I don’t expect Wendy McElroy to report anything accurately (she does write for FOX, after all). Still, her discussion of Mary Koss in a recent Foxnews column included two sentences, which were a simply amazing example of McElroy’s inability to get facts straight.
Mary Koss, for those who don’t know, is a professor who has done very influential work on designing surveys measuring the prevalence of rape. Debunking Koss is a favorite activity of anti-feminists: Katie Roiphe, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Warren Farrell are just a few of the anti-feminists who have spent a lot of ink attacking Koss and her work.
Anyhow, here are the two sentences:
So what did McElroy get wrong?
- The study Ms contributed to was published in 1987, not 1985. (There was a Ms Magazine article reporting on Koss’ research, published in ’85; but an article reporting on a study is not the same thing as the study itself).
- So where was the study itself published? In The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, not Ms Magazine.
- The study found that the 1 in 4 had experienced rape or attempted rape, not just rape. (Nor did the ’85 Ms Magazine article ever use the 1 in 4 statistic, by the way.)
- The study used standardized survey forms, not interviews.
- The women were asked dozens and dozens of questions, not just 10.
- There was a 10-question subsection related to sexual assault and coercion, which is I suppose what McElroy meant to refer to. However, McElroy is still mistaken, because respondents were NOT “deemed to have been raped if any question elicited a ‘yes’ response.”
- There were 3,187 women surveyed for the study, not 7,000 women as McElroy claims. (Including men, a total of 6,159 people were in Koss’ sample).
None of that is terribly substantial, I know, but it’s still impressive how many factual mistakes McElroy makes in such a short passage.
Also, I’ve been debating this with “Brad” (who I think may be McElroy’s partner or husband) on the ifeminists discussion board.
McElroy also cited this IWF critique of Koss’ study. I’ll tackle the IWF’s critique on Monday, and I promise that post will be more substantive.
* * *
More on Wendy McElroy
More on Mary Koss
This post has been updated since I originally wrote it, to add in the sample size error, and to put in the information about the 1995 Ms article reporting on the research..
None of that is terribly substantial
I disagree. Taken together, those errors add up to as thorough a misrepresentation as malice could manage.
I look forward to the IWF post.
to define “ant-feminist” in two words, it can best be defined as “Wendy McElroy”. With each passing year, her words become more hateful and disparaging towards women. One onders how she lives with herself, having ovaries and all.
those aren’t minor errors – they’re easily verifiable facts – if a writer can’t be bothered to even make the small effort required to get such details correct, i see no reason to treat the rest of their argument with any real seriousness
it’s either pure laziness, or as Sennoma states, malicious misrepresentation – a real argument would be able to make it’s case without needing to tailor the facts to one’s desired conclusion
Every once in a while I read a news story covering something about which I have firsthand knowledge. It seems that about 75% of the time in such stories, I can pick out a significant detail in the story which I know to be wrong.
Then I look at all the other news stories about which I don’t know the details myself.
And I get very depressed.
N.B.: they have spilled a lot of ink on the subject but they have not spent a lot of time thinking about it. If you follow the citations in Christina Hoff Sommers’ discussions of Koss, as well as Warren Farrell’s, Wendy McElroy’s, and the IWF’s, they all eventually point back to Katie Roiphe’s hatchet-job in The Morning After. The laziness involved comes mainly from citing Roiphe more or less as gospel without actually doing any background research on what Koss actually wrote or did. That’s why the drive-by “critiques” of Koss’s work are simultaneously (1) completely off-base, and (2) depressingly monotonous (if they were all contributing their own misunderstandings, rather than repeating Katie Roiphe’s, you’d expect a bit more variation).
So, here I have trouble seeing McElroy’s string of errors as malicious. It is simply intellectually lazy. Wendy McElroy ought to know better, but she has been getting worse over the past few years.
I wrote a long post about McElroy last winter. Her institute does research on the ‘most serious problems facing women’. It turns out, based on my frequency data on what she publishes, that the most serious problem women face is the unfair treatment of men, and the second-most serious problem is evil feminists. So.
It didn’t stop a lot of the men’s rights people from viciously attacking her. You think she’d get a clue.
I also saw Erin Pizzey on some right-wing site last week, talking about how ‘the family’ must be kept together. I don’t trust any of these debunkers anymore.
‘I also saw Erin Pizzey on some right-wing site last week, talking about how ‘the family’ must be kept together. I don’t trust any of these debunkers anymore.’
Erin Pizzey has been anti-feminist for *years* and is a darling of the men’s ‘rights’ movement.
This is my favourite example of Erin Pizzey being caught out in a disingenuous statement which kinda exposes her oft-repeated claim that women are as equally violent as men:
[Reporter]: So women are as violent as men?
[Pizzey] “Well, we tend to implode, our violence is turned in on ourselves or is covert – men explode and hurt others.”
[Reporter]: So it’s not exactly the same?
“It’s violence,” Pizzey says stubbornly
http://www.guardian.co.uk/women/story/0,3604,606006,00.html
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I have known Wendy since the mid 70s. The issue with her is not ideology or even ideas or values. She changes her ideas to suit the economics of the situation. Meaning if there is a profit her is hit with revelations that before evaded her. If you look at her books you will see that, astonishingly, she wrote a book about how much women need pornography, too. Hard to imagine how a woman could write such a book with a straight face. The very different biological imperatives of men and women make their sexual interests very different. Porn for women is far more likely to be romance novels.
McElroy used to write and speak about having been raped and having an abortion when she was a teenager living on the streets in Los Angeles. Since her family is Canadian I assume she moved there to go into the film industry, a usual destination back then.
Eventually I will get around to writing an article about her that lays out the monetary motives for what she has done. It explains everything.