NYT: Women cause rape by being too scarce
Hey, remember New York Times reporter John Eligon? The one who crafted this bit of drunk-shaming apologetic for a couple of alleged rapist NYPD officers? Eligon’s piece, which followed shortly on the heels of this notorious victim-blaming piece by James McKinley, Jr., helped reinforce the Times‘ reputation as a media bastion of rape culture.
And now he’s done it again, in his profile of rape and sexual assault in Williston, North Dakota:
The rich shale oil formation deep below the rolling pastures here has attracted droves of young men to work the labor-intensive jobs that get the wells flowing and often generate six-figure salaries. What the oil boom has not brought, however, are enough single women.
It turns out, according to Eligon, that scarcity economics applies to that commodity Amanda Marcotte refers to as “vaginal access” [content warning applies]:
Here, men talk of a “Williston 10” — a woman who would be considered mediocre in any other city is considered a perfect 10 out here.
“I’ve noticed my standards dropping,” said Ian Hernandez, 24, who moved to Williston from Chicago a couple of months ago. “I just went home two weeks ago. I saw the girls I had planned to see. That, hopefully, should hold me off until I go back next time in two months or so.”
Some men have forced themselves on women.
Jessica Brightbill, a single 24-year-old who moved here from Grand Rapids, Mich., a year and a half ago, said she was walking to work at 3:30 in the afternoon when a car with two men suddenly pulled up behind her. One hopped out and grabbed her by her arms and began dragging her. She let her body go limp so she would be harder to drag. Eventually, a man in a truck pulled up and began yelling at the men and she got away, she said. The episode left her rattled.
Going out alone is now out of the question, and the friend she moved here with no longer has much time to spend with her because she has since found a boyfriend and had a baby. Ms. Brightbill said she has difficulty finding other young single women with the freedom to hang out. And, she said, finding good men does not come easy.
“It’s just people trying to have sex,” she said.
Not that Eligon portrays women in Williston as just hapless victims. Some, he reports, are savvy capitalists seeking to leverage their assets:
Some women have banked on the female shortage. Williston’s two strip clubs attract dancers from around the country. Prostitutes from out of state troll the bars.
Eligon’s only reference in the piece to law enforcement is a mention of a notable increase in local domestic and sexual assaults, and a quick quote from a nearby prosecutor about newcomers not “respecting the laws of people of North Dakota.” He doesn’t mention plans for enforcement of the laws against assaulting women, access to support services for crime victims, or anything, really, of the sort.
Instead, he closes his article with the same old “solution” offered up by everyone who works to shift the blame for sexual assault:
At the urging of her family, Barbara Coughlin, 31, who recently moved to Williston after her 11-year marriage ended, is now getting her concealed weapons permit so she can carry a Taser. Ms. Coughlin, who wore silver glitter around her eyes at work as a waitress on a recent day, said her mother and stepfather, who live here, advised her to stop wearing the skirts and heels she cherishes, so she does not stand out like “a flower in the desert,” as her stepfather put it. Her family hardly ever lets her go out on her own — not even for walks down the gravel road at the housing camp where they live.
“Will I stay for very long? Probably not,” she said. “To me, there’s no money in the world worth not even being able to take a walk.”
cervantes:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:19 pm
Welllll. . . it seems to me he’s describing the situation. I don’t see where he’s condoning it or making excuses. It seems to me the sin you’re accusing the reporter of is failing to add the commentary you would have added. I’m not sure that’s entirely fair, although it’s debatable.
Buzz Saw:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:24 pm
They probably don’t have any real plans. Actually, it would not surprise me if the police department there were understaffed right now. It’s an oil boom, after all (though a fact I do not see mentioned in this post). The population has increased quite drastically in that area from what I have heard from my family who lives there.
Buzz Saw:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:25 pm
Correction, the oil boom is mentioned in the first block quote.
ChasCPeterson:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:28 pm
So are you claiming that’s not true, or that it ought not be true, or what?
I’m going to agree with cervantes that description and quotation ≠ advocacy. Without denying the rape-culture milieu of the article’s subject, casting this piece and its author as victim-blaming and rape-apologetic is a real stretch imo.
Chris Clarke:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:29 pm
Failing to include any mention of the local constabulary whatsoever is a bit more than “failing to add commentary.”
Alverant:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:35 pm
Right there in the first segment when he talks about the number of single women and then in later segments when he talks about that. By mentioning he number of women in the area he’s implying an excuse as in “well it’s OK since there aren’t many women”. He’s invoking the idea that rare = valuable = OK to take.
Ichthyic:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:40 pm
ftfy.
but oh wait…
problem solved.
*eyeroll*
speed0spank:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:40 pm
Hey hey now, if they had put any mention of what police are doing, or information on what women can do they might not have had room for the total zinger about totally average women being tens. Tens! Can you believe it?
Chris Clarke:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:41 pm
Also note that though he refers to an increase in crimes, he doesn’t provide any data whatsoever. It could have been one sentence, comparing the stats to Williston before the oil boom and to other places in the US. He doesn’t do that, making this all an exercise in anecdata.
But the larger point is that Eligon fit the facts he’s reporting into a larger frame. Closing on the “this woman isn’t wearing pretty clothes anymore because her stepfather told her not to” SAYS something. Not interviewing the Williston cops — or even mentioning whether they exist — SAYS something.
As a journalist you shape a story by the facts you choose to include and those you choose to omit, and those it never occurs to you to include. You shape a story by which choice of compelling “desert flower” imagery you choose as a compelling close. There’s no such thing as reporting without interpretation.
Pierce R. Butler:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:46 pm
Seeing the headline on this post, I had expected (analysis of) a comparable “explanation” of gang rapes in India, based on differential abortion rates and infant mortality.
The raw sexism and rape culture in both North Dakota and South Asia generally go unremarked either way, alas.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:53 pm
Rape is not caused by a lack of consensual sex partners. Rapists rape not because they enjoy consensual sex, but are having trouble finding it, and find rape an acceptable substitute, but because they enjoy raping.
The reporter is perpetuating a trope that is objectively false, namely that lack of “single women” (as if married women cannot be assaulted) is causing an uptick in assaults. No, the cause is an influx of rapists. More men came to town; a certain percentage of those men are rapists; now there are more rapes.
AlanMac:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:54 pm
Having lived in a boom town where the eligible male:female ratio was about 10:1, (Calgary , Alberta 1981), I believe that Eligon has mistaken correlation for causation. The cause is, more likely, to be the higher then normal number douches ( of various levels of douche baggery) that are attracted to these places. Most normal man knew the women had the upper hand and that they had to be MORE gentlemanly then normal if they wanted female companionship. Also he provides no actual data, only anecdotes.
robertbaden:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:55 pm
North Dakota rape culture? Sounds like they are having trouble with people from the rest of the country. US rape culture.
Chris Clarke:
January 16th, 2013 at 1:59 pm
Leave it to SallyStrange @11 to sum up, concisely, a point I should obviously have included in the post. (Thanks.)
SidBB:
January 16th, 2013 at 2:06 pm
Incidentally, the Times also has another article today (http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/indias-man-problem/) about India’s skewed gender ratio. I feel it actually makes valid points (at least in the context of India’s culture which I grew up in) and it cites a few studies.
jackiepaper:
January 16th, 2013 at 2:12 pm
Cervantes,
You don’t see it as victim blaming and glaring rape culture that this asshole explains the cause of rapes to be the fault of women for not being available to be used by men? “Won’t anyone think of the poor horny menz!” is not a decent response to a string of rapes.
Really?
He’s saying that decent guys who are not given plenty of access to women’s bodies automatically turn into rapists and that’s not promoting rape culture in your eyes? Can you imagine a gay man being excused in the media this way for raping men, because there were too few consensual partners available to him?
He then goes in to disregard the rape victims and claim that women are “cashing in” on the pussy drought by becoming prostitutes and strippers?
But you don’t see a problem. Please, look again without your privilege colored glasses on.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 16th, 2013 at 2:17 pm
Aw shucks Chris. Thanks yourself.
Dutchgirl:
January 16th, 2013 at 2:27 pm
The main problem I see with this kind of journalism is that while the inherent sexism may be obvious to some, it will be completely invisible to most. Most people will read this as an ‘this is whats happening on the ground’ piece without noticing the more subtle digs at women or the normalization of these kinds of occurances. I am with Chris, what is not included says something, but who will hear it?
Julien Rousseau:
January 16th, 2013 at 2:32 pm
Ladies, welcome to Williston,
North DakotaSaudi Arabia.I expect that if there are any “equity feminist” around they will argue that because it is not the law preventing her from going out on her own (most of the time) then there really isn’t a problem.
Maybe going out alone is more of a guy thing? (/sarcasm)
pascale68:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:06 pm
@SallyStrange – thank you! You put into words what I was thinking. This NYT writer doesn’t seem to understand that rape is an act of violence, and rapists will rape even when there is an overabundance of consenting partners available. Ending the piece by remarking how a woman isn’t wearing skirts anymore implies that this is a valid way to stop rape and amounts to victim-shaming.
vaiyt:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:14 pm
“Shortage of women causes rape” is NOT describing the situation, unless you assume the premise is true. Which it isn’t. Shut up, and fuck you.
Zugswang:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:20 pm
Man, when I saw “NYT” and an allusion to weak apologetics and general awfulness as a human being, I was certain this would be a vapid op-ed written by Russ Douthat. Then I read it, and was still surprised something at the level of this singular manifestation of ignorance wasn’t authored by Douthat.
Reading these gives me a headache…
Ibis3, Blighter and Trampler since 1971:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:22 pm
I suggest that there may also be an effect from having a subculture with many men together* which is reinforcing and encouraging toxic sexist attitudes, that may lead those newcomers to be more likely to rape than if they’d been spending their time in a different environment.In a mixed study group where rape jokes and sexist objectification aren’t condoned, a particular six guys may behave in a relatively civil fashion. Put them together on a football team or in a frat house where they’re all competing to see who can be the most “masculine” and the rapists among them feel they have free rein.
cuervodecuero:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:31 pm
I’d also add in…
An attempted forcible vehicular abduction and odds-high implied rape in the middle of the afternoon, left her *rattled* according to the stellar journalist??? And then the only quote from her is frustration at ‘people’ trying to ‘have sex’. No mention of whether she’s reported forcible assault/attempted abduction to the police?
My biased nose-wrinkling interpretation is reading a framing more like ‘hoo, those whacky manly men when they can’t get easy veejay to soothe their steamer after a hard day building the economy and improving the local biz bottom line; ya galz just gotta accept menz bulled up on oilfield work get frisky. Don’t rile them ‘r you’ll get the horns.’
jackiepaper:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:34 pm
Anyone else notice that men are, “hard working young men” when they are seeking employment, but women are “cashing in”? Ugh.
Chris Clarke:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:38 pm
Oh, good catch, jackiepaper. I’d missed that one.
evolutiongrrrl:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:42 pm
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-03-22/missing-montana-teacher-remains-found/53706438/1 Just ask this woman about being abducted….what is going on in the Bakken is messed up on a lot of levels. Besides the rape culture of women, there is the rape culture of planet earth.
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:44 pm
Ibis, yes. This. So much.
I avoid groups of men when there aren’t other people (and women) around, in the rare times I find myself in such situations. The aggressors absolutely do feel emboldened, and enough of the others will be just spineless enough and worried enough about not being seen to compromise their performance of masculinity that they will not rein the others in. If it’s not rape, it’ll be a fag bashing.
Nota bene—Although I know this disclaimer will be useless and the screeching will begin immediately, no, I am not saying all groups of men are rapists and fag bashers and equally likely to commit violence. I’m saying that I’ve had enough experience being on the bashing end of it to know that I can’t predict which ones will go that far with any accuracy and I will not compromise my safety. Call it Schroedinger’s gang.
Chris Clarke:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:49 pm
Josh, funny how Eligon seems not to have suffered any complaint by the Menz who usually object to the Schroedinger’s Rapist trope. He’s basically saying that male people are prone to getting rapey when our Sex Gauge drops down toward “E,” after all. Which seems a bit more insulting than someone saying “I can’t tell whether you’re a rapist or not by looking at you.”
F [nucular nyandrothol]:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:52 pm
Possibly hard-working young entitled male rapists. The non-rapists aren’t necessarily part of the problem. (Though they may be via sexism, a sense of entitlement, crowd behavior influenced by the previous two, and the bystander effect if applicable.)
Even if there are prostitutes “cashing in”, well, welcome to the supply and demand economics of capitalism, douchebag. Have you heard of this before?
eric:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:52 pm
jackiepaper @16;
I don’t think the reporter is saying that. Nowhere in the article is it stated or implied that the women are at fault for the crime rate. I read this prior to coming to pharyngula and my pre-pharyngula read was that the article was implying the influx of men was causing the crime rise.
There is a lop-sidedness to it, which, as Sallystrange said, is that most men do not become rapists merely because they have no access to sex. The article focuses exclusively on the ratio when the ratio is not the cause; more rapists coming to town is the cause.
Ibis3; sure, there are probably some men who do change to rapists in this environment. But my guess is that inadequate policing probably has a lot more to do with it than just men spending more free time with other men. My guess is that the men who turn from law-abiding citizens to rapists do so because it becomes clear they won’t get caught or punished; not because they’ve been playing a lot more Halo than they do at home with their wife.
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:54 pm
The NYT article SidBB linked is interesting. In it, the authors posit that a skewed male:female ratio (specifically, with more men than women) produces a group of men who thus (statistically speaking) are cut off from the possibility of romantic relationships with women, including marriage, and having families. The cut-off men are disproportionately likely to be “low-status” men anyway (as defined by things like class, race, income levels, etc) and tend to form all-mall groups, where their attitudes bounce each other and reinforce each other. Minus a charismatic leader-type, this tends to produce a group that devolves to the lowest-common denominator conduct and attitudes.
The end result, the authors claim, is a bubble of violence perpetrated by these men, frequently sexual. They specifically relate this to the highly skewed ratios found in India and China and recent high-profile cases of sexual violence, but I would argue that what’s going on here is more or less the same phenomenon.
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:58 pm
FWIW, I’m seconding Josh’s comment above about avoiding groups of men that are all men, unless I know a number of them well. Because I’m not interested in experiencing what such a group could do. They may well be the greatest nicest, least rapey men in existence. But nope. Schrödinger’s gang indeed.
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
January 16th, 2013 at 3:58 pm
Any amount of policing is inadequate, Eric, because women are routinely disbelieved, ignored, or humiliated by the justice system. This is so foundational you need to read up on it if it’s not something you already know.
The problem is rape culture. A big part of the “not getting caught” and “not getting punished” is the absolute, utter lack of social catching and punishing. The diminishment of rape. The slut shaming. The clothing policing. This informs and buttresses a law enforcement system that usually—not sometimes, usually—disbelieves victims or makes it impossible to succesfully prosecute the perps.
This article traffics in rape culture tropes, and others above have explained how very clearly. I highly doubt the author meant to, or believes that he’s participating in it. That doesn’t matter. Most of us don’t think we’re doing it until we’re confronted with it. He’s like the vast majority of people in this country who unthinkingly pass along rape culture tropes but get in high dudgeon when you suggest they’re part of the problem.
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 16th, 2013 at 4:01 pm
You’re correct, Josh. Even in a imbalanced situation where there are x violent rapey men, the way that this situation spirals into a situation where most (or even many) women feel unsafe is when said rapey men are not held accountable. Rape culture allows the rapists to get away with rape and shames women for taking steps to protect themselves.
Gen, Uppity Ingrate.:
January 16th, 2013 at 4:04 pm
I found the absolutely random bit mentioning the silver eye glitter Ms Couglin wore to work on some “recent day” to be… Astounding. The reporter is effectively saying: “She wore eye glitter to work what does THAT tell ya?” (and of course the implied answer is ‘nothing good’.)
Or is that just me?
Also, it’s reprted that there’s both a lack of consensual partners AND an influx of sex workers ( who, as mentned earlier, are “cashing in” , not seeking employment). Even if it were true that too few single women are available to supply the vaginal access product these men feel entitled to and that leads to increased sexual violence (which I can not disagree with more), wouldn’t the influx of the sex workers address the “access” “problem”? Makes no sense to me.
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
January 16th, 2013 at 4:04 pm
Shorter me: Laws aren’t enough. Social pressure and stigma is necessary and often more powerful than legal prohibitions. Think of civil rights—just because Brown v. Board of Education was decided did NOT mean that black children were all of a sudden welcome, safe, and free of violence in desegregated schools. They’re still not today. But what gains have been made have come because the collective weight of moral disapproval from society (at least in most cases about the most blatant and overt racism) has curtailed some acts that would otherwise have happened.
Same thing with rape. Same thing with homophobia. Same thing with casual sexism. Same thing with______.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 16th, 2013 at 4:21 pm
I live in ND. My husband works with a lot of oil workers who have come in from elsewhere. The overcrowding has to be seen to be believed – people in Dickinson rent their driveways out to oil workers. Yes, crime has been up everywhere the oil workers are, no, there aren’t enough cops to effectively deal with it, however, there’s an unspoken there and it is a *huge* one – no one is to be seriously tipping the oil boom boat. That includes the cops.
Barklikeadog:
January 16th, 2013 at 4:26 pm
Barklikeadog:
January 16th, 2013 at 4:28 pm
Blockquote fail again. That last part was me.
jackiepaper:
January 16th, 2013 at 4:45 pm
Eric, if it is not the fault of women that men don’t have enough access to their bodies, so natch men turn to raping women, then who is it precisely that is at fault for not supplying these men with women’s bodies to prevent them becoming rapists? (Not that for one second I think that is what causes men to rape.)
Let me break it down as I see it and you can tell me where I’m wrong.
If men rape women because their is no available pussy and women control the flow of pussy, how is that not blaming women for creating rapists?
Since there clearly are women in that town and men are raping them because, presumably those women aren’t giving it up, isn’t the author saying that women not making themselves available for fucking are to blame? If no vagina access = let the rapefest begin, then it is women, not men who control the sexual crimes men perpetrate against women. The irony is that he also says there are prostitutes who would happily sell these guys some sex, but I guess the demand so outweighs the supply that the men have turned to rape to quench their poor lonely loins. Are you seeing any scapegoating yet?
He is comparing sex with things like food and water or other things desperate people will do desperate things to acquire, because they die without them. He is suggesting that these men are owed/need women’s bodies or else those poor hard working young men will rape. I believe people should have access to food, housing, medical care and clean water. I do not believe for a moment that they are owed access to anyone else’s body. He is writing about women as if he is writing about a water rights dispute. Too many thirsty people, not enough water. That’s wrong. That’s rape culture.
Then again, I’ve been wrong before.
Barklikeadog:
January 16th, 2013 at 4:53 pm
@ jackiepaper
Well you are not wrong now! I really liked your water rights analogy. Nice.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 16th, 2013 at 4:59 pm
JackiePaper:
You aren’t wrong. He’s writing about how pussy should be on tap, and of course, it’s the fault of women if it isn’t overflowing. Poor, poor menz, without proper access, you know, because they are entitled. One would think they didn’t have two perfectly good hands.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:05 pm
jackiepaper:
Hell yes. In this view, sex isn’t an activity that two or more people engage in together for pleasure, but a requirement for life and one which women are denying these poor, hardworking young men.
It reduces human beings to sex dispensers. And miserly ones at that.
Lofty:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:06 pm
Caine:
The rapists have been properly educated, wanking makes you go blind. Gotta have pussy to be real men.
*squints blearily at the words on the screen*
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:09 pm
Lofty:
*Snorts* I suppose it would constitute work, and why the idea of those poor guys having to work after getting back to their miserable oil worker shack, having to wrap a finger or five…it’s unbearable!
Randomfactor:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:15 pm
Or is that just me?
While I had the same thought, one additional comment.
I remember reading last year a profile on a highly-regarded biology researcher who’d made a breakthrough. The article described what she was wearing in the lab. I was highly disappointed when the reporter interviewed another researcher in the field on the significance of her achievement, but didn’t give me a clue what HE was wearing…
jackiepaper:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:16 pm
Caine, They are hard working. Perhaps callused hands are really to blame here.
Somebody send those young men a truckload of Fleshlights and stop this madness!
Lofty, That explains why as I get older, my glasses get thicker. It must be a cumulative effect.
Azkyroth, Former Growing Toaster Oven:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:32 pm
Thing is, jerking off doesn’t impress your buddies, whereas “getting pussy” does. Far, far more so if it’s “the right kind of pussy” (IE, young, conventionally attractive), but anything “less” is “understandable,” even though you’re supposed to be kind of ashamed of it.
Reason #86 why I avoid hanging out with all-male groups. Even the ones who aren’t rapey per se tend to be pretty fukken toxic. >.>
Matthew Oakley:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:33 pm
Reading this kind of shit makes me sick. I’ve been single for more years than I care to think about yet I have never felt the need to force myself onto a woman. Nor have I felt the need to ‘lower my standards’, whatever the fuck that means. How anyone can buy that kind of crap is beyond me.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:39 pm
Azkyroth:
Yeah, you’re right. Even more so now, when homosociality has gone terribly toxic.
Jadehawk:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:40 pm
Including physical descriptions of women, but not men, in the article is not just reporting the facts.
Including reports of increased sex crimes, but not the increase in violent crimes in general, is not just reporting the facts.
Including quotes and paraphrases from people interviewed that imply that women are things (you can “import” them, apparently), that shortages of women cause men to go insane, and that attempted rape is “just trying to have sex” without commentary is not just reporting the facts.
All of these decisions about what to include and what to leave out are editorial, subjective decisions about how to frame a story. And this writer chose to frame it as “too few women, therefore sexual assault”, when it could have been just as easily “too quick influx of people, understaffed police, therefore more crimes”, or “bunch of men competing in toxic manliness, therefore outbreaks of toxic behavior”, or any number of different frames. so yeah, i call bullshit on the “he’s just reporting the situation” argument.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:49 pm
Ugh, so much fail in the Times article.
We got the complete failure to comment on or even be aware of what the rape culture is. We’ve got the casual relegation of sex workers to not real people (cause see if good kind white women who just want a boyfriend and a baby get assaulted than that is vaguely lamentable, but not so for those predatory evil sex workers “chasing a fast buck”).
We’ve got, as SallyStrange pointed out, the complete BS acceptance of all sorts of rape myths, worst of all, the idea that rapists don’t rape because they are rapists but because of some desperation or confusion and of course we’ve got the continuation of the myth of “the only rapist is the stranger rapist”, completely ignoring that most people who are raped are raped by someone they know (fairly often current and prior romantic partners).
We’ve got the standard complete bullshit we always get from anti-feminists and sexists about how all cis men are inherently rapists and the slightest thing will naturally just set off mass rape rampages (short skirts, lack of local sexual options, not getting their dick sucked enough, women being “uppity”, etc…) and yes, it is amazing to me every goddamn time that all the people who cry crocodile tears about Dworkin noting that sexist men view sex as rape completely fail every time to notice just how little anti-feminists and sexists view MEN as well as women. I mean, they are literally calling you a violent creature who is one bad dump away from sharpening a machete and kidnapping women on the street. How the hell does this get a pass? Oh right, misogyny and a toxic masculinity culture.
And we’ve got the incredibly infuriating “sex as Econ 101 transaction” bullshit. Which never fails to be just… GYAH. I’m asexual and I fucking understand that sex, romance, love, lust, so on and so forth have BALLS ALL to do with Economic Theory. And frankly, the attempt to reduce the complex, emotional, and so dependent on consent and genuine humanity field of sex and love into some sort of sick Men want X good from women, women want Y good from men woo says infinite volumes about just how fucked up we are as a culture and how much we’ve turned capitalism into a toxic fetish.
And that’s before we get into the heteroassumptive problems, the way the local police as depicted seem to be more concerned with “y’all not from ’round here” bullshit than actually addressing the real problems, the way the boom is simply highlighting the issues of conservative social environments, and of course the complete failure to really look at how jobs are coded as one gender or another and the problems that inevitably stem. Cause, yeah, the fact that mining and oil refineries are treated as “men’s work” where female workers “need not apply” really exasperates these sorts of problems. If there weren’t a lot of insecure men with a “macho manly” self-assumption blocking women workers because “they couldn’t possibly be as good”, reinforcing each others worst attributes, and trying to one-up each other in a story on how they best resisted any signs of femininity, things wouldn’t be nearly as bad in these sorts of communities.
But then, really doing some real journalism into that is simply so much harder and so much less well-paid than writing the same damn “women need to get out of the workplace (and the world) for their own good” that major newspapers have been running for over 20 years.
Lofty:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:52 pm
Caine:
When was it ever not?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_George_Duncan
Jadehawk:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:55 pm
oh yeah. the xenophobia about all those “thems” moving into North Dakota is huge.
Barklikeadog:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:55 pm
@jackipepper
I’ve never had to go all rapey because of the callouses on my hand and I haven’t been home and seen my wife in months. You just end up building more callouses with your callouses.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:56 pm
Lofty:
Um, I think you’re confusing homosocial with homosexual. Not the same thing.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 16th, 2013 at 5:58 pm
Jadehawk:
Along with all the “strange culture” those “thems” are bringing along. It’s not dire everywhere here, but it’s pretty bad.
Lofty:
January 16th, 2013 at 6:00 pm
Caine:
Thanks
Marcus Ranum:
January 16th, 2013 at 6:06 pm
Sally Strange @#11: Thank you. You’re awesome.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 16th, 2013 at 6:08 pm
Jadehawk @52
Yeah, there’s a really creepy unsettling feeling from his physical descriptions of women. And it really stems from how it just encapsulates a whole fleet of unpacked assumptions (from the idea that all a woman is is her physical attractiveness, to the ideas that less attractive or more sexually open women are worth less and often worthless, the near inhuman references to sexual workers that literally invokes monstrous images, and that goddamn fucking Pick-Up Artist numbering system which still might be the best Instant Red Flag for Guaranteed Douchebaggery that sexists ever adopted).
And yeah, an extra goddamn for how the author slipped in that casual “hard-working” BS as if men working in fields where sexist discrimination, hostile work environments, sexual assault and harassment, brutal and violent gender enforcement, and inaccurate sex-based assumptions artificially reduce women’s involvement was somehow more difficult and more real than the underpaid, overworked gigs that often are left to be “women’s work”.
Including, the sex work denigrated in the same article. Oil workers don’t have to worry constantly that they’ll be raped or murdered. If they get injured on the job they get worker’s comp and union support instead of a panicked run to scrounge up enough makeup to hide the scars so you won’t be fired. They don’t have to worry about being arrested or harassed by cops for free sexual favors. They don’t get to enjoy union protection, middle class wages, and industry regulations designed to keep them safe and protected. And they don’t have to literally fuck or be sexually harassed just to earn their daily bread.
Hekuni Cat, MQG:
January 16th, 2013 at 6:21 pm
jackiepaper:
You are definitely not wrong.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 16th, 2013 at 6:41 pm
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius @ 11;
Quoted for truth.
Rape is rarely if ever about sex, but it is always about power, and the normalisation of rape as ‘just what guys do when there aren’t enough women around’ is a component of that power, since it functions as a de facto excuse for rape. It is just another facet of rape culture.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 16th, 2013 at 6:51 pm
jackiepaper @ 41;
Exactly right – he acts as if all women should be the horn of sexual cornucopia, and rape is the result of their failure to perform their designated function as living sex despensors properly. It is a heinously misogynistic and dehumanising example of rape culture in action.
canabob:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:14 pm
The story paints a crappy picture of Williston, and points up a sick culture that is growing there.
But before you shoot the messenger, try reading the whole story, instead just the bits Chris picked out.
And trying reading with the kind of objectivity I would hope you’d bring to your laboratory.
I’m not sure it’s Eligon who’s looking through tinted glasses.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:23 pm
canabob:
Oh FFS. Just what is your point, exactly? What makes you think people didn’t read the story? You know, you might have the luxury to view rape culture and sexism “objectively” – for the rest of us, it’s reality. It’s our lives.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:24 pm
canabob @ 65;
Perhaps you should read through the thread to see why we consider this article so problematic before seeking to admonish us. I recommend SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius’ post @ 11 in particular.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:27 pm
I’ll also add, loudly, that there are several people commenting on this thread who live in ND and are familiar with Williston – me being one of them.
ChasCPeterson:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:29 pm
WOTI?
OK.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:30 pm
Gregory:
“Canabob” gave himself away with the laboratory remark – he’s a fan of the Vulcan Atheist model, prepared to throw strawSpocks all over the place.
canabob:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:32 pm
There you go, Caine. I’m not condoning “rape culture and sexism”. But you read what you wanted to read in my comment, without actually reading what was there.
Same goes for Eligon’s story.
That’s my point.
Running around shouting “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” has about as much validity as responding to violence by buying a gun. Eligon’s job is to point out reality – and the unhappy joy of being a reporter is that the reality we see is not always the one you WANT to see.
Sad, so sad.
But if the reality is never pointed out, it will never be fixed.
The scattering of ashes and rending of garments here is a good thing. But stand back and you’ll see that what really needs to be fixed is the rape culture and sexism – not some (possibly flawed) reporter’s attempt to point them out.
slothrop1905:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:44 pm
Just what IS the solution to such a skewed male/female ratio? The link above to the situation in India…are people in agreement here that men can socialized to not want sex? In a previous thread I thought it was agreed on here that having sex with people was something that was in your own control (because if you believe otherwise you’re a Nice Guy), but when there’s such an imbalance obviously that can’t be the case. So is the idea that with proper socialization those men who are left out should realize they just don’t want it that much? Would love to see some research on how that would work.
Jadehawk:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:46 pm
lol. because you’ve got some sort of evidence that people didn’t read it?
oh, wait, no. you’re bullshitting, despite the evidence that people HAVE read the article. evidence like discussing parts not pulled out by the OP.
sure. and the list of biased/biasing choices I listed is totes not a list of biased/biasing choices.
huh, I guess we’re back to the part where you’re simply bullshitting.
rodriguez:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:48 pm
canabob you think Caine has misinterpreted your vague and critical comment. But just what were you trying to say? You said this:
This would imply that you think there are some important bits Chris left out. Great, then, which ones?
And you also said this:
Can you point out where some specific comment is not objective?
Your comment was virtually empty of content, except for the finger wagging at all the other, much more useful and eloquent, comments.
Jadehawk:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:51 pm
oh yeah. dude totes just reported the objective reality, all the objective reality, and nothing but the objective reality. because that’s how writing a story works. reporters, they’re really just unbiased recording and transmission devices. especially in this day and age. because reasons.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:54 pm
Caine, Fleur du mal + @ 70;
Ah, I see what you mean. I want to think that this ‘laboratory’ remark was simply an unfortunate turn of phrase from someone unfamiliar with the problems skepticism has with sexism, but I am very much afraid that you are right, and we are about to be condescendingly informed that women will get so emotional about stuff like misogyny and rape culture, and need to show more academic detachment before they can be taken seriously…
And now we get this @ 71 from canbob;
and;
(Emphasis added)
It really isn’t looking good for my ‘honest misunderstanding’ reading of canabob’s words in hir first post, is it? At this rate, xe may as well just come right out and call us ‘hysterical’.
———————————————————————————————————————-
Canabob; if you aren’t promoting the fallacious ‘Vulcan atheist’ idea that people who show passion about the issues surrounding misogyny and rape culture are too emotional and irrational to be taken seriously – thus demonstrating only that you have social privilege enough that rape culture effects your life to so small a degree that you can afford to be so detached – then your chosen form of words really isn’t helping your case.
Jadehawk:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:54 pm
he didn’t report on rape culture and sexism. he perpetuated it. a story reporting ontoxic masculinity, rape culture and sexism in oil country would have been written differently. this was a story on how there’s so few women, men go insane and try to “have sex” with everything that moves.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 16th, 2013 at 8:54 pm
slothrop:
Did you even read the thread? FFS, this is not about “oh, those poor men, there isn’t enough suitable pussy around! We must remedy the situation!” It’s about rape.
rodriguez:
January 16th, 2013 at 9:00 pm
So is the idea that with proper socialization those men who are left out should realize they just
don’t want it that much?can’t rape women without serious sanctions and consequences, like jail time.Koshka:
January 16th, 2013 at 9:01 pm
The first part of the story points out that men are not getting the sex they want.
Then we have
Apparently women being assaulted is a secondary concern to the author.
This line
should read
“Some men have raped/attempted to rape women.”
The article is minimising rape and is accepting that assault on women comes second to men getting sex.
It may be pointing out “reality” but it does it as part of the entrenched rape culture.
slothrop1905:
January 16th, 2013 at 9:06 pm
Yes, I read every part of this thread and the linked articles. I see everyone saying that sex for men is not like having shelter or food or water, it’s something that your hands will suffice for (I also note that it’s mostly women saying that, but whatever). I get it, you want to discourage rape in every possible way and make the culture accept that prosecutions be taken more seriously than they ever have been in any society I’ve read about. But I have also seen that large populations of men with no access to sex usually is associated with bad things. I assume there’s a reason why that is? And the reason is social conditioning? That the drive for sex in these men will just go away? Be channelled into something more productive? Or is the idea that that drive itself is just a socially contructed illusion, and nothing bad will come from its suppression because it wasn’t really there in the first place?
Arawhon:
January 16th, 2013 at 9:08 pm
As someone with a lot of family in Williston and and many of them working the oil field, the city has gone to shit. And thats saying something cause the town was shit before the boom. Many of the guys who moved to Williston are your average soaked-in-sexism doodz who think that having sex is a right and something that all the women should be giving them. Some of the guys who moved there are extremely bitter mysogists working the field to meet their child-support payments. The culture is sick there. Most of the cops really didnt care about you before the boom, now they are severely understaffed to handle Williston.
Chris Clarke:
January 16th, 2013 at 9:10 pm
Which is what we’re doing here: reporting on a reality that fans of Eligon’s work might prefer not to see. Do try to keep up, Canabob.
Jadehawk:
January 16th, 2013 at 9:11 pm
fascinating. this totally sounds as if you think men who don’t get laid for a few months in a row inherently turn into beasts who lose control over themselves.
how would any dude ever get through puberty, if that were even remotely close to true?
seriously, stop perpetuating the weird belief that behaviors associated with toxic masculinity perpetuate themselves because men don’t get laid enough.
Chris Clarke:
January 16th, 2013 at 9:12 pm
And slothrop1905, if you don’t know the difference between male sexuality and rape, then you’ve got a problem too big for me to help you with.
John Morales:
January 16th, 2013 at 9:12 pm
slothrop1905:
I see you’re JAQing furiously.
It’s really not that complicated: Rape is not a need for sex, but a perversion of it — and part of being civilised is not accepting or excusing rape.
Rev. BigDumbChimp:
January 16th, 2013 at 9:13 pm
Jebus fucking Christ
Gregory Greenwood:
January 16th, 2013 at 9:21 pm
slothrop1905 @ 81;
You are making the mistake of assuming that this thread is about the lack of available women to satisfy the sexual urges of men in this community. It isn’t. This thread is about rape. And rape is not about sex at its most fundamental level – it is about power. Part of the power rapists derive from rape comes from society making excuses for them – excuses like the idea that rape is a response to the lack of the availability of women; an attitude that normalises rape as a ‘natural’ response to having too few women around, rather than pointing out that men that rape still rape even when there are lots of women around.
The increased incidence of rape in communities like Williston, North Dakota is not caused by a lack of available women, but rather because the industry there is socially constructed as being a masculine field that is not open to women, and these ‘jobs for boys’ attract more men, and a percentage of those men attracted will be the kind of men who rape. Claiming that it is caused by a lack of women seeks to shift the blame for the increase in the rate of rape onto the shoulders of the women who are too few in number to perform the function that the article implies they should be performing – that of public sex dispensories. This attitude is clearly misogynistic, and is not merely ‘reporting the facts’.
That there are not many women around does not mean that heterosexual men’s sex drives will atrophy, but being horny is no excuse to rape someone. There are other ways to manage sexual urges, and a responsible person employs them.
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
January 16th, 2013 at 9:23 pm
if Vulcan men can’t mate they have to fight to the death…have we considered trying this?
Rev. BigDumbChimp:
January 16th, 2013 at 9:24 pm
As a man who has a high sexual drive, that load of fucking stupidity tells me you simply deserve to get to banished to the island of misfit morons.
Men who are deprived of sex are expected to behave like moral human fucking beings. Not savages.
Even considering that rape might be an option and excused by some sexual drought says something terrible about you as a person
People like you… WTF?
Seriously.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 16th, 2013 at 9:25 pm
Slothrop:
Meaning what? That a real man would never consider having a nice wank, or what?
No, you don’t get it. This is about rape culture, living in a society which finds ways to ignore and condone rape, thanks to toxic, systemic sexism. “Discourage rape”? No, I want much more than that. I’m getting the feeling that you don’t think rape is all that bad.
Bad things? Like what? Rape, perhaps?
First, you need to define “bad things.”
No one expects men to be neutered, ffs. Most people have a sex drive, you know. Part and parcel of being human. It’s expected that people control themselves, too.
How about if you really, really have to ejaculate, you have yourself a wank if you don’t have the time to work out a consensual hook-up or relationship?
Oh fuck me, you’re an idiot.
Tony the Queer Shoop (proud supporter of Radical Feminism):
January 16th, 2013 at 10:10 pm
Wait! If months of no sex turns men into sex crazed fiends incapable of controlling their urges, I must be special. I have managed to go for over a year without sex. Strangely enough, I never thought once about sexually assaulting someone just so I could get off. I found my right hand took care of the job in such a way that any sexual tension was effectively released.
Huh. Guess I am an odd duck…err…shoop.
slothrop1905:
January 16th, 2013 at 10:27 pm
‘Even considering that rape might be an option and excused by some sexual drought says something terrible about you as a person’
Wow, sorry, never said it was an option.Where did I excuse any of this? I never excused any behavior whatsoever. And if you’re saying there’s no connection between an imbalanced ratio of men/women in the ND case, that that is merely a case of the job attracting a certain type, fine. Guess I was more interested in the link on India above, because that seemed a more stark example of what I was asking about. Hard to argue the ‘job attracts rapists’ thing in that case. Let me say it clearly: I despise rape and everything that’s connected to it. I am trying to find out what the underlying assumptions are here.
You’re saying that the disparity of men in this case is due to our patriarchal society making the oil business a man’s thing, and this type of work attracted the type of man who would rape. You’re saying, then, that it’s not just the fact of the imbalance itself that brought with it this behavior. By saying this, I AM NOT condoning the behavior, not sure how you can get to that. I am trying to get to cause. In ND you have a group of men comprised of an inordinate amount of rapists due to the job situation. So in a ratio imbalance that didn’t have that factored in, where there was no choice of joining such a group but just the ratio you were born into, what would happen?
jackiepaper:
January 16th, 2013 at 11:07 pm
Slothrop, you were ask questions. It is polite to answer them before you continue jaqing off.
Azkyroth, Former Growing Toaster Oven:
January 16th, 2013 at 11:19 pm
The cause is a willingness of a number of (almost always) men to rape and the willingness of a larger number of people (often men, but far from always) to tolerate rape. Including by pretending that the cause is something else.
Nepenthe:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:01 am
@69
Thanks for your input Chas. *coughassholecough*
—
*stares at words* *blinks a bit* Rephrase please?
Akira MacKenzie:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:05 am
While this is probably TMI, I confess that I haven’t had sex with another person in 15 years. While I would certainly like to have it again at least once before I die, I have not had the slightest desire to rape someone in order to get it.
Nope. Not once. The thought has never even entered my head.
So you’ll understand if I find the idea that sexual deprivation is any sort of excuse for rape to be pretty fucking evil and those who entertain the notion that months without sex entitles men to be subhuman shits.
Present company included.
Akira MacKenzie:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:09 am
Damn ADHD.
EDIT: …the notion that months without sex entitles men to fuck however they want to be subhuman shits.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:12 am
Nepenthe:
Basic translation: What if you’re born into a society/culture/caste where there’s a fucktonne of men and very few women and you aren’t one of the men who ever gets women? What about those men? Huh? What about them? Are they supposed to, to…*gasp* wank? Are they supposed to castrate themselves? Are they supposed to suppress their sex drive, because you’re all saying a sex drive is a social construct and…
That’s as far as I care to go.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:37 am
OOoooh! Ooh! I know the answer to this one! Pick me, teacher, pick me!
Ahem. Is it… Lock up the motherfucking rapists and let the normal men wank like normal people do when they don’t have a sexual partner?
YESSSSS! I knew it! Awesome!
slothrop1905:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:19 am
Of course lock up all the rapists, yes.
And I’ve never used the word ‘entitled’
I also have never considered even coming close to invading someone’s space in an inappropriate manner and can’t imagine what it would be like to have such a desire.
I guess at this point I’m just confused with some of the (seemingly) conflicting things I’m hearing…re the Nice Guy who (from what I’ve read here the past year) erroneously believes that ‘getting laid’ is outside his control. But there appears to be consensus in this thread that that’s just not true. One can take care of themselves, treat others as human beings and be a decent person and still, for various reasons (imbalanced ratio being one of them) never have anyone find them attractive. So Nice Guy, in many cases, is NOT wrong to think he has no control. I realize the answer to all this is ‘who the fuck cares about them?’ or something along those lines, and as one of those privileged people who’s only problem in life has been living 50 years without anyone ever being attracted to them I realize I’m coming across somewhat detached regarding issues that have more serious repercussions for others…
Rey Fox:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:29 am
Hmm. I knew there was a reason I was leery of those wildlife jobs in North Dakota. Granted, they’re all seasonal, and I’m looking for something further up the ladder, but still.
Looking back at one of them, I found this paragraph that tries to provide some warning without scaring people* off:
* The contact person on this job is a woman, and at least in nongame wildlife, half or more of the college students and other field techs are women.
Nepenthe:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:32 am
The answer, slothrop, is, in fact, who the fuck cares.
If your sex drive is really that troublesome, Caine offers some excellent suggestions. In my case I’ve gotten rid of that troublesome libido with a combo of hormonal birth control and anti-depressants. I’m sure you could find a solution for yourself.
PS. You don’t have to use the word entitled to act entitled. Example: I didn’t use the word condescending in this post and yet…
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:42 am
Worse, they might never actually find someone willing to fuck them!
Why do you conflate attractive and fucking? Ugly people fuck. Pretty people fuck. Sometimes they fuck each other. Sometimes people go for years without fucking. Sometimes people pay for fucking. Sometimes people buy a fleshlight! The possibilities are endless.
It really isn’t a problem unless you’re an entitled douchebag.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:52 am
You know, I have an excellent idea of why no one finds you attractive and it has nothing at all to do with how you look or any kind of ratio at all. You’re a rather ugly person, slothrop – one who doesn’t like to listen to others, who seems to only pay lip service to being a decent person, and is whiny with an incredibly large sense of entitlement. In short form, you’re an asshole. This would be your trouble in life.
Amazingly enough, all kinds of people manage to get happily laid, and it has squat to do with their looks or ratios of any kind. And for the extra special assholes, there are lots and lots of alternatives. Visit an adult toystore, you would not believe the goodies which are available. Save your pennies and invest in a Real Doll. Visit a sex worker. Phone sex. Or good, old fashioned wanking.
I have an idea that not getting sex isn’t the real problem, it’s obviously available, in one fashion or another. Your problem is that you feel entitled to sex and you seem to feel entitled to a relationship, too. And as long as you feel entitled, you’d best stick with paying for sex and having a relationship with something which can’t talk back, like a Real Doll.
chiptuneist:
January 17th, 2013 at 2:58 am
You do not understand this concept, and I think you should go learn what it means. It would help you to understand why there is a problem with perpetuating a narrative in which sex is depicted as a commodity which can be in short supply and owed or deserved like wages.
You will also discover that what you are suggesting is fucking terrible. You are ultimately saying that some rapists would have chosen not to rape if they had simply been granted sex by women in their lives consensually prior to the point where they could no longer choose not to rape, with the implication that the rape is actually the victim’s fault for failing to meet the Nice Guy’s unspoken expectations.
No, you aren’t coming across as somewhat detached, you are coming across as someone who believes that the problem of not being able to find a consensual sexual partner can, after some finite period of time, become more important than a woman’s desire not to be raped.
Hortan:
January 17th, 2013 at 3:49 am
SallyStrange:
Sums it up pretty well, I think.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 4:00 am
Slothtrop @101
It’s times like this where I get bummed out that the Nice Guys of Ok Cupid tumblr got taken down. And the reason for that is it was incredible (especially at its death) at directly showing how the type of person who would describe themselves as those “Nice Guys” very quickly reveal themselves in their profile or answered questions to be anything but. Lacking that, I turn to XKCD.
Nice Guys TM don’t end up alone because they’re “too nice”. They end up alone often because they have unpacked social baggage they cling to like lampreys. And the style of baggage is usually along the same lines, assumptions that men are one dry spell away from being rapists, assumptions that sexually active men must be assholes if they personally aren’t getting any, assumptions that relationships are approached through deception and that friendship is merely a cloak to wear temporarily, assumptions that sex and relationship are commerce based, and assumptions about how men and women should act. These are the things that make them unattractive and sabotage their relationships.
If they just cared enough to legitimately grow, stop viewing relationships as recipes or stories, stopped dwelling in toxic subcultures designed to worsen their interactions with those they are attracted to (romantically and/or sexually), and just generally learned to be open and honest about who they are and what they want… well, I guess at that point they’d stop being the epithet “Nice Guys” and just be guys, possibly guys that people they are interested in wanted to get to know further.
And yeah, it is kind of amazing how sexist “yeah, all men will totally turn to rape, even the really nice ones, if they have any type of dry spell” and its close cousin “all men deserve a member of the sex class to get them off, failure to provide from the sex class is totally creating ‘a dangerous situation’” are not just to women, but men.
I mean, I know a lot of men and they’ve ran the gambit when it comes to feminist awakening, but I’ve yet to meet one who is as objectively as terrible a person as patriarchal culture seems to think all men are.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 4:11 am
canabob @71
Except he’s not.
He’s not actually unpacking the rape culture at all. Which you’d know if you read the original article.
I mean, we, the comment thread here on Pharyngula are unpacking the rape culture with materials from the article, but that’s not because the original article was some scion of information, but because we’ve grown up enough in the rape culture and seeing these types of articles to be able to read between the lines and get out some of the real information and fill in the rest from observations of similar situations and cultures.
But that doesn’t mean the original article is unpacking the rape culture any more than a press release from a for-profit prison is unpacking the prison-industrial complex. We are having to add that awareness through our greater understanding of the issue. Hence why the critiques and our unpacking of the greater issues.
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 4:25 am
I don’t believe it is rape culture, but rape nature, very much like it is violent nature and not violence culture,
In essence, all humans are able to be violent when they find themselves in circumstances that are associated with violence. For example, if there is not enough food, humans will perform violent acts to obtain food, even when in circumstances of sufficient food, the same humans will share food with relative strangers.
Similarly, males will be more likely to use violence to obtain sexual access to females when they are in situations where females are scarce. Don’t forget that procreation ultimately drives sexual urges; while it is possible to get orgasms from self-stimulation or non-genital contact, successful reproduction remains the most powerful motivation for sexual behaviour (in the vast majority of humans). This does, of course, not mean that for certain individuals the main motive for sexual behaviour is not hate, status (dominance) or physical pleasure, or that sexuality cannot be coopted for non-reproductive (social) uses. What it does mean is that the motives for rape are varied, and depend on both the rapist and the circumstances, like the motives for murder or theft are varied and depend on the perpetrator and the circumstances.
The fact that in circumstances where one would expect violent and agressive sexual behaviour there are -relatively speaking- low levels of such behaviour is a testimony to the power of culture. Far from being the cause of rape, culture is what causes most males to find other means to deal with their urges, even in circumstances that favour violent and agressive behaviour (be it to obtain resources, status or the ability to procreate).
While there still is a long way to go, culture has contributed to reducing violence and promoting equality. When culture fails, nature takes over and the results aren’t necessarily nice.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 4:28 am
Also, No one and I mean no one has a right to the love or sex of another sentient being. Those of us who are romantics (as in romantics vs aromantics) may want love and those of you who are sexuals may want sex and in this modern age with its OkCupids and teh Googles and all that, those who put themselves out there and are open, honest, and not incredibly creepy, will probably get it.
But no one is entitled to that.
And that’s sort of the inherent BS in the myth of the “Nice Guy” “striking out”. It’s a person so wrapped up in a culture where women are objects to be “earned” by some crass mechanism of being “worthy” by performing superficial “nice” actions which are not at all nice and are nearly universally not honest that they fail to notice that the reason they’re having a dry spell and getting emo about it is exactly this*.
They think that by simply waiting around and “wanting” something, that it should simply happen because they grew up as a nexus of privileged classes in a world that views privileged classes as entitled to the fruits of the minority classes. The world doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you have to grow up first to be functional enough for a real relationship. Sometimes you have to expend some effort in the way you take for granted the effort of those you are interested in. Sometimes you have to sit down and be honest and vulnerable and really take a risk. And sometimes you have to become a genuinely nice person rather than just hide behind a meaningless self-identification.
*Or just going through a dry spell. Sometimes you’re not dating someone when you want to be dating someone. Sometimes that lasts awhile. Try not to become a worse person because of it, put yourself out there, accept that this includes the risk of rejection, and let it occur naturally rather than trying to force it. Because there is a lot of baggage out there in our culture, just waiting for the emo depression of “damn I’m not really with people I like”.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 4:41 am
This is absolute bullshit and you should be ashamed of every single word you typed. FFS, this is not a situation comparable to a food or water shortage – read the damn comments! You and those like you are supporting the whole “hey, pussy should be on tap, those men are entitled! If they don’t get it, they’re gonna take it, so it’s your fault you women aren’t putting out.”
Jesus Christ, people really need to stop buying into such utter bullshit.
John Morales:
January 17th, 2013 at 4:41 am
[meta]
Bill,
When I see something like “all humans”, I metaphorically perk up my ears.
I put it to you that a more defensible stance would be ‘have the potential to become’ rather than “are able to be”, because some people just freeze when the chips come down.
Why yes, large mammals often feature fighting between the males contending for a mate, but that’s not what you meant, is it?
Where you’re going wrong is this conceit that “sexual access to females” is a biological need, rather than an instinct*.
–
* What about gay men?
(Libidinous!)
John Morales:
January 17th, 2013 at 4:46 am
Of course, instincts can be sublimated in a culturally-accepted manner.
(cf. jock culture)
John Morales:
January 17th, 2013 at 4:52 am
[meta]
Nice to read you here again, Cerberus!
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 4:52 am
Bill @110
That is 100% false.
Men are not naturally rapists. Full stop.
Furthermore, rape is not a crime of sexual desire, but rather power and control. Again, full stop.
This BS myth is A) genuinely anti-male in a way that no feminist statement in the history of ever has ever managed to approach being, B) intensely creepy in a “why exactly are you so invested in minimizing rape and apologizing for it” way, and C) completely disproven by the well-recorded life-experiences of 99% of men.
And on a personally note, your complete ignorance of biology and your attempt to use it anyways to “prove” your just-so story sickens me. The main biological motivation for sex is not procreation. We don’t go, deary me, these strong bundle of nerve clusters on sexual organs are nice, but what really drives me is the need to start pumping out babies.
The main biological motivation for sex is sex. We (or rather you all, you filthy sexual bastiches) fuck because it feels good to fuck, because fucking means your happy zones get happy feelings.
The side effect of liking sex is the procreative success. When sexuals enjoy fucking each other, then there’s a nice motivation to keep doing that and increase the chances when a procreative event will occur. It also can add a nice motivation to sticking around and making sure the moppets reach reproductive age themselves. But these are just incidental accidents.
The reason being sexual is the dominant interaction in Kingdom Animalia and having complex sexuality in many mammalia is simply because A) it happened to be the case because it didn’t really come with downsides and ending up having some nice unintentional positives and more importantly B) because it turned out that genetic diversity mattered more for complex organisms than reproduction efficiency. Sexual reproduction allows a population to become and stay varied so that it can’t be easily wiped out by one crisis event.
We don’t rape as a rule because rapists fuck all that nice enjoying orgasm feeling and we don’t like hanging out sexually with them.
Ironically, rapists can mostly thank culture for creating situations where their demand for power and control and attempt to blame it on sex was at all unambiguous and tolerated.
So yeah, 100% wrong on all counts. Try harder next time.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 4:58 am
And yeah, the number of men so personally invested in the rape culture makes me feel all the sad-face.
Men, if you find yourself doing this:
A) Stop. Just stop.
B) Don’t date anyone until you get some help.
C) Get some help.
D) For fuck’s sake if you actually are raping people or think you might have raped people and are trying to mitigate the guilt about it, STOP doing it and accept that you did in fact did a really bad thing and you’re going to have to deal with the consequences of that. It’s not nature, you’re just an asshole.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 5:08 am
And the bloody “men can’t help, women are scarce” shit? Gay and bisexual men in low-queer populations seem to go okay without raping people. Lesbian and bisexual women in low-queer populations seem to go okay without raping people. Heterosexual and bisexual women in low male populations seem to go okay without raping people. And let’s be honest, by an overwhelming majority bisexual and straight men in low female populations seem to go okay without raping people.
It is only in environments with way too much toxic masculinity, way too much insular “dude culture”, way too much emphasis on power, and way too few ways for people with conscience to have any power to change the culture that we get these “oh noes, how could we change anything, men just naturally rape when there aren’t many women” situations.
A friendly hit, assholes, women aren’t very common in those specific situations BECAUSE there is strong social support for a rape culture that often rewards the rapists and punishes the victims, not because “women are scarce”.
And as horrifying as those cultures can be for the women brave enough to try and reform them with their presence, it still needs to be said, loudly and repeatedly, that the most common form of rape will always be from people the victim well knew, often current or former partners, trusted friends, or family members. People who had all the options, all the ability to have regular consensual sex but CHOSE instead to rape because it was the RAPE itself and the POWER that comes with it that got them off.
Nick Gotts (formerly KG):
January 17th, 2013 at 5:11 am
As Koshka’s already pointed out, this is a euphemism. But also, even if it were expressed honestly, it could describe any social group and setting I’m aware of, from forager to farmer to city-dweller and from slum to suburbia to superrich. Eligon presents it as if it’s something that needs a special local explanation – which he assumes is the shortage of (young, attractive) women.
bradleybetts:
January 17th, 2013 at 5:36 am
I have to agree with Cervante @#1 in part, in so far as he does not seem to be condoning rape or even making apologies for it. The only rape apologetics I could spot was the father (whose attitude seems to be “Don’t look pretty and you won’t get raped”).
He is, however, inferring that the increase in rape and sexual assault is due to the lack of single women when the general consensus amongst psychiatrists seems to be that rape is more about control and power. So he’s not guilty of rape apologetics (in this case, I haven’t read the drunk-shaming piece) so much as faulty logic; i.e. based on the premise that women are raped due to being attractive and lack of options.
I think this is a case of panic and misplaced blame; rape and sexual assualt have risen, the locals have gone “It’s the outsiders! The Newcomers are ruining our small town!” and Eligon has simply taken their knee-jerk reaction at face value and gone out of his way to rationalise it. Which I suppose makes him guilty of lazy journalism as well as faulty logic.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 5:42 am
bradleybetts:
Rather than going out of your way to prove your idiocy, why don’t you try reading the whole thread? This North Dakotan, who knows many of the oil workers isn’t having a case of panic. Just so you know there’s an actual thinking human being in the state.
Asshole.
opposablethumbs:
January 17th, 2013 at 5:56 am
@BO #110, you really need to remember that dressing up bullshit in vaguely “sciency” language doesn’t make it science.
You need to grow out of just-so stories (self-justification masquerading as bottom-of-the-barrel evo-psych doesn’t make “just-so” look any better, unless you’re willfully blind).
And if you really believe the crap you just vomited up, you need to wonder why you hate men so much.
Alternatively, if you know perfectly well it’s just a load of old cobblers that you’re trying – without much success, I might add – to use as a smokescreen to conceal the fact that you’d like it just fine if things really were that way, then you need to wonder why you hate women.
Either way, I’m sincerely sorry for the women and men who actually have to interact with you.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:01 am
Bill Openthalt @ 110;
Citation desperately needed – where do you get this idea that it is in the ‘nature’ of people to rape? Where is your evidence for such an extraordinary claim? I have been single for an embarrassingly long time, and yet I have never once felt the urge to rape anyone. The thought has never even crossed my mind, and the very idea sickens me to the pit of my stomach. I would never treat a person as an object like that.
I seem to lack your ‘rapist nature’, as do many, many other people. Does that mean I am ‘unnatural’? Does it mean there is something wrong with me in your view?
Big false equivalencuy there. Sex is not a biological necessity like food, You don’t die through its lack.
You are also really, really wrong on another point – not everyone automatically becomes violent even in violent situations. As John Morales points out, some people just freeze up. Others avoid confrontation, and some try to de-escalate the situation and avoid violence that way. Not everyone is one major crisis away from returning to our feral past.
Apparently I, and many, many people like me, don’t fall within your definition of ‘all humans’.
Where is your evidence that most people’s sex drives are primarily motivated by procreation, rather than the sexual gratification itself? Studies indicate that most rapists are motivated by power, not sex. To them, sex is a weapon – a means to their ultimate end of dominance or exercising their hatred of a specific individual or of the group their victim is a part of. If it was about procreation, there are far, far better strategies for that than rape, so your argument doesn’t even make sense even if we accept your unsupported argument that the libedo is primarily motivated by procreation.
Wrong again – the fear of legal or social consequence may stop rapists raping in some cases, but the fact is that it is culture – specifically the endemic rape culture – that creates cover for rapists by tirelessly working to normalise rape and shift the blame for rape onto the shoulders of the women, using such means as ‘slut shaming’ and claiming that the victim must have ‘lead her attacker on’ because it is somehow inconceiveable that rapists would rape without some kind of ‘encouragement’ from their victim.
Or seeking to suggest that women who do things like go out at night, have a drink with friends, wear flattering clothing, and don’t essentialy lock themselves in a panic room ever hour of every day with a shotgun kept leveled at the door are ‘asking for it’.
And lets not forget claiming that rape is a natural reponse to a shortage of women. Yes – you, Bill Openthalt – right here in this very thread – are acting as a vector for rape culture. By saying that all men are but a thin and unnatural veneer of cultural indoctrination away from their ‘true’ nature as rapists, you are excusing rapists. You are validating them, and reassuring them that their actions are not really their own fault at all, but the fault of society for not stopping them from raping, or the fault of women for not ‘putting out’ enough. It is possible that someone who might go on to rape, or has already raped, may read your words and draw validation from them. You may help to embolden a rapist to rape. Consider that before pontificating on the ‘natural’ character of rape in public next time.
bradleybetts:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:04 am
@Bill Openhalt #110
“I don’t believe it is rape culture, but rape nature, very much like it is violent nature and not violence culture… Similarly, males will be more likely to use violence to obtain sexual access to females when they are in situations where females are scarce.”
Sorry, but I call bullshit. It is not in men’s nature to be rapists, and “scarcity of women” does not cause men to get more rapey.
Take me for example. I have not had a proper girlfriend for 4 years now. Now, for 3 of those years I was at Uni and it was through choice, so in actuality I have been looking for c. a year now and haven’t found one. I am from a small market town and every girl I meet (and I am about to reveal that I am somewhat shallow here, so apologies in advance to anyone I offend) seems to fall into three categories;
1- interesting, but not someone that I find physically attractive
2- physically attractive, but either boring or thick as two short planks (or both, more often than not, the former normally being a consequence of the latter)
3- interesting and attractive but has a boyfriend
I’ve had a few dates but the one girl I really hit it off with is an oceanographer and thus is off on a boat for months at a time and not in any position to have a relationship, so that’s a no go. It has been over a month since I got laid.
And guess what? I have never, not once, considered raping someone. So, as I said, I call bullshit.
bradleybetts:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:17 am
Re. my above comment; it would seem that Cerberus, John Morales and Caine all got there before me and all put it better than I did. I guess I shall fullfill the role of the small, slightly out of tune voice at the back of the chorus :)
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:36 am
Of course the most powerful motive for sexual behaviour is procreation. We only exist because we procreate, and the life of the individuals of a species is organised around procreation. That doesn’t mean that every individual has to procreate. Ants solve the problem by having a queen and sterile female workers, but the whole purpose of the ant colony is procreation. We eat and drink and breathe to be able to procreate – as a species. Women are hornier when they’re in the fertile part of their cycle, and men dislike condoms because it reduces the chance of insemination. We’re not aware of it, but that’s what causes the feelings. And again, this does not preclude homosexuality – not all individuals have to procreate, the species needs to have a successful strategy.
And yes, given the “appropriate” circumstances, many (but not all) males will use force to obtain sexual favours from females. Think overpowering another tribe, killing all the men, and keeping the women. It’s documented in the bible and the koran, and our prehistorical ancestors in all likelihood indulged in the practice. Don’t kid yourselves; when push comes to shove, you will kill (or be killed), you will do what is required to stay alive, to get food, and to get offspring.
Again, I am not talking about individuals. What applies to populations doesn’t apply to individuals. It is probable that most rapes occuring today are perpetrated by people who enjoy power and dominance. This does not mean that putting a lot of of males in an environment with little or no access to females will not result in more sexual harrasment and rape of the females that happen to be in that environment.
Some human males rape because raping in certain circumstances is part of human nature. Some human males have sex with other human males because homosexuality is part of human nature. Some humans kill other humans because killing is part of human nature. Most humans are kind to other humans because it’s part of our nature to be kind.
Culture is that what keeps nature in check, that what allows us to live in huge societies without being related and bred for the purpose like bees and ants. Culture is the information we share with each other telling us what to do with the feelings and pulsations our nature causes.
Giliell, professional cynic:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:38 am
Bill Openthalt
That’s a big steaming pile of bullshit.
Sex isn’t like food, or water, or shelter.
You can totally live without it, you know? Many people have done so for quite long times. People with sex-drives and urges and being just plain old horny.
And lookee, they manage not to rape anybody and take care of their urges themselves.
Your argument reinforces the crap about (hetero) men really neeeeeeeeeding pussy and therefore being entitled to it, and that a woman who doesn’t give it to them although she could is just like Ebeneezer Scrooge letting bread go moldy instead of sharing it.
bradleybetts:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:42 am
@caine Fleur De Mal
“bradleybetts:
I think this is a case of panic and misplaced blame; rape and sexual assualt have risen, the locals have gone “It’s the outsiders! The Newcomers are ruining our small town!”
Rather than going out of your way to prove your idiocy, why don’t you try reading the whole thread? This North Dakotan, who knows many of the oil workers isn’t having a case of panic. Just so you know there’s an actual thinking human being in the state.
Asshole.”
Whoa, how about calming the fuck down for a second, eh? I apologise for commenting on the story before reading all 119 existing comments (/end snark), but I was in no way trying to imply that North Dakotans were all thoughtless. If it came across like that then I apologise, but that wasn’t my intent. I was saying that the inhabitants of Williston appear to be having a perfectly normal human reaction, “blame the outsiders”, and Eligon seems to be trying to rationalise it. That was all. If you disagree, fine, but maybe try laying your reasons out before assuming I’m an “asshole”? I’m human, I make mistakes and can be insensitive without meaning to be, and I’d appreciate the opportunity to set the record straight before having you tear into me.
Anyway, I went up and read a few of your posts, and from #38 I assume you believe the rise in crime is in fact due to the oil workers, but why do you believe that to be the case?
bradleybetts:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:46 am
@Bill Openhalt
“Women are hornier when they’re in the fertile part of their cycle, and men dislike condoms because it reduces the chance of insemination.”
Men dislike condoms because it reduces sensation, and in some cases because because it reduces the intamacy of the moment. I doubt very much that the part of your brain which drives primitive instincts such as sex drive is capable of understanding that a condom will stop insemination and altering your behaviour accordingly. I’d value the opinion of a biologist at this point, but I seriously doubt it.
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:19 am
@bradleybetts: You’re right as far as the physical effect is concerned. That being said, one could argue that the feeling that it “reduces the intimacy of the moment” is the way our conscious mind perceives the outcome of the calculations that might include “No chance of pregnancy”. The evaluation part of the mind doesn’t need to be able to do complex analyses, it just needs access to a few key results of other circuits (which can include cognitively complex subsystems).
It wasn’t the best of examples but it rolled nicely out of the keyboard :-)
twosheds1:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:20 am
I suspect (though I have no evidence to back it up, I admit) that a large proportion of the men attracted to those jobs tend to be fairly uneducated and economically desperate, too, which might skew the proportion of potential rapists. I’m only guessing that rapists tend to have less education, though.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:27 am
Have you actually, y’know, tried looking it up?
I know that my rapist had an MS in Biology from BYU. (And yes, I know, anecdote (especially an unsubstantiated anecdote) is not data so there is no need to go there.)
Noadi:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:39 am
You know if female scarcity were actually the cause and not the excuse there would be a very simple solution: polyandry. The fact that the men wailing about how horrible it is that there aren’t enough women don’t even even entertain this thought I’m thinking they know it’s a bullshit excuse too.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:45 am
Ogvorbis:
My rapist also had the benefit of higher education. In looking at Meet the Predators and Predator Redux, a healthy amount of rapists do enjoy a higher education.
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:47 am
Giliell You managed to get my name right! Yippee!
I don’t think the fact that one doesn’t die from abstinence matters. Of course, as far as the individual is concerned, oxygen, water and food are necessary for survival, but for the species procreation is just as important. There is no reason why producing offspring cannot engender very powerful drives over the lifespan of the individual.
Obviously, in someone dying from thirst and malnutrition, the prime concerns will be getting hold of water and food. But for a sexually mature, well-fed healthy male, procreation will be the major drive underlying almost all his decisions. Gaining status means getting access to better females, for example. Don’t forget that evolutionary speaking, individuals are not important. Whatever they experience is of no value unless they produce the next generation.
Again, I am not talking about individual humans. Each of us is the product of nature and culture and circumstances. Most human males will never experience any desire to rape, but that doesn’t mean that rape is not part of human nature. Most humans will not ever consider killing someone, but that doesn’t mean killing isn’t part of human nature. We have to understand what makes humans tick to be able devise methods to avoid undesirable outcomes.
If rape is not part of human nature, how did it get into the culture?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:52 am
Noadi:
Of course they do. It all comes down to “blame the women, no matter how much I must torture logic and reason to get there!”
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:54 am
Noadi
Polyandry is perceived as horrible because the man doesn’t know if the children of the woman are his. Getting a woman of one’s own is a better strategy. But in those cases where there is a genuine, long term shortage of women, brothers sharing a wife is not unheard of.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:02 am
Seriously?
If democracy is not part of human nature, how did it get into the culture?
If pasta is not part of human nature, how did it get into the culture?
If cherry cola is not part of human nature, how did it get into the culture?
If slavery is not part of human nature, how did it get into the culture?
Illuminata, Genie in the Beer Bottle:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:03 am
Reading Billy the Rape-Cheerleader’s posts I’m once again moved to ask the question:
how the fuck did feminists get the ‘man-hating’ rep, when rape-cheerleaders like Billy are outright saying all men are rapists-in-waiting?
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:04 am
Caine, @136
It’s unlikely that there ever is a conscious decision to “blame the women, no matter how much I must torture logic and reason to get there!”. That’s not how the human mind works, and thinking like that would indicate the person is a big-time psychopath.
if I may refer to my reply to Noadi, when I say that “the man doesn’t know if the children of the woman are his”, I don’t want to suggest that this is a conscious thought. What happens in the mind is that the feeling of dislike is caused by an unconscious evaluation of the chances of relationship between the man and the children of the woman. The lower the chance, the more pronounced the feeling of dislike. Consciousness just runs after the facts trying to make sense of what happened.
itkovian:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:05 am
I’m going to go with Chris @ #9 here.
At first the article seems to simply be a factual account of what was going on, but the framing of the article itself sends a message, which is something that I _HOPE_ many journalists aren’t aware of (which means they’re incompetent instead of just plain malicious).
You can restrict yourself to nothing but the fact, but still send a message with your wording and the very structure of the article. For example the ending note will carry more weight than the body of the article, so when someone concludes with “this woman’s father says she needs to stop dressing up like a tart”, the article stresses the point that women who dress sexy get raped more often.
And even if that is true, such a comment firmly places the blame on the victim, which is complete bullshit.
There are many ways the writer could have ended the article that would have carried a more useful message, or at least a less skewed one. Heck, instead of going with “there’s lots of men in Williston, so girls need to be careful so they don’t get raped”, he could have gone with “Williston sees a sharp rise in rapists, cops struggling.” So instead of being a more passive article that “feels” like saying “boys will be boys”, it would at least warn people about the crisis in Williston.
In short, either the writer is incompetent, or he’s maliciously trying to skew his article. I would hope its the former, but in this case I doubt it.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:06 am
Then, when a man marries a woman who already has children, he is subconsciously driven to hate them?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:07 am
Illuminata:
It does make a person wonder how they can spout such utter shit and then have a howling fit over Schrodinger’s Rapist.
opposablethumbs:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:16 am
That creaking sound? That’s BO #130 reeeeeaching as far as he possibly can to clutch at straws.
May I suggest you provide some, you know, evidence for all this wild speculation?
Do you seriously think we would instinctively want to avoid condoms – which have existed for a nanosecond on evolutionary timescales – because we know they reduce effective fertility, but have no such instinct to avoid smoking and drinking? Oh, but after years of advising that these two habits reduce male fertility some researchers now suggest that the effect is less than previously thought. Our instincts must be amazing! They “know” how condoms work, and they “know” when years of doctors’ advice is going to be countered some time in the future!
No more woolly waffling without some actual evidence, please. Otherwise what you write just suggests that you’re a tad overemotionally attached to the ol’ men-gotta-rape canard.
Rev. BigDumbChimp:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:18 am
Wait
WHAT?
It’s way to early here for this type of conscious dumbfuckery.
You sir are one big asshole of a walking naturalistic fallacy.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:24 am
Oh FFS, you are so full of shit you’re going to drown. Ancient Egyptian recipes for contraceptives are well known – the pursuit of contraception has preoccupied human beings since fucking forever. People have sex because it feels good, you idiot. That includes men, by the way, as you seem overwhelmingly dense.
All you’re doing is proving, over and over, that rape culture does indeed exist, as you keep insisting on providing cover for rapists. Poor ol’ rapists, they just can’t help it, can they?
*spits*
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:27 am
Rev. BDC:
Well, what would you know, being childfree and all? You must not be a man, just like I’m not a woman because I chose not to breed, and of course, that means Mister isn’t really a man…
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:28 am
Ogvorbis
Slavery happens because it is human nature to value less related humans less. Once the relationship is sufficiently diluted, it is possible to treat humans as objects. What we see today is that many people consider animals as sufficiently related to show concern for their wellbeing to the point of not using animal products at all.
Pasta is just a way of preparing food, and cherry cola is an abomination :)
If no male ever experienced the urge to rape, how do you explain the emergence of a rape culture? Was it god’s idea?
Illuminata
Come on, where did I advocate rape? Saying that something is human nature doesn’t mean it’s OK. Morality has nothing to do with what is, or is not, part of human nature. It has to do with living together, and maximizing well-being of individuals.
I am also saying that humans (not all of them, I am talking statistics here) are potential torturers, as experience has shown over and over again that given the circumstances, a majority of humans will torture other humans as long as it is cautioned by authority. That doesn’t make me a cheerleader for torture.
Knowing that something is part of human nature and morally wrong means that we can make those decisions that (hopefully) ensure the circumstances leading to this behaviour do not occur (at a personal or societal level).
I would really appreciate an exchange of views without insults. If you feel insulted by my contention that rape is part of human nature, please accept as apology that I am at pains to explain that this does not mean you or any other individual human is a rapist.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:29 am
Bill Openthalt:
Why are you so personally interested and enthusiastic in your attempts to justify rape culture? What is in it for you?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:32 am
Ogvorbis:
You may not want an honest answer to that one.
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:34 am
Ogvorbis @142
Hate is probably too strong a word, but there are enough examples of stepparents favouring their own offspring and ill-treating their stepchildren to conclude that genetic closeness does affect feeling of parental love.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:36 am
Bill Openthalt:
Is slavery and rape culture are inherent parts of being human, then why are they not universal? Why are they not universal in every society throughout recorded history? If rape culture is an inherent part of me, as a human male, why am I not a rapist? Why do I have no desire to be a rapist? Why am I physically sick at the idea of raping someone? Why do you want rape culture to be an inherent part of humanity?
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:38 am
But if it is, as you argue, an inherent part of being a male human, it should be pretty damn near universal. “. . . enough examples . . . ” does not come close to implying that it is part and parcel to who we are.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:43 am
There’s a whole history of humanity’s worth of examples of people happily raising non-biological children as their own. So there. Now what? I’ll tell you what – you are full of shit.
Let’s get back to why it’s so damn important for you to protect rapists, shall we?
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:43 am
Yeah, because men viewing and treating their related women and children as their property doesn’t happen at all.
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:44 am
Ogvorbis & Caine
I never justified rape, or rape culture. I merely opined that rape might not be a matter of culture, but of nature, and I offered some arguments in favour of my opinion, Where did you read any justification of or enthusiasm for rape culture (after all how can one defend what one doesn’t believe exists?).
BigDumbChimp
I did not commit the naturalistic fallacy, as I never justified rape because it is human nature. As a matter of fact, I never justified rape. Rape is never justified.
Why would it be so bad if rape were part of human nature?
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:45 am
So… in other words:
Hey adopted children, your parents don’t really love you, well not as much as REAL parents anyways. But hey, second best is still good. Wait, why are you crying? It’s just science!
twosheds1:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:47 am
I did, actually. Two sources stated that the average is a 10th-grade education.
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:52 am
Cite them.
That way we can see if there’s an issue with what rapists they included. Like if they stayed to just convicted rapists then that is going to skew the results to low education, poor and minorities, ignoring all the frat boys and shit that rape but have a fuck load of people to help get them off.
So it that case it wouldn’t really mean shit.
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:53 am
It’s not because something is part of human nature that all humans have to do/have suffer from it. Obesity is part of human nature (as I know all too well), but that doesn’t mean all humans are obese.
Our conscious mind has indeed the ability to ignore the feelings generated by the unconscious. It can also influence the unconscious. Take for example the fact that even people who are consciously non-racist, when tested do have clear unconscious dislikes of people of other races. We consciously decide racism is a bad thing, and tell our unconscious to shove it. That’s what morality is about.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:56 am
twosheds1:
I think that’s most likely dependent on what type of rapists were used to gather the info. If you follow the links I provided, the case is rapists who have or are involved in obtaining a higher education. That’s because they are the most common type of rapist, the acquaintance type. Where you’re more likely to get the stats you looked up are in cases of serial or stranger rapists, which are the less common type.
Such stats are also dependent on whether the offender is simply a rapist, or mainly an offender of other crimes, who also raped. It’s not altogether easy to parse out, but it’s not generally a good idea to assign the stereotype of “lower intelligence/education brute working class” to the situation of the oil workers.
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:02 am
JAL
Parents show preferences for natural children as well. Some people are lousy parents and abuse their own children. Some people a excellent parents and love foster children more than the lousy parents love their “own flesh and blood”. For crying out loud, love is a spectrum.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to believe that if the unconsious mind computes genetic relationships and feeds that information into the system, you are somehow condemned to love your stepchildren less than your own. You are not, but it is good to be aware of the fact because we are not very adept at observing ourselves dispassionately. What we are very good at, is finding rationalisations for our behaviour, and make ourselves look good.
Gen, Uppity Ingrate.:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:09 am
Hey Bill, pro tip here: Naturalistic fallacies and appeals to nature do not an argument make. So solly cholly. I’m not even going to make the mistake of asking for cites, because EVEN IF it were true that men are naturally rapists (and I dispute that MOST STRONGLY), then culture should still be able to overcome that ‘natural’ tendency, much the way that we simply do not piss on carpets, even though that’s the ‘natural’ thing to do.
Like Cerberus upthread mentioned, it blows my mind that people freak the fuck out about Andrea Dworkin and her nuanced arguments, but shit like this, which literally says that men are rapists naturally because nature reasons, is AOK.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:15 am
Bill, just cause you want that just-so story to be true (and what does that say about you) does not mean it actually is true.
I mean, seriously dude, do you have any idea how not-selected for rape is if it was “teh natural”? Okay, we’ve got this awesome sexual impulse in 99% of the population that makes them want to do stuff together that might result in procreation and pods of complex sexual partners wanting to collectively raise the kids. Now we add something that immediately makes the individuals associate sex with “a bad thing”, want to avoid it, carry trauma that makes them less fit as parents, and impair group dynamics.
Not really “selected for” in the strict biological sense.
But how it becomes prevalent makes sense when you understand it is a great cultural tool for creating a slave class and punishing deviations from that slave class. So let’s say you are male from ye olden times and you have decreed there is men work and women work and a woman decides she wants to do the man work too? Well, now you have a one-step solution to knocking her out of that pool and very likely killing her in the trauma of child birth. And once examples have been made, you can easier enforce artificial behavior in the others, see also how the Christian Church made aversion to sex a dominant social position.
If the point of rape was to get in there and make sure your genes survived? It’s complete fail. A parent often has little to no inclination for raising a child that directly reminds them of intense personal trauma.
But when the point of rape is to ensure social fear and compliance to a detrimental system in a female population? It works unfortunately well. Luckily, we as a society are starting to move past this and eliminate this “enforcement” and finding out that there be some nice shiny benefits on the other side that feel a lot more natural because they are natural to us.
Sadly, a bunch of men invested in the culture of enforcement and dominance have issues in acknowledging that and so often try and invent just-so stories about why a recent system of oppression is “teh natural one” that people are “unnaturally” deviating from.
Cause, eek, people are straying from 50s gender roles, impossible because science, just like when they strayed from 19th century gender roles by doing things like educating women it was considered impossible because science, and so on and so forth. Claiming science for bullshit seems to be the second refuge of the scoundrel when religion no longer seems to work.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:15 am
Fuck, we just went through this shit with Gemmer and his “hey, raping and beating women are natural, they’re irresistible urges!”
The idiocy is just too much to take.
chigau (無味ない):
January 17th, 2013 at 9:19 am
Asked about abortion in cases of rape, Rep. Akin responded, “From what I understand from doctors… if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:25 am
Ya know, Chigau, Bill is likely to believe that. For real.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:25 am
It’s also amazing when you think about it, how bad faith the “culture has no power, it is all nature” crowd is.
I mean, as atheists we are rather more aware than most of cultural assumptions caused by religion that simply have no and could have no biological origin. I mean, fuck, Christian fear of sex and sexuality? How the hell is that biologically selected for?
So yeah, they have no trouble admitting certain things that became dominant in modern society because of culture, but for some reason really don’t want to admit to this one.
And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why… and be incredibly disturbed by it.
Rev. BigDumbChimp:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:26 am
No of course you didn’t. You’re Just Asking Questions.
Define what you mean by part of human nature.
Do humans commit rape? Yep.
Are humans as a species pre-programmed to rape? Being that many humans do not rape nor do they have “urges to rape”, or a “need to rape” I think the answer is pretty clear.
Are there some people who due to circumstances or trauma in their personal lives more likely to rape? More likely, sure but not definite. This is not human nature.
And even if it was a pre-programmed part of the human species it still would be wrong. We’re [supposed to be] evolved to a point where we can use our overdeveloped mammalian brains to make choices that go against what people like you would call “human nature”.
What exactly are you trying to get at Bill?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:27 am
Cerberus:
No it doesn’t and I find it difficult to express just how disturbing I find it.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:33 am
I disagree with this one, too. It may (and I stress may) be human nature to seek out foods that give the most energy in the smallest package (fruits that are ripe to the point that they are beginning to ferment, for example). But the modern human, in western society, is storing energy for a famine, for lean times, and (in many cases) for emergencies, that don’t happen. Not all humans are obese. In almost all of human history, obesity has been the exception, not the rule. So how is that human nature?
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:35 am
Ogvorbis
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:37 am
@172: Sorry – got bitten by the blockquote. Only the first paragraph is quoted from Ogvorbis.
Katherine Lorraine, Chaton de la Mort:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:46 am
@Bill:
Bull. Shit. I’d look for citations but I’m at work and don’t want the search engine hits to show on my security log. There are excuses ALL the time! “She was wearing a short skirt” “she was flirting with him” “she was drunk” “they’re married” “she shouldn’t have been out late” and so on and so forth.
chigau (無味ない):
January 17th, 2013 at 9:50 am
Bill Openthalt
Stick to statistics.
cuervodecuero:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:52 am
Having read some testimonies from those engaged in culturally approved polyandry, where brothers ‘share’ *a* ‘wife’, I shudder at that even being snarkily considered. ‘Wife’ too often translates to ‘the one in-house breeder with no right of refusal that also does all the free domestic labour and childcare demanded of a low-tech high-macho lifestyle’.
Another small note. It’s interesting that in the article, camp followers of a local boom are defaulted to a category of cellar social status ‘sexualization for pay’ women. There’s many a man in the ancient sub-culture of ‘parting fools from their money’ that migrates from boomtown to boomtown gleefully fluffing an uncritical atmosphere of entitled ‘partying’ to sell sex, drugs and grift. Most of whom are well versed in what will and won’t be pursued by the local law.
Rev. BigDumbChimp:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:53 am
Are you really this stupid or is it that you’re so invested in your apologetics that you say stupid things like this? I’m not excluding that it’s a combination of both but those are the only options.
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:54 am
Cerberus
The bad faith is to pretend I said culture had no power. I believe that the fact we’re doing better today than ever before is due to culture. Culture is that what humans share to transcend their nature. Nature is not good, just efficient. If using violence works, it uses violence.
It is human culture that says we should not use torture on terrorists, that we should give a fair trial to people who ignore all the rules of human conduct. Not nature.
Stating that rape is caused not by human nature but by culture implies that there are consciously evil people, finding ways and means to ensure that women are raped by men who are also their victims. It’s a kind of conspiracy theory. I’d rather just accept that we’re working on improving ourselves, and that’s it’s not easy, but doable. We’ve already come a long way (see Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature”), but there’s still a long road ahead.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:55 am
The sister of a friend of mine was raped. She was 12 or 13. Her rapist was in his mid-20s. When it came to trial (that, in and of itself, is a minor miracle), the defense attorney introduced into evidence the clothing she wore that day — shorts and a halter top. The prosecutor tried to block the introduction as it had nothing to do with whether or not she was raped. The judge allowed the evidence as, even though the act of rape is wrong, sometimes there are extenuating circumstances. Her rapist was found not guilty after 5 minutes. So, for the judge, and for the jury, no matter how bad rape is, the way she dressed excused the rape.
There’s a group right there.
The ‘right’ to rape is rape culture. The acceptance of rape as a part of who we are (and thus unavoidable) or excusable because of extenuating circumstances is rape culture. Your insistence that rape is a part of who we are gives cover to men who rape by telling them that it is natural, it is okay, it is part of who you are.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:58 am
It took until July 5, 1993, for marital rape to become a crime in all 50 states, in at least one section of the sexual offense codes, usually regarding force. 30 states still have some exemptions from prosecution for rape, e.g. when the husband does not need to use force because the wife is most vulnerable (temporarily or permanently, physically or mentally legally unable to consent)!
So, on the score of marital rape alone, it’s quite obvious the person doing the raping knew it was bad, but had full legality to do so, so they did.
http://www.ncmdr.org/state_law_chart.html
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:01 am
Only to someone who has no fucking idea what “culture” is.
chigau (無味ない):
January 17th, 2013 at 10:03 am
Bill Openthalt
Could you provide a couple of sources for your knowledge of human nature?
WharGarbl:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:03 am
@twosheds1
#158
I believe its customary to provide links to sources if you’re going to use it.
Barklikeadog:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:04 am
That just made my jaw drop. I’m infuriated. Goddamned fucking shithole asswipes on and on and on……
I think if that ever happened to one of my daughters I would consider vigilante justice.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:07 am
Well, this was the late 1970s or early 1980s, so . . . yeah. Still no excuse.
But how a woman is dressed, how much she has had to drink, whether or not she has dated the rapist, the time of day, and whether or not she was alone are frequently asked questions during the reporting of a rape, the investigation of a rape, the decision to prosecute a rape, and the trial of a rapist. These are people who know that rape is wrong, but they manage to keep finding ways to excuse the behaviour of the rapist and blame the victim. Even today.
nightshadequeen:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:07 am
Bill Openthalt,
If what you say is true (and I firmly believe it is not), then logically the next step would be locking up all men.
I think you should start, yourself. If you honestly believe that if, deprived of sex for an amount of time, you would consider forcing yourself upon another person, I’d recommend turning yourself over to the nearest police station. Fast.
“Men are attacking women, not the other way around. If there is going to be a curfew, let the men be locked up, not the women.” -Golda Meir
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:08 am
RAPE CULTURE
RAPE CULTURE 101
Hey, Bill! See the pretty blue words up there ^ ? See if you can manage to click on them and actually read the content on both sites. You might actually learn something. Not that I’m going to hold my breath or anything.
cervantes:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:12 am
Now look here:
He does not say that the shortage of women causes rape. He does not say that.
Read the damn article.
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:15 am
Ogvorbis
BTW, that was an unacceptable decision.
If something cannot be part of human nature and still unacceptable, we have a problem. Our morality should be independent of human nature, It is my opinion that even if we could prove that homosexuality is wholly cultural, it should still be accepted because sexual expression is a personal choice. Rape is unacceptable even if it is part of human nature.
We know that racism is part of human nature. It still is unacceptable. We know violence is part of human nature, and it is also unacceptable. There are many aspects of human nature that are not nice, but we don’t become better by pretending they are not.
As far as people justifying their actions in court, that is not the type of “culture” I had in mind. People always justify their actions, and often in the most ludicrous fashion. That too is part of human nature.
I am not comfortable with people who see evil everywhere.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:19 am
Cervantes:
Oh fuck off, you doucheweasel. Obviously, you didn’t bother to read the comments or chose to dismiss them. Go somewhere else to defend rape culture apologia in the media.
Gen, Uppity Ingrate.:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:19 am
Dude, it wasn’t just a defendant trying to throw ridiculous arguments to try and “justify their actions”. It was a judge, jury, defense team and community BUYING that shit.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:23 am
Gen:
It doesn’t matter, Gen. It’s obvious BO is not going to accept any culture*, let alone rape culture.
*He might possible accede to the culture in yogurt, but that’s about it.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:26 am
If the public did not accept that the judge’s decision was valid, would that judge be re-elected? If the judge has not absorbed the dominant paradigm — rape culture — then he would not have made that decision. It is the culture which accepts rape, minimizes rape, and excuses rape that leads to decisions like that. Judges are not divorced from culture.
And yet you have used the naturalistic argument that rape is a part of who we are to imply that evil is inside of every man.
You preach about morality? And yet you accept the primacy of human nature, implying that culture is a thin veneer over our evil and then say you are not comfortable with those who see evil everywhere?
I am a man. I was raped, repeatedly, by my cub scout leader. I was forced into child pornography and forced to abuse a much younger girl. Was my cub scout leader just giving in to his nature? Did he really believe it when he told us that there are two kinds of people — men and girls — and that it is the right of every man to take pleasure from girls (and he considered us girls — he was going to make men of us)? Or was he using the culture that minimized, accepted, and excused rape? Or maybe all three? Or maybe I am just seeing evil where it doesn’t exist.
If something is inherent in who we are, if it is part of our nature, can culture change it? And if culture can change it, is it really part of our nature?
WharGarbl:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:27 am
@Barklikeadog
#184
Well, we do have very easily accessible high-powered marksman rifles.
Shouldn’t he be charged and convicted with STATUTORY RAPE regardless of their belief of consent if a sexual act had taken place?
Taking a step back…
If the issue at stake is whether a rape (or any sexual act occurred on account of statutory rape) occurred in the first place, that can be tricky. There’s the “presumption of innocence”, and if the prosecutor cannot find sufficiently solid physical evidences and it boiled down the “he says, she says”.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:30 am
If rape were really as integral to “human nature” as Bill claims, we would expect to see very similar rates of rape victimization across cultures.
This is not the case.
How do you account for that, Bill? Or is that not “the kind of culture you are thinking of”?
Your ignorance and lazy thinking are insulting.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:33 am
Only if the district attorney decides to charge him with that crime.
There were (and this is from remembered conversations with my friend from 30+ years ago) witnesses who saw him strong-arm her and walk her away from the carnival midway. There were scratches on his face from her fingernails. There was a medical report, from that night, that she had been penetrated and had her hymen torn.
And isn’t it nice the way that our court system is set up so that in a “he says, she says” situation, it is always presumed that he is telling the truth and she is lying. Which is why so few rapes are reported. Which is why so few reported rapes are investigated. Which is why so few investigated rapes are sent to trial. And why so few rape cases sent to trial result in the conviction of the rapist. Even when there actually is evidence. Because so many are looking for a way to blame her — did she defend herself? did she drink? how was she dressed? etc.
WharGarbl:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:34 am
@Ogvorbis
#185
Okay, refinement of previous question.
Do US (assuming this happened in US) have a statutory rape provisions in the 1970s/80s?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:36 am
You are the one claiming that it is natural for men to rape. As you believe that’s the case, then every single man on the planet is a rapist in fact or waiting. Yet, that’s not evil, because it’s “natural”, right?
How on earth do you manage to convince yourself you’re a decent human being?
It is not in the nature of most people to rape – that is why most people don’t rape. We are the ones living in reality, who are aware of how culture shapes and changes us, how culture changes when pressure is placed on society as a whole to change certain paradigms. Facing the reality of rape culture and demanding change does work – if you can manage to get anything into that brain of yours besides your biases and stereotypes, see this: Rape Prevention Aimed At Rapists Does Work: The “Don’t Be That Guy” Campaign
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:38 am
Yes. But the DA has to make the decision to actually charge the rapist. If the DA doesn’t make that decision, if the DA decides not to charge him with statutory rape, then the rapist cannot be found guilty of statutory rape. I have no idea why the DA did not file statutory rape charges concurrent with the sexual assault charge. Perhaps a lawyer could explain that reasoning.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:42 am
WharGarbl:
The United States is made up of states. Different states, different laws. Most states had and have statutory laws. What the fuck are you after here, anyway? Why this idiotic focus on statutory rape? That is not the same as criminal rape, the charge is different and so are the consequences.
I was raped when I was 16. Would you like to tell me that my rapist should have been put away for statutory rape? Here’s a suggestion: don’t.
Barklikeadog:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:44 am
That’s not what I was thinking about. Something more along the lines of something the rapist can remember for the rest of his life just like to girl has to, like, say a couple of busted kneecaps.
chigau (無味ない):
January 17th, 2013 at 10:50 am
WharGarbl and Barklikeadog
Would you consider taking your revenge fantasies to the Thunderdome?
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:50 am
Bill, if you want to see what rape as a strategy for reproduction looks like, look up mallard ducks. If rape were as integral to “human nature” as you claim, we would expect to see physiological adaptations in women and men similar to what we see in ducks: explosively expanding corkscrew penises and labyrinthine vaginal tracts with multiple dead end tracts.
But we don’t. Why is that?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:53 am
Both of you can knock that shit off right godsdamn now. It makes me fucking sick. Do either of you think this makes a person who has been raped feel any better? I have news for you both – it does not. Now shut the fuck up.
Rey Fox:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:53 am
Just leaving this here.
ChasCPeterson:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:56 am
people who don’t know the first thing about the evolution of animal mating systems probably ought to shut up about the subject.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:58 am
Chigau:
No. They can both go crawl in a fucking cave for all I care, but I do not want to hear any more of that crap.
Giliell, professional cynic:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:06 am
Bill Openthalt
How about you putting up with some evidence instead of your empty wankery about how all men will rape just to have children and hate condoms because that reduces their number of offspring. I guess vasectomies don’t even happen in your universe.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:17 am
Ever helpful, Chas.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:22 am
Bill Openthalt;
Consider what you are saying – in essence you are claiming that rape (as well as things like slavery, murder and other massively harmful activities) are all a fundamental – and thus at some level unavoidable – part of who we are as human beings. You say it is written into the very fabric of every man to rape; no matter how much he tries to sublimate or resist that element of his ‘true’ nature, it will always be there, just waiting for the opportunity to strike. You say that culture has just barely power enough to contain the worst extremes of our ‘nature’, and that we really cannot expect any more. Thereby you imply that there is no moral obligation to try to make things better, because at the end of the day ‘nature’ cannot be fought. You are saying that culture is the only answer, and it is all but powerless to do more than hold back the worst extremes of the flood most of the time.
You claim all of this without a single shred of actual evidence to back up your (grossly misandrist – far more so than anything ever said by any feminist in the history of the world) just so story of how all men are raging, all but uncontrollable rape-monsters beneath the skin.
You are trying to position culture as the only thing restraining the hidden ‘
beastrapist within’ that all men bear in your worldview, even going do far as to claim that any rape culture must flow directly from the ‘natural’ impulse to rape because, as you state @ 135;By this logic, we must have an natural impulse to engage in serial murder and cannabalism – if not, how the heck did Ted Bundy and several other killer like him come about?
Scientific endeavour must come from an elements of our nature that compels us to try to understand the factual character of our surrounding, while at the same time religion must come from an aspect of that same innate nature that causes us to prefer simplistic explanations that superimpose our own social systems of hierarchical authority upon the natural world – so the conflict between science and delusional woo like creationism is actually our ‘nature’ at war with itself? And what about the religiously mandated fear and hatred of sex – what part of our ‘nature’ gave rise to that?
What is this? Naturalistic-fallacy-palooza? If we free ourselves from an unevidenced obsession with the idea that everything flows from some immutable, fundamental human ‘nature’, then we can see that in a system as longstanding and complex as human civilisation and other social arrangements, a culture can arise.
A culture that is not directly predicated upon any aspect of innate nature, but instead grows and develops over time due to ever shifting cultural mores and the interaction between people with brains who are not hardwired to conform to an undetectable innate ‘nature’ wuith their every action. This culture is a far more credible explanation for the rise of attitudes within society that cannot be explained by any innate nature that came about through evolutionary selection pressures.
Rape is clearly not selected for when it comes to the raising of young in the context of a social species, and surely any rapist whose ‘nature’ is somehow able to note the purpose and effect of a condom might also have a subconscious grasp of the fact that women are far less likley to keep a pregnancy that is the result of rape, and may indeed have ambiguous feelings toward any child that is a constant reminder of that trauma. There are many better strategies for procreation than rape, and those strategies will quite posibily be impaired or rendered nonviable by rape – so why should a ‘nature’ somehow aware of what a condom is take the risk of rape for such a low procreative return? Even if we grant your own premise, your argument still doesn’t stack up.
Once one accepts the existence of a rape culture that developed independently of any desire to procreate – and that rape is far more about power and dominance than it is about sex, let alone passing on one’s genes – then the behaviour of rapists starts to make far more sense. Your evopsyche explanation really does grasp at straws by comparison.
@ 172 you said;
Here on Pharyngula we have encounteed any number of rape apologists who have said, often in as many words, that rape victims must have been ‘asking for it’. That the fact that they had been drinking, or were wearing what the rape apologists considered ‘provocative clothing’, or were out at night, or generally didn’t live as paranoid recluses meant that the victim was complicit in their own rape – that their actions resulted in what happened to them, and they should bear the responsibility for it. And all this is before we get to the charmers who think that the best way to deal with lesbian women is to ‘rape them straight’.
These people were very invested in finding excuses for rape and shifting the blame for it way from the rapist and onto the victim at every opportunity. Many of them delighted in thinking up any scenario, no matter how ridiculous, to feel out the limits of rape – to find any situation where there was ambiguity about whether something was rape or not. They gave the distinct impression that they were testing those boundaries for their own purposes. Perhaps they were doing it out of some privileged idiocy that led them to think that this was simply some dry academic debate where trying to win ‘points’ was all that mattered, but equally possibly they were doing it for far more worrying reasons.
Rapists are very adept at manipulating societal norms to their advantage, and a great many of them know exactly what they are doing, know the harm it causes, and just don’t care.
Believing that women are people who deserve their bodily autonomy, and that ‘nature’ is no excuse or explanation for rape, is akin to the delusions of religion in your eyes? You sound just like the ‘atheism is just another religion’ brigade.
You are the one bowing down to an unevidenced, immutable ‘rape nature’ like it is some kind of carven idiol of a god. You are treating our nature as our irresistably powerful, omnipresent master. Your deity is the naturalistic fallacy, and you have built quite the nasty little temple to it on this thread that is actually about rape culture, completely uncaring of the harm you cause in the process. You seek to defend your toxic assumptions without evidence, and chastise anyone who doesn’t agree with you in terms of their refusal to acknowledge what essentially amounts to an unevidenced ‘revealed truth’ of the inescapable rapist ‘nature’ that supposedly lies within all men, barely contained by the overmatched efforts of culture.
You remind of the most blinkered and smugly self righteous type of theist more and more with your every post.
Barklikeadog:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:27 am
OK I apologise. Please ,really, I meant no offense and I really am sorry. Won’t do it again. Promise. I wouldn’t ever really do something like that in reality. It was a poor way to express my anger and I really do apologise.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:30 am
Barklikeadog, apology accepted. Thank you.
Hekuni Cat, MQG:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:35 am
BO #151:
There are also myriad examples of stepparents who love their stepchildren. And adopted parents who love their adopted children. Love does not require genetic closeness, even if the individuals involved have biological children. Oh behalf of my mother and all other stepparents who love their stepchildren, fuck you!
I would also like an answer from to Caine’s question:
rr:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:38 am
Bill Openthalt:
So it’s
God’s willhuman nature to rape, andGod’s willhuman nature to not rape.There’s quite a lot coming out of your “keyboard.”
bradleybetts:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:38 am
@Bill Openthalt #130
Sweet jeebus, I’ve been away from this thread for a while and you still haven’t stopped talking.
Anyway, in your last message to me you said:
“You’re right as far as the physical effect is concerned. That being said, one could argue that the feeling that it “reduces the intimacy of the moment” is the way our conscious mind perceives the outcome of the calculations that might include “No chance of pregnancy”. The evaluation part of the mind doesn’t need to be able to do complex analyses, it just needs access to a few key results of other circuits (which can include cognitively complex subsystems).”
*sigh* I’ll just fish the important part out of the word-salad and focus on that shall I?
“That being said, one could argue that the feeling that it “reduces the intimacy of the moment” is the way our conscious mind perceives the outcome of the calculations that might include “No chance of pregnancy”.”
Right, so you think that subconcious biological imperitives such as procreation are somehow affected by the concious knowledge that “This bit of rubber will stop me getting her pregnant”. Now, I am not a neurobiologist by training or profession, nor even a biologist, and yet every single thought in my head is screaming that this is absolute bullshit. I am at work and frankly don’t have time to look up exactly why this is bullshit, so I’m going to do two things:
1- the simple application of Occam’s razor would lead me to believe that the main reason men generally don’t like condoms is because sex doesn’t feel as good, and thus I am going to go with the Null hypothesis that you are, in fact, talking out of your arse.
2- invoke Russell’s Teapot and ask you (or anyone else) to prove your assertion.
I would like to assure you that any convincing evidence will lead to an apology from myself, whilst also noting that the lack of any supporting evidence for your positive assertion will lead me to the conclusion that you are, in fact, talking out of your arse. Kthnxbai.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:39 am
Hekuni Cat:
Going by Bill’s love of anecdotes in lieu of evidence, this should change his mind instantly!
Well, it should work that way, right?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:42 am
rr:
Eeeeuuw.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:44 am
I just thought of this.
If genetic closeness (as measured by our ‘genetic closeness meter’ in our brains?) generates more love and care, why do we not marry our siblings? How can I love Wife (we are related (statistical certainty), but so distantly that we haven’t found it yet) if I am not genetically close?
And the part about condoms triggering the ‘I can’t knock her up’ meter in the brain, what about those of us with vasectomies? Does that mean that making love, for me, should feel like I am wearing a condom?
Bill Openthalt, have you thought through any of your positions?
jackiepaper:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:51 am
I apologize for not finishing the thread. I’m sure Bill was already taken to task for this, but I want to say this myself:
Bill,
Natural children? Are you suggesting my nonbiological children are not natural? Fuck you.
We have been through hell and high water together and the adoption won’t even be finale until Summer. I love and adore them. There is nothing unnatural about them or our family. My husband is proud as pie to be their papa and in fact, has always wanted to adopt. Biological drive to breed? What are we snails? Believe it or not, we’re thinking beings who know better than to think our genes are special or that love has anything to do with who your sperm donor was or what womb you gestated in. Meanwhile, my husband had a vasectomy ages ago and guess what? His sex drive is very much intact.
Some people favor their bio-kids? Sure. Some bio-parents kill their children. In fact the last I checked the CDC website it said that about 2,000 children are killed by their parents every year in the US alone. Some people just shouldn’t have kids. Some people aren’t fit to raise tomatoes.
People do not avoid relationships with you because you are nice. They are repulsed by your pig ignorance, lack of empathy and since of entitlement. If you want to be loved, you might want to learn what love actually is.
Giliell, professional cynic:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:52 am
I’m also wondering, could Bill care to explain to us the prevalence of rape among popular, rich and powerful guys who could actually spread their semen around like free candy?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:52 am
Ogvorbis:
Cultural tabu. Oooops, there’s that pesky culture again.
Jadehawk:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:55 am
nowhere in the US is this supposedly tragic women shortage a permanent condition. women make 51% of the population. In most cases, when a dude can’t find a partner, ever, at all, it’s because of something about him. Exceptions exist, but they exist on the female side as well, and no one is handwringing about their un-expressed libido.
and this is where I should have stopped reading. There’s nothing “natural” about the aspects described in rape culture.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
bull. if procreation was the most powerful motive for fucking, fucking wouldn’t need to feel orgasmic, since we’d already be fucking, regardless of how good it felt. The most powerful motive for sex is that it feels good. That’s WHY it feels good: because critters that enjoyed fucking fucked more, and consequently spawned more.
shallow comment is shallow. cannibalism and infanticide are also something humans are capable of, and yet we lack cannibalism-culture and infanticide-culture. rape culture is not about whether some people commit rape. it’s about how they’re enabled and excused for it, making it easy and even acceptable to rape.
also, interesting that you think only men “experience the urge to rape”. interesting, but wrong.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
bullshit. if you ask people if they’ve ever raped someone, they’d be aghast. if you ask them if they’ve done a number of things that qualify as rape, but don’t mention the word, they’ll admit to having done them.
The same happens to other things, like racism. That’s why people freak the fuck out when their racism is called out as racism.
only to a flaming idiot with absolutely no fucking clue how culture and acculturation work.
and they generally don’t get away with the ludicrous bullshit, unless the entire culture buys into it, too. like with all the excuses for rape. you know, rape culture.
that from the guy who thinks raping is an unavoidable part of men’s nature.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:56 am
Oh, no, couldn’t be cultural. Must be human nature as culture is pretty much powerless. Just ignore the history of (some) royal families for the past, oh, 5,000 or so years, right?
allegro:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:56 am
@Bill
Total bullshit. Racism is trained, not inherent. Look at any diverse group of small children (who have not yet been indoctrinated by parents and culture) playing together and you will see no fear of one another.
This bullshit that you “know” on racism and rape culture is just that: bullshit.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Ogvorbis:
Hahahahahahahahaha – I started thinking about monarchies right after I hit submit. That should be Cultural tabu. For some.
jackiepaper:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:04 pm
On the day that I see an article about women being abused and not one person shows up to say, “What about the menz!?!” I am going to throw a party with paper hats and party cake. I have the feeling that if I set up for that party today and waited, I’d just end up looking like Miss Havisham in a party hat. *sigh*
Gregory Greenwood:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:04 pm
Giliell, professional cynic @ 220;
I can give you the short version of his answer now:
“Blah, blah, blah, immutable nature, blah, blah, blah, procreative imperative, blah, blah, blah, all men are rapists in waiting, blah, blah, blah, people who see evil everywhere scare me, blah, blah, blah, the innate nature of guys knows what a condom is, but not the ways in which money can provide sexual opportunity, blah, blah, blah.
There you go. That should save you some time at least. ;-P
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:05 pm
Cultural taboo? Yep. Why don’t you ask the Egyptian pharaohs about that? After all, they practiced sibling marriage. Because they were divine, and adding non-divide blood was icky. Various other cultures have practiced sibling marriage for similar reasons.
Shit, I was researching Henry VIII once and found a reference to someone suggesting that the solution to his “lack of heirs problem” was to marry off his then-only legitimate child, Mary, to his bastard son, Henry Fitzroy. The author of the piece I was reading noted that this (1) would have been a violation of Catholic canon law and (2) would legally have been classified as incest in many jurisdictions, including England, but that the Pope signalled his willingness to sign off on it, if Henry backed down from his threats do divorce Catherine of Aragon and break with the Church.
Now, the Westermark Effect is a real thing, and may well be the source of many of the cultural taboos and the feeling of revulsion most people have at the ide of incest. But seriously, it has been gotten around by many cultures throughout time.
(Quick quiz: how many times did I say “culture” in this comment?)
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:07 pm
JackiePaper:
We’d be a party of Miss Havishams! Heh.
bradleybetts:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:08 pm
@Jadehawk
*tears of laughter* Beautiful, absolutely beautiful :) most comprehensive takedown ever. Have an Internetz.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:09 pm
Esteleth:
Yes, Ogvorbis and I both noted that. :D
bradleybetts:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:12 pm
@Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism
So according to Catholics:
“Incest: better than divorce.”
Fantabulous.
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:13 pm
To cite a more modern example: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the House of Coburg in Germany practiced routinely uncle-niece marriages. As did the House of Habsburg in Spain in the sixteenth century. The practice fell out of favor when the long-term results of inbreeding showed up. Which is to say, the Habsburgs stopped practicing uncle-niece marriages when they died out. The Coburgs are still kicking, but (mostly) under a different name – they’re known as the Windsors nowadays – and they got over their “marry your cousins” thing around the time that their sons started bleeding to death.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:16 pm
Although the male sharing a bed with a non-relative was fine for recreation and to prove that he was fertile. Of course, it sometimes required many, many, many women before he was proved fertile, but, like most nobility and royalty through history, he had to be willing to do his duty.
‘
And, given the Catholic church’s definition if incest, the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, virtually every marriage involving the royalty or nobility required a waiver — seven degrees of consanguinity was the cut-off point (which is about a fourth cousin?). Sharing a great-great-grandfather or great-great-grandmother made you too closely related.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:20 pm
Is anyone missing a ‘ ? If so, please pick it out of my #234.
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:22 pm
Trufax.
Both of Catherine of Aragon’s marriages required said waivers – in the first case because she and Prince Arthur were third or fourth cousins, in the second case because she had the same degree of relation to Henry (Arthur and Henry being brothers, after all), and because she was Arthur’s widow.
When the marriage of Catherine and Henry’s daughter Mary to Charles of Germany was being negotiated (it never happened, Charles married someone else), a waiver had to be gotten to get around the pesky “Charles’ mother Juana was Catherine’s sister” thing. But it wasn’t really seen as an issue, just another box to check. And – years later, when Mary married Philip of Spain, another waiver had to be gotten because Philip was Charles’ son, and thus Mary’s first cousin once removed. And because she and Charles had been engaged thirty years previously.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:25 pm
And one of the advantages of all of these marriages by waiver is, when the man, for whatever reason, wanted to send his wife off to a convent and annul the marriage, they just had to pay the church to ‘discover’ the relationship.
As usual. Men get whatever they want, women get screwed over.
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:34 pm
Exactly the tactic Henry tried to use to dump Catherine. Only problem was that because the first waiver had been signed by the Pope, it had to be countermanded by the Pope. And the Pope was coincidentally at that point dealing with an army camped on his lawn – an army that belonged to Catherine’s nephew, who was unimpressed with moves to have his aunt “officially” declared to have been a slut for twenty years (because if she was never married to Henry legally, then every time they slept together that was adultery).
Henry’s marital life is an exercise in the things that people would do:
(1) “The waiver was formatted incorrectly!”
(2) “She’s a witch!”
(3) [did not attempt to leave]
(4) “She’s ugly and I can’t bear to prong her!”
(5) “She’s boning like half the court!”
(6) “She’s unsubmissive and talks back!” [note: this one didn't actually go forward, he was persuaded to drop it]
Hekuni Cat, MQG:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:42 pm
Caine:
It should, but I doubt it.
rr:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:44 pm
And the fat violent rapist feral children.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:46 pm
First, why the fat shaming?
Second, I don’t understand your point. Could you elucidate please?
The Mellow Monkey:
January 17th, 2013 at 12:50 pm
So I guess us queers have sex for entirely different reasons than any other humans on earth? Or oral sex is something our subconscious minds tell us isn’t really fun? When I fuck a woman with a strap-on, are we both going “ehhh…but there’s no sperm”? Does my partner–a trans man–not have a normal male sex drive because he can’t knock me up?
Sex is sex is sex, whether there’s sperm shooting at egg or not. Yes, some people eroticize the risk/goal of pregnancy, but the basic, fundamental idea pushing a sex drive is that sex is fucking fun.
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:02 pm
What? Nonprocreative sex is unfun?
Why do women go on the pill then?
Chris Clarke:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:05 pm
Clearly I can’t leave you people alone for long enough to get eight hours’ sleep.
And there go my plans to have candy for breakfast.
I read that as a reference to the unbelievably tedious Bill Openthalt’s attempt to use obesity as a metaphor for propensity to rape as part of human nature.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:12 pm
Esteleth:
Perhaps this part of HUMAN NATURE is only carried on the heterosexual male Y chromosome, along with the rape drive.
I cannot fathom how someone can spew this stuff and not see how hateful and dehumanizing he’s being to men in general.
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:24 pm
Well, some women go on the pill to manage endometriosis, ovarian cysts, or whatever (I’m one of them), but I’m going to go out on a limb and posit that said women are minority of women on the pill.
Most women are on the pill so that they can have fun non-babymaking sexytimes.
chigau (無味ない):
January 17th, 2013 at 1:29 pm
The Mellow Monkey #245
THAT’S IT!!!11!!
*ahem sorry*
HumanNature™ is found only on the Y chromosome.
So men have only half a chance of being human and women have none at all.
Beatrice:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:30 pm
Women go on the pill because, while it is in their nature to procreate, it is also in their nature to seek the best male to do it with. So they go on the pill until they find the masculinest of them all and then steal his seed.
And none of that idiocy about some women being on the pill until menopause, or making pregnancy impossible permanently. That’s individuals. I’m not talking about individuals, but about the whole species. Except when I’m talking about individuals in the above paragraph, but that’s different.
Also, that woman who is still on the pill in her forties and has no children just hasn’t met the man who has that best “Have babies with ME” smell, which her nature seeks.
Can I haz my paper published now?
Giliell, professional cynic:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:33 pm
Hateful to men and women. Men ’cause they’re painted as rapists in waiting, women because they have to suffer the consequences.
Barklikeadog:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:40 pm
They are having a conversation on NPR right now about this very subject. One of the folks were saying something about rape kits not getting analyzed and being thrown out when the statute of limitations expired. What I don’t understand, and maybe I’m just dense (which has already been proven in this thread) is why there is a statute of limitations on rape. I’m of the opinion it should be treated just like murder but one of the other folks said something about sexual assault being the “poor cousin” to other crimes. That it isn’t given the priority in some jurisdictions that theft and robbery are. It confirms that we do indeed live in a rape culture where it is given a pass and not taken seriously.
Nepenthe:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:46 pm
@Barklikeadog
Fuck if I know. Apparently in New York State, if you raped someone five years ago that’s ancient history and why should you have your life ruined now. Plus, the evidence is all gone… I mean, 5 years in a brown paper bag is long enough to have that semen rot, right? We should be glad that they allow that much time, given that it’s all bitchez lyin’ to ruin the lives of good men.
(The statute of limitations is coming up for when I was raped and I’m a wee bit pissy about the whole thing.)
Barklikeadog:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:52 pm
I’ll bet you are. I want justice done no matter how long ago the crime was committed. Fuck our society…just goddammit fuck it sometimes. *spits.
rr:
January 17th, 2013 at 1:52 pm
Sorry Ogvorbis, it was a bad joke referring to the “obesity is part of human nature” statement above. Feral children should be excellent subjects for the study of our alleged human nature, as they lack enculturation. But I seem to remember (It’s been a long time since I studied psych) studies were done, and not a lot came of it.
Ogvorbis:
January 17th, 2013 at 3:00 pm
Okay. Thanks. I sometimes miss things.
The good Mr. Clarke explained it. No apology necessary. Sometimes I fail to grok. Sometimes I fail to grok in grand style. Sometimes I fail to grok with no style. This was the last.
Paul W., OM:
January 17th, 2013 at 5:00 pm
TL:DR WARNING… this is long as hell with big didactic stretches because I’m afraid of being misunderstood. Sorry.
–
This discussion seems mostly simplistic and unsatisfying all around, like most discussions of human nature and culture.
I think I disagree with some of what Bill Openthalt is saying, but I also disagree with people dismissing so much of it as simply invalid/stupid/evil/rape-justifying. (I don’t know about his motives, but it seems to me that some of what he’s actually saying is interesting and relevant, if insufficiently clear and nuanced. To me, it’s not obviously just JAQing off or rape-justifying.)
I also tend to read the NYT article rather differently than a lot of people here—but maybe far too charitably and very incorrectly. I read some of what the writer says as a litany of things that are obviously very bad for women, so obviously so bad that he thinks it doesn’t need elaboration. I could be entirely wrong about that. I really don’t know, and that’s less interesting to me than some of the general issues that have come up in the comment thread—and at any rate I’ll try to clarify where I’m coming from before discussing how I tend to interpret the article.
–
To say that something is “part of human nature” is ambiguous, and not necessarily to say that every human will do it, or be as prone to doing it, or do it under the same circumstances, or do it at all. It’s also not necessarily to say that somebody will do it in any given culture—some cultures may be entirely free of it.
Human nature is a mix of things of varying specificity—basic drives, general cognitive (and affective) biases and limitations, and some fairly specific instincts and inferential tricks. It allows great flexibility in how many of those things manifest themselves in a given culture, but it also puts great selection pressures on cultures—or small ones with great long-term effects making some aspects of culture probable and common across many cultures, and others improbable and rare.
I think the ability to murder is innate in an important sense, but likely not the obvious sense most people would take that to mean, and certainly not one that justifies murder. There might be significant cognitive quirks that make it especially easy for humans to learn to murder other people, and decide under some circumstances to do it, which have been specifically selected for because they’ve been useful in some circumstances in the past, or there might just be a set of broad tendencies that allows people to learn to murder, among many other things.
Because human learning and decision making are complicated, it would be extremely simplistic to try to blame a phenomenon like murder on a single motive, as though it must be caused by one specific motive in any given case, and even more simplistic to attribute it to a single motive in every case.
You can’t just say things like “murder isn’t a crime of hatred, it’s a crime of revenge” or “murder isn’t a crime of revenge, it’s a crime of exploitation,” or “murder isn’t a crime of opportunity, it’s a crime of justice-seeking” or “murder is a crime of lack of innate inhibitory function, it’s a consequence of a culture of violence.” A given murder may be any of those things, or all of those things, and the motives and opportunities and innate and cultural disinhibiting factors may combine nonlinearly—combinations of those factors may be much more likely to lead an individual to murder than simply adding them up would make you think, due to threshold effects, etc. (E.g., a threshold of cost/benefit ratio, or of passion overcoming inhibition.)
In any given case, any combination of those factors might be unnecessary or absolutely necessary for the murder to occur, and it can be more complicated than that, with only certain peculiar combinations of factors mattering much.
So, for example, all things being equal, most people are much less likely to murder if they don’t hate the prospective victim, or if don’t feel they actually deserve it, or it they don’t feel they can get away with it, or if they don’t feel they can benefit from it, or if they don’t think there’s a better plan that doesn’t involve murder but has most of the same advantages, like legally getting the person locked up for life.
If they do hate the person, or do think they really deserve it, and so on, the odds go up very rapidly, especially if the person has certain biologically innate dispositions (e.g., due to a difficulty in assessing long-term consequences of actions) or cultural ones (e.g., an honor culture that accepts vigilante vengeance and specifically murder as acceptable or even necessary justice.)
I suspect that the ability to learn to murder has been selected for, at least weakly, in two negative senses. One is that the major cognitive and affective dispositions that lead to the ability to murder also lead to the ability to do a lot of other things that can promote your genes, and murder can just be a specific learned manifestation of those. Another is that murder, specifically, has been a very successful learned strategy often enough that it contributes significantly to the selection that maintains those more general biases.
As I understand it, the biological predispositions that make an individual likely to learn to murder are many and variable. Some people are naturally a bit more prone to anger, others to cold-blooded alienation, some are more prone to accept rationalizations learned from people they know, others are less to internalize reasonable inhibitions their parents teach them, etc. (I’m not saying that any of those things is straightforwardly innate, just that there are biological differences that can result in such differences, one way or another.)
For any X and Y among dozen major factors, it would be ridiculous to say that “murder isn’t a crime of X and not of Y.” It’s just not that simple, because human learning, planning, and decision making are really complicated and involve delicate tradeoffs and thresholds. Both biological and cultural variations are many and complicated, and nonlinear, and interact in necessarily complicated ways.
As I understand it, particular individual may be more biologically prone to murdering in certain kinds of cultures—e.g., a person with a predisposition to anger management problems but who also has a pretty good ability to keep it inhibited for conscious moral reasons might be especially prone to murdering only in honor cultures, which glorify and rationalize righteous violence, disinhibiting that person in just the right way. Different people may be biologically prone to murder in different kinds of cultures.
That would not be surprising, and it means that in the general case you can’t separate what’s a consequence of nature (biology) and what’s a consequence of nurture (culture) into anything like percentages that add up to 100—a given murder may depend 100 percent on one or more biological traits and 100 percent on certain cultural factors, at the same time.
And none of that justifies murder. It actually explains why it’s important not to justify murder—that is clearly a disinhibiting factor in some cases in many cultures, and in many cases in some cultures.
–
It would be very surprising if that weren’t true, to some significant extent, because the relevant aspects of human nature and culture are not simple, and the interactions between them are not simple at all.
I think some of the same reasoning applies to rape, to some extent, with various specific combinations of factors being likely to lead to a decision to rape—some of them biological and varying between individuals, and some of them cultural and varying between cultures, and some of them depending on specific combinations of individual and cultural variations. Some innate factors may be important across similar situations across a variety of cultures, and others may not. Some cultural factors may have more or less effect across a variety of individual variations, and others may not.
As with murder, that doesn’t mean you can’t make very useful statistical generalizations, like the ones homicide detectives and FBI profilers use to identify and prioritize suspects. (A murder victim is especially likely to have been murdered by a spouse, a poisoning victim is especially likely to have been murdered by a woman, and a female victim of an apparent honor killing is especially likely to have been murdered by her own male family members, and so on.) And it doesn’t mean that those statistics don’t shed light on very commonly very important causal factors. They clearly do.
It does suggest that if you say “rape isn’t caused by human nature, but by rape culture,” or “rape isn’t about sex, it’s about domination,” or “rape isn’t caused by women’s attractiveness, or scarcity it’s caused by men justifying rape,” it’s likely to be a simplistic and misleading generalization even if there’s a very important and fairly general truth behind it. (As I think there typically is.)
–
It’s important to separate the merely causal notion of “blame” from the moral notion of blame. Conflating the two often leads to flameage, and so does misunderstanding someone else as conflating the two when they’re not.
I may blame the malfunctioning of my cell phone on a short circuit, but that’s different from morally censuring it. Identifying causes is just not the same thing as placing moral blame, though it’s often relevant in nonobvious ways.
And there’s no principle of conservation of blame—blaming one thing does not mean you can’t blame another, in a different sense or in the same sense.
For example if my dog pees on your carpet, that may be 100 percent the dog’s fault in that I have to hold the dog responsible for it, and discourage him from doing a bad thing, even if it’s my fault that it’s the dog’s fault because I didn’t train my dog as thoroughly as I should have. The dog and I are both 100 percent to blame, in different senses at different levels.
And it can be 100 percent the dog breeder’s fault in pretty much the same moral sense, if the dog breeder didn’t exercise reasonable diligence in breeding dogs to be reasonably easy to train. It can still be 100 percent my fault in sense because a) I may not have done due diligence finding a responsible dog breeder and/or b) I may not have put enough diligence into training the dog I happened to get, just because it was somewhat harder to train than I expected, and I shouldn’t have let that deter me. It can also be very much our “society’s fault” for not promoting awareness of the evils of puppy mills, regulating dog breeders, etc. And that of course is in some very different sense “human nature’s fault”—shit like that tends to happens because we are what we are, but that doesn’t imply that we shouldn’t accept responsibility at our level and do what we can to change it. (And if it’s all ultimately God’s fault, that doesn’t get us off the hook as human moral agents.)
–
The total “blame” for a given event can easily be several hundred percent in a moral sense at a given level, with several people playing crucial roles they really shouldn’t have, and several hundred more percent in the causal sense at several other interesting levels.
I think that everybody knows this, in some sense, and recognizes it in many cases. Everybody understands that when mob boss orders a hit, he is 100 percent a murderer, and so is the assassin who directly causes the death by shooting or whatever. Neither is less guilty because the other is guilty too. (And a provider of untraceable guns may be very responsible, too, and so on.) And all that’s true in the crucial, relevant senses even if it’s all ultimately God’s fault for willfully creating a universe in which that would inevitably happen.
Likewise, it may be inevitable that some rapes occur in any feasible, desirable human culture, because of biological “human nature” and its inevitable effects on culture. That doesn’t mean that culture isn’t fully to blame for most rapes that do occur, and neither means that most rapists aren’t fully to blame for their rape in the crucial moral and legal senses. (IMO they have to be, and if you don’t think so, you seriously need to rethink your concepts of responsibility and blame.)
IMO that means that it should be entirely okay under some circumstances, if you’re careful about how you do it, to say that a woman may have been raped because she was conventionally “beautiful” and dressed “sexily” and “carelessly” walking alone at night through a dark alley at night in a “bad neighborhood.” It may have been “her fault” in (only) the sense that she was imprudent, not morally at fault, and that would in no way get the rapist off the hook for being 100 percent morally and legally responsible for raping her, as I think he is. And that wouldn’t prevent fully blaming rape culture for the vast majority of such rapes, too, as I think we should.
I do think you should be very careful about how you say such things about various causes of rape, because they’re easily interpreted as being mutually exclusive causally, and as morally placing moral blame, and as diminishing others moral blame, even if none of those things is actually implied.
There’s plenty of causation and blame to go around, so blaming one thing just isn’t the same thing as excusing another.
We shouldn’t assume that causes of rape are mutually exclusive any more than we assume that about murder. If we blame human nature, that shouldn’t mean we don’t fully blame rapists, and rape culture too. You shouldn’t divide the blame for rape, and assuming you do is as simplistic as saying “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” “Blaming” guns (and the people who oppose restrictions on them) simply does not diminish people’s responsibility for how they use guns they do have.
–
Meh.
Is all this obvious to everyone? Do we just differ on how we’re applying agreed principles to the cases at hand. Does anybody think I have it terribly wrong?
It seems to me that it’s maybe not entirely obvious to (or agreed to by) everyone, and it’s not clear everybody’s giving each other appropriate benefit of the doubt about understanding these things—e.g., guessing that Bill is “faulting” one thing in order to excuse another in cases where it’s not apparent to me that he is. (But maybe I’m misreading the signs, and am mistakenly guessing that he’s not dividing blame, or headed that way.)
–
There are also some places in the NYT articles where it didn’t seem to me that “balance” and “appropriate framing” should not be necessary, because the badness of things being flatly described should be obvious, but maybe it is necessary for a lot of people in our rape-justifying culture, and the writer should know better, so he was irresponsible for not giving it.
–
I would tend to read much of page two as describing a litany of manifestions of rape culture, and implying that there’s a spectrum of manifestations ranging from verbal objectification to attempted rape, and that that’s not just a coincidence.
Chris’s second quote in the OP omits the preceding sentence, which sets the tone for me. I’d have started it like this:
The first sentence of the paragraph subtly but effectively influences how I read that paragraph, and the rest of the page. He’s describing a situation in which people are especially insensitive, and in fact they’re not just somewhat insensitive, but sensitivity is often absent. To me that’s low-key but fairly clear way of saying that these guys aren’t just normally insensitive or a little worse—they often completely insensitive—a subtler way of saying they talk like total assholes.
The writer starts by talking about this common manifestation of misogyny—the callous, unabashed verbal objectification of women on a linear scale of something like purely physical fuckability—and implies (to me) that it’s worse in Williston than in the broader culture, in three ways: (1) it’s worth remarking that it happens “often” in Williston, which suggests that it happens notably more often there than in the broader culture, (2) it’s explicitly extra-callous and demeaning because the overt scarcity-raises-value economic aspect makes it extra clear that women are purely objects, and (3) it’s extra insulting to the women in question because it clearly suggest that a lot of the women in Williston are unattractive and don’t really rate the valuation they’re getting; and only get it because the guys are so desperate. They’re mostly dogs who are lucky to rate so high.
To me, it’s an effective way of getting across that this is a situation that thoroughly sucks and is demeaning as hell to the women, but I have no idea whether that was the intended reading, or just me projecting because that’s how I think.
(I’m sure many MRAs would take it quite differently—that’s just how the world works, and it’s reasonable for guys to evaluate bitches in those terms, why pretend otherwise, and aren’t those ugly bitches lucky to be considered fuckable, etc.)
Given that I’m not an MRA, I read most of the rest of the page as a litany of even clearer, more severe, and scarier manifestations of misogyny, and to me it suggests that there’s a continuous fabric of pervasive misogyny—the rampant and unusually gross verbal misogyny is just the most visible manifestation of an especially profound and misogyny, and that rape culture in general is notably worse in Williston than most places.
I also interpret the closing bit (Chris’s last quote) differently than others here seem to. To me it reads as an obviously awful situation for a fairly typical woman who is in no way at fault. It should be dead obvious that she should be able to wear makeup and clothing that many women do in other places, and that she should be able to leave her home and walk down the road—and that it is reasonable for her to flee that grotesquely fucked-up place if it’s that misogynistic and rapey.
I take the point of that to be that if the town is that misogynistic and rapey, such that women who don’t want to be whores or strippers are reasonable flee, it is a very fucked up place indeed. Ending the article on that note makes it sound to me like the implicit theme of the article is that Williston has an especially bad case of misogyny and rape culture, and that’s very, very bad. The writer has painted a picture of pervasive and intolerable misogyny. That closing example of intolerability seems to be a culmination of sorts consistent with my reading of the prior bits.
But that’s just me. I do not know if that’s what was intended. Maybe the writer was just laying out some interesting facts, and himself rather callous to their significance, and I just read all that into it, because those facts are enough for me, given that I already think that way. Maybe the writer intends that kind of reading, but doesn’t want to beat his readers over the head with it, or maybe he just doesn’t evaluate those facts that way himself—or just doesn’t know or care much how people take it. Maybe it’s just stuff he thinks readers will find interesting, one way or another, and doesn’t really care how they evaluate it. Maybe he prefers not to annoy the anybody, including PUAs and MRAs by taking any clear evaluative stance that somebody could disagree with. I really don’t know.
At any rate, I find it interesting how clearly I get that kind of impression from the article, and how hard it is for me to argue that it’s the right interpretation, or even an especially good one. (It’s weird how much that one sentence that Chris omitted matters to me, and maybe it shouldn’t.)
–
By the way, I do agree with Chris that the article needs more data, not just some anecdotes, no matter how it’s intended to be taken. Even if I’m reading it right, it’s too easy to dismiss on evidential grounds.
I also think that this might be a case in which quoting an expert commentator might be in order, if the author does want to frame it in a way we’d like better, but doesn’t want to explicitly take a stand himself.
Despite my own reading, I think Chris may be right that there’s an all-too-easy misogynistic interpretation of the chosen facts, whether or not it was intended (or revealing of the authors own prejudices). Offering an explicit feminist frame of interpretation via a quote would make it more balanced, even if the author didn’t endorse that interpretation.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 17th, 2013 at 5:09 pm
Brevity is far more helpful than length in assuring easy comprehension for your readers. Why don’t you see if you can say the same thing but with about half the words. I bet I could do it using about 4 – 5 times fewer words than you.
Mostly because you didn’t say very much at all.
ChasCPeterson:
January 17th, 2013 at 5:19 pm
he said a hell of a lot more than ‘if rape wasn’t purely cultural than men would have duck dicks.’
Paul W. is always worth reading. Here’s an important sentence from that long post:
simplistic.
and misleading.
That’s an excellent summary of most of the comments in this thread, imo.
Gnumann+, Radfem shotgunner of inhuman concepts:
January 17th, 2013 at 5:23 pm
It certainly sums up yours.
Barklikeadog:
January 17th, 2013 at 5:40 pm
The fuck it is Chas. You just proved how dense you really are…AGAIN!
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 17th, 2013 at 5:42 pm
I wouldn’t mind Chas’ sniping if he accompanied it with, you know, actual explanations and shit. Instead he’s like, “YOU ARE ALL SO STUPID, I KNOW SO MUCH MORE THAN YOU BUT I’M NOT GOING TO TELL, NYAH.”
Fuck you, Chas.
Gnumann+, Radfem shotgunner of inhuman concepts:
January 17th, 2013 at 5:48 pm
I dunno. I have a feeling they would include a bunch of vervets, some toy stoves and a gang of idiots.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 17th, 2013 at 5:55 pm
I guess we’ll never know.
Chris Clarke:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:14 pm
For the record, I’m really grateful for Paul W.’s tl;dr comment at 255. [Update: See this retraction..] I disagree with some pivotal points he makes but it’s thoughtful, open-minded and open-hearted, and I’d take a hundred of it over one more goddamn “rapists suck and I have daughters I need to protect because the FUCKING POINT escapes me about PATRIARCHY HURR HURR KNEECAPS” comment that superficially claims to agree with things I say.
Chris Clarke:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:17 pm
(Yes, I’m in a pissy mood and watching people I like fight each other isn’t helping.)
(Yes, welcome to Pharyngula, Chris.)
athyco:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:25 pm
Paul W, I’ve lurked here for a long time. I remember with satisfaction when you got your Molly. I settled in for your TL;DR because of it. But I had to yank tissues outta the box and deal with some memories, even though you’d carefully laid out the myriad levels of blame, which ones were causal, ones that were not.
It’s my life you’re philosophically expounding upon, I’m afraid. The things my father said about my clothing, my way of sitting, standing, walking; the things he forbid me to do anymore once I had the smallest of breasts. The secrets I kept because “What would they say?” if they knew two fellows in high school were lying about fucking me in the backseat of a Volkswagen Beetle. The silence I maintained when I left an end-of-school-year party to avoid a co-worker creeper who, 30 minutes later, arrived unannounced at my home because another co-worker told him my address, gained entrance by asking for a cup of coffee before driving home, thereafter ignored every “no” and raped me.
Nowadays, it would be a different story. I wouldn’t have a single qualm that the co-worker would think I wasn’t nice enough even to answer the damn door, much less brew and give him a fucking cup of coffee.
But you go ahead out into the world and choose the rape victim and the moment to carefully say, “IMO that means that it should be entirely okay under some circumstances, if you’re careful about how you do it, to say that a woman may have been raped because she…” Out there in the world, where women live and work and share space on transportation and store aisles with everyone else, I don’t see how you can avoid the implication of drawing together of actions you term “mutally exclusive causally,” or avoid implying the diminishing of others’ blame in 9,990 conversations out of 10,000. Hell, I knew you weren’t going there, but it still hit me like a ton of bricks.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:27 pm
I’ve had a shitty couple of days. If I weren’t in a bad mood, I’d probably be less pissed off about Paul’s verbosity. Heck, perhaps I’ll copy edit it for him and prove my point about brevity.
But really, Chris… you’re not saying that you actually like Chas, are you?
Gnumann+, Radfem shotgunner of inhuman concepts:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:29 pm
I’m sorry if I contributed to the pissyness Chris.
As for Paul’s comment, I haven’t actually read it properly yet. So I would like to make it clear I was responding to Chas, not Paul.
I might have some choice words for Paul too sometime tomorrow if I get the time, right frame of mind and hardware to read him properly (neither is in the place ATM) – but it will be given in the spirit of his original comment. So far, my impression of that spirit is “honest (though possibly a bit misguided) exploration”. (Possibly a bit misguided will be a given in my response whether Paul’s is or not, that’s just the way of things and the equipment I’m given to work with).
Barklikeadog:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:32 pm
Chris I did apologise and I will do it again. I’m very sorry for the insensitive thing I wrote and won’t ever go there again. It was stupid of me. I’m sorry to anyone that I offended by my thougtless remark.
I beg forgivness and stand chagrined and corrected. And the point really doesn’t escape me. I learn more and more just reading the well thoughtout arguments. I have learned my lesson.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:41 pm
Sally Strange:
Agreed. Paul W puts great store on presenting a balanced view. Unfortunately, a “balanced” view in this case is a massive wall of airy text from the point of view of privilege, so not terribly helpful.
Also, Chas, your argument from “hey, I respect the guy” is terribly cute but utterly irrelevant.
Chris Clarke:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:49 pm
Chas has been a valued regular over at Coyote Crossing/Creek Running North for years. He’s helped keep me on my toes when I’ve gotten sloppy in my science writing — we’ve got the desert thing in common, remember — and beyond that, he’s been a good friend in times when such have been scarcer than I’d like. So yes. Unequivocally.
Not that I’m completely on board with the “I could make a point here but naah” trope, mind. But he’s on the short list of People I Damn Well Better Meet Before Shuffling Off, Preferably In The Desert With Beer Bolt Cutters And Monkey Wrenches.
Barklikeadog @268, thanks. That helps.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:51 pm
Chris:
That’s fine. I’d certainly hope you won’t mind if those of us who are more at risk for being raped and have been raped have a fair amount of problems with Paul’s need to always go for ‘balance’, which can, and did in this case, lead to him saying a number of stupid things.
It’s a wonderful luxury to be able to approach rape culture and toxic sexism with an objective view, even when you have to stretch yourself thin to the point of disappearing in a quest to remain all objective and stuff, but for many of us, this is our lives. It’s not something we care to be Vulcan about so we can appear to be unsullied, great thinkers about this. It’s a bit more boots on the ground for some of us.
Barklikeadog:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:54 pm
No thank you Chris. And Caine.
Chris Clarke:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:54 pm
Which number includes me, for what it’s worth.
Oh, absolutely. Have at it. And correction gratefully accepted.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:55 pm
Athyco, *hugs and another box of tissues*
The Mellow Monkey:
January 17th, 2013 at 6:59 pm
Okay, Paul. I’m game. [Trigger Warning]
I may have been raped because I was wearing skimpy pajamas in my own home while a male friend was spending the weekend on the couch. I may have been raped because I let him fix me a drink. I may have been raped because I didn’t realize the drink was either spiked with extra alcohol or drugs. I may have been raped because when I realized I was blacking out, I didn’t immediately call 911. I may have been raped because I froze up in horror when he began pinning me down. I may have been raped because I didn’t actually say the word “no” that I can recall. I may have been raped because, if I did say “no”, I might have been too intoxicated/drugged to say it clearly. I may have been raped because I did what he told me to do. I may have been raped because I curled up into the fetal position instead of trying to stumble out of my house naked in the middle of the night. I may have been raped because I let this man stay in my house at all. I may have been raped because I was attracted to him and had not entirely hidden that fact. I may have been raped because I’m cute. I may have been raped because I’m queer and don’t hide it. I may have been raped because that man knew I had already been raped before.
Now these are all things I think on a nearly nightly basis. What value do you think it is to me and other rape survivors for other people to suggest that these things are true?
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:00 pm
No accounting for taste, I guess.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:04 pm
athyco, and Mellow Monkey, thank you so much for sharing your stories.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:18 pm
Paul:
You know, upthread, Gregory Greenwood brought up the amount of people we get here who love to play a game. The game of “Would it be rape if…” The game of “What about in this context…” They tend to cite their objectiveness, that they are just trying to figure out this rape business, really, why are you
bitchespeople yelling, anyway?What you’re doing, Paul, smacks of those games much too closely. You’re also flat out defending rape culture, whether you like that or not. You see, it shouldn’t matter if a woman was stone drunk, wandering down an alley in the middle of the night, naked. It doesn’t make it okay to rape her and it doesn’t make it okay to put the focus on her being drunk, being out at night or being naked. The focus should be on the person or persons who committed rape. Always.
It’s right interesting that when it’s a case of, say, a young boy being raped, his dress isn’t mentioned, or that he was hanging out with a group of kids (therefor asking for it) and so on. One of the articles Chris linked is a piece about the gang rape of an eleven year old child who was slut shamed and blamed in the article. Guess what? She was a girl. This garbage runs so deep, the majority of people don’t even see it. People have to be trained to see it, they have to take the red pill. That’s just how bad it is, and here you are, grasping for reasons to maintain that status.
I’ve talked about my rape a lot here, because it’s one of the rare ones. The man who raped me was a serial rapist and murderer. He left three women alive. I was 16. I had been out that night, to a social gathering. I was wearing a dress. *gasp* For the whole godsdamned two years I got to live directly with that event, due to the trial, I got to hear snide remarks, sexist remarks and blame and shame remarks – from the people who were supposed to be on *my* side. The DA prosecuting the case said to me, after I had gotten out of a long hospital stay “what in the hell were you thinking, being out after dark, in a dress?!”
So thanks, Paul, for being part of a culture which continues to devalue me, to consider me as less than human. You’re really helping out, pal.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:26 pm
Caine:
A young man I know who was molested by a woman when he was a boy was asked, in court, what she was wearing and if he found it arousing.
The trope of woman as temptress is pretty fucking deep, even in cases where a little boy is the one who’s been victimized.
Nobody ever asked him what he was wearing.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:32 pm
Mellow Monkey:
Oh FFS. Sometimes, I just despair.
Hekuni Cat, MQG:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:37 pm
athyco and Mellow Monkey, as Sally said, thank you for sharing your stories.
Caine, thank you for sharing yours and for articulating so eloquently why Paul’s balanced discussion is so very wrong.
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:38 pm
Actually it does, because “She shouldn’t have dressed like that” and “She shouldn’t have been out at night alone.” is bullshit. It’s shaming and blaming the victim. People who get robbed aren’t told you shouldn’t have been walking home alone. Why is it women are told that? Why is it women are being “imprudent” for doing normal things that SHOULD’NT be risky?
What about women crowd surfing? Men do it all the time and don’t have issues but if a woman does it creeps take it as open season to molest her. Is that right? No. Is it right to say those women are “imprudent” for trying to do, apparently, a man’s thing? Fuck that noise.
I don’t care if a woman is naked. Just because the man’s (assuming for the example) thought process may have been “OH NAKED WOMAN, MUST FUCK NOW. SCREW HER.” doesn’t mean that you tell the victim they shouldn’t have exercised their right to do something completely harmless and fine, like what they chose to wear. How is it helpful to make US adjust to rapist though processes?
Seriously, have you not been paying attention to the pushback against those stupid rape prevention list aimed at women and the campaigns instead focusing where it should be, which is on the rapist? Caine linked to one in comment 198.
‘
Oh, and FUCK YOU for that “conventionally beautiful” addition as well. What you don’t think uglies and fatso get targeted? Sometimes specifically because they are so worthless they should be grateful for a fuck? Guess what, I’m one of those so fuck that shit. And seriously, how is a women suppose to win? Oh, don’t be conventionally beautiful ladies it puts you at risk for rape but if you somehow make yourself ugly you need to fuck every man to prevent rape too.
UGH. Fuck all this bullshit. You aren’t helping. You’re big, long, “polite”, and “balanced” view does nothing but help rape culture.
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:39 pm
Ah, I took too long responding. I’ll just second Cain’s 278 then.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:54 pm
Bob in Himmel did this thread blow up while I was at work.
It’s still kind of amazing that we keep still needing to have the same arguments about rape being this tout suite natural and unavoidable thing that poor dear rapists are helpless against.
Cause, see, the thing about natural drives, the truly overwhelming, the things denial will never fix? They don’t go away when they are discouraged. Throughout history, even though the punishments for being homosexual, transsexual, genderqueer, etc have been brutal, violent, and oftentimes fatal, there still have been no end of people pursuing and expressing themselves along those lines. Even when it carried jail times or execution sentences if caught, people have still continued to be themselves and form those relationships. Because these things really are natural, immutable, irresistible characteristics of people.
If we were to ignore the overwhelming evidence from 99% of men on how not at all universal, not at all overpowering, and not at all present the will to rape is. If we were to ignore everything we know about biology and evolution and accept that a clearly social creation (in humans) is somehow a biological creation despite how negatively it impacts gene inheritance. If we were in short to brain ourselves in the face with a claw hammer until we were dumb enough to even entertain this desperate rape apologetic ascientific assumption as even remotely valid…
It’d still fail.
Because rape only flourishes when a rape culture protects rapists, defends rapists, puts doubt on their victims, and makes apologies for their actions like “oh, he couldn’t help it, he had a dark primal impulse to fuck and you weren’t putting out… you whore”.
When a community or society actually starts giving a legitimate fuck about rape and becomes even slightly hostile to the inclusion of rapists? Rape rates plummet faster than a boulder being shot straight down towards the Earth by a cannon. Suddenly, all those rapists who just couldn’t help their uncontrollable biology have no damn issue buttoning up and flying straight so that they don’t have to face even the tiniest of consequences.
And that’s not fucking nature. Nature isn’t “oh can’t possibly resist, too difficult, oh what? Possible consequences? Oh, all better now”. And anyone who suggest differently is deliberately trying to minimize a terrible crime because of a feeling of personal investment.
And you don’t need clairvoyance to suspect why.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 7:54 pm
JAL:
Thank you *very much* for adding this, JAL. I didn’t want to start dripping venom all over the place immediately, given how much Paul’s “objective and balanced” view was appealing to the men. I was attempting to hold my temper, but that particular bit deserves extreme yelling and more highlighting.
This, also, is another example of shoring up rape culture and the particularly toxic “bitch was asking for it” attitude. It’s a convenient way for people to ignore rape culture and what rape is actually about and why it happens.
Just for all the idiots in the crowd: Infants get raped. Children get raped. Men get raped. Young women get raped. Old women get raped. Skinny women get raped. Fat women get raped. Beautiful women get raped. Plain women get raped. Ugly women get raped. Every single possible type of woman you can imagine gets raped. So for every fuckwit out there, whether you’re playing “I’m above this, so I can objective” or “It’s nature!” or any other game – do us a favour, please – get it into those rather thick, reality rejecting brains of yours that rape has nothing to do with how a person looks.
Godsdamn idiots.
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:03 pm
The problem with threads like these is that so much is said it becomes impossible to reply to everything, and arguments don’t get developed with care (my time being very limited doesn’t help either).
I would like to ask people to refrain from insinuations and insults. I hope this forum is not about shouting down those whom one thinks utter opinions and ideas one doesn’t agree with. Let’s read each others arguments carefully and not jump at conclusions. Thanks!
Definitions are important. So for the purpose of understanding my arguments, can we accept that “human nature” covers those characteristics that are encoded in genes, and “culture” those characteristics that are acquired through learning? For example, the specific languages a human speaks are part of culture, whereas the ability to acquire languages is nature.
It goes without saying neither natural nor cultural characteristics are present in the same level in all humans. Often, the distribution is Gaussian (aka normal), but for certain characteristics, Poisson is a better fit. These curves describe populations, not individuals. The variations in human height are normally distributed. If we split the population in males and females, we notice that on average, males are taller than females. This does not mean that all males are taller than all females. As a matter of fact, in a particular population the tallest female might be taller than the tallest male.
Thus, if we observe that within a population adopted children are more often abused than biological children (it’s not a good term, but I got castigated for the use of natural children), it does most emphatically not mean that all adopted children are abused. In fact, most children are not abused, be they adopted or born to the parents. When I assume that the mind’s ability to translate likeness and closeness as parental love in the conscious part, I am presenting a plausible explanation for the child abuse statistics. Obviously, it could be that people who adopt do this because they are looking for victims to molest. While this is possible (with 7 billion humans almost everything is certain to occur), it doesn’t seem to me the hypothesis of choice. Of course, there might be better explanations.
We know that sexuality is human nature. If we accept that rape is sexual behaviour, it is part of human nature. Even if we classify rape as wholly non-sexual, as violence, it would still be part of human nature. Of course, one could argue that violence is cultural, but given that animals devoid of culture are also violent, it seems reasonable to assume that the ability for violent behaviour is part of human nature.
Notice that being part of human nature does not imply that violence is acceptable, or that all humans will exhibit violent behaviour. It simply means that we get it from our genes. If the tendency towards violent behaviour is normally distributed across the population, it means that the vast majority will be relatively non-violent, with small minorities totally non-violent and very violent. There is statistical evidence that this the case.
As far as I am aware, we have not found evidence that rape (or violence) is cultural. Some cultures are more violent than others, some condone it and some frown upon it, but violence is present in all known human societies. In effect, it seems less present in larger and more complex societies with well-developed moral systems, suggesting that humans can decide that violence is not effective, and develop cultural mechanisms to reduce its prevalence. Please note that “decide” and “develop” do not mean that people get together and decide to reduce violence – what happens is that less violent societies are more successful than the more violent ones. Of course, this also means that on average, humans also would become less violent if less violent humans are more successful at reproduction in these less-violent societies.
I hope this is clear – violence and rape can be part of human nature and still be (perceived as) unacceptable. Also, a trait that is part of human nature need not be present to the same degree in all humans.
As far as procreation is concerned, I never suggested that procreation is the main motive for an individual’s sexual behaviour. This is why there is no incompatibility between individuals trying to minimise the changes of conception, and procreation being the ultimate motivator for the development of sexually differentiated species that develop strategies for efficient and successful procreation. Humans are sexual animals because on the whole, sexual reproduction works better than asexual reproduction.
It is possible that part of the sexual strategies we get from our genes deal with obtaining access to females in situations where the males outnumber the females, or when there is a perceived lack of offspring. Plants adapt their reproductive strategies to changing circumstances (like drought) so it is not far-fetched to suppose this adaptability is present in mammals (and thus humans). We know that as far as violence is concerned, humans show different levels of violent behaviour depending on the circumstances (cf. hooliganism). What is offensive about the idea that populations in which males vastly outnumber the females result in an increase in the number of males using violence to obtain sexual gratification? We know there is an increase in male-on-male violence in such populations.
Again, for all those offended by the suggestion that in such circumstances they might be showing an increase in violent behaviour, the Milgram study proves exactly that.
On a more philosophical note, I am reluctant to see people with different ideas or a different morality as evil, deluded or stupid. Sometimes it is extremely difficult to understand them, or to muster enough empathy to attempt to make connections. There are moments when I do think that a person is truly evil – consciously, knowingly harming others (or at least, showing behaviour I cannot explain otherwise). Maybe there are indeed large numbers of people who think it is OK to harm others, large enough numbers of male psychopaths (because that would be the only way to describe a male who uses women as objects) to create a rape (sub)culture. I have no direct experience with it, but then I live in the sticks and don’t get out much :).
Thanks for listening and trying to understand my argument (it took two hours to write, and I apologise for its length :). It’s appreciated.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:05 pm
…
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Wow, I would so want to live in a world where that was true. Fuck, in this world, all I can think of was the time a while ago back when Pharyngula was on ScienceBlogs when I was talking about my own sexual assault (relatively minor compared to what a lot of people suffered) and someone claiming to understand that rape was bad assumed that I made up my story and proceeded to try and spend comment after comment proving how my assault “couldn’t have happened”. Again, I wish. As I wish that everyone’s assaults really could never have happened and we could live in a world where no one of any gender or any sex would have to worry about it ever happening again.
THIS!
If sex really was about procreation and nothing else, then MAAB and FAAB people wouldn’t have their most powerful sexual nerve clusters where they do. I mean seriously, the prostate inside the anus and the tip of the clitoris on the outside of the labia? We couldn’t possibly put them in worse spots if procreation were the only point of sex.
But that’s because their point is as you say, simply sex. Sex feels good for sexuals. Sex feels hotter for sexuals when its with a consensual engaged partner with strong chemistry or romantic connections. Sometimes that helps out in procreation, sometimes that helps out with making long-term created family arrangements attractive. But it’s not the point. The point is all the fucking.
Well for you all, at least. You filthy animals ;)
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:07 pm
Oh goody, the fuckwit is back. I certainly hope Paul W is going to be all impressed and happy with the mass amounts of shit we get to clean up now.
The answer to that is no. Now, answer a fucking question: why is it so important to you to protect rapists? Just answer that fucking question.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:09 pm
Cerberus:
We love you too. :)
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:13 pm
Caine, why do you think I am protecting rapists?
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:15 pm
Gonna stop you right there, because we don’t.
We really don’t accept that rape is sexual behavior.
It’s violent behavior. It’s abusive behavior. It’s social corrective behavior (with regards to it being used as a tool to enforce compliance in what is seen as an uppity person viewed as beneath one on the social hierarchy). It’s certainly wrapped in all sorts of obsessions with power.
But it is not sexual.
Sure, it happens to use sexual organs to commit the assault, but that no more makes it a sexual behavior than the Hulk picking up a car and throwing it at you makes you the victim of a driving accident.
And it is the way we conflate the tool of the crime of power with its motivation that leads directly to apologia and false assumptions.
Because a rapist uses sex to commit the abuse, it is assumed that they were motivated by sex. That they’re motivations must therefore also correlate to consensual sexual activity and thus that the rapist must surely have been confused by some “misleading” action by their victim or some “misunderstanding” on their part to the extent of the consent.
And yes, rapists abuse this false assumption all the goddamn time. My partner’s rapist (TRIGGER WARNING) used the fact that my partner had been sexually interested in the person before the rape as the tool to get her to back down from pursuing the matter in any means either legally or socially because obviously he was simply “mislead” and “misread the signs” and besides he knew she really liked it because she didn’t fight back enough and that’s what he was going to tell the cops if she tried to pursue it.
No, rapists rape because the lack of consent, the fear, the abuse gets them off. Far more than if they just consensually explored it in a fantasy in a dungeon somewhere. Because it’s not a sexual desire, it’s a desire of toxic power.
Chris Clarke:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:15 pm
1) I did something careless and wrong here, and I need to apologize. While I do like what I’ve seen of Paul W.’s writing in the past, I should not have singled out his comment for thanks without reading it much more carefully than I obviously did. I missed the passage about “sometimes victims deserve a share of the blame” through my own extremely careless reading.
It’s been a really bad month and I’ve been battling my tendency to make careless mistakes through unmedicated scattered attention. (Not intended as an excuse as much as explanation and admission.) This mistake was especially potentially hurtful. I’m sorry to all, especially those here who are especially susceptible to the harm caused by that kind of statement.
2) Bill Openthalt, go away. Last warning.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:23 pm
We have been fighting rape culture for a very long time, longer than this, even.
You fuckwits who keep defending rape culture and providing cover for rapists need to stop. Stat.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:24 pm
Cerberus:
QFFT
Might there be a sexual thrill to it? In some cases, yes. In other cases, clearly not. But it’s not about a desire for sex. To say that it’s about a desire for sex is to define sex itself in a toxic way.
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:24 pm
Chris, I have tried to argue my case in a respectful manner. I have not once argued that rape or rapists are anything else but despicable. I have not called people names, I have not insinuated they were rapists, or fuckwits. I have tried to read answers and provide reasoned arguments. I might have failed, but I think there is no reason to ban me. If you think there is, I would appreciate a short explanation. Thanks!
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:25 pm
Chris:
Thank you, Chris. We *all* make mistakes. Hell, I make them every day. It’s almost a lifestyle. Being aware of making them makes all the difference.
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
January 17th, 2013 at 8:27 pm
@bill
Get bent
Short enough for you?
Chris Clarke:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:31 pm
I’m not banning you — yet. I’m merely telling you that your participation in this thread is at an end. And I owe you no explanation whatsoever, but because I am a kind and generous person even on my worst days here’s a partial one: you’re boring.
And if you force me to delete or bunnify further comments from you, you will annoy me further. Do not do so.
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:33 pm
Bill Openthalt,
Here is the problem:
When a rape occurs, the only person at fault IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER is the rapist.
Full stop, end of story. This is not up for debate.
The statistical probability that a rape victim reports the crime to the police is small.
The statistical probability that the rape victim who reports sees the rapist arrested is small.
The statistical probability that the arrested rapist is charged with rape is small.
The statistical probability that the rapist is convicted is small.
The reason why?
Society has created whole sets of people who are “unrapable,” (i.e. free for the taking). Society has created whole sets of situations where the fact that the person who was raped was nonconsenting (or incapable of consent) is irrelevant. Society has created rules for situations where men are “entitled” to stick their penis into orifices, and anyone who objects is wrong and deserves what is coming to them. This cultural phenomenon is known as “rape culture.”
By questioning rape victims, by suggesting that that the blame for rape falls anywhere else but squarely on the shoulders of rapists, by hypothesizing about “natural urges” or whatnot, by saying that rape has anything to do with sex, by saying that such-and-such situation could have been avoided if the rape victim had done [whatever], you are perpetuating rape culture.
That is the problem.
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:40 pm
Welcome to the motherfucking shark tank.
Some chose to respond without insults, that’s their style and that’s fine. Other, like me, say fuck it and I’m calling a fuckwit a fuckwit. Both approaches are accepted but what isn’t, is telling people their way is “rude” and “wrong”. I will shout you the fuck down because this is one of the few place were rapists and rape apologist like you don’t get to rule the roost, so to speak.
So you’re argument becomes raping is in human nature because it’s in our genes? What gene is the rape gene? You’re very first comment pulled the “it’s not rape culture, it’s rape nature” and this is suppose to help your argument? WTF is wrong with you?
Bill Openthalt:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:40 pm
Paul W., OM:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:43 pm
Let me clarify the bit that several people have understandably taken exception to, though I think I addressed the issue later in the same comment, and people didn’t notice because I didn’t spell it out right there.
Or rather I did put that in, but I edited that part out because it was not strictly necessary, and was redundant with the later part. Sorry for being too terse.
I guess I wasn’t careful enough myself in writing the above, or maybe I should just shut my privileged mouth and go away.
I did not mean to imply that any of those risk factors was necessary or sufficent for a woman being raped. Lots of women get raped in lots of other circumstances, but that is a bad combination of risk factors.
The point was that in some cases, the combination of risk factors is important, and somebody does something actually imprudent and gets raped.
That does not mean that doing such things should get them raped. A woman has a moral right do do any or all of those things and not get raped.
I am not saying that most rapes result from actual imprudence, and I don’t think they do. I think the majority of rapes happen to women who are not imprudent—they’re behaving reasonably and responsibly the in the face of ubiquitous risks that entail certain entirely reasonable gambles, and sometimes they lose the gamble.
That is not a moral fault, and it’s not a fault of imprudence either. A woman who doesn’t take unreasonable or unjustified risks is still fairly likely to get raped. And that sucks hugely of course, and is in no sense her fault.
The point of the high-risk example was only to say that even if a woman actually acts imprudently and does get raped
1) it does not diminish the rapist’s,/i> moral responsibility for raping her. He is 100 percent at fault, and
2) it does not diminish society’s moral responsibility for rapes that occur because women do things they have the moral right to do, but society doesn’t make it safe to actually do them. Society is still morally to blame for most of those rapes, in a way that does not diminish the rapist’s 100 percent blame, and which assigns zero moral blame to the woman.
I was just saying that even in the minority of cases rape is caused by a woman’s imprudence, that does not make her morally to blame at all—she is not morally obliged not to do things she has the moral right to do. The rapist is still fully to blame and society usually is too—most such rapes could and should be prevented.
That is in no way inconsistent with me agreeing that it is unreasonable to blame the victim—it is actually emphasizing that very point for the minority of cases that people are most likely to blame the victim for. Even in cases of imprudence leading causally to rape, it’s wrong to morally blame the victim at all.
IMO, it is not wrong for me to acknowledge that such cases do exist and use them as an example. I am not saying such cases are common, or that people don’t overestimate how many rapes are caused by what degree of imprudence—-they’re not common, and people do tend to
1) overestimate the proportion of rapes caused by such imprudence,
2) falsely guess that a given raped woman was behaving imprudently,
3) fallaciously assign moral blame to her for the guessed-at imprudence, and
4) fallaciously diminish others’ moral blame “because it’s her fault”
And every one of those things is an error—-they’re just different errors that all too commonly occur in combination.
Does anyone disagree with any of these points? If so, please be specific, or I won’t learn anything from it.
Brevity is the soul of talking past people.
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:43 pm
Thank you Chris for admitting that. It means a lot and I appreciate it.
And Caine, I ♥ you too, for everything. Those words just flipped me. Buried in there like it’s all reasonable to assume you’re raped because you’re sexually attractive. Ugh.
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
January 17th, 2013 at 8:44 pm
yeah everyone misheard you.
Asshole
short enough now?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:45 pm
Then STOP. Right now. Jesus Jumped Up Christ, people have explained to you six ways from Sunday how you are wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s obvious there’s only room in your head for your brand of bigotry. Have a nice day and all, fuckwit. Now go away, please.
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:45 pm
? I thought I saw Bill comment @301, but there’s a different comment there now. Did he get banhammered?
Chris Clarke:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:46 pm
Just put him in “pending” while looking for the bunny video.
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
January 17th, 2013 at 8:47 pm
Paul do you think no one pointed out this confidence before? Do you think it’s helpful? Do you think you’re fucking clever?
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:47 pm
Ah. That explains why Caine and I apparently read the same comment.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:47 pm
JAL:
Yeah, I know. I’m still feeling shaky with anger over them. Just how much those few words go to perpetuating rape culture and providing shelter for rapists infuriates me to such a degree…it becomes difficult to contain that anger.
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:48 pm
Then WTF is the point of bringing it up if it doesn’t actually matter that the woman was “imprudent”? Seriously, those handy dandy list of “risky” things women shouldn’t do in order to not get raped haven’t changed a damn thing. They do nothing but make women feel responsible by saying, “I shouldn’t have been out at night like an normal adult person.”
Why is this so important for you to bring up? If it changes nothing, why make the difference between your rare rapes where the woman was “imprudent” and the vast majority of rapes where women weren’t “imprudent”, when there’s no moral difference, confuses people, and causes women to take the blame for their rapes?
vaiyt:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:48 pm
Rape apologia can’t be respectful, asshole.
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
January 17th, 2013 at 8:49 pm
imprudence fuck auto correct consentually
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:50 pm
Ing:
Yes, he does. He also thinks he floats on cloud objectivity, above all the petty concerns of us peons. It’s annoying as hell, especially dealing with this subject, given that he’s speaking from a position of privilege.
Chris Clarke:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:51 pm
Not the most placid bunny video ever for BO @301, but I thought it was apropos.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:53 pm
Paul:
What is important about it and why does it need to be discussed? Why do you feel that “it should be entirely okay under some circumstances…to say that a woman may have been raped because” of something she did?
Many people have said that I acted imprudently. Please tell me what value there is in pointing out how stupid I was for drinking with a man, alone, while wearing skimpy clothing for bed? If you disagree with that being imprudent, please tell me how you judge my behavior “prudent’ and that of a woman who walked down a dark alley “imprudent.” Tell me what good this distinction does.
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:53 pm
It is for reasons like that that FTB needs a “like” button, Chris. :D
(And yes, I get PZ’s reasons for not wanting, them, and wholeheartedly agree with them)
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:53 pm
PAUL! Stop being a privileged fuckwit with your head stuck up your ass. You are defending rape culture and rapists. If you can’t manage to work that out, after so many of us went out of our way to explain that to you, then do us a favour and shut the fuck up.
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:54 pm
Fuck.
You.
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:54 pm
Rape is never “caused by a woman’s imprudence.”
Jesus fucking christ, Paul, what the hell is wrong with you?
Shut up.
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:55 pm
Seconded.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 8:58 pm
One more time: all the onus, the prevention lists being continually placed on women does not work. Targeting rapists does work: Rape Prevention Aimed At Rapists Does Work: The “Don’t Be That Guy” Campaign
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:00 pm
You know nothing, you damned rape apologist.
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
January 17th, 2013 at 9:03 pm
anytime someone talks about rape due to women’s imprudence I want to punch them and see if they blame their bloody nose on their imprudece. for record whenever any shit goes down being the douche to say “I told u so” or the like is epic level jackassery. Your dog ran away and got hit by a truck? Your fault for being careless. that isn’t fucking helpful..it’s sadistic or callously rubbing salt in wounds
athyco:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:08 pm
You’re defending rape because you think you have the right to tell one set of thinking, rational human beings (victims of rape) why another set of thinking, rational human beings (rapists) are only doing as nature intended.
To do that, you have to ignore the many hundreds of millions of thinking, rational human beings who share that “nature” with the rapists, yet THEY DO NOT RAPE. To do that, you have to believe that rapists are on the “monster” side of the human experience. You have to ignore that there are men who would NEVER admit to a charge that included the word “rape,” but HAVE said “yes” to researchers asking about specific actions that are undoubtedly rape. You prove that this is your mindset when you say (italics mine):
And you end with a smiley. *vomit*
vaiyt:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:08 pm
@Paul,
Just stop. You’ve dug yourself a nice hole, stop digging before you can’t get out of it.
Stop right there. A woman’s imprudence doesn’t “cause” rape any more than working in a bank “caused” my mother to be staring at the barrel of a gun last year. What causes rape is the rapist. Keep the imprudence and remove the rapist, and voilà, there’s no rape.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:19 pm
Hmm, okay, I’ll take the TL challenge.
Both sides do it, take a shot.
Yeah, here’s the thing. What it was was rape-justifying or more specifically, rape-minimizing (he was creating fictional excuses for rape that just so happened to also assume that every single man should be locked up forever because of how naturally terrible they “must” be).
I really don’t give a fuck if he intended it as rape-justifying. I really couldn’t give a rat’s ass about his intentions at all, because his statements, arguments, and stated attitudes are the problem, not whether or not he has a pure soul of tarnished brass under the personal idenitification and need to minimize rape and sexual assault. It’s kind of ancillary to everything.
Oh joy. More of this.
You know what? Thanks for that moment of self-awareness. I really do appreciate it.
Well, that’s great and all, but you only get the benefit of reading that article so charitably because you are not in the targeted communities being directly dehumanized and undermined in the way he “wrote about a bad thing”. It’s a privilege you get to have, that we as members of the assumed “sex class” don’t get to enjoy.
Yes, very ambiguous… or rather not particularly, but certainly it could be weasel-worded to appear ambiguous by backdooring culture back into the discussion of the biological and pretending that was his point all along.
Yeah, but those things still come from somewhere. They are still visible. They still have reverberations that are separate from the culture they take part in. When the “natural” thing you are talking about isn’t present in the vast majority of the population it is supposed to be present in, does not react to risk or social pressure like other legitimately natural phenomenon, and has been well studied as a strongly social phenomenon but the person just wants to ignore all that?
Well, you’ll forgive us being unforgiving of the bullshit.
And so when someone comes barging in ignoring the years of data exploring how murder is affected by xenophobia, in-group enforcement, out-group punishment, an outgrowth of violent cultural markers, etc… so they can go “well, you see murder inherently stems from revenge so people who have been murdered may have played a role in egging the murderer on” to a crowd that largely consists of people who suffered the loss of loved ones to murder or people who narrowly avoided murder, you can see why many were not real big on going “aw, poor baby, you’re right, the reams of actual data are just as valid as your completely asinine and rather offensive horseshit”.
Jeebus Christos, you love to go long distances to say little at all.
So, let’s see, previous paragraph “biological and cultural“. This paragraph, “biological”. That’s the flaw. The use of the cultural and then the sudden discarding of it without justification. I guess if you really want to argue the point, I agree murder is more complex than rape and is more likely to have some mix going on.
That said, I will point out, that a LOT of impetus for murder, as well, is cultural. Who we kill, who is an “acceptable” target, etc… There is a reason that women are the people most killed in every spree shooting in modern history. There is a reason that sex workers are the favorite target for serial killers. There is a reason that trans* people are murdered at a rate of one a month in this country alone and are the number one target by percentage for hate crimes. There’s a reason so many on this list have descriptions like “dismembered”, “genitals mutilated”, or “stoned to death” on it.
And it doesn’t have anything to do with the “biological impetus to murder”.
Yeah. Yeah you can.
When a fuckwit claims he’s innocent of butchering a young woman to death because she happened to have a dick and he’s scared his buddies would find out but claims a “trans panic” defense, it’s pretty fucking clear which aspects are biological and which parts are fat juicy societal garbage.
Fuck, we have whole systems of studies just noting the difference between inherent natural biological impulses and socially conditioned behavior.
Just because you look down on those fields of studies and their accomplishments does not mean they haven’t done good work or it isn’t rather conclusive.
No. But arguments that remove the impact bigoted cultures make in murder ignores legitimately important aspects in favor of selling fictional stories about “lone wolfs” and “disconnected crazies” that often promote discrimination against multiple groups at once (the group being targeted and the mental health people who are lumped with murderers because no one wants to admit the role racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia played in a murder).
Brave man stepping on a ledge that rickety.
Except it’s been studied and the biological hypothesis has gone begging every time, but please do go on.
Wait… are you setting up a “oh, a rape being more likely to come from a trusted loved one doesn’t mean anything because that’s simply who has the most opportunity” thing, I will find a way to travel down phone lines just to slap you.
Go fuck yourself you “both sides are extreme” ignorant asshole. Feminists don’t say those things because they’re trying to make misogynists have Sad Face. They say these things because of decades upon decades of feminist study and discourse on the subject strongly demonstrating that these things are true.
Rape isn’t a natural phenomenon, it doesn’t act like other natural phenomenon. Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about domination as seen in well… every goddamn rape ever. And rape really fucking isn’t caused by women’s attractiveness.
(TRIGGER WARNING)I’m not conventionally attractive (self corrected for low-self-esteem induced internationalized fat shaming). At all. I’m fat. I don’t like fashion. I don’t like makeup. I can’t get rid of the five-o-clock shadow on my upper lip. I’m built like the shot put thrower I am and sometimes I start to get a unibrow. And someone sexually assaulted me. In public. In front of my partner and my mother. Because he knew he could get away with it. That I at the time had no socialization to expect that sort of thing and had no narrative to understand what was happening or why my partner and mom were reacting in the coded way they were.
And as for scarcity…
(TRIGGER WARNING)My partner’s rapist was sleeping with several women casually at the time he assaulted my partner. On the night he assaulted her he had a willing sexual partner literally throwing herself on him for a good tumble. Instead he decided to stalk my partner into a separate room and shove his hand down her pants and started grabbing until she stopped struggling.
These things are not uncommon narratives. They’re the default. They’re the expected. And they’re the expected because these statements aren’t the result of privileged assholes spouting the culture’s line. They’re hard-lived experiences by those who’ve been on the front-lines of a cultural disease we don’t even want to talk about.
God, the more I do this, the more I want to punch you.
Oh, you are going nowhere good with this line of fault.
Dude, you are literally trying to weasel-word yourself into a statement you know you don’t really want to end up standing behind. Just turn the fuck back and we can all pretend you’re not going where you’re-
Again, you are setting up a mindset of victim blaming through way too much fapping over an intro Philosophy class. You really don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re about to say something that you are not nearly as skilled as you think to pull off.
STOP NOW.
Well, that might be a theoretical possibility in our infinite universe, but damn boy did you complete FUCK IT UP here.
This is vile victim-blaming garbage and having the faintest veneer of self-awareness does not detract from the social origins of this automatic assumption or how it fits into the larger culture where women’s rapes are legally erased because of bullshit lines of thought like this.
I’m done with this overwrought pile of dreck. Go fuck yourself Paul. Go fuck yourself.
Improbable Joe:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:23 pm
Paul, you could have just typed that you’re a misogynistic rape apologist and saved yourself the time, since that’s what you’ve announced with your posts.
athyco:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:27 pm
See, I knew Paul was trying to say that he didn’t believe the woman’s actions were causing rapes. He did say “mutually exclusive causally,” after all.
What you don’t get, Paul, is that saying such a thing to a rape victim won’t stop him/her from thinking of the blame (probably to an extent that would horrify you) or becoming angry that you’d want to mention it, no matter how many disclaimers of not assigning moral blame come with it.
I get to say if I was imprudent for letting my rapist into my house rather than telling him to get the hell off my porch before I called the cops. ONLY I get to say it, because only I know exactly what went into that decision and how I’ve dealt with it since. You simply cannot read my mind to know if I’ll hear your oh-so-cautious suggestion as an echo of the bitter condemnation of self that I’m still working through. It would be irresponsible to cast a victim back into that irrational shame; you’d do so as a privileged asshole.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:32 pm
Paul @302
First rule of shovels, man.
You do not have nearly enough cultural awareness, feminist awareness, and rhetorical skill to thread the needle you think you are threading. And it’s made so much worse by the fact that you think you are threading a needle when what you really are doing is being hoodwinked by cultural baggage into just poorly rephrasing extremely damaging and hurtful cultural bigotries and assumptions about rape and rape victims.
The exact responsibility of any rape victim for their rape is 0. Because there is literally nothing they could have done. (TRIGGER WARNING) My partner during her rape (or I should say one of her rapes because of another one in which a boyfriend tried to slip his dick into her ass while she was sleeping) wore jeans and a t-shirt, avoided getting overly drunk and was in an area with other people who could see her. When things got uncomfortable there, because the rapist was red-flagging, she got up and removed herself to another room. When pursued, she tried to extricate herself. When assaulted, she tried to move his hand, she squirmed in an uncomfortable manner and gave panicked body language and verbally told him to stop. When he persisted, she tried to continue telling him to stop and continued to try to escape. When she ran out of options, she tried to shock him out of his power fantasy and use it to create an opportunity to escape. You know what she believed about herself and her rape after doing all that?
(TRIGGER WARNING) “I deserved it”. “I did something wrong”. “The whole event was my fault”. And it’s because we in our society dump so much victim-blaming on rape victims that it’s the first avenue their minds often take when they are searching for some thought any thought to use to try and desperately regain the agency so cruelly robbed of them.
(TRIGGER WARNING)I even did it to myself after my assault, being down on myself for not knowing the social cues that would have gotten me out of the situation before it happened.
No matter how you try and phrase your crap, it’s hampered by that reality and that complete failure to understand just how deep in a hole you are right now.
Chris Clarke:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:37 pm
Saying “Hi” is imprudent.
Catching a cab: imprudent.
Taking the bus: imprudent.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:42 pm
Athyco:
This is another extremely important point to highlight. Thanks to rape culture, and further back into patriarchy which has fostered the notion of women as subhuman, *all* focus on rape has been placed on victims. On women, in particular. It is so drilled into every woman’s head, from an early age, that if something “bad” happens to her, it is, somehow or another, her fault.
You shouldn’t have been dressed like that.
You shouldn’t have been out unescorted.
You shouldn’t have been drinking.
You shouldn’t have been out after dark.
You shouldn’t have been in that part of town.
You shouldn’t have opened the door.
You shouldn’t have been sleeping around.
You shouldn’t have dated an asshole.
You shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, You shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, You shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, You shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, You shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, You shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, whatever.
Thanks to that, and people like you, Paul, we get to be reminded, all the time, that yes, it was our fault. Our fault. Our fault. Our fault. Our fault. There’s no FUCK YOU big enough to be aimed your way, Paul. The torture and anguish that rape victims go through, struggling for years, for lifetimes, to truly realize that it wasn’t our fault is nothing more than a throwaway line in your morality play.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:43 pm
Oh and THIS
Specifically needs to be countered and hard.
No. No damn rapes are caused by a woman’s “imprudence”. Is it too damn much to ask for that women be allowed to be people without expecting rape to happen as if it was some goddamn morality play boogeyman?
No, no woman causes their rape. Even if they went out in the streets naked, went to the sketchiest bar right down the street from the local frat house, drank all the alcohol in open containers and called their old boyfriend who they dumped for having too many red flags immediately before passing out.
Because that woman would be perfectly safe if there wasn’t a rapist around to rape her. FULL FUCKING STOP!
And let me just add, that men have no similar restrictions assumed on their behaviors. If Shmitty wants to get piss drunk in a toga at a frat party surrounded by sober sorority girls, no one is going to expect that he ends up raped. But for women, going outside in a short skirt, drinking, being in a place without a MAYUN to protect them, or… Fuck, let’s be honest, having the bad luck to be raped no matter what they did, is seen as an invitation to rape, something she caused by acting “unladylike” and “inviting trouble”.
And that. THAT is so much unbelievable bullshit and it needs to fucking stop cropping up if we’re ever going to start not sucking as a society.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:56 pm
Chris:
There’s a handy dandy victim blaming tumblr to help with just these problems. Never again must fluffy lady brains be troubled with having to keep all these imprudent activities straight. Kate Harding will do it for you!
Paul W., OM:
January 17th, 2013 at 9:59 pm
Chris:
I only just saw a comment that you posted before I posted my last one. I should have refreshed.) This is mostly redundant with the last one but I want to directly explicitly address this serious problem:
Where did I say that? I may have said something that sounded like that, or I might have inadvertently said something that means that, but I certainly didn’t mean to say that in the sense it apparently means!
Two of my major points are:
1) It simply isn’t a matter of apportioning “shares” of the blame, especially not between the victim and the rapist. You don’t divide the moral blame. The rapist is 100 percent to blame, and some other people may be 100 percent to blame too, if they aid, abet, conspire, encourage, allow, fail to prevent, etc. That does not diminish the rapist’s full responsibility. (That’s what the mob boss / hit man analogy was about.)
2) Irrespective of that, the victim is not morally to blame at all. People have a clear right not to be raped, even if they take imprudent risks. (Which is not a cause of most rapes anyhow.) They might be imprudent for doing so, but still not morally to blame, and not a “cause” of the rape that diminishes anybody else’s responsibility for rape. At all.
Please give me a literal quote of what you interpreted that way, because I don’t recognize that as what I said. At all. It’s more nearly the opposite of what I mean.
If I did manage to say something that actually means that, it was certainly a terrible thing to say and I apologize abjectly and profusely for fucking up.
Improbable Joe:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:02 pm
Keep on digging, Paul… you’re still acting as a rape apologist. Over and over again, even when people are giving you specific correction. Your not-pology doesn’t remotely help either.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:04 pm
PAUL! TRY READING OTHER PEOPLE’S POSTS RESPONDING TO YOUR VICTIM BLAMING AND OTHER IDIOCIES.
I’M DAMN TIRED OF YOU IGNORING EVERY SINGLE RAPE VICTIM IN THIS THREAD EXCEPT FOR CHRIS.
YOU SAID IT IN EVERY ONE OF YOUR FUCKWITTED POSTS. THEY HAVE BEEN QUOTED, EXTENSIVELY. YOU ARE BEING A RAPE APOLOGIST. STOP. NOW.
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:16 pm
QFFT.
Nepenthe:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:17 pm
Sleeping in ugly-ass pajamas in a locked room stone-cold-sober with one’s fiance: imprudent.
I mean, what the fuck are you talking about with this “imprudent risks” shit. Are many people being raped while they ride a homemade “hot air balloon” composed of lawn furniture and latex helium balloons? While they bungee jump with frayed ropes?
Rev. BigDumbChimp:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:18 pm
Paul, for you.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:22 pm
Seriously. WTF, Paul? We waded through your fucking walls of text. The least you could do is read what the fuck anyone other than Chris has written, because we make it really goddamn obvious exactly WHAT YOU SAID.
Just look at what you wrote here and figure out the problem. It’s easy, since it’s been pointed out numerous times.
Esteleth, Ultra-PC Feminist Harpy Out To Destroy Secularism:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:22 pm
I am so, so tempted to killfile Paul.
WTF.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:27 pm
Esteleth:
I want his OM stripped. It makes me feel filthy to share one with him.
Chris Clarke:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:28 pm
Paul, I’ll just say that I think the notion of causal blame being distinct from moral blame is useless, and beyond that refer you to the many able rebuttals you have at your fingertips already, especially but by no means limited to athyco @265 et. seq.,
sunny12:
January 17th, 2013 at 10:41 pm
Seconded.
Bringing up the concept of “imprudence” is of no use whatsoever except to bolster support for more insidious rape apologetics – even if it’s not intended. I mean, hey, when it comes down to it, we might as well say that simply being born is a case of “causal” blame for assault, since infants are raped as well. Seriously, why even go down that path at all?
Dalillama, Schmott Guy:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:17 pm
Paul
I haven’t time to compose a full response right now, so here’s the short form:
Yes. Yes, you should. You should abjectly apologize to the people who’ve been trying to educate you first, though.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:24 pm
sunny12:
Around here, we’re fond of saying intent is not magic. We often provide a helpful link to that very subject. Anyway, intent is given no quarter here, and Paul W is well aware of that.
Gen, Uppity Ingrate.:
January 17th, 2013 at 11:59 pm
Thirded. I was thinking as I read this “so if I just wasn’t born, I wouldn’t have been raped”. And I’m echoing the question here: why is it so important for you to go down this road, Paul? What are you hoping to achieve with this “nuanced”, “balanced” (*spit*) view? Because I put it to you that what you want to achieve and what you are busy achieving may not be in the same universe.
Gen, Uppity Ingrate.:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:03 am
Also, I just want to quote, to Paul specifically, what Kate Harding said so brilliantly (from the Don’t Get Raped Tumblr, own emphasis):
Down here on the ground, far away from your intellectual ivory towers of philosphy, in the real world where most of us have to live and struggle with this shit every day, do you think that your insistence on focusing on some philosophical ivory tower difference between “moral” and “causal” blame is having the effect of disrupting the status quo as described above, or reinforcing the status quo as described above?
Giliell, professional cynic:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:55 am
Cerberus
The last time some guy forced his sexuality onto me (jerking off over the house intercom) I was fat, dressed in a winter coat and holding the door for my two children in the afternoon. I’m waiting for Paul to tell me exactly how imprudent I was to make the poor sod watch me from his window and then go and force his wanking upon me. Sadly Bill won’t be able to tell me how that increased the guy’s chance of procreation.
And I really don’t expect any of them to spend one second thinking about how I do with the knowledge that somebody who doesn’t respect my boundaries is living in this house with me.
+++
Oh, and for those “imprudent” things:
I’ve done them all
Getting so drunk/drugged that I had a complete blackout? Did that.
Dancing a lot in skimpy clothing, kissing the guy like mad, giving his dick a good rub and then chickening out because I realized that it wasn’t what I wanted? Yep.
Sharing a bed with a guy I hardly knew because hey, the bed was much nicer than the floor? That’s me.
None of those things got me raped. Because the people I was with weren’t rapists. But it’s good to know that if something had happened Paul wold have told me that it was totally not my fault it was still kind of my fault because I could prevented a poor guy from ruining his life if I had done something different.
Paul W., OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:58 am
Holy cow.
I thought this could get hairy, but this is well beyond what I expected. I am overwhelmed.
I am astonished at how man people seem to think I’m saying things I’m trying as hard as I can to make clear are false.
I’m shocked that some people I consider friends and thought knew I wasn’t a total dumbfuck or total asshole seem to find it so easy to misinterpret what I’m saying so thoroughly, despite efforts to prevent those very misunderstandings.
And I’m disappointed that various people seem to be criticizing me for what seem to me to be contradictory reasons, but are happy to criticize me anyhow, and not worry about disagreements as to why.
Those things make it hard for me to know where to begin answering people, or whether to give up and slink away, as some people want. (Please, I’m, not asking for more votes—I don’t think that will help.)
This kind of thing is the main reason I rarely comment here anymore, and more often comment at places like B&W, where people (including Ophelia) are more inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt until they’re clear on what I’m actually saying, and usually do think it is worth saying. (And it’s usually just a smaller group, so it’s less exponentially overwhelming when things start to get weird.)
Those things also make it hard for me to give any kind of sincere and satisfactory apology because I’m pretty sure at least some of the criticisms are based on weird misunderstandings, I honestly don’t know which criticisms are right in a way I don’t yet understand, and I honestly don’t quite understand what I’m supposed to have done wrong, besides being a privileged dumbass who shouldn’t think he’s qualified or competent to speak on the subject.
I am not ignoring anyone. I am just overwhelmed. (And frankly seriously depressed.)
I prioritized responding to Chris for a couple of reasons:
1) because he’s made some simple statements I could clearly see how to respond to (if only to ask “Where I did I say that?”).
2) because it’s his thread, and what the host thinks does matter—e.g., if he thinks I should give up and go away, I think that should matter more than if someone else does.
I will answer athyco next, because she’s been waiting the longest, but address some issues out of order. (And in the process try to address issues raised by others too.)
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:08 am
Paul W:
Let’s get one thing very clear, before you even start up. You have not been, nor are being misunderstood. That is the same song we hear from every single person who has played the rape apologetics game here.
Look at what you did – you turned this last post into a fucking lament over poor you being misunderstood and it’s why you rarely comment here, oh the humanity! For Chrissakes, get down off that bleeding cross.
Giliell, professional cynic:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:21 am
Paul
Go to Michael Shermer, he’ll have a sympathetic ear for you
John Morales:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:23 am
[meta]
Paul W, to assume at least some regulars haven’t understood your position and its basis would be foolish.
(Time to stop repeating it and start addressing objections to it)
Sophia, Michelin-starred General of the First Mediterranean Iron Chef Batallion:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:30 am
Do we really need to state this again?
The ONLY cause of rape is the presence and actions of a RAPIST. Just as the only cause of theft is the presence and actions of a thief, or the cause of murder is the presence and actions of a murderer.
Just because it’s rape doesn’t give it a free pass. People dressing provocatively do not cause rape, people raping causes rape. This is NOT HARD.
We don’t blame the fucking money when someone embezzles from a company fund.
“It was sitting there in the account, just being so tempting at me with its gigantic numbers!. It’s human nature! Humans simply can’t control their greed when confronted with staggering amounts of money. We need to cover up the numbers, have them seem modest so I can go about my business without being tempted.”
No.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:34 am
Paul:
If everyone is saying the same thing to you, Paul, then it’s time to take a deep breath and look at yourself and realize that you’ve been acting the dumbfuck asshole.
Or is it that you think that you being completely and utterly wrong about something, which led you to be an asshole is an impossibility?
Dalillama, Schmott Guy:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:41 am
Ok, Paul, I had a slightly different response planned, but the other people did the whole point by point rebuttal thing way better than I can. So I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m just going to generally explain why you got the reaction you did, since per your last comment you don’t understand, and you’ve apparently got a history of being reasonable, hence the OM, so I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt as an honest interlocutor.
Basically, in all your philosophizing you stated two important, and false, things, for which people are justly pissed off at you, especially since you chose to continue to repeat them, over and over, in the face of many people pointing out that they were wrong. So here it is again, in very simple terms: 1) You stated that victims shared in the responsibility for their rape. This statement is universally false and damaging. No amount of equivocating about different kinds of blame changes that. 2) You used as a premise that certain behaviors/characteristics increase the likelihood of being victimized, other than existing in a space where a)there is a rapist who b)thinks he can get away with it, neither of which are in any way under the control of the victim. In other words, this is effectively a restatement of (1), but actually adds additional levels of being false and harmful. and 3)You are repeating exactly the same harmful myths that active rape-apologists use and that are constantly repeated as a buttress of rape culture. Intent is not magic, and by repeating these false and damaging myths, you are not just aligning yourself with rape apologists, you have in fact become one yourself, wittingly or not. In short, if you are being honest with us, the person who does not understand the arguments you are using is you, and you are displaying obnoxious ignorance. Since this has been explained to you repeatedly, and in a variety of ways, the correct course of action, as I noted above, is to first stop enabling rape culture with your bullshit philosophizing, second apologize profusely for behaving as a rape-enabling asshole, and third shut the fuck up until you have the slightest clue what you’re talking about. Any other course of action puts you deeper into rape apologetics, and basically confirms the opinion of all the people here who are calling you an asshole. I actually agree with them, but what the hell, I was going to write a post anyway, I may as well give you another chance to get it right and exceed everyone’s expectations.
mildlymagnificent:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:51 am
Misunderstandings? I won’t deal with the rape apologetics because others have done it much better than I ever could. Your greatest misunderstanding is that there is any way at all to be balanced or neutral or dispassionate on this subject. Any way at all.
There are plenty of other topics where there. is. no. middle. ground. This is not unusual or special, let alone unique, to sexual assault. Any subject where science or similar research has reached firm conclusions is not suitable subject material for ‘balanced’ journalism or for ‘above the fray’ disengaged discourse. There is no neutral or middle ground. There is a whole library of research material in this area. There are plenty of anecdotes that are not part of the research – just here from this very small group of women who are willing to talk about their experiences. (And might I point out right here and now that remarks like yours are a severe disincentive to other women to do the same. You might have heard more of this kind of thing from other women throughout your life you know if we, as a general rule, didn’t expect to be faced with your kind of “rational” inexpert probing of all the possible things we might have done to bring groping, exposure and outright assault on ourselves.)
I’m not sure where you think you can go with this. But the whole project is doomed if you think that your approach is in any way relevant or appropriate to the subject.
Give it up. Yesterday.
sunny12:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:55 am
You mean this one?
http://genderbitch.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/intent-its-fucking-magic/
Yeah I love it – it makes the point pretty damned well. And it’s absolutely right; ultimately the intent doesn’t matter, if the damage the statement causes is exactly the same.
Dalillama bove is absolutely right…it doesn’t matter if you try to distinguish between different types of blame, because blame is the wrong tack altogether! No focus at all should be focused on the victim in this respect. Saying a woman was raped because she was carelessly dressed bears exactly the same weight as saying that she was raped because she just happened to exist!
Really, the only correct thing to say is that a person was raped…because someone else raped them. Full stop. I wish…more people would get this. :/
sunny12:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:55 am
*Dalillama above
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 3:05 am
mildlymagnificent:
QFMFT.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 3:48 am
sunny12:
That’s the one. :)
Paul W., OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:54 am
athyco @ 329:
If this means what I think it means, it’s important, and I suspect other people not seeing what I mean is the cause of a whole bunch of people thinking I’m making the kind of asshole victim-blaming argument that I’m actually arguing against.
When I say that something causes something else, I mean that in a very basic low-level sense, not that the cause is an interesting one or a useful one for a given purpose.
Consider a perfect break in pool. We would often talk about that having a cause—the break shot is the cause of the break. But that’s not the only cause of the break—it’s just the cause we’re usually interested in when we’re talking about playing pool, but lots of other things contribute equally to the occurrence of a perfect break—all the other balls have to be in the right places and have the right resiliency, the table has to be level, and so on. Each of them is equally necessary for the perfect break to happen—change any one of them much, and a perfect break will not occur.
So literally, at a low—and admittedly usually very uninteresting level—a perfect break has dozens of causes—the presence of the balls, their initial positions, details of the felt and so on. Each of those things causes the perfect break just as much as the properties of the shot—if you change any one of them much, the perfect break doesn’t happen.
That’s usually a stunningly boring observation that’s admittedly not worth making for most purposes, because we all pretty much know that and can safely ignore it to play pool—we can pretend that it’s the cue shot that uniquely causes the perfect break. It’s the interesting cause to talk about that we’d likely call the cause.
The observation about a woman “causing” her own rape in that irrelevant, low-level geeky sense often becomes annoyingly relevant in rape discussions because other people bring it up and use it to make fallacious arguments.
I’m not gratuitously bringing it up because I want to make those arguments myself, as some people seem to assume. (But you don’t seem to.) I’m bringing it up because I want to correctly explain how and why those arguments are actually fucking wrong.
I tend think that’s worth doing because one way we fail to persuasively rebut crappy arguments is by failing to address the actual flaw, in ways that people we’re arguing against do notice and make us sound wrong, e.g., like we’re denying the obvious fact that there can be causally contributing factors, when in fact what we’re only denying that those are the particular interesting sort of contributing factors that could put moral blame on the victim and be mitigating factors for the rapist.
Whether I’m right about that or not—maybe I can’t turn this into a more effective strategy for countering actual arguments from actual rape apologists—I tend to think it’s worth understanding where the problem with the argument actually is, exactly, amongst ourselves. (Or am I a presumptious outsider to even say things like “we”?) And I think a major problem is in the ambiguity in the word “cause” and related causal terms like “contributing factor,” which do often come up in real arguments and IMO do often cause real problems in arguments.
For example, suppose some rape apologist does bring up a woman’s alleged imprudence as a contributing factor to the rape, implying that it mitigates the guilt of the rapist.
What should we do? Of course we shouldn’t grant the point that she was imprudent if there wasn’t good evidence for that, and may argue that she wasn’t, but the more general point is that even if she was, it doesn’t fucking matter to the rapist’s guilt. Her behavior may or may not have been among the causes of the rape, and may even have fully caused it in the low-level, morally irrelevant sense, along with a bunch of other irrelevant stuff, but just denying that it could have been a contributing factor doesn’t work—it could have, unless we know otherwise.
The big problem is that such contributing factors are important for some purposes, so people do inevitably notice them—e.g., women notice things like being propositioned while cornered in elevators at 4 AM precisely because that sort of situation could be a contributing factor to a rape. A lot of people have been talking about causal contributing factors around here for over a year now.
Such a thing clear can be important, is often salient if the subject of rape comes up at all, and inevitably often does get brought up, and we have to deal with it, even though we shouldn’t have to. It should be irrelevant for purposes of assigning blame, but the fact that other people do think about it and do tend to think it’s therefore relevant means it’s relevant to us in a different sense. We have to talk about it, or talk around it, one way or another.
We can’t believably deny that such causally contributing factors do exist, because they clearly do, and everybody knows it because they’re important for other purposes.
IMO the right argument is the truth that I think most of us actually agree on, even if we use the ambiguous term “cause” differently—that yes, such causally contributing factors on the part of a woman can of course exist, but they’re irrelevant for assigning moral blame. A woman doing something (allegedly or actually) imprudent just isn’t an excuse for raping her, full stop.
I thought we could all easily agree on that, but some people seem to think I’m saying something pretty much the opposite, or headed that way. I’m not.
I think I do get that, at least to a greater extent than you may realize.
I certainly don’t think we should gratuitously bring up the issue of a woman’s behavior being a potential causal contributing factor to her rape. (See above.)
I tend think it’s at least worth discussing amongst ourselves because the actual rape apologists will inevitably bring it up sometimes, and we should be clear on what the ambiguity is and how to address it. I.e., show that people are drawing the wrong inferences about blame from true but irrelevant facts about causation in the boring low-level sense.
I understand that up to a point. I would try not to say or suggest that any actual person is imprudent for any particular thing, and was trying to talk about imprudence only insofar as necessary to argue that it’s irrelevant to placing moral blame.
I’m not sure what you think I’m oh-so-cautiously suggesting, and whether I was actually suggesting it, or misunderstood to be suggesting it when I was just trying to say that it was irrelevant to placing moral blame, and had to mention it to do so. Or are you saying that even mentioning it that way, and even for that purpose, automatically “suggests” it simply by raising the subject?
If it’s the latter, that seems pretty extreme. Are you saying other people here can talk about it, but I can’t?
To me that seems like sorta like saying that I not only shouldn’t say the actual n-word, I shouldn’t mention the n-word by saying “the n-word,” even if the very point I’m making is that people shouldn’t use the n-word, and giving a reason why they shouldn’t use the n-word.
Actually I can understand that in some cases. If there’s no good reason to be discussing the n-word, it can be a weird thing to bring up and start talking about. People may wonder why you’re doing it, and draw the wrong inferences, and just be made uncomfortable. (Why does this white boy keep talking about that ugly word?)
I am somewhat sensitive to that issue, in a way that maybe I’m insufficiently sensitive to issues about talking about rape and blame.
But likewise, I usually wouldn’t gratuitously raise the issue of rape and issues of assignment of blame for rape, myself. I know it’s a fraught and painful subject for people who’ve experienced it and/or live in fear of experiencing it, so it’s a subject I wouldn’t broach without good reason, and I don’t recall ever raising the subject myself. I have lurked in similar threads and generally refrained from commenting in them, even when I had what seemed to me to be worthwhile things to say, but wasn’t sure it was advisable for me to say them.
In that basic respect, this seemed to be about as good a thread to talk about that sort of thing in as I was ever going to find—I didn’t need to bring up any major issues, because people were already talking about rape, and specifically victim-blaming and spurious mitigating factors, and I didn’t really think I was saying anything that radically different from what most people were already saying.
John Morales:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:03 am
Paul W., you seem to have missed Cerberus @327.
Paul W., OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:21 am
I have to address this and similar statements that keep being made of why I’m such an intolerable asshole who got such a well-deserved flaming:
NO I FUCKING WELL DID NOT. I SAID THE VERY FUCKING OPPOSITE OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND I KEEP GETTING ACCUSED OF HAVING SAID THAT. STOP IT.
You misunderstood something. That may be largely my fault somehow, but you and a number of other people have got me astonishingly seriously wrong.
Sure it is, if somebody actually says it, and it actually means in context what it clearly appears to mean here. I’m pretty sure I didn’t say that, and didn’t mean to say anything that meant that, though maybe I fucked up and managed to say something that meant that when I meant something else. It’s possible.
Seriously, people, do not tell me what I said without quoting me verbatim or telling me where exactly where I allegedly said it. Do not put words into my mouth and for fuck’s sake stop repeating this same accusation that I’ve already denied without substantiating it.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:22 am
Paul:
You are, at this point, willfully refusing to see what you have done and continue to do. I simply can’t reach any other conclusion. You are so fucking fond of your ‘sittin’ high on a cloud’ objective philosophizing that you simply don’t give a shit about your repeating rape apologetics over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over in rafts of text.
You have pretty much worn out any goodwill, Paul, so don’t be expecting much on the part of all those you have offended and continue to offend. It’s rather obvious you’re much more enamored of your sophistry than you are in any actual attempt to understand what other people are saying.
Maureen Brian:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:34 am
Some of this – you know who you are, gang – has made truly impressive reading. Thanks.
______
Paul W,
Can you come up with a single, peer-reviewed study which confirms the assumption you refuse to have challenged? That’s the one where the behaviour of the victims can be proved to impact on how many people are raped, where they are raped or even who is raped. Because if you can’t you’ve spent an awful lot of time dribbling on about it.
As others have noted you’d have been better devoting that time to reading the contributions of those for whom this is not just an exercise in ex post facto rationalisation, also known as the rape culture.
Paul W., OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:36 am
John,
I didn’t miss 327; I just haven’t gotten to it.
I thought there were a lot of misunderstandings in that comment and do not even know where to start.
Is there something in particular in it that you think is right and good that I have revealed that I missed (or didn’t get)? Can you tell me where I revealed that? Specific verbatim quotes would be good.
sunny12:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:42 am
I know what you’re trying to say Paul – your whole argument can be condensed down to “even if a woman is imprudent it doesn’t matter anyway because the rapist has all the moral blame.”
However, what I’m taking issue with is the fact that there’s no such thing as a woman (or man or anyone else) even being “imprudent” and “causing” the rape to happen. The crux of the problem lies in these quotes right here:
You’re drawing a line between “rapes that happen to women who are behaving reasonably” and “rapes that happen to women who aren’t behaving reasonably.” There’s no “right or wrong” way to go about doing that, because it’s not up to you to draw that distinction in the first place.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:43 am
Maureen:
I think we should call ourselves The Invisible Pixels™, given how often we’re completely ignored and dismissed. :D
mildlymagnificent:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:01 am
The Invisible Pixels.
I’m pretty sure there are now more excellent band names on this site than the requisite musicians to play/sing the necessary parts. Though I suppose this particular band need never try to appear anywhere …..
‘cos nobody will listen anyway.
Giliell, professional cynic:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:08 am
Paul W.
That word, imprudent, take it and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.
It’s the same fucking old “what you have to do in order not to get raped” bullshit I’ve been having since I learned the word rape.
“Of course you should be able to be out after dark, no, I’m not saying it was your fault, but really, it was imprudent. If you hadn’t been out after dark it wouldn’t have happened”
“Really, what were you thinking parking your car there? No, I’m not saying you’re to blame, but that was so stupid of you, you were very lucky that he didn’t manage to rape you. If you had parked your car in the lighted city carpark it wouldn’t have happened.”
“No, it was not ok for him to grab up your skirt and grope you, but if you had worn trousers it wouldn’t have happened!”
Those statements above, they are not made up. They were made to me by friends and family as a reaction to me telling them about assaults and attempted assualts that happened to me.
They shut me up pretty much. I never ever told anybody in meatspace again about the guy who went after me in the carpark after that was the reaction of my best friend. I most certainly didn’t go to the police and tell them that there’s somebody trying to assault women. Because if my friend reacted like that, how would police officers react?
And you know what, those people are certainly right in one aspect: If I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t parked there, if I hadn’t worn that skirt it wouldn’t have happened. To me.
The bastards would simply have gone looking for another victim.
Until we’re at the point where women have to police their own lives to an extend that they face more restrictions than a 5 yo (Did you read the article???).
By agreeing that a woman’s “imprudent” behaviour made that rape possible you’re puting the burden on women. You’re silencing them. You make them look to themselves for the problem.
mildlymagnificent:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:18 am
“isn’t an excuse” ??!! There is no excuse for rape …. ever.
There are plenty of people, even in the rightly despised catholic church, who will say it is morally right for someone to steal food if they have no other way of feeding their children. Many people will say it’s right, or at least justified, to kill someone who is attacking you or someone else with deadly force. In both those cases you may have to face criminal proceedings and if you’re convicted of something, your sentence will be reduced because of those mitigating circumstances.
There is no such excuse for rape. There is no justification.
bradleybetts:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:27 am
@Paul W
I wasn’t going to wade through your bullshit, other people have done a good enough job, but this infuriated me so I have to.
“IMO that means that it should be entirely okay under some circumstances, if you’re careful about how you do it, to say that a woman may have been raped because she was conventionally “beautiful” and dressed “sexily” and “carelessly” walking alone at night through a dark alley at night in a “bad neighborhood.” It may have been “her fault” in (only) the sense that she was imprudent, not morally at fault, and that would in no way get the rapist off the hook for being 100 percent morally and legally responsible for raping her, as I think he is. And that wouldn’t prevent fully blaming rape culture for the vast majority of such rapes, too, as I think we should.”
Here’s the issue; it’s perfectly fine to say to someone “That’s a bad area, don’t go down any dark alleys”. Going into dark secluded areas on your own is always a bad plan. It’s not fine to say “Don’t go out in a short skirt” or any of the other bullshit you just pulled because, and pay attention here, PEOPLE DO NOT GET RAPED FOR LOOKING PRETTY. It’s about power, you douche, the (to my knowledge) entire psychiatric community is united in this belief, and let’s be honest they know better than you.
Going down a dark alley on your own in an area you know to be high-crime is “imprudent”. But short skirts, being “conventionally beautiful”, being drunk, being “careless” (oh, that one annoyed me) is fuck all to do with it. If someone is stalking you with the intention of raping you then they will find a way to do it, regardless of how careful you are.
Here’s the bottom line Paul, and get this through your skull, it is the rapist’s fault. Theirs and theirs alone. Now for Jeebus sake be quiet.
bradleybetts:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:31 am
Oh shit, I am so angry I phrased all of the above really badly. I can’t be arsed to clarify. Paul, fuck off.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:35 am
mildlymagnificent:
But don’t you see? He said it wasn’t an excuse! All us invisible pixels are just misunderstanding him. That whole insistence on bringing up imprudent behaviour on the part of those who are raped, why that’s just plain common sense! How is it that we don’t know that?! Really, there’s just no talking to those of us with pink fluff in our skulls rather than proper brains. It’s a shame, really.
:near fatal eyeroll:
bradleybetts:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:40 am
“You got raped? In an alley? Well, you shouldn’t have gone down the alley then! I mean, you’re conventionally beautiful, so that was rather imprudent of you, wasn’t it? Silly female. What? You were wearing a skirt? And makeup? You slut!”
*Head explodes*
carlie:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:47 am
Paul,
the concepts of “causal blame” and “imprudence” are only relevant when you’re talking about actions leading to consequences just through physics or other natural laws. If I walk onto a glacier that is too thin, it is imprudence and I am causally to blame if I fall through. This can be extended to animal behavior: if I threaten a dog, I am being imprudent and I have at least some of the causal blame if it bites me. Humans are not in this category. The whole point of us and our brains is that we make decisions on what we do, and we understand the effects of what we do. You are treating rapists as a force of nature, or as an unthinking animal: press button and get response. Place trigger in front of target and get expected result. That statement, that a “beautiful woman” is being “imprudent” by being alive in the presence of a guy, is assuming that he has no control over his own actions. It assumes that the result will naturally follow from the trigger, no matter what, so the woman is being imprudent by “tempting fate”. She is not tempting fate. There is no fate. There is only a man there who is making a conscious decision whether or not to rape her.
carlie:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:54 am
Paul, what you’re saying is that a woman can be told “Well, you’re conventionally beautiful, so shit’s going to happen to you. It would be nice if it didn’t, but men, you know them, they just can’t think farther than their dicks, so when they rape you don’t feel too bad, it’s just because you are so pretty they couldn’t help themselves.”
Or: “Well, you did go out alone and unprotected, so shit’s going to happen to you. It would be nice if it didn’t, but men, you know them, they just can’t think farther than their dicks, so when they rape you don’t feel too bad, it’s just because you thought it was ok to go out alone, and they just can’t help pouncing on someone vulnerable enough to be by themselves.”
Do you see how vile this is?
Paul W., OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:25 am
Bradleybetts,
OK, you’re one of several people who’ve criticized that passage in similar terms and been enraged about the “conventionally beautiful” thing, which was there for a different reason than everybody thinks, but maybe I shouldn’t have put in in there, and I do need to address what people are saying about it.
I was a bit sloppy about that list of risk factors because whether they are actually the most important risk factors is not very important to the point I was making, which is this:
and as an important corollary:
If you disagree with either of those points, please say which, explicitly.
If you don’t disagree, please acknowledge that we are in agreement on two very important points, or explain how they’re not very important.
Seriously. What the fuck, dude?
Now to explain the “conventional beauty” thing.
Part of all of this that a lot people seem to miss is that I am largely talking about and critiquing common rape apologist arguments, and explaining why I think they recur, which has to do with why they’re actually wrong. I am not making those arguments myself. I am not a rape apologist, and I am fucking sick of people saying I am.)
For that purpose, it’s relevant what rape apologists say as well as what is actually true, because I’m criticizing what they say.
I know that physical appearance is not nearly as big a factor in a woman’s chance of getting raped—nowhere near things like opportunity—but I was under the impression that it is a minor factor, statistically. I could be wrong, and if so, that’s fine with me and I’m sincerely sorry if I perpetuated something that’s just a myth. I am invalidly factor in, whether it’s actually true or not.
I did not mean to imply that “conventionally pretty” girls get raped a lot more than non-pretty ones do, so less pretty ones don’t have so much to worry about. My impression all along was that the actual numbers were comparable.
This is one of about a zillion examples of things that people have assumed I say for nefarious, shitheaded reasons. (And fuck anybody in advance who says I’m just weaseling when I respond to such accusations.)
I was careless there, and maybe my reasons weren’t good or clear enough, but it’s certainly not the kind of thing anybody should be enraged or furious at me about.
(I’ll address the “imprudence” thing separately in responding to somebody else, since it seems to be another thing where several people are jumping to ridiculous conclusions about me meaning something stupid or sneaky and meaning to take it somewhere stupid and evil.)
But this is choice bullshit:
Get this through your fucking skull, asshole. I have said that it is fully the rapist’s fault over and over again, stressing that it is 100 percent the rapists fault.
Don’t you even fucking know that by now? Can you get anything through your fucking skull?
And you’re simply and stupidly wrong about it being the rapists’ fault and no one else’s, despite my making that obvious point several times. Of course other people can be guilty, too—people who aid, abet, encourage, allow, fail to prevent, etc.
Do you seriously disagree with that? If you do, then you are an apologist for rape culture. Get a clue. Rapists are not the whole problem. The fact that they are fully guilty does not mean that there isn’t more guilt to go around. But you knew that, and were just taking lazy, careless cheap shots at me, right? Try reading what I actually wrote.
Seriously, answer my fucking questions or retract your ridiculous accusations that I’ve already refuted, some of them several times. This is getting really fucking old.
Giliell, professional cynic:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:29 am
Next time: Traffic with Paul W.
Nonono, I’m not saying that it’s OK to ignore a red light or it’s the fault of the driver who got T-boned, but I only want to discuss the facts that she indeed drove a blue car. That is imprudent Also, this crossroads is known to be dangerous, there have been accidents before, so, what was she doing there at that time of day driving a blue car?
What do you mean I should stop blaming the victim?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:33 am
Paul, in case you’re still reading, there’s something else I’d like you to be aware of – all of us who have been raped or assaulted, and trying like hell to get through to you in this thread, we get to pay a price for that.
Rape changes you. It changes your life, irrevocably. Permanently. Your life is never the same. You can’t go back and get that life you had, you can’t go back and magic yourself into the person you were before you were raped. The effects vary from individual to individual, of course, but there is a great deal in common across those who are raped. Many of us end up with a lifetime of PTSD. Many of us end up with a lifetime of hypervigilance and sleep disorders. The list goes on. The mental and emotional torture most of us go through afterwards has a lot to do with blaming – we blame ourselves, primarily because that’s what we’ve been taught and trained to do. Even if a woman hasn’t received that particular “don’t be ‘imprudent’” training, she’ll still run the track over and over, blaming herself. Hindsight is a mean thing. Running ’round and ’round that guilt track in your head can be utterly debilitating. You truly have no idea. That’s your privilege.
For every thread like this (and, oh, there have been so very many of them), and the inevitable game players, JAQers and assorted rape apologists, we have the joy of explaining, in excruciating detail, our experiences, in the vain hope that information will help someone to stop causing harm and damage, and to let those reading know that we will not be silenced. Ever.
All that, at the end of the day[s], leaves us with terrible, torturous echoes. Faint refrains of all the poisonous, well-meaning things said to us. Images of all the trembling fingers pointing blame at us. Flames, hot and full of shame as the track of what if…why didn’t I… starts and refuses to stop. Nights spent, not in comforting sleep, but awake, huddled, staring, scared, filled with a sadness you cannot even begin to comprehend.
So, yes, we get damned angry. We have a right to that anger. We have a right to shout, at the top of our voices when someone like you comes along and refuses to take responsibility for their own words and the damage and harm they perpetrate.
sunny12:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:33 am
Contradiction detected. :/
The Mellow Monkey:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:36 am
Paul, let me break this down for you:
When you refer to a woman walking down an alley at night and getting raped as “imprudent”, you are talking about Caine. You are talking about every rape victim who has ever been told that where they were was the cause of their rape. You are repeating the patriarchal argument that societies use when they come up with laws or customs that say a woman can’t leave the home without an escort, can’t go certain places, can’t be out during certain hours.
When you refer to a woman wearing “sexy” clothing and getting raped as “imprudent”, you are talking about me. You are talking about every rape victim who was asked “and what were they wearing.” You are repeating the patriarchal argument that societies use when they come up with laws or customs that control what a woman can wear and what she can reveal and who she needs to hide her body from.
When you refer to a woman being “beautiful” and getting raped as “imprudent”, you are talking about every last fucking person on the planet who has been subject to female beauty standards, regardless of their gender. These people who have simultaneously been screamed at that if they aren’t “pretty” enough then they are worse than worthless and their very existence is an insult and an affront to every person whose dick isn’t made hard by looking at them and they should be honored if someone would rape them and if they are “pretty” enough, then they are a semen receptle who is personally responsible for every last hard-on in their vicinity and they are morally obligated to service it.
That is the world you’re talking about. You might think you can be objective about this. You might think it’s possible to use the word “imprudent” about rape victims and not hurt people, maybe because you’re using it in a hypothetical way or because you’re drawing a distinction between causal blame and moral blame.
You are wrong. You think that because you’re swimming in rape culture, the same as the rest of us. Your “common sense” has been shaped by rape culture. Your “objective viewpoint” has been shaped by privilege.
I have hurt people and said shitty things in the past. I’ve even done it right here on Pharyngula. You know what works when you do that? You give a real, genuine apology. Not the “I’m sorry you misunderstood me” bullshit. You say “this is what I said that was wrong; holy shit, I’m sorry, everybody. I’m going to try my hardest not to do that again. Thank you for correcting me.”
You think you’re adding a nuanced, balanced view that we haven’t considered before. You’re wrong. You’re just regurgitating rape culture. We’ve all got it in our heads already, so it’s nothing new.
Paul W., OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:39 am
OMG, Carlie, not you too. Please no.
Do you see how vile this is?
Of course I do! That is why it’s not what I’m saying—I’m saying that it’s wrong to say things like that.
I’m only saying that even if those things are causal contributing factors to a woman being raped, that does not mitigate the rapist’s guilt, or put any moral blame on the woman whatsoever.
I keep saying the anti-rape apologetic stuff, over and over, in varying degrees of detail, and for some reason people keep inverting what I’m saying and accusing me of being a rape apologist. Really.
And when I ask them where they think I said that, they won’t tell me. Really.
Please, oh please, if you think that’s what I said, find where I said it and tell me where it is—-post number and paragraph, or a verbatim quote I can search for, or something.
People keep telling me what they think I said, always in paraphrase, not verbatim, so I can’t just search for it.
Help! Help!
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:43 am
The Mellow Monkey @ 384, that’s a sterling post. +8.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:44 am
Paul:
WTF?
This has been repeated in nearly every last goddamn response to you.
mildlymagnificent:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:45 am
OK. Maybe I’m not as fed up as some others. So we’ll try another tack for Paul’s thinking this through.
Let’s leave the issue of rape aside for a few lines. Let’s look at groping, grabbing and other surprise! physical moments. How does someone like Paul regard the bloke at the office or the pub who knows a woman reasonably well, if not as a personal friend, just grabbing a breast or groping the crotch when they find an opportune moment in a corridor or a meeting room or a lift or on the stairs or the way to the toilets? Or the bloke who doesn’t know you at all groping you on a public beach or public transport or at a city intersection or on a public jogging path. In public, in daylight, with other people around. Think about it for a minute.
If you regard women in these situations as being entirely justified in regarding these men as totally out of order and should have kept their hands to themselves ….. do you have any remarks about these situations that would be equivalent to the ones you’ve advanced so far about rape? Think carefully before you venture down this path.
So let’s go back to that woman who might have been groped at the beach when she went swimming / surfing. A few hours later she returns home. She’s still in the same bathing suit but she’s now wearing a sarong over it and she’s wearing sandals, sunnies, the usual beachwear stuff. What sort of thing would you say to her if any men tried any of the grabbing or groping on the tram/ train/ bus, or walking to and from the stop, and then to home? Is there any excuse for the men? What “carefully chosen” words might you say to your neighbour, friend, sister, daughter or a total stranger about how she might have avoided such unwanted physical contact?
And if that unwanted physical contact became attempted or completed rape? Would you say anything different?
Hooloovoo:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:46 am
Others have said this better than I, but I feel the need to get it out of my system. Also, I’m sorry if the formatting of this is bad. The preview was awful in ways my HTML elements shouldn’t have created.
Paul W.:
“Imprudent” is not neutral. You seem to be somewhat aware of that, given that you use inverted commas for the risk factors that come from rape culture assumptions (though not around “imprudent” itself), but still, let’s unpack your use of it. First, let’s agree that it is our culture that gets to draw the line in the sand between high-risk behaviors and what it is “to behave reasonably and responsibly in the face of ubiquitous risks.” Now, is this a real line or not?
If it is a real line, what that means is that those behaviors are indeed riskier because our culture penalizes them in order to keep women in line. Risky behaviors might vary from your “careless sexy woman alone in bad neighborhood at night” scenario from women being seen by men at all (not to mention going to school or going to a movie with a male friend) . If this is the case, then your characterization of those actions as “imprudent” is technically true, but also incredibly callous. You are saying that women that don’t restrict their actions to conform to the rules of a society that views them as second-class citizens are acting “imprudently”. You are saying that their behavior in not conforming to an unfair rule is a contributing factor to their being punished for it. Again, technically true, but pointless and callous.
But what if this is not a real line? What if it’s just a way of giving women a false sense of security? (Because they could after all act prudently. It doesn’t matter if it’s their moral fault or not; without their imprudence, that rape wouldn’t have happened.) What if walking alone at night is no riskier than being at home with your male partner? What if it’s less risky? What if there is no distinction between “imprudent” and “reasonable, responsible” behavior in this context, because being a woman is imprudent? In that case, a woman’s behavior was never a “causal contributing factor” to her rape. It is rape culture that claims it was. In that case, Paul W., your use of “imprudent” was not just callous and pointless – it was wrong.
In the best of cases, you said callous things without any good reason. In the worst case, and I fear that this is what actually happened, you showed you don’t understand rape culture at all while lecturing people about fine-grained distinctions having to do with rape culture.
Giliell, professional cynic:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:48 am
Paul W
Good enough?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:48 am
Paul:
NO. People keep quoting you, from your fucking posts. Perhaps in you weren’t so in love with the sight of your own pontifications, you’d keep your posts brief enough that it wouldn’t be problematic for you to find the bits people are quoting.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:50 am
MM:
Apparently, us invisible pixels also do invisible quotations, too.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:01 am
Caine:
That our “voices” are completely invisible to him would be a hilarious illustration of the kind of rape culture and male privilege we’ve been talking about, if it wasn’t so fucking sad.
Pteryxx:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:10 am
So many of y’all are doing incredible work explaining. sunny12 for one:
QFFnT.
Paul: to try and make this clearer, there is no “behaving reasonably” or “behaving imprudently”. Analyzing a woman (and pretty much only a woman, as discussed earlier) for supposed contributing factors only happens after the fact – if I understand the concept correctly, it’s simply confirmation bias:
- A woman was raped,
- Did this woman have behaviors that could be flagged as ‘imprudent’?
- Practically anything a woman does or doesn’t do can be flagged as ‘imprudent’, ‘slutty’, ‘asking for it’ etc
- Pick some ‘imprudent’ behaviors pertaining to this particular rape victim,
- Assume that because ‘imprudent’ behaviors exist, they were causative.
It’s just a victim-blaming cold read on a massive scale.
There is no correlation between how women dress, how they act, or where they go, and the likelihood of someone raping them. The only correlation is the presence of rapists. And since rapists are so common (roughly 1 in 20, remember) and have basically free reign everywhere they choose to operate – at everyone’s work, our classrooms, doctor’s offices, conferences, transit, in our families and homes – searching the women’s behavior for correlations is nothing but a trivial exercise in cherry picking. (And victim-blaming. But that’s been covered by better folks than me.)
But this exercise also erases the rapist. Try saying:
- A rapist committed a rape.
- Why did he do that?
If your next supposedly logical step is ‘Did the woman do anything imprudent?’ you are doing it wrong. ‘Why do rapists rape’ has some well-supported answers, and they’re along the lines of ‘because they enjoy it’, ‘because they see women as pussy dispensers’ and ‘because they can easily get away with it’. And a major reason they CAN get away with rapes, often multiple rapes, so easily, is because of insistence on searching the raped woman for supposed causative factors after the fact.
From Paul’s 385 because I’m slow:
Like that.
sunny12:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:12 am
Aside: It makes me incredibly sad to see a conversation like this – because the people making such tactless remarks, then stubbornly digging their heels in when they’re called out on them, always seem so damned clueless about the pain that their words are causing. They’re more focused on shielding themselves from criticism than making amends for the hurt.
I mean, I don’t think I can actually feel the same depth of pain myself, since I’ve never personally experienced a sexual assault, but bloody hell, I still have enough empathy to realise what the effect of saying something like “I think it’s okay in some circumstances to say that a woman may have been raped because [insert stuff about her looks/clothes/carelessness/location]” can have. :/
(And since I have a feeling this is going to come up yet again in response to that quote, I’ll repeat that making a distinction between “causal blame” and “moral blame” is utterly pointless, because in the category of “causal blame” you may as well throw in things like “catching a bus,” “going for a jog,” “going shopping,” “staying at home,” “going to school,” “being a woman” – hell, even just “being alive.” All of those things could be considered “imprudent” if you’re going to venture down that path. So please…don’t even go there. Really.)
sunny12:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:19 am
Aaaaand looks like I’ve been ninja’d.
Yup. All of this, right here.
Pteryxx:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:21 am
*blush* Thanks, sunny12.
Heck, I was raped in my own home, in my own bed, by my (supposedly) loving long-term partner who I had plenty of consensual sex with, before and after. How imprudent was that? *snort*
carlie:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:26 am
It’s that part right there, Paul. Nothing you have mentioned is a causal contributing factor, nothing commonly found in “how to keep yourself from being raped” guides are causal contributing factors. The causal contributing factors to rape happening are all entirely in the head of the rapist, and there is no rhyme or reason or pattern or trend. Rapes are committed everywhere from dark alleys to in a woman’s own locked house in her own bed. They are committed to women from birth to old age. They are committed to women who are beautiful and those who are ugly, to those dressed provocatively and those dressed in burquas.* There aren’t even statistical correlations between those things and rape, much less any evidence that they are causal contributing factors. It doesn’t have anything to do with fault of any kind; it’s simply not true.
And what I tried to say above is that even if you could pin it on something – wearing red, let’s say. Let’s say that somehow, statistics bear out that 95% of all raped women were wearing red at the time.
That still doesn’t make wearing red a contributing factor to being raped. It makes seeing red a contributing factor to raping. That might seem simply semantic, but it’s not. There’s a world of difference between those two statements, psychologically and sociologically and politically.
*And even after I wrote the above comment about how rapes aren’t a force of nature, I originally wrote “rapes happen to” in this comment and then had to change it to “rapes are committed to”, because that assumption of it being something that “happens” as a force of nature is so embedded in our society. They don’t “happen”. People and their interactions are not direct cause-effect scenarios (oh that it were, and all of those “how do I make him/her fall in love with me/stop abusing me/leave me alone/pay attention to me/give me a raise/ questions could be answered!) You simply can’t say that a particular action will lead to a particular reaction in another person. And when you say “causal”, that is the definition of causal. One particular thing causes another.
carlie:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:29 am
Pteryxx, I swear I was composing mine that whole time and didn’t see that you just said basically the exact same thing already!
rowanvt:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:33 am
Sentences like the one bolded are why people are saying you are blaming women for getting raped. Because you are.
I mean, come one. Look at that last bit in the bold.
But no, you’re not putting any assignation of blame on the woman, it’s not her fault, she merely caused herself to be raped.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:37 am
Carlie, every voice counts. And who knows who Paul will find to be respectable enough to actually listen to? So far, he hasn’t been very interested in what the Invisible Pixels have had to say.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:41 am
Maybe if one of us made a sock puppet named Dr. Vulcan who just C&Ped posts from the Invisible Pixels minus all personal pronouns he’d notice.
rr:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:42 am
Paul W:
To say something is part of (our alleged) human nature is worthless. Unless you can point me to the literature that defines EXACTLY what is and isn’t a part of (our alleged) human nature. Saying something is due to (alleged) human nature is as useful as saying god did it. It provides cover for men committing rape. It provides an excuse for men to force women to wear burqas. It’s a goddamn waste of time and effort.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:44 am
The Mellow Monkey:
Hahahahahahaha. That would be a most interesting experiment.
nightshadequeen:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:47 am
Paul W.
As I said before: If you honestly believe it’s part of human nature to be rape, you should be arguing that we should lock up all the rapists forever.
“Men are attacking women, not the other way around. If there is going to be a curfew, let the men be locked up, not the women.” -Golda Meir
Paul W., OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:01 am
Caine, Gilliel, and numerous others.
Fuck me and mea culpa about that endlessly repeated quote.
That is, this one:
I thought I had responded to that one already, but I can’t find that. I partly addressed it in 380, too, but only in passing.
I do understand why that is inflammatory as it stands, and doesn’t sound right, but I thought I’d posted a pretty clear response and people were just ignoring the context and explanation I gave, and reposting the quote, out of context, which was annoying the fuck out of me.
I AM VERY SORRY ABOUT THAT.
I know that must have been extremely frustrating, and I am very sorry for trying your patience that way. REALLY.
I will reconstruct and repost that.
And Caine, I’m sorry for making it sound like nobody was quoting me, when obviously that was entirely false.
When I said that people keep quoting paraphrases of things they claim I said, and won’t tell me where, I did not mean everybody, or that there weren’t people posting quotes.
I had pioritized those non-quotes because I thought it would be easy and quick to show I hadn’t said those very bad things, if I could find the places people interpreted that way.
Sorry for making its sound like everybody was doing only that, which I didn’t mean at all. I understand that that must have been infuriating too.
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:06 am
Rapists ARE the problem. The only extra guilt to go around to rape apologists assholes like you! BECAUSE you HELP the RAPIST!
Is that clear enough? We’ve all been fucking quoting you, it’s not our fault you only want to focus on the 2 sentences in a million where you say, “But it’s the rapists fault.” We want to focus on all the other bullshit you are trying to excuse because it makes those 2 sentences a LIE.
And if your whole point in this is trying to argue against rape apologist, GO DO THAT. And if you thought about it, it says a whole fucking lot that the very people you are trying to help, disagree so much with your “arguments”.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:14 am
Paul:
Please, do not do that, I am begging you. Why? Because there is simply no defense of what you wrote – there is no context, of any kind, anywhere, in any ‘verse that will make what you wrote okay. What you wrote is wrong and the reasons it’s wrong have been beyond explained to you.
Instead, just read what we have all spent time writing and try to absorb what we have tried so hard to impart. Please, you have a chance to really learn something here – don’t fuck it up by going back and trying to defend the indefensible. Please.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:22 am
Paul W., OM @ 385;
There are several problematic elements among your remarks on this topic. For example, there is the fact that you create this curious distinction between ‘causal blame’ and ‘moral blame’ @ 255;
‘Causal blame’ makes no sense as a concept – the phrase ‘blame’ in itself implies a concept of moral responsibility for an action or event. Identifying the particular chain of causality that leads to a certain event is not a matter of moral judgement in and of itself, whereas determining ultimate moral responsibilty for that specific event is. Applying the word ‘blame’ – in whatever context – to the victim of rape is a very charged use of language indeed that will function as victim blaming (and thus rape apologia) even if that is not your intent.
However, the passage people are principally referring to is from your post @ 255 where you wrote;
(My emphasis)
Firstly, you are talking here about stranger rape, when by far the most common form of rape is acquaintance rape.
Secondly, the scenario you choose – the conventionally attractive woman who is dressed ‘sexily (just a different phrase effectively meaning ‘provocatively’ in this usuage) walking down a dark alley in a bad neighbourhood at night – is the standard fare of rape apologists. It includes many of the victim blaiming tropes – why was she out so late? What was she doing in that neighbourhood? Why did she dress so provocatively? – that are regularly used by rape apologists in a bid to either minimise the horror of rape or try to claim that the victim bears at least part of the responsibility for the rape by ‘asking for it’, rather than making it clear that the moral obligation falls solely upon rapists not to rape. Why should women be expected to have to live in constant fear of rapists? Why should they be required to live lives curtailed by limitations placed upon them in order to remove the notional opportunity or ‘temptation’ to rape from rapists? Why shouldn’t the sole moral burden for rape lie with those who commit the act of rape?
There is also the fact that the ‘pretty women in sexy clothes in a bad neighbourhood at night’ scenario accounts for only a fraction of rapes, even if we leave aside the far more common class of acquaintance rapes. Women are attacked in broad daylight all the time. The militaries of several countries have a serious problem with epidemic levels of rape and sexual assault of female service personnel by their male colleagues – these women aren’t exactly dressing in a self consciously ‘sexy’ fashion; they are often in uniform when they are attacked.
Then there are countries where the culture mandates that women wear burkas or other attire that covers them from head to toe, is designed to obscure the form of the body of the wearer as much as possible, and could not by any stretch of the imagination be called ‘sexy’; and yet those socities still have serious problems with rape – how were those women ‘imprudent’? What more could they have done to avoid ‘tempting’ rapists?
And you compound all of this by using the terms ‘careless’ and ‘imprudent’ to describe a woman who is conventionally attractive, dresses in a fashion that pleases her, and doesn’t stick only to the patriachy-approved ‘nice neighbourhoods’ while making sure to scurry home and lock and bar all the doors and windows before nightfall. These terms are loaded; they imply that women who don’t conform to these social injunctions are irresponsible, that they – the victims, let’s not forget – should have known better than to… what?
Believe that they have the right to live their life according to the same freedoms and standards as those accorded to men?
Expect men to behave as more than base rape-beasts with no self control?
Expect society to blame the rapists who rapes rather than that rapist’s victim for being irresponsibly ‘out while female’?
Think of themselves as citizens living under the shield of law, rather than members of the diposeable ‘sex class’?
These words ‘careless and imprudent’, employed in this context, replicate one of the most damaging victim blaming tropes of all:- that a woman who doesn’t behave as if she must be perpetually vigilant – never able to relax, never able to forget that her vagina paints a bull’s eye on her back, never able to just be a person, just be herself rather than the keeper of a vagina – is a fool. And worse than just a fool; she sould expect that her failure to be paranoid enough about rape will mean that in some measure society will blame her for her rape.
Can’t you see how terrible a thing this is to say to a rape victim? How much more difficult it makes it for rape victims to come forward when such attitudes are commonplace in society? How much the damage this victim blaming mentality compounds the trauma of the rape itself by saying that women who are raped would not have been raped if only the weren’t such flighty idiots?
Saying that;
Suggests that there is substantial blame to be applied beyond the rapist themselves, and could even be read as implying that there is some parity of blame between rapist and victim (though I do not believe that this was what you meant). This is a terribly damaging thing to say on a thread on a site that is read by several regulars who are rape victims themselves.
I hope that this post helps clarify to you why your remarks have made so many people so justifiably angry.
Pteryxx:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:24 am
Couple more credibility points to the Straw Vulcan theory… *headdesk*
Paul W: people being frustrated and infuriated with you really, really should not be your primary concern here. Addressing that would be treating a symptom and ignoring the cause. Please reconsider.
from Caine’s excerpts of Nice Guy 101:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/01/02/matt-dillahunty-being-all-reasonable-and-stuff/comment-page-1/#comment-526651
Main essay here: http://synecdochic.livejournal.com/214607.html?nojs=1
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:34 am
Paul, please don’t repost. Please be quiet. Please go away—for a couple of days if necessary—and ponder this before you come back.
You’re wrong.
You’re not misunderstood.
You misunderstand your own actions; it’s not other people.
I am about as disgusted as I could possibly be with you, far beyond what I ever expected when I saw your nym. That other people you consider your friends are saying the same thing in unison ought to tell you something.
It’s not that they misunderstand you. More words won’t help. Longer posts and finer dicing won’t help. The entire premise of your argument is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Please shut up and think. Or just shut the fuck up here and now.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:37 am
Gregory Greenwood:
Fixed that for you. I think there are a lot of people here who are unaware of the sheer amount of rape/assault survivors there are here, both commentating and reading.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:40 am
I’m going to repeat this, while jumping up and down and hollering, in the vain hope it will be seen in time: PAUL! PLEASE READ BEFORE POSTING. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE.
Paul:
Please, do not do that, I am begging you. Why? Because there is simply no defense of what you wrote – there is no context, of any kind, anywhere, in any ‘verse that will make what you wrote okay. What you wrote is wrong and the reasons it’s wrong have been beyond explained to you.
Instead, just read what we have all spent time writing and try to absorb what we have tried so hard to impart. Please, you have a chance to really learn something here – don’t fuck it up by going back and trying to defend the indefensible. Please.
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:41 am
In case I’m not an Invisible Pixel and my post is accessible by your visual sensory system: What Caine said above.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:43 am
Pteryxx:
On my better days, I’m an Infuriated Pixel. Right now, I’m a shaky, nauseous, about to vomit pixel. I can’t take much more of this.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:43 am
Caine, Fleur du mal + @ 412;
Absolutely true – I didn’t mean to minimise the sheer scale and prevalence of this problem, and I apologise for doing so in this thoughtless fashion. As you say, there are doubtless very large numbers of both commenters and readers of Pharyngula who are rape survivors, given that current statistics indicate that one in six women will be raped during the course of their lives, and that is a low-ball figure. And of course, that doesn’t even cover the male victims of rape.
erikthebassist:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:52 am
Paul I get that you are trying to backtrack and say you were presenting the hypothetical rape apologist argument and trying to dismantle it. We all do, and it’s bullshit.
You’re trying to weasel out of taking responsibility for saying something that you never should have said.
You have two choices, keep doubling down and trying to convince people that’s not what you meant, or apologize for saying it, and explain how your thinking has been corrected. No one gives a shit what you thought you meant or what you are now trying to say you meant.
All I care about is the collateral damage your thoughtless intellectual wankery has caused and will continue to cause if you don’t pull your head out of your ass.
Jadehawk:
January 18th, 2013 at 10:16 am
jesus fucking christ.
I have once traveled from Germany to California to spend summer with two guys I knew off the internet.
I have spent a summer living in a frat-house, getting plastered with the frat-guys.
I have accepted rides from strangers.
I have done an epic fuckload of other similarly “imprudent” things in my life.
I’ve never been raped. Because none of these actions cause rape.
Now, if you want to go all Spock on this shit, you could say that in order for person A to rape person B (instead of some other person), causal events must occur that bring persons A and B into geographical proximity with each other, and that some of these causal events were choices made by person B. This would be trivially true, and entirely meaningless to any discussion, because it’s true for absolutely everything.
However, mentioning it in the context of rape and then calling the causal events “imprudent” is an action that reinforces rape culture. Because actions that bring one into the proximity of rapists are NOT “imprudent”. They are trivial. They are things like “accepting job offer”; “moving into building”; “crossing the street here, instead of three blocks down”; “taking elevator instead of stairs”; etc.
But even this spockish tack of saying that these choices “caused” the rape is wrongly deterministic, because even being in geographical proximity of a bunch of rapists doesn’t cause rape. It always requires the causal event “person A choses to rape”, and without it there simply won’t be a rape. Example: that summer I spent in the frat-house? Some of the men around me were rapists. They would, later, admit that getting women too drunk to say “no” was something that was done at the frat-parties these guys threw and attended.
But I wasn’t raped by these rapists. Because for whatever reason, they decided not to pick me as a target of rape. Not even after I made out drunkenly with a stripper.
None of the actions I’ve taken are causal to rape.
Is that clear enough now?
athyco:
January 18th, 2013 at 10:32 am
Paul:
Before I commented, Paul, I’d copied your first post into a word-processing document. You did spend a lot of time (5 pages) trying to get it right. It was clear to me that you were not doing anything “gratuitous.” It was clear to me that you condemn anyone trying to say that a person saying “conventionally beautiful,” “dark alley,” “imprudent” is doing it WRONG. You want to explore techniques for using a deadlier rhetorical weapon to slay such an argument, and your use of “maybe” 10 times, “seem(s)” 6 times, and “might” another 6 let me know that you were exploring, not expounding. However, your method does nothing but pull us into that irrelevant, fallacious wallow.
Let’s go back to your perfect break in pool. A player who doesn’t make a perfect break then tells you why: OK, yes, he straightened too quickly as he made the stroke, BUT his cue stick wasn’t as friction free as it should have been, it wasn’t chalked adequately, the balls were not in the right place; their resiliency was not within acceptable parameters, your hands as you racked the balls imparted oils, the table wasn’t level because your tools to measure it weren’t exact enough or used accurately, there was lint and chalk dust in the exact areas to deflect important trajectories, some pocket edges were slightly out of true, the nap on the rail cushion was brushed the wrong way, the humidity affected the felt, the light above the table flickered at the exact moment in the stroke to affect hand/eye coordination, the heating vent caused air current eddies at the far right of the table, you didn’t soundproof the room well enough to block out the sound of a car passing outside. It can go on forever, can’t it? And it gets ridiculous when we’re only talking about making a break in pool. No one would allow it. Your concession of causally–but not morally!–contributory factors for rape, however, leads us directly there.
Since it does so WITHOUT a bright line dividing causally AND morally from causally BUT NOT morally, you’ve fucked us over to argue every little detail. Who benefits from that? The rapist and the apologist.
We do understand it, but you can’t turn this into a more effective strategy. Here, your “right” is even less than not effective; the rhetorical weapon opens the bearer up for a thousand unnecessary cuts. It will become the pool player bringing up lint, then once that’s countered turning to the soundproofing. Then one of his friends will ask to see the spirit level you used and documentation from the engineer that the house itself hasn’t settled since you last used it. And as you dig up the engineer’s report, you see that 40 more friends are lining up with their questions–and talking on their cell phones to bring in their friends.
Bolded part. That’s where we agree. We think that more people, hit hard with scorn for wallowing in the irrelevant and fallacious, will stop doing it. We think that hitting hard supports and empowers victims. We think that your nuance weakens and prolongs the argument. We think that the well-meaning benefit you envision is infinitesimal in comparison with the flashbacks of shaming/blaming victims will have to endure–again and again–by trying your method.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:17 am
Paul @363
HOW COULD THEY HAVE MISUNDERSTOOD ME?!? WAAAAHHHH!!!!
Well, let’s explain how.
First let’s take about what you want to say. What you think your careful phrasing is succeeding to say. This is where you think you are and that us mean old invisible pixels are just being mean to ignore.
Ugh, yeah, just threading a needle here, but don’t worries I totally understand that rape’s all a rapist’s fault. I mean, I’ve stated it enough times that obviously that lesson MUST have penetrated past the surface level, right? Right?
And here’s where it falls off the rails and we get to what you actually end up saying and why we mean nasty irrational women-folk end up getting pissy with you.
Here.
Now, I’m sure to you, this is simply a healthy continuation of the previous sentence, hence why it is in the same paragraph. That it is saying the same types of things.
But it’s not. The words are transparently attempting to be the same, but the cultural assumptions are coming through way clearer than the lesson of “rapes are the fault of the rapists”. Here, despite all the setup in trying to convince yourself that you truly do understand that rapists rape and it’s not the woman’s fault, you end up saying otherwise.
Oh sure, it shouldn’t assign moral blame, but man , it really could have contributed to it, you know in a meaningless way that really doesn’t matter and totally has a nasty extremely triggering history behind it, but shouldn’t we… focus… on…
And bam, the cultural thrust of the statement ends up carrying more the notion that woman can affect their rapes, that their is something “smart women” can do to avoid them. That there is something women can do to deserve them. And that’s what ends up resonating and shouting the most clearly because it’s the one coming from the deeper level.
Also, Paul?
…
I’m not sure you get how dehumanizing, dismissive, and destructive this metaphor is. Women are not pool balls. They are not passive objects. And yes, I get that you know that already, I don’t think you are an idiot.
My point is that when you reduce often traumatic life experiences of women into a passive object metaphor you are participating in (even if you don’t realize it) in a culture where the dominant response to rape narratives is to completely ignore women’s accounts and where women in general are often treated as passive objects rather than people.
And that’s also where the metaphor falls apart. A) We’re not talking about the perfect rape (whatever the hell that would be), the weather does not need to be an even 76 degrees, etc… we’re talking about rape. And rape happens in any possible way to any possible person. B) Those balls, their position, whether or not they’ve got that little stripe on that just makes them so “inviting” next to the corner pocket (AND DO YOU SEE HOW DEHUMANIZING THIS METAPHOR IS YET?), doesn’t really matter, doesn’t really even cause anything unless you are willing to go so far up into abstract philosophy and “don’t we cause things by existing in the first place” stuff that we end up treating living breathing women as passive meaningless pool balls and something real and traumatic as a simple intellectual exercise that should meter as little caution as walking through a nice park. C) For a deconstruction, you seem to spend as little time regarding why this damaging myth has such staying power in our culture and such emotional resonance for rapists and rape apologists as you do dwelling on the actual rape victims. Why are you so hesitant to eviscerate the myth in a long setup purporting to do just that? That’s a far more interesting question.
And D) The whole problem of nearly all your examples and conversation is that your observation is incredibly boring. It doesn’t add anything. It says nothing interesting, does nothing to contradict messages and in fact you’ve had to rely on other people’s work in pointing out things to even manage “trying not to be an asshole”.
So why say it?
Why fixate on it? Why let yourself be led along a cultural pathway to points where you end up saying things wherein you are going “well, gosh isn’t this rancid little turd of an observation something?” Why let it be your be all end all response and why is it so important to erase the narratives, life-experiences, and real lived emotions of rape victims to explore it?
And most importantly, why ignore the reality of the statement in its supposed deconstruction. Not the “I understand dispassionately that this is a giant pile of monkey balls”, but rather the emotional reality of that statement to the victims. To victims, this observation isn’t “la de la, pool ball metaphor, this subject might as well be the theoretical harvest of moon crops to me”.
(TRIGGER WARNING)To victims it is the continuation of rape after the fact. The voice in one’s head constantly bleating that they shouldn’t have worn that, drank that, been at the same party as X, shouldn’t have trusted that family member, should have realized what was happening sooner, shouldn’t have gone alone, shouldn’t have gotten cornered, should have fought back better, should have done… something, something THEY can control to make it so they can be safe again.
Because that’s what rape takes away. Agency and safety. Even if we weren’t in a deeply fucked up society that casually uses this myth to assume that women who get raped must have deserved it, this would be a powerful myth for rape victims themselves. Because it’s seductive in its horrifying way. If they just did 1 dumb thing, then all they need to do to regain agency and safety and return to a state of being where they don’t feel paranoid is avoid that one single thing. Because we don’t want to live in a world where this can just happen from anyone anywhere, especially people you trust and think well of.
And that’s what a deconstruction of this myth needs to be hyper-aware of. This isn’t a meaningless thought experiment to rape victims, this is the way rape victims tear themselves up inside and remove all the blame from the rapist, because why not, everyone else it and at least this way they can sleep at night and visit their friends, and walk down the street at night without freaking the fuck out.
And that brings me up to a very important final point.
You may have noticed that I and many other women put up something that goes (TRIGGER WARNING) up when we start talking about rape accounts, post-rape mental processing, and the state of mind we experienced after we were raped.
And that’s kind of important because it’s a “contributing factor” (yes, it is pointed, isn’t it?) to why people are not “hey, dude, privilege much” but rather “fuck you privilege douche”. When you are talking about your fancy dehumanized thought experiment where women are like brightly colored balls and the only person with agency is the rapist with the shot (seriously, watch your metaphors), you are tripping constantly over modes of thought, arguments used against people, and ways people have minimized their life experiences when they’ve finally gotten brave to tell someone.
These are triggers and what is triggered really does matter and it doesn’t make those triggered “hysterical” or “bad readers” or “reading something in my posts that isn’t there”. It means you lack the cultural awareness of women’s life experiences (to be fair to you, it’s mostly because women are regularly shut out of the conversation) and thus blunder constantly into deeply triggering statements, metaphors, and attitudes while failing to say anything meaningful for all of that damage.
And I think that’s why people are being far harsher to you than you think your various privilege mistakes deserve.
But seriously, man, if you’re not going to go anywhere with this crap other than minimizing it to a meaningless thought experiment that couldn’t possibly affect real people, then maybe you should back off and read more until you really are ready to eviscerate that argument. Or better yet, read all the people who’ve been doing a better job than you.
Cause they are.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:25 am
Have you thought much about what rape really is, Paul W.?
It’s a specialized form of torture.
That’s all. It’s a particular form of torture used to keep everyone in line with patriarchal gender roles.
Factors you can attribute to the victims that increase the risk of sexual assault? Inevitably, if you look at the research, it’s characteristics that lower the likelihood of the victim reporting the crime. Rapists prefer victims who are intoxicated, disabled, and marginalized, if we can go by the relative incidence of assault in those populations as indicating rapists’ preference. Women of color, Native American women, are more likely to be assaulted than white women. Most women and men who are assaulted are assaulted sometime before age 24; rapists rape younger people because they are less likely to recognize the red flags. Developmentally disabled girls and women also face a higher risk than able bodied girls and women. Sex workers are targeted because they have less recourse to law enforcement than other women and men, and that’s saying a lot, because law enforcement officers generally don’t take it seriously to begin with.
Nobody who is raped is raped because they are sexy. If anything, people get raped because they are vulnerable to begin with.
Spreading myths about how it’s the sexy that triggers rape is wrong AND harmful. Restating it won’t change that.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:27 am
Oh and here’s how you could have used your terrible analogy better Paul:
(TRIGGER WARNING)We can analyze til we’re blue in the face what those balls did to be sunk into those holes. We can note the flame red color on the one sitting right next to the pocket, the ugly yellow and white stripe on the one just chilling against a wall not really standing out, the way the blue one stayed close to friends while the green one was all by itself, etc… but until we look at the guy with the stick. Until we analyze HIM with the same ferocious scrutiny and stop trying to correlate it with all this data we’ve got on the balls (i mean surely having data must mean something), then we’re never going to know anything worth knowing on why he sunk those balls into the pockets and realize that for all his talk of “easy shots”, “trick balls”, etc… the name of the game is to get them all, against their will, into a position they don’t want. Anything else might as well be meaningless intellectual masturbation into the ball tray.
But seriously, Paul, I think your greatest mistake is thinking your intellectual exercise is A) accomplishing anything, B) is safe to disconnect from real experiences because of anti-real-world biases in the field of modern philosophy, and C) hasn’t been done better by more competent people long before you ever thought up this “oh so clever” thought experiment.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:36 am
carlie @398
Holy shit, that’s it!
I’ve been feeling vaguely bugged by how he was using causal and couldn’t quite parse it out, but this is totally it.
He’s taking meaningless correlation and assuming a causal chain because of debate-club chicanery and then trying to deny the argument he ends up actually making by using the phrase “causal”.
Causal means causing another thing. And establishing that sort of thing is hard work. There are a lot of meaningless correlations in any study, some that even have cultural assumptions of causality, and it’s important to resist that rhetorical direction and really look at what actually causes these events in a meaningful real way.
Anything else diminishes what causal means and allows all sorts of pathways for correlation data to be treated as causal when it isn’t. Or worse, as is used in rape apologetics, something that isn’t even correlated as a causal link that “just makes sense” because of our cultural attitudes about women.
Ironically, the reason Paul makes such an ass of himself is not entirely his fault, but rather because of the way he can’t dodge this cultural “makes sense” and the way it therefore worms into his arguments repeatedly and “seems interesting and causal” when it’s just a pile of victim-blaming ignorant bullshit that completely ignores the reality of the situation.
Paul W., OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:39 am
Gregory Greenwood:
You are right that causal blame makes no sense as a concept, which is why I put scare quotes around the word “blame” in that phrase, but not when referring to actual moral blame—it’s “blame” in a related sense which people do use and understand, (and frequently in my field). That is confusing, and I knew it needed clarification, was which is the very next sentence after what you quote gives an example of what I mean, which IMO does make sense, and does make sense of that metaphorical usage—though evidently still not clearly enough:
I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial there, though I agree the terminology is awkward. (Certainly nothing that should make anybody want to punch me in the face, as it evidently does some people.)
People do understand expressions like this:
The dog, the alternator, and the code are “blamed” for certain problems, even though they are not moral agents at all.
Do you actually have any problem understanding what I mean there, or just not like the terminology, or what? For what it’s worth, I agree it’s awkward, but but it’s a useful concept—-you can attribute causation of events to various things without also attributing moral blame.
Because I realized that was awkward terminology, I tried to shift to using a similarly morally neutral sense of the word cause, which I didn’t realize would be so hard for people to accept, because it’s a correct literal usage that’s very common in scientific discussions where agency is not in question.
At that point I considered making a couple of analogies to make it clear what that sense of cause was and that I was not using the word incorrectly, but didn’t want to be verbose, and when I did make them, it was too late. Too many people were already certain that many of my statements about things causing rape were false, and my later clarifications.
One of those was the pool break analogy. When we talk about the cue ball movement causing a break, that’s just literally true, even though pool balls are moral agents. That’s the sense of cause I needed to express what I was trying to say, and I tried to make it clear by frequently contrasting mere low-level causation like that with being to blame in the moral sense.
Clearly, some causal events do not involve an attribution of blame, right? That is obvious in the case of pool balls, right? Everybody knows they’re not moral agents, so it can’t mean blaming in the moral sense, so they get it.
I tried to use that correct and literal sense of “cause” when talking about people, because there are causal relations involving people that also do not imply moral blame.
And that is something I’ve failed to get many people to understand, and accept that you can say that somebody causes x without implying that they’re to blame for x.
Ever since then, some (most?) people have not been able to accept it when I say that somebody may cause something, even something that is blameworthy, but not be the person to blame for it—what they did that caused the event in that sense was perfectly morally acceptable, but what the other person did was completely morally unacceptable.
I don’t know why that’s such a problematic idea—is it that I’m talking about multiple people causing the same event? Is it that I’m talking about morally neutral causation by moral agents? Is it that I’m talking about an event having multiple causes that all fully cause the event?
I thought at least most scientists would get it—they’ve heard lots of discussions of plain old causation that’s clearly not about assigning moral blame at all, e.g., in physics and chemistry.
I tried to make an argument here that I’d be very pessimistic about making most places, because I thought we could get past that sticking point.
I don’t think this conversation can go anyplace useful if people don’t come to an understanding of that point (even if it’s to get me to understand that it’s wrong).
It seems to me that for any or all of several reasons, most people can’t even accept that I’m even making basic coherent sense in the way I’m talking about causation, even if the argument I’m making turns out to be wrong or even bullshit.
We have never gotten past go, terminology-wise.
Here’s the kind of thing that people resist me saying and call me several kinds of names for:
No matter how much I insist and explain that I’m talking about situations in which she’s not to blame, morally—she couldn’t be expected not to cause the rape by getting on the bus if she had no expectation of being raped—people freak the fuck out if I say that she caused her own rape. You just can’t say that, and use the term cause in that sense in that context—it always the baggage of implying blame.
Which is missing the whole point of my making the distinction.
ChasCPeterson:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:40 am
yow, PaulW, you fucking stepped in it, man.
I’ve been there (hi, Cerberus!). On this subject you will not get people to admit even the slightest hint of nuance or situational variation, nor to give a charitable reading to anything you might say. This was true from the get-go: just look at the title of the OP. It’s just the deal. You should give it up. However, your rep here at Pharyngula will never recover.
Chris, thanks.
SallyStrange: have a nice day.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:46 am
Cerberus, your post reminds me of something. My rape took place in Southern California. Decades later, I’m in a different state and live very rural. The town I live in has a population of 79. Yep. (202 if you count all the outlying farms.) We’ve been here going on 8 years. It’s quiet here, really, nothing fucking happens here and that’s fine.
The first year we moved here, we found out that labor day weekend was a *huge party* here. So, we got out a bit, and hung out at the Muddy Creek Saloon for quite a long time. Finally, I got tired and told Mister I was walking home. I’m probably a whole 5 minutes away. As I started walking, the paranoia, fear and hypervigilance hit. I straightened up, tense, made sure I had fast, easy access to my weapon (no, I don’ t carry a gun) and rapidly walked home. Upon getting in the house, I immediately got my two monster dogs and did a complete and full check of the house, which took much longer than the walk, it’s a big effing house. Every closet, every nook, under every table, under the desk and so on. In pure fear until I knew, for sure, the house was empty.
It never leaves.
Paul W., OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:47 am
SallyStrange,
Have you thought much about what rape really is, Paul W.?
Yes, apparently much more than you assume I have. And I care more too, which believe or not is most of why I hoped this discussion would be worthwhile.
You’re not telling me anything I don’t know, or making me think about anything I haven’t thought about.
You’re pretty clearly misunderstanding why I’m saying what I’m saying, what the implications actually are of what I’m saying, and why I would choose to say it anyway.
That makes me think you misunderstand what I’m actually saying. You may not believe that, but I have to, and that’s that.
Please save your breath. That approach isn’t going to work. Ever.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:52 am
Chas:
Just because you deliberately burnt your rep here doesn’t mean that will happen with Paul. I retain hope that he will, eventually, understand what we are saying. You never cared to listen to anyone else, Chas. So fuck off, dear.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:53 am
Gregory @409
thisthisthisthisTHIS! To everything you said, but especially this:
The rape culture at its core and the dialogue allowed to be surrounding it by society is essentially about terrorism.
Basically, it’s creating a system where a punitive action that is often gendered and “corrective” is used to reinforce “expected standards” of behavior for women out in society. The myth of the “hot, skintight woman in the ‘bad neighborhood’” as the prototypical rape victim is intentional. It’s designed to try and encourage women to self-censor. To be less accepting with their sexuality at least in a publicly visible way. To be less racially inclusive and home-bound because “those bad places in the bad neighborhoods of the city where you encounter those brown people” are the places that “rape happens” in our visual mediums like TV and movies. To be less into letting loose or enjoying masculine activities like drinking, watching sports, or sexual exploration and openness. All of these made seemingly fraught in order to try and fight against women who are exploring being full people and breaking out of the traditional femininity molds (hence also why lesbians and trans-men are the most common victims of “corrective rape”).
And that’s why it’s so hard fixing it. There’s too many people who are invested in the culture because they enjoy some of the fruits of societal sexism and rape or rather the fear of rape and fictional solutions to it are the way in which that culture reinforces itself and resists the inevitable reformation into a more egalitarian culture where rape and the apologies for it cease to have a home.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:54 am
Paul:
And here I just said I thought there was hope for you. So much for my prescience.
carlie:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:55 am
I’m not talking about blame AT ALL. I’m talking about your notion of “cause”. For the third time, cause means that an action has an effect. Do A, see result B. Doesn’t even matter if there is agency or not from any of the participants. And in your own example, you are using it incorrectly.
Jane’s action of getting on the bus is not causal to her rape, not any more than Jane being born is causal to her rape. In that sense, the proximal cause of her rape is the decision that the rapist made to rape her; however, every step backward from that is an ultimate cause in the same way. There are no intermediate steps. Her decision to get on the bus is just as ultimate of a cause as her birth. In order for any decision she has ever made in her life to be closer to proximal, it would have to be a decision that necessarily increased her chance of being raped, and as has been mentioned multiple times, there are no known actions that actually increase the chance of being raped.
In your pool example, which Cerberus did a fantastic job of deconstructing, those factors you mentioned have clear-cut, known reactions. Dust on the table WILL adjust a ball’s trajectory in a way we can calculate. The amount of friction on the cue DOES make a difference in a way we can measure and predict accurately. This is not true of human interactions. You can not make any analogies of causality between those things and human interactions.
Emrysmyrddin:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:57 am
I cannot cause someone to rape me. The rapist is the only cause – not the surroundings, not my clothing, nothing that I have done can influence the rapist’s decision.
Here, agency is the point. The rapist is not some implacable force of nature that just happens – there is one cause of an occasion of rape, and that is the rapist using their agency to decide to initiate something against someone else’s will (bolding for bloody relevance).
Here is your problem. You are treating this as a cold-blooded, detached, academic discussion amongst fellow Vulcans. It is not. You are more concerned with being correct rather than doing right.
You have had many posters ask you what they did that was blameworthy but not morally wrong that caused their rape. I’d like an answer.
This is not a physics or chemistry discussion. This is a discussion about a violent crime that has been perpetrated against people who are actually here, in this thread. This is not the place for quibbling over what you think ‘causation’ rilly, rilly means. That callousness, unintended or not, is why you are getting defensive, aggressive, and downright righteously indignant responses. I would have thought an OM would have the wherewithal to understand those responses.
.
Oh, and as usual, fuck you, Chas.
Jadehawk:
January 18th, 2013 at 11:57 am
that’s because it isn’t a true statement. the choice that brought her into proximity with a rapist is not meaningfully causal to rape, since proximity to a rapist literally doesn’t cause rape. you can cause yourself to be in a house full of rapists, but unless the actual causal event happens, mere proximity to rapists doesn’t result in rape.
Or to put it differently: while choices made by people regularly bring them into geographical proximity with rapists, and only people in geographical proximity of rapists get raped, your average rapist ends up in the proximity of hundreds, maybe thousands of people. The rapist choses to rape only some of all of these people. Consequently, it doesn’t make sense to talk about causing proximity to a rapist as a cause of rape.
carlie:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Let me try to be more brief:
Paul (and Chas, why not), why do you think that, say, “walking down a dark alley in a short skirt” is a)causal to anything other than getting to the end of the alley with maybe a bit of a chill or b) a “situational variance” that somehow raises the chances of getting raped, when actual rape statistics do not bear out that women walking down dark alleys or wearing short skirts are raped at rates any higher than any other women?
Beatrice:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Thanks to everyone who shared their painful experiences.
For a short and really simple explanation of why “to blame for” in some abstract/irrelevant and yet worth a couple of paragraphs and repetitions way that doesn’t mean “moral blame” is a bit bullshitty, read Jadehawk:
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:05 pm
Paul, I just wrote this in the lounge:
Does that make you feel proud of your fucking science experiment? Of completely erasing us in favour of your insistence that rape can be approached in the same manner as a chemistry project?
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:06 pm
Sally @421
This.
Especially,
This.
And worse, it’s a form of torture that is encouraged by our society. Men who rape are viewed homosocially as better people, more masculine people, higher up on the hierarchy than other people.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:13 pm
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/01/03/i-hope-this-haunts-michael-nodianos-for-the-rest-of-his-life/#comments
PatrickG:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:14 pm
Hesitant to jump in, but just wanted to utter the following peep after seeing Caine’s last post:
Thanks to the Infuriated Pixels and others for being so willing to share their experiences, their conclusions, and their impassioned positions. I know it hurts you to do so (because you’ve said so, repeatedly, in this thread). I’m sure you know how much value you add by doing so (because, again, you’ve said so!).
That’s all. Just wanted to say thanks, and that while I almost never post in threads like these (due to lack of anything to contribute), I read and learn.
Finally, to Paul: I’m not sure what you’re trying to do other than making everybody understand!!1!eleventy!, but maybe you should think about your goals in this thread. You know, other than to cause people pain.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:17 pm
Patrick G, ♥
And with that, I think I’m out for a while.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:21 pm
carlie @434
But carlieeeeee, if they admit that they assume this variance because of cultural messaging they’ll have to turn in their “totally logical vulcan” card and they will feel less masculine in the homosocial circles they prefer.
And wah, who cares about triggering rape victims, unwittingly perpetuating damaging myths surrounding rape, and dismissing the real lived experiences of women to literally place a meaningless thought experiment as being worth more than them, compared to the super important issue of THAT?!?
Chris Clarke:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:23 pm
Paul W., I strongly suggest you give your participation here a rest for a while and cogitate. Here’s why:
As a writer, it took me a long time to learn that when the vast majority of people “misinterpreted” what I’d written, it was NOT because they had each, individually, and en masse, fucked up.
This is supposed to be a skeptics’ hangout, right? William of Ockham and all? What is the most parsimonious explanation for what’s happened in this thread?
1) More than a dozen people, all of whom are literate and intellectually capable, and many of whom were strongly predisposed to give you the benefit of the doubt, uniformly interpreted what you wrote to mean the opposite of what you really said due to some emotional undertones or nuance-hating thread climate or Rampant PC or whatever;
2) You didn’t actually say what you think you said, or what you intended to say.
A good writer — by which I mean someone with a sense of professionalism, whose goal really is to communicate rather than to hear himself talk — will react to a situation like this by thanking people for their criticism (inwardly, at least) and figuring out how to hone not only the writing part but the thinking part.
You’re not acting like a good writer here. The defensiveness is fucking you up. The “et tu, Carlie?” shit is fucking you up. You’ve decided that we’re all wrong and the only way out is for you to find the magic combination of words that will unlock the Moria Gate of our incomprehension.
Trust me. That is not the case. The problem here is that you are not questioning your own assumptions. There’s no particular shame in that in and of itself: it’s human nature, to borrow a quote from the late Bill O. The shame is when you refuse to realize what’s going on.
You’re arguing based on definitions set by rape apologists and treating those definitions as though they’re immutable or concrete. The definition of “imprudent behavior” is set one way by North American rape apologists; in India, it apparently includes “getting on a bus with a male companion.” You’re basing a tower of spurious argument on that rotten foundation.
You’re not going to “explain” or “reword” your way out of it without getting away from that, and that’s work for you to do on your own.
vaiyt:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:25 pm
@Paul, obtuse fucker with a beam in the eye
HERE, YOU FUCKING LYING SACK OF SHIT.
HERE YOU’RE SAYING IT’S OKAY TO SAY A WOMAN CAUSED HER RAPE. DO US A FAVOR AND GO DRINK SOME NITROGLYCERINE.
Emrysmyrddin:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:25 pm
I’m assuming you cannot understand the (long-lasting, wide-rippling) agony of being truly helpless in a sexual situation, which is why I tentatively conclude that you fundamentally cannot understand that ascribing any kind of agency or causation in rape to the victim, and not solely to the perpetrator, the one with the real agency, is a slap in the face to every victim reading your words.
.
I hope that’s polite enough of an explanation for the reaction that you’re getting that you’ll bother to read it and think.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:26 pm
Paul @427
I’m perfect. I don’t need to improve. I understand this issue on its shallowest, least penetrative level, and therefore do not need to do any self-improvement or self-reflection to make it penetrate deeper into my assumptions and biases. I have heard previous arguments and understand that rape is bad mmkay, so it does not matter if my statements are triggering or reinforce ignorant stereotypes or are literally dehumanizing or that I’ve spent this entire comment thread literally ignoring nearly all of the rape victims explaining exactly where and why my imprecise, inaccurate, and unhelpful language and assumptions are doing real damage.
So my question is this:
Why is everyone so meeeeeaaaan to me and thinking I’m an asshole?
Improbable Joe:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:31 pm
Paul, no one is misunderstanding you… are you really so goddamned egotistical that you can’t even allow for the possibility that you’re both factually and morally wrong? You’re being a fucking shithead, comparing rape victims to pool balls and dogs, and blaming them for their rapes.
Hey, why don’t you go find a family who lost a child to a drunk driver, and tell them that their child caused their own death by being in a car? Maybe you can go around to plane crash victims and make sure they understand that they carry blame for wanting to travel long distances? Since you’re such a sadistic asshole under your phony detached personal, I’ll bet you’ll get a real kick out of that.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:33 pm
Chris:
You are a truly great writer, and I appreciate that more and more every day. Thank you.
Rev. BigDumbChimp:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:33 pm
I wonder if there is a golden back hoe
vaiyt:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:36 pm
Oh, you’re going technical with us?
Jane’s action of getting on the bus “caused” her rape as much as the bus driver’s decision of picking up the rapist, or Genghis Khan invading Europe and changing the political/populational map so that it would be the specific environment where Jane’s ancestors were born. Is that meaningful, though? Is it meaningful to talk about Genghis Khan when the subject is the cause of rape in the here and now?
People ARE giving you the benefit of the doubt. They refuse to believe you’re so obtuse and stupid as to think your blather has actual significance to the subject, so they jump to the most parsimonious conclusion – that is, you’re being a rape apologist.
In some circumstance, in an alternate universe where this kind of shit isn’t used all the time to blame women for their rape, it MIGHT be okay to say the things you’re saying without sounding like a rape apologist. THIS IS NOT OUR CASE. HERE AND NOW, YOU”RE BEING A RAPE APOLOGIST. STOP. OR FOLLOW MY PREVIOUS POST’S ADVICE.
Paul W., OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:36 pm
Chas:
Yeah. It’s been pretty clear for a while that my rep is taking a pretty big hit of a very bad sort. If so many people really think I’m a fucking rape apologist I don’t think I’m going feel as comfortable around here. I knew I was risking that, if I couldn’t make myself understood, and I gambled and lost bigtime.
So it goes, given my prediliction for making difficult arguments. I’ve been fading out for a long time now anyway, so it probably doesn’ t matter much.
Chris Clarke:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:39 pm
perhaps it was imprudent for you to walk into this place dressed up all mansplainy in those dug-in heels.
Portia, wishing for spring:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:43 pm
Hey, everybody, mission accomplished!
Newsflash, Paul, rape apologists are supposed to feel uncomfortable here. That’s the idea. If you still think everyone is wrong, and you’re just so misunderstood, reread Chris’ post above.
TRIGGER WARNING
After you do that, feel free to tell me how I’m responsible for my rape having continued because I wasn’t forceful enough in my rejection of the unwanted penetration of my person. Like my best friend told me at the time. I mean, I caused it to continue by not breaking his nose, right? Verbally rejecting him wasn’t enough, right? I mean he’d have really gotten the message if I knocked out a couple teeth? AT WHAT POINT DOES THE VICTIM STOP BEING “CAUSALLY TO BLAME”?
chigau (無味ない):
January 18th, 2013 at 12:43 pm
So that was the problem.
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:44 pm
Paul,
Well, it seems time for me to take a turn.
1) Other people have pointed out the problems with your arguments better than I ever can, but I’ll try and approach it from another angle and see if you can grasp your errors that way. Hey you never know, we might get lucky. :-)
Also, I am assuming you are true to your words and are not an MRA rape apologist in any serious sense, I assume that, according to your words, you are attempting to find (and demonstrate) logical methods for defeating rape apologia. That’s all fine, hell I agree with that goal, but I think you’ve accidentally strayed off target. I’ll try to explain why I think that is, but this is off the top of my head so bear with me.
The “faux objectivity” you have, the idealistic objectivity you are aiming for, is genuinely admirable but highly misleading. I’m a physical, not social, scientist, and it is just about possible to deal with my experiments objectively (even that is debatable to some degree), in social science it’s nigh on impossible. Not a criticism of social science, just a difficulty to be appreciated.
Neither you nor I, nor any of us, was raised by wolves, that is outside of human societies to a sufficient degree to have a suitably objective, external perspective. We really have to check ourselves double thoroughly because unconscious biases an assumptions creep in far too easily. I’m at least as guilty of this as you, so this isn’t a lecture, it’s a lament!
The faux objectivity you are demonstrating is not actually culturally independent. It’s a legacy of extant rape culture, it’s nothing more than the legacy of the desire to spread the “evil” around, to attempt to den that one person could do something so terrible to another person. Like mass shooters are derided as “mentally ill”, the victims of rape are “blamed” or in some way deemed “imprudent”. It is a way of “othering” these issues (albeit in different directions). Make the victim in some way responsible (not morally as you say, but causally) and the horror of rape is minimised, if only these imprudent people behaved prudently then some of the causes of these horrors would vanish. If only mentally ill people were not allowed access to guns, for only mentally ill people would commit mass shootings, then some of the causes of these horrors would vanish.
Those are fallacious. Firstly it’s by no means clear that (in the case of shootings) mental illness is generally causative as opposed to say, ideology, secondly it’s by no means clear that if a mental illness is a potential causative factor which mental conditions are the responsible ones. The biggest problem is people go looking for causes after the event, the ability of these claims to predict is non existent. The same for rape, it’s looking for causes after the event. The stereotypical victim was walking down Rape Alley at midnight on Rapefest wearing a short rape facilitator and screaming “rape me rape me!” having had a skinful of rapeohol? None of these are causative of rape by themselves. They all require the presence of a rapist. Rape requires the conscious act of the rapist alone, whatever the circumstances. Whether or not circumstances increase the statistical chance of rape is irrelevant to the act of rape.
Unlike your pool analogy, where the summation of small interactions and statistical oddities is relevant, it’s not relevant in the same way here. The analysis of rape as a statistical phenomenon might be improved by such an analysis, i.e. we will better understand who is raped, how and by whom, but that work (as mentioned upthread by I forget who) has been done to a huge extent. The majority of rapes are committed by friends/acquaintances and family, as you well know. Young children, men and women are raped, ostensibly heterosexual men rape other ostensibly heterosexual men as part of power struggles etc, the statistical pattern does not support any causative relationship between “imprudence” and “rape”. One reason people are jumping on you is because we’re in a mature area of study here, not a nascent one. I freely admit I’m not an expert in it, but there are enough people here who are.
2) I’ll tinker with your pool analogy and make a dehumanising analogy of my own, apologies for this, but the dehumanising aspect is part of a reductio ad absurdum.
Archery and targets. We want to improve our abilities at archery. Your argument is reliant on analysis of the target, whether blue circles are more attractive to archers (perhaps because of some inherent frequency of light sensitivity in the eyes of archers) than red, if squares are better than circles, if straw targets avoid arrows better than concrete targets etc. Maybe you even have a “lucky” target type. Here “lucky” is the replacement for “imprudent”, “archery” for “rape” and “improve our abilities” for “prevent”. This is, I’m afraid, magical thinking.
Yes, obviously, rape victims are not archery targets, I’m trying to point out the ridiculousness of the underlying logic.
Why this analogy and not a more biological predator/prey type analogy? Because as mentioned above that’s not what the data reveal. The “tastiness” of the prey organism is actually simply the “opportunity” to rape. The overwhelming statistical data is that rape occurs where the opportunity to rape is available. This isn’t the case in predator prey relationships. We’re not talking about an evolutionary arms race between prey and predator, we’re not talking about the defence options available to prey organisms over evolutionary time because the analogy doesn’t fit. Firstly, the analogy would have to expand to a food web rather than a single predator prey model at least, given the diversity of rape victims and environments. Secondly, given that diversity of victims and environments we can see that no prey strategy is successful against the predators. Something else is going on.
Back to archery. If we’re going to be better archers we need to work out what makes a good archer. That inevitably involves some analysis of their biology. Transfer this to rape, if we’re going to be better at preventing rape we need to work out what makes a rapist, and indeed what entices a rapist. Great! Turns out a huge amount of this has already been done. The answer is “pretty much anything” to the last question, and indeed the first one. From an individual or statistical perspective. That’s not the same answer you get for archery, and hence why the pool/archery analogies don’t map.
3) Adaptationist assumptions. I don’t believe there is necessarily a biological predisposition for rape or murder. I think there are biological predispositions for other things that may also cause a propensity for violent acts, the rape and murder type behaviours are by-products not adaptations. I’d be careful about the adaptationist tone of your initial arguments.
4) “They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Newton. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
Sometimes when you are being jumped on you aren’t Galileo or Newton. Sometimes (as I have learned to my cost) you’re the other guy.
Sometimes you’re not of course, but this really isn’t one of those times. If you think it is, do one simple thing and define “imprudent” in the context of rape for me. What I need is a working definition of “imprudent” as a descriptor of causative factors that applies to, let’s say, 80% of rapes.
5) To all: apologies for the dehumanising archery analogy above. I know what Paul and others have been trying to do with the pool analogy, I’m not jumping up and down and screaming about it, I just want to show why such analogies are not easily applicable and I used that reductio to do it. Hopefully successfully.
6) Caine: {hugs} if you want them (this goes for anyone else too, obviously) but Caine is my Sister Wife of Josh, and I am a terrible Brother Husband who often neglects his Duties! ;-)
Louis
Improbable Joe:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:44 pm
Paul:
Illuminata, Genie in the Beer Bottle:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:45 pm
Translation; Aren’t we so much better than these bitches, Paul?
Emrysmyrddin:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:47 pm
Your rep is only ‘taking a hit’ because you’re being obtuse, and refusing to back off, when a large amount of other posters have made it clear to you that you’re being obtuse and bullish about a subject that has quite enough baggage as it is without yet more people (previously thought to be quite incisive and thoughtful) perpetrating yet more baggage.
.
People can only go by what you post. If you continue to insist that, “You’re misunderstanding me, that’s not what I wrote,” rather than, “You misunderstand me, and that’s due to my writing being unclear; I shall attempt to do better,” then, frankly, what are you contributing except a futherance of your initial error?
.
You can say racist things unconsciously – sexist things – homophobic things – other ‘isms’ – we all grew up in cultures that are fucked up to some degree or other. It’s refusing to recognise when you personally fuck up that pisses people off. Right now you’re doing that. Take out the martyr tone unless you really want to inspire more social correction. You fucked up. All you need to do is apologise, shut up, and learn. At the moment you’re just compounding matters.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:48 pm
See, here’s the thing. If you’ve ever talked to rape victims, what you find they have in common is…nothing. They may be infants, toddlers teens or 80-year-old Alzheimer’s patients. They may wear a miniskirt or a burqa. They need not even be female. Men are raped, even outside of prisons. One may be raped with a penis, a bottle or the barrel of a gun. More often than not, the victim is smaller, weaker or in some other way vulnerable. The commonality is not in the victims. The cause or the blame or the reason or the explanation cannot lie with the victims.
What all rapes have in common is a perpetrator who says with his actions, I am justified in taking from you anything I want–even your life…even your humanity. The rapist, really, is a terrorist–using terror to take what he wants and to make himself feel powerful.
The soldier in the civil war rapes to demoralize his enemies–men and women.
The rapist waiting in the alley for the girl in the short skirt…or the 89-year old grandmother…or the toddler…any one will do…rapes to make himself fell power over his victim, her family, her society, which are all powerless to protect her.
The rapist in the boardroom is expressing his entitlement over his employees, a sort of droit du Seignor.
The date rapist says he can’t be bothered with what his date wants–all that matters is him.
Women are the predominant victims because men–especially the fucked up men who rape–want to view themselves as strong, because women scare the hell out of such men and because our fucked up society makes women a safe target (in part by blaming them for the rape). Even the selection of women as victims has everything to do with the rapist and nothing to do with the victim other than her sex.
Gen, Uppity Ingrate.:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:48 pm
I agree. Of course, the difference in these scenario’s vs rape is that there is actually a causal link between being killed by a drunk driver and using the road. There is an actual causal link between flying in a plane and being in a plane crash.
There is NO causal link for rape, NONE other than “presence of a rapist/s who intends to rape you”.
Improbable Joe:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:51 pm
Oops… sorry about that.
Quick question: how long before someone seems Paul W over on the slymepit or an MRA site, blaming us for his “newfound” misogyny? “I wanted to treat women with dignity and respect, but they FORCED ME TO HATE THEM! They are morally and causally to blame because they were mean when I simply disagreed with them whether or not rape victims are to blame for their rapes, now I have no choice but to call them c*nts and b*tches all day every day!”
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:51 pm
Myself:
” I’m not jumping up and down and screaming about it” referring to dehumanising analogies.
I mean I am not jumping up and down and screaming TO DEFEND such an analogy. I hope.
Jumping up and down and screaming about such analogies being fucking daft is entirely appropriate.
Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
Louis
Chris Clarke:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:52 pm
Let’s not do that, thanks.
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:53 pm
Chas,
This is palpable horseshit.
I’m not going to say why, obviously. But I just thought you should know.
Louis
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:53 pm
I’m just basically going to retread what carlie @431 said anyways, but it bears repeating.
No. No it doesn’t.
Let’s take the causal chain all the damn way. Big Bang, Formation of Earth, Formation of Life, Cambrian Explosion, Migration Patterns, World History, Buses being invented, Jane being born, Jane deciding to ride a bus, Jane existing, a rapist decided to rape Jane.
If you are an idiot, you can try to weasel-word all that as being causal, but it’s not, because remove one tiny thing from the chain:
Big Bang, Formation of Earth, Formation of Life, Cambrian Explosion, Migration Patterns, World History, Buses being invented, Jane being born, Jane deciding to ride a bus, Jane existing
Suddenly Jane isn’t getting raped anymore. And if Jane isn’t getting raped when all of those oh so totally real causal aspects are in existence?
IT ISN’T FUCKING CAUSAL
Not “meaninglessly” causal, not “oh but in a moral sense” causal, not in a “I’m currently masturbating to my all holy thought experiment” sense of causal. It’s not causal because there is no longer a link to the product.
If by removing a causal action from the chain, you cease causality, then the rest of the chain is not causal. No, not even then. THIS is the real science on causality. You can say it is correlated. You can say it was present. You can say these are things that exist in reality. But you can’t point to any form of causality and any attempt to do so is an attempt to water down causality and at that point one starts to wonder why that’s so important to you.
So no, as much as it would totally be interesting as a thought experiment because “whoa, my hand is moving colors”, it’s just not well, true. Like at all.
The only causal link in the chain in any sense is the decision to rape, because without it the only outcome is Jane goes about her day, unmolested. Full stop.
Adding anything else, even in a “well, but, wouldn’t it be interesting if” way might as well be arguing that in a world where people were made of ice cream wouldn’t cannibalism be tasty as fuck while everyone is talking about how they lost their leg to a cannibal.
Emrysmyrddin:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:55 pm
Bears repeating, just in case Paul missed it in my post, or the myriad other different ways it was asked upthread. Because I really, really want this answered. Otherwise we’re just going around in circles of ‘misunderstandings’… ¬.¬
Portia, wishing for spring:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:55 pm
This made me laugh, Louis, thanks ♥
ChasCPeterson:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:57 pm
fair enough, Louis; we agree that you owe me nothing.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:58 pm
Louis, ♥ thank you for that wonderful post.
Emrysmyrddin:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:58 pm
Chas,
Louis, ol’ horse, I love you.
Jadehawk:
January 18th, 2013 at 12:59 pm
I find that an unlikely outcome.
Janine: Hallucinating Liar:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:03 pm
Been keeping out of this but I have to point out, Paul W is too much of a critical thinker to end up with that den of “critical thinkers”.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:03 pm
Paul:
You haven’t been very active since I started posting here, but I admired you back when I was a lurker. I am genuinely sad to see this turn of events. Not because people are “misunderstanding” you, but because you refuse to even consider the notion that you might be wrong, that you might be arguing from a place of privilege, and that you might be viewing things through the lens of rape culture when you think you’re being objective.
In the grand scheme of things, what we’re asking for here is not that much. Instead of considering why so many people would interpret you the way that we have, you dismiss us as “misunderstanding” you.
That is so depressing and so disappointing. The rape survivors here have all already asked themselves about the sort of “causal” relationship you mention. We’ve asked ourselves about that more times than you could ever possibly imagine. You didn’t bring something new. You weren’t misunderstood. You just brought up the same old crap and then accused us of misunderstanding when we pointed that out.
When we’re fighting against people who don’t even view us as fully human and a culture that has built up to protect a form of torture and those who would carry it out, there isn’t actually that much nuance that needs to be discussed.
Emrysmyrddin:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:06 pm
Paul’s just wrong on this occasion and unable to see it; not wilfully a douchebag.
Portia, wishing for spring:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:08 pm
What’s really imprudent is for men to go outside when it’s common knowledge that men are statistically most likely to rape.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:08 pm
Paul, I’ll give this one last try, because I really want to believe your are still the thoughtful, intelligent, insightful person I used to know.
People did start out by giving you the benefit of the doubt. Many people tried to patiently explain to you what was wrong in your initial post. People also tried, many times over, to explain that as well as being wrong, what you were insisting on repeating and defending was causing actual, real time harm.
A lot of us were shocked to see such…rhetoric coming from you, Paul. Especially when you chose to double down rather than re-think what you were doing. It’s not that people think you are a dyed-in-the wool rape apologist – it’s that you have consistently refused to listen to anyone else, running roughshod over anyone and anything in your determination to prove yourself correct.
In this case, Paul, you are not correct. You made a mistake. A pretty big one. That’s something which can be rectified, if you wish. If you wish to take an honest look at yourself, listen to what others are saying and stop being defensive long enough to realize that in some areas, you still have learning and growing to do.
I’m tired. I’m weary. And it really, truly hurts to think that you would toss us all on a heap with scorn because you can’t face being wrong about something.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:10 pm
IJoe:
Paul wouldn’t do that. He’s simply wrong in this case.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:24 pm
I would note that one of the things that drives some men to presume that women did something that caused them to be raped is that they often want desperately to protect the women in their lives from a similar fate. They think that if they can find something the victim did “wrong”, all they have to do is prevent their loved ones from making a similar mistake.
You get the same thing if you get cancer. People used to say to my wife “Oh, cancer is an angry disease. You must be an angry person.”
You might as well try to make sense out of getting hit by a meteor.
Blaming the victim doesn’t necessarily arise from bad motivations. But it is always wrong, always unproductive, and since it doesn’t work, you keep adding more strictures and prohibitions… Eventually, you wind up dressing women in Burqas and forbidding them from leaving the house unaccompanied by a male relative (as if that will keep them from getting raped).
Improbable Joe:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:33 pm
Look at that Paul, everyone defending you even after you’ve made a terrible mess of things…
So do you really think all of your friends are magically wrong in the exact same way, and with no obvious personal motive since they all seem to have a lot of trust in you? Or is it more likely that you’re really really just wrong, and doubly so because you refuse to listen to people who are going out of their way to give you the benefit of the doubt?
Emrysmyrddin:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:33 pm
I call this Pigeon-Dancing; I catch myself doing a form of it when my agoraphobia flares. The trick is to notice that you’re doing it; something that I thought skeptics were adept at, until, well, a few years ago…
Paul W.:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:35 pm
Caine:
Thanks for saying that.
I’m likely to be at Butterflies and Wheels, not so much The Slymepit. It’s more my kind of Pharygula-hatin’, misogynistic rape apologist place.
carlie:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:40 pm
Well, now I’m offended. Paul, I hope you know that I’ve always held your comments in high esteem. You are often brilliant and clear and cut to the point, and you’re high on the list of people whose comments I just can’t click on to read fast enough when I see their names appear in the sidebar. I am not someone who is likely to handwave and dismiss you casually. In addition, I am in the extremely lucky, random position of being a woman who has not ever been raped, so I have that emotional distance that so many people seem to think is necessary when talking about rape*. In short, I’m not someone who is likely to not give you the benefit of the doubt, or to have an agenda, or to be all non-Vulcan about this.
And it offends me that you think that I am, that you think that we all are. Several of us have tried very hard to explain what we see is wrong with what you’re saying. Not just hurtful, for fuck’s sake not difficult, but what is wrong. And you’re ignoring every bit of it, only saying that your arguments are too difficult, that we just don’t understand, that all we’re doing is screaming rape apologist at you because of having our feelings hurt. You’re calling us stupid and irrational, without even trying to engage the substance of what we’re saying, without even giving us the courtesy to look at what we’re saying and think about it and see if it makes any sense to you. THAT is the kind of thing I find offensive. I don’t agree with you, so it’s not even that I’m wrong, it’s that I am somehow not smart enough to understand your difficult argument, or too emotionally wrapped up in it to allow myself to admit you may have a point. Do you really think that little of all of us?
*that emotional distance is totally not necessary. In fact, it’s often a hindrance.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:46 pm
Paul:
You’re welcome. See, you aren’t reviled or hated. Now, would it really kill you to listen to what we’re saying and re-think your position?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 1:50 pm
Especially Carlie, Paul. Listen to Carlie. Why was it so necessary for you to go out of your way to imply she’s stupid? You know damn well she isn’t.
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:01 pm
Emrysmyrddin, #465,
Yeah sorry, I don’t want to (appear to) take credit for the question, but it is one of the obvious and foundational (erroneous) areas of assumption in Paul’s arguments/analysis. It’s no surprise that it’s been hit on a few times.
For me the frustrating thing is I really sympathise with what he’s trying to do, hell I do it! I just have to remind myself why I am making a balls up when I am doing it.
Sorry, I mean, I have been brain washed by the hypersensitive, irrational, hysterical perpetual victims of Pharyngu-Femistasi-Thought-Squadism and therefore am immune to nuance or reason about the subject. It’s not that I have made identical errors in the past and continue to make them despite my best efforts and have had that kindly pointed out to me with far more generosity of spirit than my cluelessness deserved. That’s right out.
Louis
Emrysmyrddin:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:09 pm
I didn’t intend to imply that you’d creamed the point, Louis, I’m sorry – it’s just you’d put it concisely and coherently (naturellement), so it was an immediately ram-able point worth repeating.
.
I also understand what Paul was trying to say – I just don’t agree with his point, nor his methods.
.
And it’s not the brain-washing, it’s the handy and generous provision of a uterus. How’s it doing, by the way? I hope you placed the box in the best position on the windowsill, and don’t forget to mist it gently twice a day, or it may shrivel and you’ll suddenly find yourself reading the Daily Star, and scratching and belching at inopportune moments again.
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:12 pm
Caine, #476,
Unpossible. No one can be permitted to be Wrong On The Internet. Purge! Maim! Kill the Error Strewn One!
(In other words, Paul: we all fuck up. And perhaps, just perhaps, you have in this instance. No worries, eh?)
Louis
a_ray_in_dilbert_space:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:14 pm
Emrysmidden: “The trick is to notice that you’re doing it; something that I thought skeptics were adept at, until, well, a few years ago…”
Yup. The trick, as always, is to be aware. Skeptics are human. We don’t find it easy to look at things that scare us or make us uncomfortable. And in some ways the smarter someone is, the easier it is for them to hide their true motivations from themselves. I’ve often said that the reason we have so many furrows and crevasses in our brains is so we can drop inconvenient facts in and forget about them.
My wife was raped when she was 12 years old–her first sexual experience. She told me the guy’s name. Multiple times. Buggered if I can remember it. I ultimately decided that my mental block arose from the fact that if I ever met the guy, I would flay him alive with a fucking butterknife…and enjoy every minute of it. Much of what we do is to protect ourselves from what we are not ready to face.
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:16 pm
Emrysmyrddin,
We are in concord I fear! ;-)
The uteri are doing fine, I of course keep them well stocked with foetuses to abort and menz to undermine. The windowsills in my new house were a little too southern in their exposure, so I have put the uteri in a special Uterus Room with the appropriate lighting system. Granted, the flavour of the abortions isn’t quite as good as when in natural light, but I have upped productivity and am thus effectively castrating men (i.e. myself) at a greater rate.
Louis
P.S. The Daily Star? I wish! The Daily Mail is the horror fall back. The scratching and belching continues unabated. You can take the boy out of the rugby team…
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:24 pm
A_Ray:
That’s a fact. I’m sorry for what your wife went through. I experienced my first orgasm, being raped when I was 9. That one took a whole lot of years to deal with. More than I like to think, actually. Anyway, when I finally reached a point to where I talked with Mister about a lot of what had happened to me, he “lost” a lot of details within days. I think, for the same reason you don’t remember that name.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:33 pm
a_ray_in_dilbert_space:
Caine:
Thank you both for this, as it just fit a puzzle piece into place for me. When I got to the point of being able to talk about the details of being raped by my couch surfing “friend”, it seemed like I had to tell the story repeatedly “for the first time”, as the details never stuck in my partner’s head and he was horrified by them as if he had never heard it before each time. I knew he cared and was listening, so couldn’t make sense of why he kept putting it out of his mind like that.
Emrysmyrddin:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:34 pm
But, but, the Daily Mail’s a feminist publication! They even have a Wimmin Section! Full of things that concern the ladybrains!
Paul W.:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:39 pm
Thanks, Chris and Caine and everyone, for all the well-meaning advice to take a good look at myself, realize that everyone disagreeing with me must mean I’m wrong, and so on.
But please stop it now. I do appreciate that you’re honestly trying to help me, but more repetitions won’t help more.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:54 pm
MM:
Yes, that was the same with Mister. I knew he cared, I knew he was listening and I knew he was outraged over most everything he was hearing, too. He reacted very much the same way your partner did.
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:55 pm
Emrysmyrddin,
Ahhh yes, but that is part of a secret misogynist campaign. They pretend to provide ladythings for the consideration of PinkFluffyLadyBrainz ™ , but in actual fact what they doing is perpetuating sexist and misogynist stereotypes and ideals in a sort of acceptable way. Cunning, see. The Daily Star is almost a positive celebration of the female form by comparison, almost third wave in its feminist appreciation of sex positivit…
No…no…even I can’t take the piss THAT much.
Louis
Jadehawk:
January 18th, 2013 at 2:56 pm
true, but I don’t actually think that’s what happened here. I’m pretty sure Paul was going for something… anthropic-principle-ish along the lines of “things ‘now’ are the way they are because everything before happened the way it did; if different things had happened, then the ‘now’ would be different”. I don’t find that a useful perspective here because it’s so trivial and doesn’t really lead to any new insights on the topic, while at the same time being easily abusable (and often abused), and being triggering by being so very similar to the victim-blaming version. Especially when so unfortunately formulated with a vocabulary with very specific connotations in relation to rape (e.g. “blame”, “imprudent”, etc.), when they become pretty much indistinguishable.
Cyranothe2nd:
January 18th, 2013 at 3:10 pm
Paul @ 426
I cannot even give you the fucking benefit of the doubt anymore. Whether you want to talk moral agency or not, you are flat out saying that A WOMAN CAUSES HER RAPE in some way. Whether you are making a distinction between moral culpability and something else is irrelevant– you are still blaming the victim. Its irrelevant in fact, and its irrelevant in arguing against rape cultural narratives (as you claim you are trying to do, and yet you keep parroting the same tired rape culture narratives as if they were facts.)
Fuck. You. Seriously, there is no excuse for saying that a woman can, IN ANY WAY, be responsible for being raped. You are a horrible human being, and you deserve every ounce of criticism you’ve gotten here.
@ Caine, Maureen, Mildly and all the other Invisible Pixels who have shared their stories–THANK YOU. Thank you for having the courage to do that, and thank you for making me feel so much less alone when reading this filth. I admire you all so very much. I’m honored to share a screen with you. (((if you want them)))
Gen, Uppity Ingrate.:
January 18th, 2013 at 3:13 pm
Aquick comment via iPad (so all praise in advance to Tpyos), just to say to ImprobableJoe, re my 459: no worries at all.
I was trying to make the point that even in cases where causality on the victim’s part could in some sense be argued to play a (blameless) role in a resulting tragedy we don’t do that shit as a society in general. We don’t do it, because while it may betrivially and teeeeechnically true in the very most flimsy and ivory tower philosophy of ways, not only is it callous to the point of malicious cruelty, but it’s also completely and totally without positive point or effect.
Of course, like always though, rape, where NO such causality has ever been convincingly argued or shown to exists on the victim’s side, is the exception to that social norm. My surprise, lemme sho u it.
Cyranothe2nd:
January 18th, 2013 at 3:22 pm
Rats, I was responding to Paul’s 424, not 426.
erikthebassist:
January 18th, 2013 at 3:29 pm
Paul comes in to the room, drops trow and starts mustering up a huge pile of steaming shit.
People in the room are shocked, “He wouldn’t do that” “What’s he doing?” “OMG he’s about to shit on the floor in the middle of the room!”
Paul takes a huge dump right there in the middle of the floor.
“Paul, WTF? Why did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Take a huge shit right in the middle of the floor?”
“I did no such thing! How can you accuse me of that?”
Multiple people start pointing at the pile of feces while holding their noses.
“It’s right there Paul, and it stinks!”
“I have no idea what you are talking about?”
Finally a man goes over and jumps up and down next to the pile of shit, waiving his arms and yells “Over here Paul, right here, this pile of shit, we saw you leave it there!”
“Oh, that pile of shit, well, you see, I’m trying to make a point about how shitting on the floor is never good. I didn’t pinch your typical loaf, this loaf is special. Look at the texture, and the color.”
“Fuck that Paul it’s shit and it stinks, clean it up!”
“Not until you examine it with me so you can see why I left it there. Look, it has peanuts and corn and….”
“STFU and clean it up Paul, NOW!!”
“No no, I think I’ll leave it there, I know it stinks but you refuse to understand why I left it there so I’ll just leave it there until you do. Thanks for making me feel like a random shit dropper when I am anything but. That was a highly nuanced shit and I’m sorry you don’t understand my motives for leaving it there.”
Paul W.:
January 18th, 2013 at 3:43 pm
Caine (et al.),
It is not clear to me at this point that people generally agree on how I’m wrong in specifics—e.g., the one crucial thing I’m fundamentally wrong about in one clear, agreed-upon way.
I would be happy to try to address any one issue that people agree is the crucial one I’m wrong about—and in particular, one particular objection to it.
If there’s really some crucial thing that you all clearly disagree with, and disagree with in the same way, please tell me as precisely as you can what it is.
My last attempt to identify such a thing was a key idea in that paragraph I thought I’d already posted a response about.
But you told me not to reconstruct and post that, so I didn’t.
Maybe if I go away for a couple of days and come back and go through stuff with I fresh eye, what you are talking about as the big mistake everyone sees will just pop out at me. I don’t know.
Emrysmyrddin:
January 18th, 2013 at 3:47 pm
So you have no comments at all on the hundreds of posts already here?
ChasCPeterson:
January 18th, 2013 at 3:55 pm
or, maybe not.
But for right now, walking away is the thing to do.
Tethys:
January 18th, 2013 at 3:58 pm
I haven’t caught up, but this sentence from Mellow Monkey #294 hits the nail on the head:
Exactly. I wish I had something to add to expand upon this crucial point, but being triggered is not conducive to clear communications. I’ll be brief.
Paul W
You are wrong, and fuck you very much for the shit on the floor.
——–
Horde
I love you. Thank you.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:04 pm
Emrysmyrrdin:
I decided to scroll past Paul’s latest post, as he asked me specifically to back off and I didn’t want to find myself replying anyway. I surmise scrolling past was a good decision.
Eric Saveau:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:06 pm
Paul W., you have long been one of my favoritest atheists in the online world. For you commentary in general, but also for one comment in particular – the legendary Comment 29 over at Ophelia’s old place. It’s something I link to frequently as a clear, incisive, and downright brilliant example of showing someone exactly how and why they are wrong and how all the efforts to explain something away as a misunderstanding are useless and misguided.
You see where I’m going, don’t you?
The commentariat here has been Comment 29′ing you. At length. In exhaustive detail. With facts. They are demonstrating the same “we’re pissed and we should be and here’s why” qualities that make Comment 29 such a standout piece. And they are pissed. But I daresay that most of them are doing so with the expectation that you are smart and decent enough, regardless of what they are reacting to now, to get it.
Please get it. Please take this very seriously. It’s at least as important as what Comment 29 so cogently addresses.
Tethys:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:06 pm
Yes. I have steam coming out me ears, and it’s not even addressed to me.
Cyranothe2nd:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:08 pm
/thread
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:18 pm
Eric Saveau, thank you for reminding me of Comment 29.
*sad*
Dalillama, Schmott Guy:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:18 pm
Paul W
I’ll give you a big hint, Paul. It’s the part that everybody has been quoting back at you when they tell you why you’re apologizing for rape. It’s the part where you insist that the behaviour of the victim is in some way causal of their being victimized. That’s the part where you are wrong, in every imaginable sense. No amount of philosophizing about this premise will get you anywhere useful, because this premise does not reflect reality. Your continued insistence that we just consider that maybe this might be true is the problem, because a) it is demonstrably not true, and b) stating that it is or may be true is actively harmful to people who have been victimized by rapists, which category includes a lot of people here, who used to like you, until you repeatedly, over and over again, accused them of complicity in their rape. That’s the one, singular problem that everyone’s been trying to point out to you, and I cannot conceive of how you can honestly claim not to understand that if you have read even a tenth of the posts on this thread. My initial presumption that you are an honest but terribly misguided interlocutor has been sorely tested, and my willingness to continue to respond in a halfway civil manner has more to do with my personal preferred writing style when I am very, very angry, in that I attempt to be very precise to avoid typing a cathartic but uninformative string of “FUCK YOU”s. Understand that I come to this discussion as a male who has never been sexually assaulted in any way; this is not you triggering me. The reason I am very pissed off is that you have been directly triggering people who I like to consider to be friends, and furthermore denigrating, although not to their face since they’re not here, my husband, my roommate, and literally every adult female not in my immediate family (possibly bar one) whom I have gotten to know to a significant degree. All of them have at least one story of rape, near rape, or sexual assault, which they have shared with me. To see you continue to insist that they are culpable in their victimization, over and over, in the face of so many people explaining how and why you are wrong, has literally raised my blood pressure to the point that my vision blurs with each heartbeat. And that’s me. I can only imagine how much more you’ve hurt and angered Caine, Cerberus, and all of the other people who have opened their wounds for your edification and delight, and you owe each and every one of them a personal apology, as abject and groveling as you can make it.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:19 pm
Thanks, Tethys. I won’t go back and look.
Cyranothe2nd:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:22 pm
Eric Saveau–can we get a link to the famed Comment 29? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it…
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:24 pm
Dalillama:
I can only speak for myself, but all I want from Paul is for him to turn that critical eye on himself and to see that in this instance, he is wrong. That’s it. And that’s a lot, I know. Right now, I’d settle for a really good try.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:28 pm
Paul
Wow. I’ll admit that the cynical side of me was expecting that your comment @492 would turn out to be the disingenuous douchebag flounce I was reading it as, but I wasn’t really expecting that to be A) true or B) revealed so damn quickly.
8 comments later and there wasn’t even really anything there to set you off. We were letting you climb back up the ladder to dignity. Did you think the dignity was angry bees? Are you just a cavophiliac?
Also weren’t you ranting earlier about how we were just picking on these one or two statements that just “sounded bad out of context” and “I already addressed that, so I am done forever because communication is a one-way street” and now it’s all “you’re picking on so many different things (that all are about very similar things cropping up multiple times), how could anyone hope to respond or view it as at all valid”?
I mean, if you want time alone with the hole, all you gotta do is throw a sock up and tell us to bug out for awhile. We’re really not here to judge.
Dalillama, Schmott Guy:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:28 pm
Caine
If that works for you it works for me, certainly, although I think I’d feel compelled to apologize anyway, if I’d put my foot in it this deep.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:28 pm
Cyranothe2nd, http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/jesus-said-some-good-things/#comment-82630
Gregory Greenwood:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:31 pm
Chris Clarke @ 451;
And this is such a bad neighbourhood of the information superhighway afterall – a real dark intertoob alley. Full of nasty castrating feminazis just waiting for any opportunity to set upon one of the unwary menz. When you think about it, coming in here was downright careless of Paul W…
Cyranothe2nd:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:33 pm
Thanks Caine. That’s a really good post. I admit that I haven’t come across Pal before (or, if I have, that his ‘nym hasn’t stuck in my brain), so I was not as charitable in my reading of his first post as some others were when they attempted to explain why he was so wrong. It seems like it really didn’t matter, since he doubled-down instead of listening, but its good to know that he’s not just some troll.
Also Caine, you’ve been rocking this thread hard. Mad props!
Chris Clarke:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:36 pm
That’s a matter of opinion. Given this in his latest:
… I find it difficult to believe that he’s arguing in good faith. I am not feeling inclined to welcome him back with open arms.
Chris Clarke:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:36 pm
Your point about Caine rocking the thread, however, is much-warranted.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:38 pm
Cyranothe2nd:
Yeah, it is. And that’s the least of what he wrote during the accommodation wars. He shined during those. It’s why so many of us are having a really difficult time with all this now.
Thanks. :)
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:40 pm
Chas, #467,
Oh I dunno. Contempt isn’t nothing whether or not you find it significant.
Louis
The Mellow Monkey:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:40 pm
Paul:
Okay.
athyco @265:
Me @ 275:
Caine @ 278:
JAL @ 282:
Chris @ 292:
JAL @ 311:
Me @ 316:
Josh @ 320:
vaiyt @ 326:
Cerberus @ 327:
athyco @ 329:
Cerberus @ 330:
Caine @ 332:
Cerberus @ 333:
Nepenthe @ 339:
It’s this, for a few hundred comments. Over and over again, the same thing. Yes, yes, we know you don’t really think that a rape victim was “asking for it.” We know that. But you are still trying to argue that there is “nuance” here, that our basic stance is one of “extremism”, and that there’s nothing wrong with discussing a victim’s “imprudence” so long as you make it clear you’re making a distinction between “causal blame” and “moral blame.”
And that is all wrong. And we have all said it is wrong. And we have all said the many ways that it is wrong. The fact that you think we’re somehow in disagreement here baffles me. We are all saying the same things.
There are many different ways you’re wrong and many different ways we can analyze that wrongness and fine shades of wrongness, but at the end of the day, it’s just rape culture baggage.
And it’s wrong.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:44 pm
Chris:
Thank you. You did some impressive rocking yourself, Chris.
I didn’t read his latest (last?) post, but this bit:
Wow. I…
wow. I don’t see how he could possibly say that with a straight face or any honesty. If we ever sounded like an echo chamber, it was in this thread. We were all saying the same damn thing. Over and over.
Okay. Well, I tried. We all tried. And that counts, right?
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:46 pm
Gregory Greenwood, #516,
Downright imprudent I’d have said. Not that that makes anyone morally responsible.
Louis
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:48 pm
Caine,
I got a Certificate of Attendance.
And you don’t get one of those for just showing up.
Louis
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:49 pm
MM:
!
:eyebrows climb and climb and climb until they fall off the back of my head:
Chris Clarke:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:53 pm
:picks up Caine’s eyebrows, dusts them off, hands them back:
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:56 pm
Oh, there they are! Thank you, Chris. I might require superglue.
Hekuni Cat, MQG:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:57 pm
MM:
Wow. Thank you. There are so many things wrong about Paul’s comments that I didn’t see this until you pointed it out.
carlie:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:58 pm
Maybe.
Maybe if you don’t think of it as “what is everyone trying to hammer at me as a big mistake”, which automatically raises defenses to the “la la la I can’t hear you” level.
Maybe if you try skimming through and reading just all of Caine’s responses, or skimming through and just reading all of Cerberus’ responses, etc., it might make more sense because each person is coming at it from their own angle, and maybe it was having all of those perspectives coming at you at once that made it seem confused and muddy.
Maybe if you don’t try looking for one magic bullet of wrongness, but look at it as “what are the possible weaknesses in what I said and how”.
I’m just really discouraged that you seem to see this whole thing as “everybody against Paul” rather than “everybody against this thing Paul said”. I’m really sad that you are interpreting it as people being mean and irrational and directing their meanness at you rather than the possibility that they are all trying to clue you in on something important because they care about what you think about this thing. I don’t argue like this because I think it’s fun. Nobody was getting any enjoyment out of this. It’s affected some people very strongly in a very negative way. It wasn’t for the sake of wanting to make you feel bad; that wouldn’t ever be worth what they’re going through right now, how their day and possibly their next few days have been ruined. It’s not an attack on you. It’s about this idea you put forth and how it’s flawed, and the reason it was attacked so strongly is because that exact same idea gets promulgated time and time again, and it’s both factually wrong and is used as a cudgel against people who could never deserve it.
Paul W.:
January 18th, 2013 at 4:58 pm
OK, here’s that paragraph that at least some people seem to take as a proof that I’m a victim-blaming rape apologist, and I can certainly see why:
Presenting it out of the context I at least attempted to create for it, It really does seem to clearly mean something fucking horrible that makes me a victim blaming rape apologist.
But that is NOT WHAT I MEANT. REALLY.
I intended a very context-dependent meaning, in which the sentence is true but only if you interpret several terms in particular ways.
That is, it was intended to be a statement that seems horrible and damning if you interpret one way, but can nonetheless actually be true and even morally acceptable if it’s clear that a very different interpretation is meant.
That’s why the paragraph has several apparent “obvious” problems that make it clearly seem like a horrible statement. It’s supposed to be a statement that some people would find obviously victim-blaming on one interpretation, but that other people would think is a statement of fact and have an interpretation on which it’s true, and think is okay.
If you don’t believe me about that—that the statement is supposed to seem obviously victim-blaming, etc., in a way that I am not, but it has yet have a different much-less-obvious interpretation that is true and okay, then if I say that the statement is true, it will seem like I am clearly some sort of victim-blaming asshole who really does not belong here.
I really fucked myself with this example, because clearly I made it too complicated and dependent on too many non-obvious matters of interpretation, and that made it difficult to believe me when I said it could ever be true or okay on any interpetation, and that effectively derailed my argument right there, in a way it never recovered from.
I spent too much time trying to justify an example that was poorly chosen and prone to disagreement, and made people suspicious that I was just wanking for the sake of it, or that I wouldn’t spend so much time wanking about a horrible statement if I wasn’t trying to pull a fast one, or any of various other bad things.
I am sorry I fucked up in that way, and compounded it by not keeping my eye on the ball, quickly ditching the example with an apology, and coming up with an example that I could make work and make convincing.
If you think I’m a rape apologist because you didn’t understand what I was trying to do with that example, or didn’t believe me that it was really what I was trying to do, I understand that. I did fuck up, bigtime, and made myself too hard to understand and even too hard to believe.
I am very sorry for putting everyone through all this with that huge fuckup, and some other fuckups.
I hope you’ll believe me when I say that my motive was not to justify victim blaming, but to explain how it can hinge on an ambiguity, and that I at least thought there was a good reason to make that kind of point, and certainly didn’t mean to put everybody through this crap just to make that point.
Unfortunately, it took me way longer than it should have to realize how much I’d fucked up with that example, and I didn’t understand why so many people didn’t believe me when I said that I was arguing against victim-blaming, not for it. I did the wrong thing in response, repeating what I do actually think and denying that it was victim blaming, rather than recognizing why people wouldn’t believe me in the face of what seems like a clearly victim-blaming statement on my part.
Again I am very sorry for all that.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:00 pm
Caine, I may have overstated that, but it was my interpretation of this mess from his first monster post:
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:03 pm
Thank you, Carlie. ♥
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:05 pm
MM:
:re-reads:
No, no you didn’t.
*sigh*
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:07 pm
From mob bosses and assassins to pool balls to dogs to alternators to…
We’ve been about everything except who we are, eh?
Chris Clarke:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:08 pm
Yes, Paul, your mistake is precisely that you were playing twelve-dimensional chess for an audience of rubes. That’s exactly what happened. We’re all just golden retriever puppies here watching as you put quadratic equations on the chalkboard, and waiting for an apology from you for going too far over our heads.
You’re done in my thread. Go away.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:09 pm
Paul, I get this is an ego thing. I get that you’re trying. I get that you’re hurting. And I get that this is your way of trying to mend bridges and I accept your apology, but seriously, man, your continued stance of “all y’all with your lady brains are too stupid and short-attention-spanned to get my super duper important thought experiment point” just makes me want to punch you in the junk.
I get that this whole… thing… got really tied into a lot of ego about how smart you are and you know what, you a schmott guy, but… no. You really do not understand how much you are failing because of the cultural contexts in which you keep saying these horrible sexist things like “the women who disagreed with me just couln’t understand my super complex man point”.
carlie:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:12 pm
Caine, I’m sorry for how this has affected you. I do sometimes take the “unaffected in the same way you (the person I’m arguing with) are” viewpoint in discussions like this, and I always worry that I’m coming off as callous and performing sideswipes on other people in the process. I hope I’m not.
I’m now whimpering on the floor in academic frustration. The bolded part is exactly what many of us have been arguing against this entire time. Not the first interpretation. We are taking issue with “can nonetheless actually be true”, because it is not, in fact, actually true, in any correlative sense of the word, in any statistically significant sense of the word, in anything but the most trivial “and also there was a big bang that was causative of this event just as every event is a summation of everything that has happened in all of space and time prior to said event” sense of the word. I’m honestly at a loss to explain that point any differently than is has been the last dozen or so times.
Chris Clarke:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:13 pm
If you think of men as leptons, and women as hadrons, then according to this Feynman diagram it’s clear that causality is dependent on hey where did everyone go?
mildlymagnificent:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:13 pm
I’ve skipped a few posts so someone else might have got here before me.
Paul, do you really understand where your thinking is taking you? Your real problem is that you’re resisting going to the place that all women inhabit. Our thinking, our upbringing, our life experience all combine to make us understand that women are never, ever, never, safe from the reality of rape.
Your rationalising and logicalising about factors or contributors or causes of any particular rape are the same intellectual tap-dancing that women have to do all the time – when we’re seriously trying to avoid facing the fact that it isn’t up to us.
I realise that you’re not there yet – but welcome to our world anyway.
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:14 pm
Paul,
You made your argument too conditional and complicated? I didn’t think so, it was just incorrect. I also didn’t and don’t think you are any species of rape apologist, other than accidental at worst, and hell, we ALL do that whether we like it or not.
You’re about to get a barrage of “intent=/=magic” by the way, so brace yourself. I wouldn’t be shocked if your “complicated” comment makes people think your apology is actual a classic notpology.
Imagine a single rapist. That rapist has individual drives, desires, tendencies that will make that rapist rape a subset of potential victims. IIRC many rapists have a “type” (someone please correct me if I am wrong, I am working from memory). One can’t easily generalise from the specific tendencies of one rapist because the cohort “rapists” and the cohort “rape victims” are too diverse (as mentioned before). Again this is an area that has been well studied, a mature area of the social sciences. And again, the only major commonality, the only major generality, seems to be “opportunity”. In all cases of rape the only identifiable proximal cause is the presence of a rapist. That’s not as tautological as it sounds because it is an explicit refutation of your claim that one can meaningfully talk about other proximal causes of rape.
Note that I am not talking about blame, or moral responsibility, just simple causative factors.
Is the presence of the rape victim a distal cause? Their clothing? Their drunkenness etc? Sure. But then so is (as others have already said) any damned thing that lead either rapist or victim to be present at the time and place of the rape. How far do you want to go in examining distal causes? And why only examine the distal causes associated with the victim and not the rapist? Sure one person’s drunkenness might be a distal cause for one rapist’s rape, but so is the set of circumstances the rapist placed themselves in to be able to rape. It’s an endless regress, and the tendency to focus on distal causes associated with victims is a legacy of rape culture. It is explicitly an apologia, accidental perhaps, for the distal causes associated with the rapist.
Worse, it ignores the only reliable PROXIMAL cause we have: the presence of the rapist and their opportunity to rape. Again, the data bears this out simply by noting the diversity of rapes, victims and rapists.
It’s partly the confusing of proximal and distal causes, and the focus on distal causes associated with the victim only that particularly undermine any argument you are trying to make. Plus, well, you know the other stuff I said upthread! ;-)
Louis
DLC:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:18 pm
Mmmmkay. been away from this for a while. Yes, Paul W, I am going to pile on. Paul W, rape is never, ever justifiable for any reason at any time FULL FUCKING STOP. I don’t fucking care if the victim was dancing naked in the street wailing out hit me baby at the top of their lungs.
No one, not ever, not even their spouse, has a right to force themselves on that person sexually. There is no damn nuance, no ambiguity.
carlie:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:19 pm
YES WHAT LOUIS JUST SAID RIGHT THERE
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:23 pm
Clarification:
Distal causes are things like “ZOMG if I had got on that plane I would have died in that crash, but I was saved by my car breaking down”. I’m using the term (perhaps incorrectly) as representative of events that are related to the event causally some how, but are irrelevant to the actual, proximal cause of the event. So for example, my car could have broken down on a day when I wasn’t due to take a flight, causing me disruption but no life saving inconvenience.
The same applies to the stereotypical “short skirt” (or whatever). Sure Rapist A with Short Skirt Urge might be partly aroused to rape by the presence of a short skirt, but this is a distal cause, it takes no account of other distal causes and is irrelevant to the proximal cause of the rape: the presence of a rapist and the opportunity to rape. The stereotypical “short skirt” could have been present in front of a bazillion rapists none of whom had the opportunity or current desire to rape.
Focussing on individual distal causes in this way, especially distal causes in the case of rape victims, is to totally miss the really important bits about the rape. If you’re trying to find ways to combat apologists, start there.
Louis
carlie:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:24 pm
THIS was one of the points I was trying to make. No wonder I couldn’t quite get it down right; it was off playing around in Louis’ head where I couldn’t reach it.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:26 pm
Carlie:
Thank you. I know what these threads do to me, but it’s important. We can’t sit in a corner and be silent.
I obviously haven’t told you just how very much I appreciate that you can do that. You can go places I can’t, you can reach people I don’t and you always provide a calm, rational, well reasoned and often cutting commentary. I can never read you fast enough. In threads like this, you act like an anchor for me. And I love you dearly for it.
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:26 pm
Sorry, Carlie.
We feminazi pharynguscum all think alike. I must have accidentally stolen the Hymn Sheet when it was your turn.
Louis
Gregory Greenwood:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:27 pm
Cerberus from Time Forgot @ 429;
It is very nice of you to say that, but I think you put it far better than I did.
————————————————————————————————————————-
Paul W. @ 424;
Fine, you don’t want to listen to me. Fair enough, others have made the point far better than I have. If you will take some free advice from me, it would be to go back and read all the posts from people like Caine, Carlie, and all the women on this thread who have experienced rape and its legacy upon society and the individual. They understand these issues far better than a man like me (and, I assume, like you) who has never experienced rape or sexual assault can ever hope to.
Read all the posts by Cerberus too – they succinctly cover all the points you need to understand, and the deconstruction of why your pool analogy is so problematic is particularly effective.
It is not that none of us are detached and rational (or even ‘smart’) enough to grasp your arguments, or that we are all making the exact same mistake that leads us to misunderstand what you are saying in the exact same way – you are wrong on this, and the reasons why you are wrong have been repeated scores of times on this thread. We are not doing this to hurt you, emasculate you or belittle you. We are trying to communicate why your remarks are so harmful, in the hope that you will understand that your words are causing damage.
Even I – someone who has never had to go through the trauma of rape or sexual assault – do not enjoy this type of grinding verbal sparring over an issue that is so triggering and causes so much pain. I find it draining and depressing. I cannot imagine how difficult it is for the people who have had to live through rape and its longterm aftermath. These people are prepared to suffer the triggering and the resurgent trauma caused by threads like this because the message they are seeking to express to you is so important. The least you can do is put aside your reflexive defensiveness and listen to them.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:28 pm
Paul, I understood what you were trying to say and do just fine. I do not fucking appreciate the “sorry you’re all too stupid to get my incredible argument”. We got it. It was wrong. What, exactly, does it say about you, that you can’t manage to understand what we have been saying for hundreds of posts? What, exactly, does it say about you that you cannot admit that you are wrong?
carlie:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:29 pm
Now I’m embarrassed enough to hide under the couch. ♥ I love how you can be passionate and eloquent at the same time, because as soon as it’s something where I am emotionally involved, I turn into a sputtering pile of incoherence.
Paul W.:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:30 pm
One clarification… I was only looking for one especially bad thing (that everyone agreed was the terrible thing) because some recent comments by others seemed to suggest that there was a big particularly crucial thing that everyone saw as The Big Problem but me.
I had never thought that was likely, myself—it had seemed that there were many varied criticisms of many things, and trying to address—but if there was one biggie, I wanted to address that one for sure before leaving.
Having at least attempted one that seems pretty big to me, I’m history.
Goodbye everyone.
Best wishes, and sorry for all the pain.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:32 pm
:Momentary derail:
Cerberus:
Cerberus, would you mind stepping over to the Angry Dome to help us out with a burning question?
:/Momentary derail:
vaiyt:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:35 pm
Stop thinking you’re smarter than everyone here. We can read the fucking context, you idiot. We KNOW you were making a completely meaningless causal link that “coincidentally” sounded exactly like rape apologia. We pointed it out to you REPEATEDLY. YOU DOUBLED DOWN. AGAIN. AGAIN. AGAIN. AND FUCKING AGAIN. You refused to let go of your precious argument. Guess what, you can take the argument AND the context and shove BOTH in your nostril until it hits your brain.
All together now!
YOUR!
INTENT!
MEANS!
JACK!
FUCK YOU and have a good day!
The Mellow Monkey:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:38 pm
Caine:
Seconding this to Carlie. Your contributions are just phenomenal.
And Caine, you’ve really been an inspiration to me with how you handle threads like this.
I want to thank the Horde in general, because when I first started posting here, I couldn’t handle these topics for more than a few posts before descending into incoherent monkey rage and tears. The months here, reading these arguments, seeing the apologetics ripped to shreds, has helped me more than just about anything else and I can finally discuss these things without just making a sobbing ass of myself. I haven’t always been like that (and absolutely have made an ass of myself here), but being able to talk about this stuff and hold my ground is an incredible gift. Thank you for that.
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:44 pm
The Mellow Monkey,
Oh but DAHHHLING, all the best people have!
Louis
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:48 pm
Chris:
You are a wonderfully wicked man.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:50 pm
MM:
♥ You are a clear and wonderful voice and you have no trouble at all making a mean point. Or a dozen.
chigau (無味ない):
January 18th, 2013 at 5:51 pm
Chris
Paul W. #551 looks like a real exit.
Would you consider leaving it?
It would take a Mighty Bunny to close this episode.
SC (Salty Current), OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:53 pm
Oh, Paul. Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul.
Describing your first post as “didactic” is illustrative. Stop trying to teach. Stop fucking typing. Read. Listen. Try to understand.
You know I’ve long liked and respected you. I’m confident you’ll do the right thing.
erikthebassist:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:54 pm
Caine, Cerberus, Athyco, Jal and the rest…
Well, if there’s anything positive to take out of this mess it’s this: I want you to know that two years ago I wouldn’t have understood the response to Paul W today. I might have even thought people were over reacting.
Today, I knew Paul was fucking up and knew what the reaction would be before I even saw it.
I had the same reaction.
I know he put a lot of people througha lot of pain today, and it pisses me off that he did, but you should all know it’s not for nothing, that there’s another me out there lurking who in 6 months, or a year from now, is going to remember this thread, and countless others like it.
They are going to remember what Paul (and others) said and how it contributes to rape culture and how it can be used to pour salt in the wounds of the victims, and they will stop and think before they speak, and might even find themselves calling out someone else on similar bullshit.
What you are doing is making a difference, you are winning hearts and minds. I’m proof of it, and I know there are hundreds of others just like me out there reading this.
I want you to know that, and thank you, from the bottom of my being, thank you. I’m a better person for having known you and for my time here.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 5:58 pm
Erik, thank you. This is the first time I’ve had good tears in my eyes.
Jadehawk:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:08 pm
seconded. that’s pretty much the idea I was trying to get across.
Chris Clarke:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:12 pm
That was my intention, yep.
This one’s not really right for this thread, but I’m putting it here for safekeeping for use in mid-thread with a lower-stakes troll.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:15 pm
I would like to add my voice to those pointing out that the words of people like Caine and Carlie and all the other wonderfully expressive and intelligent feminists and progressives on Pharyngula do make a real difference. It does raise awareness of what rape culture is and how widespread that poison has become in our society. It is from people like you that I learned about it as a lurker. You are the ones who put the red pill in my right hand, and the blue in my left, and let me choose whether I had the fortitude and intellectual honesty to look at how messed up our patriarchal culture is without the comforting blinders of the cis/het, white male privilege I happened to be born into.
I took the red pill, and every day since has been an exercise in trying to be aware of my wholly unearned privilege. It has equipped me with the knowledge to start to become a better person, and I flatter myself that I have made a couple of tentative, tottering steps in that direction, though with many a trip and stumble along the way, My journey to becoming more socially aware began with people like you and your fantastic, well chosen, insightful (and inciteful) words – you are the reason it has been possible. I would like to thank you for that, doubly so knowing the personal pain it must have cost you to do it.
Your words do make a difference. They made all the difference for me, and they will do so for others.
erikthebassist:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:15 pm
*hugs* Caine. I don’t gerally approve of hero worship, people are people no matter how smart or successful, but it’s awfully hard not to make an exception in your case.
Hekuni Cat, MQG:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:18 pm
Eric, Caine’s not the only one with good tears in her eyes.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:18 pm
It’s your thread, Chris, but I wouldn’t mind if Paul came back for a bout or two, because I’d really like to find out if he can reach understanding. Just on this page alone, we’ve had some outstanding explanations (Carlie and Louis) that I don’t know that Paul has seen yet.
chigau (無味ない):
January 18th, 2013 at 6:21 pm
baby bunny…popcorn…
I may never recover.
♥
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:23 pm
Okay, I’m gonna join Carlie under the couch. ♥
Gregory, you have been a consistent, patient (incredibly patient, if you ask me) voice of reason for quite a long while now. I’ve seen you reach people no one else could get through to, and that’s worth…well, everything.
Hekuni Cat, MQG:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:26 pm
I mean Erik. I’m sorry.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:26 pm
Very nice explanations that should have gotten through. But, I think Paul really had a blind spot, having to do with choices by the rapist. Just as the rapist picks a victim for whatever reason he needs, it is very similar to the bank robber picking a bank to rob. It is there, and its where the money is (paraphrasing Willie Sutton).
erikthebassist:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:29 pm
I’ll forgive you Hekuni Cat if you forgive my never ending string of typos, deal? =)
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:32 pm
Nerd, #571,
Ahhh but banks that get robbed are imprudent for not having enough guards, being out late at night in the wrong parts of the economy and wearing a short interest rate.
Slutty, slutty banks.
Louis
SC (Salty Current), OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:35 pm
Love.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:37 pm
Caine, Fleur du mal + @ 569;
Aw, shucks. Now I’m all embarrassed…
;-P
Sometimes, though, I wonder whether my ability to reach some of these people is a product of my openly male nym more than anything else. I fear that I am enabling their misogyny by providing an obviously male voice for them to engage while they continuously ignore the voices of other posters with feminine or gender ambiguous nyms who make the points easily as well (and usually far better) than I do.
Somewhere in the shadowed recesses of my noggin, there is a little imp in a cage furiously rattling its bars and screaming at me to drop the non-swearing-slightly-milquetoast-nice-chap routine and just yell at that type of person to actually address the women on the thread directly rather than ignoring their existence in favour of engaging the commenters with the clearly male nyms.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:39 pm
Only one thing to do with this logic. Give it a tankard of 9-day-old *dons PPE to make the transfer*.
Chris Clarke:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:41 pm
Well, I kind of felt like I was doing him a favor, and I certainly wouldn’t be aching to come back were I in his shoes.
But I have benefited from chances offered when I didn’t deserve them in the past. So.
Paul, if you want to come back and read and actually engage, and you can manage to write responses that don’t make me hear them in Phil La Marche’s voice as The Brain in my head, here’s a second chance. You can thank Caine.
Improbable Joe:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:41 pm
I’m totally on board with what Erik said, and I’m in the same position.
You folks have taught me a lot… I’m sure some of you remember some of the asshole moves I’ve pulled over the last couple of years. But as slow as I am, I learned some stuff. I learned that if something isn’t YOUR issue, it is better to ask what other people closer to the issue think rather than make statements based in ignorance. I learned that if someone tells me that I’m wrong, maybe I should ignore my first instinct to get defensive and make sure that I’m not actually wrong.
And the big one: trying to score intellectual debate points isn’t worth hurting other people. It doesn’t matter if I can figure out a clever way to spin things so that I’m technically “correct,” if I’m causing other people pain then I’m absolutely doing the wrong thing and I need to stop immediately and apologize. Treating other people’s real-life experiences like some sort of game that I can crack open and poke around in is wrong every time, no matter how complicated a rationale you can build up in order to justify it to yourself.
And Paul, I’m going to go ahead and apologize for some of what I said to you. Some of my anger is just that I could have been as stupid and cruel as you have been, and in defense of people I’ve grown to care about. Accusing you of being a potential MRA/misogynist was uncalled for, and I’m sorry.
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:44 pm
Just so we don’t get accused of being an echo chamber, I’ve learned nothing from any of you and I hate everyone.
Louis
SC (Salty Current), OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:45 pm
And just think of the sluts robbed by banks! Out for an affordable student “loan” (everyone knows what that means) or looking for a whoregage in a seedy neighborhood.
Predatory, my ass.
chigau (無味ない):
January 18th, 2013 at 6:47 pm
I still like you Louis.
Pteryxx:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:48 pm
Joe: and heck, if YOU can learn to do better… ;>
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:49 pm
Dang, can’t even include GROG in post #576. (Time to fix the Friday night fish dinner for the Redhead (she’s not religious, just that the local restaurants have fish fries on Friday night). Where are the Idaho potatoes to nuke *goes in search of*?)
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:53 pm
IJoe, *bravo*. That was a good post.
Gregory, don’t listen to that imp, tell them to shut up and settle down. I have seen, in more than one thread, a person listen and respond primarily or exclusively to you, however, it makes your presence and willingness to engage all the more important. There will always be men who are at a stage where they simply aren’t willing to engage with women on some topics, or they are uncertain how to engage with women or they’re plain scared of engaging women.
A lot of the time, when a man is trying to figure certain things out, especially if those are confusing, complex things, it feels better and easier to for them to be able to talk with another man. In this, as well as much of other bits of life, homosocial bonding can be crucial, it can be the make or break. So, you just keep telling that imp to mind it’s own business. So to speak.
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:54 pm
Paul W.
As said, Intent Isn’t Magic. Anyways, EVEN IN CONTEXT your statement is bullshit and wrong.
This is the problem. I couldn’t disagree with this more. Those statements aren’t true. They aren’t okay. Not even in the “harmless change one factor and change the whole incident” way because the only way to change something to make a rape not happen is to remove the rapists.
1.) Fuck your condescension. We understand you perfectly. Maybe it’s YOU that isn’t understand us. Ever think of that Mr. Observational Vulcan Ivory Tower Philosophical Wanker?
2.) You spent hundreds of words on this, there is NO WAY to make it okay.
3.) Your argument is exactly the problem, even with all the charitable interpretations and leeway given you.
4.) Notpology.
5.) There IS NO example that could work or be convincing.
Oh, fuck you and your condescending notpology. You sound like this:
“Oh, I’m sorry you’re the one misunderstanding me. Oh, I’m sorry my example was too complex for you. I’m sorry I didn’t give you a better, simpler example for you poor slow folks. I’m sorry you’re too cynical to believe me, even though I’m a good person with a good track record. It’s okay *pats heads* I understand you at least.
1. Doesn’t matter.
2. NOT TRUE. There’s no ambiguity.
3. Really? I’ve asked and yet haven’t seen an answer except maybe that “in a clinical, strictly observational sense” trash. Even if you make up an coherent reason, again, it doesn’t matter. It’s not true, it’s not okay, and there’s no reason for your rape apologist argument.
4. Doesn’t matter, you did. You still don’t get it and are really just making it worse.
If you’re really gone, good riddance. Like Dawkins, you’ve got a sexist blindspot here. While you may have been great before and may be great later on other issues, you suck at this topic and honestly, fuck that. I don’t see a reason to believe your arguing in good faith or that you can come around.
My atheism with be inter-sectional or it will be bullshit. Fuck coddling supposed friends and allies, when there is plenty of others to support who won’t pull this shit. If others want to hold your hand and play nice with you, good luck to them and I respect their decision, I’m just not going to do that. Fuck you.
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:54 pm
SC, #580,
Just think what this means the economic downturn and toxic debts are in terms of sluts/feminism/rape culture.
And quantitative easing. That’s positively disgusting!
Oh dear, I’ve gone again haven’t I?
Louis
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 6:56 pm
SC:
:Laughs: You have a wonderful way with words.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:00 pm
Caine, Fleur du mal +@ 584;
OK then.
Oi, imp! Yes, you in the cage – pipe down or I’ll feed you to my id. It hasn’t had a decent meal in days…
Gregory Greenwood:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:03 pm
Louis and SC (Salty Current), OM;
*Applauds*
Your riffing on banks is brilliant, just brilliant!
:-)
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:03 pm
Oh, damn. Again, I’m slow composing and missed a lot. I swear the last comment I read before my last post was Caine’s 567. I still stand by what I said though. I’ll leave now since people want him to come back and be charitable and I’m just not willing to do that.
Good luck all.
erikthebassist:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:07 pm
coffe on screen and keyboard, I’ll clean it up monday… (wanders out in to the cold and my car, chuckling, thankfully)
SC (Salty Current), OM:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:09 pm
:) Mutual! And that also goes for Carlie, Chris, Gregory, Louis, JAL, Cerberus, and many others (including Chas and Paul W. when they’re fighting the good fight).
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:09 pm
JAL, you didn’t miss anything and I thought your post was good. I agree with it. It’s not at all certain Paul will be back, and your voice is every bit as important as everyone else’s.
I’m just curious to see, given the explanations given by Carlie and Louis, if Paul could pull his head out and actually achieve understanding.
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:09 pm
Gregory,
Fancy a look at my fiscal policy? I’ll show you my LIBOR if you show me yours.
Louis
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:12 pm
You know, SC, it will be your fault that whoregage will now reside in my brain forever and I just know it’s going to pop up at the most inappropriate moments, causing a laughing fit.
Koshka:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:23 pm
Count me in on the echo chamber. Several years ago I would have been sympathetic to Paul W ‘s argument. The regulars here helped me to think ( and to STFU and listen). Thank you all. I know it causes you pain to deal with this but it does make a difference.
carlie:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:31 pm
Thanks to everyone – I have a very hard time taking compliments, but I’m glad if anything I write is useful. And I’m constantly amazed at the communication skills of everyone who comments here.
And thank you, Eric, for letting us know so well that it can end up making a difference.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:38 pm
Louis @ 549;
Ohh – cheeky…
Just so long as your LIBOR hasn’t been artificially inflated like that slutty Barclays Bank…
;-P
Louis:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:42 pm
Gregory,
Artificially inflated? What a thing to say to a boy! I’ll have you know I am the very epitome of financial probity.
Unless you have a crooked accountant and a tax avoidance loophole, then I’ll do anything!
Louis
Janine: Hallucinating Liar:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:50 pm
Would use a vacuum pump to inflate a LIBOR?
evilisgood:
January 18th, 2013 at 7:56 pm
Y’all,
Thanks for all of your work in this thread. Just reading it has worn me down. However, it has also motivated me to do something I have never done before, in detail, and that is to share my story.
I was imprudent. It was a party, you understand, and I was drinking like everyone else. There were some drugs there, too, and I know I partook in some of those, because at the time I tended to take what was offered me in a desperate attempt to stave off my depression. I couldn’t tell you if I was conventionally attractive, but I was thin and I had big boobs. At this party, I met a new fellow. He was smart and well-read, and he seemed to like me. We ended up making out quite heavily, and were still doing so after the party had wound down and everyone else had gone to bed.
[TRIGGER WARNING] At some point, I woke up with this guy between my legs. I knew I didn’t want him there, but I was too fucked up to move, to speak, to do anything, so I passed back out. When I woke up the next morning, I told my friend, the host of the party, that I thought I might have been assaulted.
“Are you sure you didn’t consent?” he asked me.
Well, no. I wasn’t sure at all. Maybe when I woke up from being blacked out, I just changed my mind. Maybe I led him on. Obviously I didn’t stop him or say no when I realized what was going on, so he must have taken that as implicit consent. Really, he was such a smart and charming guy. He wouldn’t do such a thing. I was so taken with this idea, that I was the cause of his behavior, and that he was really just a great guy, that I continued a casual relationship with the man. It lasted several months, until I moved away.
This house was a safe zone. I had been partying there for years, had passed out fucked up on numerous occasions, and nothing like this had ever happened. Imprudent, that’s what I was.
Later, I was even more imprudent. I frequently walked down the streets of Roxbury (a sketchy neighborhood in Boston) drunk and alone at 3 or 4 in the morning. Sometimes I wore a dress. You know what happened to me? Aside from being solicited to purchase crack, nothing.
So, Paul W., when you say things like:
You are talking about me. Imprudent, thoughtless, risky-behavior-engaging me. I was raped, and seventeen years later I still struggle with the thought that I could have acted better and prevented it.
When you say those things, it’s intellectual to you. To me, it’s my inner monologue reminding me that, even though it’s 100% my rapist’s fault for raping me, I acted imprudently. So, really, not 100% his fault. Kind of my fault, too.
Cerberus from Time Forgot said something that resonated:
About a year after the assault, I was consensually fooling around with my boyfriend (the man who would become the incomparable Mr. Evilisgood) when I momentarily forgot what was happening and freaked the fuck out. Screaming, kicking, running to the corner of the room, curling up in a ball kind of freaking the fuck out. See, I thought it was happening again, but I wasn’t drunk and drugged up and so I finally got to do what I had wanted to do. Only it wasn’t the assault, it was just some good, happy, fun sexy times. Nothing kills the mood more than having a flashback to your rape in the middle of consensual sex.
To his credit, my boyfriend got it. He never asked if I was sure it was rape. He just believed me, no questions asked. Probably this is one of the reasons I decided to keep him around permanently. We worked together to make sex okay again. It was not an easy process, and it took years.
Paul W., I understand that you do not want to be seen as a rape apologist. But some of the things you’ve said in this thread are deeply hurtful and thoughtless. And you just keep digging in, like if you repeat these things enough times, we’ll all go, “You know what? You’re right! Imprudent-acting women totally caused their rapists to rape them!”
With some confidence I can assert that this is not going to happen.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, there is some cheap red wine in the fridge , and I don’t think I can get through another moment of this thread without it.
Is that imprudent of me?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:01 pm
Thank you, Koshka. :)
chigau (無味ない):
January 18th, 2013 at 8:03 pm
Paul W.
Please don’t come back.
Tethys:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:05 pm
evilisgood
Thank you for sharing your story, and hugs if you want them.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:19 pm
evilisgood, hell yeah, cheap red wine is imprudent. If you drink enough, ya might get a headache. Risky.
Thank you for having the courage to share your experience. It’s difficult, I know. Flashbacks are a b…bear, aren’t they? Hate the damn things. It will be 39 years this summer since my rape. 37 since the trial was over and I could finally walk away, at least until the first parole hearings.
All these years later and I still get hit out of nowhere. Mister knows not to walk up behind me. But he was excited about something last month and forgot and walked quietly out of the bathroom, into my studio, behind me (sitting at my desk) and placed his hand on the back of my neck. I screamed so damn loud, jumped out of my chair and had a knife at his throat before I even processed one thing. That sort of shit isn’t fun and it isn’t funny.
Janine: Hallucinating Liar:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:25 pm
Chigau, that was not cool.
chigau (無味ない):
January 18th, 2013 at 8:30 pm
Janine
You’re right.
I posted immediately after reading evilisgood’s comment. (without thinking)
I apologise and retract it.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:30 pm
Janine:
Seconded. What is the point of all this grief if there’s no possibility of opening eyes? Of growth? Of learning?
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:31 pm
Thanks, Chigau.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:32 pm
Thank you for sharing your story, evilisgood. I was “imprudent” enough to be raped twice in about the span of a year. It’s only been three years since the second assault and I have to maintain certain rules with my partner about what I can and cannot do. Sadly, one of those rules is “no cuddling at bedtime” and sometimes “don’t touch me at all.” Being touched while I’m asleep is a guaranteed way to ruin the night with flailing and a defensive attack.
sunny12:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:35 pm
*logs in*
*reads all of Paul’s latest posts*
*headdesks*
cm's changeable moniker:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:42 pm
If anyone’s interested in the LIBOR thing:
http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/ready-fire-aim.html
If not, whatever …
evilisgood:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:58 pm
Gah, that was way too long a screed, and I missed the flounce. But whatever. It’s out there now.
Tethys, hugs are always enthusiastically accepted. Thank you.
Caine, two things. 1. I will drink slowly and take some aspirin. Risk mitigation FTW! 2. You are an inspiration to me. The courage you display every day on this forum is something I aspire to. Thank you.
The Mellow Monkey, I know of what you speak. It’s good that you have a partner who understands. Together, you can work through this.
Everyone, thanks for reading. That was difficult, but maybe it will help somebody.
athyco:
January 18th, 2013 at 8:59 pm
Paul all along said that the rape apologists were arguing things that were irrelevant and fallacious, and thought that we might fight them back better if we could explain with some sort of “causal v moral” distinction rather than scornfully dismissing them. “It is NEVER the victim’s fault!” would sound to rape apologists as though we were unreasonable. After all, they could come up with “conventionally beautiful” and “dark alley” and “short skirt” and stuff.
He hadn’t thought beyond the step of addressing the apologists. He hadn’t thought of what it would mean to victims watching allies argue it; how unspeakably vile and ENDLESS it would be to argue on their festering victim-blaming ground. He hadn’t thought how utterly impossible it would be for victims to argue it. His method made me think of Audre Lorde’s title “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”
I’m framing new ideas (still scornful, still refusing “causal” or “moral” to apply to a victim), but they’re based on the arguments from the rest of you that any new ideas have come. I like the concise and accurate identification of Paul’s “causal blame” versus “moral blame” by Louis @541 as “distal” versus “proximal.” I may jump on that like a bunny in a bowl of popcorn sometime.
But I’m mad at you for hiding it from carlie and me when it should have been in the Hivemind Hymnal, Louis.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:09 pm
Athyco:
I was excited by the distal/proximal values also. I think that could actually work when arguing with genuine apologists, as far as possibly getting them to at least change their focus. Distal/proximal comprise good, easy language, too, with none of that problematic moral/blame business.
Janine: Hallucinating Liar:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:12 pm
I am sure that there are lurkers who can relate to the story that you told earlier, evilisgood. Enough people delurk often enough to relate how these threads have helped them out. Do not doubt that you have done good.
Pteryxx:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:20 pm
evilisgood: telling your story helped me, you should know.
(warning for telling my own story) Not long ago I had a similar severe flashback during consensual sexytimes with current awesome partner; instead of fighting and screaming, I went rigid and mentally checked out… which is exactly what I did to endure being raped by my abusive ex. I didn’t realize it at the time, though, because back then I hadn’t figured out that it counted as rape. I still thought ex had abused and threatened me ‘but at least I haven’t been raped’. All the kudos to new partner, who realized within seconds something was very wrong and comforted me for the next couple of days, question- and blame-free.
Thanks to you and Caine and so many other of the legion (as on Caine’s shirt) for helping the quiet portions among us put the pieces together.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:30 pm
You have a good person there, Pteryxx. I’m so happy for you.
sunny12:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:38 pm
I’m another lurker – I’ve only really just started to post here (with the exception of…one post I think I made last year?) – but I’ve been helped immensely by all the comments I’ve been reading over the past few months. It frustrates me eternally when I see yet another advice column on how women can avoid being raped (complete with the usual stuff about clothing, hair, etc.) pop up on my Facebook feed courtesy of friends who saw fit to share it. I’ve tried pointing out how this advice may be well-meaning but incredibly damaging, but keep being met by the same tired old “well some men just can’t help it, so telling them not to rape isn’t going to accomplish anything” and “hey, I’m only caring about women’s safety, why are you being so mean to me?”
There’s always that conundrum…do I risk alienating my friends by continuing the argument? Or just shut up and say nothing to keep the peace? *sigh* So far I’ve always opted to do the former because I really think it’s just that important, but it frustrates me.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:46 pm
sunny12:
:facepound: This moronic, deadly meme must die. Penises are not alien brainsuckers, dragging poor innocent men off to rape whoever is convenient. Men have brains, they can use them. One thing that moronic meme does is to paint men as stupid, helpless beasts. Seriously, if I was male, I’d be pretty pissy about that.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:49 pm
I’ve linked to this several times, but this might help, Sunny12 – The Don’t Be That Guy Campaign. Post it right back, *bam*, in their face. Do it repeatedly, if necessary, until the get they message.
sunny12:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:51 pm
Yeah same. It always amazes me when people accuse feminists of hating men…but then stay ridiculous stuff like that, which actually manages to be far more insulting to men than anything I’ve heard a feminist say.
sunny12:
January 18th, 2013 at 9:56 pm
Wow, thanks for sharing that, that’s awesome!
*bookmarks*
chigau (無味ない):
January 18th, 2013 at 10:05 pm
John Varley wrote a short story called Manikins in 1970mumble called
[story summary copied from http://herbboehm.webs.com/storysummaries.htm
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 18th, 2013 at 10:21 pm
So…if the alien brainsucking penises are in women, who turn into men, that means…
uh oh.
evilisgood:
January 18th, 2013 at 10:30 pm
Pteryxx, thank you for that. Your partner has your back, and that is wonderful.
Dalillama, Schmott Guy:
January 18th, 2013 at 10:56 pm
Caine
I am, and I am. Although when I hear that shit from another man, it also scares the shit out of me; it’s kind of like the christians who say ‘without god, what keeps you from robbing and killing people?.’ I hear things like this, and what I hear is “I am a standing danger to everyone around me, because I will commit acts of gratuitous violence and terror the very second I think that no one’s going to stop me.” And that scares me. Basically, when women say things like ‘[some] men just can’t help themselves’ ( I have encountered it without the qualifier) I write it off as rape culture myths deeply imbedded. But I am a man, and I know damn well that I don’t have any urges to go out and rape, so when I hear a man say that, it reads not as internalized myth, but as projection; any man who says something like that, I automatically start to wonder exactly what they do when they think they won’t be caught, you know?
evilisgood
Thank you for sharing your story with us. I’m glad to hear that you, Pteryxx, and Caine have found good partners finally; I’ve heard similar anecdotes that didn’t end nearly as well. I’ve also been in on the other side of the scenarios involving the Messrs Caine and evilisgood; while I don’t pretend that it’s as bad as having one’s PTSD triggered, I can say that it’s no joy on the other end either. A combination of abject fear that I’d done something terribly, terribly wrong and sickening anger at the person(s) who initially did do something terrible, the echoes of which I’m now seeing.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 19th, 2013 at 12:00 am
evilisgood-
*Hugs*
You are incredibly brave and it was never your fault. Even slightly. Ever.
dontpanic:
January 19th, 2013 at 12:13 am
Are you going to have next-to-leading-order, and next-to-next-to-leading order diagrams? You know … to fully describe all the distal interactions due to the patriarchal sea that arises out of the spontaneous symmetry breaking of the vacuum expectation value of no rape?
Ack. I read the whole thread (okay, skimmed a few parts of Paul’s wall-o-text) and want to thank all those who shared their stories and explained their points (so passionately). I can see that once upon a time I might have been a “Paul” (though a bit less lengthy) and I’m sure that time on Pharyngula did me some good in that regard. I do hope some of the serious points seep into today’s lurkers brains and while they might not wake up with a “Eureka” moment, it will at least subtly affect their future thoughts and behaviour.
FossilFishy (Νεοπτόλεμος's spellchecker):
January 19th, 2013 at 12:41 am
Caine #608
This, this right here.
When I first stumbled on this place the Horde scared the crap out of me. The savage takedowns of shoddy thinking and unevidenced claims were intimidating in the extreme, and they still are. But under that you find #608. That desire to educate, to make the world a better place, is a deep current here.
One of the things I hate the most about the skeptic, rationalist, atheist movement, such as it is, are the StrawVulcans. Their tone trolling dismissals of arguments couched in passionate language angers me in a way that no creationist has ever achieved.
Not just because it belittles the experience of those who’ve suffered and then found the strength to tell us about it, though that callous exercise of privilege is more than enough to justify my rage. But also because it dismisses that underlying passion to make things better.
I thank you all for your passion, for your courage and for your persistence in the face of privilege-hardened obstinance.
The world may be far from perfect but with you folks in it there is still hope.
vaiyt:
January 19th, 2013 at 12:44 am
is completely meaningless, as pointed out in this thread. Saying that the victim “caused” her rape is only technically correct in the sense that her parents having sex caused her rape, or that people inventing and building the bus she was raped in caused her rape, or that the fucking Big Bang caused her rape. That’s not useful. It’s bloviating bullshit.
None of those factors help us distinguish a rape situation from a non-rape situation. The presence of the rapist does. Change all the other factors and keep the rapist – rape. Keep all the other factors and remove the rapist – non-rape. Simple like that.
mildlymagnificent:
January 19th, 2013 at 4:18 am
And I think that is the toll that the poor long-suffering brain of Paul is not willing to pay to enter the reality that women face.
We live with never knowing who or how or why or when the 1 in 20 chance of a man being a rapist will turn into the reality of sexual assault on ourselves or someone we know.
And. we. know. it has fuck all to do with how we dress or where we go or what we do. For as long as the rapist statistics are at the 1 man in 20 level, we have to acknowledge that working in a workplace or going to a function where there are 50 or more men, the odds are that there is at least one rapist in the group, (and there may be several). And that person might be the one we’ve known the longest or trust the most. We are literally playing the odds – that we can avoid the man/men in question and that even if it’s one of the men we know, that this time it won’t be ourselves that he chooses to target.
It’s not a wonderful way to live. Most of us manage it with a reasonably good grace most of the time. We’re used to it – no matter how awful you might think it that we have to live like this. If you have never before seriously entertained what this must be like, give it time. We were brought up to it. We’ve lived with it. We have lots of experience of grabbing and groping in lots of times and places. We’ve extricated ourselves from several not so positive encounters with various men over a fair number of years. And 1 in 6 of us have had to deal with actual sexual assault. (And let’s not forget the 1 in 4 of us who’ve suffered violence at the hands of partners.)
This is not a pretty picture. But life is harder for some than others. For Paul and all the others like him who simply can’t face the fact that this is the way it is, be grateful that you’ve not been taught all your life that men are dangerous but that it is your responsibility to keep out of their way if they’re strangers and keep them happy if they’re not. Be grateful that it’s taken this many years before you’ve been asked to get this notion into your head – and be even more grateful that you’re not being asked to make the changes to your job choices (don’t be a baker or another kind of worker who has odd hours, for starters) and your other activities that women are expected to.
You can’t refuse this. Life is not a cafeteria where you can ignore all the options that you fear or dislike. Some of them are an inescapable reality. Just be thankful that you can absorb the message simply by reading and thinking about it rather than living with it.
Maureen Brian:
January 19th, 2013 at 4:28 am
I’ve been following this if always behind the curve for time-zone reasons but others were doing an admirable job and the couple of points maybe worth adding – maybe – would be footnotes anyway. So here they are.
Question one: why would anyone spend six hundred and odd comments discussing whether or not a particular line of argument, Paul’s, could or should be used without any reference to whether or not the folktale he was repeating had any basis in fact?
One thought which comes through loud and clear in the famous Comment 29 is the very same person saying that the untruth of religion should be the over-riding consideration, regardless of tactics, style, personality, whatever. Here we had people constantly shouting “check the facts” but it went unheard.
Trying to keep up with this has been like watching a whole series of very badly edited disaster movies. Time after time someone risks life and limb to rush to the edge of the precipice waving a huge red warning flag and then we cut immediately to the very same out-of control locomotive heading toward exactly the same fate.
Question two: if we women are so very stupid how are we expected remember the several million different magic tricks, protective rituals, incantations and dress styles which over the course of a few decades we have all been told will – honestly! – save us from rape?
Question three: why the fuck would we go to trouble of remembering all that quasi-religious nonsense rather than put our energy into what has already been proved to help? Things like rape crisis centres, campaigns aimed at potential rapists, pressure on police to provide a better response and on legislators to update arcane laws – things which work on this planet, anyway, if imperfectly to date.
Louis:
January 19th, 2013 at 5:35 am
The distal/proximal stuff was only dealing with the causal part of Paul’s comments, not the moral part. Reading Paul’s comments it’s abundantly clear neither he nor anyone consider any action on the part of the victim to be morally responsible for a rape.
The reason I further split causal stuff into distal and proximal was because it was key to the problem. It’s the core confusion whenever the “but she was wearing a short skirt” type stuff comes up. If rapists were some homogeneous cohort of people who only raped a specific, homogeneous cohort of victims under a very narrow set of clearly identified circumstances, then maybe, MAY-BE, we could draw some proximal causes of rape from victim behaviours (i.e. specific members of the victim cohort, deliberately and knowingly putting themselves into the path of known rapists under the correct circumstances). It still wouldn’t denote any moral responsibility, because there is no link between an is and an ought in that sense.
The major, overwhelming problem with this idealised universe that Paul has attempted to refer to is it bears zero relation to the real one. The data does not show anything like this. Rapists and rape victims are not homogeneous cohorts by any stretch of the imagination, they are not (to steal Chris’ analogy above) a specific type of lepton or boson with known properties that behave in (reasonably) predictable ways. Neither are the circumstances of rapes necessarily similar, again the available data is that rape is conducted over a horrendously diverse set of circumstances.
This is why one can’t pretend to the sort of philosophising that Paul was aiming for. Granted I know what he was trying to do with it, deconstruct rape apologetics and more power to him, but the problem is he was (accidentally IMO) using rape apologetics to dismantle rape apologetics. It’s like punching people for pacifism. You don’t successfully dismantle a piece of rape apologetics by (accidentally) perpetrating the same errors that are used in rape apologetics (mistaking proximal and distal causes, ignoring the data, focussing on the distal causes associated with the victim, focussing on distal causes at all etc).
Louis
carlie:
January 19th, 2013 at 6:47 am
And what was so frustrating is how many of us were saying that, and Paul never addressed that at all. He fixated on the “you’re confusing moral with causal” mistake he thought everyone was making, and, I don’t know, skipped those comments entirely?
Louis:
January 19th, 2013 at 6:54 am
Carlie,
Yup!
Amazing how so many people hit on the same thing. It’s almost like it’s a single glaring error or something. Ahhh but the Invisible Pixels are playing a familiar tune it seems. One of their classics “Being All Uppity And Shit”…
Louis
P.S. A thought, half formed, occurs to me (I’m slow on the uptake, forgive me). The implicit claim that the universe is really this idealised space where rapists are RAPISTS who BEHAVE in certain WAYS and all (prudent potential) VICTIMS need to do is not allow themselves to succumb to those WAYS is related to why some people (not Paul AFAIK) can’t grasp Schrodinger’s rapist. Rapists are not apart, not a type, not a homogeneous group, they are potentially almost anyone and there’s no way to tell until the opportunity presents itself. I.e. after the fact. This is not the same thing as saying “all men are potential rapists” (accusatory tone, wag of finger, castrating hand gesture), it’s saying that you can’t tell the potential rapists from the potential non-rapists because we do not live in this idealised space where rapists are RAPISTS.
carlie:
January 19th, 2013 at 7:19 am
Louis – what I really liked about your explanation is how you took it from “so everything in the world is causal then” specifically to “then every prior action of the rapist is causal”, so why focus on the prior actions of the victim without mentioning the prior actions of the rapists? How imprudent of him to go down a dark alley when he knew that he might rape somebody.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 19th, 2013 at 8:23 am
And this, I think, is an outgrowth of the insistence on conflating rape with sex. There are people (and especially male rape apologists) who recognize that the sex drive is powerful and, thinking that rape is in some way associated with the sex drive, assume that some men simply have a sex drive that pushes them to rape. As if “rape” is a hardwired orientation that leads into assaulting people as easily as looking and admiring someone you find attractive. And this is wrong, thankfully. Even pedophiles can remain non-offenders.
Rape is to sex as slavery is to love. There are instances where one may look like the other, where consensual interaction may mimic rape/slavery, but the nightmarish, human-rights-violating real things are fundamentally different. They are based on different desires and different goals. A rapist may get a sexual thrill from the act, but slave owners feel affection for enslaves nannies and mistresses and children. The rape was no more about sex than the slavery was about love.
ChasCPeterson:
January 19th, 2013 at 10:14 am
Looks like it’s all over here but the mutual back-patting: another successful wagon-circling and the doctrinal hardline held against another onslaught of original thought and nuanced reason. Repetitive near-verbatim chanting of the assertions of Theory will instantiate them as Truth, is that it? Good luck with that project.
Louis:
see, to me, this obvious truth was a major chunk of the point PaulW was trying to make. It’s not Paul who lives in an idealized universe where rape is treated as a one-size-fits-all monolith that can be completely discussed via a few well-memorized nostrums. It’s (most of) his critics.
Seriously. To insist (for example) that ‘rape is never about sex’ is to dwell in an idealized Identity-Studies fantasy world. Which, I guess most of y’all feel comfortable there so keep it up.
SAT fail.
chigau (無味ない):
January 19th, 2013 at 10:29 am
Does this mean you’re leaving? Again.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 19th, 2013 at 10:51 am
Wow, Chas has totally rebutted me. I’m all a’tingly, imagining that razor-edged wit turned on all those poor stupid feminists and their theory throughout history.
Andrea Dworkin: “The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.”
Chas: “Nuh uh.”
carlie:
January 19th, 2013 at 10:51 am
What was the nuance, Chas? His point was that you could say that performing action x caused result y. It was pointed out to him that this is really a trivial and meaningless statement, as action x had no higher causality for result y than any other action taken by either participant at any point in their lives up until that moment. Furthermore, besides being a factually trivial statement, it is not a neutral one, as it falls directly in line with a trope that has been and continues to be used to great harm, emotionally, legally, and sociologically, and is therefore not a great concept. He never engaged with this idea in any sense, preferring to fall back on “you don’t understand what I’m saying”. He (or you, or anyone agreeing with you both) never even tried to explain why what I just said above is wrong and how. There was no engagement, and no nuance.
carlie:
January 19th, 2013 at 10:57 am
And THAT’S the part that really pisses me off, Chas. This is the pattern that gets repeated over and over and fucking over again.
Person A says problematic thing B.
People C explain the exact issues they have with thing B.
Person A latches on perhaps one thing one person in cohort C said that was more than a bit insulting and shorthand, and claims that nobody understands.
People C continue to explain in multiple ways the issues they have with thing B.
Person A only repeats how nobody understands.*
People C repeat their explanations again.
Repeat from *.
Then people C get called an echo chamber who don’t do anything but say the same things over and over again.
Do you see where this goes wrong? It goes wrong right at the asterisk, where person A gets so offended by being challenged and/or insulted that they don’t even notice that there were actual criticisms made of their argument. I really wouldn’t mind arguing over the finer nuanced points of which part of all of the distal causalities to mention and what rhetorical implications those might have, but Paul never even went near that point. He just kept saying his ideas were too difficult for us to understand.
carlie:
January 19th, 2013 at 11:05 am
So Chas, or Paul, or anybody else who thinks this was just a shouting match to impose an ideology. TELL ME WHERE THIS IS WRONG AND WHY:
That, I think, fairly well sums up everything everyone has been saying. This is the hypothesis I am putting forth to you now. Tell me how this:
A) is an incorrect use of what Paul means by causality
B) is incorrect in how reliably certain actions result in rape
C) does not have the implications I’ve said it does
Because that is the fucking problem, that people who try to defend themselves don’t even do so with any regard to what is actually being criticized.
Pteryxx:
January 19th, 2013 at 11:18 am
Nobody claimed this was a complete discussion of every different form of rape there is. However, there is NO nuanced view that invalidates the statement “rape is never the victim’s fault”, much less mitigates its harm.
carlie:
January 19th, 2013 at 11:38 am
No no no, Pteryxx, you see, he never said it’s the victim’s fault, just that what they did could be said to cause it to happen. You just don’t understand that he’s not assigning fault, just causality. It’s your emotions that are causing you to see moral blame assigned where he meant none to be. If you would only understand that he didn’t mean moral blame, everything would be ok and you would agree with him. Because nobody talked about the faults with his definition and use of causality at all, nope. It’s all about the moral blame and how nobody can get past that to understand the logical rational physics of the whole thing.
Louis:
January 19th, 2013 at 11:56 am
Chas,
1) I’m not getting drawn into your bitter little war against Pharyngula. Have fun with it. If other people choose to make the odd joke at the expense of some piece of cluelessness and you don’t like it: Tough. Whine about backslapping and circled wagons all you like, it won’t make any of it real. What you see as self congratulatory group think may be something else. Projection, Chas, it’s what’s for breakfast. Your bitter inadequacies are simply not any one else’s problem.
2) The bit you quote from me has some relevant context, pointing out precisely why I think it contradicts the key part of Paul’s original post that so many take exception to:
What I was saying, when read in context, Chas, is that whilst we can talk about those (distal) causes all we like, it’s a wonderful towers in the sky thing to do, it has no bearing on reality. It’s mental masturbation and not the good kind. The majority of Paul’s post was a set up for this quoted part. The argument hinged here, particularly around the words “okay” and “imprudent”. The problem comes when those distal causes are treated as if they were proximal causes, something not borne out by the available data, and when the only distal causes under consideration are those surrounding the victim, not the rapist, it’s a reflection of extant rape culture. Whilst Paul might have been talking about nuance and complexity for a large portion of his post, he has yet (AFAIK) to note that the very nuance and complexity of rapists, victims and rapes explicitly undermines what he was claiming.
That diversity, that complexity, renders meaningless any discussion about distal causes unless all distal causes are equally considered. Paul explicitly didn’t do that, he explicitly said it was okay (i.e. justified either intellectually or morally) to consider the distal causative factors involved in the victim’s behaviour only. No mention was made of the rapist. In the sense that this could be applied to statistical study of rape, it’s already been done, the answer’s in, no specific behaviour or distal cause on the part of the rape victim is sufficiently well correlated with rape to be meaningful. So Paul was wrong. For all the complaints about insufficient nuance and what not, that was incorrect.
He’s been asked to define “imprudent” more than once too. It should be an easy thing to do as this is part of the crux of the disagreement. Why isn’t he doing it? Actually, since you’re his champion it seems, why aren’t YOU doing it?
3) “Rape isn’t about sex” and sundry slogans are insufficient to encapsulate every nuance of rape? Well thank you, Sifu, for your profound insight. For your next trick why don’t you tell us that water is wet and grass is green.
These slogans OF COURSE don’t encapsulate a complex phenomenon like rape. But they are more than useful enough to see off the 99% of asinine, 101 level horseshit that get hoyed at rape victims on a daily basis. I, for one, wasn’t aware that at the top of the thread there was a neon sign reading “100% comprehensive discussion about all nuanced aspects of rape everywhere”. People were sloganeering because that’s all that’s required. People have finite resources, engaging every Wrong with the same fervour is not only exhausting it’s impossible.
But clearly such understanding and charity is beyond you when there’s whinging about “Identity Studies” to be done. Whatever the fuck those are. Never seen one. I suspect they are an American thing. Never trusted Americans, can’t say aluminium right. Bloody abomination I tell you.
Louis
Giliell, professional cynic:
January 19th, 2013 at 12:24 pm
“Women cause their own rape”
Yeah, that’s really original. That’s a totally new concept nobody has ever heard of before. So much original thought in that. Totally not an idea we’ve been fighting against for, how many, a hundred years?
“Women can lower their chances of rape by doing XYZ”
Such nuanced position! Because the nuance goes from “don’t walk down the alley” to “cover yourself in bedsheets and only leave the house with your owner”
God, when you look up “arrogant asshole” in the encyclopedia there’s probably a picture of Chas.
Gnumann+, Radfem shotgunner of inhuman concepts:
January 19th, 2013 at 12:28 pm
Chas:
You got to learn how to speak human Chas. Step away from you biological textbooks and evopsych fairy tales for some moments.
Sex is of course involved in rape, but it’s not what defines a rape. What defines a rape is violence, dominance and deceit. These are always the core defining elements. This removes a rape from normal human sex in every important aspect except the possibly physical acts.
AFAIK – there is no scientific literature making a good case for rape as a part of human sexuality. At least not any more than murder is a part of human social interaction.
Emrysmyrddin:
January 19th, 2013 at 1:07 pm
Be specific, or fuck off. It’s a simple choice.
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 19th, 2013 at 1:09 pm
Overall on Paul-
This post on psuedoallies really seemed to sum up Paul’s fundamental problem.
Sometimes an “ally” might really want to help and they might really just not have it in them to actually help because they haven’t really committed emotionally to opposing oppression on a real level.
And I think that’s Paul’s central problem. He wanted to help by creating this beautiful thought experiment where he could look like the reasonable male in issues of rape and go “gee gosh, mr. really bad rape apologist, you sure have a lot of points about how bitches be cray-cray and go all weird about how it’s never the woman’s fault a rape occurred, and now that I’ve connected in that way, oh yeah, everything they said actually was true.”
But that doesn’t help. The only good parts are just copy-pasted from the “extremists” and are directly undermined by all his other parts and his bad parts actually take his thought experiment from “unhelpful” into “legitimately harmful” to the population he was trying to be an “ally” for.
And I think by doing that and by doubling down so painfully, Paul revealed his pseudoally nature on this particular issue.
I hope in the future Paul gets his shit together and can move from being a psuedoally to being the legitimate ally he, I’m sure, wanted to be.
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
January 19th, 2013 at 1:10 pm
again Chas you can leave.
We would cry but really you can. Well find another scientific sexist to be a passive agressive douche bag.
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
January 19th, 2013 at 1:13 pm
chas can’t speaak human on this. He is a rational male scientist above you lesser peons.
And we know he’s right because monkey women’s like pots
Cerberus from Time Forgot:
January 19th, 2013 at 1:14 pm
…
Yeah, I just had a rape flashback this morning. I think I’ll let everyone else rip apart Chas.
…
Okay one piece:
And right there you revealed yourself to be the sort of right-wing paranoid conspiracy theorist who thinks that minorities studying the world around them or bringing out data on their populations is somehow reverse bigotry against dominant populations, whose monomaniacal focus on their own culture and the exclusion of any real information disputing its conspiracy theories, is of course “just how the world works, man”.
You are not even worth engaging.
And with that, I’m out.
Louis:
January 19th, 2013 at 1:24 pm
Giliell,
I’m wondering what nuance will elevate the distal cause of a rape (say the length of a woman’s skirt) above the proximal cause of a rape (say the presence of a rapist with the opportunity to rape)?
For me Paul’s argument was like an hourglass. Lots of lovely space and fluffy stuff at the top. Equally lots of lovely space and fluffy stuff at the bottom. But there’s a pinch point in the middle and that pinch point seemed to be hinging on an analysis of distal causes surrounding victims, not any causes surrounding rapists. The pinch point is where the flaw is. Unfortunately, otherwise we might have had a GIGO or something else, as opposed to a lengthy set up of well disguised (probably even disguised from himself) unequal apportioning of causality to the victim.
Louis
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 19th, 2013 at 1:32 pm
Cerberus:
Yes, I had one last night. Not that that sort of shit matters to the high and mighty Chas, no sir.
What broke my heart was reading a post by Ogvorbis in the lounge. We all know what he’s been through the last couple of years. He felt the call to show up to this thread, being one of the Invisible Pixels, but when he saw the “woman gets on bus yadayadayada caused her own rape”, he immediately thought “I joined the boy scouts” and had to walk away.
He wasn’t even in this thread, and it caused harm. If Paul ever comes back to read, I hope he gets a bit of understanding out of that.
carlie:
January 19th, 2013 at 1:40 pm
Not even an analysis of distal causes, he was simply saying they exist. At least, he thought he was simply saying they exist. What he wasn’t realizing was that they are no different from any other distal causes that exist in the universe, and that it makes a world of difference if you are only talking about those specific distal causes linked to the victim; he himself was elevating those distal causes to some importance beyond what any analysis of rape would allow those distal causes to be elevated to.
Also, he gave away his underlying biases with the term “imprudent” when describing normal human behavior.
I’m sorry, Cerberus, that being involved and trying to help people understand did you harm. Caine too, and everyone else who was set off by this.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 19th, 2013 at 1:42 pm
Louis and Carlie, I could read you both on this subject all day, because I am learning. Lots and lots of learning. Thank you both.
Louis:
January 19th, 2013 at 1:46 pm
Carlie,
All very true, especially this:
But I’ve been trying to be charitable. Well, to Paul at least. He seems like a decent guy, and I have a massive soft spot for Decent Guys Who Make Mistakes On The Internet.
For some reason. I can’t imagine why. ;-)
Louis
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
January 19th, 2013 at 2:31 pm
@Louis
There’s too much charity already
Gregory Greenwood:
January 19th, 2013 at 2:40 pm
ChasCPeterson @ 639;
Chas, please try to consider what you are saying here. Try to put yourself in the position of the rape surviviors on this thread who have had to deal with a lot of very triggering language and imagery. Try to look beyond a shallow, pseudo-vulcan approach to atheism and skepticism that views the possession of the personal privilege required to be able to view these issues in a detached fashion as indicative of a superior grasp of the arguments. It doesn’t prove your superior rationality or understanding, merely that you have never been on the receiving end of rape and rape culture – all it shows is that you have social privilege enough to be able to afford to view the topic as a mere academic exercise rather than the reality of your day to day life. Passion is not the same thing as delusion, and detachment is not automatically equal understanding.
Above all, try to stop and consider whether this is the appropriate venue for you tell yourself how intellectually superior you are when compared to we mere mortals not graced with a penthouse suit on Mount Olympus. Is massaging your own ego in public really worth causing rape survivors pain? Do you really want to be ‘that guy’ – someone who is so self obsessed, so egomanic, that they would behave like that?
You are an intelligent, intellectualy capable guy, Chas, no one contests that. You are, or at least should be, better than this.
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
January 19th, 2013 at 2:44 pm
Please don’t speak for everyone
Tethys:
January 19th, 2013 at 2:45 pm
*joins the having flashbacks pool*
I appreciate that others have savaged the harmful stupidity on this thread. I was aghast to read every. single. erroneous. rape. trope. given as “causes” of rape. I especially hate the dark alley/short skirt response. I know many rape victims. None of them were assaulted by a stranger in an alley due to fashion choices.
Yet every single fucking time the word rape is uttered, that stupid trope is trotted out as adding nuance!?
Pteryxx:
January 19th, 2013 at 2:53 pm
Add me to the pool, too. “circling doctrinal wagons” bull. shit. More like lighting a single candle in the dark.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 19th, 2013 at 2:53 pm
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist “Starting Tonight, People will Whine” @ 662;
A fair point – correct the sentence in my 661 to;
“I believe you are an intelligent, intellectualy capable guy, Chas, and I do not think I am alone in this estimation. You are, or at least should be, better than this.”
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 19th, 2013 at 2:54 pm
Gregory:
Actually, he does. Chas deliberately burnt his rep here and has been doing a lot of bitter grudge holding. He could change that anytime and he’s well aware of it. Chas has a hate-on for anything sociological and a love of evo-psych, which comes under a great deal of criticism here. He chooses to think we’re all too stupid and in love with antiquated, incorrect ideas to get where he’s coming from, so it boils down to a “fuck you, morons!” from him. Most of us just ignore his crap.
Dalillama, Schmott Guy:
January 19th, 2013 at 2:56 pm
Mellow Monkey
I suspect that a combination of lack of empathy and a massive sense of entitlement can combine to allow some men to decide that their sex drive is the most important thing in the world, and be willing to start justifying rape to themselves a a way of restoring the ‘balance’ of the world, since clearly they’re entitled to just go fuck somebody whenever they want, and if that somebody disagrees, then they need to be punished, and now we’re back to power again.
gregory
I certainly fucking well do.
No, this is pretty much par for the course for Chas.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 19th, 2013 at 2:58 pm
Tethys:
Godsdamnit. I’m sorry. ♥
Pteryxx:
:anklehug: And, word. It amazes me (and it shouldn’t) that Paul and Chas can actually state something like “original thought” with anything approaching a straight face. That’s not “original thought”, it’s fucking “old as the godsdamn hills thought”.
Tethys:
January 19th, 2013 at 3:03 pm
*peanut m&ms for pteyrxx*
—–
I just checked a map of Williston, ND and it’s good news everybody! There aren’t any alleys at all, dark or otherwise. I’m so glad to know that the women of Williston are completely safe from alleys.
Tethys:
January 19th, 2013 at 3:16 pm
sorry for misspelling your ‘nym pteryxx
—
Caine
Much love back. The company in the pool is pretty amazing.
Pteryxx:
January 19th, 2013 at 3:21 pm
np Tethys, I rather like seeing what alternate spellings folks come up with.
Ogvorbis:
January 19th, 2013 at 3:37 pm
I had a really unpleasant dream last night.
I dreamt that I did what I should have done and reported my abuser.
And the reaction was, “well, you wanted to join the scouts, right?”
Luckily, I was able to, well, not laugh at my dream, but take it for what it is — a reaction to something I read.
Doing okay. But what a shitty dream.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 19th, 2013 at 3:39 pm
Ogvorbis:
I’m glad you’re okay. Yes, that was shitty. It’s a form of flashing back, and flashbacks suck. Seriously so.
Tethys:
January 19th, 2013 at 3:40 pm
Welcome in to the amazing pool Ogvorbis.
The Mellow Monkey:
January 19th, 2013 at 3:56 pm
My deepest sympathies to everyone who had flashbacks or nightmares because of this. I simply had a dream that I was trapped in a burning building and desperately trying to protect myself by spraying down the carpet with a little water bottle. Certainly no symbolism there or anything…
Dalillama:
Right. And that’s a viewpoint of sex that is itself toxic, long before any rape occures. From the perspective of such a person, there is no real difference between consensual sex and rape.
The fact is that in a complex social animal like humans, sex is not a discrete concept that simply describes a single basic act. We’re describing our ideas and goals and feelings around that act. This is why two consenting adults rubbing their bodies together is a type of sex–frot–and yet a dog running up and humping your leg doesn’t constitute you having sex with that dog.
Drawing that distinction between sex and rape isn’t from ignorance of what sexual pleasure a rapist may or may not be seeking. It’s drawing that distinction because to not do so is to put rape in a place of legitimacy, where discussions of what the victim did to turn on the rapist are appropriate, where there’s a “fuzzy line” between sex and rape, and where it’s much easier for someone to justify committing rape. The rapist who rapes because he values his sex drive more than he values other people has far more in common with the rapist who rapes purely to humiliate and hurt someone, with no thought of pleasure than he does with people who only have consensual sex.
Making that distinction and redefining sex in a non-toxic, healthy way is important for battling rape culture. The trouble is, we usually get stuck in this rape culture 101 bullshit instead of moving beyond that into all of the–gasp–nuances.
athyco:
January 19th, 2013 at 4:01 pm
*hugs (as accepted) and beverage service of choice to Cerberus, Caine, Tethys, and Ogvorbis in the flashback pool*
Seems that mine was gotten out of the way right at the beginning (belated thanks for the extra box of tissues, Caine!). And, wow, the second page comments went a long way to erasing the “yeah, but…” thoughts I had tamped down but hadn’t successfully rebutted in years.
Ogvorbis, I have always liked the “you” I read. During a smile/cry session I had over this thread, some of your recent words popped into my head, and they were good for me. I’d project you saying to those in the dreams, “‘Boy Scouts’ is damned distal, you asshole casseroles with smegmarmalade sauce.”
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 19th, 2013 at 4:03 pm
MM, *applause*
You know, I have my molly noms all selected for the last couple of months, but if PZ (or Mary) ever get back to posting the OM Noms, I’m going to nom this whole damn thread for a special molly.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 19th, 2013 at 4:06 pm
Athyco:
:D :D :D
♥
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
January 19th, 2013 at 4:13 pm
But fem monkeys!
Gregory Greenwood:
January 19th, 2013 at 4:21 pm
Caine, Fleur du mal + @ 666*;
I’m probably wasting my time then. He made some good posts before he changed his nym – he seems to have completely gone off the rails in recent months.
***
And Dalillama, Schmott Guy @ 667;
I have seen him be dismissive toward the experiences of rape survivors and ganerally obnoxious on several threads relating to rape culture. I still hope that he might snap out of it at some point and realise how much harm he is causing, and how poor his reasons are for causing it, but then again I am a terminal optimist…
But if things continue this way, I am eventually going to have to accept that all I am doing is wasting keystrokes.
———————————————————————————————————————-
* You got the cool post number for this thread I see.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 19th, 2013 at 4:26 pm
Gregory:
Yes, he did. A whole lot of them, actually. I still really enjoy it when he posts about turtles or the environment, on those subjects, he can be a joy to read.
Ogvorbis:
January 19th, 2013 at 4:27 pm
Yup. So damned distal that it disappeared when I trimmed my toenails.
Thank you for that.
Tethys:
January 19th, 2013 at 4:34 pm
I recently read and recommend Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America.
The short skirt trope was used against her 120 years ago. Her scandalous skirt can be seenhere.
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
January 19th, 2013 at 4:35 pm
Chas started to be a jerk before he changed names
Janine: Hallucinating Liar:
January 19th, 2013 at 4:51 pm
Stephanie Zvan has a new post that, sadly, fits the theme here.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 19th, 2013 at 4:55 pm
Tethys:
Goodness me, you can their ankles! Scandalous indeed.
Janine: Hallucinating Liar:
January 19th, 2013 at 4:58 pm
She also abandoned her family!
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 19th, 2013 at 5:04 pm
Janine:
*Aaarrrrrgggghhh*
evilisgood:
January 19th, 2013 at 5:28 pm
Wow. I should not have clicked Janine: Hallucinating Liar’s link. That was repugnant.
I’m very fond of all of you here, and maybe I’ll be back in a few days, but right now it’s too much.
Thanks for your work.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 19th, 2013 at 5:33 pm
evilisgood:
Understood. Take all the time you need and have a glass of cheap red wine for me. ♥
Janine: Hallucinating Liar:
January 19th, 2013 at 5:45 pm
Rape culture can pop into the strangest and sickening ways.
A woman goes to a hospital for a hysterectomy. While she is under but still conscience, the anesthesiologist forces his penis in her mouth.
Where does the rape culture bit comes in?
The columnist, who is a woman, opens her column with this line.
She lost a womb but gained a penis.
Real fucking funny.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 19th, 2013 at 5:48 pm
Janine:
Oh great. Just fuckin’ great. I think, if I ever need surgery again, I’m demanding a female anesthesiologist.
Pteryxx:
January 19th, 2013 at 6:26 pm
But it’s probably that woman’s fault somehow, for, uh… needing major surgery… by trained professionals… in a hospital… hm.
*holds out apologist-script, rips it crossways three times, throws the confetti in the air and walks offstage*
Ogvorbis:
January 19th, 2013 at 6:39 pm
Pterryx:
Well, we must keep in mind that the rape was the proximal cause, which outweighs the fact that the gas-passer was a rapist.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 19th, 2013 at 7:32 pm
Janine: Hallucinating Liar @ 685;
I read the linked post, and have one more reason to despise feMRAs like Wooly Bumblebee with every fibre of my being. She even has the gall to claim that all she is doing is protecting innocent little menz from hysterical women who supposedly throw out rape allegations at the drop of a hat;
This man, for one, neither needs nor wants her ‘help’? She doesn’t realise that it is not some mythical oppressed class of men victimised by false rape claims that she is aiding here – she is rallying to the defence of rapists, and is too blinkered and/or poisoned by her much prized ‘chill girl’ status to see it.
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
January 20th, 2013 at 10:26 am
wolly comment shows she’s not trying to protect some innocents..she finds rape amusing. She does want to protect rapists given the glee she takes in proding victims
ChasCPeterson:
January 20th, 2013 at 2:11 pm
My #639 was an intemperate outburst that I would have done well to keep to myself. I am sorry for any and all hurt it caused.
So but still I feel the need to address some of the responses elicited. Please skip it or killfile me if you don’t care; that’s fine. To illustrate the technique involved, here I will be skipping what I perceive to be nonsubstantive, personal, and juvenile responses. Have a nice day.
carlie @#642-4:
I am not comfortable speaking for PaulW. As for me, trying to think for myself, I don’t buy the universality of that assertion. For one thing, it ignores the real-world concept of differential a priori risk. (However, I have multiple reasons for declining to re-engage in this argument itself. If it pleases you to include cowardice among them OK. This includes the All-Caps Challenge in #644.)
I understand. It’s my strong impression that this is the foundational idea from which Paul’s critics are starting; the reason for even wanting to engage with his comments in the first place. It’s also–and I’m sorry for going all INTP (if not Vulcan) here but I am what I am–an argument from adverse consequences and therefore an appeal to emotion.
Did that part occur in this case (i.e. PaulW = Person A)?
More generally, your scenario assumes that the stuff being ‘pointed out’ to Person A by Cohort C is true beyond its appeal to consequences.
Again I don’t want to speak for Paul; this is my opinion. You imply that A says ‘nobody understands’ because s/he feels insulted. Another possibility: s/he feels (probably, around here, understandably) insulted, and feels misunderstood, because most of the immediate response consists of shoring up the appeal to consequences in automatic opposition to the conventionally toxic concept and shows no particular sign of even trying to understand A’s point. *shrug*
Well. There’s plenty of opportunity for it to go wrong in various ways before that, but this too can happen, sure.
yeah. By the time the point in question rolled around, Person A was pretty burnt an freaked out I think, and so there are no doubt arguments made that he could have addressed more specifically.
However, on the other hand, I honestly don’t think that a lot of Cohort C was interested in understanding his ideas, just beating back their perceived toxicity.
Pterryx:
Agreed.
Louis:
or maybe before that, when one commits to a simple dichotomy of cause-types.
Agreed.
It seems bizarre, though, to equivocate the behavior of 2 people in a clear victim/perpetrator situation as if their various ‘distal causes’ were somehow objectively listable.
I just don’t think that’s true in a general or universal way. It seems obvious, to me, that certain behavioral decisions are far more important than others, and that in the real world, far from the ‘wonderful towers in the sky’, there is a meaningful concept called ‘risk’.
A diversity of causes and situations necessitates a diversity of explanations, maybe case-by-case. The sloganeering obviates all of that in favor of a simple, unified front.
did somebody link to these data? There has to be a lot to unpack in any such study.
I’m nobody’s champion, Louis. I call shit as I see it. And I never used the word ‘imprudent’.
interesting.
Gnumann:
I thought our operational definition of rape was nonconsensual sex. If that’s reasonable, then neither violence nor deceit (?) seem necessary or core, whereas the sex act is. It just seems bizarre to deny this. Domination I would regard as intrinsic to nonconsensual.
And if you think you can determine what is and what isn’t “normal human sex” then you’re a far better determiner than I am.
So I guess you’ve read Thornhill and Palmer (2000), which attempts to make that case (I have not). They also have a response to critics posted online, if you’re truly interested.
uh…it happens all the time, man. And it used to happen a lot more.
You might want to check out Jared Diamond’s new book, as do I.
Cerberus:
LOL. I am nothing of the kind; none of it.
Rather, I am merely an opponent of bullshit (as perceived by me). I’ve also spent the last 30 years on college campuses, socializing, reading the paper, serving on committees, checking out conferences, etc., and I have noted the sources of the bullshit I have perceived. That’s it.
Greenwood:
I acknowledge this.
And I do not doubt that if my experiences had been somehow different I would feel very differently about it.
And this is one of the multiple reasons I am shutting up.
Caine:
Exaggerations both. I only ever mention Sociology specifically to yank SC’s chain. And I do not “love” Evolutionary Psychology; I frankly don’t even know much about it specifically. Haven’t read Pinker, Buller, or Fine (yet, but I am in possession of copies).
What I do love is stuff that makes sense, like biology.
What I do hate is what I call ‘North-campus bullshit’, which includes but is not limited to the substitution of rhetoric, emotional appeal, political opinion, and ideological Theory for empirical knowledge and rational logic. In my experience, such emanates mostly from the purveyors of interdisciplinary Studies programs and their cohorts in places like Sociology and Cultural Anthro.
just to set that record straight. Not that it will endear me to y’all North-campus types.
As far as I can tell–and I try pretty hard at this–I don’t “choose to think” anything, just think shit. In fact, what prompted my intemperate and unnecessary comment was precisely my perception that Cohort C had all chosen to think certain things. But whatever.
And I do not think the commenters at Pharyngula are stupid, else I wouldn’t be here. I do think that non-stupid people can often say stupid shit, though.
And I do not think the locally popular ideas I regard as incorrect are antiquated; on the contrary, they are all too curent, imo.
Greenwood:
point of clarification: I did not so much change my nym as abandon a nym (actually, at the time, a series of anagrammic nyms) for my actual real-life name. With the understanding that ‘Chas’ is the conventional English abbreviation for ‘Charles’ you can look me up on Scholar or call me up for a beer if you’re on Long Island.
But I have indeed gone off some rails in recent months; you’re right about that. Apologies for apparently letting it slop over here.
These allegations I deny vehemently. Please explain and link or apologize.
Caine, thank you for the kind words. I swear I will try to limit myself to less controversial subject matter in the future.
Dalillama, Schmott Guy:
January 20th, 2013 at 3:57 pm
chas
FFS. Start here, dipshit.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 20th, 2013 at 7:07 pm
Chas:
I can easily see how you’d think that. The massive problem was that we find ourselves in a position to fight such toxicity all the bloody time and it has to be beaten back, even at the expense of discussing the underlying idea Paul had in mind. That had to take place because all it was doing was giving credence to such toxicity. People did try, repeatedly, to explain to Paul that his language was problematic and even then, he refused to change it. I don’t think you have any problems understanding that. As you can see, once the repeated rhetoric was gotten out of the way, a lot of us started talking about Paul’s goal and how it could be achieved. It is an interesting subject and I think it deserves discussion, but not at the expense of living people who have already been fucked over and don’t need to see someone doing that again.
I think it can be discussed without offense to people and without using words, that at least on the surface, turn us into objects.
I said that because I meant it. I have found you to be an interesting, engaging person much of the time. I also think you don’t need to limit yourself, I think subjects like rape and rape culture are difficult ones for *everyone*. All that’s needed, really, is for everyone to be a bit more thoughtful and more mindful of their language and the potential effects of language and how an argument is framed. I think it’s fair to say that everyone gets pretty damn heated in threads like this, with good reason. At the bottom, though, the most crucial part is to keep, right at the forefront of our brains, that we are people and people can get hurt, very easily.
carlie:
January 20th, 2013 at 9:12 pm
That was at the crux of what I was trying to discuss. I don’t have any at hand, but then again I’ve never seen any studies that indicate that there ARE any specific risk factors for being raped. Those things about skirts and alleys are just “something everybody knows”, without any backup. I’ll try to look things up tomorrow, or maybe somebody else has a reference right at hand.
Thank you for responding – I was looking for something like that from Paul and part of my frustration was that he didn’t provide it.
Pteryxx:
January 21st, 2013 at 12:53 am
I’m also looking for general summary references but I’m too damn burnt out. There aren’t any double-blind short-skirt studies out there anyway. What there is, is a massive body of research analyzing rapists’ behavior and tactics, and they simply don’t rape random beskirted or flirty or pretty women. They seek out victims based on their vulnerability versus the rapist’s security within their social context, and depending on the rapist’s preference/comfort zone/skill level, their victims can be kids, family members, acquaintances, co-workers, even strangers. That’s one reason rape incidence is higher when the victims are disabled, for example. Dependence is a vulnerability, trust is a vulnerability, lower social status is a vulnerability. One kind of rapist rapes women who can’t get away, another rapes women whose backs were turned, and yet another rapes women who don’t believe a trusted friend could do such a thing to them. And they’ve mostly been able to refine their chosen technique through practice, because their victims usually get blamed and silenced and thus consequences don’t happen.
/venting *sigh*
Useful scraps I managed to find: (bolds mine)
from the same site, bolds in original:
http://www.iup.edu/page.aspx?id=44097
Also from the CDC:
Risk factors for perpetration of sexual assault
I’ve been digging around the CDC and the DOJ but their sites are a mess. Most sites that list the myths about rape are referencing a specific DOJ publication, which I haven’t been able to find:
I did manage to find the source for the 1 in 6 and 1 in 33 stats:
Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Rape Victimization: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey. January 2006. with pdf available at the link.
and another fact sheet with lots of references: http://www.vaw.umn.edu/documents/inbriefs/sexualviolence/sexualviolence.html
and for the moment I’ve read as much about rape as I can stomach.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 21st, 2013 at 1:00 am
Thanks, Pteryxx. Digging around in such research is difficult on more than one level.
Tethys:
January 21st, 2013 at 2:09 am
For further reading on myths about rape I have this link bookmarked.
Understanding the Predatory Nature of Sexual Violence by Lisak.
carlie:
January 21st, 2013 at 4:54 pm
I think this post is a good example to throw in here. It’s by a person who describes a woman who does everything “wrong”, but is not raped… I don’t want to reprint it here because Stephanie deserves the page hits, but it’s seriously worth reading.
Drolfe:
January 21st, 2013 at 7:07 pm
It seemed to me the reason for wanting to engage was a moral one: repeating these tropes in the presence of people that have been raped is harmful to them. Causing harm is immoral*. Saying “don’t do that” isn’t an argument. (Is it?) It’s self defense. So you know, it seems like you could expect some push back from moral people wanting to stop harm. (Even before considering the wrongness or perhaps effectiveness of the tactic etc., you need to stop doing harm.)
If you are far removed from rape and the possibility of rape and you need to deconstruct rape apologetics in order to construct better arguments against rape apologists in their own terms — you’re sure this would be a productive use of your intellect — you should probably not do that around people that have been raped and perhaps do it in private with a bunch of Vulcan dudebros where your expressions aren’t going to harm onlookers or propagate the sort of toxic shit you ostensibly are trying to combat.
* Usual caveats.
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 21st, 2013 at 7:18 pm
Drolfe:
No, it isn’t. Saying don’t do that implies that the person you’re admonishing already understands the reasons X shouldn’t be done.
ChasCPeterson:
January 22nd, 2013 at 12:59 am
yeah. Hey, if I had a bunch of Vulcan dudebros to hang out with, I wouldn’t spend this much time in teh blogosphere.
But thanks for…whatever…interacting, I guess.
kidding. Point taken.
watch me shut up:
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 22nd, 2013 at 1:05 am
Chas:
I think if there were a bunch of Vulcans around, a whole lot of us would be taking time off.
Gregory Greenwood:
January 22nd, 2013 at 1:08 pm
ChasCPeterson @ 697;
So turning up on threads about misogyny and rape culture, stating how boring you find the whole business, engaging in that obnoxious ‘I could comment, but I won’t’ trope you go in for, and on this very thread making crass comments about ‘circling wagons’ with regard to the comments of rape victims discussing how toxic rape apologia is, doesn’t count as being dismissive of the experiences of rape victims and generally obnoxious in you eyes?
Here’s a thought Chas – maybe that lies at the heart of your problem; you don’t understand how badly you come off as someone who goes onto a thread where victims of rape deal with a very painful topic, only to repeatedly make it clear how very boring you find the whole topic, as if there is something more important everyone should be discussing.
It will probably come as grand revelation to you, but not everything is all about you and your pet obsessions. Sometimes, when you don’t have anything of worth to contribute, the best course is simply to stay silent and pay attention to what others have to say. It is times like that that you learn something.
Drolfe:
January 22nd, 2013 at 6:22 pm
Gregory,
“Circling the wagons” seems to me like the rational response to a damaging attack, that is the defense of self and others against harm. Is protecting yourself and others against harm too emotional? Spock seemed to be OK with it. (Maybe that was his human half.)
Caine, Fleur du mal +:
January 22nd, 2013 at 6:28 pm
Excuse me, Gregory and Drolfe – neither one of you is helping by turning this into a “what’s wrong with/about Chas” session. Chas addressed people in his last post and said he’s strengthened his resolve to stay out of these kinds of subjects. I’m not overly happy about that, because I think he can contribute with a bit more thoughtfulness, however, it’s his decision and he knows what he is and isn’t capable of doing.
This is also not discussing the actual topic of the thread, so unless either of you have more to add on that score, would you please take any talk of Chas elsewhere? Thank you.
ChasCPeterson:
January 22nd, 2013 at 9:31 pm
As per Caine’s request, I took it to the ‘Dome. Greenwood, please click the link.
Paul W.:
February 1st, 2013 at 5:16 pm
Chris,
I only just saw this, because I’ve avoided revisiting this thread until now.
I may take you up on that offer, or may not, but in any case, thank you very much.
And thank you very much, Caine.
Caine, poisoned chalice:
February 1st, 2013 at 5:33 pm
You’re welcome, Paul.
Paul W.:
February 5th, 2013 at 9:37 am
I want to retract my ill-fated paragraph, but not the opening construction, which a lot of people do seem to have misunderstood.
I was trying to make a point about how we talk about causation and blame, and I still think it’s a good one. It’s an important point because simplistic talk about causation and blame has consequences—for example, it’s often used to justify libertarian and conservative bullshit. (E.g., “guns don’t kill people,” and saying we shouldn’t address social issues underlying crime because that’s “social engineering” and we should instead talk about “individual responsibility” and be “tough on criminals.”)
–
This is not, as many people including Chris have said, a matter of being a Spock wannabe and emotionlessly treating people like pool balls or leptons. It’s also not just pointless ivory tower philosophical wankery, as others have said. It’s about how people actually talk about important stuff.
It’s very much about how normal people normally talk about causation, when discussing people’s actions and their consequences, when it seems clear enough where blame does and doesn’t belong.
–
I want to explain the opening construction I used in that ill-fated paragraph, about how “IMO it should be entirely okay under some circumstances, if you’re careful how you do it, to say that somebody caused” X—where X is something horrible he or she blameless for. (In this case a rape, but people seem to have misunderstood and sometimes intentionally misrepresented the basic construction.)
All of those qualifiers are really important, and they’re not just superficial hedges to get away with saying something otherwise unacceptable.
–
People say that kind of thing about blameless causation all the time, and in context, it can be a perfectly fine thing to do because it’s clear that it isn’t about blaming.
Some examples of phrases that may sound blaming and horrible and unfair out of context, but can be non-blaming and okay in context:
I killed my neighbor’s dog
she killed her husband
he killed himself and his buddy
If I’m talking about a situation in which I was driving responsibly, and a dog suddenly bolted in front of my car, and I hit it despite trying not to, I may say “I killed my neighbor’s a dog with my car today. It had gotten loose and ran right out in front of me. It was so horrible.”
In that case, I’m talking about myself in terms of plain old causation “like a pool ball or a lepton,” not because I’m philosophy wanker, and maybe because I’m an empathetic animal lover. It matters to me that I killed a dog, even if I don’t think I’m to blame for it, and it’s specially horrible to have caused the dog’s death myself, even through no fault of my own, and despite my attempts to avoid it.
Likewise, if I’m talking about a situation in which a woman caring for her husband administered a dose of a drug, and the drug killed him because the doctor messed up the prescription, presumably she’s not to blame, and that’s one of the things that makes it interesting that she nonetheless caused his death—”she was just trying to take good care of her beloved husband, and was horrified to discover that she’d killed him.” The fact that she caused the death herself is part of the nightmarishness of the situation.
Saying that she killed him, in that context, is not blaming an innocent party, it’s just talking about her causal role. And that’s part of what’s horrific about the situation, that’s being empathized with.
–
And if I say that a guy killed himself and his buddy, that can be non-blaming if I’m talking about a situation in which the guy was flying a large plane, and chose to crash it into an unpopulated hillside rather than risk an emergency landing in a populated area. “The guy killed himself and his buddy to save a lot of innocent people below.”
–
That’s the kind of thing I meant about how it should be okay under some circumstances, if you do it carefully, to talk about somebody blamelessly causing an event that’s horrible for themselves or others.
It doesn’t mean it’s okay to say that kind of thing carelessly or out of context. If you call me a “dog killer” because I failed to avoid running over a dog despite my best efforts, that’s obviously not okay. And if you just flatly say that some woman “killed her husband” as though she’d murdered him, that’s not okay either.
The point is that context does matter a whole hell of a lot, and it should be okay to talk about innocent causation, if you’re careful about it, without it being assumed that you’re placing blame.
That is a very, very different thing than saying “it’s okay to say that a woman caused her own rape” as though she was to blame. I never said that, and certainly didn’t mean that, and explicitly said the opposite over and over.
And I meant it.
Paul W.:
February 5th, 2013 at 10:20 am
Louis et al.,
Re distal vs. causal, I considered using those terms but realized it’s not the right distinction.
The morally blameworthy cause can be more distal or more proximal than the blameless causes.
For example, if a poisoner slips something in somebody’s drink, the drinker is the more proximal cause—they cause their own poisoning in a blameless way, because they were set up to do so.
But more distal causes than the poisoner are not generally blameworthy—for example, the manufacturer of rat poison, or the poisoner’s parents. (Unless they raised the kid to be a murderer.)
There are lots of causes of events, but the only ones that matter for placing blame are the ones where somebody fails to meet an obligation—they either do something they’re not supposed to, or don’t do something they are supposed to. That cross-classifies a lot with what’s more proximal or distal.
That is why the rapist is generally fully to blame, and the victim is not to blame at all—the rapist is obliged not to rape, irrespective of the other causes leading to the rape.
It is also why more than one perpetrator or enabler can be fully guilty, and you don’t divide the blame among them. E.g., if I’m obliged to prevent a rape, and don’t, that doesn’t change the fact that the rapist is obliged not to rape. It’s not to the rapist’s moral credit or debit whether I’m around to prevent it; either way, the rapist has failed to meet a basic obligation, and my guilt or lack of it has nothing to do with that.
ChasCPeterson:
February 5th, 2013 at 10:36 am
heh; I figured you’d return.
I know what you’re talking about, Paul.
But I predict further line-holding.
Dalillama, Schmott Guy:
February 5th, 2013 at 11:04 am
But the thing is, Paul, that first you have to establish that there is, in fact, causation occurring. That’s what you never did, and that’s why everyone was jumping all over you, because there is not any such evidence in the current literature. Unless you can provide some?
Paul W.:
February 5th, 2013 at 11:55 am
Dalillama,
I think it’s obvious to absolutely everyone that there’s causation occurring, even if they don’t use that term, and freak out when I do.
Consider a woman who is raped because she got on a bus, and there happened to be a rapist on it, and she had no way of knowing that.
That’s causation. It’s why we say because, and it’s obviously not about blaming in that case.
Some people seem to understand that, but be mystified why I’d talk about that boring sense of plain old causation if I didn’t have some malicious or stupid victim-blaming place I was going with it.
(One reason is that victim-blaming often occurs when people slip illegitimately from the straightforward sense of causing to one that carries baggage of blameworthiness. The falsehood or fallacy is often not in saying that somebody caused X, but in then proceeding to blame them for something they merely caused, as though they’d failed to meet some obligation, when they clearly didn’t.)
Other people don’t seem to understand that literally is causation, and it’s the basic, central sense of “causation,” and literally do not seem to be able to understand if I use the term “cause” in a way that doesn’t imply blame.
That is why I gave the examples I did of innocent causation.
Here’s an example of innocent causation leading to rape:
She was raped because she asked her old friend to fix her a drink, and didn’t watch him like a hawk. He roofied and raped her.
That’s plain causation with no blame involved—presumably the woman should be able to trust an old friend not to roofie and rape her, but shit like that does happen.
In that case, if you understand that of course she is not being blamed, and of course we’re not talking about “causation” in the sense of finger-pointing to a culprit, then you should be able to say that yes, in the basic sense of causation, she caused her own rape by doing something entirely reasonable, in the same way that I caused the dog to die when I killed it with my car, the woman caused her husband to die when she dosed him as prescribed, etc. Causation doesn’t imply blameworthiness. Only failures to meet obligations imply blameworthiness.
Whether we use the term “cause” in that case or not, that sense of causation necessarily comes up in discussing things that lead to rape, and you can or can’t prevent rape, given whatever the risk factors are or are not. (E.g., given the prevalence of acquaintance rape, trusting an old friend to fix you a drink is surprisingly dangerous relative to some stereotypically “dangerous” behavior.)
I don’t think anybody here actually disagrees with me that such causation actually occurs. I think the sticking point is the use of the term “cause” which for many people seems to evoke blame no matter what I say to explain that I’m not talking about that.
–
Did you understand my examples of innocent causation involving accidental or justified killing? Did you disagree with any of it?
–
A huge problem with talking about any of this is that in normal speech, we often do use causal talk to imply blame.
For example, if I say that somebody killed his wife, and don’t say that it was innocent or justified, people are likely to assume something that I didn’t say—that he committed homicide. Or if I say that somebody went to the electric chair because he killed his wife, it’s just assumed to be a shorthand for saying that he didn’t just cause her to die, he murdered her, which is actually a much stronger statement.
(Unfortunately, I fucked up my fatal paragraph by talking about the wrong risk factors as potentially causing rape. That was stupid, but it was also because it mostly didn’t affect my point—I guess my point being that even if a woman was engaging in stereotypically risky behavior, and even if that behavior really was particularly risky, it wouldn’t mitigate the rapist’s guilt. It wouldn’t affect his obligation not to rape, or mitigate his guilt for failing to meet that obligation. She wouldn’t be failing to meet an obligation, so she wouldn’t be blameworthy at all.)
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
February 5th, 2013 at 12:02 pm
@Caine
Chas doesn’t need his hand held or for more “he’s a regular” pitty when he so constantly is a shit
Dalillama, Schmott Guy:
February 5th, 2013 at 12:48 pm
throwaway:
February 5th, 2013 at 1:04 pm
Paul W @ 719:
She was raped because someone decided to rape her, not because she asked someone to do something for her. Why would the rapist be the indirect subject with a passive existence in the description of events? Such careless phrasing ignores the causal choice that mattered – someone decided to rape.
How about this phrasing instead: “He exploited her trust by drugging her drink surreptitiously.” Much better, clearer, and best of all the victim remains blameless, causation is all clear and there is no prescription of precautions in order to remain blameless. The actor in the sentence is the one responsible for the outcome (and sounds better than the subject flip-flop in the quoted passage.)
I also have a problem with your inclusion of the phrase “didn’t watch him like a hawk.” I’m sure you’re aware by now what this implies, what kind of guilt-tripping this does to victims? What the phrase implies (you know, because words in certain orders do have specific meaning) is that “if-only” the victim hadn’t created the opportunity to become a victim then they wouldn’t be a victim.
Chris Clarke:
February 5th, 2013 at 1:35 pm
Smaller stuff first:
Chas: not helpful. Predicting a thread will go badly is never a way to make it work better. You know this. Cut it out.
Ing: If we’re not cutting slack to people acting like assholes just because they’re regulars, that cuts in more than one direction. As far as I can tell your only contributions to any of my threads consist of sniping at other people. The only reason I haven’t banned your whiny ass is that you’re a regular. Do not make me regret that more than I already do.
Caine, poisoned chalice:
February 5th, 2013 at 1:45 pm
Ing:
I know your feelings about Chas, Ing. That said, I can think for myself, thank you.
Paul W:
I’m sad to see that I was wrong and you still don’t understand one iota of what anyone was trying to tell you. It’s a devastating disappointment to see you cling to your harmful construct as if it were more important than the people involved.
Chris Clarke:
February 5th, 2013 at 1:51 pm
Larger stuff:
Paul, the whole point of you taking a break was not for you to sit and think of more effective ways to explain yourself to those of us who are just not quite as clever as you.
I would add my signature to Dalillama’s in 721: what is your intent here? Even if you’re right, what on earth do you think we will accomplish by examining ways in which women “cause” their rapes by existing?
You — and Louis too, for that matter — are using the word “cause” in a way orthogonal to the way it is understood in colloquial usage. No one outside a graduate-level philosophy seminar uses the word “cause” this way. A bank did not “cause” the bank robbery by being there. A waiter did not “cause” his death by showing up for work atop the WTC the morning of September 11, 2001.
What you’re talking about is more properly described, in the English most of us speak, as a “necessary precondition.” If no women are at the club where the rapist is, no women get raped.
Which is not a useful consideration. It’s firmly in the category of “no shit, Cumberbatch.” Unless, that is, your conclusion is to tell women to refrain from being part of the necessary preconditions, at which point — regardless of your intent — you contribute to hurting those women.
Your post hurt people here, Paul. Your subsequent participation hurt people. You engaged in good faith and with apparent benign intent, but that doesn’t matter a bit. And your apparent absolute lack of subsequent self-awareness not only doesn’t make it better, but it makes me regret taking Caine’s advice to let you stay.
Chris Clarke:
February 5th, 2013 at 1:53 pm
Not that I’ll be any less likely to take Caine’s advice from now on, mind. It’s just that on this one matter, I’m going to stick with my original gut feeling.
Chris Clarke:
February 5th, 2013 at 2:03 pm
Oh, and this?
Take your condescension somewhere far, far away and do something physically unpleasant with it, Paul.
Pteryxx:
February 5th, 2013 at 2:04 pm
Thank you, Chris.
Caine, poisoned chalice:
February 5th, 2013 at 2:31 pm
Chris:
I’ll freely admit you were right and I was wrong. I don’t understand why Paul is so invested in his concept to the exclusion of how people actually think and feel, but after reading his further contributions, I’m not feeling benevolent anymore.
mythbri:
February 5th, 2013 at 2:32 pm
@Paul
I have read this entire thread, and even though I understand what you think you mean, you’re still not understanding what people here are trying to tell you.
Caine, carlie, Tethys, Louis, Pteryxx, Gregory and others that I have not yet mentioned have attempted to explain to you exactly what is offensive about your comments here, especially about the original one. And the reason they persist in doing so is not because they’re too stupid to understand what you’re getting at.
An older man manipulated my cousin’s emotions and isolated her from her friends and family so that he could have sex with her. She was 14.
The direct cause of her statutory rape was the man who deliberately set out to put her in a vulnerable position, preying on her inexperience, loneliness and emotional issues for his own gratification.
Plenty of people have engaged in the behavior that my cousin did and NOT been raped. The only difference was the presence of a rapist.
Who do you think you’re talking to here, Paul?
Rape is “important stuff.” Do you know how people actually talk about rape, when they do actually talk about it?
They say, “What was she expecting, going out dressed like that?”
They say, “What was she expecting, leading him on like that?”
They say, “What was she expecting, letting him into the house like that?”
They say, “What was she expecting, drinking as much as she did?”
They say, “What was she expecting, getting in the car with him?”
That’s how people actually talk about rape. What you’re doing is trying to make a meaningless distinction that is NOT important, however you feel about it, between causation and blame.
How is this useful in any way?
Chris Clarke:
February 5th, 2013 at 2:48 pm
Caine, I wasn’t blaming you for Paul’s dropping another Vulcan turd in the thread.
I was just saying you caused it.
Let me concisely explain what I mean in only a few short thousands of words:
*clears throat*
What you all fail to compreh&*^^&*$%^^bnv%^
%@%@%@%@%
NO CARRIER
Caine, poisoned chalice:
February 5th, 2013 at 2:56 pm
Chris @ 731, oh I wish I wish
I was a fishthat would provide the clue of enlightenment Paul so badly needs. Sometimes, to my consternation, I seem to be an optimist.Louis:
February 5th, 2013 at 3:12 pm
Chris,
I didn’t think my use of the word “cause” in that manner would be problematic. Apologies as it clearly was, and apologies for my not considering that it could be. I was trying to address Paul in his own…I’m struggling for a word here…is “voice” okay? Hmmm I may revisit that! “On his own terms”? Something like that.
Oh and for the record, Paul cannot have been talking to people not as smart as him because I’m smarter than everybody. I know this because my mummy told me so. And no one is going to call my mummy a liar, now are they?
;-)
Louis
Chris Clarke:
February 5th, 2013 at 3:13 pm
Look on the bright side, Caine: You’ll probably stop being an optimist eventually.
Chris Clarke:
February 5th, 2013 at 3:14 pm
And no worries, Louis. I thought your contribution was very helpful. I just don’t think that’s the right word, though I appreciated how you approached it.
carlie:
February 5th, 2013 at 3:23 pm
Repeated for emphasis. And to add on – the point I tried to make over and over again is that it is not the only necessary precondition, and is not any more “necessary” than any of the other preconditions.
Paul, in your hypothetical, do you see any difference in necessity/causality between “she asked him for a drink” and “she didn’t watch him like a hawk” and “she said yes she’d come over” and “she decided she wanted some company” and “she woke up in the morning”? If you do, you’re saying there are “risk factors” for rape that make them more necessary preconditions than other actions/states of being. And what we’ve all been trying to tell you is that, statistically, there are no actions or factors that make rape more of a necessary precondition than any other. As I’ve said several times, sure, asking for that drink is a precondition. But not any more of a precondition than every other event that led to that exact moment. If you really feel like you must explain yourself further, that’s what I want you to explain: Do you think there are actions that make rape more of a probable outcome than other actions, and what evidence do you have that that belief is true?
carlie:
February 5th, 2013 at 3:25 pm
(hit submit too soon)
And if you do not think there are actions that are more necessary to the outcome than others, what is the benefit of singling out any one of those actions for comment?
Caine, poisoned chalice:
February 5th, 2013 at 3:46 pm
Paul:
Wrong. It’s how you talk about important stuff. You have repeatedly spent thousands of words either ignoring or running roughshod over how the rest of us talk about “important stuff.” In that one sentence alone, Paul, you come off as a superior being, one who knows the proper way to talk about “important stuff”, while all us peons who have had the actual experience of being raped or assaulted or know someone who was have no idea at all how to talk about those experiences. Basically, you’re telling us we aren’t sophistimacated enough to grok your talk.
Well, we are and we get it. Sorry to deliver such shocking news. You’re still talking with your mouth full of shit, and all the protestations in the ‘verse won’t change that at all. There’s a reason that most everyone in this thread sees you the same way and it would be nice if you could manage to turn that incredible brain power on yourself for once, instead of insisting you and your concept are correct.
We’ve already read your ideas, your concept, to the point we are seriously over-saturated with it. It’s still wrong. It’s still incorrect. It’s still not the way that people talk about stuff, important or not. You cannot insist on objectifying us, then cry foul when we resent and reject the objectification. As has been repeatedly said to you, Paul, you are ignoring us as people, you are denying us our humanity. We are not objects for you to juggle about in an attempt to stuff us into your construct. Your construct is wrong from the base up.
ChasCPeterson:
February 5th, 2013 at 3:52 pm
Paul W.:
February 5th, 2013 at 4:45 pm
[Bla bla bla excized]
The problem is not that I’m talking highfalutin’ philosophy talk on a non-philosophy blog. It’s that I’m talking about causation in a normal colloquial and scientific sense on a science-and-liberalism blog, but about the wrong subject.…
And there we have it, folks.
Chris Clarke:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:05 pm
Paul’s done in the thread. It’s PC GONE WILD.
Dalillama, Schmott Guy:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:06 pm
I realize that the ‘conversation’ is probably over what with the bunnies, but still:
Yes. Specifically, about a subject where it is not relevant to the discussion, and causes harm when it comes up. That’s why it’s the wrong subject, which is what you seem to persistently be ignoring.
carlie:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:20 pm
God damn it. I didn’t see the comment before, but the one sentence that is left indicates that Paul is either entirely ignoring me or I can’t seem to get my point across at all. Yes, we know what you mean by causation, Paul. We knew what you meant from the very first time you said it. My own point is that the causal examples you are using, the ones you used right in your first post, are indistinguishable in effect from every other action that occurred prior to the incident. I’m asking you why you chose those particular actions to highlight and talk about. I’m asking if you understand those particular actions are statistically identical to every other action prior to the incident in terms of their amount of causation. You never answered. It sounds really narcissistic, but I’m really disappointed that you chose to focus solely on the fact that your comments were causing emotional damage and ignored not only me, but several other people who were trying to address your biases in what you did and did not consider to be causal. And now you’re going to go off mad, and think that you’ll never be understood here, and you’re probably hurt yourself by it, and all this time you’ve been ignoring everyone who’s tried to address these other parts of it.
Caine, poisoned chalice:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:21 pm
Paul:
Uh huh. Amazing you just can’t buy yourself a clue or three, eh? :near fatal eyeroll:
Nepenthe:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:22 pm
I thought the bunny video was cute but so so and then got to the 1:00 point. Chris, you almost killed me with a potato chip. IRL choking! You could post moar bunnies and I would forgive you.
Paul W.:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:23 pm
Chris:
I mostly agree with this, and I think it’s a very, very important point, which I wish I’d made explicit earlier, and mostly used different terminology.
You are certainly right that many of the things I’m talking about are best viewed as “necessary preconditions” for events.
They are causes—in not just a technical sense but a perfectly colloquial sense, but are usually not the relevant ones for identifying a fault or assigning blame, for a particular purpose.
Part of the problem there is that what you should call a “cause” vs. just a “necessary precondition” is not an objective fact—it depends on what level of analysis you’re talking about, and for what purpose.
So, for example, if you’re talking about rape prevention, and not talking about blaming the victim, you will try to identify causes of rape, so that they can be avoided.
But if you’re talking about who deserves moral blame for a rape, what counts as a cause worth calling a cause is different.
In the Chernobyl meltdown situation, what we’d call a cause would depend on what we’re trying to accomplish. If we’re just trying to figure out how the disaster happened and why it happened when it happened, we will consider the machinery operator’s pushing the button to be clearly a cause—it activated something that in turn caused the meldown.
But if we’re trying to figure out who was responsible for the disaster—who failed to meet an obligation—we clearly won’t count that as a “cause.” That will be part of the background we ignore as things proceeding as expected. We “screen out” most actions as (1) not being salient causes because they’re what we normally expect, or (2) not being blameworthy causes because they’re don’t involve failing to meet an obligation.
Both of those apply to the Chernobyl machinery operator—we assume she’ll push the button as she’s supposed to, because that’s normal,. and it would only be salient if she failed to. We normally “screen out” such “background” events in talking about any system, even where blame is not an issue. We also don’t consider that an interesting cause for moral blaming in particular, because she is not failing to meet an expectation—she’s not only doing what we’d normally expect, but that’s what she’s supposed to do.
That difference is relevant to any discussion of victim blaming. Often the interesting cases where people screw up and blame the victim are where we can’t screen things out for the first reason—somebody made a choice that’s not predictable—but we should screen them out for the second reason, and we don’t.
I think that’s very relevant to the subject of victim blaming—it’s often how things go wrong. People may find some causation—something the victim did—salient because it’s unpredictable, and was a cause in the sense of being a “necessary precondition” for the rape, but then fail to screen it out as they should because it wasn’t a failure of obligation—it was just something the woman chose to do, which she had every right to do, that happened to be a necessary precondition for the rape.
The big problem there is that some things clearly are “causes” for some salient purpose, such as rape prevention, but not for that one.
mythbri:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:28 pm
I’m positively breathless with anticipation, Paul.
What do you consider to be rape prevention?
Caine, poisoned chalice:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:29 pm
Paul:
Also, Paul, since you seem to be determined to be a fuckwit, just because science comprises part of this blog does not give you license to run off at the mouth treating people like shit, ignoring people who have seriously hard questions and having yourself a happy fun time turning us into objects for your own gratification.
As it seems to have escaped your notice, this is also a social justice blog. That means the concerns of actual human beings count, so you can take your objectification of us and stuff it. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you where.
Paul W.:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:30 pm
Ooops.
I hadn’t seen where Chris said I was “done in this thread.” Didn’t mean to sneak anything in after that.
Carlie, I’m really not ignoring you. I have thought about some of the things you’ve said, and may not have come to the realizations you want—maybe I will in the future, I dunno—but I’m not ignoring you. For example, my last comment was partly in response to things you’ve said, though I don’t know if that’s obvious.
I do think the issue of which causes we think and care about, of the many causes we know about, is absolutely crucial, and the answer is interesting and important, and entirely relevant to understanding victim blaming.
But I’m gone.
Bye, everyone.
Caine, poisoned chalice:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:31 pm
Mythbri:
I’m absolutely positive it wouldn’t be any of the standard crap which was repeatedly written down for Paul’s edification in the two pages of this thread, oh no. I’m ever so sure it’s brand new prevention stuff, something to do with us being pool balls, likely.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:35 pm
Well, the big bang was one of them, but it irrelevant to the point that was being made against you. Not all necessary preconditions are equal, and citing cause, you are implying a responsibility that wasn’t there. I would have left such stuff out, even if philosophically correct, as it doesn’t meet the reality of the situation.
Here’s where you got into real trouble. The only cause of rape is the rapist. End of story. All else is minor contributing factors at best, or irrelevant in most cases. You appeared to be ignoring this fact and concentrating on the irrelevant factors to detriment of the only real cause of the rape. Essentially you came accross as saying the victim was responsible for their rape. That is what you need to rectify. You do that by apologizing for bring the trivial irrelevant factors into the picture.
ChasCPeterson:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:37 pm
aw. An unfortunate decision, in my view.
What? The post title is ‘Women cause rape by…” and it specifically mentions “blame-shifting” and “victim-blaming’. What did you think Paul was trying to talk about?
Argument from consequences. Feelings are more important than ideas.
At least admit it.
Paul W.:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:38 pm
Carlie,
It appears that Chris excised the stuff I was talking about and replaced it with “blah blah blah,” so my response to some of your concerns disappeared. (And I’m guessing this will too.)
At any rate, I do care what you think and wasn’t just ignoring you.
ChasCPeterson:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:40 pm
wow, that’s pretty unfair.
But I’m done here too.
mythbri:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:48 pm
@Chas
Based on Paul W’s recent comments, it seems as though he’s saying what we’ve seen before on threads regarding rape, albeit in a more convoluted and intellectual way:
“I’m not saying that people are to blame for their own rapes! The victim is not to blame whatsoever! Incidentally, we can figure out how to ‘prevent rape’ by analyzing what the victim did to cause their rape.”
carlie:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:49 pm
And what we have been trying to say is that there aren’t any causes other than the rapist’s decision to do so. There is not a single “cause” that you can tie to rape so that “if you do x, rape will most likely occur”. Or more likely occur. If you want to talk about rape prevention and identify causes of rape, you have to look at it from the rapist’s angle. You have to look at all of the actions, all of the causes, that the rapist performed up to that point, because those are the proximal causes, the distal causes, the necessary preconditions. What the victim does is entirely random from a statistical point of view. Women get raped in bars, in frat houses, in taxis, at church, at the doctor’s office, during surgery, in their own houses, in their own beds. Women get raped wearing short skirts, long skirts, baggy clothes, burqas. Women get raped when they’re adolescent and flirty, when they’re old and feeble, when they’re not even old enough to walk yet. There are no ways to identify causes of rape that use the trajectory of the rape victim, because every trajectory is different.
We’ve been trying to prevent rape by analyzing the action trajectory of the victim for decades now. It hasn’t worked. That’s because if you’re looking for causal factors, looking at the trajectory of the victim is looking in the wrong place.
mildlymagnificent:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:53 pm
Come on Paul. It doesn’t matter how you dance around ascribing causes, correlations and conditions to the victim of a rape.
The big issue is – always – what if the victim who caused, for certain values of cause, rape by getting on the bus which contained the rapist didn’t get on that bus ….. but another woman did get on the bus. How are you going to make the different history and different circumstances and different actions of an entirely different woman become a “cause” of a rape by the same rapist?
The only common features to the event are 1. the rapist, 2. the bus. The only thing that makes the victim a victim is the presence and actions of the rapist.
What you’re overlooking is that, even if anyone did follow your “causation” notion, the only thing that happens if the victim you’re talking about takes some other course of action is that she dodged a rape, this time. Why? Because some other woman would have come under the rapist’s notice if our victim sidestepped her place in his sights. And our not-a-victim-this-time subject has to keep on dodging tomorrow and every day following. While the rapist simply changes focus and changes targets.
Remember we’re talking about 1 in 6 women being raped in their lifetimes. Dodging any particular rape ‘opportunity’ is not at all like moving out of the way of an out of control train – that’s a once in a lifetime, hardly ever happens to anyone, event. Rapists are everywhere we go and involved in pretty well everything we do. And they don’t carry warning signs.
carlie:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:55 pm
Paul- thanks.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
February 5th, 2013 at 5:56 pm
More explanation-free pronouncements from Chas, O frabjous fucking day.
John Morales:
February 5th, 2013 at 6:01 pm
[meta]
Chas:
Well, yes. That’s what morality (and indeed, social justice) is all about.
(duh)
vaiyt:
February 5th, 2013 at 6:03 pm
Paul W, dumb ass rape apologist who’s taking too long to shut up, says:
You’re showing pretty well where equivocation occurs. Your entire oeuvre in this topic has been nothing but equivocation after equivocation.
Exhibit A – the quote that started the shitstorm:
Italics for emphasis. The problem, Paul W, is that doing what you’re asking in this quote is FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE. It would require that we not live in this bullshit culture of victim-blaming. It would require a cultural milieu that doesn’t conflate “participation in the chain of events” with “blame” for this specific kind of event. It just DOESN’T FUCKING WORK. No matter how fucking careful do you think you are, there’s NO THORDAMN WAY you, in this culture, in this time and place, can say that a woman was raped because of something she is or did, and not end up blaming the victim. That’s why we don’t do that, we don’t like when people do that, and you’re playing the game of rape apologists when you insist on doing that.
Moreover, when we’re here, discussing the “causes of rape”, we’re definitely NOT treating all causal factors as equal – and someone as smart as you think you are SHOULD know this. If you insist in perpetuating the confusion by using a definition of “cause” that’s not useful for the discussion, either you’re not really smart, or you’re deliberately adding noise. What it is, then? Stupidity or malice?
Caine, poisoned chalice:
February 5th, 2013 at 6:06 pm
Chas:
No, it wasn’t in the least unfair, Chas. In two pages, Paul compared rape victims to all manner of objects and has continually treated us as objects. After two pages of the same textorrhea from Paul, all of it leading to the inevitable place of “it’s something the victim did!”, I’ve had enough of trying to get through to Paul. If he can’t handle what he’s actually doing to people, then he needs to get a fucking clue, stat, and stop fucking doing it.
Appealing to his so-called reason is not working. If he (or you) thinks I’m being harsh, maybe it’s godsdamned time you see things from a POV which is not yours. Someone who was in this thread earlier posted elsewhere that they were triggered by Paul’s continued crap parade already. Paul has already made it clear, by his actions, that he doesn’t give one single shit about the actual people involved here. Me, I’m on the side of us peons. You can think what you like, Chas, but nothing changes by being all sweetness and light to those who attempt to dehumanize us.
vaiyt:
February 5th, 2013 at 6:12 pm
NO SHIT, SHERLOCK. THAT’S EXACTLY THE PROBLEM OUTLINED IN THE OP, AND YOU’RE NOT HELPING.
Seriously. Paul W must think he’s a genius. He comes into a thread that is specifically about conflating causation and blame, and proceeds to slobber that “hey, we shouldn’t conflate causation and blame”, while trying to squirrel in an use of “cause” that DOES EXACTLY THAT. Then he observes with amazement, incapable of understanding why people don’t agree with such a wonderful piece of insight.
vaiyt:
February 5th, 2013 at 6:16 pm
Boohoo. I’m not even going to whip out the violin, just don’t forget to grab your crown of porcupine thorns from the rack before you go out.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls:
February 5th, 2013 at 6:17 pm
Ideas that cause shame, fear and more in those who have been raped, compared to an unnecessary pseudointellectual exercise? (If it was truly intellectual, it would have taken the distress it would have caused into account).
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
February 5th, 2013 at 6:26 pm
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine":
February 5th, 2013 at 6:33 pm
sorry Chris didn’t see your post. Ending whine and leaving
Nepenthe:
February 5th, 2013 at 6:34 pm
You are so right Chas. Every one of the rape victims getting upset in this thread is anti-intellectual and overly emotional because they prioritize their mere feelings over an invigorating discussion of whether, in some esoteric sense, they caused another person to commit a crime against them, the trauma of which may have radically altered the course of their lives. How could we be so disappointing and shallow. My sincerest apologies to you.
*spits*
Caine, poisoned chalice:
February 5th, 2013 at 6:36 pm
Nerd:
QFT.
Dalillama, Schmott Guy:
February 5th, 2013 at 6:49 pm
Paul
No, they are not used that way in a colloquial sense. No one says that the Aurora victims caused their shooting by going to see Batman, no one says that the passengers caused the Lockerbie bombing by taking that flight, etc. People only say the victim caused their victimization when they’re y’know, victim blaming.
Yes. And that has been done. What causes a rape is a rapist deciding to rape somebody. Now we need to work on how to get them to stop doing that.
Chas
The thing is, he’s not talking about victim blaming. He’s engaging in victim blaming. Do you understand the difference? By choosing to focus on trivialities which have no statistical correlation with being victimized, he is perpetuating rape culture, because that focus is a part of rape culture. Everyone here already knows that our culture focuses on irrelevancies when it comes to rape. That’s the fucking problem. Focusing on those irrelevancies even more does not help. Also, and largely separately, you’re an asshole and I still wish you’d just STFU and go away.
Giliell, professional cynic:
February 6th, 2013 at 2:50 am
There’s one, only one thing that prevents rape: don’t rape.
And even if you had a point that for a woman engaging in some fairly normal stuff like going to a bar and having a beer put her at risk for being raped, then we should always go with Golda Meyr and tell the men to stop going there.
Wouldn’t that be horribly unfair if all those 94% of men who are not rapists were asked to abstain from a shitload of social activities women then get to enjoy freely?
Yes?
Now, so, why should women be asked to abstain from those things to prevent a crime happening to them?
It’s also noteworthy that Paul doesn’t only compare women to all kinds of objects, he also constantly compares rape to accidents in his analysis of “causes”.
Caine, poisoned chalice:
February 6th, 2013 at 3:30 am
Giliell:
You’re right, that is noteworthy and it shouldn’t be ignored. It’s an insidious thing to do, providing even more cover for those who do rape.
ChasCPeterson:
February 6th, 2013 at 9:27 am
cross-posted from a Thunderdome comment:
I apologize for the feelings of hurt, dehumanization, anger, and frustration caused by my words in this thread. I’m sorry to have been inconsiderate.
carlie:
February 6th, 2013 at 9:59 am
Crossposting back from Thunderdome in case Paul will notice it:
(Caine)
And not only was that wrong in all the ways in which it is wrong, but it is also wrong from the scientific viewpoint he so insisted he was using. Inanimate objects obey the laws of physics. Set up the same set of causal actions and you will get the same reaction, every time. People aren’t like that. One person could respond to a causal action of being cut off in traffic by sighing and hoping the other person has a better day, while another responds with road rage. And even if you want to make educated guesses about causes and reactions in moods, it still doesn’t hold, because the actual causal action for their attitude wasn’t the cut off at all, it was something that happened earlier in the day that helped shape their current mood. That’s one of the parts he refused to get.
Also, thanks for saying that, Chas.
Caine, poisoned chalice:
February 6th, 2013 at 10:00 am
Chas, responded in Tdome. Thank you very much for your considerateness and thoughtfulness. It’s appreciated.
Caine, poisoned chalice:
February 6th, 2013 at 10:03 am
X-posted from Tdome:
Chas:
I know you didn’t, however, I can’t extend that benefit to Paul. It wasn’t a matter of being talked about. Paul deliberately compared us to objects, such as pool balls and alternators. He also compared us to dogs, mob bosses and assassins. He was told that replacing us with this, that and the other wasn’t helping, by a whole lot of people, and instead of listening, he just moved on to comparing us to something else. He *erased* us, even while we were present and trying to get through to him. Nope, just handwaved us away. I know you’re capable of understanding how that feels.
Paul did. not. listen. At all. To anyone. He didn’t care about causing harm nor did he care that he was simply using us as objects in his precious construct. Honestly, I don’t understand just what stake Paul has in insisting on that whole mess. It reeks, from top to bottom and there’s something terribly off in that insistence. For all his disclaimers, everything he said all came down to the same old shit – putting the focus and onus on those who are raped. You know, we’re tired. Damn tired of this being the case for fucking forever already. The focus and the onus needs to be on those who do, will or would be willing to rape. How many times did I bring up the “Don’t be that guy” campaign in Canada? That works. It works where all the massive “rape prevention” lists don’t. It works because it focuses on the one factor which remains static in cases of rape – the presence of a rapist.
I don’t have any sort of personal grudge with Paul, but I gotta say, this last round – I don’t think so well of him now. I’ll admit, I expected better. I gave him one chance after another. I gave him more benefit of the doubt than he deserved. Dressing up old shit in new clothes isn’t good science, it isn’t good anything, and that’s all Paul was doing, after doubling down, tripling down, nthing down.
Tigger_the_Wing:
February 6th, 2013 at 10:32 pm
Yesterday, I was so angry with what I had read here I hoped to make a comment of my own; but meatspace stuff got in the way, as it has a tendency to do, and I ran out of time. When I got back to this thread, it had drawn to a close with Caine’s brilliant summing-up.
But, dammit, I don’t want anyone to think that the people who did the heavy work in this thread are in a small minority. I want to put up my hand and say “I care, too.”
Paul W. was wrong, in all the ways Caine says he was.
Despite his continuing his horrible, triggering comments over in the Thunderdome, he doesn’t get off making it all about him and his feelings, as if being asked to stop hurting other people is by far the worst thing that could happen, far worse than anything he might say to hurt them.
~~~~~~~~~~
Pteryxx
Paul W.
It simply isn’t true, however much he might protest, that he is entitled to victim-blame as long as he calls it something else. That response of Paul’s was disgusting.
Paul W.
A condescending remark to Carlie, referring to her very good comment here, followed by a small, brief, grudging apology (mis-)naming just one of the victims he triggered and then lumping all the rest under ‘everyone else’ doesn’t get him off the hook, in my opinion.
There are plenty of other people, men especially, who read this thread and didn’t feel qualified to comment. Please do. The more of us who show that we do not support rape apologetics, no matter who is making them and no matter how hard the victim-blamers protest that they aren’t doing that, the better.
Whether or not we have direct experience of the horrors of rape in all its manifestations, we all have a part to play in putting the blame squarely where it belongs: on the choice of the rapist to rape, without qualification. Without esoteric philosophical discussions about ‘ultimate causes’. And certainly without speculation about the behaviour of the victims, which is completely irrelevent to the decision the rapist makes. Those do nothing except harm the innocent.
Paul W. was told this, over and over again by many brave men and women, yet still chose to say that it was because no-one understood him instead of admitting that everyone understood him only too well, but disagreed with him.
FossilFishy(Anti-Vulcanist, with a perchant for pachyderm punditry):
February 6th, 2013 at 10:39 pm
Chris, I’m adding this because it was pointed out the men of Pharyngula have been letting the side down a bit in these threads and I want to add my voice by way of retroactive mitigation of that failing. Please bunnify me if you feel that this is unfair piling on.
Paul, I read your arguments and I understood them. My initial response was negative, but I didn’t dismiss you out of hand. Instead I waited. And then came the response that I half expected: a comprehensive rebuttal from multiple sources, evidence that my initial impulse was correct.
I take no pride in that correct assessment. It was dim and half-hearted and my lack of trust in my own judgment shows I have a long way to go on these issues. It’s a failing and I accept it, just as I accept that I have an obligation to mitigate and remedy that failing.
That’s all us men can do when we trip over our societal privilege Paul. Acknowledge it, accept it, and try to do better. You haven’t done this.
You’ve triggered people here by doubling down instead of backing off with an apology when it exploded in your face. You’ve cause demonstrable person harm to individuals over and above the perpetuation of rape culture inherent in your arguments. You belittled and demeaned those arguing with you by reducing their experiences and pain to an intellectual game in which you have to be right and damn the consequences. This is contemptible.
I repeat, because that is all I can do:
Women are not the cause of rape.
Never.
Rapists are the cause of rape.
Always.
Damn you and all impervious straw-Vulcans for never being able to accept that.
Tony the Dancing Telegram Queer Shoop:
February 6th, 2013 at 11:00 pm
Paul:
A woman is raped by an acquaintance at a party.
The reason she is raped is because a douchebag raped her. There *is* no other reason.
She wore sexy clothes. Not a reason.
She chose to drink. Not a reason.
She flirted with guys. Not a reason.
She stayed too late. Not a reason.
She came to the party in the first place. Not a reason.
The house where the party occurred was built. Not a reason.
The rapists’ parents got married. Not a reason.
The *only* reason…the absolutely *only* reason that she was raped is because some douchebag chose to rape her. The responsibility for the rape rests on the rapist. Whipping up a set of circumstances to explain how the woman wound up in a situation where she was raped is victim blaming. It’s saying “don’t do this”, “don’t go there”, “don’t wear that”, “don’t drink that”. Instead of trying to figure out how the woman should have done something differently so that she wouldn’t be raped (as if that’s possible), how about telling men “don’t rape”?
Feline:
February 7th, 2013 at 6:50 pm
To claim that your use of cause here is colloquial is a damnable lie.
If I am at a party and person A puts down an empty bottle of beer on the edge of a table and I sweep my arm through the top of that bottle, causing that bottle to fall to the floor, I would be at fault. I would be expected to sweep up the glass shards and pull out a mop to clean up the small shards. And never would anyone think to even ponder what person A did. It does not happen. Person A did not cause the bottle to fall.