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Slightly OT, but I always wonder that people presume that men will be in full cognitive control to do something difficult (act out novel behaviors against prevailing norms) when women are "too drunk to consent". This seems to be bad social engineering driven by ideology. On the other hand, attempts to prevent situations where rape occurs (e.g. when drunk and horny people of the opposite sex congregate) is viewed as "blaming the victim". I believe this to be an unfortunate side-effect of feminism emerging from left-wing philosophies (edit: which support "sexual liberation").
On your larger point, I agree. The scientific method is used to hone in on a local optimum. It is slow and incremental. In messy, complex social phenomena we are likely nowhere near a global optimum so there is room for large-scale experimentation and intuition.
Also, this is not to say that you are not correct about some cases - I'm sure there are many cases where two horny people have sex and were not in control then the woman later calls it rape. Its just that given things such as the article listed and my own observations in the world, I'm inclined to believe that it is not what is happening in the majority of cases.
This is one of those complex things getting oversimplified. Perhaps part of the problem is indeed related to over-eager feminists over-simplifying the problem, and thus turning off men who can empathize with the notion of acting overly aggressively when drunk and causing them to over-simplify the problem in return.
I just saw this post going around Facebook, and I've actually heard some really sadistic things from women who have confided to me in person things that rapists will say during or afterward. It is my belief that there are both mistakes of the sort you are talking about, and and actual sick sadistic bastards out there who intentionally use alcohol to make it easier for them to have power over someone else and violate them. And many other scenarios as well.
Seems to me there is a lot of confusion and/or miscommunication about this topic (and the manner this topic is typically discussed, is also not helpful).
From the links at your article and this comment, I get an idea that there are many violent rapes done by relatively few men, repeatedly. From a typical online discussion with a feminist, I get an idea that every man is a rapist, and that men constructed the whole society to help each other get away with their crimes. -- These two ideas seem rather contradictory. Or at least have opposite connotations.
I suspect that what really happened is this: There are some horrible crimes that almost everyone (except the offenders) would like to prevent, or at least punish. But we fail to do that, and that makes us feel frustrated. So in the absence of a proper solution, we want to find at least something, anything, to make us feel that we did something useful, that we are not completely helpless. Which invites all kinds of irrationality.
As an analogy, imagine that we live in a large village with wooden houses, and once in a few months, a house is set on fire. It is obviously caused by a human, but it has been happening for years, and we never succeeded to catch anyone. We can't watch everything and everyone all the time, so the arsonist has all the opportunity they need. (We are not even sure it was the same arsonist all the time, but the experience from other villages suggests that it is usually only a person or two per village.) We are desperate, and we are helpless.
In the absence of a proper solution, random pseudosolutions appear naturally. For example, whenever someone shows some anger (whether justified by circumstances, or not), people start saying that this is the kind of personality that could make one become an arsonist. Or when someone lights a cigarette, they are accused of "enjoying fire".
Sometimes political coalitions are built on common interests. For example an organization against smoking adopted the "smokers enjoy fire, which makes them dangerous to their neighbors" as their slogan, first because it instrumentally helped their goals, but gradually the slogan attracted new members who sincerely believed it. A huge theory about a "fire culture" is developed, theorizing that the ancient arsonists invented bonfires to make burning down of their neighbors' houses more socially acceptable; some people make a tenure studying this.
A few years later, smoking is banned, people are taught never to display anger in public, etc. Yet, the arsonist remains uncaught, and once in a few months, another house is set on fire. Which is seen as a proof that we have to be more tough on fire, perhaps remove all positive mentions of fire from books, or something. Because obviously, having a house set on fire every few months, is not how we imagine a decent society where we want to live.
EDIT: I also agree with ialdabaoth's analysis.
Alternative hypothesis: there are different phenomena that all get grouped into the category 'rape', even though they happen in different ways and for different reasons. Because the outcomes are the same (severe emotional trauma, socially stigmatizing positive feedback loops, and horrific displays of power disparity), it makes sense to group all these phenomena together, and in fact failure to do so can sometimes appear to be legitimizing certain behaviors or downplaying certain experiences (the old "it wasn't RAPE-rape" schtick).
But if our goal is prevention, we actually do need to examine the different ways in which different rapes occur.
My limited observations:
There's a very small number of men who commit multiple violent rapes due to sociopathic tendencies (biologically impaired empathy and impulse control). In a prior post, I called these men 'desperados'.
There's a larger number of men who commit multiple coercive rapes due to access and reinforcement (socially impaired empathy and easily exploitable power disparities). In that same post, I called these men 'predators'.
There's a much, much larger number of men who help out the 'predator' group by maintaining their power disparity and maintaining the environment that impairs their empathy. A small number of these men also attempt to mimic the predators as a status signal. In the previous post, I called these mimickers 'schlubs'. I have also heard them called 'dudebros'.
But the point is, they each are doing very different things, and the way to prevent them from inflicting harm on society is different.
The first group are easily combatted by law enforcement, and in fact the current methodology of law enforcement is designed to do exactly that. They are outlaws, and thus they almost always get caught.
The third group can only be combatted by social pressure, because there's just too damn many of them. Their behavior has to be de-normalized so that they no longer wish to emulate the predators.
The second group are the hardest ones to catch, because most often they are closer to the people in charge of the catching than we are. When a US president, or a prominent lawyer, or a police chief, or a movie mogul, or a sports superstar sexually assaults a woman, what the hell are you supposed to do about that? Because the people who are supposed to arrest them are likely to just give them a free pass due to their social status, as are the people who are supposed to condemn them, as are the people who are supposed to teach them better.
So, since group 2 are out of reach, the people who REALLY WANT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS start focusing their rage on group 3, and on random parts of the system that they perceive group 3 supporting. Sometimes they're actually right, but sometimes they aren't.
These are well-chosen words.
Once I had a short experience of teaching in a private school for high-status children, and the environment felt like a training room for sociopaths. The children were reinforced, every day, for years, that no rules apply to them, their actions have no consequences, and everything is someone else's fault and someone else's problem. (The only rule was to never cross a path of someone even more powerful than you.) Any kind of problem can be fixed, first by parents, and later I assume by powerful friends; which is why it is critical to know a lot of people in the same social class, and be ready to offer the same kind of help to them.
Approximating on what I saw there, I can well imagine that if they would later rape someone and face a trial, their sincere thoughts would be: "Why are these people making such a big deal out of nothing? Are they insane, or what? I should call my parents/friends to get me rid of this stupidity." And after the problem would be fixed, their only emotion would be an indignation about how some stupid person had the audacity to bother them over nothing; and their friends would completely agree with them.
(I wish I had a statistics about how many of them, 10 or 20 years later, end in jail, and how many in parliament or similar. I guess, some of them could really end in jail, not because of the justice system per se, because they will overestimate their power and contacts in some specific situation, or unknowingly cross the path of someone more powerful. But maybe this is just a wishful thinking.)
Fascinating.
I will meditate on this more, it relates to many things I'm processing right now and makes a lot of sense.
Please come back with your thoughts once they're ready; this is the most productive and nuanced conversation I've managed to have on this topic in quite some time.
Unfortunately I can't talk about these thoughts, since they're mostly mapping what he's describing in people to my personal experience and analysis of that.
If you have public digital record of other productive and nuanced conversation on this topic, I'd love if you'd link.
Except the outcomes are not the same, certainly not for everything feminists have been trying to get away with calling "rape" recently.
As an aside: Is there ANYTHING I could do to get you to stop this absurd retributive downvoting? It's become tiring, and it's making it difficult for me to tell whether I actually said something dumb, or whether I'm just paying my weekly "I once disagreed with Eugine Nier" tax.
The power disparity point for group 2 is important. My understanding and observation is that its not about sex for them, hence why the term predator is very appropriate. As the article I cited reports, there is an overlap between those who rape and those who abuse children. Its not about sex for this group, its about power and having someone helpless under your control who can do nothing to stop you while you violate them. To these people, that is hot.
That's not something most people get, so that's part of the confusion - normal people assume that rapists are a single consistent population that do things like get drunk and lose control while wanting sex, and that's how they normal people empathize with the behavior.
The rapists that are in this group 2 are very mentally differently motivated than most people. Its a little easier to understand when you look at the things some of them say. And they really do say these things - I've heard things as sadistic or worse than what is posted on these signs, both from women who have been raped and people of both genders who were abused as children.
It is very unfortunate that there is so much confusion about how it is just a few specific men (and women when we add in child abuse) who act this way, and neither "no men" nor "all men." It is also frustrating how they can blend so well, and how since very few people want to talk or think about this topic or consider that they could possibly know someone in this category, the guys who do this sort of thing generally just get away with it so long as they are not stupid enough to do anything like videotape their actions. Few are that stupid.
Its also worth pointing out that I think there are many more groups. For example, there probably actually are occasions where a guy does drugs or gets drunk and gets out of control and it is not motivated by a more systemic lack of empathy or darker problems.
Yes! And it's not just rape.
There's a certain kind of man who has a lot of power, and who really, really enjoys overt displays of his power over anyone he perceives as weak. Luckily, he's pretty rare. Unfortunately, there's another kind of man who isn't very powerful, but who sees the first man as a role-model, and who will march to that first man's drum.
In a lot of cases, actually, the choice of women as the target is just a Schelling point - women are perceived as weak, so they're seen as easy prey, so they get preyed on more, so society normalizes the preying, so they're perceived as weak.
EDIT: A trivial and somewhat pathetic example of this - there is someone on this site that, every time they log in, every one of my posts that I've made since the last time they logged in gets voted down. If I email them to ask about it, someone new registers to the site, and then every post that I've made for the last few months gets voted down again.
Some people treat everything as a chance to inflict power.
I don't know if it makes sense to complain, but the first linked article starts by this:
and concludes this:
Am I just oversensitive or did someone write their bottom line first, and then collected links to anything related to create an impression of research?
(Also, in the second linked article, author complains about being asked to leave a mailinglist 'because of her language' when she complained about a sexist joke. Without any more information, this is outrageous. But there is no link to or quote of the specific complaint she used, so all we have is a report about a conflict, from one of the participants, providing no data. If we had the same kind of report about some other topic, how much credibility would we assign to it?)
Yeah, it is frustrating that documentation by activists is not better, and that they often exaggerate or distort to get seen, and that this ends up getting them discredited, even when they are actually making good points.
This is a classic stereotypical masculine/stereotypical feminine battle - many women and intuitive men are prone to emoting (and losing the rational tools) when upset, and in masculine/non-emotive culture, this gets them instantly discredited and discounted, regardless of content.
Personally, I've learned how to be level under stress and to look for more concrete facts and to keep my head in most cases, and I do find that I am taken much more seriously, but doing this has taken a lot of work and discipline to learn, and I think is something that a lot of people who are more intuitive simply cannot do. Where I have screwed up and gotten emotional, even after building a lot of credit about having real content in what I say, in more logic oriented circles, I have gotten instantly discredited and shunned.
In well functioning feminine/empathetic circles, the response to strong emotion is usually to pay more attention and take the topic seriously and get curious. When this happens the person calms down and the issue is addressed sanely. So I think the problem you're looking at is a result of two different evolutionary strategies clashing.
This post is an expression of acknowledgement and deep dismay that "logic-oriented circles" and "empathetic circles" are considered mutually exclusive, and that they often attempt to deliberately shun and discredit each other.
I have yet to understand why, when someone is experiencing an overload of emotion, the logical response is not to listen to them until they calm down, and therefore increase the level of logic in the discussion.
I have yet to understand why, when someone is expressing a rational attempt to solve someone else's emotional problem, the reaction is almost invariably hostility rather than appreciation for the attempt.
A proper rationalist recognizes that people are not always rational, and that tending to their emotional needs will lead to a more rational outcome in the long run.
A proper empath recognizes that emotions have consequences, and that these consequences need to be weighed rationally to the best of everyone's rational capacity.
Keep honing your capacity to express your empathic understanding through logic, because it's a sorely needed skill in these kinds of communities.
Actually, after discussions in this thread, I realized that this is a skill I should develop. (I don't want to react like this all the time, just to be able to do this when I decide to; and to be aware of the situations where doing this might be the right choice.)
But whether it is the right choice or not, depends on circumstances. For this method to work well, there are a few conditions:
- the person will eventually calm down and be able to communicate logically, because the person is not insane;
- your listening will make the person calm down, because there are no other people interfering with the process and keeping the person emotionally overloaded (either by opposing the person, or by socially validating their emotional overload);
- the person will be there to communicate with after they calm down, they will not go away (in an internet discussion, this is often unpredictable and likely);
- you have enough time to be there when the person calms down (also, your patience could be depleted);
- the person will not cause significant preventable damage during the emotional overload, in which case your priority could be to prevent or reduce the damage (the damage can include emotional damage for wittnesses of the emotional overload, damage to your reputation, etc.).
The situation is different in real life and on internet, whether you know the person or not, how much and how specifically do other people interfere. (Best circumstances: you know the person, you trust the person to be sane, there is no damage done, it's just two of you together, and you both have enough time.)
Well, let's back up a little.
Do you understand why, when I point a gun at your head and tell you to give me your wallet, the rational response is not necessarily to give me your wallet? More generally: do you understand why, when I threaten you, the rational response is not necessarily to accede to the threat?
Yeah, I came up with a disturbing hypothesis after reading that article talking about the overlap with rape and child abuse. I know rape drops off when men are around 24-26, and the theory I'd heard for it was that it was because of the drop in testosterone.
Given what I have learned about how predatory behavior is about a very small subset of men who repeatedly violate and appear to be motivated by desire for power over others more so than horniness, I now think its quite possible that getting more easy targets around that age when more people have kids could potentially be a significant contributing factor to the drop off.
Given how much I have heard about unreported child abuse at this point, I think that abuse of children is a lot more common than rape. Kids really don't report - they don't have the context to know that what they're experiencing isn't normal.
Also, the cost of reporting is potentially much higher for children. They risk being left with an angrier abuser, or losing their home.
Yes, true. There was one case that I recall when I was in elementary school myself - a boy mentioned to another girl and I that a parent had beaten him. He came back a week later and was enraged at the other girl - apparently she had reported it, and it had landed him in a foster home, which he considered much worse.
By the way, depending on the circumstances being beaten by parent =/= child abuse.
This strikes me as being a strawman, or as an indication that the feminists you have been talking to are either poor communicators or make very different statements than I am used to from feminist discussions online. (To be clear: Both of these are intended as serious possibilities, not as snark. Or as they say in Lojban: zo'onai )
Discussing each part individually:
I think this is denotationally wrong. The assertion is not that all men are rapists, but that all men are potentially rapists. This is because men tend to learn, culturally, a set of socially acceptable actions that intersects with the set of rape actions. That does not mean that every man's actions actually cross into the latter set.
This language, e.g. the phrase "constructed [...] to help each other", implies a deliberate act of planned societal design. That is not an assertion I tend to hear from feminists; rather, they say that male privilege does makes it easier for rapists to escape consequences, but do not claim an intentional or conspiratorial source for that privilege.
Of course, one needs a definition of "potentially" crafted specifically for the purpose of this specific claim. Otherwise, it could be argued that all women are potentially rapists, too.
I agree that the parts of culture teaching (anyone) that rape is a socially acceptable action should be removed.
(By which I mean, if it is shown that they really teach that, not just that someone is able to find an analogy between something and something else.)
Yes, it does.
And I think female rapists have it even easier in our society. Don't they?
By the way, I also think islam makes it even easier for the male rapists. (Technically, islam could be considered a part of the male privilege, but I mean the safety bonus a male rapist gets in a Western society merely for being male, is smaller than the additional safety bonus he gets for being a muslim in a muslim community.) I am not aware of mainstream feminists saying that loudly. (Which could be a statement about my ignorance.)
To say it explicitly, I think that different kinds of people have different kinds of privileges. Which does not mean that all privileges are equal or symmetrical. It just means privileges are not black-and-white; that if a group has a specific privilege, it does not prove that people outside of that group don't have another specific privilege.
As far as I know, feminists partially acknowledge that recently, by using the word "kyriarchy". Kyriarchy means that not all privilege is male privilege; you can also have white privilege, rich privilege, majority religion privilege, etc. But it does not seem to mean yet that you can have a female privilege, a minority privilege, an atheist privilege, etc. Instead of one black-and-white view we have multiple overlaping black-and-white views along different axes. (From the simplistic "women good, men bad", we have progressed to a more nuanced perception of society "women good, men bad, but rich white women also a little bad, etc.".)
According to this model, it would be acceptable to speak about "male privilege" or "rich privilege", and illustrate them with examples of rapists, but speaking about "female privilege" or "muslim privilege" and illustrating them with examples of rapists, is not acceptable, because it goes against the official black-to-white gradient. Seems to me that the map does not match the territory here.
Again, I agree that all unfairness in the society should be removed. I just don't trust people starting with the bottom line already written to remove all the unfairness, especially if they believe that some of it does not exist.
As far as I know, the current idea is that women don't know which men are rapists, and shouldn't be resented for being cautious around men.
Prototype: woman who crosses the street at night to avoid a man she doesn't know. The man shouldn't feel slighted just because he knows he isn't a rapist, or at least he shouldn't talk about feeling unfairly treated.
I'm just describing the starting point for those discussions. I don't have strong feelings about it, though I'll note that crossing the street at night to avoid strange men doesn't seem to add a lot to women's safety.
I agree that female rapists are more likely to get away with it, and I'm expecting that sexually abusive women (of boys as well as men) are probably going to become a public issue in the forseeable future.
Of course, this is exactly analogous to the idea that people do not know which blacks are criminals, and shouldn't be resented for being cautious around blacks, with only a separation of degree.
Many of the feminists/social justice activists I know seem to use "privilege" to refer to something which can be aggregated across multiple specific privilege-demonstrating scenarios (much like many utilitarians I know treat "utility"), and to use "X privilege" to refer, not to the aggregate over privileges X has that nonX doesn't have, but rather to the net of the aggregates for X and non-X.
That is, they seem to use "white privilege" to refer to the difference between the aggregated privilege whites have and the aggregated privilege nonwhites have, "male privilege" to the difference between aggregated male privilege and aggregated non-male privilege, etc.
This is further confounded because it's rare for anyone to think clearly about non-X cases. IME people are more likely to pick a specific salient non-X, Y, and substitute "Y" for "non-X" in their heads throughout. E.g., when white Americans talk about non-whites they typically are either thinking of blacks or Hispanics, depending on the topic and the geographic region.
If I adopt that unpacking, I still end up with statements like "there is no female privilege", but what it means is not "there are no scenarios under which females have benefits over non-females" but rather "aggregating across all scenarios, males have a higher privilege score than females".
I suspect that every social justice proponent pretty much ever would agree with this sentence without reservation. I also suspect they would mostly deny that it applies to them.
Well, it's called social justice, not social rationality.
Ayup. Still, I find I do better when I correctly understand what other people are saying, even if I'd prefer them to be saying something different.
I am not sure how many of them really use "there is no Y" to mean "Y is smaller than X", and how many of them simply use it to mean that, literally, "there is no Y". (In other words, I am not sure what part of this really is understanding, and what part is wishful thinking.)
But either way, steelmanning their arguments is a good thing, because there is a hope than one day the steelmanned version will be accepted as the "true essence" of what they meant all the time.
http://cos.livejournal.com/108721.html
An approach which includes assuming that people of good will can make mistakes, and working with them on that basis.
I get the impression they use "there is no Y" to mean "Y is so much smaller than X that no decent person should bother with Y".
WRT understanding vs wishful thinking... fair enough.
As I said initially, I'm talking primarily about the feminists/social justice activists I know; I'm pretty confident that I understand what they mean, having discussed the issue at some length with many of them, but of course that's no reason for you to be confident, especially if you don't consider me a source of reliable reports. There's also no particular reason, even if you do consider me reliable, for you to consider them representative of other communities.
WRT steelmanning... I'm not sure I follow.
Are you suggesting that, supposing hypothetically that what is meant by "there is no female privilege" really is "aggregating across all scenarios, males have a higher privilege score than females", it is nevertheless a good thing to behave as though what was meant was "there are no scenarios under which females have benefits over non-females"?
Yes, good point: perhaps "socially permitted to be" is better than "potentially".
To be clear, the assertion is that some rape is taught to be socially acceptable. Violent rape and rape using illegal drugs is right out; we are talking about cases closer to the edge than the center, but which are still significantly harmful.
For example, it's part of the standard cultural romantic script that women put up a token resistance to advances, which men then overcome by being insistent and stubborn. This is social acceptance of rape to the degree that it instructs men to ignore non-consent unless it's sufficiently emphasized, or to put it another way, to the degree that it makes it more difficult for women who are non-confrontational to effectively deny consent.
I think this is also a strawman, at least of feminism as I've interacted with/participated in online. Privilege is an epistemological failure, not an ethical failure. To be privileged is not to be a bad person, it's to have incorrect or biased information-gathering skills regarding the experiences of various social groups compared to one's own.
This isn't quite an isomorphic case: male privilege helping males abuse non-males isn't parallel to Islamic privilege helping Muslims abuse Muslims. However, if you're looking for general recognition among online feminists that Islamic countries have a lot of problems with gender inequality stemming from religious sources, then I'm very surprised to hear you say that.
Agreed.
This is a very good point, I agree. I have heard feminists address this by attempting to coin new terms, but I don't think it's working very well.
The problem there is that frequently privilege is taken to mean, not just ignorance, but that pain which a non-privileged person causes a privileged person should be treated as irrelevant.
I agree that this is a failure, though I do not think the problem is with the definition of privilege itself. As a parallel example: Social Darwinism (in some forms) assigns moral value to the utility function of evolution, and this is a pretty silly thing to do, but it doesn't reduce the explanatory usefulness of evolution.
Non-negligible prior probability.
(See this.)
I find the 1 in 6 statistic you site highly dubious. Eric Raymond has a decent explanation here of what's wrong with it.
Frankly, even the people who claim to believe it don't act like they do, as demonstrated by the fact that they are organizing "slut walks" rather than advising women to use make up to make themselves look uglier (which is what women frequently do in times and places where the rape rate is really that high) or even advising them to avoid the parties where this rape allegedly happens. Seriously imagine if the prevalence of some other serious crime (such as burglary, mugging, or murder) were that high, people would be investing in body guards and improved security not demonstrating for their right to walk alone at night down dark alleys wearing expansive jewelery.
From that article:
0.364 female rape victims per 1000 people total, or 0.364 female rape victims per 508 women. If he's going to say stuff like ‘1/7 isn't compatible with 1/6’ (seriously -- are we talking about watchmaking?), he shouldn't be making factor-of-two mistakes himself.
EDIT, 21 Sep 2013: And of course 0.4 x 0.91 = 0.364 is most likely false precision.
Murder obviously doesn't sound comparable, and ISTM it's not like people living where the rate of mugging is of the order of 0.1 per person per lifetime are that terrorized. (Sicilians do rally against the mafia once in a while.)
EDIT: I've started to read the comments to the article you linked to and... Wow. Suffice it to say that I am appalled that the same person as the editor of the Jargon File would be that bad at middle-school maths.
That sounds like it would make it harder for them to get consensual sex either. The analogue of that wouldn't be just wearing ostensibly cheap clothes so that muggers, pickpockets, etc. won't target you, it would be leaving your wallet at home so that you can't even spend money if you do want to.
And if victims of thieves were customarily asked why they were carrying money in the first place if they were going to keep it for themselves (as if the askers didn't realize that someone could be willing to potentially give money to people but not to anyone who asks, or more realistically as if they were envious that they're not the ones being given the money) and accused of being prodigal, they'd be probably eventually be quite rightly pissed off by that.
So you admit that these alleged "rapes" are some combination of sufficiently rare and/or insufficiently bad, that the expected utility loss from them is less than the expected utility gain from the increased amount of consensual sex?
I dunno, having no first-hand experience.
It also matters how much rarer rapes are given modest clothes than given sexy clothes, to which question I've heard that the answer is “not so much as one would expect”.
Yes, thank you for stating this clearly.
Check out the article I linked - it is very insightful. I would agree with what you are saying if most rapes were single instances. However, most rapes are committed by a very small percentage of guys, who on average rape or attempt to rape half a dozen women each. That it is the same guys doing it repeatedly implies that it is not a mistake.
Thanks for the information, I appreciate more statistics on it.
Lately I've been calling for a right-wing neovictorian form of feminism. The party culture that I witnessed at college seemed designed to put women in a compromising position: black out drunk, scantily clad, in a fraternity house. The sole attempt at sexual assault prevention is shaming sober males. Questioning the whole culture is never done, since "sexual liberation" is also part of feminism. But it really doesn't seem in women's interest.
I read a rape confession thread on reddit once and I was struck by how most of the men deeply regretted their actions and how some had even had their lives destroyed by it. Many of them got into bed drunk and horny with a woman in the same state before she withdrew consent. Few were without remorse.
Following up on your article, I think we should tell girls that 2/3rds of women are raped while they are intoxicated. But feminists would never stand for it. They believe that they have the right to make themselves drunk and vulnerable without being raped. And of course they do - but rights are flimsy things when you're counting on them for protection.
I also have the right to leave an iPad out on my carseat in downtown SF without having my car broken into. But I don't insist on my right the way feminists do.
Thanks for sharing this, that is an interesting data point.
A question that immediately pops to mind which cannot be answered with current information as I know it, is are these men who confessed representative of the majority of men who rape, or one subset? For example, in the study cited, while most rapes were done by repeat rapists, there were still many who did only do it once - this scenario seems most likely to me coming from that population.
On the other hand, I've been a domestic violence counselor, and I know "the cycle of violence," where an apologetic phase is part of a cycle that happens over and over. http://www.domesticviolence.org/cycle-of-violence/. From my training, we were told that men who do this almost never change, and that while they will go through this phase of remorse, that counseling almost never works to get them to stop cycling back to the behavior considered abusive. I don't know if any advancements have been made on that front since my training, which was several years ago. So anyway, if the cycle of violence which goes on in domestic violence between couples applies to the repeat rapists, then it would make sense that they would express remorse.
Making a separate reply so you get an orange envelope. I just reread this, and it isn't really conducive to summarization. I'd read the whole thing, it's worth it. It's what got me to really start noticing subtle rationalizations and subtle avoidant behaviors in myself and others. http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/06/amy_schumer_offers_you_a_look.html
Placeholder, cant post efficiently from phone. A fascinating foray into the apology phase by The Last Psychiatrist, I'll post a link and summary later when able.
nod one problem that occurs, though, is that the 'false positive' problem can be REALLY nasty for the people who DON'T fit the actual behavioral pattern, but who wind up in a situation or have an aspect of their personality that trips the sensors anyways.
It is true that the vast majority of rapes are committed by a small group of high-status predators who have a very effective schtick which is supported by our culture, and a smaller minority of rapes are committed as blatant predatory acts by low-status desperados, and an even SMALLER minority of rapes are actually committed due to a non-deliberate breakdown of communication by median-to-low status schlubs.
The thing is, the high-status predators are VERY GOOD at using culture to hide their predations, and to shift blame onto the desperados. This is why "stranger danger" is so much more engrained in the narrative than the actual statistics should bear out. And as the feminist community begins recognizing how rare the desperado is and shifting their focus to the predator, note that the next trick in the predator's arsenal is to shift focus onto the schlub.
Schlub-shaming (i.e., constructing a narrative about Nice Guys and focussing more on Nice Guy shaming than you do on fighting frat boy dickishness) helps support the predators. The schlubs need education, not shaming. I've seen far too many social networks where the fight is between the schlubs and the feminists, because the predators are REALLY GOOD at telling the schlubs that the feminists are out to get them, and egging the schlubs into making themselves obvious targets (i.e.: the PUA community).
Instead of treating the schlubs as "easy targets" to vent their rage against the socially untouchable predators, a lot of positive gain could be made if the feminist community instead explained to the schlubs that the main thing keeping them from getting laid is the predators running around making the entire environment too dangerous and hostile, and hiding behind the schlubs to do it. (EDIT: I acknowledge that this will be hard to do in practice, because the predators are so much higher-status and more powerful than the schlubs, and our social instincts say to always attack the socially weakest targets.)
Does this make sense?
The notion that "the PUA community" has anything predatory about it is a persistent misconception. On the contrary, widespread adoption of the kind of sexual scripts PUA has pioneered is the only way I can see of making enthusiastic consent into a sustainable social norm. Otherwise males will gradually erode the norm as a way of asserting/signaling dominance in a cheap, straightforward way - and many women might go along with the erosion for the most part, simply due to being attracted to a dominant attitude. Note that aspiring PUAs would not do this, because they have superior alternatives. (It would also be a huge strategic liability, when one considers the way PUA works overall)
PUAs do teach aggressive touch escalation, less talking more body language. Don't ask to kiss her, kiss her. That kind of thing.
An important part of PUA teaching is getting over feelings of guilt for your sexual feelings, which alphas and guys that are confident with women don't display.
Non-verbal communication is still communication.
To the extent that this happens, it is an efficient adaptation to prevailing norms: the escalation is not "spontaneous" at all - although that's obviously a desired effect - but is carefully calibrated to minimize 'regret' (to the extent that this is possible based on prevailing signals). PUA also teaches other techniques that balance out active escalation ("push-pull", "freeze-out"). We're talking about a very broad toolkit which can adapt to a variety of scenarios.
I do agree that on net, guys into PUA are decent well meaning human beings. When I think about it from "what would I do if I were a predator" perspective, I do get the answer that learning from and trying to influence the PUA community would be a fabulous idea with many potential upsides.
I would guess that unless there is a lot of active effort to keep guys who enjoy partaking in predatory behavior out, if we assume that such men exist, I would think that there would be some active ones in the PUA community.
Sure. If 6% of men are rapists in the general population, then I would expect 6% of PUA men to be rapists too, unless there was something actively selecting for or against rapists in the PUA set. That's just the base rate; it's no different from expecting 6% of men named "John" to be rapists.
Yes, thanks for the insights. I posted something on Facebook related to this awhile back which was a precursor to thoughts above. As discussed in the comments, I completely agree with you that there are male victims of false rape accusations as well as victims of rape, and I would really love to see a system that does not harm one group of innocents as a way to protect another.
Well, I think part of that is a higher reliance on personal responsibility - i.e., prevention techniques need to be discussed without an accusation of "victim blaming".
This can be done better if the culture's default attitude isn't victim-blaming, of course, so now the whole damn thing looks fractal.
To make the recursion explicit: most men who try to offer advice on how not to get raped are not intending to blame the victim, but a certain subset of men are very good at creating an environment of victim-blaming that causes legitimate advice to get swallowed in the 'victim-blaming' filter. (These tend to be the same kinds of men who rape.) The biggest problem is that they have a VERY successful game rigged - the behaviors that enable their raping and shaming are all seen as high-status behaviors. If we want to build a new system, the first thing we need to do is to stop worshipping men as success-objects, in the same way that we reduce women to sex-objects.
A properly 'feminist' approach would reject the whole masculine idea of adversarial dominance-hierarchies - at core, "victim-blaming" relies on the underlying assumption that there's always a Right Argument/Perspective and a Wrong Argument/Perspective and they fight like little soldiers.
A LOT of work needs to be done on all sides, to learn to respect narratives and come to understanding rather than play out dominance games with people's lived experiences.
(That is not to say that there aren't "more right" and "less wrong" perspectives to have! Just that trying to educate people that there are better perspectives adversarially is a really dumb way of going about it, and we should stop.)
Yup. As you say, this takes very careful thought. As the article linked above describes, those who enjoy partaking in predatory acts are not easy to identify, most likely have the average distribution and range of IQ including very smart ones, and are integrated into society. Some of them are also very personally interested in these topics and influencing policy. That makes changing policy well especially difficult - you have to really consider what is being said and not take anything at face value in public discussion about rape and other such topics. I'm glad that there is a growing movement working on these problems.
One quick objection here: I think we absolutely have to take everything that is said at face value, AND ALSO examine the underlying subtext. This is part of what makes it so tricky.
Example: When someone says "but I respect women!", take that at face value, and assume that they actually DO have a legitimate desire to respect women; they are just confused as to how. Use that to adjust your tactic when dealing with this person, and frame your debate with them in terms of "this is how to show your respect; the way you're doing it now isn't working" rather than "you are bad and you don't actually respect women at all". If you take that at face value and they don't act in accordance with it, of course, call them on it.
Example: When someone says, "but she was asking for it!", take that at face value, and assume that in their warped narrative they actually DO believe that consent was given, if not implied. Use that to adjust your tactic when dealing with this person, and frame your debate with them in terms of "this is why consent needs to be enthusiastic, and these are the failure modes of your approach" rather than "you are a filthy rapist!". If you take that at face value and they don't act in accordance with it, of course, call them on it.
Example: When someone says, "bros before hoes", take that at face value, and assume that they are explicitly identifying who they wish to ally with. Use that to focus your hostility here, at the root of the issue, rather than attacking the epiphenomena "but she was asking for it!" and "but I respect women!" Because in the first two cases, taking them at face value (at least at first) gives you an opportunity to identify potential allies who are stuck behind enemy lines, AND gives you an opportunity to call people out on their bullshit far better than going in guns blazing.
That's... about as much insight as I have, and it's of course subject to all the usual disclaimers; we're all stuck in this together and we're all seeing it from different perspectives.
Fair point, thanks.
I'm not sure that the serial rapists are high-status. I get the impression that they're mostly medium status (typical for the bars they frequent).
The lower-end ones are, but those are the ones that tend to get caught. The recent Steubenville case seems more common to me - people who are protected at every step, who are at the pinnacle of their social group, and who are taught over and over that they are untouchable and can do no wrong.
In a certain sense, we are looking at a Pareto power distribution, due to a combination of mechanisms - at higher levels of social power, you both have more opportunity and access, and more immunity to prosecution and even suspicion.
Remember, most rapes go unreported. Similarly, many rapists go uncaught their entire lives. The demographics may seem skewed low due to the fact that higher-status rapists are far less likely to get reported against or noticed as suspects, let alone caught and convicted.
Did you accidentally reverse something there?
Thank you! corrected.
Second thought here: has anyone read enough accounts by women who've been raped to have at least a preliminary opinion about whether rapists tend to be high status?
I wish I knew of more such data that was well compiled.
Keep in mind, that if a woman reports about a high status man raping her, he will immediately take action to silence the report and will typically have much more power to do so than she will have to get the word out.
Especially since rape tends to go together with alcohol, its hard to make a powerful and persuasive argument. "I got drunk and he had sex with me against my consent" does not hold up well in court. The woman gets accused of not being in control and "defaming" the guy, and and is quickly silenced, typically without investigation regarding the accuracy of her claim.
That's part of why the study of rape self report that I quoted is so beautiful - its the first I've seen of uncontested accounts of rape, and a set of guys actually admitting that they used alcohol intentionally for the purpose of being able to have sex with a woman even if she protests.
There is some data that I think would be interesting - the study above listed 4 different categories that they asked guys to self report for that are rape without using the "r" word. I'd love to know how many answered yes to this particular one:
2) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone who did not want you to because they were too intoxicated to resist?
The silencing is a big deal. Most don't fight back, and even for those who talk, it is very common for women to get court ordered to shut up. The notion that a woman might falsely accuse a man is something that is societally much more upsetting than the notion that she might be telling the truth and he might be getting away with it, and societally most people just want to avoid thinking about these topics and don't feel personal responsibility to investigate what is actually true.
trigger warning: rape discussion
I wonder if anyone else thinks that calling a non-violent sexual encounter with a person who is too intoxicated to properly consent a "rape" is a non-central fallacy?
When I think of rape, the images I get is a stalker in a dark alley, a lot of violence, lasting physical and/or emotional damage to the victim, etc. Or maybe someone using a date rape drug on you. Or maybe an abusive boyfriend or a husband using violence and intimidation to get sex from an unwilling partner. Bad things like that.
The image I don't get is a girl knowingly having too much too drink in a sexually charged setting and then someone not properly obtaining consent, so she later has misgivings about the whole thing. Or, to a ridiculous degree, the Julian Assange case. To be sure, the "taking advantage of impaired faculties" case is still clearly a bad thing and ought to be punished, but it is also clearly (to me) not in the same class as a violent sexual assault, in terms of consequences for the victim.
Yep.
This is a pretty valid point - as I mentioned earlier, there are multiple ways that consent can be violated, and lumping them all under the rubrick of "rape" makes it very difficult to discuss their causal makeup, or their actual utilitarian impact.
Agreed that there are many different shades of grey here both in severity and how the cases should be treated. That is a good point.
Generally, if a guy intentionally has sex with a woman who is too intoxicated to stop him, he does not suffer any negative consequence at all. I don't think these sorts of cases are often brought to court - way too much ambiguity to prove anything.
It would be interesting to get more data about the different ways in which this plays out. My guess is that as you imply, there are cases where women intentionally lose their ability to say no. My guess is that also, there are many cases where guys capitalize on this ambiguity with quite a lot of intention.
More plus points in my book toward a cultural shift to where saying yes before sex is the norm. If there are such groups, I'd rather have women who want to be manipulated into sex lose their ability to have this happen than to have someone be forced into a physical act against their will.
This is plausible. According to wikipedia, about 8% of all rape allegation are later deemed false. I did not see any stats on false positives (where an alleged rapist was prosecuted while being innocent). What is obvious from a cursory online search is that the consequences for falsely accused and convicted tend to be as bad as or worse than for real survivers of violent rape.
But this was not my point, I simply asked if what is being discussed as "rape" here is a non-central case.
I'm not sure this is based on ideology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content seems to suggest that if a Man and a Woman both have the same number of drinks, the Woman is likely to be more intoxicated, even if the Man and the Woman both have the same weight. Since an Average Man is also heavier than an Average Woman per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_weight , that makes it even more likely that the woman is more intoxicated.
The exception to the general Man/Woman presumption you mention even seems to have its own stereotype that gets used in various media: A man wakes up in bed with a particularly heavy woman, is ashamed, and has no idea how that happened.
And this even plays into the predatory dynamic: If you're a Heavier Male and you're purposely consuming intoxicants with a Lighter woman, any suggestion that you and she have the same number of intoxicants so you're both comparably intoxicated is the kind of thing that may sound fair to some people(particularly if those people are intoxicated!), but really isn't.
Honestly, the more I consider those tables, the more it is shocking. Given a significant enough weight difference and any familiarity with alcohol, a man can be sober enough to drive when a woman is in a stupor even though both had the same number of drinks.
People already take into account how much they weigh, how familiar they are with alcohol, etc. when deciding what and how much to drink.
If I'm with someone who weighs about half as much as me and they drink three half pints while I drink three pints, I wouldn't treat them as though they were much more sober than me or expect them to treat me as though I was much more drunk than them.
That's probably more because “heavy” is what the “various media” usually use to signify something like ‘as sexually undesirable to the median man as the median man is to the median woman’.