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Eugine_Nier comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong
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That's probably an accurate summary of their intent. I'm still not sure that I believe their empirical claim. Adultery and non-marital sex have been common in pre-immodesty Western history across many social classes.
Adultery certainly existed, I don't think it was as common as it is today. Certainly people were much less likely to have kids out of wedlock, or to not even bother getting married before having kids.
That assertion about adultery might be appealing to believe. But that doesn't make it true. And citation to an essay asserting increased social stratification is not evidence that out-of-wedlock births are more common now than in the past, or that marriage is becoming uncorrelated with child-rearing.
By the way, do you have a citation that rape jokes increase rape, since near as I can tell the evidence for it is of the same kind of vaguely anecdotal/common sense that you like to dismiss when it supports a conclusion you don't like.
That's a fair question. To be clear, my assertion was that society's response to rape would be "better" if we gave negative feedback to rape jokes, which would reduce their frequency.
Concrete examples of recent changes:
At this point, I think the evidence shows a strong correlation between anti-rape-joke attitudes and society's responsiveness to rape. That's not proof of the causal mechanism I'm asserting (reducing rape jokes causes attitudes towards rape to change in the general population), but it is suggestive.
This is not clear to me at all.
Do you mean jokes about prison rape? I agree that prison rape jokes do not appear to have decreased in frequency in the Baby Boomer era.
If you mean jokes that imply women want/deserve/enjoy rape, do you dispute that they were somewhat frequent in the 1970s or that they are relatively infrequent today (in the US)?
I am not making the opposite claim, only expressing doubt. There is a folk narrative that US society was less enlightened in the past, and I agree that the notion that instances of rape jokes have declined does fit into this narrative. But this is hardly an "empirical approach to feminism." For instance it's another common folk narrative that US culture has degraded into filth since the 1960s, accordingly one might expect instances of rape jokes to have increased.
I think each of these stories is equally plausible at an intuitive level, though I expect the first to appeal to people with different political opinions than the second. I'd be interested in finding out whether rape jokes have increased or decreased in frequency, at least after making this claim more precise. But you don't seem to claiming you know how to do this, only that you find the answer somehow obvious.
I see what you mean. It is an article of faith in certain feminist websites. Given the frequency of the generalized assertion, I assumed that there was data supporting it, but web-searching leaves me empty handed.
The best I could come up with was the TVTropes page "Rape as Comedy." There's no particular reason to think the lists there are complete, and they certainly aren't sorted by time. I assume that the media from the 1970s listed in the "Rape Culture" page on wikipedia have contemporary examples, but I don't have access to them.
Or we could just ask someone old enough to remember the 1950s-1970s.
Edit: And during totally random web browsing, I ran across this story. The incident in question is from 1998, so it probably cuts slightly against my factual assertion. On the other hand, the mnemonic might have been fairly old. <shrug>
Why is this an improvement? Beyond the signaling value of "rape is bad, so punishing rapists is good, let's expand the definition of rape so we can punish more rapists".
In practice what this means is that a woman can declare any sexual encounter to be "rape" after the fact.
I understand that law can be complicated, but you seem to endorse the following position:
That legal position is inconsistent with most other crimes (robbery is taking your property from you without consent - no violence element is included). I think criminalizing sex in the absence of consent is quite justified. I acknowledge that consent can have multiple meanings and that ambiguity must be resolved, but non-consent seems a complete justification for criminalization.
Additionally, the above theory seems likely to put the victim at risk of further harm - my understanding is that most police departments recommend not resisting (both rape and robbery) because of the risk that the criminal will do further injury.
False accusations are a problem for the criminal justice system in general. I can falsely accuse you of stealing money from me, or hitting me, or harassing me. If I tailor the explanation carefully, the police would have no reason to expect corroborating evidence. You deny the charge, and it comes down to relative credibility. I'm not saying this is ideal, but it is the best we can do in the absence of some kind of truth-oracle. Why is this a bigger problem for rape than other crimes?
As Instapundit points out here.
I think this nicely illustrates the problem with the definition of rape that feminists like yourself are pushing.
Yes, many feminist thinkers are epistemically unhealthy. That doesn't prove all or even a majority of feminists are anti-epistemic. Notice how the original advice columnist (on Slate.com - hardly an anti-feminist site) rejected the idea that the woman's experience was obviously rape. More importantly, she emphatically rejected the idea that attempting to withdraw consent after the sex is over is something that others should respect in any way.
I think you could have made this point without linking to Instapundit. If you don't want this thread to get totally mindkilled, perhaps it's better to leave out links to people who elicit highly polarized reactions from different political tribes.
I find it rude to quote people without linking to them.
The problem is that the accusation isn't "false", in the sense that if the woman decides she didn't want the sex after the fact it is rape by the de facto definition .
Well for starters, the DoE recently sent out a dear college letter demanding that colleges use the weakest possible standards of evidence for rape cases on pain of loosing federal funding.
There's no way to read your assertion about de facto rape that isn't essentially false. Accusations of murder (or child abuse) are huge blemishes, even if you are acquitted. And legally, you can't revoke consent after the fact - the problem is proof, not definition.
Regarding the letters you mentioned, I'd like to point out if you thought some fact (i.e. someone is trying to attack you) was "more likely than not," you'd act - not wait until the evidence was "clear and convincing" or "beyond a reasonable doubt."
Also, there are lower evidence standards in the law than "more likely than not." For example, a police officer can arrest you at a much lower standard.
Obviously this happens; however, are you sure that this downside is not outweighed by more security against manipulation, blackmail and such? I'm confident that it is.
Also if now social changes count as evidence, I'd like to point out the recent changes in attitudes towards adultery.
I was writing this long post asking you to be more concrete, but I realized that this is not my true rejection. On reflection, I think you are right that society is now more tolerant of adultery (sex when one partner is married) and non-marital sex than at times in the past, although it's not clear to me that this has been a one-way ratchet in favor of libertine behavior - compare the 1950s to the 1920s (roaring twenties). Likewise, Victorian era prudishness may have been a reaction to the permissiveness of the Hanoveran Kings before Victoria.
(For convenience, I'm using "illicit sex" as a general term to include adultery and non-marital sex).
My real issue is as follows: Hays Code moralists (aka sex-moralists) argued that more revealing clothing encouraged illicit sex. That may be so, but different "revelations" of the female body might have different effects on the illicit sex rate. I suspect the move from one-piece swimwear to bikinis had a stronger effect than allowing the exposure of ankles and wrists. And sexual-moralists don't seem to recognize this difference of effect - for them, every change is the end of the world. Worse, they don't tend to care about the double standard (in dress and behavior) between men and women.
All of this makes me think that sexual-moralists have a vision of how the world should be, and are willing to say whatever is necessary to push the actual world in that direction. Forcefully asserting that revealing female clothing will lead to the end of civilization will cause (ceteris parabis) women to dress less revealingly. But asserting that when there's no reason to think it is true is not an empirical project.
I'm not saying feminists haven't done some similar things - politics mindkills us all, not just those who disagree with me. But that doesn't mean feminism as a whole is anti-empiricism, any more than assertions that "allowing same-sex marriage will lead to chaos" are proof that all sexual-moralists are anti-empiricism.
[citation please], as in I think your exaggerating their position.
The actual assertion was "allowing same-sex marriage will lead to the end of marriage", an assertion which I think is perfectly plausible (give it about a generation to work out).
Not that it's worth much, but here.
Divorce is becoming more acceptable over time, but that significantly predates the rise of the gay marriage movement.