Harry's Place

Last night, at an event held as part of the Jewish Book Week, I listened to Eve Ensler speak about how she is “an emotional creature.”  Ensler is best known for The Vagina Monologues, a play that comprises a series of monologues that relate in some way to the vagina.

In her speech, Ensler declared that one in three women in the world are raped.  Of course, Ensler did not cite a source for this stupendous claim.  The reason she did not do so is because it is fictitious.

Ridiculous statistics about rape have long been banded around in the feminist movement. A famous study that carried out in the 1980s was that Mary Koss and associates with some results published by the popular Ms. magazine. According to Koss and her colleagues, of more than 3,000 college women who were sampled, 15.4 percent were rape victims and a further 12.1 percent had been the victims of attempted rape.  Therefore, they argued, a shocking 27.5 percent of respondents were either victims of rape or victims of attempted rape. Christina Hoff Sommers (Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women [Touchstone, 1995] pp.210-215) discussed this report in detail. She stated that the “one in four” headline statistic from the Ms. study began to be widely cited in women’s magazines, women’s studies departments and elsewhere.

Neil Gilbert (“Realities and Mythologies of Rape” [subscription required] Society, May/June 1992 pp.4-10) commented on the questions that were included in the survey.  As well as those that referred to the threat or use of “some degree of physical force,” there were the following two questions:

Have you had a man attempt sexual intercourse (get on top of you, attempt to insert his penis) when you didn’t want to by giving you alcohol or drugs, but intercourse did not occur?

Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?

Gilbert declared:

Forty-four percent of all the women identified as victims of rape and attempted rape in the previous year were so labeled because they responded positively to these awkward and vaguely worded questions. What does having sex “because” a man gives you drugs or alcohol signify? A positive response does not indicate whether duress, intoxication, force, or the threat of force were present; whether the woman’s judgment or control were substantially impaired; or whether the man purposely got the woman drunk to prevent her from resisting his sexual advances. It could mean that a woman was trading sex for drugs or that a few drinks lowered the respondent’s inhibitions and she consented to an act she later regretted. Koss assumes that a positive answer signifies the respondent engaged in sexual intercourse against her will because she was intoxicated to the point of being unable to deny consent (and that the man had administered the alcohol for this purpose). While the item could have been clearly worded to denote “intentional incapacitation of the victim,” as the question stands it would require a mind reader to detect whether an affirmative response corresponds to a legal definition of rape.

But this is not all. As Gilbert also comments:

When asked directly, 73 percent of the students whom Koss categorized as victims of rape did not think that they had been raped. This discrepancy is underscored by the subsequent behavior of a high proportion of identified victims, forty-two percent of whom had sex again with the man who supposedly raped them. Of those categorized as victims of attempted rape, 35 percent later had sex with their purported offender.

Such information clearly makes a mockery of the “one in four” rape or attempted rape claim.  I dread to think how Ensler has come up with a new, even more dramatic, “one in three” claim. Ensler did not even qualify her statement by adding that the statistic included those who were victims of attempted rape, she simply declared that one woman in three around the world are rape victims. While I appreciate that incidents of rape could well be higher in countries other than America, Ensler’s “one in three” statistic does not seem plausible.  Of course, if we change the definition of rape out of all recognition then Ensler could even declare that she was being prudent. The radical feminist writer Robin Morgan declared in the 1970s:

[R]ape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman , out of her own genuine affection and desire…. Most of the decently married bedrooms across America are settings for nightly rape.

Victoria Davion (“Rape Research and Gender Feminism: So Who’s Anti-Male?” [subscription required] Public Affairs Quarterly, July 1997, p.230) cites the male radical feminist John Stoltenberg as stating:

[I]t is not at all inaccurate to suggest that the ethics of male sexual identity are essentially rapist.

Stoltenberg’s extreme views may be less surprising to readers who are aware that he is the husband of Andrea Dworkin, who herself declared in 1979 (Intercourse,  [Basic Books, 2006], p.xxi) that romance is “rape embellished with meaningful looks.”

Having noted all of the above, according to Ensler, not all rape is bad rape. In early versions of The Vagina Monologues, Ensler had a twenty-four year old woman ply a thirteen year old girl with alcohol and then sexually violate her. As the National Post (Ontario) October 6, 2006 reported, Ensler’s child character states: “I say, if it was a rape, it was a good rape, then, a rape that turned my [vagina] into a kind of heaven.”

One wonders about Ensler’s moral compass.