With an estimated 188,000 women battered each year, there’s no doubt that domestic violence, or intimate partner abuse, against women in this country is a very significant problem.14 But is marriage really to blame?
Research suggests that married women are less likely to be victims of violence than those who are divorced, separated, or unmarried but cohabitating with men. Waite and Gallagher studied the data collected in the National Crime Victimization Survey and found that two-thirds of attacks on women considered “intimate violence” (which means that attacks from friends or acquaintances are excluded) were not committed by husbands. Similarly, ex-spouses, boyfriends, or ex-boyfriends were responsible for 21 percent of rapes compared to the 5 percent committed by husbands (acquaintances, friends, or other relatives were responsible for more than half of rapes).15
Violence within marriage certainly exists. But young women contemplating their future relationships should understand that violence infests only a minority of marriages. Less than 2 percent of wives and 1 percent of husbands are subjected to an episode of violence that results in physical injury in a year.16
Of course, there are reasons why abuse within marriage may go unreported. Many wives—who may be dependent on their husbands for economic support or who don’t want their children to lose a relationship with their father—may hesitate to report violent husbands. As Gallagher and Waite emphasize even a “tiny fraction of fifty-three million married couples in America adds up to hundreds of thousands of injured spouses each year.” Yet given that these incidents occur in just a fraction of all marriages, it seems reasonable to assume that marriage itself is not the cause of this violence. 17
Did you vote yesterday? No, but I reported a rape.
“Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.”
—Feminist author Catharine MacKinnon
The fact that marriage may reduce the likelihood of violence18 and the likelihood that women will be victims of a crime are just a few of the lesser known benefits of marriage. As will be discussed in the next chapter, young women often receive a lot of politically incorrect misinformation about marriage and divorce.
The dubious origins of the one-in-four statistic
According to the Department of Justice, more than 150,000 women were the victims of rape or attempted rape in the United States in 2001-02.19 For many reasons, this number may understate the number of women who experience such an attack. Some women may be reluctant to come forward out of misplaced shame, or because they have a relationship with the attacker that makes it difficult to report his crime. Some may just want to avoid the police and the courts.
Since it is reasonable to assume that this statistic under-estimates the prevalence of rape in the United States, what’s a better estimate of its true frequency?
One of the most common statistics used by women’s studies centers—and repeated by the media—is that one-in-four college women are victims of rape or attempted rape. It’s a shocking ratio; if true it would raise the number of rapes in the United States well above 150,000. Where did it come from and how was it derived?
In Who Stole Feminism, Christina Hoff Sommers details the origins of the one-in-four statistic. In 1982, Mary Koss, who had written for Ms. Magazine, surveyed three thousand college women. Their responses to three questions were used to determine if they had been raped: Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs? Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man threatened or used some degree of physical force (twisting your arm, holding you down, etc.) to make you? And, have you had sexual acts (anal or oral intercourse or penetration by objects other than the penis) when you didn’t want to because a man threatened to use some degree of physical force (twisting your arm, holding you down, etc.) to make you?
What a Feminist Icon Said:
There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation. There is no analogue in occupied countries or in dominated races or in imprisoned dissidents or in colonialized cultures or in the submission of children to adults or in the atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag. There is nothing exactly the same, and this is not because the political invasion and significance of intercourse is banal up against these other hierarchies and brutalities. Intercourse is a particular reality for women as an inferior class; and it has in it, as part of it, violation of boundaries, taking over, occupation, destruction of privacy, all of which are construed to be normal and also fundamental to continuing human existence.
Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse. http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/IntercourseI.html
Based on responses to these questions, researchers concluded that 15 percent of women surveyed had been raped and 12 percent had experienced an attempted rape. Therefore, a total of more than 27 percent of women were either the victim of rape or attempted rape.20 This is the origin of the one-in-four statistic.
There’s important information that’s not reflected in that number. For example, only 25 percent of the women who Koss counted as having been raped described the incident as rape themselves. Nearly half described the incident as “miscommunication” and 11 percent said that they did-n’t feel victimized.
Sommers describes how scholars questioned the accuracy of the figure. A professor at Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare noted the problems associated with the question, “have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs.” Anyone who drank too much and had a sexual encounter might answer yes even though the regrettable incident probably wasn’t rape:If your date mixes a pitcher of margaritas and encourages you to drink with him and you accept a drink, have you been “administered” an intoxicant, and has your judgment been impaired? Certainly, if you passout and are molested, one would call it rape. But if you drink and, while intoxicated, engage in sex that you later come to regret, have you been raped? Koss does not address these questions specifically, she merely counts your date as a rapist and you as a rape statistic if you drank with your date and regret having sex with him.21
Koss also found that four in ten of the women she counted as victims of rape, and one out of three victims of attempted rape, went on to have intercourse with their so-called attacker again. While Koss ponders potential reasons these women would return to their attackers, Sommers offers a more simple explanation:Since most of those Koss counts as rape victims did not regard themselves as having been raped, why not take this fact and the fact that so many went back to their partners as reasonable indications that they had not been raped to begin with?22
Reporters who had examined this study estimated that if you eliminate women who didn’t think that they had been raped and those who had responded affirmatively to the alcohol and drug question, instead of one in four women being victims of rape or attempted rape, between one in twenty-two and one in thirty-three are victims, or between 3 to 5 percent of women. This lower estimate is still alarming and probably understates the exact number—women may be reluctant even to admit having been raped in an anonymous survey.
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, Cathy Young; New York, The Free Press, 1999.
Another study of four thousand women, compiled in the report “Rape in America” found that one in eight American women—or about 12 percent—had been the victim of forcible rape, which was defined as “an event that occurred without the woman’s consent, involved the use of force or threat of force, and involved sexual penetration of the victim’s vagina, mouth, or rectum.” More than eight in ten did not report the crime to the police.
Yet with all the problem regarding underreporting, these lower numbers are a significant improvement over a figure which is plainly too high, and inevitably leads to an hysterical fear that one quarter of al
l American women—some forty million—will be raped.
More research is needed to get a better understanding of the prevalence of rape in our country, even if knowing the exact number is impossible. Greater efforts need to be made to reduce the number of women (and men) who are victims of this brutal crime. But given that the one-in-four statistic is almost certainly inflated, it should not to be taught as gospel—if for no other reason than it may alarm young women unnecessarily.
Defining rape
Part of the uncertainty about the prevalence of rape may stem from the increased ambiguity about the definition of the crime. While a dictionary provides a seemingly straightforward definition of “forcing another person to submit to sex acts, especially sexual intercourse,” what constitutes “force” has become murky. In particular, in situations involving alcohol, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish what’s rape and what’s simply poorly thought out sex.
Many feminists have pushed for a very broad definition of rape. Feminist Catharine MacKinnon’s definition of rape—“politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated”—is tremendously openended, suggesting that there’s essentially no time that a man can feel confident that a woman could not later decide to characterize their sexual interlude as rape.
In Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, Cathy Young catalogues how this ambiguity has created significant problems in the legal system. A liberal definition of rape has opened the door for women who, for example, drink too much and then have sex to accuse their partner later of having raped them. Women who initially say no, but then continue to engage in sexual activity leading to intercourse, have accused men of rape even though they faced no physical threats and did not refuse again, which was sadly construed by their partners as having constituted a change of mind. This new standard for what constitutes rape has led to the incarceration of innocent men accused of a brutal crime by women motivated by spite or jealousy.
As Young details, the desire to give the accusing woman the benefit of the doubt stems from an understandable impulse to correct the historical mistreatment of rape victims, who were often made to feel as though they were responsible for causing the crime. However, it’s unavoidable that rape—particularly date rape or rape that occurs between acquaintances who have engaged in some sexual contact—often comes down to a situation of “he-said, she-said.” While it’s important to take the woman’s accusations very seriously, it’s also important not to lose sight of the rights of the accused. Innocent until proven guilty is an important tenant of our legal system and must not be thrown out simply because of sympathy for the victim.
It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind.
Date rape is unwanted sexual activity that can be distinguished from ordinary rape by the absence of overt violence. If a woman’s date violently attacks her and literally forces her to have sex, then what we have is rape without adjectives, not “date” rape. In some cases of date rape, a female college student claims she was raped by her date, while the male insists that the sexual act was consensual. Sometimes, alcohol consumption has clouded the picture of who did what, said what, and meant what. She didn’t say no clearly enough; she wasn’t clear in her own mind what she wanted. Or maybe she was clear in her own mind that she didn’t want it, but she allowed herself to be talked into it and then regretted it later. That process of “talking her into it” becomes the act of aggression that justifies the description of the act as a rape.
Jennifer Roback Morse, Smart Sex: Finding Life-Long Love in a Hook-Up World
Women also should consider the social implications of such an expansive definition of rape. By implying that it may be rape anytime a woman has intercourse after consuming alcohol, feminists are suggesting that women are incapable of making decisions when drinking—hardly consistent with the idea of women as capable, independent, and equal.
The notion that once “no” has been uttered, anything after that is rape constitutes a loss of liberty for women. While many colleges and universities have attempted to impose guidelines and speech codes for how to obtain consent during a sexual encounter, such rules ignore how human beings tend to act. Most women (and men) are more coy in sexual situations, and don’t want to engage in a lengthy, technical discussion about precisely which intimate acts may occur. One study revealed that six in ten sexually active college women had actually said “no” to sex, even when they intended ultimately to engage in intercourse and nearly all had said “no” when they were still making up their minds.
Conclusion
Violence against women is a problem in the United States. Women need to be prepared to protect themselves and take precautions to minimize their risk of attack. Young women should be particularly aware of the potential for violence and know that even seemingly nice guys can turn out to be bad. But they should recognize that such men are outliers, violence isn’t inevitable, and that such crimes are an aberration in American society.
Chapter Seven
MARRIAGE: HAPPIER EVER AFTER
Many people think marriage is in trouble. It’s common knowledge that divorce rates soared during the second half of the twentieth century while rates of marriage declined. An increasing number of couples are also choosing to forgo or at least postpone marriage and cohabitate, believing that under this arrangement they can enjoy many of the benefits of marriage without the commitment and responsibilities.
Many factors contributed to marriage’s decline, including changes in divorce laws, the sexual revolution, and women’s increased economic independence. Feminists’ assault on marriage also has played a role in devaluing marriage. Radical feminists view marriage as a cruel trap for women, perpetuating patriarchy, and keeping women subservient to men. They lament the roles that women and men tend to assume in traditional marriages, believing that women get the worse deal from the marriage contract.
In spite of this negative perception of marriage and the high rate of divorce, most young women still aspire to marry. These women should be assured that marriage is a reasonable goal, associated with greater health, happiness, and financial security.
Guess what?
Radical feminists view marriage as a cruel trap for women, perpetuating patriarchy, and keeping women subservient to men.
It’s important for young women to recognize that cohabitation and marriage are not equivalent.
Married women report higher levels of sexual activity and satisfaction than their single counterparts.
Feminists’ rocky relationship with marriage
The feminist movement has a long history of viewing marriage with suspicion, and some radical feminists have gone so far as to call for women to boycott marriage entirely. A radical organization formed in the 1960s called “The Feminist” included the following restriction on marriage for its membership:(a) Because THE FEMINISTS consider the institution of marriage inherently inequitable, both in its formal (legal) and informal (social) aspects, and
(b) Because we consider the institution a primary formalization of the persecution of women, and
(c) Because we consider the rejection of this institution both in theory and in practice a primary mark of the radical feminist,
WE HAVE A MEMBERSHIP QUOTA: THAT NO MORE THAN ONE-THIRD OF OUR MEMBERSHIP CAN BE PARTICIPANTS IN EITHER A FORMAL (WITH LEGAL CONTRACT) OR INFORMAL (E.G., LIVING WITH A MAN) INSTANCE OF THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE.1
Even members of the more mainstream feminist movement, such as Robin Morgan, who became the editor of Ms. Magazine, wanted to end marriage as we know it: “We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.” 2
Eventually, some feminists came to recognize the problems associated with this hostility to an institution that many women value. In 1981, Betty Friedan (who many argue launched the modern feminist movement) urged the feminist movement to consider the positive role that marriage and family play in many women’s lives and to move beyond its reflex
ive hostility: The women’s movement is being blamed, above all, for the destruction of the family. Churchman and sociologists proclaim that the American family, as it has always been defined, is becoming an “endangered species,” with the rising divorce rate and the enormous increase in single-parent families and people—especially women—living alone. Women’s advocation of their age-old responsibilities for the family is also being blamed for the apathy and moral delinquency of the “me generation.”
I think we must at least admit and begin openly to discuss feminist denial of the importance of family, of women’s own needs to give and get love and nurture, tender loving care.3
She’s married. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
We must stop repeating the absurd mantra “it’s okay to be single,” and adopt the more aggressive stance that, “it’s not okay to be married.”
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism Page 8
