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DSimon comments on Changing Systems is Different than Running Controlled Experiments - Don’t Choose How to Run Your Country That Way! - Less Wrong
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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.
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.
Thanks for the link! As if you read my thoughts, because I was actually thinking "seems like I am only familiar with irrational feminists, but some people here seem to know rational ones, perhaps I should ask about some good links", so I open LW... and it's already here.
Okay, some things became clear now, some questions remain.
In my social circle, there actually are a lot of people thinking like the linked person. Actually, I do, at least approximately. But none of these people self-identifies as a "feminist". Why? Well, because the people who do self-identify as feminists here, are usually the ones whom when I describe on LW, I get a "that was a strawman" reaction. So the people who are reasonable about human relationships self-identify as "not a feminist" here.
One possible explanation is that this is just my weird perception or my weird social circle; there is always this possibility. But maybe this is a cultural difference. -- In former Czechoslovakia, women were able to vote since the country started existing in 1918. So one important feminist topic simple never existed here; women here never had to fight for vote. Women going to work? Of course, when you need more money to feed your family, you do. There is nothing "feminist" about that; that's simply life as usual. People who agree with that, they don't feel a need to use a special label. A decade or two ago, you didn't have to be a feminist to care about domestic violence, although I guess today the organizations self-identifying as feminist took over that agenda.
So I guess that people having what you would probably call "rational feminist" or "moderate feminist" opinions here, did not need a special label. I am not saying everyone was like that, or even that most people were like that, just that it was mainstream enough; you didn't perceive yourself as doing something "against the system". So naturally the label was used by people who had more extreme positions... and of course the people having the moderate positions refused to use the label, to express that their positions are not extreme. (It's like: "Women should have a right to vote, should be treated fairly, should not be abused or raped; that's what I expect from a civilized country. But I'm not a feminist -- I don't hate men, I don't think all men are evil, I also know some bad women, and I'm not crazy.") If a women self-identifies as a feminist, it often means that she is a heavily mindkilled university student, or that she is a politician and wants to use this to get some important "gender" position to decide about the "gender" money (and it's a patriarchal opression if you don't let her).
I personally started being opposed to "feminism" (to what the word means here) when I was on the university and I chose "gender studies" as a voluntary subject. Until that moment, I was curious and sympathetic (that's why I chose the subject; I was the only guy there). After spending a semester listening to women who self-identified as feminists, and hearing about the problems they were trying to fix, I decided that this stuff is insane. And some of the girls in the class came to the same conclusion. -- An example I remember after all those years: We spent a lesson analysing some unknown poem from some nobody I never heard about; the poem was about numbers 1 and 0, and how they have a marriage and together they become a number 10. Now of course this is sexist, because the number 1 represents the male, the number 0 represents the female, and the number 10 is sexist because the male goes first, which reflects a power imbalance in a patriarchal household. I felt like: WTF?! and who cares?! I mean, we live on a planet where Chinese women had their feet broken, some African tribes mutilate little girls' genitals, muslim women have no rights... and perhaps to include some first-world problems, girls in my country are less enthusiastic about maths and computer science than boys (seriously, this is a topic I cared about, as a teacher)... but no, those are not the important problems for our academic feminists, this poem is.
So... uhm... I have some material to think about; probably should make a reality check with more people from my culture whether they also have similar experience. Perhaps the answer is that crazy people self-identifying as feminists are everywhere, but the difference is that in some cultures there are also many sane people using the same label. Maybe it's a question of how long the label is used, because the new labels attract extreme people.
For now, the main lesson for me is that when people on LW speak positively about feminists, they probably mean the kind of people who in my social circle would self-identify as "not a feminist".
I decided I wasn't going to identify as a feminist back in the 80s when I read some Mary Daly. She isn't a totally useless writer [1], but the only way I could get some good out of her writing was to steelman it to an extraordinary extent. Her material in favor of the high-gusto life made sense if I read her "women" to mean "people" and her "men" to mean "some sort of boring monsters". Her hatred of men revolted me. I wasn't going to identify with a movement that accepted someone like her.
Fast forward to more recently, and there were feminists who hated her, but it wasn't about the misandry, it was about the transphobia (which I hadn't noticed). When she died, the eulogies split between people who thought she was wonderful and people who were angry about transphobia. If anyone beside me noticed the misandry, I didn't find them.
It might be relevant that she probably never did any damage to men, but there are transgendered people who died because they couldn't get into women's shelters. (A claim that I don't have details for, but seems plausible.)
Anyway, it's possibly amusing that I identify as a libertarian, and if someone (or a lot of them) who I disagree with strongly identifies as a libertarian, I assume they're getting libertarianism wrong, but I gave up on feminism because it includes people I don't want to be associated with. Maybe I only have room for one really difficult identity.
Another possible reason for why things are different in your country-- I think the US (and possibly some other anglophone countries) are still recovering from Victorian ideas about women. The Victorians had a dream of the ideal woman who was physically, intellectually, and financially helpless. It wasn't quite true at the time (only feasible for upper class women, and I think they were expected to be in charge of their households), but it had a strong grip on both men's and women's imaginations. [2]
For the physical side, see The Frailty Myth -- Victorian upper class girls were permitted so little movement that they were having trouble (when somewhat older) giving birth, so lady-like low intensity exercises were invented.
Anyway, a lot of earlier feminism was directed to the idea that women should be able to be independent from men, and be able to do work, and especially to do interesting work in the public sphere.
Eventually, there's been a split in the US, with womanism [3] intended to address issues specific to black women (and possibly also poc women). For example, there was never an issue with black women working for money outside the home, as there was for middle to upper class white women. Instead, black women were pushed toward menial work for little money.
[1] She's the one who pointed out to me that "fix" can mean repair, immobilize, or punish. And that there's a difference between search and research..
[2] There's a destructive streak in the human race of trying to turn women into supernormal stimuli.
[3] I've only poked around the edges of this. I'm sure I'm missing a lot.
It's nice to see that numerology has progressed so much since the time of the Pythagoreans and Chinese antiquity - it used to be that zero wasn't even considered a number, because it doesn't "count" anything. Now imagine how sexist that would be.
I remember, when cos first posted this, thinking "yup, the fundamental attribution fallacy sucks."
It seemed rather a lot of words for that insight, but I could sort of imagine how someone for whom understanding the fundamental attribution fallacy and how it applies to the difference between "Sam is a sexual predator" and "Sam performed this act of sexual predation"; "Sam is the sort of person who respects consent" and "Sam noteworthily respected consent the other night", etc. etc. in the abstract was challenging, it might be valuable to be walked through it more carefully. And the comment thread seemed to suggest that were many such people, which, OK, cool.
Rereading it now, I'm left with the same reaction.
Have I missed anything key about the post, on your view?
I think the post is also a meditation on the SNAFU principle (communication is impossible in a hierarchy-- specifically, fear of punishment inhibits communication).
Cos's approach involves actually lowering the punishment level, not just claiming that whatever people who have the moral edge do mustn't be counted as punishment.
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"?
I meant: If a person says <something stupid>, and you say "oh, you probably meant <something smart but sounding similar>", you gave them an opportunity to save face. When you do this to a group of people, you give them an opportunity to switch to the smart opinion without feeling like betraying their tribe. And if only a part of the group changes their mind, without this option they would probably leave the group, but with this option they can stay and perhaps the smart opinion will some day really become the official version.
Sure, I understand the general case. It's the specific case I'm being confused by. What is the stupid statement being made, and what is the similar-sounding smart statement you're endorsing using instead?
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”.