The Atlantic “Proves” That Women Are Just As Sexually Coercive As Men

You've got to hand it to The Atlantic! The magazine that will take any steps to "prove" that the two sexes are identical.

Case in point: Atlantic staff writer Conor Friedersdorf's new piece arguing that women sexually assault men almost as much men sexually assault women.

Really? Sexual assault–rape and other forced sexual penetration–is invariably defined as a violent crime (indeed, one of the most serious of violent crimes.)

But the U.S. Justice Deparment's Bureau of Justice Statistics says this:

Based on the self-reports of victims of violence, women account for about 14% of violent offenders & an annual average of about 2.1 million violent female offenders.

The difference between 86 percent (men) and (14 percent) women doesn't exactly indicate much parity between men and women as far as sexual assault is concerned. And indeed, there are 14 times as many men as women incarcerated in state and federal prisons (you have to be convicted of a felony–such as rape or other sexual assault–in order to serve time in a prison in contrast to a county jail. This makes sense, because men are simply more physically aggressive than women.

OK–so what is Friedersdorf talking about?

Two years ago, Lara Stemple, Director of UCLA’s Health and Human Rights Law Project, came upon a statistic that surprised her: In incidents of sexual violence reported to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 38 percent of victims were men––a figure much higher than in prior surveys. Intrigued, she began to investigate: Was sexual violence against men more common than previously thought?

For years, the FBI definition of rape was gendered, requiring “carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” But a recent redefinition focused instead on forced penetration with no mention of gender. Meanwhile, other data-gatherers had started to track a new category of sexual violence that the Centers for Disease Control call “being forced to penetrate.”

Forced to penetrate? Um, exactly how does that happen? How can it happen? Physically speaking, I mean. Well, maybe if a dominatrix, or better yet, two or more dominatrixes, tie the guy down and then….But how often does something like that actually happen–in real life in contrast to pornography? Let's read on:

Today, the fruits of [Semple's] research were published in another peer-reviewed paper, “Sexual Victimization Perpetrated by Women: Federal Data Reveal Surprising Prevalence.” Co-authored with Andrew Flores and Ilan Meyer, it appears in Aggression and Violent Behavior. Once again, federal survey data challenged conventional wisdom.

“These surveys have reached many tens of thousands of people, and each has shown internally consistent results over time,” the authors note. “We therefore believe that this article provides more definitive estimates about the prevalence of female sexual perpetration than has been provided in the literature to date. Taken as a whole, the reports we examine document surprisingly significant prevalence of female-perpetrated sexual victimization, mostly against men and occasionally against women.”…

As well, “a 2014 study of 284 men and boys in college and high school found that 43 percent reported being sexually coerced, with the majority of coercive incidents resulting in unwanted sexual intercourse. Of them, 95 percent reported only female perpetrators.

Well, that sounds bad, except for this:

The authors defined sexual coercion broadly, including verbal pressure such as nagging and begging, which, the authors acknowledge, increases prevalence dramatically.”

"Nagging and begging"? That's "sexual coercion"? No wonder, when you use a definition like that, the "prevalence" increases "dramatically." No wonder all those college administrators keep talking about "rape culture."

Now, if I were Semple and her colleagues, I'd draw a different conclusion about all that research. My conclusion would be: Women get horny, too.

But this is the liberal world of The Atlantic, where you've got to believe that the sexes are identical, so if you twist and turn and manipulate words into pretzels–you turn "begging for sex" into "forcing a guy to penetrate"–well, you really can show that women are sexual predators just as much as men.