Today I woke up to a lovely morning — the birds were singing, a cat clambered up onto the bed demanding affection from my wife and me, it was reasonably cool and not terribly humid, and I had a phone notification buried in amongst the pile of work server notifications that I’d received a pingback on my blog from A Voice for Men.

I’m really moving up in the world, building a genuine rogues’ gallery of people hellbent on making my life miserable. I must be a real threat to some people’s blinkered worldviews now! My name is apparently splattered across the front page of their antifeminist conclave with the epithet “confessed rapist” attached. Two days ago it was r/MensRights, now it’s the Alpha Males themselves beating their chests and beating on my reputation.

Why? Because I believe Shermer’s accusers and believe that he’s probably a lot looser with consent than he should be, possibly up to and including being willing to rape unconscious victims. And that I’m willing to believe this even despite my having personally experienced a fake rape charge at 16. Instead of becoming an angry man shouting down those uppity feminists for advocating for clear consent, I sided with the feminists, and therefore I am the enemy. Therefore I am a monster. And I must be STOPPED.



A “gentleman” by the name of Birric Forcella left a very long comment that I let to fester in moderation because I simply didn’t have the time to address all the myriad ways he betrayed his own lack of reading comprehension. This apparently chafed him enough that he went to Paul Elam and asked him to post it on A Voice For Men. And so there it is, right now, my name splattered across their front page with a demonstrable lie predicated on their both misreading my post, and the strawfeminist trope that every accusation must be 100% without a doubt true.

This despite their own admission that fake rape charges are exceedingly rare compared to actual rape charges — the lowest number I’ve seen on their site, though, is one in ten, indicating that 90% of rape allegations are true. Most statistics pin this at about 6%, give or take, though a large number of the studies skewing this number upward are demonstrably flawed and there’s good evidence the police attempt to cook the books by bullying the accuser until they recant.

So A Voice For Men and theoretically Birric both know that false rape charges are actually a smaller problem than real rape. Let’s crunch some numbers to prove my point, then we’ll get on with the actual meat of Birric’s argument and determine exactly how unethical one must be to argue as a devil’s advocate for the thing you must know is empirically wrong.

Let’s be exceedingly generous and take some super-high estimates to present the MRAs’ best cases with regard to rape. Imagine a stack of 5000 rape allegations on a rape investigator’s desk.

5000 rape allegations

Of the 5000 allegations, let’s say that 15% (a really, REALLY high estimate) are fake. So that’s 750. Let’s further assume these are 750 malicious fake rape claims, and they’re not actually just claims that are dismissed by police as “no crime”, despite ample evidence that there’s a lot of cooking of the books to keep rape numbers artificially low.

There’s still 4250 real rapes in that pile. Rape is also the most underreported of crimes, with some statistics suggesting as high as 95% of them not being reported at all. So, let’s go with a lowball estimate, more in line with common analysis: 50% of rapes get reported. Presumably, this wouldn’t include those 750 fake rapes.

4250 rapes (unreported)

4250 rapes (reported)

750 fake rape allegations

Of the 5000 rape allegations on that desk, only 25% of those will lead to an arrest. Number is more like 24%, in fairness, but we’re high-balling. And to be exceedingly generous to the MRAs’ arguments, let’s assume that 25% of each category is actually arrested, and that there’s no skew that might mean that fake accusations leading to arrest are actually any rarer than this.

4250 rapes (unreported)

3187 rapes with rapists never arrested

567 innocents are ignored by police

—

1063 rapists arrested

—

187 innocents arrested

Of those arrested, about 75% end up being prosecuted. Let’s assume that the ones without corroborating evidence, the false accusations, are equally disadvantaged here instead of the more likely to be dismissed.

4250 rapes (unreported)

3187 rapes with rapists never arrested

265 arrested rapists are not prosecuted

—

567 innocents are ignored by police

46 innocents arrested but not prosecuted

—

798 arrested rapists prosecuted

—

141 innocents prosecuted

The probability of being convicted after being prosecuted is actually at an all-time high. Assuming the innocents are not actually at an advantage here, assuming we’re looking at sheer percentages only, and assuming the best case scenario conviction rate, 63% will be convicted. The reason I think this is being overly generous is because 95% of convictions are the result of a guilty plea, and presumably innocent folk won’t plead guilty because they’re not, unless their lawyers think their cases are so toxic they can’t win and are hoping for leniency. Nonetheless, let’s give this one a tilt to disadvantage the innocent equally.

4250 rapes (unreported)

3187 rapes with rapists never arrested

265 arrested rapists are not prosecuted

295 rapists not convicted

—

567 innocents are ignored by police

46 innocents arrested but not prosecuted

52 innocents not convicted

—

503 rapists convicted

—

89 innocents convicted

After this, rape convictions result in a wide range of sentences, from 30 days to 30 years, depending on where you are and whether or not the rapes were violent or repeated. And even really blatant cases, where the perpetrator pled guilty to what amounts to serial rape of a minor, he still got a slap on the wrist of 30 days.

However, 21% of rape convictions result in probation. Again, let’s assume this is a raw percentage, and not skewed to the innocents’ benefit, despite the fact that one would assume judges would give lighter sentences to the more ambiguous cases.

4250 rapes (unreported)

3187 rapes with rapists never arrested

265 arrested rapists are not prosecuted

295 rapists not convicted

105 convicted rapists receive probation

—

567 innocents are ignored by police

46 innocents arrested but not prosecuted

52 innocents not convicted

18 convicted innocents get probation

—

398 rapists put in jail or prison

—

71 innocents put in jail or prison

Even with every single tilt on the playing field set up to artificially benefit the MRA’s arguments, only 10% of maliciously false accusations would land an innocent man in jail. Meanwhile, of 8500 actual rapes, 398 rapists end up in jail.

That’s 4.6%, assuming each allegation is not a repeat offender (which is, actually, a hell of an assumption). MAYBE those 398 rapists who end up in jail account for a significant proportion of the rapes that didn’t ultimately see justice — it’s well possible, given the giant backlog of totally untested rape kits. 95.4% of rapes do not see justice directly, even if the rapists ultimately do get put in jail after a later rape. The vast majority of rapes go completely unpunished for a variety of reasons. And those numbers are assuming a lot of things that benefit MRAs’ arguments that false allegations are the real problem.

False allegations (of the malicious sort) ARE a real problem, and I’ve said so from the beginning. I know from firsthand experience how they damage you if you’re actually innocent, but I also recognize these false rape claims damage others at the same time. They have two exceedingly nasty effects on society: first, they ruin individual accused folks’ lives, and second, they make it all the harder to see any measure of justice done with regard to actual rape. MRAs care about the first effect, but they demonstrably do not care about the second, no matter how much more pronounced it might be. The fact that I didn’t universalize the case of my malicious false rape allegation and thereafter assume all bitches be lyin’ about every rape allegation, means I’m an enemy of freethought.

How dare I think differently than them? I must be an evil, terrible man who should be silenced at any cost, even at the cost of exacerbating a fake rape case from almost twenty years ago, when I was 16 years old! Even if intentionally making my extraordinary case worse for me actually undercuts their own arguments about false rape allegations, about how prevalent they are and how life-wrecking they are. Even if it amounts to them punishing me, picking at my scars, trying to cause the sorts of trauma they claim to want to protect men from experiencing.

So, now that we know the scope of the ACTUAL problem here, we know that AVfM and Birric are willing to contribute to one of the two problems of malicious false allegations of rape. They were willing to tar me with “confessed rapist” when my story is nothing of the sort, because they believe that when feminists look at the numbers and see 95% of rapes going unpunished and say “that’s a problem”, that we’re actually saying “every accusation of rape is true on the word of the victim alone, and anyone accused of rape should be put in jail”. And so they splatter a whole lot of false rape charges across their front page, including ones against Avicenna, despite the accusers admitting it was a stunt designed to damage rape victims’ ability to come forward.

What’s really funny about their effort is just how much they have to intentionally get wrong about the story they’re using as a club the process. It’s a serious display of mental gymnastics that I’m guessing is motivated by a need to seem smarter than their proven inability to do math.

I’ll get to their misread of my story in part 2.

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