Following the Me, Too Movement that gained momentum in 2017, we began hearing feminist cries across the country to “believe all women.” This chant was a reaction to the staggering number of female public figures coming forward to describe their abuse and sexual assault at the hands of powerful men who threatened them into silence. As feminists, we were outraged. We wanted to clear the path for female victims to safely report sexual assault and to trust that they would be believed.

This call to action was met with criticism. Skeptics asked, “What about innocent men who are falsely accused?” We swept this inconvenient question under the rug, pointing out that such false allegations are astonishingly rare. We were laser-focused on our mission: Believe all women.

Contemporary research may indicate that our impulse to rug-sweep this question was a mistake when it comes to some men’s perceptions of sexual assault. Or, perhaps to put it more gently, a miscalculation.

There is an abundance of published empirical research and government fact sheets about the prevalence of sexual assault against both cisgender and transgender women (see: Centers for Disease Control, 2022; Fedina et al., 2018, Kantor & Twohey, 2019). However, there are many men who willfully ignore or even reject these findings. They suggest that such claims are outright lies or exaggerations crafted by angry women to retaliate against men who hurt them or to assuage the guilt of “sex regret” (Bonher et al., 2009; Muehlenhard et al., 2017; Triggs, 2018). Sadly, even within the academy, there is a........

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