One of the core facts from which evolutionary social science begins is the reality of the sex difference. Men and women are different. This is in part due to socialization and culture, but more basically because of biology and the logic of natural selection, as it operates on sexed species like our own.

To those who have not spent a lot of time sitting in front of college professors, that probably sounds like common sense. But there is significant resistance to this idea among America’s cultural elites and those whom they influence.

I encountered an intriguing example in a recent course I taught at a liberal arts college,. We had read an evolutionary explanation for why rape is overwhelmingly committed by males against females.

A few students, clearly unhappy with that argument, were quick to point out that rapes inconsistent with this pattern also happen. Of course that’s true, I noted, but even in those exceptional cases it is almost always males who are the perpetrators, albeit with male victims. This is the common pattern in prison, for example, where there are typically no female potential victims present. The evolutionary explanation, I went on, which is centered on why we see males as nearly always the aggressors here, is untroubled by that kind of exception.

The several students continued to vigorously object. “But there are many rapes of men by women too!” they claimed. I know quite enough about the state of academic thinking to know just where they had gotten such ideas. A new “finding” of some contemporary research on this topic is precisely as my students said. An example published by Elsevier in 2016, “Sexual Victimization Perpetrated by Women: Federal Data Reveal Surprising Prevalence,” makes the astounding claim that males and females report sexual victimization at almost exactly the same rates annually.

Somewhat surprisingly, academic literature like this frequently describes itself as motivated by feminist ideology. One might think that the feminist worldview is most consonant with a view of sexual violence in which men (who run everything, according to most strains of feminism) victimize and women are victimized. But a still more radical feminist approach argues that such a limited view relies on an understanding of human sexuality rooted in biology, and such biological frameworks must be rejected by a proper grounding in social constructionist feminism. In this view, to deny women the ability to commit sexual violence is to deny them their full humanity. Sex is fully plastic, that is, everything is possible, and this means sexual violence, too, is equally unamenable to any of the reductive patterns claimed by evolutionary thinking.

It does not take much work to show what is really going on with this new method for defining sexual violence. All we must do is look at how the study above  defines “sexual victimization.” It includes rape, obviously the most serious form, but then also a number of other categories: “non-consensual sex in the form of being ‘made to penetrate’ someone else, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and non-contact unwanted sexual experiences.”

We are not told precisely what this final category—sexual victimization in which no sex act was actually performed—might be. We are also not told what the distribution of male claims about victimization among these different categories is. There is also no speculation about the possibility that, given the overall cultural understanding of sexual violence as fundamentally a male-perpetrated act and the moral value in achieving status as a victim, some men might be quite desirous of putting themselves into the category of victim as a matter of enhancing their status in the study.

Historically, crime statistics have demonstrated stark sex differences in sexual violence. Female victims of male perpetrators have always been far and away the largest category, with more than 90 percent of all acts of sexual violence against both female and male victims having male perpetrators. It is also clear that the great majority of actual rapes of male victims happen in jail or prison. While the rape rate (attempted and completed) for all men in the American population is perhaps 1.4 percent, even according to sources with an interest in exaggerating rape rates, it is as much as 4 percent or 1 in every 25 for men in jail and prison.

When I informed my students of these patterns, they responded that significant numbers of men who have been victims of criminal sexual violence such as rape do not report because they fear stigma. Such a claim is impossible to verify. The only way one can find significant numbers of alleged male victims of female sexual assaults is by doing what the researchers in the Elsevier study have done, which is to create new categories of sexual violence. For example, some surveys these days include a category called “made to penetrate.” It refers to “when a victim was made to, or an attempt was made to make them, sexually penetrate someone without the victim’s consent because the victim was physically forced (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threatened with physical harm, or when the victim was too drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.”

One might well begin by asking how the subcategory of this offense that involves men who were “made to penetrate” when they were “passed out” works. It is one thing to consider a rape case in which the victim is unconscious. This is perfectly physiologically plausible. But it seems rather another kind of thing when the violent act in question is one of being forced to insert an erect penis into the offender while the victim, the person with the penis that is being inserted into the offender, is unconscious. Likewise, imagining a “rape” in which the male victim is struggling to escape an aggressive female attacker, and she nonetheless somehow succeeds at physically forcing him to penetrate her, requires one to veer significantly outside the normal parameters of human sexuality.

When one closely investigates incidences of this purported act of sexual violence, one finds further intriguing peculiarities distinguishing it from traditionally defined male-on-female acts of sexual violence. For example, in this National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence (NISVS) survey, you find that fully 77 percent of the alleged “made to penetrate” victims (more than 6 out of every 7.8 estimated such victims) were participants in acts classed as “alcohol/drug-facilitated” and not the other category they give, which is “forced.”

In other words, even when you create a new and amorphous category designed specifically to find male victims of female sexual aggression, the overwhelming majority of those acts wedged into this new category are not defined by the purported victims having been physically coerced or forced. How many of these acts were basically drunken encounters in which the purported male victim determined after the fact that it was an encounter he would have preferred not to have? There’s no way to know. What we are supposed to assume is that these are cases in which a predatory female attacker got the male victim drunk or high and then took sexual advantage of him against his wishes.

This kind of reasoning operates completely against the grain of everything we know about the typical course of male and female sexual behavior. It is undoubted that there might be rare and anomalous exceptions to those typical patterns in which we find the female predator scenario insinuated here. But the idea that the phenomenon is so frequent that roughly the same number of men are victims of this variety of predation as there are women raped by men every year is clearly beyond the realm of the plausible.

The distinction between the typical act of sexual violence against women is stark. When you look at rapes of women reported in the same NSVIS survey linked above, you find that 75 percent of these were victims of forced penetration, and not the more amorphous category of alcohol/drug-facilitated penetration. That is, force is very typically present in male-on-female sexual violence, but it is exceedingly rarely claimed to be present in this new category of female-on-male “made to penetrate.”

These are the tricks of the trade progressive researchers use to bulk up the numbers of victims of sexual violence. The rhetoric behind the “made to penetrate” category includes efforts to directly equate it with rape, and even to challenge the idea that the two are different categories. The ideological goal is to expand sexual violence—and, therefore, sexuality—as widely as possible. Anyone who believes the industry to expand definitions of sexual violence will stop with “made to penetrate” is advised to stick around and watch.