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DaFranker comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong
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TL;DR: Please isolate and clarify what specific experiences and actions you are talking about when you say "rape", "assault", etc. in the same manner that you would want others to if you were talking about taxes and people kept saying "theft" and "slavery". Thank you.
Disclaimer: Not intended directly as a critique or counterargument to the submissions.
Other disclaimer: If reading descriptions of violent sexual assault can trigger traumatic experiences, don't read this.
Nitpick:
Rape rape raaaaaape!
Honestly, when things like "my ex raped and assaulted and abused me" and "forced sex on me" come up, I have no idea what the person is referring to. In context, the person saying this might have a very specific emotion / subjective experience in mind when they say this. However, without direct access to this experience, I'm left hanging...
Does this mean the partner just insisted verbally a lot, saying "it'll be fun", "come on, don't be like that" (with negative connotation), maybe some psychological pressure, and then the victim ended up agreeing to have sex because, who knows, they might enjoy it and it'll please their partner quite a lot if they're that insistent? If so, I've been "raped" like this at least ten times in my life. And I'm a guy.
Or, is it completely on the other end of some imaginary rape spectrum; a male punched a female down to the floor or otherwise used physical violence until the female had no more ability to defend herself, and then the guy ripped apart clothing and forcefully inserted himself, fending off or forcefully countering (perhaps by preemptive hitting to weaken her) her attempts at defense (if any by that point) while just painfully (for her) enjoying his forced sex, control, cruelty, dominance and the humiliation / despair of his victim?
There needs to be some kind of context or perspective here if anything reasonable is to come out of the subject.
I personally don't dislike the first above scenario I described, even though by that (noncentral) definition I was raped. I don't resent it in the slightest, did not have any sort of negative subjective experience, and so on - in terms of my best approximation of my utility function, it was technically a net win, in hindsight (because of how I value the experiences of my partner). Just not a hedonistic net win.
As for the second scenario, I obviously have the immediate gut reaction of wanting to tear that male's groins right off the rest of his body, and then put them in a blender for good measure (and to make sure he can't have 'em reattached). I suspect that something close to the gut-level disgust and hatred is what most people feel whenever the trigger-word "rape" comes up. This is not always the full reality. The ambiguity may also have been deliberate, sometimes even exactly to bring out these feelings.
By this point, I feel the need to point right back up to my disclaimer at the top: I'm not making an accusation on the submitters. I am well aware that there are or may be other circumstances or counterarguments for most of the specific situations to which the above could be mapped. My goal here is to remind people that this intermediary step between that particular situation described in the posts, and the general higher-level abstract discussions, is present and very often glossed over or ignored entirely.
Please keep in mind the empirical cluster, spectrum and connotations of the words you use when discussing this subject, please make an effort to notice when there is a divergence in the usage between two people or comments, and please specify, taboo, reduce or replace with the substance whenever you think it might be ambiguous. Otherwise, we're going to keep getting a lot of noise.
As you can tell, I wrote this because I was really annoyed by said noise and miscommunications.
Other other disclaimer: The behaviors I implicitly reprimand are not things I've observed only in one gender. To the best of my memory, I have observed good and bad epistemological hygiene in this respect proportionally to the base rate of poster, so I tentatively infer that gender is not a factor and that people just make these mistakes. Not "only women trying to get attention by sounding so victimized do this" or "apologetic males who want to keep raping without guilt" - PEOPLE, in even distributions.
One major problem with communication on this issue is that the quoted text is not how sexual assault tends to appear in the real world. If that's the definition of rape or sexual assault, then what happened in Steubenville wasn't rape or sexual assault. (Just to be clear, I think what happened in Steubenville deserves to be criminalized as sexual assault).
Here is one analysis of the sociological research on rape. In brief, in a survey of ~ 1800 college students, 6% said yes to questions like:
63% of the folks who said yes to those questions admitted to having done it more than once. The mean for that group was 5.8 incidents (median of 3, so some big outliers are skewing the mean).
In a study of ~ 1100 naval enlistees, 13% said yes to a similar question, with 71% of the yes-population admitting multiple incidents. In that research, 61% of all the incidents were based on intoxication alone, with no threat of force.
That looks nothing like "male punched a female down to the floor or otherwise used physical violence until the female had no more ability to defend herself." So if that's what you are looking to prevent, you aren't trying to prevent the thing that seems to be happening.
In short, "He was drunk, she was drunk" sex is a hard problem for policies based on consent and capacity to consent. But it looks very little like "He waited until she was drunk, then took her somewhere private, and had sex with her, knowing that she wouldn't have said yes if she were sober. And he attended the event planning or hoping to do that to some woman."
I feel like I'm being read rather uncharitably.
This is, in fact, one of my points. People sometimes gloss over the differences between various points in the spectrum, and speak with connotations as if all forms of rape were exactly as horrible and utility-destroying as the one I described. My nitpick is that this should be avoided. My desire is that people pay more attention to avoiding this error.
I'm surprised, and not in that direction. 6% seems unusually low if taken at face value. Adjusting for the fact that this is a self-reporting survey, sure, that matches my priors (even though that still feels a bit low, but might be a memory / bias thing). The military stats also somewhat fit within the bounds of my priors, though I'll update a bit on this because I had very little specific information.
I may have to go read the link and related research later, since it's considered a "blog" and blocked by the network I'm currently using.
I'm not specifically suggesting anything to prevent, nor proposing any "rape" redefinitions, nor pointing towards any kind of particular policy (especially not legal or society-wide). I'm not sure how to interpret this part.
I don't know what I did wrong. I'm making a comment about the way people (or LWers specifically) talk about sexual abuse, specifically about the way they conflate various meanings, specific actions, and vastly different ranges of personal experiences and internal monologues for both the victims and the abusers, and often lump everything into one big scary word.
I want to unpack that big scary word because I think we can have more meaningful discussion and less noise if we speak about experiences and actions, rather than an abstract "event" that can include a wide range of different (usually undesirable) activities.
Perhaps also importantly, I believe that the fact that said scary word is "rape" should not make the whole thing suddenly more misogynistic, evil, bad, improper, and worth condemning than if I wanted the same thing about the word "politics" or "theft".
I didn't downvote. Sexual assault certainly is a spectrum. But your two examples are roughly like saying:
Suppose I have a strong prior that one doesn't think the second prong is true. Then I should adjust my estimate that one is very confused about drug abuse significantly upward (because DARE is nonsense).
The interventions likely to reduce stranger rape are unlikely to effect skeevy rape. Since skeevy rape is overwhelmingly more common (the linked research says that no one described using force on a stranger), that's where we should focus the discussion.
For the record, before reading your comment I interpreted the two examples as "here are two extremes, please be more specific about where on this spectrum what you're describing falls", rather than "which of this two was it?"
(This is not to contradict your critique. On re-reading the original text I can see it's not explicitly saying either, I just interpreted differently. I only mean to make known to both the poster and you that (what I assume was) his intent was not opaque to all readers.)
Fair enough. I think the best form of my critique is something like:
Aha. This makes some things clearer for me. Perhaps I can also make some things clearer about my thought process:
The intent behind those two specific examples was to give something that seems only a little bit less bad than Judge McJudgington's average rape case, and then give something utterly horrible that can fight for headlines with Jack The Ripper.
My motive for this was that when Judge McJudgington's (really) average rape case (not the one I gave as example) makes the headlines, people thinkof the second example and go all indignant and want the rapist to be punished more than a murderer. Many people on the internets have this model of what "rape" is that matches the extreme example. However, I've also noticed that many (feminists and anti-male-apologists seem to come up more often here) others have for model of "rape" the first example, and anything that goes above that they will decry "rape and torture!" in the same way the previous category of people get enraged at the extreme case.
In all those situations, the headline article for Judge McJudgington's case will cater to both of these groups and try to appeal to their emotions. Thus the entire spectrum, from both endpoints, gets blurred into a single word -- "rape".
That is why I chose those examples. They're the two endpoints where, from my observations, the entire spectrum of the word "rape" get blurred into one when a large representative group talks about it (or a headline news article gets written).
I agree that this dynamic occurs and is extremely irrational. I just think the better solution is to avoid talking about extreme-rape as if it is something that actually occurs.
Many feminists find this dynamic very troubling. When they want to talk about rare prevention, people start talking about how to prevent extreme-rape instead of how to prevent average-rape. Thus, those feminists that I find worth reading (like the piece I linked) tend to sharply challenge the assertion that extreme-rape occurs with enough frequency to deserve being the focus of attention (or receive any attention at all).
Unfortunately, most discussion about rape turns quickly into advice that is likely (1) already known to any person not currently living under a rock, (2) not a highly effective intervention, and (3) very judgmental. E.g. "Don't accept drinks from a stranger at a party."
(1) Not exactly new advice to the listener
(2) Doesn't address the social context about other people at the party accepting or endorsing the consequences of skeezy sex
(3) Implicitly, is quite judgmental about women even being at parties.
There is a point where this kind of re-framing and attribution of intent goes beyond ridiculous and becomes outright dangerous. The advice "Don't accept drinks from a stranger at a party" is necessary wisdom for people living in the world that is. The same applies to the related personal security knowledge "Don't walk alone at night in a dark alley" (Well, get a cab, you moron! And on the way, if a stranger offers you candy, don't get in the van!.
It would be nice if the world was one in which it was not possible for people to have bad things happen to them. But we don't live in that world. Yet there is a pervasive notion that acknowledging risks and taking precautions is in some way endorsing the need for them. Anyone who tells you to act as if the world is as it should be instead of how it is (on pain of being stigmatised as 'judgemental') is acting as an enemy, not an ally---they are sabotaging you.
That's great. The cultural transfer of life skills is working as intended. Most instances where things like "look both ways before crossing the road" and "don't accept drinks from a stranger at a party" are shared should be redundant.
Ozy Frantz tried to remedy that on zir blog.
Wait, so when my mother was telling me this when I was 15, it was implicitly judgmental about women being at parties? (ftr: I'm male and always have been.)
I think the inference here is way too liberal and there's way too much Find-The-Mysogyny being applied here. The advice is good, and if it happens to be even more important for women because they have the additional possible negative consequence of getting raped (or rather, much higher probability, since men can and do get raped at parties in rare occasions), then all the better for it to be said and applied.
Certain contexts may or may not make certain phrases like that one judgmental, and your experience may or may not show that such contexts usually do so for this particular phrase... but they don't in my experience.
None of this was aimed as a rebuke to your main point that they can be extremely judgmental.
Your mother told you not to accept drinks from strangers at parties? Do you recall her rationale?
If there were no such chemical as a roofie, would the no-stranger-drinks rule at parties be a good idea?
Edit: Yes, it would be a better if men and women received the instruction equally, instead of the suggestion being directed predominantly towards women.
No, it was implicitly judgmental about the listener being at parties (i.e. your mother was expressing some amount of preference that you not go).
Isn't the inverse there: "She attended a party, planning to get drunk and sleep with some guy who she wouldn't sleep with if she was sober"?
Where's the consent issue? She made a decision when she was sober and had capacity to make decisions.
If you point a gun into a crowd and fire, it's no defense to say to you didn't intend to kill whoever was unlucky enough to get hit.
It would be a defense if the crowd showed up to a getting shot party (this is an exaggeration). There's a reasonable argument to be made that people show up to parties expecting to drink and do things they wouldn't usually do except when drunk. That makes it a lot less sinister for someone to plan on going to a party and getting drunk and having sex with a drunk girl, if the social assumption is that's what most people are going to the party for in the first place.
Where did that social assumption come from? Can't someone drink at a frat party without wanting or anticipating having sex?
I don't know, but I'm pretty confident it exists. I'm sure someone CAN drink at a frat party without wanting or anticipating sex, and in fact most people probably don't get laid. But I also think it's not as immoral to go to a frat party expecting and planning on hooking up with a drunk person, as it is to rape someone.
Even if that person intended to have drunk sex, it doesn't mean that they intended to have it with you specifically. And anyway, I doubt that many people who intend to have drunk sex also intend to have it while drunk enough to be in a state of consciousness so much diminished that they are unable to consent.
My impression is that both sides in the argument are using the level of drunkness which supports their point.
The people who don't want drunk = non-consent imagine people who are moderately drunk, who are more likely to say choose sex than they would be sober, and who chose to get that drunk because they want to have sex but otherwise wouldn't.
The people who do want drunk = non-consent imagine people who are very drunk-- unconscious or barely able to mumble and make vague gestures.
Neither side is entirely wrong-headed, though my sympathies are with the second group, since it's pretty common for people to drink to the point of incapacitation.
On the other hand, rules becoming much stricter than necessary happens too.
I've encountered people who want drunkenness to be non-consent who explicitly reject the reasoning in your second example; they want any reduced capacity to make decisions to render consent invalid. (And I've seen some very convoluted logic about passive versus aggressive sexual behavior justifying why it's still rape when the man has also been drinking from a couple of them.)
(The inability to strawman feminism is really bizarre. It's possible to strawman individual feminists, but for the ideology as a whole, no matter how bizarre a position you can think up, there's somebody that actually holds that belief, and more insists it is proper feminist thought, and who probably also insists that anybody who doesn't agree isn't a proper feminist. And the craziest also tend to be the loudest; Jezebel, for instance.)
Yes; I also suspect many of them don't even realize it -- simply, the typical example of a drunk person is someone who deliberately drinks in order to lower their inhibitions in the minds of the first group, but in the minds of the second group it's a passed-out person, due to the different experiences of the two groups and generalizing from one example.
(This is an example of a more general pattern, about which I've been thinking of writing a top-level post but kept putting that off.)
I was going to say “is it?”, then I remembered that, according to this article (discussed on OB before BTW), I am from an “integrated” culture and you're from an “ambivalent” one.
The ability to consent varies continuously with intoxication level, hence it could be technically argued that a gray area exists. But the effect seems quite non-linear, with a sharp transition. As a rule of thumb I would say that if somebody is able to walk on their own then they can consent, otherwise they can't.
I suppose there are cases when somebody first consents, or reasonably appears to consent, then they fall unconscious during the act, then they wake up and OMG I WAS RAPED!!!11ONE1!!
This type of "accidental rape" is possible, but I doubt it's common: evidence suggests that the majority of rapes, including those enabled by victim intoxication, are committed by a small proportion of men who are serial rapists and often have other patterns of antisocial behaviors. These people typically understand that their behaviors violate laws and social norms, yet they do it anyway because they don't care and believe (often correctly) that they can get away with it.
I think we should start by addressing this problem.
Also levels of drunkness, also directedness. IIRC evidence suggests some issues with intentionality.
That sounds like a very dangerous social norm, which should probably be changed at the earliest opportunity, but excellent point.
I don't necessarily agree. It's dangerous if there's a grey zone and all parties sort of sidle into it and bad stuff happens, but I think it's not bad to have a subset of parties for this purpose. A more socially acceptable and accessible version of play parties :)
If the norms were better articulated people could more clearly consent or opt out, but as it is I'd say it's easier to treat drinking as its own thing and create such parties from scratch if you must have them.
Care to explain why?
Just to be clear I also find what happened in Steubenville unacceptable, then again I find a lot of sex related things unacceptable that you probably don't.
Their actions weren't consensual among all the participants. The places in law or morality where non-consensual acts between private citizens are allowed are few and far between.
I'm aware of your hypothetical about high caste people wanting a huge physical space from lower caste people. That's not about consent - that's about what acts society requires consent to perform. Physical contact is a pretty clear line.
Whether it was "rape" depends on vagaries in the definitions in Ohio's criminal code. That's why I'm talking about the category of sexual assault.
Except that's not where society actually draws the line. For example, there are people who for religious reason don't what what to be touched by any member of the opposite sex who isn't a relative or spouse. Yet we don't demand consent before touching in social situations even though some people might object to being touched.
Edit: also why that particular Schelling point? The history of attitudes towards sex over the past century is a series of Schelling points regulating what is or is not acceptable sex getting overturned. Why, shouldn't this one also be overturned?
The law surely does require consent. Implied-consent-from-social-context is different from overriding non-consent.
Also, I doubt that they suffer anywhere near the level of trauma from this compared to the Steubenville victim.
Not obvious given that the Steubenville victim didn't even know about it and thus couldn't have suffered trauma until she found out about it several days later.
That's irrelevant as she did find out, probably would have found out eventually, and almost everybody strongly values knowing what happened to them.
Given how the perpetrators acted, it was virtually certain the victim would find out. Parading her around and bragging about what they'd done might not have been done with the purpose of causing her to find out or humiliate her. But it certainly was an easily predictable consequence.
Would you have objected it they hadn't bragged about it and posted pictures on their website?
TBH, I think being forced into sex through emotional blackmail of whatever is part of the same empirical cluster as "real" rape - although naturally it's a less damaging variant, it's also more insidious precisely because it doesn't trigger a violent emotional reaction as easily.
That said, I'll second the request for clarification.