Heather McDonald is concerned about the feminist left’s effort to undermine the presumption of innocence for men accused of rape. She makes an argument in the prestigious City Journal that there is actually a reason why we should not believe women’s rape claims, especially in an age of feminism, until we have the evidence that proves that the man being accused is guilty.

First, she gives an example of the fake rape charge made by the Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz. I’ll omit the history of consent before, during, and after the sex and go straight to the reason for the false accusation:

It wasn’t until eight months after their August 2012 coupling that Sulkowicz filed a campus-rape charge, alleging that Nungesser had anally raped her while she struggled and told him to stop. She claims that she waited so long to file so as to avoid re-traumatizing herself. Nungesser argues that she was simply chagrined that they had not become an exclusive couple.

Reason magazine actually reported that she texted Nungesser to come over and “f*** me in the butt”. We have that text, and we know that this happened. So what happened? She had painful sex with a guy, and the relationship ended, and she wanted to shame him for breaking up with her after she gave him recreational sex. She felt she was entitled to a relationship after doing so much.

Here’s another one where the consent was documented before during and after the act, and the woman made a false accusation after because she was disappointed that the sex did not result in a relationship:

In September 2013, two freshmen at Occidental College in Southern California had sex after both had been on a 24-hour drinking binge.

Jane reported their coupling to campus authorities only after seeing that John was unaffected emotionally by it, whereas she, having lost her virginity, felt distracted and unable to concentrate.

He was found guilty of rape and expelled.

In another case:

In another case, a female student was caught by her boyfriend while cheating on him with another male student. She then filed a complaint of assault against that second male. The morning after their sexual encounter, they had exchanged texts. He wrote: “How do I compare with your boyfriend?” She responded to the boy she later accused of rape: “You were great.”

Saying no to the hot guy would have deprived her of a pleasurable experience. The rape charge got her out of being sanctioned by her boyfriend and judged by her peers. She probably couldn’t even understand why her boyfriend was angry, or why her friends thought less of her. After all, it’s her right to pursue happiness, and nobody should judge her.

So, what’s really happening? What’s really happening is that women are consenting to sex, sometimes after having chosen to get drunk, then when they sober up and realize how it makes them look to others – their boyfriends, their peers, their family, their pastors – they use rape charges as an excuse to rehabilitate their reputation. Regret over consensual sex is driving the rape accusations.

MacDonald explains:

Our booze-fueled hook-up culture has made relations between men and women messier than ever, leaving many girls and women with pangs of regret—but those regrets do not equal rape. If we were actually in the midst of an “epidemic of sexual assault,” as New Jersey senator Cory Booker asserted the evening of the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings, we would presumably have seen women and girls take protective actions, such as avoiding frat parties and flocking to single-sex schools. None of those protective actions has occurred, however. Either women are too clueless to avoid patent danger, or the epidemic of sexual assault is a fiction. All evidence points to the latter conclusion.

I have some thoughts about this, too.

In my experience dealing with women on college campuses, they tend to want a relationship, but the only men they are attracted to are hot bad boys who refuse to commit to them with marriage before having sex. So, the women give the hot non-committing bad boys the sex, thinking that the sex will be so good that it will lead to a relationship. The alcohol is used to provide an excuse later on, if the sex doesn’t result in a relationship. And if it doesn’t result in a relationship, they accuse the hot bad boy of rape in order to restore their reputation with their friends, (“I’m not a slut”), and punish the hot bad boy for not committing to them.

The more distrust there is between men and women, the fewer men and women will get married. What should we do? We should encourage women to stop drinking so much, to stop choosing men for fun and thrills, to stop having recreational sex, and to stop blaming their own poor choices on men.

UPDATE: Glenn found a great article at The Federalist which talks about women making poor choices, then blaming the bad men they freely chose:

But in the Me Too era and under the burgeoning expectation of enthusiastic consent, the first questions asked are something like, “What kind of horrible man would do this?” and, “How can we make him pay for this crime yucky way he behaved toward women?” Any attempt to ask why a woman would invite a man into her bedroom late into the evening if she didn’t want to have sex with him, accept the offer of a third date after she really didn’t enjoy the first two, or continue a years-long sexual relationship even though sometimes the sex made her feel bad, are considered victim blaming. It is as though we are to believe that the woman involved has no agency, no free will, and no control over her own choices.

A lot of harmful and costly social outcomes happen when women choose bad men, and do bad things with those men. Abortion, divorce, single mother welfare, fatherlessness, and deterring good men from having relationships (because women are seen as crazy and irresponsible). We’d better start holding women accountable to make better decisions about men, and prioritize marriage over fun and thrills.