In my experience, moral panics are almost never about what they claim to be about. I am just (barely) old enough to remember the tail end of the period (around 1965) when conservative panic about drugs and rock music was actually rooted in a not very-thinly-veiled fear of the corrupting influence of non-whites on pure American children. In retrospect it’s easy to understand as a reaction against the gradual breakdown of both legally enforced and de-facto racial segregation in the U.S.
But moral panics are by no means a monopoly of cultural conservatives. These days the most virulent and bogus examples are as likely to arrive from the self-described “left” as the “right”. When they do, they’re just as likely to be about something other than the ostensible subject.
In Lies, Damn Lies, and Rape Statistics a college newspaper does a little digging through U.S. crime statistics and finds that the trendy “anti-rape” movement is exaggerating the rape risk of college women by two full orders of magnitude – as it concludes, “the ‘one in four’ chant should be abandoned and replaced with the more appropriate, albeit less catchy, 1 in 400.”
What can explain such gross distortion? I’ve looked into this issue myself and discovered a lot of flim-flam. Still, even the the best-case figures I arrived at apparently overestimated the actual risk on campuses by a factor of 50. (Barbarian zones – like, say, inner-city Detroit – might be a different story.)
If the rape panic runs parallel to the the now nearly forgotten drugs-and-rock panics of the 1950s and 1960s (and many others like them, before and after) we should expect it to actually be be rooted in an attempt to assert control of or cultural dominance over some threatening Other. And there is indeed evidence that points in that direction.
Recently, Meg Lanker-Simmons, a left-wing activist at the University of Wyoming, faked a rape threat. The agenda seemed obvious: smear Republicans, confirm feminist narratives about male hostility to ‘uppity’ women, confirm women as morally superior creatures who rightfully dictate the content and style of male behavior.
This, together with the crazy inflation of rape statistics, suggests that the campus “anti-rape” movement has little or nothing to do with preventing rape. It has become an instrument of the sort of political warfare in which truth is most likely to be the first casualty.
We’ve seen this sort of thing before, of course. Playing the “racism” card has become such a cliche of left politics that even the reliably lefty Jon Stewart now spoofs it as overdone and busted. In that case the threatening Other is working-class white men, especially rural and most especially Southern, and the aim is clearly to prevent them from pushing back against the culture and politics of elite bicoastal left-liberals.
But there’s actually something a bit more puzzling about the campus-rape panic. College campuses are far from a threatening environment for feminists. Nowadays women outnumber men in every department outside STEM fields. At many colleges mandatory ‘sensitivity training’ heavily privileges female and feminist perspectives. By federal encouragement, female students can now accuse men of rape and expect the claim to be evaluated under circumstances that deny the man any right to due process and the presumption of innocence.
On campus, the Other seems so thoroughly controlled that some academics now attribute declining male enrollments to an unwillingness to enter a hostile work environment. What are women like Meg Lanker-Simmons really pushing against? What in their environment do they not already own?
I think the answer is…themselves. The increasing intensity level of the campus-rape panic seems well correlated with the erosion of college womens’ position in sexual bargaining.
The key concept here is hypergamy: womens’ wired-in desire to mate with men who are taller, smarter, richer, a little older, and higher-status than they are. Hypergamy is at the core of the human female mating strategy in exactly the way that seeking physical attractiveness (signs of fitness to bear) is at the center of male strategy.
An increasing number of hypergamically-aspiring college women are competing for a decreasing pool of higher-status male peers. The consequences are well documented; in the “hookup” culture that now pervades many campuses, sex has become a woman’s opening bid rather than a prize men must compete strenuously to attain. This was a more or less inevitable result once premarital sex stopped being strongly tabooed and the campus sex-ratio flipped over to majority female.
It is not surprising that women like Lanker-Simmons should resent this situation, because it’s almost exactly the reverse of the instinctively K-type mating strategy common to females in humans and most other mammalian species. It’s sex on male r-type terms, and women have DNA going clear back to the Cretaceous that pushes against it.
(This logic also implies that today’s campuses should be among the last places to expect rapes rather than the first. I’ll leave that demonstration as a very simple exercise for the reader.)
This Other, alas, will not be so easily banished. To reverse the dynamic, one of the following things would have to happen:
(1) Premarital sex again becoming strongly enough tabooed that effectively all women cannot offer it as an opening bid. (It has to be effectively all; otherwise the defectors get a large enough advantage in competing for men to make the withholding strategy unstable for the rest. We’ve seen this movie before.)
(2) Sex ratios on campus flip back to a large enough majority of males so that each woman has multiple hypergamic targets who must compete for her. Under these circumstances “not till we’re married” becomes viable again.
(3) Women as a group revert to having much less economic autonomy and social power than men – enough less, anyway, that almost any nominal SES peer or near-peer is a hypergamic target. There’s a tradeoff between this and move 2; the fewer males there are in the nearly-peer population, the more status and autonomy women must implicitly sacrifice to have a constant number of eligible hypergamic targets.
I leave the reader to imagine the screams of rage that would issue from feminists if any of these were even seriously proposed, let alone attempted. And I am not actually advocating any of them, just pointing out that women like Meg Lanker-Simmons are caught in a trap that has nothing to do with (mythically) rape-minded men and everything to do with the world easy contraception and feminist ideology have given us.
I think that underneath the obvious political maneuvering, screaming about a nonexistent rape pandemic is a displacement activity. Campus feminists do it because confronting their actual powerlessness and the jaws of the dilemma that created it would be too painful for them to face.
At bottom, the problem is that female hypergamic instinct and the ideology of sexual equality are inevitably in collision. (Men don’t have the symmetrical problem because their instinctive mating strategy is to just bang women who turn them on physically without regard for differential status.) Short of genetically re-engineering humans to change their mating instincts, there is probably no fix for this.
Of course the implications of this logic go way beyond college campuses. It’s a fundamentally tragic situation and I don’t know what we as a culture or a species are going to do about it.
One thing I am sure of is that displaced moral panic and silly, counterfactual yabbering about “rape culture” will not solve the problem.
Hypothetically, as a programmer, you know something about math. But this entire post is based on not knowing the difference between an incidence statistic (the NCVS number cited in the article) and a prevalence statistic (the one in four number from the 1970s).
Now, the ‘one in four’ statistic is actually wrong, especially today: estimating the population-wide rate of sexual assault from a college survey is WEIRD statistic, and the rate of sexual assault has declined 88% since 1973. But the actual lifetime prevalence of rape is still quite high, albeit hard to estimate for obvious reasons.
>But the actual lifetime prevalence of rape is still quite high, albeit hard to estimate for obvious reasons.
One of the links in the article was to a previous one where I actually went through the math required to estimate lifetime incidence and prevalence.
“On campus, the Other seems so thoroughly controlled that some academics now attribute declining male enrollments to an unwillingness to enter a hostile work environment.”
We have declining male enrollment in Europe too without the hostile work environment. So this seems to be a very US centric (and wrong) explanation. A better explanation that floats around is that education itself has been made to expect a level of self-control and sense-of-duty that girls attain years earlier and to a greater extend than boys. Hence, boys are starting to drop out of the race for academic attainment.
” To reverse the dynamic, one of the following things would have to happen:”
4) Or girls simply accept that they will be the one to bring in the money and stop hyper-gamy. Get a career yourself and a nice boy-friend that services all you other needs (even care for the children). Will put a whole different kind of selective pressure on the men.
We should also note that the federally-encouraged fashion that men accused of rape are treated with (itself encouraged by radical feminists) has left men, especially the hypergamic men that these women seek, far more cautious about who they are willing to date, and under what circumstances. The hypergamic male has the ability to pick and choose, and a woman who seems likely to scream ‘rape’ without due cause is least likely to be chosen. They have indeed made their bed, and they get to lie in it – alone, it seems.
Hmmm, an interesting theory. I’m not disagreeing, but to me this looks like, at least in part, a process typical to radical ideologies. Their internal logic leads proponents to search (and compete) for ideological purity. They all agree on a certain direction, so the people furthest in that direction are seen as groundbreakers and leaders. Some might voice concern about extremism as a tactic, because it can interfere with near-term political goals (at least in a democracy), but few in any radical movement will want to publicly disagree with the groundbreakers and leaders.
The result is ever more extreme positions over time. Feminism (e.g.) has gone from reasonable demands for legal equality and objections to sexual harassment, to a hyper-sensitivity to “microaggressions” and anything perceived as “offensive,” and the absurd-on-its-face terminology of “rape culture.” (How can we have a “rape culture” when rape is not only illegal but heavily condemned by the vast majority of men? Maybe we have a “rape subculture,” but the culture as a whole is clearly anti-rape.)
The fact that campuses are already heavily tilted toward feminist ideology is almost irrelevant to this process. There weren’t really any counter-revolutionaries in Russia in the ’30s, or in China in the ’60s, and yet the internal logic of Communism demanded that those ghosts be fought.
esr:
> In my experience, moral panics are almost never about what they claim to be about. I am just (barely) old enough to remember the tail end of the period (around 1965) when conservative panic about drugs and rock music was actually rooted in a not very-thinly-veiled fear of the corrupting influence of non-whites on pure American children. In retrospect it’s easy to understand as a reaction against the gradual breakdown of both legally enforced and de-facto racial segregation in the U.S.
Oh come on. I am old enough to remember it .
The left has always been against low status males getting laid, all the way back to 1640, when they first raised the age of consent, and its hostility to low status males getting laid has over the years only become more extreme. Race has nothing to do with it, and never did have anything to do with it.
The sex and drugs panic has been getting only more extreme, the current rationalization being “rape”. Compare the drama about Woodstock 99, with the considerably lesser drama about th original woodstock.
After Woodstock 99, a large of number of girls, some of them preteen, found that they had inexplicably mislaid their clothes and become covered in semen, and had no clear recollection of how they had got into this state, and what recollections they did have seemed to feature giant rainbow snakes and suchlike. This caused much tut tutting, but after the first Woodstock, memories were similarly blurred, and as best I can recollect, there was not nearly so much tut tutting.
Near as I can figure, the sex and drug panic was put to bed in 1680, dug up again in the early nineteenth century, and has been getting steadily worse ever since. Observe ever rising, and ever more enforced, age of consent, etc, ever more inclusive definitions of rape, rape trials ever more biased against the defendant, and so on and so forth. Example: Violence Against Women Act.
And you are contributing to the culture of rape.
That article you quote is deeply flawed – it decides that rape is not rape because its either not reported or because the victim doesn’t believe its rape.
To have sex with someone when they do not wish it is rape. Whether its at knife point or whether they’re drunk.
Rape is chronically under reported (annecdotally all the women I know of personally who have been raped or sexually assaulted never reported it). Its not hard to see why when police often don’t take it seriously, even when presented with video evidence, and men treat rape as a joke.
The rest of your article is typical MRA rubbish. Oh us poor hard done by white men, we have it sooo hard with our privileged position and power.
Male privilige (like white privilege, and class privilege) is very real. It doesn’t exclude being on the receiving end of other privilege (a black man suffers from white privilege but benefits from male privilege, a working class white man suffers from class privilege etc) and is obviously not a univeral rule.
There are issues for men, obviously. We are increasingly subject to body image issues, suicide is more prevalent amongst young men, there is a perception that boys will not do as well at school (except in sciences), but none of these negate the male privilege from which men benefit.
Of course false accusations of rape do occur, but they are relatively rare and get disproportionate coverage (by the male dominated media).
Thankfully we have made much progress, but there’s still a long way to go, and any libertarian worth their salt should realise this.
>And you are contributing to the culture of rape.
Idiot. I teach women to shoot pistols with the specific intention of empowering them to kill rapists. Which I’m guessing is a helluva lot more than you’ve ever done to address the problem.
Rape, to me, isn’t unwished sex. What the victim want internally honestly is of no importance. Mind reading machines are not widespread and you can’t get a green/red scan on every potential partner by scanning them with your smartphone.
What more humans are known to lie and manipulate. As such, only acts can be trusted, not internal wishes only shared to friends unofficially and potentially years after the fact.
You got raped, man or woman if you didn’t concent and got unwished sex. Actually even if you wish it but clearly acted as you didn’t, it is still rape.
Again there no mind reading and machine.
As of your friends, it is funny they are so many to admit to have been raped, to admit they don’t ever plan to report it and to consider that you are the best person to discuss of that.
LOL, you’re a faggot. Look man, virtue signaling will not get you Feminist Jane’s rotten croch. They want masculine shitlords, not male feminist faggots.
You are arguing that the left’s myths about itself used to be true, but our now less commonly true.
The left’s myth about itself are generated as a byproduct of the fact that its position is always changing, but it never admits every having been wrong about anything. US history, like Soviet history, is adjusted so that yesterday’s left was always politically correct by the standards of today’s left.
In the sixties, the left revised its previous woman-are-angels position, to women-are-angels-even-if-they-have-sex. Much frantic mythmaking ensued, similar to the notorious editing of the Soviet Encyclopedia.
Bullshit.
Of course they all seem very real to people who look at the world in those terms. Sin is very real to religious fanatics, but that doesn’t prove that their particular worldview is the ultimate arbiter of all moral and political issues.
So, we are, what? Arguing for a natural state of polygamy? You seem to suggest that, in absence of a woman’s being able to compel men otherwise, that’s the way it goes. I have my doubts, although we’ve seen it in other cultures.
I suspect your preconceptions are collecting data to support themselves but, it’s an interesting idea.
>So, we are, what? Arguing for a natural state of polygamy?
Oh, good Goddess no. That’s what you get when the social status and economic power of most men is so low that only a relatively few men at the top of the heap make suitable hypergamic targets. I wouldn’t want to live in a society that stratified, even at the top.
I’m not advocating for any particular change, just pointing out the problem.
@PapayaSF
“Of course they all seem very real to people who look at the world in those terms. Sin is very real to religious fanatics, but that doesn’t prove that their particular worldview is the ultimate arbiter of all moral and political issues.”
I would go a step further. Morals are the worst possible explanation of social issues. They neither explain anything, nor do they suggest effective solutions. In my experience, all moral explanations are cover-ups to hide the real story.
@esr
” I teach women to shoot pistols with the specific intention of empowering them to kill rapists. ”
First you tel use rape is very rare, then you induce women to invest a lot in murdering potential rapists. Somewhere I lost your train of logic here.
Rape is even less common in many places where women do not carry guns, so it seems to be an unnecessary investment in time an money. An investment that might even be ineffective given the profile of the average rapist, victim, and crime scene. Most women I know would also be very weary of murdering classmates or the son of a neighbor or family friend.
>First you tel use rape is very rare, then you induce women to invest a lot in murdering potential rapists. Somewhere I lost your train of logic here.
No, it’s very simple. Teaching women to kill rapists is a move to keep the incidence rare. It isn’t simply that a dead rapist is unable to repeat the crime, it’s that salting the population of potential victims with an unknown number of women who look like prey until they fucking kill you is a great way to raise the perceived risk to the point where scumbags who might otherwise rape buy a party doll instead.
It’s the same logic that makes concealed weapons on (even a small fraction of) teachers a much better counter to schoolyard shootings than uniformed police. In both cases, investment in decentralized and concealed defenses does much more to change the potential bad guy’s risk calculations than the cops can. In both cases, the odds of any individual shooter having to respond are very low, so if you’re taking only a short-term view the investment looks inefficient.
But it isn’t. Regression analyses by John Lott and others have shown that civilian concealed weapons are much more efficient (in terms of invested dollar per change in crime rates, especially: forcible rape, felony assault, and hot burglaries) than any other policy or intervention available.
I teach women to shoot pistols with the specific intention of empowering them to kill rapists.
Thass great for the ones that hide in the bushes, but most folks seem to reckon they’re a minority.
>Thass great for the ones that hide in the bushes, but most folks seem to reckon they’re a minority.
Their confusion is their problem, not mine. When force is not involved, I choose to respect the woman’s autonomy enough to figure she made her own choices. She got blind drunk with a man she met an hour ago in a bar, you say? If you want to call that “nonconsensual sex” I might stand still for it, depending on how picky I’m feeling about personal responsibility that day. But I won’t call it rape; to do so would be disrespectful and cruel to women who were genuinely brutalized.
@esr
” Regression analyses by John Lott and others have shown that civilian concealed weapons are much more efficient ”
And that is why the crime and murder rates in the USA are higher than in Western Europe, is it because the Europeans got the inefficient route and spend less in terms of percentage GDP and forbid firearms?
http://www.boell.org/downloads/Dewan__Eittingler_Comparing_Public_Spending.pdf
>And that is why the crime and murder rates in the USA are higher than in Western Europe, is it because the Europeans got the inefficient route and spend less in terms of percentage GDP and forbid firearms?
No. It’s for two reasons having nothing to do with firearms policy.
First: Americans as an entire population are less law-abiding than Europeans. This is a deep cultural trait that shows up in a myriad of ways, some of which are actually positive.
Second: we have a handful of large cities where, due to perversely bad government policy, civil order has been effectively absent for decades. Detroit is the worst of these, but by no means the only. The distribution of crime and murder in the U.S. is sharply bimodal; when you subtract out this handful of plague spots the profile of the rest of the U.S. doesn’t merely resemble Europe, it is as peaceful as Switzerland.
Almost all criminal firearms violence in the U.S. is gang-on-gang stuff in the plague spots, usually connected to the drug trade.
Of course rape panic isn’t about rape. If it were, I wouldn’t be harassed by some self-ascribed feminist every time I try to teach self-defense to other women.
I also agree that the changes imposed on us by women’s rising financial and political power combined with easy, reliable contraception and a culture that does not exactly reward childbearing in one’s prime has disrupted mating scripts that evolved long before we had those things.
I’m not sure that you’ve convincingly linked the two.
Perhaps I’m biased. While I have on occasion practiced hypogamy, I have a steady trickle of hypergamic targets available to me* by virtue of being an intelligent alpha-personality female with competency at and presence in the communities surrounding primarily male activities like martial arts and hacking. The women I see around me lately don’t generally seem to be *trying* to practice hypergamy — or hypogamy, for that matter — they seem to be stumbling around with no real theme (conscious or otherwise) to their choices.
Most of the stupid things I see “normal” women doing can be attributed to our society not having a uniform script for mate selection, negotiation, and relationship management. Instead, we have a situations where individuals in an extremely heterogeneous culture are expected to select, negotiate, and manage relationships in an ad hoc and mostly individualized manner. If one has an IQ that breaks the bank and a bit of social intelligence, that’s not a big deal. However, for the rest of humanity, it’s awfully complicated.
Meanwhile, our popular media pushes the idea of power-by-victim-card hard enough alongside a demand of inhuman perfection from women (so ill-defined that even if it were attainable, no one would ever agree it’s been attained) that weaker women often find themselves grasping at ideas like “privilege” and “rape culture” to try not to feel doomed. After all, their inability to meet nebulous-but-unattainable goals must not be their fault. Some men are so scared of being associated with something as horrible as rape (or worse, unknowingly contributing to it) that many will pick up the rape panic rhetoric just to distance themselves and feel better, without ever examining it.
*Amusingly, I’m not at all thin or particularly pretty: suck that, magazine publishers.
>Of course rape panic isn’t about rape. If it were, I wouldn’t be harassed by some self-ascribed feminist every time I try to teach self-defense to other women.
HedgeMage forgot to mention that she has been on the front lines in a different way, as a counsellor for women who have been raped and sexually abused.
Her opinion of published rape statistics is both more grounded in field experience and more negative than mine.
> they seem to be stumbling around with no real theme (conscious or otherwise) to their choices.
That, I suspect, is the root cause of an _awful_ lot of problems. It certainly was for me, for quite some time.
@esr
“Almost all criminal firearms violence in the U.S. is gang-on-gang stuff in the plague spots, usually connected to the drug trade.”
Which is the same in Europe. Only on a much lower level.
My point is that I do not see why we should take advice on how to make our countries safe(r) from people who are unable to get their own house in order.
If you think concealed guns will make your neighborhood safe, be my guest. I expect the bad guys will start to shoot before they rob you, just in case.
However, I will fight everyone who advocates carrying concealed weapons to make our neighborhood even more safe than it already is. And I am pretty sure almost all of the people in my neighborhood agree with me (actually, I have yet to meet a neighbor who would advocate carrying guns to improve safety).
Brilliant theory and superbly articulated.
The problem may be resolved if (when) the state fails economically. Those who capture the statism use the left propaganda to effectively castrate the other males in society, so they get all the women they want (and other forms of power). Feminists probably don’t realize that they are the tools of the power elite.
@Winter:
Perhaps it is because the state is the surrogate man. Women don’t need a man to support their children, and men don’t need to work and excel in order to have a high standard of living. In some European countries, they only need to work 35 hours a week, get a month paid vacation per year, and this is required for any blue collar trade profession with the unions holding the companies hostage.
@JustSaying
“Perhaps it is because the state is the surrogate man.”
This suggests to me you have a weird, over-active phantasy and some odd preferences.
@JustSaying
“Women don’t need a man to support their children, ”
No, women can work and earn a living themselves. They tend to live with a partner, though.
@JustSaying
“and men don’t need to work and excel in order to have a high standard of living.”
No, on welfare your standard of living is at the level of the minimum wage (or below).
@JustSaying
“In some European countries, they only need to work 35 hours a week,”
You exaggerate. With a degree, 32 hours a week is sufficient. Especially if both spouses work a 32 hour week.
@JustSaying
“get a month paid vacation per year,”
Indeed, excluding ample national holidays.
@JustSaying
“and this is required for any blue collar trade profession with the unions holding the companies hostage.”
No, it is the law. Unions are not involved. But they do get the occasional extras from a company.
Funny, with all these “worker rights”, countries like the Netherlands and Germany have a (very) high productivity and still out-compete than the USA. Seems we have organized things well over here.
“She got blind drunk with a man she met an hour ago in a bar, you say? If you want to call that “nonconsensual sex” I might stand still for it, depending on how picky I’m feeling about personal responsibility that day. But I won’t call it rape; to do so would be disrespectful and cruel to women who were genuinely brutalized.”
If you get drunk with a man you met in a bar and wake up to find your wallet gone, with no memory of what happened, should that be just called a “nonconsensual gift” rather than “robbery” becasue calling it “robbery” would be disrespectful to those who have been brutally mugged while sober?
How does this differ if you previously knew the man who is now claiming that you gave him your wallet freely? Is it less or more really a “robbery” becasue A.) You had more expectation of saftey so less obligation to be wary of getting drunk with him, or B.) it is more likely that you really would be inclined to give property to someone you know well – and maybe you just don’t remember your generosity?
>If you get drunk with a man you met in a bar and wake up to find your wallet gone
The cases aren’t parallel, because nobody gets drunk with strange men out of a desire to get robbed without taking responsibility for their behavior. Women, on the other hand, frequently do the analogous thing in order to get sex without having to own the behavior. Any woman who gets blind drunk with a man she met in a bar knows what script she’s walking into. It’s what lawyers call a “rebuttable presumption”.
(Note: In case anyone wonders, I’ve never had sex with a drunk woman, and find the idea revolting. On the one occasion that I was propositioned by a woman in her cups, my reply was “Yes, if you ask me again when you’re sober.” She didn’t.)
Being completely drunk is I think illegal in many countries and actually it rob you of your capacity to behave as an adult and that’s a big problem in itself. That’s why it is forbidden to drink if you are a child: you are not trusted to handle it properly.
Even the bartender is supposed to refuse you your drink if he see you are already drunk. You also not trusted to drive a car or to do most things where you to do it and killing somebody, you’d go to jail because you acted fullishly and are a liability to society being so irresponsable. I don’t get why agreeing to sex is the only activity where you instantly become a victim if drunk.
While I agree no one shall abuse a drunk person, I think in many case the 2 where drunk and both irresponsible, so what? They raped each other. But who to blame ? Put both in jail ? Why only the woman is the vitim ?
Still I don’t get the point to pointedly get drunk in a dangerous environement around people you don’t trust. You know this is going to happen.
So basically … militant feminism has backfired on the militant feminists?
[ cue grumpy-cat photo ] Good.
May it be so with those who live at *every* spoke of the Frankfurt School plan.
If the rape panic runs parallel to the the now nearly forgotten drugs-and-rock panics of the 1950s and 1960s (and many others like them, before and after) we should expect it to actually be be rooted in an attempt to assert control of or cultural dominance over some threatening Other. And there is indeed evidence that points in that direction.
This might explain the near-simultaneous rape panic wrt to the Armed Forces…my impression is that this has come top-down from Congress rather than bottom-up from crowds of servicewomen…but it’s easy to see that either a leftist academic, a leftist congressman lobbied by the academic, or an enlisted servicewoman could spend a lifetime seeing the military itself as this “threatening other,” and using rape accusations to beat it into submission. It fits beguilingly well, in fact, but I can’t think how I’d test it.
I’m a bit confused about the point of the post. Is it about moral panics generally, or the “moral panic” associated with rape and the idea of rape culture?
I’ll just pretend it’s about the second one, and comment accordingly.
1) Rape is sex without consent. It’s not just “no means no”, it’s also “yes means yes”. It’s not just, “no I don’t want to have sex with you”, it’s also, both (all) people agreeing (whether verbally or otherwise) that they want to have sex with each other. If one person is unconscious (whether because they are drunk or otherwise), they can’t consent.
2) Rape happens (obviously), but for women, it is more likely to be a person they know (just like child molestation is more likely to be done by someone the child knows). (I have no idea what the numbers are like for men who are raped.) This leads to a particular problem: it’s hard to shoot your husband/BF because they raped you. It’s hard to report. But, it still happens. It’s also a lot harder to shoot your friend’s friend (as compared a hide in the bushes rapist), because you’re at a party, not carrying your gun. And it’s hard to report, because you’ll potentially be stigmatised and disbelieved by your friends (and even lose them) and will face disbelief, because you went to the party and got drunk (and so must have consented).
3) Rape culture, as I understand it, is part of society’s culture which means that (among other things): people who report rapes face stigmatisation and disbelief; people generally (and the media particularly) focus on the alleged perpetrators, rather than the victim (e.g. oh those poor young men, and they had such a promising football career ahead of them); people blame the victim (well you shouldn’t have dressed like that (which leads to, don’t tell women how to dress, tell men not to rape), you shouldn’t have got drunk, you shouldn’t have gone to the party, you shouldn’t have got married and became dependent on someone who later became abusive and depressed after losing their job and being unable to find another one because the economy sucks), rather than discuss the problems with the rapist (you raped someone, WTF dude?); etc.
Any disagreements with my first two points? I’m sure there’s disagreement with my third point, I’ll be happy to see where I’m wrong (if I actually am…).
When I hear of rape accusations, I see that the supposed rapist lose his job, wife, has his life destroyed before justice had the time to do any investigation.
So I don’t agree with your view of the things on how it is going on.
Minor kibitz —
It doesn’t really make sense to talk about r- and K- selection differences between men and women. That’s a theory that has to do with entire species. The “r” and “K” refer to the exponent of population growth and the carrying capacity of the environment, respectively. (dN/dt = r N (1 – N/K))
“r-selected” means n << K. That is, the species population is nowhere near its carrying capacity so it can afford to reproduce as quickly as it can. K-selected means the population is near its carrying capacity so it's a bad idea to produce more offspring than you can afford to support. There's no way, by this definition, that one sex can be r-selected and one can be K-selected.
Humans, obviously, are K-selected as far as animals go. If you wanted to extend the concept to be relevant to humans, though, it might be something more like "in a desolate wasteland or a violent and disease-prone environment, people tend to have more children and invest less in raising them, because they don't expect them to survive to adulthood."
First: Americans as an entire population are less law-abiding than Europeans….The distribution of crime and murder in the U.S. is sharply bimodal; when you subtract out this handful of plague spots the profile of the rest of the U.S. doesn’t merely resemble Europe, it is as peaceful as Switzerland.
So what laws are these allegedly less law-abiding folks out in the tea party hinterlands away from Baltimore and whatnot actually breaking, if the crime statistics there look more like Switzerland’s?
@Michael
I suspect the point of this discussion is that it is all the fault of the women.
The problematic question is now what it is, the women are faulted for?
Is it the rapes, the rape scares, the plight of the suspected rapists, or the moral panic? Anyhow, it seems the women are guilty, one way or another.
@esr
” The distribution of crime and murder in the U.S. is sharply bimodal; when you subtract out this handful of plague spots the profile of the rest of the U.S. doesn’t merely resemble Europe, it is as peaceful as Switzerland.”
I forgot that gem. That trick works both ways. You forget that if you subtract out the handful of the local plague spots, the profile of Switzerland is as peaceful as a women’s convent.
@HedgeMage
“*Amusingly, I’m not at all thin or particularly pretty: suck that, magazine publishers.”
My respond to women worrying about their looks or weight is to ask them whether they know more “overweight” than “underweight” women that are single. Most men are accused of having no idea what women want in a man. But this misunderstanding seems to be mutual.
(however, one woman described “what men want in a woman” as just long hair and kindness, I leave it to the reader to judge her understanding)
“You forget that if you subtract out the handful of the local plague spots, the profile of Switzerland is as peaceful as a women’s convent.”
Yes, and? The point is that Switzerland seems to be a level that even the most hard-core gun-hating leftists accept. We’re already there aside from the thugs. We should be concentrating on the thugs, not on the guns.
This is relevant to the current discussion because it, too, depends on lying with statistics, just as the whole “rape culture” business is, to the end of controlling people in ways deeply antithetical to the foundations of our society.
The legal definition varies, but the English word means to force someone into sexual intercourse. Whether they “wish it” is irrelevant.
The language problem starts with “equality”, which is (taken on its own) an undesirable quality that in fact nobody is interested in. What we are doing with things like equal opportunity employment is redistributing privilege to groups that the current elites believe are more deserving. And I agree with some of that rearranging. But people want to believe it’s all coming from a morally superior place. So we have to continue with the charade and everybody gets horribly confused along the way.
The main privilege of being born male is that men are just plain stronger. This is attested to by their virtually uncontested dominance of the planet since forever. I don’t see how this is any different to being born smarter or larger than other people. Culture certainly magnifies the effect beyond the individual, since like tends to ally with like, and the major activity of feminism so far has been to beg men for privileges. I’m not saying this is a bad idea, but it’s increasingly starting to sound like self-contradictory loser talk.
Also, let’s talk sense about hypergamy.
What’s at issue today is the feminization of higher education. If women tend to get more education than men (and they do), and we’re moving towards a more credentialized society (and we are) then women are at an advantage over men in the marketplace. But there are no signs of anybody shifting towards female-breadwinner, male-caretaker/homemaker households. Most people still (implicitly) want to form families where the wife works and earns less and spends more time with the kids than the husband. This is a problem.
To stereotype wildly:
As children, girls tend to be more obedient and verbally fluent than boys. Our educational system rewards obedience and verbal fluency. Combine this with increasing educational credential inflation, and you have a situation where boys drop out of the system and grow up to be men without a place in a bureaucratic world. In the 19th century they might have gone West or gone to sea or started businesses, but the modern world often has no role for a young man with energy but little disposition for obedience.
My own take is that we absolutely *need* to buck this trend. I think the boom in entrepreneurship and programming (which is an autodidact-friendly profession) is really healthy. And women with sense need to see that it is not “marrying down” to end up with a hardworking, spirited man who doesn’t make a good bureaucrat. The credential bubble is not sustainable. Those who will do well after the dust has settled are those same energetic, “disobedient” people who are losing the credentialing game today.
@Jay Maynard
” The point is that Switzerland seems to be a level that even the most hard-core gun-hating leftists accept. We’re already there aside from the thugs. We should be concentrating on the thugs, not on the guns.”
And your point is? The rest of Western Europe is not much different from Switzerland. And everywhere the majority of crimes is committed in a few hot-spots. Half of the fire-arm murders in the Netherlands are the result of gang wars in inner city Amsterdam and Rotterdam (still the total number of all murders was165 in 2011, ~1/100,000).
But comparing selected “good” parts of the USA to the average of a country is indeed the hallmark of “Lying with statistics”. The correct comparison is between the South or North of the USA versus, say, the South or North Euro zones. Not the good parts of rural or suburban USA versus the whole of Switzerland, including the bad parts.
@ Joseph W.
When I was in the Navy a woman accused me of sexual assault just so she could get out early. I think the only things that saved me were my established reputation in the department and the fact that there was a witness whose statement matched mine. I now have a very jaded view toward those who say false accusations don’t happen. Women are people, and some people will use whatever weapons available to achieve their goals, and we have made accusations of sexual violence a weapon.
Winter: “Which is the same in Europe. Only on a much lower level.”
Only if you ignore the tens of millions of Europeans who were murdered by their governments in the last century alone.
They don’t count, though, right?
“we have made accusations of sexual violence a weapon.”
Not only a weapon, but a nuke: there’s no defense, no reply, no accepted reaction but to bend over and take whatever the system chooses to do to you.
@Winter
> And that is why the crime and murder rates in the USA are higher than in Western Europe
John Lott also explains why cross sectional comparison, like yours, it useless:
Explaining why cross-sectional data is not useful for comparing the impact of gun ownership on crime rates
http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2013/04/explaining-why-cross-sectional-data-is.html
You miss (pun intended) one obvious point. The men are being told to practice self-control, to not engage (so low value males have no options except to become pick-up artists). The women are told go ahead and give in to your desires. That sex is part of the liberation (Ignore pregnancy and STDs). That you aren’t a woman if you are still a virgin.
HM says there is no script. Go to any manosphere game blog and you will find The Script, including where gammas turn into alphas by changing their behavior. Learning to pushnthe emotional buttons. You don’t have to get a woman drunk, just silently communicate to her lower brain that you are an alpha and she will react like a male presented with a centerfold on a pole.
There is one other difference. Men want to marry virgins or at least women who aren’t sexually experienced. Women generally don’t care about the number on a man. So there need not be a need for all women to get the premarital sex taboo. Even now they are having difficulty finding men when they wait till their 30’s to marry. “Mating” is used in two contexts to mean two different things. Sterile and immediate but fun sex v.s. Finding someone to become a family with. That was the original divorce (pun intended) caused by contraception. But the two are poles apart and one tends to lessen or destroy the other. Do you enjoy life now with debt or save for retirement? Is delaying gratification still a virtue?
There is the other script, but that is that tired, old, right-wing valuing of virgins and mothers (for Catholic examples, Joan of Arc, Catherine of Sienna, Theresa of Avila, who wielded power, also queens that were saints).
Eric,
You seem to be assuming rape is about sex. If the studies you are ignoring are correct, then rape is about power. If rape is about power, then you need to rethink any arguments stating that rape isn’t happening when men get enough sex. (You made at least two.)
That said, feminists overstating rape occurrence rates is most definitely about power. But you seem to be stating it is also about sex.
Conclusion? Eric thinks a lot about sex…
Interesting analysis. I’ve noticed for a while that the campus talking points conjoin rape and sexual assault to make it look scarier. If I recall correctly, there was one study where sexual assault included asking a girl out again after being rebuffed. This sort of inflation is a grave disservice because it hinders rational choice.
Stop living in fear, dammit! Harumph.
Part of the problem with exaggerated rape statistics is that if you question them, you’re branded as an apologist for rape culture. Regular A&D readers will recognize this as a kafkatrap.
#MartinetMemo: You TWICE use the word
womens’. The apostrophe is in the wrong place. This is a common error: the rule “in a plural possessive, the apostrophe goes after the S at the end of the word” is erroneous, but accurate for the vast majority of nouns, which form their plurals by adding that (E)S.But “women” is the plural of “woman”, so the formation of the possessive is precisely like that of most singular nouns, and the apostrophe properly precedes the S.
And “Cretacious” should be spelled “Cretaceous”.
Might as well get these cleaned up before this post starts getting attention from the Left, which will seize upon anything to discredit dissent.
“No, it’s very simple. Teaching women to kill rapists is a move to keep the incidence rare.”
You left out challenging Winter’s moronic claim that killing rapists is murder. Self defense isn’t murder, by definition.
“If you get drunk with a man you met in a bar and wake up to find your wallet gone, with no memory of what happened, should that be just called a “nonconsensual gift” rather than “robbery” becasue calling it “robbery” would be disrespectful to those who have been brutally mugged while sober?”
Could be it was robbery but not rape, you know.
@ESR
There seems to be a fairly obvious partial solution, one that we already see developing when you wrote the article “a natural contemplates game”. This Game / PUA community went through a certain kind of explosion, first of all it is no longer only for one night stands with a Machiavellian gist, Athol Kay developed it in http://marriedmansexlife.com/blog/ into a method by which to enliven normal marriages, and took off the repulsive parts, basically he says to have a good marriage be a good alpha and good beta, leader and comfort-giver at the same time. Certain blogs explored other aspects of it, social, political, cultural, e.g. http://theredpillroom.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-crab-basket-effect.html and now it is called more and more Red Pill Theory, not PUA.
Anyway, the idea is that men start to learn Game, and while for men it is zero sum, collectively, women will be hornier. And a horny and satisfied woman naturally and happily gravitates to a more submissive role. Or anyway, maybe submissive is not the right word, the point is that when people – both women and men – are made happier in bed, they tend to be more easily agreeable in other matters. Plain simply they are willing to pay a price for it.
If the Gravatar is any indication, you don’t have much to worry about in the prettiness department. Thinness is hella overrated.
You have to perform the same operation on both sides of the equation.
Anyway, you fell for one of the classic blunders.
@Jeff Read
Having met HedgeMage in person, I can say ….
/me Furiously contemplates how to put this diplomatically
… her gravatar is quite flattering.
Having said that, the real bottom line is – “Smart Is Sexy”.
But we all knew that already. ;-}
If you intentionally put yourself in peril (getting drunk with strangers, for instance) you bear at least some culpability for what happens to you. You are ultimately responsible for your own defense, and if you cripple yourself, well, tough.
And Winter – my state, Connecticut, had 124 murders among 3.5 million residents in 2011. 70% of those occurred in just 3 cities of no more than 125,000 population each. In fact, all but 16 of them occurred in just 8 municipalities. Since we have a total of 169 municipalities in Connecticut, that means that more than 140 municipalities (better than 80%) had NO MURDERS AT ALL.
And CT is a carry state, open or concealed. Once you have your permit, you can (well, could up until April 4th) carry whatever you like. Now you’re stuck at 10 rounds, but that’ll be getting reversed soon enough.
What I’m saying is that Europeans aren’t especially civilized. They’re just better at lying to themselves about it.
@Rick C
We’ve argued that one before. IIRC, Winter says self-defense is “justified murder”, while most of us say that’s oxymoronic, because justified killing is not murder by definition.
I’m so picky about language because I believe that sloppy language tends toward sloppy thinking. The moment you accept “all killing is murder”, it becomes much more difficult to conceptualize the difference between aggressor and defender. I therefore refuse to accept that equation, especially when the dictionaries support the distinction.
@Winter
That is the definition of a “hostile environment”. Education has been made unfriendly to boys. Perhaps the word “work” confused you.
@esr
Perhaps feminists are in the feminism business. They don’t just disband and go back to their former lives once they reach their goals. They adopt new goals, so they can stay in the feminism business. Consider the March of Dimes.
@The Monster
Remember that English is not Winter’s first language. He writes so well that we sometimes tread his mis-translation of a term from the Dutch as if he were a sloppy American.
@Winter
I Am Not A Lawyer, but I think the word you want is homicide, not murder. Murder is one category of homicide. It is not the general word in English for the killing of human beings.
Murder is if you do it with the willingness to kill and assassination add that you planned it.
As such killing somebody in self defence can be or not a murder. If you did it on purpose to protect yourself, knowing you would kill, then it is a murder. If it was by accident, it isn’t.
How about this for an idea for root cause instead? What if it’s just that people like Lanker-Simmons have given up their individualism for group ideals. And the groups that Lanker-Simmons has attached to says it’s OK to have a lot of uninhibited sex before monogamy when in fact the opposite is true. And that nature, religion and all sorts of other controls that placed limits over sexual activity have been valid since the beginning of human culture and that those “rules” can’t be reversed in forty years no matter how much the group think says so or wants to think so. The same applies to a bazillion other “progressive ideals” including economics, property rights, justice, etc. The elites in University humanities departments have become so enamored by their own voluminous and supposedly lofty words that they actually believe that human culture can and is being reinvented. Except that people like Lanker-Simmons end up hoisting themselves on their own petards because, in this case, the very simple human principle of honesty came into play. By posting a bogus and pathetic anti male group think, she exposed herself for the human beings that we all are. You don’t have to belong to a religion or even believe in a supreme God to understand morals. So she demonstrated the fallacy of the entire enterprise of feminist thought, it attempts to dismiss natural rules that have worked successfully for generations. Don’t have sex too often unless it is the result of higher order values where the act itself transcends the act itself.
@BobW
Indeed, I meant homocide. At least for killing someone not by accident. I was most certainly not intending to imply that it was illegal or not “justified”.
@Brian
Ignoring possible differences in the definition of murder, why do you think this is not true in a country of 17 million people with the second largest harbor in the world?
You think our murderers all live in the countryside?
Winter – Those cities in Connecticut are our three most populous. I’m not getting your question about something not being true in a country of 17 million.
There’s something else we have that most European countries don’t have – racial, cultural and social heterogeneity. Look at Sweden. Until the mass immigration of Muslims, Sweden was pretty monolithic. And now it’s coming apart at the seams because all the cultural assumptions that went into their social democracy are no longer valid.
America never had any such cultural assumptions.
Tristan wrote: “Male privilige (like white privilege, and class privilege) is very real.”
Yes, it is because men invented and built virtually everything in society and everyone knows that without them there would be no society. Therefore they are accorded privilege — a word you spelled wrong by the way (see above).
All the talk about “male privilege” suddenly disappears as soon as the storm hits and/or the power goes out and we need those dreaded men to fix the technology and infrastructure they themselves put into place. Men get the privilege of working at 4 a.m. in snowstorms to get the electricity turned on so professors can teach in classrooms about how useless men are.
@Tristan
“And you are contributing to the culture of rape.”
Define “culture of rape” in explicit language. Explain how free speech somehow directly contributes to presumed criminal behavior. Then explain why it is worth your time to shame those exercising free speech.
“That article you quote is deeply flawed – it decides that rape is not rape because its either not reported or because the victim doesn’t believe its rape.”
Your reasoning is deeply flawed if you decide that documented and vetted incidences of rape are insufficient data for the problem, and that instead you must simply make up numbers to add on top of the official rape statistics. This is a form of faulty reasoning known as, “using your imagination,” in place of data. You see, in this scenario, you don’t like the actual prevalence numbers of a crime so you just presume that there’s lots of unreported instances, and then you attack anyone who doesn’t fudge their numbers much higher to “account” for the unreported rapes. That’s known as lying.
“To have sex with someone when they do not wish it is rape. Whether its at knife point or whether they’re drunk.”
It is interesting then, that I never see women charged with rape when they have sex with drunk men. When you consider that a simple paternity test on a resulting child could turn that act into a lifetime of child support payments, I consider this a serious crime.
“Rape is chronically under reported (annecdotally all the women I know of personally who have been raped or sexually assaulted never reported it). Its not hard to see why when police often don’t take it seriously, even when presented with video evidence, and men treat rape as a joke.”
Yes, because you said this, it must be true. Yes, police ignore rape reports when the evidence is thin so much that even famous people are able to avoid prosecution. Famous people like Kobe Bryant were clearly just allowed total freedom with no cost to his reputation because of it. Powerful men like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund managed to not get thrown in prison from a verified rape accusation…
OH WAIT, no that didn’t happen. Wow, so all these wealthy powerful, famous men were raked over the coals, unable to get the law to look the other way, even when the evidence against them was thin…. Huh. And you know, when your average male, with no access to the finest lawyers in the land, and no money to pay for representation, those judges and prosecutors and police officers just look the other way for all those average guys, right?
Your assertion that police do not take rape seriously is a flat lie. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so evil.
“The rest of your article is typical MRA rubbish. Oh us poor hard done by white men, we have it sooo hard with our privileged position and power.”
^^^ Typical whining about an imagined social privilege supposedly gifted to a segment of the population that historically has been forced by law and fiat to lay down their lives for the king/country/republic. When women start volunteering to be on the selection lists to die for their country on the front lines of war, then maybe male privilege is something to consider, maybe. Until then, try to define your terms instead of making an argument from a dreamlike state of reality.
“Of course false accusations of rape do occur, but they are relatively rare and get disproportionate coverage (by the male dominated media).”
Male dominated media? That’s so backwards is stunning.
“Thankfully we have made much progress, but there’s still a long way to go, and any libertarian worth their salt should realise this.”
What does being libertarian have to do with anything? This post is about human rights, which anyone, left/right/libertarian should be sensitive to. You seem to want to shut down discussion, to stop freedom of expression simply because it attacks a sacred cow in your political view.
Winter said: If you think concealed guns will make your neighborhood safe, be my guest. I expect the bad guys will start to shoot before they rob you, just in case.
Evidence for that expectation, from the giant experiment the US has been running this past decade or more is actually vanishingly small.
Mostly they seem to try and find places where the victims are unlikely to be armed, or switch to robbing cars or empty homes, as far as I know.
In any case, I am unaware of a any evidence at all that armed victims tend to make muggers and robbers into murderers (at any higher rate than they already were; remember that a dead victim is, shall we say, the least likely to identify you in a lineup).
If any existed, I’d expect the anti-gun nuts to be trumpeting it, and they are not.
Sigvald – I can offer a simple explanation for why your observation is correct.
Criminals are criminals because it’s easier than getting a job. Once they risk getting shot and/or killed, it’s not easy any more.
Criminals are still motivated by risk/reward calculations. They are, after all, made of meat.
@HedgeMage: “Most of the stupid things I see “normal” women doing can be attributed to our society not having a uniform script for mate selection, negotiation, and relationship management. Instead, we have a situations where individuals in an extremely heterogeneous culture are expected to select, negotiate, and manage relationships in an ad hoc and mostly individualized manner. If one has an IQ that breaks the bank and a bit of social intelligence, that’s not a big deal. However, for the rest of humanity, it’s awfully complicated.”
Animal behaviorists have the concept of the “action chain”, a sort of extended reflex. It is triggered by a stimulus, and proceeds through a set of steps to an end result, The key point is that *all* steps must be carried out, in the specified *order*, or the end result does not occur. Nest building behavior and mating behavior are both examples of action chains.
There is considerable evidence that action chains exists in human beings, too, but action chains for the same purpose can differ between cultures. For example, there was an interesting problem during WWII, in the build up to the D-Day invasion. Hundreds of thousands of US troops were bivouacked in Britain, waiting for the Joint Chiefs to set the date when they would board transports for the run across the Channel to Normandy.
High command was getting a slew of complaints from a village that had a US base nearby. Village girls complained the GIs were pushy and sex-crazed. GIs complained the girls were prudes or whores. Investigation pinpointed the problem. A GI would take a village girl on a date. Things would go well and they’d like each other. He’d take her home and attempt to kiss her goodnight. The kiss, in Britain at the time, was a specifically erotic act that did *not* occur until much later in the relationship. What the guy was trying to communicate was “That was fun! I like you! Let’s do this again.” What the *girl* got from it was that she must either scream and run or get ready for sex.
A step in the action chain was in a different order in Britain than it was in the US, with potentially tragic misunderstandings resulting. And this was between two cultures that shared a common language and history, and had only really diverged about 150 years previously. The issues arising when the cultures are *very* different, and the action chain is “conflict resolution” *have* had and *are* having tragic results.
The script you speak of is an action chain, and our heterogenous culture means it *can’t* be uniform. It’s made worse by the fact that the script is not conscious and explicit – the steps are learned by observation beginning in early childhood, and operate on the level of reflex as adults.
It will be awfully complicated if you *have* an IQ that breaks the bank and a lot of social intelligence, unless you confine your mating behavior to those in your own micro-culture who share your assumptions about How Things Are Done, and even then, opportunities or confusion are manifest.
@Brian
My country too has big cities where, unsurprisingly, we see most of the crimes. So I do not see your point about ct. Moreover, more than half the population lives in cities.
And the Netherlands is not Sweden. We got colonies, Indonesia, Surinam, and acfew Caribean islands. Quite a number of people from there came here after independence. Same for Belgium and France.
@Winter
Sweden added around 1 million immigrants within the last couple of decades. This is over 12% of the previous population. Is the proportion of immigrants in the Netherlands that high?
@esr: I *am* old enough to recall the drug and sex panic of the 60’s, and I’d analyze it a bit differently than you do, but your basic point is largely valid. A former co-worker described a lecture he attended give by a California Law professor, whose thesis was that many laws had an “us vs them” component, and were specifically attempts by the dominant group in the culture to assert dominance and keep other groups firmly in a subordinate position. Laws criminalizing marijuana, for example, had roots in marijuana being a favored recreational material in black communities.
But the Other in the terms you use wasn’t a group of people: it was a perceived threat to the formal system of the dominant culture. Formal systems are learned by admonition and precept, and become reflexes. Formal systems include various taboos – Things That Are Not Done – and when a taboo is violated, the response tends to be gut level hysteria untouched by rational thought. The underlying emotion is “That’s Wrong!”. If you say “Yes, but *why* is it wrong?”, and the answer is “It just *Is!*”, you have a pretty strong clue about what you’re dealing with,
One of the things I’ve been wondering about recently is whether we see things like you describe when the battle has effectively been won.
Left wing blogger Will Shetterly has gone on a bit about “Social Justice Warriors”. (He think’s they’re full of it.) An example is those espousing Critical Race Theory, which seems to reduce to “We live in a racist society where blacks have been systematically repressed for centuries. If you grow up in that society, you cannot help but be racist, and you may not make comments critical of blacks unless you are black yourself because your comments will have an unavoidable racist underpinning.” This particular notion seems popular with a subset of left-wing white liberals, who conveniently ignore or dismiss “That’s bullshit” responses from *black* commentators.
I know one of the SJW types slightly. I’ll do her the courtesy of assuming that she truely believes what she espousws, but suspect that her real motivation is the attention she gets by espousing it. She’s a Drama Queen, and that seems to be a common characteristic.
I can’t help but suspect that sort of motivation among some of the “rape culture” activists.
What do you do when you’re a revolutionary, the revolution has happened, and you’ve arguably won? You’ve derived status, power, and identity from *being* a revolutionary. If a good case can be made that the goals of the revolution have largely been attained, you are increasingly irrelevant. Your status and power diminish, and fewer and fewer and fewer people know or care who you are.
You try harder and harder to attain a bigger slice of a shrinking status pie, and become more fanatical in the process.
@DMcCunney
The English described the American GI as “Overpaid, oversexed, and over here!”
This cultural trait also shows up in Australia, where it’s called larrikinism. It manifests in a variety of ways, even in the government: certain warning signs are written in an amusingly g’day-mate casual tone, presumably because bogans are more likely to flout officious-sounding directives.
However, Australia has a functioning state without the perennial corruption and debt problems that plague U.S. politics. And they seem to be doing all right with gun regulations close enough to a universal ban as makes no practical difference for self-defense purposes. In the decade before the 1996 gun restrictions, there were eleven mass shootings in Australia including the Port Arthur massacre which inspired the laws; after 1996, there have been zero. Gun violence of all sorts plummeted considerably, without a corresponding increase in other sorts of violence. Put simply, in a country with strong cultural parallels for good or ill to American culture, gun control worked.
(I was actually asked by a native while on the Gold Coast a couple weeks back: “What’s with you Americans and all your guns? Why do you need them?” I didn’t have a ready reply.)
First, responses to some of the comments:
“Rape is chronically under reported (annecdotally all the women I know of personally who have been raped or sexually assaulted never reported it).”
The NCVS figures are not based on reports to police. They give figures much lower than the ones commonly cited in anti-rape campaigns.
Eric’s argument on the deterrent effect of concealed carry can be found, incidentally, in my price theory text, published in 1986.
Winter: “And that is why the crime and murder rates in the USA are higher than in Western Europe”
Murder rates in the USA are higher than in western Europe. Other crime rates are not.
Take a look at the ICVS figures for 2003-4. Overall victimisation for 10 crimes; “one year prevalance Rates in 2003/04 (percentages) of the top 15 countries …” (Figure 3 in “Criminal Victimization in International Perspective” )
The top five are Ireland, England and Wales, New Zealand, Iceland, and Northern Ireland. In addition to the top five, Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland and Belgium are all higher than the U.S..
On the comparison between getting drunk and having sex vs getting drunk and having your money stolen … . Where drunk means literally unconscious, there is some basis for classifying sex as rape, assuming there wasn’t some obvious evidence of consent in advance. But my impression is that most of the situations in dispute are ones where the woman isn’t unconscious, merely sufficiently drunk so that her ability to make decisions is arguably impaired. Describing that as rape puts you in the odd situation of claiming that, in many cases, each partner was raping the other, which isn’t how we would normally use the term. I think when two people choose to get drunk in the sort of setting where they know sex is likely, one ought to regard the resulting intercourse as voluntary on the part of both partners. The analogy to losing money then isn’t to finding that someone has emptied your wallet, it’s to getting drunk, playing poker, and losing. I wouldn’t consider that robbery.
And, finally, the point I wanted to make in response to Eric’s interesting essay … .
Suppose the woman’s objective is not short term sex but a long term relationship, marriage or a close equivalent. I wonder if casual sex is actually the right tactic, even in the current environment. I have a mental picture, probably from the mid-20th century, of a social scene where high school boys tried to sleep with the “bad girl” in the class but ended up married to one of the girls who didn’t sleep around and was quite likely to be a virgin. The modern version of that might be a girl who accumulates male friends rather than lovers, deliberately doesn’t sleep with any of them until she is at least engaged if not married, and uses that policy as an alternative strategy for getting a husband. One can imagine intermediate versions, with sex limited to reasonably long term relationships even if not to ones expected to be permanent.
I have no data, just speculation. But if that worked, the spread of that strategy might eventually change the pattern Eric is describing. The male half of it would presumably be men who engaged in casual sex prior to marriage, but not with the woman they were going to marry—and that arguably reduces the cost to them of courting a woman who won’t sleep with them.
One question is to what degree male pair bonding emotions link to sex. Will the man who has been engaged in casual sex prior to marriage feel less strongly bonded to his partner after?
>Eric’s argument on the deterrent effect of concealed carry can be found, incidentally, in my price theory text, published in 1986.
I believe that, but I didn’t get it from there.
In the very early 1970s Florida had an epidemic of rapes. This was only a few years after 1968 and hostility to civilian weapons was not yet a part of political-class ideology, so in 1972 the Florida police tried encouraging Florida women to arm themselves. They ran classes and did outreach programs. Rape rates dropped like a rock.
And the moral panic itself helps worsen the situation for the women at these schools because the panic, so loudly expressed, helps drive men away from the place.
This is one of those self-reinforcing situations that can only run amok until it crashes of its own absurdity. Or someone wins a lawsuit big and fat enough to get the attention of administrators, donor alums, regents, and governing boards.
I think the answer is…themselves. The increasing intensity level of the campus-rape panic seems well correlated with the erosion of college womens’ position in sexual bargaining.
This has broader implications. Right now we’re seeing the screeching on college campuses. However, in wider society, men are turning away from marriage in droves. What moral panic will be used when that hits in full in 5-10 years and tens of millions of women cannot find mates?
>What moral panic will be used when that hits in full in 5-10 years and tens of millions of women cannot find mates?
A revived anti-porn crusade seems a likely outcome.
You might be interested in this paper by Murray Straus, “Processes Explaining the Concealment and Distortion of Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence”
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf
It’s an eyeopener.
Anti-prostitution and anti-mail-order-brides crusades, to be more precise. Here, in the world capital of feminism, Sweden, we’ve had the former for almost 15 years by now. Even the damn language reflects it. The commonly used word for a prostitute is “prostituerad”, which grammatically is not a noun but a gerund that literally means “forced into prostitution”. There is no non-offensive word for “sex worker by choice”.
The latter sees occasional discussion as well. But strangely, the opponents of bride immigration are not bashed by media in any way, as the opponents of, say, refugee immigration are. And how could they bash someone who is good-hearted and minds woman’s well-being? Everybody knows that poor Thai and Ukrainian village girls are made into housemaids and sex slaves to degenerate alcoholics who threaten them with divorce and therefore loss of residence permit if they don’t obey.
A revived anti-porn crusade seems a likely outcome.
And anti-video game, which seems to be already in the works.
Mr Read:
Lived in Alice for 2 years. You’re full of shit. There are still shootings in various metro areas, there is still a LOT of violence (of course most of this is from the drug users and the alcoholics in the aboriginal community).
There are at least three reasons Australia doesn’t have the debt problems the US does:
1) It’s a country almost the size of the continental US, with the population about that of California, and it’s resource rich as hell. So the AU government lets the Chinese come in and mine the crap out of the country in exchange for taxes. Also the east coast of Australia is an *awesome* tourist destination.
2) Australians historically, were used to doing a lot with a little. You get into the outback and the folks there live a fairly sparse lifestyle materialistically. That is changing.
3) Historically the white community had a degree of self reliance and “get off my f*king lawn” that would do Americans proud. That history is going away.
The AU government got themselves in financial trouble, so they through the left out. Then Gilliard got back in and now they’re in economic trouble again.
Oh, and I new quite a few folks who wanted to shoot, but it wasn’t worth the effort for them (many thought they “couldn’t”, which is bullshit. It’s not hard, it’s just a lot of paperwork. I had a license to shoot while I was there, and if I’d stayed on I would have bought a pistol. I could have bought a rifle any time).
everybody’s getting raped!
http://feck-blog.blogspot.in/2011/05/predictors-of-sexual-coercion-against.html
funny guy that murray straus:
“A year or so later I was in the audience when my colleague Murray Straus presented the results of a study on which we had collaborated with Suzanne Steimetz …. The study included data on violence by women towards their husbands or male partners. Straus was unable to complete his presentation because the yells and shouts from members of the audience drove him from the stage. To even discuss female offenders, I was told later, could only undermine the case for battered women. Straus, who also considers himself a feminist, was, in his own words … “excommunicated” from the mainstream feminist community. He was rarely invited to speak at conferences on wife abuse, many of the speeches he gave were boycotted, and he has received threats, including death threats, over the past 15 years!” (Richard J Gelles, Research and Advocacy: Can One Wear Two Hats ? Family Process 33, March 1994).
These blog comments would be so much less interesting if @Winter wasn’t here to keep saying stupid things.
Sometimes I suspect he is a ringer troll, who says stuff not because he believes it, but because he enjoys stirring the pot.
So, @esr, you read the various Red Pill Blogs, yes?
>So, @esr, you read the various Red Pill Blogs, yes?
I wasn’t even aware that they existed until you brought it up. Now that I’ve read some of them…
Yes, some of my analyses parallel theirs. This is largely though not entirely independent invention. One thing I will give the “manosphere” credit for is that (mainly through a different face, the PUA/Game blogs) it refocused me on the concept of hypergamy and how it affects mating strategy. Otherwise, my thinking on their issues is independently derived – more rooted in biology and economics, less in social criticism and less in direct reaction to feminism.
Racist Pig earlier mentioned FEMEN, a Ukraine-based activist group who protest prostitution by… standing around with their tits out. Kind of reminds me of the old joke about “fucking for virginity”.
>FEMEN, a Ukraine-based activist group who protest prostitution by… standing around with their tits out.
I look at those pictures, and they’re an education. Mainly in how anger can make even a shapely, half-naked young woman so ugly that I wouldn’t fuck her on a bet.
Agreeing with William. Here in New Zealand we have strictish gun laws, but in reality you go get a license (and if you don’t have a criminal conviction it’s easy enough) and you can buy shotguns and rifles to your heart’s content. You do need to jump through more hoops to get a pistol, but that’s doable too.
We have quite liberal knife laws, any folding knife up to 10cm can be imported without issue, and longer than that (Cold Steel Espada XL?) you need to take a request to the Police station, or buy from one of the various importers who sell locally. You can carry a knife with good reason (like you use it for work or something) and our Police are pretty nice people.
If someone says, as above, that it is pointless to compare the US and European countries, then why did they start that?
@Sean
While Eric certainly oversimplified, he *does* have a point. There is a difference between “I said no, but he was more able to overpower me because I was drunk”, “I didn’t say no, but only because I was too drunk to realize I was making a bad decision”, and “I got drunk so I had an excuse for not saying no”.
The first of those three is definitely still rape, albeit rape of an idiot, and should be harshly punished.
The second is sometimes treated as rape in our society, but shouldn’t be. Men shouldn’t be expected to read minds, or check the BAC of women they meet. If women want to be treated as equals, part of that is taking responsibility for our own choices, including doing things that may make us more likely to make poor choices.
The third, I think we all agree, is not rape. However, it’s such a common social script that it compounds the problem of the second. When so many women use intoxicants as a social tool to disclaim responsibility of things they choose to do, men can’t be expected to be able to discern that behavior from the one who just plain isn’t thinking clearly because she drank too much.
@Sean Hastings:
I would say you deserve it for failing to protect yourself. Instead statists think the state should protect them from being personally irresponsible, thus statism breeds irresponsibility and failure of society. Statists live in a fantasy that laws can form a perfect society where all people are equal, game theory does not exist, and humans are helpless idiots that need the state to direct them.
@Tristian:
You forgot to insert the words “of delusion” after the word “culture”. As esr has explained, the only culture of rape is a political and economic invention as feminists try to double-down on the failure they have created for women and society by gaming the statism.
@esr:
I did when I used to drink. Then I did perhaps once or twice when sober, and indeed it is revolting or less satisfying because the woman can’t fully interact.
@Winter:
You like to cite statistics that conveniently exclude the 80 year cycle of megadeaths that result from such statism.
Which is much higher than most other people in the world live, who work much harder and produce much more. (Off topic: minimum wage is yet another statism that creates a failed economy.)
This claim is so delusional, that I am inclined to not even debate it. Let’s compare again in several years ;)
Fantastic analysis,esr.
Comment section is…interesting,but there’s a whole lot of libtards in it. David Friedman’s responses were very good and addressed many of the libtarded claims I would have addressed. A few things I would add are that there is no such thing as “male privilege”. This assumes a natural group cooperation that does not exist in men.Take that Tristan guy up there,for instance. He’s essentially trying to jump ahead of me in the pussy queue by illegalizing my free and easy interaction with females because they find it more attractive than his pussy-begging supplicating approach.This is beside the point,though,and I have no wish to rub the man’s natural handicap in.
The group cooperation you refer to as “male privilege” exists in women (a phenomenon which we refer to as “Team Woman”),because many women are necessary to fend off one man, the need for which may or may not be caused after STEALING resources from the man, in order for women to maximize their own resource attainment. Men, on the other hand, are mostly evenly matched,and compete with one another quite naturally,a phenomenon which can even and perhaps most strikingly be observed in young boys, so the idea of men setting up a system to privilege men as a group is absurd. A man doesn’t want to share resources with other men equitably,because he could as easily kill all the competitors and purchase more women for himself with their resources. This is what a man is biologically wired to do,and this is why women form partnerships with these men This is why women only seem interested in “bad guys”,why they swoon for the Dzohkhars, and why Tristan don’t get no pussy.
I should add that women,also, do not WANT to share resources with other women. They are forced to, because it is necessary for women to team up in numbers in order to take down one man,and those team services must be bought with cooperation. Take a look at the woman manufacturing a false rape threat against herself and the community response to that and tell me that’s not what’s going on.
On the man having sex with drunk women vs man robbing drunk man, David’s response was again very good. He neglected to mention that the logical conclusion is that FRAUD is what has occurred,not rape.The women have been scammed into considering a mate choice without their anti-slut defenses up, which is what is twisting so many people’s panties about these cases,including the male libtards. Fraud is indeed very bad,and the usual solution to it is consumer protection; that is, a public service announcement warning people not to undertake a particular relationship with a certain organization or individual. If you attempted to protect women from this fraud, they’d never stop screaming “misogyny” or “victim-blamer”. That’s why the onus for protecting the women from their own uninformed or reckless decisions is transferred onto male fraudsters themselves, which, it goes without saying is ABSURD.
Hey con men, don’t be con men! Hey criminals, don’t commit crime! Yeah,that’ll work. Why don’t we port that plan on over for murderers,arsonists,home invaders,and muggers,and just fire all the police. Why weren’t we doing this all along!? Oh, yeah, that’s right. Because it doesn’t fucking work.
Here’s your two choices.
1.Criminalize all sexual interaction between men and women,and say hello to 1984,comrades.
2. Advise women that, for their OWN SAFETY, it is better that they don’t drink or voluntarily enter possibly sexual settings or exchanges with people,because they can’t handle acting like responsible adults and keeping track of themselves. I’m sure that’ll be well received.
Look,if you libtards want to live as sexless eunuchs in a world sanitized of all distinction and purpose, be my guest, but if you’re planning on forcing society into that mold, tell me now so I can shoot myself and add another figure to your distorted gun death statistics.
@HedgeMage:
In esr’s prior blog on the dating game, there was presented the theory that women who can’t demand all the attention of an alpha-male (or sigma), may try to get impregnated by one and then capture a lower male for the help in rearing the children. I suspect what you see as random behavior is the inability to capture an alpha-male and thus an a chaotic, indecisive fit to imperfect options. (I see you alluded to this in the last portion of your comment)
As an alpha or sigma (male or desirable female), we have an abundance of choices and thus are able to act more decisively.
This is an illusion of statism. Women have always had their power, but what we see now in the Western countries is a mirage of debt funding.
Women and men are not equal, yet they do need each other and they both have their areas of power and superiority. Women are much happier in societies where the statism is low and their roles have not been distorted by debt.
I am for women getting as much education as they can personally fund and have any career which they can excel without gaming anti-discrimination laws from the state.
In Japan they pay women to have children, yet still the women don’t want, because the statism has funded so many other incentives and distractions (shopping, addictions, etc).
A female can never be an alpha, because she doesn’t crave absolute power as the means to genetic relevance. Maybe it is different on Venus. Perhaps you are a sigma?
@Jason:
Your south island is absolutely the most beautiful place I’ve ever been in my life (which at this point includes large parts of America, Italy, bits of Australia and about 2/3rds of the south island. Beautiful enough that I’d put my guns back in storage for two or three years if I could find work down there.
The thing about NZ–at least the south island–is that outside of Christchurch it’s practically a mono-culture, and even in Christchurch–we’ll let’s just say that one (fairly large) apartment building I lived in in Chicago had more diversity than I saw in Christchurch. This greatly reduces friction and keeps rates of violence down. Much better integration than what I saw in Australia. But then I was only on the island for 10 days, I might have missed some subtly.
You know anyone who needs a high end Linux/Unix admin next year, ping me please?
@Hedgemage.
You forgot #4. We were both pretty drunk and things just sorta happened.
@ESR:
This is the problem with the FLoTUS. Beauty is only skin deep but rage and bitterness make you ugly to the bone.
@HedgeMan:
I used to like thin, and I suppose this was because my mind had been programmed by mass media, because since I have stopped viewing mass media for a decade or more, and have much increased my sex experience and acumen, the more I appreciate a figure with love handles and curves. Faces are diverse and men seem to have a wide range of definition of beauty. I rarely comment to another man about a woman’s face, because men will rarely agree– while we have a roughly bimodal chance of agreement on figure.
@Winter:
Shoot, then rob, creates time to be shot by the other armed citizens responding to the gunshot sound. Shooting in a well armed citizenry is an even more high risk activity for a bad guy.
Because (as we discussed in the prior blog on Boston bombings) Japan didn’t dare try to invade us by land because we have a gun under every blade of grass, whereas Hitler ran over you unarmed citizens like a knife through warm butter.
I read the point to be that the statism and its vested interest groups (e.g. feminists) have destroyed the situation for the women.
@Michael:
While it sounds noble, your definition of rape requires a mess of statism that can be gamed to yield failure for society. The only definition of rape should be “it is your personal responsibility to protect yourself”. If the state has to be every where , all the time, society can not function and the various interest groups will strangle the society.
@esr:
With the IMBRA, they already tried to stop men from seeking third world women. They are even trying to enforce rape and pedophilia laws against nationals abroad.
@Sarah:
This is an illusion of the current peaking global statism. We are moving to computer revolution, where the programmers and out-of-the-box high-tech thinkers will rule the roost. Autodidacts will be significant. Hackers don’t care about certificates and prestigious names.
@Jay Maynard:
I argue we should do nothing, except allow people to move to armed communities. The thugs will then kill off themselves in the unarmed communities. When the global statism collapses, people who don’t know how to protect themselves, will perish.
@tz:
Because under the extreme, peaking statism we have now, there is no meritocracy, thus women can not easily discern the true alpha or sigmas. The state is funding the lower achievers.
A systemic problem with a negative feedback loop. Somethin’s gotta give.
ESR
Am I wrong or racist to point out that the correlation between violent crime levels and proportion of non-asian minorities is very high? That if you control for non-asian minority population, crime approaches swiss levels (as you allude)? Did you choose to obfuscate this with a circumlocutory focus on abandonment by the authorities, as opposed to focusing on the criminals themselves? I’m not accusing you, just wondering if you’d just decided to spare Winter’s head from exploding any further.
>Am I wrong or racist to point out that the correlation between violent crime levels and proportion of non-asian minorities is very high?
You are not wrong. You will certainly be called a racist for having pointed this out.
>Did you choose to obfuscate this with a circumlocutory focus on abandonment by the authorities, as opposed to focusing on the criminals themselves?
I wasn’t obfuscating; the incentive system created by welfare-statism might well have produced our domestic hellholes anyway. It certainly made the problem worse that they were acting on a population with a low mean IQ and correspondingly high rates of criminal deviance.
“If you think concealed guns will make your neighborhood safe, be my guest. I expect the bad guys will start to shoot before they rob you, just in case.”
What is your expectation based on?
Because the experience over here in the US is the exact opposite. Random shootings tend to happen where it’s known (often posted and enforced by law) that no one has a weapon.
I went to college in the early 90s, graduated 1993.
Back then, there was a lot of ideas floating around like “all men are potential rapists.” (We responded by saying all women are potential whores. We were total bros.)
If anyone dared asked about false rape reports, we were piously informed that “women don’t lie. Not about that.” Yeah just ignore the false report Eric is mentioning here, not to mention the Duke Lacrosse case, the woman who tried to extort money from coach Rick Pitino, and others.
There was another idea floating around that “If women ran the world, there would be no wars.” Yeah, if women ran the world, we would soon find ourselves living in a utopian society. As I recall, Margaret Thatcher ran Britain for 11 years, and they did in fact have a war. Of course the people who make idiotic assertions like this did not have Thatcher in mind.
Where does this stuff come from? There seems to be a belief underlying all this: women are good, men are bad. Women are virtuous and moral, men are scummy rapists. They hate men.
I don’t understand how anyone who has lived in the real world for five minutes could believe this.
Also, the reason the European states are less violent and have less crime is because they tend to have a single ethnicity, also this seems to be changing. The liberals are always saying that diversity is a source of strength, but has anyone ever really proven this? This assertion is merely handwaved, as if it were so obvious it required no proof.
People who are diverse are not like each other, they have less in common. Thus they tend to have less interest in socializing with each other.
All this diversity divides people.
While Eric certainly oversimplified, he *does* have a point. There is a difference between “I said no, but he was more able to overpower me because I was drunk”, “I didn’t say no, but only because I was too drunk to realize I was making a bad decision”, and “I got drunk so I had an excuse for not saying no”.
The cases recently in the media (Stubenville and Audrie Pott) has been “I was passed out and they took pictures and/or video”. This just getting drunk at a party and not in the context of being given any option to say yes or no for sex.
It’s simply amazing that in this discussion that the most cut and dried cases from recent history are assiduously ignored by those that wish to claim that somehow this is the fault of feminists pushing some agenda.
Kids will make mistakes and get too drunk and pass out. That isn’t license to do whatever you want even if you are drunk too.
There’s an anti-rape movement/panic because the perps are putting their exploits on the net and because of the perception that they get away with it if they are jocks unless the victim commits suicide as a result.
That some folks are using this politically or using dubious statistics is neither new nor unexpected.
If you take the article and the numbers provided then 6.75% of respondents indicated they had been raped (27% of the 25% of respondents agreed with Koss’ rape assessment). That’s not 1 in 4 but still is 1 in 20 in the survey.
One problem was pointed out in the comments of that article: The 1 in 4 number is a measure of the number of respondents that had been raped during their time in school (or lifetime…not sure which). The 0.28% number is a measure of the percent of population raped every year. While the 1 in 4 number is inflated it’s measuring something different.
@esr
> Oh, good Goddess no. [Polygamy is] what you get when the social status and economic power of most men…
But isn’t that exactly the situation you are claiming? An excess of females for suitable males? FWIW, I have noticed that polyamorous relationships are more and more common. I’d say, amongst the people I know, close to 20%-30% have some form of poly thing going on (by which I mean a full disclosure poly thing, rather than cheating.) I don’t necessarily mean full on poly, but swinging, casual dating, open relationships, that kind of thing as well as committed poly.
I have also noticed that the females tend to be much less poly than the males they engage with (which is to say they often have a token boyfriend, but still pair bond with their number one, unlike the male.) But perhaps that is just something unique to the people I mix with. So poly biases the pack in favor of the ladies, I think, by some measures anyway.
But I am a little confused by how the argument applies outside of the stifling confines of the academy. Way I see it, it works like this (ignoring poly and homo for the time being). Men are a set of people who are ordered by an attractiveness function. Women are also a set of people ordered by a different attractiveness function. Both women and men strive to mate with people who are of a similar attractiveness rank within a range of acceptability. Everyone tries to reach up to a higher rank, but will ultimately compromise for someone pretty close to their rank, even slightly below.
Women tend to have a narrower range of acceptability, and the attractiveness functions both vary from person to person, and radically between the genders. Hypergamy is no doubt a factor, but not the only factor, especially with professional women. But with that outcome, assuming a fairly equal number of people in each set, then, as the old saying goes, every pot has a lid.
FWIW, I work with Chinese a lot, and have spent some time in China. Talking to Chinese women exactly the opposite is in play there. A huge shortage of women give those women a lot of choices. American women tend to stress a lot about finding the right guy, and being left on the shelf. Chinese women don’t worry about that at all. And rape, real rape that is, is quite disturbingly common. (Central planning bringing its usual benefits I see :-)
>But isn’t that exactly the situation you are claiming? An excess of females for suitable males?
Yes. I’m observing that is the case; I am not saying I want to live in a society in which polygamy on the traditional model is normal. In one case I’m relaying an observation; in the other case I’m uttering a value judgment.
>FWIW, I have noticed that polyamorous relationships are more and more common.
That is true to my experience as well.
>I have also noticed that the females tend to be much less poly than the males they engage with (which is to say they often have a token boyfriend, but still pair bond with their number one, unlike the male.) But perhaps that is just something unique to the people I mix with.
I think it is. Also I think you are interpreting what you see through a false premise; no blame for that because understanding of why it’s false is rare outside of poly circles.
In the poly culture I’m familiar with, it is normal for both women and men to have a primary to whom they are strongly pair-bonded. There is a general belief that poly relationship structures not built on pair bonding are dangerously unstable – that is, Heinlein got it half wrong, Nests don’t work (but line marriages do).
In this culture, normal behavior is to have one primary and one or more secondaries; the latter case, for women, is what you may be misinterpreting as “token boyfriends” (or the dominant poly pattern may be different where you are; I don’t know). It is considered that ideal secondary is a long-term friend (with benefits) who is also close to your primary. But secondaries may also include someone you’re having a torrid fling with that isn’t likely to last six weeks.
In the poly culture I know, women are often the initiators of poly, and have done most of the culture’s theorizing about it. This makes perfect sense biologically; poly lets a woman play “marry the lord, screw the gardener” without worrying that the lord will toss her out for infidelity.
>And that is why the crime and murder rates in the USA are higher than in Western Europe, is it because the Europeans got the inefficient route and spend less in terms of percentage GDP and forbid firearms?
1) Crime and murder rates in Europe are NOT lower than in the US. There is a propaganda element in the reported statistics, where the numbers are tweaked in such a way as to enhance national prestige or self image. In England, for example, a murder is not counted as a murder when the corpse is discovered – no, they must first arrest, try, convict the murderer, and all his legal appeals must be exhausted, and then and only then do they count it as a murder. Unsolved murders are not counted as murders at all. You can’t just compare their published statistics with our published statistics and draw any valid conclusions. I think even Canada has higher murder rates than the US (except for Chicago).
2) The per capita law enforcement manpower in Europe is much higher than the US. In France, I believe it is about ten times higher. This is expensive, but it does have some benefits in terms of preventing police corruption – they rotate partners much more frequently than we do, so that they don’t know who they will be working with next week, and therefore even when you get two bad apples together, they can’t make long term nefarious plans. The bureaucracy is large enough to ensure a life-long career path that tends to discourage the risks of corruption (in theory, at least).
3) We have made the decision to have lower police manpower levels, because we have chosen not to live in a POLICE STATE. In France, the cops are always sticking their noses into your business, your kid’s business, anybody’s business that they can find. This is needed just to keep all those gendarmes busy and out of mischief, and to help raise enough money through permit enforcement and ticketing to pay all those salaries.
Political Correctness has never been about making the world better, but is instead about controlling others. When you have campus cultures that convey status and privilege to victims, and with that privilege the supposed right to impose one’s own views and attitudes on supposed “victimizers,” it’s hardly surprising that individuals fake incidents of rape or racism in order to further their agenda while reinforcing their status as “privileged” victims. Believing in the bigotry or moral inferiority of others becomes an article of faith and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
@V.M.Smith:
Are you including the 47,000 TSA officers in the comparison? What about comparative levels of firepower? For example, does France have the per-capita equivalent of 1.6 billion hollow point bullets to shoot over the next 10 years?
As Homelove demonstrated, manpower can be ramped up over a few years.
@The Monster:
“We’ve argued that one before. IIRC, Winter says self-defense is “justified murder”, while most of us say that’s oxymoronic, because justified killing is not murder by definition.”
Ah, I must have missed that but I agree.
“I’m so picky about language because I believe that sloppy language tends toward sloppy thinking. The moment you accept “all killing is murder”, it becomes much more difficult to conceptualize the difference between aggressor and defender. I therefore refuse to accept that equation, especially when the dictionaries support the distinction.”
Exactly.
@sigivald: “Mostly they seem to try and find places where the victims are unlikely to be armed, or switch to robbing cars or empty homes, as far as I know.”
Mmm, yes, as opposed, say, to England, where, since the criminals know the populace is disarmed and disallowed self-defense, they have gone to hot robberies: home invasions while the occupants are there.
@ESR
I see these places as enclaves of “shame-based” (with many “thar” elements) sub-cultures within the “guilt-based” culture. It is difficult to determine how much is nature and how much is culture, because anyone of color who strays from the “authentic” sub-culture assigned him is a “cornball brother”, “Uncle Tom”, etc. who “acts white”, all critiques of the destructive sub-cultures are dismissed as “racist”.
I remember when “Them darkies cain’t he’p theyse’ves. They cain’t behave like decent white folk!” was self-evidently racist. Now it seems that the Ethnic Conformity Police have taken it as their mission statement.
@JustSaying: the 1.6B hollowpoint story has been shown to be wildly overstated. Figures I’ve seen are that the number is off by 2-3 orders of magnitude (and that number wasn’t a single-year figure, either) and the correct number amounts to on the order of a thousand rounds per year per police officer across pretty much all the Federal government, which is a somewhat adequate number for maintaining a basic proficiency. (It’s easy to go through a couple hundred rounds in an afternoon at the range.)
It doesn’t reaIt doesn’t really make sense to talk about r- and K- selection differences between men and women. That’s a theory that has to do with entire species. The “r” and “K” refer to the exponent of population growth and the carrying capacity of the environment, respectively. (dN/dt = r N (1 – N/K)) “r-selected” means n << K. That is, the species population is nowhere near its carrying capacity so it can afford to reproduce as quickly as it can. K-selected means the population is near its carrying capacity so it's a bad idea to produce more offspring than you can afford to support. There's no way, by this definition, that one sex can be r-selected and one can be K-selected.
Technically, you may be correct, but this does work as a nice shorthand for the two very distinct reproduction strategies of the two sexes. Think of it this way. Males, given their druthers, will father as many children as they can. This is the resources unlimited situation. Seem to remember some potentate having >1,000 of them. And, I think with the reduction in legitimacy, we are seeing an increase in the numbers of children that some males are having (while more are having none – note the males in inner-city communities bragging of having 10 kids with almost as many women, mostly paid for by the state). Females on the other hand face the resource limited “K-selected” situation. They must dedicate nine months for gestation, along with maybe a decade and a half per child. They cannot have 1,000 offspring. Cannot happen, except maybe with surrogate wombs, which has yet to be programmed into our DNA. And, up until maybe a century ago, the more children they tried to have, the more likely they were to die from having them, leaving the rest of their children motherless. All conducive to viewing reproduction as resource limited.
And, remember that we are talking probably hundreds of thousands of years of programming in both sexes here. Or, I should probably say, more of the female than the male here, since the male strategy has probably not changed as much as the female one has since we genetically diverged from our chimp relatives.
Jessica Boxer on Thursday, May 2 2013 at 11:43 pm said:
> Women are also a set of people ordered by a different attractiveness function. Both women and men strive to mate with people who are of a similar attractiveness rank within a range of acceptability. Everyone tries to reach up to a higher rank, but will ultimately compromise for someone pretty close to their rank, even slightly below.
You attribute a symmetry between men and women that does not exist.
Men always want more, and women always want better. Big difference.
If both sides pursue their objectives without concern for their sexual partners, you get the situation where women regard only mister one in thirty as barely acceptable, all the others being invisible, and mister one in thirty is a very busy man.
The fact is, Mister one in thirty is quite happy to dumpster dive. I think you yourself observed that for men, sex is like pizza. There is good pizza and there is better pizza, but just about any pizza is fine. So the result is twenty girls who know that they are not in an exclusive relationship with Mr one in thirty, five girls who think they were briefly in an exclusive relationship with him and might be in an exclusive relationship with him again, and five girls who think they are still in an exclusive relationship with him, despite the fact he does absolutely nothing to give them that impression.
Traditional morality was designed to prevent this by forcing both sides to accept what they did not want – less for men, and worse for women.
Winter on Thursday, May 2 2013 at 2:47 am said:
> We have declining male enrollment in Europe too without the hostile work environment.
The European environment is ten times as hostile, (consider Julian Assange), resulting in eye rolling and ridicule even from such US leftists as Michael Moore.
It is just that mentioning the hostility of the environment is even more forbidden in Europe than it is in the US.
Jessica Boxer on Thursday, May 2 2013 at 11:43 pm said:
> I have also noticed that the females tend to be much less poly than the males they engage with (which is to say they often have a token boyfriend, but still pair bond with their number one, unlike the male.)
By this, do you mean that she has a boyfriend who is in love with her. She is, however, in love with mister one in thirty, who can barely remember her name.
If so, I would agree with that account of the typical polyamorous relationship.
Where exactly is this “moral panic” about rape?
All I can hear here are a bunch of old, grumpy white men whinging.
A bit like Fox News on permanent loop.
Kids will make mistakes and get too drunk and pass out. That isn’t license to do whatever you want even if you are drunk too.
First, this is far more prevalent today than it was back when I was in college some 40 years ago. Most girls, you were lucky to get two drinks in them, if that, if you weren’t in a relationship with them. It was common knowledge that alcohol decreased inhibitions, and made a guy’s job all that much easier. Sure, as a college (or high school) guy, you tried to get the girls drunk, but it rarely worked. Probably as likely to have sex without getting her drunk, as getting her drunk, then having sex. Something like that. These were the mothers and grandmothers of the young women today binge drinking on campus these days. Alcohol consumption seems maybe to have gone up some with males during that time, but has skyrocketed with females. And, interestingly, at least to me, a lot of males drink through the week (esp. beer), and don’t drink that much more on the weekends, but a lot of those females are drinking primarily on the weekends, and doing so at very high levels. At my kid’s school, they call it “transporting” – the students are drunk enough that they have to be transported (i.e. in an ambulance), and the females notably outnumber the males.
So, yes, if a female has little experience with alcohol, gets drunk, and then has sex that she doesn’t want, then maybe you have a point. But, this rapidly falls apart, when all her friends are doing that, she is doing it week after week, at least as far as the drinking goes, etc. At least by college, most of the young women know that they make themselves quite vulnerable to less discriminating sex through alcohol usage. They learn about it in high school. They learn about it in orientation. And, a lot of sororities have “sober sister” programs, where a selected (and rotating) percentage of the women remain sober throughout the evening to protect their less sober sisters from being cut out of the pack by ambitious males. And, yet, they continue to put themselves in such vulnerable positions, week after week.
Why do they do it? Not really the alcohol consumption, but the alcohol followed by the quasi-consensual(but sometimes regretted) sex. Best answer I have ever heard (mentioned above) is that the social opprobrium of being drunk is significantly less than of being a slut. At least in the minds of the females. They know, deep down (i.e. probably from their genetic programming), that they (historically) need a permanent mate to help raise their children (which is what sex is supposed to be about), that the appearance of easy sexual availability reduces their appeal to higher status males (if for no other reason, than it reduces their apparent loyalty to any given male), and, thus, their chances of pair bonding with such. Maybe shorter – males prefer chaste females to unchaste ones because the former are less likely to cuckold their mates, passing the progeny of other males off as those of their mates. The more alpha the male, the more selective he can be for this apparent trait. And, since alpha males provide better progeny genetically, females are genetically programmed to mate with the highest alpha that they can catch. Which translates into the appearance of selectivity on the part of the females.
But, back to my original point – if a female has little experience with alcohol, accidentally gets drunk, and gets taken advantage of, then maybe we shouldn’t pin the blame on her, and maybe call it rape by the guy. But, this is not the norm, or even close. Most of the females getting drunk and “accidentally” having sex with some guy or another are intentionally putting themselves in that position of vulnerability. I would suggest that any female that puts herself in that position around multiple drunk males at the time in their life when their testosterone levels are at the highest, and the judgment centers of their brains have not completed development, bear as much, if not more, responsibility for any sex that may occur.
I have to seriously question whether someone who is hypergamic (or the male equivalent, a PUA) is capable of holding a relationship together anyway.
Maybe we’re just seeing the reality and the fact that so many people are emotional cripples more clearly, now that behaviours are no longer constrained by public morals that at least used to enforce ‘appearances’.
I doubt any claims that this generation is worse than any other, I think the only change is that we now have the technology to see more of the world faster and closer up, and so, patterns that were there all the time are becoming obvious.
Humanity just has a certain percentage of empty heads that are best avoided — no matter what age or culture you live in.
(Feminism or other such ideologies do not produce nasty people, but, they empower them by giving the nastiness a robust shape and being a handy weapon they can wield against the rest of us. If you remove the feminism, you’re still left with a nasty person who will just pick the next best tool to be annoying with instead.)
@V. Smith
“Crime and murder rates in Europe are NOT lower than in the US. There is a propaganda element in the reported statistics, where the numbers are tweaked in such a way as to enhance national prestige or self image.”
My 168 homicides in 2011 for the Netherlands (1/100,000) were “moord en doodslag”, which means anyone who died by violence of any kind. National politics in the Netherlands is trying to increase feelings of insecurity (they learned that from USA politicians, I think).
But you can go on pointing out “regions in the USA that are as safe as Switzerland”. For that I can point out regions in the Netherlands and Switzerland that are as safe as a convent. Averages do not work if you can chose your samples on their outcome. In the end, most of our inner cities are more safe than some of your country side (see, I can manipulate statistics too).
@V. Smith
“We have made the decision to have lower police manpower levels, because we have chosen not to live in a POLICE STATE.”
I would add to JustSaying’s response the massive number of private security guards in the USA. I have seen a guard on every street corner (and one in between) in some neighborhoods in NYC. Also, your police can do pretty much everything they like with impunity. Moreover, under USA law, pretty much anyone can be arrested at any time on some charge or other, only to be released at a large cost or even plea bargain. That sounds a lot like a police state to me.
In total, Europeans spend less on security than the USA, both in absolute terms as well as a percentage of GDP (see my earlier link).
@JustSaying
“This claim is so delusional, that I am inclined to not even debate it. Let’s compare again in several years ;)”
Germany has a trade surplus with China. Chinese exports are made on German machinery and tools. Dutch productivity per hour worked is almost identical to that of the USA
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL
But indeed, we often chose to spend time with our families instead of with our colleagues. That is an economic choice.
What you are saying is effectively that it is good to make sure people do not earn enough to take time off to spend with their (grand-)children.
What is missing from this discussion: the scary inability of certain feminist circles to draw CLEAR line between “doing X is not OK / not cool” and “one deserves to rot in prison for doing X”. Either something is all-OK or a crime. What is missing is those “grey line” acts that deserve to be punished by social ostracism, but not by prison.
Note to libertarians: one way you notice how much libertarian instincts people have, regardless of their actual ideology or talking points, is whether they consider punishment by social ostracism as a significant element of human interaction (akin to market self-regulation) or not, or in other how big is the gap between what they find unacceptable and what they would punish by law.
I find Mr. Friedman’s poker analogy apt. Actually something like this happened to me when I was young and foolish: passed out, dropped a debit card, some idiot acquaintances considered it fun to go buy booze with it, then put it back. Had they owned up to it the next day and offered to buy dinner or something I would have considered it an acceptable prank. After seeing it on my bank statement without any message from them, even though legally it was theft, it was too minor for me to inform the police, and I also felt I was a bit stupid myself, but I did inform our mutual acquaintances. I think haven’t seen those folks invited to subsequent parties. This is how punishment by social ostracism works.
“A better explanation that floats around is that education itself has been made to expect a level of self-control and sense-of-duty that girls attain years earlier and to a greater extend than boys.”
If this is an example of the sort of casual and unreflective bigotry on campus, no wonder young men aren’t interested.
@Bruce
I have a convenient time machine for you folks. I mean, interestingly, here in Eastern Europe Communism somehow managed stop time and to conserve certain older ways of thinking – yeah, I know it is weird, nevertheless – so even in 1995 in many ways our culture was equivalent to the American culture of say 1975 or maybe even 1955. So at 35 my life experience is bit similar to someone being 65 over there. Anyway, in my twenties, a cheery, bubbly, mellow-fuzzy woman at a party or disco club was consider perfectly OK but a seriously drunk one was considered disgusting, unwomanly, something an underclass person (“lumpenproletariat”) would do and not self-respecting woman. Same as cussing or fighting – mostly seen as a “man thing”. When I lived in the UK in 2006 – 2009 it was a fairly serious culture shock to see binge drinking, passed out, vomiting women, falling off high heels, losing shoes and going home barefoot in the winter, the police even considered handing out slippers, it was the first time of my life when I felt zero attraction to good looking women purely because of their behavior. Oh and they were cussing and fighting, too. The biggest surprise was the fights – not the hair-pulling, feminine catfights I would have expected from women but punch-throwing, man-style brawls. And the newspapers even mentioned “glassings”…
But what really made me surprised that if it was manly looking women (lesbian, trans-dressing, or just simply a coal miner type) doing this I would have understood that, but the real cognitive dissonance for me was and the real reason that even to this day I don’t fully understand this is that they tried to be girly with miniskirts, cleavages, good hairdos, lots of make-up, there was even a certain element of Hello Kitty style neoteny – cuteness.
Does this ring a bell in the US? Is there an explanation for these seemingly incompatible stuff?
@Bruce:
I offer another theory which I think is more plausible because it is a first-order effect, that they can not discern much differentiation between males (to discern which is fit to fulfill hypogamy), because statism has raised them all up too equally, thus they have to be mindless to get motivated for sex.
@TomM:
I can have consensual sex with a (different) beautiful woman 1/2 to 1/3 my age every day of the week, if I wish. I am not exaggerating. If you want to wager a bet of sufficient monetary value to be worth my time, I will demonstrate it to you. I can even mix in the occasional virgin or one past bf, to refute the claim I can only get sluts. Besides the fact that none guess my age being over 35, despite being 47.9 and battling peripheral neuropathy. Who is grumpy?
Why did the U.S.A. create the IMBRA law to invade the privacy and discourage males from using arbitrage to better their and their female mate’s lives? Marriages between filipinas and Americans have a much lower divorce rate than the average for the U.S.A.. Note I do hear horror stories of foreigners who abuse the devotion of the filipina, such as a recent one from a relative of a Brit who extinguishes his cigarette butts on the skin of his wife. I hope I never come into contact with him, as I might not be able to control my outrage (of course allowing to hear first his side of the story).
@JAD:
I would prefer to cast your moralism as an economic phenomenon so as to be more objective.
Without the backstop of statism, women and men have to settle for less than they want. They keep their eyes open for better or more, while their effort to make what they have harmonious is proportional to the reality of the restrictions/resources they have. This is why I say women are happier in societies with less debt-funded statism, because they live in reality. In the west, women declare happiness with for example shopping and material status, while in the Philippines women declare happiness with abundance of friends, family, children, marital sex, and conversation. Neither are perfectly mated to the alpha-male and the filipinas will dream of higher material lifestyle, but the latter are more fulfilled generally speaking and have more personal power. Because of the lack of statist backstop, the filipina typically won’t risk cheating on her good husband and losing him (the filipinos who game this and under support their wives run the risk of the wife looking for a better mate). I asked the women near my mountain abode why they slave away peeling bananas and don’t go to the city to earn a higher salary, and they responded because they would miss their husbands too much. Western women have expectations which can’t be met, because theirs is a misallocated reality. This lack of suitable males is natural outcome of removing the diversity of economic stratification in society. And there are the outlier filipinas who are very smart over achievers, so I am not advocating ignorant, barefoot, and always pregnant women. The free market balance will be some where in between the west and the Philippines.
@Shenpen:
+1
@Winter:
No it is debt funded. If it were free market economic, I wouldn’t complain, rather applaud higher productivity that enables the arts, etc.. Germany is run on a debt subsidy given to the rest of Europe. Let’s talk in a few years.
@JustSaying
“Let’s talk in a few years.”
I have heard phrases like that since the 1970s (I am that old). The markets have spoken about that probability recently:
Negative interest rates spell final defeat for beleaguered savers
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeremy-warner/9456634/Negative-interest-rates-spell-final-defeat-for-beleaguered-savers.html
The Netherlands is one of those countries that occasionally get paid to borrow money.
For my edification, what are “k-type” and “r-type”? Googling was not helpful, turning up references to the main sequence of stars and a game respectively.
@ JustSaying
> I can have consensual sex with a (different) beautiful woman 1/2 to 1/3 my age every day of the week, if I wish. I am not exaggerating.
I don’t doubt it. Precisely how your sexual proclivity is relevant to the question of whether we are collectively (as our host would have it) in the grip of a moral panic somehow related to the incidence of rape, however, remains unclear.
My point was that there seems to be more than a few commenters here who think that the Evil Feminists are repressing us brothers (for they are icky females and must not be trusted) and we must all Rise Up against the outrage that is Being of Accused of Rape When All One Did Was Merely Engage in Nonconsensual Sex, officer.
Maybe I am oversimplifying, but it seems to me that the best way to avoid such injustice is simply to make sure that such sex as one is fortunate to enjoy is of the consensual variety.
> Why did the U.S.A. create the IMBRA law
I am not a U.S. citizen and confess I am unfamiliar with this legislation. According to Wikipedia (I know, I know, all you conservatives hate Wikipedia because it is Evil and Progressive, but bear with me for I am but a simple foreigner) IMBRA requires international marriage brokers to do some due diligence before arranging a commercial marriage transaction.
This seems to include such draconian requirements as not advertising the availability of child brides and checking the criminal history of potential customers.
Hardly seems the commencement of a Pinko New World Order.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Marriage_Broker_Regulation_Act
@esr –
Actually, he did pretty thoroughly describe a line marriage, in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. I’m surprised he didn’t play with that model more in his later works.
I came here via Instapundit. I will be back. This was one of the most interesting posts I’ve read in awhile on this topic.
I have been following with derision this hyper-feminist perspective for my entire adult life. Early on as a professional woman I realized that this ideology had nothing to do with “equality” but everything to do with what I call the de-masculinization of our culture. To what end, well matriarchy, not equality. When I hear women putting down their husbands or men generally my typical response is to bemoan a world without men. I can imagine no worse hell than to be surrounded and completely interactive with only women or men who act like women. Yet you only need to pay attention to any commercial or program to learn that men, especially white men, are the stupidest, mysogynistic, racist creatures. You are just left in total wonderment that our species has survived at all since according to the experts these men have “all the power, coupled with white privilege.” It’s all so astounding and perplexing since they are so “stupid.” Wouldn’t that piss you off? Wouldn’t that just drive you to make things up?
Something somewhere is stupid and it’s not men, either the white or “of color” variety.
This hyper-feminism is just like any other progressive ideology: it is counter to our natural being. That’s what frustrates them and makes them so bitter and angry. After all of this work, after all of this money, after all of this propaganda spewed out in Masters and Phd programs in “women’s and gender studies” guess what, women still want a man, most of us want him all to ourselves, and we still want to have babies. Then horror of most horrors we want to suckle our children, coo over our children, nurture our children and take care of our children. We would rather do that than go to meetings, talk on the phone and order other adults around. Maybe some men would prefer this as well, but since we give birth we get first dibs. There really should be some perks that come with that process and most men realize that, at least the ones who are content to let us have them all to ourselves.
I can have consensual sex with a (different) beautiful woman 1/2 to 1/3 my age every day of the week, if I wish. I am not exaggerating.
In the Philippines?
Tremendous. Say hello to Gary Glitter if you happen to run into him.
Why did the U.S.A. create the IMBRA law to invade the privacy and discourage males from using arbitrage to better their and their female mate’s lives?
Possibly because they thought there was an enormous and rather one-sided potential for exploitation there.
Just a wild stab in the dark.
@Winter: I’m “that old” too. I did indeed believe that debt-funding would create an economic crash in the 1970’s. You correctly note that it didn’t happen then, and hasn’t happened yet (at least not at a level where widespread chaos and social breakdown occurs). So…do you postulate that therefore it will never happen? Can we go on like this indefinitely, or are we baking a civilization-level crash into our economic cake? I still have an old-fashioned belief: “Things that can’t go on forever won’t.”
I’m not quite sure why this article reminded me of this experience, but here goes…
Years ago, I visited my youngest sister in Boston (I live in Atlanta). While I was visiting, and on a complete whim, we decided to take a short road trip up to Kennebunkport. On the way, we took a side trip to Portsmouth, to eat lunch.
While in Portsmouth, we went “shopping.” For men, “shopping” is a mission: go out, target stuff, get stuff, bring stuff home. For women, “shopping” is entertainment: have stuff displayed to you in a sort of pageant; maybe buy stuff.
In any event, at one store in Portsmouth my sister saw a coat she pronounced “horrible.” She then went on to feel the coat. I asked her why, since the coat was “horrible,” had she taken the time to finger it, up and down. “Oh, I just wanted to know whether it felt as bad as it looked.”
At that point, I realized that women really do have higher sensitivities than men, that men are meant for fighting and f*cking, that women are meant for culture, procreation, and transmission, and that attempts to change this natural order are bound to wreck.
@JustSaying
I fail to see how you get to your point.
A definition of rape as “non-consensual sex” (with consent being given, not just assumed) in no way requires a mess of statism. It’s like saying that murder, being the killing of someone without a just reason, requires a mess of statism. You’re talking silly.
As for “it is your personal responsibility to protect yourself”, so if someone murders another person, it’s the fault of the victim for not protecting themselves sufficiently? If someone is walking down the street at night, and is robbed, is it their fault for not sufficiently protecting themselves? You seem to be playing “blame the victim” (something I noted is associated with rape culture).
@Mark Atwood I actually enjoy Winter’s comments. Though I do sometimes have to wonder if they are a masochist. They keep coming back for more, even though many of the other commentators here seem to be too thick to get the point.
—-
At everyone, I’ve provided some things that are associated with rape culture above. These include stigmatisation of victims, focus on the alleged perp, and victim blaming. Does anyone disagree that these three things happen in society? And that at least two of these discourage victims from reporting rape?
@Tim Condon
“So…do you postulate that therefore it will never happen?”
Ah, now we come to the heart of the matter. It can indeed happen. It has happened before, and it will happen again. The point is that you cannot predict whether and when it will happen because people will see this coming and try to adapt.
If you have followed EU politics, you see they are currently working to contain the debt crisis. History never repeats itself, but the UK and the Netherlands have over the centuries mostly repaid their debts. And with the recent negative interests on government bonds, the market actually believes them.
“I know, I know, all you conservatives hate Wikipedia because it is Evil and Progressive, but bear with me for I am but a simple foreigner”
I found this amusing, given that the founder of Wikipedia was, and I presume still is, an admirer of Ayn Rand.
@Shenpen
This is exactly what I was thinking earlier this week when a MO state legislator proposed a law that would make it a felony, punishable by 1-8 years in prison, for a member of the clergy to have sexual contact with whom he had provided counseling within the previous 180 days. I heard about this on a KC radio program that discussed the proposed law. It was defended on the basis that we don’t let attorneys or psychologists have such relationships with their clients. But we don’t incarcerate those professionals who do so. We strip them of their professional licenses¹. I find it distasteful when someone takes advantage of an asymmetrical power relationship, but I can’t justify sending Men With Badges And Guns to enforce my tastes.
¹That too goes beyond what I support as a minarchist; a private certification organization could withdraw its imprimatur while leaving the person so punished free to practice his profession with clients who understand that he does not maintain that organization’s standards, and agree to those terms.
@Winter
“I suspect the point of this discussion is that it is all the fault of the women.”
No.
Many men were complicit in the changes that feminism created. It was (second wave) feminism that tried to convince everyone that men and women are completely equal in all ways, and then followed that on with “Oh now we are *more* equal”. This completely ignores biology.
Women are gifted with many things that Feminism does everything it can to deny. They are gifted with the greater power in the dating (pre-marriage) world, their beauty. This greater power in the world of the single people comes at a price, that price is limited time to capitalize on it. Feminism tries to teach women to ignore trying to be beautiful while young and instead spend time acquiring male power. Feminism tries to teach all women that you will still be beautiful and desireable as a mate well into your 50s, which is completely absurd and worthy of humor. This entirely undermines the power the ladies have to secure a good mate when they are young and able to bear young (a LIMITED TIME OFFER if there ever was one). Feminism preaches absolute lies to (now older) ladies who subscribed to this nonsense and ended up marriageless and/or childless.
Feminism is also in furious denial of the value of masculinity. Feminism teaches that women can successfully raise children by themselves, that they do not need a husband to have a family. The reality is that single motherhood is the largest single way to raise every single risk factor for a child. The black and hispanic communities in America are now dealing with disastrous consequences of extremely high single-mother rates in those communities.
http://www.returnofkings.com/2090/how-black-america-has-predicted-our-future
The reality that everyone knows, but doesn’t talk about, is that good fathers are CRUCIAL for a stable family structure. However feminism attempts to undermine fathers at every turn. Feminism made divorce easy and rewarding for women. Feminism portrays fathers in mass media as bumbling idiots unworthy of praise. Feminism teaches us that little boys are socially dangerous and require drugs to make them peaceful. Feminism shames “nice guys” for attempting to treat women with the gentle gloves of equality as perverted men who “only want sex”. Feminism invents language time and time again attempting to paint men as part of some vast conspiracy against women that does not exist. Again, there’s lots of men in power who are fully complicit in all of this.
Women did not specifically cause these problems, feminism did. Feminism has been against the American Family FROM THE START and those chickens are about to come home to roost in a big way.
@Winter
>However, I will fight everyone who advocates carrying concealed weapons to make our neighborhood even more safe than it already is.
Fine, just promise you won’t fight to ban 3D printers not even when they can do this: http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/03/that-3d-printed-handgun-youve-been-waiti
@JustSaying:
@David Friedman:
Doesn’t matter what the founder is. Matters what the *editors* are. There’s a difference between a hobby and a calling. For a conservative maintaining a wikipedia page on a topic will generally be a hobby, not something with a political objective in mind.
This, generally speaking, is the difference between the Progressives and the Conservatives. To a Progressive the government is the vehicle to do “Good”, and they send their best and brightest. To the Conservative government is at best a tool to prevent harm, doing “Good” is for other institutions. Thus they generally send the also-rans, or folks who’ve already had a career doing on other things. And no, Dole, Bush (either of them), McCain and Romney were not Conservatives.
@James Jones: “For my edification, what are ‘k-type’ and ‘r-type’? Googling was not helpful, turning up references to the main sequence of stars and a game respectively.”
google on “k r reproductive strategy” and you’ll get more (relevant) hits than you have time to read. (Note the space between “k” and “r”.)
My wife, commenting on your post, suggests that one possible response to the shortage of suitable men is for more women to become lesbians, reducing the number on the heterosexual market. My rather casual impression is that the homosexual/heterosexual line is much fuzzier for women than for men, in which case that option could result in a significant degree of elasticity in the demand curve for male husbands. The option is made more attractive by the existence of institutions, sperm banks, that let a lesbian couple produce a child by one of them without having to give the biological father any control. Pushing a little farther forward, it seems likely that in not too long it will be possible for two women to produce a daughter of whom they are both biological parents.
>My rather casual impression is that the homosexual/heterosexual line is much fuzzier for women than for men
Yes, there are several lines of evidence for that; I’ve actually blogged about it in the past Most notably here (you’d probably find the comments interesting too).
On the other hand, I think it’s doubtful that a much larger percentage of women than has already done so can be persuaded to give up on men – as opposed to competing harder for them. The reason I say this is that we now know what the results of three decades of lesbian-separatist recruiting look like. It appears there simply aren’t that many women whose sexual wiring really allows them this option. (Unsurprisingly; the genes for it would have been selected against in the EEA.)
@ Pam – “This hyper-feminism . . . after all of this propaganda spewed out in Masters and Phd programs in ‘women’s and gender studies’ guess what, women still want a man, most of us want him all to ourselves, and we still want to have babies.”
This is an example of the power of subversive memetic infection. It can override evolutionary programming, essential self-interest, rationality, common sense, and core happiness.
The criminalization and public denouncement of rape does not preclude the existence of rape culture. Rape culture, in this day and age, is about the tacit, “wink wink nudge nudge”, “boys will be boys” attitude that the government, media, and other institutions take towards rape. When a woman walks alone at night wearing a short skirt or other revealing attire, and is attacked, and the police say “she was asking for it with what she was wearing” — that’s rape culture. When the convictions were handed down in the Steubenville High School case and the media was abuzz with commentary on what the perpetrators had to endure, having been duly convicted of a heinous crime — with little to no word about the victim’s suffering — that’s rape culture.
Rape culture — and its proximate cause, male privilege — are real. They are not confabulations of an evil leftist conspiracy to oppress poor beleaguered white males. They are artifacts of some deeply-ingrained cultural habits which most of us aren’t aware of, but which aren’t hard to spot once you’ve been trained to observe carefully. A good deal of feminist “consciousness raising” is training people to carefully observe their unconscious cultural habits.
@Jeff Read
The facts that it’s 100% illegal and that a vast majority of the culture doesn’t do it and denounces it are what makes the word “culture” a misnomer.
I really don’t know where you get the idea that this is the general American cultural attitude toward rape. Sure, every now and then someone says something stupid, or excuses a rapist they want to support (e.g. Bill Clinton), but that’s the exception and not the rule.
Steubenville was largely about blacks defending other blacks accused of a crime, and to some extent about liberal whites excusing blacks accused of a crime. Even those “boys will be boys” defenses aren’t evidence for “rape culture” because, again, the vast majority of the culture condemns such actions.
If you support condemning a culture at large for the actions of a small minority in it, you should have no trouble with calling Islam a “terrorist culture” or American blacks a “gangster culture.” Either would be just as unfair as calling the U.S. a “rape culture.”
The “she was asking for it” issue is a bit of a gray area. If my car is stolen, I’m clearly a victim. If my car is stolen after I leave it running in a bad neighborhood with the keys in the ignition and the windows down, I’m still a victim, but I also bear some responsibility for doing something foolish. If a woman passes out drunk at a frat party and something bad happens, it does not lessen the crime, but she does bear some responsibility. To acknowledge that is common sense, not “rape culture.”
> Otherwise, my thinking on their issues is independently derived – more rooted in biology and economics, less in social criticism and less in direct reaction to feminism.
That’s one of the awesome things about truth, is that it can be independently derived from multiple paths.
The PUA “how to get laid” stuff is for younger men who have gotten tired of doing all the stuff they were told that works, realized that it can’t work, and go looking for what does.
After a while, the smarter, wiser, and/or older ones start asking why does it work, and what does it mean and imply on a longer term social and cultural basis. That’s the Red Pill.
It’s an unpleasant process of realization, but like all types of getting wiser, one is glad it happened, after it does. I’ve gone through it, and I’ve handed the red pill to two other people so far, and it was an unpleasant enlightenment for them as well. Most other people, I let stew where they are.
Me, I “enjoy the decline” (another red pill blogosphere phrase worth knowing).
@Jeremy you’ve obviously heard of the different waves of feminism. So why do you seem insist that all feminism is the same? There are various types of feminism, and feminists often violently disagree with each other. I won’t explain how what you’ve written isn’t true feminism, for that reason. (Feminism, ultimately, is about men and women being treated as, and acknowledged as, equals. With the fact that men and women are sometimes different (men and women are generally equivalent when it comes to intelligence, though men are generally stronger) acknowledged, and accounted for.)
@PapayaSF you obviously disagree with the terminology. But do you disagree that women are quite often stigmatised and disbelieved if they claim to have been raped? Do you disagree that victim blaming occurs a hell of a lot more when it comes to rape than it does in other areas? Why aren’t their more people saying, “oh those idiots, they deserved to get murdered living in Iraq, they should just leave”, or “it’s their own fault for living in a dangerous area, that’s why they got murdered”? (Maybe because they can’t afford to move?)
@esr on Friday, May 3 2013 at 12:32 am said:
> In the poly culture I’m familiar with, it is normal for both women and men to have a primary to whom they are strongly pair-bonded.
I think that is true when there are children involved — the parents obviously have a special shared bond, and I personally do not know of any poly relationships where the kids are from mixed parentage (excluding step children from previous relationships.) It is not my experience talking to people that poly is primarily initiated by women, though it kind of depends on what you mean my “primary initiation”. Not that it doesn’t happen of course, but in my experience it is significantly rarer. Notwithstanding the distinct possibility of reporting error.
In terms of women being more involved in the theory, I think I agree with that. However, I think there is an underlying reason for that, in terms of the social culture and pressures on women deriving from the fact that the fact that the word “slut” applied to a man is mostly positive, and to a woman is mostly negative. Consequently, for a woman to be in a poly thing rather than being a good girl in a nice mono relationship demands that she find sufficient justification in her mind for her choices to resist the onslaught of societal disapproval. Men have that too, but not nearly as much as women do. After all, the meme is that boys will be boys.
In terms of stability, that really depends on where all the pieces fit. A real polyfidelity relationship with multiple commits is a very different thing that swinging and casual dating. These latter to are a much larger percentage of poly than full on polyfidelity. And these types of relationship are not expected to be stable. Though for sure, you are right, about 50% of these relationships have a stable pair bond in them too (again the numbers are based on the people I know.)
I’ll certainly agree that being stigmatized and disbelieved about rape does happen, I just don’t believe that it happens most of the time, or that it constitutes a “culture” in the U.S.
I also don’t agree that “victim blaming occurs a hell of a lot more when it comes to rape.” I see small amounts of “victim blaming” at various times, and not a noticeable amount more regarding rape. When an elderly person dies in a car accident, you’ll sometimes hear “They shouldn’t have been driving.” When a business cuts back employment due to Obamacare, I’ve had an otherwise bright friend say “They should have structured their business better.” When a soldier is killed in Afghanistan, you may hear “He shouldn’t have joined the Army.” I’ve personally never heard anyone say, about a woman who was raped at gunpoint or knifepoint, that it was “her own fault.” I’m not sure I’ve even read such a comment online. I’ve only heard related sentiments expressed when, as with Steubenville, the woman did something foolish that greatly increased the odds of something bad happening. Even then it’s very rare to hear anyone actually excuse the rapists as having done nothing wrong.
And, of course, part of the problem is that the definition of “rape” has been vastly expanded in recent decades. When people try to use it mean “She got drunk and did something she regretted the next day,” or “He persisted in asking for sex until she gave in,” then it’s inevitable that people will look at all claims of “rape” with a more jaundiced eye. Thus much of the “evidence” of “rape culture” is a result of activists trying to expand the definition of rape. It’s the same way with “racism”: the wider the use of the term, the more the serious cases become diluted by the less serious or frivolous ones.
@ Mark Atwood
> the red pill
You mean this: http://www.mgtow.com/ ?
What a load of infantile, poisonous garbage.
Ok, I give up. What means ‘in the EEA’?
Obviously it refers in some fashion to some part of the last 100k years or so of human evoulution, but I haven’t heard the term before.
Jim
>Ok, I give up. What means ‘in the EEA’?
Should have been EAA. I have a tendency to typo that one.
Environment of Ancestral Adaptation. It’s a term intended to remind people in the conversation that human behavioral adaptations developed in an environment very different from today’s. As regards the post topic some of the relevant differences are (a) high incidence of dangerous infectious diseases, (b) high incidence of death in childbirth, and (c) no reliable contraception or paternity tests.
@PapayaSF I don’t agree with you that the meaning of the term “rape” has expanded in any meaningful sense. Rape is rape. If there isn’t consent, that’s rape. If person A persists in saying, “sex sex sex” until the person B is too tired to say no, and then person A has sex with person B, that’s probably rape (because rape isn’t just about “no means no”, it’s also about “yes means yes”). That’s not giving in, that’s being forced to give in. (Though, the legal definition has expanded, e.g. husbands can now rape their wives, previously it wasn’t considered rape. But it was still rape, the law just didn’t consider it rape.)
Rape isn’t “I was drunk, I voluntarily had sex with someone, and then regretted it the next morning”. Rape is “I was drunk, I passed out, and someone started having sex with me (without prior consent)”. It may then continue “I may have then continued to have sex with them without telling them to stop, and I regretted it in the morning”. But that second section is not the point, and is irrelevant to the fact that the first part is, wait for it, rape.
Talking about Steubenville. A young women did something foolish. She got drunk around a bunch of rapists. That’s like what I said in my first comment, that women who went and got married to a man and became dependent on him, and he later lost his job and become depressed and abusive? She shouldn’t have got married in the first place should she. It’s her fault. No it’s not actually, and it’s not the fault of the young women at Steubenville. The only way to avoid being raped, is to not be around rapists (and you just can’t tell, so good luck).
Rape culture. Rape culture is not just stigmatisation and disbelief.
From http://cogentcomment.com/2013/03/19/so-youre-tired-of-hearing-about-rape-culture/.
See also http://www.shakesville.com/2009/10/rape-culture-101.html
And this comment is going to be too long and won’t get through the spam filter if I keep putting in links, so I’ll leave it at that.
I’m not saying that rape culture is all pervasive (unlike, say, the state). I’m saying that rape culture exists.
All right, Michael, but what about the other side of the equation? What do you suggest for those males who are now so terrified of being unjustly accused of rape that they are simply avoiding situations that might leave them vulnerable to such attacks? Like, say, going to college? Or are you going to simply blame those victims?
You think fear of false rape accusations might be a significant factor in the decline of male college enrollments? Intriguing idea, though most eighteen-year-olds I’ve known haven’t been much for dwelling on worst case scenarios like that.
@ Michael – “I’m saying that rape culture exists.”
OK, its time to call bullshit on this.
The term “rape culture” is semantic distortion and infiltration. Cultural traits are, by definition, societal attributes that are dominant, pervasive, and persist over time. The behaviors cited by Michael are aberrant and rare, and thereby constitute a mutation within the established culture. Dominant societal and cultural norms proscribe rape and its marginal forms, but you can’t forbid mutation in culture any more than you can forbid it in physical evolution.
Once you accept the term “rape culture” as legitimate language, the memetic chessmasters have already won.
People are expected not to provoke strangers with insults and to lock their doors – even though polite people get bashed all the time and a locked door will not deter a professional burglar. In the absence of perfect enforcement burglary and violence are inevitable; therefore they are, to some degree, accepted as part of life, with the victim shouldering some responsibility for prevention and recovery. So it is with rape. Since every culture incorporates some level of rape acceptance such a statement as “rape culture” can only be made comparatively between cultures (the priorities of rape activists are not a meaningful measuring stick). The modern, white-dominated world is the safest, most rape-unfriendly culture yet to have existed. In fact, the survival of rape activist ideology is contingent upon the generosity of males in our culture. There is of course, room for improvement (“perfect” doesn’t exist, so this is a null statement). But the designation “rape culture” is as bullshitty as other ideologically-motivated terminology – try talking to some people on this forum about “freedom” some time if you want some entertainment.
@ Jay Maynard
>What do you suggest for those males who are now so terrified of being unjustly accused of rape that they are simply avoiding situations that might leave them vulnerable to such attacks? Like, say, going to college?
Are you seriously arguing that there are real live individual males who have decided not to go to college … because they are “terrified of being unjustly accused of rape”?
I call “citation needed” on that bullshit.
One thing that has sort of always bothered me, especially during the sensitivity training at college was this odd contradiction we hold in the US. On the one hand, if you go to a bar, get black out drunk and then have sex, you were raped and bear no responsibility in anything that happened, and anyone that suggests (even if they agree you were raped) that you should have exercised better judgement is immediately torn to shreds.
At the same time, if you go to a bar, get black out drunk and then get behind the wheel of a car, you are completely and utterly responsible for everything and anything that happens to you or as a result of you being in that car.
@tpmoney
That is an apples and oranges comparison. If you are actually unconcious, and someone puts you in a car with a brick on the gas pedal, you are not responsible for everything that happens (though I’ll grant you that might be hard to prove.)
There is a huge difference between someone doing something to you because you are not capable of stopping them, and you doing something that you are not capable of doing.
Don’t get me wrong, most of that sensitivity stuff is ridiculous. But that doesn’t mean that any girl drunk and unconscious has somehow lost her right to the integrity of her body any more than my leaving my car unlocked means I am responsible for my car being stolen.
Both might be bad choices, but that doesn’t mean that the mistake accrues any responsibility.
Let me turn it on you: lets say you were drunk and unconscious in a bar and some random guy came up and fucked you in the ass. Would you be comfortable that you deserved a significant amount of the blame?
Indeed, this is silly. There was a good post above about credentialism that is much better on this issue.
There’s a distinction to be made between being unconscious (and therefore unable to, say, drive), and being conscious but unable to remember clearly in the morning (or perhaps just making poor choices).
@DMcCunney:
“It will be awfully complicated if you *have* an IQ that breaks the bank and a lot of social intelligence, unless you confine your mating behavior to those in your own micro-culture who share your assumptions about How Things Are Done, and even then, opportunities or confusion are manifest.”
I disagree. I’ve been pretty successful over a culturally diverse set. While there’s a level of intelligence below which I lose interest, I’ve pursued (and been pursued by) men of different ages, from different countries and regions, different SECs, and so on. I attribute it in large part to not having (m)any assumptions about How Things Are Done.
This *is* something that can be brute-forced with a combination of intellect and social aptitude — unfortunately the levels required are non-trivial. The easy-to-reproduce bits are mostly:
* a willingness to assume that anything “off” is honest social awkwardness or mismatched expectations rather than rudeness or malice, until proven otherwise
* a willingness to over-communicate and take pains to get explicit consent when even marginally unsure, even for actions (like placing a hand on someone’s shoulder in the context of conversation) that one might normally take for granted as acceptable
* the skill to communicate social boundaries in a way that doesn’t put others on the defensive
* a commitment not just to saying what one really means, but to do everything possible to reduce social risk (including the perception thereof) inherent in others doing the same in return
The harder-to-reproduce bits have a lot to do with:
* being able to quickly baseline people in order to later read and adapt to subtle cues of comfort/discomfort/attraction
* reducing for the other person the social risk inherent not just in communicating directly, but in expressing interest directly
* escalating smoothly from less intimate, more ambiguous behavior to more intimate, less ambiguous behavior, despite any cultural disconnects that might make it difficult to ascertain what another person finds more/less intimate or more/less ambiguous
* being willing to take social risk oneself to prevent the other person having to take it
@Winter
I’m well aware that, despite my own body image issues, my appearance isn’t hurting my chances with men. Hence the “suck that, magazines” comment. It would have been hard for me not to notice, as a tomboy with a mostly male social circle, that what women say men want, and what they actually tend to go for are not the same things.
I find that disconnect both hilarious and sad.
@Winter:
We already had that discussion in a prior blog about the true meaning of negative sovereign interest rates for the “too big to fail countries” juxtaposed by very high interest rates for anything enterprise in the bankrupt developed countries that is not backstopped by those aforementioned sovereigns.
Yeah like stealing all of Spain’s social security funds to buy Spain’s sovereign bonds to keep the interest rates low since summer 2012.
@Tim Condon:
During the 1970s, the USA was a creditor nation with less than a majority depending on government aid. We are withing a few years (probably less than 3) of major contagion and chaos. This will worse through the 2020s. It will end with massive suffering and war.
@TomM:
At least one commentator above claimed that he was accused of raping someone he never had sex with.
More perversely and pervasively, the statism is amplified into negative effects on everyone, which we are detailing. Statism can never do just the thing it was intended to do, because centralization can’t anneal to diverse outcomes– the degrees-of-freedom are destroyed. For example, we are discussing about many western women can no longer find a suitable mate, because most of the men appear to have the same social status (artificially induced by debt statism). We are documenting invasions of privacy that distort normal beneficial economic arbitrage, etc..
First you assume that any marriage is ever not a commercial transaction. Don’t you get it that for (even western) women it always is an economic decisions? And the background check is required before even getting contact information. How about you submit to a background check before every date? Welcome to a police state.
@Pam:
I met a 28 year old filipina online who had been working as an English and Math teacher (Math major) in Thailand and already accomplished her moderate financial goals (lift her family out of poverty, etc), and I was trying to encourage her to learn computer science and further advance her career. She was “done with that, time to get married and have kids” mode and I had no chance of keeping her focused on her math capabilities. I keep trying to find a pretty, smart one who wants to focus on knowledge development for at least several years before childbearing. We men want to build things, women want to nurture. I suppose there are outliers, but I haven’t found her yet.
@Adrian Smith:
I remember that being one of the BS reasons cited by proponents of the law. Perhaps they’ve never seen what happens to a foreigner who marries a filipina– they end up supporting the entire family including 5th cousins.
@Willam O B’Livion:
To minimize the risk that these 1.6 billion rounds could be misused in a “crisis”, I would be much less alarmed if they were not hollow point, to insure they are really just useful for training. Our nation is founded on the concept of the citizen police and army, thus we should remain diligent on the details. I am alarmed that there is a 10 year planning, and the slippery slope of the purchases being accelerated under the chaos coming. I would be much less alarmed if we didn’t have 47,000 federal police under the TSA. The slippery slope of precedents.
@David Friedman:
@esr:
But the effect on the men has apparently been more unbounded.
One can gain insight by interviewing bar girls in Angeles City. The American men often request the lesbians, select the most slutty or the minors on drugs. The Asians (Koreans, Malaysians, Singaporeans) have a voracious sex appetite, select the pretty dolls, and pay well.
@Jeff Read:
And females will be females, if not for your Frankenstein statist ideas about “organizing” what society should be.
@Michael:
Ditto above and Roger Philips reply. The negative effects far outweigh the noble unattainable perfection.
Dead is not dubious as “consent” (justified killing versus murder notwithstanding). And yes individuals must protect themselves against murder. The state can rarely stop a murder before it happens. Every 80 years or so, the state will fail to protect and there will be widespread death without armed citizenry.
Of course you are! Leaving the car unlocked is causative. It doesn’t excuse the culprit, but he may never be caught, so the costs fall onto the next-most-causative person – you.
Yes! Again, if the culprit can be caught he should be punished because (modulo his own nature) he had absolute power to stop the crime (by not doing it). Consequently punishment will discourage future rapes. But if he cannot be found then the victim will have to assume some responsibility because he was the next most able to stop the crime (by not willfully becoming unconscious in an unsafe place).
None of this changes that interfering with an unconscious person is and ought to be a crime. But the “victim can’t be blamed” thing is silly. Blame isn’t a substance that comes in portions. It’s an expression of who had the opportunity to prevent a particular outcome from happening.
Here’s a boring story: I remember sharing an office space at university with some other students, one of whom was stupid enough to leave the door open while they left the room for a mere 5 minutes (on an upper floor that was restricted to keycard holders). Their wallet was of course stolen off their desk while they were gone. They felt aggrieved by me for not having seen the perpetrator (there were high dividers in the room, which housed about 12 desks). It didn’t occur to them that not only were they stupid for ignoring the big sign on the door warning of the need to keep the door shut due to theft, but that they had endangered the belongings of everyone else who used the room, and increased the likelihood of future thefts! All by shutting the god-damn door – while they expected me to sacrifice my concentration to watch over their belongings. The moral of the story is: you need to modify the behavior of the people who have the power to prevent a particular negative outcome – within the limits of your ability to control people – not get caught up in fictions about fairness.
>>Should have been EAA. I have a tendency to typo that one.
About what I figured.
I might quibble with your response a bit — ‘ high incidence of dangerous infectious diseases’ is fairly recent in evolution terms, particularly evolution of instinctual behavior. It’s just the last 10k years or so that epidemics would have been common enough to affect selection much. And probably quite a lot less than that for STDs to have been a big issue.
What is with you and your uncanny ability to blog nothing but absolute intelligence?
@me in response to Adrian Smith:
Even before marriage, in nearly every internet cafe I visit, I overhear some random filipina lying (“I love you honey”) to multiple men to get money wired to her. Yeah “enormous”ly one-sided, lol.
@Roger Phillips
> Of course you are! Leaving the car unlocked is causative.
Welcome back Roger, haven’t heard from you in a while.
But you are wrong. Leaving a car door is not causative, it is just not preventative. An unlocked door doesn’t cause a thief, a locked door merely interferes with his thieving.
No-one has the right to open my door; regular folks don’t need a lock to prevent them from stealing my car. The purpose of a lock is to increase the difficulty for bad people from doing bad stuff. The fact that I don’t take steps to prevent bad people in no way reduces the badness of the bad people.
The only reason we have locks is to deal with the pragmatic reality that there are a lot of bad people in the world.
@Jessica Boxer:
From which Godly power do you claim such rights?
Nature does not give you such rights. Lock your door, if you don’t want it opened.
@JustSaying
> From which Godly power do you claim such rights?
From the common law principle of private property, the concept that is at the core of 90% of the law.
> Nature does not give you such rights. Lock your door, if you don’t want it opened.
How good a lock? How many locks? Do I need a burglar alarm? Perhaps an armed guard?
@JustSaying –
In the US – the 4th Amendment to the Constitution – “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, …”
No, we respectfully and mutually offer these rights (considerations) to each other.
Lemme come try your front doorknob some evening. Am I welcome to whatever I can carry out of your dwelling?
I remember that being one of the BS reasons cited by proponents of the law. Perhaps they’ve never seen what happens to a foreigner who marries a filipina– they end up supporting the entire family including 5th cousins.
Well, of course, if my family and I were short of the readies for various aspects of health care, education or shelter, and some Internet millionaire just happened to marry one of my comelier nieces, I like to imagine that I would not consider imposing upon him with importunate requests for assistance. But then, I’m privileged to have never been in that position.
No sign of him, then? He might be travelling as Paul Gadd. He wore out his welcome in SE Asia a bit, but they may not have heard about him in the Philippines yet.
@Jessica Boxer & John D. Bell:
In all due respect, private property rights are not nature– they have to be enforced, that is why we hire security guards. The quoted clause of the 4th amendment is about rights which the government should not be given, has nothing to do with individual behavior in nature. The failure to secure your private property is an invitation to require statism and thus destroy the 4th amendment.
It is up to your assessment of risk versus cost analysis. Being individual, there will be many experiments and thus mathematically annealing to the optimum aggregate outcome.
@Adrian Smith:
So where is that enormous disadvantage that requires the police state of violating the privacy of those who wish to date? Filipinos are much less helpless than westerners, because they realize they have to protect their own outcomes. They (individually, not collectively) are typically not going to be on the losing side of any deal (not since the natives took a mirror in exchange for land, because land was not owned in their culture). Any way, they routed around the IMBRA– an ignored and unenforceable joke. Lack of statism means the people are very resourceful and resilient. It is impossible to depopulate all the nooks & crannies of the tropically fertile Philippines, notwithstanding perhaps hundreds of nuclear bombs. Don Juan was seen in Europe.
P.S. I see the detailed reply I submitted at 11:13pm addressing all comments since yesterday is still in the moderator queue.
Hello. I apologise for being a jerk in some previous conversations (to be abrupt).
If you open a door during a snowstorm, Would you then say that is not causative of your house being filled with snow, then? After all, a shut door merely interferes with the filling of the house. I think you are postulating a final cause when no such thing exists. I mean, the thief’s choice not to thieve is merely interfering with his natural impulse (which is not chosen). But this is irrelevant – when we talk about causes we mean something that can (perhaps only in principle) be used to control some outcome.
I thought I was quite clear that to say that the victim’s responsibility doesn’t reduce the responsibility of the perpetrator. I’m not entering into a discussion on “rights”, which is irrelevant. You have the right to leave your door unlocked, and that does not grant the right to steal from it. But if you willfully leave your property unprotected your insurer may not cover the loss, since you have a responsibility to them to take reasonable measures against theft. Responsibility is just what is required of you, whether it’s an insurance contract or the informal expectations people have of you. Being a “victim” does not in and of itself cancel responsibilities.
Is it your assertion that thieves are always bad? What is your criterion for “bad”? If thieves were good and we were bad (or we were both neutral) are you saying that we wouldn’t use locks? We have locks because we want to keep our property and putting a lock on them makes us more likely to do so.
@JustSaying
I don’t think either were claiming that this is the case. They were speaking about the rights that are generally granted by law (correct me if I’m wrong).
@JustSaying
> In all due respect, private property rights are not nature
Sure they are. Go to any kindergarten class you will see a fully operational system of private property rights. It is certainly intrinsic in our basic human nature. Ignoring that is the reason why the first year half the Pilgrim Fathers died, and recognizing it why the thrived the following years.
> they have to be enforced, that is why we hire security guards.
Nobody is questioning that force is required to enforce our rights. Of course they are. The argument is not what it takes to enforce rights but rather whether I have a right at all to have my car secure, or, in the case of rape, my body unviolated. If I have the right, I bear no responsibility if someone chooses to violate them.
> The failure to secure your private property is an invitation to require statism
What a curious statement, since private property and statism are pretty much polar opposites.
TomM on Friday, May 3 2013 at 9:49 pm said:
> Are you seriously arguing that there are real live individual males who have decided not to go to college … because they are “terrified of being unjustly accused of rape”
Purdue university has approximately ten accusations of completed forcible rape per year.
These are investigated under rules that pretty much tie the hands of of the authorities, who have to assume the male guilty and the female innocent. The investigating officer has to be female, which is reasonable, since males never suspect how wicked women are, especially if the woman is pretty, while women usually have a good idea.
Despite this, about 50% of these accusations are terminated by the female admitting the allegation to be false. We may conclude, therefore, that the great majority of these accusations are false.
You will also see a fully operational system of theft, curtailed only by the presence of adults. Does the bigger/meaner kid have the right to steal from others because it comes naturally? Appeal to nature is a fallacy..
@John D. Bell:
Perhaps the spirit of my partial agreement (and personal responsibility point) was lost in the tone or terseness of my prior reply. I think most of us libertarians would choose to congregate in private communities that had such respectful values and thus lowered the necessary costs of security. Contrast the freedom of such a private choice, with statist enforcement of such choice. If we choose to live in the larger community of wild nature and all its abberations including statism, blowback to tyrants or warlordism, etc., then nature doesn’t disappear even if we cover it up with statism for 80 years before the blowback.
This whole argument about relative “causitiveness” based upon “who has the relative power to prevent a crime” is wrong because it is based upon a flawed premise, i.e. that “blame” accrues to people who allow themselves to be in a position where they are subject to being victimized by other human beings, so-called (including, presumably, women who get drunk and/or wear skimpy clothes). The truth is that every individual has an absolute right NOT to be victimized, no matter where they are, no matter what their condition is, no matter what clothes they choose to wear (or no clothes at all). Otherwise we find ourselves in a position of clucking over all manner of crimes that “could have been prevented,” e.g. all the Jews wiped out in WW II. Query: In the 1950’s and before in America people commonly left their home doors unlocked, and the keys in their cars, and crimes were not committed; would those people incur “blame” for the wrongful acts of criminals who took advantage of them? I argue no. We require a certain level of behavior by the human beings around us; they are not (supposed to be) animals, and should be treated as dangerous animals if they cannot or will not comport with our enforced norms of behavior based upon the notion of innate human individual rights to life, rights, and property. So I don’t care if a woman is drunk and walking down the street naked in the middle of the night in a bad neighborhood: She has an *absolute* right to do so and be so (libertarian that I am), and an absolute right not to be molested (e.g. raped) by another human being. The corollary is that she (or anyone else) would be absolutely privileged in defending her/herself by using force against an attacker. To conclude otherwise takes us over the line into the barbarism of, say, Islamic clerics who refer to western women as “whores” who deserve to be raped because they “tempted” marauding young muslims. Screw that whole line of thinking.
@ JAD
> Despite this, about 50% of these accusations are terminated by the female admitting the allegation to be false. We may conclude, therefore, that the great majority of these accusations are false.
No, we may not conclude any such thing.
(But even if we did, show me *one* example of a living, breathing male high school graduate who has decided not to go to college due to his fear of being “unjustly accused of rape”). Sheesh.
>(But even if we did, show me *one* example of a living, breathing male high school graduate who has decided not to go to college due to his fear of being “unjustly accused of rape”). Sheesh.
I have to say that in today’s environment I don’t find this scenario implausible.
But even if we reject this specific scenario, it may remain the case that many young men are generally aware of several related problems. They may know they’ll be put through belittling and humiliating “sensitivity training”, for example.
@Jessica Boxer:
If you are not denying that it takes force to maintain property rights, then who provides that force? Either the individuals or the state. Hopefully you see the connection why if individuals don’t enforce their property rights, then it is a power vacuum for the state must then do so. Private property rights do not exist in nature without force, thus private property rights (without force) are not nature. I repeat myself.
@Tim Condor:
What is the cost function of your claim of absolute rights? Answer: infinity. The reason is that rights don’t exist in nature without force. And absolute force has an infinite cost, especially because it can only come by eliminating all degrees-of-freedom. If this response is too abstract, perhaps someone else can think of a better analogy for elucidation.
@Roger Philllips:
I missed this comment. They may have been, but it makes no difference from my view that either the individual or the state has to provide the force. Thus I am essentially saying laws are not needed, if individuals are responsible for their own outcomes (and force). Statism breeds the expectation of perfection (and helpless individuals that expect the state to do everything for them) and costs absolute power at its ultimate peak failure.
I am headed out bar hopping ;)
@ esr
> I don’t find this scenario implausible
> They may know they’ll be put through belittling and humiliating “sensitivity training”, for example
Now who’s stirring up a moral panic?
Roger Phillips: “Leaving the car unlocked is causative.”
WRONG!! The cause is the thug who steals what’s not his, period, end of discussion. Back in the 60s, there was an ad campaign to get people to lock their cars. The tagline: “Don’t help a good boy go bad.” It was pulled quickly amongst much justified outrage. The thief didn’t go bad; he was bad to start with.
The difference between the thief and the snowstorm is that the snowstorm is not intelligent and cannot choose to blow or not blow. The thief can choose not to steal.
TomM: Ever been through sensitivity training? For a white male, it’s a class about nothing but what a bad person he is due to his race and gender, irrespective of anything else at all.
tpmoney, am I correct that, as you’re using it, “black out drunk” is not the same as “unconscious”?
(“Black out drunk” = able to walk, talk, flirt, have sex, etc., but you don’t remember it afterwards; unconscious = unconscious.)
So where is that enormous disadvantage that requires the police state of violating the privacy of those who wish to date?
That’s not police state, police state is when you break a law and they break your fingers (for openers), they don’t bother with anything unenforceable. I personally have few feelings about the catalogue bride market (if that’s what it is) apart from being vaguely creeped out by it, so don’t try and take me to task as a defender of folks trying to regulate it out the wazoo. But I can see how such folks would be likely to view it as the boutique end of the sex trafficking industry, and would regard the possibility of exploitation of various balding middle-aged specimens by Machiavellian Filipinas as kind of a low priority. Yet another tragedy inflicted upon the innocent by the forces of peecee.
Returning to the original post, creating and initiating a moral panic could be viewed as a memetic tool. Herd creatures are wired to respond automatically to a panic stimulus. If you wanted to plant a particular message within a large group, this could be an effective means of doing so.
Perhaps there is a hidden agenda concealed within the “rape culture” meme.
@JustSaying:
To minimize the risk that these 1.6 billion rounds could be misused in a “crisis”, I would be much less alarmed if they were not hollow point, to insure they are really just useful for training.
1) Hollowpoint ammo is as useful for training as it is for shooting someone.
2) There is no ammo that is of sufficient quality for training that is not good enough to use in a war, with the possible exception of sinterned metal rounds, and even those are fairly lethal.
If you’re going to put people on the street armed they should be thoroughly trained in the use of force. Spending 1200 rounds a year to do that is pretty close to what I’d expect the *minimum* to be. Heck, that’s only 1 box of ammo every 2 weeks. (normally pistol ammo is sold in boxes of 50. 20 for the high-dollar self-defense stuff).
One whine being heard is that the military doesn’t do that much. I’m not sure I buy this as when I was in we certainly went through more–at least in the marines. The Reserve forces not so much, but then we were reservists and not grunts.
@JustSaying: It is obvious that “rights” must be enforced, and that they must be enforced with power. The claim, however, of absolute individual rights—Constitutional, natural, inalienable, God-given, evolutionary steady state, or however else you may want to derive them—does not demand an asymptotic cost-curve. It *does* follow, however, that rights are not subject to cost-benefit analyses. I know the comeback: What about when rights collide, your right to stretch your fist, the end of my nose, etc. etc. Not relevant. The fact that there are inevitably thorny situations where rights do collide does not mean that rights are thereby cancelled or otherwise vitiated. It just means that the issues need to be “reasoned out” (read your Ayn Rand). Those who argue that rights don’t exist vis a vis human beings must perforce take the position that big strong men have the moral option to rape smaller, weaker human beings (e.g. women, who tend to be biologically smaller and weaker than male humans). But that way lies madness…even if it is the normal state of humanity (with fleeting historical exceptions for certain lucky sets of people).
@JustSaying
> If you are not denying that it takes force to maintain property rights, then who provides that force?
If you are arguing that might makes right, I don’t agree. Almost universal amongst human cultures is a believe that some things are intrinsically right, and some things are intrinsically wrong, regardless of whether there is any might to back them up. In any culture I want to live in one of those things is that a woman has the right to chose consciously who puts their penis inside her. Not due to the Glock in her purse or the cop on the corner, just intrinsically.
As I happens I think there is a lot more going on in the philosophy of that, but it is Saturday morning, and I haven’t had a cup of coffee yet. FWIW, I absolutely agree with Roger that argument from “nature” is utterly bogus. Both because it is a vacuous argument itself, but also because nature isn’t all that great. Nature includes salmonella in your eggs, dinosaur extinctions and rattlesnakes biting children. Nature sucks.
@ Jessica Boxer, Tom Condron and Joseph W.
Absolutely, you have a 100% absolute right to not be violated, bodily or otherwise against your will, where against your will means “absent positive consent.” If you are passed out in a bar, no one has any right to touch you, steal from you, or otherwise violate your person or property. You will get no argument from me on this.
However, as we are so fond of saying around here, with rights comes responsibility too. You are responsible for reducing your exposure to risk. While you may have an absolute right to life, liberty and the pursuit of tail, there are people in this world who would violate those rights, and there are certain places, people and actions which increase your likelihood to be exposed to those people. Since you have no right to demand that others protect your rights, it is incumbent upon you to take the actions necessary to protect your rights.
Yes, if you are drunk and passed out in a bar, no one has the right to violate you. That does not absolve you from the blame which comes from making the choice to go to a bar, order drinks, and drink past your limit. Each of those were individual choices you freely made all of which increased your likelihood of having a bad encounter with someone without respect for your rights.
Similarly, I have every right in the world to walk down the middle of harlem with a sign on my back saying “I hate all ******s and they should go back to africa” and no person in all of harlem has any right to assault me for that. But no one in their right mind would say if I did get an ass beating along the way that I didn’t share in the responsibility for that ass beating.
As a final example, I own a convertible car. I choose not to lock the doors on the car as the top is more expensive to replace than anything I might decide to keep in the car. That said, if I go downtown and leave my laptop in the car, I have an absolute right to come back to that car and have the laptop sitting there on the seat where I left it. But if it’s gone, I share in some of the responsibility for leaving it on the seat and leaving my door unlocked, especially if I know the area I’m in has a high level of theft.
This of course cuts both ways. There’s an old social taboo that an unmarried man and woman should never be alone together, there is another that you should never get so drunk as to be out of control. While these has many sources and reasons, one very good reason for both taboos is that it means your integrity and your actions can not be called into question. The drunken men who get accused of rape because they went to a party, got drunk and found themselves in a bed the next morning with an equally drunk woman without a memory of how they got there share in the blame for their own misery. They knowingly went to a party, knowingly got drunk past their limits and very likely did so with the intent (or hope) of getting some. If they had instead chosen to remain sober, or chosen someone to help keep them under control, or chosen to remain home or any number of other actions which would not have had them violating those two taboos, they would not be in the trouble they find themselves in.
So like I said. You have an absolute right. You also have an absolute responsibility.
About the 1.6 billion hollowpoint rounds: There’s a lot of validity to the argument that you should train with the ammo you’ll use in a fight. There will be no subtle differences in feel, and you’re guaranteed that the gun will function properly with it – something you can’t guarantee 100% if you practice with different rounds from what you shoot for real.
a further observation about ammo –
When I was buying ~~3 weeks ago for GwG (getting whatever I could get, at whatever price it was being offered at, given the current shortages), the only 9mm I could find was hollowpoint.
If I was an ammo manufacturer, in the current climate, I would the make the stuff with the highest profit margin and greatest demand. Hence, probably only hollowpoint.
@ Jay Maynard
No actually, I haven’t – unless you count corporate training sessions designed to reduce the risk of sexual harassment suits in the workplace. What I found interesting in those sessions was the number of (old, white) men who seemed genuinely surprised that unwanted sexual advances could be actionable harassment.
To the extent those men now understand something they didn’t before, I think the sessions count as productive.
TomM, was it that they were surprised that unwanted sexual advances were harassment, or was it that they were surprised at what the feministas have gotten tagged as unwanted sexual advances?
And I’d be astonished if the surprise was limited strictly to old white guys. That you bring that up at all reveals your own biases.
@TomA
Those behaviours certainly seem to be “dominant” and “pervasive” in that town… Yes?
And victim blaming is through out society, it is dominant and pervasive. And it does appear to be persisting. When you have media figures saying that women shouldn’t wear high-heals, because they are loud and so rapists can hear you coming… Rape culture are jokes about rape. You can disagree with the wording, and with the semantics of the term, but the fact is, the ideas exist in society, and are widespread.
Do you want more examples?
From http://www.shakesville.com/2009/10/rape-culture-101.html (which have further links, where you can go for more information, I’ve left those links out of this quote):
@Roger Phillips
An interesting view point. Except that it ignores the fact that there is no way to prevent rape. Just like there is no way to prevent murder. Except that rape is more likely. You could be walking down the street, and someone could run you down with a car. Or, you could be chatting to a person at a party. You leave and go home. You don’t notice you were followed. The next day, the door, you answer, and someone pushes in and rapes you. (This scenario taken from Shakesville, apparently something much like this happened to the author.)
And yes, you can compare cultures, and yes, certain cultures are more or less forgiving of rape. But, there are points where you say, “this is wrong, and it doesn’t matter if that place is more wrong, it’s still wrong here”. (And, there are multiple cultures in the “white” “western” world, and sometimes they seem quite alien to each other.)
And I think I’ll leave it at that. I’ll probably not be posting again on this topic. Two main reasons: 1) I’m not an expert, and I’d rather direct people towards 101 material which can do a better job than I can. 2) I’ve argued the point, I can direct people to further resources, but I suspect I’ll start repeating myself if I continue here.
@Michael
An interesting view point. Except that it ignores the fact that there is no way to prevent rape. Just like there is no way to prevent murder.
This is true, but nowhere did I imply that it wasn’t. You cannot guarantee prevention, but there are ways to reduce your chance of being murdered, such as not walking into dangerous neighbourhoods at night, carrying a concealed weapon, sleeping in a locked house, etc. Obviously if someone you trust stabs you in the heart out of the blue nobody can fault you. That is not what is being discussed here at all. You need to read more thoroughly.
I remember a mate of mine had to have reconstructive surgery after calling a random person a “cunt” at 3AM on the street (he was drunk) and being king-hit in the side of the face. Can’t say I had much sympathy for him, as he was being totally irresponsible. That doesn’t mean the guy who hit him was in the right – if caught he would rightly be arrested and charged.
Completely and utterly irrelevant to the point, which is that “rape culture” is flawed terminology. The fact that things can be done better is utterly irrelevant to this point, and as I was careful to explain is a virtually null statement since perfection doesn’t exist.
You seem like a nice person Jay, but putting “period” at the end of your sentences doesn’t qualify as an argument. Please explain _why_ this is true.
What did this have to do with the idea of causation? You don’t seem to have made any sort of argument here, just blurting “WRONG!!!” at me. Please make an argument if you’re going to wade into a philosophical discussion. Do you have anything to say on why final causes do or don’t exist, for example?
>(But even if we did, show me *one* example of a living, breathing male high school graduate who has decided not to go to college due to his fear of being “unjustly accused of rape”). Sheesh.
The fear of being unjustly accused of rape is part of an “anti-masculine culture” that pervades many institutions today, especially primary education that is dominated by female teachers and administrators. It isn’t possible to separate this particular fear from the rest of that culture, in which a man is presumed to be guilty of sexual harassment based on any woman expressing that she feels uncomfortable as a result of something he said/did. It is not necessary in these cases to show that his words/actions are objectionable by any standard that he can know in advance. The only way for him to know that he’s guilty is for the woman to say that he is. We have thus empowered women to “interpret” words/actions to be “harassment” after the fact. Our Constitution says we can’t have ex post facto for the simple reason that a law cannot discourage an act that had already occurred before it was enacted.
The question is not whether it is rape to have sexual contact with an unconscious person, but a person who is conscious and by all appearances willing at the time, but after the fact decides that it was against her better judgement. The fear of this particular scenario is woven into the tapestry that is the War on Men, many of whom have chosen some hills aren’t worth dying for.
@ Michael – “Those behaviours certainly seem to be “dominant” and “pervasive” in that town . . . And victim blaming is through out society, it is dominant and pervasive.”
No it’s not. Your evidence is anectotal and you appear to suffer from selective perception.
Perhaps you should consider the possibility that you have been duped into believing a lot of hogwash.
@tpmoney: Disagree on all your examples. They’re all just exercises in blame-shifting. Anyone who does anything to violate the rights of others, no matter what the “excuse” or “provocation,” needs to be taught how to act like a civilized human being (the uncivilized recognize no rights inhering in anyone). How to accomplish that? Whatever it takes.
@ Roger with regard to his comment directed at Jay: Roger, I think that by putting “period” near the end of his sentence, Jay was indicating a certain level of exasperation with those who are unable to perceive that the “ultimate cause” of a crime is the criminal, not the victim. What we call political “liberals” are particularly prone to such thought processes (such as they are). I agree with Jay.
@esr
“The cases aren’t parallel, because nobody gets drunk with strange men out of a desire to get robbed without taking responsibility for their behavior. Women, on the other hand, frequently do the analogous thing in order to get sex without having to own the behavior. Any woman who gets blind drunk with a man she met in a bar knows what script she’s walking into. It’s what lawyers call a “rebuttable presumption”.
So then your position is that because some women use alcohol as an excuse to behave sexually that all women who get drunk with people they don’t know are asking for it? So that a man who has sex with a drunk woman who is a stranger to him is not culpable even if that woman is clearly beyond the ability to give consent – walking into walls – unable to converse coherently – perhapse even actually unconcious?
Presumably this defence also applies even if she just appears to be drunk but is actually experiencing some medical problem that causes incoherence in a public place… I mean, she looked drunk to me so I assumed she wanted it – how was I to know she was having a stroke…
Or is the more rational position that everyone should understand that it is rape to have sex with anyone who seems beyond the ability to consent to such attention?
And you did not answer my second previous question. How does the scenario change when the woman does know the man? If a woman gets very drunk among people with who she has an expectation of being safe and a man she knows has sex with her when she is beyond the ability to consent, is that “rape”? Or does another “rebuttable presumption”, that because she has an existing relationship with the man that she more likely wanted to have sex with him, mean that we should call that something less than rape too?
>So then your position is that because some women use alcohol as an excuse to behave sexually that all women who get drunk with people they don’t know are asking for it?
See “rebuttable presumption”. It’s not just that “some women do it”, as if that were a sporadic random occurrence. It’s that this is a more or less standard stupid adolescent behavior so common that everybody involved knows the script. When little Suzy Creamcheese gets drunk at a Delta Tau Chi kegger and goes upstairs with some guy, our model of what she’s expecting next is not really contingent on whether she’s merely mildly glowing, tipsy, spifflicated, or staggering blotto.
>So that a man who has sex with a drunk woman who is a stranger to him is not culpable even if that woman is clearly beyond the ability to give consent – walking into walls – unable to converse coherently – perhapse even actually unconcious?
Back to our kegger. How is the guy supposed to know the difference between a woman who is genuinely chemically wrecked and a woman who is pretending to be drunker than she is as a form of disowning what she actually wants? He knows this happens. I grant you there are extreme cases where the distinction is obvious, and I myself find the thought of jumping a woman who is three-quarters passed out revolting. But this was already a well-established form of mating ritual when I was in college in the 1970s, and I’m pretty sure that hasn’t changed. Putting the guy in the same ethical and legal category as somebody who rapes women at knifepoint would be deeply unfair.
My early college years coincided with a brief period during which marijuana competed with alcohol as the sex-excuse drug of choice. This didn’t last past around 1979 at UPenn, and I think that’s precisely because marijuana made it more difficult for women to pretend that they didn’t know what they were doing.
>Presumably this defence also applies even if she just appears to be drunk but is actually experiencing some medical problem that causes incoherence in a public place… I mean, she looked drunk to me so I assumed she wanted it – how was I to know she was having a stroke…
Now you’re being silly. It’s very obvious why the defense does not apply. Women don’t fake drunkenness on the street to have sex, they do it in contexts where that is on some level expected behavior. Furthermore there’s a element of expressed consent in the behavior that consists of her going to where privacy and sex are possible. Please don’t try to tell me that you genuinely confuse a stroke victim being raped on a public thoroughfare with little Suzy Creamcheese stumbling upstairs at a kegger, because I know you’re not that stupid.
>And you did not answer my second previous question. How does the scenario change when the woman does know the man? If a woman gets very drunk among people with who she has an expectation of being safe and a man she knows has sex with her when she is beyond the ability to consent, is that “rape”? Or does another “rebuttable presumption”, that because she has an existing relationship with the man that she more likely wanted to have sex with him, mean that we should call that something less than rape too?
I think this one is more difficult for a reasonable person to call without details you haven’t specified. And you have to bear in mind that I don’t think “rape” is a term we should properly use at all when physical coercion is absent. Otherwise we risk confusing it with behaviors which, while culpable and nasty to various degrees, don’t have the same meaning or the same consequences.
P.S.: Looking at this a few hours after I first wrote it, I see that what I wrote might be interpreted as a claim that many women are habitually consciously deceptive in their sexual behavior. This isn’t so, and I actually wish it were that simple. What makes life particularly complicated for the guy who Suzy Creamcheese follows upstairs at the kegger is that women are quite good at deceiving themselves. Some women merely pretend not to be consciously seeking casual sex when they actually are in order to avoid being socially tagged as a slut. Others routinely conceal their sexual intentions from themselves, running on mating-dance autopilot while their brains strenuously pretend something else is going on. I think many cases of “she said rape after the fact” begin with this kind of self-deception.
@HedgeMage
“Men shouldn’t be expected to read minds, or check the BAC of women they meet.”
Everyone should be expected not to have sex with someone whom they believe incapable of consenting. Anyone who knowingly does so is a rapist, whether the victim forgives them later or not. Where you place the line on how fucked up it too fucked up to give consent is definitely going to be a fuzzy zone – but under what circumstances the victim got into such a state should have no bearing on the question of whether or not it is rape. If other witnesses testify that the victim was walking into walls and not making any sense, and I am on the jury, I vote to convict.
@Tim Condon
That might make Jay feel more comfortable in his misapprehension, but the interesting question is: can you justify the presence of a final cause? As I showed with my examples the idea of a final cause is highly problematic. There is, of course, the person who is judged to have been most able to have prevented something from occurring, but that does not affect causality, and it also doesn’t displace responsibilities of others. I mean, I would love for you to actually present some sort of argument. I can come up with more thought experiments that show this whole idea to be ridiculous if you’re unclear.
@ The Monster
> The fear of being unjustly accused of rape is part of an “anti-masculine culture” that pervades many institutions today
Hang about, is the “fear” (that is, the fear held by the male who I take it we now all agree is merely rhetorically choosing not to attend college as a result of that fear) part of the anti-masculine culture, or does the anti-masculine culture give rise to the male being thus afraid?
I confess I am struggling to understand precisely how one’s masculinity is threatened by a woman accusing another man of rape.
(In the circumstances which seem to be fascinating other commenters here, it is not difficult to anticipate that having sex with an obviously drunk woman you have just met carries with it some risk that the ability of the woman to consent to the sex may be reduced. It is also not difficult to come to the view that it might therefore be better to avoid having sex with her).
Roger, Tim Condon has it correct. I’ve had more than enough of fuzzy-headed leftists who try to shift blame for crime anywhere but the criminal. If you can’t see why that is simply, unalterably wrong, no amount of argument will get you to see the light. In my experience, those raising such nonsensical arguments usually do so in order to try to draw out the subject into expressing what they see as a contradiction, solely so they can pounce, say “Gotcha!”, and declare victory. I have no time for that kind of shenanigan.
And you have to bear in mind that I don’t think “rape” is a term we should properly use at all when physical coercion is absent. Otherwise we risk confusing it with behaviors which, while culpable and nasty to various degrees, don’t have the same meaning or the same consequences.
Well, we could call drugging someone with Rohypnol and tickling their kidneys while they’re indisposed “chemosexual harassment”, I suppose, if you want to save “rape” for the guy in the bushes who can safely be seen off with a barrage of hollowpoints. I’d still prefer to prioritise the victim’s views on what the consequences were over those of the perpetrator, though.
>Well, we could call drugging someone with Rohypnol and tickling their kidneys while they’re indisposed “chemosexual harassment”, I suppose
Ethically, I don’t see a lot of difference between this and hitting the victim from behind with a blackjack.
@ Tim Condon
There’s no blame shifting because in my world, blame isn’t a zero sum game. You can have culpability in a situation without reducing another persons culpability.
Look at it this way, you said that a person who violates the rights of another is “uncivilized”, in another context we might call them an animal (something we allude to when we call them predators). If a child pokes and prods at a mean dog and the dog turns around and bites the child, just because we admonish the child not to provoke the dog doesn’t change that we still put the dog down. Th child’s culpability in the attack does nothing to diminish the dog’s (and the dog’s owner if there is one) culpability.
Going a step further, it is only with a non zero sum model of blame that you can insist that a person has an absolute right to do or say anything. A zero sum model of blame implies that there are actions one can take, or things one can say which reduce the responsibility of the attacker to respect their victims rights. On the other hand, in a non zero sum model, I can easily convict the rapist with 100% responsibility and guilt for their actions, while simultaneously admonishing the victim that they should avoid in the future going to parties, getting drunk over their limit and going upstairs with guys alone.
@adrian smith
I believe that esr would call that physical coercion too. I don’t think anyone is making a distinction between chemically restricting someone’s ability to resist and using duct tape. What esr appears to be referring to is the choice of lowering your inhibitions, and then regretting (or finding you don’t remember later) your subsequent choices.
@TomM
Well, that’s because you’ve added an “-ity” to what I said. When the “anti-masculine culture” targets a victim, it does not surgically excise “masculinity” from him. It destroys him (or her, for that matter. Women who exhibit certain “masculine” traits have been targeted as well).
I also called it a War on Men, but that’s not =quite= right, because the war isn’t exactly against all males. Homosexual males are the most obvious exempt class, but even heterosexual males who recite the feminist catechism and emanate all the right signs and shibboleths can generally stay out of the line of fire. But these Vichy Men must forever be on guard lest they slip up and act male even for a moment.
A man who behaves in a truly masculine way is right in the crosshairs. But it is not his “masculinity” being threatened; it is his freedom. The fear of being sent to a prison, then when released being placed on a “sex offender” registry, unable to live within a certain distance of a school, unable to hold many jobs… It definitely factors in to the decisions young men make. They may seek vocational/technical training, which for certain occupations they can still get male instructors who won’t punish them for not having female learning styles. They may reason that the few women who seek such training are themselves more “masculine” in behavior, and thus unlikely to be trouble.
Or the whole decision may fall on unconscious processes; just a general feeling that one environment is less threatening than another. The young men who choose not to go to a college/university may not even be aware that the fear of being branded a “harasser” or “rapist” tainted the decision in any way. Similarly, the oppressors may not be aware that they are creating hostile environments when they blame males for being males. That’s how powerful this “anti-masculine culture” is. It’s PERVASIVE.
@ Roger, who has many arguments about “ultimate causality,” and adds “I can come up with more thought experiments that show this whole idea [of personal, individual responsibility] to be ridiculous if you’re unclear.” LOL, I confess that I *am* unclear…but believe that the whole ultimate causality thang (sic) is a red herring. Exposition: “Marty and I broke up again. After he took me to Palm Springs with his cut of the earnings. And had sex with me for three days. And made me forget about my wrist hurting and my bills mounting because I quit my job at BioTech and went back to music (because Marty made me remember about dreams and all that romantic bullshit). He came to me in my studio, dangling his freedom in front of me like a carrot dangling from a stick. The ultimate causality, the one thing I will do it for. I went with him to Palm Springs and let him….” Go now! Read all!
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2396134/1/Causality
“If you think concealed guns will make your neighborhood safe, be my guest. I expect the bad guys will start to shoot before they rob you, just in case.”
Crime statistics don’t support this belief. Thanks for demonstrating the triumph of dogma over reality.
Back @ tpmoney: Dammit, tp, I agree. Well-said. (I hope I haven’t just negated what I myself said previously….)
@Winter
> And that is why the crime and murder rates in the USA are higher than in Western Europe
Yes, gun control explains it! Just as gun control explains the difference in murder rates between relatively-uncontrolled (and low murder rate) El Paso, TX, with its crazy-violent neighbor Juarez just across the border (situated in a country with truly onerous gun control).
@esr:
Or smothered in useless rigor of memorization and conformance (“certification”) that obedient females may excel with, but which have very little relevance to the out-of-the-box critical reasoning to solve the market needs.
Not to bash females in a free market environment, where they amaze me:
http://ricefieldcollective.org/ (female readers will probably love this real life story)
@Jay Maynard:
Please put your oven burners on the floor so the children can burn not only their hands but also their feet and faces. What you fail to appreciate is that people are learning as they go through life. This is analogous to offering people free money with no down payment housing loans. Who caused the real estate bubble?
The cause is shared by all who facilitate the outcome. Any other explanation is an uneconomic statist inducing illogic, where that closet (or unconscious) statist attempts to erroneously imagine the fantasy world in absolute uneconomic morals.
@Adrian Smith:
A police state is where there is no privacy.
What do you think marriage is for most non-alpha males?
@William O. B’Livion:
You and the others make excuses to get further and further away from constitutional a citizen army and police force. Now we have federalization of ammo purchases, 47,000 federal TSA officers, and somehow you think this is not the slippery slope our founding fathers wanted to avoid. I could careless if our police officers can shoot perfectly well. I am very concerned about the destruction of our constitution and that there are nearly no true Americans remaining. Even the gun rights activists here are making these excuses. This affirms to me why I left the USA for good in 2006.
@Tim Condon:
The asymptotic cost is due to the fact that Iron Law of Political Economics, where any right that requires the state, ignites the statism that always degenerates to everybody gaming the collective and stealing everything from everyone (themselves) and ending up in a war and pestilence. There is no counter example in the history of the world. We had this debate already in the prior blog.
@Jessica Boxer:
And that is the difference between absolute rights that always must be enforced by the state, and personal choice to congregate in private communities of shared values.
For example, I would not choose to live in private community with most all of you, because most all of you are statists (even you don’t admit it) and don’t understand economics. Eric is probably the only consistent person here I would congregate with in a community (but he probably wouldn’t feel that way about me). However, with technology I can live with all of your and protect myself from your horrific statist outcomes.
@Jessica Boxer:
Nature is reality. Anyone who says evolution is vacuous, must have a few screws loose. If you personally can afford a better reality, that is also nature. However, if you require the state, that is an uneconomic failure mode.
@Sean Hastings
Right, but they have to have enough information to form that understanding in the first place.
There are some grey areas here. There’s a difference between sleeping with someone who chose to get too drunk to use optimal decision-making, and dosing someone with rophynol or GHB. I’d hesitate to coin anything “rape” unless it involved physical force, non-consensual drugging, or similar forms of aggression.
Sure it does. I know plenty of women who get blackout drunk specifically because they’re too inhibited to have sex any other way. A lot of women want sex, but unlike you and I can’t think independently of social nonsense like getting labelled a slut (or just feeling like one). So, they use intoxicants as a way to escape the cognitive dissonance. Most women I know under 35 or so see having sex with someone while intoxicated less damning in terms of “being slutty” than having sex while fully in control of one’s faculties. It’s stupid, but it’s a widespread cultural meme and it *is* consensual.
That isn’t to say that every woman who gets drunk wants sex, it just means that it would be unfair to expect men to be able to tell the difference. It’s easy for men who don’t have trouble finding mates to get all high and mighty about this, but the fact is that if one is a heterosexual male in the middle or at the bottom of the gametic scale, the vast majority of (or possibly only) casual sex available is with women who chose to get intoxicated. Men high up on the gametic scale can be picky and surround themselves with women who have their act together, but if you pass a “no sex with drunk women” rule, the majority have to stay virgins until they are 30 or marry somebody. That’s not a fair expectation when an inebriated female is oozing pheromones at a possibly-also-inebriated young, inexperienced beta or gamma male and gesturing toward the bedroom.
If anyone, anywhere, has any evidence she said “no” or struck out to defend herself at any point, I vote to convict. If she’s stumbling drunk and making interesting noises, that’s on her as much as on him. That’s not to say I want to hang out with a guy who likes fucking women who can’t talk intelligibly — that is a special kind of pathetic and I have a higher grade of human being available to me — but I’m not going to throw him in jail and give him lifetime sex offender registration for being either an opportunist jackass or a desperate, low-functioning gamma.
The idea that men should always take the responsibility and women should expect not to need to communicate boundaries, make decisions in their own self-interest, or make informed decisions on potentially risky behavior is part of why our mating rituals are so damn broken. Women who declaim responsibility have an easy out by which they get to have sex while condemning all the other women who have sex, and the expense of men having any idea what consent looks like.
There is virtually no situation in which a man can have sex, or for that matter any sexual contact, with a woman he doesn’t know *extremely* well and be confident he won’t be called a rapist later. Given the social risk you endure (jail, sex offender registries, job loss, shunning), I wonder why men still bother with sex outside long-term committed relationships. I’m not sure I could deal with that.
>Right, but they have to have enough information to form that understanding in the first place.
Sean, I hope you’re noticing that you just got essentially the same take on the intoxication issue from HedgeMage and me. That is, from two people of unusually broad and varied experience, one male vs. one female, one upper-middle-class Ivy League city boy vs. one rural working-class country girl, one tail-end Boomer vs. one Generation Y.
@Michael:
It isn’t a coincidence how in statism everybody becomes a victim. Economics and game theory expects it to happen.
Statism is the way all the weak people try to get everything they want without actually buying it. They get to live in communities that have all the “correct” values, but then they wonder why they are always bickering over political control. I summarized this (and my prior post) in the past as “governments are only useful to legislate what can’t be accomplished in reality”.
Eric blogged on this in the Some Iron Laws of Politcal Economics, but I add the point that the vested interests are really everyone.
The solution of course is individual responsibility. But weak people don’t want that.
Eric said rapes dropped like a rock at a Florida university after teaching the females to arm themselves.
@Tim Condon:
Okay Mr. Perfect, you don’t need state reeducation then. Study the reeducation death camps in communist countries– and see the children posing with Obama when he signs laws. Oh you mean your ideas of perfection right. And of course everyone agree right. Because perfection exists right. Sigh.
@Sean Hastings:
Your first post made a strong argument that “consent” is dubious and undefinable.
So let’s just not have sex then since “consent” is a landmine (unless we are so drunk that we forget the law). Bingo! This is the result we are getting.
Tangentially, Armstrong claims correlation of tax rates and low birth rates through human history:
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/05/05/birth-rate-declines-with-higher-taxes-is-hollywood-to-blame-for-divorce/
@ The Monster
>A man who behaves in a truly masculine way is right in the crosshairs.
I think we inhabit different realities.
@Jay Maynard:
Although it sounds noble and correct, the outcomes of the dubious “consent” definition for criminalizing all but the very clear “rape with a weapon”, is really leftist (as this blog explains). The lack of personal responsibility inherent in placing all responsibility for a solution on reforming or punishing the criminal is a leftist position. Thus the right and the left are the same– statist bedmates.
@tpmoney:
Yeah but the difference is the solution. Individual responsibility is economic. Statist perfection is uneconomic, because reeducation is not efficient (for the numerous “you can’t do just one thing” negative outcomes detailed in this blog and comments).
I understand it is very difficult to accept that “if all people would just be civilized” is illogic, because it has a nice sound.
@The Monster:
Weak people who want the state to make a perfect civilization (because they can’t work hard to buy and effect their own) are pervasive. I suspect many very smart alpha-males decide to become cattle herders (e.g. work for Goldman Sachs), instead of sheepdogs precisely because of this realization.
@HedgeMage:
I suspect the alphas and sigmas have long since left the country or only randomly dance with very intelligent women who understand as you do. Perhaps Eric hands a gun to a woman before sex ;) I am getting some ideas.
A police state is where there is no privacy.
There’s always privacy on the Internet if people are willing to make a bit of an effort. Hence the unenforceability of IMBRA, I imagine.
What do you think marriage is for most non-alpha males?
Sex trafficking industry is what I said. Course, the distinction might be moot in your neck of the woods. People would presumably be worried that a proportion of these girls were effectively being sold by their families without their consent.
@HedgeMan:
I missed this comment.
Feeling insecure that not all man need your IQ? Why lash out illogically with such a degrading characterization. Please realize that even non-gammas will fuck a hot bod with a low IQ, because men are wired to select the physical genes and the higher our IQ is the more likely the offspring will do well in evolution. I can’t hang around long after the sex with a low IQ lady though.
@Adrian Smith:
Social networking sites blur the line between dating sites. Also dating sites that offer the same services policies to all nations are exempted, so the penpal sites just offer paid subscriptions to all the countries, even though only the westerners buy them.
How do you distinquish between someone who is trapped in a marriage for economic reasons from someone who is trapped in a job for economic reasons? I can agree with a definition of trafficking where there is physical force employed, but the economic case seems to be a reality of life.
@justsaying
>Feeling insecure that not all man need your IQ? Why lash out illogically with
>such a degrading characterization. Please realize that even non-gammas
>will fuck a hot bod with a low IQ, because men are wired to select the
>physical genes and the higher our IQ is the more likely the offspring will
>do well in evolution. I can’t hang around long after the sex with a
>low IQ lady though.
Context is everything, what you missed about her comment was that the “can’t talk intelligibly” remark wasn’t about IQ. It was about inebriation.
Please realize that even non-gammas will fuck a hot bod with a low IQ, because men are wired to select the physical genes and the higher our IQ is the more likely the offspring will do well in evolution.
Children tend to, er, “do well in evolution” if their fathers hang around to help raise them, I think you’ll find. Particularly boys – there’s some evidence that the decline in male college enrollments some folks want to blame on fear of false rape accusations actually has something to do with an increase in single-parent families.
@tpmoney:
My mistake and apologies to HedgeMage. Trying to read and reply to too many comments too fast, read it out-of-context indeed.
Speak for yourself, Shelby. For my part, if a good-looking dame opens her mouth and idiotic nonsense comes out that’s a serious bonerkill. Religious nonsense is particularly the opposite of arousing.
@Roger Phillips:
See Mr. Phillips, here’s the thing. If my door is locked and you try the handle, you can’t get in. If my door is unlocked and you try the handle you can get in. So my leaving the door unlocked only makes it EASIER TO DO WHAT YOU ALREADY INTENDED, which is to commit a crime.
If you weren’t a f*king thief you wouldn’t be trying my door handle. Leaving the door unlocked might be why you stole *MY* car, but it’s not why you were stealing car to begin with.
My daughters should be able to walk through any neighborhood at midnight in a bra and panties and get *at worst* a wolf whistle, or the loan of a coat. I should be able to leave a car parked, keys in the ignition, in front of a movie theater while I enjoy a double feature. My daughters “honor” and my private property should be respected.
That it is not is a huge failure on the part of society. One side in the political debate considers this a feature.
@William O’Blivion
“My daughters should be able to walk through any neighborhood at midnight in a bra and panties and get *at worst* a wolf whistle, or the loan of a coat.”
Make that stark naked and stoned/drunk.
@William
Here’s the thing: this has no bearing on anything I said. I’m only now beginning to grasp how devastating it is to show someone how fictional the ideas that they use to justify their beliefs are.
Again, this has nothing to do with causation. Are you able to follow a line of reasoning, or just spew out a bit of entertaining outrage that your little fictions are crumbling?
I don’t disagree; and it doesn’t contradict what I’ve been saying about causation and responsibility, so I can only assume you are either talking to someone else or horribly confused.
@Jay
You’re confused; nonsensical isn’t a synonym for “incomprehensible to me”. You have shown repeatedly that you simply lack the comprehension skills to follow what I’m saying. I mean, here you are accusing me of “shifting blame onto the victim” – a sentence that would to seem to anyone who has actually read and understood my argument to be an attempt at humor. Since you’re obviously having trouble I’ll spell it out: I don’t absolve a thief of a crime even a whit if the door is unlocked. It has nothing to do with fishing for contradictions. You disputed my account of causation – now cough up with an argument.
@ Roger: You’re getting tedious. The state of affairs that William describes is called “civilization,” a shorthand way to refer to shared values, a “culture,” if you will, and despite what they may have taught you in college, all cultures are not equal, or equally valid. “Civilization” means that certain standards of behavior are to be enforced (I admit, this may be culturally insensitive of me, reminiscent of the British imperialists who banned the practice of suttee in 19th century India). The apparently amazing fact that such norms of behavior (e.g. respecting the rights of women not to be raped) must be taught to each generation, and enforced, takes away nothing away from the fact that “civilized” human beings do not rape, even when presented with what some cultures might see as either irresistible provocation or opportunity.
@Tim Condon
Red herring to what? I pointed out that society tends to hold people responsible for things they have a causative hand in. Jay objected, being adamant that the only cause of the car theft is the thief, thus suggesting a final cause (or, more charitably, an approximate final cause). In what way is demanding an account of how the thief can be regarded as a final cause a red herring? Why do you and Jay have so much difficulty distinguishing between “holding the thief accountable as the primary culprit” and “leaving the car unlocked is causative in the car being stolen”? These are not contradictory positions.
We are well and truly through the looking glass: William B. Oblivion and Tim Condon are now apparently arguing the opposite of esr’s original post.
I suppose consistency has never been the traditional strong suit of the conservative.
@Tim Condon
I can only imagine what it’s like to have entirely imaginary conversations as you are now having with me. Quote anything I’ve said that contradicts raping another person being uncivilized. I mean, here you are talking about the validity of value judgments between cultures as though it contradicts my views, when earlier in this thread I was pointing out exactly that the same thing! It’s like you read my posts and, not wanting to take the time to go against the grain and think, simply invent your own meaning for them that gives you some fuel for outrage so you can get off defending your ideology.
@Roger Phillips
In most countries, if you find a bag with $10M, you are up for serious penalties if you keep them. If you find a key in the streets and use it to enter a car, building, or vault and steal things, it is the same.
If you lower your defenses to such an extend that your cannot prevent a crime anymore, you are not responsible for the crime. It is stupid, but stupidity is not a crime.
@Winter
Who said it was a crime? Are you able to read? Please respond to things that I actually said. Countries do not regulate causality, but their regulations tend to hold people responsible for things that they have a causative hand in. Do you dispute this? This thread is a great case study showing how it is not in man’s basic nature to *think*. You confuse so many concepts together, e.g. you seem to think “held responsible” implies “charged with a crime”.
@Roger Philips
“Held Responsible” is not the same as “One of the causes”. Criminals will always pick the easiest target. That does not make the easiest target responsible for the crime. There will also always be an easiest target.
“Since you’re obviously having trouble I’ll spell it out: I don’t absolve a thief of a crime even a whit if the door is unlocked.”
Then why are you blaming the victim, too?
I’ll spell it out for you: The victim of a crime is blameless in the commission of that crime. The criminal is the one who should be blamed and who should be held responsible. Anything else leads inexorably to the breakdown of society. You seek to excuse the criminal in some measure, whether you admit it or not. You are an active threat to society, just as your leftist pals who seek to fix “the true causes of crime”. Dressing your pro-criminal arguments up in fancy academic language serves only to obfuscate – something you need badly to do so you can bamboozle people into agreeing with you.
I will fight you and those like you with my last bullet and my dying breath.
@Jay Maynard
> your leftist pals
Funny, your “no-one should have to lock their doors” (or the analogue for other crimes) attitude is a position I’ve most often seen held by people on the self-described left.
@Jay Maynard
” You are an active threat to society, just as your leftist pals who seek to fix “the true causes of crime”.”
This sounds as if you would object to policies that try to prevent people from becoming criminals. That would not be a very rational stance.
Winter, the problem is that policies that are purported to try to prevent people from becoming criminals never work., and are essentially always ways for the Left to buy votes with taxpayer money.
@Michael
So why do you seem insist that all feminism is the same? There are various types of feminism, and feminists often violently disagree with each other. I won’t explain how what you’ve written isn’t true feminism, for that reason. (Feminism, ultimately, is about men and women being treated as, and acknowledged as, equals.
As with Islam vs Christianity vs Judaism… Show me the moderates who are publicly denouncing the illegitimate actions of the fringes, and then your group can be properly accepted as at least containing moderates. Until that happens, the group gets labelled by the worst acts of its members. I’m sure there were many moderate communists working for Stalin; rational mid-level-managers under Pol Pot; and lots of Germans who did not want to kill innocent German citizens regardless of ethnicity. However, those people failed to deny the extreme actions of their fringes, and the result is a matter of history.
Movements are defined by their unrestrained fringes.
@TomM
My point was that there seems to be more than a few commenters here who think that the Evil Feminists are repressing us brothers (for they are icky females and must not be trusted) and we must all Rise Up against the outrage that is Being of Accused of Rape When All One Did Was Merely Engage in Nonconsensual Sex, officer.
I think all rational people can admit that freedom comes at the cost of responsibility. Without responsibility, we lose freedom.
Can you name me one responsibility that the feminists have fought for? Their fight for equal rights fills libraries, where is their fight for equitable responsibility?
@TomM
You mean this: http://www.mgtow.com/ ?
What a load of infantile, poisonous garbage.
Why is it infantile and poisonous for individuals to choose to define themselves how they will? Why is it garbage for men to choose a life of bachelorhood? Isn’t this the same ethical worldview we encourage Homosexuals, Transgendered, and Transsexuals to appreciate? Don’t we let women choose single-motherhood and then celebrate them for it? Why then is it poisonous to deny men the same right to self-determine the path their life takes?
Here we go, to all those who would try to believe that Feminism is just about equality, please find me a major feminist denouncing this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/louise-pennington/radical-feminism_b_3169754.html?just_reloaded=1
Please show me the moderate feminists who only want equality denouncing that. Show them to me, or your arguments attempting to define feminism as equality-seeking are just a load of hot air.
@Jay Maynard
“Winter, the problem is that policies that are purported to try to prevent people from becoming criminals never work., and are essentially always ways for the Left to buy votes with taxpayer money.”
Say, it can be proven that sending children from poor, inner city neighborhoods to pre-school reduces the number of children flowing into youth gangs and crime. Would you object to subsidizing pre-school education for those children?
I know many will vehemently object to studies showing such a policy might ever work. That is not the question. The question is, if such a policy could be proven to work, would you object to it?
(proven to work = whatever your standard of evidence is)
Please show me the moderate feminists who only want equality denouncing that.
You’re not going to find a lot of feminists denouncing each other for a male audience, they try to keep that stuff private (by which I mean on their own blogs, it’s no great effort to find them having huge rows with each other). The woman’s a radical feminist who believes capitalism is a big part of the problem. Big surprise, yadda yadda. The notion that “moderate feminists” are somehow to be held responsible for what she’s saying or You Won’t Take Them Seriously is…not to be taken seriously. There Is No Feminist Pope, as they are fond of saying. You have an issue with Louise Pennington, go and troll her yourself on Twitter instead of acting all entitled to denunciations, ffs.
Why do we have to do your homework for you?
Go to a coffeeshop and — provided you can make yourself not sound like a total ass — start chatting up some really smart women. Talk to them about feminism, but again try to sound sympathetic and certainly not confrontational. There are your moderate feminists Most of them are not vocal about denouncing people like Louise Pennington, because frankly, Louise Pennington is the least of their worries. Worth a chuckle at best.
@Jeremy
> Please show me the moderate feminists who only want equality denouncing that. Show them to me, or your arguments attempting to define feminism as equality-seeking are just a load of hot air.
I am a moderate feminist who believes that the right thing is equality in the law, and who believes that there are some residual patriarchal attitudes in the society mindset that could do with some revision. And I am not alone, that is the position of nearly every feminist I know of.
Don’t confuse the loudest opinion for the most frequently held.
Oh, and FWIW, I find the societal emasculation of men utterly appalling. Just as I find some of the arguments here appalling. The idea that men are rutting baboons unable to control their sexuality in the face of a short skirt and a flirty female, is just as dreadful as the idea that women would (and do) manipulate men into compromised positions because they can’t face the reality of their own sexuality, and are so oppressed by the need to maintain their reputation as if they were some Victorian parlor maid.
You know guys: here is a crazy idea — no means no, even when she means yes. How about growing a set of balls and taking responsibility for the situation, even if she is being a manipulative bitch. There is plenty of sex to be had out there, and there are few things so attractive as a confident guy who can’t be manipulated like a pathetic plaything. Enough guys do that and that manipulative behavior will be gone as quick as you can say “hostile work environment.”
>You know guys: here is a crazy idea — no means no, even when she means yes. How about growing a set of balls and taking responsibility for the situation, even if she is being a manipulative bitch.
Good advice for alphas. Easy for me to take, personally – even if I weren’t married, I’m an eligible hypergamic target for a lot of women (fame does that) and it’s thus easy for me to blow off the obviously manipulative bitches.
But, as HedgeMage pointed out, a lot of men with relatively low value in the mating market would die virgins if they took this advice. And the slutty, booze-soaked women they turned down wouldn’t be all that happy either.
I don’t know what is to be done about this, but I am sure that just barking “keep your fly zipped” isn’t an effective move, however satisfying it might feel to those of us who do have healthy self-respect and self-discipline.
Um, “keep your fly zipped” is clearly a relative statement; it doesn’t mean refusing invitations for sex entirely. When a woman is being genuinely inviting, getting an expression of overt consent is obviously worth trying for. But when this doesn’t succeed, it is indeed best to get out. Especially since such a norm would simultaneously thwart manipulative women, and protect women who are self-deceiving and don’t really know what they’re wrong (they may be looking for excitement, but who know whether they’re actually consenting to sex? It’s just trouble waiting to happen.)
So would a lot of chimps with low value in the chimp mating market. Low-ranked chimps have adopted what primatologists actually call a “sneak and rape” strategy; it’s their only shot at getting some.
Even the lowest of us is a bit better than a chimp. We have the capability of understanding that our females have rights because they are sapient beings, and of choosing to respect their needs and wishes as communicated to us. The right choice is to treat a “no” as a “no”, because the worst consequences of that choice are that dishonest women will be denied the sex they crave, and maybe then they learn to be more up front about their desires. (Let’s face facts, the worst breeding candidates among men are not exactly quick on the uptake.) The worst case for not adhering to this rule involves some poor girl who legitimately didn’t give consent getting raped.
I’ve heard a rumor that in Japan, if a woman invites you inside her apartment, it is a tacit invitation to fuck her with impunity, whatever she may say to the contrary after the initial commitment was made — the idea being that Japanese men are so into rape fantasies that any cries of “no, please, stop” after the initial commitment is made are just scene-setting on the woman’s part. I don’t believe this story and I shudder to contemplate the horrid things that might have been done by someone who did believe it.
“the idea being that Japanese men are so into rape fantasies that any cries of “no, please, stop” after the initial commitment is made are just scene-setting on the woman’s part. I don’t believe this story and I shudder to contemplate the horrid things that might have been done by someone who did believe it.”
I think there’s a grain of truth in that, although of course it _is_ horrid. It’s certainly such a well known stereotype that the word ‘yamete’ (which means ‘stop!’ in Japanese) is used in other Asian countries as a derogatory reference to these purported sexual practices.
@esr
> But, as HedgeMage pointed out, a lot of men with relatively low value in the mating market would die virgins if they took this advice. And the slutty, booze-soaked women they turned down wouldn’t be all that happy either.
I don’t know if either would be true, were we to change the “rape culture.” Them be sarcasm quotes, since I agree with the sentiment here that that is a greatly exaggerated thing. But for sure it is a cultural dysfunction that this weird imbalance occurs. Were all the “low value” guys to keep their pants zipped, the “booze soaked” women would presumably be forced to change their behavior to get their itch scratched. That is a dating/sex culture issue, not to do with rape, but to do with a messed up way of thinking about sex.
But on a different way of thinking, from what I have seen, these putatively low value guys are not so much looking for the booze soaked “sluts,” and the booze soaked “sluts” aren’t looking for them either. Usually these sorts of guys are looking for a longer term stable relationship. Not out of any sense of altruism, but rather because they find the dating culture difficult enough that they want to get out of it, while still ensuring access to sex. The long term relationship being the solution. And the booze soaked “sluts” if they are looking for a quickie are presumably looking for a higher value guy, who they might not score an LTR with, but might score a crazy night of monkey sex with.
BTW, I put the word “sluts” in quotes, because I don’t much care for it in its most common usage. It seems to be largely designed to oppress women’s sexuality, giving a negative value judgement against women who like sex enough to think about going outside of the culturally sanction bounds. The fact that its pejorativeness is sexually diamorphic is enough for me to not want to use it, except with people who I have a shared understanding of sexual openness with, where there is not subtext of judgementalism. I think you, Eric, would share that understanding, but I think the point is worth making even if it doesn’t apply to you.
>BTW, I put the word “sluts” in quotes, because I don’t much care for it in its most common usage.
Actually, I don’t either. I seldom use the word, and when I do I do not intend it to mean merely a woman who has lots of sexual partners. To me, a “slut” is a woman whose sexual behavior conveys a lack of self-respect and self-control. (This usage was current when I was in my teens and may still be in some subcultures.)
I think it is far more slutty to use intoxication as an excuse for casual sex than to straight-out jump on a man while sober and open-eyed, owning the behavior. The latter may be slutty also, if it displays a pattern of uncontrolled lust towards partners of low value.
The problem of unattractive men dying virgins if they stop getting involved with dubiously consenting women is easily solved by prostitution. Granted, the whole trafficking moral panic does cause people to choose this strategy less often – which is a darn shame, since having sex for a fixed and previously agreed upon price be one of the common options does sound like it’ll drastically reduce the success of manipulative female strategies for flings/one night stands at the very least (and I find it interesting that the people saying in previous threads that women often tend to ask for sex in their experience seem to be from places with some form of legalized prostitution). I wonder how/if these two panics are linked, past the obvious fact that easily available prostitution further reduces women’s bargaining power in sexual relationship.
“I think it is far more slutty to use intoxication as an excuse for casual sex than to straight-out jump on a man while sober and open-eyed, owning the behavior.”
Hmmm. Is it even plausible that a woman with low self-esteem (I am guessing that this is what you mean by ‘lack of self-respect’) would do the latter – much less with ‘partners of low value’ (I’m not quite sure what that would mean, BTW)? AIUI, there is a stereotype of women using casual sex as a way of compensating for low self-esteem, but AIUI, some kind of self-deception seems integral to this behavior. FWIW, men in the pickup/’game’ subculture tend to find these women quite challenging (at the very least) due to the amount of self-deception and motivated logic involved, and seem to think that trying to boost the woman’s self esteem to acceptable levels is the best approach.
@ Jeremy
> to deny men the same right to self-determine the path their life takes?
Way to euphemise, buddy.
If “the red pill” crap peddled at the site I linked is to be taken at face value, we are to believe that men are universally oppressed by evil women who are, without exception, even now plotting their next moves to further enslave their poor husbands and deny them sex.
It is poisonous and infantile because it elevates male selfishness above responsibility as a man for a man’s own conduct.
(And moreover there is certainly nothing stopping those men who do not want to be responsible for their children or partners from leaving them. It happens all the time.)
This is what the Post Feminist Dating Script looks like.
In all cases, the “you” is a male.
1) If she’s inebriated, even to having a glow and a mild buzz, and start trying to lay subtle signals down, his only safe answer is “I’m flattered, we can try again when you sober up.”
Note to guys: If she has to get drunk to find you attractive/overcome her inebriation? You can and should do better.
2) If she’s not inebriated and we’re doing the spooning/snuggling/kissing thing and the expectation is for the male to “make a move”, there really won’t be one.
There will be a completely romantic conversation that runs something like this:
“I am going to ask you to fill out a piece of paper saying that any sex between us is fully, completely, consensual, and that you are not inebriated or otherwise impaired. This is as utterly non-negotiable as condoms are, and for the same reasons. You don’t want an unexpected pregnancy. I don’t want an unexpected court appearance.”
I went through a life-altering event because a woman woke up, fully clothed, on my living room couch, had a conversation with me that had her decide I MUST’VE drugged her to get her there, because “she wasn’t that drunk.” (too drunk to put a key in her car door lock. Also, gee, thanks ever so much for the compliment.)
Fortunately for me, I still had the receipt from the cab I called for her at the bar before she passed out, and the bartender backed up my side of events…said bartender also helped carry her into my building and lay her on the couch after she passed out.
The story “Campus IT professional with dorm room access rapes co-ed” in the campus newspaper, with your name and face to it? I can recommend against the experience.
It took 14 months to reach a court date. During that time:
0) No physical evidence was taken. None.
1) My university “auto renewal” contract did not renew. Oh, they had a justification, but the reality is that when you’re a network tech and go out to dorms to fix computers, they aren’t going to put you there with the publicity I got.
2) I had to move. Rock through the window with a death threat.
3) I could not get ANY KIND of IT work, because, gee, college town, everyone knows someone who knows someone who works on campus. I went to job interviews where a female interviewer looked at me like something that had crawled out of a dog turd.
4) I had to pretty much wreck my credit to stay out of jail. While unemployed, and unemployable. I eventually worked as a minimum wage counter-clerk at drug store to make ends meet.
My day in court arrived. The woman who accused me…didn’t show up. She apparently didn’t tell her attorney she wasn’t going to show up. I presented my receipt (oh thank god for not cleaning my desk…) and had the bartender testify and corroborate my events. We got the cabbie to testify to her state of unconsciousness on that night.
I was exonerated. I was awarded a bench judgment of $20,000 from the judge. My accuser hadn’t shown up because she’d dropped out of school and was back in California, and effectively out of reach of that judgment.
Two years ago, I got $5,000 off of that judgment when she filed for bankruptcy…after nearly 18 years.
So, go ahead. Tell me that these “false claims are a price we have to pay to eradicate rape culture.”
Tell me – how would you feel if that had happened to you?
Not good. She should have been sent to prison. Any person who falsely accuses another of a serious crime…and then doesn’t bother to show up on the court date, deserves prison time. How about the hooker/stripper/drug addict who accused the Duke lacrosse team of rape? How about the Duke professors who piled on with full-page newspaper ads attacking the lacrosse players? How about those same pig-academics who are still teaching at Duke?
@William O’B’livion:
You statists are the f*king thieves!
You require the state to enforce something which is unnatural, just because you wish it to be nature, instead of taking personal responsibility to take natural protections, thus you create this state apparatus where the vested interests (which is every body, since people are weak and love to get something for free, even though nothing in nature is free), redistribute wealth. The cattle herders then conveniently capture the apparatus and direct the redistribution into socializing the debt defaults, so they aggregate the $trillions and enslave humanity.
You want to be enslaved, because you refuse to acknowledge that nature is nature.
I guess there is nothing I can say that will ever make a statist realize he is a thief? Yet you boast here about how others are the thieves. Do you not have any shame?
@Jeff Read:
Statism is a worse religion than some of the soft Catholicism I come into contact over there. Mostly here people just say they are religious, but in reality they act naturally and rationally (self-interested) for the most part. The extreme religious insanity I see mostly from the missionary foreigners, for example the guy who told me he couldn’t find his Bible because he had failed to read it for a few days. Then he suddenly found it once he confessed his sin.
So I guess I just have a very open mind and I like to try many things and add to my experiences and knowledge. And to the other commentator, yes I know kids do well with two parents around, and I am either using contraception or withdrawing to prevent pregnancy. Life is diverse though and there should be unexpected outcomes. For example, my father wasn’t around and I attended more than 10 schools (I forget) before I graduated high school. Sometimes I was sitting a classroom with negros throwing spitballs and no teacher. Somehow I was able to learn. When I got to college, I preferred to be in the library than go to class (just showed up to ace the tests after an all niter on the chapters). Smart people find a way…nature has a way of weeding out the weakest, such as my sister who was murdered by her drug addict husband.
I like life raw and real.
I think Ken’s story is absolutely horrible. He was obviously dealt a pretty serious injustice. I am sure he recognizes that there are legitimate cases of rape where the responsible party deserves pretty severe criminal sanction. He got caught in the transaction costs, and $20,000 is laughable, especially uncollected.
I’m interested to know what practical changes he would suggest that would have made his experience less traumatic? Whenever you are accused of a crime falsely, it is going to be rough, and no doubt those accused of rape (or a few other offenses such as pedophilia) it is going to be super rough. But what practically speaking would he change to make it better?
There is a saying in the law: let ten guilty go free, rather than one innocent be punished. But what about 100 guilty, or 10,000? The only way to guarantee that no innocent person ends up punished (whether in a pre trial phase line Ken, or by being found falsely guilty) is to shut down the criminal justice system entirely, and have no courts. If you think the dial is tuned too far toward the “toss em in jail”, what practical steps can be taken to tune it back?
If, as Tim suggests that we toss the false accuser in jail, we simply flip the problem round. We are then going to throw genuine victims in jail along with all the vile fake victims. The criminal law is not all that finely tuned an instrument.
Feel free to rage, but I am honestly interested in practical thoughts.
@Winter:
Sure it is. Ignorance of the law does not absolve one of the criminal liability. I see all the time stupid people breaking the law because they don’t know the law, and then being punished for it, e.g. traffic laws.
But we digress. The statist believes that everything is a crime (because everyone’s wants for perfection have to be placated and every vested interest has to be encoded in laws), hence 20,000+ laws and increasing.
Please recite the 20,000 laws for me to prove to me that you are civilized and not unknowingly breaking the law.
Because your myopic statists don’t include the 80 year war and pestilence outcomes from statism.
@Jay Maynard:
Statism isn’t breakdown of society? How do you otherwise characterize what is coming down the pike over the next decade? How do you propose to stop criminality if people don’t stop being victims and take individual responsibility for preventing crimes, if not for statism?
You will kill the non-statists to protect statism? Yet you wonder why gun rights are gone in the USA. I must agree with Roger, can you think?
@Roger Philips:
If not locking the door is causitive, why is it less causitive than the desire to steal? Or did you not agree that it is less causitive? Why does more blame go on nature, so as to expand statism and promote being victims?
@Jeremy:
How can we have responsibility if everyone expects the state to enforce responsibility and the definition of victims? Responsibility begins with being individually culpable for outcomes. Once you shift the responsibility to the group, no one has to be responsible. This is statism.
When I see statists here claim that others are the thieves and misuse the word responsibility, I realize the megadeath culling is coming because people just can’t use logic. I am not claiming that the weak people won’t demand statism, I am just hoping smart people would recognize the paradigm instead of defending it as “responsible”. Statism is the antithesis of responsible.
Not exactly, Jessica: Real victims of real crimes don’t move to California and fail to show up in court to see justice done, while letting their unjustly accused victim swing in the wind of the criminal justice system for two years. This woman, by doing what she did, and then blithely failing to appear in court to testify, was and is a criminal, and should be dealt with accordingly.
@Jessica Boxer:
As the recent blogs about radicalizing the moderate middle illustrates, there is no moderate statism.
Either you need the laws to enforce your social model (which shows how weak and non-evolved your gridlock is), or you believe individuals should set their own morals in a competitive evolution. Brow-beating westerners are insane. I want to be as far away from them as possible. Which means I should also not be here trying to tell you.
I think I am done here. I obviously get a very bad feeling from the comments here, and am losing any good mood.
@Tim
> Not exactly, Jessica: Real victims of real crimes don’t move to California and fail to show up in court to see justice done,
In Ken’s case for sure. Some people are clearly guilty of making false accusations, and should certainly be punished for that. Nonetheless, you are wrong. Victims of crime do do exactly that. If she had actually been the victim of a terrible crime, and was fearful for her life, or felt that the crime had ruined her life (as ironically it did to the real victim here — Ken), she might very well move away and not show up, in an attempt to get away from it and start a new life.
Again the point is that the criminal justice system is a blunt instrument. Innocent people get squished, guilty people go free. That is just as true of the crime of making false accusations, even if we have tuned the dial strongly away from the guilty for that particular crime.
@JustSaying
> As the recent blogs about radicalizing the moderate middle illustrates, there is no moderate statism.
First of all, that isn’t true, there are plainly different degrees of statism, unless you serious content living in North Korea is the same as living in Iceland. Nonetheless, why do you equate feminism with statism? I’m a feminist and I doubt anybody would accuse me of being a statist.
> Either you need the laws to enforce your social model
That is nonsense. In fact, frankly, it is statist. There are many ways to enforce or encourage a social model without passing laws. I’m an advocate of healthy eating and exercise, but I think Mayor Bloomberg is a blowhard tyrant. Eric is an “open-source-ist” but I am guessing he is not in favor of putting me in jail for the heinous crime of not giving away my source code.
>or you believe individuals should set their own morals in a competitive evolution.
I think feminists, exercisists, healthy-eating-ists and open-source-ists use voluntary means to attempt to propagate the memes that they advocate. And that is as far from statism as it gets.
You know, my sister has fallen in with ne’er-do-well men too. None have hurt her, thank God. For them. Because if one of them did I would chase him down and there would be hell to pay.
And I certainly wouldn’t say of her “nature has a way of weeding out the weakest”.
Thanks for making perfectly clear what a sick fuck you are, Shelby.
@William O. B’Livion
“That it is not is a huge failure on the part of society. One side in the political debate considers this a feature.”
I direct you to the comment I made to Jay Maynard. “Funny, your “no-one should have to lock their doors” (or the analogue for other crimes) attitude is a position I’ve most often seen held by people on the self-described left.” and the comment it was in response to.
It seems to me that _both_ sides want a world where you don’t have to lock your door, they just each think that their policies are the only way to do so.
“I don’t disagree; and it doesn’t contradict what I’ve been saying about causation and responsibility, so I can only assume you are either talking to someone else or horribly confused.”
This is all horribly confusing, because both sides are attempting to own the desire for such an ideal world, with varying degrees of recognizing or not that it’s not the one we live in now and/or accusing the other of not recognizing it.
Nonetheless, why do you equate feminism with statism? I’m a feminist and I doubt anybody would accuse me of being a statist.
It seems an easy mistake to make, as feminism has relied on leveraging the power of gov’t to improve outcomes for women pretty much from the start.
Some snarky types might add that modern feminism has long since given up on the pretense of ‘equality’ for women, and is now much more blatant about simply improving outcomes for women at any and all costs- again leveraging the power of gov’t, of course. (See ‘War on Men’.)
@Jessica Boxer “I think feminists, exercisists, healthy-eating-ists and open-source-ists use voluntary means to attempt to propagate the memes that they advocate. And that is as far from statism as it gets.”
For at least two of these (and you yourself provided an example for “healthy-eating-ists”), this claim requires you to define those who don’t as not being true scotsmen.
@esr
“Sean, I hope you’re noticing that you just got essentially the same take on the intoxication issue from HedgeMage and me. That is, from two people of unusually broad and varied experience, one male vs. one female, one upper-middle-class Ivy League city boy vs. one rural working-class country girl, one tail-end Boomer vs. one Generation Y.”
Lots of people with different and varied experiences agree on things that I vehemently disagree with. I am pretty sure this holds true for you as well.
My own experiences and the way my mind is ordered lead me to believe that it is not rational to presume that someone unable to understand what is going on around them would ever want to be used sexual – by a stranger or anyone else. Unconscious means no. Beyond the ability to answer simple questions means no. It seems insane to me to assume that anyone would want to have sex while in such a state and I have never seen evidence of this despite your apparent belief that it is common. The fact that the force involved is minimal because the victim is unable to resist doesn’t make it any less rape – it just makes rape easier.
A lot of men have problems with not being “straight” and their first homosexual experiences often involve a lot of alcohol. I assume your logic about presumed consent applies here too. If you ever misjudge your tolerance to some unfamiliar tasty alcohol beverage (cherry mooonshine for example) and wake up the next day with no memory of what happened, a sore anus, and a colon full of semen, I presume that you wouldn’t consider this to have been rape. No force was involved and the original owner of that semen has life experience that leads him to believe that straight guys often get drunk so they can have sex with male strangers.
>My own experiences and the way my mind is ordered lead me to believe that it is not rational to presume that someone unable to understand what is going on around them would ever want to be used sexual – by a stranger or anyone else.
I understand your belief. Like me, you’re male, exceptionally intelligent, and a libertarian self-control freak. You actually think in terms like “not rational”. Good for you, but most people don’t. This makes you vulnerable to a very sophisticated kind of naivete about how most people behave, most of the time.
You don’t hang out in the kinds of places where women get drunk to have casual sex, and probably never have. If you don’t trust me that this happens a lot, trust HedgeMage the former rape-trauma counsellor.
>the original owner of that semen has life experience that leads him to believe that straight guys often get drunk so they can have sex with male strangers.
There are circumstances in which that belief would be justified. Say, if a nominally “straight” guy got drunk in a a gay bar. There’s a difference, though; this is not in the standard set of scripts for how people behave at Delta Tau Chi keg parties or other events that are not socially marked “for homosexuals”.
The most vocal and successful feminist thinkers and organizations in the United States have identified with the left. You’re something of a black swan in that regard.
@Ken Burnside ‘s story is indeed horrible.
The lesson to be learned is “no good deed goes unpunished”, or slightly more specifically “Stranger single young women in their 20s are toxic, especially if they are in college and have had anything to drink. Except in purely professional public contexts surrounded by coworkers during the day, unless you already know them very very well, have nothing to do with them. Don’t be alone with one. Don’t touch one. Don’t mentor one. And especially never ever try to be a white knight, and make any attempt to rescue one from the consequences of her own bad choices and bad behavior”.
It’s a hard lesson, and will be painful to implement, because it goes directly against megayears of evolutionary programming coded into the genetics and deep brain structure of male mammals: “protect the fertile females at all costs”.
But it’s utterly necessary, for the health, safety, and freedom of the half of the species with a Y chromosome.
They have asked for it to be this way, they have demanded it for it to be this way, and they have forced a restructuring of society for it to be this way. So be it. This is the way it is. Let them receive and enjoy what they have demanded, good and hard.
@Sean: “My own experiences and the way my mind is ordered lead me to believe that it is not rational to presume that someone unable to understand what is going on around them would ever want to be used sexual – by a stranger or anyone else. Unconscious means no. Beyond the ability to answer simple questions means no. It seems insane to me to assume that anyone would want to have sex while in such a state and I have never seen evidence of this despite your apparent belief that it is common. The fact that the force involved is minimal because the victim is unable to resist doesn’t make it any less rape – it just makes rape easier.”
You’re right. It *isn’t* rational. Your error is assuming that other people *are* rational.
Believe me, there *are* people who behave as described. Far too many of them. I’ve met and despised males and carefully side-stepped females of the species.
Alcohol reduces inhibitions, and is used as a social lubricant. Men use alcohol to attempt to make a woman more likely to have sex with them. Women use alcohol as an excuse to have sex. If she’s drunk, she’s not in her right mind, and can’t be expected to be responsible for her actions.
In the extreme form, you get men who spike women’s drinks with a “date rape” drug. to *insure* their inhibitions and responsibility are off-line.
I heard a story a while back from an acquaintance who was handed a drink at a bar by an attractive woman and consumed it. He discovered what happens when you are given a date rape drug, as someone had spiked the drink given to her, and she suspected it and pawned it off on him. He managed to get home and survive the experience safely, but it took some doing and he was ultimately lucky. He really should have thought twice about accepting a drink he didn’t order and see the bartender pour.
Rationality is a thin veneer over unconscious motivation, and it’s sometimes a far thinner veneer than we might prefer. It’s also not reliable even if it *is* thick. I’ve sometimes referred to man as the “rationalizing animal”, because most of what passes for rational thought consists of coming up with reasons *after* the fact why what we’ve already decided to do in our gut is not only a good move but the best possible course of action. You can find endless examples in day-to-day life of people doing things that make an outside observer say “What were they *thinking?*” Easy enough: they saw what they wanted to see, and carefully reasoned through to the result they wanted to get. (Reports in the business sections of newspapers of corporate decisions are very fruitful sources of examples.)
For some background, see this comment. Eric said that he was following up on some of the pointers I’d left, but he seems to have retained the same opinions as he had before, about “crazy inflation of rape statistics”.
I’m now aware of another consistent result using similar methodology, the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. Note also that the NISVS finally used better questions to ask men if they’d been the victims of rape (though they tallied it separately under ‘made to penetrate’ so that they could keep the rest of the methodology constant), and got a surprisingly high number for lifetime incidence, which really should prompt a lot of follow-up work. I mean, unless you think that this methodology is all flim-flam.
I suppose if you dismiss durable, repeatable results from multiple sources (and consistent across methodologies surveying both men and women!) showing that women are frequently the victims of rape, then it’d make some kind of sense to believe that all the anti-rape activism is about feminists being angry that they’re not getting enough chivalry, rather than being about, you know, rape.
And again, Eric, there’s not really much evidence that women are raped because they don’t have enough guns; the primary methods used are alcohol and coercion. If you want to argue that guns give women more confidence, and confidence makes it easier to resist coercion, I guess that’s plausible. But it’s a really off-center kind of rape prevention that just happens to match up with one of your hobby horses. I’m skeptical that you just happened to pick guns as the ideal thing that would help lower the incidence of rape; it seems more like an “every problem looks like a nail” sort of thing.
>Eric said that he was following up on some of the pointers I’d left, but he seems to have retained the same opinions as he had before, about “crazy inflation of rape statistics”.
Retained? Intensified, rather. The incidence of false rape accusations appears likely to be much higher than I estimated at the time; I wasn’t cynical enough.
@Mark Atwood
> The lesson to be learned is “no good deed goes unpunished”,
No it isn’t. The lesson is “some good deeds go unpunished.” I’m thinking that Ken has successfully hooked up with several young ladies who did not drag him through the court system.
> They have asked for it to be this way, they have demanded it for it to be this way,
Who are “they”. It is ridiculous to project the bad actions of a few onto a whole gender. The percentage of times this happens relative to the number of hook ups is negligibly small. This kind of thinking leads to things like the TSA and the Patriot Act. Life is risky, but it is better than the alternative.
> it seems more like an “every problem looks like a nail” sort of thing
And it’s surprising how often (here at least) the nail is bent – to the left!
Nothing I pointed you to had anything to do with false accusations. I’m not sure what you’re talking about. False accusation as a proportion of actual rapes is minuscule, because all accusations as a proportion of actual rapes are minuscule. (False accusations as a proportion of all accusations, I have less information on.)
However, the central point I marshaled all that evidence for was about the incidence rate, which is (over a woman’s lifetime) around 10-15%. You still think that “the ‘one in four’ chant should be abandoned and replaced with the more appropriate, albeit less catchy, 1 in 400”, which is, as far as the data points, as obviously wrong as anything in the social sciences can be. That’s what I was talking about.
>You still think that “the ‘one in four’ chant should be abandoned and replaced with the more appropriate, albeit less catchy, 1 in 400?,
I quote: “The Bureau interviews a random sampling of nearly 150,000 Americans about their criminal victimization, and in 2009 and 2010 they determined that the occurrence of rape of women was 0.23 percent and 0.21 percent, respectively.”
You cannot make those numbers square with 1 in 4, or 1 in 6, or whatever the hysterical chant is this week.
You go raise your awareness or whatever it is you think you have to do. I’ll go on teaching women how to kill rapists. I’m not in much doubt about which one of us is addressing an actual problem.
@Jessica Boxer I may have missed it from his story of what happened, but he wasn’t “hooking up” with a tipsy girl, he was *saving* one that was, bluntly, too stupid to live. This is not a “hookup” gone wrong.
If one wants to walk back my advice to something more on-the-surface palatable, if harsher wisdom is too hard to bear, go with, “Don’t have anything, at all, ever, to do with young women who are passing out drunk. You as a private citizen don’t have a duty-to-save, and you should take advantage of that. Let the venue call 911, and let her wake up the next morning in a cell or in a hospital (with an expensive and embarrassing bill) instead.”
@Mark Atwood
> This is not a “hookup” gone wrong.
I suggest you reread what I actually said, because it evidently isn’t what you think I said.
> “Don’t have anything, at all, ever, to do with young women who are passing out drunk. You as a private citizen don’t have a duty-to-save,
That seems a bit extreme. Pour her into a taxi home might be a nice thing to do. Make sure her friends look out for her would be a public service. If your advice is “don’t take her home to sleep it off”, that might well be good advice, regardless of how honorable your intentions are.
Again, prudence is always a good idea. Nonetheless, it is a huge mistake to allow a few loud and obnoxious idiots to rob you of your opportunity to live the way you want. Like I always say, if you want to know if the terrorists won, take a trip on a commercial airliner.
You risk sitting next to a guy who lights his underwear on fire, but nearly always you get there without a hitch.
@esr
>they determined that the occurrence of rape of women was 0.23 percent and 0.21 percent, respectively.”
Is that per year, or per lifetime? If per year that is a lifetime risk of 14% or so, which, FWIW, is in line with what I hear from talking to my female friends.
>You go raise your awareness or whatever it is you think you have to do. I’ll go on teaching women how to kill rapists.
I’m with you on that for sure.
>Is that per year, or per lifetime?
Per year. But beware of straight-line extrapolation; rape incidence falls off real fast for women out of their fertile period, and 0.21-0.23% should probably be considered peak risk.
@Winter: ““Held Responsible” is not the same as “One of the causes”. Criminals will always pick the easiest target. That does not make the easiest target responsible for the crime. There will also always be an easiest target.”
This post encodes the assumption that the criminal first creates the crime, then assigns it to a victim on a 1-1 basis, which is of course nonsense. I mean, where do you think these criminals live? You think they’re off meditating in a cave somewhere, then they have a revelation and find someone to take it out on? Taking your position to its logical conclusion there is no point with any measures of deterrence at all.
Unfortunately, “spelling it out” isn’t an argument.
How would you feel if I started making things up about you?
lol? I am in favor of harsh penalties for criminals and strict enforcement of the law. However, I have reached this stance without resorting to self-righteous nonsense.
And your glowing blue disc!
If it is, then it is because locking your door doesn’t stop burglars. If locking your door was fool-proof then an unlocked door ought to be held as a prime cause. This is obviously not the case, whereas the choice not to burgle essentially eliminates the possibility of a burglary. Unfortunately that choice as a freely changeable variable exists only in principle, but nonetheless it is targeted via imprisonment and (in some times/places) killings.
Don’t load your questions so much, please. This whole idea that “nature” made him do it is more final cause nonsense. People believe that a large number of burglaries will be averted if government enforces laws forbidding it. They also believe locking their doors averts burglaries. So people are brought up to believe that they have a responsibility to lock their doors and to refrain from burglary. There are also laws forbidding burglaries. These efforts have been wildly successful – most people don’t turn to burglary. This makes the illusion that the majority don’t burgle because of some innate superiority is simply slave morality, since they scarcely had any choice to begin with. But to say that intervention of authorities constitutes *statism* (which is not synonymous with government, which can be local), is a logical jump that I can’t fill in.
I messed up some of my wording in that last paragraph. It says:
Should read:
I think you’re missing something here. I’ll quote from a post I made last time around.
You’re quoting the NCVS, which measures “how often people will say they are raped”, rather than “how often people are actually raped”; the difference is, like I said last time, kind of analogous to measuring how many people think they’re alcoholics rather than how many people are alcoholics.
One of the reason Koss et al.’s “The Scope of Rape” caused such a stir back in the 1980s was that there was such a difference between its results and the NCVS. But it’s been done at least four times that I’m aware of, and the results are durable: if you ask women “have you been [definition of rape]d?” rather than “have you been raped?”, the numbers come back way higher. You get compatible results when you ask men “have you [definition of rape]d anyone?” rather than “have you raped anyone?”; the number of rapists is smaller than the number of victims, because there are a few very prolific offenders.
That is how the NCVS numbers “square” with “whatever the hysterical chant is this week”–which has been pretty much constant since 1987. If you think there’s an error cascade going on here, you’re going to have to figure out what the source is and how it’s durable across both methodologies (both asking female victims and asking male offenders).
The part where you compare incompatible kinds of statistics is kind of like how last time you pointed out that the NCVS numbers are much lower than the Koss et al.-type numbers and declared that you, unlike the entire social science research community had noticed this and debunked an obvious falsehood. This is why I say that you seem to have retained your original opinions. Which is kind of sad–I’d think you’d have been really interested in someone getting such surprising yet solid results by playing rationalist taboo.
Consider the case of Elton Yarbrough, and let me know where you think his victims being armed would have made a difference. Note that at no point did he rely on physical force; they were incapacitated in other ways. I get that you have a very specific threat model in mind, but I don’t think it’s very accurate, especially considering how accurate your ideas about the rest of the “how and when rape is committed” question are.
>Consider the case of Elton Yarbrough
My conclusion from studying cases like this is not one you’re going to like. It has several parts. I was going to write a long comment about it, but I think it needs to be a blog post. I will anticipate it only by saying that Yarbrough is a nasty piece of work, but thinking about what he did highlights our need to stop lumping together as “rape” several different behaviors (some obviously criminal, some not) that have different meanings and different consequences.
I’d like to also respond to HedgeMage here, she has (way!) more field experience than me, but I think she’s missing a few bits.
They do! Women know they’re being raped (rather, that someone had sex with them when they didn’t want it but were unable to resist), and men know they’re raping (rather, that they had sex with someone when that someone didn’t want it but was unable to resist); we know this because if you ask women and ask men, the number who say, in effect “yeah, she was drunk and he had sex with her when she didn’t want it but was too out of it to stop him” match up. (Asking women is the method of Koss et al., replicated in the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey and various others; asking men is the method of Lisak and Miller, replicated by McWhorter.)
It’s really easy to muddy the waters with vague-sounding questions like “but can we ever really know what happened?”, but if you survey people, they certainly seem to know the difference. And furthermore, men who don’t have an interest in raping women seem to generally avoid committing rape. It’s a little weird to consider that at least nine-tenths of men are either “[low] on the gametic scale” or foreveralone virgins. It seriously does seem like it’s not that big or problematic of an expectation that men not rape women.
Also, consider Elton Yarbrough, an excellent case study of the “undetected rapist”. (He was only caught because he was recorded admitting it on a phone call with one of his victims; without that evidence, it’s extremely unlikely he would have been prosecuted.) He didn’t seem to be particularly unpopular or have trouble finding consensual sex partners. The model where rape is due to men being frustrated and unsuccessful in finding consensual sex doesn’t seem to account for most of the rape actually committed. And in general, rape proclivity seems to correlate well with being “alpha” or at least holding the sort of opinions that lead one to use phrases like “alpha male”. (An adversarial view of sex, a positive view of traditional sex roles, acceptance of violence in interpersonal relationships.)
I wonder how the chances work out if you compare P(rape accusation|consensual sex) to, for example, P(rape victimization|drinking with friends). All of this, in any case, is a really good criticism of how nobody likes to wait for an actual conviction when someone is accused, and that goes especially for sex crimes. It doesn’t really say anything about the risk of actually being raped, though.
It’s frustrating, isn’t it, that “men get away with rape in droves” and “men who are falsely accused of rape are punished in a lot of ways without ever actually being convicted” can both be true.
Thanks for doing the reading. I think I can come off as a bit linkspammy sometimes.
While you’re at it, though, please do remember that it’s just a single anecdote, and that’s good for illustrating and illuminating, but the primary results I’m pointing to are large, aggregated sets of data.
Ah. Well, if this ends up involving the phrases “legitimate rape” or “real rape”, I probably won’t like it; if this ends up concluding that Elton Yarbrough was doing something that wasn’t really that bad, I probably won’t like it. But I should clarify that I’m separating moral categories from legal ones here–I don’t think putting roughly seven million men in prison for long terms is a good idea; I’m not even sure what the thing to do here is. It’d be nice if it were easier to change social norms to address the problem of “well, yeah, she didn’t want to have sex with me, and she was so drunk she couldn’t stop me, but I didn’t rape her”, but really, I’m not even sure where one would start with that.
I mean, come on, I’m arguing with people on the internet. It’s pretty much the lowest form of activism. It’s like sub-activism.
@esr
> Per year. But beware of straight-line extrapolation; rape incidence falls off real fast for women out of their fertile period, and 0.21-0.23% should probably be considered peak risk.
I can straight line extrapolate over the domain of the data, unless the study indicates that it is a peak rather than an average. I didn’t see a cite for the study (though it might be in there with all the hundreds of comments above), so I couldn’t determine if it is per year (which you clarified) and which members of the female population where included in the study, and if, as you say, this is peak risk or average risk over the whole demographic range of females.
Even were it to only include women in their forty years of fertility, that is still 8%, which is still one in twelve. That ain’t one in four for sure, but it is, nonetheless, a disturbingly high number.
I also think it is disturbing how little discussion takes place about male rape. I think the numbers are probably really high, but it doesn’t get talked about. And if you include the incidence of rape in American prisons then the number of male on male rapes in the country as a whole may well be higher than the number of male on female rapes.
All of this talk about the crime of rape made me think of a (girl)friend I had in college in the 1970’s. I remember we were discussing one point or another and somehow got onto the subject of rape; she said “I don’t see it as that big a thing.” It turned out I was more outraged by it than she was. Why? Because, as she asked me, in the universe of crimes (and in the absence of physical damage other than the rape itself) which is worse, being raped or being stabbed? Being raped or being shot with a gun? Being raped or having an arm or leg ripped off? Being raped or having an eye gouged out? Her point was that the crime of rape is an act that in other circumstances people willingly and happily do all the time, and in the absence of violence, the act of sexual intercourse doesn’t permanently damage a woman (unlike any of the instances of crimes noted above). So why was I more bothered by the notion of rape than she was? And why the comparative hysteria and highlighting of the crime of rape over other crimes that involve permanent physical damage? (I wonder if I’ll be denounced for even relating the story and asking the question. This may be revealing in its own right.)
@grendelkhan “which measures “how often people will say they are raped”, rather than “how often people are actually raped”” “if you ask women “have you been [definition of rape]d?” rather than “have you been raped?”, the numbers come back way higher.”
They come back even higher still if your “[definition]” is something other than the actual definition, and includes acts that are not rape.
@Tim Condon
> she said “I don’t see it as that big a thing.”
She is definitely in the minority. Why? Because you (or she) is grossly underestimating the consequences of psychological trauma (and of course the very real possibility of various horrible STDs.) As Decective Stabler of Law and Order’s SVU says: it is taking one of the best things in the world and making it one of the worst.
If you had the choice of loosing an arm or loosing your ability to have sex, which would you choose?
Of course there are lots of different types of rape, and not all of them are equally impactful.
Of course it does! But how is that at all relevant to the research I’m citing?
>So why was I more bothered by the notion of rape than she was?
Because she’s clearly lacking imagination.
I’d like to update this bit that I wrote above:
That should read:
“It’s frustrating, isn’t it, that “men get away with rape in droves” and “men who are accused of rape are punished in a lot of ways without ever actually being convicted” can both be true.”
By definition, there can’t be a difference in the way we treat “men who are accused of rape”, “men who are accurately accused of rape” and “men who are falsely accused of rape” until an actual trial. Funny how it looks like I’m saying something different in each case, though, eh?
“Of course it does! But how is that at all relevant to the research I’m citing?”
My understanding is that typically the kind of study that comes back with a number like “1 in 4” tend to use a definition that includes “ever been asked more than once to have sex”.
But I haven’t looked at the specific studies you’re citing, so I’m not 100% sure it’s relevant except as a general comment on the incentives that can influence their methodologies.
I also think it is disturbing how little discussion takes place about male rape.
For most men outside of prison or the Congo the possibility feels pretty remote, I’d say, to the extent that joking about it doesn’t seem particularly distasteful, unless you insist on going off and immersing yourself in firsthand accounts.
@grendelkhan: “I’d think you’d have been really interested in someone getting such surprising yet solid results by playing rationalist taboo.”
That is a good game to play, but if it is done by researchers who then present their results in terms of the original loaded word (or if basically all public coverage and discussion uses that word–obviously one of these has happened here), the game is incomplete and it can actually worsen matters. The best outcome of playing that game is that you’ll find there are n different underlying concepts, and you’ll come up with names for each one of them which will then be used in later discussion of the issue. This satisfies the desires of conversants to have words for the concepts they mean, while frustrating the efforts of malicious (or effectively-malicious) participants to exploit language flaws to distort the conversation to their ends. It would be nice if the researchers had done that.
It appears Eric has said he’ll write a post about roughly this topic. This sounds like a good idea. For the moment, I’ll give my take.
The most primitive form of “rape” is certainly sex that is obtained by physically overpowering a victim. It seems straightforward to include the *threat* of physical force, used to intimidate a victim into complying, as being equivalent to its direct use here. (Indeed, I expect physically overpowering someone usually does not involve continually striking them until either the crime is completed or the victim is unconscious–I expect usually the victim will consciously give up resisting at some point, after which the coercive mechanism reverts to intimidation by prior demonstration.) However, if a victim is simply unconscious–even assuming that the victim’s non-consent is firmly established–that seems to me a rather different crime, because the criminal has not threatened anyone with serious injury or death.
By the way, there is precedent in the naming of other crimes. I believe “robbery” means going in and threatening someone to make them give you things, while “burglary” implies stealing things when no one’s there, and “theft” is more general and doesn’t imply the use or threat of force directly against a person. Consequently, “robbery” sounds to me much more dangerous and heinous than “burglary” or “theft” of unspecified objects. Let’s check official definitions to see if I’m right about this (i.e. if common usage agrees with me):
Google define:robbery –> The felonious taking of personal property from someone using force or the threat of force.
Wiki: Robbery is the crime of taking or attempting to take something of value by force or threat of force or by putting the victim in fear.
define:burglary –> Entry into a building illegally with intent to commit a crime, esp. theft.
Wiki: Burglary (also called breaking and entering and sometimes housebreaking) is a crime, the essence of which is illegal entry into a building for the purposes of committing an offence. Usually that offence will be theft[…].
define:theft –> The action or crime of stealing; stealing –> Take (another person’s property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it.
Wiki: In common usage, theft is the taking of another person’s property without that person’s permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.
So, yes, we (we who inherit the English language) have separate words for many different kinds of stealing. (Feels good, man.) Furthermore, there is an explicit mention that robbery is a felony, implying that it is *worse* than the other kinds of stealing. (Theft of a large and/or very valuable object can also be pretty bad, but “grand theft” is also a term.)
Some people discussed the case of someone waking up and finding his wallet is missing, and I can imagine someone saying “I’ve been robbed!”, but I think this is a case of common misuse of a term. In particular, I don’t think that would be treated as seriously, nor does it feel to me as threatening, as if the wallet were taken at gunpoint.
To draw further connections… I can imagine a scenario where one friend or acquaintance takes another’s wallet temporarily while he’s asleep, genuinely believing that he’d think it was “all right” in some way (e.g. he’s buying food that they’ll all eat in the morning, or he needs to buy something now and forgot his own wallet and plans to pay him back later), and the guy wakes up and thinks “OMGWTF”, and, even after the friend brings it back and explains what he did, the guy says, “I don’t care about your explanations. I feel violated, and I would not have agreed to it if I had been awake.” I could agree that this was a crime, but it does not seem to me very serious–it seems that the worst the friend should have to do is pay back the amount of money he took, perhaps a small multiple thereof if we’re feeling *really* punitive, and likely the amount taken was small enough that a court wouldn’t even bother to take the case.
Malicious intent and the use of force seem like serious bad things. (And I think a law student would say here, “Yeah, congratulations, we’ve been saying that for hundreds or thousands of years.”) In their absence, the appropriate punishment seems based purely on the observable damage inflicted, and we might describe the perpetrator as “negligent”. In the presence of both, the perpetrator could probably be called a “monster”, and even if it is someone robbing people just so he can feed his kids, he is a threat to his potential future victims, and he really can’t complain about being stopped and punished by the law.
Anyway, there seem to me at least two kinds of things that are being called “rape” that should have different names. The first is the violent rape that relies on the deliberate use or threat of physical force; I am inclined to insist that “rape” meant just this in the past and should continue to mean just this, although if someone convinces me otherwise, I would proffer the term “violent rape” or “forcible rape” (I think the latter is used in some literature). The second is penetrative sex on an unconscious victim, who is presumed to not give consent. I don’t have a good term that refers to just this, but “nonconsensual sex” is a nice blanket term for nonconsensual sex, and I might recommend that [noting that it should not connote “you mean violent rape”]. (By the way, I’m not sure it should qualify as “sex” if one person is not responding at all; I’m inclined to call it “penetration, not sex”, but I wouldn’t press the point.)
And then there are cases where the victim was conscious, just intoxicated to some degree or other, and their consent is in question. In these cases I feel like I should say “alleged victim” until we have some details about what transpired. For example, if the alleged victim said “No” and didn’t say anything positive after that before penetration, then that seems pretty good evidence of non-consent (although it can be trumped by other things–for example, if the victim actively took off her clothes and those of the defendant, and did all the work of sex while he just lay there–all without saying any further words, I would interpret that as consent). Basically, the question of consent has to be established with evidence, and the only pieces of evidence inherent to the case are that the alleged victim was part of a sexual act and that she was not coerced by force or the threat thereof–which seems to suggest that consent is presumed. (Compare a case where someone signed a contract, possibly intoxicated, and later claims he didn’t give proper informed consent. It seems that the presumption would be that he did give consent, because the signature is the loudest existing piece of evidence. To make his case, he would probably argue that (a) there’s a part to the contract that he, now in his right mind, would not agree to, (b) he was not in his right mind, and (c) he would not have agreed back then had he been in his right mind.)
Also, remember this from earlier. Malicious intent and the use or threat of force is terrible, dangerous, and must be killed. Malicious intent is bad, but not life-threateningly dangerous. No malicious intent and no force or threat is accidental, negligent, maybe willfully negligent at worst. The words you use, and the punishments you support, should reflect this. –For example, if the victim of genuinely nonconsensual sex gets an incurable STD, that sounds like a very serious problem, and I would feel heavily violated in that case, and clearly there are damages. If someone’s vagina or asshole has been heavily abused and is bleeding, that’s also serious damage. If someone feels disgusted at having strange fluids inside them, that might be a thing. Then there are psychological issues, and I don’t really know how this is or should be taken care of by the legal system… but any punishment justified by *that* should (a) be limited by the demonstrated extent of psychological damage, (b) be possibly constrained to direct causality [e.g. if a bunch of other people tease or harass the victim, must the defendant answer for that?], and (c) be possibly mitigated if the defendant acted non-maliciously or even in good faith. [Is it possible for someone to carry through what his partner deems non-consensual sex, and yet do it in good faith? At the limits of bad communication, yes. I guess extreme intoxication makes this more plausible.]
Why should anyone care about using words less than “[violent] rape” to refer to perpetrators of nonconsensual but non-violent sex? I suppose it might be empathy with the defendants. I expect the people who actively use phrases like “rape culture” would probably bring that forth as an accusation. But no, there are other considerations. As a general principle, if people are receiving punishments and condemnation out of proportion to what they’ve done, then the legal system and the system of shunning-people-who-do-bad-things are being subverted to do things they’re not supposed to do. This might have dangerous implications (e.g. if some of these out-of-proportion punishments are being used specifically on people who are trying to resist some kind of abusive exploitation), or it might not, depending on things you could find out by researching the world. In any case, it is a safe strategy to oppose out-of-proportion punishments and condemnation in *all cases* on principle, and anyone who tries to discourage this behavior is… well, if I felt like condemning people, which I might in the face of condemning rhetoric from the people who try to discourage this behavior, then I’d say you were enablers of tyranny, whether you realized it or not.
My experience was, in some ways, a perfect storm of events. I eventually got over it.
I’m still unlikely to get within 10 feet of a woman in a public place at this point, unless she’s actively inviting me, or I know her well, or I’m being introduced by one of her friends. It’s just not worth the risk to me. Rape victims talk about “triggering” experiences.
Mine come from walking down the street. They don’t count to society at large. I’m male, and I’m expected to deal with it. Nobody will ever change laws to accommodate my trust issues.
That is the crux of the matter. Moral panics are an attempt to use a clumsy, blunt instrument to assuage someone else’s trust issues, whether it’s a moral panic about pornography, gun control, rape prevention, or “those people not in my tribe might do something I Don’t Like.”
It’s very easy to see yourself as being right and virtuous when you’re the one swinging the hammer. As someone who got brushed by a near miss – and trust me, it was a near miss in my case – I would far rather shrink the size of the hammer.
I think that the operational definition of the word “rape” needs to be “violence or threat of violence with the intent of gaining sexual intimacy.” Yes, this means that “date rape” and “rape drugs” like GHB get a different statutory code. Yes, this will get twisted into “real rape” “rape-rape” and “legitimate rape” by the people who benefit from the current muddle for political aim.
I would love to live in a world where false rape accusations got punished. I don’t, and I doubt that I ever will, because there’s a movement – a strain of feminism – that is all about justifying its continued existence as a revolutionary compact by any means necessary.
You want to talk about a real gender-normative tragedy?
Men are twenty times likelier to die on the job than women are. This isn’t even considered newsworthy.
Men are thirty times likelier to end up completely homeless than women are.
While incidences of diagnosed depression are about twice as likely in women as they are in men, men are over five times likelier to kill themselves then women are across all ages. When broken down by age cohort, there are two hot spots:
Men in their late teens and early twenties are thirteen times as likely to commit suicide as their female peers. Most of that age demograhic who off themselves, based on statistical samplings of notes, do it because they’ve gotten heartsick and don’t have a functioning dating script. The numbers have gone up since the 1990s.
The other hot spot is men in their late thirties, early forties, most often within six months of a divorce. Divorced men kill themselves at about thirty times the rate as divorced women.
This is considered normal.
“You want to talk about a real gender-normative tragedy?”
The standard among lefty feminists appears to be:
1) any situation in which women are “disadvantaged” or “discriminated against” (like health insurance, where women are charged more because they use it a LOT more) is EVIL and/or evidence of the patriarchy, and must be remedied by government force (as when Colorado made it illegal to charge women more for health insurance)
2) any situation in which women have an advantage (lifespan (which curiously has increased more than average male lifespan during the age of modern medicine in spite of discrimination claims), college attendance and graduation, teenage driver insurance rates) is simply “natural”. Nothing to see there, move along.
I don’t know what you mean by that last part, but your understanding is wrong. (More detail here.)
If you find this surprising (as I did), please try and do some cache-invalidation on the beliefs that led you to your original understanding.
One issue with this theory is that this stuff doesn’t seem to exist in the UK or the parts of Continental Europe I’ve visited. If it does, it’s certainly on a much smaller scale than the US. So why is that when those countries also have sexual freedom?
I would love to live in a world where false rape accusations got punished.
I think they usually are, when there’s proof available and the accuser doesn’t have the option of going home to California. But of course doing so could suppress the reporting of genuine rape accusations in situation where the accuser has reason to doubt she’ll be believed, and in a campus environment there are no prizes for guessing which way that tradeoff is going to swing.
Horrible that she went from “I could have been raped…” to “…so I must have been!” without anyone in the decision chain seriously considering the alternatives. But yeah, campuses.
@Roger Phillips:
I am not arguing that crime should be tolerated.
Opportunity cost (which is evolution, economics, nature) is always the cause of crime, because in the absence of cost, everyone wants what they want (e.g. bluntly Jessica Boxer apparently wants a form of moderate feminism empowered by the state stealing from me, not funded by her own personal resources). We alter the individual’s opportunity cost, then they alter their choices.
Laws and state punishment are one means of altering the opportunity cost for certain actions. However, I assert they are catastrophically worse than the most inefficient means, because:
1. They (via opportunity cost) encourage individuals to not do the most efficient means– self-protection. They encourage becoming a victim and allowing the state to define victimization.
2. Collectively defined victimization can be gamed and politicized– a power vacuum. Statism always ends up in the same place, which is an ever growing orgy of giving everybody everything they want (the only possible resolution to bickering), including all forms of victimization. As Ken Burnside says, the power vacuum creates an ever growing hammer.
@Jessica Boxer:
Very simple. If women are responsible for protecting themselves, then rapists will be dead. And no one will be false punished, unless the woman is a murderer, in which case she will soon be dead too.
That would require that you stop stealing from me in order to get what you want. You would have to use your own resources to protect yourself. But I assume you don’t want to live in a world where you have to protect yourself. You want to live in a fantasy world, where you can require others to pay for your protection. And this fantasy world always ends up destitute over and over again in history because everybody wants everything collectively– it is a false sense of security at the end game economic implosion.
Besides I don’t agree with funding your protection so you can boast about how much more empowered women are now. If you are really strong, you can protect yourself. It would be nice to be appreciated for being a man, for being a brother, etc..
Because you require the law and police, not self-protection.
@Jeff Read:
Why should a destroy my life to take revenge on Robert? Will it bring my sister back? Can’t I go more good by being productive? It was officially ruled a suicide, and that is what I thought when I saw him. My mother hired a private detective and he discovered she couldn’t have fired the gun into her mouth with her left hand at that angle and besides she was loaded up with drugs.
In 2003, my sister asked for $5000 (she was my CPA) to bribe a judge to get Robert out of jail (he was in a bar fight). And I told her no because she was going to ruin her life. She told my parents to never let me see her again, and I was unable to know where she was. In April 2006, I mentioned to my mother that I needed to talk with her and I had a feeling it was important. My mother didn’t give me contact. May 31 she was dead. What do am I supposed to do? What do you think I feel about that? That is my only sister, I tried to protect her, but she wouldn’t let me.
My big mistake apparently was encouraging her to get an abortion in 2002, because I was very concerned about the situation of her relationship. Perhaps if I hadn’t done that, her mother instinct would have kicked in. I will forever feel horrible for that decision.
@Roger (who is smart and spirited in his arguments, and seems like a good sort in spite of some of his off-putting positions): Hidden but false premise, Roger: You say “Opportunity cost (which is evolution, economics, nature) is always the cause of crime, because in the absence of cost, everyone wants what they want….We alter the individual’s opportunity cost, then they alter their choices.”
The hidden premise contained in those statements is that when someone “wants what they want,” they will and must act on such wants regardless of whether taking such action violates the rights of others. As I have said before, I believe in a quaint notion called “civilization.” You have inadvertently hit upon one of the foundational premises of civilization, i.e. when someone “wants what they want,” they are subject to self-imposed ethical standards that prevent them from acting upon such “wants” if such action results in the violation of the rights of others (how and why such “rights” are arrived at and distilled is irrelevant, but they are often reflected in a code of laws). So yes, you may “want what you want,” but in a state of civilization you do not ipso facto *act* upon those wants. Otherwise, if you wanted to take Jessica (or Shirley, or Barbara) sexually, then you would do so, subject only to a crude and animal-like cost-benefit analysis (often “on-the-fly”). Civilization and those who live in a civilized state justly treat such people as the dangerous animals they are. Sure, doing so “alters their opportunity cost,” but we don’t try to shift blame onto the victim by saying “opportunity cost is always the cause of the crime.” It’s not.
@Tim Condon:
You meant to attribute your reply to me, not Roger. Thanks for your kind words about me. My oft-putting positions are motivated by the end game of statist enforced ethics being horrifically evil.
The problem of ethics is they are not absolutely agreed upon by everyone. As we see with this blog, the definition of the victim slides the slippery slope of statism from something widely agreeable (assault with force) to the contentious and social paralysis “yes means no, if I wasn’t mentally fit to decide for myself”.
But I regress away from the main point into one you can argue. Let me get back on point.
Criminality is defined as violating the rights of others. But rights are naturally conflicting. The only possible resolution is economic. You either ignore this reality and create a statism that slides into the morass of a collective power vacuum, or you let each individual be economically responsible. There is no other choice. There is no middle ground. You can argue for middle ground statist enforced ethics, but never in the history of the world has one been sustained, because of the very nature of collectivism (the state power) is that it encourages individuals to take more (even in the form of grossly expanded victim definition) than they produce. With individual responsibility, ethics is encoded by economic resources and individual free market decisions.
Yes I would also like to live in a society where people have respect for each other. But as we see, statist enforced ethics always slide into disrespect and social dysfunction, because of the nature of collective economics.
Perhaps someone such as Eric who is a better communicator than me, could elucidate this more clearly than I have. Eric has, Google Some Iron Laws of Political Economics. I am also curious what position Eric takes on ethics encoded in laws versus in individual responsibility, i.e. if he thinks there is some sustainable middle ground and why.
@me in response to Jeff Read:
I have observed in life that when I make decisions for others, I take responsibility for their actions. Yet another reason for me to not take revenge. This is yet another evidence in my life experience, that collectively enforced incentives (including punishment after the fact) can never do just the one intended thing. This blog is topic is another evidence.
Now I loath to try to direct the lives of others, or those who do so– I cringe when I overhear them.
Statists think they can just legislate correctness, as if they have perfect visibility of 6 billion localized cost functions.
The free market (individual responsibility) is optimum, because it continuously adjusts with localized economic feedback loops. Note that as far as a know simulated annealing is the only algorithm that can (asymptotic) find a global optimum solution (given infinite cooling time) for an unknown problem a priori, and it requires that all the actors (whether they be molecules, neurons+synapses, or individuals in a society) have maximum global degrees-of-freedom with only localized optimization constraints (i.e. slowly cooled/annealed towards the solution).
@Just Saying: “Opportunity cost (which is evolution, economics, nature) is always the cause of crime, because in the absence of cost, everyone wants what they want (e.g. bluntly Jessica Boxer apparently wants a form of moderate feminism empowered by the state stealing from me, not funded by her own personal resources). We alter the individual’s opportunity cost, then they alter their choices.
Laws and state punishment are one means of altering the opportunity cost for certain actions.”
It might help to step back and look at this from a different level.
When people live together in a society, there *must* be agreement on acceptable behavior. We call the agreement “customs” or “morality”. We call the written down version “law”. but the agreement exists or the society doesn’t survive.
Laws do not *prevent* crime. They activate *after* a crime has already occured.
The single most basic deterrent to crime is that the vast majority of people simply don’t commit them. We all “want what we want”, but most of us have limits on what we’ll do to get it. Those limits are in the “customs” or “morality” mentioned above. That stuff is learned by admonition and precept starting *early*, and operates on a reflex level as adults. This is not a question of “opportunity costs”, as it never reaches the cost/benefit calculation level. While many of us might personally benefit from actions considered criminal, it normally just doesn’t *occur* to us to do so.
The primary controls to crime are internal. People refrain from committing them, because there are things they just don’t *do.* Laws are external controls for the cases in which the internal controls weren’t sufficient.
I don’t care *what* kind of ideal society you you might postulate. You *will* have a mixture of internal and external controls on behavior. You *will* have laws, and people designated by the society as those empowered to *enforce* those laws. For that matter, and for similar underlying reasons, you *will* have something that performs the functions of government, even if you disguise the fact by calling it something else.
I don’t get quite as upset as some here about additional laws, because I think they are unlikely to be passed and put on the books unless the underlying societal agreement is already there. Law is custom written down, and if it isn’t already custom, it’s unlikely to *be* written down.
@DMcCunney:
I think your presumption is that only criminals commit crimes and they are outliers so we need only to remove them from the society. Nice fantasy. But this doesn’t address my point, which is the statist definition of crime slides because it is gamed, until everyone is a criminal. The ultimate end game is Nazi Germany. I read now that in California any employer who opts out of Obamacare will be illegal. Eventually they will criminalize opting out, as they do for not paying child support to a deadbeat mom.
@Just Saying: “I think your presumption is that only criminals commit crimes and they are outliers so we need only to remove them from the society. Nice fantasy.”
Nice reality. By definition, if you commit a crime, you’re a criminal. If you don’t, you aren’t. So yes, only criminals commit crimes.
The larger question is why they do so. Correct me if I’ve got you wrong, but your earlier statement “Opportunity cost (which is evolution, economics, nature) is always the cause of crime, because in the absence of cost, everyone wants what they want. … We alter the individual’s opportunity cost, then they alter their choices.” seems to assume that an individual’s decision to commit a crime is solely a cost/benefit calculation, and if there’s a defined benefit to them and no perceivable cost, *anyone* might commit a crime. (I would hate to live in a society where that was true.)
Reread my earlier comments on the idea, That isn’t how it works, and never has been. Cost/benefit calculations may be made if you are inclined to commit a crime in the first place, and are considering whether the rewards you get if you succeed are great enough to make the risk of failing acceptable. (It also requires you to be smart enough to want to make that determination. Many criminals simply aren’t smart, and likely wouldn’t be criminals if they were.)
We all have a reflex level set of “Don’t dos” that serve as the primary control on civilized behavior. For most people, most of the things we agree are crimes are covered by those “Don’t Dos” It simply will not occur to the vast majority of people in a society to commit a serious crime, even if there is broad opportunity and *no* cost.
Most moral behavior is reflex behavior, not consciously considered rational choice. The issue any society faces is those who for whatever reason never acquired the proper social reflexes, and removing them from society is the usual response when one is found.
@DMcCunney:
My point is that if the collective is allowed to define what is crime, there is no stable definition and eventually everything becomes a crime (until the state fails, then humans repeat the same mistake again), because human desires (for their “rights”) conflict. That is why only individual self-protection is a stable paradigm, where individual rights are what the individual can achieve (with her or her resources). I even provided the mathematical model which makes this statement true, and it is observed to be true throughout all human history.
If we could all agree on the behavior of say 2% of the society that we want to eliminate, and this was a stable definition, then we could eliminate it. Unfortunately, that is a fantasy and thus a criminal in a statist definition is not only one who commits crimes, but rather eventually everyone. Statism resolves to gridlock and paralysis.
What you and other idealists want to do is think that there is some agreement in society, but this is an illusion provided by the time it takes for statism to morph from a horrific reset into another horrific reset, which may be approximately every 78 years.
We all live in a reality where humans simply don’t agree. We can feign agreement with a statism that appears to be stable for about 52 years, until it is top heavy from too many laws and masses of parasites gaming the collective, then it goes into the 26 years downside into horror (for which the clock started in 2007 for the USA which is dominant global economy).
The specific time periods I am using are not central to my point, and they are a new model I have become aware of only recently (so I reserve the option to change them or not use them in the future as I collect more evidence).
@Tim: I think you confused me with JustSaying, because he wrote my name at the top of his reply.
I’m sorry, I didn’t have this information.
The way you put it was particularly monstrous-sounding.
@Jeff Read:
Understood. I state shocking conclusions, that don’t reflect my entire thought process. Thanks.
On the statist front, coming to realization that no cryptocurrency will be able to subvert it, my thought process is that I should be trying to enable more people become involved in hightech to minimize the unemployed, rather than trying to find ways to subvert their failure.
My admonitions don’t reflect that I am cognizant that we must live in the reality and uplifting people is always the most positive endeavor.
Saw this earlier today (aggregated link from another site), and couldn’t help but think of this column. Looks like this moral panic has teeth.
http://www.creators.com/conservative/mona-charen/obama-administration-scraps-free-speech.html
Russia’s moral panic towards a state enforced religion.
@me:
Wow a very young filipina who quotes Linus on her facebook, “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”. The only interaction I have had so far is she wrote to me that she loves to code in Java and other languages. Based on her family name and the headdress of others in her photos, she may have relatives or friends who are Muslims, although she lists her religion as “Christian – other”.
@me (relevance to blog topic was upthread discussion):
She wrote on the Linus quote:
I like this witty logic, she even avoids needless whitespace. I am going to call her.
@esr and sean hastings –
i’m inclined to agree with sean – particularly because your scenario, esr, posits that a woman got blind drunk WITH the man. perhaps not. perhaps she just got blind drunk and poof – there’s this man. or passed out or .. . . a thousand shades of grey (if we can still use “of grey” without innuendo)
on the other hand, sean hastings, using your example – if the man that took your wallet was a woman you would still have been robbed. which is to say, if a woman has sex with a man who is blind drunk – did she rape him?
frankly, as a woman, i’m offended by nearly all the loudest voices out there and no one wants to discuss anything real. date rape does happen – does it happen cuz boys aren’t “controlled and punished” or is it “only the rare psychopath?” both lovely theories in their simplicity – if only things were that simple and then
we wouldn’t have to discuss that girls are taught never to say “yes” and therefore boys are left to figure it out. culture shows a thousand times that girls really really want you to just “go for it” or you’re a wimp. culture teaches boys that they don’t want intimacy – that they are rutting animals and any screw is a good screw. and teaches girls that boys don’t “make mistakes” they “prey on.” culture that treats boys (like steubenville boys) as “meat” themselves (do you suppose they would have been protected if they weren’t star athletes or ya know, paid any mind) . .. and on and on it goes while feminism and the manosphere argue over whether it’s women or men that are evil. sigh.
also @esr – while i am personally a gun control believer – i respect and admire your stance; i’ve seen too many people make the leap from “the numbers are wrong about rape” to “most women are lying about it / deserve it” in an eyelash flutter.
Some of the people making rape-while-drunk arguments have constructed a straw man. Of course it’s wrong to have sex with someone who is unconscious-drunk. But that’s not what some alleged cases of drunk-rape are. I have had the experience of being literally begged by a drunk woman to have sex with her, but not doing so because I believed that she would regret it later (for various reasons that I won’t go into). I’ll bet an awful lot of men have had a similar experience. Out of all those cases, sometimes the man does not refuse. And out of all of those cases where the man has not refused, sometimes the woman later becomes convinced it was rape — particularly so if she’s immersed in a sub-culture that defines it as such.
Is it really so hard to believe that this could happen on a college campus? There have got to be tens of thousands of instances of the basic situation each year (drunk woman wanting sex when she would regret it later), many of which will end up as the the first case (man does not refuse), out of which surely some non-insignificant number have to end up in the second case (false accusation of rape). We do not have to believe that having sex with an unconscious drunk isn’t rape to be concerned about false accusation of rape.
And we don’t have to believe this is as common as real rape to be concerned about it, either. That would be a false choice. The two issues are entirely separate, other than occurring in the same society.
Rape is sex without legitimate consent. The judgement-impairing characteristics of alcohol are well-known. If you have sex with a woman who is alcohol-intoxicated, she cannot possibly give legimiate consent to the act, and such an act would be rape, by the very definition of rape. Period. End of story.
It doesn’t matter if you were drunk too. It doesn’t matter if “this happens all the time on college campuses”. You are a rapist and will be tried, convicted, and imprisoned as a rapist and be listed on the sex offender registry.
(And yes, it does happen all the time on college campuses. Why do you think people keep repeating that between one and six and one in three women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Contrary to what Men Going Their Own Way believe, feminists don’t just pull these stats out of their asses.)
Oh shut up, Jeff. In America on any given day and evening millions upon millions of people imbibe alcohol to various degrees. In our civilization it is widely and commonly used as a social lubricant that makes people both happy and comfortable with each other. And—horrors!—many men and women (not to mention same-gender couples) actually go on after drinking a little (or a lot of) alcohol, and—horrors!—enjoy sex! B.F.D. You want to pull out your Puritanical, holier-than-thou condemnatory little speech that would please any social-fascist, go sing it elsewhere. People drink. People screw. People fall in love. People get married. People drink and screw at the same time. People drink and fall in love. Get the fuck off your high horse and stop parroting the exceedingly stupid, bitter, witch-feminist party line. Geez. You’d be a great stormtrooper for Mayor Bloomberg. Get lost. Period. End of story. In a just society people like you would be tried, convicted, whipped, and banished to another country where you’ll be more comfortable, like Iran or Saudi Arabia. No danger of people drinking alcohol and having sex THERE. Makes you happy, I’m sure. End fuckin’ rant.
@jeff read
why is a man who is drunk capable of consent and a woman who is drunk is not?
i’ve no issue with the idea that there is a level of impairment that negates consent but, to my mind, that applies to women and men. if anything, societal conditioning would make women more predisposed to saying “no” and/or to giving thought to whether to say no even while drunk. whereas men/boys are raised with the idea that men don’t say no. ever.
so again, why do you see a drunk man as still capable and a drunk woman as a victim? and where does that line end? if i would have done the same sober and have no regret – was i still then violated?
It’s not that the man can give consent while drunk. It’s that the law is structured to favor women. There are perfectly good reasons for this: generally speaking women are less able to defend themselves and suffer higher negative consequences from the sex act including greater risk of physical trauma, greater risk of STD transmission, and of course pregnancy. Better that the law occasionally wrongly impose legal consequences on a man than put women at physical risk. So in such cases where neither partner is able to give what the law considers legitimate consent, by convention the woman is considered the victim and the man the perpetrator.
And it’s not just rape, this appears to be a general principle in law. If you are a man, and a woman saves your sperm against your will and impregantes herself with it, you are on the hook for child support. Yes, there have been cases where this was claimed, and the court found in favor of the woman, every single time, strictly on the basis of “whatever may have transpired, you had sexual contact with this woman in the past and you tested as the biological father, therefore you owe her money”.
Disclaimer: IANAL, TINLA. If someone with an actual JD wants to chime in on this, I’d be inclined to hear their thoughts.
This article is bullshit.
Here’s the list of reasons why men are bailing out. Unlike what they made you to believe, there’s a reason why alimony never required a woman to continue cleaning the house of her ex husband – because he was expected to be able to do it alone. The whole unpaid labor is a joke because it never accounts the fact that men did and still do most of the out-of-house unpaid work as well as many household chores related to painting, fixing things, plumbing the sink. Now most men also share cooking, ironing, cleaning and washing their socks with their working wives, it’s not a rocket science.
Here’s the list of reasons why marriage is increasingly refused by young men:
1. marriage brings automatic assumption of all children being biologically yours, and there is no difference between paternity fraud percentages of married and unmarried couples. Many men are indeed secretly doing paternity testing and this is a huge taboo in this society, it’s even punishable by law and you can be sentenced to jail. Yet anonymous testing is a no-risk job and many men send the samples anonymously and then confirm the paternity by visiting their links anonymously via the internet. I’ve done that with my son, not because I don’t trust my fiancee, but because it’s my right and it’s one of hypocrisies of the society to shame men to hide their concern and legal right to have definite proof. You feel awkward at first, but you feel so much better after a week, because you have peace of mind forever. It should be obligatory or free-of-charge at birth and offered to married men, possibly at full discretion from their wives. Why should a wife have full discretion by all physicians about her adultery and cuckolding in case of a child that is biologically not her husband’s but a husband shouldn’t have a discretion to avoid such scenario. Let’s be honest, it does happen and it happens very often. If it’s been the opposite, you’d have men being jailed for cuckolding their wives to pay and raise other woman’s children unknowingly. Check out multi-million dollar lawsuits for accidental switching of babies born in hospitals and you’ll get the point.
2. Divorce proceedings are filled with anti-male bias that it’s ridiculous. Alimony is awarded to women in 97% of cases. Children are awarded to wives in 85% of cases and only 10% of cases to husbands. Wives are also the only ones with legal option to avoid paying child support legally, with no legal sanctions.
Don’t get me wrong, I consider women to be better behaved than men. They drink less often, they smoke weed and do drugs less often, they do crimes less often. But we’re talking about a smaller percentage of society that is at fault. Somehow the courts work this way: children are mother’s domain and father is a sperm donor and a paycheck, he can be disposed at his wife’s whim at any time. Stupid thing is that one parent continues to be the parent while other is forced to be part-time parent at best, if the other parent allows them to be even that. There is no logical explanation why someone should be a viable parent until divorce and their role is supposedly necessary, yet to be arbitrarily degraded and deemed unnecessary once their spouse (generally wife) decides to cast them out of their child’s life. If someone should be pushed out, there should be a heavy fault involved – felony, alcoholism, drug abuse, prostitution, schizophrenia, etc.
Wife doesn’t need to prove that, she gets custody on default. You need to prove your wife is at fault, and no, marital infidelity, prostitution, smoking pot and many other things aren’t making her at fault. No kidding. You might have heard how no fault is father’s fault in essence. Well, it is. This is why there is a strong correlation with divorce initiation and residential custody: While divorce initiation by gender is roughly equal when it comes to child-free couples, it gets heavily biased when children are involved. Roughly half of all divorced couples are child-free while half couples have children involved, so the difference is strikingly evident. No-fault essentially makes the same result as what happened when husband was at fault back in the day. And no, divorce wasn’t rare even during the 50s, more than 25% of people were divorcing, and more than 20% were divorcing during the 1930s.
This whole deal with child support and father treatment is also a reason why many fathers are very anxious regarding the father role and many opt out on purpose, not because they don’t want children but due to fear. There is no difference about child support and father treatment whether married or unmarried, you need to pay child support. I feared being a father myself and was shocked when I heard that my common wife was pregnant. Even though I wanted children. I went the whole trial marriage because I don’t believe in that whole institution, because it guarantees me nothing. And I feel sorry now only because although I hate that institution, I know that it’d mean a lot to my common wife if we married. I’ll most probably do it after we get a second child which I’ll put to DNA testing as well, just out of habit. It really gives peace of mind forever.
Not a single man spoke of the common problems for men regarding marriage, children, alimony or life in general. Not a single one. Yet I am sure that lots of men are feeling the same out there. I know that because we talk about it when we are in buddy-groups. Not directly, but it’s very obvious by the way people speak of some issues. Until those things are acknowledged, everything will be more and more casual, because the treatment of men in this society is like treating trash. Your feelings and your life doesn’t matter.
Instead of tackling those issues, author tackles the issue with false problems and gives false solution: men outnumbering women on colleges and such stuff. Women outnumbering men on colleges is rather the proof that the whole home preparation, elementary and high school, media and government’s effort is focused on girls and women advancing, while not making any efforts to tackle very present problems for boys. In fact, best solution for boys would be home-schooling due to terrible influence of single-parent children. That way you’ll isolate the problem of other households and their gangsta behavior would not spread like cancer.
Until people acknowledge that paternity, father’s role, alimony and well-being of men SHOULD be relevant, society will continue to have an increasing number of men who treat women as cars as well, and an increasing number of men who are afraid of marriage and having children.
@john doe – assuming all that is true – how does any of it make the article bullshit?
Rape culture is when an Ivy League university’s policy states that “written reprimand” is the administrative punishment for “non-consensual sex”.
I note that the *cough* Jezebel article didn’t include a link to or even quote the alleged policy.
For a comprehensive treatment of the subject read “SEXUAL UTOPIA IN POWER – Don’t Marry” by F. ROGER DEVLIN: http://dontmarry.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sexualutopia.pdf
Well, that sounds very clever and all, but it can’t be right because the myth of hypergamy is pure Feminist Mystique v.2.0, straight, full-strength bs.
Women’s Cinderella Complexes != hypergamy.
See if you can take the hypergamy out and then reconstuct what’s left into anything coherent. Better yet, try it with hypogamy instead!