There’s been a bit of a fuss recently about seating of children on airplanes in New Zealand. A man who was seated next to a child travelling alone was asked to change his seat, because the airline has a policy against men sitting next to unaccompanied minors. The man objected, the fuss reached the press, the airline claimed that it was only doing what most airlines do on international flights. (Why not domestic flights?) In the fallout, there have been many cogent objections to the policy:
Mr Latta agreed studies of sexual offenders showed somewhere between 70 and 90 percent were male but the airlines’ policy would not help protect children.
“In 15 years of working with thousands of sexual offenders I’ve never treated or heard of a man who sexually offended against a child on a plane.”
New Zealand’s Green Party says the airlines policy banning men from sitting next to unaccompanied children is discriminatory and will take the matter to the Human Rights Commissioner.
Green MP Keith Locke said the policy was an example of moral panic about men posing as potential threats to children.
They’re all quite correct: It is a stupid policy, it won’t help children, it’s discrimination, and it’s moral panic.
It’s also an extremely common and widespread bigotry, although not one usually codified in policy.
Reading about the New Zealand flap, I was reminded of a study by anthropologist Susan Murray that was published in the academic journal Gender and Society. The study’s subject was men who work in child care in the U.S.. From Murray’s article:
In my study, many workers, both men and women, talked about how the men who are child care workers are subject to different unwritten rules regarding their physical access ot children. Specifically, in many centers, men are more restricted in their freedom to touch, cuddle, nap, and change diapers for children. As one worker who I surveyed stated, “I have worked in centers that employ male caregivers. Parents have on occasion been hesitant to accept them. One parent explicitly asked that a male caregiver not rub her daughter’s back at naptime.” […]
…My data clearly showed numerous cases in which parents clearly did not want their children taken care of by a man at all. Sometimes parents requested another caregiver for their children; at other times, parents refused to enroll their children or withdrew them once they discovered a man was working at the center.
The article goes on to recount many other examples of male childcare workers being discriminated against in this exact way – men are not supposed to be in physical contact with children. Murray, in a discussion of the implications of this, suggests that the bigotry against male caregivers is rooted in sexism and in bigotry against gay men (even if the caregiver isn’t gay).
In the case of men in child care, just the act of their caring for children calls into question their heterosexuality. The fact of their sexuality, whether gay or straight, need not ever be confirmed. It is their choice to do child care that arouses suspicion and leaves them vulnerable to homophobic reactions. Men’s actions become suspect because they are choosing to do something that women do and, even worse, because child care is undervalued employment for women. Gay is a sexualized identity. When a man admits to being, is discovered to be, or is suspected of being gay, his gay identity may come to define everything else. He is, then, seen as someone who is guided by sexual practices, thoughts, and feelings in all else he undertakes. Within the child care setting, anything having to do with adult sexuality is strictly off-limits. So, when a person’s identity as a gay person is discovered or even suspected (as may be the case with straight men doing “women’s work”), that person’s competence as a teacher/caregiver gets called into question. To the extent that being gay is viewed as a perversion, it is linked with other perversions, such as child sexual abuse.
Murray also discusses the “glass elevator” effect, in which men in childcare professions are promoted to administrative positions more often and more easily – an advantage to men who want to be administrators, but a disadvantage to ambitious women caregivers who’d like to advance, and to men who’d rather stay in direct childcare positions. The overall effect is to turn many child care centers into places where traditional gender roles are enforced.
[“Jeff,” a male childcare worker Murray interviewed, said:] “You just need to be ultracareful. In San Francisco the men Early Childhood Education teachers can’t have a child on their lap, the women can, but the men can’t. I’m thinking, what kind of a message does this send to the children?”
Murray concludes with the speculation that child care centers may be teaching children traditional gender roles: men as administrators and playmates, women as nurturers. This discrimination is bad for the men being discriminated against, and also bad for the girls and boys who are subjected to gender-discriminatory childcare.
And to comment on the original post:
Ampersand wrote: They’re all quite correct: It is a stupid policy, it won’t help children, it’s discrimination, and it’s moral panic.
Oh, for heaven’s sake.
Although “Bigotry against men in childcare” is a bad headline, there is a problem with regard to the fact that because 98% of child molesters are male, parents justifiably worry about childcare workers who are male. This is a worry that can be dealt with in care centers by setting in place good policies and good practice.
But the idea that an airline should be required to do anything of the kind is nonsense. An airline isn’t supposed to screen its passengers for criminal records, or provide job training to its passengers. The simplest, most straightforward, and most effective way an airline can protect children travelling alone from child molesters is to ensure that children travelling alone don’t sit next to men. Not because all men are child molesters, but because 98% of child molesters are men, and airlines are not equipped to sort out the guilty from the innocent. It is just wrong to say that this policy “won’t help children”, it’s not “moral panic”, and yes, it’s discrimination, but it’s hardly discrimination that harms anyone.
I know a man who looks like a thug and has the heart of a chivalrous gentleman. He told me once, in pure exasperation, how annoying he finds it when he’s walking down the street late at night and a woman by herself reacts to him with fear. But, he says, it won’t do any good to protest indignantly that she’s judging him solely by her prejudices against what he looks like: that won’t stop her being afraid. He just crosses the road and walks on the other side. That’s because, for all his faults (and he has many) he recognizes that the important thing is to reduce her fear, not to make big indignant protestations against her prejudice.
That’s a gentleman. A man who would get indignant about being moved away so that he wasn’t sitting next to an unaccompanied child is either a disappointed child molester or the kind of man who would go up to a terrified woman on the street and yell at her for being prejudiced against six-foot-one thugs in black leather jackets, with shaven heads, covered in tattoos – because his feelings are so much more important than hers.
I’m calling for an end to discrimination against men as sexual objects, too. I want to see parity among Hooters servers, strippers, and mostly naked people on the cover of Maxim, et al.
Oh, wait. That’s not the same, you say? Really. “Supply and demand,” you say? Really. I think you’re just coming up with elaborate justifications for discrimination against men in the sex object industry!
“Yes, you arrange for care by contacting care providers and telling them about opportunities to provide their services in exchange for a paycheck. You obtain jobs for people. You have an ethical responsibility not to discriminate. _That_ is an important factor. Moreover, “Don’t blame me! Blame my clients!” is not a valid justification.”
I have an ethical responsibility not to put people into someone’s HOME that might make them feel threatened.
I don’t obtain jobs for people, and I don’t pay them. I told you I’m not an employer, but you failed to comprehend that. I essentially am a dispatcher.
I can’t believe you would compare an issue of someone feeling safe to discrimination. My ethical responsibility is to the parents of these children and their comfort. Period. The end. I didn’t make an “excuse,'” so don’t try and act like I’m copping out. I expressed the reasons for their discomfort and expressed that I thought it was unreasonable to expect otherwise of them. That’s not “making excuses.” That’s agreeing.
>>I have an ethical responsibility not to put people into someone’s HOME that might make them feel threatened.>>
Oh, I’m sorry. You say you don’t just hand out information about potential workers? You actually go to your clients’ homes, break their doors down, and force them at gunpoint to watch your assignee playing with their children? You mean you don’t just put your clients in touch with potential workers, and that they don’t have any say in the decision process once they notify you of a need for childcare? Never mind, then. Yes, you do have an ethical responsibility not to do that.
Do you feel this way about all perceived threats? I doubt it.
>>I can’t believe you would compare an issue of someone feeling safe to discrimination. >>
The perceived threat is disproportionate to the actual threat. By supporting the perceived level of threat, you are discriminating against safe and capable employees.
By supporting the perceived level of threat, you are discriminating against safe and capable employees.
Nah. The parents who won’t hire men are discriminating. But, as employers too small to fall under the rubric of anti-discrimination laws, they’re free to do so.
There’s no ethical obligation to go out of business, which is what would happen to someone in oracle’s shoes who insisted on sending over men to interview, after clients freaked out and told him “don’t send over any men”.
Is it unjust? Yeah. But it’s personal service – if you’re not comfortable with someone being in your house and caring for your children, then that’s no good. Admittedly, I’m one of the dread Libercons (“theists in disguise!”), but if I was even a smidgen uncomfortable with anything about a nanny, I wouldn’t hire them – even if they were a member of fifteen protected groups. Screw their rights; it’s my kids we’re talking about.
Assess risks and make choices for your OWN kids, is what it comes down to.
Quentino: “Saying men not stopping when a woman changes her mind in the middle of sex is rape, fine but I hate to tell the ladies here that men experinece that pretty frequently too so how broad of a definition do you wish to have? If she orgasms and then tells him to leave her alone. how much time does he have to stop before it is rape? What if he does the same, is he to be ridiculed as a “quick draw” or etc for orgasming be3fore she is done or is she a rapist?”
You stop IMMEDIATELY when the other person asks to stop! Why is that difficult? Why is that confusing? I can’t FATHOM why anyone would keep going when their partner asks to stop! If you’re not done, too bad, pull out and finish using your hand! But you STOP when your partner asks you to STOP.
Piny: “Oh, I’m sorry. You say you don’t just hand out information about potential workers? You actually go to your clients’ homes, break their doors down, and force them at gunpoint to watch your assignee playing with their children? You mean you don’t just put your clients in touch with potential workers, and that they don’t have any say in the decision process once they notify you of a need for childcare? Never mind, then. Yes, you do have an ethical responsibility not to do that.”
It’s starting to seem like you’re deliberately misunderstanding. Yes, I go into people’s homes, break their doors down, point a gun at them, and tell them this woman here is going to watch their children.
I do in fact put my clients in touch with workers. They call them on the phone and introduce themselves, and if the client isn’t cool with them, I locate another person. The majority of the people we have are female. Once, I had a person with an androgynous name, and when I left a message telling the client the person’s name, they called back totally freaked out that we were sending a man. I’ve never successfully assigned a male caregiver, and I don’t know of anyone who’s been happy with one.
When it’s your children, you’ll find that you’d rather be safe than “egalitarian.” The statistics are there, and while I don’t have children, I would probably feel the same. Another way I look at it is with a hitchhiker. I’d probably pick up a woman hitchhiker. But a man? No way. Not under any circumstance ever. Is that sexist? Discriminatory? Maybe if men stop raping people it won’t have to be that way anymore.
You go right ahead and don’t discriminate. I’ll choose safety.
Jesu:
Though, I honestly think the practice by the airlines has very little to do with the practical saftey of children, and more to do with limiting their legal liabilities should something happen. I agree that the practice is discriminatory, but I’m not sure that it is “harmless”.
I think that it indirectly feeds into the idea that men are predators and cannot control their sexual urges. Yes, I realize that the majority of child sexual abusers are male.
For me the easiest way to ensure a child’s saftey (from strangers) abord flights is to require that either a parent or other responsible adult fly with that child. This could be a flight attendant that is trained to deal especially with children, and would accompany the child from point of departure to point of arrival.
Anyone care to discuss the lack of gender parity among Hooters servers? I mean, they probably make more, after tips, than the average daycare worker. Also, women in porn get paid more than men in porn, on average. Doesn’t anyone care about that instance of discrimination against men?
I think that it indirectly feeds into the idea that men are predators and cannot control their sexual urges.
Well, that idea is indeed problematic.
How about this one:
Men are predators, and many will not control their sexual urges.
Mendy: For me the easiest way to ensure a child’s saftey (from strangers) abord flights is to require that either a parent or other responsible adult fly with that child.
Ah. So instead of “indirectly feeding into the idea that men are predators and cannot control their sexual urges” you think it would be better for parents to indirectly feed into the idea that men and women are predators and cannot control their sexual urges.
Because that’s what your idea says: rather than let airlines just go with the rule of thumb that as 98% of child molesters are men (which is a very different statement from “98% of men are sexual predators”) they best protect unaccompanied children by not letting men sit next to them, you want the airlines to assume that anyone, male or female, could be a child molester, so there shouldn’t be any unaccompanied children on a flight.
Sure, it would be better if children never travelled long distances by themselves. But given that sometimes children have to, I really fail to see why men’s hurt feelings at being asked to move to a different seat are so much more important than minimizing the risk that a child will be seated next to a child molester. It’s not as if there’s a real discriminatory rule in place that says no man can be permitted to board an airplane without a woman attendant accompanying him to ensure he doesn’t molest anyone sexually while the plane is inflight.
Quite honestly, if I was booked on a long-haul flight next to an unaccompanied child, *I* would ask to be moved. I’m not acting as the involuntary & unpaid carer for a stranger’s child in those circumstances.
I’m not acting as the involuntary & unpaid carer for a stranger’s child in those circumstances.
Good grief. Well, when I was 14, flying unaccompanied, though I don’t think I could have dealt with a child molester sat next to me, I certainly didn’t need an “involuntary and unpaid carer”: I sat, read my book, drank my orange juice, was impressed to discover it was free, and looked out of the window.
Indeed, I think I would have been rather annoyed with an adult who took it upon herself to be my “involuntary and unpaid carer”. On the other hand, at 14, if the adult sitting next to me had assumed I’d need “care” during the flight and had insisted on being moved, I would have been quite happy: more elbow room.
I was thinking age 11 or 12 and under. I’ve been on flights where I’ve seen that kids of that age can be quite needy, making demands on their parents’ time and attention. And that was sometimes just on flights of not much more than an hour. If we’re talking *long-haul* flights, as I specified, that’s up to 24 or 25 hours in total. No thank you.
I said that partly in response to the attitude which I suspect some airlines have.
This is an article from an Australian paper, re: the NZ policy
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/11/29/1133026469460.html
“Other airlines contacted by the Herald said they had similar guidelines.
A Cathay Pacific spokesman, David Bell, said the carrier felt that females tended to “relate more to young kids”.
A United Airlines spokesman, Tony Rasman, said the policy was in place because women were “much more maternal”.”
———————————————————————-
Now WTF is “maternal” or “relate more” of any relevance to the airlines? The only reason I could come up with is that they expect the female passengers to take some kind of care of unaccompanied child passengers.
Jesu:
That was just a suggestion, albeit a poor one. However, being a mother of three, all below the age of 13, I wouldn’t allow my children to travel alone. That is just my feeling as a parent.
What I actually wrote about airlines asking men to switch seats is this from post #248:
I’ve actually been thinking about this some, and iirc from my abnormal psychology class, children are most at risk from the people that they have routine contact with. These are people like priests, coaches, teachers, and neighbors, etc. Child abuse mirrors rape in that most victims know their attackers.
So in a sense, it does feed into the idea that “men cannot control their sexuality”, and then that idea is used by men to excuse the very same behaviors that we would like to come to an end.
Daran
No. This case had been referred to by another poster(possibly yourself?). I was only wanting to post the link. However it did occur to me that if he had been “set up” then the whole situation was contrived and therefore unrealistic.
No. That would be rape.
“I’m wondering how many of the guys out there that would claim this treatment as discrimination still wank off to porn. I mean, do you really think you can objectify women and children and *not* have any of it come back at you? ”
Relevance?
Sorry, I’m Australian. I’m in no position to judge the reliability of any US media.
Robert
If I may:
“Human beings are predators, and many will not control their sexual urges.”
Maybe not, but this from the post I was reponding to certainly does:
“Just once!! Please just this once can we have a discussion about discrimination against men without it being turned into how all women are victimised.” me
“Not in this circumstance we can’t. Sorry.” Elinor
Is it any wonder that divorce rates are as high as they are?
Can’t we all just get along? I think that all the feminists and all the mra’s should get together for a good old fashioned “bed in” like John Lennon and Yoko Ono to show that well… as much as we disagree, a bed in would be fun!
Sheena
Excellent point. This is the other side of the coin isn’t it. There are assumptions being made about women within those rules as well.
Italics – me. Otherwise(in case you couldn’t tell) all credit to Ginmar.
http://www.prevent-abuse-now.com/index.htm
http://www.breakingthesilence.com/
Your concern is of little interest to me. However I would ask if you would take this tone with a female victim.
How would you know?
Not at all.
My mother not a feminist? LOL If you but knew.
Men like me marched side by side with womens libbers thirty years ago. Men like me spoke publicly, wrote articles and financially supported that movement for decades. Men and women like me have become saddened at a movement that promised so much but descended in the same kind of bigotry it once stood firmly against.
Well where are they?
Um….no.
Que?
Um….no. In fact part of my treatment is coming to an understanding of exactly the opposite. Do you actually understand anything at all about rape and it’s effects?
Um…..no. Durrrrrrrr
Excuse me? My behaviour? My honesty? Whatever happened to “believe the victim”.
For the second time – wrong. I don’t even hate the woman who raped me.
Of course not. I would suggest you look up courtesy in a dictionary however.
I’m getting quite satisfactory help thank you very much. The point remains that I had to use my mums experience, rather than my own to get that help. In that regard I definitely have “benefited” from rape.
Isn’t that my very point – that the ARE no services for male victims.
Now I’m starting to think you’re a satirist.
But I’m lying, remember. How can I blame anyone for something that didn’t happen?
Sorry, I only believe in individual responsibility.
Huge numbers? No I’m not aware of that.
No. What matters to me is that rules are being made on the presumption that ONLY men are a danger to children.
There we have it. Clearly, in your mind, all men rape all women all the time.
Good. Good to see female rapists now being caught as well.
I notice in a later post that Ginmar is going away. That’s a pity. She might have learned something.
Lilith:
I don’t mind discussing it, and as far as I can tell from the very few times I’ve been to any Hooter’s establishment there are no male servers. I, for one, would not mind seeing an even mix of male and female servers. Though I imagine that most men would balk at the idea of wearing suntan tights and those shorts.
And as far as porn goes, I watched a special on television several months ago. Iirc, the industry norm is for the average gay male performer to make more than the average female performer. And that women in general earn more than straight male performers in porn. So, it would seem that in one sense there is still gender bias in porn that favors men (granted a minority group of men but still).
Though I do think that both of these topics would make for interesting discussion and debate, I’m not sure that most men would be comfortable with the subject matter, because in both instances men are the primary consumers.
Mendy: However, being a mother of three, all below the age of 13, I wouldn’t allow my children to travel alone. That is just my feeling as a parent.
I don’t disagree with you that it’s better for young children not to travel alone. But sometimes it happens, for reasons outside anyone’s control. (Sorry, I missed post 248: it’s been a long thread.)
Ampersand.
Is there a reason my post #330 is “awaiting moderation”? Have I done something wrong? Given the nature of Ginmar’s comments I feel I should have a right of reply.
Jesu:
It has been a long thread. I understand that sometimes things happen and children need to travel unescorted. In those instances, I don’t think it is discriminatory for an airline to ask a male passenger to switch seats so that an unescorted child either has empty seats next to them or is seated next to female passengers. The reason I don’t feel it is discriminatory is that when you purchase a ticket on a plane you are guaranteed a seat, but not any particular seat.
That is the long way of saying that I agree with the heart of your argument, but disagree that the reasoning behind it is to “protect children”. I honestly believe that the airlines instituted the policy to protect themselves, and any increased security for children is a secondary benefit.
Ampersand:
The 8% figure is for unfounded rapes. Unfounded should mean that it demonstrably never happened. In practice it rarely does. It’s worth quoting Kanin on the subject:
Generally, this issue is couched in terms of unfounded rape. However we are not addressing that concept here since unfounded rape is not usually the equivalent of false allegation, in spite of widespread usage to that effect. There is ample evidence, frequently ignored (see MacDonald, 1971; Brownmiller, 1975), that in practice, unfounded rape can and does mean many things, with false allegation being only one of them, and sometimes the least of them.
I don’t think so. 8% is a real figure, unlike the 2% myth, but I find it scarcely more credible. It’s been several years since I looked at this, but what I found was that the figure appeared in the text of the FBI Uniform Crime Report in the part discussing rape. There were no data to support it, and it never changed from year to year, from the earliest year for which I could obtain a report until the most recent one then available. (I can’t remember which years were covered, and I’ve not looked again recently, so I don’t know if it has been reinstated in any later report.)
It looked like a cut&paste job to me. If it represents anything it is the figure for one year only.
If all unfounded rape allegations had been genuinely investigated and found to have not happened, then this figure would be a lower limit to the actual number of FRAs, just as the unconviction rate for rape (i.e., 100% less the conviction rate) is an upper limit. The actual FRA rate would lie somewhere in the midst of all the ‘don’t knows’
Of course, we all know that ‘unfounded’ has often been used as a bin in which to dump reports that the police don’t want to deal with, for whatever reason. here’s a very detailed report on police handling of rape in Philadelphia.
But the unfounding rate can also be manipulated downward, in response to political pressure:
The proportion of cases deemed “unfounded” fell when the unit, under pressure from the FBI to stop rejecting so many complaints, began disposing of tough cases in “investigation of person.”
Two years ago, the FBI and departmental auditors questioned the use of the code. Sex-crimes investigators backed off “investigation of person” and again began “unfounding” large numbers of cases.
source
Here’s a post I made two years ago documenting another example of blatent manipulation of the figures, this time downward. (Unfortunately the original source has disappeared from the web). I no longer agree with everything I wrote back then, so I’ll just quote it here and comment afresh.
NYPD sex crimes investigator Harry O’Reilly (1984):
The last myth I want to deal with is that of false accusations. Do we
really have women running around making false accusations against innocent men? Does this happen? Are there false reports?
A false report – i.e a false allegation is not the same as a false accusation an accusation must accuse somebody. An allegation may not identify anyone. Antifeminists typically ignore this distinction and point to figures such as Kanin’s 41% as a figure for false accusations, ‘lying women’ sending innocent men to jail. But Kanin’s figure is really about allegations.
O’Reilly, as we will see goes the other way, and uses the lack of an accusation to justify not counting the report as false.
Of course there are, and we must always be on the alert and be aware that victims may be telling a lie. Some women do lie, of course, but the number of women who make false reports is negligible in comparison with the number of valid complainants. In a six-month period in New York City there were around 2000 reported rapes, of which about 250 were unfounded reports.
OK, so we’re starting off with about a 12.5% rate of unfounding.
But `unfounded’ does not mean lying…
Doesn’t it? So how come in the following discussion, he doesn’t give even a single example of someone not lying?
…Let’s see what it means: 200 of the 250 were simple administrative
errors. They should never have been called rapes in the first place; for
example, a woman phones the station and yells rape. The police car goes out and there’s no one home. The next day a detective goes to follow the
incident up and the woman says “Oh yes, my boyfriend and I had a fight last night and I yelled “rape”‘. `Why did you yell rape?’ `Because if I had
yelled disorderly conduct, nobody is going to come, but if I yell rape I
know damn sure that a cop is going to come in a hurry.’ That kind of thing is not a false rape charge, but a mild inconvenience to the police…
It’s still a lie, though. Just because it was a ‘mild inconvenience’ and not malicious doesn’t make it true.
There is a legitimate question here: what is a report? Is a 911 call a report, is it only a report when a statement has been given?
Note also, that if this had happened in Philadelphia, and the altercation had been in progress when the police arrived, then correct procedure would be to record this as a founded incident, but not a rape report.
This illustrates one reason for the sheer range of figures for FRAs – people
have different views as to what constitutes one. The antifems (inevitably) want to count everything. Feminists and rape survivor advocates (and O’Reilly, as we shall see) want to count as few as possible.
…We are therefore left with potentially 50 liars out of a total of 2000
complainants.
So now we’re down to 2.5%, which we might round down to 2%. Greer traces the 2% figure back to “the commander of the New York City’s Rape Analysis Squad”. So clearly this is, if not the actual source of the figure, then very close to it.
But hold on a moment. If 200 reports are “administrative errors”, then they should be excluded from the 2000 total. So we are left with “potentially” 50 liars out of a remaining total of 1800 complainants which is 2.78%, which rounds to 3%
Of that 50, perhaps 20 cases of false report were made as
some kind of attempt by the woman to protect herself against a tyrannical father or husband because she had violated some family rule, usually a time curfew, and she has to account for why she is late. Rarely in these cases, however, does she accuse a specific person; rather, she claims that some mysterious figure in the night pulled her into a car and did this awful thing to her and caused her to be two hours late in coming home. Other times we have women who have psychological problems, loneliness being the main one, and they know if they say `rape’ the officer will come and talk with them awhile. These women have lied, of course, but no more maliciously than has the woman with the tyrannical husband/father
After analyzing all the ‘unfounded’ reports, we found that there were
actually only five cases of women maliciously telling lies and deliberately falsely accusing men of rapes that had never been committed. In these cases the women are arrested for making false accusations – false charges are crimes which must be punished. the bottom line, then is that out of 2000 charges of rape, there were five proven liars. That is good enough evidence for me to conclude that most victims are telling the truth! (p.96-7).
The last two sentences is truly astounding. He has 50 proven liars out of 1800 (after excluding 200 liars from consideration), then, having concluded that 45 of them “have lied of course”, promply forgets about them. In Orwell’s Ninteen Eighty-Four, O’Brian destroys a document in from of the hero, then seconds later claims that it never existed. “I do not remember it”.
And it’s people like this (as well as those in Philadelphia) who prepare unfounding figures for submission to the UCR!
The 8% figure doesn’t measure anything.
The following is a generic response that I’ve used several times:
I have no idea what put your post into moderation, specifically.
The computer has this big list of words that automatically get a comment put into the “needs approval” pile; most of the words are somehow related to poker, to porn, to loans, or to prescription medicine. If your post happened to use one of those words, then it got put into “needs approval” list. Also if you happened to be posting from an ip address other than your usual ip address.
(The words or bits of words that trigger auto-moderation can be totally unexpected and hard to predict. For a while, every time someone wrote a comment using the word “socialist” it was automatically put into moderation, because the word “cialist” was on the list!)
Anyhow, once a comment is in moderation, it stays there until I approve it. And if I happen to be busy or asleep, that can unfortunately take a while . Sorry about that – but it really IS necessary. Blame the free market for creating spam.
Sheena
They ended up there as a consequence of the logical gymnastics required to get out of their original discrimination.
Daran, you clearly have a deep-felt wish (or need) to believe that women lie about rape. It’s probably not worthwhile discussing with you if women lie, since your conviction that they do is so strong and you evidently don’t require evidence to believe it. (For example, you’ve just gone through an analysis of statistics that shows that of 2000 rape reports, at most 3% are based on false reports – and of those, the vast majority are women not bearing false witness against any person. Yet upthread you were asserting wildly that you thought about half of the women who had charged men with rape were lying. No compunction from you? No “I was wrong to so malign so many women”? Just your faith in Greer to sustain you?
The last two sentences is truly astounding. He has 50 proven liars out of 1800 (after excluding 200 liars from consideration), then, having concluded that 45 of them “have lied of course”, promply forgets about them.
Such aggressive misreading becomes a kind of lie in itself. He defines a specific kind of deliberately harmful lie – bearing false witness, charging someone with a crime who did not in fact commit it – and points out that of 2000 reports, only 5 fell into that category.
I think the 8% figure is about as reliable as the 41% figure from Eugene Kanin you’ve been relying so much on. Yes, you’ve been careful to say that it’s a “tentative” conclusion, but you still use it as evidence.
What you want, essentially, is a double-standard; you want it to be acceptable for you to use extremely weak and dubious evidence to support your claims that about half of reported rapes are false reports, but you also want to reject similarly weak evidence that far less than half are false reports.
You can’t have it both ways. Either weak evidence is not evidence at all, in which case your claims have no evidence to back them; or weak evidence is evidence, in which case the 8% figure from the FBI certainly supports Jesu’s view.
gwallan , please read this page on how to create blockquotes.
Saying that “men raped” is not at all the same as saying “all men rape.”
Furthermore, I’m pretty certain that saying “everyone” was raped before feminism is hyperbole.
Is this the original source?
I have to agree with Jesu; you’ve given O’Reilly a very unfair reading. He wrote that “there were actually only five cases of women maliciously telling lies and deliberately falsely accusing men of rapes that had never been committed.” Then two sentences later, he writes “the bottom line, then is that out of 2000 charges of rape, there were five proven liars.”
Any fair reader, given the context of the whole paragraph, would understand that when he says “five proven liars,” he means women who “maliciously tell lies and deliberately falsely accuse men of rapes that had never been committed.”
And that’s also the relevant point for this debate. And I’d say that O’Rielly’s analysis (which I never read before today) provides strong evidence that the large majority of rape reports made to police, are true.
(You’re correct that O’Rielly should have subtracted the 200 administrative errors from his equation, but that’s not a very substantial critique, since the difference between 2% and 3% is not earth-shaking).
Before feminsm, men raped everyone and got away with it. Ginmar
There we have it. Clearly, in your mind, all men rape all women all the time. me. (Idiot. One day I’ll learn to stop biting)
She didn’t say anything even remotely like that. Amp
OK I’ll rephrase.
Before feminism everyone – men, women and children(and presumably the rapists themselves) – were ALL being raped. THIS is Ginmar’s position.
Frankly, while my original comment may have been as absurd as hers, I believe I have been much fairer to her than she has to me.
Gwallan, since you’ve made it clear that you think Ginmar was being extremely unfair, being “fairer to her than she has” been is not a standard you should aspire to.
Instead of trying to be fairer than you perceive Ginmar as being, you should try to be as fair as you can be.
For instance, you might try acknowleging that hyperbole exists. Responding to obvious hyperbole as if it were a statement of literal fact, is an unfair tactic.
Oops sorry Ampersand. Didn’t see you’d amended #339.
I suspect Ginmar meant to say “…men raped anyone…”
It’s at least understandable that way.
Gwallan, since you’ve made it clear that you think Ginmar was being extremely unfair, being “fairer to her than she has” been is not a standard you should aspire to.
I wasn’t “aspiring” to anything. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking in those terms at all at the time. Actually fairness never intered my thinking at all as I read Ginmars post. #249
Instead of trying to be fairer than you perceive Ginmar as being, you should try to be as fair as you can be.
That’s what I did. I can’t see how I can do anything else.
For instance, you might try acknowleging that hyperbole exists. Responding to obvious hyperbole as if it were a statement of literal fact, is an unfair tactic.
But something less than the original hyperbole surely. Look, to be totally honest, by that stage I wasn’t responding to the hyperbole specifically but to the general invective. That invective wasn’t necessary, let alone warranted.
Please understand this. From my perspective she is doing to me exactly what she accuses all men, including myself, of doing to women. And far less subtly.
Before being too easily diverted my underlying thinking on this issue (men and kids) was thus:
Sometimes children are sexually abused by women. Whether it’s 10% or 30% is not overly relevant. I certainly don’t care.
There are organisations operating on the presumption that men are either all, or the vast majority, of child sexual abusers.
I’m not sure that the victims of any predators are going to care much about the statistical likelihood re their abusers gender.
So what do we do? Do we pretend that it won’t happen? When the next kid gets molested on a plane – bear in mind only women get the opportunity now – can we simply explain that away as “statistically insignificant”?
Oops, sorry, we thought only men did that.
Apologies.
On reflection “bear in mind only women get the opportunity now”(#343) is not fair.
I’m trying to say if it does happen it WILL be a woman.
gwallan: There are organisations operating on the presumption that men are either all, or the vast majority, of child sexual abusers.
That’s because the vast majority of child sexual abusers are men.
Do we pretend that it won’t happen? When the next kid gets molested on a plane – bear in mind only women get the opportunity now – can we simply explain that away as “statistically insignificant”?
Gwallan, have you ever read or heard of an actual example of a woman sexually molesting a child on a plane?
What is this upset over men being asked to change seats on a plane? It doesn’t damage their civil rights; the only men it can possibly, seriously upset is men who either are child abusers, and are upset they won’t get the chance to molest children, or else men who seriously think that it’s far more important that their feelings should never, ever be hurt – even by so trivial a thing as changing seats on an airplane – than it is to remove 98% at least of the risk that a child travelling alone will be sexually molested. Which category do you fall into, Gwallan?
We could throw statistics at on another all day. Work in this area – women as offenders – is sparse, wildly variable and I don’t trust any of it. Too much of it is driven by idealogues on BOTH sides.
I’ve never heard of anyone doing it(which is not to say it hasn’t happened). I could equally be describing any environment where these sorts of rules could be applied.
(Whew. Distict whiff of ad hominem around here)
Probably the “group” wondering about the 2% or the 10% or the 30% of victims – hell I don’t know who to believe – that you so casually write off.
I couldn’t give a stuff about the passengers or their civil rights. If these airlines(or any other body) are really serious let them do it properly. It’s only their need to maximise their profit that forces them into not seating those kids alone in the first place. For a few cents on all their fares we could all be feeling warm and fuzzy about what we’re all doing to stop child molestation on planes. Instead we get this debacle.
As for this
the only men it can possibly, seriously upset is men who either are child abusers, and are upset they won’t get the chance to molest children, or else men who seriously think that it’s far more important that their feelings should never, ever be hurt
Thankyou for that characterization. Really narrows things down doesn’t it. By the way, what of women who are uncomfortable with it? What’s their motivation?
Gwallan: Work in this area – women as offenders – is sparse, wildly variable and I don’t trust any of it. Too much of it is driven by idealogues on BOTH sides.
Actually, I suspect that given you’ve evidently never read any material by women about their personal experience of sexual molestation, since if you had you could hardly have missed reading at least one account of a man taking casual advantage (as described below), you’re probably just too uninformed to be able to judge: and probably working on some theory that it can’t possibly be true that the vast majority of sexual molesters, like the vast majority of any group of rapists, are men. That’s men’s right’s ideologists for you: they can’t stand actual facts, so they go on faith.
I’ve never heard of anyone doing it(which is not to say it hasn’t happened).
There were reports upthread of men molesting children they were sitting next to on longdistance flights. (I can understand you missing them: it’s a long thread.) I can think of far more reports – first person, women describing what’s happened to them – of men just casually taking advantage of being seated next to, or standing next to, a woman, a young girl, or a child, to sexually molest them. If you have never heard of this happening, it’s presumably because you have never troubled yourself to read any material written by women about their personal experience of sexual harassment or sexual molestation.
It’s only their need to maximise their profit that forces them into not seating those kids alone in the first place. For a few cents on all their fares we could all be feeling warm and fuzzy about what we’re all doing to stop child molestation on planes. Instead we get this debacle.
Debacle? Oh, right, you get men complaining about being asked to move because their feelings have been hurt, and that’s a “debacle”. And it’s far more important that men’s feelings should not be hurt, that men should not be reminded in any way that the vast majority of rapists and child molesters are men, than it is for airlines to have to book two seats for a child travelling alone. Everything else in the world is less important than hurting some man’s feelings.
I gather that most airlines have a rule that children travelling alone sit in the front row where they are under the eye of a flight attendent virtually all the time. Good rule. Much easier to carry out than a rule that unaccompanied children always have to have an empty seat next to them – which again, just assumes that everyone – both male and female – are equally potential child molesters, which is just not true.
By the way, what of women who are uncomfortable with it? What’s their motivation?
A woman who are uncomfortable at being asked to change seats because the airline thinks that she’s a man? Oh, you meant a woman who’s uncomfortable because a man’s feelings have been hurt? Well, lots of women are taught to think that it’s terribly important not to hurt men’s feelings – that somehow, bruises to a man’s ego are far more important and hurtful than actual damage done to someone not a man. That, I assume, is the motivations of the women who are getting all worked up over men being told they have to change seats on an airplane.
I think you’re seeing bad motives where none are necessary.
It’s possible (and to my mind, likely) that women who object to this object to the profiling of a person based on their gender much as many of us would object to that profiling on the basis of race or religion, even if that profiling was for something that that race and religion really did constitute a majority of.
It really bothers me that the solitary conclusion you came to for why women might object to this seems to boil down to “brainwashed by the patriarchy,” not “perhaps they’re acting on principle.” I’m not saying that they’re acting on a principle you necessarily agree with, but that’s another discussion.
—Myca
ps. A disclaimer: NO, I don’t particularly mind this. YES, keeping children safe from sexual molestation is more important than the hurt feelings of men. But I also believe that keeping planes from exploding is more important than the hurt feelings of Muslims, and I oppose that sort of profiling too. On principle.
gwallan writes: I had my first sexual encounter with a woman when I was eight.
i read above that you said you were in counseling. i’m not sure if you feel comfortable discussing those issues online, but there is a great forum at Male Survivor that may be helpful. the guys there are very supportive, and no one will force you to talk about anything you don’t want to.
Because several people have raised the subject of gender parity in Hooters in this thread, I just want to point out that a few years ago, Hooters was hit with a “sex discrimination class action filed by job applicants and employees who alleged that the restaurant chain unlawfully refused to hire men as waiters, bartenders, ad hosts.”
The chain settled for several million dollars.
statistically speaking, female cargivers would pose a greater risk. the majority of cases of nanny abuse have been with females, not males.
actually, the majority of reported sex offenders are men. and that is most likely because a) they can be more easily prosecuted, b) female victims are more likely to report abuse, c) it is actually considered possible, and d) it is actually viewed as wrong rather than experimentation or consensual. when you look at independant studies, the numbers vary (as they should) as to the rate of female sex offenders.
but that is irrevelant because the rate of assault on a plane is what should be considered, and it is incredibly unlikely that a child will be assaulted by a complete stranger on a plane. the policy is founded in hysteria, and possibly misandry, but certainly not in fact. the vast majority of people are not sex offenders (and no i am not denying that there are more men who rape. i just doubt the difference is greater than 60/40) , and those who are typically abuse a child they have grown close with and know. kidnappings and stranger assault are far less common. so despite your acceptance of the bias, the fact remains that a child is more likely going to be assaulted by her five year old dog than a random man on a plane. sorry.
Unless you somehow are adjusting for the fact that the vast, vast majority of nannies are female, that’s not a meaningful statistic in this context.
You don’t present any evidence to show that the “most likely” causes you cite are at all likely. I think it’s more likely that the majority of molesters are male.
There’s a ton of evidence showing that the large majority of rapists are male. And when it comes to stranger rape – which is the kind of rape that is most similar to molesting a stranger child on an airplane – there are only a handful of documented cases of female rapists.
Since men so predominate in stranger-rape, I don’t think it’s at all illogical to think that they predominate in stranger-molestation, as well.
Please cite specific studies (which means linking to or giving a full citation for the study itself, not just a general website). Are there any which show that men are not the majority of child molesters?
That’s what I thought when I wrote the opening post on this thread. However, I am now in doubt, particularly after reading this comment earlier this thread. Now, however, I am seriously considering that men who would decide to try and cop a feel (or worse) from a child on a plane might be more common than I had considered. I certainly can’t dismiss the possiblility.
But the relevant comparison isn’t her five year old dog – it’s the likelihood of being molested by a random man on a plane, compared with the likelihood of being
arrestedmolested by a random woman on a plane.Since neither likelihood is absolute zero, perhaps the best policy would be to require unaccompanied children to sit in the frontmost row, where the fight attendants can see the children at all times.
jaketk
Thanks for that. I think I’ve had a look at Male Survivor a while back. There are a number of internet resources. I do prefer to keep my admissions subtle(ie “sexual encounter” rather than “rape”) most of the time. It’s not for my sake. Rather it’s because it clearly upsets some others to have to acknowledge that women can be sexual predators.
It makes me sad that when they say it’s “for the children” what they really seem to mean is “it’s for the children but only the ones WE choose”.
People have written that ‘sexual assault’ on a plane is unlikely. But I think that language is misleading. It’s more like an accidental/on purpose grope, or something so quick you can barely tell it happened and you don’t know how to react, or, ‘sympathize with me, my wife is frigid, you’re so pretty.’
I’m not even sure if these things would be criminal (to the extent it’s happened to me, I don’t even remember telling any adults about it because I was just embarassed). But I would rather it not happen, period.
Men *can* be weird with girls, especially pubescent girls which is the age we’re talking about here. Of course not all of them will be. But I don’t think this is a ridiculous policy. Sitting with women is just easier and simplifies things.
Lilith wrote:
Well, there’s two issues there. First is, should Hooters exist at all? I’d prefer that they didn’t; I wish there wasn’t a market for Hooters, Maxim, etc.
But, given that Hooters does exist, being female is a job requirement for working there. As I understand it (and I’ve never been to Hooters), the waitresses are there as entertainment, not just as servers. It’s a little bit like the “discrimination” of only hiring women to model the clothing in a catalog of women’s clothing. For some jobs, being female is a job requirement.
I also have nothing against hiring only men as boy scout troop leaders, only women as girl scout treat leaders, only women as workers at a battered women’s shelter, etc etc.. I have nothing against producers of “Sweeny Todd” considering only men for the part of Sweeny and only women for the part of Mrs. Lovett.
Discrimination is not objectionable, in my view, when being female or male is a legitimate job requirement.
(The problem, of course, is that some sexist employers try to use this principle as a way of excusing discriminating against women when sex isn’t a legitimate job requirement.)
You suspect wrongly. Furthermore your implication that only womens’ experiences matter is highly offensive. The victims in question here are both male and female regardless of the gender of their assailant.
Well I’m so sorry. Prior to today I had no knowledge of any sexual assualts of children specifically on planes. At NO stage did I say it never happened.
Again, so what? You keep refering to “vast majority”. Look if it suits your idealogical sensitivities to think that way that’s fine. I’ve never tried to claim that the majority of offenders aren’t male. I’m just unwilling to accept any of the research for reasons I’ve already stated. I’m also unwilling to accept either the highest or lowest estimates of anything just because it fits with what I already believe.
I will not say this again nor should I have to. I am not an MRA. I’ve already stated that my only active involvement in gender politics was with womens lib/feminism.
Once again you refer only to men in reference to abusers. In fact you only include males as victims via the non gender specific use of “child”.
I’ve got bad news for you. Women do it TOO. And, shock, horror, sometimes their victims are boys.
Shit yeah. While any publicity is “good publicity” I’ve never seen so many people trying to cover their own butts so quickly.
Didn’t I already say that I didn’t care about the passenger’s reactions?
I don’t recall saying they were.
Very droll.
I would rather ascribe to women an ability to grasp the issues. I’m very surprised you don’t.
What about all those aunts and other assorted women who poked and prodded me and insisted on hugs and kisses when I obviously didn’t want it? What were they doing? I’ll see an orgy of this sort of stuff on Sunday actually. Bet I don’t see any blokes treating little girls like this.
Sorry, That previous bit is from Elenas post #28. Maybe I should get some sleep. I think I’m trying to do too much.
Gwallan: You suspect wrongly.
Ah. So you knew that women and girls have been victimised by men in this way, but you still feel that minimizing the risk of molestation is unimportant compared to the hurt feelings of a man being asked to change seats on an airplane? Fine.
I don’t recall saying they were.
Then you missed the point of your argument that, rather than making sure the seat next to an unaccompanied child shouldn’t be occupied by a man, it shouldn’t be occupied by anyone. That’s you arguing that airlines should act as if men aren’t the vast majority of child sexual abusers, and should treat their passengers as if women and men are equally a risk to children.
I would rather ascribe to women an ability to grasp the issues
I would; you evidently wouldn’t, since you’re determinedly looking away from the issues yourself. But some women evidently don’t, and think that men’s hurt feelings are more important.
Myca Writes: It’s possible (and to my mind, likely) that women who object to this object to the profiling of a person based on their gender much as many of us would object to that profiling on the basis of race or religion, even if that profiling was for something that that race and religion really did constitute a majority of.
Actually, I’d say the issue is pretty simple. A man who’s asked to change seats on an airplane because he’s sitting next to an unaccompanied child, where the airline has the policy that no men shall be allowed to sit next to an unaccompanied child, isn’t being “profiled” any more than it’s “profiling” when passengers sitting in the row next to the emergency exit are asked to confirm that they’re physically able to get the emergency door open, or whatever it is we’re supposed to do when we sit there.
The man who’s being asked to change seats isn’t being discriminated against. He wasn’t guaranteed any particular seat on the airplane: no one is. No one is even making any specific categorization of him according to what he looks like: most men don’t rape, most men don’t molest children, and in a situation where a man was being employed as a caregiver for children, assuming the appropriate legal and other safeguards were in place, it would be wrong to assume that because he’s a man, he’s a child molester.
Airlines can’t do police checks of all their passengers. They can’t screen them. Airline staff absolutely shouldn’t judge by their appearance whether they think any particular man is more likely to be a child abuser. But, the vast majority of child abusers/molesters/sexual harassers are men. It’s a pragmatic and simple way to make sure that a child travelling alone isn’t going to be molested or harassed, and it harms no one.
Except, of course, the men who hate being reminded that it’s men who rape, molest, and harass. Those men are going to get het up and whine about how awful it is that they’re discriminated against, they’ve actually been made to change seats! Yeah, well. I would rather every man who flies on a commercial transport got hurt feelings about how awful it is that they might be asked to change seats, than even one kid got sat next to a guy who decided a transcontinental flight was the perfect place to do a little quiet groping. I just don’t consider men’s egos to be that important. If men don’t like being reminded that it’s men who rape, molest, and harass, well – tough. Deal. Women don’t like being reminded that it’s men who rape, molest, and harass, and generally speaking, women get reminded of this a lot more nastily than by being asked to change seats in an airplane once in a while.
Ampersand: But, given that Hooters does exist, being female is a job requirement for working there. As I understand it (and I’ve never been to Hooters), the waitresses are there as entertainment, not just as servers. It’s a little bit like the “discrimination” of only hiring women to model the clothing in a catalog of women’s clothing. For some jobs, being female is a job requirement.
Yes: so long as you think it not unreasonable that Hooters is entitled to direct its entertainment exclusively at heterosexual men, Hooters is entitled to “discriminate” by hiring only young, attractive, women to be waiters there. (I’m fairly sure that Hooters does not have lesbians in mind.) The discrimination in that case is not in the hiring practices but in the catering practice: Hooters is not interested in providing equivalent entertainment to heterosexual women by hiring young, attractive men.
Actually it would since the position is that males are the threat, not that females take care of more children.
And as I said, reported incidents verify that.
What does that have to do with the probably of a child being assaulted on a plane?
I would love to, but there appears to be an issue with posting links at the moment. But type “female sex offender study” into google, and you get several right on the first page. Feel free to read the studies for yourself. This way you cannot say I am distorting the facts. You will find, as I stated, the numbers vary.
I thought personal experiences could not be used to bolster any claims about incidents occurring. That was the understanding I reached on the other thread.
That would be the intelligent thing to do. Whether it will be done is up for grabs.
I’m sorry if I’m reading something into your words you don’t intend, Jake, but are you implying that the reported incidents give us a wrong impression?
If so, I have trouble believing that . . . not that the percentages couldn’t be off a bit one way or another, but I don’t think that there’s a hugely unreported spate of female rapes out there.
Of course, if that’s not what you’re implying . . . then . . . umm . . . never mind.
—Myca
Jersurgislac:
The discrimination in that case is not in the hiring practices but in the catering practice: Hooters is not interested in providing equivalent entertainment to heterosexual women by hiring young, attractive men.
Not discrimination so much as rational targeting. They don’t know how to provide equivalent entertainment to heterosexual women; it isn’t one of their competencies.
In other words, they’re discriminating against women in the same way that Wal-Mart is discriminating against high-end computer shoppers: by not targeting that market segment.
Wal-Mart would love to sell $6K Falcon-style gaming rigs to geeks, and collect those sweet margins, but they don’t know how to integrate that into their existing business model, and their calculations indicate that learning how and creating the physical ability would cost more than it’s worth. Competencies cost money to develop and maintain. Can’t sell everything to everybody; you have to decide what you’re selling and to who, which for most businesses will exclude 99% of the world.
Hooters would also have brand identification issues. They can’t start pitching to gals without damaging the brand ID they’ve developed; and if they buy the competency and start a parallel business aimed at women, they’d be doing it without the brand leverage they’ve already invested in. It’s probably smarter for them to devote resources to expanding their existing success, rather than trying to create a new success from scratch.
If there’s a big market space for getting stupid women to pay extra money for bad food delivered by beefcake, someone other than Hooter’s is likely to collect it. That can be you!
(I’d call it “Peckers”, and have a Woody Woodpecker logo.)
no problem, dude. i typically do that as well, simply to avoid the unnecessary conflict. however, at the forum no one will attack you for calling it rape or downplay the effects, occurance, or wrongness of it. i think about 1/3 of the guys there have been raped or abused by female offenders, so it really is a safe place to talk about it. and the mods are very good at protecting the survivors from negative comments and vicious attacks.
it honestly has nothing to do with the children whatsoever. most policies like this usually have nothing to do with those they claim to protect. they typically are nothing more than manifestations of stereotypes and biases. it is simply that they are socially accepted and justified that makes them so bothersome and irrating.
of course, one could simply subject those individual people to their own logic as a means of demonstrating just how biased it is. for instance, if Jesurgislac were to take a flight with my 13 year old male cousin or 5 five year old godson (both of whom happen to be within the preferred age range of female predators) she cannot be left alone with them (for their protection). of course, i am not implying that she is a sex offender, merely that female predators tend to rape very young children or pubescent children. if she is offended by this, then she either is a sex offender (which is a powerful display of my clairvoyance) or she is protecting her ego or hates being reminded that some women rape children. granted, it doesn’t make me sound like a great person, but who cares. my cousin’s and godson’s protection far outweigh any of her feelings about the reasons for keeping her away from them.
simple question (which will provide you with the answer to your question). do you think the reported statistics about the rates of rape and domestic violence from the 1940s and 1950s demonstrates an accurate account of how often the abuse occured then and/or now? why?
Yes, of course I do, but not all ‘faulty or incomplete evidence’ can be used to justify anything.
I mean, look, the you can argue that our methodology in measuring rape is faulty, and use that to say that it’s possible that there are more rapes than we believe, but you can’t use that to argue that magic unicorns live in your bellybutton.
I’m not arguing against the proposition that our percentages of male/female stranger/aquaintance rape are off. I think they probably are. I’m arguing against your implied proposition that the large majority of rapes are not male on female. Keep in mind that even if female on male rapes are underreported by a 500% margin, that still would leave men with a huge majority . . . and it’s very very unlikely that they’re underreported by that much.
I mean, I’d have a similar problem with believing, sans evidence, that male on female rapes are underreported by 500%. This isn’t a gender thing.
Show me some evidence that male on female rapes do not constitute a huge majority of all rapes comitted, and we’ll talk.
—Myca
Robert wrote:
I think an indymedia activist once proposed something similar in a satire. I’d rather go with calling it “Big Dills” or something, though. Much better potential for stupid pun-related promos, not to mention a logo that would lead to a high-profile lawsuit from Heinz. It’s all about the press, you know.
Are you intending to exclude prison rapes from that statement?
If prison rapes are included, then I would ask you to lower the bar. Can we talk if all I can show is that the evidence we have is insufficient to conclude that male on female rapes are a huge majority of all rapes committed?
If prison rapes are excluded then I would ask you to be more careful in your statement, but I’d be on your side of the fence. I say that (outside of prison) male on female rapes are the huge majority of all rapes committed. If jaketk wishes to dispute that, then the burden is upon him to demonstrate a genuine controversy, either by producing new evidence of his own, or by rebutting our evidence, or otherwise by showing that it is insufficient. Just saying “it ain’t so”, or even “it might not be so” doesn’t cut the mustard. There are zillions of facts that I’ve accepted without much scrutiny because they’re what I’ve been told to believe. Checking every single one would be impossible. Checking every one that someone, somewhere, disputes would be impossible. You have worth my while to look more clossely at something. You have to show me a genuine controversy.
Robert: Not discrimination so much as rational targeting. They don’t know how to provide equivalent entertainment to heterosexual women; it isn’t one of their competencies.
Right, of course, and it’s just not possible for any business to add to its competencies.
More to the point, Hooters discriminates against heterosexual women, I would imagine, for much the same reason the porn industry discriminates: heterosexual men are accustomed to having their sexual appetites conveniently catered to, and to spending money towards that goal. Hetero women aren’t used to that, and aren’t used to spending money towards that goal, and – moreover – generally have far less disposable income than hetero men do. Hooters discriminates against hetero women because we live in a patriarchal society, where men get most of the money and are used to being catered to.
jaketk: if Jesurgislac were to take a flight with my 13 year old male cousin or 5 five year old godson (both of whom happen to be within the preferred age range of female predators) she cannot be left alone with them (for their protection). of course, i am not implying that she is a sex offender, merely that female predators tend to rape very young children or pubescent children.
Bad argument, jaketk. As I have repeatedly observed, the reason airlines ask men to move is because the vast majority of sexual molesters are men: and because (as was noted above) airlines have actual experience of men thinking that a seat next to an unaccompanied child means a sexual opportunity. Not permitting any man to sit next to an unaccompanied child would have eliminated all known examples of children being molested on airplanes. I know of no actual examples of women sexually molesting children they were seated next to on any form of public transport (not just airplanes) but can think of many first-hand experiences I have read of men doing just that. When the vast majority of the risk can be eliminated by simply asking a man to change seats, why wouldn’t any responsible airline do just that, and any responsible man agree? You may desperately want to believe otherwise, jaketk, but the vast majority of child sexual molesters are men.
Hmm. good point. Yes, I had intended to exclude it, not because I’d actually decided to, but just because I hadn’t given it much thought.
The discussion on prison rape is a good one to have, but I tend to think it’s not really what Jake meant. Still, good catch.
—Myca
Jesu:
I haven’t been to the Hooter’s here in town, not because the sight of the servers would bother me, but because I find paying inflated prices for less than mediocre food to be distasteful.
And one local bar got very creative in its buisness model recently. About once every three months or so, the bar brings in the “Le Bare” dancers from Dallas, TX. This is an all male dance revue. The bar is restricted to women only during the show and for about an hour afterwards. Normally this occurs on a Thursday or Friday night and the following week the bar will bring in something that will draw the men. I went to see the show once, and wasn’t very impressed by either the dancers in thongs. I did notice that many women were treating the male dancers as “objects”, and though mildy disgusted found the entire scene to be interesting on some level.
I think that Robert is arguing that the cost for Hooter’s to obtain the competency to market “beefcake” servers to hetero women wouldn’t make the money to justify the expenditure. Misogyny plays a role in making this “the norm”, but it is capitalism that drives the whole thing. I mean Hooter’s wouldn’t be in buisness if there weren’t tons of guys willing to go and pay over inflated prices for horrid food just to have the chance to watch the servers in those hideous outfits.
I did get a kick out of the Outback Steakhouse commercial that had the three female friends sitting at the table ogling their three very different male servers. I believe that the puch line was “Variety, another advantage to Outback” or something.
I don’t agree that the two figures are remotely comparable as far as relevance is concerned. Kanin is not bad data. Kanin is good data. Kanin goes to great lengths to explain his methodology. We know that it is pertinant. We can tell its strengths and weaknesses. We can criticise it. We can make a judgement. That judgement is that it is weak support for the hypothesis.
The unfounded rapes figures has none of these virtues. It is an average of returns from police departments across the country, but we don’t know how those departments come by their figures, or whether they are even relevant to the matter at hand.
Take a look at this graphic. Do you know what they’re counting in, say San Antonio? I don’t, but it’s a fair bet that it’s something very different from what they’re counting in Phoenix. If they’re counting apples in San Antonio and oranges in Phoenix, then average of those figures is not even weak evidence for the number of pears.
But let me turn your argument on its head. If we reject the weak evidence for my tentative claim that false rape allegations are relatively common, why should we accept feminism’s firm conviction that they are very, very, rare.
Ampersand:
Yes. Thank you for rediscovering it.
What on earth makes you think that the reader be “given the context of the whole paragraph”. I first encountered a redacted version of this quotation here I challenge you to come up with a more deceptive edit.
How much responsibility does O’Reilly for a third-party edit? In so far as he basically set it up, I would say that he must have some.
would understand that when he says “five proven liars,” he means women who “maliciously tell lies and deliberately falsely accuse men of rapes that had never been committed.”
Those aren’t the only two sentences. He also says “the number of women who make false reports is negligible in comparison with the number of valid complainants”, “‘unfounded’ does not mean lying”, and “That is good enough evidence for me to conclude that most victims are telling the truth”
If you give these sentences the Harry O’Reilly meaning, then they’re all true and reasonable. If you give them their normal English meaning, they’re all either demonstrably false, or unsupported and probably false.
Where else do you see normal English words and phrases given quite different meanings? In politicised discourse, where else? Libertarianism, for example, is all perfectly logical and reasonable, once you realise that by such words as “violence” and “freedom”, they’re talking about something quite different from what you (and the rest of the English speaking world) mean by them.
That such an obviously intelligent person as you could be taken in by it, demonstrates how effective this kind of rhetoric is. He’s said nothing at all about the class of founded allegation. He’s given you no basis for drawing any conclusion about their truth or falsehood. All he’s done is demonstrate that the vast majority if not the totality of the 250 original unfounded ones really were false.
It demonstrates either deliberate distortion or incompetence. Either way, it undermines his credibility still further.
Daran: If we reject the weak evidence for my tentative claim that false rape allegations are relatively common, why should we accept feminism’s firm conviction that they are very, very, rare.
You yourself cited a recent study which showed that false rape allegations consist of about 2 or 3% of all such, and women bearing false witness against a specific assailant consists of somewhere between 0.25% and 0.28%.
You haven’t been able to come up with any evidence to support your faith that false rape allegations are much more common than any study of police records suggests. Yet you keep trying to claim that your faith is true, and the evidence is all just wrong.
Therefore, according to your own definition, your belief is a cult.
1. Certain particular statements are routinely asserted as though it were established facts. Check.
2. There is no substantiation for these alleged facts. Check.
3. A person who questions them is attacked, lied about, and vilified. Check.
4. A person who attempts to defend them, or who allows a fact-based discussion about their truth is attacked for so doing. Check.
Daren is a member of the “False Rape Allegations Cult”. Can anyone suggest a more amusing acronym to refer to his cult than FRAC?
Ampsand, I’ve just found another very interesting resource here
I do know that boys and girls are victimised by men and women.
I feel that minimizing the risk is extremely important and wish to see it reduced to zero. You on the other hand are quite happy for sex abuse to continue as long as it’s only women who get to do it.
I missed the point of MY argument. How cute.
I think I understand now. You see removing men AND women as implying that both genders are an equal risk. You clearly don’t like that idea. I wonder how different you are to those men you’ve been calling cry babies because they think it’s discriminatory.
Read what I said. If you don’t understand it read it again. Don’t blame me for your inadequate comprehension.
Sorry, my concern is the victims. Something you’re determined to ignore unless they fall into your approved categories.
Good grief.
Look I give in. You’d never lose an argument anyway because anyone who disagrees with you is a paedophile, a sook or a bimbo and possibly all three.
Your position is:
Men cannot be trusted to have unsupervised contact with kids.
Women can even if they are abusers.
Male victims don’t exist or if they do there are so few we can safely ignore them.
Victims of females, whether male OR female don’t count either.
I’ll posit this as a solution.
Men to have no contact with children that is not closely supervised by a woman.
Women are to be solely responsible for the protection of children. Sanction to be applied for failure.
Children to be taught that women are the only threat to their safety.
Seems to me that if I was the kid on that plane(or playground or school or wherever) you’d move a man who was almost certainly no threat, replace him with the woman who raped me and still think you had done the right thing.
How is that disciminatory? Nobody’s stopping you from setting up an equivalent establishment for women. Why insist that somebody else provide it for you?
That’s been my sense of it all along and is why I find this approach flawed. It only addresses part of the problem and it tells some of the victims that they aren’t worthy of protection.
I have no problem with this if we’re looking at the more traditional concept of rape. Arguably, without the use of a foreign object, a woman cannot rape a man. However given the much looser definition of rape nowadays we’re getting into much greyer territory. If the issue is “rape” as distinct from “sexual assault” this effectively makes it a gender specific crime.
Frankly, in a culture where men are conditioned to believe that women do not sexually offend and women are conditioned to believe in an epidemic of rape there is no way we’ll ever know the truth. Men will not report and women will.
Yeah, that different definition of rape being women’s definition of what men do to them rather than men’s charitable definition of what they consider to be good fun.
Your fixation on minimizing the rape of women by men makes me wonder what dog you have in this hunt. Same thing with Daran, his FRAC membership and his persistance in the face of considerable evidence makes it almost seem personal to you guys.
I now withdraw the claim even tentative, that false rape allegations are about as common as true ones.
I do so for three reason.
1. I was giving too much weight, in my thinking, to the University data cited in Kanin’s study, which is clearly of much lower quality than the data in the main part of the report. Had I based the claim solely upon the 41% figure, I should have said “between a third and a half of rape allegations are false”.
2. I had not considered what in retrospect is a blindingly obvious selection effect. Although I do not share the antifeminists agenda, it’s because of the noise that they make that I sought out this particular study, rather than any other. (“sought out”, because I refused to accept any version which has been edited to their agenda.) I should therefore have given more consideration to the question of whether this study is an outlier, since obviously as an amateur researcher whose primary resource is the internet, there are a great many references and studies I have not followed up, and consequently not figured into my thinking. (Hat tip to Jesurgislac whose allegations of personal bias on my part, though unjustified, lead me to this realisation).
3. In fact, I had concluded that the study’s findings were not outlying on the basis of Kanin’s own review of estimates in the literature ranging from 0.25% to 100%, which extremes are obviously not credible. I had assumed that this was an essentially exhaustive list, and that therefore there were no other credible figures, or if they were, then they would be evenly distributed between those extremes. Kanin himself is remiss on this point, since he could and should have discussed more of these finding. Brydon does, and the weight of them point to comparatively low rates of false reporting, (though much higher than 2-3%).
Kanin, therefore does indeed appear to be an outlier, as does O’Reilly on the other side. However, I do not think Kanin can be dismissed as I do O’Reilly. Brydon calls Kanin ‘the most impressive “false report” study’. Nevertheless, the field sans Kanin is not as vacuous as I thought, and clearly we need to look at these other studies. For the above reasons, I concur with Bryant that “Pending the results of further research, we can only say that the proportion of rape reports that are false may be higher than modern scholars usually suppose.”
The charge I make against Feminism stands. There is no basis in fact for its firm conviction that false reports are very, very rare. Jesurgislac’s countercharge against me of cultish thinking is, I hope, comprehensively refuted by the above retraction.
Christ, not as long as you keep stating the same essential belief. All you did was refute your allegiance to some anti feminist nut jobs. Your essential belief that women lie about rape in large numbers remains unchanged and it amoutns to fucking reinventing the damned wheel.
You assume tha women lie about rape in large numbers. This is frankly bullshit, and it ought to get you banned. On this one belief lie any number of sexist stereotypes of women, which is why some people fight so hard to continue to believe it. Whatever your use for this theory, you just want to belive that women lie.
By the way, I wanted to apologize to Daran for assuming earlier that he was pulling numbers out of the air. (From a different thread).
I hadn’t read the post and was making assumptions.
He’s pulling shitty numbers out of shitty research, so hey, don’t let that bother you.
I wanted to apologize to Daran for assuming earlier that he was pulling numbers out of the air. (From a different thread).
Accepted.
I wonder if there’s a club or something open only to people who have at some point apologised for something they’ve said on the internet.
Be rather exclusive, I would think.
I will be charitable and believe you really mean there’s a growing understanding of the impact of sex abuse on all it’s victims.
Illogical piece of ad hominem.
No I am not a rapist, nor am I a defender of rapists. However I do have first and second hand experience of children being raped by women.
No rape can minimize any other rape. Your implication is offensive and the logic utterly absurd.
You’ll enjoy this:
Women “lie, cheat and steal”
Gwallan:
Read the link provided, and all that confirms is that women are human beings. I notice that no study was done asking men the same questions to determine the general veracity of men in general.
I find the fact that the study serves to reinforce the onerous notion the women are less truthful than men disturbing. And it is weak evidence for your argument, because it in no way speaks to the heart of your arguments that women aren’t truthful about rape allegations.
Some women do lie, some women rape, and some even lie about it. But that in no way negates the fact that when you exclude prison rapes, women, not men, are the majority of victims. And men are the majority of rapists. (No, I do not ignore that men are victims too.)
Let’s stop arguing the basics of accepted evidence, and begin to look for solutions to these problems.
No argument from me. It was just somthing for Ginmar to chew over.
Actually I’ve not involved myself in the discussion on false allegations. It’s only obtusely related to rape anyway ie the number of false allegations bears no relationship to the actual number of rapes. They’re different crimes. The bee in my bonnet is really about non-reporting whether by men or women. There are far more actual rapes than false allegations and there is no such thing as a false or malicious non-report.
Some have to the extent of calling me a liar which I suggest they would never do to a woman. They are so intent on denying female wrong doing that they’ll even ignore the female victims of women.
As long as it’s the whole problem and not just the politically correct part of it.
My problem with these airline rules(and the cultural dynamic that leads to them) is that it says to victims of women that they’re not considered worthy of protection.
Gwallan: Some have to the extent of calling me a liar
Actually, as far as I can see, most people just get pissed off at you for de-railing every discussion. I’ve never seen anyone call you a liar, though you are just extremely annoying: always popping up and insisting that we pay attention to you, because you seem to feel that your problems are so much more important to everyone on the blog than any general discussion about sexual molestation could ever be. You behave like a spoiled child, screaming when ignored. I disbelieve most of your complaints about how you’ve been treated on blogs, online, because they simply do not reflect reality of how I’ve seen your irritating, aggressive behavior treated here.
My problem with these airline rules(and the cultural dynamic that leads to them) is that it says to victims of women that they’re not considered worthy of protection.
Got any actual examples of any woman ever molesting a strange child who happened to be sitting next to her on public transport? According to what I know about the rare examples of sexual molestation where women molest children, their victims are children they are responsible for, they are caring for. Whereas men tend to be so arrogant, sexually and in other ways – as you are, on this blog, constantly demanding we pay attention to you – that it’s relatively common for a man to think he can just make use of a girl (or sometimes aboy) who’s just temporarily available and vulnerable to him, that situation is so uncommon with a woman as the molester that I cannot think of any examples of it.
Mendy:
If that were true, then it wouldn’t be the first time a poll has been directed at one sex only, or asked different questions in a way which was essentially prejudicial.
To be fair to the pollsters, it’s not clear whether the poll was sexist, or merely the spin put on the story by the reporter. I’m not aware of any evidence that women in general are any more or any less honest than men, and given the obvious agenda , I wouldn’t consider this story to be evidence of anything at all, at least, not until I can examine the methodology and actual (i.e., not media reported) results of the poll
You seem to have confused me with Gwallan. It’s my argument, (which you distort by representing it as a general claim about women, rather than an explicitly weak claim about allegations made to the police). But it wasn’t me that introduced this ‘evidence’.
None of this is disputed by me. But that in no way negates the fact that the preponderance of evidence indicates that rate of false reports is much higher than the 2% claimed by Feminism.
Accepted by whom? And on what basis? It’s clear that ginmar and Jesurgislac ‘accept’ evidence which matches their ideological preference and reject evidence which contradict it, regardless of the scientific merits of the data. So the memoirs of a retired police officer a decade after the events described is a “study”, (comment #374), while a genuine study published in a peer reviewed journal is dismissed as “shitty” (comment #384).
To be able to solve a problem, you need to make a sincere, impartial, non ideologically-tainted effort to understand it.
There’s nothing wrong with how Koss asked her questions.
If she had claimed to be trying to discover how often men are raped, or if she had said her study showed how rape prevalence differs between male and female victims, that would have been wrong. But she didn’t make either of these claims. And I don’t buy that it’s prejudicial to study rape of women by men.
EDITED TO ADD: I also don’t see anything wrong, in principle, with a study of how often women lie, or anything else about women (or men) – although I’m bewildered as to why anyone would learn more about lying by asking women, rather than of a general population. (Koss decided to concentrate on female victims for her survey because virtually all the criminology literature agrees that women are the most likely victims of rape. I’m not aware of any scholarly literature showing that women are the most likely liars).
This particular survey about women lying seems to have been commissioned for a popular magazine. I can’t find any details about it, but offhand I doubt it was peer-reviewed or used good survey practices, since it seems to be aimed more at sensationalism than knowlege.
Ampersand:
It’s indicative of a world-view in which women are viewed solely as potential victims and men solely as potential rapists.
(Please do not assume that, because I make one particular criticism of Koss, I necessarily agree with other criticisms of her work.)
Mendy wrote “I find the fact that the [That’s Life Magazine] study serves to reinforce the onerous notion the women are less truthful than men disturbing.” I don’t feel disturbed, (maybe I have a higher disturbance threshold than she), but I agree that it’s prejudicial. Koss’s research was predicated on a similarly onerous notion.
We don’t know that they did. All we know is that this was the spin put on it in this news report.
In this post you say:
In fact it was Human Rights Watch that did the surveys, but this is a trivial error. According to you, Koss’s focus upon the victimhood of women was reasonable because the literature about non prison rape was overwhelmingly focused upon the victimhood of women, while HRW’s focus upon the victimhood of women was reasonable because the literature about prison rape was overwhelmingly focused upon the victimhood of men.
For all that there are minor differences in wording between the two quotes, your essential arguments in each case appear to be diametrically opposed.
Nor am I, but the mere fact that the stereotype exists is reason enough to study it.
There seems to be more than one magazine with that name. I agree with you that this ‘study’ should be presumed junk until proven otherwise.
Daran, you’re entirely ignoring (or perhaps simply unaware of) context in your eagerness to play “gotcha!” In context, both Koss and HRW (thanks for the correction) were doing the same thing – filling in holes in the literature.
HRW (iirc) was working in a context where there had already been several studies of male prison rape, including a pretty good one by Cindy Struckman-Johnson. In that context, doing a study of female prisoners – even though men are believed to be the majority of prison rape victims – made sense. (I don’t know if that’s what they were thinking, but that’s what I’d speculate).
Koss, on the other hand, began work on her survey many years earlier. At that time, the only real studies of rape prevalence were the FBI’s UCR numbers (which only counted reported rapes) and the NCVS, which had a rape section which was very badly designed. Koss, and many criminologists, believed that there was much more “hidden” rape that the numbers weren’t showing; it was that “hidden rape” that Koss wanted to study. Until Koss’ study, no one had attempted to design a survey instrument for measuring “hidden rape” prevalence in a large, fairly representative[*] sample, so Koss was in a very real sense in uncharted territory.
[*]Representative of college students, not of the whole population.
So Koss decided to concentrate on rape among young women, because the belief at that time was that if there was unmeasured “hidden rape,” it was mostly among young women.
Both HRW and Koss were concentrating their studies in areas which were largely unstudied – which is, as I said, a reasonable strategy. Both were filling in holes in the literature – at least, Koss was, and I suspect HRW was as well. Pretending that they both faced the same situation, in order to play “gotcha!” with my out-of-context statements, ignores the actual situation Koss faced.
EDITED TO ADD: Daran wrote:
I really dislike this method of criticizing studies. First of all, it’s ad hom – a study produces accurate results, or not, and it shouldn’t matter what the author’s “world-view” is. If the author’s world-view has led to a flaw in procedure or design, then the flaw in procedure or design – not the world-view – is where criticism ought be focused. On the other hand, if the author has come up with a good design, then the study might produce good results despite flaws in the author’s world-view. So world-view, in and of itself, proves nothing.
Second of all, since no one study can possibly cover everything in the world, no study can escape this critique – one can always claim that whatever the study didn’t cover indicates a blind spot in the author’s worldview.
P.S. I should add that rape prevalence, both in and out of prison, is horribly understudied for both sexes. At this point, I can’t begrudge any good study done of rape of either sex. There are a lot of studies doing small-scale versions of Koss’ work, but there’s not a lot of really substantive work, imo. Unfortunately, there’s not all that much funding available for this kind of research, although the recent anti-prison rape legislation, and VAWA, should help with that a bit.
I suggest you ponder the relative colours of pots and kettles.
Will you get off the bus please. The airline case is only relevant because it demonstrates our cultural prejudices.
Forgive me my obvious simplicity but didn’t you just call me a liar?
No where on this blog, that I recall, have you specified that the circumstances of your molestation or rape were a stranger taking advantage of you when you were temporarily available and vulnerable, in the way that a child on a plane is temporarily vulnerable to the person in the next seat.
Even if you have mentioned that, it’s not fair to expect that everyone else would remember such a detail.
So no, I don’t believe you’re being called a liar.
Daran:
I never said otherwise. Though I did find a few of Koss’s questions to be leading, her results have been duplicated many times over. So, even if that one study was flawed, other studies have been done with correct methodolgy that have replicated results that are very close to those that Koss’s study obtained.
On reflection I have to agree that there is no clear evidence that the study in and of itself was flawed, but until I can actually read the study and its results I will have to go with fact that the story itself was predjudiced and served only to reinforce the negative stereotype that women lie and can’t be trusted.
I am sorry if I confused your arguments with those of gwallan. But, I personally feel the that the conotation of your “weak claim” about false allegations to the police serves the same purpose in practice as does the general statement. I understand that you may not intend it to be taken that way, but there are those that would read that study and your “weak claim” and make the illogical leap that a majority of women lie about rape allegations. I agree that the number of false allegations is probably higher than the 2% statistic that is accepted, but I do not believe that it is greater than the total number of women raped in a year, and I choose to focus on fighting rape and sexual assault.
I find it interesting that you would assume that I would have the same thoughts about things as the other posters you’ve listed. I read all the statistical evidence that is given (in this thread as in others), and I make my own mind up from there. I do not consider myself to be a radical feminist, and so several of my posititions will not match those of radical feminism.
And I agree with your last statement, and I would include Patriarchy as an ideology that shouldn’t taint efforts to understand society’s ills anymore than racisim should. Again, this is just my personal opinion and shouldn’t be taken as indicitve of feminism as a whole.
[Edited to add: I never in any of my posts stated or implied that you are a liar. I have no reason to disbelieve any anecdotal evidence you wish to share, and I extend that courtesy to everyone. However, anecdotal evidence isn’t proof of a societal trend either and one individual’s experiences cannot be considered normative for the entire society either.]
Gwallan: Will you get off the bus please. The airline case is only relevant because it demonstrates our cultural prejudices.
Huh? It’s relevant because, as was cited already on this thread, there are specific examples of men molesting unaccompanied children sitting next to them on a plane, and there are many, many accounts of men molesting children, girls, and women temporarily made “available” on public transport. As I said, I can think of no account of a woman sexually molesting a child under those circumstances. To ignore the experience of women and children being molested by men and to claim it’s all just “cultural prejudices” suggests that you’re really not interested in protecting vulnerable children from men: you just want to attack women.
Forgive me my obvious simplicity but didn’t you just call me a liar?
Gwallan, in this entire thread, you’ve never once asserted that you were molested by a strange woman on public transport. This comment of yours strikes me as more of your predictable arrogance: it’s got to be all about you. Well, mostly, it’s not.
“Some have to the extent of calling me a liar which I suggest they would never do to a woman. They are so intent on denying female wrong doing that they’ll even ignore the female victims of women. ”
Gwallen: why is it that women can’t simply, and directly, discuss how men harm women? Why is it that men balk at this? How difficult should it be for women, in a public forum, to discuss the harm that men perpetrate against women? Because that harm does happen. Everyday. It isn’t rare, or unusual, or even unheard of. We aren’t here to discuss female wrongdoing. If we wanted to do that here, we sure as hell would do so. If we wanted to talk about how women, like me, have been raped by other women, we sure as hell would do that too. But that’s not what we want to do. We have yet to exhaust the topic of how men hurt women and how that is a socially condoned and normative experience. When we have exhausted that to our feminist satisfaction, then we’ll move on.
Further, you can’t possibly expect to see any relevance between debating or defining a patriarchal rape culture and claims of “but women do it too!” Show me the connection. Show me how saying “but women do it too” is the moral, political, and theorectical equivalent of defining a patriarchal rape culture. Forget statistics; I want theory, real theory. Show me the relevance of women’s gender when she is the rapist. If you cannot do that, but instead continually throw out “but women do it too!” you have a very weak and immature argument. Better yet, show me the relevance of women’s gender vis-a-vis her sex, and then show me the relevance of women’s gender when she is the rapist vis-a-vis gender as a hierachical power structure. Better still, let me see that you understand gender as a political and social force before you bleep out “but women do it too!”
Then, and only then, can we even get to the meat on the bone. Until then, you’re politics are transparent.
why is it that women can’t simply, and directly, discuss how men harm women? Why is it that men balk at this? How difficult should it be for women, in a public forum, to discuss the harm that men perpetrate against women? Because that harm does happen. Everyday. It isn’t rare, or unusual, or even unheard of. We aren’t here to discuss female wrongdoing. If we wanted to do that here, we sure as hell would do so. If we wanted to talk about how women, like me, have been raped by other women, we sure as hell would do that too. But that’s not what we want to do. We have yet to exhaust the topic of how men hurt women and how that is a socially condoned and normative experience. When we have exhausted that to our feminist satisfaction, then we’ll move on.
Hear, hear! Here, here! That is the best summation of the situation in oh so many threads here & why it is irrelevant. Thank you QGrrl.
As an attorney I can assure you that Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts monitor and control access for the same reason: liability.
Regardless of your ideologies of equality or essentialism, juries have their own realities. As much as it would be nice to pretend a leftist never-never land that should treat heterosexual soccer moms exactly the same way it treats bull dyke PE teachers, NAMBLA members, or homosexual b-boys, it just ain’t gonna happen.
As an attorney, I help my clients deal with the reality of the world, not some leftie dreamland. If they don’t do what I tell them, they WILL get sued, and they WILL pay.
Hey, wasn’t it leftist dreaming that brought you democracry in the first place?
No, no, Q. What brought you “democracy” was a bunch of wealthy White guys who were tired of smuggling and wanted to go legit without having a King charge ’em for it. :p
Samuel must’ve missed the memo that explained how often those PE teachers and soccer moms are either one-and-the-same or partnered with one another. Maybe it’s time I sent out another “chain” letter. :D
Myca writes:
And what exactly do magic unicorns have to do with statistics?
But you just admitted that it is possible that your statistics are off. So what exactly are you basing your assumption that the vast majority of rapes would be against women on? I have no problem stating that the majority of statistics, largely based on reported incidents, say that women are the majority of victims. I also have no problem stating that I do not believe we know just how many rapes occur, who does them, or who the victims are. Simply put, I am not afraid to say “I don’t know.” We do not know because most professionals state that most victims, particularly male victims, DO NOT report their assaults. That would include the police and also confidential studies.
Jaketk: I also have no problem stating that I do not believe we know just how many rapes occur, who does them, or who the victims are. Simply put, I am not afraid to say “I don’t know.”
Simply put, you are afraid* to say what we do know: that while we may not be certain how many rapes go unreported, nor be absolutely certain how many men who are raped fail to report their attacker, we do know that the vast majority of rapists are men.
And for some reason, we can also say for sure that you are unwilling to let male violence against women – rape and assault – be discussed, without disrupting the discussion, even though you have no new data to offer to justify your disruption.
*or unwilling