A subsequent police investigation involving 70 people, including Jackie’s friends, colleagues, and members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity found no one to corroborate her story. By mid-2015, Rolling Stone’s article had been retracted and removed from the site, the editor responsible for publishing the story had resigned, and the magazine was facing multiple lawsuits.
Rolling Stone’s humiliation came at the height of “rape culture” panic on college campuses, in which feminist activists convinced the media, as well as the White House, that college-aged women were being raped at levels comparable to war-torn, lawless countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The statistic they endlessly trot out is that one in four women will be sexually assaulted during their time at college, a number they arrive at based on surveys even the conducting researchers admit are likely to be inflated by response bias.81 Actually reliable statistics, from the Bureau of Justice, put the figure at 6.1 per 1,000 for students and 7.6 per 1,000 for non-students.82 Still too many, but not even close to the number President Obama has repeated. In 2015, 89% of colleges reported zero campus rapes.83
If you want a clear example of the power of “fake news,” consider what the rape culture narrative did to American college campuses. Miscarriages of justice up and down the country. Colleges facing crippling lawsuits from students. Male and female undergraduates terrified of one another—the former of being dragged through the new kangaroo courts springing up on college campuses, and the latter of a rape panic that paints college-aged men as insatiable, psychopathic monsters.
Virtually every media outlet insisted that some variation of “lad banter” and “frat culture” was responsible for a new epidemic of rape. Video game developers found themselves being accused of “rape culture” if they made their characters too sexy. Newsstands faced pressure to take raunchy magazines off shelves. Blurred Lines, an innocuous pop song by Robin Thicke, was portrayed across the media as a “rape anthem” for the line, “I know you want it.” The song was banned from multiple college campuses in Britain and America.
Making it all worse, any criticism of feminist commentators was portrayed in the media as unquenchable misogyny.
I find it hard to understand how everyone allowed themselves to be hoodwinked for so long by this idea of “rape culture.” Rape has existed since the first caveman saw a cavewoman with less facial hair than usual and picked up a bone club. How did we get the idea that it’s a brand new crisis, worse than it’s ever been? The crime statistics are inarguable: rape has declined nearly 75% since the early 1990s and continues to plummet.84
For some time now, feminists have preferred fiction and feelings to facts and reason. As discrimination against women has largely disappeared, feminists have had to invent new, fake problems in order to stay relevant and have something to be angry about. “Campus rape culture” is a particularly egregious and damaging example, but there are many more.
BABY KILLERS
Pro-life used to be a feminist ideal: the original feminists, like Mary Wollstonecraft and Susan B. Anthony, denounced abortion.
Abortion is murder. Abortion is wrong. I think everyone knows that, which is why abortion activists are so angry all the time. It’s like when you catch someone in a lie and they get mad at you. It’s the guilt, you see.
When I say abortion is wrong, its defenders leap to their feet, demanding to know why I want to jail a ten-year-old rape victim. Well, guess what? I don’t want to jail that girl, and I defy you to find any opponent of abortion who does.
The Catholic Church provided graceful reasoning on moral dilemmas long before the first feminist had a hissy fit. In principle, the direct, intentional taking of innocent human life is wrong. Because that’s a principle, it’s easy to say that, even in the most heartbreaking case, like that of the ten-year-old we’re considering, it cannot be right to take the innocent life growing inside her.
But as Western civilization has always understood, hard cases make bad law. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, “Human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain.” In other words, it’s not wise to punish with human law everything that may be opposed to the natural law.
Thomas Aquinas wasn’t the killjoy puritan your lying professors claim: St. Thomas and before him St. Augustine both followed anti-utopian views, for instance, when it came to prostitution. They thought it was wrong to do, but foolish to make illegal. I don’t think they’d approve of hooking for haute couture, so my twenties still required in-depth Confessions.
The Aquinian distinction between human and divine law means I can say it’s wrong to take innocent life, without having to say that we should outlaw abortions in every single case. In a sane country, we would argue about which cases should be illegal.
However, just because I don’t believe abortion ought to be outlawed in all cases doesn’t mean I don’t find it appalling. Feminist campaigners like the harpies behind “#ShoutYourAbortion” (which is exactly what it sounds like—women boasting about their abortion) want to turn baby-killing into a token of pride. These women are the worst humanity has to offer.
Even if abortion had no negative effects on the person who undertakes it, it would still be wrong. But just in case you need more persuading that murdering children ought to be frowned upon, consider the effects on the mother. In 2010, the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry published a study based on a sample of 3,000 women in the United States. It found 59% increased risk for suicidal thoughts, 61% increased risk for mood disorders, and a 261% increased risk for alcohol abuse.85 In a sense, the law doesn’t have to punish those who have abortion; the guilt itself is a punishment. Removing any sense of guilt from having an abortion is not protecting the mother’s feelings; it’s making things worse.
Abortion is obviously bad for the future women it murders (sex selective abortion is becoming common in the UK and other countries with growing Muslim populations), and also has disastrous effects on the lives of the women that kill their children. It doesn’t surprise me that feminism promotes abortion, because feminism seems to always go against the actual interests of women.
Abortion is particularly horrifying given the widespread availability of contraception. Given the ease with which women can now avoid becoming pregnant, having to have an abortion, outside unusual cases like rape, is the height of irresponsibility.