Yesterday, having looked into the ongoing controversy over Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone piece on the University of Virginia, I wrote about skepticism and “rape apology,” and criticized those who willfully conflate the two. I also suggested that we are approaching a point at which “narrative” is deemed to be more important than objective truth. Today, Salon’s Katie McDonough has provided us all with an absolutely perfect example of what I was talking about. Having acknowledged that there are some problems with Erdely’s article, McDonough goes on to write:
But — and this is key — it would have been impossible for Rolling Stone and Erdely to have emerged from this story without having their process and motives questioned. Because so many of these protests about ethics and transparency are just the latest cover for the same tired bullshit: derailing public conversations about rape so that we will talk about virtually anything else.
And I resent being expected to treat every person who says hey no fair when a survivor speaks or a damning report is published as if these are all serious and credible concerns that elevate the discourse and bring us somewhere closer to the truth about sexual violence. Because this happens every single time. I challenge you to name a piece of reporting on rape or a survivor’s personal account that was not met with an immediate and predictable backlash, invasive questions about the victim’s credibility, a chorus defending the alleged rapist’s good name.
Steubenville. Maryville. Woody Allen. Bill Cosby. Jian Ghomeshi. The cycle is exhausting. The regularity of the violence is numbing.
As you can see, this ticks pretty much all the usual boxes. Claim #1: Because people always tend to ask for more details, we shouldn’t have to worry too much about answering the troubling questions in this instance. Tick. Claim #2: Skeptics are not genuinely interested in the truth, they’re just providing “cover for the same tired bullshit: derailing public conversations about rape so that we will talk about virtually anything else.” Tick. Claim #3: Because there are a lot of rape accusations, we shouldn’t greatly concern ourselves with whether these particular allegations are true — instead, we should talk about the issue more generally. Tick. And so on and so forth. It’s just all so darn predictable.
McDonough also indulges in some remarkably impressive question begging:
And in all of this, we have lost the point of Erdely’s piece. We have lost Jackie. We have lost the other women, some who spoke under their own names and others who requested anonymity, whose sexual assaults were also ignored by the University of Virginia. We have stopped talking about Liz Seccuro, who recounted in the piece how she was also gang raped by fraternity members at Phi Kappa Psi and was later asked by campus officials if maybe her rape was “just regrettable sex.” (One of the men who raped Securro was eventually convicted of aggravated sexual battery — two decades later.)
So: skeptics shouldn’t question whether those such as UVA’s “Jackie” are telling the truth, because then they won’t be able to focus on their ordeals . . . the veracity of which they are questioning.
Bizarre.