17 August 2006
♥ the girl who cried wolf
Civilization is booming. The global population has skyrocketed in the last decade, babies are being born every minute, and through it all, men still have the upper hand. Despite all this "progress," women still make only 76 cents for every dollar earned by males performing similar duties. Despite the notion that leaps and bounds are being made every day, women still have to fight to maintain control of their own personal medical decisions.
We can place the blame on Corporate America for paying men 24% more than it pays women. We can blame the neo-Cons for trying to outlaw birth control and make abortion illegal. But, as much as I hate to say it, there needs to be some self-examination here.
According to a 2005 study by Eugene Kanin, a sociology professor at Purdue University, 41% of reported cases of sexual assault over a nine-year period were proven to be false. That's almost half. "False rape allegations are not the consequence of a gender-linked aberration, as frequently claimed," Kanin writes, "but reflect impulsive and desperate efforts to cope with personal and social stress situations."
Several psychology professors conducted a study which tested whether people were more likely to believe allegations of molestation if the accused was male or female. Not surprisingly, the the behavioral science experts found that "the allegations involving male perpetrators were believed more than allegations involving females."
If Kanin and his colleagues are correct, there is a disturbing new trend among young women: the best way to get back at men is to accuse them of some type of sexual abuse.
The culture that's been created is conducive to this sociopathic behavior. The idea now is that girls are always believed and the accused are always investigated. Even when it turns out not to be true, which is apparently the case 41% of the time, the alleged pervert is ruined. It becomes a case of "he said, she said."
Who are these women? I want someone to sit them down and explain to them that what they're doing is bringing us down further than any Planned Parenthood picketer ever could.
For decades, sexually abused women had to keep quiet, because no one would believe them if they spoke up. Those days are over, because women fought too long and too hard for the right to tell someone when they had been abused, and a couple (41%, in fact) of sick individuals are not going to take that away.
But how can we solve this problem? Aside from simply not believing anyone who says they've been raped, that is. Is there really anything we can do about it?
It's not like we can just say, "Okay, girls, gig's up! No more false accusations!"
What we can do, though, is keep it up. We can keep the dream of those 1960s and 70s sexual revolutionaries alive by continuing to fight for our rights. We can march in the streets until we're earning the same money for the same work as men. We can defend Roe v. Wade and keep the neo-Cons from sticking their noses where they don't belong and turning back the clock on birth control.
The days of just popping out babies and making dinner in your mother's pearls have come to an end; we're capable of so much more than that. Women have orchestrated entire civilizations. Hell, we ran the country while men were overseas during World War II. Is there really any question as to whether we can get past this?
You're damn right, Rosie.
We can place the blame on Corporate America for paying men 24% more than it pays women. We can blame the neo-Cons for trying to outlaw birth control and make abortion illegal. But, as much as I hate to say it, there needs to be some self-examination here.
According to a 2005 study by Eugene Kanin, a sociology professor at Purdue University, 41% of reported cases of sexual assault over a nine-year period were proven to be false. That's almost half. "False rape allegations are not the consequence of a gender-linked aberration, as frequently claimed," Kanin writes, "but reflect impulsive and desperate efforts to cope with personal and social stress situations."
Several psychology professors conducted a study which tested whether people were more likely to believe allegations of molestation if the accused was male or female. Not surprisingly, the the behavioral science experts found that "the allegations involving male perpetrators were believed more than allegations involving females."
If Kanin and his colleagues are correct, there is a disturbing new trend among young women: the best way to get back at men is to accuse them of some type of sexual abuse.
The culture that's been created is conducive to this sociopathic behavior. The idea now is that girls are always believed and the accused are always investigated. Even when it turns out not to be true, which is apparently the case 41% of the time, the alleged pervert is ruined. It becomes a case of "he said, she said."
Who are these women? I want someone to sit them down and explain to them that what they're doing is bringing us down further than any Planned Parenthood picketer ever could.
For decades, sexually abused women had to keep quiet, because no one would believe them if they spoke up. Those days are over, because women fought too long and too hard for the right to tell someone when they had been abused, and a couple (41%, in fact) of sick individuals are not going to take that away.
But how can we solve this problem? Aside from simply not believing anyone who says they've been raped, that is. Is there really anything we can do about it?
It's not like we can just say, "Okay, girls, gig's up! No more false accusations!"
What we can do, though, is keep it up. We can keep the dream of those 1960s and 70s sexual revolutionaries alive by continuing to fight for our rights. We can march in the streets until we're earning the same money for the same work as men. We can defend Roe v. Wade and keep the neo-Cons from sticking their noses where they don't belong and turning back the clock on birth control.
The days of just popping out babies and making dinner in your mother's pearls have come to an end; we're capable of so much more than that. Women have orchestrated entire civilizations. Hell, we ran the country while men were overseas during World War II. Is there really any question as to whether we can get past this?
You're damn right, Rosie.
8/17/2006
