lifetime. Two, that rape is very rarely reported to police. Third, that rape is usually committed by someone known to the victim, not by a stranger.

All three of these findings were widely suspected when Koss began her study, but had not been verified with social science research.

These three findings have since been upheld by every nationwide survey designed to measure violence against women. That, in social science research, is usually the gold standard - if a finding can be repeated, then it should be taken seriously.

So which are these other studies?

• The NIJ/CDC “National Violence Against Women Study” found that 14.8% of American women experience a completed rape at some time in their lifetime. A typical rape-defining question was worded like this: “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.”
• The Department of Justice’s Sexual Victimization of College Women study included a sub-study in which college women were asked about lifetime incidence of rape (most of the study asked about rape since the beginning of the school year,which isn’t directly comparable to Koss). 10% of the women interviewed reported having been raped at some point in their lifetime. Rape was defined as “unwanted completed penetration by force or the threat of force.”
• There’s also The National Women’s Study (NWS), a large-scale national study which found that 13% of American women have been raped in their lifetime.

At least a dozen other studies have confirmed Koss’ results, but those three are the biggies.

As the war crimes at Abu Ghraib continue to come to light (for those of you who don’t know, the short version is this: photos have been published of six American soliders, male and female, torturing Iraqi prisoners) I’ve seen more than a few comments along these lines, from Bitch Has Word:

Or this one from the comments at Billmon:

I have to admit that I’ve been surprised every time I’ve encountered this sentiment, and yet I’ve also been not surprised at all.

I think comments like these come about because of one of two ideas: the idea that women don’t do this sort of thing, and the idea that women should be less inclinded to do this kind of thing because it is so often done to them. Both of these views are pervasive in our society, particularly the first; torture and war are supposed to be the domain of men, while women are supposed to be too weak-willed for, too empathic for, or just better than that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Women can be every bit as nasty and brutish as men; evil is hardly the sole domain of a single gender. Women turned Jews over to the Nazis; women owned and beat, or had beaten, slaves; women have been spies, traitors, murders, and thieves. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that, when put in a situation where there was, apparently, an implicit or explicit order to extract information from people through whatever means possible that women should become torturers just as men do. There’s no real reason to believe that they wouldn’t. As BHW pointed out in her post, “I guess the mob mentality kicked in for her, too.”

One thing that seems particularly surprising to some is the sexual nature of the torture and humilitation, particularly that a woman would engage in torture and humiliation of a sexual nature. Women may be more often threatened by and victims of sexual assault and violence, but this hardly means that they are immune to commiting such acts themselves when placed in a position where they have absolute authority. In much the same way that children who have been abused can grow up to be parents who abuse their children, the sons and daughters of alcoholics can become alcoholics themselves, and even the friends who stab their friends in the back despite having had this done to them — in much the same way as these things can happen, so too can women become the perpetrators of sexual assault when placed in the just right (really, just wrong) position of being able to commit them.

There isn’t a doubt in my mind that it is a good thing that women are (slowly) being allowed to join the armed forces in (slowly) whatever way they see fit, but at the same time I think that we are all going to have to (unfortunately) become used to seeing situations like this one. We appropriately bristle at the suggestion that one should be surprised when a woman performs an act or heroism, bravery, or strength; why should we be so surprised then when a woman performs or participates in an atrocity?

(BHW link via Feministe.)

Update: Just to be clear on something: I’m not saying or meaning to suggest that torture, or even war, is an okay thing and that we should just get used to women participating in it. On the contrary, we should be shocked and appalled that any person of either sex thinks that this is ever an appropriate way to treat any other human being.

[Edited to include something I meant to include when I first wrote it.]