Boys Will Be Boys

by Clementine Ford

  As Kate Harding writes in her 2015 book, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture—and What We Can Do About It, the primary ‘evidence’ used by MRAs here is a small and highly questionable study from 1994 in which researcher Eugene J. Kanin investigated 104 sexual assault complaints made to a small Midwestern police station between 1978 and 1987. According to Kanin, 41 percent of these allegations turned out to be false.

  Well, now that’s a compelling statistic! Sure, it relies on data that’s almost four decades old and has to be placed within the context of Midwestern attitudes towards women, sexual agency, second-wave feminism and male entitlement—but 41 percent! I mean, it’s no surprise that bitches lie, but it’s just so handy to have some evidence that tells us definitively and without any bias whatsoever that they lie all the fucking time.

  Yeah, nah.

  The problem with Kanin’s study (and indeed almost all assessments of ‘false’ allegations in a crime as hotly disputed as rape and sexual assault) is that determining duplicity has occurred is both difficult and extremely flawed. In 2009, David Lisak co-authored a report for the National Center for Prosecution of Violence Against Women looking in part at difficulties inherent in defining a ‘false’ report. He wrote, ‘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.’ Lisak (who’s widely regarded as an expert in the field) argued that Kanin’s study failed to question the police methods used to assess the veracity of sexual assault allegations in that small Midwestern town and that any potential biases ‘were then echoed in Kanin’s unchallenged reporting of their findings’. Basically, it’s scientifically unsound to use as a control group a selection of people who, history and sociology inform us, are unlikely to be impartial when it comes to judging whether or not a woman is telling the truth about her own rape.

  Rape allegations can also be declared ‘false’ if law enforcement officers and/or prosecutors decide not to pursue charges, which might be because they don’t believe the claimant (understanding, of course, that social attitudes towards rape, victim-blaming and sexual violence are just as likely to be found within the institutions we rely on to protect us as they are outside them, especially as these institutions continue to be male-dominated) or because it’s felt that successful prosecution will prove difficult if not impossible. Sometimes, as was the case with those reports declared ‘false’ in Kanin’s study, rape allegations are withdrawn by the person filing them.

  Well, gee willikers, I wonder what it is about the society we live in that would make someone withdraw a complaint of sexual assault? I mean, who doesn’t love the idea of being grilled about their behaviour, their clothing, their previous sexual encounters and their complicity in a violent situation, first by law enforcement officers, then by defence lawyers and, last but not least, by members of the public?

  You don’t have to look very far to see how women are treated when they allege sexual misconduct against them. Branded liars and sluts, they’re often terrorised for trying to ‘ruin’ a decent man’s life or accused of going through the entire rigmarole of a rape report and subsequent trial because they irresponsibly fucked someone one night and woke up with a case of the whoopsies. Yeah, opening your entire sexual history up to public comment over a period of months sounds way less complicated and time-consuming than spending the day huddled under a blankie, watching a Drag Race marathon and vowing never to drink again.

  Isn’t it incredibly interesting how society in general has no problem characterising women as vindictive, illogical harlots who will happily ‘destroy’ a man’s entire life rather than take responsibility for their own sexual choices, but that same society cannot equate their knowledge that rape exists with the fact that this means a proportion of men are actually rapists? The idea that millions of women—almost 50 percent!—who purport to be rape survivors are in fact conducting elaborate schemes of revenge or ‘attention-seeking’ (as Kanin characterised one of the motivations for filing false reports) rather than being, you know, actual rape survivors would be a bizarre enough fantasy in a world that rewarded women for opening up about such things. But the reality is that women who come forward with rape allegations are treated like garbage. Contrary to popular opinion, a truckload of cash doesn’t arrive at a woman’s doorstop the moment she opens her mouth to screech ‘J’accuse!’ at some poor, innocent man. She isn’t carried into the courthouse atop a diamond-encrusted throne, deposited into the witness stand and given a relaxing spa treatment for the next three hours. The friends and family members of the accused do not seek her out to thank her for alerting them to his scurrilous ways. The #MeToo and #timesup movements might have put the fear of God into the world’s men (particularly those with something to hide), but even their success isn’t enough to erase the fact that silence-breakers are still accused of lying, still bombarded with death threats and still risk losing their jobs, social standing and entire relationships. Daisy Coleman, fourteen when she was raped by a classmate in Missouri, but whose family was later driven out of the town; the anonymous young female victim of the Steubenville rape, who had to watch as news anchors lamented the loss of ‘promising futures’ for her assailants; the female students featured in the documentary The Hunting Ground about rape on US college campuses, many of whom ended up leaving school after facing administrative failure to act as well as bullying from their classmates; Saxon Mullins, raped by Luke Lazarus outside his father’s nightclub in Sydney and then forced to watch as a parade of well-heeled community members lined up to provide character references for him. These are just a drop in the vast, vast ocean of women who have been punished to varying degrees for daring to besmirch the names of the men who can always count on being protected by their communities.

  None of this is to say that women don’t ever lie about being raped or are incapable of such duplicity. There are circumstances in which people’s lives have indeed been destroyed by false allegations or convictions, and there are people who have served incomprehensibly long prison sentences for sexual crimes they were later discovered not to have committed (but it’s worth pointing out this is infinitely more likely to happen to men of colour than to white men). But it is altogether too common for suspicion to be directed at any woman who alleges rape, especially when it implicates the kind of man considered valuable by broader society. The phrase ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is shouted ad infinitum whenever an allegation hits the news (or even just the grapevine), but very few people seem to have a problem with assuming that women are guilty of either lying or being complicit, even when it involves dozens of them speaking out against the same man and demonstrating a pattern of access and abuse played out over decades. See: Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump.

  Leaving aside the extreme contortion required to listen to these kinds of repeated testimonies and still find them unconvincing, it’s also important to remember that the determination of what makes something automatically false is flawed. Someone falsely imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit isn’t evidence that the crime itself didn’t occur, only that the justice system might have failed to identify the correct perpetrator. Someone withdrawing their allegation of a crime is not the same as admitting they lied, particularly when moving forward frequently carries such a heavy burden. A rape victim changing their story or proving unreliable with their testimony is not definitive proof that a story has been manufactured; on the contrary, it’s consistent with a neurobiological response to trauma that sees the brain more likely to form memories based on sensory rather than visual or linear recollection. A verdict of Not Guilty doesn’t mean She Lied, especially when it is notoriously difficult to secure convictions for sex crimes.

  And yet, these nuances are all too often discarded in preference for a simple true/false binary that denies not only the complexities of interpreting and reporting se
xual assault but also the ease with which the evidence of it can be hidden or obscured. While this reality is dismissed, the trope of the archetypal, vengeful woman painted as fact by large swathes of society (and weaponised by aggrieved MRAs) holds fast. As Harding argues:

  Let’s not act as though one woman’s false testimony is, by itself, sufficient to create the Kafkaesque hell of a wrongful prosecution—especially when a genuine victim’s credible testimony is still often not enough to merit an arrest. The idea that any given vengeful, embarrassed, or simply bored woman can ‘cry rape’ and automatically send an innocent man to prison is pure fiction.

  The term ‘fake news’ might be relatively recent, but the tendency to dismiss inconvenient facts as a conspiracy has been around since long before Donald Trump pussy-grabbed his way to the presidency. MRAs have been beating the false-accusations drum for decades, pointing to studies like Kanin’s and individual high-profile cases (such as a discredited Rolling Stone article about rape on campus at the University of Virginia) as definitive proof of the rape industrial complex and the feminist crones who sacrifice men at its altar. Study after study has disproved the claims of high rates of false reports, but the myth persists. Why?

  Unlike the feminist movement, which throughout its rich and storied history has sought to liberate all humans from the oppressive structures of patriarchy, the men’s rights movement is founded on the basic conviction that women are trying to fuck men’s shit up and it isn’t fair. In relation to their view of rape particularly, there’s a bizarre disconnect. Women need men to protect them, MRAs say, and feminism’s disruption of this necessary relationship puts those same women at risk. But when MRAs also deny men’s complicity in the violence women experience—indeed, when they argue that women are the ones who are just as likely, if not more likely, to be guilty of perpetrating gendered violence—who is it exactly that we need men to protect us from? We’re instructed to modify our behaviour, our clothes and our movements in order to ‘prevent’ rape, yet we’re also apparently just as likely to lie about it as we are to be subjected to it. If male-perpetrated violence against women isn’t the risk we’ve been conditioned to believe it is, why are we still warned against going into parks after dark or getting drunk or wearing a short skirt or kissing someone we aren’t also prepared to ‘see it through’ with? And if women are in fact the real danger—if it is us and not men who have the capacity and the desire to inflict pain on others in order to exercise our female privilege—why aren’t men expected to minimise and reduce their own engagement with the world in order to not make themselves a target of its violence?

  You would think these questions would be of concern to MRAs, but I guess they’re too busy conspiring to take down women who do speak out against assault and/or attempting to jam the systems being put in place to try to help them. (See also: when MRAs tried to impersonate women of colour online to get #endfathersday trending, thereby creating the evidence they needed to prove their claims that feminists wanted to . . . end Father’s Day).

  In 2013, a liberal arts university in LA created an online anonymous reporting system for rape and sexual assault. Victim advocates at Occidental College devised the ground-breaking system as a way for students to ‘log’ their rapes with the school for the purposes of supplying statistical data and seeking support in a safe environment. To be clear, this was never meant to be an official avenue for students to report their experiences of one, both or either to authorities.

  But it didn’t take MRAs long to get their hands on a link to the reporting tool, misrepresenting its directive from the outset. On the Men’s Rights subreddit (r/mensrights, just in case you want to spend an evening in cyber hell), a poster linked to the reporting tool with the explanation: ‘Feminists at Occidental College created an online form to anonymously report rape/sexual assault. You just fill out a form and the person is called into the office on a rape charge. The “victim” never has to prove anything or reveal their identity.’

  This wasn’t even remotely true. Occidental created the tool not just to provide a resource for students who had been raped or assaulted while attending the college, but because a federal Title IX lawsuit had directly accused the administration of under-reporting on-campus sexual assaults to the appropriate authorities. But even if they had wanted to use it as a means of funnelling into the prison system douche-haired young men raping (sorry, ‘dating’) their way around campus, there’s no jurisdiction in the world that will issue a rape charge on the strength of an anonymous tip alone.

  Not that this stopped the MRAs spurred on by the Reddit post. In just over thirty-six hours, more than 400 false rape reports were submitted via the online tool, with many of them naming actual students (most of them women). One commenter on r/mensrights wrote: ‘The quickest way to shut this one down is to anonymously report random women and let them sweat in the hot seat. This will be over before it begins.’ Another wrote: ‘Step one: Get a list of every “Feminist” at Occidental College who supported this system. Step two: Anonymously report them for rape.’

  MRAs repeatedly bemoan what they see as an abundance of false rape accusations, but at the first opportunity they conspire to flood the system with—wait for it!—false rape accusations. Take a moment to feast on the fucking irony.

  As Lindy West wrote on Jezebel in her article ‘Occidental College Finally Addresses Persistent Rape Problem’ in 2013, ‘I can barely fathom the putrid mental contortions required to look at a list of rape crisis hotlines, treatment centers, and counseling services and see a threat that must be destroyed.’

  But, then, destroying the progress made by women who seek nothing but their own liberation from violence and oppression has always been the primary objective of the men’s rights movement. It doesn’t matter that a service like the one provided at Occidental would have benefited male victims as well. The very existence of a rape reporting tool is an acknowledgment that rape might actually be a real problem. And unlike Jeff Bridges’ iconic turn in The Big Lebowski, these dudebros will NOT abide.

  It isn’t just rape convictions for which MRAs hold the legal system to account. The family court is one of the biggest bugbears of the men’s rights movement, with an almost psychotic fixation on the ‘lying bitches’ (because whether she’s stupid, conniving, lying or heartless, she’s still always a bitch) who evidently collude with judges to abduct children from their fathers. AVFM eagerly stokes the flames of this discord, encouraging the false view that family court judges are in the business of ruining men’s lives. (Ironically, in addition to denying loving dads the right to see their kids, feminism is also responsible for forcing men to become dads in the first place and extorting them for child support they don’t want to pay and probably aren’t even responsible for because paternity fraud is also A Big Problem according to the charter of paranoid man-babies. Don’t be alarmed if you find it confusing; MRAs make sense to nobody but themselves.)

  To his followers, Elam presents himself as a kind of vigorous, take-no-prisoners defender of male dignity. He reserves particular viciousness for the family court system in his article ‘The family courts have got to GO and I mean right fucking now’ in 2011:

  I am a pacifist. I do not advocate violence. [LOL WHATEVS PAUL!] But I tell you this. The day I see one of these absolutely incredulous excuses for a judge dragged out of his courtroom into the street, beaten mercilessly, doused with gasoline and set afire by a father who just won’t take another moment of injustice, I will be the first to put on the pages of this website that what happened was a minor tragedy that pales by far in comparison to the systematic brutality and thuggery inflicted daily on American fathers by those courts and their police henchmen.

  The passion of Elam’s declaration is more than slightly at odds with his actual knowledge of custody battles and family law. To hear him speak, you’d think he’d had a particularly heinous experience of both—that behind the scenes was a wife who’d conspired to keep him from his children and whose actions, fo
r better or worse, were the spark that set Elam’s meninist convictions ablaze. But the truth is a lot more embarrassing for the man who once wrote of disgruntled fathers, ‘I am an older man and have witnessed this silent, ignored tragedy for far too long . . . This sort of thing cannot be allowed to continue.’ The truth is that Elam willingly abandoned his own kids not once but twice.

  In 2015, Buzzfeed journalists Katie J.M. Baker and Adam Serwer reported that Elam’s parental history was less than exemplary. Rather than being a victim of the feminazi family court system, Elam turned his back on his biological children twice—once following his divorce from their mother and then again after his daughter sought a reconciliation as an adult. He speaks bitterly of child support as a kind of crime syndicate racket that fathers are forced into against their will, but as Baker and Serwer revealed in their 2015 article ‘How men’s rights leader Paul Elam turned being a deadbeat dad into a moneymaking movement’, ‘he accused his first wife of lying about being raped so he could relinquish his parental rights and avoid paying child support’. Reader, I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you. As his daughter Bonnie (not her real name) told Buzzfeed, ‘People come to Paul for advice on parenting, even though he has two estranged biological children that he did not raise or take care of.’

  There’s a racket taking place, for sure. And given Elam’s the only financial beneficiary of AVFM, it’s fair to say he’s running the whole damn thing.

  But let’s be fair. As reprehensible and vindictive as a good proportion of MRAs seem to be, it’s also true that some men are disenfranchised and disadvantaged by a legal system that has the power to keep their children away from them. The fact that they form the minority of men’s experiences with the family courts doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and in some ways it’s understandable that such desperation would attract them to a movement that claims to want to right these wrongs. I have sympathy for these men. I mean, it’s hard not to sympathise with the thought of a loving parent being kept from their children. Since giving birth to my son, I’ve conducted more than a few thought experiments about what I would do if he were taken from me or if I were forced to live apart from him. Even contemplating it makes me feel numb and broken inside. It would be like a form of banishment, like being cast into a dark room underground where the air was stale and nothing beautiful could ever grow. As much as some people might not like to believe this, I take no pleasure in the thought of loving, committed fathers being parted from their children. And, yes, of course I acknowledge there are some women who use their kids as a means of exacting revenge.