“She’s saying that if they do [get drunk and into bed], then they can’t claim to be raped and expect to be believed.”
You cite the official statistic that 1 in 4 college women are raped, and acknowledge that that’s so overstated as to be “nonsense.” Surely that suggests that more behavior is being “believed” to be rape, not less.
MacDonald also reports that at UVa only 23% percent of the subjects that the survey characterized as rape victims agreed that they had, in fact, been raped. Getting campus authorities to believe a rape occurred does not seem to be the problem. (“New York University’s Wellness Exchange counsels people to “believe unconditionally” in sexual-assault charges..”)
“And what about the men in all this? Does everyone posting on this site endorse the double standard as MacDonald does? It seems so. Must be an American thing.”
Cultural anthropology aside, it may simply be because we disagree about what MacDonald’s article says. For example, though not quoted in your piecee, her article talks about men acting thuggishly, and deserving censure when they take advantage of women who have incapacitated themselves. (Note again that she is NOT talking about rape here, but what you call “beer goggles”.)
Yes, her primary focus is on female accountability, but that is explicitly in response to what she perceives as the opposite double standard at work on campuses, which “holds that inebriation strips women of responsibility for their actions but preserves male responsibility not only for their own actions but for their partners’ as well.”
MacDonald’s article isn’t about rape, but about what she calls the “campus rape industry,” which she contends accepts ambiguous sexual behavior as rape, favors the female narrative, and punishes males for behavior in which both sexes sometimes participate willingly. Because she’s trying to counter that narrative, it can look lopsided if the context is stripped away.
