{"id":2235,"date":"2002-11-18T14:30:25","date_gmt":"2002-11-18T21:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2235"},"modified":"2019-05-24T12:01:31","modified_gmt":"2019-05-24T19:01:31","slug":"fact-checking-the-anti-feminists-like-following-around-an-elephant-with-a-bucket-no-matter-how-much-crap-you-clean-up-they-keep-producing-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2235","title":{"rendered":"Fact-Checking the Anti-Feminists; like following around an elephant with a bucket, no matter how much crap you clean up they keep producing more."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.instapundit.com\/archives\/005549.php#005549\">Instapundit<\/a> links to this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vix.com\/menmag\/paglsomm.htm\">interview<\/a> with professional &#8220;anti-feminist feminists&#8221; Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers. (The interview comes from &#8220;liberal media&#8221; PBS).<\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t claim to know the truth or fiction of everything the anti-fem mavens say. But, going from what I already know about these issues, here are just some of Camille and Christina&#8217;s mistakes in this interview:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Hoff-Sommers refers to Mary Koss&#8217; study &#8211; which found that &#8220;one in four&#8221; female college students had experienced rape or attempted rape at some point in their lifetime (measuring only completed rapes, the number is 15%) &#8211; as a &#8220;grotesque exaggeration.&#8221; Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that Koss&#8217; results didn&#8217;t exaggerate the problem. Aside from Koss&#8217;, there have been three other nationwide, representative studies specifically designed to measure rape prevalence, and all three &#8211; one by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ojp.usdoj.gov\/bjs\/abstract\/svcw.htm\">U.S. Department of Justice<\/a> (10% for completed rape), one by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ojp.usdoj.gov\/nij\/pubs-sum\/172837.htm\">U.S. Centers for Disease Control<\/a> (15% for completed rape), and one by the Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center (13% for completed rape) &#8211; supported Koss&#8217; findings.\n<\/li>\n<li>Paglia claims that a female instructor at the University of Pennsylvania &#8220;demanded [a Goya painting of a nude woman] be taken down because she felt sexually harassed by it&#8221;; Paglia says the prof was &#8220;embarassed and upset&#8221; by human nudity. But Professor Nancy Stumhofer never claimed that Goya&#8217;s <em>Naked Maja<\/em> sexually harassed her; this myth was made up by right-wing pundits like Paglia. And far from being upset by nudity, Stumhofer assigned works with human nudity in other contexts. She did have <em>Naked Maja <\/em> moved to a public area in the student center, not because she felt harassed by Goya, but because her developmental English students seemed distracted by the painting. (Source: <em>Democratic Culture<\/em>, Spring 1994, pp 18-22).\n<\/li>\n<li>Hoff-Sommers cites only one source &#8211; <em>Washington Post<\/em> journalist Ken Ringle &#8211; to prove there&#8217;s no connection between the Super Bowl and increased domestic violence. The problem is, Ringle&#8217;s a known liar. Both the American Journalism Review (5\/93) and the <em>Washington Post<\/em>&#8216;s own ombudsman <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fair.org\/extra\/9409\/stolen-feminism-hoax.html\">critisized<\/a> Ringle for his factual errors, bias and &#8220;twisted and selective quoting&#8221; in reporting this story. As <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fair.org\/extra\/9304\/superbowl.html\">FAIR<\/a> notes, three of the four experts Ringle cited to &#8220;debunk&#8221; feminists, actually disagreed with Ringle&#8217;s claims. (I don&#8217;t claim to know if there&#8217;s more domestic violence on superbowl Sunday or not; I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s enough evidence to say. But for Sommers to claim that she <em>does<\/em> know, based on a dishonest source like Ken Ringle, is ridiculous).\n<\/li>\n<li>Hoff-Sommers claims only 100 Americans a year die from anorexia &#8211; but she doesn&#8217;t understand mortality statistics. According to the <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20021208162548\/http:\/\/www.nimh.nih.gov\/publicat\/eatingdisorder.cfm\">NIMH<\/a>, anorexics typically die due to &#8220;complications of the disorder, such as cardiac arrest or electrolyte imbalance,&#8221; not anorexia itself. Hoff-Sommers might as well have claimed that because so few people have &#8220;cigarettes&#8221; written on their death certificate, smoking hardly ever causes any deaths.\n<p> So what&#8217;s the real number? There are about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.census.gov\/population\/socdemo\/gender\/ppl-121\/tab01.txt\">19 million<\/a> American women between ages 15 and 24; of those, somewhere between 190,000 and 380,000 have anorexia (it&#8217;s estimated that <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20080316031550\/http:\/\/www.workplaceblues.com\/mental_health\/anorexia.asp\">1-2%<\/a> of young women suffer from anorexia). About <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20041015034318\/http:\/\/www.nimh.nih.gov\/publicat\/eatingdisorders.cfm\">0.56%<\/a> &#8211; somewhere between one and two thousand &#8211; of those die of anorexia-related causes each year. (This is a conservative estimate, both because some studies have found a <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20080316031550\/http:\/\/www.workplaceblues.com\/mental_health\/anorexia.asp\">much higher<\/a> long-term mortality rate, and because not everyone with anorexia is a young woman age 15-24).<\/p>\n<p> Hoff-Sommers uses the false &#8220;100 deaths&#8221; statistic to refute an also-false number some feminists used in the early 1990s. She was right to correct the feminists &#8211; but, unlike Hoff-Sommers, the feminists were willing to retract their mistaken statistic. Hoff-Sommers has never corrected or retracted her false &#8220;100 deaths from anorexia&#8221; figure.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Remember, these are the same people who built careers claiming that feminists are fact-challenged. Apparently right-wingers don&#8217;t have to worry about that whole &#8220;glass houses&#8221; thing.<a style=\"text-decoration:none\" href=\"\/index.php?p=floxin-5-10-20\">.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Instapundit links to this interview with professional &#8220;anti-feminist feminists&#8221; Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers. (The interview comes from &#8220;liberal media&#8221; PBS). I can&#8217;t claim to know the truth or fiction of everything the anti-fem mavens say. But, going from &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2235\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,19,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-feminists-and-their-pals","category-christina-hoff-sommers","category-mary-koss-controversy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2235"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25000,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2235\/revisions\/25000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}