All of pencilears's Comments + Replies

A number of people have asked about that feature of weirdtopia, and as far as I know, Eliezer has never answered. ---------------------------------------- ETA: My mistake. I was going by memory rather than checking the context. Eliezer has an answer upthread. I can't say it makes a tremendous amount of sense to me, but I'll give it another reading. ETA2: I think I understand Eliezer's ideas. I'm not sure the boundaries of sexual consent are that easily changed. I can imagine a society where there are clear (or as clear as such things are among neurotypicals) signals for playing rape fantasies out. If it's the latter level of clarity, it would be a nightmarish place for those who are bad at the signals, but good enough for fiction fodder. It's harder to imagine a society where there are no pairs of people where one person is attracted to the other while the other is emphatically and consistently repulsed by the first. ---------------------------------------- In the real world, men don't like being bullied or harassed about sex. And this applies to heterosexual men being bullied or harassed by women. It's just less likely to happen than the other way around. Something I didn't get around to posting in a previous discussion of relationships between men and women. There's been a lot of talk about the difficulties for men of having to make the first move. Those difficulties are quite real, but there's a non-obvious advantage-- if you're always making the first move, you can be sure (unless you're being pushed by family or friends) that you're making your own choices.

Think about Free Speech. People have the right to lie to you, to say anything they want to you. A stranger can walk up to you on the street and say horrible, uncomfortable, distress-causing sequences of words and symbols to you, and theres not really much you can do to stop it. Why should a person be allowed to say to you a thing that is not true, a thing that you do not want to hear, just in the interest of his own free expression? Now just include sexuality to be included under the umbrella of free expression, blur the lines between mental and physical pain and discomfort, and there you go. And before anyone assumes that this kind of reasoning makes me at all pro-rape or sympathetic to the idea of it, please know that i personally consider Free Speech laws to actually be in their ultimate effect, regressive and detrimental to veracity within the sociopolitical spectrum. That which is true is sustained by its own evidence and merits, only insanity and falsehood needs establishment power to prop it up.

My first thought was that the word "rape" must have come to mean something different, for example maybe it's been redefined so that women can still rape men, but a man who forces himself upon a woman is assaulting her, not "raping" her. Changes like this happen in language/culture. (As in the Old Testament, wherein the only reason lesbians aren't sentenced to death is that Moses didn't think of sex as something women could do, but only have done TO them.) But this would have been trivially easy to make clear (ten more words of exposition from the Confessor would have done it), and the author didn't bother. It seems as though the author was trying to show that The Future Is Shocking and Offensive. It most certainly will be. But the culture we see isn't consistent with the Hey Rape Is Legal Now bombshell, and he's made no attempt to reconcile them. So, yes, the conclusion we're left with is that either the author doesn't understand what rape is, or doesn't care.

For context, see also the original "Open Source Boob Project" article.