Goading the masses into societal deterioration

Now, this is an interesting turn of events.

Just as there is a lucrative race-hustling industry in this country, a lot of feminists have found a source of busy work by fabricating a "rape crisis" on university campuses.  Part of an overall "war on women," doncha know.

Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute has examined the phenomenon:

The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two). The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.
This claim, first published in Ms. magazine in 1987, took the universities by storm. By the early 1990s, campus rape centers and 24-hour hotlines were opening across the country, aided by tens of millions of dollars of federal funding. Victimhood rituals sprang up: first the Take Back the Night rallies, in which alleged rape victims reveal their stories to gathered crowds of candle-holding supporters; then the Clothesline Project, in which T-shirts made by self-proclaimed rape survivors are strung on campus, while recorded sounds of gongs and drums mark minute-by-minute casualties of the “rape culture.” A special rhetoric emerged: victims’ family and friends were “co-survivors”; “survivors” existed in a larger “community of survivors.”
An army of salesmen took to the road, selling advice to administrators on how to structure sexual-assault procedures, and lecturing freshmen on the “undetected rapists” in their midst. Rape bureaucrats exchanged notes at such gatherings as the Inter Ivy Sexual Assault Conferences and the New England College Sexual Assault Network. Organizations like One in Four and Men Can Stop Rape tried to persuade college boys to redefine their masculinity away from the “rape culture.” The college rape infrastructure shows no signs of a slowdown. In 2006, for example, Yale created a new Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center, despite numerous resources for rape victims already on campus.
If the one-in-four statistic is correct—it is sometimes modified to “one-in-five to one-in-four”—campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years.

An interesting parallel can be drawn to the environmental movement.  As LITD has noted, we could go to an all-wind-farm-and-solar-panel energy system in this country, and it wouldn't move the needle on average global temperatures worth a diddly.  So it is with the measures the feminists have taken with regard to the "rape crisis."

Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency—Take Back the Night rallies and 24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergrads would need to take the most stringent safety precautions. Certainly, they would have to alter their sexual behavior radically to avoid falling prey to the rape epidemic.

But token measures are adequate and then some, because the "crisis" is phony:

During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results—very few women said that they had been. So Ms. commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then classified as rape. Koss’s method produced the 25 percent rate, which Ms. then published.
Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.
All subsequent feminist rape studies have resulted in this discrepancy between the researchers’ conclusions and the subjects’ own views. A survey of sorority girls at the University of Virginia found that only 23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped—a result that the university’s director of Sexual and Domestic Violence Services calls “discouraging.” Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of what the feminist researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report.” The “victims” in the study, moreover, “generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries,” report the researchers.

MacDonald, and others, have pointed out the irony that, parallel to the rise of the rape-crisis industry, there has been a proliferation of Sex Weeks on campuses, featuring demonstrations by porn actors and workshops on all manner of exotic human interaction.  Campus health clinics hand out condoms and other contraception at many schools.   You kids have fun, but be careful!

Well, its seems some Take Back the Night marchers at one institution were jeered and heckled and pelted with said condoms, and, doncha know, the were offended.  And as a result, the entire Greek system on the campus has shut down all social activities.

The suspension involves 14 fraternities, but all 44 fraternity, sorority and community groups involved in the Greek system plan to participate, he said. About 3,000 of the campus' 34,000 enrolled students are part of Greek life.

The voluntary decision by the fraternities comes after a series of ugly incidents in the past week. 

On Friday, a Take Back the Night anti-rape march by about 35 people from the Concerned Students and Take Back the Night groups was met by egg-throwing, sex toy-waving members of two fraternities, according to Concerned Students coordinator Jordan Busse. 

Busse said that the next night, a woman was reported to have been sexually assaulted at a fraternity house. San Diego State University police confirmed there was a sexual assault report but declined to identify the fraternity involved.

"Aggressive and violent and abusive behavior from fraternity members goes unchecked," Busse said. "This year there have been 14 sexual assaults at SDSU, five of them at fraternities and not one arrest has been made."

Why no arrests?  Did the alleged victims go to the police?

This is another aspect of the whole phenomenon that contributes greatly to its murkiness.  Campuses encourage alleged victims to first contact administrative personnel.  A violent crime is a violent crime, is it not?  Police have the investigative chops, not agenda-driven counselors.

But the main point is the glaring irony.  A culture that has pretty much uniformly  jettisoned all notions of sexual mores is running headlong into a pervasive denial of differences between men and women, a fiction that cannot withstand a few drinks, giggles and kisses.  The result is a whole lot of confusion and accusation, not to mention brittle world views devoid of tenderness or romance.

The cycle of militancy and backlash is the same one we see with regard to racial shenanigans.  And it gets so tiresome.

We'll have to keep an eye on this one.  Hope someone close to the situation is asking the "why" questions.  Some Concerned Students Coordinator's take on it is surely not the last word.