[Shorter Amp: Eugene Kanin famously found that 41%, or perhaps 50%, of rapes reported to police are false. Kanin's study is both badly designed and unverifiable; more reliable studies have found that between 2% and 8% of rapes reported to police are false reports.]

In a new (sort of) post on on Ifeminists, Wendy McElroy¹ suggests that false rape reports are common, relying heavily on Eugene Kanin’s famous study of false rape allegations. This study is commonly cited by MRAs and anti-feminists. McElroy writes:

How prevalent is the false reporting of sexual assault? Estimates vary widely.

According to much-cited feminist statistics, two percent of all reports are false. Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will (1975), for example, claims that false accusations in New York City dropped to that level after police departments began using policewomen to interview alleged victims. Elsewhere, the two percent figure appears without citation or with a vague attribution to “FBI” sources.

According to a study conducted by Eugene Kanin of Purdue University, the correct figure may rise to the 40 percent range. Kanin examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987. Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as “false.” Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were “false.”

Studies and statistics often vary and for legitimate reasons. For example, they may examine different populations. But such a dramatic variance — two percent to 50 percent — raises the question of whether political interests are at work.

Tellingly, McElroy doesn’t go on to question whether Kanin — or the police whose records Kanin reported — might have “political interests” or biases. If McElroy applied her argument honestly, her “dramatic variance” logic would necessarily raise suspicions of both statistics. Instead, her skepticism (in this article, at least) is reserved solely for feminists.

I think the 2% statistic deserves skepticism and criticism; it’s popularity among feminists is an example of what I meant when I wrote “Within feminism, there’s sometimes too little skepticism regarding statistics and news stories which emphasize harms against women. We’ve created a culture which does a rotten job of self-correction.”

That said, the 2% statistic is not wildly out of line with some other reported statistics. Quoting an article in St. John’s Law Review:²

To illustrate, when the Portland, Oregon police department examined the 431 complaints of completed or attempted sexual assault in 1990, 1.6% were determined to be false. This was in comparison with a rate of 2.6% for false reports of stolen vehicles.

Similarly, Sgt. Joanne Archambault of the Sex Crimes Division of the San Diego Police Department routinely evaluated the rate of false reports over several years and found them to be around 4%.

More recently, the FBI reported an unfounded rate of 5.4% for forcible rapes (quoted in a newspaper article, via Abyss2Hope). However, because “unfounded” does not mean “false,” the actual “false” number would be lower than 5.4%. Quoting the Oregon sexual assault task force report (pdf link):

It is critical to bear in mind that a report determined to be unfounded is not synonymous with a false allegation or report. This distinction is important enough that it is worth repeating – a report that has been unfounded is not the same as a false report (or false allegation).

The FBI definition of unfounded specifically refers to cases that are found to be false or baseless. [...] Typically a baseless report is the result of a mistake of law – the reporter believed that they were the victim of a crime when based on the state criminal code they were not.

Even Eugene Kanin has written “unfounded rape can and does mean many things, with false allegation being only one of them, and sometimes the least of them.” (Pdf source.)

So how common are false rape reports? No one can say for certain. However, after conducting a review of the (extremely limited) available research, a recent report by The National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women concluded:³

When more methodologically rigorous research has been conducted, estimates for the percentage of false reports begin to converge around 2-8%.

So what about Kanin’s report, which found that over 40% of rapes reported to police are false? I wouldn’t suggest that Kanin has a political agenda — but I do think his methodology (which consists of tabulating police data from an unidentified small town) was overly credulous.

First of all, it’s important to realize that Kanin has kept secret what police force he was studying. This may have been necessary to gain access to police records, but it also means no other researcher has ever had the chance to verify Kanin’s findings and claims. There is no indication that Kanin attempted to interview any of the alleged false rape accusers to get their perspective, or in any way attempted to independently verify anything he was told by police. Kanin also implies that the recanters were told they’d be charged with filing false reports, but does not report the outcome of those charges.

In other words, Kanin’s study consists of Kanin uncritically reporting the claims of a single police force in a small, unidentified city, without those claims having been checked or verified in any way whatsoever.

Contrast that to this description of a genuinely rigorous study conducted by the British Government:³

The largest and most rigorous study that is currently available in this area is the third one commissioned by the British Home Office (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). The analysis was based on the 2,643 sexual assault cases (where the outcome was known) that were reported to British police over a 15-year period of time. Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports. Yet the researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators, based on the victim’s mental illness, inconsistent statements, drinking or drug use. These classifications were thus made in violation of the explicit policies of their own police agencies. The researchers therefore supplemented the information contained in the police files by collecting many different types of additional data, including: reports from forensic examiners, questionnaires completed by police investigators, interviews with victims and victim service providers, and content analyses of the statements made by victims and witnesses. They then proceeded to evaluate each case using the official criteria for establishing a false allegation, which was that there must be either “a clear and credible admission by the complainant”⁴ or “strong evidential grounds” (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). On the basis of this analysis, the percentage of false reports dropped to 2.5%.

Kanin (quoted by Marcella Chester) describes how the police relied on by his study determined that a case was false:

In fact, agency policy forbids police officers to use their discretion in deciding whether to officially acknowledge a rape complaint, regardless how suspect that complaint may be. Second, the declaration of a false allegation follows a highly institutionalized procedure. The investigation of all rape complaints always involves a serious offer to polygraph the complainants and the suspects. Additionally, for a declaration of false charge to be made, the complainant must admit that no rape had occurred. She is the sole agent who can say that the rape charge is false. The police department will not declare a rape charge as false when the complainant, for whatever reason, fails to pursue the charge or cooperate on the case, regardless how much doubt the police may have regarding the validity of the charge. In short, these cases are declared false only because the complainant admitted they are false.

However, as the sexual assault task force for the State of Oregon (pdf link) wrote (emphasis theirs):

Victim Recantation is a retraction or withdrawal of a reported sexual assault. Recantations are routinely used by victims to disengage the criminal justice system and are therefore not, by themselves, indicative of a false report.

If over 40% of women reporting rape recant — even though multiple, more rigorous studies have found false rape reports are usually 2%-8% of all reports — that could indicate a police culture which gives rape victims an extremely strong reason to want to “disengage the criminal justice system,” even if they’re threatened with a fine or a short jail stay. And, as we will see, routinely pressuring all reported rape victims to take a lie detector test is a sign of a police department with a strong bias against taking rape reports seriously.

Jody Raphael, of the DePaul University College of Law, wrote:⁵

[Kanin's study] is frequently cited on web sites devoted to debunking the prevalence of rape. During this ten year period, the police department followed policy (now deemed unlawful by the U.S. Congress for police departments receiving federal funds) that required polygraphing complainants and suspects as a condition of investigating rape reports. Kanin’s department only declared a complaint false when the victim recanted and admitted it was.

In his published journal article, Kanin (1994) admitted that “A possible objection to these recantations concerns their validity….rather than proceed with the real charge of rape, the argument goes, these women withdrew their accusations to avoid the trauma of police investigation.”

And indeed, the Kanin study has been criticized for the department’s use of polygraph testing in every case, a process that has been rejected by many police departments because of its intimidating impact on victims. The International Association of Chiefs of Police disapproves of requiring polygraph tests during rape investigations because “victims often feel confused and ashamed, and experience a great deal of self-blame because of something they did or did not do in relation to the sexual assault. These feelings may compromise the reliability of the results of such interrogation techniques. The use of these interrogation techniques can also compound these feelings and prolong the trauma of a sexual assault” (Lisak, 2007, p.6).

Given the popularity of Kanin’s study, especially in light of the collapse of the Duke University lacrosse players prosecution, David Lisak (2007), an associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, cautions that this particular police department employed a common procedure in which officers’ inherent suspicion of rape victims results in a confrontational approach towards the victim that would likely result in an extraordinarily high number of victim recantations. Lisak also points out that Kanin’s is not a research study, because it only puts forth the opinions of the police officers without any further investigation on his part.

Kanin (1994) himself cautioned against the generalizability of his findings…

Sally Baird, in a letter to the editor, also cites Lisak’s article, writing:

Prof. Kanin’s study was examined in the article “False Allegations of Rape: A Critique of Kanin” by Dr. David Lisak in the September/October 2007 issue of the Sexual Assault Report. Dr. Lisak is an associate professor of psychology and director of the Men’s Sexual Trauma Research Project at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Dr. Lisak says that “Kanin’s 1994 article on false allegations is a provocative opinion piece, but it is not a scientific study of the issue of false reporting of rape. It certainly should never be used to assert a scientific foundation for the frequency of false allegations.”

He makes the point that Kanin “simply reiterates the opinions of the police officers who concluded that the cases in question were ‘false allegations.’” After citing an International Association of Chiefs of Police manual (Investigating Sexual Assaults, www.theiacp.org/documents/pdfs/RCD/Inves… p. 13), which states that polygraph tests for sexual assault victims are contradicted in the investigation process and that their use is “based on the misperception that a significant percentage of sexual assault reports are false,” Lisak then observes that “It is noteworthy that the police department from which Kanin derived his data used or threatened to use the polygraph in every case… The fact that it was the standard procedure of this department provides a window on the biases of the officers who conducted the rape investigations, biases that were then echoed in Kanin’s unchallenged reporting of their findings.”

For more reading, I’d highly recommend:

Abyss2Hope is far and away the best blog on this subject: Here, here, here, here and here, for starters. And see as well, Date Rape Is Real Rape.

Successfully Investigating Acquaintance Sexual Assault: A National Training Manual for Law Enforcement includes an excellent chapter on the question of false rape allegations (pdf link).

False Reports: Moving Beyond the Issue to Successfully Investigate and Prosecute Non-Stranger Sexual Assault (pdf Link).

1. If McElroy’s post feels a little stale, that’s probably because it’s a Kobe-related column she wrote six years ago, with paragraphs strategically deleted. (back)
2. Hecht-Schafran, L. (1993). Writing and reading about rape: A primer. St. John’s Law Review, 66, 979-1045. Due to the age of those studies, I haven’t read the primary sources, or even the secondary source, which was quoted to me in an email from Kimberly A. Lonsway, co-editor of Sexual Assault Report. (back)
3. Quoted from “False Reports: Moving Beyond the Issue to Successfully Investigate and Prosecute Non-Stranger Sexual Assault,” by Kimberly Lonsway, Joanne Archambault, David Lisak. (Pdf link.) (back) (back)
4. I’m a bit skeptical of accepting an “admission by the complainant” as proof of a false rape report, for reasons described elsewhere in this post. In this case, it would depend on what their criteria for “clear and credible” are. (back)
5. Violence Against Women, Vol. 14, No. 3, 370-375 (2008). Pdf link. (back)

The Countess

As I had expected, the news about the woman who has been ordered by a judge to take her children to see their father, the man who had raped her, is bringing out the claims by men’s rights activists that women frequently falsely accuse men of rape. A big problem is including unfounded cases with cases of outright false allegations. When a rape case is deemed unfounded, it does not mean the woman was lying.

This blog continues with some excellent information on how statistics on rape cases may feed into the myth that most rape allegations are false and therefore no rape occurred.

Fox News

“Every year since 1989, in about 25 percent of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI where results could be obtained, the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing….”

There is a huge flaw in using this data to say that 25% of the sexual assaults reported didn’t happen and therefore 25% of the alleged rape victims are liars.

In many of the cases handled by the Innocence Project (where the quote above came from), those cleared through DNA testing were convicted of rape/murders. So making a direct correlation between a DNA mismatch and a false allegation (as the phrase is commonly used) would mean that no murder occurred. Since we know this isn’t true, the use of this data is meaningless in determining the percentage of alleged victims (in non-lethal rape cases) who lie about being raped.

An alarming national trend: False Rape Allegations by Eugene J. Kanin, Ph.D.

The investigation of all rape complaints always involves a serious offer to polygraph the complainants and the suspects. Additionally, for a declaration of false charge to be made, the complainant must admit that no rape had occurred. She is the sole agent who can say that the rape charge is false.

and

First, with very few exceptions, these complainants were suspect at the time of the complaint or within a day or two after charging. These recantations did not follow prolonged periods of investigation and interrogation that would constitute anything approximating a second assault. Second, not one of the detectives believed that an incident of false recantation had occurred. They argued, rather convincingly, that in those cases where a suspect was identified and interrogated, the facts of the recantation dovetailed with the suspect’s own defense

The investigation process used as the basis of this study raises a huge red flag. Even though the official stance is that all rape allegations are investigated fully, it’s clear that in the recanted cases investigators quickly assumed the accusers to be liars. Combine that assumption with the polygraph and you’ve got everything you need to get false confessions (and false retractions).

In the city studied by Kanin, there is no mention whether the recantations were given in response to a threat of criminal charges against those who reported rape or whether the recantations were influenced by a “We investigated your allegations and know you weren’t raped. What really happened was ____, isn’t that right?” type of questioning.

It would be fascinating if someone did a survey of all those who made rape reports in that city during the period of Kanin’s study to see how they would evaluate the police response and ethics. If they were asked: “Were you pressured to recant your rape allegation?” what percent would answer yes?

About reports of a 50% rate of false rape reports on campus referred to by Kanin, I suspect the high rate is due to combination of a mismatch in where people draw the line between “real” rape and unwanted but non-criminal sexual contact and the college’s desire to look as safe as possible. Likely the campus police would ask questions to see if the alleged victim did anything wrong or “stupid,” and if the answer was yes then the campus police could decide that what happened to her couldn’t be rape.

In my post Abyss2hope: Gang rape and university culture - a case study the gang rape describedwasn’t classified by the university as a rape. In fact if it were included in a study like Kanin’s it very well could be classified as a false allegation of rape.

The bottom line is I can’t find a single scientific reason to believe the claims that more rape reports are false allegations than any other type of serious crime.

Note: Also posted on my blog, abyss2hope.blogspot.com

It’s a rare day in Mudville that I agree with Wendy McElroy…

The toddler wandered from her nursery school, Ready Teddy Go, through a door left open. A bricklayer named Clive Peachey drove past her in his truck. At the inquest, he stated, “I kept thinking I should go back. The reason I didn’t was because I thought people might think I was trying to abduct her.”

Instead, he assured himself that the parents must be “driving around” and would find her.

A few minutes thereafter, Abby fatally fell into an algae-covered pond.

There’s no doubt that child molestation is a real problem, and increased awareness is a good thing. But as Abby’s story horribly illustrates, societies in which adults don’t feel free to approach or help strange children, are not child-safe.

McElroy, uncharacteristically, doesn’t comment on how this effects men in particular. But I think men are more likely to be seen as sexual predators, with the result that innocent men are more likely to worry about their actions being misconstrued than innocent women. (I’ve posted in the past about the extra suspicion some male child care workers have to deal with).

Curtsy: The Argument Clinic.

UPDATE: Abyss2hope has a different take.

(This is the third of three posts on “equity feminism” and “gender feminism.”) (Part one) Part two)

Ironically, although self-dubbed “equity feminists” often say they’re continuing the traditions of first-wave feminism, it’s doubtful any first wave feminists would have signed on to an ideology so extreme in its pretense that feminism has nothing to say beyond formal legal equality that it believes that rape has nothing to do with misogyny or gender bias.

After Hoff-Sommers, the person who has done the most to popularize the concept of “gender feminism” is libertarian, “ifeminist” and Foxnews columnist Wendy McElroy. In Roderick Long and Charles Johnson’s essay on libertarian feminism, they consider Wendy McElroy’s use of “gender feminist.” (Long and Johnson are rare libertarian feminists whose feminism is distinguishable from anti-feminism.) At one time, they say, McElroy used “gender feminist” to refer mainly to radical feminism, but her definition has expanded over the years:

McElroy now clearly lumps liberal and radical feminists together as “gender feminists,” and opposes libertarian feminism (individualist feminism, ifeminism) to this aggregation. … “liberal feminism,” “left-of-center feminism,” and “gender feminism” are all apparently being treated as equivalent.

The implicit suggestion is that to regard something as a legitimate object of feminist concern is ipso facto to regard it as an appropriate object of legislation. On this view, those feminists who see lots of issues as meriting feminist attention will naturally favour lots of legislation, while those feminists who prefer minimal legislation will be led to suppose that relatively few issues merit feminist attention. But without the conceptual confusions that all too often accompany the authoritarian theory of politics, it’s hard to see any reason for accepting the shared premise. Certainly McElroy’s 19th-century libertarian feminist predecessors did not accept it.

…McElroy’s career has been a steady stream of books and articles documenting, and urging a return to, the ideas of the 19th-century libertarian feminists. Yet we know ““ and it is largely owing to McElroy’s own efforts that we know ““ that if there are any “gender feminists” lurking out there, the 19th century individualists, while libertarian, would certainly be found among their ranks.

* * *

One odd effect of Hoff Sommers’ formulation - in which “equity feminists” do not perceive any social problem of anti-woman beliefs (a position very at odds with first-wave feminist thought, by the way), and who additionally think feminism’s only legitimate goal is formal equality under the law - is that the category of feminists who can be considered “equity feminists” is astonishingly narrow. It consists of a handful of Republican activists and think-tankers, like Hoff Sommers herself and the IWF; and also some libertarians whose primary connection to feminism is opposing it, such as Wendy McElroy (who earns a living writing an anti-feminist column for Foxnews) and Cathy Young.

The way “equity” feminists like Hoff Sommers and McElroy discuss feminism is entirely binary; they don’t acknowlege that there are any feminists who don’t fit into the gender/equity dichotomy, nor do they suggest that any overlap between the catagories exist. Therefore, when “equity feminism” is drawn so narrowly, “gender feminism” becomes correspondingly broad. Virtually all feminists, apart from a handful of Republican and libertarian activists, are in practice derided as “gender feminists” by Hoff Sommers, McElroy and their fellow travelers.

In a comment on a HNN thread, Charles Johnson writes:

The popularity, in some libertarian circles, of Christina Hoff Sommers’ distinction between “equity feminism” and “gender feminism,” a pair of opposed categories that–so far as I can tell–actually track no historical tendency of thought and no shared premise whatsoever. (I don’t know what “gender feminism” is supposed to actually be, but I do know that if you put Kim Gandy, Andrea Dworkin, and Mary Daly into the same political boat, you are surely misunderstanding something.)

He’s got a point.

It can be useful, for the purpose of a particular article or thought experiment, to create a classification system from scratch. In her essay “Marooned on Gilligan’s Island” - one of my favorite pieces of intra-feminist criticism - Katha Pollitt makes up a category called “difference feminism,” which she contrasts unflatteringly with “equality feminism.”

But Pollitt’s category doesn’t have the effect of encouraging ignorance; although she posits a new category, “difference feminism,” she didn’t go on to make the difference/equality dichotomy her only lens for viewing feminism for decades on end. Since her difference/equality dichotomy wasn’t her sole and only approach to understanding feminism, her analysis doesn’t force her to lump together feminists whose intellectual traditions are actually strongly opposed. For Pollitt, “difference feminism” was an analytic tool, but not the only tool in the toolbox.

In contrast, most conservatives use the terms “gender feminist” and “equity feminist” less as a tool than as crutches; the simplistic duality between a handful of marginal libertarian and Republican feminists, and all other feminists, is their only means of understanding feminism. This means, of course, that they cannot understand feminism at all.

It’s as if someone divided all of cinema into two categories, “Arnold Schwarzenegger films” and “everything else,” and then remained committed to using this classification system, and no other, for decades. Is it really useful to have, as one’s exclusive classification system, an approach that pretends that the cinematic traditions that produced Fanny and Alexander, Mureal’s Wedding, Hero, and Monsters, Inc do not have any noteworthy distinctions?

An approach to feminism that divides feminists into “Hoff Sommers, McElroy and their allies” versus “all other feminists” is not useful to anyone who hasn’t already decided to hold the “all other feminists” catagory in contempt. Such an approach promotes lazy, stereotypical thinking, in which someone can read Mary Daly and conclude that he’s read all he needs to know about Katha Pollitt, Catherine MacKinnon or Martha Nussbaum, since they’re all from a single intellectual approach.

I can see why this approach is idealogically attractive to conservatives and anti-feminists; what I can’t see is how such an approach can be anything but intellectually vapid.

In her latest column, foxnews anti-feminist (and “ifeminist”) Wendy McElroy tells the story of Norma Khouri, a longtime con artist who wrote a fraudulent account of honor killings in Jordon. Wendy’s point is that people nowadays aren’t skeptical enough:

McElroy’s language clearly indicates a change over time; society “has become” gullible, and “no longer” requires evidence. But when did this less gullible age take place, exactly? Although McElroy assumes that people are quicker to fall to frauds nowadays - due to an alleged new belief in victimhood - in fact, people have always been susectable to frauds, including literary frauds.

For example, the author of the acclaimed 1965 novel The Painted Bird led people to believe that the novel was based on his own life story as a boy brutalized in Holocaust-era Europe. (This book is only one of several best-selling fake holocaust stories - a particularly annoying breed of hoax, since holocaust deniers sieze on these lies as proof of their own lies. Oy.)

The Ern Malley poetry hoax - in which the literary world was fooled into lauding the deliberately awful poetry of a made-up author - took place in 1943.

So scratch off the 20th century in our search for a time when people were smarter skeptics. How about the 19th century - when PT Barnum took an 70ish black woman and put her on tour as the 160-year-old nurse of George Washington? I don’t think so.

The 1700s were also a time of stunning hoaxes, such as an English teacher who drew up a fake 14th-century “Roman” map of Britain which was so widely accepted that it screwed up history books for a generation. That was minor league compared to the widely celebrated “Homer of Scotland,” Ossian, whose works were mostly made up by a schoolteacher.

There’s no reason to believe that there ever was an age of skepticism. Nor do current-day frauds need claims of victimhood to pull the wool over our eyes; Tom Carew’s bestselling hoax Jihad! painted the author as a daring military hero, for example, not as anyone’s victim.

McElroy complains that Norma Khouri’s hoax “should have immediately collapsed of its own weight. But, then, that would have required asking a question.” McElroy’s own claim - that people are any more gullible nowadays - should also have collapsed immediately. But, then, that would have required McElroy to conduct a five-second google search.

* * *

Here’s what I wonder: Why didn’t McElroy use this incident as another opportunity for her signature feminist-bashing? My guess is because many of the people responsible for exposing the hoax were women’s rights activists in Jordon, whereas prominent anti-feminists like Kay Hymowitz fell for the hoax.

* * *

Further links: If you love reading about hoaxes, check out the wonderful blog Museum of Hoaxes. And this blog has more posts on Wendy McElroy, if you’re interested.

I don’t expect Wendy McElroy to report anything accurately (she does write for FOX, after all). Still, her discussion of Mary Koss in a recent Foxnews column included two sentences, which were a simply amazing example of McElroy’s inability to get facts straight.

Mary Koss, for those who don’t know, is a professor who has done very influential work on designing surveys measuring the prevalence of rape. Debunking Koss is a favorite activity of anti-feminists: Katie Roiphe, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Warren Farrell are just a few of the anti-feminists who have spent a lot of ink attacking Koss and her work.

Anyhow, here are the two sentences:

So what did McElroy get wrong?

1. The study Ms contributed to was published in 1987, not 1985. (There was a Ms Magazine article reporting on Koss’ research, published in ‘85; but an article reporting on a study is not the same thing as the study itself).

2. So where was the study itself published? In The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, not Ms Magazine.
3. The study found that the 1 in 4 had experienced rape or attempted rape, not just rape. (Nor did the ‘85 Ms Magazine article ever use the 1 in 4 statistic, by the way.)
4. The study used standardized survey forms, not interviews.
5. The women were asked dozens and dozens of questions, not just 10.
6. There was a 10-question subsection related to sexual assault and coercion, which is I suppose what McElroy meant to refer to. However, McElroy is still mistaken, because respondents were NOT “deemed to have been raped if any question elicited a ‘yes’ response.”
7. There were 3,187 women surveyed for the study, not 7,000 women as McElroy claims. (Including men, a total of 6,159 people were in Koss’ sample).

None of that is terribly substantial, I know, but it’s still impressive how many factual mistakes McElroy makes in such a short passage.

Also, I’ve been debating this with “Brad” (who I think may be McElroy’s partner or husband) on the ifeminists discussion board.

McElroy also cited this IWF critique of Koss’ study. I’ll tackle the IWF’s critique on Monday, and I promise that post will be more substantive.

* * *

More on Wendy McElroy

More on Mary Koss

This post has been updated since I originally wrote it, to add in the sample size error, and to put in the information about the 1995 Ms article reporting on the research.

• PinkDreamPoppies wrote earlier this week that “vacuums are from hell.” He didn’t know the half of it. (Via Skippy).

• Echidne of the Snakes celebrates the latest milestone in women’s sports: The Lingerie Bowl.
• Check out Noli Irritare Leones for a good critique of a bad Wendy McElroy article - this time on the father’s rights movement.
  OK, so McElroy has found several hundred different embittered men who believe women are heartless golddiggers. And “it becomes prudent to listen” - in other words, to take these testimonials, not as evidence of some men’s opinions, but as evidence of the way family law right now really is. Well, guess what? There are lots of embittered divorced women out there. There are stories like this one of a woman who traded her daughter’s college education to hang onto her house, and then lost the house anyway. And there are bitter single women to match the bitter single men. It’s not hard to find several hundred divorced people, men or women, prepared to say that they were screwed. Taking the stories of the men alone, even if you have several hundred of them, is not adequate evidence that family courts really are biased against men.
• Dirk Deppey has a long, well-done rant about the state of the current comic book industry. Shorter Dirk Deppey: If superhero fans don’t learn to broaden their tastes, comic book stores won’t be able to survive.
• Last week I linked to an article in Foreign Policy about Japan’s population troubles - basically, many young Japanese women are choosing to remain single and childless rather than subject themselves to the sexist norms of marriage in Japan. Trish Wilson has more commentary about the article, pointing out that women in many cultures could be making the same complaints.
• Blueheron has some interesting thoughts on Christianity and Neo-Pagen Spirituality. Here’s a sample:
  Every pagan I know talks about how we shouldn’t insult Christianity and Christians, and yet almost all of us do so. I was amused at a comment years ago on alt.pagan about how the Wiccan declaration of honoring all gods in practice means honoring all gods except the Christian Trinity. This discomfort that most pagans feel with Christianity is troubling for two reasons. The first reason is obvious and honestly hardly needs to be repeated. Every pagan reading this knows that responding to intolerance with intolerance is useless and actively harmful, especially since there are many Christians who have no trouble with pagans. However, the other reason is somewhat more complex. From a historical and anthropological perspective, Wicca and all of the other neo-pagan faiths, from the OTO to the Church of All Worlds are in large part Christian variants.
• Why wait until election day? ABC News has pulled its reporters from the Kucinich, Sharpton and Moseley Braun campaigns. Via TalkLeft.
• Tod Lindberg discusses gay marriage. What’s interesting is that even a homophobic right-winger like Lindberg can see that the “secular” arguments against gay marriage are exceptionally weak.
• Everything you could want to know about the McDonalds Spilled Coffee Lawsuit - and probably a good deal more - can be found in these well-done posts from The Curmudgeonly Clerk and Blog 702. Oh, and Blog 702 again.
• The Fifty Minute Hour has a good post describing the French government’s attempts to outlaw Muslim women from wearing hijabs.
• Chris at Crooked Timber provides this startling factoid from Amartya Sen:
  In fact, it turns out that men in China and in Kerala decisively outlive African American men in terms of surviving to older age groups. Even African American women end up having a survival pattern for the higher ages similar to that of the much poorer Chinese, and decidedly lower survival rates than then even poorer Indians in Kerala. So it is not only the case that American blacks suffer from relative deprivation in terms of income per head vis-a-vis American whites, they are also absolutely more deprived than low-income Indians in Kerala (for both women and men), and the Chinese (in the case of men), in terms of living to ripe old ages.

So, anyhow - can conservatives be feminists?

My answer is “yes, but.” Yes, in my opinion, conservatives can be feminists. But, in my opinion, most of the conservatives who call themselves feminists aren’t.

Why?

Because feminism is - and always has been - an activist and political movement. Feminists, by definition, think society needs to be changed.

Susan Faludi, in a Slate debate, gets at this - that being a feminist is essentially a political act:

My main problem with “ifeminism” and other conservative brands of feminism is that they seem to be premised on the idea that (at least in this country) feminism has already won. The essential message I see in McElroy’s iFeminist columns and books like Who Stole Feminism? is that women are already equal; there is no need to agitate for change in order to bring women’s equality about.

So, for example, conservative “feminists” argue that we shouldn’t worry about the wage gap, because it’s merely a matter of worker’s individual choices, and has nothing to do with discrimination. They argue that the rape crisis is fiction, a result of feminist exaggerations and morning-after regrets. They argue that domestic violence has nothing to do with sexism because (as Christina Hoff Sommers argued) men are equal victims of spouse abuse.

Note the common theme - in each case, the conclusion of the argument is that sexism against women is no longer a problem, and political, activist solutions - that is, feminism - is no longer necessary.

Well, that’s nice - but it’s not feminism. Feminism is and has always been about activism; feminists are trying to change society. In particular, feminism is about changing society so that women, who are unfairly kept down in our society, can at last experience full equality.

If you don’t believe that sexism is an important problem keeping women down today, then you may be a nice person, and you may believe in equality - but you’re just not a feminist.

* * *

The rest is just detail. Susanna says she has no problem accepting the basic premises of feminism as I define them:

(Please note that this is just how I, personally, define feminism. I am not claiming any special authority to define feminism for anyone other than myself.)

Susanna thinks she’d probably disagree with me regarding “the extent, genesis and solution [to] the inequality and sexism, and most likely would also disagree with at least some of the solutions to the social, political and economic inequality.” Well, yeah, that’s a given - all feminists disagree about that stuff. That’s why there are terms for different schools of feminism - socialist feminism, radical feminism, liberal feminism, cultural feminism and so on. If there was anything like a universal agreement on that stuff in feminism, we’d just have one school of thought instead of dozens. And even within each school, feminists disagree all the time.

Sara at Diotima, who says I’m her favorite lefty blogger (aw, shucks!), has a good point about the Wendy McElroy FoxNews column I blogged about yesterday.

The McElroy column, as you may recall, is premised on the idea that Christian feminism is widely rejected by mainstream feminism (or is about to be - McElroy vacillates on if Christian feminism is a new thing or not). Of course, Christian feminism - like Jewish feminism - has been broadly accepted within feminism for decades. I thought this was a rather staggering error from someone who writes about feminism for a living. But Sara points out that McElroy’s argument actually makes sense, if we assume that by “Christian” McElroy meant “conservative evangelicals”:

Sara’s reading is probably correct - but if so, it’s rather ironic. McElroy, who constantly chastises feminists for our allegedly narrow conception of “feminism,” seems - at least in this column - to have an incredibly narrow conception of who can be called a “Christian.”

Wendy McElroy, in her latest FoxNews column, is worried that mainstream feminism is going to reject Christian feminism.

Contrast that to what Bean - who would surely qualify as a “politically correct feminist,” in McElroy’s view - wrote on this blog only last month.

McElroy writes as if Christian feminism is something new. But in fact, Christian feminism - like Jewish feminism - has been around for decades. There have been hundreds (thousands?) of books written by Christian and Jewish feminists about combining their religious traditions with feminist beliefs (44 such books are listed in my local library catalog); there are academic journals such as The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion; religious magazines like CrossCurrents frequently carry articles about feminism and by feminists; there’s even a regularly published magazine of Jewish feminism, Lilith, which has run for over a quarter-century.

Of course, there are some feminists who question if Judeo-Christianity and feminism are really compatable - just as there are some feminists who question if the Democratic party and feminism are really compatable. But just as Democratic feminists are broadly accepted, Chirstian feminism and Jewish feminism are broadly accepted withing the feminist mainstream today.

How do I know that? Because I do. Because as someone who regularly writes about feminism, I’ve read enough actual feminists and speak to enough feminists to have an idea of what’s out there. Just as, I assume, people who write about baseball have an idea of who is on which team and what the rules of the game are.

What staggers me is, how could Wendy McElroy - who writes a column a week about feminism for Fox - not have known about Christian feminism? She’s not a run-of-the-mill writer; she is, I think it’s fair to say, one of the conservative movement’s leading experts on feminism. Writing about feminism is what she does for a living. It’s like a baseball writer not being aware that there’s this team down in Florida called the “Marlins.” Maybe you don’t have to be able to know the names of the pitching staff or even who their clean-up batter is - but if you don’t even know that the Marlins exist, and have existed for years, isn’t that a problem?

How on earth could an expert on feminism not know that Christian feminism exists, and is broadly accepted?

The answer, I suspect, is that McElroy rarely reads feminists, beyond skimming NOW press releases looking for attack lines. She probably has few if any feminist friends outside of the echo-chamber of ifeminism, and she’s unwilling to respect feminists who don’t subscribe to a right-wing or at least libertarian ideology. McElroy even refers to schools of feminist thought she disagrees with by made-up names - “PC feminists” - so she can avoid the basic courtesy of referring to schools of feminist thought by their proper names, such as “radical feminism” or “liberal feminism.”

Furthermore, because McElroy mainly writes for the choir, no one ever calls her on it. I’ve seen at least two intelligent conservative bloggers - Sara and Susanna - link to McElroy’s essay. But it wouldn’t occur to either Sara or Susanna to criticize McElroy for not even knowing the most basic, obvious facts about feminism, because (and I’m sorry to say this, since I respect them both) they’re as ignorant as McElroy herself. So they take McElroy’s word for it, and propagate McElroy’s ignorance in their blogs, and the ignorance spreads wider and wider in conservative circles. (This is certainly not the first time McElroy’s column has spread misinformation)

UPDATE: And while I’m on the subject… Judith at Kesher Talk has a justly angry post ripping apart the conservative lie that American feminists haven’t objected to outrages against women abroad. Christine at Ms Musings makes a similar point, and like Judith includes plenty of documentary links. This isn’t a new issue, alas - I’ve written about this sort of counterfactual attack on feminism before, and so has Body and Soul. Sigh.

Regarding Illinois’ new rape law (see the post before this one for details on that), several folks, like Don of Anger Management, seem to be objecting based on a serious misunderstanding of the California case that inspired this law. The problem is that instead of reading real news, Don is relying on Foxnew’s report:

But the facts of the case (pdf file) are nothing like what Don (or Fox) describes. (Note: what follows is the court’s description of the rape victim’s testimony; please don’t read on unless you’re prepared to read a description of rape.)
Read the rest of this entry »

Curiously, the two big “anti-feminist feminist” discussion boards have recently been removed by their supporting sites. SheThinks, an astroturf campus organization created by the right-wing Independant Women’s Forum, removed the online discussion board as part of a site redesign - although the rest of SheThinks.org seems to have been left online. Just as well - the SheThinks.org board was dominated by overt misogynists and feminist-haters who mainly used the board as a place for bad-mouthing the much more successful and lively Ms Magazine boards. In essence, the SheThinks board was a spin-off of the Ms. boards, a home for anti-feminist posters who had been booted off of Ms.

Meanwhile, the folks at Ifeminists.com - whose public discussion forum actually had a life of its own, rather than just being a satallite of a pro-feminist board - have taken their boards down. Wendy McElroy says this is because the boards were too successful - she no longer had time to moderate them. (Update: I just came across this livejournal post, talking about hypocripsies in McElroy’s moderation, and just basically trashing McElroy on many other grounds.)

As far as I know, there are no longer any public forums online sponsored by anti-feminist feminists (that is, right wing anti-feminists who self-identify as feminists). (I’m using “right-wing” broadly here; McElroy is a libertarian, not a Republican).

UPDATE: McElroy later reinstated her discussion board.

For folks interested in genuinely feminist discussion boards…
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Here’s a decent Washington Post article on the feminist content of the new health-aid-to-Africa bill.

It’s amazing what gets opposed in the name of pro-life, isn’t it? Nonetheless, it’s genuinely encouraging that many conservatives supported this bill.

Of course, the support among right-wingers isn’t universal.

In the “if a feminist walked on water, she’d be blamed for getting her feet wet” department, FoxNews columnist Wendy McElroy is pissed off that men in Africa will be discouraged from practicing rape. She’s particularly incensed about the “widow inheritance” provision - which is bleakly funny, since McElroy apparently doesn’t know what the term “widow inheritance” refers to.

“Widow inheritance” practices vary, but they can include women being put into a position where they have no choice but to have sex with their deceased husband’s brother - something that clearly could directly “figure into the vector of disease,” if the deceased husband died of AIDS, or if the husband’s brother has AIDS.

That said, what’s wrong with working on eradicating indirect causes of AIDS, as well? I say, go for it. Anything that reduces AIDS incidence is good, regardless of how “direct” it is.

Women who have the economic and social clout to pick and choose their sexual partners (or choose to be on their own, if they prefer) are less likely to get AIDS. Improving women’s status not only helps fight AIDS - it helps reduce other STDs, and health tragedies such as obstetric fistulas. Why would any reasonable person oppose this?

Even Sara at Diotima - who’s generally aligned with McElroy’s views - is too sensible (or perhaps too humane) to go along with McElroy on this one. Jeanne at Body and Soul also posted an excellent response to McElroy’s knee-jerk anti-feminism.

(This isn’t the first time I’ve posted about McElroy, by the way; in the past, I’ve criticized her appalling red-baiting attacks on Afghan feminists, and also her false claim that Martin Luther King Jr. opposed affirmative action.)

A phrase I read over at Eve Tushnet’s place gave me deja vu:

…anti-aff. action people talk about the colorblind ideal, judging people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Eventually, I remembered where I’d recently read something similar: Foxnews’ Wendy McElroy had quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in a recent anti-affirmative action column:

…is it ever proper for a tax- funded institution to systematically privilege one class of people at the expense of another?

Martin Luther King, leader of the ’60s civil rights movement, didn’t think so. In his justly renowned speech “I Have a Dream” King declared, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Contemporary “civil rights” leaders are demanding King’s grandchildren be judged on the basis of skin color.

Both Eve and McElroy are pretty typical of their movement: conservatives love citing Dr King to attack affirmative action. In California, the Republican party has even used film clips of Dr. King in anti-affirmative-action ads.

Strangely enough, none of these folks seem to know - or care - that they’re distorting King’s words and meanings to oppose what King himself believed. Without making too big a deal of it, there’s something dishonest about dozens of conservatives quoting MLK to make their anti-AA case - none of whom admit that they’re arguing against what Dr. King himself believed, and against how King himself meant the “I have a dream” speech.

Did Dr. King oppose affirmative action? Well, the term “affirmative action” wasn’t in play during Dr. King’s life; and it’s impossible to know for certain what King would think if he were alive today. But during his life, he certainly didn’t oppose special programs to help blacks. According to historian Clayborne Carson:

Even before the March on Washington, he had applauded the Indian government’s efforts to help the caste once called untouchables through “special treatment to enable the victims of discrimination” including the provision of Especial employment opportunities.” Moreover, in his 1964 book, “Why We Can’t Wait,” King compared the social reforms he favored to the GI Bill of Rights, which gave World War II veterans special preferences including home loans, college scholarships and special advantages in competition for civil service jobs. King maintained that African- Americans could never be adequately compensated for the “exploitation and humiliation” they had suffered in the past, but he proposed a “Negro Bill of Rights” as a partial remedy for these wrongs. He insisted that African-Americans should be compensated through “a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.” He added that “such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest.”

King wrote that “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years, must now to something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.” King’s organization began “Operation Breadbasket,” an early AA-type program. Here’s how Dr. King described the program in Where Do We Go From Here?

Operation Breadbasket is carried out mainly by clergymen. First, a team of ministers calls on the management of a business in the community to request basic facts on the company’s total number of employees, the number of Negro employees, the department or job classification in which all are located, and the salary ranges for each category. The team then returns to the steering committee to evaluate the data and to make a recommendation concerning the number of new and upgraded jobs that should be requested. The decision on the number of jobs requested is usually based on population figures. For instance, if a city has a 30 percent Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30 percent of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas, as the case almost always happens to be.

In fact, King’s writings - taken as a whole, rather than the out-of-context quotes right-wingers prefer - make him sound pretty much like any current defender of Affirmative Action. “Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic.”

Conservatives like Eve do share a dream with Martin Luther King: a dream of a society in which everyone is judged by the content of their characters, not the color of their skins. But we’re not there yet; and as Dr. King said, it’s unrealistic to expect that we can achieve equality without preference programs. To use Dr. King to oppose the policies he favored - or to simply lie and claim he’d oppose such policies, as Wendy McElroy did - ain’t playing kosher.

Attempting to reframe Dr. King as an AA opponent is both dishonest and disrespectful.

UPDATE: So what is going on here? If it were just a matter of Eve’s post, there’d be no problem. But what’s going on is a widespread pattern of conservatives using MLK against affirmative action - and generally using him in a far less evenhanded and fair way than Eve did. And I’ve yet to see a single conservative citing MLK’s “dream” acknowledge that MLK himself thought his vision was compatible with supporting AA-type policies.

Overall, I think conservatives cite MLK so much because Dr. King has - not just with liberals, but with virtually all Americans - a great deal of credibility on race issues. Conservatives, in contrast, have zero credibility on race (except among other conservatives). Since conservatives are so lacking credibility on race, they try and “borrow” some of MLK’s for their own purposes.

Eve asks if she should have to cite MLK’s actual views every time the phrase “content of their character” comes up. Maybe not - but it would be nice if the conservative movement, when frequently citing MLK on affirmative action, would cite his actual views at least some of the time.

Wendy McElroy used her August 20th Foxnews column for an attack on RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. According to McElroy, American feminist groups like the Feminist Majority Foundation (which McElroy mysteriously refers to as "FMN") "should be called to account for its role in funds directed toward the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan." That certainly sounds serious. So what has RAWA - know for running desperately-needed schools and hospitals for Afghan women - done, that’s so awful?

First, McElroy worries that RAWA lacks fiscal accountability. This is a fair concern- but McElroy, who has expressed this concern before, needs to display some journalistic accountability. In two columns attacking RAWA, McElroy doesn’t produce a shred of evidence to suggest that RAWA has ever misallocated funds. Isn’t it usual to have proof when demanding that people be "called to account"? Apparently, that’s not how journalism is done at Foxnews.

Although fiscal accountability is a legitimate concern, it’s one that probably can’t be resolved in the real world - not unless we refuse to support indigenous third-world organizations like RAWA. As McElroy probably realizes, third-world organizations don’t have the resources to document finances the way most U.S. charities do. Even the tiny nonprofit I work for (a local historic site) requires specialized software, Western-educated employees to run the software, and the services of two CPAs to keep our financial records straight. RAWA hasn’t had access to any of that; furthermore, RAWA has been working in the midst of violent suppression and a war. No reasonable person thinks RAWA can meet American standards of fiscal accountability.

Why donate to RAWA, then? It’s a tradeoff; donors lose some accountability, but gain the advantages of supporting an indigenous organization. Unlike any American organization, RAWA is Afghan women doin’ it for themselves; isn’t that better, in the long run, than Western NGOs doing it for Afghans? RAWA’s members know firsthand, in the way that no American can, where aid to Afghan women does the most good. And RAWA members, who have risked execution opposing the Taliban, have shown a commitment and (as even McElroy has admitted) heroism that cannot be matched.

McElroy ignorantly suggests accountability can be provided by "letter writing" - the model of charity suggested in late-night commercials starring Sally Struthers, asking us to "sponsor" a starving child, in exchange for the child’s grateful letters. However, the accountability of letter-writing is an illusion - as the Chicago Tribune, ABC News, writer Michael Marin, and others have shown, letter-writing didn’t prevent Save the Children from badly mismanaging funds and decieving donors.

Furthermore, as the New Internationalist (among other critics) argues, letter-writing is a fundimentally flawed approach to charity. It’s a fundraising gimmick that doesn’t benefit people in need. When Westerners "sponsor" a child or a teacher, the primary beneficiary is the Western donor, who gets an ego-boost; meanwhile, the supposed beneficiary - in this case, teachers - get a needless addition to an already huge workload. "However well-intentioned such aid may be, the kernel is the creation of a paternalistic relationship which is unnecessary and potentially harmful." Rather than forcing teachers to waste time and money writing fundraising letters to Americans, I’d prefer RAWA’s resources to be used actually helping Afghan women - and I doubt I’m the only RAWA donor who feels that way.

But don’t letters prove that some money is being spent in the right ways? Maybe. But better proof is already available, from Westerners who have seen RAWA’s operations firsthand, such as FemAid’s Carol Mann, the Guardian’s Natasha Walter, and University of Maryland professor Anne Brodsky. Is this accountability perfect? No, of course not; there is no absolute guarantee (with RAWA or any other charity) that no dollar has been misspent. But despite McElroy’s insinuations, there’s no evidence of RAWA misusing funds, and considerable evidence of the good RAWA does; for an American wanting to help Afghanistan women, donating to RAWA is a good bet.

McElroy has a couple of other complaints about RAWA. She claims that a "prominent RAWA member… blasted" Ms Magazine - but it seems extremely unlikely that Elizabeth Miller of Ohio is a member of RAWA, prominent or otherwise. (Fact-checking, like having evidence before implying misuse of funds, is apparently not a Foxnews staple.) (Speaking of fact-checking, McElroy claims that the Feminist Majority Foundation, which owns Ms, "has reacted with silence" to Elizabeth Miller’s letter - even though McElroy herself links to an article in American Prospect quoting the president of FMF’s reaction).

McElroy also complains that RAWA "is not, as it claims, apolitical." But when has RAWA ever called itself apolitical? McElroy doesn’t say, and a google search of RAWA’s website doesn’t find a single use of the word "apolitical." As McElroy knows, RAWA describes itself as "an independent political/social organization"; and RAWA openly states its political goals. So what mysterious "political" goal does McElroy fear RAWA is hiding?

McElroy’s purpose here, it turns out, is red-baiting. McElroy mentions that "Other political goals can be discerned from RAWA’s activities. For example, at its 2000 celebration of International Women’s Day, one of RAWA’s featured speakers was Afzal Shah Khamosh, the heads of Pakistan’s openly Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party." (A paragraph later, McElroy admits this is meaningless - so why did she say that political goals could be discerned from it?) McElroy also slips in that RAWA’s founder attended a French Socialist Party Congress twenty years ago; in last week’s Foxnews entry, McElroy brings up unsubstantiated accusations of Maoism. For her coup de grace, McElroy points out that RAWA has criticized the United States’ actions in Afghanistan (gasp!).

Does any of this add up to the slightest proof of impropriety? No, of course not; but McElroy is here for unsubstantiated insinuations, not evidence.

McElroy rightly criticizes RAWA for unfair attacks on other Afghan feminists, a legitimate point (albeit one swiped from The American Prospect). Unfortunately, like the Prospect, McElroy hypocritically does the same thing herself, quoting an anonymous wit who dubbed RAWA "the Talibabes." (Apparently unfair attacks by RAWA are bad, but unfair attacks on RAWA are cool). But that RAWA has unfairly maligned other women’s groups doesn’t erase the real good RAWA’s funding of schools and hospitals has done Afghan women.

All of McElroy’s concerns - name-calling and angry letters to Ms., the pathetic red-baiting, the desire for Afghan teachers to waste time writing letters - miss the point. The bottom line is, or should be, helping the women of Afghanistan. As eyewitnesses have verified, RAWA uses its resources to help; and as long as that remains true, donating to RAWA is a sensible choice for Westerners who want to help Afghan women.

* * *

For coverage of the RAWA flap worth reading, skip Foxnews and go to Noy Thrupkaew’s essay in The American Prospect. Thrupkaew argues that, in a post-Taliban period in which the goal is reconstruction rather than revolution, more moderate women’s groups can accomplish more than RAWA. This may be true, but it’s a little simplistic. Western feminist history shows that both moderates and "extremists" have been needed; during the fight for emancipation, for example, Alice Paul’s uncompromising dedication to absolute equality both laid ground for reforms beyond the vote and made feminists like Susan B. Anthony seem moderate and reasonable by comparison.

Of course, Afghanistan is not the pre-suffrage U.S., but it would have improved Thrupkaew’s essay if she had at least considered if a similar dynamic could be at work among Afghan women’s groups. It’s possible that RAWA, by demanding a level of women’s equality beyond what most Afghans are ready for, is creating more space in the national Afghan discourse for "moderate" reform groups like the Afghan Women’s Resource Center.