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Torie,
You and Jezebel are right that Heather Mac Donald goes off the rails with her rant against drunk college girls. Which is too bad, because before that, she was making an important point. At first I wondered, why is she rehashing this now? Because I thought so many others, including Christina Hoff Sommers in her excellent Who Stole Feminism more than 15 years ago, had cast significant skepticism on the 1-in-4 trope. But, despite all the back and forth on the study by Mary Koss back in the 1980s that gave us this statistic, and despite all the healthy debate about what the real numbers are (anywhere from 2 percent on up), this number that should be controversial is still bandied about as accepted fact. (Even the CDC uses it. And my alma mater, too.)
No doubt that the activists and counselors who cite it are well-meaning and want women to be aware of what can happen to them. But it still peeves me to no end. This inflated statistic is actually harmful, because it trivializes the women—whatever percentage that may be—who actually are raped. If one in four of us is brutalized and we're all walking around just fine, then, hey, it must not be a big deal, right? It happens to everyone, so just get over it already, why don't you?
There will probably always be gray areas in defining rape. And such crimes will probably always be under-reported—it's unfortunate but true. But there have to be ways to address those problems that involve neither trumpeting a flawed statistic or attacking young women for being irresponsible.
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In a Sunday column for the Los Angeles Times, Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute questions the incidence of campus rape, which is reported to affect 20 percent to 25 percent of college women. (Penn State, the college I attended, is among the schools Mac Donald scolds for repeating the statistic. I say “college I attended” because alma mater’s a little highfalutin for my state school.)
She argues that the statistics are flawed because some of the women counted as being raped did not, in fact, consider themselves to have been raped. She writes, “A 2006 survey of sorority women at the University of Virginia, for example, found that only 23% of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped.” That means either A) college women are woefully uneducated about what constitutes rape or B) the stats are inflated. Mac Donald, of course, believes the answer is B, though I suspect it’s a combination of the two.
It’s fair to question the accuracy of the numbers and to debate the definition of rape. The real problem with Mac Donald’s piece is, as Jezebel puts it, that she “descends into a Laura Sessions Stepp-like rant against drunk sluts.” Feministing also slams Mac Donald for “think[ing] girls who dare to leave the house and socialize are getting what they ask for.”
The article concludes primly, “College is for learning.” I’m always confused by that admonition. Of course college is for learning. But learning and partying (that all-encompassing term for drinking, hooking up, eating greasy pizza at 4 a.m., singing along to “Livin’ on a Prayer”—sorry, getting a wee bit nostalgic here) aren’t mutually exclusive. I graduated in 2006 and had a good time in college. I partied my fair share and also managed to learn, land internships, work, and take part in extracurriculars. I guess she was just looking for a pat way to wrap up the piece, but scolding college women for spending too little time with books and too much time with booze isn’t the cure for any of the ails Mac Donald bemoans. It won’t keep women from being raped or make statistics more accurate. She seems more disturbed by girls getting drunk than the prospect of sexual assault.