Letter #26: Pedophiliac Attractions to Children

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rape tw

[I have posted this letter from my advice column over here, because Medium doesn’t let me hold new commenters’ comments for moderation, and I would rather not subject the letter writer to the unfiltered vitriol of the entire Internet on this subject. Comments will be moderated closely and misbehavior will be particularly likely to result in a ban. Please be compassionate to the real person who is in a very bad situation.]
[content warning for description of attraction to children]

I’m a trans woman and started HRT three months ago. For the most part the experience has been immensely positive, and has rescued me from bad depression, but there’s one (possible) big downside: it might be causing me to be (non-exclusively) sexually attracted to pre-teen girls; the feelings seem to correlate in intensity with level of estrogenisation. I expect this to go away and not stay (it’s only been a couple of weeks I’ve been fully feeling it), but I’m still anxious about the possibility.

What should I do if this turns out to be real? Is it responsible for me to continue HRT knowing it has this effect? Should I seek out therapy for this, and if so how? Do you know any healthy ways of managing such desires, or deal with stigma? How will I be able to find adult partners who won’t hate me? I am very anti-contact/anti-csem and don’t think I’m at serious risk of offending; I have been badly hurt multiple times by previous interactions with the mental health profession as a child and as an adult, which makes me nervous about seeing a therapist for this, but am open to the idea.

(Also, to forestall the question: I don’t think this is pOCD. I do have other distressing intrusive thoughts, but I don’t feel panicky now at the thought I might commit/have committed/be committing sexual violation, and I don’t think pOCD makes you moan and roll your eyes back in ecstasy at the thought of making out with a kid.)

This is definitely not an effect I’ve ever heard of anyone having with estrogen, and it seems unusual. However, it doesn’t seem implausible to me that this is an effect for you: testosterone and estrogen both typically lead to changes in people’s experience of their sexuality, and you drew the worst fucking hand. 

I am not a doctor and am not qualified to diagnose anyone with POCD, especially through a letter; I encourage you to consider the possibility that you have it carefully, but will proceed under the assumption that you are attracted to preteen girls.

You mention that you don’t think you’re at risk of harming a child. In fact, the same thing is true of many people in your situation! The research suggests that pedophilia and child molestation are, while linked, distinct. (Wikipedia has a good summary.) Somewhere between a quarter and half of all child molesters are pedophiliac. It is difficult to know how many pedophiles molest children, because non-offending pedophiles are typically closeted, but most experts believe a large proportion of pedophiles never hurt a child. 

You mention seeking out therapy, and that’s a lot of people’s first piece of advice for people struggling with pedophilia. Unfortunately, despite years of research, no one has to my knowledge come up with a reliable way of treating paraphilias. In fact, sex offender treatment programs sometimes increase recidivism rates. Our best treatment strategy is medication that reduces libido.

What is worse, seeking therapy is going to be very difficult. All therapists are mandated reporters, which means that if they suspect you are abusing a child they must report it to the authorities. Therapists typically vary wildly in their interpretation of these rules, and it’s difficult to know how a therapist will interpret it until you open up to them — and potentially face serious consequences. I don’t mean this to discourage you from seeking therapy, but simply as a note of caution. 

However, you don’t actually need a therapist. You will need someone who can listen to you, a source of nonjudgmental support, affirmation, and acceptance and of advice and even criticism when necessary. A therapist can provide that, but so can a friend or family member or (if you’re religious) a religious leader. (You can check the list of mandated reporters in your state here.)

I would suggest talking to at most two or three people: you don’t want your secret getting out any further than you need for support. Choose people who are trustworthy and keep secrets. Select someone you feel comfortable around. Find someone who is calm, doesn’t freak out, and is willing to hear you out about things. 

Unfortunately, many people do not have a friend that trustworthy and have to seek other options. I don’t know anyone with experience in these groups, but this website seems to link to a lot of support groups for non-offending minor-attracted people; perhaps one of them will help you?

Seeking support is an important first step for anyone in your shoes. The other steps you should take depend a lot on your personal experience of your attraction to preteens. Whether or not to continue taking estrogen is a personal decision. You can continue to take estrogen and manage your feelings on your own. You can choose to go off estrogen (and explain to those who ask that you can’t take estrogen for medical reasons), if you find yourself struggling with temptation or if the costs of experiencing this attraction aren’t worth it for you. 

You can also choose to remain on estrogen and add a libido-lowering medication: the easiest ones to obtain, which have the fewest side effects, are SSRIs. You can get SSRIs by telling your primary care physician that you have depression; the screening is usually minimal, although it may help to look up the symptoms of depression ahead of time. The website Roman sells sertraline (an SSRI) legally, online, and with minimal fuss as a treatment for premature ejaculation, if making a doctor’s visit is too difficult. Even if your first choice of SSRI doesn’t work, you can keep trying. Different SSRIs have different effects, and an increased dose or a different SSRI may be exactly what you need to make your sexuality more manageable. (As a second-line option for people assigned male at birth, the research suggests antiandrogens, but presumably you are already on those.)  

Some people suggest that pedophiles avoid all contact with children or being alone with children. Again, I think this is a personal decision. It is important to remain scrupulously nonsexual in your interactions with preteen girls, and if you can’t do this you must avoid them. But people attracted to adults are often attracted to people that they must remain scrupulously nonsexual with, and most of the time we do not implement the Pence Rule. You will have to talk with your support people and figure out what a reasonable set of boundaries is for you.  

However, if you have a crush on a preteen girl — and particularly if you’re starting to think she has a crush on you, or she’s flirting with you — it is important to distance yourself. Avoid being alone together, giving gifts, cuddling, and other “plausibly deniable” flirtatious or romantic behavior. Make a list of the many reasons to avoid feeding your crush (suitably redacted if you’re afraid of snoops). Consider drawing your attention to the flaws of your crush and making a deliberate effort to notice all the things that would be bad about it. 

Because you can’t distance yourself from your own child, I would advise against having children if you have not already; if you do have children, this is a strong point in favor of SSRIs or going off estrogen. 

Think carefully about whether you use written or drawn pornography involving preteen girls. (Of course, you should not use child porn created through raping actual children.) For some people, porn is an outlet for desires they cannot ethically put into practice. For others, it reinforces and strengthens their paraphilia. Reflect on which of these is truest for you. Similarly, consider whether ageplay is a satisfying expression of your fantasies for you, strengthens them, or simply does nothing. 

Finding a romantic partner may be difficult. You do not have to disclose your attractions and, in a more casual/secondary relationship, I wouldn’t; the stigma is too harsh. When looking for a primary partner, you might consider bringing up the topic of pedophilia early on in the relationship, perhaps on the third or fourth date (or equivalent). You can ask in a sort of general way how they feel about sex offender registries, treatment for pedophiles, or lolicon; you can also discuss how they feel about keeping secrets. If there’s a positive result, you can come out to them. This will be risky, particularly if they decide to tell your friends! But it’s best not to have a long relationship with someone who, while personally tolerant, does not want to commit to someone with attractions like yours — that way just leads to heartbreak.

In having pedophiliac attractions, you are in one of the unluckiest positions a person can be in. It seems like you’re taking a good approach to it: you need to accept your sexuality as it is — unchangeable — while taking steps to avoid harming children. I want to say that this is an unfair burden which has been placed on you, and that it is a brave and admirable thing to exist with this stigmatized trait without harming others. 

Good luck!

Further Objections To Three Sentences In An Interview With Ray Blanchard (They’re A Really Bad Three Sentences)

Tags

csa tw, ozy blog post, rape tw, ray blanchard callout post, speshul snowflake trans

On Monday, I wrote a post about my most important objection to this answer of Ray Blanchard’s in an interview from 2013:

[Interviewer:] Do you think autoandrophilia, where a woman is aroused by the thought of herself as a man, is a real paraphilia?

[Blanchard:] No, I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism, because there are all these women who want to say, “women can rape too, women can be pedophiles too, women can be exhibitionists too.” It’s a perverse expression of feminism, and so, I thought, let me jump the gun on this. I don’t think the phenomenon even exists.

I wanted to stick to the most important issue in the first post. However, I could not in good conscience refrain from objecting to everything else objectionable about those three sentences.

First: autoandrophilia obviously exists. Autoandrophilia obviously existed in 2013. Archive of Our Own had existed for four years at the time. AO3 hosts an enormous quantity of porn written by women about men having sex with each other; many (although of course not all) of the readers insert themselves as one of the characters in the pairing. The phenomenon of women imagining themselves as men in slash fanfiction dates back to 1966, when the TV show Star Trek began and women began shipping Kirk/Spock. There is honestly no excuse for a person who considers himself a world expert in sexuality related to gender deviance to be unaware that autoandrophiles exist.

As I said in the previous post, Blanchard has recently admitted to the existence of autohomoeroticism, a sexual fetish in which people assigned female at birth are sexually attracted to the idea of being a gay man. He considers this to be extraordinarily rare. (Out of curiosity, I did a small survey on a fandom Discord I frequent and found that 60% of the respondents assigned female at birth were autoandrophiles, although I suppose it is possible that every autohomoerotic person in the world frequents this particular Discord.) It is unclear to me how the hell autohomoeroticism is supposed to be different from autoandrophilia, except that it would be embarrassing to Blanchard to admit he’s wrong because of something as minor as “the facts.”

Second: Blanchard implicitly equates pedophiles, rapists, and exhibitionists with autoandrophiles. Pedophiles and rapists either perform nonconsensual sex acts or are tempted to do so; while people who have sex in front of consenting people are also considered exhibitionists, presumably Blanchard is referring to people who want to show their genitals to or have sex in front of nonconsenting people. Cisgender autoandrophiles might strap on a dildo and get a blowjob from another consenting adult, but they don’t do anything nonconsensual nor are they tempted to do so.

I am glossing over the complicated issue of transgender autoandrophiles, in part due to the disagreement about whether they exist. I have met the occasional self-identified non-dysphoric autoandrophile who has transitioned. In general, they have tried to be indistinguishable from dysphoric trans people and to pass as their preferred gender. This is very unlike rape, pedophilia, or nonconsensual exhibitionism, where the victims know they’re involved in a sex act. It seems rather more like a person getting off on the reactions they get when they wear sexy clothes, or on secretly wearing sexy underwear, or on receiving a hair massage, or whatever: perfectly fine as long as it is not obvious to other people what they’re doing. Whatever you may think of the wisdom of their transitions, it does not seem to be a nonconsensual sex act. Blanchard’s inability to distinguish between consensual and nonconsensual sex acts is appalling.

Third: Blanchard has an openly contemptuous attitude towards the idea that women commit sexual violence. However, women uncontroversially commit sexual violence. In a study conducted in 2010, it was found that 4.8% of men had been, over the course of their lives, forced to penetrate someone through violence, threat of violence, or use of drugs/alcohol, and 6% were coerced into sex. 79.2% of male forced-to-penetrate victims had only female perpetrators, while 83.6% of male sexual coercion victims had only female perpetrators. By comparison, 98.1% of female rape victims had only male perpetrators, and 92.5% of female sexual coercion victims had only male perpetrators, and women are more likely to experience both rape and sexual coercion than men are.

Female child molesters are understudied. However, victimization surveys suggest that somewhere between 14% and 26% of children molested are molested by a woman. Official crime statistics suggest that as few as 1% of children molested are molested by a woman; it is probable that female child molesters are undercounted.

It’s true that men are more likely than women to commit sexual violence. However, a significant minority of victims of sexual violence have female perpetrators. The idea that pointing this out is laughable is rape apologism and morally wrong.

Fourth: Blanchard appears to believe the only reason one would write paragraphs like the above is some sort of bizarre “women can do anything men can do” ethos. It does not seem to occur to him that people would care about supporting the victims of female rapists. I have drafted several sentences in response to this and had an extraordinary difficulty ending them with anything other than “fuck off.”

People– men, women, and nonbinary– are sometimes raped by women. I’ve gotten anguished emails from victims of rape by women thanking me because I am the only blogger they’ve found who will even say they exist. I’ve listened to people– blog readers and friends– talk about bracing themselves when they say the gender of their rapist, because people will laugh at them, or tell them they wanted it, or question them to see if there was some sort of horrible misunderstanding, or immediately derail the conversation to talk about how Men Commit Most Rapes Though, or assume they’re anti-feminist men’s rights activists and call them misogynists, or ask intrusive details about how it could happen mechanically, or assume that they’re the perpetrator and their rapist was the victim. Our society is awful to rape victims of all stripes, but there are unique ways in which it is awful to victims of female perpetrators, and it needs to stop. Pointing out that female rapists and child molesters exist is the first step.

Critique of Just Love, Part Two

Tags

ozy blog post, rape tw, sex postivity

[Previously.]
[Content warning for discussion of the ethics of rape, pedophilia and sex with teenagers.]

Free Consent

Consent: Affirmative, Verbal, or Enthusiastic?

Consent is necessary for ethical sex. But what does “consent” mean? (As always throughout this series, I am discussing the ethics of sex, not the legalities.)

Many feminists have argued for an enthusiastic consent standard: that is, you shouldn’t have sex with someone unless they are enthusiastic about having sex with you. As the saying goes, “if it’s not a fuck yes, it’s a fuck no.” However, I ask the reader to consider the following vignettes:

1. A couple struggling with infertility is trying to conceive a child. Their fertility monitor has shown that today is ovulation day. They’re both tired and neither of them is really feeling it, but they have a quickie to maximize their chance of conceiving.
2. A man notices his boyfriend is horny today. Since he’s not in the mood, he cuddles his boyfriend while the boyfriend jerks off and whispers to him all of the nasty things he’ll do to him tomorrow.
3. A woman and her girlfriend want to keep the spark alive. Every Friday, they schedule sex. They usually both end up getting incredibly turned on, but even if they don’t, making sure to have sex once a week makes them feel like sexual beings and increases their satisfaction with their sex life.

All three vignettes involve unenthusiastic consent. All three vignettes seem to me to be completely and utterly morally unproblematic. Certainly, some people might decide that it is wrong for them to have sex when they’re unenthusiastic about sex. But it seems to me to be perfectly normal and ordinary for some people to sometimes consent to sex when they aren’t enthusiastic about it, and have that as part of their flourishing as human beings.

You might try to save the enthusiastic consent metric by saying “the first couple is enthusiastically consenting to sex because they enthusiastically want a baby!” By this logic, if you hold a gun to my head and force me to have sex with you, I’m enthusiastically consenting because I enthusiastically want not to be dead.

So I think unenthusiastic consent is sometimes a part of ethical sex. I will now consider no-means-no consent, affirmative consent and verbal consent. (I am informed that everyone else uses “affirmative consent” and “verbal consent” interchangeably. This is stupid and I refuse to bow to common usage.)

No-means-no consent is beloved of consent rules lawyers everywhere. The basic idea is that if your partner says “no” or “stop” or “safeword” or “red,” then you should stop, and otherwise it is open season and you can do whatever you want.

The nice thing about no-means-no consent is that there is a bright line. If your partner has said “no” or “stop” or “safeword” or “red,” and you continued, then clearly you are doing something wrong. The problem with no-means-no consent is that, taken literally, it says that there is nothing wrong with getting as close as humanly possible to raping someone as long as you don’t technically rape them. In fact, it’s a good thing to do that! Hey, man, you got laid!

No-means-no consent implies that there is nothing wrong with having sex with a man if he is lying there, silent, unmoving, staring at the ceiling, with a blank expression on his face. After all, he didn’t say ‘no.’ Would you like a sticker that says Technically I Didn’t Commit A Felony on it?

I think we need a fundamental shift in our understanding of consent. We need affirmative consent.

As I use the term, seeking affirmative consent means only having sex with people if you have sufficient evidence to believe that they want, at that moment, to have sex with you. Explicit verbal consent, such as dirty talk, can be a form of affirmative consent, but it is only one form. Perhaps the most common form of affirmative consent is active participation, such as touching, moving, and kissing. Sounds like moaning or grunting can also be affirmative consent.

In general, I’d argue, affirmative consent should be given throughout the sex act. If your partner stops affirmatively consenting, you should pause and say something like “hey, you okay?”

Of course, this is a rule that admits of many exceptions. For example, some people become quiet and still and meditative during sex, which can be hard to distinguish from a person who isn’t enjoying sex. Some people enjoy roleplaying nonconsensual sex. Some people want to have sex when affirmative consent cannot possibly be given– most commonly, they want to be woken up during sex.

I think all these cases should be addressed through pre-sex negotiation. For example, you can say “I get really quiet when I’m turned on, but nothing’s wrong,” or “if I don’t call ‘red’, you should keep going,” or “you can wake me up with sex whenever you want,” or “you can wake me up with sex but only when I’ve said you can the night before.” (You might say that that is an unreasonable level of negotiation to have about sex while the other person is sleeping, which most people are fine with. This is because you have never dated a sleep-deprived person who has finally gotten a chance to sleep in, and it would be totally justified for them to throw an alarm clock at your head.)

I do not think explicit verbal consent is necessary for affirmative consent. Verbal consent means saying something like “I want to have sex with you,” or “let’s fuck,” or “do you want to have sex?”, or “down on your knees, slut,” or “your slave has prepared himself for you, master,” or otherwise communicating with your words that you want to have sex with someone.

The problem with saying “verbal consent is necessary for ethical sex” is that observably lots of people have sex without saying anything. My experiences with sex-without-saying-anything have mostly been that it was extremely awkward, not that my consent was disrespected or that people had difficulties reading my signals. I see no reason to believe that nonverbal communication is any less effective at conveying “I want this” than verbal communication. (Of course, verbal consent seems superior for complicated negotiations, such as kink or fetish negotiations, which probably explains its popularity in those communities.)

Verbal consent is also difficult to maintain continually throughout sex. It is not actually ethically mandatory to chant “yes! yes! yes! yes! yes!”, although many people may find it enjoyable. Therefore, verbal consent ends up being a form of no-means-no consent– once a person says “yes”, it is assumed they mean “yes” until they say “no” again. Affirmative consent, however, is possible to maintain all the time.

I suspect all these niceties, however, are rarely relevant in the bedrooms of the nonrapists of the world. In fact, I myself have had the experience of forgetting to establish a safeword before I began noncon play with someone. Don’t do this, it’s a terrible idea. And yet when I actually had to say no to sex, “no! I mean, really, no! This is not part of the scene, stop right now! RED! SAFEWORD!” conveyed the message very well and nothing bad happened.

I suspect the reason is that I was having sex with someone who actually cared about whether I wanted the sex. Naturally, they paid attention to information that suggested that I might not be interested in sex and paused to check in when they thought that might be the case. I think this is actually the normal way for sex to go among the non-rapists of the world.

Problematic Consent: Sex With Teenagers

Midway through writing this section, I noticed this old blog post of mine about age of consent, which I still agree with. Go read that.

Problematic Consent: Intoxicated Sex

The problem with ‘intoxicated sex’ as a category is that it refers to several different things.

First, sometimes when people say ‘intoxicated sex’ what they mean is ‘having sex with someone who has said that they don’t want to have sex with you when they are too intoxicated to meaningfully resist.’ That is technically called ‘rape’ and it’s a violent felony. Don’t do it.

Second, ‘intoxicated sex’ sometimes refers to sex with someone who is incapable of giving informed consent because they are too intoxicated to understand what they’re consenting to. If a person is confused about who they are, where they are, what time it is, or what’s going on, they are incapable of providing consent to sex, and having sex with them counts as rape morally and, in most jurisdictions, legally. (Exception: if a person has prearranged ahead of time that they consent to sex while intoxicated, I think that’s morally fine, although you’re on your own on the legalities.)

Third, ‘intoxicated sex’ sometimes refers to sex with a person who has consented to sex and understands what is going on but has poor judgment due to being intoxicated. I don’t think this counts as rape morally, and my understanding is that in nearly all jurisdictions it does not count as rape legally. (Unfortunately, sex education classes– even “feminist” sex education classes– often lie to people about this fact.) I think there are three cases worthy of consideration here.

The simplest case is when you’re having sex with someone who agreed while sober to sex while intoxicated, or with a person you know very very well (such as a long-term romantic partner) whom you sincerely believe would like to have intoxicated sex with you. In that case, I think you should go ahead and have sex, as long as you respect their drunken preferences (you don’t get to rape people even if their sober self said it was okay).

If a person has said while sober that they don’t want to have sex with you, or if you have reason to believe that they wouldn’t want to have sex with you while sober (e.g. they are married to someone else), then you should not have sex with them when they’re drunk no matter how enthusiastic they appear to be. You would be taking advantage of their poor judgment in order to get them to do something that they wouldn’t do sober; that is skeezy as fuck and shows a deep disrespect for the person’s ability to make informed choices about what happens to their own body.

A complicating factor is that some people get drunk in order to feel able to express preferences they can’t express sober. I feel sorry for these people and the way that our sex-negative culture has messed up their ability to communicate their sexual needs; they are victims, not wrongdoers. However, I do not think it is too much to ask that they at least maintain an ambiguous silence about their sexual desires while sober, so that people who know they make poor decisions while drunk can say “I do not want to have sex with you” and trust that that will be respected.

Finally, sometimes you don’t know whether someone would want something while sober: perhaps they’ve maintained an ambiguous silence, or perhaps you met them while they were intoxicated. I would not want to entirely ban drunken hookups with strangers. I understand this is a very common kink which many people enjoy greatly and find deeply fulfilling. However, I would suggest that if there is any uncertainty about whether your partner will regret it in the morning, you should suggest waiting until they sober up.

Obviously, quite often, people who are intoxicated enough that they have poor judgment are having sex with other people who are intoxicated enough that they have poor judgment. Being intoxicated is not an excuse for committing rape; if being intoxicated might cause you to commit violent felonies, then you should not become intoxicated. However, having sex with someone who might regret it in the morning is more of a puking-in-front-of-someone-else’s-door-and-not-cleaning-it-up offense, which is wrong but for which “I was really drunk and not in control of my actions” is an excuse.

Finally, if you are less intoxicated than the person you’re having sex with, it is your job to ensure that you have sex responsibly, including taking all safer-sex precautions.

Fourth, ‘intoxicated sex’ sometimes refers to sex with a person who is slightly intoxicated but still capable of making good decisions, such as a person who had a glass of wine with dinner. This sort of intoxicated sex is morally unproblematic.

[Coming up next post: power dynamics, sex work, safewords, emotional pressure, and suicidality.]

 

Whisper Networks, Callout Posts, and Expulsion: Three Imperfect Ways of Dealing With Abuse

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.

Fantasies Are Okay

Tags

noncon cw, ozy blog post, sex positivity

[This post is a request made by Cliff Pervocracy. One person who backs me on Patreon at the $5 level or above will be randomly selected each month to pick a topic for a post or story I write.]
[content warning: murder fantasies, rape fantasies]

Is it okay to fantasize about killing your boss?

It’s definitely not okay to start researching how to get a gun license and tracking your boss’s schedule to find out when he’ll be alone. That is not fantasizing but, in fact, what is technically called “planning”.

It’s probably not okay to deep in your heart of hearts want to kill your boss, to think it would be a very good thing if he were dead and very satisfying to watch his blood spurt over your hands, and if you had a ring of invisibility you would stab him and watch him die. That is also not fantasizing; it is instead “desiring”. It is not as bad as actually planning to kill your boss, but it’s still not a very good state of affairs, and you should probably think about treating your burnout or moving to a different office.

But what if you just get chewed out by your boss, and as you sit down at your desk you think “what if I stabbed him with that pretentious gold pen he has on his desk. man, if only”– but if anybody offered you the opportunity, you’d turn it down? I mean, he has kids, and he’s a pretty reasonable guy all things considered even if he was unfair today. You wouldn’t actually want to kill him.

That’s fine, it’s normal, and everyone does it.

Maybe not about bosses in particular. Maybe it’s your ex-boyfriend, or your abusive mom, or that asshole who doesn’t know how to drive. Maybe you’re a free-speech absolutist who kind of wishes Nazis would get punched in the face. Maybe you’re not particularly prone to the sin of wrath– some people aren’t– and instead you fantasize about laying in bed all day (even though in reality that’s kind of boring) or eating 24 donuts (even though that would make you sick) or having your neighbor’s fancy car (even though you know it would stop being attractive as soon as you actually own one).

The thing about fantasies is that, in fantasies, you usually only focus on the desirable part and abstract away the parts that make the reality horrifying. You think about the good parts of murdering your boss: you don’t have to put up with that asshole anymore, and you would wreak vengeance for the injustice done you. You don’t think about the grief of your boss’s family, or your husband sobbing as visitor hours at the prison end and he won’t be able to see you for another week, or your tremendous guilt at violating your moral beliefs about murder, or the fact that there’d be a human life, a little world, forever gone.

Or think about the zombie apocalypse. Lots of people enjoy fantasizing about the zombie apocalypse. Some people like thinking about shooting zombies with their arsenals of weaponry, personally I like thinking about the details of crop rotation, whatever floats your boat. But notably I have never met anyone whose fantasies include “everyone I know and love would be dead.” Or “I would suffer crippling PTSD.” Or “no one would ever make a Star Wars movie again.” Or “I would probably not be a stone-cold badass, actually, I would probably get chewed on by a zombie while I was taking a shit and die thirty minutes into the apocalypse.”

This is why fantasies about the zombie apocalypse are cool, and the actual zombie apocalypse would be terrible.

But of course people don’t usually feel guilt about their fantasies about the zombie apocalypse or boss murder. No, this guilt is usually reserved for sexual fantasies.

All of the same arguments apply. There are lots of happily monogamously married women who sometimes fantasize about fucking a cute stranger they pass on the street. These fantasies notably do not include “my wife, whom I love more than life, feels crushed and betrayed that I cheated on her”, or “I broke my promise, which goes against everything I hold dear”, or “sex with random strangers is often really bad”, or “the random stranger might have an STI or get me pregnant or assault me”, or “I don’t actually want sex with strangers, it takes me some time to get comfortable with someone before I want to have sex with them”. It is totally consistent to have sexual fantasies about cheating and not actually want to cheat.

And similarly for other sorts of sexual fantasies. I sometimes see the argument that rape fantasies are actually ravishment fantasies, because in many such fantasies the victim actually wants sex. This argument has always seemed problematic to me (in real life, if someone says “no” but is aroused by the sex anyway, it’s still rape) and anyway I don’t know about you but I definitely don’t only have fantasies about attractive men having sex with women who say “no” but are secretly enthusiastic. My rape fantasies have actual rape in them.

But having a rape fantasy doesn’t mean you actually want to rape anyone or be raped, any more than making a zombie plan means you want all your friends to die. It is totally consistent to be sexually aroused by the thought of raping someone and to actually have moral objections to causing people years of emotional trauma and pain, such that actual rape is repulsive to you.

There are two special circumstances I want to talk about. First, sometimes having fantasies makes you want to do the thing more than you would otherwise. For instance, some recovering alcoholics find fantasizing about beer makes them want to drink, and some people who cheat on their partners find that sexual fantasies about people other than their spouses make them want to cheat. It makes sense that that would happen: fantasizing makes the good parts more salient than the bad parts. In that case, it can be helpful to explicitly remember the bad aspects. For instance, it’s fun to drink and makes you feel less anxious, and also last time you went on a bender you lost your job. Sex with the cute girl would feel really good, and it would break your wife’s heart.

Second, sometimes people don’t want to have close relationships with people who have certain fantasies. I think there’s a certain level of emotional intimacy required before that’s a reasonable request: your boss doesn’t get to request that you don’t have murder fantasies about him, no matter how much he’d like it. But it’s okay for someone to prefer that their romantic partner not have sexual fantasies about anyone else or that their friend not fantasize about killing them when they’re pissed off. If you have those fantasies anyway, you can try to stop (if that’s something that’s pretty easy for you to do, or if the relationship is worth it), or you can choose to end the relationship.

On Peter Singer, Anna Stubblefield, and Rape

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rape tw

[content warning: ableism, rape apologism, bestiality, rape of children]

Anna Stubblefield has succeeded at the dubious achievement of simultaneously being a rapist three different ways at the same time.

First, Stubblefield used facilitated communication, a discredited way of communicating with nonverbal disabled people, to speak with DJ. Assuming for the sake of argument that facilitated communication works, she was literally his only means of communicating with the outside world; DJ did not successfully use facilitated communication with his family. His ability to get a GED, read books, even say what he wanted for dinner, was entirely dependent on her continued support. This creates a power imbalance in which sex cannot happen ethically. If she had been responsible, she would have said “I have feelings for you too, but we can’t explore them until you have another long-term facilitator who’s able to work with you.” (She would have also checked his desire for sex with her with another, naive facilitator, as is done when a disabled person who uses facilitated communication accuses someone of sexual abuse.)

Of course, facilitated communication does not work; according to the best scientific evidence, facilitated communication works something like a Oujia board, and what you get out of it is what the facilitator put in. So she raped him in a second fashion, by having sex with a nonverbal disabled person without taking the appropriate measures to ensure that he fully consented, instead relying on a pseudoscientific communication technique.

The third way that Stubblefield raped DJ is by ignoring his nonverbal communication: when she kissed him, he sat up, left the bed, and scooted out of the room. She then proceeded to perform oral sex on him. While she believed this was okay because his facilitated communication said he consented, given that facilitated communication does not work, our only means of understanding his preferences implies he did not want this.

Peter Singer has written a controversial editorial about Stubblefield’s case. Several parts of this editorial have been condemned throughout the effective altruist community: for instance, Singer’s defense of the pseudoscientific facilitated communication technique and his failure to mention either the first or the third ways in which Stubblefield raped DJ. However, one passage from his editorial has led to a great deal of argumentation:

A central issue in the trial was whether D.J. is profoundly cognitively impaired, as the prosecution contended and the court seemed to accept, or is competent cognitively but unable to communicate his thoughts without highly skilled assistance, as the defense contended. If we assume that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, we should concede that he cannot understand the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation. These are, after all, difficult to articulate even for persons of normal cognitive capacity. In that case, he is incapable of giving or withholding informed consent to sexual relations; indeed, he may lack the concept of consent altogether.

This does not exclude the possibility that he was wronged by Stubblefield, but it makes it less clear what the nature of the wrong might be. It seems reasonable to assume that the experience was pleasurable to him; for even if he is cognitively impaired, he was capable of struggling to resist, and, for reasons we will note shortly, it is implausible to suppose that Stubblefield forcibly subdued him. On the assumption that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, therefore, it seems that if Stubblefield wronged or harmed him, it must have been in a way that he is incapable of understanding and that affected his experience only pleasurably.

This is not exactly what one would call the most lucidly written passage. Several people I respect, including Kelsey and Scott Alexander, have interpreted it differently than I do; they believe the passage says that it is theoretically possible for disabled people who can’t use language to consent to sex. I certainly hope that Singer was trying to say that and failing miserably, and I hope that he edits the article to clarify given the controversy he has engendered.

However, in the overall context of Singer’s work, I believe that a more reasonable and charitable (in that it accurately reflects Singer’s beliefs) interpretation is that Singer believes there is nothing wrong with having sex with a disabled person who can’t use language, regardless of their consent, as long as violence is not used.

Peter Singer regularly compares severely disabled people to animals; one of his most commonly used arguments in favor of animal welfare is that one would not torture a severely disabled person with the cognitive capacities of a chicken, and therefore one should not torture a chicken. He has repeatedly spoken out against speciesism, the belief that one should treat beings of equivalent capacities differently based on their species. Therefore, given that he believes that many non-language-using disabled people have similar capacities to animals, and that it is unethical to treat beings of similar capacities differently based on species, we can use his beliefs about bestiality to enlighten us about what this passage means.

Singer has written in the past about bestiality. He has explicitly outlined forms of bestiality he considers unacceptable:

Soyka’s suggestion indicates one good reason why some of the acts described in Dekkers book are clearly wrong, and should remain crimes. Some men use hens as a sexual object, inserting their penis into the cloaca, an all-purpose channel for wastes and for the passage of the egg. This is usually fatal to the hen, and in some cases she will be deliberately decapitated just before ejaculation in order to intensify the convulsions of its sphincter. This is cruelty, clear and simple. (But is it worse for the hen than living for a year or more crowded with four or five other hens in barren wire cage so small that they can never stretch their wings, and then being stuffed into crates to be taken to the slaughterhouse, strung upside down on a conveyor belt and killed? If not, then it is no worse than what egg producers do to their hens all the time.)

But sex with animals does not always involve cruelty. Who has not been at a social occasion disrupted by the household dog gripping the legs of a visitor and vigorously rubbing its penis against them? The host usually discourages such activities, but in private not everyone objects to being used by her or his dog in this way, and occasionally mutually satisfying activities may develop. Soyka would presumably have thought this within the range of human sexual variety.

This suggests that Singer may believe that bestiality is morally okay as long as it is mutually satisfying, and that all cases in which the animal initiates are certainly mutually satisfying. However, there is an intermediate case: the case in which the animal is not particularly interested in sex, but is having sex for some other reason. Singer writes:

[Rural men] may also take advantage of the sucking reflex of calves to get them to do a blowjob…

For three-quarters of the women who told Kinsey that they had had sexual contact with an animal, the animal involved was a dog, and actual sexual intercourse was rare. More commonly the woman limited themselves to touching and masturbating the animal, or having their genitals licked by it.

In this case, the animal does not desire sex. The calves are sucking as a reflex action; the dogs are presumably not licking human genitals out of a passionate desire to perform cunnilingus. (My understanding is that people who practice bestiality often put a food, such as peanut butter, on their genitals to induce the dog to lick them.) Singer does not appear to have clarified whether he considers this form of sex to be acceptable. However, given the fact that he mentions it as evidence that bestiality is quite common and does not condemn it, it seems to me that the correct way of interpreting Singer’s belief is that this too is acceptable. In short, it appears that Singer’s view is that it is always okay to have sex with an animal as long as the sex does not involve injury or pain to the animal, particularly if the animal experiences something that is prima facie rewarding (as sucking is to calves and food is to dogs).

Extending this to DJ’s case, I believe that Singer’s passage above means that as long as no injury or pain was done to DJ, and DJ experiences something that is prima facie rewarding (as oral sex is to humans), then sex with him is ethical.

Further evidence is that this explains an otherwise puzzling omission on Singer’s part. Singer says that “[DJ] was capable of struggling to resist, and, for reasons we will note shortly, it is implausible to suppose that Stubblefield forcibly subdued him.” But DJ did, in fact, resist: he attempted to leave. It’s possible that Singer is ignorant of this basic fact of the case. However, Singer himself says he has “stud[ied] the evidence advanced by Stubblefield’s attorney in support of her appeal.” When I searched Google for “anna stubblefield” on incognito mode, the above article was the second result. (The first was Singer’s own.) This is readily available information for anyone who wishes to read about the Stubblefield case. Unless we’re assuming that Singer is both a liar and grossly negligent, we should assume that he is aware of these publicly available facts of the case.

Therefore, the most logical conclusion is that Peter Singer does not consider DJ’s attempt to leave to be a sign of resistance. The idea that, in general, trying to leave isn’t a revocation of consent to sex is absurd rape apologism and I would not slander Singer by claiming he believed it. However, if Singer believes that violence or pain is what makes sex with DJ unethical, then it makes sense for him to point out that there wasn’t any violence or pain. In this context, Singer’s statement makes perfect sense.

The bestiality case illustrates this clearly. One can imagine a situation where you intend to have a calf give you a blowjob, the calf wanders off, you wait a bit for it to stay still, and then you have it give you a blowjob. It seems to me that if bestiality is unethical, this situation is unethical, and if bestiality is ethical, this situation is ethical.

The difference is that calves do not have an abstract, conceptual understanding of sex, because calves do not have an abstract, conceptual understanding of much of anything. A calf is not thinking “I have a consistent preference over time to not have that guy’s penis in my mouth and I’m going to try to communicate this preference through walking out the barn door. Oh, okay, it looks like he’s not going to give in, so I’m going to lie back and think of England.” A calf is thinking “I want to go investigate that sunbeam. Ooh! A thing to suck on!”

However, while I’m sympathetic to this model when we’re talking about sex with calves, I am very unsympathetic when we’re talking about sex with non-language-using humans. Calves have known capacities; severely disabled humans do not. To pick a very clear example: it is vanishingly unlikely that calves are capable of receptive and expressive language, with vocabularies of hundreds of thousands of words, and the only reason they’re not writing poetry to rival William Shakespeare’s is that their vocal cords aren’t shaped right. Receptive and expressive language are complex capacities and there would be absolutely no reason for them to evolve in a species without vocal cords that can produce speech.

Conversely, nearly all humans have receptive and expressive language capacities. We know that some humans retain receptive and expressive language, even if they have lost the ability to speak. For instance, many humans with cerebral palsy have difficulty controlling their mouth muscles, so they can’t speak, but they can communicate with augmentative and auxiliary communication technology. Some autistic humans are intermittently incapable of speech under stress. Therefore, a non-language-using human may lack the capacity to use language altogether, or they may understand language but have such large difficulties using it that (unlike in the case of many humans with cerebral palsy or autism) we can’t tell that they have that capacity.

Of course, language use is not a morally relevant capacity. But the same thing does apply to morally relevant capacities. How are you supposed to tell whether a person who can’t use language understands the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation? I mean, it’s not like you can ask him.

We don’t even have a good sense of the probabilities here. It could be that every non-language-using disabled person has the cognitive abilities of a calf. It could be that every single one of them understands sexual violation. We have no way of distinguishing these two worlds.

I note that Peter Singer agrees with this argument. Inexplicably, he seems to believe that DJ can have the ability to understand sexual violation if and only if facilitated communication works as a way of communicating with him. Since presumably DJ had those capacities (if he does) before he ever met a facilitator, he could also presumably have those capacities even if he cannot communicate them.

Furthermore, it does not seem like the ability to be sexually traumatized is as complicated as all that. One-year-olds in general have a very poor understanding of consent, as one can see by their tendency to hit other toddlers to hear the interesting noises the other toddler makes, but I would expect that fucking a one-year-old would cause them no small amount of emotional harm both in the short and the long run. It certainly seems like a bad idea to decriminalize sex with toddlers on the grounds that they are incapable of giving or withholding consent.

The safest course, I believe, is to assume that DJ is a person (albeit a person with certain diminished capacities). As a person, he is capable of being sexually traumatized. This does not necessarily mean he should be consigned to celibacy. I personally agree with Scott’s proposal:

I wish there were a system in place to protect disabled people from sexual abuse while not banning all sexuality entirely. If you want to do surgery on a disabled person who can’t consent, lots of doctors and lawyers and friends and family get together and do some legal stuff and try to elicit information from the patient as best they can and eventually come to a conclusion. The result isn’t perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than either “no one can ever operate on a disabled person” or “any surgeon who wants can grab a disabled person off the street and do whatever operation they feel like”. If there were some process like this for sex, and they decided that DJ wanted to have sex with Anna, then (again ignoring the power dynamics issue) I think this would be better than either banning him from all sex forever, or letting her have sex with whoever she wants as long as she can make up convincing enough pseudoscience.

Notably, this does seem to not have happened here even in an unofficial way, as one can tell by the fact that the family’s response to Anna revealing that she had sex with DJ was not “woohoo, finally” but “what the FUCK?” and trying to get her to go to jail for twelve years. Which is the second reason that I’ve claimed she’s a rapist.

(The fact that Peter Singer did not say something like “while good consent practices were not used in this case and Stubblefield is a rapist, I want to be clear that it is possible for a neurotypical person to have enjoyable and enriching sex with a non-language-using person if proper care is taken to ensure that they consent” seems to me to be further evidence that my claim about what Singer means is right and he in fact thinks that Stubblefield’s actual behavior is morally acceptable.)

Finally, I’d like to address the issue of abstracting away specific details of the case to talk about underlying philosophical issues. Clearly, it should be acceptable to talk about under what circumstances it is okay for non-language-using people to have sex; clearly, the routine desexualization of intellectually and developmentally disabled people is a grave harm to them.

However, let’s imagine that Peter Singer had instead written an article entitled Who Is The Victim In The Brock Turner Case? In this article, in addition to using pseudoscience to claim that Brock Turner’s victim actually consented, Singer writes that it’s a mistake to assume that sex with unconscious people is unethical just because they can’t verbally revoke consent.

Of course, it is possible to ethically have sex with unconscious people. Many couples enjoy waking each other up with sex. It is very silly for some sex-positive feminists to criticize it for lack of affirmative consent. But it seems to me that making this argument in the context of, you know, an actual rape victim is absurdly offensive and insensitive. Doing so in an article called Who Is The Victim In The Brock Turner Case? in which you argue for clemency for Brock Turner leads one to the conclusion that you’re not just abstractly considering important issues but, in fact, arguing that the particular rape which actually happened is morally unobjectionable and should not be punished.

And it seems to me to be equally objectionable to argue against protests of Who Is The Victim In The Brock Turner Case? by pointing out that it’s harmful to say that waking people up with a blowjob is rape and then saying it’s a shame that Singer didn’t do his homework about the details of the case, whereupon he would realize that Brock Turner did not in fact finger his girlfriend with her previous consent with the intent of allowing her to wake up pleasantly. Brock Turner’s case is clearly and obviously not the same thing as waking up your partner by fingering them, and it is offensive, morally wrong, and worst of all extremely unenlightening to discuss them in the same place.

On The Baby It’s Cold Outside Discourse

Tags

christmas, ozy blog post, rape tw

[content warning: rape]

It’s the Christmas season. Trees and nativity scenes are going up in houses. Presents are being wrapped. People are watching traditional Christmas movies like Die Hard. And feminists everywhere are practicing our traditional wanky discourse about Baby It’s Cold Outside.

I think it is fucked to try to get people not to listen to Baby It’s Cold Outside. I personally enjoy listening to the Chris Colfer/Darren Criss version, as well as many other songs about behavior I don’t endorse in real life. It is okay for people to enjoy things! At best, I’d suggest that it’s probably inappropriate to play Baby It’s Cold Outside in stores, because rape-culture songs really ought to be opt-in, but there are really many, many more important feminist issues than enthusiastically consenting individuals choosing to listen to Baby It’s Cold Outside of their own free will.

On the other hand, I have also seen people explaining that Baby It’s Cold Outside is not really a rape-culture song. You see– they argue– at the time Baby It’s Cold Outside was written, women couldn’t really say ‘yes’ to sex, because that would mean she wasn’t a good girl; they had to reject men’s advances whether they wanted to or not. So the Mouse is saying token ‘nos’ that she doesn’t expect the man to listen to, and the Wolf is offering her lots of excuses she can tell people. So the song is about her exercising her sexual agency in a culture that didn’t want her to! Feminism!

The problem with this interpretation is that most people– in the early twentieth century and today– don’t say “no! Stop! I don’t want this!” They use soft nos. Think about the last time you turned down something you didn’t want (nonsexually). You might say “this evening has been very nice, but I really must go.” Or “I have to leave, my parents will worry.” Or “I really ought to say no.” For most people who aren’t impaired in social skills, these sentences are still easily parsable as a refusal. Even in ask culture, refusals tend to be fairly soft: we probably wouldn’t say we’d love to do something that we wouldn’t, but we might say “I’m sorry, I just don’t have time.”

The Wolf is blatantly ignoring the Mouse’s soft nos. When a person pushes another person’s boundaries, it’s common for the other person to give in, even if they don’t want to. In this situation, the Mouse is alone with the Wolf. He is probably significantly physically stronger than her. She’s strongly implied to be more innocent than him. If he does hurt her, the general social opinion will be that she asked for it because she was alone with a man. In this situation, a lot of people would give in and do whatever the Wolf says.

So essentially this is a situation where it is very difficult to tell apart a person who’s saying “no” to sex from a person who’s saying “yes” to sex. The technical word for this is “rape culture.”

Now, a lot of people are pretty good at reading other people’s body language and tone of voice. It’s likely that the Wolf actually cares about whether the Mouse wants to be there, and if she sounded scared would help her into her coat and take her home. But that’s dependent on the Wolf’s ability to read body language: if he misreads the Mouse’s signals, he would coerce her into sex.

If the Wolf is a little less scrupulous, the difficulty of distinguishing “yes” and “no” offers him a way to salve his conscience. After all– he might think– women always say “no” when they mean “yes”, so there’s no harm in convincing or even forcing a woman who says “no”. With a little bit of self-deception, he can convince himself that he didn’t notice the signs of her fear, or that those signs were actually eagerness. That means he’s much more likely to commit rape.

Even if the Wolf doesn’t care about whether or not he’s committing rape, his friends might. In that case, “yes” sounding like “no” gives him a way to justify his behavior to others: after all, women always say “no” when they mean “yes”, and she went up to his apartment and took his drinks and didn’t leave, so she definitely wanted it. Many people are not consciously aware of the small signs of anticipation or happiness that they notice in people they’re flirting with; it’d be all too easy for a rapist Wolf to describe his behavior in a way that sounds like what everyone else is doing.

It’s a much better system to assume that when a person says “no” to sex– including soft nos– that they probably actually mean “no” and it is not a good idea to attempt to repeatedly convince them. This system offers no plausible deniability to rapists, either to themselves or to others. And it minimizes risk that someone will misread another person’s signals when by “no” they actually did mean “no”.

In conclusion: depending on how the song is played, it’s very possible the Mouse consented. However, Baby It’s Cold Outside is still a product of a rape culture.

Why Everyone Is Irrational About Victim-Blaming and Rape

Tags

ozy blog post, rape tw

The nice thing about helpful advice, in general, is that you can refuse to take it.

Consider the case of the helpful person who says to me “Ozy, if you ride in a car, you’re significantly increasing your chance of dying in a car accident. You should only take buses.” I would respond with “thank you, but I don’t want to spend hours of my life waiting for the perennially late bus to arrive; I will take a car.” No one finds this a strange conversation.

Or consider the person who observes me leaving my bike unlocked. “If you leave your bike unlocked, it might get stolen!” they say. “Yeah, I know,” I say, “but the bike lock hasn’t come from Amazon yet, and I need to get dinner.” Again, this is not considered a strange conversation.

Now, imagine the case of the person who helpfully informs me that walking around alone late at night in the sort of semi-gentrified neighborhood I tend to live in increases my risk of getting raped. I reply, “Yes, I know, but I enjoy the peaceful feeling I get when I walk alone late at night when the stars are shining and the world is quiet. So even though it increases my risk of getting raped, I am going to continue to take my long walks.”

Or imagine someone who isn’t me having a conversation with a friend about the risks of getting wasted in public. The friend says, “you know, if you get wasted, you might get raped.” Imagine if that person replies “I’ve thought about it, and actually I’ve decided I care more about being able to get wasted sometimes than I do about getting raped.”

If you are like most people I’ve talked to, the latter two conversations sound really weird. Those people sound careless, like they’re taking pointless risks with their safety, like they fail to understand how horrible rape is, and it is quite unlikely that their friend will go “yeah, that makes sense” instead of “but you might get raped when you walk around late at night!” Rape risk is just not the sort of thing you make tradeoffs about.

Note that this has absolutely nothing to do with how objectively bad the consequences are. Most people agree that being a rape survivor is less bad that being dead (otherwise, rape survivor euthanasia would be a much more popular program than it actually is); nevertheless, the risk assessment is done much more sensibly for car accidents than it is for being raped.

What this means is that saying “this thing increases a woman’s risk of getting raped” essentially means “no woman should ever do this thing ever again, no matter how good a reason they have for doing it.”

Furthermore, for things that are not rape, how much you get condemned for doing something tracks pretty well with how important it is to the average person to do that thing. For most people, leaving their bikes or houses unlocked is not particularly important, and so you get criticized pretty hard for leaving your bike unlocked; however, for most people, riding in a car is a pretty important part of their lifestyle, and so you don’t really get criticized for riding in a car if you have a car accident.

This is, incidentally, why “I don’t walk around in bad neighborhoods late at night waving my wallet stuffed full of cash around!” is a terrible analogy. Most people have no reason to walk around in bad neighborhoods late at night waving around a wallet stuffed full of cash, while many people do have perfectly good reasons for going on late-night walks.

For rape, how much you get criticized for doing something does not necessarily track with how much it interferes with your life. In a study of which rape prevention tips are the most common, several were things that wouldn’t interfere too much in the life of an ordinary person (“communicate sexual limits”, “leave unsafe or uncomfortable situations”, “lock your doors”). However, many would limit the lives of the average person: “be aware of surroundings” (whoops, so much for playing Pokemon Go or listening to podcasts while you walk home), “avoid secluded areas”, “walk in well-traveled areas”, and “avoid being alone.”

(There is also the separate issue that, due to the undercounting of male victims, this advice is provided almost solely to women, and therefore circumscribes women’s lives while leaving men’s untouched. Men may very well be as likely to be raped as women, and are certainly as likely to experience violence at the hands of men, so there is no reason to direct this advice solely to women. Everyone must avoid secluded areas!)

So let’s assume that you’re an average introvert for whom “avoid being alone” is advice about as good as “consider doing surgery without anesthetic on your own foot.” In what way can you respond to this advice?

Well, for rape, you can’t say “I value being alone and thus am willing to take the increased risk of getting raped.” Indeed, the thought might very well be unthinkable. Rape is something you’re not used to thinking of in terms of acceptable risk and reasonable tradeoffs; that’s utterly taboo. Deciding to increase your risk of being raped is just not a thing people do. But, naturally, you also have no desire to be around two or more people every day for the rest of your life. You can’t say “I want to make this particular tradeoff,” and you certainly can’t say “I am part of a culture in which it is unacceptable to say I want to make this particular tradeoff”; like a lot of reasoning, avoiding cultural taboos happens on a subdeliberate level and you don’t have access to exactly what your brain is doing.

So what do you say? “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”

Which is usually cunningly disguised as the phrases “don’t blame victims” and “teach men not to rape.”

Which seems super-offputting to people who just want to give useful safety advice. Of course you agree that people of all genders shouldn’t rape, and of course you agree that it is insanely douchey to tell a rape survivor that they should have stayed sober, and so you don’t see how those topics have any relevance to the thing you’re saying. And some people seem to imply that no one should ever talk about reducing one’s risk of rape– which is an attitude we don’t have about any other issue.

Well, here’s the problem: You functionally cannot have a discussion of sensible risk management if other people can’t respond with “having thought about it, I am totally comfy running this particular risk”, and particularly if the subject is so taboo that they can’t respond with “fuck you, I get to make risk tradeoffs that make sense to me.” If hopping on one foot reducing your risk of rape means that all women everywhere are going to be hopping on one foot next week, then women are going to do some hella fallacious reasoning about why they shouldn’t have to hop on one foot.

If you want to be able to have sensible conversations on avoiding rape, start by making rape risk something it’s acceptable to make tradeoffs about. Doing it the other way around won’t work.

Thoughts On Victim-Blaming Rape Survivors

Tags

ozy blog post, rape tw

A lot of people say “why can’t we criticize rape victims’ behavior? I mean, I agree that no one should commit rape; it’s a horrible crime. But you have to admit that there are some things that can increase your risk of being raped.”

I certainly agree.

For instance, 27% of perpetrators of rape are a spouse or romantic partner– a statistic that is particularly startling given that most people only have one spouse or romantic partner at a time, while they generally have several relatives, friends, acquaintances, and strangers they see in passing. Of the people you interact with in your day to day life, your spouse or romantic partner is by far the most likely to rape you. And no wonder! Most people regularly put themselves in a vulnerable position around their spouses and romantic partners: they sleep next to them, spend time around them naked and unarmed, and even have sex with them.

And it’s easy enough to avoid the risk, isn’t it? You have essentially complete control over whether you have a romantic partner. All you have to do is be celibate and not have any romantic relationships; to be on the safe side, you should probably also avoid platonic primary relationships, because most of the being-in-a-vulnerable-position-around-others concerns still apply, even though those are rare enough that they don’t show up in the data. Surely that’s a tiny price to pay for a reduction in your risk of getting raped, right?

(And there are other benefits! Current research suggests that it is very uncommon to be a victim of intimate partner violence if you don’t have an intimate partner.)

And, hey, how come these helpful people never talk about men? If you include men who are forced to penetrate women, year-to-year, men are as likely to be raped as women. Therefore, no man should ever get drunk or high unless he’s alone in a locked room, because a woman might rape him while he’s intoxicated. We should probably close down bars altogether. Or maybe they should be gender-segregated? We can have a heterosexual female bar and a heterosexual male bar, all flirting strictly prohibited. (Sorry, LGB people, you’re out of luck. It’s locked rooms for you guys.)

That doesn’t make any goddamn sense? I agree! For a lot of people, a primary relationship is one of the most fundamental sources of strength and happiness in their life, and sex and romance are really fun for most people. It’s smart to take reasonable precautions– don’t fuck people who violate small boundaries because they might violate big ones– but ultimately you just have to accept that dating people does increase your risk of being raped, and that you’ll take a small increase in your chance of being raped in exchange for not coming home to an empty twin bed for the rest of your life. Similarly, many men enjoy getting drunk with their friends; they don’t want to decrease their risk of getting raped at the cost of all their drunken half-remembered camaraderie.

The same thing is true of any other behavior people criticize in rape victims. I occasionally walk alone at night, because I did the cost-benefit analysis and decided that the low risk of being raped by a stranger on a street corner was outweighed by being able to get snacks at 2 am when I want them. Other people get drunk in public because, for them, the risk of being raped when drunk is outweighed by the enjoyment of getting drunk at bars.

(You might argue that perhaps these people are making an incorrect tradeoff. But in my experience there is not exactly an absence of the message that rape sucks really hard and you are more likely to be raped if you are drunk; I suspect all women who go out drinking are fully informed of the risks.)

This is, I think, a taboo tradeoff. Rape is the Worst Thing In The World. You’re not supposed to make reasonable cost-benefit analyses about the Worst Thing In The World and decide what is an acceptable risk to run. There is no such thing as an acceptable risk of the Worst Thing In The World! Can’t you read? It’s the Worst Thing In The World!

So here’s the corollary: If a person takes a calculated risk, and they get the bad outcome, they didn’t do anything wrong– even from a prudential perspective. If I offer to give you a thousand dollars if the coin comes up heads if you give me fifty dollars if the coin comes up tails, and it came up tails, this does not magically make the bet a bad bet. If I die in a car crash, that does not magically make my decision to ride in a car instead of taking a bus everywhere a bad decision, even though buses are safer. And if I decide that I really like partying and I’m willing to take a risk of being raped, and then I am raped, it does not magically make my decision a bad decision.

(The thought that it does is called hindsight bias, by the way.)

The rape victim did not make an unwise decision; they made a wise decision that, unfortunately, due to circumstances outside their control, turned out poorly. They are not at fault and should not change their behavior. The only person in this situation who ought to change their behavior is the rapist, on account of they violently attacked someone.

Do Rapists Believe All Men Are Rapists?

Tags

ozy blog post, rape tw

Do rapists believe all men are rapists?

I’ve seen this claim around the feminist blogosphere. It’s perhaps expressed most powerfully in this comment by Time-Machine:

A lot of people accuse feminists of thinking that all men are rapists. That’s not true. But do you know who think all men are rapists?

Rapists do.

They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again.

Virtually all rapists genuinely believe that all men rape, and other men just keep it hushed up better. And more, these people who really are rapists are constantly reaffirmed in their belief about the rest of mankind being rapists like them by things like rape jokes, that dismiss and normalize the idea of rape.

If one in twenty guys (or more) is a real and true rapist, and you have any amount of social activity with other guys like yourself, then it is almost a statistical certainty that one time hanging out with friends and their friends, playing Halo with a bunch of guys online, in a WoW guild, in a pick-up game of basketball, at a bar, or elsewhere, you were talking to a rapist. Not your fault. You can’t tell a rapist apart any better than anyone else can. It’s not like they announce themselves.

But, here’s the thing. It’s very likely that in some of these interactions with these guys, at some point or another, someone told a rape joke. You, decent guy that you are, understood that they didn’t mean it, and it was just a joke. And so you laughed…

That rapist who was in the group with you, that rapist thought that you were on his side. That rapist knew that you were a rapist like him. And he felt validated, and he felt he was among his comrades.

This comment is missing a citation. Which is fine; it is powerfully written, and I don’t cite all my claims in blog comments either. Unfortunately, when I look for “psychological study, the profiling, the studies”… I don’t find it.

First, I looked for people making a similar claim who actually did cite their sources. Van Badham, writing for Comment is Free, links to the following site, which shows a distressingly high rate of acceptance of rape myths in the general population. The general population is, you know, mostly not rapists. In fact, the rhetorical strength of Time-Machine’s point depends on the general population not thinking rape is okay. Furthermore, the book they’re citing was published in 1991, which means it probably mostly relies on research from the 1980s. The sexual assault rate has fallen by more than fifty percent since 1993. If one is arguing that rape myth acceptance leads to increased rape, one probably shouldn’t use data on the rate of rape myth acceptance from before the extremely large drop in the rate of rape. Unfortunately, I cannot find the source itself online for a more thorough critique.

So let’s look at Google Scholar. Feild finds that there is no difference between rapists and the general population about how normal rape is. However, this study is also from 1978. Maybe the general population’s belief that rape is very normal dropped in the past forty years, leaving rapists the lone population that considers this normal behavior?

Tieger, however, finds that men who rate themselves as likely to commit rape if they were not caught are more likely to believe that rape is normal and acceptable. I am worried, however, by the lack of apparent controls for social desirability bias; is it possible that some men are simply more likely to admit to stigmatized traits on surveys? Malamuth finds similar results but has a single, aggregated ‘rape myth acceptance’ variable, which does not allow us to figure out whether the correlation is primarily driven by e.g. rapists believing that women ask for it.

Mostly, what I’m seeing is a fat lot of nothing. It doesn’t look like this is a subject that is commonly explored at all– at least using the keywords I’m searching.

In short, I must say that I cannot find the profiling and psychological studies that this blog comment claims exist, and thus provisionally– while it certainly seems plausible that rapists generally believe everyone rapes– I do not accept it as fact.