Five Feminist Lies We Take For Granted

Five Feminist Lies We Take For Granted

Pierre Lescaudron

"Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism... the molding, direction, and expression of sexuality organizes society into two sexes: women and men. This division underlies the totality of social relations."

Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a feminist theory of the state

Catharine McKinnon, one of the founders of 'radical feminism'

Some years ago I began an unexpected journey down the feminist rabbit-hole. It was in 2014 when my Grandma asked me about the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest and I found myself unable to explain who the winner was: Conchita Wurst, a man who dresses like a woman and wears make-up, but sports a beard.

In hindsight, I realize this journey was a painful process, probably because it touched something deep in me. The data I discovered were in conflict with my protective instinct, something that is deeply wired in males. While females are hardwired to nurture and care, men are wired to provide and protect.

So when a man is exposed to victimized women (as depicted by the feminist narrative), it triggers his core instinct and social duty to protect. In addition, the instinctual hijack and deep cultural values tend to inhibit any proper intellectual functioning.

The above might be one of the reasons why the victimhood of women is so central to the feminist ideology. It might also be one of the reasons why so many men blindly embrace feminist narratives.

Feminism didn't invent anything by using the victimization of a population to further its political agenda. Long before the feminists, the French revolution was justified by the victimization of the 'tiers état' (the farmers), the Bolshevik revolution by the victimization of the proletariat, and the Nazi revolution by the victimization of 'Aryans'. But history shows that the revolutionaries, whether in France, Russia or Germany, never cared about the alleged victims. Each time the victimized population ended up in a far worse situation after the 'revolution' than before it.

The alleged victims are only a pretext to point the finger at oppressors (the nobility, the clergy, the Jews), destroy them and seize their rights and assets (leaving aside their duties), and that's exactly what we are witnessing today with the feminist movement.

We are bombarded daily by stories about affirmative action, women's rights, women's empowerment, women's initiatives, women's organizations, women's events, women's shelters, women's marches, women's safe spaces... all these political claims are based on one single foundation: the victimization of women, which is widely taken for granted. But does the victimhood Feminism proffers actually exist?

1/ Women are the victims of domestic violence

Narrative: It is widely believed that domestic violence is a rampant epidemic affecting a vast proportion of US households:

"Half the women in the US are abused."

Langley & Levy 1977, Wife Beating: the Silent Crisis

According to the widely-accepted narrative, most of the domestic abuse epidemic is due to men:

"Women were seven to fourteen times more likely to report that intimate partners had beaten them up, choked them, threatened them with weapons, or attempted to drown them."

Arias et al, .2002

Reality: First and foremost, domestic violence affects a minority of couples. Depending on the method and samples, between 85 and 99% of US couples do not experience any kind of domestic violence.

Poster published by Domestic violence awareness based on statistics from Straus, 1977

In addition, males are far from being the sole perpetrators of domestic violence, quite the contrary. Unilateral violence (i.e. non-reciprocal violence) is more often committed by wives than by husbands:

"70% of the perpetrators of unilateral conjugal violence are female."

Whittaker et al., 2007 CDC national survey

The higher prevalence of domestic violence perpetrated by women also applies to severe assault:

• 10% of married couples and 13% of cohabitating couples reported females using severe violence when the male partner was non-violent (husband battering)

• The reverse pattern (wife battering) was 6% -7%.

So husband-battering was about double wife-battering

Stets and Strauss, 1989/1992

In the most comprehensive domestic violence study ever conducted (a meta-analysis with a sample size 64,000 subjects), the conclusion was that:

"Women are slightly more likely than men to use intimate violence" d' = .05

Archer, 2000

Interestingly, the prevalence of domestic violence committed by females is more pronounced in younger generations, as shown in a study conducted among college students (19 countries - 9,549 subjects).

"On average, female partner violence had a 21% higher incidence than male partner violence."

Douglas and Strauss, 2006

While the myth that domestic violence is primarily perpetrated by men is still widely accepted, even feminists recognize that women are the main perpetrators of domestic violence.

"Women are doing the battering, as much or more than men."

Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement

Confirming that the highest prevalence of domestic violence is committed by females, and totally removing any male influence from the equation, are the statistics about lesbian violence. Lesbian couples have the highest violence rate, about 50% higher than the violence prevalence in heterosexual couples.

"Lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner, focusing for the first time on victimization by sexual orientation. In their study, there was a victimization prevalence of 43.8 percent for lesbians."

CDC 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey

Conclusion: domestic violence is not as rampant as depicted. Over 95% of couples report no intimate violence (Laroche 2005). For the minority of couples where violence has occurred, females are more frequently the perpetrator than males. This trend is worsening and we observe higher female-perpetrated violence in younger generations.

One factor in why men batter less than women is likely the strong taboo around men beating women:

"Only 2% of North American men agree with 'it is ok to hit your wife to keep her in line'."

Simon et al., 2001

Conversely, women beating men doesn't seem to be taboo. Such behavior is actually perceived positively by most witnesses who see it as a sign of empowerment or harmless self-defense. Watch this interesting social experiment where women beat men (in a public park) and the supportive reactions of the witnesses:

Now, compare this to the reverse situation where a couple (portrayed by actors) in a London park gets into a heated argument and the man begins to physically abuse his girlfriend. Onlookers, male and female, immediately notice and take action:

2/ Women Are The Victims of Rape

Narrative: According to feminist voices widely echoed by mainstream media, the Western world is undergoing a rape epidemic that stems from a deeply-rooted 'rape culture'. Basically, all men are rapists, at least in potential if not yet in actuality.

"Men, by and large, have a rape switch. All men are capable of rape."

Greg Laden

The 'figures' provided to back up the 'rape epidemic' are troubling.

An American woman has allegedly a 26% chance of being raped in her lifetime. The situation on campuses is even worse: allegedly, 1 in 5 women will experience sexual assault in college. For example, the rape rate in Berkeley was estimated at 3,000 cases per year (Gilbert 2005). So, with 20,000 female students over an average 4-year period, the overall rape rate is more than 50%.

Reality: Let's take the Berkeley case. Out of the 3,000 projected rapes per year, only 40-80 students seek guidance each year from the rape counseling center and only two reported to the police. (That's a report, not a conviction)

When Koss' victims were asked directly,
- 73% who had had attempted unwanted sex did not believe they had been raped
- 42% had sex later with the man who "raped" them

Dutton, 2008

If the rape rate on campus was more than 50%, do you think female students would participate in 'undie runs', like the one depicted in the image on the right?

The Berkeley over-inflated rape epidemic is not an isolated case. The report on Violent Victimization of College Students is based on actual police reports (not claims) and tells a very different story from the Berkeley narrative.

"Between 1995 and 2002, the DOJ found that there were six rapes or sexual assaults per thousand per year. This means a 2.5% annual rate rape."

DOJ - report about Violent Victimization of College Students

In addition, the same DOJ statistics show that the overall rape rate is in sharp decline: since 1995, the rate of female rape or sexual assault has decreased by about 60 percent.

Interestingly, rape analyses virtually always focus on female rape, as if male rape did not exist. In fact, male rape did not exist legally until 2013. Before that, the FBI definition of rape explicitly excluded men from the victim count:

[rape is] "the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will."

UCR - FBI

Once the new definition was applied and men were not excluded from sexual assault or as potential rape victims, the figures provided by the CDC (US Center for Disease Control) paint a much more balanced picture:

"Rates of non-consensual sexual contact basically equalized, with 1.270 million women and 1.267 million men claiming to be victims of sexual violence."

CDC

The new definition includes instances where men were made to 'penetrate'. Because of cultural factors, we generally assume that if a man has an erection, he must want sex. After all, men are sexually insatiable, right?

So, imagine for a second that we apply the same logic to women, knowing that a number of women show signs of physiological arousal during rape:

"I've assisted more young women than I can count with this very issue...There have been very few studies on orgasm during rape, but the research so far shows numbers from 10% to over 50% having this experience."

Popular Science

Supervisor McCormik was found guilty in a case involving 12 juvenile inmates who sued for sexual and physical abuse.

In both cases, signs of physiological arousal are not proof of consent. If men's arousal is not there, there are many ways to artificially create it.

This point is illustrated by the following South African case where three women kidnapped a man, held him for three days and gang-raped him while forcing him to take Viagra and energy drinks. That had been the 5th such incident in South Africa of abduction and gang-rape of a male by a female trio in the space of a couple of years.

The CDC study showing that sexual violence is equally distributed between men and women doesn't provide the whole picture because the prison and jail data are not integrated in their report.

Compared to the rest of society, prisons exhibit very high rates of sexual violence, with a prevalence varying between 9 and 23%, depending on the sources.

While common belief portrays rape in prison as a male-to-male crime, the few surveys about sexual assaults in prison reveal unexpected results:

"Those surveys turned up the opposite of what we generally think is true. Women were more likely to be abused by fellow female inmates, and men by guards, and many of those guards were female.

For example, of juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 percent were boys reporting abuse by a female staff member. In total, inmates reported an astronomical 900,000 incidents of sexual abuse."

Stemple and Mayer, 2014

The number of total sexual assaults perpetrated in US prisons comes straight from the Department of Justice and dwarfs the number of sexual assaults committed outside prison:

"More men are raped in the U.S. than women, according to figures that include sexual abuse in prisons.
In 2008, it was estimated 216,000 inmates were sexually assaulted while serving time, according to the DOJ figures. That is compared to 90,479 rape cases outside of prison."

The Guardian

3/ Women Earn Less Than Men

Narrative: Feminists and mainstream media have been repeating for decades that women are paid lower wages compared with men. Even Barack Obama, in his 2016 State of the Union Address, repeated the feminist mantra according to which "women make 77 cents to every dollar a man makes." This is naturally held up as 'blatant proof' of systemic sexist discrimination against women.

Reality: First, let's note that in the 1970s women were said to make about 65% of what men did. Today that number is about 80%. So, whatever causes the wage gap, it has narrowed since the 1970s.

Obama's 77% figure is simply the difference in median annual incomes of full-time male and female workers. It's comparing apples and oranges, since it does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week.

When such relevant factors are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing. More than vanishing, in some countries, like in the UK, the pay gap is inverted:

"When hourly rates are compared, a recent UK survey reveals that, the pay gap is inverted from 20 to 40 years old. Figures compiled by the Press Association show that between the ages of 22 and 29, a woman will typically earn £1,111 more per annum than her male counterparts. The 'inverted pay gap goes on for workers between 30 and 39 years old with women earning 0.2% more than men."

The Guardian

These figures only take into account the hourly rate and leave aside the fact that men and women don't work in the same way.

Below are factors that generally favor men and help explain why men earn more. It shows that men tend make more money not because they are privileged but because their work input is different. This list was compiled from Warren Farrel's excellent book, Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap - and What Women Can Do About It:

• Men gravitate more towards higher-paying occupations in technology and hard sciences (e.g., petroleum engineer).
• Men choose higher-risk, higher paying occupations with greater safety risks for occupational injuries and fatalities (e.g., oil field worker, roofer, and logging).
• Men are more willing to work outdoors in uncomfortable, physically demanding work environments (construction, oil field workers, commercial fishing, logging).
• Men are more willing than women to choose demanding, intense jobs where you can't check out at the end of the work day (e.g., corporate attorney, senior White House staff).
• Men select jobs with higher pay but with lower personal fulfillment (tax accountant).
• Men select jobs with higher financial and emotional risks (e.g., venture capitalist).
• Men are more willing than women to work the worst shifts during the worst hours.
• Men often choose higher paying sub-fields (e.g., surgery and anesthesiology).
• Men are more willing to work in dirty or unpleasant environments with minimal human contact (e.g., prison guard, steel worker, truck drivers).
• Men work longer hours per week and more weeks during the year than women on average.
• Men more frequently than women invest in updating their skills with greater financial payoffs (e.g., master's degree in computer technology vs. master's degree in education).
• Men are more likely than women to have more years of continuous experience in their current occupation.
• Men are less likely than women to be absent from work (doctor's visits, sick days, taking time off when children are sick, etc.).
• Men are more willing than women to tolerate longer commute times.
• Men are more willing to relocate, especially to undesirable locations at their company's request.
• Men are more willing than women, on average, to travel extensively on the job.
• Men are more willing than women to take the risk of a variable income, e.g., to be paid by commission vs. a fixed salary.
• Men often produce more output, e.g., scholarly research articles for university professors

The graph below illustrates the first point addressed in the above list and shows how males predominantly choose high-paying careers while females choose predominantly lower-paying jobs:

Highest and lowest paying job by gender and average wage

Eventually, even feminists had to backtrack on years of propaganda and finally admit that the pay gap is mostly due to women's choices:

"The American Association of University Women (AAUW) has finally admitted that the 'gender pay gap' is caused primarily by women's choices, not discrimination."

Leadership Institute

This backtracking is little more than lip service, however, since the pay gap myth is still widely propagated in the mainstream media, academia, and schools.

4/ Men Are Child Abusers

Narrative: Men are inherently violent. They beat their wives and they beat their children. That is what Kahneman and Tversky (1982) called a 'representative heuristic', where batterers have the attributes of maleness, and they alone pose a risk to the child.

Reality: Actually, two major studies about violence against children drew very similar conclusions. Mothers are more likely than fathers to be violent towards children.

children are almost three times more exposed to violence from mothers

• 4.3% exposed to severe male to female violence

• 11.4% exposed to severe female to male violence

McDonald et al., 2006

In a Health Canada survey from 2001, mothers were found to commit 4 out 5 types of violence more frequently than fathers:

Biological mothers (as compared to biological fathers) are more likely to be the substantiated perpetrator of:

• physical abuse (47 vs 42%)

• neglect (86% vs 33%)

• emotional maltreatment (61% vs 55%)

• multiple categories (66% vs 36%).

The biological father is the most likely perpetrator of sexual abuse (15% vs. 5%).

Dutton, 2008

An American survey on child maltreatment conducted in 2004 among more than 700,000 individuals revealed an even larger gender gap than the Canadian survey: it found that mothers are more than twice as likely as fathers to mistreat their children.

Perpetrators of children maltreatment by parental status

Mistreatment of children, perpetrated by mothers, is higher in terms of prevalence and also in degree. According to that 2004 American survey, among all cases of children who died of maltreatment in 2003, 30.5% were caused by the mother and 18.2% were caused by the father.

The fact that mothers tend to spend more time rearing children than fathers is likely a factor of course, but these data dispel the myth that it is predominantly men who are cruel to children.

5/ Female accuser = Victim

Andrea Dworkin, the other founder of radical feminism

Narrative: When it comes to matters as personal and sensitive as sexual abuse, women have no reason to lie. In fact, it takes a lot of courage to overcome the shame and share such painful memories.

Reality: Men and women both lie. This is exacerbated when the legal system excessively protects the accuser, strips the accused of his most elementary rights, and reverses charges where the burden of proof is on the accused rather than the accuser. The concept of being 'innocent until proven guilty', which has prevailed for centuries, has been turned on his head. In a dreadfully totalitarian spin, many men are today deemed guilty until proven innocent.

Today women are encouraged by social workers and attorneys to file accusations against partners and spouses, they have financial incentives (getting the house, alimony), they have total anonymity (while the name of the accused is widely reported), they are immune to being sued for making false accusations, civil courts offer lower standards of evidence, and more.

Papers about the politically sensitive topic of false rape accusations are scarce, but they nonetheless exist:

"Purdue University sociologist Eugene J. Kanin found that '41% of the total disposed rape cases were officially declared false' during a nine-year period, "that is, by the complainant's admission that no rape had occurred and the charge, therefore, was false.

A follow-up study at a university found 50% of accusations were false, again purely by the recantation of the accuser.

Unrecanted accusations certainly put the actual percentage of false allegations much higher. Kanin concluded that 'these false allegations appear to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and attention'."

Stephen Baskerville, The New Politics of Sex

Here are two examples of blatant and fully-documented false accusations. First, a cheerleader calls the police and claims her boyfriend choked and beat her. The police are about to arrest the man when he provides a video showing that it's actually the exact opposite to what happened:

In the second case, the girlfriend of a young lawyer threatens to make a false domestic violence accusation against him in order to get him out of their house:

How many other cases are there where the men did not gather evidence of false accusations, and so ended up in prison solely based on those false accusations?

A critical factor when lying to the authorities is whether or not the lie will be believed. The following paper assessed authorities' biases in domestic violence cases, depending on whether the perpetrator was a male or female:

• When a woman called the police to report IPV (domestic violence), the man was ordered out of the house in 41.4% of cases. When a man called, the woman was ordered out of the house in 0% of cases.

• When a woman called, the man was threatened with immediate arrest in 28.2% of cases. When a man called, the woman was threatened with arrest in 0% of cases.

• When a woman called, the man was threatened with arrest at a later date in 10.7% of cases. When a man called, the woman was threatened with arrest at a later date in 0% of cases.

• When a woman called, the man was arrested in 15.2% of cases. When a man called, the woman was arrested in 0% of cases. In 12.1% of cases when the man called, the man himself was arrested.

1985 US National Family Violence Survey, carried out by Murray A. Straus and Richard J. Gelles

These surveys show that men are very unlikely to report violence (rape, domestic violence, child maltreatment) committed by their spouse because, at best, they won't be believed and, at worse, they are the ones who will end up behind bars. Interestingly, that is precisely what many women claim happens to them when they report rapes.

Conversely, women are encouraged to make reports because their allegations (whether true or false) are more likely to be believed, and even if the allegation is false, they won't face any legal repercussions.

As a result, all the above statistics are probably biased by male under-reporting and female over-reporting. Taking into account this reporting bias would further increase the prevalence of domestic violence, child maltreatment and rape perpetrated by females.

An example perfectly illustrates the very Machiavellian effects of the feminist lies: foster care. Those facilities are, in theory, designed to protect children from maltreatment experienced at home.

The prevalence of false allegations about child abuse during custody disputes is strikingly high: 55%. So, the majority of the cases are at best distorted, at worst purely fabricated.

But false allegations of child maltreatment can lead to the very real placement in foster care of a child who had until then lived a peaceful life, free of neglect and violence. In foster care, the child will probably experience a far less peaceful life:

"[There is] 10 times the rate of physical abuse and more than 28 times the rate of sexual abuse of children in group homes than in the general population. "

Stephen Baskerville, The New Politics of Sex:

It is more than a little ironic (and decidedly tragic) that the result of feminist exaggeration around child abuse in the family unit is the facilitation of the removal of children from safe family homes to placement in foster care facilities where the child is most likely to experience abuse.

Conclusion

Rape, domestic violence and child abuse are confined to a small part of the population and, overall, the figures reveal a general decrease. It's also clear that the gender gap is grossly distorted. Men and women earn money, perpetrate rape, batter and abuse their children in comparable proportions.

This is a very important point and should prevent any kind of gender-oriented generalizations. Figures show that a small percentage of adults do act violently. The most important predictors for such behaviors have little to do with gender but are strongly correlated with factors like personality disorders, negative emotionality, trauma experienced during childhood, etc.

Despite this gender equality in terms of violence and salary, the upward trend of female-perpetrated violence in recent years is noteworthy.

Actual quote from Andrea Dworkin, the other feminist leader (and advocate of incest and pedophilia).

One might wonder if this is not the result of feminist lies infecting some minds? For decades feminists have depicted women as victims: abused, raped and discriminated against by men. This might have unleashed a wave of resentment, entitlement, 'empowerment' and hate among many women, which have, in turn, led to an increase in male rape, child abuse and domestic violence.

Here you might see the very Kafkaesque nature of the whole feminist movement. The feminists fantasize about a world dominated by rape culture and violent men, yet they are creating almost the opposite: a world where women increasingly embrace crime and violence against men, the people to whom those very same crimes were wrongly ascribed in the first place.

There will always be pathological individuals around, along with their destructive ideologies. That is something we cannot change. What we can change is how we perceive and address this problem. These are the same pathological individuals that create revolutionary movements by pointing the finger at a scapegoat population (the nobility, the bourgeois, the Jews).

It's a diversion, plain and simple, that channels people's justified anger towards the wrong culprit: the scapegoat instead of the pathological puppet masters.

Feminists tell women that all of women's problems are due to men. This scapegoating technique can be very effective because it offers a very comfortable lie, which is then projected onto the other and in doing so exonerates women of any responsibility.

This is the very core of the feminist/postmodernist credo, where the other is hell, the other is the source of all suffering, the other is domination. I think that the take-away message is just the opposite; let's stop projecting onto others our own weakness, fears and shame; let's stop trying to change the other with our arbitrary, despotic and dystopian vision of what good is.

Let's focus on the only thing we can potentially change - ourselves - and instead of feeding our self-importance - whether expressed in the form of self-pity, victimizing, grandeur or guilt - let's take responsibility for our lives and our societies and see the world and ourselves not as we would wish them to be, but as they are. Only from a position of full understanding of ourselves and others can we ever hope to make the right decisions that result in a better world for all.

Dr. Fiamengo "Feminism: Forerunner To Female Goddess Worship?