UPDATE: Robert VerBruggen weighs in over at Phi Beta Cons about how campus feminists have been distorting Mac Donald's articles.
He says he's "finally figuring out how feminists think" based upon their reactions to the Mac Donald piece. I couldn't agree more.
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Heather Mac Donald exposed the dubious claims of several organization that believe, without proof, that rape is an everyday event on American college campuses. Here she is in The Los Angeles Times and in City Journal.
Here are my favorite paragraphs:
So what reality does lie behind the campus rape industry? A booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the sixties demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. “We’re adults,” the students shouted. “We can manage our own lives. If we want to have members of the opposite sex in our rooms at any hour of the day or night, that’s our right.” The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, sluttish behavior that gets cruder each year. Do the boys, riding the testosterone wave, act thuggishly toward the girls? You bet! Do the girls try to match their insensitivity? Indisputably.It's as if Ms. Mac Donald were actually on campus to observe. She might have a few words to say about this Portside article riddled, as it is, with bogus statistics and feminist agenda. (Fortunately, Dan O'Toole CMC '09 and others have taken that article's authors to task.)
College girls drink themselves into near or actual oblivion before and during parties. That drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests University of Virginia graduate Karin Agness: it frees the drinker from responsibility and “provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn’t.” A Columbia University security official marvels at the scene at homecomings: “The women are shit-faced, saying, ΩLet’s get as drunk as we can,≈ while the men are hovering over them.” As anticipated, the night can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know. This less-than-romantic denouement produces the “roll and scream: you roll over the next morning so horrified at what you find next to you that you scream,” a Duke coed reports in Laura Sessions Stepp’s recent book Unhooked. To the extent that they’re remembered at all, these are the couplings that are occasionally transformed into “rape”—though far less often than the campus rape industry wishes.
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I wrote Ms. Mac Donald several years ago when I was caught, unarmed, in a politically correct firestorm. Though some students on campus threatened to kill me and assaulted a fellow student over our critical examination of the school's diversity program, I was, curiously enough, the only one punished.
After I was given an administrative slap on the wrist -- the school had first threatened me with expulsion -- I came across Mac Donald's article entitled "Prep School P.C. Plague." Her depiction of the political correctness cabal mirrored everything about my experience.
Eventually, I sent her an email, asking her why she didn't focus too much on my former prep school, Milton Academy. She responded about how it was just too easy to poke holes in. Unfortunately, she's right. What a pity there isn't a FIRE for high school students.
