When I was in high school, the boys (and only the boys) were called into an assembly on rape prevention. Predictibly, we were all treated as potential rapists and shamed for our gender. How dare we choose to be men!

During the assembly however, a statistic was presented to us. One that I, at the time, found shocking and horrifying. the feminist on stage informed us that "one in every three women would be raped before the age of 25." I remember still being 14 and cringing in my seat. What sort of nation would allow this to be so?! Why didn't the police do something?! Was there no justice in the world?

Years later I went off to college and formed a fairly diverse group of friends. Within that group, friends of friends commonly commingled with us and would pop in and out; both male and female. The closer I got to people, the more about them I learned. Shockingly and much to my horror, the more I got to know the girls (and there were about 7 in my group), 4 mentioned being raped.

Again, I was disgusted. The number was even worse than what I was told in high school! Was the world really that cruel to women? Why wasn't something done to protect them? And more pressingly, where were all these rapists? Well, funny thing about that number...

After freshman year, one of the girls drunkenly admitted that she had never been raped. She'd invented the story to get sympathy from her current BB boyfriend. I obviously never spoke to her again after learning this, but thought that it was disgusting that anybody would make up a claim like that. Still, I foolishly believed she was an anomaly. Nobody else could be that fucked up, right?

Well later that year, one of the other girls who insisted she'd been raped as a teenager invited her cousin to visit. While he was here, the subject came up between him and I and he suddenly turned red with embarrassment. He informed me that what had actually happened is she'd slept with a guy, had a massive rape fetish, asked him to essentially rape her and not yield no matter what she said, then changed her mind 5 seconds in. A strong hamster, I know, but suddenly my number of four had dropped to 2.

From then one, I began to press the issue harder. Girl 3 insisted that a guy in the dorm across campus had done it, so I coxed a name out of her friend and tracked him down. When I spoke to the guy and his friends, the moment the girl's named was uttered, they all cringed. Apparently the girl was a total psycho and had made up the rape to cover the fact she'd cheated. Girl 4 wound up recanting later that year when the accused sued for slander.

It was around senior year that I had an epiphany. Of all the girls I knew, NONE had ever been raped. Further more, of the girls I'd known who confided they were raped, 100 fucking percent of them had lied.

100%

Think about that for a moment. Imagine if you discovered that all the people you'd met with cancer had been faking the illness. Imagine if all of the people who'd been reported dead in drunk driving accidents had faked their own deaths. Your faith just might be a wee bit shaken in the statistic, no?

Granted this is a very small sample size, but of all these unrelated women, ALL had been lying about their rape. Doesn't that make you wonder, the statistic we've been shouted at for so long, what are the real numbers?

Obviously I am not a statistician, but I like to try and believe what I can observe when it comes to things like this, and of all the rape accounts I've ever heard of, and I've heard of many more since then, all of it has always turned out to be fake.

Food for thought. I honestly very rarely believe rape stories any more; in my experience they almost always turn out to be totally false.