Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

212 WHO STOLE FEMINISM?"One in four" has since become the official figure on women's rapevictimization cited in women's studies departments, rape crisis centers,women's magazines, and on protest buttons and posters. Susan Faludidefended it in a Newsweek story on sexual correctness. 13 Naomi Wolfrefers to it in The Beauty Myth, calculating that acquaintance rape is "morecommon than lefthandedness, alcoholism, and heart attacks." 14"One infour" is chanted in "Take Back the Night" processions, and it is thenumber given in the date rape brochures handed out at freshman orientationat colleges and universities around the country. 15Politicians, fromSenator Joseph Biden of Delaware, a Democrat, to Republican CongressmanJim Ramstad of Minnesota, cite it regularly, and it is the primaryreason for the Title IV, "Safe Campuses for Women" provision of theViolence Against Women Act of 1993, which provides twenty milliondollars to combat rape on college campuses. 16When Neil Gilbert, a professor at Berkeley's School of Social Welfare,first read the "one in four" figure in the school newspaper, he was convincedit could not be accurate. The results did not tally with the findingsof almost all previous research on rape. When he read the study he wasable to see where the high figures came from and why Koss's approachwas unsound.He noticed, for example, that Koss and her colleagues counted asvictims of rape any respondent who answered "yes" to the question "Haveyou had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gaveyou alcohol or drugs?" That opened the door wide to regarding as a rapevictim anyone who regretted her liaison of the previous night. If yourdate mixes a pitcher of margaritas and encourages you to drink with himand you accept a drink, have you been "administered" an intoxicant, andhas your judgment been impaired? Certainly, if you pass out and aremolested, one would call it rape. But if you drink and, while intoxicated,engage in sex that you later come to regret, have you been raped? Kossdoes not address these questions specifically, she merely counts your dateas a rapist and you as a rape statistic if you drank with your date andregret having had sex with him. As Gilbert points out, the question, asKoss posed it, is far too ambiguous:What does having sex "because" a man gives you drugs or alcoholsignify? A positive response does not indicate whether duress, intoxication,force, or the threat of force were present; whether the woman'sjudgment or control were substantially impaired; or whetherthe man purposefully got the woman drunk in order to prevent herresistance to sexual advances. . . . While the item could have been