- If the above video isn’t showing, it’s because the heirs of David Foster Wallace have used a copyright claim to have it taken down. Read more about it, and sign the petition asking them to reconsider, here.
- Rob Tish at Waking Up Now did an extraordinary series of posts responding to a Catholic blogger’s list of anti-marriage-equality arguments. If you have a bit of time and want to read some excellent pro-SSM argumentation, pull up a chair and start reading.
- How will a mass influx of robots affect human employment? The answer is, it’s up to us. If we want, we can have a Star-Trek-like paradise where all basic needs are met and humans live lives of chosen work and leisure. But I suspect that we’ll just have gated communities for the rich and misery and starvation for everyone else.
- How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment – NYTimes.com
- Beauty, and What It Means: Wearing Stigma “It’s impossible to think of the performance of femininity without considering the ways that the performance is an exercise in stigma management. And it’s impossible to think of the ways women manage the stigma of their bodies without looking at fashion and beauty.”
- QUOTE: “When I was little, I thought the stars were a metaphor, something poets wrote about to inspire people. It wasn’t until I got glasses in second grade that I realized they were actually up there and everyone could see them.”
- Why Do Men Keep Putting Me in the Girlfriend-Zone?
- January 2008: Can Marriage Survive? | Cato Unbound An interesting essay by Stephanie Coontz and response essays by various folks.
- The Flaw in Many Humanitarian Arguments for War – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlantic
- On Writing While Privileged
- Having Chronic Pain Is…
- Social Power and the Central Park Five; Should a prosecutor be held responsible for locking up five innocent boys be training future lawyers at Columbia? There’s so much good in this Ta-Nehisi Coates post that I’m tempted to just quote the whole thing.
- 1 | A New Map Of The U.S., Created By How Our Dollar Bills Move
- Why Reading Or Watching News Is Bad For You
- Patrick Buchanan says that Christians will respond to gay marriage with civil disobedience. What on earth would civil disobedience look like, in this case? I mean, it’s cool if Pat wants to boycott attending gay weddings, but frankly I doubt he’s getting many invitations.
- The new anti-urban ideology of ruralism, followed up by Ruralism, Urbanism, Suburbanism. If returning to small-town roots is the right way to live, what should folks from big cities be doing?
- An experiment in paying villagers in one of India’s poorest states an unconditional basic income has been successful enough to change the government’s thinking.
- How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement Long but excellent post.
- I saw the new production of “Pippin” on Broadway. I wouldn’t say it was deep, but it was pretty spectacular.
Sweeney is the perfect accompaniment to a tough-on-crime comic. I bet the Judge had invested money in the prison industry.
The major Mass. law newspaper just published a lengthy article on the Goodridge gay-marriage decision(the 10th anniversary date is coming up in November) in which they explain that the owner in 2003 was a right wing anti-gay dude who wouldn’t let them go beyond “just the facts,” how upset all the staff was at the time; and how happy they are that (new owner) they can now officially say “yeah, this was the right thing to do, duh.” So they kicked off the hoped-for celebrations with a multi-page article. (sorry, paywall prevents linkage.)
I love my state.
Also, the “how can I get guys to keep from seeing me as girlfriend material?” article is fascinating.
Both the author and the typical “nice guy” complainer want other people to have different responses to them. Both the author and the typical “nice guy” complainer make pretty generalized judgments about the opposite-sex “offenders,” and don’t seem to be willing to take on much (any?) blame for the “unfair” disparity.
I don’t think the article is bad and I don’t think that the author is incorrect. For some reason that I can’t explain, I don’t find this nearly as troubling as many “nice guy” posts–I am really not sure why I feel that way, but I do.
Do y’all share my views that this is OK, or at least more-OK than a lot of “nice guy” stuff? If so, I think it’s interesting to reflect on why our reactions are so different.
After all, she says stuff like:
(classic nice guy)
Classic nice guy. The “doesn’t care about me as a person” line is an excuse because it is just a proxy for the speaker’s desires. If you want someone to love you romantically and they want to be friends, they “don’t care about you as a person.” If you want a friend and they DO love you romantically, vice versa.
As with “nice guys,” the author discusses non-acceptable manipulation. Unlike them, though, she seems to be rejecting it (maybe that’s why it comes off better.)
But still: is it appropriate to try and control another’s emotions like this? Is it more appropriate when preventing love than when attempting it?
As edited, this is almost verbatim “nice guy rant.” the similarity is pretty clear.
So others (a) see the similarity and (b) share my “not as bad, though I can’t say why” evaluation? I am interested to see how the femoblogosphere treats this.
Yeah, I see the similarity. Because it’s a deliberate satire of nice guy/friendzone posts.
—Myca
Like Myca, I think it’s a parody.
Oh, neat. That really should become a holiday, shouldn’t it?
It is similar, because it is a deliberate parody.
It ‘sounds less bad’, because humans (both male and female) are for some reason more likely to excuse certain behaviors depending on the subject’s gender. There’s a lot of research on this. Hell, there are sites on the internet which serve the typical Alex and X experiment, and keep track of the biases.
The experiment involves asking people to judge Alex’s behavior, and the judgements wildly swing depending on whether Alex’s partner has a male or female name. The funny thing is, the biases are pretty uniform across gender lines.
OMG. I totally just got Onioned.
Man, I am never going to live this one down.
[Ron’s comment has been moved to a new post of its own. –Amp]
I’ve entered in data on “Where’s George” when I come across a stamped bill. I just did a few days ago. One of these days I’m going to spend $10 on a rubber stamp (you can buy them online already formatted for the “Where’s George” site) and stamp a few new ones to see where they go.
Note how many of the dark blue lines are major rivers.
What would civil disobedience regarding opposition to gay marriage look like? Not that I’m advising any of this, but in no particular order:
1) Refusing to acknowledge in any form that a marriage bond exists between two people of the same sex. Do not use the word “husband”, “wife”, “spouse”, etc. to refer to someone’s partner.
2) If a government official, refuse to process forms or other data that would establish such. Yes, that would be illegal. Civil disobedience often is.
3) Refuse to provide services related to such (wedding cakes, reception space, marriage space in a wedding chapel, photography, etc.)
4) Refuse to publish announcements of such marriages or anything that acknowledges the existence of such unions in any newspaper or other media outlet one owns or works for.
The entire audio of David Foster Wallace’s speech was already online, and still is — without the cuts and without the Powerpoint sound effects. Also without the smiling white people being smiling white people, while we’re at it.
I can’t really think that there’s anything so valuable in the video version it’s worth petitioning for its return, when the original is one Google search away (admittedly, that Google search is now clogged with a lot of “news” about the video version).
Charles:
That. Is. Not. What. I. Said.
What I DID say was that rape survivors might somehow end up in the many categories of people to whom we might want to provide extra oversight in certain situations to ensure that they were actually consenting.
Yes. largely because he is–as you apparently are–much more interested in arguing with a general “G&W has said I am subhuman” straw man as opposed to actually addressing what I said.
Instead of the “Charles S. Summary” or “Ben Summary,” try block quotes. Because if you look at what I said rather than what you would prefer to argue with, you’d see this, which is a consistent example from my “beyond the pale” post:
Since when is focusing social resources to help people who have been mistreated a bad thing?
If you think that is not only wrong, but thread-banningly “beyond the pale,” then you, sir, are one scary and anti-social dude.
G&W,
Yes, let’s look at a block quote, shall we:
I realize that what you have written here is basically empty weasel words: “I’m not convinced” “evaluated in the same fashion” that point at a position that you clearly haven’t really given much thought to plus some sign-posts that you hold ill-considered and ignorant positions of contempt towards groups who it is generally considered socially acceptable to have contempt for: the use of scare quotes, “gimmick”, “those people”.
Declaring that you want to help people is not a free pass. There is a long and ugly history of attempting to “help” people whose capacity to consent is considered less than full capacity. You can pretend all you want that the only reasonable way to interpret “oversight” is to mean outreach and offering free kink-friendly mental health services, and that I must be some sort of monster to reject your beneficence, but that isn’t actually a reasonable interpretation of the word oversight, nor of safeguards.
Look, Amp has recently previously explained to you why he often doesn’t find you worth replying to. Maybe you should go back and reread that with some actual introspection, just as some helpful oversight. Because I have to warn you that “g&w” is edging closer to experiencing the same focused social resources as your previous pseudonym.
I’m not interested in parsing your phrasing further here, nor am I interested in the details of what you might now wish to claim you were intending to imply by “oversight” or “focused social resources” or any of the rest of your empty and innocuously phrased disparagement. Nor what silly insulting interpretations you can assign to my annoyance with you. When I banned you from that thread, I did not suggest you take it to an open thread. There was a reason for that.
We are done discussing your participation in that thread or you opinions on that topic. End of discussion.
If we want, we can have a Star-Trek-like paradise where all basic needs are met and humans live lives of chosen work and leisure.
Can we, really? The linked article doesn’t explain how we get rid of the people who maintain the robots, fix their errors, write their code, supply their parts and dig up the minerals that go into their circuits. Automated checkout machines still need a human supervisor. ATMs have been around for decades, yet we still have bank tellers. There’s a lot of handwaving in this article, probably because it drives links to tell the chattering class ‘we’ll do to you what we did to all those blue-collar workers you don’t give a fuck about’.
In re link 9 about various sorts of aid being a more effective way of helping people than violent intervention: what about letting people emigrate out of war/dictatorship zones? That’s fairly cheap, even if you help them after they arrive somewhere better.
Mythago – you could still have economic distinctions between citizens even if there’s a minimum level of wealth. OK, you want me to spend my spare time writing boring automated-mining-bot software instead of hanging in the holodeck with Virtual Valerie? I’m gonna need a much bigger apartment than the bozos who jerk off for a living get. Doesn’t mean the bozo apartment is crap; the bozo apartment can be a palace, and I’ll still have some motivation from getting to have the DOUBLE palace with the jello slide.
I think the idea behind the Star Trek economy is that the amount of work that people would do just for the joy of it (considerable), plus the amount of work that people can be incentivized to do with preferential positioning in the economy that remains, plus the super-cheap-or-free automated labor that we can deploy anytime we need to, is going to be sufficient to get done what needs to be done. Even most of the crap jobs I’ve ever done in life, are jobs at least a component of which I could see doing voluntarily, if food and shelter and Virtual Valerie tokens weren’t something I had to pay for out of my productivity.
I can’t remember which thread it was, but I recently complained about the recent, and horrible, department of education letter.
A variety of people raised the protest that, in their view, the letter was no different than the 2001 standards. I tried to explain (poorly, I think) why that was not true.
Now the experts have spoken. Here is a detailed explanation of why the 2013 letter is very different from the 2001 version.
Mythago – you could still have economic distinctions between citizens even if there’s a minimum level of wealth
Sure. The fiction is not that we’ll all live in huge apartments; it’s that we’ll magically make all scutwork and drudgery disappear.
Thanks for posting that link, g&w.
Yes, thanks for the link.
Are there any links that aren’t at… well, “The Fire” or similar sites? I’ve learned to not give them traffic.
What do you have against FIRE? They only focus on educational speech rights, and take a broad “protect free speech” position, true–but within that highly-limited focus they’re pretty straightforward and do a lot of excellent work.
You may or may not agree with their views, of course. A lot of these rights (and outcomes) are in conflict. A desire to prioritize free speech has consequences, just as a desire to prioritize due process rights also has consequences. You may or may not like the consequences of broad free speech rights; lots of people feel that way.
But that’s just SOP for politics, and FIRE is by no means a partisan or extremist group. Not to mention that free speech is, relatively speaking, fairly neutral in a political sense (unlike, say, gun rights or abortion rights.) I’ve never seen anyone who is literally unwilling to click on the site: are you sure you are not confusing FIRE with something else?
UPDATE:
The OCR has recently issued a new email (I’m not sure how official it is) which appears to address some (most? all?) of the concerns regarding its earlier edict.
http://thefire.org/article/15857.html
The 1st amendment position in the email seems reasonable. So does the consideration of subjectivity (at least if you give it a broad reading as discussed below.) The general “the earlier edict didn’t mean what you say it did” seems pretty ridiculous, but in the long run it doesn’t matter.
So I guess the question now is different: If this is what OCR meant to say, is OCR going to officially clarify its ruling so that people will know OCR’s official position? That would make the most sense and seems like a good demand.
BTW, for those who don’t know harassment law…. OCR said:
This is the normal standard. Harassment needs to be subjectively AND objectively offensive. You can’t have an allegation of harassment without an accusation of subjective offense–you can insult your best friend and it’s not harassment if they like it, even if an objective party would be horrified at what you said. But you can’t rely only on subjective harassment, because there’s no telling what offends people and some of it isn’t objectively reasonable: (“You’re offending me.” “I’m offended by your accusation of offense.” “I’m offended by your response.” And so on.)
FIRE used to be noticeably right-wing, giving a pass to censorship of left-wing views on campus (for instance, professors who have been punished in some way for criticizing Israel). I haven’t done any careful study, but it has seemed to be subjectively that FIRE has been better about this in the last couple of years.
I can’t help translating “OCR” as “Optical Character Recognition.” I keep wondering how that’s issued regulations or emails…
That is correct. They added more liberals* to the board and have become more centrist.
That said: Academia is liberal (both types). Many speech code changes and most of the due process changes these days are driven by new-school liberal thought. As a practical matter it seems likely that a generalized defense of free speech on campus will often end up on the opposite side of liberals and will be opposed to new liberals even more often. In the academic context, anti-establishment arguments will often appear conservative, irrespective of the motivations.
*By which I mean old-school liberals on the “enhance civil liberties” side and not new-school liberals on the “enhance social justice” side. Those two classes are often in conflict, often w/r/t free speech. It’s the old “your rights end where my offense begins” argument writ large. Unsurprisingly, there aren’t many new-school liberals on the FIRE team.
Everything I’ve seen from The Fire suggests to me that they’re mostly interested in protecting the rights of heterosexuals, whites, males, and highly religious students to make those unlike them feel unwanted, unwelcome, and unsafe on campus, while relying on a rather vile mixture of arguments like “sexual harassment is mostly made up to retaliate against men” and “Republican/religious students don’t like being told that learning sometimes involves questioning their beliefs and recognizing their participation in systems of oppression” and “if religious students can’t tell everyone how terrible fags are, they’re being censored” and “requiring verbalized consent for sexual interactions is oppressing men and encouraging women to cry rape.”
Who are you quoting?
Points to FIRE for publishing the OCR letter that clearly refutes their previous interpretations. I am glad to see that my previous reading of the UoM agreement was correct, and that this was a non-issue.
Points also to you, g&w, for posting it here. Thanks.
I don’t see any particular need for OCR to do something more public than respond to queries, particularly given that their response to the query has been promulgated through one of the venues that was promulgating the misinterpretation. Unless there is any reason to think the UoM officials were engaging in the same misreading, then nothing needs to be officially corrected. I have a hard time imagining that UoM officials were engaging in a misreading of the agreement that required the introduction of radically new policies and promised expensive and embarrassing court cases that they would eventually lose, given that a reading that required no such thing was easily available simply by reading the agreement within the context of existing policy.
Like I said: new liberal / old liberal. Right?
People who focus on free speech and civil liberties (like FIRE) would suggest that the solution would be more speech, etc. If someone felt unwanted they would view that as a bad outcome, but an unfortunate consequence of the more-important values of free speech and civil liberties.
You (and other new-liberal folks) might value “protecting Joe from Ken’s speech” as a benefit that exceeds the cost of “limiting Ken’s speech.” That’s not a fringe view; even though I think you’re wrong it’s obvious that there isn’t a “right” answer in an objective sense. Lots of intelligent folks have different opinions on this.
But it’s not reasonable to call free-speech folks conservative or hypocritical unless they start switching positions when the “hurt party” is a conservative, or when the party seeking protection is a liberal. FIRE doesn’t do that. It takes causes on behalf of liberals.
Also, FIRE has been very clear that the precedents it is seeking to establish are broadly applicable. A law which prevents a school from forcing the Christian Club to admit atheists like me, acts as precedent to protect a school from forcing the Atheist Club to accept priests. FIRE is very smart in case selection, and it tends to choose cases which have precedential value AND which are winnable.
Huh? Seriously? Quote, please.
Now I’m really confused: since when do you think this is vile? This could be copied from a post on this blog and I wouldn’t be surprised.
Well, yes. If you restrict their speech, that’s censorship, which carries a cost. If you don’t restrict your speech, they’ll offend others, which also carries a cost. That’s just reality. I don’t think the old-liberal stance in favor of free speech is “vile” but you’re welcome to disagree.
This one’s pretty vile, especially the use of the word “oppressing.”
That said, as a practical matter, changes in due process mostly DO have an effect on men: Men are the category who is most likely to commit assault, of course. Men are also much more likely to be accused (for obvious reasons.) And men are therefore much more likely to be falsely accused (if you’re more likely to be accused and a given % are false, you’re also more likely to be falsely accused; this isn’t a jab a false %ages.) . And of course, if you combine a significant change in due process with the oft-repeated feminist truism that “women never lie about sexual assault,” you can end up with a pretty significant effect. Or you can end up with, say, college disciplinary boards who evaluate rape cases and have members who state that denying the charges might be proof of guilt because, of course, that’s what rapists would do. headdesk.
This is just reality; as with free speech and offense: It is what it is. These changes may not be a bad thing and may even be a good thing; your conclusion depends on your worldview. Certainly it is nothing new. The balance between “protect the victim” and “convict the guilty” and “protect the wrongly accused” happens in the court system on a regular basis.
But as with free speech & offense: analyzing the issue; or pointing out the pros and cons; or taking a side in a debate that is “obviously not obvious,” are all perfectly reasonable things to do.
I now have TWO KITTENS!!!
God, they are cute.
Awesome! Congrats!
Email me a pic of the kittens and I’ll post it in this thread. (Really, that offer applies to anyone reading this who has pets.)
Yay for kittens. May they grow up to be strong, healthy loving cats who live long and happy lives.
College disciplinary boards are not going to declare guilt if they don’t have to. They have to report the number of sexual assaults on campus, and anything they can to do game those numbers low, they’ll do.
Admittedly I am behind on attending my Feminist Conspiracy meetings, but I have not heard ‘women never lie about sexual assault’ as some kind of “oft-repeated truism”.
Did you miss this, Amp? It’s awesome:
http://thehawkeyeinitiative.com/post/50432219744/special-guest-edition-the-hawkeye-initiative-irl
Mythago: Huh? Do you seriously dispute that feminists generally take the position that women who report a sexual assault are not lying, and should/must be believed?
I’ve seen that about a hundred times. I could probably find a hundred links. Heck, folks were discussing the viewpoint on this blog (among other places) back in 2006 and it wasn’t exactly a new thing back then.
In fact, the concept that women don’t lie about rape–and the corollary, which is that the legal standards of rape should match women’s assessment of rape –are the functional underpinning of most of the feminist movements to limit due process for the accused and/or to make convictions easier: it is, of course, the foundational assumption for every comparison between “reports and convictions,” and is the primary fuel behind the push for conviction rates to match “reality.” Such as, say, this chart.**
Frankly I think that in the criminal justice context we have done a perfectly reasonable job of protecting the rights of the accused; I don’t think that there is any particular cause to think that false accusations are a real issue. Sure, some people lie, but women aren’t any more likely to lie than anyone else.
But that is in a setting where people are taking oaths of neutrality, are under a judge’s supervision, are subject to voir dire, etc. In that context, people with general prejudice against a class of victims/accuseds don’t seem much more likely than anyone else to allow their personal biases to control their ultimate conclusion.
My point is that the particular due process issues involved in college are different. First of all, they often don’t have trained overseers who can talk about bias; they don’t have peremptory challenges or voir dire; they don’t have appeals; they often have limited defenses; etc. And of course they tend to have vastly different apportionment of resources: if you’re a victim you are eligible to receive a variety of services but there are on “public defenders.”
As such they are particularly susceptible to bias. So the simultaneous changes of standard of proof and evaluation of bias leads to some pretty big problems. I think these things should be handled in the courts.
Do you seriously dispute that feminists generally take the position that women who report a sexual assault are not lying, and should/must be believed?
“Should/must”? C’mon, you’re a smart guy and a lawyer. Surely you know those are not synonyms. Similarly, “false reports of rape are extremely rare” and “you should believe someone who says they have been raped” are not the same as “women never lie about sexual assault.”
The link you cite to, by the way, does not say that women never, ever lie about sexual assault. It’s talking about women who do not use the label “rape” for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it was a sexual assault, and addressing the question of whether ‘believe women’ means that if a woman says “It wasn’t rape because I had sex with him once a couple of years ago” we should accept that as objectively true:
Let me back up a bit: WITHOUT RESTRICTING IT TO WOMEN OR RAPE, what does “lie” mean to you, in the context of accusing someone of a criminal act?
Does it mean that someone knowingly and intentionally lies about the entire thing, because they are trying to frame the accused? This is very rare, to be sure.
Does it mean that someone makes a factual claim in the course of a trial/hearing, intending to be correct, but they are actually wrong? This is much less rare and probably pretty common; people make factual mistakes all the time.
Does it mean that someone embellishes and/or selectively omits testimony–possibly intentionally, maybe with a bit of peer pressure, possibly without making a specific internal decision or really “meaning to” do it–to help achieve the outcome they want at trial? This is pretty common.
Does it mean that someone honestly believes that the defendant should be convicted of a crime, but the accuser doesn’t realize that the defendant’s actual behavior didn’t meet the restrictively-defined legal standards for the particular crime? This is also, fairly common.
The only definition which we have reason to put in the “extremely rare” category is the first one, which is maliciously false accusations. But that’s a tiny percentage of all the “things that accusers say that aren’t true,” which laypeople correctly refer to as “lies.”
Yeah, I know: they aren’t lies, really, they’re just “misstatements” or “errors” or what have you. Those are distinctions without much of a difference, in the “you’ve been named as a defendant” context.
It’s not that women lie, it’s that people lie. All people. All the time.
In particular, people who have a vested interest in a particular outcome will usually try to achieve that interest, whether subconsciously or intentionally. And people whose testimony is the primary factor in determining that outcome, lie even more. And people who face cognitive dissonance as a result of truth-telling tend to lie even more.
Which, of course, is a
prettyoutstandingly good match for many types of rape cases… on both sides.Now, back to feminism and “women don’t lie about rape:” I maintain that feminists generally would reject the concept that women would
liefail to be objectively correct about rape. And I maintain that most feminists would by no means limit the rejection to the (truly rare) “malicious framing” kind of situation.I maintain that to be true because I’ve been arguing the civil-rights perspective for a number of years in a variety of locations, and it’s been routinely rejected–not with a factual response, mind you, but because it is “pro-rape,” “enabling rape culture,” “supporting rapists,” and so on.
G&W, what does the word “never” mean to you? I think that’s a pretty essential qualifier in the phrase you attributed to feminists generally, and not one that many feminists would agree with.
I certainly agree with Mythago that the post of mine that you cited was in no way an example of me saying “women never lie about rape.”
I have heard feminists say “believe women!” or whatnot, but I think this is more of a political slogan than a literal claim about statistics. (As I discuss in detail at that post of mine you linked to).
And by the way, I think laypeople actually have a pretty clear idea of the distinction between an honest error and a lie. Do the people you hang out with really not make such a distinction?
gin-and-whiskey, the “feminist truism” you propose is not made in the context of criminal charges. There is no “feminism truism” that if a woman says she was raped, then we take that as sufficient evidence to judge the accused guilty of a crime. If it were, then there would be no feminist truism that “the percentage of false reports of rape is the same as for any other crime” because feminists would not believe in false reports of rape.
The very link you provided is Amp saying that ‘believe survivors’ is about refuting rape myths. Why do you keep digging?
First, to fix my miscommunication:
Oh, sorry, complete mixup: I wasn’t citing that to suggest that you were saying “women never lie about rape.” Nor do I think that you DO subscribe to the party line.
I was citing it in support of my argument that this is a strong party line, and to demonstrate that even in 2006 the “women never lie about rape” meme was all over the place–which is why you were discussing it.
Literally, “never” means “never,” as in “not even once, ever.” Literally, statements such as “women never lie about rape” or “women don’t lie about rape” are, obviously, false–even the most stringent feminists appear to acknowledge that there are a non-zero number of false accusations.
But since they continue to rely on the “women never lie about rape” or “women don’t lie about rape” memes, it is clear that feminists are not using the literal meanings of those phrases. Instead, they’re using the common rhetorical tactic which equates “never” with “very rarely,” and so on.
I don’t really agree.
Yes, there are certainly feminists who are both anti-rape and willing to consider the civil rights of defendants, even in the context of discussing a rape case. I’m one; you’re one; Amp is one.
But there is certainly a depressingly large contingent who (for example) suggests that an accused should be required to affirmatively prove the presence of consent. And there is a much larger contingent who believes that the systemic failures are demonstrated by a lack of convictions, and who are strongly in support of changing the laws and processes to make convictions much more frequent–generally in conjunction with a press for stronger rape shield laws, which have the overall effect of making it harder to determine when/if accusers are lying. And so on.
Also, I’m not sure that the “context of criminal charges” or even “in the context of the court system” aren’t a cop-out. Because what is almost certainly happening, of course, is that feminists are promoting alternate means of punishment because many of these cases don’t win in the court system.
I’m not actually all that concerned about the “women don’t lie about rape” meme in the context of the criminal system, largely because the entire system is designed to handle that sort of thing.
I am much more concerned–and I wrote this post–by the attempt to use back-door alternatives to the court system, primarily as a means of obtaining results (whether “punishment for accused” or “protection for the accuser”) when you can’t otherwise get them in the court system.
That’s worth restating: the push for alternate systems is because people can’t obtain the results they want through an existing system, even at the “preponderance” standard. Which should say quite a bit about the issue.
After all, we have a preponderance standard in civil court right now, and rape is actionable in all 50 states. And our courts are perfectly capable of imposing temporary or protective orders; they do it every day. Restraining orders use a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard and are often granted ex parte for short period, without giving the accused a chance to make a defense. And on the criminal side: while conviction is a “reasonable dout” question, an arraignment requires only probable cause, which doesn’t even need to be “more likely than not.”
You don’t need a due-process-limited, non-jury, non-appealable, preponderance-level case before god knows who, in order to get help with sexual assault. You do need it, of course, if you’re unwilling to testify under oath. Or to be cross examined. Or to have your case analyzed by a trained fact-finder and/or jury, rather than by a student disciplinary council and/or a random administrator. Or to be able to get the accused some initial punishment without meeting the restraining order standard. And so on.
Well, at least we seem to agree that there’s a feminist truism that “the percentage of false reports of rape is the same as for any other crime”which is a bit of a start ;)
GNW, I think it might be helpful if you were to offer some links and quotes to back up your claims. Thus far the only link you’ve provided is for discussion of a different matter, and there seems to be general consensus that it’s not really what we’re talking about.
If it’s as prevalent in feminist circles as you’re claiming, backup shouldn’t be hard to come by.
—Myca
Maybe. It’s hard for me to predict whether that’s true because, in the context of rape, I rarely see anything other than the “malicious framing” discussed, by anyone, feminist, antifeminist, or otherwise. If you’re interested in discussing other types of lies or unintentional inaccuracies (I can’t make “lie” mean something unintentional in my head), the original prefeminist meme that “malicious framing” is common could almost be looked at as one long derail that feminism has been responding to.
g&w, there’s not much point in having a discussion when your position is “Yes, that’s true, but I’m going to discard that now and repeat myself.”
There is no widespread feminist trope that women never lie about rape. As has been pointed out over and over, “Believe women when they say they were raped” (which is, thankfully, becoming “believe people who say they were raped”) does not mean that women never, ever lie about rape or that there is no such thing as a false rape report. It means, as you acknowledged and then ignored, “Set aside the rape myths that say we should immediately question anyone who says they were raped, and take their word for it, just as you would if a friend said her car was stolen.”
Regarding the criminal justice system, I don’t know who this “contingent” is or how large they supposedly are. Are we talking about a few blog commenters at Twisty’s place? The only “contingent” I am aware of talking about this might be Catherine Mackinnon, who did not advocate for witness testimony being sufficient for conviction; she’s proposed lowering the burden of proof from “reasonable doubt”. Certainly I, and a lot of people, have issues with that, but even her position is a far cry from suggesting that “believe women” is actually an evidentiary standard that anyone is seriously proposing.
This looks to be an interesting experiment that will be well worth watching over the next year or two; at least if the Government of Spain follows their central bank’s suggestion:
The Bank of Spain recommended on Friday to suspend the country’s minimum wage to tackle record high youth unemployment of 57.2%.
The quote above is from the primary source, which is linked in the first sentence of the link I give. I give that link because I think the commentary is interesting.
Mythago:
I can’t answer for “widespread”, but people have certainly expressed that very proposition to me here on this blog.
I do not think that anyone literate could believe “Women never lie about rape.” All it takes is one example to disprove this, and I’m not going to bother choosing from the documented ones of which I am aware.
I strongly doubt that “There are as many false reports of rape as there are for any other crime”, because “any other crime” includes murder, and it is a bit harder to accuse someone of murder when there is no body, than it is to accuse someone of rape when there was no sex. It is also harder to accuse someone of murder with a body resulting from an legal killing/accident/self-defense than it is to accuse someone of rape when there was consensual sex/prostitution. That said, it is possible the statement is true. I know of false accusations of murder without a body.
I can easily believe “Women rarely consciously lie about having been raped”, because that will take care of “She honestly thought that she had been raped, despite the fact that what happened is not legally rape”, and because “rarely” is very flexible. But this is not a good rallying cry, and a very weak argument for creating exceptions for how the legal system handles rapes, as opposed to other crimes. So, yes, I have read “Women do not lie about rape” on this very blog, and not once or twice. While this statement is equivalent to “Women never lie about rape”, I just view as what it is – useful rhetoric that no one sane believes.
Given that the discussion has shifted somewhat from discussing the topic to discussing the semantics of the topic, I figured that as someone whose day job it is to discuss semantics, I should point out that “Women do not lie about rape” and “Women never lie about rape” are not equivalent sentences in English – the former is a generic sentence, the latter is a universal sentence. This is an important distinction as generic sentences allow exceptions, but universal sentences do not. It is a perfectly rational for people to believe and argue the former while not believing and arguing the latter.
(Note that none of the above is a statement about what what women do or what feminists believe, it’s just a point about a linguistic distinction that came up in the above discussion).
Now, this is derailing the derail, but I have to point out that the point of view “Generic sentences are useful, but strictly speaking false, and should be avoided in any important exchange of information” is quite common amongst engineers. As a matter of fact, I have had heard variations of the above sentence at least twice during classes. Not from people whose day job is discussing semantics, of course.
———-
Actually, I stand corrected. BY people whose day job is semantics.
Even the big heads at MIT cannot agree whether generic sentences should be encoded as tripartite quantificational sentences or as monadic predictions. But you are of course right. In neither case, are they equivalent to the false predicate that most closely matches them. Personally, I stick to what I was taught in Liebesman’s class: always stick a “Typically” in positive ones, and a “Rarely” in negative ones, and you will make it easier for everyone – human or machine.
@Sebastian, your second paragraph makes no sense unless you talked yourself out of that first sentence. That said, I don’t get why it’s hard to believe; the statistics are for reports of crimes where the report is actually false, not unsubstantiated or where charges were not pressed for whatever reason.
Eytan’s point is that there is a difference between “cats have four legs” and “cats always have four legs”. The first is a general statement about cats that is true but is not destroyed if you point to a cat that lost a leg in an accident. The latter is an absolute assertion, and one that doesn’t stand up to a minute of thinking.
Mythago, there is nothing I can say about the second paragraph that I have not already said. If you choose to believe that there are as many people who would dare make a false accusation of murder (A) without a body or (B) with a body not resulting from murder as there are people who would dare make a false accusation of rape (A) without sex having occurred or (B) without non-consensual sex, we’ll just have to say that our instincts about probabilities are wrong. Or maybe my English is impossible to understand.
Speaking of my English: I have no idea how anyone reading my second post could think that I do not understand what generic sentences are. I admitted that saying ‘equivalent’ was wrong by listing the two ways people encode generic sentences.
In this case, the meanings are “Typically, women do not lie about rape.” and “Chances are, a woman talking about rape isn’t lying.” But neither of these two is really as potent as “Women do not lie about rape” when trying to take away constitutional protections from people accused of rape, is it? So, people use generic sentences… so that their listeners don’t automatically start thinking where we would be if we started deciding court cases on 50.00001% probability.
Evidence evidence evidence evidence evidence evidence.
Goddammit.
The ratio of ‘wild claims’ to ‘actual citations’ here is starting to approach Vince Foster/bigfoot/truther levels.
If all of these ‘women never lie about rape’ claims are as obviously widespread on THIS! VERY! BLOG! as some of y’all are claiming, please please please please give me a goddamned blockquote and link.
It’s not that I think that claims near that are never made, it’s that I think they’re much less common, much less strong, and much less defended than some of you seem to think.
—Myca
They told me that if I voted for John McCain that the Federal government would become “Big Brother” and start looking at all the phone calls we made – and they were right!
Maybe. There are some caveats to the story:
We sure do need to find out. You can tell there’s a Democrat in the White House, by the way – because if there was a Republican in the White House this would be the front page story on the New York Times this morning.
Funny, RonF, but I’m looking at the New York Times’ site right now and it is on the front page this morning, as the very first story. (I also saw it yesterday on that noted liberal rag, the LA Times.)
Your MSM conspiracy stuff isn’t any more convincing than when you spouting birtherism.
ETA: Also on that noted bastion of stodgy conservative thought, the San Francisco Chronicle. Keep digging, Ron.
You mean, because you’re objecting to this?
—Myca
Beaten to it but, yeah, that’s been on the front page of the Times app since before I went to bed last night, RonF.
What I’ve been missing so far – because I haven’t watched it – are the wild speculations coming from FauxNews about this. I’m sure that this is the scandal we’ve been waiting for. The one that leads to impeachment.
It’s also on the front page of today’s physical New York Times, but only barely, as a teaser headline at the bottom of the front page, telling readers to turn to page A16 for the full story.
What’s curious to me about the physical NYT front page is that it seems to be about a day behind – the big story is Susan Rice’s appointment, which is a story that broke about 20 hours ago. I’ll be curious to see if the Verizon wiretap story is more prominent in the physical paper tomorrow – I expect it will be, judging from its top status on the website.
Ron’s failed attempt to turn this into a partisan issue aside, he does touch on a disturbing issue, which is that Obama has killed opposition to this sort of thing as a Democratic Party position. Obama’s betrayal of his base on a whole range of so-called security issues is, I think, the single most despicable thing Obama has done. For the foreseeable future, there will be no credible candidate for President to vote for, from either party, who opposes this sort of abuse of power. There is no viable candidate to vote for if you want to vote against the President running roughshod over the 4th Amendment.
(There are politicians in both parties who oppose this sort of thing, but they are not the sort of “centrist” politicians who end up being credible candidates for President).
Myca: search for ‘ginmar’ and ‘rape’ on this blog and you’ll find all the strong statements you want.
Great point, Robert, and thanks for making it.
Let’s do that!
So remember, we’re looking for something along the lines of “women never lie about rape,” or “women don’t lie about rape.” By resorting to Ginmar, of course you’re already conceding that this isn’t as widespread or widely defended as people seem to be saying, as she’s notorious for being a contentious figure, even with other feminists, but still. Let’s check it out.
I’m only going to look through the first couple of posts, both because it’s a hassle and because doing someone else’s homework isn’t my idea of a good time.
Rape survey at Air Force Academy shows big problem – which it probably underestimates.
Ginmar Comments:
Hmm. Okay, nothing there that could be reasonably characterized as “women never lie about rape,” or “women don’t lie about rape.”
Next.
Rape Shield Laws and the Kobe Bryant Case
Nope, nothing there either.
I’ve looked through a couple more posts further down the googlerank slide, but haven’t found anything in those. I’ve not read through everything Ginmar has written here, certainly, but ~50 of her comments or so.
So does anyone who’s actually making these claims want to provide evidence?
—Myca
Well, I’ll freely cop to the fact that for once the NYT has finally got on board and caught me off base. My bad, and good for the New York Times.
Myca, I certainly objected when Pres. Bush did it as well. My objection to violation of civil rights and intrusive government is non-partisan.
mythago, please cite at any point where I held that Pres. Obama was not born in the U.S. I believe you’ll find that at every point where I said that he should produce a birth certificate I also said that I was sure he was born in the U.S. – doubt of which was the central point of “birtherism”.
Amp, your bringing up of Pres. Obama’s betrayal of his base and credibility of future candidates leads to a couple of comments. First, I quite agree with you that the nomination of Susan Rice to be NSA deserves – and hopefully will get – more light from the MSM. Second, the NYT has an editorial today on the very matter of Pres. Obama’s credibility. Some excerpts:
a) Which was blindingly obvious to anyone who’s familiar with Pres. Obama’s background and how the political environment he was formed in operates.
b) If any organization is an expert on losing credibility it would be the NYT. But maybe they’re trying to reclaim it.
Hm. A Constitutional right to privacy. Seems to me that the whole right to an abortion was based on finding a right to privacy in the Constitution and that Pres. Obama is a strong supporter of this right. Supposedly. And one of the main points of the genesis of the Tea Party Movement was the attempt to bring about that fundamental shift they’re talking about here by the present Administration.
Anyone who listens to Sen. Feinstein talk about guns, the 2nd Amendment and the various anti-civil rights legislation she’s proposed has heard her say LOTS of absurd things, so this I suppose is no surprise. Has she always just uncritically fallen right in line with whatever the current Administration wants, or does it just seem that way lately?
There’s even more good stuff in the editorial about how Pres. Obama is doing other kinds of things (like the killing of at least one American citizen with a drone) and trying to sweep them under the rug. But again – this is the Chicago way. True, Presidents have always tried to accumulate power. But the hypocrisy of the contrast between Sen. Obama and Pres. Obama is breathtaking, and the complicity of his partisan colleagues in the legislature after what they themselves said about Pres. Bush is just amazing. Talk about partisanship vs. protecting the people’s rights.
I seem to recall getting told something along the lines of “if a woman says she’s been raped, believe it” by ginmar or someone during the discussion of the Duke Lacrosse case. If memory serves, that was a while back. But that was about 1/2 a dozen posts and God knows how many comments, so I’m not slogging through that.
Or maybe that wasn’t it. JHTDC, how long HAVE I been reading this blog?
Seems to me this is the Presidential way.
I take it you’ve never seen the debate between Governor Bush and President Bush?
Look. People who run for President (never mind people who become President) are not likely to be people that you or I would consider good or trustworthy people. It takes enormous ambition and willingness to screw over others (friends or not) to be in position to become President. I wouldn’t trust a single one of the Presidents in my conscious lifetime with anything I held dear. We just reign in our criticism and outrage a bit when the guy who is closer to our political beliefs is in power. Perfectly understandable.
Sure, but even that, which I have not been able to find on a quick read-through of a 1/2 dozen of the threads, is not remotely the same as, “women never lie about rape.”
Unless someone wants to try to dig up evidence, I’m declaring this whole line of argument a pile of misogynist strawfeminist lies, and frankly, everyone who repeated it over and over owes the rest of us an apology. You were full of shit, and you should feel bad about it.
—Myca
RonF @61: Actually, I was referring to your longstanding habit of not wanting to spend ten seconds fact-checking something if it might disprove an opinion or a gut feeling – say, actually surfing over to nytimes.com to see if they in fact had the story up – and sometimes of ignoring fact-checking when it’s inconvenient. For example, your concern-trolling that Obama could dispel all this birther stuff if he just opened his birth certificate to independent verification, even after it was previously pointed out to you that the birth certificate had been independently examined.
While you certainly don’t bear all of the blame for this nonsense, we’ve gone from “women never lie about rape” being a feminist truism to the view of a small but troubling feminist minority to something like something Ginmar maybe said once I dunno but maybe you can Google it for me.
Concur with Myca: For fuck’s sake.
Well, I didn’t repeat it over and over, but I will say that I was wrong.
I’ll *apologize* for suggesting that you look something up with the Alas search function, which appears to have been created as a first draft effort at an online war crime, by someone who hates data and hates searchers and hates text and hates, frankly, America and the baby Jesus.
Your search function is a piece of dingo shit, is what I’m getting at, Amp.
So then I went and searched with a search engine NOT engineered by monkeys (and not the high-quality monkeys, with go-getter attitudes and HTML skills. Idiot monkeys who regularly misfire when they fling their own dung. Defense contractor welfare monkeys who, because they never actually learned about banks, don’t know what to do with their checks. Very low grade monkeys, is what I’m getting at, Amp.) and looked at, like, 20 posts where Ginmar wrote on or related to rape.
And holy crap did she say some rude and offensive things (and I said a few epically dumb things as well) but, she never did say this that I could find. And so I was wrong, and mea culpa.
Heh. That’s the out-of-the-box WordPress search box, and it’s pretty darn good considering that it was built by trained monkeys using only scotch tape and dingo shit, which is to say it’s awful.
To tell you the truth, I’ve sort of forgotten it’s even there; when I need to search for something on “Alas,” I go to Google. Maybe I should just remove it from the sidebar? Would anyone miss it?
I think what’s being referred to is the assertion that the default assumption should not be “since women very commonly lie about rape, the woman I am talking to is currently lying.” That you should apply basically the same standards to an acquaintance telling you “I was mugged” and “I was raped.” Which, if person is a liar who sucks and is trying to explain to you why you should lend them an extra $1000, maybe you don’t believe them. But absent weird circumstances, you don’t tend to say, “I dunno, I’m pretty sure that you fell off your bike and your wallet accidentally got emptied into the gutter.”
It’s not meant to be a legal tenet or anything.
Should straight actors play gay roles? The curious case of gayface.
Jake: Seems to me this is the Presidential way.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
I take it you’ve never seen the debate between Governor Bush and President Bush?
Can’t think of one offhand. But don’t take that as disputing your point, I’m sure there’s fitting examples out there. And that actually segues to this:
Obama sponsored bill that would have made Verizon order illegal
Myca & mythago: Hm. Seems we’re rotating around whether “women never lie about rape” = “if a woman says she’s been raped, believe her”. I must say that despite the analysis presented upthread my reaction when hearing the latter was that the former is what the speaker meant. But I also took it at face value as that it was what that one person thought. What I did not say (and don’t think) is that it’s a widespread/generally accepted principle of feminism that this is so. Lord knows that I have no body of knowledge regarding feminism that would permit me to honestly represent ANY particular thought or proposition as such.
Mythago:
Consider the fact that the sample of my comments here would be skewed towards false positives – in other words, you never see the bullshit that I’ve seen on various websites and have checked and found out “ah, that’s BULLSHIT” (or at least can’t be verified) and then not posted it. It’s been a lot. The noise:signal ratio out there can get pretty high. Yeah, the comment about the NYT was off-the-cuff and wrong. It was snark without checking first and I consider my wrist justly slapped.
Frankly I’m surprised. The MSM is getting a little feisty lately. The latest bit about PRISM using search records from Google, Microsoft et. al. was front-page above the fold in today’s Chicago Tribune. I suspect that going after the AP reporters’ records may prove to have been a mistake. As (hm, attributions for this one are all over the map) once said, “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.”
By the way – just continuing my thought from before, I understand Ron is no longer arguing this case – the physical New York Times today has a huge front page headline about the web data-gathering story, at the top of the page. I forget how much quicker news comes on the web than in print.
If you go to my post #60, click on my first link and then compare the first excerpt I cited to the actual content you’d justly think I was a very dishonest person. It would appear that I edited
down to
significantly changing the meaning of the quote (my italics, to emphasize the change). So let the record show that I didn’t edit it. The NYT did. And didn’t note that edit (or according to the Daily Caller link, a few others) in the new version.
Personally I think they had it right the first time ….
In very fine and light grey print at the bottom of the editorial it says “A version of this editorial appeared in print on June 7, 2013, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: President Obama’s Dragnet.” I wonder what version?
There is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjJAIuQz9D8
RonF:
This is (as I’ve pointed out before) certainly not true.
Robert:
Thanks, I appreciate it, and yeah, it was neither you nor RonF I was thinking of.
I generally use Google’s search functionality, though as I was scouring the admin side of the site yesterday for one comment I’d made more than 2 years ago, I was wondering whether there’s some sort of improved search plugin for WordPress. I would love something that let you search for “comment from [[NAME]] containing [[STRING]]”
Mandolin:
RonF:
I think of “believe women who say they’ve been raped” as occupying the same mindspace as “believe kids who say they’ve been molested.” Belief ought to be the default.
Surely, Ron, you can see how weird it would be for someone to respond to, “believe kids when they say they’ve been molested,” with “SO YOU’RE SAYING KIDS NEVER LIE?”
Wouldn’t you find that initial reaction a little … creepy?
It’s creepy for a couple of reasons. Both because, “Why on Earth does the thought of believing kids who say they’ve been abused offend you so much” and because the implication that “kids never lie” wasn’t there! Some kids lie. (Some of everyone lies.) Start off by believing them because the consequences of doing otherwise are so horrific.
By saying this, BTW, I’m not attempting to infantilize women, but rather to say that women have been infantilized, and that the automatic skepticism on matters of rape is part of that.
—Myca
My response would be “If a kid says he’s been molested it should always taken seriously and be investigated.” And if a kid or parent tells me their child has been abused (and it’s happened, more than once) I do just that. I drop everything, take all the steps outlined in the BSA Youth Protection policies and check it out thoroughly.
But I would never make the blanket statement “Believe kids when they say they’ve been molested” – because it’s possible that they ARE lying. I’ve seen kids do some pretty malicious things.
Bolivian man buried alive with body of woman he is suspected of murdering
When someone says that they’ve been molested, raped, robbed, assaulted, etc., I assume that they’re telling me the truth unless there’s a clear and obvious reason to think otherwise.
That’s the point. I don’t evaluate the truth of, “My uncle touches me,” any differently than I’d evaluate the truth of, “this kid knocked me down and stole my bike,” or, “on my way to work this morning, I got held up.”
—Myca
Myca & mythago: Hm. Seems we’re rotating around whether “women never lie about rape” = “if a woman says she’s been raped, believe her”
I don’t know what you mean by “rotating around”, unless by that you mean “ignoring many detailed statements about what ‘believe victims’ is about, some i this very thread”. As has been pointed out over and over and for the love of Ubizmo should I just put this on a macro already, “believe women” does not mean “because women never ever lie, and because that is solid evidence that should be used to lock men up with no further evidence”; it’s about countering the special and hostile treatment accorded rape victims:
Should I start a pool on how many times this needs to be referenced before “yes, buuuuuuut……” stops?
Ampersand:
I just wanted to point out that Ozy Frantz’ blog appears to be deleted by the author and that your blogroll software now displays titles of The Good Men Project articles while linking to a “this blog is deleted” wordpress page. I suspect zie’s not interested in having zie’s name associated with TGMP article titles given zie’s disassociation with TGMP/NSWATM a while back.
Oh, that’s too bad. Hopefully Ozy’s blog will return, but in the meanwhile I’ve taken it off the blogroll. Thanks for the heads up.
That may be a context that’s understood by feminists, but it’s not one understood by me. I don’t have any understanding that thinking that women habitually falsely accuse men of rape is a traditional belief. So when I hear someone say that, my understanding is that said person thinks that women don’t lie about rape.
And that’s not going to change, because the fact that a feminist tells me that there is a traditional belief that women habitually falsely accuse men of rape is not on the face of it going to convince me that such a “traditional belief” is in fact a traditional belief. After all, I know a lot of men – and women – and I have not observed such.
So while a feminist talking to other feminists might say something like that and be understood in the context you reference, saying it on a public vehicle such as a blog will communicate an entirely different concept. And that’s not the public’s fault. If you want to communicate to people, you have to understand who you’re talking to and what meaning your words will have to them.
FYI, I’m not ducking. I’m just busy as shit. Myca’s request is perfectly reasonable, and I’ll either be back with evidence or a “shit, no evidence; I was wrong” post.
Thanks, gin-and-whiskey. Like I said, I’m totally open to evidence, I just haven’t seen any thus far.
—Myca
That may be a context that’s understood by feminists, but it’s not one understood by me.
You can lead a horse to water, but if he’s ideologically opposed to admitting that drinking is a thing….
Incidentally, this is also why there was a large-scale move towards a ‘believe kids who say they’ve been molested’ narrative. Remember how all of a sudden in the mid-80’s, adults on sesame Street could see Mr. Snuffleupagus? That was a deliberate move on the part of the writers – they didn’t want to reinforce the “adults won’t believe you, because you’re kids,” narrative.
Also wanted to quote something else Mythago said upthread:
This is why there’s a difference between “believe kids” or “believe women” and “women never lie/kids never-ever-ever lie.” It is true that cats have four legs. it is also true that some cats have three legs. This is not a contradiction.
—Myca
Regarding whether or not it’s a problem that women are not believed when they say someone has raped them, see this New York Times article about the situation in South Africa. Some salient quotes:
And then later:
One could, of course, choose to believe that we, here in the US, are far more civilized than “those people over there,” wherever “there” happens to be in your imagination, but I doubt there’s much evidence of any kind that would change that kind of thinking. There is a reason why we have had such a fraught discussion in this country about the nature of consent and about what does or does not constitute evidence of rape in a court of law; one part of that reason has been the ubiquity of people who believed that when a woman failed to run away or scream or fight back with sufficient force those things constituted “defects” in her story which couldn’t “be ignored” and so were understood to be evidence that she wasn’t really raped. In other words, she wasn’t believed.
Re: One could, of course, choose to believe that we, here in the US, are far more civilized than “those people over there,” wherever “there” happens to be in your imagination, but I doubt there’s much evidence of any kind that would change that kind of thinking.
I must be missing something here, because I’m having difficulty understanding what you even me. Of course it would be difficult to change that kind of thinking, because that sort of thinking is, uh, true? As bad as the rape problem is in America, you cannot seriously be suggesting that we *aren’t* better on this front (and many others) than South Africa, or, for example, northern India.
Sexual violence is *epidemic* both in south Africa and in northern India, as well as in some other parts of the world (Afghans, Pakistanis, Australian Aborigines, etc.). So I’m not sure quite how a story from South Africa is relevant to the American situation.
Hector:
I don’t have time to respond in detail right now, so I will say these three things:
1. It is convenient that you take the first sentence out of context as if it has no relation to the sentences which follow. Granted, it is not the most elegantly constructed paragraph, but I would think the logical connections I was making between and among the sentences are not that hard to follow.
2. Sexual violence against women is a global problem, not one of individual nations, with remarkable continuities in how the problem is framed, how the violence is understood, how it is justified, how it is excused prosecuted, etc., across national boundaries.
3. As to whether or not we are “better” here than “they” are “over there,” I suspect that whether or not you think violence against women is epidemic here depends on where you are willing to look, not to mention whether or not you are willing to recognize the violence as violence. (Which is not intended as an accusation against you personally.)
Re: Sexual violence against women is a global problem, not one of individual nations, with remarkable continuities in how the problem is framed, how the violence is understood, how it is justified, how it is excused prosecuted, etc., across national boundaries.
Yes, and no. That’s true in a relatively vacuous sense- sexual violence does in fact exist in every country in the world. In a more important sense, of course, it’s false. The prevalence, and the degree to which it’s culturally accepted, varies tremendously between cultures. Sweden today, for example, has the third highest rape rate in the world. Almost none of this is the fault of the Swedes themselves: the rapes are being committed by Pakistani, Afghan and Somalian immigrants, who apparently have very little interest in conforming to the values of a decent society, and who have imported their own backward cultural norms into Sweden. The Swedes’ commitment to tolerance and multiculturalism is, I think, a big part of the problem, and undermines the efforts to deal with sexual violence. (Rod Dreher had a great thread on this last month).
In any case, the reason I bring it up here is because I think it’s ludicrous to compare the rape problem in South Africa- in which it is, actually, epidemic- to the rape problem here. The two are simply not comparable.
First of all, it’s nearly impossible to directly compare official Swedish rape prevalence statistics to those of other countries. Sweden doesn’t have the highest rape prevalence in the world; it has the highest rape reporting and rape counting prevalence in the world.
Second of all, you didn’t source your claims. The overwhelming majority of the sites making the “Muslim immigrants are mass raping Swedish women!” claim are far-right sites and often blatantly racist sites. The idea that Sweden is dealing with a huge wave of immigrant criminal violence (as opposed to protests) is hard to square with some of the statistics (such as the incredibly low Swedish murder rate). Do you have an actual source, perhaps in a respectable peer-reviewed journal, to support your claim?
Third, is there a source which measures rape prevalence in the US and in South Africa using a similar high-quality methodology? If not, then I don’t know what basis you have for making your final paragraph’s claim.
On second thought, I’m not inclined to allow a long discussion of Swedish rape rates here.
My thoughts are: (1) American rape issues are more than enough for discussion, and (2) virtually all of the best and most nuanced information on how Swedish rape statistics are gathered and what they mean is presumably in Swedish, a language I suspect few or none of us read.
I’ve read a lot more about rape statistics than most people, and it’s not a simple subject. I can’t imagine that anyone who didn’t understand written English would be able to find out enough to have any decent understanding of what the various [U.S.] rape prevalence statistics measure and how they differ; similarly, it’s hard for me to imagine that we’d be able to understand what’s going on with Swedish rape statistics.
Am I wrong about any of this?
Re: The idea that Sweden is dealing with a huge wave of immigrant criminal violence (as opposed to protests) is hard to square with some of the statistics (such as the incredibly low Swedish murder rate).
Not really. Sweden doesn’t have many guns, hence a lower murder rate. Several West European countries have violent crime rates that are fairly high, but relatively few *murders*, because of the strict gun control.
@Ampersand, the point you’re missing is that Hector dislikes multiculturalism. Whether there is the slightest evidence that any commitment to multiculturalism has a thing to do with sexual-assault rates is beside the point.
Mythago,
I didnt bring up cross cultural issues, Richard Jeffrey Newman did. He brought up South Africa and cross cultural rates, in a manner that I considered mocking towards cultural conservatives, so I responded.
Well, let’s see. (TW for the rest of this comment.) I’ve included things that are victim-blamey in the implied “she secretly wanted it” way, though not the implied “she deserved what she got for dressing that way in public” way. I’ve also included things along the lines of, “Well, that wasn’t REALLY rape.” And I’ll mention that I’ve never seen a discussion about this issue where somebody didn’t explicitly point out that this attitude is in opposition to the many, many people who automatically don’t believe rape victims. But in any case…
There’s the Wisconsin state representative who made headlines last fall for saying–to a newspaper!–“some women rape easy”. His defense for that comment was, “What the whole genesis of it was, it was advice to me, telling me, ‘If you’re going to go down that road, you may have consensual sex that night and then the next morning it may be rape.’ So the way he said it was, ‘Just remember, Roger, some girls, they rape so easy. It may be rape the next morning.'”
Also last fall, Todd Akin’s comments about pregnancies not resulting from “legitimate rape” only makes sense if you think there is a division between legitimate rape and other kinds of rape. Actually, I don’t even have to make that case: Rep. Phil Gingrey of Georgia did it for me, as reported by the Daily News.
In a similar vein, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act whose original language only specified exceptions for “forcible rape”.
Googling something like “regret in the morning rape” turns up pages and pages of sites with commentary like:
and
Some of the people defending Roman Polanski.
An Orange County judge was publicly admonished for saying at a sentencing hearing in 2008:
Manboobz on an elder statesman of the MRA movement:
One of the volunteer coaches of the Steubenville, OH high school football team:
Or this New York Times article about the multiple gang rapes of an 11-year-old girl by 20 different teenagers and adult men over a 4-month period:
(and here’s Mother Jones on various problems with the reporting in that article)
And speaking of that case, the defense characterized the assaults this way:
Those were all things I pulled off the top of my head from the last 5 or so years. More generally:
An article about studies on percentage of rape reports which are false, which includes a quote from a 1952 Yale Law Journal article:
and things like the police surgeon who studied 34 rape cases from 1969-1974 and said a case was false if the victim wasn’t upset, seriously injured, or disheveled, or if she made the report after a delay.
Hey, look, there’s a whole victim-blaming tag at Jezebel!
Or you could Google rape culture.
(I’ll also note, since it’s relevant to some things upthread: this NPR story discusses a study done by the Center for Public Integrity on the handling of sexual assault cases on university campuses. One thing in it I hadn’t heard before was that a number of college administrators would like these cases to be tried through the criminal system but the local prosecutors won’t take them, so the administrators feel that they have to address it somehow internally.)
Hector:
Actually, I brought up cross-cultural attitudes, not rates. More importantly, though, Harlequin’s comment is far more effective a response to Ron’s comment than mine was.
Harlequin, I have no doubt that it’s easy to go onto the Internet and find a collection of fools that have ass-backwards attitudes towards sexuality and rape. But you can find a collection of fools that have ass-backwards attitudes towards anything. That doesn’t mean that you can presume that the attitude of fools is my understanding or that it’s most people’s understanding, and that therefore most people reading the statement made won’t make the same presumption I did.
This obviously needs repeating.
It’s a matter of basic communications. When you tell people something you have to ask yourself “How will the people I’m talking to understand what I’ve said?” The fact that you think they are not thinking correctly doesn’t change what you actually communicate.
It’s not actually that hard to understand. We’re explaining it to you like you’re a child not because it’s all that difficult, but because you seem really dedicated to not understanding the plain meaning of sentences.
When I say, “I believe my wife,” nobody honestly thinks I’m saying, “my wife has never lied or been mistaken.” I’m saying that I give my wife the benefit of the doubt and believe the things she says unless I have a good reason to do otherwise.
—Myca