Sometimes National Post Op-Eds Annoy. And That's More Than OK

This week Men's Rights Advocates in Edmonton crawled out from their Reddit subforum, and they brought some posters with them. Following Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton's "Don't Be that Guy" campaign, they decided the world needed a matching "Don't Be That Girl", even if they didn't need to take any new photos for it. So they took the "Guy" pics, and with a little Photoshop magic, added the following statements: 

• "Just because you regret a one-night stand doesn’t mean it wasn’t consensual. Lying about sexual assault = crime"
• "Women who drink are not responsible for their actions, especially when sex is involved. Double standards"
• "Just because she's easy doesn't mean you shouldn't fear false rape accusations. Lying about sexual assault = an unpunished crime."

Reaction was - as the Men's Rights Advocates probably hoped - quick and loud. The story was picked up by the CBC and The National Post. The latter also found a female voice to speak out for the forgotten ones. For those who had been silenced and misrepresented for so long. For... the Men's Rights Advocates. In a column titled "Sometimes, assault accusations are false. A little awareness is OK," Robyn Urback let the feminists know that "... despite the tactless presentation, the message remains fair: Sometimes, women falsely accuse men of rape." And I would agree with that. Sometimes, that happens. Does that happen often enough to warrant an ad campaign equating false rape accusations with rape itself? An event that's possible, though improbable, compared to a crime of depressing prevalence that's likely to go unreported, according to this StatsCan doc, nine out of ten times? Or is this just another example of rape culture, a campaign which does nothing to support the falsely accused, and everything to tell women they're "responsible" - a word picked directly from one of the posters - for their own drunkenness, for their assault, and for having the audacity to just be women at all?

Now I did it. I used that phrase, "rape culture," which marks me as something more sinister than just a simple feminist, tapping ineffectually away on her keyboard. Because, according to Urback, "there’s also another sort of “rape culture” whereby any sort of critical analysis of an accusation is immediately rejected as “victim blaming.” And it looks like I'm a part of it. 

Pictured: one of two rape cultures from Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome. 

Which one? Couldn't tell ya.

I guess Urback thinks we're in some kind of Rape Thunderdome - Two rape cultures enter, one leaves! - but that little joke is not enough for this insulting column. I am pissed the fuck off that anyone can find something to salvage in this offensive campaign. I want Robyn Urback's work broken down to its component parts, and each of those then dismantled one by one.

And yet, that's too much for just one person to handle. Fortunately, an awesome friend of mine, Maggie Gordon, can slice Urback's assertion that "Statistics show that false accusations of sexual assaults occur about as frequently as false accusations of other crimes — somewhere between two and four per cent" to shreds in her excellent blog post, "Conversations about False Rape Allegations are Generally Full of Bullshit." And anyone with a basic grasp of figures should find something shady when Urback says that there are "countless stories of innocent lives being derailed by illegitimate accusations" and then mentions exactly two, neither of which happened in Edmonton, the target of this campaign.

I'll just take a look at Urback's argument that "the new posters around Edmonton inadvertently bring attention to their [people falsely accused of rape's] plight." Because they don't. They just don't. Urback herself does a better job of this. You won't see any victims of false accusations, or figures on imprisonment, in these posters. Just photos of anonymous women, called out for ruining men's lives. At least Urback found two anecdotes for her column. The idea that this isn't about men at all is obvious from the text as well, particularly in the third poster I mentioned. It starts off seemingly directed at at a male reader (Just because she's easy) before returning to tell the now female reader not to "be that girl." The second poster also does a poor job of sharing any sort of message about wrongfully convicted men - whining about double standards doesn't do much, except make you seem petulant. So, Robyn Urback, a little awareness is probably OK, but these posters don't even contain that. Perhaps you could try a little bit of self-awareness, and admit you're just searching for pageviews. 

And I'll do the same, and admit I regret the handful I'll send you through this post.