This is about justice, not identity politics. Yet it is a thing of wonder that the identity politics of feminism could induce so many women (and many men!) to prize vengeance against hypothetical rapists and actual juvenile cads so highly that they willingly sacrifice their own sons, husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins and friends to the spirit- and reputation-thresher that is a bogus rape accusation.Photo by: Alyssa L. Miller
If we strip away the ideological claims and go back to the evidence (also see Cathy Young’s report on the case at Brown University), it fits a pattern. These are cases where two young people have an existing sexual relationship, usually one that’s “casual” or on-again, off-again. They sleep together and the young woman acts, for a while, as if everything is fine and they’re still friends. But later she comes to decide that she was raped.
The key is the dubious notion that the young woman somehow figured out, some time after the fact, that she was assaulted. We get lines like: “Natalie did not come to see her relationship with Nungesser as abusive, or their sexual relations as non-consensual, until ‘months after their breakup.’” Or: “some women do not even realize they have been abused.” Coercion is physical force. It is blunt, it is physical, it is perceptual. Would you know it if you were being mugged? But what is being described here is having negative feelings about something in retrospect, and there’s a very different word for that: regret. What these women are really expressing is regret for sexual encounters they wish they had not engaged in.
This, too:
As for the defense that “there is no such thing as the perfect victim”—well, could we at least have a halfway decent victim, one who acts in any way as if she has been victimized? The mantra that “there is no perfect victim” is used, not to explain away a few discrepancies in the alleged victim’s account, but to explain away all of them. Its actual meaning is: there is no such thing as exculpatory evidence for the accused.
This is about justice, not identity politics. Yet it is a thing of wonder that the identity politics of feminism could induce so many women (and many men!) to prize vengeance against hypothetical rapists and actual juvenile cads so highly that they willingly sacrifice their own sons, husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins and friends to the spirit- and reputation-thresher that is a bogus rape accusation.
