Date-rape drugging sheltered from DSM-5

When women make a rape accusation days, weeks, or even years afterwards, they always get the question about why they did not report it earlier, or why witnesses say that she was a willing participant. Sometimes the answer is that the rapist must have used a date-rape drug!

The NY Times reports:

He had money, charisma, movie star looks and no apparent reason to drug his sexual partners. But he did it anyway, according to multiple accusers, who remember little except losing consciousness and waking up partly dressed and molested.

That case — of Andrew Luster, a cosmetics heir convicted in 2003 in Ventura County, Calif., of raping three women after dosing them with a date-rape drug — is distinct from comedian Bill Cosby’s. Women have accused Mr. Cosby of drugging and raping them over a period of decades; he has denied the allegations and not been charged.

Yet the stories the men’s accusers tell raise an overarching question: Why would someone who has seemingly easy access to consensual sex resort to drugging?

So there is a question for the dopey psychologist experts.

Maybe it is like space alien abduction. Abductees often tell similar stories, and claimed that they were programmed or drugged to forget the details of what happened.

Freud got into trouble with feminists for claiming that women's stories of sex abuse were made-up fantasies. So the shrink don't dare say that anymore. So they blame it on the accused:

One of those motives is obvious: simple opportunism, the reason men have spiked women’s drinks (or less commonly, women men’s) since the dawn of cocktail hour. Another is coercion; the perpetrator is aroused by domination, forcing his (or rarely, her) sexual will on the target.

“This is common enough that we debated whether to include it as a diagnosis in the D.S.M. 5,” psychiatrists’ influential diagnostic manual, said Dr. Michael First, a Columbia psychiatrist who edited it. But the idea was shelved, in part because of concerns that doing so would give rapists added recourse in legal cases, he said.

A third and far less common motive is a rare kind of “paraphilia"— an unusual sexual preference that becomes compulsive. “In this case, it’s a preference for unresponsive partners,” Dr. Cantor said.

The DSM-5 is the official book of psychiatric disorders. It has a pretense of being scientific, but as the editor just admitted, they made their decisions based on social justice political opinions, rather than on scientific merit.

My readers will not be too surprised at bad criteria being used for the DSM-5. I have posted many stories about dubious disorders and how the committee is politicized. Sometimes they loosen criteria in order to make state funding more readily available, and sometimes they tighten criteria in order to avoid stigma.

Probably their most famous decisions were to make homosexuality a disorder, and then when closeted gay psychiatrists infiltrated the committee to eliminate the disorder. The decision was ultimately made as a political vote of the membership, and not based on any scientific evidence. You can listen to a pro-gay NPR version of the story.

But I am surprised that the DSM-5 come right out and admit that they excluded a disorder in an attempt to manipulate the legal system to convict more defendants.