Let's Look at the Numbers

Got an angry note from Jennell Jaquays, noted game designer, graphic artist, and trans-gender social justice warrior, in regard to my essay on rape culture and why I think its a myth.  I'm not going to quote her, but her anger at me is based on two things.

The first thing she's basing her anger on is that I obviously do not and cannot understand rape culture because I am a white middle-aged cis-gendered male and thus am inherently prejudiced about the subject, what with being a potential rapist myself.

This is funny (as in humorous) to me for two reasons.  The first reason is that being told that I am incapable of understanding something due to characteristics that are inherent to me and that are not under my control at all, especially while being lectured about supposed prejudice, is amazingly hypocritical.  The second reason is because I am a rape survivor, and thus I understand rape and what it means to be a victim of it better than anyone who hasn't been raped, like Jennell herself, could possibly imagine.

Surprise!

Anyway, the second basis for her anger is apparently that women live in fear every time they leave the home because they never know when they'll be attacked because 1 in 4 women and that men need to be taught to not rape because women never know which man will be a rapist and after all because all men are potential rapists and men are just rapists at heart anyway and you cannot trust men to not be overcome by their base urges and women get rapes all the time every time they step out of the house it can happen to everyone all the time as long as they were female.


No, these were not her exact words.

Her exact words were a more flowery version of this message, though, and included a blatantly insulting comment regarding my intelligence and my "obvious anger toward all women," because one cannot disagree with these people without being angry misogynists, obviously.

Okay, Jennell.  I'll bite.

Let's look at these phantom rapists that Jennell says are laying in wait for a random woman around every corner, behind every bush, and in every shadow every time she happens to leave her home.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (who, remember, recently changed their official definition of rape so that it no longer includes rapes in which a woman forcibly causes a man to penetrate her), an average of 90,000 rapes happen every year.  Now, let's maximize the horrific nature of this statistic and assume that each and every one of these 90,000 rapes was a separate incidence of rape perpetrated by a different rapist on a different victim (in other words, we're ignoring the existence of serial rapists, rapists who have raped the same victim multiple times, and rape victims who have been raped multiple times by different people).

Let's also assume that the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network's claim that 54% of all rapes against women go unreported (Note:  this claim is false and has been repudiated by the FBI's crime statistics) is also true.  That would mean that 90,000 is actually only 46% of all rapes committed.  So, a little multiplication later, and we find that, given all our assumptions, the actual number of rapes committed in a year is 195,652.

(I actually rounded to the nearest whole number because the idea of 17% of a rape just doesn't make sense.  And remember, we're assuming that each and every one of those 195,652 rapes is a separate incident with separate victims and separate offenders.)

A quick Google search of the term "Current US Population"gives us a total population of 313.9 million people.  When we divide the number of rapes by the total US population, we find that the percentage of the population who are real and actual rapists is 0.06%.  Now for those of you who are numerically challenged, you read 0.06% as "six one-hundreths of one percent."

0.06% of 313,900,000 is 188,340.

That's a miniscule number compared to the total population, which means that while rape does happen, the chances of it happening to a randomly selected woman at a randomly selected time aren't really worth being overly worried about.  We're not talking lottery odds, but according to the FBI, you've got a better chance of walking into a convenience store robbery when you stop off to by a slushee than you do of being raped by a random man you encounter on the street.

Wait a second.

I forgot something.

Hold up.

The 0.06% figure is wrong.

I forgot one of the most important other claims.  That claim is that 99% of all rapists are men (this claim is based on the fact that 99% of all people arrested for rape are men; 99% of all people arrested for men are male, of course, beause nobody in law enforcement gives a shit about punishing women who commit rape...  but I digress...)

For the sake of argument, let's just round that up and say that all rapists are men.  Just for the sake of argument, we'll ignore the fact that women commit rape all the time.

Anyway, men make up 49.2% of the total US population, which means there are approximately 154.5 million men in this country.  So when we run the numbers, the percentage of rapists becomes 0.1% of the total US population.  That's "one tenth of one percent" for those who don't understand fractions.

0.1% of 313,900,000 is 313,900.  That's certainly a larger number than 188,340, but its still an an absurdly small number of people compared to the entire population of the country.  It still isn't enough people for any given woman to really have anything to worry about, when you look at it from the point of view of probability.

Oh, hold on a second!

Let pretend that the number of rapes that go unreported isn't 54% (a figure that we know is false, remember) but rather 99%.  I've seen certain feminist groups make that claim, despite it being even more ridiculous than 54%.  That means there are actually just under 9 million rapes per year.  When we do the entire math thing again for the whole of the United States population, we get just over 2.8% of the population who are rapists.  When we do the numbers for just the men in America, we get 5.8% of the male population.

2.8% of 313,900,000 is 8,789,200.

Sorry, but even though we're now talking about millions of rapists, compared to the entire population of the country, we're still talking about an infintessimally small chance of a woman meeting a random rapist on any given excursion out of her home.

Also, remember that we arrived at 8,789,200 rapists by assuming the ABSOLUTE WORST CASE SCENARIO.  Meaning that the actual number would be smaller than this.

So, what does all this math ultimately mean?  Glad you asked.


What it means is this.

NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY TO COOK THE BOOKS TO SUPPORT THE IDEA, BEING AFRAID OF EVERY SINGLE MAN IN AMERICA BECAUSE THEY MIGHT JUST BE A RAPIST MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE AT ALL!

The numbers simply do not support any reason for women to fear going out because they might get raped.

So where the hell are women getting the idea that they need to be terrified of leaving their homes?  Where are they getting the idea that they have to be afraid of every man in the country, because any of of them might suddenly leap out of the bushes and rape them?

Where do you think?  They're constantly being told over and over and over again by the Professional Women Are Nothing But Victims Industry that they are likely to be assaulted by men every time they go out their front door.  They have also been convinced that the whole of society is to blame for this terrible problem and that something must be done about it and something must be done about it RIGHT NOW and that anyone who denies this horrible horrible war on women must be nothing more than a woman-hating rape apologist.

If I thought it would do any good, I'd beg Organized Feminism and the Feminist Social Justice Warriors to stop the fear-mongering already.  It serves absolutely no purpose at all except to create a problem that otherwise does not exist.

And before one of you throws Mary Koss and that "1 in 4 women" statistic she cooked up at me in response, remember that I can document how dishonest Dr. Koss was, and how she intentionally skewed the results of her research to reach a pre-determined conclusion by, among other things, applying the "rape victim" label to women who specifically told Koss that they weren't rape victims.  At best, Mary Koss is dishonest and a rape-apologist at worst (she was once asked why she didn't believe male rape victims existed, and her answer was "When it happens to men, its not really rape;"  yes, she really said this).  So Mary Koss is an utterly unreliable source.

I've got an idea.  How about you own up to the fact that feminism invented the "rape crisis" as part of an anti-male political agenda and then move on to a real problem you can really fix.  Wouldn't that be something?