Dare I bring up unexplained cases of hysteria affecting young women, the condition that launched Sigmund Freud’s career? Examining the hyperbole surrounding the college date rape mania, Freud’s observations help explain the sudden onslaught of unsubstantiated rape charges by college co-eds against male students. While many charges of sexual assault by college women have turned out to be false, no less than former president Jimmy Carter has weighed in with a book on the subject. The Justice Department is on the warpath, applying extortion by threatening withdrawal of federal funding to colleges that do not implement Soviet-style kangaroo courts to frame accused male students. Under the mandate, schools are required to establish star chambers to indict, even in cases that supersede the judgments by local law enforcement that refused to bring rape charges based on unproven accusations.
As in federal civil rights charges that defy the constitutional protection of “double jeopardy,” the federal apparat demands that colleges indict males accused of sexual assault not charged or found not guilty in a court of law. For college males accused of sexual assault, yet cleared by area police departments, their ordeal is not over. Campus show trials commence, rigged against the defendant. The accused will have his reputation stained and his degree endangered simply because a charge was brought. The alleged rape may not have appeared in the criminal public record, but the new, federally approved campus courts will assure his transcript will mention it in an effort to ruin his employment prospects.
Isn’t that what it is all about? Revenge against the male power structure? In the Duke lacrosse case, radical professors saw the accused boys as guilty, whether or not the facts fit the charges. The president of Duke threw his own students under the bus in a spasm of politically correct righteousness. As became obvious, the lacrosse players were pawns in the ongoing class war as seen through the prism of politically correct victimization politics. To the activists, an “innocent” black female working mother had the courage to accuse affluent white boys of rape. As it turned out, the accuser was actually a prostitute who invented the entire story. But the class warriors got what they wanted, even when the boys were exonerated: permanent damage to their reputations
Which explains the motives of the female writer who faked a sensational feature story in Rolling Stone magazine designed to defame the University of Virginia, white males and the fraternity system. Like the dozens of reporters since the 1970s who have concocted news features, the writer felt that the accuracy of the story was unimportant. She believed, and was outraged by reports of rape on campus going unpunished. She was convinced she was doing the right thing for the sake of the larger effort to punish males for their chauvinism over the last two centuries. I have covered this sort of journalistic dishonesty before, which leads me to believe the writer still does not think she has done anything wrong. By sensationalizing the issue, she believes she is helping young women and punishing young men, an objective of women’s studies programs at UVA and across the country.
We have reached a critical point where facts and statistics are now tools to be manipulated to manufacture the calculus of politics and social behavior. Women’s groups pushing enforcement of show trials on college campuses maintain that 25 percent of college females are sexually assaulted each year. This figure certainly has stimulated action, but that statistic is not supported by empirical data.
The blame for this condition in society lies in two areas, the university and the media. The political radicalization of the curriculum has created graduates who place sensitivity, victimization and utopian fairy tales above reality. The media, who hire these students, have lost their sense of fairness and adopted a partisan worldview defined by coverage that combats racism, chauvinism, homophobia and American “exceptionalism.” Rolling Stone is representative of the new regime in journalism.