The Sun Herald and the Gay Menace
Can anyone say “moral panic”?
HUNDREDS of straight men are being raped in the city and eastern suburbs every year, many after having their drinks spiked.
Health experts have warned that men can be just as much of a target for sexual predators as women, although most men were not aware of the threat that lurked every time they went to the pub.
That’s right punters, EVERY TIME YOU GO TO THE PUB, poofters are lurking around the corner looking to drug you and take your anal virginity. It’s a wonder there isn’t more awareness of this problem considering it’s so prevalent.
Obviously, male-on-male rape happens and isn’t funny, although the problem of homosexuals who rape straight men is a considerably less serious problem than that of straight men who rape women. Men ‘can’ be just as much a target for sexual predators as women, but they aren’t actually now, are they?
The figure the article opens with, “hundreds of straight men are being raped in the city and eastern suburbs every year” (and note, it doesn’t specify how many of those are drink-spikings, just “many”) is 95% dubious. It seems to be based on taking a figure of 44 sexual assaults on men last year, and then multiplying that by “up to 95%” – which of course would give us a figure of up to almost a thousand. The only thing we have about drink-spiking is that “drug-assisted sexual assaults” are “relatively common” among the 44. Common relative to what, one wonders. Do we have any numbers on this? Has it happened five times? Was it perpetrated by people the men knew? Were the victims or perpetrators straight or gay? ARE STRAIGHT MEN REALLY BEING MENACED BY LEGIONS OF DIRTY GAYS WITH ROHYPNOL AT ALL? I love the invocation of the city and eastern suburbs as well, by the way. We all know who hangs out there, right?
Seriously, could Fairfax do something about the Sun Herald already? I genuinely don’t see why we need it given the existence of the Sunday Telegraph.
EvilPundit wrote:
This is no different from the moral panic about heterosexual ‘drink spiking’ which has been going on for some time.
In most cases, the effects attributed to ‘date rape drugs’ are in fact the effects of alcohol.
liam wrote:
Let’s break with tradition in these kinds of arguments and let the facts intrude.
Yes, the effects of alcohol are included in the Australian Institute of Criminology’s definition—rightly so.
Also from the conclusion in the second link, which discusses and dismisses the idea of drink spiking as an ‘urban myth’, the most important point:
EvilPundit wrote:
Facts? That article is little more than hand-waving and appeals to faith. Most of it is guesswork.
While I have no doubt that drink spiking occurs, like rape and child sexual abuse it’s a feminist-driven issue in which many claims are faked or grossly exaggerated, and actual verifiable facts are thin on the ground.
It’s interesting to note that when the perpetrators are portrayed as heterosexual men, drink spiking is a major problem – but let gays be the culprits and males the victims, and suddenly it’s an evil homophobical moral crusade myth thing.
Thus we see the political roots of the whole issue. As in all such things, the actual occurrences are secondary to the propaganda usage of the meme.
liam wrote:
Let’s try the second link again.
Evil, let me get this straight. You’re trying to give as much statistical credence to a Sunday Herald article that states “men can be just as much of a target for sexual predators as women” as to a study done by the AIC?
EvilPundit wrote:
I would give them roughly equal credence, in that both of them are suing a phenomenon on which very little hard data is available for the purposes of pushing an ideological barrow.
The AIC paper boils down to “there’s very little in the way of evidence, so we have to rely on taking people’s word for it”. The Sun Herald extrapolates from a pool of alleged victims, also mainly on the basis of “taking their word for it”. So I consider the two studies approximately equal in their not-very-credibleness. But overall, I think the significance lies in the political import of the rival studies, not in their ‘findings’.
More interesting to me is the sexism apparent in Mark’s post. If eeevil heterosexual males are spiking poor helpless women’s drinks, that’s a BIG MAJOR PROBLEM. But if gay males are spiking men’s drinks, that just isn’t serious.
So I see this blog post as reflecting typical leftist prejudice against straight men, and defence of one of the sacred cow categories, that of gay men. It’s also significant that there is no objection to the ‘moral panic’ that seeks to portray heterosexual men as potential drink-spiking rapists.
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