I think it's more about mob mentality on a societal or cultural scale, and how it can lead us into a tunnel-vision view of things. The way we understand rape is changing these days, and I think we are past the day when a majority of rapes went unreported or unpunished because a woman was afraid of being dragged through the wringer or because "it isn't rape if" justifications would be thrown at them. The story in Rolling Stone does women a huge disservice by giving some fuel to those who claim that women will cry "rape" just to hurt others. And it seems as if the writer already had her story and simply needed a corroborating account, so when "Jackie" stepped forward, the writer did not properly vet her story, nor did the magazine's editors demand that she do the necessary follow-up work.
In one of the books I read recently (may have been Gladwell's Blink) there is a test that checks how we link the feeling of threat to skin color. As the researchers had expected, whites were much more likely to feel threatened by blacks than by other whites. But as they did not expect, blacks reacted similarly. Which indicates that racial prejudice is much more subtle and much more pervasive than we might think. It's not a stretch to imagine that many of our worst prejudices and ideas are disseminated the same way and pervade the thoughts of even the most progressive person, because we aren't even aware that we're being exposed to it and programmed by it. On the more positive side, the more that society makes a conscious effort to push a more enlightened idea, the more and more that it will 'infect' us in the same way.
The Rolling Stones' UVa story has a more far-reaching effect than it might seem at first glance, in that it might undo some of the progress we have made in re-framing the way we think about rape.
In one of the books I read recently (may have been Gladwell's Blink) there is a test that checks how we link the feeling of threat to skin color. As the researchers had expected, whites were much more likely to feel threatened by blacks than by other whites. But as they did not expect, blacks reacted similarly. Which indicates that racial prejudice is much more subtle and much more pervasive than we might think. It's not a stretch to imagine that many of our worst prejudices and ideas are disseminated the same way and pervade the thoughts of even the most progressive person, because we aren't even aware that we're being exposed to it and programmed by it. On the more positive side, the more that society makes a conscious effort to push a more enlightened idea, the more and more that it will 'infect' us in the same way.
The Rolling Stones' UVa story has a more far-reaching effect than it might seem at first glance, in that it might undo some of the progress we have made in re-framing the way we think about rape.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
