Doug Wilson Says Women ‘Rejecting the Patriarchy’ ‘Amounts to a Tacit’ ‘Acceptance of the Propriety of Rape’

Rejecting the Patriarchy and the Propriety of Rape

“Say a woman — for some egalitarian and very foolish reason, declines to have her dinner date walk her back to her car in some urban center after dark. Let us say she is raped and murdered. According to what RHE [Rachel Held Evans] says, my response is going to be some variant of ‘served her right.’ Now you would have to be a fool not to see the connection between her refusal of an escort and what happened to her, but you would also have to be pretty vile to say that walking to your car deserves the penalty of rape and murder. You would also have to be pretty high up among Obama’s advisers to falsely accuse someone of being that vile.

One consequence of rejecting the protection of good men is that you are opening yourself up to the predations of bad men. I fully acknowledge that this is not what such women > think they are doing. They think they are rejecting the patriarchy, or some other icky thing, but when they have walked away from the protections of fathers and brothers, what it amounts to is a tacit (implicit, in principle, not overt) acceptance of the propriety of rape.”¹ – Doug Wilson

OPINION: When you read Doug’s words in context, at first it appears that he does not believe that a woman who walks to her car alone deserves to be raped. Yet, a few sentences later, he seems to contradict himself by suggesting that, in rejecting male protection, a woman implicitly accepts the appropriate (“propriety”) consequence of her choice—rape. So which is it? Does she not deserve to be raped, or does refusing male protection make her complicit in her own sexual assault?

There are so many things wrong with what Doug says here, but let’s look briefly at some key issues:

The idea that “patriarchal” protection from fathers or brothers effectively prevents rape is neither logically sound nor supported by Scripture. What of Lot offering up his two daughters to be raped by the angry mob in Sodom (Genesis 19:8)? Or the story of Tamar? She was raped because she obeyed her father David’s orders to serve food to her half-brother Amnon (2 Samuel 13:6–15), the very thing Doug claims would protect her. Doug fails to understand that the perpetrator is often in a woman’s own family or other people she may know. According to a 2010 report by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, “More than half (51.1%) of female victims of rape reported being raped by an intimate partner and 40.8% by an acquaintance.”² This means that it is more likely that the man who walked her to her car would be the rapist, not some stranger lying in wait.

Doug also shifts responsibility from the perpetrator to the victim. She is to blame for being raped, at least in part, because “for some egalitarian and very foolish reason”³ she refused male protection. While rejecting an escort may increase vulnerability in certain circumstances (though, as stated before, rape most often is perpetrated by someone the victim knows), it does not logically follow that the woman is thereby morally culpable. The rapist alone bears the guilt. Even in the Mosaic law, a rape victim was never blamed for placing herself in a vulnerable situation—her only responsibility was to cry out for help (Deuteronomy 22:24). If the rape took place when no one else was around, she was believed, even without witnesses (Deuteronomy 22:25–27). No question of how she looked, dressed,⁴ or if she was properly escorted by a man. Blaming the victim of rape is both wrong and extremely harmful. Doug’s framing of his argument exposes his own bias to blame victims rather than perpetrators.⁵

Similarly, Doug implies that when a woman puts herself in a vulnerable situation she is implicitly accepting rape as acceptable, or proper⁶, and therefore culpable. Vulnerability and acceptance are completely different notions. Scripture never suggests that being at risk equates to endorsing or causing sin. Rape is consistently and unequivocally condemned in God’s Word (Genesis 19:4–9, 34:1–31; Deuteronomy 22:13–29; 2 Samuel 13:1–39; Judges 19:11–30). There is no passage where a victim’s vulnerability is portrayed as consenting to or endorsing assault. Consider the angels who visited Lot in Sodom: They placed themselves in a dangerous context (Genesis 19:1–11), yet God’s judgment fell on the wicked mob, not the angels (Genesis 19:12–13). Their presence in a hostile environment did not mean they “accepted” the morality of the violence threatening them. Similarly, if a woman is attacked, the Bible places blame on the perpetrator alone, not on any vulnerability or independent choice the victim may have made (Exodus 21:22–25).

Furthermore, Doug creates a false dichotomy when he implies that a woman has no ability to defend herself and must accept male protection or else risk harm. This is just not the case. We live in a world where women can and do protect themselves (pepper spray, martial arts, taser, etc.). Biblically, there are examples of women who defended themselves against personal harm and even protected others (Judges 4:17–22; the entire book of Esther, etc.). Rejecting patriarchy is not equivalent to rejecting all means of God-given safety. In fact, God calls himself the stronghold of the oppressed (Psalm 9:9) and that he will bring justice and redemption (Psalm 103:6, 72:13–14).

Doug correctly writes that men should “be a wall of protection for the women in their lives”⁷ but rather than lamenting that “many women have abandoned any such protection”⁸ and blaming them, he should instead focus on teaching men to protect women by not harming them physically, mentally and spiritually and when men fail to do so, place any blame that exists squarely on them for their failure. As Dr. Duncan Forbes writes: “It is really important that we understand that rape occurs because of people committing evil against another, not because another declined an escort to their car. We need to put blame where blame lies, on the rapist, not the victim. We need to train boys, and disciple men better, so that they recognise the power they have, and use it to serve and protect, rather than sexually victimise women, and verbally blame women for rape.”⁹

Once again, Doug has shown that he is not “accurately handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15, NASB95). He falls short of the scriptural standard for an elder, who must be “able to teach” (1 Timothy 3:2, NASB) and must uphold “the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict” (Titus 1:9, NASB95).

My prayer is that Doug would realize how his framing of the situation to blame victims of rape is contrary to God’s Word and God’s heart (Psalm 9:9; Ezekiel 34), and that this devalues women made in God’s image, and gives perpetrators excuses for their crimes. I pray that he would remove such teaching from his books and blog, seek forgiveness from those who have been harmed by his teaching, and instead of insulting those who disagree with him, turn to faithfully teach God’s Word.