= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Skatche comments on A Rationalist's Account of Objectification? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (325)
Warning: potentially triggering.
Well, okay, first let's review some statistics. At least one in six women will be raped over the course of their lives; actually the numbers I see are usually significantly higher than this (rape statistics suffer due to extreme under-reporting). Moreover, about half the time it will happen (the first time) before they turn eighteen. Lastly, about two thirds of rapes are committed by friends and acquaintances of the victims.
So, if you take an adult woman at random from your community, there is a significant chance (again, the numbers on the site I linked to are abnormally low, but they give some idea) that she has already been raped or sexually assaulted by someone she knew, and is therefore very aware of this danger; even if she hasn't been raped, she has most likely been taught at a young age to fear rape and to take appropriate precautions (you'd think we'd start teaching men not to rape, but no, it's apparently up to women to stop this from happening to them).
So what does this have to do with objectification? Well, look at what happens on the relatively rare occasions that rapes lead to criminal trials: the woman is interrogated about what she was wearing when it happened, whether or not she fought back (because if she was too scared to move, it must have been consenting), why she was out drinking/walking/dancing, whether they acted in a friendly manner toward the attacker. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the victim is emotionally brutalized for the duration of the trial, and then the rapist never spends a day in jail. Through it all, the implicit message is clear: the only reason women might demonstrate comfort in their own bodies is if they're looking to attract men, and indeed this is their sole purpose, and if they happened to actually "get" a man during that time, they should feel grateful and not niggle over little details like consent.
So, confronted by people who take this objectifying attitude toward women, your average female - who might have already been raped at some point in her life, and is certainly aware of the possibility - is likely to get a little upset, and rightly so. If she feels like you're basically a decent group of men who might just be a little misguided, she might give you the benefit of the doubt and speak out, hoping you will listen. More likely, though - if she's not yet comfortable with the group, or if her voice has been repeatedly ignored - she will remain silent, and take leave of the group at the earliest available opportunity. The risk is not just to her social status but to her body, her sexuality and her dignity.
(I am infuriated by the suggestion that offense is precisely and only a form of status-seeking behaviour. Some white, heterosexual males might perhaps display their progressive values for the sake of signaling social status; but for visible minorities, there is quite a lot more at stake.)
This is not the only reason to avoid objectification, but it is certainly sufficient and compelling enough on its own, I think.
That only holds if the fact that rapes are under-reported was not used in calculating the estimate that one in six women will be raped. The site you linked to gives no reason to think that's the case, it's pretty likely that less than one in six women reports a rape, and then estimates of reporting rate were used to get an estimate of one in six.
(Edit to add) That is, if the "1 in 6" is an actual estimate of rapes; the Eric Raymond piece Eugine Nier linked seems to indicate that there never was such an estimate, the 1 in 6 number originally also included attempted rape, and then turned into a number of actual rapes by a game of Chinese whispers.
Even if the actual measurement is 1 in 6 rapes-AND-attempted-rapes, that's still horrible, and still connotes chronic psychological trauma to an entire category of human being.
Actually, most of the numbers I've seen in my researches are in the ballpark of one third to one half, with about one quarter of women being raped before they turn 18. The site I linked to was simply the first that came up in a Google search, so I wouldn't have to dig for references, and so that I could give an estimate on the conservative side.
It's true that such statistics are methodology-sensitive, but everything I know about rape seems to suggest that the weight is heavily toward under-reporting. Women who report being raped are liable to face an onslaught of abuse and victim-blaming from the criminal system and even from their own peers, and rape trials rarely end in conviction, so a lot of victims never bother. Even then, many rape victims suffer from psychological problems (which contribute to their being targeted), and therefore come to believe that they deserved what happened to them, no matter how degrading or violent. In this case they may not conceive of it as rape, especially if the rapist is their partner or spouse.
I suspect you underestimate the effects of status.
I have watched my status in the U.S., as a queer man, increase significantly over the last twenty years; this has translated directly into increases to my safety, my liberty, pretty much every aspect of my life. There is quite a lot more at stake in seeking and protecting status than you seem to be respecting.
All of that said, I apologize for infuriating you.
FWIW, I and many of the men I know were in fact taught not to rape. So we do seem to be starting to teach that, in at least some places and times.
Well, fair enough. I still feel that the term "status" carries all the wrong connotations - images of high school popularity competitions and all that sort of thing - but I can see that wasn't your intention, so I'm sorry for singling you out.
Yeah, progress is being made. I mainly see this sort of thing happening on university campuses, which means it's still only reaching a minority, but it's a start. I'd like to see this (handled properly) as part of standard high school sex education before I'd say we're really getting there, and ideally it would be taught at home to each individual child by their parents.
Re: the connotations of "status" -- for my part, I care more about having some label for the thing we're talking about than I care what the label is.
Do you have a preferred term?
In some contexts one can talk about "rank," or "privilege," or "juice," or "clout," or even "wealth," but I find them all too specialized for general use. I use "status" precisely because it can apply just as readily to high-school students trying to avoid ostracism as prison inmates trying to avoid assault as poverty-stricken peasants trying to avoid starvation, which is useful when trying to talk about the thing they all have in common.
"Kyriarchal advantage" is a bit of a mouthful, but it might be useful, especially if you want to differentiate between status that's granted as a result of being in a particular reference class vs. status that has been personally earned.
Thank you for that post. I'm not sure what "Kyriarchal" is supposed to mean, but the article made a lot of sense and shows how complicated it is.
Well, "Kyrie" is generally translated as "Lord," so a kyriarchal system is presumably one which is ruled by the people who rule it.
Yep, basically that - any system where certain people intrinsically have more status/power than others is kyriarchal. Notably, most activism communities are still just as kyriarchal as mainstream society, except with regards to the specific issue that they're doing activism about. (Some of them are even kyriarchal with regards to their own issue - notably disability activism, where many activists focus on getting more power for people in situations like their own without much concern for other kinds of disabilities.)
Glad it's appreciated. I've been waiting for an opportunity to pull that out. ^.^
I thought about it, and unfortunately I can't think of a good, widely-known alternative, although as far as neologisms go, I find this "Kyriarchial advantage" rather appealing.
Defense against status attacks is in no way illegitimate, status is one of the most valuable commodities humans have, and often considered literally worth dying for, as proven by countless suicides in defense of status ( seppuku, Romans falling onto their sword etc). Just because current society brands recognized status moves as illegitimate doesn't mean denying the status component of social problems makes it go away, or that they can still be usefully analysed without.
Yes, describing a legitimate behavior in status terms factually constitutes a very serious attack on people who depend on the viability of that behavior if it is accompanied with the usual delegitimazation. And discussion here so far possibly hasn't taken that into account sufficiently and so inadvertently damaged many legitimate causes that depend on the power of offense. But that doesn't change any facts.
Rape looks in large parts like a status problem to me (I in no way mean to make light of rape, as said status is extremely important, even worth dying for). One of the things that make rape so horrible is that it's pretty much the largest status degradation possible (and since status can be worth dying for the status component alone can move rape into roughly the same moral class as murder).
My suspicion is that most of the difficulties rape victims you describe can in large part be attributed to rape victims having lower status in the relevant eyes just for being rape victims, and pretend status blindness preventing anyone form recognizing this and compensating for it consciously. And one cause for the prevalence of rape seems to be the completely unfair way womens status is lowered just by being sexual while the opposite is true for men.
I suspect that if women had a higher status in general rape would also be less frequent, but since differences in rape incidence between countries seem to be dominated by the rate of underreporting and the wideness of the legal definition of rape there seems to be no way to check this by comparing the rate with womens apparent status in each country.
Eric Raymond gives a good discussion here of what's wrong with that statistic.
This doesn't leave me with the feeling that your other statistics are accurate.
By the way, I've been reading through the comments on that post, some of them are quite good, there's some willingness to work the maths out, change one's mind that seem to be signs of mature, rational discussion (there's also a bit of political feces-flinging, but that can be easily ignored).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears that Mr. Raymond's argument is roughly as follows:
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to puzzle out the error in that one. Also note that there's no mention of how "over-reporting" and "false allegations" are determined. My guess is that this is based on the conviction rate (I don't know how else you'd do it), in which case you run into precisely the problems I mentioned.
No, his argument is more than that, I suggest you read it again. You seem to have skipped the part where he says that the "1 in 6" statistic covered both rapes and attempted rapes.
Basically he looks for where the "1 in 6" figure comes from, and finds a figure that are lower. You may criticize his methodology, but recalculating the value yourself seems like a better strategy than repeating a statistic of dubious origin.
The point here is that feminists tend to use a definition of "rape" that is vastly more general then what the word commonly refers (it tends to boil down to "any sex you regret in the morning") to in order to inflate the statistics.
I'm not sure, how are you determining your "extreme under-reporting"?
I haven't spent a whole bunch of time on this topic, but I've never actually run into a definition of rape that could be described that way. Citation?
The comment Skatche just made above I think does a pretty good job of explaining what feminists consider rape, and I think it's easy to infer why non-feminists who only hear the cursory explanation get confused and feel that feminists are "exaggerating" it.
I'm actually aware of the concept of enthusiastic consent, and even considered including an explanation of it in my comment. It's not obvious to me how that could look even remotely close to 'any sex you regret the next morning' - the principle of enthusiastic consent leads to a definition that doesn't even particularly correlate with that unless you add a qualification that one of the partners must consider it rape in order for it to be rape.
Considering that some feminists have argued that all heterosexual sex is rape, he's not exaggerating that much. The ones who make the studies he was referencing do things like making questionnaires that ask questions like "Have you ever pushed a girl into bed to make her have sex with you?" and counting that as rape to inflate the statistics, because more rapes = more money for the rape services they work for.
If I came to believe that I'd made someone have sex with me by applying force, and we hadn't previously negotiated the terms of that scene, I would consider that an instance of rape and I would feel pretty awful about it.
So I don't reject the results of that survey on those grounds.
I understand that you do reject it, and presumably you would similarly disagree about that hypothetical case. A lot of people would. I understand why, and I don't want to get into a discussion of which of us is correct because I don't expect it to lead anywhere useful.
But you should at least be aware that your position isn't universally held, even among men who believe in the existence of consensual heterosexual sex.
Well, obviously there's a difference between violently throwing someone into a bed, and joking around and playfully pushing them on the shoulder to signal them to get into the bed, but my point is that the studies conflate the two and everything in between them and classify them all as rape. Just check "yes" in the box, and voila, you're a rapist.
Upvoted for actually bothering to listen to what feminists are saying. That model has long since fallen out of favour, though, for obvious reasons: see e.g. Rethinking Rape by Ann J. Cahill. The "enthusiastic consent" model is currently one of the most popular, and I think it captures pretty accurately what we should consider a healthy, versus an unhealthy or coercive, sexual encounter.
That ... sounds like it would predictably overestimate the amount of rapes. Unhelpful though this may be, not everyone has adopted "enthusiastic consent" in their day-to-day lives.
For under-reporting, look here. Even amongst high-school students, the incidence rate was as high as one in five women, and half of these had never told anyone about the incident.
I'm sorry, but this is absolute nonsense. In fact this is precisely the kind of nonsense that gets used to systematically belittle and trivialize rape victims, and which leads to the under-reporting I mentioned.
The typical popular model of sexuality goes something like this. The woman has, i.e. possesses, sex; the man wants to get it from her. She, on the other hand, wants to hold onto it for the best mate she can find (in order to get married, etc.). Therefore his job is to put on the moves, and her job is to put on the brakes. However, if she resists, then she's a bitch, because he deserves it after all, therefore she better not resist. If she does resist she might just be playing hard to get, because after all she really wants it, so as long as she's not resisting too hard you can keep pushing anyway, either ignoring her protests or whining until she gives in. If she regrets it in the morning, well, she shouldn't have been such a slut anyway. Because this is after all the sexual norm, she probably won't even think of it as rape, and might never think to mention it to anyone.
Feminism makes the radical suggestion that this model is totally, balls-out insane and that maybe our notion of a healthy sexual interaction should necessarily include enthusiastic consent on both sides. If you want a more complete summary of the feminist position, "Yes Means Yes" is a good introductory source. I don't think I can do as good a job of explaining as the authors can, so I'm going to leave this off here.
Though obviously the consequences aren't as severe, it works the other way too: it can be the woman who has the model that she must play hard to get even when interested (thereby diminishing the information value of even the sincere rejections), and the man who views this mentality as batshit insane. (Consider the effects on the incentive profile and the kind of man this selects for.)
Yes, absolutely. This is actually where "Yes Means Yes" got its name: the authors were looking for a positive view of female sexuality, which is to say, the freedom for women not only to turn down propositions but also to fully explore their own desires.
But enthusiastic consent doesn't always happen, because women routinely use male sexual aggressiveness as a filter. These women make the man do all of the initiation and all of the advancing, and may put up "last-minute resistance" to having sex the first time, because they only want to have sex with men who are aggressive enough to overcome this resistance.
This is probably related to the high prevalence of rape fantasies among women. Men seldom fantasize about being raped; surveys indicate most women have. And most romance novels depict the heroine being raped, usually by the hero. And I've had women ask me to pretend to rape them, because it gets them more excited.
And it's also related to the strong attraction some women feel towards violent men. Even men who display violence only towards women. Men who are in prison for murdering their wives get unsolicited offers of marriage from women who haven't met them. The more violent the murder was, the more solicitations they get.
The best thing women can do to make men stop acting aggressively towards women, is to stop rewarding men who act aggressively towards women.
(Of course, to do so would be to deliberately change evolved human values.)
I have mixed feelings about this. In the first place, while I've seen this dominance-seeking theory tossed around, I've never heard it from a reliable source, nor backed by solid evidence. I consider it reasonably likely that there are some women out there who prefer to be pseudo-"forced" into sex, but I have no reason to think they are anything close to a majority - in fact, I've never met a woman who feels this way, though my social circle is not necessarily representative of the general population in this respect. As a model of typical human sexual roles, this is most likely false - a bit of wrongheaded folk psychology tossed around by Nice Guys™.
There's always a significant danger, when making these sorts of claims, of victim-blaming: of putting the responsibility on rape victims to solve their own problems. I think you're right, however, in identifying feminine sexual roles as part of a more general problem: even beside the rape epidemic, our sexual milieu is far from healthy. I think there is indeed a burden on women to learn to take the initiative and ask for what they want, simply because no one else can do it for them. Even mock rape scenes can be safely enacted if properly negotiated beforehand.
In the meantime, however, men can facilitate the process by healthier gender roles ourselves. Sure, a little bit of swagger is a turn-on, in men and women alike. But this is not the same thing as being pushy. A man who can coolly and confidently articulate his desires (when appropriate) in a way that doesn't impose them on the object of his attraction becomes about an order of magnitude more attractive himself.
The best thing the subset of women who reward men who act aggressively towards women can do is stop rewarding. Those who already don't reward it don't have "stop rewarding it" as an option.
True. But they do have the option of shunning other women who reward it. Or of mentioning it as an option, when they write books about male aggression.
That women should learn to take a more assertive role in their own sexual fulfillment is one of the main themes of Yes Means Yes, and is more or less the unanimous view of mainstream feminism today.
While this is a phenomenally stupid and dangerous position to hold, it does not in any way disprove or even address the claim that these studies are conflating actual rape, of the kind which causes serious trauma and involves forcing someone to have sex with you, (for a wide definition of "forcing", of course,) with consensual sexual activity which is later "regretted". I'm not going to endorse that claim, but talking about how some people interpret refusal as "playing hard to get" or selfishness or any of a number of things rather implies that you have pattern-matched Eugine - correctly, for all I know - onto your model of the misogynist Enemy rather than engaged with his point.
To be absolutely clear here: your problem with "objectification" is because it encourages slut-shaming rape victims? Because I'm still unclear after reading your comment as to how there's cause and effect there.
Not quite. One of my problems with objectification is that it implies certain attitudes which -- among other things -- create a favourable environment for rapists. That being said, I wrote the above comment at a time when rape was particularly salient to me, and may have overstated its relevance to this issue; I would now argue, more generally, that objectification openly expressed within a social group signals to women (almost by definition!) that they are regarded as objects and will not receive the status of full personhood within that group. Because these attitudes can be difficult if not impossible for women to correct by speaking out, many make the decision to withdraw from the group, further tilting the power balance toward the men.
Fair enough. I can certainly see how that could happen.