Unsurprisingly, Felicia Somnez took issue with Emily Yoffe’s lengthy post about the destruction of Jon Kaiman’s world. She had been offered the opportunity to participate, to “tell her story,” beforehand, but declined. Only afterward did she take issue, and then with a vengeance.

In her 8,000-word story, there was a lot Ms. Yoffe got wrong, so please forgive the length.

What one person perceives as wrong isn’t necessarily wrong, but rather not the story told her way. It used to be that every person was the hero of their own story. Now, every person is the victim of her own story, and Somnez was certainly her own victim. That doesn’t make her the victim.

Reason made three minor factual corrections flagged by Sonmez. Otherwise, many of Sonmez's requests reflect disagreements over interpretation, not fact. If we are to fairly judge such complicated situations, both sides deserve to be told.

— Emily Yoffe (@EmilyYoffe) August 27, 2019

Sonmez’s complaints about the story were added as a link at the end, making it possible for any reader to juxtapose the story as written, with the three minor factual corrections, with her complaints about the story. There was nothing to hide. There was much to question. It should come as no surprise the two people on different sides of a story have very different perceptions of what happened and who did wrong to whom.

But for what would have passed for a thoughtful, if controversial, discussion of moral panic, reinvention of engagements that were relatively benign at the time but turned into the fashionable sense of pseudo-rape in the throes of #MeToo, when every slight or hurt morphed into the most traumatic moment ever, the story became a litmus test of rape culture versus “believe the victim.” And dear Prudence was relegated to the role of self-loathing female misogynist.

Newflash: if you accuse a man of sexual assault because he "started whining" and you couldn't be bothered to say no, you're not the victim. He is. https://t.co/BOCcVvSTdq

— Cathy Young 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@CathyYoung63) August 28, 2019

The question that is either answered by ideology or by facts is “who is the victim?”

One of the most vigorous points of contention for the unduly passionate is that any discussion of the woman’s conduct is immediately cast as “victim blaming.” What can women do to protect themselves from harm? Victim blaming. Was the woman wrong in this specific instance? Victim blaming. Was the woman the victim? Victim blaming. Only misogynists blame women, so by raising the question, one is clearly a victim blaming misogynist.

Emily Yoffe has taken more than her share of hits from the unduly passionate, as has Cathy Young. It’s not enough that they are women to overcome the cries of sexism. They must be self-loathing women or they wouldn’t be serving the cause of the Patriarchy. Kafka would smile at this reasoning.

When Cathy pointed out, in response to a typically snarky but vapid attack on Emily for “defending men” instead of her gendertribe, that maybe Sonmez wasn’t really a victim, it was an invitation for castigation. After all, Sonmez was the woman, and women must be believed. If they say they’re the victim, then dammit, they are.

And indeed, sometimes the women are the victims of horrific and disgusting conduct. But as the meaning of rape has become untethered from such awful conduct, so too has the meaning of “victim.” When the issue of victimhood is mentioned, the passionate will respond with examples of brutal rapes, guns, beatings, overwhelming force, all the characteristics of what has always been considered rape. All the things that make the crime so horrific and disgusting.

What will be subsumed in the obvious is the “other” rapes, the post-hoc regret rapes, the little-bit-drunk rapes, the sex that appeared fully consensual that is later chalked up to the catch-all of tonic immobility, where the woman was able to move deftly and without issue except to use her lips to utter the word “no.”

Is seduction rape? Is banal deception rape? (Be careful how you answer, women who wear spanx, wigs or have a penis lurking beneath your skirt.) Is whining rape? Is drunk but fully aware of what she was doing rape? Is “too exhausted to not consent” rape?

From the perspective of “believe the woman,” everything is rape if the “victim” says it’s rape, no matter what in fact happened at the time. Wrap up conduct in jargon and emotive adjectives and even enthusiastic consent, not to mention participation, magically morphs into rape because she didn’t really want to do it, even if she said she did.

The effort to shut down voices like Emily Yoffe’s and Cathy Young’s by the usual ad hominems is more important in the scheme of winning the rape war as they are women calling out the lies of “victim blaming.” When men do it, it’s easy to negate their impact. After all, they’re men, probably rapists themselves and certainly misogynists. Aren’t all men, really?

Neither Yoffe nor Young remotely blame victims. What they do is question whether someone is a victim only because they’re a woman and they say so. If claims of victimhood can’t pass scrutiny based on the facts, even if they aren’t the characterization of the facts as the woman would prefer her story be told, then it’s not victimhood.

If no one can challenge victimhood without being shredded by the unduly passionate, then it serves only to prove Emily’s point, that we’re up to our eyeballs in a moral panic that precludes rational assessment of whether something wrong happened and someone deserves to have their life destroyed for it.

At Reason, the decision was made to link to Sonmez’s attack on Yoffe’s story so that readers had the opportunity to read both and reach their own conclusion. This is a courtesy that the unduly passionate would never give others, to question or challenge their conclusions grounded in their belief that if a woman cries rape, then it can be nothing else, and to even raise the question is to engage in the outrage of victim blaming.