As you all well know, I try to keep a steady beat of media criticism of a specific kind of bad reporting—-bad science reporting in the name of supporting sexism. Sexists in your secular democracies face a problem—-arguing that women are inferior to men has always been the job of religion, where you can just make shit up without any evidence, declare it the truth, and start oppressing people. In steps bad science reporters to fill in the gap, elevating hack scientists over good ones because the hacks say what sexists want to hear, anthropomorphizing animal research to reach strained conclusions, claiming that misogynist conclusions were reached in research that weren’t, and allowing armchair evolutionary psychology* to masquerade as genuine science. But this story takes the cake. Is it possible that bad science reporters, when faced with research that cannot be construed in any way to mean that bitches ain’t shit, will just lie about it?
Via Feministing (and emailed to me—-thank you, damnedyankee!), we find that the Telegraph ran a story suggesting that women who don’t stay home and knit on a Friday night are basically asking the vigilante justice system known as rapists to punish the women for their infraction with the proper punishment for errant women—-rape. They’re just trying to help you stay safe, ladies! Plus, it’s science and nature and utterly irrefutable, so you have no choice but to give up that social life.
And just in case you want to claim that we can’t judge a story by its headline, here’s the lead:
Psychologists found that all three factors had a bearing on how far men were likely to go to take advantage of the opposite sex.
They found that the skimpier the dress and the more flirtatious the woman, the less likely a suitor was to take no for an answer.
Interestingly, this is the toned-down version from the original copy. They went after women who drink in the first version, but were forced to give that one up after Goldacre called bullshit. But the main idea of the story—-that the research is about how women cause rape, remains.
The story leads off by saying that if you flirt and wear short skirts, you put up a scientifically proven “open for raping” sign. But was the research actually about how women get themselves raped by making themselves so available for raping? Was the research really about how this is all women’s fault?
Of course not. As Ben Goldacre reports, the original press release put the blame for rape on an unusual target—-the men who actually do the raping.
Oddly, though, the title of the press release for the same research was: “Promiscuous men more likely to rape.”
Well, obviously it’s untrue that men who rape women are the ones to blame. That’s like blaming the police when a robber breaks into a house and they arrest him. The crime committed here was the flirting and short skirt-donning, and that’s that. Except not according to the actual researchers, who seem to be invested in this weird idea that rapists are to blame for rape. Goldacre called the researcher on this very preliminary research, Sophia Shaw. She’s not pleased about this story.