Are all men rapists? - problems with the Violence Against Women Act of 1993

National Review, August 23, 1993 by Stephanie Gutmann

VAWA might change this aspect by sprucing up the charge a bit. (The Feds, after all, theoretically step in only where there is a "national interest" in stopping a certain type of crime and where there is a pattern of pervasive bias in the state courts.) However, even Sally Goldfarb of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund says, "Most experts have concluded that very few cases will be brought under Title III." "But," she adds, "these cases will be very significant for their symbolic public impact as well as for the individuals involved in these cases. The significance comes not from having a large volume of cases but from having a small number of cases that will set precedents and act as a deterrent."

"The purpose of this bill is to let people know what is offensive and inoffensive conduct," echoes Senator Hatch. "The existing criminal laws don't send that message." By literally making a federal case of it, the senators hope, as Senator Biden told the Associated Press, to "raise the consciousness of the American public."

But what message do they want to send? What are they trying to tell us and who, really, are the tellers? Here we come to the real reason to be wary of this bill.

In December 1991 (soon after the rape acquittal of William Kennedy Smith and the Clarence Thomas hearings), Catharine MacKinnon published an op-ed in the New York Times in which she laid out the rationale behind her long crusade to make rape a civil-rights violation. "What," she asked, "if Florida's case against William Kennedy Smith had been a sex equality case?" Miss MacKinnon answered her own question:

Instead of asking did this individual commit a crime of battery against that individual, the court would ask did this member of a group sexually trained to woman-hating aggression commit this particular act of woman-hating aggression? ... Set in a context of women's enforced inequality to men, the alleged victim would not have been seen as an exception. It would be clear that infinitely more rapes that do happen are not reported than are reported and do not happen.

Biden's office, which was spectacularly uncooperative for this article, wouldn't say whether Miss MacKinnon was a consultant on this bill, but we do know that her frequent collaborator Andrea Dworkin (famous for her statement that "intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women") was a consultant. The committee report cites a book by Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode, who recently announced at a conference that "white men make up only 8 per cent of the world population. I find that such an encouraging fact." Mary Koss, the mother of rape revisionism (her study is usually used to supply the national statistics in "date rape epidemic" news stories), makes many appearances in the report as well, especially to shore up claims like: "According to conservative estimates, as many as 84 per cent of rapes remain unreported." NOW Legal Defense has, as New Republic writer Ruth Shalit put it, "complete hegemony over the bill." When Miss Shalit said she needed someone to "walk her through the bill," Biden's office directed her to Sally Goldfarb, of NOW Legal Defense.