Which in my experience people picture extremely inaccurately. They picture girls getting grabbed off a park sidewalk by a ravenous stranger. That's a very atypical case. Outside of prison, rape is typically perpetuated by friends and lovers and dates. This is unsurprising given pure opportunity, just as it's unsurprising that children are typically victimized by families and trusted friends of their families, not by strangers with candy.
Point.
Still, you know what I mean. Forcible rape, not things-that-are-bad-and-sexual-so-we-call-them-rape.
Requiring rape to be "violent" is to require that most extra-penal rape be reclassified as not-rape.
Well ... yeah? That's not the same thing as it being perfectly acceptable, mind.
There is usually the implicit threat of violence, and the (typically) women in such circumstances are made to understand they have no choice or power. Anyone who looks at this issue will quickly meet people who insist that it isn't "rape" if the woman did not violently resist and never succumbed, or if there were no beatings involved.
Oh, yeah, threats should totally be included AFAICT. But the example under discussion was a sleeping/unconscious victim, wasn't it?
"Rape" is only as meaningful as "meaningful consent."
That is to say not meaningful at all, because you're treating meaningful consent as a fundamental property of things.
Babies cannot give meaningful consent.
Why not, if they can express desire for sweeties or whatever? At what point do they stop being "babies" and become "children", under this schema? Are we including toddlers here?
Children can sometimes give meaningful consent, but it is difficult to determine.
Aha! He admits it! Pedophilic relationships can be OK!
We allow parents to make decisions for their children in weighty matters - within strict limits. We do not allow them to give their kids liquor and cigarettes nor restrict them to "alternative medicine" for deadly disease. All of this makes sense: by and large, we do not allow families to stunt and cripple development.
There are some issues where we can safely say we know better, just like, say, an adult consenting to an addictive drug. But how could sex be one of those cases, when it's only harmful if the person doesn't consent in the first place? (Ignoring for a minute STDs and such, which parents (and many kids) should be able to take into account.)
"Meaningful consent" comes in degrees: adults are better at it than young teenagers. Most states have age of consent laws which, while allowing sex with minors, only allows it within a certain age bracket. Differential intellectual capacity matters.
Why?
You'll notice that I haven't tried to give a definition. With complicated concepts, it is often better to talk about them as if they were meaningful, and notice that they are, that we can recognize their presence or absence from different circumstances.
From hence did this meaningful concept come to you? What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?
What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?
I wish we could get past slogans.
Ok, we're trying to determine whether or not "meaningful consent is meaningful". A question: could you guess with high reliability what situations I think constitute meaningful consent or not?
A scenario: suppose I slip a girl a roofie, slip her into my car, take her home, and fuck her. Then I sneak her back into the party.
Was my crime "slipping a girl a drug", or was my crime "that and rape"?
LessWrong has been having fun lately with posts about sexism, racism, and academic openness. And here just like everywhere else, somebody inevitably claims taboo status for any number of entirely obvious truths, e.g. "top level mathematicians and physicists are almost invariably male," "black people have lower IQ scores than white people," and "black people are statistically more criminal than whites." In my experience, these are not actually taboo, and I think my experience is generalizable. I'll illustrate.
You're at a bar and you meet a fellow named Bill. Bill's a nice guy, but somehow the conversation strayed Hitler-game style to World War II. Bill thinks the war was avoidable. Bill thinks the Holocaust would not have happened were it not for the war, and that some of the Holocaust was a reaction to actual Jewish subterfuge and abuse. Bill thinks that the Holocaust was not an essential, early plan of the Nazis, because it only happened after the war began. Bill thinks that the number of casualties has been overestimated. Bill claims that Allied abuses, e.g. the bombing of Dresden, have been glossed over and ignored, while fantastic lies about Jews being systematically turned into soap have propagated. Bill thinks that the Holocaust has become a sort of national religion, abused by self-interested Jews and defenders of Zionist foreign policy, and that the freedom of those who doubt it is under serious attack. Bill starts listing other things he's not allowed to say. Bill doesn't think that the end of slavery was all that good for "the blacks," and that the negatives of busing and forced integration have often outweighed the positives. Bill has personally been the victim of black-on-white crimes and racism. Bill is a hereditarian. Bill doesn't think that dropping an n-bomb should ruin a public career.
Here's the problem: everything Bill has said is either true, a matter of serious debate, or otherwise a matter of high likelihood and reasonableness. Yet you feel nervous. Perhaps you're upset. That's the power of taboo, right? Society is punishing truth-telling! First they came for the realists... Rationalists, to arms!
Or.
We can recognize that statements like these correlate with certain false beliefs and nasty sentiments of the sort that actually are taboo. It's just like when somebody says, "well science doesn't know everything." To this, I think, "duh, and you're probably a creationist or medical quack or something similarly credible." Or when somebody says, "the government lies to us." To this, I think, "obviously, and you're likely a Truther or something." Bill is probably an anti-Semite, but Bill doesn't just say, "I'm an anti-Semite," because that really is taboo. He might even believe that he shouldn't be considered something awful like an anti-Semite. Bill probably doesn't think Bill so unpleasant.
That's the paradox: "taboo" statements like black crime statistics are to some extent "taboo" for sound, rationalist reasons. But "taboo" is not taboo: it's about context. People who think that such statements are taboo are probably bad at communicating, and people often think they're racists and misogynists because they probably are on good rationalist grounds. If you want to talk about statistical representatives on the topic of race, be ready to understand that those who are listening will have background knowledge about the other views you might hold.
All this is the leadup to my question: what highly probable or effectively certain truths are genuinely taboo? I'm trying to avoid answers like "there are fewer women in mathematics" or "the size of my penis," since these are context sensitive, but not really taboo within a reasonable range of circumstances. I'm also not particularly interested in value commitments or ideologies. Yes, employers will punish labor organizers and radical political views can get you filtered. But these aren't clear matters of fact. I also don't mean sensitive topics like abortion or religion, nor do I mean "taboo within a political party."
Is there really anything true that we simply cannot say? I have the US in mind especially, but I'm interested in other countries as well. I'm sure there are things that deserve the label, but I've found that the most frequently given examples don't hold water. I think hereditarianism is a close contender, but it's not an "obvious truth." Rather, my understanding is that it is a serious position. It's also only contextually taboo. If it were a definitive finding, it could perhaps become taboo, though I think it more likely that it would be somewhat reluctantly accepted.
Any suggestions? If we find some really serious examples, we might figure out a way to talk about them.