The idea that one in five college women has or will be sexually assaulted is mind-boggling and horrifying. After 2011, popularity slowly began to rise and then, beginning in 2013, it spiked.
According to Google search analytics, the topic generated almost no traffic in 2005 or before. Once rather obscure and confined to sociology and women’s studies departments, the term “rape culture” has slowly invaded the national consciousness. She holds an MA in social sciences from the University of Chicago and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in English from Northwestern University. Wilhelm is a columnist for, a senior contributor at The Federalist, and sits on the board of governors for Opportunity International, a Chicago-based microfinance group providing small business loans to impoverished entrepreneurs around the world. The following is a summary of The ‘Rape Culture’ Lie (February 2, 2015) by Heather Wilhelm. Google Analytics – “Rape Culture” Online in the US It also found that campus sexual assault was nearly 20% less frequent than for similarly-aged non-student women, and down 50% from the late 1990s.įor a discussion of the history, origin and meaning of the “rape culture” meme, see All Sex is Rape – All Men are Rapists. * The 18-year DOJ study “Rape and Sexual Assault among College-age Females, 1995-2013” found the prevalence of all forms of sexual assault on campus to be 0.61% annually, and campus rape to occur at a rate of 0.2% per year, or 2 in 1,000 college women. Whether there is an epidemic of campus sexual assault in the US* is largely irrelevant, as it is assumed to be so because it is essential to the popularity and spread of this meme, which would become extinct (as some genes do) if it were widely known that it’s unquestioned axioms were not true and hence the meme was not supportive of cultural evolution – a “regressive meme” as it were.
One of the most discussed memes today is “rape culture”, the proliferation of which is the basis of the increasingly strident effort to curb an alleged “epidemic” of campus sexual violence in the United States.
Like genes, memes self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selection pressures, such as political activism and journalism, with their origins often disguised or lost in history. Like a gene, which is unit of biological information that propagates a physical characteristic through the generations and which can become prolific in a given population, a meme is a unit of cultural information that spreads virally from person to person within a culture. It’s to authentic human culture what genetically modified corn is to maize.
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