Wendy McElroy just published an op-ed on the harm done to genuine rape victims by feminists who falsely claim rape. Based upon Wendy’s description of the facts of the case, that seems to be precisely what the Brevard, Florida NOW Chapter President and part-time Rollins College student Desiree Nall did. After surveying the facts of the case, she writes:
Assuming that Nall lied, she has achieved the opposite of what I believe she intended. By “crying rape” she has made every woman who is a victim less credible and less likely to receive justice from the police or the public. She has made women less safe.
Rollins student Elizabeth Humphrey states the point simply: “Lying about that story is absolutely horrible because women are victimized every day. And if we get the reputation of lying, then people won’t start to believe us if it does happen.”
Instead of publicizing sexual violence against women, Nall has spotlighted the problem of false accusations against men. Her case also raises the question of whether NOW-style feminists encourage false accusations when they flatly insist that women must be believed.
In the ’60s, feminists fought to have rape taken seriously. But taking an accusation seriously is not the same as granting it automatic validity. Rather, it means investigating the facts and weighing them in an unbiased manner that favors no one and nothing but the truth.
The feminist dogma that a woman has no incentive to lie about rape is absurd in the extreme; it’s a all-too-easy way to totally ruin a man’s life, even if the case dies before trial. It is certainly terrible that some women do lie about rape. It is a grave injustice to the man falsely accused. It creates an (in fact) unfounded fear of attack in the community. Worst of all, it casts doubt upon the allegations of rape by genuine victims.
It’s bad enough for a woman to do all that for petty reason of revenge; such a woman deserves to be shunned by all honest and civilized men and women. For a feminist to falsely allege rape in order to “raise awareness” about it is incomprehensibly vicious. (The same evaluation, of course, applies to those who write racist graffiti in order to “raise awareness” about racism, as also recently happened on some college campus.) Such tactics are also bizarrely dishonest: If rape or racism were such a problem, couldn’t examples be found rather than invented?
I vaguely remember hearing (perhaps from Stephen Hicks) that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hard left faced an inescapable either-or choice between socialism and reality. Unsurprisingly, they abandoned reality in favor of socialism — and thus postmodernism was born. Based upon my readings on Soviet Russia and Red China, I’m certain that most (if not all) hard leftists abandoned reality decades earlier. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the last shred of their pretend concern for the facts disintegrated. Postmodernism then served as a convenient rationalization for their abandonment of that pretended concern for facts: Wow, as it turned out, the idea of objective fact was just a myth!
That same general pattern seems to be at work in these cases of invented evils, in that the facts are simply treated as irrelevant in the face of leftist dogma about pervasive racism and sexism.
