One of feminists' favorite ways to smear and demonize men is this:

"Women are justified in being afraid of men, because men are 90% / 95% of rapists. Women aren't out there raping men, it's men doing it to women."

Of course, feminists will use any claim to attack men. They don't care if it's true or not. But we do. So... is it?

You probably already suspect that it's bullshit just because it's feminists speaking. If so, you're right.

The real numbers are so different to the standard, feminist-promoted narrative that you will definitely be challenged if you cite them. So I'm going to give you all the information you'll need to both quote the correct figures and also defend your position afterwards.

Sources

Feminists like to quote figures from feminist organizations because those use terrible methodologies to come up with bogus numbers that support feminist propaganda.

For example, remember "1 in 4 women on college campuses has been raped"? If true, that would make college campuses the most dangerous places in the world for women. That number was obtained by sending a survey to the mailing list of a sexual assault support organization. Of course, that's not a representative sample of female university students. "1 in 4" is an obviously false number, but feminists don't care and have continued to repeat it ad infinitum ever since.

Instead, we're going to go to the biggest and most credible source of statistics on sexual assault and violence: the CDC. Specifically, the CDC's primary publication on this topic: the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS):

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/NISVS-StateReportBook.pdf

Terminology & Definitions

There is some important context to consider before looking at the CDC data.

Prominent feminist Mary P Koss consulted to the CDC as an "expert" on rape from 1996 to at least 2005, according to her own CV. Mary P Koss has frequently expressed her contempt for men, including her view that men are not harmed by being forced to have sex. She insists that the act of a woman forcing a man to have sex without his consent should not be considered "rape" but instead simply labelled "unwanted contact". Her stated views on men are utterly reprehensible, though sadly not unusual for a feminist.

Through her lobbying, Koss convinced the CDC to exclude male victims of women from their published rape statistics. Instead, the CDC puts men who are forced to have sex by women under the label "made to penetrate" rather than calling them rape victims.

Like almost all non-feminists, I disagree with Mary P Koss and the feminist position on male victims. So rather than using her definition of rape, I am instead going to use the dictionary definition (Merriam-Webster in this case, but the others are all similar):

rape: unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against a person's will or with a person who is beneath a certain age or incapable of valid consent because of mental illness, mental deficiency, intoxication, unconsciousness, or deception

For this reason, I argue that we should add the "made to penetrate" numbers back into the CDC's rape statistics in order to get an accurate picture.

The Figures

Refer to the NISVS report linked above, specifically:

  • Table 3.1 on page 18 for the number of female victims
  • Table 3.5 on page 26 for the number of male victims

The tables contain two sets of figures: "Lifetime" and "12 month". They are derived, as you'd expect, from questions like these:

"Has <thing> ever happened to you in your lifetime?"
"Has <thing> happened to you at any time in the last 12 months?"

Lifetime prevalence figures are considered by statisticians to be far less accurate than previous 12-month prevalence figures. If you consider, for example, a 65-year-old being asked to think back over their entire life, one source of inaccuracy becomes obvious. Another, changing societal attitudes, is especially relevant in this case.

While women do not always report their rapes, men massively underreport being victims of rape for a variety of social reasons. There is still a huge stigma attached to male rape victims, especially of women perpetrators - far more than the stigma for female rape victims, which has been alleviated by decades of public education campaigns and positive portrayals in pop culture. Some men don't even realize that men can be raped, so they don't recognize that it was rape when that happened to them. Male underreporting is now improving rapidly thanks to increased awareness of this issue, but the changes are quite recent.

As a result, the further back in time any survey looks, the greater will be the impact of male underreporting. That's why these tables show an unusually large difference between the lifetime and 12-month figures: they reflect the huge shift in attitudes to male rape victims in recent decades.

So we're going to use the previous 12-month figures for our assessment.

[Note that the most recently published NIPSVS is from 2012. Attitudes to male rape victims have shifted substantially over those eleven years, so we can expect even the 12-month figures from this report to understate the number of male victims significantly.]

With that context all taken into account, what are the figures from the NISVS report for male & female rape victims?

Women: 1,473,000 victims

Men: 219,000 [CDC figure for rape by a penis] + 1,715,000 [CDC figure for men forced to penetrate a woman] = 1,934,000 victims

1,934,000 / (1,473,000 + 1,934,000) = 0.5676

Thus men are 57% of the total number of rape victims.

1,715,000 / 1,934,000 = 0.8867

So the perpetrators who are making men penetrate them (i.e. women) commit 89% of the rapes of men.

It's a shocking result, isn't it? The complete opposite of what feminist propaganda claims. I think it's clear that feminists are waging a war on men, and as the saying goes, "The first casualty of war is truth". The truth doesn't support the feminist narrative, so it had to be cast aside and replaced with a lie.