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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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Comments (260)
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.
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.