I kept thinking as I was reading this "Don't girls go to bars with a girlfriend or two?" Wouldn't a friend be able to verify an attack and also drag the drugged friend home safely? This whole thing seems to depend on women being alone. Maybe I am way out of date....but when I was involved in bars women would always come with a friend or two, or a guy or two. Maybe things have changed?
Ladies, want to feel safe? Why not go to the bar with a male friend? All of the hoopla about women can do anything men can do, seems to fall apart here.
Thanks Janice for exposing this. I had never heard a thing about it.
As far as I could tell from the victim stories I read, many of these gals *were* with friends. That's what is so weird about the stories: nothing happened to them except that they claimed they were spiked. How were they spiked? Big mystery.
Is it likely that a woman could be injected by means of a syringe and not feel it? They'd scream the place down. Their claims are hysterical attention seeking and nothing more.
Possibly. That's part of the problem. The instances I'm aware of were women who'd gone out on their own. There are all kinds of reasons a woman might go to a bar on her own. Sometimes it's to have a drink while getting work done. Sometimes they've trusted the wrong guy and it's a date. Sometimes, they're looking to get laid. I could see why some women might argue that they shouldn't have to worry about predators, but the fact of the matter is that they do. Denial doesn't help; nor does blaming all men.
Hypodermic needles and syringes are big, and the volume of fluid needed to be injected is around 1 millilitre. Even using the smallest needle size which is 25 gauge they are very easily bent and still sting when the skin is penetrated.
To get through layers of clothing the 25 gauge needs to be long, not a short one that diabetics use. After injection if not directly into a vein, it can take up to 40 minutes for the drug to take effect.
Another thing is that the person with the syringe and needle needs the needle to be covered by a plastic sheath or else they would be the one who gets spiked.
It needs two hands to remove that sheath and even then in a dark, crowded place, it would be very easy to spike one's self.
The injections if they happen will most likely be subcutaneous and when diabetics injection insulin, the short acting insulins are administered 30 mins before meals.
To be fair here in northern england young women tend to wear amazingly little, given our climate, on a night out. However after three such panics since 1999 its pretty clearly an urban myth.
Those complainants with a negative toxicology report should be charged with wasting police time. Similarly, the penalties for demonstrably false accusations against another person should be increased and enforced. Many women in particular seem to have no qualms about using false claims as a weapon and/or to garner sympathy from a society predisposed to believe them.
It won't happen in our lifetimes because the political upside is too small and the downside far too great. Included in the reports I read are plenty of cautions about how the drugs administered may exit the body very quickly, making it difficult to test for them. Even in cases of demonstrably false accusations, it is too easy for the accuser to claim honest mistake, honest belief, or prior abuse leading to mental confusion. The risk of being shown to have disbelieved or punished a single verified victim is simply too high. In comparison, smearing all men as predators and enormously wasting police resources are as nothing.
Indeed, you'll have to forgive me then if I don't "believe all women" (even you Janice!). Ultimately crying wolf hurts all of society because it erodes social capital. However, it's main target is men. Women shouldn't be surprised if it creates more wolves in the process, and a greater tolerance for wolves among men.
I wouldn't trust me either. I don't see that it does tend to create more wolves, but perhaps eventually it will. I've yet to meet a man who is genuinely indifferent to the abuse of women. But I definitely see more men deciding that, whatever happens, they will not intervene because it's too dangerous for them.
I believe it will create more wolves because if you're treated like a wolf, regardless of your true nature, you might as well behave like a wolf and gain the benefits that come with it, including revenge. I cannot be a wolf at all times because it's not in my nature, but I admire them and am learning to be one when the opportunity arises.
I will stand up for individual women who I know to be worth defending, but my attitude toward women in general is that they can take care of themselves, just as I'm expected to take care of myself because I'm a man. The excuse that it's too dangerous to help is valid, but I don't care to help. If I was on a sinking ship it would be children and men first.
There are still plenty of manipulated 'white knights' in existence, but I'm hopeful that the times are changing. Feminist complaints of a rise in "disturbing" attitudes among boys are encouraging, even if the boys really are young wolves in the making.
I don't think this will create more wolves either, at least in terms of sexually aggressive males as in 'wolf whistle'. If anything it might tend to take males who simply aren't that way out of the bars and the dating pool altogether, which would leave women with less savory options. Most men wouldn't sexually abuse or rape anyone even if they knew they could get away with it, so I completely disagree with the proposition that it's a crime of opportunity for any but the same tiny percentage of sick men that already exist.
Spot on Janice. Things are now so bad that even glaring inconsistencies in the accounts of rape given by women falsely alleging an attack are taken as positive proof, whereas with any other crime they would be taken as proof that the complainant is lying and the complaint dismissed.
Yet anyone who’s ever witnessed the Fear & Loathing-like atmosphere of a typical UK meat market nightclub on a weekend could only laugh at the silliness of it all. Shame on the police for actually wasting time and manpower on this instead of just saying “Dear, that wasn’t some evil stranger’s doing - that was 12 tequilas on an empty stomach in a 100 lbs frame”. But God forbid British millennials should ever be called out on behaving irresponsibly or (gasp) having a drinking problem.
Fascinating analysis by Janice, as always. It is terrifying how easily women are able to cook up yet one more example of men's evil doings. And always there are male authorities willing to indulge in virtue signalling by condemning other men. What a sick world we live in.
For some reason, this reminds me of the 'recovered memories' craze of the 1990s. Some therapists persuaded their clients to 'remember' things that never happened.
Thanks for this. I had two friends at university, both of whom were working hard to remember, in their 20s, that their fathers had done things to them. Two narcissistic, troubled women, causing trouble.
I do believe that people repress memories, but only consciously. It's the thing that people do when they just decide to stop dwelling on something and move on. I also believe that people can be in denial of reality, both internally and externally, but the idea that an existent traumatic memory could somehow be inaccessible and then 'recovered' in therapy makes no sense.
These so-called 'recovered memories' are almost certainly 'implanted memories'. Elizabeth Loftus studied implanted memories and her research shows very convincingly that it's quite easy to make people 'remember' things that can be verified to have never happened. For this she was once assaulted by a woman on an airplane with a rolled up magazine. The woman believed that recovered memories were real and that Loftus was denying justice to victims.
Haha. Yes, we all feel that, don't we? And being a victim is the surest way to feel special in our societies. How sad that we've discouraged healthy normality.
If they can produce some credible evidence of this, then I support the authorities in hunting down the perpetrators, in giving them whatever resources they need. But until then I'm saying that this is just another feminist-fueled hysteria to justify further persecution of men.
OK thank you. Is 'rape culture' still a thing? I am not on campus, but I don't hear about it anymore. It seems like so many little hysteria's that flare up, then dissipates. If it is gone, then maybe THIS thing replaces it.
This new thing is preposterous. No one is injecting drugs into drinks. not at scale any way, and for crying out loud, no one is actually sticking hypos into women's arms and going unnoticed. That idea is insane.
I'm not sure how prevalent it is, Steven. Covid interfered with the regular promotion of feminist dogma on many university campuses. But here is a very recent article from a Canadian university beating the rape culture drum:
The common factor in outbreaks of public hysteria is.....wait for it......women. Not surprising that they are so much loved by advertisers. It is just too easy to whip them up in to an irrational mob.
IF this was actually a thing, there would be plenty of evidence, both physical and videotape, and lots of witnesses. It sounds exactly like the hysteria associated with the Salem Witch Trials.
Here in the UK the recent moral panic you referred to was in fact the third here since the turn of the century. There have in fact been no prosecutions for a crime committed in this way. Though there have been a small number of prosecutions for "spiking" drinks. Apart from anything else it would be a completely useless MO as in no case was the supposed "victim" harassed or assaulted. I do wonder if the most recent flowering of this urban myth in the UK might have been kicked off by the case of a gay serial killer who befriended and lured young gay men to his flat and did inject some of his victims to sedate them. Of course this is a very different scenario to randomly injecting people in a bar. As always some hapless policewoman got into hot water for suggesting the most likely scenario, that the reason for the symptoms were simply that the women had underestimated the volume of spirits they had consumed. As with supposed "spiking" of drinks there is little need to undertake any complicated procedure as there is a common behaviour of drinking spirits prior to going out and consuming spirits in cocktails. A predator need take no pains or risks to find "out of it" girls, or boys.
As I say there is no recorded case of such spiking being prosecuted in the UK nor of an assault involving such a spiking being prosecuted. And when i researched it there had been just over 100 cases of drinks spiking and assault over that 20 year period.
Thank you for this wonderful article, Dr. Fiamengo. Very astute observations and well-supported arguments. I've long been fascinated by feminism's attempts to regulate an economy of victimhood so that women will always be "the haves" and men "the have-nots." Much like other regulatory bodies--such as the Federal Reserve in the United States--that seek to stabilize or strengthen currencies by adjusting interest rates, the regulators of the value that feminism wants to place on victimhood seem to view fear as a tool that they can manipulate to ratchet victimhood into the range where it optimizes perceptions of the pitiable female victim at the hands of the scurrilous male oppressor. I'm sure they're also emboldened by the custom of allowing regulatory bodies to act with a high degree of impunity: few investigators or media agencies--aside from people like Dr. Fiamengo--will call them out on their ruthless, senseless, and generally deplorable tactics.
Other than the fact that the needle spiking accusation targets all males at large rather than a specific accused, this seems to be a hysteria not unlike past hysterias. They always seem to serve the interests of some powerful class against a powerless class of victims who are portrayed as perpetrators.
It reminds me of the daycare sex-abuse hysteria and the satanic ritual hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s which sent innocent people to prison, took children from loving parents and put them in foster care, and destroyed countless lives (think Wenatchee, WA, McMartin preschool in Los Angeles, Fells Acre daycare in Malden, MA, Wee Care in NJ, Little Rascals in NC, etc., etc.), all in service of advancing the careers of local District Attorneys who climbed the ladder on the backs of the innocent people they prosecuted.
Not long before that was the "recovered memory" hysteria, which has since been conclusively shown by memory researchers, esp. Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, to have been implanted false memories.
And then there's the Blood Libel, the false accusation that Jews kidnap and kill Christian children because Christian blood is supposedly needed to make matzoh for Passover. (Have you ever seen a Passover matzoh? It's a cracker made of flour and water and nothing else.) But this false accusation has stoked hysteria among Christians throughout Europe for a millennium, resulting in Christians murdering untold numbers of Jews. The skeletons of one set of Jewish victims of such a Christian-perpetrated massacre were recently found at the bottom of a well in Norwich, England. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bones-found-in-medieval-well-likely-belong-to-victims-of-anti-semitic-massacre-180980692/) Among other motivations, murders of Jews throughout Europe in the Middle Ages enabled the looting of their property by their Christian neighbors.
Stoking hysteria to amplify the number of false accusations always serves the interests of the powerful. In the case of the needle-spiking hysteria, the powerful are the MeToo types who gain power by feigning victimization.
I haven't read Mein Kampf, so I don't know whether Hitler actually made this argument or not, nor the context if he in fact did make such an argument. But if he did, my response is that even a broken click is right twice a day.
I kept thinking as I was reading this "Don't girls go to bars with a girlfriend or two?" Wouldn't a friend be able to verify an attack and also drag the drugged friend home safely? This whole thing seems to depend on women being alone. Maybe I am way out of date....but when I was involved in bars women would always come with a friend or two, or a guy or two. Maybe things have changed?
Ladies, want to feel safe? Why not go to the bar with a male friend? All of the hoopla about women can do anything men can do, seems to fall apart here.
Thanks Janice for exposing this. I had never heard a thing about it.
As far as I could tell from the victim stories I read, many of these gals *were* with friends. That's what is so weird about the stories: nothing happened to them except that they claimed they were spiked. How were they spiked? Big mystery.
wow. with friends? The bar for a woman to claim victimhood is getting lower and lower. Gracious.
The feminist response would be "women shouldn't have to do anything to make themselves safe".
Exactly.
Is it likely that a woman could be injected by means of a syringe and not feel it? They'd scream the place down. Their claims are hysterical attention seeking and nothing more.
Amen.
Possibly. That's part of the problem. The instances I'm aware of were women who'd gone out on their own. There are all kinds of reasons a woman might go to a bar on her own. Sometimes it's to have a drink while getting work done. Sometimes they've trusted the wrong guy and it's a date. Sometimes, they're looking to get laid. I could see why some women might argue that they shouldn't have to worry about predators, but the fact of the matter is that they do. Denial doesn't help; nor does blaming all men.
Hypodermic needles and syringes are big, and the volume of fluid needed to be injected is around 1 millilitre. Even using the smallest needle size which is 25 gauge they are very easily bent and still sting when the skin is penetrated.
To get through layers of clothing the 25 gauge needs to be long, not a short one that diabetics use. After injection if not directly into a vein, it can take up to 40 minutes for the drug to take effect.
Details, details, Philip.
Seriously, thanks for this.
Another thing is that the person with the syringe and needle needs the needle to be covered by a plastic sheath or else they would be the one who gets spiked.
It needs two hands to remove that sheath and even then in a dark, crowded place, it would be very easy to spike one's self.
The injections if they happen will most likely be subcutaneous and when diabetics injection insulin, the short acting insulins are administered 30 mins before meals.
To be fair here in northern england young women tend to wear amazingly little, given our climate, on a night out. However after three such panics since 1999 its pretty clearly an urban myth.
Next it will turn out to be Russian spooks armed with pellet-shooting umbrellas. Two birds, one stone.
my thoughts exactly
Those complainants with a negative toxicology report should be charged with wasting police time. Similarly, the penalties for demonstrably false accusations against another person should be increased and enforced. Many women in particular seem to have no qualms about using false claims as a weapon and/or to garner sympathy from a society predisposed to believe them.
It won't happen in our lifetimes because the political upside is too small and the downside far too great. Included in the reports I read are plenty of cautions about how the drugs administered may exit the body very quickly, making it difficult to test for them. Even in cases of demonstrably false accusations, it is too easy for the accuser to claim honest mistake, honest belief, or prior abuse leading to mental confusion. The risk of being shown to have disbelieved or punished a single verified victim is simply too high. In comparison, smearing all men as predators and enormously wasting police resources are as nothing.
Indeed, you'll have to forgive me then if I don't "believe all women" (even you Janice!). Ultimately crying wolf hurts all of society because it erodes social capital. However, it's main target is men. Women shouldn't be surprised if it creates more wolves in the process, and a greater tolerance for wolves among men.
I wouldn't trust me either. I don't see that it does tend to create more wolves, but perhaps eventually it will. I've yet to meet a man who is genuinely indifferent to the abuse of women. But I definitely see more men deciding that, whatever happens, they will not intervene because it's too dangerous for them.
I believe it will create more wolves because if you're treated like a wolf, regardless of your true nature, you might as well behave like a wolf and gain the benefits that come with it, including revenge. I cannot be a wolf at all times because it's not in my nature, but I admire them and am learning to be one when the opportunity arises.
I will stand up for individual women who I know to be worth defending, but my attitude toward women in general is that they can take care of themselves, just as I'm expected to take care of myself because I'm a man. The excuse that it's too dangerous to help is valid, but I don't care to help. If I was on a sinking ship it would be children and men first.
There are still plenty of manipulated 'white knights' in existence, but I'm hopeful that the times are changing. Feminist complaints of a rise in "disturbing" attitudes among boys are encouraging, even if the boys really are young wolves in the making.
I don't think this will create more wolves either, at least in terms of sexually aggressive males as in 'wolf whistle'. If anything it might tend to take males who simply aren't that way out of the bars and the dating pool altogether, which would leave women with less savory options. Most men wouldn't sexually abuse or rape anyone even if they knew they could get away with it, so I completely disagree with the proposition that it's a crime of opportunity for any but the same tiny percentage of sick men that already exist.
Spot on Janice. Things are now so bad that even glaring inconsistencies in the accounts of rape given by women falsely alleging an attack are taken as positive proof, whereas with any other crime they would be taken as proof that the complainant is lying and the complaint dismissed.
Yet anyone who’s ever witnessed the Fear & Loathing-like atmosphere of a typical UK meat market nightclub on a weekend could only laugh at the silliness of it all. Shame on the police for actually wasting time and manpower on this instead of just saying “Dear, that wasn’t some evil stranger’s doing - that was 12 tequilas on an empty stomach in a 100 lbs frame”. But God forbid British millennials should ever be called out on behaving irresponsibly or (gasp) having a drinking problem.
Fascinating analysis by Janice, as always. It is terrifying how easily women are able to cook up yet one more example of men's evil doings. And always there are male authorities willing to indulge in virtue signalling by condemning other men. What a sick world we live in.
For some reason, this reminds me of the 'recovered memories' craze of the 1990s. Some therapists persuaded their clients to 'remember' things that never happened.
Exactly. Feminism similarly persuades women to remember things that never happened.
I just googled it, here's one interview with a women who 'remembered' the abuse then later recanted https://www.salon.com/2010/09/20/meredith_maran_my_lie_interview/
Thanks for this. I had two friends at university, both of whom were working hard to remember, in their 20s, that their fathers had done things to them. Two narcissistic, troubled women, causing trouble.
I do believe that people repress memories, but only consciously. It's the thing that people do when they just decide to stop dwelling on something and move on. I also believe that people can be in denial of reality, both internally and externally, but the idea that an existent traumatic memory could somehow be inaccessible and then 'recovered' in therapy makes no sense.
These so-called 'recovered memories' are almost certainly 'implanted memories'. Elizabeth Loftus studied implanted memories and her research shows very convincingly that it's quite easy to make people 'remember' things that can be verified to have never happened. For this she was once assaulted by a woman on an airplane with a rolled up magazine. The woman believed that recovered memories were real and that Loftus was denying justice to victims.
That craze was also fully supported by the feminist movement:
https://culteducation.com/group/1255-false-memories/6420-feminism-fanaticism-and-false-memories.html
When I saw the sign in the first photograph, I first read it as 'We Deserve To Feel Special'. I think THAT is the true meaning behind this movement.
Haha. Yes, we all feel that, don't we? And being a victim is the surest way to feel special in our societies. How sad that we've discouraged healthy normality.
If they can produce some credible evidence of this, then I support the authorities in hunting down the perpetrators, in giving them whatever resources they need. But until then I'm saying that this is just another feminist-fueled hysteria to justify further persecution of men.
I have literally never heard of this. And I can only agree with what Janice has written, sounds like just hysteria and moral panic.
Based on Janice's article it seems to be a UK thing only, but who knows. It sounds exactly so-called 'rape culture', a manufactured problem.
Largely in the UK, but it spread to Canada, U.S., France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Australia--all countries with an active feminist movement.
OK thank you. Is 'rape culture' still a thing? I am not on campus, but I don't hear about it anymore. It seems like so many little hysteria's that flare up, then dissipates. If it is gone, then maybe THIS thing replaces it.
This new thing is preposterous. No one is injecting drugs into drinks. not at scale any way, and for crying out loud, no one is actually sticking hypos into women's arms and going unnoticed. That idea is insane.
I'm not sure how prevalent it is, Steven. Covid interfered with the regular promotion of feminist dogma on many university campuses. But here is a very recent article from a Canadian university beating the rape culture drum:
https://thesil.ca/wgen-works-to-address-rape-culture-on-campus/
And one from May of 2021 on the same subject:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/16/universities-rape-culture-on-campus-students-protest
Yeah that is good point, COVID would have interfered with propaganda campaigns of all types on campus.
So many young people (men and women) have so little meaning in their lives, and easy lives, they have to invent problems.
The common factor in outbreaks of public hysteria is.....wait for it......women. Not surprising that they are so much loved by advertisers. It is just too easy to whip them up in to an irrational mob.
IF this was actually a thing, there would be plenty of evidence, both physical and videotape, and lots of witnesses. It sounds exactly like the hysteria associated with the Salem Witch Trials.
As a precaution against drink spiking, all women should pay for and handle their own drinks on dates. You know it makes sense...
As for 'needle spiking', let's follow covid social distancing rules and keep two metres apart at all times on the date. Problem solved!
Here in the UK the recent moral panic you referred to was in fact the third here since the turn of the century. There have in fact been no prosecutions for a crime committed in this way. Though there have been a small number of prosecutions for "spiking" drinks. Apart from anything else it would be a completely useless MO as in no case was the supposed "victim" harassed or assaulted. I do wonder if the most recent flowering of this urban myth in the UK might have been kicked off by the case of a gay serial killer who befriended and lured young gay men to his flat and did inject some of his victims to sedate them. Of course this is a very different scenario to randomly injecting people in a bar. As always some hapless policewoman got into hot water for suggesting the most likely scenario, that the reason for the symptoms were simply that the women had underestimated the volume of spirits they had consumed. As with supposed "spiking" of drinks there is little need to undertake any complicated procedure as there is a common behaviour of drinking spirits prior to going out and consuming spirits in cocktails. A predator need take no pains or risks to find "out of it" girls, or boys.
As I say there is no recorded case of such spiking being prosecuted in the UK nor of an assault involving such a spiking being prosecuted. And when i researched it there had been just over 100 cases of drinks spiking and assault over that 20 year period.
Thank you for this wonderful article, Dr. Fiamengo. Very astute observations and well-supported arguments. I've long been fascinated by feminism's attempts to regulate an economy of victimhood so that women will always be "the haves" and men "the have-nots." Much like other regulatory bodies--such as the Federal Reserve in the United States--that seek to stabilize or strengthen currencies by adjusting interest rates, the regulators of the value that feminism wants to place on victimhood seem to view fear as a tool that they can manipulate to ratchet victimhood into the range where it optimizes perceptions of the pitiable female victim at the hands of the scurrilous male oppressor. I'm sure they're also emboldened by the custom of allowing regulatory bodies to act with a high degree of impunity: few investigators or media agencies--aside from people like Dr. Fiamengo--will call them out on their ruthless, senseless, and generally deplorable tactics.
I've never thought of the subject in quite this way: ingenious use of the economic metaphor!
Other than the fact that the needle spiking accusation targets all males at large rather than a specific accused, this seems to be a hysteria not unlike past hysterias. They always seem to serve the interests of some powerful class against a powerless class of victims who are portrayed as perpetrators.
It reminds me of the daycare sex-abuse hysteria and the satanic ritual hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s which sent innocent people to prison, took children from loving parents and put them in foster care, and destroyed countless lives (think Wenatchee, WA, McMartin preschool in Los Angeles, Fells Acre daycare in Malden, MA, Wee Care in NJ, Little Rascals in NC, etc., etc.), all in service of advancing the careers of local District Attorneys who climbed the ladder on the backs of the innocent people they prosecuted.
Not long before that was the "recovered memory" hysteria, which has since been conclusively shown by memory researchers, esp. Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, to have been implanted false memories.
And then there's the Blood Libel, the false accusation that Jews kidnap and kill Christian children because Christian blood is supposedly needed to make matzoh for Passover. (Have you ever seen a Passover matzoh? It's a cracker made of flour and water and nothing else.) But this false accusation has stoked hysteria among Christians throughout Europe for a millennium, resulting in Christians murdering untold numbers of Jews. The skeletons of one set of Jewish victims of such a Christian-perpetrated massacre were recently found at the bottom of a well in Norwich, England. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bones-found-in-medieval-well-likely-belong-to-victims-of-anti-semitic-massacre-180980692/) Among other motivations, murders of Jews throughout Europe in the Middle Ages enabled the looting of their property by their Christian neighbors.
Stoking hysteria to amplify the number of false accusations always serves the interests of the powerful. In the case of the needle-spiking hysteria, the powerful are the MeToo types who gain power by feigning victimization.
"They always seem to serve the interests of some powerful class against a powerless class of victims who are portrayed as perpetrators."
Sounds a bit like Mein Kampf.
I haven't read Mein Kampf, so I don't know whether Hitler actually made this argument or not, nor the context if he in fact did make such an argument. But if he did, my response is that even a broken click is right twice a day.
Oops. That should have said "broken clock"!
Strong, empowered women demanding the Patriarchy protect them!
I wonder will it be female police officers who have to tackle these villains?