Jeremy Taylor wrote:

Well, the one in five statistic that activitists were touting turned out to be bogus. I believe the real figure was something like 2-3% across four years. That is lower than for those who don't attend university. And that is with a wide definition, like being patted or pinched on the bottom or unwanted attempts at kissing (by which measure, I've been sexually assaulted by women half a dozen times or so).

Do you have a source for this? If we're working with that wide a definition of sexual assault, then that 2-3% figure is absurdly low even for men, not to mention women. 

I would worry that the "real" figures are at least as likely to be partisan as ones presented by activists, if not more so. Activists at least have a more robust understanding of the phenomenon than whoever might oppose them.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

The Human Rights Commission in Australia tried to manufacture the same kind of panic here. They did a survey on sexual assault and harassment on campuses. But they tried to stack the deck: they used very wide definitions (staring, for example, was a form of sexual harassment) and the stats were based on self-reporting. For the sexual assault, they allowed the incident to have occurred in the last two years, rather than the one for harassment. Really, the whole thing didn't make sense. In Australia, most domestic students go to university in the city they grew up in and still live at home. Most students don't live on campus or hang out there much outside classes, so the assaults would have to be occuring in classes or in corridors between classes, or perhaps the food court. It is usually international students who live on campus or with other students, and knowing the Human Rights Commission, they wouldn't want to suggest the problem is prevalent mostly amongst foreign students.

That would be a serious difference then, since living on campus is of course much more common in the United States. I can't speak to what's going on in Australia, but the college campus is really the sort of artificial environment that begs this type of problem, especially when you take modern sexual permissiveness and too much alcohol into account.

I'm not sure how the stats on something like this could be based on anything but self-reporting, though, given problems with under-reporting.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

I don't have those stats, but I read them somewhere. This quotes a DOJ study that puts the figures even lower:

http://thefederalist.com/2014/12/11/new-doj-data-on-sexual-assaults-college-students-are-actually-less-likely-to-be-victimized/

Self-reporting makes the sample non-random. I would think a study trying to be as accurate as possible

I certainly wouldn't take official statistics as gospel without looking into them, but I would hazard a guess that, when the official ones aren't compiled by activists, the official ones are probably more trustworthy. The activists are ideologues, and identity politics ideologues for decades have shown a great tendency to distort and manipulate statistics and research. Just about any statistic that comes from radical feminists, for example, should be suspect until shown otherwise. Read, for example, the late sociologist Murray Straus on what happened to him when he and his research partner actually asked women if they commit domestic violence and under what circumstances. They found women do commit such violence to a degree not far off that of men, and generally not in circumstances where it can be called self-defence or justified retaliation. For this, he and his research partner were vilified and even threatened by both activists and alleged scholars. Straus also talked about the lengths feminist scholars, and universities and governments under their sway have gone to make sure such findings are repeated. So funds are hard to obtain, for example, for research that doesn't take a gender-based approach, and might, for instance, ask women about their own violence. Or feminist scholars just distort findings or even give a different finding from that the research establishes. I strongly suggest reading Straus's article. I can't find the article right now, but this page seems to go through the main points (though I can't speak for the site, as I just found it on a search for the original article):

http://menaregood.com/wordpress/straus-exposes-the-academic-veils-placed-on-domestic-violence-research/

I would be very careful immediately associating sexual abuse advocacy with radical feminism. The feminist movement is far from monolithic, and there are many other voices in there besides the radical feminists. The queer theorists, for one, have been challenging that narrative of victimization for decades now, and there's really no reason an activist can't come from that school--or any other school--instead of specifically radical feminism. I am very familiar with modern feminism and gender studies broadly, since I went to the type of college that is a hotbed for the movement, and any article that discusses feminist beliefs as some sort of one-size-fits-all tyranny, as that Men Are Good page does, is really going to set off warning bells. Some feminists would admittedly like to believe that women can do no wrong and men are always the oppressors, but you'll also find a lot of interest in men's studies and the ways in which social expectations harm them as well. So please don't insinuate that everyone who has an interest sexual abuse advocacy is a radical feminist. We're not.

On to the surveys, looking into it further, there are a number of different ones, and not all with questionable survey procedures (I see what you mean by self-reporting now; I thought you meant compared to actual reported crime statistics before). This DOJ study from back in 2000 put the number at 1/36 per year (6.91 months), but points out that if that rate remains stable throughout the entire college career, it could rise to 1/5. Much more disturbing, it reports that almost half of women whose incidents were categorized as completed rapes did not consider that incident to have been a rape at all. (Which sounds very strange, but I can certainly attest to not knowing whether or not I've been sexually assaulted. Nothing serious, but my quickness to excuse it is really problematic.)

Both this survey and the one linked in that Federalist article discuss the differences between the various results. One thing that came up is that the survey with lower numbers was specifically looking at the issue from a criminal angle and tailoring its questions for that end rather than approaching it as a public health issue. This is going to result in significant underreporting if there is a strong tendency amongst rape victims to deny that they've been raped at all.

Here is another survey I found from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, not specifically dealing with college age violence, but still on the topic of sexual assault. It says that 1/5 women and 1/71 men will be raped at some point in their lifetime, and that 1/2 women and 1/5 men will experience other types of sexual violence victimization. I don't know if you want to call this an epidemic, but I hope we can all agree that it's not good.


 

Last edited by Hypatia (10/05/2018 11:04 pm)

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

The influence of Marxism on the New Left is huge and obvious. Reas Scruton's Thinkers of the New Left. The influence of quasi-Marxist beliefs is growing on the left today. Radical feminism, much LGBT activism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, etc., all have important Marxist antecedents, even if they certainly aren't pure Marxism.

For a moment, let's disregard that I have no idea what New Left is. Looks like an attempt to resuscitate the Red Scare.

Now, that aside, I can agree with Scruton's assessment - with a stretch of imagination. Yes, the connections are there, but the problem is that they are imaginary, not concrete. For example LGBT activists have not read Marx at all and never refer to him. Post-structuralists and feminists only extract some de-nuanced concept from Marx such as equality or masses or minorities and ignore the rest, while they in fact more often operate with "plurality" which is not Marx's.

With the exact same stretch of imagination, I can assert that Scruton has fascist antecedents. He even likes Wagner! So let's drop these too easy associations.

To associate critical theory and radical deconstructivism with Marx and Marxism is a straightforward mistake. Marx was highly structured. His idea was not just revolution, but to establish other institutions that he outlined - after first having described with good precision the contemporary institutions. On the other hand, the current brand of art and social critique/analysis relying on critical theory has nothing constructive in it. It just aims to deconstruct and demolish what is currently standing, and has no ideas beyond that.

These two things are related only with a stretch, and it's particularly a stretch when the representatives of the latter do not fall back to the former and you cannot back up the latter by quoting the former without distortions.

Added: The best possible claim to the association would be perhaps to say that the representatives of the current "New Left" trends serve as unknowing "useful idiots" to a great Marxist masterplan that is slowly spanning over centuries. But this claim goes into the same basket as Illuminati theories. In fact, Illuminati theories are actually more concrete, because the theorists are able to point out real-life grey eminences such as certain banking dynasties. The claims to the LGBT-Marxist connection would achieve the same credence as soon as someone can point out similar grey eminences. Until then, the Illuminati theories remain much more credible.

Last edited by seigneur (10/06/2018 4:26 am)

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

I'm sorry, but as far as I can see, queer theory, women's studies, critical theory, radical feminism, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, etc., are just ideology posing as serious scholarship. That isn't to say there might not occasionally be something of worth brought up, but it is so lost in the accretions of nonsense and ideology as to be irretrievable. These are the kinds of bilge that made the Humanities and social sciences a joke, which as an early career Humanities/social science annoys me no end.

​The New Atheist writer Pete Boghossian has turned his attention to some of these fields with some new hoax papers in 'Grievance Studies':

https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/

The rape culture problem among dogs in parks in Oregon is a good one, and it won a kind of prize.