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Aside from grunge music, what made the late ’80s and early ’90s culture so gay was a Third Wave of feminist panic, this time without a threat on the ground to respond to. A full employment plan for professional feminists thus required cooking up a boogeyman, and because they prey mostly on impressionable undergrad and grad students, they found it useful to invent the threat of “campus rape” and “date rape.” There was a real rape problem in the general population leading up to 1992, though, so Third Wavers were simply parasitizing the popularity of a campaign aimed at helping real rape victims. Let’s have a look at whether the various rape hysterias, measured by coverage in the NYT, responded to a real or manufactured threat.
To begin with the facts on the real threat, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, part of the US Department of Justice, has data available on forcible rape from 1960 to 2006…
Here is a graph:
There is a fairly steady increase from 1964 to 1992, and a pretty steady decrease from then to 2006. To measure the national hysteria, we will count how many articles appeared in the opinion-leading NYT in a given year that contain some relevant phrase, which tells us how “in the air” the idea is.[1] Here is the graph for “rape crisis,” almost always in the context of rape crisis centers, their organizers, and so on:
Overall it looks like it’s tracking something real, namely the forcible rape rate: the phrase first appears soon after rape crisis centers were founded in the early ’70s, and the graph steadily rises until 1993 and steadily falls afterward. A separate question is whether the level of panic in a given year is “appropriate” to the threat — is there too much or too little coverage? That’s a value judgment, or perhaps a tough empirical matter, so I won’t explore that. What is clear is that the trend in coverage of rape crisis centers tracks the trend in forcible rape rate pretty well, so these articles are reporting on something real.
Rape crisis centers were not confined to colleges — they were part of community outreach programs, so it makes sense that they would have been more in touch with reality. What happens if we look just at the hysteria about rape on college campuses? Heather Mac Donald wrote a good overview of the subject, called “The Campus Rape Myth”. Here is the graph for “campus rape,” “rape on campus,” or the plural forms of these two phrases, which supports her use of the term “myth”:
The graph is very different from before: there is almost no coverage until the late ’80s, there is an abrupt spike lasting through the early ’90s, and a sudden return to a lower level. The increase-then-decrease pattern is correct, and the peak is roughly where it should be, but the rest of the shape is all wrong. There should be a steady increase up to and away from the peak, not a sudden spike.
What the “campus rape” meme resembles is a bit of gossip that flares up and burns out quickly. The rise and fall of real rape happens on the time scale of decades, while the rise and fall of the “campus rape” myth unfolds on the scale of years. That’s what we expect from a gossip model, since gossip spreads very quickly — by word-of-mouth — while the social forces that cause the rape rate to change cannot produce such fast changes, judging by how “slowly” social change in related areas proceeds (such as the rates for homicide, illegitimacy, divorce, etc., which also rise and fall on the order of decades). The fact that the two peaks are very close suggests that this myth “piggy-backed” on the popularity of a real threat; otherwise it wouldn’t have been taken seriously.[2]
Lastly, let’s look at the popularity of the more nebulous concept called “date rape.” Here’s a graph for articles containing “date rape,” “date rapes,” or “date raped”:
As with “campus rape,” the coverage is mostly divorced from reality: there is almost no coverage until the late ’80s, an abrupt spike, a sudden downturn, and a steady but still high level afterward. So, unlike “campus rape,” the “date rape” myth remains popular. Now, “date rape” is a great myth because it is too vague to easily measure, and therefore difficult to show it’s not a grave threat. We know that this coverage cannot reflect forcible rape in general, since that has been declining since 1992, not stabilizing after 1995. One useful definition of “date rape” is rape by an acquaintance, as opposed to those dark-alley events. Here is a relevant fact from a journal article on the decline in many forms of abuse against minors since the early 1990s (another story you haven’t heard anything about in the gossip-driven media):
Sexual assaults of teenagers have dropped, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). From 1993 through 2004, overall sexual assaults decreased 67% (Figure 2). The subgroup of sexual assaults by known persons was down even more.
Granted this is for victims aged 12 to 17, but the pattern among 18 to 24 year-olds must surely mirror this. Women far north of this are less likely to be raped at all, and in any event they are not the ones who the media portray as victims of date rape — it’s usually a naive college freshman, as in that dopey movie Higher Learning (a wonderful reflection of the zeitgeist). So, as with “campus rape,” most of what you hear about “date rape” is folk mythology.
To close, how did the rape panics affect the average person? It likely gave well-to-do women an exaggerated view of the dangers of male sexuality, and likely left their male counterparts’ heads spinning, with lasting effects. Let’s take 1991 to be the peak year of these hysterias, and include the two years on either side, when the irrational ones were in their spike phase. Then let’s consider people who were 15 to 24 years old — those still forming their identities, growing into adulthood, figuring out how the social world works, who are open to new views, etc.
This creates a cohort born from roughly 1965 to 1978 that would most strongly bear the imprint of this hysteria, and especially those born around 1971 — basically, Generation X, with Roissy’s and Udolpho’s cohorts being near ground zero, Half Sigma being one of the elder members, and Thursday being a younger member. Because the hysteria was so abrupt, there is a strong contrast right outside of this cohort — for example, Steve Sailer and Alias Clio are not very far outside, but the tone of voice they use when talking about the battle of the sexes is very different, regardless of who turns out to be more accurate in a particular case. The same holds for most Baby Boomers.
The young people I’m friends with or have tutored, who were still in diapers in 1991, don’t seem to bear the imprint of the hysteria — you had to be a struggl
ing adolescent or young adult at the time for it to really fuck with your mind. Children were too blissfully ignorant, while full adults’ outlook on the world had already comfortably congealed, more or less. It is no accident that this cohort produced the pickup artists like Mystery — the women in this group are more psycho than in other cohorts, and the men still have a bad taste in their mouths from being on the receiving end of a national witch hunt. (Full disclosure: I was born in 1980.)
Why didn’t the nutty Second Wave of feminism leave a similar imprint on those born before 1965? All of that Andrea Dworkin stuff couldn’t have been easy to stomach. I think because, as exaggerated as the Second Wave ideology was, there was a real and steady increase in violence against women at the time, not to mention the parallel increase in homicide, drug use, race riots, and all other kinds of sick shit. You may not have agreed with their assessment of how bad things were, or what caused them, but you could still tell that things seemed to be getting worse — at least they weren’t making everything up.
However, the ’90s reversed just about every awful social trend of the previous 30-odd years. Surrounded by evidence of things not being so bad, you could only react with total bewilderment when a group of average women — not just the bulldog lesbians — got in your face about how awful men are for date raping their friends and turning college campuses into rape zones, so that women needed to Take Back the Night. The appropriate response to this is, of course, “Are you all fucking crazy?” But that would have only strengthened the witch-hunters’ suspicion that you were a closet-rapist. It’s a hardening experience to be told that you and the other guys in the room are potential rapists of the girl sitting the next row over.
Tomorrow I’ll look at a closely related myth, though this time one that is still increasing in popularity, and I’ll propose a model for it and estimate parameters.
[1] I eliminated any “duplicate” results, such as a “summary of the Metro section” that only mentions that there’s an article on rape inside (I only counted the real article), or in some cases if what should have been a single long article was salami sliced into 6 or so short pieces — for example, if a single day’s feature on “campus rape” had 6 vignettes focusing on 6 campuses, I counted only one of them. Overall these were rare, though. The 2008 data-points are up through September 1, but I included them just to get a hint of where things are now.
[2] In terms of differential equation modeling, the growth rate of the parasitic response would be an increasing function of the current level of the real threat, and perhaps of the rational response too.
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Hey, grunge was great. The Melvins still kick ass. It’s 80s music that was absolute pants.
Yeah, what was wrong with grunge? Jesus Christ. You can’t tell me this song isn’t pure genius.
i don’t get the grunge hatred either.
I didnt read the article thoroughly but should we consider that aggressive young men are in Iraq now?
Good paper.
Now that the rape panic is losing its edge, new fears are being inflated. Fathers beating children, husbands murdering wives, mothers killing babies, grandfathers seducing little girls in the parks. What next?
I don’t mind the rawness and back-to-basics mindset of grunge, but I find it too mopey and deliberately no fun — at best, ironic and sarcastic. For my money, you get the same good qualities — plus fun — from the early Beatles, 1977 punk, or the spurt of similar-sounding rock around 2003 – 2005.
Why _did_ the the best eras for music (the mid to late 60s and the early to mid 90s) coincide with some of the most ridiculous political posturing ever?
Why _did_ the the best eras for music (the mid to late 60s and the early to mid 90s) coincide with some of the most ridiculous political posturing ever?
By the same people, no less! I remember when Eddie Vedder knocked over his chair during Pearl Jam’s MTV Unplugged session and wrote “PRO-CHOICE” on his arm with a black marker. I don’t think I at all disrespect the pro-choice stance when I say it isn’t “bad-ass” or revolutionary; it’s totally mainstream. Regarding his use of black marker, all I’ll say is that Iggy Pop used to actually cut himself on stage.
Anyway, I think Camille Paglia (she’s on my mind today because my boss brought up her comment on Sarah Palin during a staff meeting and I was floored by the fact that my boss reads Camille Paglia) would probably answer your question with something along the lines of “Music and dance are Dionysian art forms which flourish in the spirit of opposition to an Apollonian status quo.” (It’s better than anything I could come up with so there you go.) Sometimes that opposition can be silly, I guess. Or, in Eddie Vedder’s case, entirely in the artist’s head.
things got better in the 1990s because hillary was co-president.
Why _did_
In short, because you are of course reckoning sociopolitics in terms of truth, while most art is inherently an act of idealization — almost more like a lie, as the insightful Ni Chi insisted, contra Keats. When the zeitgeist swings several ticks too far, for basic or practical purposes, towards idealism — most modern artists feel invigorated.
Basic is obviously not meant as pejorative. What is practical, in terms of obtaining bread, maintaining freedom, and living most sorts of lives well — including some very aesthetic and spiritual sorts of lives, but not the most aesthetic ones of all — is 82.3% realism and 17.7% idealism. Speaking here of realism and idealism as they exist almost in the very senses, prior to discourse about ethics and ways of life.
The victimization culture and industry you illustrate, perhaps peaking in the 90s, may also have more than a little to do with idealism on the rise against realism. Idealism always naively sides against all suffering, since other views of suffering are pretty confusing (they certainly are confusing to me, and incidentally I think they remained confusing to Nietzsche). Therefore idealism must treasure unrestrained compassion.
Victim glory probably would have been on a diminuendo already, even before the realism-promoting 9-11, except that the excessive Bush stuff has tended to scare people back the other way, delaying this trend.
The Melvins on the politics of musicians. It’s been said before a million times, but it’s funny seeing someone with hair like Buzz mocking rock musicians for being weirdo degenerates.
I have to disagree with your idea that there is no threat on the ground. 45 to 30 is not much of a decline, especially when you consider how steep the preceding upslope was. There is still a rape crisis, and likely always will be.
Granted this is for victims aged 12 to 17, but the pattern among 18 to 24 year-olds must surely mirror this. That’s pretty flimsy evidence. first of all, most girls in their early teens are not raped by other teenagers, but rather by pedophiles. Second of all, why dont you just give the figures for 18-24 instead of assuming they must be the same?
Lastly, rape statistics are pretty unreliable in general. I’m not convinced that the decline in rape from 1992 to 2004 is real. if it is, my guess is that it’s because of the so called hysteria (did you use that word just to annoy feminists?) rather than in spite of it.
That’s pretty flimsy evidence. first of all, most girls in their early teens are not raped by other teenagers, but rather by pedophiles.
First, that wouldn’t be pedophiles, would it? (Look up the word). At any rate, it doesn’t matter who the perp is because I showed that the overall trend of sexual assaults against teen minors was down — only added that date rape is down even more.
We know the rape rape is down for women in general, and of teen minors — it’s obvious that it’s down among 18 to 24 y.o.s as well.
I’m not convinced that the decline in rape from 1992 to 2004 is real.
Then you didn’t read the journal article I posted a link to, and are therefore a lazy idiot. Further such comments will be deleted.
Rape is mostly just another crime that criminals commit, so the rise and fall of rape should mostly just reflect the rise and fall of crime more generally.
The problem comes from thinking of rape as a prejudice or a political ideology. Nope. The exact same men who will hit a man to take his wallet, will hit a woman to take sex.
So Agnostic, you’re 28 (or soon to be 28)? I had thought you were a few years younger. And this makes your hanging around at teen dance clubs all the more inappropriate.
Regardless of the etymology of “hysteria,” it does seem justified here. But Agnostic was a little confusing, because to my mind you only really see the hysteria if you follow his link, and read about this “one in four or five” statistic for the odds of a woman facing attempted or completed sexual assault by the end of college — which is highly unbelievable.
Stopped Clock suggests Agnostic downplays the general incidence of rape, but he doesn’t; nor does he say the Times should stop reporting on rape or the rape crisis just because some data show a recent maximum followed by a decline. Really all Agnostic says about that, is that during the increase in rape there was a good reason for the Times to become more concerned. He explicitly says that everything beyond that is subjective.
I don’t think Agnostic supported his contention that there was no reason for the upswing in concern with campus rape. This has nothing to do, strictly, with the “one in four” claims. It doesn’t matter what confused persons may claim about one in four: anytime sensible persons see campus rape go up significantly — absolutely or as a proportion of all rapes — then some kind of increased media coverage of campus rape is arguably justified. But Agnostic provides no data about trends in campus rape, absolutely or as a proportion of all rapes. Instead he criticizes the shape the of the curve for coverage of campus rape, saying it fits a gossip model in several ways. This partly depends on his claim that campus rape cannot really climb over a timescale of years like the coverage of it did, but rather should require decades to do so, because that is what happens with other sociopathies (including rape in general). Even if one accepts this, it ignores the fact that there might nevertheless be a shorter timescale for the trend to change from being not very statistically significant to being definitely significant, from nondramatic to dramatic, and thus become worthy of reporting on. A single year’s data move the p value from over 0.05 to under 0.05. (Yes, it is of course partly arbitrary to set alpha at 0.05, but we all know it has to be set somewhere.) Also, research may be autocatalytic in that one analysis of crime data can stimulate other workers to publish on other data sets, thus causing a strong (and correct) concordance of evidence to appear “instantly.” Overall, one may or may not find this part of Agnostic’s discussion suggestive, but probably few would actually take it as strong evidence that “the coverage is mostly divorced from reality.”
As for date rape, Agnostic demonstrates a spike in coverage by the Times from 1989-1991. But to argue that this change in media coverage was unjustified, he cites data showing a proportional (relative to all rapes) and absolute decline in “known person” sexual assaults of teens during 1993-2004. These time intervals do not overlap, so the evidence cited cannot apply.
This analysis is so good, I hate to mess with it, but since the rape data are based on police reports, the trends reflects reporting rates (and other things) and rape is a notoriously underreported crime (estimates I’ve seen indicate that 10-30% of them are reported).
The National Crime Victimization Survey is a huge representative sample of the U.S. population 12 and older. It shows that rape has been declining since the early 70s, with a steeper decline after 1990.
Maybe the changing culture and those shelters opened in the early 70s convinced more and more women to report the crime, producing the big increase in reported crimes that lasted until the early 90s.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/rape.htm
I was a victim of date rape, many years ago. I never reported it; in fact, it took some time for me to realize that I could BLAME the acquaintance who took advantage of me. I took LSD for the first and last time in the late 1960s. The female friend who was there to watch over me started feeling ill. She dropped me off at the house of a male we both knew, who proceeded to take advantage of me even though I was lying motionless, incapable of resistance, crying the whole time.
I refused to see him ever again, but I also blamed myself for not resisting.
A large part of that was, I think, my 1950s and 1960s American middle-class upbringing. Women were expected to protect themselves. To dress demurely, to stay out of situations in which they might be defenseless, to put themselves in purdah, in effect. Any deviation from the rules of purdah made a subsequent rape the woman’s fault. “She was wearing revealing clothing; she was drinking with the guys; she asked for it.”
The fuss over date rape was more than hysteria, I think: it represented an attempt to change the rules of purdah, to say that women *should* be able to wear revealing clothing, go to parties, drink, flirt, kiss, and then say NO — and have that NO respected.
I haven’t looked closely at any empirical studies of date rape. Rapes reported to police don’t count, as most date-rapes wouldn’t have been reported. You can do retrospective self-report surveys, but how the questions are phrased and how the respondents define rape would be hard to control. Rape isn’t a “fact”, but a culturally-defined category, and I think we’re seeing a process of category change here.
So Agnostic, you’re 28 (or soon to be 28)? I had thought you were a few years younger. And this makes your hanging around at teen dance clubs all the more inappropriate.
I’m 27, and I make no apologies for preferring kittens over cougars. 18 beats 28, let alone 38, hands down.
The issue of underreporting is well worth mentioning, no doubt. Thought I’d look into the numbers that would be needed to justify the statistic Heather Mac Donald attacks (one in four or one in five, risk of attempted or completed assault by the end of college). The below is intended as a rough calculation, using not necessarily the world’s sturdiest postulates.
The recent peak incidence of rape in the general US population, by Agnostic’s Dept of Justice data, is 50 / 100,000 = 0.05%.
If a female faces these same odds each year from 14-24 (feel free to correct this postulate), which is 10 years, the expected lifetime risk for rape by 24 is close to 0.05% * 10 years, which is 0.5%.
Inductivist supplies a reporting rate of 0.1 to 0.3. If we assume 0.1 and correct this by multiplying by 10, we move from 0.5% to 5% as the lifetime risk by age 24.
Those numbers from Justice are presumably for completed assault. Mac Donald supplies the following: “completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two” — though it is unclear from context whether she believes this herself or is instead holding its validity up to question. Assuming the former, we would add another 2/5 of 5%, for a total of 7%.
“One in five” is of course 20%, which is pretty far from 7% — but not nearly as far as I would have thought before doin it up. So, in retrospect I would rather I had somewhat softened my rhetoric about victim culture.
Again, a very rough bit of estimation, and given how controversial everything under the sun is, I’m sure there’s someone out there somewhere who would think the bottom end of the rape reporting range supplied by Inductivist is not justifiable at all, and other stuff could be disputed too.
And since the one in five claim seems to apply to college grads only, obviously I haven’t done anything to deal with the SES differences and such that correlate with completing college. That’s a major defect. So is my implicit assumption that the underreporting ration for attempted rape is the same as the underreporting ratio for completed rape (since I assume Inductivist’s figures refer to the latter).
REPORTED rapes are down. Which may be due to crime being down (rapists have a different pathology than thieves by the way) or it may be down due to less rapes being reported.