Seems to me there is a lot of confusion and/or miscommunication about this topic (and the manner this topic is typically discussed, is also not helpful).
From the links at your article and this comment, I get an idea that there are many violent rapes done by relatively few men, repeatedly. From a typical online discussion with a feminist, I get an idea that every man is a rapist, and that men constructed the whole society to help each other get away with their crimes. -- These two ideas seem rather contradictory. Or at least have opposite connotations.
I suspect that what really happened is this: There are some horrible crimes that almost everyone (except the offenders) would like to prevent, or at least punish. But we fail to do that, and that makes us feel frustrated. So in the absence of a proper solution, we want to find at least something, anything, to make us feel that we did something useful, that we are not completely helpless. Which invites all kinds of irrationality.
As an analogy, imagine that we live in a large village with wooden houses, and once in a few months, a house is set on fire. It is obviously caused by a human, but it has been happening for years, and we never succeeded to catch anyone. We can’t watch everything and everyone all the time, so the arsonist has all the opportunity they need. (We are not even sure it was the same arsonist all the time, but the experience from other villages suggests that it is usually only a person or two per village.) We are desperate, and we are helpless.
In the absence of a proper solution, random pseudosolutions appear naturally. For example, whenever someone shows some anger (whether justified by circumstances, or not), people start saying that this is the kind of personality that could make one become an arsonist. Or when someone lights a cigarette, they are accused of “enjoying fire”.
Sometimes political coalitions are built on common interests. For example an organization against smoking adopted the “smokers enjoy fire, which makes them dangerous to their neighbors” as their slogan, first because it instrumentally helped their goals, but gradually the slogan attracted new members who sincerely believed it. A huge theory about a “fire culture” is developed, theorizing that the ancient arsonists invented bonfires to make burning down of their neighbors’ houses more socially acceptable; some people make a tenure studying this.
A few years later, smoking is banned, people are taught never to display anger in public, etc. Yet, the arsonist remains uncaught, and once in a few months, another house is set on fire. Which is seen as a proof that we have to be more tough on fire, perhaps remove all positive mentions of fire from books, or something. Because obviously, having a house set on fire every few months, is not how we imagine a decent society where we want to live.
From the links at your article and this comment, I get an idea that there are many violent rapes done by relatively few men, repeatedly. From a typical online discussion with a feminist, I get an idea that every man is a rapist, and that men constructed the whole society to help each other get away with their crimes. -- These two ideas seem rather contradictory. Or at least have opposite connotations.
I suspect that what really happened is this: There are some horrible crimes that almost everyone (except the offenders) would like to prevent, or at least punish. But we fail to do that, and that makes us feel frustrated. So in the absence of a proper solution, we want to find at least something, anything, to make us feel that we did something useful, that we are not completely helpless. Which invites all kinds of irrationality.
Alternative hypothesis: there are different phenomena that all get grouped into the category ‘rape’, even though they happen in different ways and for different reasons. Because the outcomes are the same (severe emotional trauma, socially stigmatizing positive feedback loops, and horrific displays of power disparity), it makes sense to group all these phenomena together, and in fact failure to do so can sometimes appear to be legitimizing certain behaviors or downplaying certain experiences (the old “it wasn’t RAPE-rape” schtick).
But if our goal is prevention, we actually do need to examine the different ways in which different rapes occur.
My limited observations:
There’s a very small number of men who commit multiple violent rapes due to sociopathic tendencies (biologically impaired empathy and impulse control). In a prior post, I called these men ‘desperados’.
There’s a larger number of men who commit multiple coercive rapes due to access and reinforcement (socially impaired empathy and easily exploitable power disparities). In that same post, I called these men ‘predators’.
There’s a much, much larger number of men who help out the ‘predator’ group by maintaining their power disparity and maintaining the environment that impairs their empathy. A small number of these men also attempt to mimic the predators as a status signal. In the previous post, I called these mimickers ‘schlubs’. I have also heard them called ‘dudebros’.
But the point is, they each are doing very different things, and the way to prevent them from inflicting harm on society is different.
The first group are easily combatted by law enforcement, and in fact the current methodology of law enforcement is designed to do exactly that. They are outlaws, and thus they almost always get caught.
The third group can only be combatted by social pressure, because there’s just too damn many of them. Their behavior has to be de-normalized so that they no longer wish to emulate the predators.
The second group are the hardest ones to catch, because most often they are closer to the people in charge of the catching than we are. When a US president, or a prominent lawyer, or a police chief, or a movie mogul, or a sports superstar sexually assaults a woman, what the hell are you supposed to do about that? Because the people who are supposed to arrest them are likely to just give them a free pass due to their social status, as are the people who are supposed to condemn them, as are the people who are supposed to teach them better.
So, since group 2 are out of reach, the people who REALLY WANT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS start focusing their rage on group 3, and on random parts of the system that they perceive group 3 supporting. Sometimes they’re actually right, but sometimes they aren’t.
Once I had a short experience of teaching in a private school for high-status children, and the environment felt like a training room for sociopaths. The children were reinforced, every day, for years, that no rules apply to them, their actions have no consequences, and everything is someone else’s fault and someone else’s problem. (The only rule was to never cross a path of someone even more powerful than you.) Any kind of problem can be fixed, first by parents, and later I assume by powerful friends; which is why it is critical to know a lot of people in the same social class, and be ready to offer the same kind of help to them.
Approximating on what I saw there, I can well imagine that if they would later rape someone and face a trial, their sincere thoughts would be: “Why are these people making such a big deal out of nothing? Are they insane, or what? I should call my parents/friends to get me rid of this stupidity.” And after the problem would be fixed, their only emotion would be an indignation about how some stupid person had the audacity to bother them over nothing; and their friends would completely agree with them.
(I wish I had a statistics about how many of them, 10 or 20 years later, end in jail, and how many in parliament or similar. I guess, some of them could really end in jail, not because of the justice system per se, because they will overestimate their power and contacts in some specific situation, or unknowingly cross the path of someone more powerful. But maybe this is just a wishful thinking.)
Please come back with your thoughts once they’re ready; this is the most productive and nuanced conversation I’ve managed to have on this topic in quite some time.
Unfortunately I can’t talk about these thoughts, since they’re mostly mapping what he’s describing in people to my personal experience and analysis of that.
If you have public digital record of other productive and nuanced conversation on this topic, I’d love if you’d link.
The power disparity point for group 2 is important. My understanding and observation is that its not about sex for them, hence why the term predator is very appropriate. As the article I cited reports, there is an overlap between those who rape and those who abuse children. Its not about sex for this group, its about power and having someone helpless under your control who can do nothing to stop you while you violate them. To these people, that is hot.
That’s not something most people get, so that’s part of the confusion—normal people assume that rapists are a single consistent population that do things like get drunk and lose control while wanting sex, and that’s how they normal people empathize with the behavior.
The rapists that are in this group 2 are very mentally differently motivated than most people. Its a little easier to understand when you look at the things some of them say. And they really do say these things—I’ve heard things as sadistic or worse than what is posted on these signs, both from women who have been raped and people of both genders who were abused as children.
It is very unfortunate that there is so much confusion about how it is just a few specific men (and women when we add in child abuse) who act this way, and neither “no men” nor “all men.” It is also frustrating how they can blend so well, and how since very few people want to talk or think about this topic or consider that they could possibly know someone in this category, the guys who do this sort of thing generally just get away with it so long as they are not stupid enough to do anything like videotape their actions. Few are that stupid.
Its also worth pointing out that I think there are many more groups. For example, there probably actually are occasions where a guy does drugs or gets drunk and gets out of control and it is not motivated by a more systemic lack of empathy or darker problems.
The power disparity point for group 2 is important. My understanding and observation is that its not about sex for them, hence why the term predator is very appropriate. As the article I cited reports, there is an overlap between those who rape and those who abuse children. Its not about sex for this group, its about power and having someone helpless under your control who can do nothing to stop you while you violate them. To these people, that is hot.
There’s a certain kind of man who has a lot of power, and who really, really enjoys overt displays of his power over anyone he perceives as weak. Luckily, he’s pretty rare. Unfortunately, there’s another kind of man who isn’t very powerful, but who sees the first man as a role-model, and who will march to that first man’s drum.
In a lot of cases, actually, the choice of women as the target is just a Schelling point—women are perceived as weak, so they’re seen as easy prey, so they get preyed on more, so society normalizes the preying, so they’re perceived as weak.
EDIT: A trivial and somewhat pathetic example of this—there is someone on this site that, every time they log in, every one of my posts that I’ve made since the last time they logged in gets voted down. If I email them to ask about it, someone new registers to the site, and then every post that I’ve made for the last few months gets voted down again.
Some people treat everything as a chance to inflict power.
I don’t know if it makes sense to complain, but the first linked article starts by this:
The week started with the arrests of two Steubenville girls … The 16-year-old is charged with one misdemeanor count of aggravated menacing for threatening the life of the victim on Twitter. The 15-year-old is charged with one misdemeanor count of menacing for threatening bodily harm to the victim on Facebook.
and concludes this:
In a world where thousands of anonymous men can instantly gather to deliver swift retribution against any perceived threat, it’s easy to understand why more women don’t speak out.
Am I just oversensitive or did someone write their bottom line first, and then collected links to anything related to create an impression of research?
(Also, in the second linked article, author complains about being asked to leave a mailinglist ‘because of her language’ when she complained about a sexist joke. Without any more information, this is outrageous. But there is no link to or quote of the specific complaint she used, so all we have is a report about a conflict, from one of the participants, providing no data. If we had the same kind of report about some other topic, how much credibility would we assign to it?)
Yeah, it is frustrating that documentation by activists is not better, and that they often exaggerate or distort to get seen, and that this ends up getting them discredited, even when they are actually making good points.
This is a classic stereotypical masculine/stereotypical feminine battle—many women and intuitive men are prone to emoting (and losing the rational tools) when upset, and in masculine/non-emotive culture, this gets them instantly discredited and discounted, regardless of content.
Personally, I’ve learned how to be level under stress and to look for more concrete facts and to keep my head in most cases, and I do find that I am taken much more seriously, but doing this has taken a lot of work and discipline to learn, and I think is something that a lot of people who are more intuitive simply cannot do. Where I have screwed up and gotten emotional, even after building a lot of credit about having real content in what I say, in more logic oriented circles, I have gotten instantly discredited and shunned.
In well functioning feminine/empathetic circles, the response to strong emotion is usually to pay more attention and take the topic seriously and get curious. When this happens the person calms down and the issue is addressed sanely. So I think the problem you’re looking at is a result of two different evolutionary strategies clashing.
Where I have screwed up and gotten emotional, even after building a lot of credit about having real content in what I say, in more logic oriented circles, I have gotten instantly discredited and shunned.
In well functioning feminine/empathetic circles, the response to strong emotion is usually to pay more attention and take the topic seriously and get curious. When this happens the person calms down and the issue is addressed sanely. So I think the problem you’re looking at is a result of two different evolutionary strategies clashing.
This post is an expression of acknowledgement and deep dismay that “logic-oriented circles” and “empathetic circles” are considered mutually exclusive, and that they often attempt to deliberately shun and discredit each other.
I have yet to understand why, when someone is experiencing an overload of emotion, the logical response is not to listen to them until they calm down, and therefore increase the level of logic in the discussion.
I have yet to understand why, when someone is expressing a rational attempt to solve someone else’s emotional problem, the reaction is almost invariably hostility rather than appreciation for the attempt.
A proper rationalist recognizes that people are not always rational, and that tending to their emotional needs will lead to a more rational outcome in the long run.
A proper empath recognizes that emotions have consequences, and that these consequences need to be weighed rationally to the best of everyone’s rational capacity.
Keep honing your capacity to express your empathic understanding through logic, because it’s a sorely needed skill in these kinds of communities.
I have yet to understand why, when someone is experiencing an overload of emotion, the logical response is not to listen to them until they calm down, and therefore increase the level of logic in the discussion.
Actually, after discussions in this thread, I realized that this is a skill I should develop. (I don’t want to react like this all the time, just to be able to do this when I decide to; and to be aware of the situations where doing this might be the right choice.)
But whether it is the right choice or not, depends on circumstances. For this method to work well, there are a few conditions:
the person will eventually calm down and be able to communicate logically, because the person is not insane;
your listening will make the person calm down, because there are no other people interfering with the process and keeping the person emotionally overloaded (either by opposing the person, or by socially validating their emotional overload);
the person will be there to communicate with after they calm down, they will not go away (in an internet discussion, this is often unpredictable and likely);
you have enough time to be there when the person calms down (also, your patience could be depleted);
the person will not cause significant preventable damage during the emotional overload, in which case your priority could be to prevent or reduce the damage (the damage can include emotional damage for wittnesses of the emotional overload, damage to your reputation, etc.).
The situation is different in real life and on internet, whether you know the person or not, how much and how specifically do other people interfere. (Best circumstances: you know the person, you trust the person to be sane, there is no damage done, it’s just two of you together, and you both have enough time.)
I have yet to understand why, when someone is experiencing an overload of emotion, the logical response is not to listen to them until they calm down, and therefore increase the level of logic in the discussion. I have yet to understand why, when someone is expressing a rational attempt to solve someone else’s emotional problem, the reaction is almost invariably hostility rather than appreciation for the attempt.
Well, let’s back up a little.
Do you understand why, when I point a gun at your head and tell you to give me your wallet, the rational response is not necessarily to give me your wallet? More generally: do you understand why, when I threaten you, the rational response is not necessarily to accede to the threat?
Scenario A: There are a thousand people, P1-P1000, and one mugger M. M threatens P1, P1 gives M their wallet. The next day, M threatens P2 and the same thing happens. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually other people become muggers, since it’s a lucrative line of work. Eventually everyone’s wallet is stolen.
Scenario B: As above, but P1 does not give M their wallet, and M shoots P1 and flees walletless. The next day, M threatens P2 and the same thing happens. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually M gives up mugging because it’s not a lucrative line of work.
I don’t mean to suggest that either of these scenarios are realistic; they aren’t. But given a choice between A and B, however unrealistic that choice, do you understand how a rational agent might prefer B? (EDIT: Or how a society of rational agents might want to create a framework of enforceable precommitments that incentivizes B to a point such that P1, when being mugged, will prefer B?)
No, a rational agent with majority-human goals would prefer for others to do B, while itself doing A. At least if it cares about its life more than about the collective wallets of the others, modulo the impact that getting shot might conceivably have on the mugger’s future behavior.
Even using TDT makes no difference unless the agents valued a potential muggerless society over its own life. And the muggerless society would still be assuming that other agents are similar enough to use TDT as well as share the martyr trait, and don’t defect to save their own lives. It’s still “life or 1 wallet” for each individual. Not that TDT mandates valuing the collective wallets of arbitrarily many others over your own life.
Not to get sidetracked though, I take issue with taking rational as also implying “caring about the welfare of society” over “caring about whether I live or die”. A rational agent doesn’t need to be that altruistic, it can just be rational about how to keep alive (if that’s high on its priority list) effectively (the effectively captures the ‘instrumentally rational’ part), which would lead to giving up the wallet.
You can think of perfectly rational agents who crave nothing more than being shot the first chance they get (orthogonality thesis), so a “rational agent might prefer B” just comes down “an agent might prefer B”, which is obviously true since there can be agents preferring anything over anything.
IOW: “Do you understand how a rational agent might prefer B” is actually asking “Are you certain there can be no agents who prefer B”, for which the answer is a blanket “no” regardless of the B, so it’s not really pertinent to what y’all discussing, bless your hearts.
Certainly, given a third choice C in which others don’t give up their wallets and P1 does, P1 chooses C. Agreed.
I take issue with taking rational as also implying “caring about the welfare of society” over “caring about whether I live or die”.
I agree. I take issue with you describing the question I asked in those terms, as opposed to “preferring a small chance of dying and a large chance of keeping my wallet over a large chance of losing my wallet.”
Not that TDT mandates valuing the collective wallets of arbitrarily many others over your own life.
True, it doesn’t.
there can be agents preferring anything over anything.
Sure. Not what I meant, but certainly true.
Anyway, if the only way you can imagine a rational agent choosing B over A is to posit it has radically different values from yours, then I suspect that I am unable to explain the thing you initially said you didn’t understand. Tapping out now.
[EDIT: I just realized that the original question I was trying to answer wasn’t your question to begin with, it was someone else’s. Sorry; my error. Nevertheless tapping out here.]
P1: That of the whole system, which—if seen as a distributed agent—may indeed sacrifice a few of its sub-agents to get rid of mugging
or
P2: that of the individual agent getting mugged, who has to make a choice: Give up my wallet (including the impact that action will have on society on a whole) or give up my life.
The problem with how you’d like the probabilities to be presented is that you get “preferring a small chance of dying and a large chance of keeping my wallet over a large chance of losing my wallet” only when taking perspective P1.
Reason: An agent who has to actually make the choice is already being mugged and doesn’t get to say “a small chance of getting mugged”, because he is already getting mugged, no need for a counterfactual. So each agent who’s actually faced with the choice of whether to make the ultimate sacrifice only has a binary choice to make, with no probabilities other than 1 and 0 attached to it:
P(agent lives | gives up wallet) = 1. P (agent lives | doesn’t give up wallet) = 0.
I.e. no individual agent who has to immediately make that choice ever gets to include the “low probability of getting mugged” part, if he has to make the choice, then that case has already occurred, and it will always be its own life in exchange for saving the wallets of others.
Only “the society” in an agent-perspective would in that situation want to give up its sub-part (much to gain, not much to lose), not individual agents who value their lives a lot. They could do a precommitment (“If any of us get mugged, we promise each other to die for the cause of a crimeless future society”), but once it comes down to their lives, unless those are quite un-human agents (value-wise, instrumental-rationality-wise we posited for them to be rational), wouldn’t they just back out of it?
Compare it to defecting in a 1-iteration PD in which the payoff matrix is massively skewed in favor of defecting and you can control your opponent’s behavior.
(Most acts of standing up to a mugger and then getting shot probably have more to do with bravado and spur of the moment fight-choosing in the fight-or-flight situation, not with “I’ll die so that society may be muggerless”. Also, unlike in the scenario we’re discussing, those resisting the mugger in real-world scenarios have a significant chance of not dying to him, or even defeating him. I’d reckon that also plays a major role in choosing when to fight; it’s not strictly a self-sacrifice. Not even with religious martyrs, since they have that imaginary heaven concept to weigh the scales. An agent who deems self-sacrifice for a potential positive impact on society as the most effective way of accomplishing its goals (which would necessary be the case for a rational agent to choose so) doesn’t share many of its values with an overwhelming majority of humans. Intuitions about “standing up to muggers” muddle the assessment, I guess if we transformed the situation into an equivalent formulation with the mugger being exchanged by an all-powerful agent with a killing booth and a thing for wallets giving you a choice (with the same payoff matrix for the others in society), my estimation would be less controversial.)
They could do a precommitment [..] but [..] wouldn’t they just back out of it?
So, first, I completely agree that precommitment is a key issue here. “An agent who has to actually make the choice is already being mugged,” as you say, is reliably true only if precommitment is impossible; if precommitment is possible then it’s potentially false.
And perhaps you’re right that humans are incapable of reliable precommitment in these sorts of contexts… that, as you suggest, whatever commitments a rational human agent makes, they’ll just back out of it once it comes down to their lives. If that’s true, then scenario B is highly unlikely, and a rational human agent doesn’t choose it.
I agree that real-world acts of mugger-defiance are not the result of a conscious choice to die so society will go muggerless.
I agree that an agent who deems self-sacrifice for a collective impact as the most effective way of accomplishing its goals in a broad range of contexts doesn’t share many of its values with an overwhelming majority of humans.
I am not as confident as you sound that an agent who deems self-sacrifice for a collective impact as the most effective way of accomplishing its goals in no contexts at all doesn’t share many of its values with an overwhelming majority of humans.
Well, whenever I think of e.g, some historical human figure, and imagine what an instrumentally-rational version of that figure would look like, I feel like there is a certain tension: Would a really, really effective (human) plundering Hun still value plundering? Would an instrumentally-superpowered patriot still value some country-concept (say, Estonia) over his own life? I’m not questioning the general orthogonality thesis with this, just its applicability to humans.
Are there any historical examples you think of where humans die for a cause, and where we’d expect (albeit all speculation) an instrumentally empowered human to still die for that cause? Still value that Estonian flag and the fuzzy feelings it brings over his own life, even when understanding that it was just some brainwashing, starting at his infant stage?
Regarding the precommitment: The problem is that an agent can always still change its mind when it’s at that “life or wallet” junction. The reason being a bit tricky: If there is a credible precommitment with outside enforcement (say you need to present your wallet daily to the authorities), then the agent will never get to the “life or wallet” junction, it’ll be a “life and the severe repercussions of breaking your precommitment or wallet and the possible benefits from the precommitment of sacrificing yourself, say a stipend for some family members” (which depressingly is how terrorist organisations sweeten the deal).
So whenever it’s actually just a “life or wallet” decision, any prior decision can be changed at a moment’s notice, being in the absence of real-world and hard-to-avoid consequences from precommitment-defecting. And a rational agent which can change its action and evaluates the current circumstances as warranting a change, should change. I.e. it’s hard for any rational agent to precommit and stay true to that precommitment if it’s not forced to. And the presence of such force would alter the “life or wallet” hypothetical.
I agree that a “life and the severe repercussions of breaking your precommitment or wallet and the possible benefits from the precommitment of sacrificing yourself” decision, as opposed to a “life or wallet” decision with no possible benefits from such precommitments, is one way a human agent might end up choosing scenario B over scenario A even when mugged. (It’s not the only one, but as you say, it’s a typical one in the real world.)
If you let me know how I could have worded my original hypothetical to not exclude options like that, I would appreciate the guidance. I certainly didn’t mean to exclude them (or the other possibilities).
do you understand how a rational agent might prefer B?
to
do you understand how a society of rational agents might want to create a framework of enforceable precommitments that incentivizes B to a point such that P1, when being mugged, will prefer B?
For example, if anyone who gave up a wallet later received a death sentence for doing so, the loss of life would be factored out—in effect, being mugged would become a death sentence regardless of your choice, in which case it’d be much easier hanging on to your purse for the good of the many. (Even if society killing you otherwise could be construed as having a slightly alienating effect.)
Effective program which is based on the premise that a lot of bad behavior is the result of stress, and adding stress to ill-behaved people doesn’t work. I’d been meaning to post it here anyway because it’s a change in a high school discipline which requires changing a number of factors at the same time.
That analogy is too convoluted to be worth unpacking.
But some people react with hostility to A’s “rational problem solving” in the face of B’s “emotional problems” because they see A as a threat. Which A might well be; this sort of framing can be a significant challenge to B’s credibility. (More generally, it’s a status challenge.) Similarly, some people react with hostility to B’s “overload of emotion” because they see that as a threat.
So understanding why acceding to a perceived threat isn’t necessarily the only rational response seems important if I want to understand the thing ialdabaoth has yet to understand.
As for stress-reduction as a behavior-manipulation tool… I’m all in favor of it when the power differential is sufficiently high in my favor. When the differential favors the ill-behaved person, though… well, I’m less sanguine. For example: yes, I understand being X in public frequently causes anxiety in non-Xes, which can sometimes lead them to bad behavior, but for many Xes the (oft suggested) response of not being X in public so as to reduce the incidence of that bad behavior seems importantly unjust.
(nods) Fair enough. In cases where the underpowered person happens to know techniques for lowering the anxiety of the overpowered person without suffering additional penalties by so doing (e.g., has been trained in NVC), I’m more inclined to endorse them doing so.
Yeah, I came up with a disturbing hypothesis after reading that article talking about the overlap with rape and child abuse. I know rape drops off when men are around 24-26, and the theory I’d heard for it was that it was because of the drop in testosterone.
Given what I have learned about how predatory behavior is about a very small subset of men who repeatedly violate and appear to be motivated by desire for power over others more so than horniness, I now think its quite possible that getting more easy targets around that age when more people have kids could potentially be a significant contributing factor to the drop off.
Given how much I have heard about unreported child abuse at this point, I think that abuse of children is a lot more common than rape. Kids really don’t report—they don’t have the context to know that what they’re experiencing isn’t normal.
Yes, true. There was one case that I recall when I was in elementary school myself—a boy mentioned to another girl and I that a parent had beaten him. He came back a week later and was enraged at the other girl—apparently she had reported it, and it had landed him in a foster home, which he considered much worse.
I’ve read many arguments in favor of spanking, and they tend to go out of their way to distinguish spanking from beating; for instance by admonishing parents not to administer corporal punishment while angry with the child; and distinguishing measured spanking from lashing out physically at a child.
Well, the folks I’m thinking of make a distinction between physical punishment enacted with forethought, and physical violence enacted out of anger, rage, or the like; and draw a distinction between spanking and beating.
As an aside: Is there ANYTHING I could do to get you to stop this absurd retributive downvoting? It’s become tiring, and it’s making it difficult for me to tell whether I actually said something dumb, or whether I’m just paying my weekly “I once disagreed with Eugine Nier” tax.
From a typical online discussion with a feminist, I get an idea that every man is a rapist, and that men constructed the whole society to help each other get away with their crimes.
This strikes me as being a strawman, or as an indication that the feminists you have been talking to are either poor communicators or make very different statements than I am used to from feminist discussions online. (To be clear: Both of these are intended as serious possibilities, not as snark. Or as they say in Lojban: zo’onai )
Discussing each part individually:
[...] every man is a rapist [...]
I think this is denotationally wrong. The assertion is not that all men are rapists, but that all men are potentially rapists. This is because men tend to learn, culturally, a set of socially acceptable actions that intersects with the set of rape actions. That does not mean that every man’s actions actually cross into the latter set.
[...] men constructed the whole society to help each other get away with their crimes [...]
This language, e.g. the phrase “constructed [...] to help each other”, implies a deliberate act of planned societal design. That is not an assertion I tend to hear from feminists; rather, they say that male privilege does makes it easier for rapists to escape consequences, but do not claim an intentional or conspiratorial source for that privilege.
The assertion is not that all men are rapists, but that all men are potentially rapists.
Of course, one needs a definition of “potentially” crafted specifically for the purpose of this specific claim. Otherwise, it could be argued that all women are potentially rapists, too.
I agree that the parts of culture teaching (anyone) that rape is a socially acceptable action should be removed.
(By which I mean, if it is shown that they really teach that, not just that someone is able to find an analogy between something and something else.)
they say that male privilege does makes it easier for rapists to escape consequences
Yes, it does.
And I think female rapists have it even easier in our society. Don’t they?
By the way, I also think islam makes it even easier for the male rapists. (Technically, islam could be considered a part of the male privilege, but I mean the safety bonus a male rapist gets in a Western society merely for being male, is smaller than the additional safety bonus he gets for being a muslim in a muslim community.) I am not aware of mainstream feminists saying that loudly. (Which could be a statement about my ignorance.)
To say it explicitly, I think that different kinds of people have different kinds of privileges. Which does not mean that all privileges are equal or symmetrical. It just means privileges are not black-and-white; that if a group has a specific privilege, it does not prove that people outside of that group don’t have another specific privilege.
As far as I know, feminists partially acknowledge that recently, by using the word “kyriarchy”. Kyriarchy means that not all privilege is male privilege; you can also have white privilege, rich privilege, majority religion privilege, etc. But it does not seem to mean yet that you can have a female privilege, a minority privilege, an atheist privilege, etc. Instead of one black-and-white view we have multiple overlaping black-and-white views along different axes. (From the simplistic “women good, men bad”, we have progressed to a more nuanced perception of society “women good, men bad, but rich white women also a little bad, etc.”.)
According to this model, it would be acceptable to speak about “male privilege” or “rich privilege”, and illustrate them with examples of rapists, but speaking about “female privilege” or “muslim privilege” and illustrating them with examples of rapists, is not acceptable, because it goes against the official black-to-white gradient. Seems to me that the map does not match the territory here.
Again, I agree that all unfairness in the society should be removed. I just don’t trust people starting with the bottom line already written to remove all the unfairness, especially if they believe that some of it does not exist.
Of course, one needs a definition of “potentially” crafted specifically for the purpose of this specific claim.
Yes, good point: perhaps “socially permitted to be” is better than “potentially”.
I agree that the parts of culture teaching (anyone) that rape is a socially acceptable action should be removed.
To be clear, the assertion is that some rape is taught to be socially acceptable. Violent rape and rape using illegal drugs is right out; we are talking about cases closer to the edge than the center, but which are still significantly harmful.
For example, it’s part of the standard cultural romantic script that women put up a token resistance to advances, which men then overcome by being insistent and stubborn. This is social acceptance of rape to the degree that it instructs men to ignore non-consent unless it’s sufficiently emphasized, or to put it another way, to the degree that it makes it more difficult for women who are non-confrontational to effectively deny consent.
From the simplistic “women good, men bad”, we have progressed to a more nuanced perception of society “women good, men bad, but rich white women also a little bad, etc.”.
I think this is also a strawman, at least of feminism as I’ve interacted with/participated in online. Privilege is an epistemological failure, not an ethical failure. To be privileged is not to be a bad person, it’s to have incorrect or biased information-gathering skills regarding the experiences of various social groups compared to one’s own.
I am not aware of mainstream feminists saying that [islam grants males rapists a safety bonus against consequences] loudly.
This isn’t quite an isomorphic case: male privilege helping males abuse non-males isn’t parallel to Islamic privilege helping Muslims abuse Muslims. However, if you’re looking for general recognition among online feminists that Islamic countries have a lot of problems with gender inequality stemming from religious sources, then I’m very surprised to hear you say that.
And I think female rapists have it even easier in our society. Don’t they?
Agreed.
According to this model, it would be acceptable to speak about “male privilege” or “rich privilege”, and illustrate them with examples of rapists, but speaking about “female privilege” or “muslim privilege” and illustrating them with examples of rapists, is not acceptable, because it goes against the official black-to-white gradient.
This is a very good point, I agree. I have heard feminists address this by attempting to coin new terms, but I don’t think it’s working very well.
Privilege is an epistemological failure, not an ethical failure. To be privileged is not to be a bad person, it’s to have incorrect or biased information-gathering skills regarding the experiences of various social groups compared to one’s own.
The problem there is that frequently privilege is taken to mean, not just ignorance, but that pain which a non-privileged person causes a privileged person should be treated as irrelevant.
I agree that this is a failure, though I do not think the problem is with the definition of privilege itself. As a parallel example: Social Darwinism (in some forms) assigns moral value to the utility function of evolution, and this is a pretty silly thing to do, but it doesn’t reduce the explanatory usefulness of evolution.
As far as I know, the current idea is that women don’t know which men are rapists, and shouldn’t be resented for being cautious around men.
Prototype: woman who crosses the street at night to avoid a man she doesn’t know. The man shouldn’t feel slighted just because he knows he isn’t a rapist, or at least he shouldn’t talk about feeling unfairly treated.
I’m just describing the starting point for those discussions. I don’t have strong feelings about it, though I’ll note that crossing the street at night to avoid strange men doesn’t seem to add a lot to women’s safety.
I agree that female rapists are more likely to get away with it, and I’m expecting that sexually abusive women (of boys as well as men) are probably going to become a public issue in the forseeable future.
As far as I know, the current idea is that women don’t know which men are rapists, and shouldn’t be resented for being cautious around men.
Of course, this is exactly analogous to the idea that people do not know which blacks are criminals, and shouldn’t be resented for being cautious around blacks, with only a separation of degree.
Many of the feminists/social justice activists I know seem to use “privilege” to refer to something which can be aggregated across multiple specific privilege-demonstrating scenarios (much like many utilitarians I know treat “utility”), and to use “X privilege” to refer, not to the aggregate over privileges X has that nonX doesn’t have, but rather to the net of the aggregates for X and non-X.
That is, they seem to use “white privilege” to refer to the difference between the aggregated privilege whites have and the aggregated privilege nonwhites have, “male privilege” to the difference between aggregated male privilege and aggregated non-male privilege, etc.
This is further confounded because it’s rare for anyone to think clearly about non-X cases. IME people are more likely to pick a specific salient non-X, Y, and substitute “Y” for “non-X” in their heads throughout. E.g., when white Americans talk about non-whites they typically are either thinking of blacks or Hispanics, depending on the topic and the geographic region.
If I adopt that unpacking, I still end up with statements like “there is no female privilege”, but what it means is not “there are no scenarios under which females have benefits over non-females” but rather “aggregating across all scenarios, males have a higher privilege score than females”.
Again, I agree that all unfairness in the society should be removed. I just don’t trust people starting with the bottom line already written to remove all the unfairness, especially if they believe that some of it does not exist.
I suspect that every social justice proponent pretty much ever would agree with this sentence without reservation. I also suspect they would mostly deny that it applies to them.
If I adopt that unpacking, I still end up with statements like “there is no female privilege”, but what it means is not “there are no scenarios under which females have benefits over non-females” but rather “aggregating across all scenarios, males have a higher privilege score than females”.
There are only two sides, and every point scored against one side, is a point in favor of the other. Everyone in the audience keeps a mental running count of how many points each speaker scores against the other. At the end of the debate, the speaker who has scored more points is, obviously, the winner; so everything he says must be true, and everything the loser says must be wrong. … This means getting the wrong answer to physical questions with definite factual answers, because you have mixed up logically distinct questions—treated facts like human soldiers on different sides of a war, thinking that any soldier on one side can be used to fight any soldier on the other side.
I am not sure how many of them really use “there is no Y” to mean “Y is smaller than X”, and how many of them simply use it to mean that, literally, “there is no Y”. (In other words, I am not sure what part of this really is understanding, and what part is wishful thinking.)
But either way, steelmanning their arguments is a good thing, because there is a hope than one day the steelmanned version will be accepted as the “true essence” of what they meant all the time.
Thanks for the link! As if you read my thoughts, because I was actually thinking “seems like I am only familiar with irrational feminists, but some people here seem to know rational ones, perhaps I should ask about some good links”, so I open LW… and it’s already here.
Okay, some things became clear now, some questions remain.
In my social circle, there actually are a lot of people thinking like the linked person. Actually, I do, at least approximately. But none of these people self-identifies as a “feminist”. Why? Well, because the people who do self-identify as feminists here, are usually the ones whom when I describe on LW, I get a “that was a strawman” reaction. So the people who are reasonable about human relationships self-identify as “not a feminist” here.
One possible explanation is that this is just my weird perception or my weird social circle; there is always this possibility. But maybe this is a cultural difference. -- In former Czechoslovakia, women were able to vote since the country started existing in 1918. So one important feminist topic simple never existed here; women here never had to fight for vote. Women going to work? Of course, when you need more money to feed your family, you do. There is nothing “feminist” about that; that’s simply life as usual. People who agree with that, they don’t feel a need to use a special label. A decade or two ago, you didn’t have to be a feminist to care about domestic violence, although I guess today the organizations self-identifying as feminist took over that agenda.
So I guess that people having what you would probably call “rational feminist” or “moderate feminist” opinions here, did not need a special label. I am not saying everyone was like that, or even that most people were like that, just that it was mainstream enough; you didn’t perceive yourself as doing something “against the system”. So naturally the label was used by people who had more extreme positions… and of course the people having the moderate positions refused to use the label, to express that their positions are not extreme. (It’s like: “Women should have a right to vote, should be treated fairly, should not be abused or raped; that’s what I expect from a civilized country. But I’m not a feminist—I don’t hate men, I don’t think all men are evil, I also know some bad women, and I’m not crazy.”) If a women self-identifies as a feminist, it often means that she is a heavily mindkilled university student, or that she is a politician and wants to use this to get some important “gender” position to decide about the “gender” money (and it’s a patriarchal opression if you don’t let her).
I personally started being opposed to “feminism” (to what the word means here) when I was on the university and I chose “gender studies” as a voluntary subject. Until that moment, I was curious and sympathetic (that’s why I chose the subject; I was the only guy there). After spending a semester listening to women who self-identified as feminists, and hearing about the problems they were trying to fix, I decided that this stuff is insane. And some of the girls in the class came to the same conclusion. -- An example I remember after all those years: We spent a lesson analysing some unknown poem from some nobody I never heard about; the poem was about numbers 1 and 0, and how they have a marriage and together they become a number 10. Now of course this is sexist, because the number 1 represents the male, the number 0 represents the female, and the number 10 is sexist because the male goes first, which reflects a power imbalance in a patriarchal household. I felt like: WTF?! and who cares?! I mean, we live on a planet where Chinese women had their feet broken, some African tribes mutilate little girls’ genitals, muslim women have no rights… and perhaps to include some first-world problems, girls in my country are less enthusiastic about maths and computer science than boys (seriously, this is a topic I cared about, as a teacher)… but no, those are not the important problems for our academic feminists, this poem is.
So… uhm… I have some material to think about; probably should make a reality check with more people from my culture whether they also have similar experience. Perhaps the answer is that crazy people self-identifying as feminists are everywhere, but the difference is that in some cultures there are also many sane people using the same label. Maybe it’s a question of how long the label is used, because the new labels attract extreme people.
For now, the main lesson for me is that when people on LW speak positively about feminists, they probably mean the kind of people who in my social circle would self-identify as “not a feminist”.
I decided I wasn’t going to identify as a feminist back in the 80s when I read some Mary Daly. She isn’t a totally useless writer [1], but the only way I could get some good out of her writing was to steelman it to an extraordinary extent. Her material in favor of the high-gusto life made sense if I read her “women” to mean “people” and her “men” to mean “some sort of boring monsters”. Her hatred of men revolted me. I wasn’t going to identify with a movement that accepted someone like her.
Fast forward to more recently, and there were feminists who hated her, but it wasn’t about the misandry, it was about the transphobia (which I hadn’t noticed). When she died, the eulogies split between people who thought she was wonderful and people who were angry about transphobia. If anyone beside me noticed the misandry, I didn’t find them.
It might be relevant that she probably never did any damage to men, but there are transgendered people who died because they couldn’t get into women’s shelters. (A claim that I don’t have details for, but seems plausible.)
Anyway, it’s possibly amusing that I identify as a libertarian, and if someone (or a lot of them) who I disagree with strongly identifies as a libertarian, I assume they’re getting libertarianism wrong, but I gave up on feminism because it includes people I don’t want to be associated with. Maybe I only have room for one really difficult identity.
Another possible reason for why things are different in your country—I think the US (and possibly some other anglophone countries) are still recovering from Victorian ideas about women. The Victorians had a dream of the ideal woman who was physically, intellectually, and financially helpless. It wasn’t quite true at the time (only feasible for upper class women, and I think they were expected to be in charge of their households), but it had a strong grip on both men’s and women’s imaginations. [2]
For the physical side, see The Frailty Myth—Victorian upper class girls were permitted so little movement that they were having trouble (when somewhat older) giving birth, so lady-like low intensity exercises were invented.
Anyway, a lot of earlier feminism was directed to the idea that women should be able to be independent from men, and be able to do work, and especially to do interesting work in the public sphere.
Eventually, there’s been a split in the US, with womanism [3] intended to address issues specific to black women (and possibly also poc women). For example, there was never an issue with black women working for money outside the home, as there was for middle to upper class white women. Instead, black women were pushed toward menial work for little money.
[1] She’s the one who pointed out to me that “fix” can mean repair, immobilize, or punish. And that there’s a difference between search and research..
[2] There’s a destructive streak in the human race of trying to turn women into supernormal stimuli.
[3] I’ve only poked around the edges of this. I’m sure I’m missing a lot.
Yes. If the feminism is supposedly about the equality of sexes, why is hatred against men so tolerated?
Ironically, feminism is good at describing the problems of such behavior when men do it. Like: it’s not enough if you don’t tell rape jokes, you also shouldn’t be a friend with people who do, or at least you should tell them to shut up; otherwise it seems like you give them a silent support. Yes, and for pretty much the same reason, you should also say something when people from your movement preach hatred against men; just not doing it with them is not enough.
More meta: All ethical commandments that feminism currently proposes for men should be symetrical. If it’s bad when men do it, then it is also bad when women do it. Perhaps today mostly men do it, so the efficient use of resources is to focus on stopping men from doing it; but the rule should be gender-neutral anyway, even if the current policy isn’t. (Violence against people is bad. Hating people because of their gender is wrong.) Otherwise some people will intrepret it like an asymetrical moral rule, and the rest will seem like giving them a silent support.
there are transgendered people who died because they couldn’t get into women’s shelters.
How about having also some shelters for men? By the way, Erin Pizzey, the person who started women’s shelters in Europe didn’t have a problem with that: she also had a shelter for men. Guess what happened? Feminists started sending her death threats, scared her enough to make her leave the country, then took over her shelter network, and removed her name. I am not making this up! (But I am sure they don’t teach this in Feminism 101.)
The Victorians had a dream of the ideal woman who was physically, intellectually, and financially helpless.
Reminds me of a discussion with my girlfriend. She said that society puts pressure to both men and women to fit their gender roles, but the difference is that the actions expected from men are intrinsically useful, while the actions expected from women are useless. For example, men are pressed into making a lot of money, and while the pressure itself can be bad, having money is good, per se. So a man who makes a lot of money fulfills the social expectations and has the advantage of being rich, at the same time. (Then we had some problems making specific examples about what the society actually wants from women. Perhaps there are multiple, sometimes contradictory social pressures today.)
But I guess we didn’t have this Victorian ideal in this part of the world. Or, more likely, the nobility had it, but for some reasons it never spread to lower classes. Or perhaps the communism eradicated such mannerisms. Don’t know; should ask someone better in history. (EDIT: After some research, it seems the communists removed all the upper-class manners.)
For example, there was never an issue with black women working for money outside the home, as there was for middle to upper class white women.
Maybe the situation of an average Eastern European woman is in some aspects more similar to the situation of an average black woman in USA, than of the Victorian lady.
Yes. If the feminism is supposedly about the equality of sexes, why is hatred against men so tolerated?
That was probably a rhetorical question, but I think the answer is that it’s easier to recruit people for a fight than for making things better for people in general.
Yes, and for pretty much the same reason, you should also say something when people from your movement preach hatred against men; just not doing it with them is not enough.
Indeed, but it’s hard work, and can be emotionally damaging.
From what I can tell, Erin Pizzey was attacked for saying that a majority of the women in domestic violence shelters were violent themselves.
Until I looked for details, I didn’t know she was involved with shelters for men, and I think her early career was about shelters for women.
She said that society puts pressure to both men and women to fit their gender roles, but the difference is that the actions expected from men are intrinsically useful, while the actions expected from women are useless.
Bearing and raising children is useless?
The Feminine Mystique was about the situation of middle to upper class women in the US in the 50s and 60s—they’d been educated, but then they were expected to limit their ambition to taking care of suburban households, and it was making them crazy. This was a toned-down version of the situation of Victorian upper class women.
Are Eastern European women expected to work for money, but very hard for very little money?
The Feminine Mystique was about the situation of middle to upper class women in the US in the 50s and 60s—they’d been educated, but then they were expected to limit their ambition to taking care of suburban households, and it was making them crazy. This was a toned-down version of the situation of Victorian upper class women.
It also didn’t help that advances in technology had made taking care of the household a lot more boring.
It also didn’t help that advances in technology had made taking care of the household a lot more boring.
They did? Spending 4 hours cleaning clothes with a washboard sounds more boring than spending 40 minutes loading & running a washing machine (for example).
They did? Spending 4 hours cleaning clothes with a washboard sounds more boring than spending 40 minutes loading & running a washing machine (for example).
Well the Victorian upper class women Nancy referred to wouldn’t be doing that, they’d be managing their servants cleaning the clothes with a washboard.
Quite true, but given your reference to “advances in technology” I thought you were talking about “middle to upper class women in the US in the 50s and 60s”.
Now of course this is sexist, because the number 1 represents the male, the number 0 represents the female, and the number 10 is sexist because the male goes first, which reflects a power imbalance in a patriarchal household.
It’s nice to see that numerology has progressed so much since the time of the Pythagoreans and Chinese antiquity—it used to be that zero wasn’t even considered a number, because it doesn’t “count” anything. Now imagine how sexist that would be.
I remember, when cos first posted this, thinking “yup, the fundamental attribution fallacy sucks.”
It seemed rather a lot of words for that insight, but I could sort of imagine how someone for whom understanding the fundamental attribution fallacy and how it applies to the difference between “Sam is a sexual predator” and “Sam performed this act of sexual predation”; “Sam is the sort of person who respects consent” and “Sam noteworthily respected consent the other night”, etc. etc. in the abstract was challenging, it might be valuable to be walked through it more carefully. And the comment thread seemed to suggest that were many such people, which, OK, cool.
Rereading it now, I’m left with the same reaction.
Have I missed anything key about the post, on your view?
I think the post is also a meditation on the SNAFU principle (communication is impossible in a hierarchy—specifically, fear of punishment inhibits communication).
Cos’s approach involves actually lowering the punishment level, not just claiming that whatever people who have the moral edge do mustn’t be counted as punishment.
Huh. Interesting. Sure, I can see that if I focus solely on the fear-of-punishment aspect of hierarchy.
I certainly endorse defining punishment by its effects independent of the moral edge of its initiators, and I endorse factoring in the knock-on effects of punishment (including but hardly limited to inhibition of communication) when deciding whether to engage in it. (Relatedly, I try to remember that punishment is often reinforcing for the punisher.)
WRT understanding vs wishful thinking… fair enough.
As I said initially, I’m talking primarily about the feminists/social justice activists I know; I’m pretty confident that I understand what they mean, having discussed the issue at some length with many of them, but of course that’s no reason for you to be confident, especially if you don’t consider me a source of reliable reports. There’s also no particular reason, even if you do consider me reliable, for you to consider them representative of other communities.
WRT steelmanning… I’m not sure I follow.
Are you suggesting that, supposing hypothetically that what is meant by “there is no female privilege” really is “aggregating across all scenarios, males have a higher privilege score than females”, it is nevertheless a good thing to behave as though what was meant was “there are no scenarios under which females have benefits over non-females”?
I meant: If a person says , and you say “oh, you probably meant ”, you gave them an opportunity to save face. When you do this to a group of people, you give them an opportunity to switch to the smart opinion without feeling like betraying their tribe. And if only a part of the group changes their mind, without this option they would probably leave the group, but with this option they can stay and perhaps the smart opinion will some day really become the official version.
Sure, I understand the general case. It’s the specific case I’m being confused by. What is the stupid statement being made, and what is the similar-sounding smart statement you’re endorsing using instead?
The stupid thing is “there is no female privilege”. The smart thing is your steelman of it, “aggregating across all scenarios, males have a higher privilege score than females”.
The difference between “men have more advantages than women” which I guess is true, and “women have absolutely no advantage, ever” which seems to me obviously false, but is how I would naturally unpack “there is no female privilege”.
I find the 1 in 6 statistic you site highly dubious. Eric Raymond has a decent explanation here of what’s wrong with it.
Frankly, even the people who claim to believe it don’t act like they do, as demonstrated by the fact that they are organizing “slut walks” rather than advising women to use make up to make themselves look uglier (which is what women frequently do in times and places where the rape rate is really that high) or even advising them to avoid the parties where this rape allegedly happens. Seriously imagine if the prevalence of some other serious crime (such as burglary, mugging, or murder) were that high, people would be investing in body guards and improved security not demonstrating for their right to walk alone at night down dark alleys wearing expansive jewelery.
advising women to use make up to make themselves look uglier
That sounds like it would make it harder for them to get consensual sex either. The analogue of that wouldn’t be just wearing ostensibly cheap clothes so that muggers, pickpockets, etc. won’t target you, it would be leaving your wallet at home so that you can’t even spend money if you do want to.
And if victims of thieves were customarily asked why they were carrying money in the first place if they were going to keep it for themselves (as if the askers didn’t realize that someone could be willing to potentially give money to people but not to anyone who asks, or more realistically as if they were envious that they’re not the ones being given the money) and accused of being prodigal, they’d be probably eventually be quite rightly pissed off by that.
That sounds like it would make it harder for them to get consensual sex either.
So you admit that these alleged “rapes” are some combination of sufficiently rare and/or insufficiently bad, that the expected utility loss from them is less than the expected utility gain from the increased amount of consensual sex?
It also matters how much rarer rapes are given modest clothes than given sexy clothes, to which question I’ve heard that the answer is “not so much as one would expect”.
According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the most recently available rape victimization rate is 0.4 per 1000 people. Applying the 0.91 percentage of female rape victims corrects this to 0.364 per 1000,
0.364 female rape victims per 1000 people total, or 0.364 female rape victims per 508 women. If he’s going to say stuff like ‘1/7 isn’t compatible with 1/6’ (seriously—are we talking about watchmaking?), he shouldn’t be making factor-of-two mistakes himself.
EDIT, 21 Sep 2013: And of course 0.4 x 0.91 = 0.364 is most likely false precision.
Seriously imagine if the prevalence of some other serious crime (such as burglary, mugging, or murder)
Murder obviously doesn’t sound comparable, and ISTM it’s not like people living where the rate of mugging is of the order of 0.1 per person per lifetime are that terrorized. (Sicilians do rally against the mafia once in a while.)
EDIT: I’ve started to read the comments to the article you linked to and… Wow. Suffice it to say that I am appalled that the same person as the editor of the Jargon File would be that bad at middle-school maths.
Seems to me there is a lot of confusion and/or miscommunication about this topic (and the manner this topic is typically discussed, is also not helpful).
From the links at your article and this comment, I get an idea that there are many violent rapes done by relatively few men, repeatedly. From a typical online discussion with a feminist, I get an idea that every man is a rapist, and that men constructed the whole society to help each other get away with their crimes. -- These two ideas seem rather contradictory. Or at least have opposite connotations.
I suspect that what really happened is this: There are some horrible crimes that almost everyone (except the offenders) would like to prevent, or at least punish. But we fail to do that, and that makes us feel frustrated. So in the absence of a proper solution, we want to find at least something, anything, to make us feel that we did something useful, that we are not completely helpless. Which invites all kinds of irrationality.
As an analogy, imagine that we live in a large village with wooden houses, and once in a few months, a house is set on fire. It is obviously caused by a human, but it has been happening for years, and we never succeeded to catch anyone. We can’t watch everything and everyone all the time, so the arsonist has all the opportunity they need. (We are not even sure it was the same arsonist all the time, but the experience from other villages suggests that it is usually only a person or two per village.) We are desperate, and we are helpless.
In the absence of a proper solution, random pseudosolutions appear naturally. For example, whenever someone shows some anger (whether justified by circumstances, or not), people start saying that this is the kind of personality that could make one become an arsonist. Or when someone lights a cigarette, they are accused of “enjoying fire”.
Sometimes political coalitions are built on common interests. For example an organization against smoking adopted the “smokers enjoy fire, which makes them dangerous to their neighbors” as their slogan, first because it instrumentally helped their goals, but gradually the slogan attracted new members who sincerely believed it. A huge theory about a “fire culture” is developed, theorizing that the ancient arsonists invented bonfires to make burning down of their neighbors’ houses more socially acceptable; some people make a tenure studying this.
A few years later, smoking is banned, people are taught never to display anger in public, etc. Yet, the arsonist remains uncaught, and once in a few months, another house is set on fire. Which is seen as a proof that we have to be more tough on fire, perhaps remove all positive mentions of fire from books, or something. Because obviously, having a house set on fire every few months, is not how we imagine a decent society where we want to live.
EDIT: I also agree with ialdabaoth’s analysis.
Alternative hypothesis: there are different phenomena that all get grouped into the category ‘rape’, even though they happen in different ways and for different reasons. Because the outcomes are the same (severe emotional trauma, socially stigmatizing positive feedback loops, and horrific displays of power disparity), it makes sense to group all these phenomena together, and in fact failure to do so can sometimes appear to be legitimizing certain behaviors or downplaying certain experiences (the old “it wasn’t RAPE-rape” schtick).
But if our goal is prevention, we actually do need to examine the different ways in which different rapes occur.
My limited observations:
There’s a very small number of men who commit multiple violent rapes due to sociopathic tendencies (biologically impaired empathy and impulse control). In a prior post, I called these men ‘desperados’.
There’s a larger number of men who commit multiple coercive rapes due to access and reinforcement (socially impaired empathy and easily exploitable power disparities). In that same post, I called these men ‘predators’.
There’s a much, much larger number of men who help out the ‘predator’ group by maintaining their power disparity and maintaining the environment that impairs their empathy. A small number of these men also attempt to mimic the predators as a status signal. In the previous post, I called these mimickers ‘schlubs’. I have also heard them called ‘dudebros’.
But the point is, they each are doing very different things, and the way to prevent them from inflicting harm on society is different.
The first group are easily combatted by law enforcement, and in fact the current methodology of law enforcement is designed to do exactly that. They are outlaws, and thus they almost always get caught.
The third group can only be combatted by social pressure, because there’s just too damn many of them. Their behavior has to be de-normalized so that they no longer wish to emulate the predators.
The second group are the hardest ones to catch, because most often they are closer to the people in charge of the catching than we are. When a US president, or a prominent lawyer, or a police chief, or a movie mogul, or a sports superstar sexually assaults a woman, what the hell are you supposed to do about that? Because the people who are supposed to arrest them are likely to just give them a free pass due to their social status, as are the people who are supposed to condemn them, as are the people who are supposed to teach them better.
So, since group 2 are out of reach, the people who REALLY WANT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS start focusing their rage on group 3, and on random parts of the system that they perceive group 3 supporting. Sometimes they’re actually right, but sometimes they aren’t.
These are well-chosen words.
Once I had a short experience of teaching in a private school for high-status children, and the environment felt like a training room for sociopaths. The children were reinforced, every day, for years, that no rules apply to them, their actions have no consequences, and everything is someone else’s fault and someone else’s problem. (The only rule was to never cross a path of someone even more powerful than you.) Any kind of problem can be fixed, first by parents, and later I assume by powerful friends; which is why it is critical to know a lot of people in the same social class, and be ready to offer the same kind of help to them.
Approximating on what I saw there, I can well imagine that if they would later rape someone and face a trial, their sincere thoughts would be: “Why are these people making such a big deal out of nothing? Are they insane, or what? I should call my parents/friends to get me rid of this stupidity.” And after the problem would be fixed, their only emotion would be an indignation about how some stupid person had the audacity to bother them over nothing; and their friends would completely agree with them.
(I wish I had a statistics about how many of them, 10 or 20 years later, end in jail, and how many in parliament or similar. I guess, some of them could really end in jail, not because of the justice system per se, because they will overestimate their power and contacts in some specific situation, or unknowingly cross the path of someone more powerful. But maybe this is just a wishful thinking.)
Fascinating.
I will meditate on this more, it relates to many things I’m processing right now and makes a lot of sense.
Please come back with your thoughts once they’re ready; this is the most productive and nuanced conversation I’ve managed to have on this topic in quite some time.
Unfortunately I can’t talk about these thoughts, since they’re mostly mapping what he’s describing in people to my personal experience and analysis of that.
If you have public digital record of other productive and nuanced conversation on this topic, I’d love if you’d link.
The power disparity point for group 2 is important. My understanding and observation is that its not about sex for them, hence why the term predator is very appropriate. As the article I cited reports, there is an overlap between those who rape and those who abuse children. Its not about sex for this group, its about power and having someone helpless under your control who can do nothing to stop you while you violate them. To these people, that is hot.
That’s not something most people get, so that’s part of the confusion—normal people assume that rapists are a single consistent population that do things like get drunk and lose control while wanting sex, and that’s how they normal people empathize with the behavior.
The rapists that are in this group 2 are very mentally differently motivated than most people. Its a little easier to understand when you look at the things some of them say. And they really do say these things—I’ve heard things as sadistic or worse than what is posted on these signs, both from women who have been raped and people of both genders who were abused as children.
It is very unfortunate that there is so much confusion about how it is just a few specific men (and women when we add in child abuse) who act this way, and neither “no men” nor “all men.” It is also frustrating how they can blend so well, and how since very few people want to talk or think about this topic or consider that they could possibly know someone in this category, the guys who do this sort of thing generally just get away with it so long as they are not stupid enough to do anything like videotape their actions. Few are that stupid.
Its also worth pointing out that I think there are many more groups. For example, there probably actually are occasions where a guy does drugs or gets drunk and gets out of control and it is not motivated by a more systemic lack of empathy or darker problems.
Yes! And it’s not just rape.
There’s a certain kind of man who has a lot of power, and who really, really enjoys overt displays of his power over anyone he perceives as weak. Luckily, he’s pretty rare. Unfortunately, there’s another kind of man who isn’t very powerful, but who sees the first man as a role-model, and who will march to that first man’s drum.
In a lot of cases, actually, the choice of women as the target is just a Schelling point—women are perceived as weak, so they’re seen as easy prey, so they get preyed on more, so society normalizes the preying, so they’re perceived as weak.
EDIT: A trivial and somewhat pathetic example of this—there is someone on this site that, every time they log in, every one of my posts that I’ve made since the last time they logged in gets voted down. If I email them to ask about it, someone new registers to the site, and then every post that I’ve made for the last few months gets voted down again.
Some people treat everything as a chance to inflict power.
I don’t know if it makes sense to complain, but the first linked article starts by this:
and concludes this:
Am I just oversensitive or did someone write their bottom line first, and then collected links to anything related to create an impression of research?
(Also, in the second linked article, author complains about being asked to leave a mailinglist ‘because of her language’ when she complained about a sexist joke. Without any more information, this is outrageous. But there is no link to or quote of the specific complaint she used, so all we have is a report about a conflict, from one of the participants, providing no data. If we had the same kind of report about some other topic, how much credibility would we assign to it?)
Yeah, it is frustrating that documentation by activists is not better, and that they often exaggerate or distort to get seen, and that this ends up getting them discredited, even when they are actually making good points.
This is a classic stereotypical masculine/stereotypical feminine battle—many women and intuitive men are prone to emoting (and losing the rational tools) when upset, and in masculine/non-emotive culture, this gets them instantly discredited and discounted, regardless of content.
Personally, I’ve learned how to be level under stress and to look for more concrete facts and to keep my head in most cases, and I do find that I am taken much more seriously, but doing this has taken a lot of work and discipline to learn, and I think is something that a lot of people who are more intuitive simply cannot do. Where I have screwed up and gotten emotional, even after building a lot of credit about having real content in what I say, in more logic oriented circles, I have gotten instantly discredited and shunned.
In well functioning feminine/empathetic circles, the response to strong emotion is usually to pay more attention and take the topic seriously and get curious. When this happens the person calms down and the issue is addressed sanely. So I think the problem you’re looking at is a result of two different evolutionary strategies clashing.
This post is an expression of acknowledgement and deep dismay that “logic-oriented circles” and “empathetic circles” are considered mutually exclusive, and that they often attempt to deliberately shun and discredit each other.
I have yet to understand why, when someone is experiencing an overload of emotion, the logical response is not to listen to them until they calm down, and therefore increase the level of logic in the discussion.
I have yet to understand why, when someone is expressing a rational attempt to solve someone else’s emotional problem, the reaction is almost invariably hostility rather than appreciation for the attempt.
A proper rationalist recognizes that people are not always rational, and that tending to their emotional needs will lead to a more rational outcome in the long run.
A proper empath recognizes that emotions have consequences, and that these consequences need to be weighed rationally to the best of everyone’s rational capacity.
Keep honing your capacity to express your empathic understanding through logic, because it’s a sorely needed skill in these kinds of communities.
Actually, after discussions in this thread, I realized that this is a skill I should develop. (I don’t want to react like this all the time, just to be able to do this when I decide to; and to be aware of the situations where doing this might be the right choice.)
But whether it is the right choice or not, depends on circumstances. For this method to work well, there are a few conditions:
the person will eventually calm down and be able to communicate logically, because the person is not insane;
your listening will make the person calm down, because there are no other people interfering with the process and keeping the person emotionally overloaded (either by opposing the person, or by socially validating their emotional overload);
the person will be there to communicate with after they calm down, they will not go away (in an internet discussion, this is often unpredictable and likely);
you have enough time to be there when the person calms down (also, your patience could be depleted);
the person will not cause significant preventable damage during the emotional overload, in which case your priority could be to prevent or reduce the damage (the damage can include emotional damage for wittnesses of the emotional overload, damage to your reputation, etc.).
The situation is different in real life and on internet, whether you know the person or not, how much and how specifically do other people interfere. (Best circumstances: you know the person, you trust the person to be sane, there is no damage done, it’s just two of you together, and you both have enough time.)
Well, let’s back up a little.
Do you understand why, when I point a gun at your head and tell you to give me your wallet, the rational response is not necessarily to give me your wallet? More generally: do you understand why, when I threaten you, the rational response is not necessarily to accede to the threat?
Not really, no—but I may have an impairment in this regard. Can you walk me through it?
Compare the following two scenarios.
Scenario A: There are a thousand people, P1-P1000, and one mugger M. M threatens P1, P1 gives M their wallet. The next day, M threatens P2 and the same thing happens. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually other people become muggers, since it’s a lucrative line of work. Eventually everyone’s wallet is stolen.
Scenario B: As above, but P1 does not give M their wallet, and M shoots P1 and flees walletless. The next day, M threatens P2 and the same thing happens. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually M gives up mugging because it’s not a lucrative line of work.
I don’t mean to suggest that either of these scenarios are realistic; they aren’t. But given a choice between A and B, however unrealistic that choice, do you understand how a rational agent might prefer B? (EDIT: Or how a society of rational agents might want to create a framework of enforceable precommitments that incentivizes B to a point such that P1, when being mugged, will prefer B?)
No, a rational agent with majority-human goals would prefer for others to do B, while itself doing A. At least if it cares about its life more than about the collective wallets of the others, modulo the impact that getting shot might conceivably have on the mugger’s future behavior.
Even using TDT makes no difference unless the agents valued a potential muggerless society over its own life. And the muggerless society would still be assuming that other agents are similar enough to use TDT as well as share the martyr trait, and don’t defect to save their own lives. It’s still “life or 1 wallet” for each individual. Not that TDT mandates valuing the collective wallets of arbitrarily many others over your own life.
Not to get sidetracked though, I take issue with taking rational as also implying “caring about the welfare of society” over “caring about whether I live or die”. A rational agent doesn’t need to be that altruistic, it can just be rational about how to keep alive (if that’s high on its priority list) effectively (the effectively captures the ‘instrumentally rational’ part), which would lead to giving up the wallet.
You can think of perfectly rational agents who crave nothing more than being shot the first chance they get (orthogonality thesis), so a “rational agent might prefer B” just comes down “an agent might prefer B”, which is obviously true since there can be agents preferring anything over anything.
IOW: “Do you understand how a rational agent might prefer B” is actually asking “Are you certain there can be no agents who prefer B”, for which the answer is a blanket “no” regardless of the B, so it’s not really pertinent to what y’all discussing, bless your hearts.
Certainly, given a third choice C in which others don’t give up their wallets and P1 does, P1 chooses C. Agreed.
I agree.
I take issue with you describing the question I asked in those terms, as opposed to “preferring a small chance of dying and a large chance of keeping my wallet over a large chance of losing my wallet.”
True, it doesn’t.
Sure. Not what I meant, but certainly true.
Anyway, if the only way you can imagine a rational agent choosing B over A is to posit it has radically different values from yours, then I suspect that I am unable to explain the thing you initially said you didn’t understand. Tapping out now.
[EDIT: I just realized that the original question I was trying to answer wasn’t your question to begin with, it was someone else’s. Sorry; my error. Nevertheless tapping out here.]
It’s a matter of whose perspective you take:
P1: That of the whole system, which—if seen as a distributed agent—may indeed sacrifice a few of its sub-agents to get rid of mugging
or
P2: that of the individual agent getting mugged, who has to make a choice: Give up my wallet (including the impact that action will have on society on a whole) or give up my life.
The problem with how you’d like the probabilities to be presented is that you get “preferring a small chance of dying and a large chance of keeping my wallet over a large chance of losing my wallet” only when taking perspective P1.
Reason: An agent who has to actually make the choice is already being mugged and doesn’t get to say “a small chance of getting mugged”, because he is already getting mugged, no need for a counterfactual. So each agent who’s actually faced with the choice of whether to make the ultimate sacrifice only has a binary choice to make, with no probabilities other than 1 and 0 attached to it:
P(agent lives | gives up wallet) = 1. P (agent lives | doesn’t give up wallet) = 0.
I.e. no individual agent who has to immediately make that choice ever gets to include the “low probability of getting mugged” part, if he has to make the choice, then that case has already occurred, and it will always be its own life in exchange for saving the wallets of others.
Only “the society” in an agent-perspective would in that situation want to give up its sub-part (much to gain, not much to lose), not individual agents who value their lives a lot. They could do a precommitment (“If any of us get mugged, we promise each other to die for the cause of a crimeless future society”), but once it comes down to their lives, unless those are quite un-human agents (value-wise, instrumental-rationality-wise we posited for them to be rational), wouldn’t they just back out of it?
Compare it to defecting in a 1-iteration PD in which the payoff matrix is massively skewed in favor of defecting and you can control your opponent’s behavior.
(Most acts of standing up to a mugger and then getting shot probably have more to do with bravado and spur of the moment fight-choosing in the fight-or-flight situation, not with “I’ll die so that society may be muggerless”. Also, unlike in the scenario we’re discussing, those resisting the mugger in real-world scenarios have a significant chance of not dying to him, or even defeating him. I’d reckon that also plays a major role in choosing when to fight; it’s not strictly a self-sacrifice. Not even with religious martyrs, since they have that imaginary heaven concept to weigh the scales. An agent who deems self-sacrifice for a potential positive impact on society as the most effective way of accomplishing its goals (which would necessary be the case for a rational agent to choose so) doesn’t share many of its values with an overwhelming majority of humans. Intuitions about “standing up to muggers” muddle the assessment, I guess if we transformed the situation into an equivalent formulation with the mugger being exchanged by an all-powerful agent with a killing booth and a thing for wallets giving you a choice (with the same payoff matrix for the others in society), my estimation would be less controversial.)
So, first, I completely agree that precommitment is a key issue here. “An agent who has to actually make the choice is already being mugged,” as you say, is reliably true only if precommitment is impossible; if precommitment is possible then it’s potentially false.
And perhaps you’re right that humans are incapable of reliable precommitment in these sorts of contexts… that, as you suggest, whatever commitments a rational human agent makes, they’ll just back out of it once it comes down to their lives. If that’s true, then scenario B is highly unlikely, and a rational human agent doesn’t choose it.
I agree that real-world acts of mugger-defiance are not the result of a conscious choice to die so society will go muggerless.
I agree that an agent who deems self-sacrifice for a collective impact as the most effective way of accomplishing its goals in a broad range of contexts doesn’t share many of its values with an overwhelming majority of humans.
I am not as confident as you sound that an agent who deems self-sacrifice for a collective impact as the most effective way of accomplishing its goals in no contexts at all doesn’t share many of its values with an overwhelming majority of humans.
(Short tangent:)
Well, whenever I think of e.g, some historical human figure, and imagine what an instrumentally-rational version of that figure would look like, I feel like there is a certain tension: Would a really, really effective (human) plundering Hun still value plundering? Would an instrumentally-superpowered patriot still value some country-concept (say, Estonia) over his own life? I’m not questioning the general orthogonality thesis with this, just its applicability to humans.
Are there any historical examples you think of where humans die for a cause, and where we’d expect (albeit all speculation) an instrumentally empowered human to still die for that cause? Still value that Estonian flag and the fuzzy feelings it brings over his own life, even when understanding that it was just some brainwashing, starting at his infant stage?
Regarding the precommitment: The problem is that an agent can always still change its mind when it’s at that “life or wallet” junction. The reason being a bit tricky: If there is a credible precommitment with outside enforcement (say you need to present your wallet daily to the authorities), then the agent will never get to the “life or wallet” junction, it’ll be a “life and the severe repercussions of breaking your precommitment or wallet and the possible benefits from the precommitment of sacrificing yourself, say a stipend for some family members” (which depressingly is how terrorist organisations sweeten the deal).
So whenever it’s actually just a “life or wallet” decision, any prior decision can be changed at a moment’s notice, being in the absence of real-world and hard-to-avoid consequences from precommitment-defecting. And a rational agent which can change its action and evaluates the current circumstances as warranting a change, should change. I.e. it’s hard for any rational agent to precommit and stay true to that precommitment if it’s not forced to. And the presence of such force would alter the “life or wallet” hypothetical.
I agree that a “life and the severe repercussions of breaking your precommitment or wallet and the possible benefits from the precommitment of sacrificing yourself” decision, as opposed to a “life or wallet” decision with no possible benefits from such precommitments, is one way a human agent might end up choosing scenario B over scenario A even when mugged. (It’s not the only one, but as you say, it’s a typical one in the real world.)
If you let me know how I could have worded my original hypothetical to not exclude options like that, I would appreciate the guidance. I certainly didn’t mean to exclude them (or the other possibilities).
Maybe change
to
For example, if anyone who gave up a wallet later received a death sentence for doing so, the loss of life would be factored out—in effect, being mugged would become a death sentence regardless of your choice, in which case it’d be much easier hanging on to your purse for the good of the many. (Even if society killing you otherwise could be construed as having a slightly alienating effect.)
Edited accordingly. Thanks.
What is your analogy between the mugger and the inconveniently emotional or inconveniently logical person?
http://acestoohigh.com/2012/04/23/lincoln-high-school-in-walla-walla-wa-tries-new-approach-to-school-discipline-expulsions-drop-85/
Effective program which is based on the premise that a lot of bad behavior is the result of stress, and adding stress to ill-behaved people doesn’t work. I’d been meaning to post it here anyway because it’s a change in a high school discipline which requires changing a number of factors at the same time.
That analogy is too convoluted to be worth unpacking.
But some people react with hostility to A’s “rational problem solving” in the face of B’s “emotional problems” because they see A as a threat. Which A might well be; this sort of framing can be a significant challenge to B’s credibility. (More generally, it’s a status challenge.) Similarly, some people react with hostility to B’s “overload of emotion” because they see that as a threat.
So understanding why acceding to a perceived threat isn’t necessarily the only rational response seems important if I want to understand the thing ialdabaoth has yet to understand.
As for stress-reduction as a behavior-manipulation tool… I’m all in favor of it when the power differential is sufficiently high in my favor. When the differential favors the ill-behaved person, though… well, I’m less sanguine. For example: yes, I understand being X in public frequently causes anxiety in non-Xes, which can sometimes lead them to bad behavior, but for many Xes the (oft suggested) response of not being X in public so as to reduce the incidence of that bad behavior seems importantly unjust.
Non-Violent Communication is a system for lowering anxiety in confrontations without giving in.
(nods) Fair enough. In cases where the underpowered person happens to know techniques for lowering the anxiety of the overpowered person without suffering additional penalties by so doing (e.g., has been trained in NVC), I’m more inclined to endorse them doing so.
Yeah, I came up with a disturbing hypothesis after reading that article talking about the overlap with rape and child abuse. I know rape drops off when men are around 24-26, and the theory I’d heard for it was that it was because of the drop in testosterone.
Given what I have learned about how predatory behavior is about a very small subset of men who repeatedly violate and appear to be motivated by desire for power over others more so than horniness, I now think its quite possible that getting more easy targets around that age when more people have kids could potentially be a significant contributing factor to the drop off.
Given how much I have heard about unreported child abuse at this point, I think that abuse of children is a lot more common than rape. Kids really don’t report—they don’t have the context to know that what they’re experiencing isn’t normal.
Also, the cost of reporting is potentially much higher for children. They risk being left with an angrier abuser, or losing their home.
Yes, true. There was one case that I recall when I was in elementary school myself—a boy mentioned to another girl and I that a parent had beaten him. He came back a week later and was enraged at the other girl—apparently she had reported it, and it had landed him in a foster home, which he considered much worse.
By the way, depending on the circumstances being beaten by parent =/= child abuse.
Interesting. Under what circumstances do you consider beating children to be reasonable?
Spanking, i.e., punishing the child for particularly egregious behavior.
I’ve read many arguments in favor of spanking, and they tend to go out of their way to distinguish spanking from beating; for instance by admonishing parents not to administer corporal punishment while angry with the child; and distinguishing measured spanking from lashing out physically at a child.
How did we go from “beating” to “lashing out physically”?
Well, the folks I’m thinking of make a distinction between physical punishment enacted with forethought, and physical violence enacted out of anger, rage, or the like; and draw a distinction between spanking and beating.
I’m not much convinced, myself.
In Shannon’s example it’s not clear that “beating” was being used in the technical sense you mean as opposed in its more general sense.
Except the outcomes are not the same, certainly not for everything feminists have been trying to get away with calling “rape” recently.
As an aside: Is there ANYTHING I could do to get you to stop this absurd retributive downvoting? It’s become tiring, and it’s making it difficult for me to tell whether I actually said something dumb, or whether I’m just paying my weekly “I once disagreed with Eugine Nier” tax.
This strikes me as being a strawman, or as an indication that the feminists you have been talking to are either poor communicators or make very different statements than I am used to from feminist discussions online. (To be clear: Both of these are intended as serious possibilities, not as snark. Or as they say in Lojban: zo’onai )
Discussing each part individually:
I think this is denotationally wrong. The assertion is not that all men are rapists, but that all men are potentially rapists. This is because men tend to learn, culturally, a set of socially acceptable actions that intersects with the set of rape actions. That does not mean that every man’s actions actually cross into the latter set.
This language, e.g. the phrase “constructed [...] to help each other”, implies a deliberate act of planned societal design. That is not an assertion I tend to hear from feminists; rather, they say that male privilege does makes it easier for rapists to escape consequences, but do not claim an intentional or conspiratorial source for that privilege.
Of course, one needs a definition of “potentially” crafted specifically for the purpose of this specific claim. Otherwise, it could be argued that all women are potentially rapists, too.
I agree that the parts of culture teaching (anyone) that rape is a socially acceptable action should be removed.
(By which I mean, if it is shown that they really teach that, not just that someone is able to find an analogy between something and something else.)
Yes, it does.
And I think female rapists have it even easier in our society. Don’t they?
By the way, I also think islam makes it even easier for the male rapists. (Technically, islam could be considered a part of the male privilege, but I mean the safety bonus a male rapist gets in a Western society merely for being male, is smaller than the additional safety bonus he gets for being a muslim in a muslim community.) I am not aware of mainstream feminists saying that loudly. (Which could be a statement about my ignorance.)
To say it explicitly, I think that different kinds of people have different kinds of privileges. Which does not mean that all privileges are equal or symmetrical. It just means privileges are not black-and-white; that if a group has a specific privilege, it does not prove that people outside of that group don’t have another specific privilege.
As far as I know, feminists partially acknowledge that recently, by using the word “kyriarchy”. Kyriarchy means that not all privilege is male privilege; you can also have white privilege, rich privilege, majority religion privilege, etc. But it does not seem to mean yet that you can have a female privilege, a minority privilege, an atheist privilege, etc. Instead of one black-and-white view we have multiple overlaping black-and-white views along different axes. (From the simplistic “women good, men bad”, we have progressed to a more nuanced perception of society “women good, men bad, but rich white women also a little bad, etc.”.)
According to this model, it would be acceptable to speak about “male privilege” or “rich privilege”, and illustrate them with examples of rapists, but speaking about “female privilege” or “muslim privilege” and illustrating them with examples of rapists, is not acceptable, because it goes against the official black-to-white gradient. Seems to me that the map does not match the territory here.
Again, I agree that all unfairness in the society should be removed. I just don’t trust people starting with the bottom line already written to remove all the unfairness, especially if they believe that some of it does not exist.
Yes, good point: perhaps “socially permitted to be” is better than “potentially”.
To be clear, the assertion is that some rape is taught to be socially acceptable. Violent rape and rape using illegal drugs is right out; we are talking about cases closer to the edge than the center, but which are still significantly harmful.
For example, it’s part of the standard cultural romantic script that women put up a token resistance to advances, which men then overcome by being insistent and stubborn. This is social acceptance of rape to the degree that it instructs men to ignore non-consent unless it’s sufficiently emphasized, or to put it another way, to the degree that it makes it more difficult for women who are non-confrontational to effectively deny consent.
I think this is also a strawman, at least of feminism as I’ve interacted with/participated in online. Privilege is an epistemological failure, not an ethical failure. To be privileged is not to be a bad person, it’s to have incorrect or biased information-gathering skills regarding the experiences of various social groups compared to one’s own.
This isn’t quite an isomorphic case: male privilege helping males abuse non-males isn’t parallel to Islamic privilege helping Muslims abuse Muslims. However, if you’re looking for general recognition among online feminists that Islamic countries have a lot of problems with gender inequality stemming from religious sources, then I’m very surprised to hear you say that.
Agreed.
This is a very good point, I agree. I have heard feminists address this by attempting to coin new terms, but I don’t think it’s working very well.
The problem there is that frequently privilege is taken to mean, not just ignorance, but that pain which a non-privileged person causes a privileged person should be treated as irrelevant.
I agree that this is a failure, though I do not think the problem is with the definition of privilege itself. As a parallel example: Social Darwinism (in some forms) assigns moral value to the utility function of evolution, and this is a pretty silly thing to do, but it doesn’t reduce the explanatory usefulness of evolution.
As far as I know, the current idea is that women don’t know which men are rapists, and shouldn’t be resented for being cautious around men.
Prototype: woman who crosses the street at night to avoid a man she doesn’t know. The man shouldn’t feel slighted just because he knows he isn’t a rapist, or at least he shouldn’t talk about feeling unfairly treated.
I’m just describing the starting point for those discussions. I don’t have strong feelings about it, though I’ll note that crossing the street at night to avoid strange men doesn’t seem to add a lot to women’s safety.
I agree that female rapists are more likely to get away with it, and I’m expecting that sexually abusive women (of boys as well as men) are probably going to become a public issue in the forseeable future.
Of course, this is exactly analogous to the idea that people do not know which blacks are criminals, and shouldn’t be resented for being cautious around blacks, with only a separation of degree.
Many of the feminists/social justice activists I know seem to use “privilege” to refer to something which can be aggregated across multiple specific privilege-demonstrating scenarios (much like many utilitarians I know treat “utility”), and to use “X privilege” to refer, not to the aggregate over privileges X has that nonX doesn’t have, but rather to the net of the aggregates for X and non-X.
That is, they seem to use “white privilege” to refer to the difference between the aggregated privilege whites have and the aggregated privilege nonwhites have, “male privilege” to the difference between aggregated male privilege and aggregated non-male privilege, etc.
This is further confounded because it’s rare for anyone to think clearly about non-X cases. IME people are more likely to pick a specific salient non-X, Y, and substitute “Y” for “non-X” in their heads throughout. E.g., when white Americans talk about non-whites they typically are either thinking of blacks or Hispanics, depending on the topic and the geographic region.
If I adopt that unpacking, I still end up with statements like “there is no female privilege”, but what it means is not “there are no scenarios under which females have benefits over non-females” but rather “aggregating across all scenarios, males have a higher privilege score than females”.
I suspect that every social justice proponent pretty much ever would agree with this sentence without reservation. I also suspect they would mostly deny that it applies to them.
Well, it’s called social justice, not social rationality.
Ayup. Still, I find I do better when I correctly understand what other people are saying, even if I’d prefer them to be saying something different.
I am not sure how many of them really use “there is no Y” to mean “Y is smaller than X”, and how many of them simply use it to mean that, literally, “there is no Y”. (In other words, I am not sure what part of this really is understanding, and what part is wishful thinking.)
But either way, steelmanning their arguments is a good thing, because there is a hope than one day the steelmanned version will be accepted as the “true essence” of what they meant all the time.
http://cos.livejournal.com/108721.html
An approach which includes assuming that people of good will can make mistakes, and working with them on that basis.
Thanks for the link! As if you read my thoughts, because I was actually thinking “seems like I am only familiar with irrational feminists, but some people here seem to know rational ones, perhaps I should ask about some good links”, so I open LW… and it’s already here.
Okay, some things became clear now, some questions remain.
In my social circle, there actually are a lot of people thinking like the linked person. Actually, I do, at least approximately. But none of these people self-identifies as a “feminist”. Why? Well, because the people who do self-identify as feminists here, are usually the ones whom when I describe on LW, I get a “that was a strawman” reaction. So the people who are reasonable about human relationships self-identify as “not a feminist” here.
One possible explanation is that this is just my weird perception or my weird social circle; there is always this possibility. But maybe this is a cultural difference. -- In former Czechoslovakia, women were able to vote since the country started existing in 1918. So one important feminist topic simple never existed here; women here never had to fight for vote. Women going to work? Of course, when you need more money to feed your family, you do. There is nothing “feminist” about that; that’s simply life as usual. People who agree with that, they don’t feel a need to use a special label. A decade or two ago, you didn’t have to be a feminist to care about domestic violence, although I guess today the organizations self-identifying as feminist took over that agenda.
So I guess that people having what you would probably call “rational feminist” or “moderate feminist” opinions here, did not need a special label. I am not saying everyone was like that, or even that most people were like that, just that it was mainstream enough; you didn’t perceive yourself as doing something “against the system”. So naturally the label was used by people who had more extreme positions… and of course the people having the moderate positions refused to use the label, to express that their positions are not extreme. (It’s like: “Women should have a right to vote, should be treated fairly, should not be abused or raped; that’s what I expect from a civilized country. But I’m not a feminist—I don’t hate men, I don’t think all men are evil, I also know some bad women, and I’m not crazy.”) If a women self-identifies as a feminist, it often means that she is a heavily mindkilled university student, or that she is a politician and wants to use this to get some important “gender” position to decide about the “gender” money (and it’s a patriarchal opression if you don’t let her).
I personally started being opposed to “feminism” (to what the word means here) when I was on the university and I chose “gender studies” as a voluntary subject. Until that moment, I was curious and sympathetic (that’s why I chose the subject; I was the only guy there). After spending a semester listening to women who self-identified as feminists, and hearing about the problems they were trying to fix, I decided that this stuff is insane. And some of the girls in the class came to the same conclusion. -- An example I remember after all those years: We spent a lesson analysing some unknown poem from some nobody I never heard about; the poem was about numbers 1 and 0, and how they have a marriage and together they become a number 10. Now of course this is sexist, because the number 1 represents the male, the number 0 represents the female, and the number 10 is sexist because the male goes first, which reflects a power imbalance in a patriarchal household. I felt like: WTF?! and who cares?! I mean, we live on a planet where Chinese women had their feet broken, some African tribes mutilate little girls’ genitals, muslim women have no rights… and perhaps to include some first-world problems, girls in my country are less enthusiastic about maths and computer science than boys (seriously, this is a topic I cared about, as a teacher)… but no, those are not the important problems for our academic feminists, this poem is.
So… uhm… I have some material to think about; probably should make a reality check with more people from my culture whether they also have similar experience. Perhaps the answer is that crazy people self-identifying as feminists are everywhere, but the difference is that in some cultures there are also many sane people using the same label. Maybe it’s a question of how long the label is used, because the new labels attract extreme people.
For now, the main lesson for me is that when people on LW speak positively about feminists, they probably mean the kind of people who in my social circle would self-identify as “not a feminist”.
I decided I wasn’t going to identify as a feminist back in the 80s when I read some Mary Daly. She isn’t a totally useless writer [1], but the only way I could get some good out of her writing was to steelman it to an extraordinary extent. Her material in favor of the high-gusto life made sense if I read her “women” to mean “people” and her “men” to mean “some sort of boring monsters”. Her hatred of men revolted me. I wasn’t going to identify with a movement that accepted someone like her.
Fast forward to more recently, and there were feminists who hated her, but it wasn’t about the misandry, it was about the transphobia (which I hadn’t noticed). When she died, the eulogies split between people who thought she was wonderful and people who were angry about transphobia. If anyone beside me noticed the misandry, I didn’t find them.
It might be relevant that she probably never did any damage to men, but there are transgendered people who died because they couldn’t get into women’s shelters. (A claim that I don’t have details for, but seems plausible.)
Anyway, it’s possibly amusing that I identify as a libertarian, and if someone (or a lot of them) who I disagree with strongly identifies as a libertarian, I assume they’re getting libertarianism wrong, but I gave up on feminism because it includes people I don’t want to be associated with. Maybe I only have room for one really difficult identity.
Another possible reason for why things are different in your country—I think the US (and possibly some other anglophone countries) are still recovering from Victorian ideas about women. The Victorians had a dream of the ideal woman who was physically, intellectually, and financially helpless. It wasn’t quite true at the time (only feasible for upper class women, and I think they were expected to be in charge of their households), but it had a strong grip on both men’s and women’s imaginations. [2]
For the physical side, see The Frailty Myth—Victorian upper class girls were permitted so little movement that they were having trouble (when somewhat older) giving birth, so lady-like low intensity exercises were invented.
Anyway, a lot of earlier feminism was directed to the idea that women should be able to be independent from men, and be able to do work, and especially to do interesting work in the public sphere.
Eventually, there’s been a split in the US, with womanism [3] intended to address issues specific to black women (and possibly also poc women). For example, there was never an issue with black women working for money outside the home, as there was for middle to upper class white women. Instead, black women were pushed toward menial work for little money.
[1] She’s the one who pointed out to me that “fix” can mean repair, immobilize, or punish. And that there’s a difference between search and research..
[2] There’s a destructive streak in the human race of trying to turn women into supernormal stimuli.
[3] I’ve only poked around the edges of this. I’m sure I’m missing a lot.
Yes. If the feminism is supposedly about the equality of sexes, why is hatred against men so tolerated?
Ironically, feminism is good at describing the problems of such behavior when men do it. Like: it’s not enough if you don’t tell rape jokes, you also shouldn’t be a friend with people who do, or at least you should tell them to shut up; otherwise it seems like you give them a silent support. Yes, and for pretty much the same reason, you should also say something when people from your movement preach hatred against men; just not doing it with them is not enough.
More meta: All ethical commandments that feminism currently proposes for men should be symetrical. If it’s bad when men do it, then it is also bad when women do it. Perhaps today mostly men do it, so the efficient use of resources is to focus on stopping men from doing it; but the rule should be gender-neutral anyway, even if the current policy isn’t. (Violence against people is bad. Hating people because of their gender is wrong.) Otherwise some people will intrepret it like an asymetrical moral rule, and the rest will seem like giving them a silent support.
How about having also some shelters for men? By the way, Erin Pizzey, the person who started women’s shelters in Europe didn’t have a problem with that: she also had a shelter for men. Guess what happened? Feminists started sending her death threats, scared her enough to make her leave the country, then took over her shelter network, and removed her name. I am not making this up! (But I am sure they don’t teach this in Feminism 101.)
Reminds me of a discussion with my girlfriend. She said that society puts pressure to both men and women to fit their gender roles, but the difference is that the actions expected from men are intrinsically useful, while the actions expected from women are useless. For example, men are pressed into making a lot of money, and while the pressure itself can be bad, having money is good, per se. So a man who makes a lot of money fulfills the social expectations and has the advantage of being rich, at the same time. (Then we had some problems making specific examples about what the society actually wants from women. Perhaps there are multiple, sometimes contradictory social pressures today.)
But I guess we didn’t have this Victorian ideal in this part of the world. Or, more likely, the nobility had it, but for some reasons it never spread to lower classes. Or perhaps the communism eradicated such mannerisms. Don’t know; should ask someone better in history. (EDIT: After some research, it seems the communists removed all the upper-class manners.)
Maybe the situation of an average Eastern European woman is in some aspects more similar to the situation of an average black woman in USA, than of the Victorian lady.
That was probably a rhetorical question, but I think the answer is that it’s easier to recruit people for a fight than for making things better for people in general.
Indeed, but it’s hard work, and can be emotionally damaging.
From what I can tell, Erin Pizzey was attacked for saying that a majority of the women in domestic violence shelters were violent themselves.
Until I looked for details, I didn’t know she was involved with shelters for men, and I think her early career was about shelters for women.
Bearing and raising children is useless?
The Feminine Mystique was about the situation of middle to upper class women in the US in the 50s and 60s—they’d been educated, but then they were expected to limit their ambition to taking care of suburban households, and it was making them crazy. This was a toned-down version of the situation of Victorian upper class women.
Are Eastern European women expected to work for money, but very hard for very little money?
It also didn’t help that advances in technology had made taking care of the household a lot more boring.
They did? Spending 4 hours cleaning clothes with a washboard sounds more boring than spending 40 minutes loading & running a washing machine (for example).
Well the Victorian upper class women Nancy referred to wouldn’t be doing that, they’d be managing their servants cleaning the clothes with a washboard.
Quite true, but given your reference to “advances in technology” I thought you were talking about “middle to upper class women in the US in the 50s and 60s”.
I was comparing the Victorian upper class women with middle to upper class women in the US in the 50s and 60s.
It’s nice to see that numerology has progressed so much since the time of the Pythagoreans and Chinese antiquity—it used to be that zero wasn’t even considered a number, because it doesn’t “count” anything. Now imagine how sexist that would be.
I remember, when cos first posted this, thinking “yup, the fundamental attribution fallacy sucks.”
It seemed rather a lot of words for that insight, but I could sort of imagine how someone for whom understanding the fundamental attribution fallacy and how it applies to the difference between “Sam is a sexual predator” and “Sam performed this act of sexual predation”; “Sam is the sort of person who respects consent” and “Sam noteworthily respected consent the other night”, etc. etc. in the abstract was challenging, it might be valuable to be walked through it more carefully. And the comment thread seemed to suggest that were many such people, which, OK, cool.
Rereading it now, I’m left with the same reaction.
Have I missed anything key about the post, on your view?
I think the post is also a meditation on the SNAFU principle (communication is impossible in a hierarchy—specifically, fear of punishment inhibits communication).
Cos’s approach involves actually lowering the punishment level, not just claiming that whatever people who have the moral edge do mustn’t be counted as punishment.
Huh. Interesting.
Sure, I can see that if I focus solely on the fear-of-punishment aspect of hierarchy.
I certainly endorse defining punishment by its effects independent of the moral edge of its initiators, and I endorse factoring in the knock-on effects of punishment (including but hardly limited to inhibition of communication) when deciding whether to engage in it. (Relatedly, I try to remember that punishment is often reinforcing for the punisher.)
I get the impression they use “there is no Y” to mean “Y is so much smaller than X that no decent person should bother with Y”.
WRT understanding vs wishful thinking… fair enough.
As I said initially, I’m talking primarily about the feminists/social justice activists I know; I’m pretty confident that I understand what they mean, having discussed the issue at some length with many of them, but of course that’s no reason for you to be confident, especially if you don’t consider me a source of reliable reports. There’s also no particular reason, even if you do consider me reliable, for you to consider them representative of other communities.
WRT steelmanning… I’m not sure I follow.
Are you suggesting that, supposing hypothetically that what is meant by “there is no female privilege” really is “aggregating across all scenarios, males have a higher privilege score than females”, it is nevertheless a good thing to behave as though what was meant was “there are no scenarios under which females have benefits over non-females”?
I meant: If a person says , and you say “oh, you probably meant ”, you gave them an opportunity to save face. When you do this to a group of people, you give them an opportunity to switch to the smart opinion without feeling like betraying their tribe. And if only a part of the group changes their mind, without this option they would probably leave the group, but with this option they can stay and perhaps the smart opinion will some day really become the official version.
Sure, I understand the general case. It’s the specific case I’m being confused by. What is the stupid statement being made, and what is the similar-sounding smart statement you’re endorsing using instead?
The stupid thing is “there is no female privilege”. The smart thing is your steelman of it, “aggregating across all scenarios, males have a higher privilege score than females”.
I would be surprised if that’s what ViliamBur meant, but I have no objection to the statement, modulo emotional connotations.
Actually, I did mean exactly that.
The difference between “men have more advantages than women” which I guess is true, and “women have absolutely no advantage, ever” which seems to me obviously false, but is how I would naturally unpack “there is no female privilege”.
Ah, OK. (I am, in fact, surprised.) Thanks for clarifying.
Non-negligible prior probability.
(See this.)
I find the 1 in 6 statistic you site highly dubious. Eric Raymond has a decent explanation here of what’s wrong with it.
Frankly, even the people who claim to believe it don’t act like they do, as demonstrated by the fact that they are organizing “slut walks” rather than advising women to use make up to make themselves look uglier (which is what women frequently do in times and places where the rape rate is really that high) or even advising them to avoid the parties where this rape allegedly happens. Seriously imagine if the prevalence of some other serious crime (such as burglary, mugging, or murder) were that high, people would be investing in body guards and improved security not demonstrating for their right to walk alone at night down dark alleys wearing expansive jewelery.
That sounds like it would make it harder for them to get consensual sex either. The analogue of that wouldn’t be just wearing ostensibly cheap clothes so that muggers, pickpockets, etc. won’t target you, it would be leaving your wallet at home so that you can’t even spend money if you do want to.
And if victims of thieves were customarily asked why they were carrying money in the first place if they were going to keep it for themselves (as if the askers didn’t realize that someone could be willing to potentially give money to people but not to anyone who asks, or more realistically as if they were envious that they’re not the ones being given the money) and accused of being prodigal, they’d be probably eventually be quite rightly pissed off by that.
So you admit that these alleged “rapes” are some combination of sufficiently rare and/or insufficiently bad, that the expected utility loss from them is less than the expected utility gain from the increased amount of consensual sex?
I dunno, having no first-hand experience.
It also matters how much rarer rapes are given modest clothes than given sexy clothes, to which question I’ve heard that the answer is “not so much as one would expect”.
From that article:
0.364 female rape victims per 1000 people total, or 0.364 female rape victims per 508 women. If he’s going to say stuff like ‘1/7 isn’t compatible with 1/6’ (seriously—are we talking about watchmaking?), he shouldn’t be making factor-of-two mistakes himself.
EDIT, 21 Sep 2013: And of course 0.4 x 0.91 = 0.364 is most likely false precision.
Murder obviously doesn’t sound comparable, and ISTM it’s not like people living where the rate of mugging is of the order of 0.1 per person per lifetime are that terrorized. (Sicilians do rally against the mafia once in a while.)
EDIT: I’ve started to read the comments to the article you linked to and… Wow. Suffice it to say that I am appalled that the same person as the editor of the Jargon File would be that bad at middle-school maths.
Yes, thank you for stating this clearly.