Installment 17. If Men Have All the Power How Come Women Make the Rules?
Share this compelling intro to the Men's Movement with your skeptical friends.
“Herjury”: False Allegations of Sexual Misconduct
We are easy targets of herjury. We are always suspects if not presumed guilty in matters of sexual impropriety.
So dangerous is male sexuality, in fact, that in March 2001 British Airways told a traveling executive that he would have to change seats because two unaccompanied children were sitting next to him on the plane.
We can imagine the conversation between the man and the flight attendant who wanted him to move:
Okay, so there are two unaccompanied children sitting next to me. And?
And they’re children.
And?
And they’re unaccompanied.
And?
And… you know.
No, I don’t know. And what?
And you’re male!
And?
And they’re sitting next to you.
And?
And, you know, you’re male and all and they’re unaccompanied and they’re sitting there right next to you and you might, you know…
Might what?
You might molest them!
The flight attendant said it was “company policy.”
It’s a good thing the executive “got uppity” and demanded and won an apology from the airline. He won a victory for us all.
We’d be more enthusiastic about stamping out sexual harassment if women were more enthusiastic about stamping out false allegations of sexual harassment.
“Her testimony was an insult because she lied. She knew what the game was… and she played it to her advantage, but when she didn’t like the way it was being played, she cried ‘foul ball’.”
— the forewoman of a jury in Milwaukee, talking about a woman who alleged sexual harassment at work; Washington Post, October 5, 1997
“Male judges are mostly paternalistic, and don’t feel so strongly about a boss who fails to promote a woman, but they feel very strongly indeed about a woman who is sexually mistreated on the job. So I always advise my clients in employment discrimination cases that if the facts can support the allegation in any way they should also file a charge of sexual harassment.”
— A lawyer conducting a workshop at the 1987 NOW convention (emphasis was hers)
A Feminacentrist Discussion of False Allegations of Sexual Harassment
David Brinkley: “Sam, are you saying that any woman has the power now, will under these new laws we’re talking about, the power to destroy a man by making charges that he cannot disprove?”
Sam Donaldson: “I don’t think a woman any more than a man would do that, though, simply willy-nilly. I mean it takes some sort of a sick mind to want to do that.”
Brinkley to Barbara Walters: “What do you think about that?”
Walters: “I don’t think that that will happen. I think that it will make men perhaps more conscious, this is what we have seen this week, more conscious of how women feel, not just in terms of sexual harassment, but in sexual discrimination, which has not come up here… ”
— “This Week with David Brinkley,” ABC News, during the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, October 13, 1991
A false allegation of rape can have consequences as severe as—or even worse than—an actual rape. Why is it punished so lightly, if at all?
“In [1990 and 1991] women in [seven Washington, DC-area jurisdictions] filed 1,842 rape reports, and police concluded that 439 were unfounded.…
“[One] woman said she lied because she needed an excuse for having been late to work.”
— Washington Post, June 27, 1992
Ah, Chivalry…
“Our philosophy is that a woman who would file a false rape report needs counseling, not jail time.”
— Lt. Dan Davis, Howard County (Maryland) Police Department, Washington Post, June 27, 1992
“People can be charged with virtually no evidence… If a female comes in and says she was sexually assaulted, then on her word alone, with nothing else—and I mean nothing else, no investigation—the police will go right out and arrest someone… Too many prosecutors just take the word of the female—that’s it—and don’t investigate. I think if they did investigate, they would find false accusations… [Prosecutors] have visions, I suppose, of women’s groups going to the press, of being personally attacked by women’s groups… It’s all a public relations issue; they’re just terrified of being raked over the coals.”
— Rikki Klieman, criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor in Good Will Toward Men by Jack Kammer
Women coined the emotionally powerful phrase “date rape” to identify a danger they face. We need to popularize “fake rape” to call attention to a problem that threatens us.
The criteria for concluding a rape allegation is false can be debated but false allegations of rape are not rare. A study by Eugene J. Kanin, Ph.D. of Purdue University found 41 per cent to be false; two samples analyzed by Charles P. McDowell, Ph.D. of the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations found 27 per cent and 60 per cent false. Pheminists, however, insist the figure is two per cent (“no more than in other crimes”) referring to “FBI statistics” that just don’t exist.
Most newspapers will not publish the names of alleged victims of sex crimes, but will publish the names of the accused. But if the accused denies the charges, isn’t he claiming to be the victim of a sex crime, namely a false accusation of rape?
“The names of suspects in rape cases should be protected like those who lodge such complaints, the attorney for Dallas Cowboys star Michael Irvin said Sunday. The remarks came two days after police cleared his client, saying that a woman’s rape allegations involving Irvin and teammate Erik Williams were unfounded… A police spokesman said that the department is comfortable with how it handled the case, including releasing the suspects’ names on the police report—a decades-old policy.”
— Associated Press, January 12, 1997
“A former topless dancer pleaded guilty yesterday to perjury, admitting she alone decided to falsely accuse two Dallas Cowboys players of sexual assault.”
— USA Today, September 16, 1997
Abuse Abuse: “That devil made me do it.”
Abuse Abuse is a variation on Herjury’s theme.
Houston housewife Andrea Yates drowned her five kids in a bathtub in 2001. Womenfirsters insist it was her husband’s fault for being “abusive.”
Forest technician Terry Barton started a fire that brought at least six people to their deaths and destroyed more than a hundred homes in Colorado in 2002. Womenfirsters say it was her husband’s fault for sending her the “abusive” letter (she claims) she was burning when (she claims) the fire got out of control. (She tried blaming a particular male camper first, and even provided his minivan’s license number, but investigators were able to expose that lie and save him from her shameless frame job.)
When women murder their husbands, Womenfirsters reflexively rush to their defense, often claiming the husbands were—you guessed it—“abusive.” The premier “expert” on the dubious Battered Women’s Syndrome, which seeks to exonerate murderous women who (claim they) were abused, is Lenore Walker, one of the “experts” whose shoddy work on the Super Bowl domestic violence hoax we talked about on page 38. (That ought to give you confidence that you’re safe in your own home and your wife or girlfriend couldn’t kill you with impunity if she wanted to.)
When a man and woman commit a crime together, prosecutors invariably assume the man is the truly guilty party while the woman was only a hapless—maybe she was abused!—dupe in the male’s nefarious plot. They’ll make a deal with her and she’ll cry on the witness stand and explain to the jury how the bad, bad man was bad, bad, bad. And she was afraid. And she was abused. (And she was a perfect angel to him and to society at large.) He stews, maybe fries; she walks.
So, in large measure, we live in a society in which women can reckon they have a fair shot at getting off scot-free for even heinous crimes—if they can raise a convincing tear or two and have a defenseless (dead will do) nearby man to finger.
Both Herjury and Abuse Abuse exploit deep cultural biases that deem men to be mean and ugly and women to be pure and virtuous.
Sick of it yet? I know I am.
“Emotional abuse has become a catch-all phrase used by some unprincipled women to justify themselves legally or morally in whatever they do vis-à-vis men. A man can defend himself against a spurious charge of physical abuse, to some degree, by demanding physical evidence. But emotional abuse can be anything and everything—how can any man effectively counter this charge?”
— columnist Glenn Sacks, July 2, 2002