LA Times: What rape crisis?

I’m not getting wet, so there’s no way it’s raining!
This op-ed in yesterday’s The Los Angeles Times is very likely to make your head explode. Or at the very least, inspire you to write a scathing letter to the editor.
Writer Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the right-wing think tank the Manhattan Institute, says that the rape crisis is all in our heads – and that it’s really slutty girls who are to blame for all this “rape” nonsense.

Such a crime wave — in which millions of young women would graduate having suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience — would require nothing less than a state of emergency. Admissions policies, which if the numbers are true are allowing in tens of thousands of vicious criminals, would require a complete revision, perhaps banning male students entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergraduates would need to take the most stringent safety precautions.
None of this crisis response occurs, of course — because the crisis doesn’t exist.

Last time I checked, institutional inaction has never been an indicator that something doesn’t exist. But in Mac Donald’s world or warped logic, the fact that people ignore rape culture means that it couldn’t possibly be real.
And then comes the all-too-predictable victim blaming:

Many students hold on to the view that women usually have the power to determine whether a campus social event ends with intercourse. A female Rutgers student expressed a common sentiment in a university sexual-assault survey: “When we go out to parties and I see girls and the way they dress and the way they act … and just the way they are, under the influence and um, then they like accuse them of like, ‘Oh yeah, my boyfriend did this to me’ or whatever, I honestly always think it’s their fault.”

Just because the sentiment may be common, it doesn’t make it right. In fact, it’s horrifying. But not to blame queen Mac Donald, who thinks girls who dare to leave the house and socialize are getting what they ask for.

Maybe such young iconoclasts can take up another discredited idea: College is for learning. Fighting male dominance or catering to the libidinal impulses released in the 1960s are sorry substitutes for the pursuit of knowledge.

Yeah, bitches, stop fighting rape and do something useful with your education.
Now, clearly I don’t expect much better than this from anti-feminist assholes, eager to blame campus feminism for anything they’re keen on making up. But the fact that LA Times would print this is just disgusting. Especially when you take a look at the full article the op-ed was adapted from, where Mac Donald actually takes a woman’s story of sexual assault and opines how there’s no way it’s true.

Though the Harvard victim does not remember her actions, it’s highly unlikely that she passed out upon arriving at the party and was dragged away like roadkill while other students looked on. Rather, she probably participated voluntarily in the usual prelude to intercourse, and probably even in intercourse itself, however woozily.

The horror goes on and on in that one; I can’t even bring myself to fisk the whole thing. There will always be anti-feminists, there will always be rape apologists, there will always (sadly) be rapists. But that doesn’t mean we have to stand by while the media gives them space to spread lies. Please, write to the LA Times and tell them how you feel.
Via SAFER.