Male Guilt Before MeToo

We should stop pretending that punishing men without evidence is anything new

One of the strangest moments in the recent history of feminism was the hailing of the MeToo movement as if it were a novel departure.

Over and over, we were told that silence was at long last being broken, that victims were finally finding their voices. MeToo was a “watershed moment in the advancement of gender equality.”

In one of the most naïve of analyses, critic Christina Hoff Sommers claimed that MeToo was an “awakening” and a “historic moment.” It represented a chance for men and women to address “long-tolerated abuses” on the way to a “new era of understanding and respect.” So long as the feminist ideologues didn’t “hijack” the movement, she warned, it could be a much-needed “sexual reckoning.”

It was difficult to fathom how Sommers, long-time chronicler of feminist calumnies stretching back into the mid-1980s, could have welcomed a fresh outburst of evidence-free accusation.

In fact, MeToo was simply a continuation of trends already well-established in North American culture, as anyone who cared to look might have known. As Daphne Patai demonstrated in her 1998 Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism, employers and college administrators had been, for decades, more than willing, even eager, to allow a woman’s word to destroy a man’s reputation and career.

The egregious Duke Lacrosse scandal of 2006 was just one high-profile example, in which three lacrosse players were publicly pilloried for over a year, including by professors as well as many activists at their school, following a false accusation of gang rape. Law professor Catharine MacKinnon had been claiming since the 1980s that in an unequal society, so-called “normal” sex was essentially indistinguishable from rape; accuser Anita Hill was lavishly rewarded in the early 1990s for her bizarre charges against Justice Clarence Thomas; and Lorena Bobbitt became a feminist celebrity (and even domestic violence advocate) in 1993 after cutting off her sleeping husband’s penis with the excuse that she was a battered wife.

The notion that women had never had the power to accuse men is pure fiction.

Sommers’ own Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women (1994) furnishes extensive proof of jiggered rape surveys, fudged statistics, and febrile denunciations. Moreover, an obscure piece of horse’s-mouth evidence, an article published in Time magazine, “When Is it Rape?” by Nancy Gibbs, provides further context.

This article offers compelling evidence that decades before MeToo, guilt through accusation was already a time-honored feminist M.O.

Gibbs’ article pretends to offer a “both sides” analysis of perspectives on rape. At first, the author even seems interested in men’s points of view, as in the following:

“Women charge that date rape is the hidden crime; men complain it is hard to prevent a crime they can’t define. Women say it isn’t taken seriously; men say it is a concept invented by women who like to tease but not take the consequences. Women say the date-rape debate is the first time the nation has talked frankly about sex; men say it is women’s unconscious reaction to the excesses of the sexual revolution.”

Read quickly enough, the crude posturing and sexual nastiness of the men’s (surely fabricated) statements may not be immediately apparent. Moreover, the article acknowledges a “gray area” surrounding sexual relations and quotes a female journalist, Stephanie Gutmann, who asks “How can you make sex completely politically correct and completely safe?” Readers of the article may imagine that they are reading an even-handed report.

The appearance of neutrality, however, is only skin deep. The vast majority of quotations are taken from feminist experts, and the majority of their absurd claims are, as we will see, at least tacitly approved by Gibbs. Very few such experts are countered by non-feminists. Lionel Tiger, one of the unheralded academic critics of feminism from early days, is the only men’s advocate quoted.

The primary argument of Gibbs’ article is that men and women understand rape differently. But it’s still rape: men simply don’t (yet) accept that it is. Not a single admitted false allegation is discussed by Gibbs, and there is no description of the consequences of a false allegation for the innocent male accused.

All “He said / She said” scenarios skew radically towards the female victim. In one, we learn of a woman who, nervous on a first date, rather inexplicably fell asleep with her head on the man’s shoulder and “woke up to find him on top of me, forcing himself on me.” This victim was apparently unsure whether what had happened to her was rape, but readers are clearly not meant to doubt, and we are told that the terrible experience—her guilt, self-disgust, the rapist’s lack of remorse—is “typical in many ways,” with a feminist pundit affirming men’s common predatory behavior.

In the only account by a male student objecting to feminist dogma, the man’s own words betray his guilty conscience. During a drunken hookup with a friend who kissed him first, he said to himself, “This is my friend and if I were sober, I wouldn’t be doing this.” His friend’s agency, her desire, her responsibility are not mentioned; if he didn’t technically rape her, Gibbs implies, he certainly violated her trust.

Here and throughout, the main emphasis is on the many grave injustices women (but never men) have endured over the centuries and today.

No wonder there are so many angry advocates. Susan Brownmiller, quoted from Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975), alleges that rape “is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation, by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” All men benefit from the fact of rape, according to Brownmiller. Such an extraordinary, hollow claim (respectfully received at the time of publication and by Gibbs herself) prepares for New York psychologist Gina Rayfield’s contention that any accused man must have done something to deserve the accusation:

“If a woman did falsely accuse a man of rape, she may have had reasons to,” according to the psychologist. “Maybe she wasn’t raped, but he clearly violated her in some way.”

Here is punitive MeToo psychology, already full-blown and calmly reported in 2001. The author does demur a bit: “Taken to extremes [sic], there is an ugly element of vengeance at work here.” The moderate version, presumably, is okay. Gibbs also refers to statements by Catherine Comins, assistant dean of student life at Vassar College, who in 1991 (also in Time magazine) expressed little concern for men falsely accused of rape, and seemed to approve of women’s insouciance:

“To use the word [i.e. rape] carefully would be to be careful for the sake of the violator, and the survivors don’t care a hoot about him,” she asserted.

Even a woman who was not raped may be a survivor, in Comins’ mind, and even a man who did not rape her may legitimately be called a violator. Comins was not just any feminist shouting through a bullhorn. She was the Director of Resources on Rape/Assault, Conflict and Harassment from 1989 to 1991 at Vassar, in which position she oversaw campus trials and punishments of accused college men.

If pressed, Comins was willing to acknowledge the pain of the falsely accused, but also quick to dismiss it:

“They have a lot of pain,” she admitted, “but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it [i.e., a false accusation of rape] initiates a process of self-exploration. ‘How do I see women?’ ‘If I didn’t violate her, could I have?’ ‘Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?’ Those are good questions.”

Good questions indeed, but not for a man falsely accused. They help the rest of us appreciate the depth of her hypocrisy and unwillingness to recognize men’s humanity. How should a man see women when he knows that some portion believe all men guilty? The answer would seem to be: with extreme wariness and well-founded disgust.

The author of “When Is it Rape?” acknowledges that Comins’ words are extreme, but her acknowledgement focuses on their harm to women. “To suggest that men whose reputations are destroyed might benefit because it will make them more sensitive is an attitude that is sure to backfire on women who are seeking justice for all victims.” That’s as far as Gibbs can go, worrying about the backlash for women.

As already noted, Gibbs includes no accounts of men falsely accused, so the reader is left in the dark about how widespread the problem may be and what the consequences are for the accused. (For the best, most thoroughgoing discussion of the number of sexual assault allegations that are false—showing the difficulties even of determining the category—see the peerless Rick Bradford/William Collins. His research shows that the known [i.e. fully investigated] rate of false accusations to police is around 10%, a number far higher than most feminists will admit. And those are only those allegations that have been proven false. Most police officers do not spend time establishing that no rape took place.)

By the end of “When Is it Rape?” all pretense to objectivity has vanished, as feminist talking points are presented as fact. In the concluding summation, the author endorses doctrinaire feminism:  

“What is lost in the ideological debate over date rape is the fact that men and women, especially when they are young, and drunk, and aroused, are not very good at communicating. ‘In many cases,’ says [feminist author Susan] Estrich, ‘the man thought it was sex, and the woman thought it was rape, and they are both telling the truth.’ The man may envision a celluloid seduction, in which he is being commanding, she is being coy. A woman may experience the same event as a degrading violation of her will. That men do not believe a woman’s protests is scarcely surprising in a society so drenched with messages that women have rape fantasies and a desire to be overpowered.”

Let’s leave aside the undeniable fact that many women do have rape fantasies and a desire to be overpowered. According to Estrich, the only significant reason a man might believe an encounter was sex, not rape, is his own sexism: his socialized ignorance, his sexual brutality. The woman’s woundedness and outrage, on the contrary, are based in reality.

This article demonstrates how discussions about what was then called date rape (now sexual assault) prioritized feminist interpretation and implied that the only thing true in the male perspective was learned ignorance.

While conceding that “there may be murky issues of intent and degree involved” (never illuminated with any examples of a woman’s lies, mistakes, or self-deception), Gibbs ended “When Is it Rape?” by emphasizing that rape victims should be believed because of their immense pain: “On the other hand, those who downplay the problem should come to realize that date rape is a crime of uniquely intimate cruelty. While the body is violated, the spirit is maimed.”

Like Christina Hoff Sommers approaching MeToo with hope for a long-overdue sexual reckoning, Nancy Gibbs justified the radicalism of feminist positions by referring to the long pre-history of patriarchy, when men’s many bad deeds went unpunished and when even the most egregious violation was held to be the female victim’s fault. As I’ve argued elsewhere, it is far from clear that this was ever the case, and it certainly hasn’t been so for at least the past 40 years. So long as we continue to accept a feminist version of history, we will not be able to establish the depth of MeToo injustice.