Don’t Swallow Dogma
November 4, 2005
Dear Editor:
I was excited when I read Chris Cantu’s editorial (“Men are oppressed,” Oct. 25) on the other side of feminism. He wrote a well thought out argument for why feminism hurts men. I knew right then that there would be trouble. Feminism has never been a movement that took criticism very well. In fact, feminism does very well at silencing all opposition through belittling and shaming their opponents. Aubrey Jeppson’s response (“Cantu skewed his facts”, Nov. 4) is exactly that, an attempt to shame a man to silence.
Jeppson quotes a “1 in 4” rape statistic, which Cantu previously states is false. While Cantu actually takes the time to state the actual book that proves this, Jeppson simple restates the statistic like it is self evident. Stamping your feet and saying it twice doesn’t make it true, Ms. Jeppson.
To illustrate the silliness of some of Ms. Jeppson’s statistics I’d like to run some numbers. She states explicitly, “Every two minutes a woman in the United States is raped.” Using some simple arithmetic the total comes to 262,980 rapes per year. Jeppson previously quotes the number of rapes per year at 135,550 and that only 37% reported the rape. 135,550 / 37% is 366,351 which is the total rapes per year including those not reported. So according to Ms. Jeppson about 100,000 women are made up or don’t know they’ve been raped yet.
This begs the question, does Ms. Jeppson know what she is talking about or is she just spouting off canned dogmatic responses? It would seem that Cantu’s editorial is so appalling that it warranted a 5 minute google search and hopscotch to different sites gathering not truthful data but simply some statistics that fit Jeppson’s emotional appeal. What appalls this reader is that Ms. Jeppson is a Secondary Education major and that she will eventually teach future college students the art of lying through their teeth.