Reason magazine has a very good piece by Linda M. LeFauve, a brave college administrator at Davidson. She offers some much-needed revisionism about the “study” that has become the most-cited evidence for the presence of serial rapists on American college campuses. The study’s author — well, he’s not actually the author, as you’ll see when you read the piece — is called David Lisak, a formerly obscure associate professor at the University of Massachusetts/Boston, who has rocketed to stardom by asserting that serial rapists stalk women on campuses and get away with it.
I’ve been doing research on the “rape culture” myself, and looked into some of Lisak’s work. This is no objective researcher. Here’s his explanation of what causes men to become rapists:
“Gender – the division of human qualities into two mutually exclusive categories, each associated with a biological sex is central . . . to the motivations for rape. . . . this gendering pervades our culture and . . . while it is purported to be founded on biological differences, it is actually a production of culture.”
In other words, the artificial division of society into male and female, i.e., “gendering,” is what creates rapists. This is not scholarship, it’s fantasy. But it has taken firm hold of the left and is enforced through the Department of Education at nearly every campus in America. I happen to think that dismissals of college rape as complete hysteria are overbroad. There is a problem with sexual behavior on campuses — but I submit that the hook up culture, not male pathology or, for heaven’s sake “gendering” – is what permits it to thrive. I’ll have more to say on all this next month. Stay tuned.