Ron Collins
Jul 30, 2017 · 3 min read

I’ll stand with Svetlana Voreskova’s thesis, that alleged “rape culture” is just another highly-effective cover for yet another re-working of the tried-and-true methods of the witch hunt. What it really represents in practice, is denunciation culture: a means of denying a targeted enemy all future status and viability, by accusing them of something horrific.

Denunciation culture as exhibited by the laughable falsehood of there being any rape culture, is not limited to accusing anyone of rape. The same ends may be achieved by accusing them of sexual harassment, or white nationalism, or hate speech, or any of a long list of “-phobias”, or racism, or white privilege, or one of my personal favorites, “possession of child pornography.”

Denunciation culture equates accusation with guilt, and finds so many ways to create guilt by association that it becomes irrelevant whether the targeted accused is even being accused of anything specific at all, other than where their potential sympathies must certainly fall based on what they have said or written or attended or clicked “like” about.

And just as Lana had postulated that any actual belief in witchcraft was essentially a moot point in creating a culture of witch-hunting, the same applies for any other form of denunciation culture: the fear it deploys in the larger public, is not any genuine fear of the things the accused are accused of or even any belief in the veracity of the accusations, but the much more risky and ubiquitous threat of being accused oneself of being in sympathy with them. The reflex counted on among the herd, is to put distance between the individual not yet accused and those who have been. The resulting isolation, stigma and distrust the accused are thereby met with once accused, IS the punishment, not any prosecution or litigation which might be enacted on them.

Witness, for example, how since the launch of the Violence Against Women Act, continual efforts have been made by various organizations to de-criminalize rape and sexual assault, for the purely strategic reasons that diverting such cases into both civil courts and the court of engineered public opinion are likely to cause deeper and more lasting harm to the accused while their opportunity to ever be fully exonerated for lack of evidence is completely denied to them.

If one really has a realistic look into the history of supposed efforts to oppose rape culture, one finds the astonishing irony that the factions which have done the most to trivialize and normalize rape by making it a mere civil tort or campus rules violation instead of a felony, are the ones screaming the loudest about rape culture. It has been pointed out often, and accurately, that those who claim to be fighting against rape culture, are the very ones who have the most vestiture of interest in there being as many rapes as possible. Not only do their funding and public support rely on a continuing claim of high numbers of cases, but so also does the perception of credibility these supports must have in order to be sustained.

We see such constant absurdities as claims being made that low numbers of rapes reported in a given jurisdiction or on a specific campus, serve as “proof” that more rapes than ever are being committed. Nobody reporting them, we’re told, must certainly mean that everyone is more afraid than ever to “come forward.” And every time someone does “come forward” and it turns out their claims (from Duke to Jackie and beyond) are demonstrable fabrications, the spin surrounding their claims is re-spun to say that at least these cases helped “raise awareness.”

The most vicious and irresponsible quality of all about these constant claims of a rape culture, is in discrediting the individuals who actually fall victim to these unspeakable crimes. They have not been raped by any “culture”, but by a rapist. And yet looky-here: the ones who have done the most to assure that the one rapist will almost certainly never see any prison time, are the ones who claim that the crime was committed by a culture, and not by a criminal.

Nobody ever did more to advance the prospects of real rapists and assure them impunity, than those who denounce a nonexistent culture for committing the very real crimes of individuals.

    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s