Wimminworsting Strikes Again at NPR

Discussing the role race may have played in the different treatment of sexual misconduct allegations against two Hollywood figures in a story on Weekend Edition Sunday, Ailsa Chang and Anne Helen Petersen couldn't resist bringing gender into the discussion quite illegitimately. I commented:

In comparing the two celebrity rape [sic] allegations, you slipped in a bit of ideological nonsense with the claim that these cases illustrate different attitudes based on gender as well as race -- patently impossible since the celebrities, though of different races, are the same gender and so were those who accused them.

The reality is quite the opposite -- our society more readily acknowledges and acts on sexual violence against women than against men, as documented here for instance: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/male_rape_in_america_a_new_study_reveals_that_men_are_sexually_assaulted.html

This compassion gap is also visible in how the world expressed outrage at Boko Haram's kidnapping of girls -- after the same politicians and celebrities had completely ignored their gruesome murders of boys.

These are both examples of a pervasive assumption, without any regard for evidence or even the need to look for any, that women always get the short end of the stick -- an unexamined faith that men's rights intellectual Alison Tieman has dubbed "the Church of Wimminworsting."

This was a little differently worded when I originally posted it here because I was writing from memory. Subsequently I've received an email acknowledgement from NPR including the text of what I'd sent them, which I've used to correct the text here.