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Either my model is wrong or this story is false. Specifically, I doubt an famous feminist's considered opinion was that the world would be better if a substantial number of people "unspecified disappeared." Cocktail party quips do not count.
Read the reference Ozy gave.
Admittedly, this can be interpreted as sex selection of gametes and embryos, not disappearance of currently living people.
Your model of feminism is probably wrong. Feminists are varied and complicated. Some parts of feminism are completely rotten and people in them claim that all porn is rape, that rape of men doesn't matter, that no woman enjoys blowjobs. In particular, Mary Daly said some awful things about trans people, and refused male students in her classes.
Wowzers! Daly is so essentialist (i.e. thinks women all inherently have certain mental characteristics). I'm not surprised that someone held her positions so much as I am surprised that she's considered an (recent) influential feminist. I thought that all (contemporary?) feminism was just applied post-modernist (i.e. noticing that gender roles are historically contingent). But that's clearly inconsistent with Daly. Model updated.
That said, I suspect I'm a lot more sympathetic to many of the arguments than you are. I don't think I need to reject Andrea Dworkin in order to reject the essentialism of Daly. That said, I hope that Dworkin hasn't said that the gender of the rape victim matters, because it shouldn't matter. (She essentially agrees with your other examples, I think).
(Academic) feminist theory has gotten much more postmodern (perhaps more specifically poststructural) over the past three decades, but constructionism isn't the major axis of differentiation. When difference feminists were important they tended to be a bit more post-y than the dominance theorist, who were very often as modernist as the day is long.
Thanks. My recent experience is that my philosophical reach often exceeds my philosophy terminology grasp. I know what I think - and people have told me that it's a "deconstructivist" position.
But I definitely don't know the ins and outs of particular schools of thought - I had a discussion recently with a third-wave feminist who argued that rejecting intersectionality was an essential element of being second wave feminist. I don't doubt that many second-wavers implicitly (or explicitly) rejected intersectionality - and I think intersectionality is an important structure in the correct theoretical framework. But I'm not familiar enough with the schools of thought to know whether second-wave is inherently inconsistent with intersectionality.
In short, are there accessible references that lay out the central positions of the various schools of thought - at a more nuanced and detailed level than wikipedia? The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is at the right level, but doesn't seem to be directed at the topics I'm referring to here.
As with most things, my experience is that specialist encyclopedias are your best bet for knowledge per effort. There's nothing as high-quality and legally accessible as the SEP, but the standard other places should have you covered. Depending on the level of detail you're looking for, Cambridge Companions, Oxford Handbooks, and Very Short Guides tend to be pretty accurate and accessible.
(As for intersectionality I have yet to see a definition which isn't either trivial or theoretically problematic. Which isn't to say that realizing and incorporating the trivial form is itself trivial, but I don't think either version would really hold up as a necessary or sufficient condition for differentiating waves. Waves are noticed based on broad shifts in theory and are thus necessarily fuzzy. But this is just IMO.)
I can't find a cite but I'm sure someone in that school of thought has made that claim explicitly ("Men can't be raped").
That said, Dworkin and others have indicated that all penetrative sex is rape, specifically of the sort that a male perpetrates upon a female, so that would suggest that it could not happen the other way 'round.
Yes, I agree that Dworkin equates coercive sex and penetrative sex. If Dworkin thinks that understanding rules out male rape victims (female tool use, to say nothing of homosexual rape), that would make me sad. After all, male tool use on females would be coercive according to her.
Edit: Forgot central point, which is that saying "men can't be raped" is very different from saying "male rape victims don't matter" The first is an argument about definition and perspective. The second blatantly contradicts the assertion that rape is wrong.
At a certain level, I think it is right to say sex is generally coercive, in much the same way that going to work is generally coercive. If you don't go to work for a long enough period of time, you will be the subject of violence. (e.g. eviction)
That understanding of coercion has the twin failings of (1) not being the ordinary usage of the word, and (2) not saying much that is interesting. Everything is Dworkin-coercive, just about.
"Its not wrong when it happens to the out-group" is standard human thinking. Also overall people do tend to care less about average male than average female suffering.
I don't understand this analogy. It really is necessary to work. It's not necessary to be in any intimate relationships. Taking a vow of celibacy does not lead inevitably to getting raped. Within a relationship, there will be increasing pressure to have sex as time since last coitus increases, but there is typically the alternative of ending the relationship, at least in modern Western society.
It's not necessary to be in a relationship. Nor is it necessary to engage in sexual relations within the relationship. But there is social pressure to be in a (hetero-normative) relationship and to perform sex acts. Dworkins' first point is that this pressure is gendered. The social norms function to make women feel worse for violating them than men. And the amount of pressure isn't close.
Dworkins' suggested response is to remake society to remove (and prohibit) this type of pressure. Whether she admits it or not, this conflicts with "freedom of speech." But so do most anti-discrimination and anti-group defamation laws (the latter have not been generally implemented in the United States). That doesn't meet we must implement Dworkins' vision to avoid hypocrisy. But I think it is valuable to notice the trade-off we are making. To use economic language, one might call the gendered norms an opportunity cost of arranging society the way we have.
And if the referenced norms seem wrong to you, then you ought not to think of Dworkin as an idiot. Feel free to continue thinking badly of Mary Daly (with my blessing and encouragement).
I don't follow. Dworkin criticises something stupid, that doesn't make ver not an idiot.
Dworkin is from the school of thought that helped us notice those particular costs of the setup. If post-modern thought doesn't appear, we might not notice any of the problems it identified.
I suggest that post-modern thought looks foolish now because more mainstream thought appropriated and applied most of its greatest insights. What "remains" of post-modern thought is much less insightful.
They're not very different in how they are actually understood by listeners. The perceived differenced is based on a notion that humans consciously manipulate their mental categories by arbitrarily choosing explicit verbal definitions and that's not the case.
Meghan Murphy has written a blog post entitled "Can women rape men? I'm not sure I care.", though she later retracted it.
I don't think anyone has explicitly said "penetrative sex is rape"; they do use phrases like "inherently degrading and violent", but I've only ever heard opponents rephrase it as such.
Yes, I think the furthest Dworkin has gone is saying that a) penetrative sex is inherently violent, b) sex that is not initiated by "the woman" is never consensual, and c) men's pleasure is necessarily linked to victimizing, hurting, and exploiting.
Is this a generally accepted notion in feminism, or does it represent a fringe view ? The reason I ask is because this sounds exactly like something a Straw Feminist might say...
What algorithm do you use to tell the difference between a feminist and a straw feminist? According to this algorithm, are Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin straw feminists?
It seems to me that any feminist suddenly becomes a straw feminist when an offensive or clearly irrational quote made by them is presented in a discussion about feminism.
I think a straw feminist is meant to be a character (a fictional character, or a persona played by a troll, or an imaginary opponent), not a person sincerely expressing their position. So Daly and Dworkin weren't (or kept up the charade for quite a long time). Straw feminists say stupid and offensive things to make actual feminists look bad. Bugmaster meant that the quote sounds more like something someone would attribute to a feminist in order to make feminism look bad, than like something a feminist would say.
But there are in fact fringe feminists who are indistinguishable from their parodies.
I don't have a complete algorithm handy but I know that the first line includes the query "Does this person exist?"
It would be (arguably) legitimate to make that redesignation if the character is a fictional feminist. Then determining whether it is a 'straw feminist character' or 'feminist character' would entail an evaluation of to what extent the beliefs or behaviors reflect that which is within the realms of 'feminist', also taking into account inferences about the author's motives in creating the character. (Then you just shut up and say it is 'straw' if that makes your side of the debate look better.)
Could you provide evidence that Daly or Dworkin did assert such a thing? I've read quite a bit of Dworkin, nothing suggesting anything of the sort; I've read less Daly, and while I found all of it pretty silly I would be surprised if that was among them.
The "all sex is rape" claim is most often attributed to Dworkin or MacKinnon, which makes me strongly suspect that while surely someone somewhere has believed it, prominent radical theorists were not among them.
In another comment in this thread there is a link to Daly saying, in an interview:
A short look at wikiquotes of Dworkin gives this:
So assuming these are the best quotes to be found (I did not try too hard), it would be more precise and fair to say that Daly enjoyed the thought that 90% of men would be "decontaminated" by "an evolutionary process"; and Dworkin said that every man (under patriarchy, which means anything) is a "rapist or exploiter".
None of this really makes any of them a sick person, does it?
I mean, if I said that "if life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth; a natural process resulting in drastic reduction of the females" and "under feminism, every women is a rapist or exploiter of another man", those would also be perfectly OK, politically correct, inoffensive, and uncontroversial statements, ready to get me to the textbooks as a defender of equality and everything good. (Just joking, those are not my opinions.)
MixedNuts and wedrifid said it better than I could.
It fits well into the memeplex of radical feminism. While I haven't had my finger to the pulse of feminism for a few years, I've gotten the impression that radical feminism hasn't been mainstream since the 1990s.
Radical feminists are a varied bunch. Twisty "everything is rape" Faster is a radfem, but so are a whole bunch of genderqueer BDSM pornographers.
I don't think the genderqueer BDSM pornographers usually call themselves "radical feminists"; they do call themselves both radicals and feminists, but they don't usually combine the terms. The term "radical feminist" seems to have been largely monopolized by the Andrea Dworkin/ Mary Daly/ Twisty Faster crowd.
That's ... pretty far. I mean, damn.
That distinction seems pretty fine; "degrading and violent sex" sounds a hell of a lot like rape (or perhaps some BSDM simulating rape, I guess.)
Rape is very often not violent, and there are many contexts where it wouldn't be thought degrading by the victim or by the culture, such as marital rape in a culture where it's considered normal.
Consensual degrading and violent sex is certainly kinky, but not necessarily a kind of kink that counts as BDSM and certainly not necessarily rape play. (I feel like I should be making innuendo here about developing your imagination or something.) The "cunnilingus and cuddles" feminist crowd probably don't think it can truly be consensual, but they're just obviously wrong; people might be brainwashed by the patriarchy to go along with something their partner wants, but not to seek it out secretly.
Excellent points.
Even if the word "rape" isn't being used, it seems to me - and this may be a failure of imagination - that it nonetheless simulates rape, or at least something close to it.
You sure about that?
Thanks.
There's some nitpicking to be done about precise definitions of "degrading" and "violent".
It seems fair to describe any pain play (at least if sufficiently intense and fast) as violent. And handing one's date a flogger with a grin and a "Pretty please?" doesn't look much like rape at all.
Here's an example of very degrading sex that's not rape play either. (The domme gives orders to the sub, and there's one act the sub is reluctant to perform, but throughout the scene the sub expresses consent verbally and physically.) This story is extremely gross porn; there are two characters; the domme is a crossdressing woman; the sub is a woman; seriously I mean the "gross" part, you have been warned: Piggy, by Jen Cross.
It might be fair to classify all reluctance play as "simulating something close to rape" (e.g. "Stop hitting me"), and even anything involving restraints if you're being very inclusive, but if someone's begging to be hurt and to do something degrading (and there's no roleplay where they're being forced to or anything) I don't see the resemblance.
Nope! I just dismiss it as a Cartesian demon hypothesis. If you're going to question what someone's sincere introspection tells them they want when they think about it alone and at leisure and they never have to tell anyone about it, you might as well question your own impulse to question things; are you brainwashed by the patriarchy into slut-shaming women who have sex you don't like, or into denying women's agency, or into erasing female desire? Any amount of introspection that's sufficient for you to decide you aren't should also suffice for the person whose desires you're questioning.
And if you're not just questioning patriarchy-approved activities like intercourse and leg-shaving and slut-shaming, but also fetishes patriarchal thinking condemns as weird, you'd better also question your love of cunnilingus and cuddles and bra-burning.
I didn't read the story based on your warning and the fact that you gave a ... synopsis ... that seemed sufficient.
I think I see your point; it does seem possible that sex could independently be violent and degrading, for most values of "violent" and "degrading", without utilizing rape play, although that would seem to be the easiest route.
That's basically what I was thinking of.
Funny thing, but I seems to have been thinking that "degrading" meant nonconsensual. Which is stupid, now that I think of it. I guess "degrading" is an ambiguous term, come to think.
Yes, it simulates something close to it, but I think the two-step distinction is enough that avoiding the word "rape" and its connotations is very appropriate. The "degrading and violent" taps into certain emotions, but lacks certain key other emotions and characteristics that make rape so bad and hurtful. To name some, the helplessness feeling is most likely not present (since it's consensual, as stated), and the whole existential crisis that is triggered by the emotional cascade and status markers and mental model updates that all happen at the same time during or in the aftermath. The trauma oft associated with "rape" seems to come mostly from those missing elements, so I wouldn't include this in my carving.
I'm actually thinking that the reverse is more likely true: People can (and probably are) be brainwashed by culture/patriarchy to secretly seek out something.
I see no reason why they couldn't, and I feel like I could draw a graph of at least one plausible way it could happen if I put some brain time into it.
Obviously, there is a distinction between rape and BSDM play that simulates rape. Still, the claim that all penetrative sex is either rape or an attempt to capture certain emotional elements of rape seems very close to the statement that all penetrative sex is actual rape.
"Suggest" very loosely, in that we would have to ignore both cases where both the penetrator and the penetratee are male, and cases where artificial tools of various sorts are used to perpetrate penetration, in order to draw that conclusion.
Which is not to say that there aren't people who would argue precisely that.
I thought it would be sufficiently damning that it already rules out 'ordinary' female rape of males. If your definition of 'rape' includes consensual sex and does not include this, then we've stopped talking about rape.
I've heard non-obviously-bogus arguments that it should, e.g. men cannot get pregnant as a result of rape.
Some can. It's probably a very different experience though.
And many women can't. If it's unknown to the rapist, asserting power through a threat of forced pregnancy might still happen, but if she's like sixty-five that's not going to happen.
But gender does matter. A man raping a cis woman has a gender wars element to it, usually something like "Men want sex and women don't, so this man is taking it from this woman, scoring one for Team Men. She's a slut for letting it happen, unless she can prove she's a perfect victim and he's a complete monster, in which case she's a victim of female weakness and needs protected by a strong good man.". Conversely, a man raping a man hinges more on "A man weak enough to let someone rape him is not a real man, but gay-female-feminine. He is ridiculous and pathetic.". There are other gender-dependent examples with female perpetrators, with prison rape, with corrective rape, with rape as a weapon for cultural domination, with isolated communities, and so on.
Of course it doesn't matter in that some rapes count and some don't, and it shouldn't matter at all. Just saying, you should expect different support structures, not identical rape shelters which just happen to be 25% male-populated.
Unwanted pregnancy can be a result of rape, but rape seems like a separate Bad Thing that can happen to someone.
In addition to what MixedNuts said, the question I was raising was whether this was a feminist position. To the extent that it is, I'd like to know whether it is from the methodologically incorrect branch (represented in this discussion by Mary Daly) or the methodologically more correct branch (represented by Andrea Dworkin).
It would surprise me to hear that Dworkin has asserted that men can't be raped - and if I heard it, I'd need to re-examine whether her arguments about the social effect of porn are valid (even if she's right, there are knock-on concerns that weigh against censorship).
More generally, conflating Daly and Dworkin is like conflating Stephen J. Gould and Stephen Pinker.
I think I saw a comment subthread on The Good Men Project along the lines “What's it matter whether it's a man who has sex with a woman too drunk to consent [or something like that] or the other way round?” “The woman can get pregnant, etc., etc.” “Wow, that's some serious Dworkin you're channeling”, but I can't find it right now, so I might have dreamt it or something.
Yup. Mysandry is a real thing, if rarer than the reverse. Hell, since stereotypes of men are much less likely to be challenged then those of women, it's arguably more common (on a far lower level than your examples, obviously.)
The mistake is to stereotype all "feminists" as spouting such nonsense, of course.
Hooray, I get to recommend No Seriously, What About Teh Menz? and other nifty things by Ozy Frantz.
...and zie's the only person I know of who writes about misandry without turning into a giant douche.
... is that a stealth insult?
Do you mean to Ozy? It was supposed to be praise.
Or do you mean to you? If you write about misandry, I have yet to see your writings, so I'd be hard-pressed to insult you based on them.
Or do you mean something else?
Well, I wrote a comment on it. Right there. You replied to it.
... I guess I was just imagining things, although your comment was slightly ... tangential. Such comments are rarer than those criticizing the parent. Hell, I even opened this comment by contradicting you.
... thanks for the recommendation.
Plenty of posts on The Good Men Project in general are surprisingly sane given their subject matter, too. (The comments are less good though, especially recently with the allegations of rape apology.)
I haven't seen any good ones that were about misandry specifically, but yeah, there's lot of good stuff. The series on male depression's good.
Most of the articles are fluff along the lines of "Hats are cool", though. And right now I'm just a little bit reluctant to recommend the site that published the "I raped a few people, but partying is fun so I don't mind" article.
I do see the point of publishing such articles; but unfortunately they (and I) overestimated the sanity (in the LW sense) of the readers -- see the third paragraph of “Belief as Attire”. Turns out that some of the readers are more like Alabama bar patrons than like nerds, and unfortunately there's no way of saying ‘X did Y because of Z’ to Alabama bar patrons that won't sound like ‘it was right for X to do Y’.
"Rapists justify themselves by claiming consent is complicated" goes over well all the time. "I'm a rapist, but consent is complicated so it's a risk I'm willing to take" is supposed not to go over well.
Knowing the justifications rapists use is not useless. But "I had an e-mail exchange with an anonymous rapist, and here are some quotes" would suffice, whereas "Here's an article by a person I disagree with" implies some degree of respect for the defended position.
Having a few quotes doesn't give you a full understanding of the justification. If you really want to understand the justification the article is much better for that purpose.
Meh, not really. How People Rationalize Rape Culture is Feminism 102, and the article was the same old excuses. There was one bit that wasn't drop-dead standard, where he described committing rape as a risk for him to take, rather than the potential victim, but even that is kind of an extension of "consent is hard".
What we need is insight into the actual motivations for rape, and those aren't going to be in articles written for the express purpose of making the author look good. Rudolf Hess's notebooks and his psychiatrist's rarely agree.
And even then, the editor's note should be scathing enough to compensate for the status boost of publishing his article, not a half-hearted refusal to endorse.
I think that depends on the people in the discussion. If you discuss among high status folk where everyone agrees that all the participants of the discussion have reasonable views then there no problem to point to articles with crazy views.
If you discuss in a group where there a chance that someone actually supports the crazy view you have to be more careful.
I mostly agree with what you are saying, but I'm not sure what the phrase "high status" is intended to add. High status is not the same as "clear thinking" or "rationally weighing the evidence" - and it is dangerous to pretend otherwise.
The website is public and has a rather large audience. Moreover, it talks about misandry (and generally gender from a male perspective) a lot, and therefore has originally tried hard to distance itself from those who call themselves Men's Rights Activists.
Considering the article in question didn't actually defend his actions, I'm not sure why.
I either disagree or ADBOC depending on what exactly is meant by "respect". People didn't stop printing copies of Mein Kampf, did they?
Mein Kampf is a pretty good example. In many countries buying and selling it is banned except under special circumstances, or requires specific notes, or is legal if you don't look like you endorse it. The Bavarian government controls the rights, and usually forbids reprints.
Most people would certainly be very suspicious of someone distributing Mein Kampf unless they did a whole annotated song and dance about how it's an absolutely horrible book but they have a duty to preserve historical evidence, disgusting as it is. "Here's a person whose conclusions I disagree with" implies that the arguments are worthy of consideration, not just evidence about the person's psychology. As opposed to "Here's what goes on in the head of a freaking rapist ew ew".
Mein Kampf was aimed at people in Wiemar Germany, so I'm not sure it retains much persuasive power for modern, say, French.
Can't argue with you about the hats, but I'm not sure what people's problem is with publishing that article. It's not like he was defending himself, just giving useful information on how someone's life can lead them to rape despite consciously committing to the principle that Rape Is Bad. Are they worried that understanding the enemy better will force them to stop viewing people as Evil Mutants?
It could be, but, after reading that interview, I get the feeling that MD wouldn't mind it at all if currently living people (male ones, that is) got disappeared, as well. That interview is actually quite fascinating.
I imagine females will also be reduced to 10%. Gender is pointless. I know I'd like to be (sexually) female sometimes, futanari (is there an english word for this?) sometimes, and male sometimes, and the rest of the time something totally different. Probably with tentacles. I think I'd like to be totally sexless sometimes too.
When you spend enough time on certain places on the internet, radical feminists look like conservatives on gender issues.
Indeed. Reading about the details of sex between one "male" and one "female" partner as though it's the only kind of sex, really reads to me like trying to enforce a (outdated and sexist) traditional view of how humans are supposed to self-identify and relate to each other.
Depending on what you mean by futanari, 'hermaphrodite' or 'shemale' are common, though the latter is almost surely slang (and checking what Google has to say on the subject is almost surely NSFW).
The latter is a slur.
Well, by that link, both "transvestite" and "hermaphrodite" (NTM "it") were on the list of slurs. I think it was just indicated as a slur for transsexual people, not inherently a slur.
I'll just keep calling it futa. It's the only word for that mode of being that I have not seen used offensively.
I must say that I haven't seen it used offensively either. Nor, for that matter, have I seen the sun rise && false.
(ie. Using the word futa may not be optimal for communicating object level content with people who speak English.)
good point
Modern, generally accepted term in english is intersexed
I'm pretty sure "intersexed" is more general than the sense of "futanari", or at least the sense meant above.
"No-op trans woman"?
Technically accurate, but not general enough. A futanari, as I understand, is a person who has a penis, but otherwise has the physical characteristics typically designated "female" (breasts, wide hips, etc.). A no-op trans woman would fit this description, but so would someone who started out with the typical "female" phenotype but had their genitals modified and kept the rest of their body the same. (As far as I know, this hasn't happened in real life, but it's theoretically possible.) Also, though I'm not aware of any such condition, I suppose there could be an intersex condition that produces a "futanari" phenotype. (If anyone is aware of one, I'd be curious to hear about it.)
I dunno. The option would be nice, but I think I'd still spend easily 90% of my time as a "male" and I doubt that's unusual; the categories of "male" and "female" still have meaning if some women spend their holidays as dolphins.