One of the things that most bothered me about the reaction to Rolling Stone's "A Rape on Campus" was the generally unthinking acceptance that a fraternity at a major university in the United States of America in the early 2010s would, as an initiation ceremony, engage in gang rape. The "as an initiation ceremony" part of that sentence is an important one, at least to my mind. Because it suggests that, over the years, literally hundreds—perhaps thousands?—of men would have partaken in the gang rape of countless dozens (hundreds?) of innocent young women.
To join a club.
I'm guessing (hoping?) most people just glossed over that portion of the story, as it was more an insinuation than stated fact. But it was right there: In addition to the liar "Jackie's" story, it was suggested that several other young women had reported being gang raped in similar ceremonies at the fraternity house in question. And it was just kind of taken for granted. No real outcry.
I consider this to be a rather fascinating example of confirmation bias. Because what it suggests is that the vast majority of people who feted the story—the journalists who praised it to high heaven on Twitter, the wags on MSNBC who tut-tutted about the evils of rape culture—believe that, as a matter of course, frat bros are gang-raping monsters. That they're subhuman psychopaths, immoral monsters.
As Richard Bradley—one of the first to call the RS story into question—wrote:
Erdely claims that she asked Jackie this question at this point because Drew was "at-large" and "dangerous." That claim does not pass the smell test. For one thing, this would have been the case pre-publication as well as post. For another, in the wake of the 2.7 million readers Erdely’s story attracted, it’s implausible that Drew was sitting back is his frat boy lair planning his next gang rape. This is not Silence of the Lambs we’re talking about.
Jonathan Chait made the same allusion in his writeup of the CJR report:
One of the peculiar, unexamined assumptions is that fraternity members are capable not only of loutishness or even rape, which is undeniable, but the sort of routine, systematized torture we would normally associate with serial killers or especially brutal regimes. The story describes a gang rape as a fraternity initiation ritual, complete with members referring to their victim as "it," the way Buffalo Bill dehumanized his captive in Silence of the Lambs.
You don’t need to feel much affinity for Greek culture — I certainly don’t — to question whether depravity on this scale is plausible. It’s the sort of error that could only be produced in an atmosphere of unquestioned loathing. Caitlin Flanagan, who has reported extensively on the pathology of fraternity culture, told Hanna Rosin that Rolling Stone’s gang rape scene beggared belief. But Flanagan and Rosin have both offended the left in different ways, so their skepticism merely served to convince Rolling Stone’s defenders that the story’s skeptics were motivated by anti-feminism:
There is a way to be critical of journalistic standards. Quoting Caitlin Flanagan is not a good start.
— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) December 3, 2014
Emphasis mine. It's not just the acceptance of frat bros as "the other," to borrow a word progressives love. It's the combination of that acceptance with an explicit refusal to engage anyone who has been judged to harbor politically incorrect thoughts that leads to trouble. The closing of the PC mind was a heck of a thing to watch with regard to this story. The headlines as questions began to emerge were something else:
Even now, after the story has crumbled into nothing, they're not much better:
It's a troubling, but common, tactic taken by the neo-PC crowd: blindly accept whatever advances the narrative, then personally attack anyone who disagrees with said narrative in the most personal ways possible. Confirmation bias is bad enough on its own. But confirmation bias combined with a culture in which it is frowned upon to ask the wrong sort of question ("You rape denier!") or consort with the wrong sort of person ("Why would you quote that rape denier!") is a recipe for unmitigated disaster.