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wallowinmaya comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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Omg, I didn't know how misogynistic our society still is.
This particular instance needn't have much to do with misogyny. I was in a similar situation once in school.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm because that story doesn't reveal misogyny, but on the other hand your comment isn't funny.
The misogyny mostly comes from the fact that this situation happens much more often to girls than to boys (i.e. boy-groups are much more likely to have one of their members ask out a girl on a dare than the reverse, along with associated connotations and social implications).
I also assume there are implied feelings of having to reject a boy because he asked you out on a dare, on pain of looking like a slut (or an "easy girl" in slightly less rude terms), while a boy being asked out by a girl wouldn't have the same subtext.
To compare, in older age groups it is much more common for girl-groups to dare one of their members to do something sexually suggestive or provocative in front of a boy (e.g. faking a boob slip or opening up their legs while wearing a skirt) than the other way around, at least in my dataset.
My (admittedly limited) experience reveals no such trend, and indeed suggests the opposite. There is likely a great deal of variation.
I don't know why you think that is true, I guess. Experience, probably, but in my experience I've never seen either happen.
I read a long discussion of bullying by girls in school, and it looked as though the version committed by girls was usually inviting another girl to a party or somesuch-- but the offer was a setup for humiliation.
Possibly other (and possibly fictional) sources: girl bullies telling their victim that a boy liked her and pushing her to ask him out.
I have had the exact same thing happen to me, but gender-reversed. I may be unusual in this respect.
AFAICT, the reasons why I would expect such an episode to be more common than the gender-reversed version (and both come more from stereotypes than from any actual first-hand evidence -- I'm not even that sure they apply to real life) are 1) boys tend to be more overtly nasty to each other (e.g. asking embarrassing things on a dare) than girls do, and 2) boys tend to be less likely to turn down dates. And I wouldn't slap the label “misogynist” on either of those.
This isn't actually representative of how misogynistic society still is IMO. This is very tame, and examples I would consider similar to this occur with lower frequency than situations I would consider much, much worse.
If you want to take the long worldwide view, the very specific case of "7 year old girls being sold into sexual slavery when a boy of that age wouldn't" likely happens at about a 5:1 frequency ratio to the specific quoted example above (i.e. "sixth-grade girls being asked out on a dare when a boy that age wouldn't") by my best-guesstimates (with very wide confidence margins, mind you, but my goal is to counter bias by making mentally available things much worse that probably happen with much higher frequency).
At the mean, our society (north-america in this case) informally still considers that when a woman complains ( / cries / seeks comfort / otherwise attempts to get over in some manner that involves other humans) about getting raped instead of "dealing with it / getting over it on her own", she probably deserved it, or is a weakling, or some other strong negative affect. Of course, admitting this view overtly is very low-status, and consequently acknowledging anything like this as "true" is politically-incorrect.
I agree with you, though I'd phrase it as "men's problems should be taken more seriously" rather than "it's unfair that women's problems are taken seriously."
It's taken a lot of work (not yet complete) over a long period to get women being raped taken seriously, let alone lesser issues.
Hypotheses about why the abuse of men is barely on the agenda: There's even more prejudice against men who've been hurt than against women who've been hurt. Men aren't as good at organizing to be heard, which overlaps the first hypothesis. Women have formed an interest group on the subject which is preventing men from being heard. Other suggestions? Suggestions for action?
For what it's worth, I believe that men frequently have a worse deal than is publicly acknowledged. I've been expecting sexual abuse of men and boys by women to show up on the public agenda. No one seems to believe me.
I think this is the large picture of power balance between the sexes.
In the past, physical strength was the most important thing, therefore men got the unfair bonus points. Currently, communication is the most important thing, therefore women get the unfair bonus points.
And, that's basicly it. (You didn't expect Azathoth to care about fairness, did you?)
Of course the official narrative is different, but that's just business as usual. The ancient patriarchy also had their narrative about why women are responsible for everything bad, because Eve listened to devil and ate the apple in the garden of paradise. Plausible? Well, at the time this story was invented, it was easy to believe it; and also if you didn't, you were punished. Today we have another narrative, written for the contemporary society, about why men are responsible for everything bad, because... you know, the usual story preached in the modern equivalents of churches.
Men, learn to communicate, both as individuals and as groups. (Before it is made illegal. EDIT: Specifically, I mean: Before the male-only groups discussing men's problems from the men's point of view are forbidden, on pretext of sexism. I have read an article about a university officially forbidding an unofficial "male studies" students' group for this reason, while women studies remains part of the official curriculum. But I can't find the link now.)
EDIT: But I would still bet my money on men losing against Azathoth. And although it sucks to be on the losing side, I don't think that men being the losing side is intrinsically worse than women being the losing side. The important thing is impact on the humanity as a whole, which yet needs to be determined experimentally.
Lots of people have a hard time actually imagining a woman having sex with a man without his consent. (Seriously, every time I see a link to such a story on Facebook there are plenty of men saying stuff to the effect that they wish that happened to them.)
Japanese fiction is often way ahead of the curve in such things, for some reason. One indicator here is their erotic manga specifically, which have been featuring terrifyingly high amounts of exactly what's said in the quote in the past couple years, and in growing proportion.
(Which implies that there's a market out there in japan of tens-or-hundreds of thousands of people buying and presumably enjoying erotic manga fantasies of men being sexually abused and raped by women -- not directly that this is a common real-life thing. The question after that is, how did this market get created, and where does the inspiration for the artists come from?)
There are numbers for this?
The easier-to-get numbers are simply number of hits for specific tags.
However, yes, there are all kinds of numbers for this. Most large-scale or popular cons in japan AFAIK keep fairly accurate records of circles' sales, and number of new releases in a genre or catering to particular tastes is usually strongly correlated with how well the big names in those genres/tastes have been selling in the near past, in my observations.
As far as I know, the conventions have been racking up record growth throughout the 2000s and 2010s, so unless you've run the numbers you can't really say anything about the proportion - since everything has been increasing so much.
Well, my most important specific piece of evidence is that the ratio of scanlations tagged both "femdom" and "forced" out of all those tagged "forced" on certain databases has increased very significantly over the last three years.
I'm very reluctant to disclose my sources on this for social, signaling and personal reasons. I hope some of them are obvious. (also, in public with permanent records?)
Eh, databases. Convention records are much more convincing.
True. Now that this topic has been brought to light and I realize it's a more serious issue than I had mentally filed it as, I might actually go look at some of those (along with other stuff I would want to find numbers for first, since this isn't the most important metric by any stretch). They're pretty hard to get, though.
It's not that sexual harassment of men by women never gets depicted, it's that it isn't seen as a problem.
Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" is what would now be seen as a textbook case of sexual harassment, but I had to do some searches to eventually find a critic (a contemporary woman, probably not by coincidence) who saw it that way. Instead, I was running into other interpretations... was it supposed to be funny? Was Adonis' refusal of Venus an example of virtuous chastity?
One possible cause of this:
Just as society (the "patriarchal" one, a feminist might say) brainwashes girls and women into thinking sex should only be done out of love for their partner, sexual things are services to men, and too many other related things to list here, men also get programmed by social expectations, the most relevant here probably being:
All men enjoy sex (at least that "given" or "obtained" from women) in any form, and always do, and are always ready and willing and desiring of it. Thus, no man can possibly logically ever be sexually harassed or raped by a woman, because all men will always in all circumstances be willing unless there's a complication factor directly attached (e.g. life threatening situations).
And even when there's a complication attached, it isn't "rape" or "sexual harassment" of any sort, it's dereliction of duty or willful distraction endangering others or some other thing directly about increasing the risk or causing whatever complication factor was attached.
The above is the most common answer I've seen; "Men can't be raped because men always want sex."
Arguably, the only form seen as a "problem" (and a very insignificant one, at that) is prison inmates bending over to pick up the soap and getting a surprise present. Just the imagery and terminology used should be representative of how little people take this seriously as a "problem" - it's usually only seen as an anecdotal deterrent against doing less-morally-damaging crimes that might still get you in jail (e.g. bank cracking or money laundering).
The way this is usually handled is asking the men stating that to imagine a very ugly/elderly/morbidly obese woman stripping them using force.
Out of six women with whom I tried this, all six responded by the social equivalent of laughing in my face. It just seems too ridiculously absurd: If a man doesn't want sex, he won't be turned on, if he's not turned on, he won't be erect, if he's not erect, no sex can ensue. In all cases, the man is (apparently) turned on and erect, therefore willing, therefore no rape.
So they assume the explanation is that some men have weird preferences and enjoy sex with ugly/elderly/morbidly obese women, which is true on its own but completely irrelevant and completely ADBOC-stuff, and that this man was one of them and is just seeking to abuse society or the legal system to get free money or attention (or both).
That's ... not how arousal works. At all. Did you tell them this?
I tried. And then something happened where I realized I had to explain stuff about arousal. And then I had to explain some biology. And then some psychology. And then they went back and destroyed 3/4 of all of that based on something a priest once told their father, sixty years ago. I gave up that approach and tried telling them "You're wrong, read this on why arousal doesn't work that way" instead. Predictably, they didn't read it.
There's so much inferential distance to cross in most cases that I think this is a reasonably serious social problem.
Edit: Also, one of them had already read quite a bit of PUA material "for fun". Which kind of explicitly includes: "Arousal is separate from wanting sex." Then again, PUA is specific towards men seducing women, and I shouldn't expect the average person to infer that this also happens to be a humanwide universal.
I have found better luck by telling them to imagine the woman has toys.
In the manga, is a male being harassed by a female presented as something that it's normal for him to dislike? As funny? As sometimes a serious problem for him?
I'm using 'male' and 'female' since either partner might be an adult or might be in the boy/girl range.
A thing I've heard about Japan is that it was never a Christian country, and therefore doesn't have a background belief that people's imaginations about sex have to be controlled.
Manga.
How is this even remotely credible?
I've corrected the spelling of manga-- thanks.
A brief history of Christianity in Japan-- Between one and four percent of Japanese are Christian. Christianity was forbidden in Japan (and severely persecuted) from the late 1500s to 1853. Christianity really does have less influence there than in a great many other countries.
The part which is less certain is the influence on portrayals of sex, but it doesn't seem crazy to me that the taboos against portraying sex (for various values of sex) which are in play (much less than they used to be) in countries with a heavier Christian influence would be weaker or non-existent there.
I've modified my last sentence above to be about sex rather than imagination in general.
Not the point under question.
Christianity is not the only religion with sexual taboos. I thought this was just a thinko or something, but after reading your elucidation, I'm even more bewildered.
I think her point makes sense. Shinto( the main religion in Japan) does have a lot less taboos and is a lot more open towards sex than other religions (including Christianity). It might be the case that there is another factor responsible for the lesser inhibitions towards sex in the Japanese culture which also caused Shinto to be formed the way it is, but nonetheless unless I am missing something NancyLebovitz's point makes sense.
Reducing Japanese religious experience to Shinto is almost even more wrong than reducing it to "not really Christian."
I'm done. Anyone who cares can read what the IES has to say about the matter.
But feudal/imperial japanese culture had very different attitudes on sexual matters than almost every religion with sexual taboos. Even the buddhism-branched traditions, religions and cultures didn't have the same views, even though it still resulted in practical terms in "Monks (Priests) should abstain from sex and thoughts of sex".
AFAIK throughout most of post-genpei japanese history up until slightly after the beginning of Meiji, it was perfectly acceptable (and sometimes recommended) for a woman who liked a man but could not "be with" (aka have a romantic relationship or sexual interactions) that man for social, status, etc. reasons to instead designate a "replacement" - in rude terms, a whore hired by the woman to have sex with the man as a sign of affection. This is portrayed in a very crude fashion at some point in the popular movie "Shogun", IIRC.
However, the whole thing about how this is directly related to them not being a Christian nation somewhat baffles me still.
Modern Japan has heavy taboos of all sorts on portrayals of sex (see last year's fiasco about the Tokyo ban on porn, or their stringent laws on censoring of all erotic content), but where sex is accepted, they're apparently much more liberal in which kinds can be represented or even done.
Note that the censorship was something that the US Occupation enacted, and that the Japanese government simply never repealed.
It isn't.
Yes, all of these. Will depend a lot on the author and what kind of crowd they want to reach (or just what they enjoy producing). I'm guessing at least half portray it as actually negative and something that should be prevented. A significant fraction of the other half probably don't for "people are supposed to masturbate to this!"-style reasons.
It being "normal for him to dislike" is slightly less common as far as I'm aware, but the large prevalence of oblivious male characters who don't respond well and don't have particularly strong desire for sexual interactions with females explicitly and overtly trying and wanting to have some with them (in non-erotic anime and manga especially) should serve at least as some evidence that it's at least not a completely alien concept.
Well, as far as I've heard that happens to an even greater extent when a man complains about getting raped (outside the prison system).
That seems over-optimistic to me-- as far as I can tell, a lot of Americans (at least) believe that male prisoners deserve to get raped. Female prisoners get raped by male guards, but that isn't on the public radar at all.
At least it's considered a coherent possibility and a disincentive to actions that risk jail time.
Rape isn't something that "just happens" in prison. It's something that we, as a society allow to happen - in a similar way to the fact that the US Bureau of Prisons doesn't allow conjugal visits or running your business in prison.
We have a moral responsibility for what happens in prisons, whether we cause it, allow it, or prevent it.
My point was that the male-on-male rape in prisons is considered something most men would want to avoid, unlike female-on-male rape. Obviously prison rape is a Bad Thing.
That sentences doesn't go together well with:
Effective disincentives can have secondary consequences that make them Bad Things overall, even if they have a small positive net utility in specific contexts.
Example: Tribal law in Afghanistan might actually have a {real} deterrent effect on thievery, but it comes with a world of heinous secondary consequences, so altogether it is a Bad Thing.
Prison rape is presumably similar. Remember, a decision's net utility is equal to its TOTAL future utility gains and losses.
Suppose you have a bunch of different utility equations, each of which contributes to the total system. You plug in "prison rape" and get the following set of conjugals to sum into your dot product:
-10, -5, -33, -1075, +2, -4, -22, -15
If your alternatives are hovering around a total of +5 to +20, then saying "but look at that +2!" (i.e., "look at that disincentive to risking jail time!") doesn't seem particularly relevant, considering its surrounded by a larger collection of absurdly weighty negatives.
EDIT: {real} was originally {legitimate}
The key word is legitimate - which I deny is appropriate in the context of prison rape.
Sure, making prisons less pleasant may decrease crime - although behaviorism suggests immediacy and salience are more important. Nonetheless, talking about societal benefits of particular prison arrangements is a kind of societal endorsement of those arrangements.
(Edit:)
After all, talking about the incentives of life threatening injuries from serious car accidents towards safer driving is creepy. I think there is very reasonable and widespread moral disapproval of the practice.
This discussion is about perceptions of rape, specifically men being raped. Hence "At least it's considered a coherent possibility".
It's a serious sort of torture, and a possible death sentence. It happens to younger and weaker prisoners, not to whoever law-abiding citizens think ought to be punished the most. And it means that rapists get away with it.
Also, the justice system isn't all that reliable about determining guilt and innocence.
Uh ... yes? Does that somehow change what I said? Prison rape (M-on-M) is still viewed differently to F-on-M rape by most people. Rape is always bad, obviously. That's kind of the point. Most people don't realize men don't want to be raped (by women) but do realize that men don't want to be raped in jail (by men.)
F-on-M rape codes the way it does in part because of societal gender expectations. Causal direction is difficult to disentangle, but there is some reason to think that people would be more aware of the reality of F-on-M rape (and supportive of victims) if gender expectations were different.
Did you reply to the wrong comment?
I meant at least outside the prison system.
I touch on something relevant to that here. Basically: "It's silly for a man to complain about getting raped, because it's simply logically and physically impossible for a man to get raped by a woman." The causes are very different, AFAICT.
I interpreted that as sarcasm. There doesn't seem to be any sexism in the quote.
That makes a bit more sense than my initial interpretation. The quote can be considered to have implied sexism of some form, but after reading some responses in a different subthread I'm inclined to think it would be highly situation and context dependent, AKA not directly related to what the quote is talking about at all.
That makes sense.
"At the mean, our society (north-america in this case) informally still considers that when a woman complains ( / cries / seeks comfort / otherwise attempts to get over in some manner that involves other humans) about getting raped instead of "dealing with it / getting over it on her own", she probably deserved it, or is a weakling, or some other strong negative affect." I have, literally, never heard this expressed (and I hang wit h/read some rather traditional people).
" Of course, admitting this view overtly is very low-status, and consequently acknowledging anything like this as "true" is politically-incorrect."
Ah, 'of course', that's why. They all (or the mean of them all) secretly think it but don't want to say so. Can I politely ask how you came to this conclusion? Not related ones, but this specifically.
Experimentally by making ideological statements under a social persona in the presence of two biased samples: random internet people, and high school students not part of my circle of friends.
Yes, I deliberately made disgusting statements like "Girls should shut up about rape, if they can't do anything about it on their own they deserved it." in the presence of strangers for the sake of science. Responses ranged from the traditional Internet-chat "..." catchall to "...Wow, you should go hang yourself" (in person, with stares of disgust and/or incredulity), along with a "HOLY FUCKING SHIT!" followed by immediate ban by an admin in one internet case.
I think it's clear the above is evidence of the denotational claims. (specifically: Admitting this view is low status, claiming that people do believe this view is politically incorrect)
As for whether people are "secretly" thinking this while disclaiming the above, well... court cases, public media, gossip about public media about court cases, and lots of general gossip or offhand comments. While the first dataset included mostly males, this second dataset includes mostly adult women.
Also, please do make sure you've noticed (I think you did, but your observations / response if I assume that you did are unexpected to me) that I'm mainly talking about "some strong negative affect" (of any kind, in general), not necessarily the specific "She deserved it!". The most common statements I hear to this effect go along the lines of "Okay, she should shut up about this, stop bugging people, and move on, she's just worsening her case".
In general, most less-rational people looking at it in Far mode seem to believe by default that the best strategy after being raped is to send a post-it note to the local police in the magical wishthinking that they'll catch the rapist silently without media attention, and then the woman should shut up and not do anything else beyond that. One could explore in the direction "The less we hear about it, the less it exists", but that's a whole different beast with different rules.
To be clear, it was only the first part I doubted (that most people believe that women psychologically harmed by rape deserved it or is a weakling), not the second (that people recognize that sentiment as socially disapproved).
That people don't want to themselves discuss it with a particular victim, or think the woman would be better off not dwelling on it (which is a different model of psychological healing, not of the justifiability of the rape, imo), or that rape is over publicized in relationship to other problems, are different sentiments than your 7:35 comment seems to be arguing for, both more credible that people believe it, and less offenisive on the face of it if they do.
"Also, please do make sure you've noticed (I think you did, but your observations / response if I assume that you did are unexpected to me) that I'm mainly talking about "some strong negative affect" (of any kind, in general), not necessarily the specific "She deserved it!". "
Hyperbole, then? I don't see how one would notice what you were mainly talking about, when "she deserved it" was the first judgement described.
Really? Is that the message I'm sending? Wow.
(in case of doubt: Not sarcastic)
I usually read enumeration statements of the form 'A or B or some other C', where C includes A and B, as "Here are two examples of C things to avoid confusion, and it's one of the C things". If I'm either not interpreting this right at all or I wasn't actually communicating this for some reason, I really want to know.
Well, "[Average Americans think that if a woman complains of a rape in some form, then] she probably deserved it, or is a weakling, or some other strong negative affect.""
I read that as that people make a negative judgement, of which be deserving or being a weakling is among them not uncommonly and is typical of the category in general.
If you wanted to demonstrate that the "deserved it" judgement was an outlier, I would expect some modifier or formulation like "[they consider...] that she's overplaying it, or some other negative effect, even seemingly that she deserved it somehow."
Unless you were trying to invoke this trope:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArsonMurderAndJaywalking
Not sure if serious ... upvoted on the assumption of sarcasm.