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Reached in Connecticut this week, Ms. Maine acknowledged she does not know the original source of her numbers. She said she pulled some of the figures from another author’s book, published in 1988. “I don’t know if I had additional citations that somehow were dropped in production and I failed to notice at the time, or if I had another secondary source,” Ms. Maine wrote in an email to the National Post on Friday. “This is not something I can fully address right now, due to the urgent commitments of my clinical work as well as my other professional activities.”

The “one study” to which she refers in her book, and which is promulgated by so many others, simply does not exist. Worse, says the scholar responsible for some of the data which are mentioned, the Body Wars passage misrepresents his work.

University of California, Los Angeles professor Neil Malamuth teaches and researches topics related to men’s acceptance of violence against women. In an interview Friday, he said he doesn’t conduct work with high school students, and cannot recall any study that indicates “over half of high school boys, and nearly half of the girls stated that rape was acceptable if the male was sexually aroused.”

Nor does he recall any study in which 83.5% of men “argue that ‘some women look like they are just asking to be raped.'”

“That doesn’t sound right,” said Prof. Malamuth.

He did conduct studies with some college men almost 30 years ago, reporting that 8% of his subjects indicated that they “had either attempted or successfully raped.” That is a very troubling finding; however, it does not mean that 8% of all university men rape.

It’s also misleading to claim that 30% of college men “say they would rape if they could get away with it,” says Prof. Malamuth, or that “when the wording was changed to ‘force a woman to have sex,’ the number jumped to 58%.'” That’s not what his studies found. He says that unfortunately, “sometimes people oversimplify. Sometimes they distort.”

And sometimes they regurgitate inaccuracies and loaded phrases, passing them off as truths, twisting situations that call for attention and careful guidance into tangled messes that are bound to become worse.

National Post