Jezebel ran an odd hit piece by writer Erin Gloria Ryan that targeted Cathy Young. It is obvious the article is a hit piece when readers get to this part, early in the article:
Cathy Young has a history of—to put it mildly—rape victim skepticism. To put it harshly, she’s a writer who has been writing virtually the same rape-is-a-hysterical-feminist-fantasy op-ed over and over again for years. Here Young trots out the MRA standby “men get raped just as much as women!” for a Time piece that dismisses the sexual assault of women too drunk to consent as “alcohol-addled sex” instead of real rape. (You know, the kind when “a rape victim… is either physically overpowered or attacked when genuinely incapacitated.”)
This is an absurd claim.
In September 2014, the CDC released a report on sexual violence in America that reported about 1 in 5 women have been raped in their lifetime. It is important to remember that this study was praised by none other than Jezebel itself, which reported at the time,
A comprehensive study recently released by the Center for Disease Control has found that nearly 1 in 5 women in America report that they were raped. Not just during their time in college, which is a statistic we’re all depressingly familiar with — the CDC found that 19.3 percent of women in the United States have been raped at some point in their life.
. . .
This is something women have been saying since time immemorial, and something skeptics have been eagerly trying to debunk for just as long — because, you know, our lived experiences are meaningless and untrustworthy due to our gender. Conservatives, in particular, are obsessed with trying to prove that the 1 in 5 college rape statistic is wrong and that rape culture is made up. Guess what, guys: it’s really not!
So this CDC study is awesome! It’s the gold standard of sexual violence studies. So can you guess where the statistics that Cathy Young discusses about male sexual victimization–you know, the MRA standby ones–come from? That’s right, they’re from the same study.
How could that be? After all, very few men in the CDC study were classified as victims of rape: 1.7 percent in their lifetime, and too few for a reliable estimate in the past year. But these numbers refer only to men who have been forced into anal sex or made to perform oral sex on another male. Nearly 7 percent of men, however, reported that at some point in their lives, they were “made to penetrate” another person—usually in reference to vaginal intercourse, receiving oral sex, or performing oral sex on a woman. This was not classified as rape, but as “other sexual violence.”
And now the real surprise: when asked about experiences in the last 12 months, men reported being “made to penetrate”—either by physical force or due to intoxication—at virtually the same rates as women reported rape (both 1.1 percent in 2010, and 1.7 and 1.6 respectively in 2011).
Young’s point is not that men are victims of rape or sexual violence at the same rate that women are. Rather her point is that the study’s methodology uses overly broad and ambiguous questions about sexual experiences that result in overreporting of sexual violence by both groups.
Writers for Jezebel and others can’t say that this CDC study finally proves what they’ve been saying all along about female rape victimization, but then turn around and say the study’s findings about male sexual victimization is simply part and parcel of Men’s Rights Activist nonsense. As Young writes in her concluding paragraph,
We must either start treating sexual assault as a gender-neutral issue or stop using the CDC’s inflated statistics. Few would deny that sex crimes in America are a real, serious, and tragic problem. But studies of sexual violence should use accurate and clear definitions of rape and sexual assault, rather than lump these criminal acts together with a wide range of unsavory but non-criminal scenarios of men—and women—behaving badly.
