Tags
abuse tw, but ozy where's the part of the post with solutions?, fucked if I know, ozy blog post, rape tw
[Commenting Note: This post is absolutely not a place to host discussion of certain recent events in the rationalist community. Comments referring to those events will be deleted and the commenter banned.]
Let’s say you have a community. Like most communities, it has harassers and abusive people in it. For whatever reason (the actions don’t rise to the status of ‘crime,’ the victims would prefer not to bring the police into it, or your community is leery of the police), you can’t go to the police. What do you do about the problem?
There are three primary ways I’ve seen people I know respond to the problem, and all of them– while suited for some problems– are imperfect.
Whisper Networks
A whisper network is when someone pulls you aside and says “hey, watch out for Alice– she’s a rapist.” When you see Alice flirting with someone new, you pull them aside and warn them.
There are three big problems with whisper networks.
First, whisper networks are often inaccurate. Sometimes people make false accusations, for various reasons, including most tragically an abuser accusing the person they’re abusing of abuse. Sometimes the accusation itself is not false, but gets changed or exaggerated as people gossip: I myself have seen an accusation of harassment transform into an accusation of rape. Sometimes people hear “so-and-so is a harasser” from three or four different people and conclude that they’re a serial harasser, when in reality the person fucked up one time while they’re drunk. Neither the accused nor people who might have witnessed the event have the chance to give their own perspective on events.
It’s not just inaccurate in the “false accusations” direction, either: whisper networks can make it really fucking hard to put together a pattern. Many people won’t bring up an interaction that made them feel somewhat uncomfortable but isn’t a big deal, unless they know it happened to a dozen other people. Sometimes there are four or five events, each individually somewhat minor, that together add up to a pattern of serial harassment– but no one knows about all five of the events.
Second, whisper networks never get to everyone. New people, relatively marginal members of the community, and people who are widely disliked will almost never hear the accusations. These people are likely to be some of the most vulnerable to abusers and harassers. Whisper networks might protect the well-connected, but they do so at the expense of those who are less well-connected.
Third, whisper networks have a major missing stair problem. Even if you manage to warn everyone to stay away from Alice, the result is that Alice continues to be part of your group and you have to put constant effort into making sure that everyone is aware of Alice’s bad behavior. Eventually you’re going to think someone else told the new person, eventually someone’s going to not believe you and decide to give her a chance, eventually someone is going to forget to assign her her Rape Babysitter…
And then someone gets raped.
Callouts
A callout is when someone publicly posts– perhaps on social media or a blog that many members of your community read– a list of all the misdeeds a person commits.
Callouts get a bad rap. Partially, this is because a lot of callouts are about genuinely trivial issues, and many callouts that aren’t about trivial issues pad themselves out with a bunch of trivial issues. (“Alice not only commits rape, she’s also an aphobe!”)
But there are also lots of problems even with callouts about genuinely serious issues.
A callout is inherently public. That’s its advantage over the whisper network: new and marginal people can see the callout and the accused can write up a defense. But that also creates a whole host of new problems.
It is really, really unpleasant to be a victim making a public callout. You have to think about an experience that might be painful or traumatizing. People will be passing judgment on your reliability. Sometimes people will send you hate, or dig through your past to find reasons you’re a Bad Victim, or deny your pain and trauma. You can lose friendships. For sufficiently public callouts, it may show up on Google for your name, and you can find yourself explaining the situation to future employers. (You can use a pseudonym sometimes, of course, but then you have to worry about being doxxed.)
Because the experience is so unpleasant for the victim, many victims refuse to participate in public callouts. It’s generally considered unethical to share private information against someone’s will, particularly if it causes them misery. If you anonymize the accusations to protect the victim, they’re less credible. If you just say “I’ve investigated it and Alice is a rapist,” it’s less credible still.
If the accusation is false, it can be really hard to retract the accusation.
If the accusation is true, it may follow the perpetrator for the rest of their lives. That might be a desirable outcome for some misdeeds, like rape or abuse. But if you harassed someone when you were eighteen, and it was ten years ago, and you’ve changed and haven’t harassed anyone since, the callout might still be in the first page of Google results for your name. (Some victims, aware of this, will refuse to participate in callout posts because they don’t think it’s fair to punish someone forever for harassing them; then you get the problems I discussed with public callouts.)
Some communities, such as the kink community and the feminist community, have counter-communities of unpleasant people who hate them. Members of these communities can access public callout posts and use them to smear the entire community. In addition to being unpleasant, this makes victims less likely to want to participate. Similarly, the callout post may be a subject for voyeuristic gossip on the part of uninvolved people, which the people involved may find very unpleasant.
Expulsion
Expulsion is simple. You investigate the claim. In some cases, you might have a designated point person whose job is to investigate claims of rape, abuse, and harassment; in other cases, this might be part of the job of the moderator, store owner, party host, or other person who gets to decide who’s allowed in a particular space. If the person in charge finds that the charge is validated, that person is no longer allowed in the space.
Assuming the person doing the investigating is honest, capable, and willing to expel harassers and abusers, expulsion is absolutely the best method of dealing with harassment, rape, and abuse accusations. It protects future victims and allows past victims to participate fully in the community.
However, it only works for relatively centralized communities. If you’re no longer allowed in a game store, a church, an online forum, or a club, you can be successfully expelled from the community built around that game store, church, online forum, or club. On the other hand, some communities are relatively decentralized: they’re extended groups of friends, and the community spans dozens of meetups, parties, events, knitting circles, and book clubs.
There’s a word for communities where the leaders can say “no one talk to this person anymore” and that immediately causes everyone to stop inviting them to every meetup, party, event, knitting circle, and book club. That word is “cult.”
In non-cultish communities, sometimes a person is going to decide that Alice is her friend, she believes Alice and not some silly community leader, and Alice is absolutely going to come to every one of her parties. That’s actually good: it’s an important protective factor against Alice being expelled from the community because she brings up uncomfortable truths or says things popular people disagree with or defends abused people. But it means that expulsion is inherently limited as a tool to protect against abusers, harassers, and rapists.
Thing of Things 
Another thing about whisper networks is that in my experience, they’re basically never run intentionally, as a separate security measure, that people in the community are interested in spreading to new members. Instead, they piggyback on non-essential gossip and drama: “Haven’t you heard? Bob broke up with Carol on Valentine’s Day eve! Not to mention that he’s friends with Alice – and she’s a rapist.” So to access essential safety information, you have to be (1) allowed to participate in gossip (for which you have to first be fairly close friends with more than one gossiper) and (2) be willing to gossip. This is really bad if you’re like me, such that gossip and drama are devastating for your mental health, and whenever they happen, you want to run into a bomb shelter and enter cryostasis until the shitstorm is over. But instead of doing that, if I want to have information essential for my safety, I have to go participate in gossip and drama, and then recover from the damage they do to my brain. This is bad.
LikeLiked by 4 people
There’s a word for a whisper network that’s run intentionally, as a separate security measure. It’s “blacklist”. People do try it from time to time, for example the Hollywood blacklist in the 50s and the “Shitty Media Men” list recently. When the fact of the blacklist inevitably gets out, the people responsible for it look bad, even though the threat of communism or sexual harassment or whatever is real and serious.
LikeLiked by 1 person
… Should I understand your comment as supporting the idea that there was indeed a communist threat in 50s Hollywood ?
LikeLike
There was a real threat of communist infiltration in the 50s. I don’t think I’d go as far as to say Hollywood was actually an important nexus of that threat.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Sometimes people make false accusations, for various reasons, including most tragically an abuser accusing the person they’re abusing of abuse.”
This is a problem with all three methods. I was in this situation years ago, and my abusers were able to take advantage of whisper networks, public callouts, and expulsion to isolate and harass me. Any community that values safety simply must have a process in place to reliably confirm factual allegations. Without that, the community simply sides with the highest status member and/or the best storyteller.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Oops, didn’t mean to have that name be “anon.” It should be “Wes”
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s the problem in the example: how do you know Alice is a rapist? Somebody told you. How does the next person you tell know Alice is a rapist? You told them. Eventually someone is going to have to ask “So, what’s the evidence that Alice is a rapist?” and if you’re lucky, you’ll have a long chain of “Joe told Bill told Sue told Annie told Sam told Kenton told me that Alice is a rapist” where Joe is credible and has factual evidence of this and witnesses to back the accusation up.
If you’re not lucky, it’s all “someone told someone told me” and whatever the original evidence, the original people have left the group, or aren’t willing to talk publicly about it, or nobody knows exactly who first said it and warned everyone.
LikeLike
The problem is that whisper networks are unable to know the number of accusers.
LikeLike
Ideally, you’d have an impartial arbiter who is trained in and follows proper procedures, that strike a good balance between the rights of the accuser and of the accused. Then both the accuser and the accused have someone supporting them who know about those procedures and who try to ensure that the relevant information is presented to the arbiter.
Anyway…I hope my point is clear.
I think that above a certain level of seriousness, trying to reinvent the legal system is folly and quite harmful. If the legal system is faulty. It should improved, not evaded in favor of informal systems that merely seem better because they exist in so many different variants that are generally so chaotic and inconsistent that it is hard for people to see how poorly they function. The poor experiences are then so varied that it is hard to get a group together to improve them. The legal system does have flaws, but the flaws are relatively predictable and can thus be addressed more easily.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The problem is that the legal system is meant only to deal with the things that are so bad we’re willing to use the coercive power of the state to deal with them. Smaller communities need ways of enforcing codes of conduct that are made to meet the needs of their members. Rape is illegal, but a lot of what we consider harassment isn’t, and even if someone is convicted as a harasser, they’re usually not going to get thrown in jail (and even if they are, they’ll get let out after a relatively short period). Much of what we consider abuse is perfectly legal. Misgendering people is legal. Using racial slurs is legal. Communities need ways of encouraging good behavior aside from just the legal system.
The other issue is that we have some measure of control over our communities, and very little over the legal system. For the legal system to change, it takes a massive amount of coordination of huge groups of people. Most communities operate on a much smaller scale, so it’s easier and faster to implement necessary reforms. Saying that we need to fix the legal system instead of dealing with this ourselves is basically saying that we shouldn’t deal with it.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Sure, but then we actually need to limit those mechanisms to the relatively mild fouls, let the punishment be low in severity and accept that the quality of the process is going to be poor.
I see a lot of people who honestly seem to believe that they can do much better than the legal system and that severe issues should be handled this way. That is the path of vigilantism.
The question is whether people are actually capable of such moderation. Frankly, SJ doesn’t have a particular good track record of this (see Title IX tribunals & Damore).
Nerd environments often get accused by SJ advocates of not policing enough, but from my perspective, this is a fairly logical consequence of nerds often being low status & low in EQ and thus likely to lose out in (semi-)informal systems, not getting justice as accuser or the accused. So they err strongly on the side of less policing, since any policing that they had experience with was usually strongly unfair against them (or at least perceived that way).
Of course, the community around this blog tends to both nerdy and SJ, so it is a place where the perspective and limitations of low status and/or low EQ people do get taken fairly seriously, but in the normal world it’s the high status and high EQ people who tend to take advantage of systems like these at the expense of ‘us’.
And if you try to exclude these people from your community to prevent that, you better hope that your community is so low status that they are are not interested, because they will attack the community as a whole if they are. However, amazingly it seems that fewer and fewer communities are considered low status enough for more normal people to not want to push in and change it to their liking at the expense of the subculture.
One of the first things these people tend to fight for is these kinds of (semi-)informal systems that generally seem to be applied inconsistently right away, with a strong bias in favor of the outsider and against the subculture. So I don’t particularly trust them. Of course, AFAIK the majority of the readership here has a trait that gives them [+5 social power] in any informal dispute, so I can see how this would lead to greater trust in such systems.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Do you mean trans status ? Because per the 2016 LW Diaspora Survey, only 22% of Thing of Things regular readers are trans.
LikeLike
No, I was talking about women. SSC is overwhelmingly men and my impression is that thingsofthings readership is majority women. But I’m not very confident about that last claim, to be honest.
It does seem that women favor such ‘paralegal*’ systems more, which I attribute partly to them being generally biased towards women when it comes to abuse disputes.
I’m very unsure what the effect of being a transwoman is in an abuse dispute in a blue environment. I would guess that in a dispute with a man, she would be judged as a woman and in a conflict with a woman, more as a man. But I’m sure that there are many people here more qualified to address that.
* I’m unhappy how this word is used in English
LikeLike
@Aapje
Still no. 34% of Thing of Things regular readers are women. 2% are nonbinary. 65% are men.
(Also, my last number on trans people was incorrect. Only 14% of Thing of Things regular readers are trans.)
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks for the correction 🙂
LikeLike
In most cases, a trans woman (in a dispute with a cis woman) will be judged, explicitly or unconsciously, as “a man”, or at least someone who was “socialized male”, “not a true woman”, or even in some cases (if people outright hate trans women which exists even in some SJ circles…), a “freak”, “a monster”, “a delusional person” etc
LikeLike
The state tends to have only two options for punishment: “nothing” and “ruin your life forever”. Like, imagine that your community has a harasser, and this harasser is an immigrant (not yet a naturalized citizen) – specifically, an openly gay man originally from Iran. The only possible outcome of reporting him to the police is that he gets deported and then executed. Most forms of harassment should result in punishment, but probably none should result in death – and yet it’s the only form of punishment that the state offers in this case. And yes, ideally, it’s the system that needs to be fixed, but this problem is gonna stay unchanged for decades. In the mean time, communities need to implement mechanisms for delivering retaliation that’s between “do nothing” and “kill the perpetrator” in its intensity.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Excessive punishment may be a valid concern in the US (or Russia). In my country, the courts do not generally do that. A celebrity killed a person while drunk driving and got 30 days of community service and a 1 year driver license suspension. That doesn’t seem excessive to me. I also don’t see progressives in the US fight for reduced sentences for abuse cases. Clinton was harsh on crime with his silly 3-strike law. Under Obama the focus was on reducing drug sentencing. This may have been what was achievable politically, but I don’t see activists fight for across the board sentence reduction much either.
As for your concern/example about a criminal refugee, I suspect that this has little bearing on the choices that abused people normally make. To start with, the US allows in a really small number of refugees. In 2016, a peak year, it was just 85k. In 2015, a Dutch peak year, we had 82k for a much smaller country. Germany has had a peak over a million. The chance that the perpetrator is a refugee is really quite low in the US. I don’t think it is very useful to argue as if a special case is the typical case.
Also, the US government is supposed to uphold non-refoulement, which they may do imperfectly, but it is US law. So your claim that the only possible outcome is deportation and death seems to assume that US officials always break the law, which is a rather radical thing to claim. I don’t see how you can justify that.
LikeLike
@Aapje
You are conflating “this person is officially a refugee according to the US government” with “this person would have a really bad outcome if they had to go back to their home country”.
I don’t see how “well MY country has a reasonable criminal justice system” is a useful response here. It may be reasonable for people in your country to rely on your legal system, but “well your country should just be reasonable” isn’t exactly actionable advice for those of us who live here now and can’t really force reasonableness onto the system.
People in this social circle absolutely do push for criminal justice reform, including lower sentences for just about everything. But obviously that’s a long-term thing and doesn’t get rid of the need for a solution *now*.
(I’m honestly pretty annoyed at your argument here, this is coming across as “you should just rely on the official system in place for this, surely it is reasonable and wouldn’t have terrible consequences, and if it does it’s your own fault and/or you should just pretend it’s reasonable and use it anyway”)
LikeLike
I think that I was way more nuanced than your straw man of my argument.
Sophia made a claim that seems factually incorrect to a large degree. Claiming that “the only possible outcome of reporting him to the police is that he gets deported and then executed” seems like absurd hyperbole to me. Yet she got 3 likes and no push back (except for me), while my attempt to add some outside perspective is apparently little more than anger-inducing.
Well, that annoys *me*. The standard being applied here seems not just a little biased, which I expect, but to an extent where reasonable debate may become impossible.
Now, I assume that this is because recent events have rubbed people raw on this topic, but it seems to me that several people are dangerously close to being mind killed.
PS. I was trying to present a more hopeful image of what can be achieved and a more realistic assessment of where the US is now.
LikeLiked by 1 person
In most of the Western world*, it’s a fairly rare case that reporting a crime to the police would result in death, although not impossible. The biggest justification for extralegal responses that I see are that:
(a) the legal system, which requires a high burden of proof, may not take action against someone who is only 51% likely to be guilty (or 70% or more). Worse, if the legal system finds the case against the person to be unproven, she may use that finding as evidence of innocence.
(b) the legal system permits the accused various rights, such as the right to question the accuser, to present evidence of social media postings, etc., a requirement that claims be brought within a particular amount of time, that the accuser may find traumatic.
It’s definitely true in some cases that the accuser would like a different or lesser punishment than legal proceedings would produce, and some communities have set up procedures, but it’s tough.
*I’m not as familiar with the rest of the world, and don’t mean to imply any judgment.
LikeLike
Yeah okay it is not the case that literally the only possible outcome is death. It is more correct to say “the probability distribution of possible outcomes is weighted towards very weighty outcomes to an unacceptable degree”. The point being made is still more actionable and usefully correct than yours, which is I suppose composed largely of true statements while being useless in terms of pointing in an actionable direction.
LikeLike
@jossedley
Both your (a) and (b) boil down to not accepting the balance between the rights of the accuser and the accused that defines Western rule of law & which exist for very good reasons. I think that abandoning the rule of law is vigilantism at the core.
When the rule of law is merely abandoned for some crimes, where the vast majority of accusers happen to be women and the vast majority of accused happen to be men, but not for other crimes where the gender distribution is more equal, there also seems to be a distinct inegalitarian/sexist component.
@tcheasdfjkl
It’s only directly actionable if the perpetrator happens to be a refugee, which as I’ve argued, should be quite rare. Trump implied that a very large percentage of rapes are perpetrated by refugees/migrants and that was seen as extremely racist by the mainstream left. Furthermore, all but the far right generally sees it as racist to exclusively focus on crimes perpetrated by other ethnicities/refugees/migrants/etc and propose policy merely based on those cases.
From my perspective, Sophia is arguing in a way that is quite dangerous, although she arrived at it from a compassionate point of view. However, many people make faulty arguments in favor of a compassionate goal and then draw poor or even very noxious conclusions based on those arguments.
Looking at edge cases does have value to criticize a system, but it is generally a bad idea to argue for alternative systems by merely pointing to edge cases, while not addressing the impact on the more common cases.
LikeLike
@Aapje – at this point, I’m just trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive, and identify the concerns pro and con call-outs.
As to Western law, I’d clarify that the law on criminally punishing someone provides the rights you identify. There’s a different set of rights for public statements, based around defamation law (and sometimes other privacy rights like the right to be forgotten or wrongful disclosure of private facts).
Legally, if you think I’m a jerk, you’re allowed to say it in more circumstances than it would be possible to convict me as a jerk. (That doesn’t mean it’s morally right, of course, which is some of what Ozy seems interested in exploring).
LikeLike
The legal system has many of the problems of callout posts w.r.t. victim cooperation, but far more so. Accusing someone of a crime is deeply unpleasant; if the victim was traumatized, it can result in retraumatization and complicate the process of healing. Some victims, particularly in the US, think it is wrong to send people to prison at all, because they don’t want their rapist or abuser to be raped, separated from their children, subjected to violence, and so on.
Many cases of abuse, and the vast majority of rapes, are crimes that are not provable beyond a reasonable doubt. Obviously, the legal system should consider people innocent until proven guilty. But if our two categories are “convicted of a crime” and “cannot even be gossiped about,” then most rapists are going to have easy access to victims forever. (Of course, this fact means that many people– quite sensibly– don’t want to report he-said-she-said rape and abuse cases to the police, because they don’t want to experience retraumatization for no reason.)
Sexual harassment and emotional abuse can be perfectly legal and still be a problem you want to deal with. For example, there’s nothing illegal about a forum member messaging every forum member they find attractive with “I’m so depressed, send me nudes or I’ll kill myself,” but that doesn’t mean it’s perfectly fine for them to keep doing it.
LikeLiked by 4 people
“Obviously, the legal system should consider people guilty until proven innocent. ”
I’m pretty sure you mean the opposite of this.
LikeLike
Yes, fixed.
LikeLike
@Ozy
When crimes are hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, it’s especially important that the crimes be reported to a central authority, so multiple hard to prove allegations can be combined into one strong case.
People apparently gossiped a lot about Harvey Weaselstein, yet he kept doing what he was doing. It took a set of allegations to take him down. This was because he had power that whispers could not deal with. Other perpetrators work different communities (or random people) making whisper campaigns fail. Perpetrators also sometimes do things that are hard to prevent even with some knowledge.
For obvious reasons, collecting sets of allegations as has been done recently, heavily favors going after celebrities who get media attention, while not doing much against perpetrators who are not famous. It also results in people being dragged through the mud for mere crudeness, like Aziz Ansari or where there is a very doubtful single allegation like against Woody Allen.
—
Retraumatization: Yes, serious issue and hard to prevent. I do believe in a responsibility for the government to provide good victim care and some (not unlimited) obligation by victims to help stop serious perpetrators, to prevent victimization of others.
Abusive prisons: In (some?) Middle Eastern countries the victim can propose an alternative punishment that the perpetrator can accept. This doesn’t fit the Western model very well, but it is interesting as the victim can then control the maximum sentence. Of course, prisons should be made safer regardless, but while they aren’t, reluctance is understandable.
—
Anyway, I’m fine with soft enforcement for less serious issues, if the enforcement is actually kept soft. But for the serious issues I think that the goal should be to work to a better system, not to give up and settle for shitty alternatives that will never work right. I think that too many activists are doing the latter and too few the former.
It also seems to me that the messaging is often too extreme, causing victims to expect the worst. While change does require pointing out the sore spots, gross exaggerations can do harm to victims (and also cause potential allies to see the activists as liars and/or dangerous radicals).
LikeLike
Actually, there was a police investigation of Weinstein in 2015. He used his power to keep it from going anywhere.
The thing that ultimately brought down Weinstein was the efforts of journalists for the New York Times and the New Yorker; in my taxonomy, that qualifies as a callout post, just one conducted on a particularly large scale. I think this suggests that sometimes callout posts are the right tool (just like sometimes whisper networks are the right tool, and sometimes expulsion is the right tool, and sometimes the police are the right tool).
If you take the accusations against Aziz Ansari seriously, he had sex with a woman after she clearly said “no,” which goes a bit beyond “crudeness.” (I realize “having sex with people who have said ‘no’ is rape” is one of my extremist radical feminist opinions, but can we at least agree it is really bad?) However, we shouldn’t take seriously a single anonymous accusation with no corroborating evidence.
LikeLiked by 3 people
@ozymandias
There is something that is qualitatively different between a call-out post and journalism, though. Journalism has epistemological rigor that call-out posts are completely devoid of because call-out posts are self-published by the accuser while journalism isn’t (outside of a serious breach of ethics). This avoid some of the pitfalls you mention.
LikeLike
My understanding of the 2015 Weinstein investigation is that there was a single accuser, that the police set up a meeting with the accuser and Weinstein with close surveillance to get a police witness if he did it again, but that the accuser backed out at the last moment. Then the police took Weinstein away for questioning, but later decided that the evidence was insufficient to prosecute, presumably because there was merely one accuser and it was he-said/she said.
Having had multiple people testify to the police seems likely to have resulted in enough evidence for prosecution, as this is what later happened and then Weinstein was prosecuted.
As for your defense of call-outs, you fail to address my objection about it most likely working extremely poorly against non-celebrities (which also probably means that it strongly favors more privileged victims). Aren’t you worried about creating systems that work well for the privileged, but poorly for the less privileged & then losing support for a better system, because those with the most power already have something decent?
—
As for Ansari, I would classify the encounter as two people being really wrong about the desires of the other person, combined with very poor communication. Ansari believed that Grace was willing to have intercourse, but came to believe that she wanted to more slowly build up to it. Grace (probably?) wanted to cuddle and such. From my perspective, even when basing myself on the story based on Grace’s testimony, I see Ansari making it fairly clear what he wants (like saying he was going to get a condom shortly after they entered his apartment), while Grace often said things that seem to indicate a desire to go more slowly. Furthermore, by her own words, a lot of her communication was by mumbling and body language.
She also didn’t just say ‘no,’ she said: “no, I don’t think I’m ready to do this, I really don’t think I’m going to do this.” So she was stating her own willingness to (not) act, not telling Ansari to stop acting. In the context of the rest of the encounter and given how she reacted to his suggestion after she made the previous statement, I can see why Ansari concluded that she wanted more foreplay and why he assumed that she would stop him and/or refuse to do things that she didn’t want. After all, she made a statement that implied that she knew that she had agency.
Anyway, I think that both of these people deserve a (metaphorical) slap on the side of the head and need some maturity and/or sex education. I don’t think it is evidence that Ansari is a rapist. As far as I can tell, he was never violent or otherwise coercive beyond being (irritatingly) persistent. He never violated a direct demand. At any point, she could have chosen to walk out, clearly state hard boundaries, etc.
Like it or not, we live in a culture (or with a humanity) where many expect ‘romanticism.’ Such a thing can only work if both sides understand that they have agency and are willing to police their own boundaries.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You need not deal with the criminal justice system to deal with the civil system – civil restraining orders is a thing. In the civil context, the burden of proof is “balance of probabilities”, i.e. 51% guilty. There are also ways to protect the privacy of the accuser and the accused through pre-trial motions.
The main problem with accessing the legal system is cost – lawyers are expensive and you absolutely need a lawyer to access some of the more bespoke solutions the law can give you with respect to harassment and sexual assault claims.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Aapje
“She also didn’t just say ‘no,’ she said: “no, I don’t think I’m ready to do this, I really don’t think I’m going to do this.” So she was stating her own willingness to (not) act, not telling Ansari to stop acting.”
????????
I really don’t think that’s a real distinction. Sex involving two people is a two-person act. Are you interpreting this as her not wanting to take an *active* role in sex but being okay with someone else doing sex *to* her? I don’t think that’s a reasonable reading at all. If someone is doing sex things to her, then either she is having sex or she is being sexually assaulted.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@tcheasdfjkl
She said no after he bent her over and said: “Where do you want me to fuck you? Do you want me to fuck you right here?”
After she said no, he abandoned this and went back to doing/trying the same things that he did before, which she hadn’t (explicitly) said no to back then. So it seems to me that he interpreted the ‘no’ specifically as not wanting to have intercourse, not as request to stop having other kinds of sex. Assuming that he didn’t realize that she didn’t really enjoy that other stuff before, that doesn’t seem like an illogical way to interpret her words.
If I read the story, I see a woman who is poor at directing her partner, policing her boundaries and/or playfully slowing down a guy (instead of becoming passive to signal disinterest), confusing the guy. I see a guy who doesn’t notice signals that he is being way too aggressive, enough. So they were both being very incompetent at this.
The woman was clearly into guess culture, which means that the guy has to guess. Ansari was bad at guessing in this case.
I think that some bad experiences are an unavoidable ‘cost’ of guess culture: it results in one person doing what (s)he thinks the other person wants/likes, which is sometimes going to be wrong. Then that other person can abandon guess culture and tell him/her off, but it’s going to be a post-facto response. So then the undesired sex act still happened.
I think that if we accept guess culture, we cannot expect undesired sex acts to never be performed. We can/should blame men for being way too aggressive and especially, for not listening if a woman abandons guess culture and makes an explicit demand. From my perspective, Ansari was probably not aggressive to the extent that we should call it sexual assault or such.
If we don’t accept guess culture, then we should primarily blame Grace, because according to her testimony, Ansari asked explicitly many times (“She said she remembers him asking again and again, “Where do you want me to fuck you?” while she was still seated on the countertop.”). By refusing to answer, she refused to engage in ask culture. Of course, from an anti-guess culture perspective you can blame Ansari for not abandoning the attempts after not getting an answer and for mostly falling back to guess culture.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Aapje – it would be a better world if people were both (a) clearer about saying “no,” and (b) less interested in using ambiguity to keep trying to push for sex.
Arguably, Ansari is a pretty good case for a callout. Assuming the account is honest, there’s a public discussion about whether it’s OK to keep pushing until you get a clear no, and a discussion about whether people should be more comfortable just saying “no, this isn’t happening.”
LikeLike
@jossedley
You forgot (c) clearer about saying yes and (d) less interested in ambiguity to feel desired and/or not feel ‘easy’. It seems to me that women prefer ambiguity much more than men, on average.
It’s also complicated because there is a spectrum of female behavior. Some women prefer to be very passive and even to put up token resistance, even when enjoying themselves a lot. As long as men and women do guess culture, especially when engaging in casual sex with people whose traits they know relatively little about, then mistakes will be made and undesired things will happen.
In the end, calling out people who go too far may prevent some excesses, but doesn’t fundamentally solve the issue that if people engage in guess culture and then don’t abandon that when it’s not working for them, then you will get situations like with Grace: a person who is unhappy with the way the encounter goes and who isn’t able to steer it into something more pleasant, but who keeps going along in such a way that she becomes very frustrated and hurt, even though she had the power to stop the encounter the entire time. I’m very uncomfortable with putting all the responsibility on Ansari, because she did have agency, that she chose not to use.
In general, both feminism and #metoo have a strong tendency to minimize female agency, which I see as a regressive tendency that helps maintain gender inequality.
—
We can argue whether or not Ansari was way out of line. To me it’s hard to tell. This is not so much a question of honesty, but of subjectivity. Grace puts great significance on signals like mumbling, turning away and other such things. However, we merely know how she meant those signals (or even merely how she interpreted her behavior after the fact) and that he interpreted those signals very differently. How can we then know if the signals were actually clear to a theoretical ‘reasonable person?’
Body language is also (sub)cultural. Your subculture or even merely people who have known you for a long time, may know what you mean by certain body language. Move to another subculture or even interact with people who don’t know your peculiarities and they may interpret it completely differently. As a result, people can be very wrong how universal their body language is.
I’ve heard too many stories about one person being fully convinced they signaled X, while the other person was fully convinced that Y was signaled, to just believe that X or Y was clearly signaled.
—
I also question why this callout had to be public. She had his contact information and did contact him after the encounter to voice her displeasure. She could have expanded on this and discussed specifics with him only, to tell him where he was wrong, in her eyes.
Instead, she chose to go public, which to me seems to have a retaliatory component. She felt pain, so now he has to feel (social) pain. If it was about teaching Ansari something, she could have discussed it just with him. If it was about teaching all men something, she could have anonymized the story.
I think that Social Justice advocates in general have a strong tendency to idealize the callout, portraying it as a method with great virtue and seeing the callouter as a virtuous person, ignoring that the motives for the callout can be poor. For example, I see some evidence in the story that she rounded Ansari down to a stereotype of an abuser and that she may have wanted to retaliate against abusers as a group or even men in general and reduced Ansari to a scapegoat for a class of people.
LikeLiked by 1 person
These things are not symmetrical. I mean, I like ask culture, I think it would be better if more people used it. But if you’re escalating a situation sexually, it’s on you to check if the other person is interested.
The article describes the woman using her words multiple times in addition to walking away from Ansari. This is more than enough information to know that he should slow down and check what’s going on before continuing.
…I don’t feel like letting this go but neither do I feel like finding new ways to say things I’ve said before so I will copy my opinion on this that I shared before:
“The only way you get as far as Aziz Ansari allegedly did with an unhappy partner while honestly believing you’ve done nothing wrong* is if the question you’re trying to answer is not “what does my partner *actually want*” but “am I allowed to believe that my partner wants to continue”/“has my partner given me a maximally unambiguous no”/“will I be Clearly A Rapist if I continue”. In other words, selfish motivated reasoning.
The problem with motivated reasoning, as always, is that you ignore evidence that doesn’t point in your preferred direction, and indeed you avoid acquiring such evidence at all if you can. If the rule you’re following is “I’m allowed to continue as long as my partner hasn’t told me with extreme clarity that they want me to stop”, you’re incentivized to escalate as quickly as possible while obtaining as little information as possible about your partner’s actual desires – which, of course, is exactly what Ansari allegedly did, with obviously bad consequences. (Or you actively bias your evidence collection by asking questions where the answer you want is already presupposed, like “where do you want me to fuck you”, which is practically a textbook example of poor survey design.)
That’s why this is a BAD RULE. It is, in fact, usually possible to find out what your partner does and doesn’t want to do without having to read their mind, because you can ASK THEM, if you have any uncertainty about what their nonverbal cues mean. If you’re bad at reading nonverbal cues, you slow the fuck down and/or use your words. You make an actual attempt to actually learn your partner’s boundaries, rather than confidently assuming they don’t exist until you’re told otherwise.
*I don’t know if he thinks he did nothing wrong. I’m just saying that the most charitable interpretation is still not good.”
[and follow up]
“I also want to say, I don’t want to argue that navigating people’s boundaries is always easy. I really don’t think it is. Sometimes people misjudge their own boundaries. Sometimes people go nonverbal during sex. Sometimes good-faith attempts at communication break down. It’s just that the Ansari story REALLY doesn’t sound like a good-faith attempt at communication, and there absolutely are some relatively easy steps that he should definitely have taken and did not.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
@tcheasdfjkl
Oh, I missed this one earlier.
When I read testimony by one side in a conflict, I tend to read it asymmetrically, trusting statements that go against the narrative much more than those which align with it, because people tend to change their recollections and their testimony to fit the narrative. Of course, we can discuss the other claims hypothetically, but I’m wary of considering them to be ‘the truth,’ especially when it comes to condemning a person. We probably have been talking past each other, because you don’t do this.
Anyway, IF Grace’s accusations are true, I agree that Ansari could have acted a lot better and should entertained the possibility that Grace might have had very different expectations, rather than merely preferred different pacing. But the more I say about this, the more I validate those who spread a narrative where Grace was left helpless because of what Ansari did, which is how a lot of people now interpret these stories.
Ultimately, when communication around sex fails, the person who wants less usually has the escape hatch of walking out completely, yelling no, screaming, etc. There is a huge advantage to having this be a relatively clear delineation between rape/sexual assault vs an affirmative consent rule where some vague point on a spectrum of saying ‘yes’ is sufficient to have permission, which is the only possible way in which affirmative action can work. This doesn’t mean that affirmative action isn’t helpful as the default, but it is the least helpful when things are not going well.
An issue is that many people, and especially women, seem to want a high level of agreeability in their communication, which leads to a lack of clarity. Teaching people, and especially women, that the other side is then at fault when communication breaks down, rather than teaching them that they are also to blame for this miscommunication and to abandon that desire for agreeability if it doesn’t work, is inevitable going to lead to many situations where one person feels extremely ill-treated, while the other person has no clue that the former person has such strong negative feelings.
This is actually very hard, because many people, especially women, consider that highly off-putting. So in many cases, a man has the choice to either proceed with uncertainly or to ask explicitly, but by doing so, to (on average) greatly decrease the willingness by the other person. IMO, this is one reason why so many highly thing-oriented men have such trouble with dating, because if they try to figure out the rules for informal behavior by sometimes asking, the very act of asking changes the willingness. So they cannot effectively calibrate their behavior by asking, nor does asking work well as a fallback.
Anyway, such a situation results in strong negative conditioning of men to ask explicitly. Now, there is the theory that with enough shaming, men will stop responding to incentives (and will somehow come to master body language). However, in many other cases, like the war on drugs or gay people wanting to have sex with the same sex, progressives recognize that trying to shame people out of behavior that those people feel incentivized to do, is a rather hopeless endeavor.
Merely putting pressure on men to ask explicitly, without putting similar pressure on women to adopt more explicit communication, will predictably just result in men who obey to generally do far worse than men who don’t, with women voting with their feet/vagina, which is very effective at teaching men to stop listening to feminists, to become resentful, to become misogynist, to give up on women, etc; but very ineffective at actually improving dating.
So to bring it back to Ansari: I think that these kinds of callouts, that almost always happen to one gender and that address one failure mode, are simply not effective at improving things. Ultimately, our society doesn’t take men’s needs or problems seriously and as a result, men flail about, trying to find happiness by adapting to others (and then they get blamed for doing so). We can keep blaming men for not taking the high road, but if the high road is blocked by ice and debris, what other choice is there but to take the low road or to just give up?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Sometimes you’re stuck trying to approximate a legal system because you’re a large organization that has to enforce rules that are irrelevant to the actual legal system: for example, you’re a professional or semi-professional sports league trying to prevent cheating. The result is often
a necessary evil at best.
LikeLiked by 2 people
All good points, Ozy. In a rare “yes, and” for me …
One more risk of callouts is that they often require people to take sides. Last year my neighborhood forum was on fire for quite a while when Neighbor A called out B for his dog jumping the fence and running around. A was right, but the whole thing devolved into whether the forum was the right place, everyone else’s grievance, etc. TeamHarpy is another good example.
LikeLike
Something I was surprised that didn’t get mentioned wrt callouts is that they are inherently aggressive.
At the very least, they are an escalation of hostile behavior, or in the case of someone who is unaware (for whatever reason) that the callout is possible, they are an initiation of hostile behavior.
Obviously, there are times when escalation is the correct response (that’s why police officers carry weapons and are taught pain techniques). But initiating or escalating aggression is a dominance play, and a significant fraction of people react very badly to such activities.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Excellent post, I entirely agree with these categorizations. Don’t know of any real solution either.
LikeLike
Callouts get a bad rap. Partially, this is because a lot of callouts are about genuinely trivial issues, and many callouts that aren’t about trivial issues pad themselves out with a bunch of trivial issues. (“Alice not only commits rape, she’s also an aphobe!”)
Not sure that’s so much callouts getting a bad rap as it is things called “callouts” getting a bad rap; I suspect a lot of the association there is with the word and not with the practice.
LikeLike
Pingback: Rational Feed – deluks917
Pingback: Link Roundup: July 2018
It seems like there are two parameters that are varying here: (1) how unevenly your community’s truth-finding capacities are distributed, and (2) how many people are informed in a given communication event.
(2) is the whisper-versus-callout axis; (1) would be centralization, whisper-and-callout-versus-expulsion.
This suggests a fourth method to complete the square, but then again it does seem like once you’ve gotten to a centralized authority it doesn’t matter as much whether they’ve been alerted via whisper or broadcast.
Well, in the limit case of a single authority, anyway. If there are multiple authorities, whispering presumably means alerting some without alerting the others, presumably because the whisperer doesn’t trust those other authorities.
LikeLike
It seems like the axis corresponding to whisper-versus-callout on the centralized end would be private arbitration versus public trials, with publication of evidence after a private trial sitting somewhere in the middle maybe.
LikeLike
“If the accusation is false, it can be really hard to retract the accusation.
If the accusation is true, it may follow the perpetrator for the rest of their lives.”
I’d say it may follow the person for the rest of their lives regardless of whether it’s true or false. Even if they can clearly demonstrate that it’s false, their name is still publicly associated with scandal, and a lot of people will remember only that they were involved rather than whether the accusation was disproven.
Two common reasons people choose not to call out:
1) fear of retribution. People who have done truly unethical things are also people whose vengeance you realllllly don’t want. I’ve also seen cases where a person had wronged several people in a similar way, and even those victims who would have been willing to have an anonymous summary of their experience made public decided not to, because of the risk that the wrongdoer would guess wrong about who spoke up and retaliate against the wrong person.
2) This probably varies by country, but my understanding in the US is that if you try to ruin someone’s reputation and your sources are anonymous (“I’ve investigated it, and I want the community to know that Alice is a rapist”), you legally are the source. Meaning you can be sued for defamation, because you can’t prove the claim is true.
LikeLike
One is important. If the accusations are true, your dealing with somebody whose sense of scruples isn’t exactly high. Your also dealing with somebody with many ethical issues and lack of boundaries. They are going to do anything possible to punish and make life miserable for the people that called them out. Some of them might even have the power and social status to really hurt you for calling them out.
LikeLike
The partner dance scene has two somewhat related problems in policing its’ members behavior. There are people, generally men, who use dance as an excuse to get way too touchy with other people, generally women, because partner dancing provides for a lot of plausible deniability. This is especially true for sexy dances like tango, salsa, and West Coast swing where getting up close and personal is the behavior. Organizers of various events and dances try to run events and have a policy about complaining but your dealing with dozens, hundreds, or even up to a thousand people at one time. You can’t be omnipresent and there isn’t enough communication to get a general list of exclusion.
The other problem is preening. Some dancers can get very picky about who the dance with and like to use their desirability as a partner as a form of social posturing. This generally involves a high level dancer than they aren’t going to dance with a certain group of people, generally low level dancers, that they aren’t going to dance with because they are oh so superior. Its a lesser problem than harassment because your only dealing with hurt feelings and consent is an issue in dance as in sex. At the same time, organizers don’t like social preening on the dance floor either because it can drive new blood away from dance and social dancing is supposed to be about fun. There isn’t really a way to deal with social posturing either because it is too widespread.
There aren’t really any really effective aways to optimally get people to behave well and deal with people who refuse to do so. Assholes are going to asshole. Whether its abuse, harassment, or simple social posturing; they feel it is their right to be an asshole and the certainly aren’t going to let anything stop them. A certain percentage of humans are just proudly dysfunctional. We have been trying to find ways to deal with the proudly dysfunctional for thousands of years. Some progress has been made but not a lot.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Lee, that’s very interesting – is there a formal policy for identifying and responding to offensive dancers?
LikeLike
None at all.
LikeLike
In some communities. E.g. my local contra dance has a “safety team” of people who are introduced at every dance who you can talk to if something is making you physically or socially uncomfortable (e.g. someone is dancing too rough and hurt your wrist, or someone hugged you after a dance in a way you didn’t like.) Then it’s the safety rep’s job to talk to the person about the problem. https://www.bidadance.org/safety-at-bida
There’s also a “safety committee” who decide whether to restrict people from events.
It feels like a new but workable system for that scene. Some unsolved problems: whether dance organizers should address behavior that happens outside dances, how organizers of different events should coordinate with each other.
LikeLiked by 1 person
One thing you didn’t mention is callouts or whispering that don’t name the person accused.
This can lead to some real Dread and Terror as everyone tries to judge the size of the problem and also people making promises that they can’t keep.
LikeLike
> Assuming the person doing the investigating is honest, capable, and willing to expel harassers and abusers, expulsion is absolutely the best method of dealing with harassment, rape, and abuse accusations.
I am part of very close-knit community (a commune of 100 people) and I think that there are many cases where expulsion is not the best idea. For people in a community such as this, it can be pretty close to the ruin-your-life-forever situation. At the very least, it’s “better find a place to live and a job pretty damn soon”. A lot depends on the severity of the thing, but I think that a rehabilitative approach can often be good, especially in cases of harassment (the least offensive of the three). People fuck up, and if a community is able to say “Hey, you fucked up. We still love you, and we expect better” you are much less likely to have secrecy and obfuscation. If a person knows their membership in a close-knit community that is the center of their life is at stake, then they are incentivized to do anything to get out of a harassment claim, even for relatively minor offenses.
LikeLike