Critique of Just Love, Part One

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god bothering, ozy blog post, rape tw, sex positivity

[Content note: this post discusses, without explicit detail, many forms of unethical sex, including rape, sexual harassment, and child molestation.]

A reader commissioned me to write a blog post about the book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, by Margaret Farley, a Catholic nun and former professor at Yale University Divinity School. (It’s “Just Love” as in “love that follows principles of justice,” not as in “only love.”) Just Love was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church for endorsing masturbation, gay marriage, gay sex, divorce in some situations, and remarriage after divorce.

I will begin by discussing why we should have sexual ethics other than “don’t rape people” at all, then explain Farley’s view of sexual ethics, then I will critique each of her proposed norms in turn. I have a lot to say about this book, so I’m splitting the post up over several days in order to save everyone from having to read a ten-thousand-word monstrosity.

A Justification of Sexual Ethics Beyond Rape

Many people adopt what I consider to be an extraordinarily deontologist view of sex. They consider sexual ethics to consist solely of not having sex with people without their consent. Everything else is strictly supererogatory. You might decide to care about your partner’s sexual pleasure, or indulge your partners’ fetishes, or avoid sex that makes you feel sick and empty and degraded inside, but these are all personal choices with no moral valence. The actual ethics is in the consent.

I admit this is a model I am continuously tempted to use. It is so simple and so elegant. A free agent in the sphere of sexuality and romance can set their boundaries and express their needs to other people. They search until they find a partner who has a compatible set of needs and boundaries. Throughout the relationship, they renegotiate as their boundaries and needs change; when their boundaries and needs no longer mesh, the relationship ends. No set of needs and boundaries is “wrong”, although with certain sets of needs and boundaries it may be hard to find a compatible partner. The only unethical action is violating someone else’s boundaries.

But it is unsatisfying in many ways. It is all very well for deontologists to have a model where as long as you follow the rules you’re okay. But utilitarians ought to object that there are many instances of consensual sex which do not produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Egoists should remark that there is no reason to assume that all consensual sex is pursuing the individual’s enlightened self-interest. Virtue ethicists might point out that it would be very odd if sex were the only sphere of human interaction in which we cannot cultivate wisdom, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Even many formulations of deontology object: sex can be consensual and still involve treating a person as a thing or following a rule that you would not will everyone else abide by.

The “only nonconsensual sex is unethical” is equally odd from the perspective of intuitive morality. Sometimes consensual sex is disloyal, harmful, or unfair. Certainly it would be very strange if sex were the only area of human life in which the sum and total of ethical human behavior is “don’t commit literal felonies.”

I think how unsatisfying the only-nonconsensual-sex-is-bad ethic is can be shown through how many other aspects of sexual morality people insist on attempting to smuggle into it. For instance, some people argue that cheating is wrong because it violates your spouse’s consent. It seems extraordinarily puzzling to me that people get to consent to sex that they are not involved in and may not even be aware of, and very unprincipled that only spouses have this capacity. (Why can’t parents revoke consent for their teenagers to have sex? Why can’t governments revoke consent for sodomy to happen between its borders?) You might argue that the difference is that you have sex with your spouse and you do not generally have sex with your government. But in that case a spouse would have no room to object if their partner had sex with someone else and then conscientiously never had sex with them again. Most people, I believe, would consider the latter decision to compound the harm, not to erase it.

I think the only logical conclusion is that the harm from cheating has nothing to do with consent; instead, the harm from cheating comes from breaking a promise. It is possible for sex to be completely and 100% consensual and also be wrong.

A lot of people have a flinch reaction to that conclusion, which makes sense. As completely reasonable sentences that are usually followed by horrible bullshit go, “it is possible for sex to be completely consensual and also be wrong” is right up there with “I’m not racist” and “think of the children.” Traditionally, of course, “it is possible for sex to be completely consensual and also be wrong” is followed with some thoughts on the evils of premarital sex, pornography, homosexuality, polyamory, birth control, feminism, sex toys, oral sex, sex outside of the missionary position, and literally everything else that’s fun. In our more modern era, it is also used by various Tumblr users who want you to know that BDSM is violence and violence is still wrong when everyone is consenting, which is presumably why they make a habit of protesting boxing matches and karate dojos.

That is what you might call act-based sexual morality. In addition to sex without consent being wrong, people put certain sexual acts on the “no” list, because those acts are considered to be inherently violent or misogynistic, objectifying or going against God’s will, disrespectful or a violation of the proper end of the human body, regardless of context or how the participants feel about it.

I think that consent-only sexual morality is right but doesn’t go far enough. However, act-based sexual morality is totally and completely wrong. After a great deal of thought, I have not been able to identify a single sex act qua act that I would consider conclusively wrong in all circumstances. (As opposed to, say, choice of sexual partner, where there are a number of choices that are wrong in all circumstances– children, your students, people who are in a monogamous relationship with someone else, etc.) Unprotected PIV is wrong if you picked up a stranger at a bar, but beautiful if you’re conceiving a loved and desperately wanted child. Calling your partner a disgusting whore is cruel if you mean it, but extremely hot for some people in a negotiated D/s dynamic. Certain forms of dangerous edgeplay are far too risky for most people, but can be valuable for certain people who are aware of and have accepted the risks.

(Sex in public where people might see is the closest I can get to an “always wrong in all circumstances” thing, but even then if there were enough sex-in-public enthusiasts that they convinced the city to allow them to cordon off a few streets every so often for the purpose, and there were bouncers checking IDs and making sure everyone knew what they were in for, I think that sex in public would be absolutely wonderful.)

The fallacy of act-based sexual morality makes sense once you try to apply it to any other subject. Is it inherently wrong to punch someone? Depends on whether they’re assaulting someone else at the time. Is it inherently wrong to play at a rock concert? Depends on whether you’re doing it in my backyard without my consent. Is it inherently wrong to give away a million dollars? Depends on whether you’re giving it away to the Nazi party. You can’t judge any action outside of its context, so why do people think this is a reasonable way to judge sexual ethics?

Three final notes: First, while I do think sexual ethics should consider issues other than consent, I do not think any form of consensual sex should be illegal. It is wrong to cheat on your partner, but that does not mean that you should go to prison for cheating on your partner.

Second, no person is perfectly ethical. This is true for every area of ethics. It is wrong to yell at your children, but nearly all parents yell sometimes. It is wrong to go on expensive vacations instead of giving that money to the poor, but most people who can afford to go on expensive vacations have gone on at least one. It is wrong to eat products that come from chickens, but I still eat the occasional cookie without inquiring too closely about whether there are eggs in it. Similarly, we would expect all people to have unethical sex sometimes. The question is whether you are doing the best you can, not whether you have reached some unattainable standard of goodness.

In particular, it is very very common for people to do wrong things because they have no other choice: for example, people eat eggs because they’re depressed and if they didn’t eat eggs they wouldn’t eat at all. It is not ever wrong to take care of yourself first. Ethical actions should be healthy, happy, and sustainable.

Third, when I say that sexual ethics must go beyond consent, I don’t mean to imply that consent is not important. In fact, consent is the bedrock of all sexual morality. Unfortunately, our society has caused many people to internalize the idea that you shouldn’t say no to sex if you have a certain relationship with someone, or if they really really want it, or if you don’t have a good reason. All sexual ethics has to come from the fundamental, baseline position that you can always refuse sex with someone for any reason or no reason at all. Even if your reason is really really stupid, you have a right to say no to sex for stupid reasons. Even if they paid for dinner, or you’re married, or it’s the third date, or you’re a man and you think men always want it you have a right to say no to sex. You should absolutely say no to any sex that makes you feel sick or gross or sad or violated.

Farley’s Framework

Farley argues that justice involves treating other humans with respect for who they are as humans: a unique person with a body and a soul, needs for food and clothing and shelter, the capacity for free choice and thoughts and feelings, a history, a social and political and cultural and economic context, a relationship to various systems and institutions, a potential for growth and flourishing, a vulnerability to diminishment and despair, interpersonal needs and capacities, and emotions. Of particular relevance to sexual ethics are a person’s ability to make free choices (autonomy) and their ability to have relationships with other people (relationality).

Farley presents a seven-item framework for sexual ethics. The first two are grounded in human autonomy, while the second five are grounded in relationality.

1. Do no unjust harm

While this is a general principle of ethics, avoidance of harm is particularly important for sexual ethics. Violations of this principle include rape, domestic violence, enslavement, sexual exploitation, unsafe sex, deceit, betrayal, sexual unfulfillment, emotional manipulation, and so on and so forth.

2. Free consent

Free consent is the right of each individual person to determine their own sexual actions and relationships. Violations of this principle include rape, violence, coercion, sex with people who do not have the capacity to give informed consent, sexual harassment, and child molestation. Norms derivative from this norm of free consent include privacy (the right of an individual to keep information about their sex life confidential), telling the truth, and keeping promises.

3. Mutuality

Mutuality is mutual participation in the sexual act. Sex is not a thing that one person does to another person; instead, it is a relationship in which everyone involved is both active and receptive and both gives and receives pleasure. This does not necessarily imply that it is morally wrong to be, for example, a pillow princess or an exclusive top: as just one example, a pillow princess may actively participate through their obvious enjoyment of the sex.

4. Equality

While no two individuals are perfectly equal in power, Farley argues that individuals participating in ethical sex must be sufficiently equal. Severe inequalities, such as when one person is very emotionally immature or those produced by certain patriarchal cultures, may result in one person being vulnerable and dependent and having limited options. Violations of the norm of equality include sexual harassment, emotional and physical abuse, some forms of sex work for some people, and giving up your entire sense of self for the person you love.

5. Commitment

In general, Farley argues, ethical sex requires some form of commitment to your partner, although not necessarily a lifelong marriage.

6. Fruitfulness

The most obvious kind of fruitfulness is procreation. Procreative sex must be conducted in a context that ensures the responsible care of offspring, the creation of a family, and participation in the great project of building the human community. However, for many people, sex is not procreative: they might be gay, infertile, childfree, or simply not ready to have children. However, they can still have fruitful sex. Ethical sex opens you to the wider community. It is not self-involved. Good sex can strengthen you, which lets you move beyond yourself in many ways: you can nourish your other relationships, make art, help people, provide goods and services to others through work, or raise your own or help raise other people’s children.

7. Social justice

Please note that this is “social justice” in the Catholic sense of the term, not in the modern-day sense of the term.

Social justice is an umbrella term covering many different kinds of sexual ethics. It is not sexual ethics construed narrowly, as in whether or not you should have particular kinds of sex; it is sexual ethics construed broadly, as in all the ethical problems which are affected by our sexualities. All people have a right to “freedom from unjust harm, equal protection under the law, an equitable share in the goods and services available to others, and freedom of choice in their sexual lives– within the limits of not harming or infringing on the just claims of… others” (Farley pg. 228); unfortunately, some people are denied these rights due to their sexualities or in the sphere of sexuality.

In a narrow sense, social justice requires that we take responsibility for the effects our actions may have on others, such as public health concerns, procreation, broken promises, and so on. In a broader sense, social justice implies a concern for the many ways in which people are harmed based on sexuality: a brief and incomplete list would include sexism, sexual and domestic violence, racism, global poverty, oppressive religious and cultural traditions, HIV/AIDS, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, lack of contraceptive access, and the harmful use of new reproductive technologies.

Unjust Harm

In general, I endorse Farley’s reasoning. If you are the sort of person who reads a long post about sexual ethics, you probably already know that you should not rape people or sexually harass them or enslave them. It is in general wrong to have sex with people if you know it will cause them more distress than pleasure.

Many utilitarians may object that “no unjust harm” pretty much covers all of sexual ethics and we don’t need any additional sexual ethics. Be that as it may, I think it’s useful to have guidelines about how you can avoid harming people, particularly for those of us who have already mastered “slavery: probably a bad idea.” These sexual ethics I will discuss in the next post.

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

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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.

Book Post for April, Not About Parenting

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american politics is the best reality show, diane duane, god bothering, history side of tumblr, lingua latina, ozy blog post, rape tw, rationality, science side of tumblr, sex work, there is no justice and there is no judge

Eros and Thanatos: A pair of philosophical dialogues about love and sex, starring a family of Roman reconstructionist pagans. If this sounds like your sort of thing, it probably is. In the first, Catullus (a closeted gay man who believes that Love Conquers All) debates homosexuality with Germanicus (a Stoic who believes sex is only for procreation), Lydia (a Catholic), Sheila (a basically normal person), Ali (a postmodernist feminist) and Juvenal (the sort of edgelord who goes about saying that everything is violence and power). In the second, Juvenal, Germanicus, and Catullus debate whether murder is ever morally acceptable, along with Caligula (an atheist) and Brutus (a Buddhist).

Motel of the Mysteries: From the Body Ritual Among The Nacirema school of parody, the premise is that two thousand years from now an archaeologist finds a buried motel and concludes that this was a place of sacred mysteries. The book discusses The Great Altar (a television), the ceremonial burial cap (a shower cap), and the sacred collar (a toilet seat). Funny and pointed.

Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism: This is a very frustrating book. I thought I would really enjoy it because I love her blog– even when I disagree she’s always insightful– but this book occasionally veered towards something I agree with and then felt like it came from Cloudcuckooland. People who have casual sex are all sex addicts! You can tell, because they deny that they’re sex addicts, and addicts always deny their addiction. Obviously. Nevertheless, Selmys’s conversion story is really interesting. She gets catechized early on by a Druid.

Sexual Authenticity: More Reflections: I find this book much less frustrating than the former book, and even agree with it in some places.

Selmys uses the Roman emperors as a framing to talk about the etiology of homosexuality. Of the first fifteen Roman emperors, only one was completely heterosexual. Even assuming that some were slandered by their detractors, at least half the emperors had some level of same-sex attraction. This seems strange from a perspective in which only three percent of the population is LGB, and startling even if you assume Roman emperors carried the gay gene, since many early Emperors were not related. She uses it as a framework to talk about different causes of homosexuality: for instance, Julius Caesar might have been an opportunistic bisexual, Tiberius a sex addict, Caligula a sexual assault victim, Nero a very feminine man forced into an ultra-masculine role in an ultra-masculine society by an overbearing mother, Hadrian a normal well-balanced person who happened to be in love with a man, Elegabalus a trans woman. Even given the many similarities between Roman emperors, there’s a lot of diversity in sexual behavior and motivation and what it means to call someone gay or bisexual.

Selmys’s observations on ex-gays seem to match up with my own observations of bihacking. Some people experience a sudden change in sexuality, but it’s not common and there’s no way to cause it; most people can, with a lot of hard work, transform themselves from Kinsey 0s and 6s to Kinsey 1s and 5s, but this does not actually offer a realistic hope of a relationship. Selmys claims that sudden orientation shifts are often caused by falling in love, which isn’t true in my experience, and I am curious what the difference is.

Selmys had a really interesting perspective on how having a lot of kids affects the experience of a parent of a disabled child. If you have one kid, all your hopes and dreams are on that kid. When your child is diagnosed with a disability, you have to grieve all the experiences you won’t have: if your child uses a wheelchair, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to play football; if your child is intellectually disabled, it’s harder to share the pleasures of science with them. But if you have more than one kid, then you can still have those experiences with your other kids, and it’s easier to recognize how good your disabled child is as themselves. I am not sure if I agree, but I think it’s interesting to think about.

Interim Errantry: Three Tales of the Young Wizards: An excellent three-novella collection. It’s nice to get a little breather and see what Kit and Nita are up to when they aren’t saving Earth. Interim Errantry is as weird as any other Young Wizards book: my attempts to explain the plots to Topher involved a lot of “Jack O’Lanterns are apparently sapient”, “and then the tree alien decides to become a Christmas tree”, and “and then through a series of misunderstandings an alien concludes that Nita and Kit are going to engage in the Impregnation Ritual on Valentine’s Day and the prelude to this involves eating one candy heart each day.”

Science fantasy is a genre close to my heart. I love urban fantasy that takes full advantage of the fact that it takes place in our reality and therefore has moons and aliens.

Also, I’m not sure if this is just me, but there were definitely more references to boners and porn than I’m used to in the Young Wizards series. The freedom of self-publishing? Changing standards in YA books?

Borderline (The Arcadia Project Book 1): The fey exist. All genius artwork comes from collaborations between humans and their fey soulmates, called “Echoes”. (The soulmate does not have to be a romantic soulmate.) The Arcadia Project, which employs solely crazy people, manages the fey/human interactions.

Our protagonist has borderline personality disorder and it’s amazing. Nothing I love more than a book about a borderline who totally has insight into the awful things she does and keeps doing them anyway. I liked how it realistically wrote her both as sympathetic and as kind of an awful person, but not as some kind of chaotic evil monster– just someone who has the same empathy and compassion as anyone else, but who sometimes does bad things on impulse. I really liked how the protagonist had recovered from suicidality but was still obviously mentally ill and had a life that sucked because, yeah, not being suicidal anymore doesn’t necessarily mean your life is great. And there was DBT in the book! The protagonist talks about her reason mind and her emotion mind, and one of the other characters is someone who literally severed her reason mind from her emotion mind with magic! I would have appreciated more use of skills, but then the protagonist is (canonically) not very cooperative with therapy. So I guess it makes sense.

 

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High: Wow, it’s like the book Nonviolent Communication, but without the weird and creepy implication that if you do everything right then people will do what you want.

The key piece of advice is that you should focus on what you actually want and doing things that will achieve the goal you actually want, instead of giving into the temptation to instead achieve the goals “no one ever criticizes me” or “the person I’m talking to is punished” or “my sense of self-righteousness is justified” or similar. Do not assume that it’s impossible to get a deal both sides will be okay with: this is often possible!

Before you can succeed at a crucial conversation, you have to separate out what’s actually going on from the story you’re telling yourself is going on about how you are an innocent victim, or the other person is a horrible monster, or you are completely incapable of improving the situation. Try looking at the objective facts of the situation and separating them from your interpretations of what’s going on. Ask yourself about your role in the problem, why a reasonable and rational person would do what the other person is doing, and what you should do to move towards what you want.

The first step in a crucial conversation is to notice when people feel unsafe. When people feel unsafe, they will usually turn to silence or violence: on one hand, selectively showing your true opinions, avoiding important issues, or even withdrawing from the conversation altogether; on the other hand, forcing your views on others, labeling and stereotyping people, or insulting and threatening people. When these happen, the conversation has gone off the rails. Even noticing unsafe conversations can be a huge step towards improving conversations, but you can also work on making it safer. You do that through: apologizing when appropriate; using a contrast statement which addresses others’ concerns that you don’t respect them or have a malicious intent and then clarifies your respectfulness and intent; and finding a mutual purpose, a goal both sides share. You do that through CRIB (this book is as fond of acronyms as DBT is): committing to find a mutual purpose; recognizing why the person you’re talking to wants the things they want; inventing a mutual purpose, perhaps by agreeing that everyone wants the relationship to be strong or the business to succeed; and brainstorming new strategies that serve everyone.

Once everyone is safe, you want to find out other people’s perspectives and share your own. To share your own perspectives, use STATE: share a factual description of the situation from your perspective; tell the story you’ve told yourself about those facts; and ask for the other person’s perspective. While doing this, talk tentatively, saying things softly and in a way that implies you want other people to correct you, and encourage other people to share their own views, no matter how controversial. To encourage other people to share their perspectives, use AMPP: ask to hear people’s concerns; mirror other people’s feelings; paraphrase what you’re hearing; and if they really won’t share their opinions with you at all, prime by saying tentatively what you think the other person’s perspective might be. If it turns out you and the other person disagree, start with an area of agreement; build on what the other person is saying by suggesting that they might have overlooked something; and compare positions, suggesting that you differ and not that one of you is wrong, when you really can’t reach consensus.

When it comes time to make the decision, you should follow an appropriate decision-making procedure: for instance, the boss has the final say in a corporation, but in most marriages decisions are made by consensus. When decisions are made, you should always be clear about who is responsible, what exactly they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it by, and what the followup will be.

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Voters are systematically biased: for instance, compared to the consensus of economists, they tend to underestimate the usefulness of markets and the economic benefits of trade with foreigners. Voters are wrong even about obvious empirical issues: for instance, voters tend to vastly overestimate the percentage of the budget devoted to foreign aid. Voters care about trivia about politicians (Dan Quayle’s feud with a television character) at the expense of practical issues (who is their senator); while voters swiftly punish transgressions they hear about, these transgressions are generally things like “said a racist slur” or “cheated on his dying wife” rather than things like “caused the incarceration of millions of people for relatively small crimes” or “destroyed the entire economy”. The worst part is that voters are altruistic, so instead of voting based on their pocketbooks (which, presumably, would incentivize politicians to have a good economy for most of their voters) they vote based on what they think is good for the country (which incentivizes politicians to give voters things the voters think are a good idea, whether it is or not).  All this means that voters vote for and receive terrible policy.

Honestly, it’s kind of remarkable to me how democratic governments wind up with their current level of low-variance mediocrity. This happens every time I read something about society. Like, it’s really remarkable how well our society works given that every individual element of it is a constantly-falling-apart shitshow. I have no explanation for this state of affairs.

Weirdly, Caplan models the situation as “there are benefits to having biased opinions (less effort researching right opinions, signalling group membership, not having to admit you’re wrong), there are costs to having biased opinions (you are wrong about things and that hurts you), since any voter has an astronomically small chance of flipping the election it is rational for them to buy way more bias than they would for things affecting their personal life.” While I think that’s correct for some situations, other biases, such as the availability heuristic, clearly don’t seem to fit this model. Like, I really don’t think parents are hysterical about children playing outside because they’re obtaining a certain amount of signalling that they’re good parents at the cost of a certain amount of parenting effort, I think they’re legitimately just mistaken about the chance their children will be kidnapped. And I suspect similar arguments apply to voters as well.

Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction: I am impressed by the consistent high quality of the “very short introduction” series and wish I could subscribe to a program where they mail me a random one each month and then I get to learn about mathematics or nothingness or logic or something each month.

The most interesting thing I learned from this book is that some people, including Flynn himself, believe the Flynn effect is due to increased familiarity with standardized tests in general and intelligence tests in specific. For instance, in the 1930s, an IQ test was probably the first standardized test a person had ever taken, while I took about two standardized tests a year for twelve years while attending a school system which was widely criticized for primarily teaching me how to be good at taking tests. It’s no wonder that I’d have a higher IQ score. In this case, the Flynn effect means that changing IQ scores provide us little to no information about whether and how people’s IQ scores are changing over time.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think: This is a pretty good introduction to the YIMBY position on housing. Various regulations– including rent control and zoning– make it more difficult and less profitable to build more homes, so we have fewer homes than we need. The idea that homes are an “investment” which always increases in price also increases the price of housing for people who don’t own their own homes. As a result, people live further from work (leading to unpleasant commutes and lots of pollution) or move to cities with cheaper housing but fewer jobs. This is bad, because dense locations provide a lot of benefits to people– ranging from higher productivity to a cleaner environment to better restaurants.

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How The Law Is Used To Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful: I originally thought I was a ooey-gooey soft-on-crime liberal, and then I read this book, and discovered I was an ooey-gooey soft-on-crime liberal except for crimes committed by presidents. When Glenn Greenwald remarked that under international law torture is punished with the death penalty, I thought “yep, actually, I totally support executing George W Bush.”

Unfortunately, my tough-on-crime stance is not shared by most people. In fact, under the name of “unifying the country” and “looking forward not backward”, presidents have managed to get away with absurd violations of national and international law: from Nixon’s multiple felonies to Bush’s surveillance and torture. Of course, this is not actually how the rule of law ought to work: the most basic principle of our government is that it is a government of laws not men, which is to say that if you commit a crime you should be punished, even if you are the president. (Especially if you are the president!) Claims that “public policy takes precedence over the rule of law”. Of course, there are many incentives for any given president to pull this shit: if they punish their predecessors for felonies and war crimes, maybe they’ll be punished for their own felonies and war crimes! All this is combined with a massive expansion of incarceration, meaning a poor black person gets more time in jail for smoking pot than a president does for violating international law.

Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk: The real lesson of this book is that Margo St. James, the founder of COYOTE and the St. James Infirmary, is a stone-cold badass. Margo St. James became a sex worker after she was accused of doing sex work because she was a beatnik and hosted lots of different men in her apartment, and obviously the only reason one would have men stay over is doing sex work. Her conviction meant that she couldn’t find a job other than doing sex work. She founded COYOTE, one of the first sex workers’ rights organizations, a year after J Edgar Hoover died “because we wanted to make sure he was really dead”. COYOTE’s shenanigans included awarding a giant keyhole to the Vice Cop of the Year and holding loiter-ins at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Their largest victory was when Judge Marie-Victoire dismissed almost forty sex workers’ cases on the grounds of sex discrimination, since the police had not arrested the clients. (The assistant district attorney for vice crimes said there was no reason to arrest men because “the customer is not involved with the commercial exploitation of sex, at least not on an ongoing basis.”) St. James also climbed Pike’s Peak to prove that sex workers aren’t diseased. Today, he St. James Infirmary commits to doing research that sex workers feel matters to them: for instance, it performed the first medical research on the foot problems caused by working all night in hooker heels.

I also appreciated the following slogans from a protest of Playboy Bunny clubs which only paid their workers in tips, without any salary: “don’t be a bunny, work for money” and “women should be obscene and not heard.”

In 34 states, doing full service sex work while being HIV positive is a felony, regardless of whether transmission occurred or what the actual risk profile of the sex act is. No HIV-positive client has ever been prosecuted.

The unsung heroes of this book are public health workers and activists, many of whom regularly break laws to help their sex worker clients: from giving out clean needles and crack kits, breaking trafficking laws to help underage sex workers find shelter and necessities, giving out birth control and post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV without prescriptions, or letting people know when the police are a few blocks away.

[content warning: rape]

Bang: The advice in this book is mostly reasonable. The author, however, is a goddamn misogynist.

As an example: Roosh says that you should do things because you want to do them, not in a desperate attempt to please a particular woman. This is great advice; I agree that if you’re buying someone a drink, it should be because you like them and want them to be happy, not because you’re desperately seeking their approval. His next sentence says that if he buys women drinks, it’s not a form of supplication, it’s to loosen them up so they’ll fuck him.

This is merely one example of a larger problem. Roosh seems to view sex not as something that people do together because it’s fun but as a competition between men and women in which men try to obtain sex and women try to deny it. He views a woman saying no to sex as an ordinary, normal part of the process of having sex with her; his writing clearly seems to imply that he expects a woman to say “no” to sex three or four times the first time he has sex with her. It is nice that he does not suggest physically forcing a woman into sex. He does, however, suggest ignoring her nos (for instance, responding to “we’re going too fast” with “yeah, I agree” but continuing to do whatever you’re doing) and responding to an outright “no” by stopping for a few minutes and then doing the thing again.

Of course, perhaps some women are saying “no” in the hopes that Roosh will override her “no”. (As I’ve always said, I think such ridiculous behavior should be punished by those women not getting to have sex until they learn better.) And of course some people say no to sex and then change their mind and say yes, although early on in a relationship you should probably check in and see if they’re sure. But a lot of the women he’d be using that strategy on are people who are scared, inexperienced, unsure, not good at setting boundaries. They might be frightened that if they don’t comply he will hurt them; he’s given them no reason to think otherwise. It is scary to be alone and naked, often in a house that isn’t your own, with a person who is larger and stronger than you. Is this the sort of thing you’re comfortable doing with a sexual partner?

Even from a purely selfish level, I can’t imagine that this is a great way to obtain sex. Like… surely you want to have sex with someone who wants to have sex with you? What benefit does having sex with a reluctant person have over masturbation? They make very good Fleshlights these days, you know. And it certainly makes the rest of Roosh’s pickup advice questionable. If he’s so good at seducing women, how come he has to pressure people who don’t want sex with him into sex? Surely they should be throwing their dripping panties at his head?

I think a lot of pickup stuff can be really useful for shy men. It can be hard to think of something to say to strangers, so knowing basically what you’re going to say can make it easier to break the ice and come off as charming and fun. A lot of pickup stuff isn’t the Magic Secret To Obtaining Sex, it’s just a basically reasonable thing to say while flirting, and that can serve as a magic feather to build confidence so you actually hit on people. And by relying on other people’s lines for a while you can develop a sense of what works and what doesn’t and eventually learn to flirt without the lines. But there has got to be a book written by a man with less awful and disgusting views about sexuality.

[content warning: rape, suicide]

The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented A Story of Martyrdom: A depressing amount of this book is based on word games about the meaning of the word “persecution”. You see, it only counts as persecution if the government intended to oppress Christians. The actual state of affairs was that Christians were widely thought of as very strange and rumored to be incestuous and cannibals, were occasionally oppressed by local governors, and sometimes were executed because the Emperor passed a law that said that everyone had to sacrifice to him or be executed, intended to figure out who his political enemies were, but that accidentally harmed Christians. I found this sort of argument-by-definition extremely pedantic. I also found the tie-ins to current culture war stuff really annoying: I can figure out for myself the connections between Christian ideals of martyrdom and Rick Santorum’s idea that Christians are persecuted today, thank you.

That said, it’s still an interesting read for the historical facts. Many so-called martyrdom stories are, in fact, fiction: there are historical inaccuracies and lurid plotlines that make the most sense if they were popular novels intended to amuse the reader. Many bear a striking similarity to Greek romance novels popular at the time. They have plots like “a Christian who has taken a vow of celibacy is forced to marry a vestal virgin, whom he converts to Christianity; they are arrested for trying to convert people, where the vestal virgin is sentenced to work at a brothel; an escaped lion does not harm her but instead kills the men attempting to rape her.” This is salacious enough that it is probably fiction and not a thing that actually happened.

Voluntary martyrdom was apparently quite common in the early church. We have several early Christian writers condemning it as heresy and the sin of suicide; this was probably political, because the Christians we would today consider non-heretical often escaped or recanted their Christianity, and there was a group of heretics, the Donatists, who had confessed to being Christian but were not executed for one reason or another. The non-Donatists have an obvious reason to condemn voluntary martyrdom. One of the stories we have about early Christians is that they went to a regional governor to try to be martyred, except the governor refused and instead told them that if they wanted to die there were cliffs to throw themselves off and ropes to hang themselves on.

The Christians were really confusing to the Romans. Roman polytheism was syncretic; it literally did not make sense to them that worshipping one god meant not being allowed to worship the emperor either. Many Christians were deliberately stubborn and difficult: for instance, one Christian responded to all questions, including his name, with “I am a Christian.” Many Christians said they respected God alone, which was both incomprehensible and probably seditious from a Roman perspective, since Roman society was based on hierarchies of respect.

 

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.

Against John C Wright’s On The Sexual Nature of Man, Part the Second

Tags

ozy blog post, rape tw, sex positivity

[content warning: discussion of rape, abuse, and human rights atrocities; satirical misandry on my part; actual misandry on Mr. Wright’s part; slurs]

Part two of my post disagreeing with John C Wright’s On The Sexual Nature of Man. Part one available here.

4.4 Men Are Jerks

Speaking as a man, and on behalf of the spear side of the race, let me tell any ladies reading these words that men are jerks. Perhaps the males you know are finer beings than what I describe here: if so, you need read no further. Nothing in my cynical world view will persuade you. None of the dangers I deem it prudent to protect against seem like threats to you. So be it.

I can only base my judgments on the evidence presented to me by my experience. If you have never been abandoned by a father seeking a lover younger than your mother, never been subject to a date-rape, never been dumped without a word by a man to whom you gave as much of yourself as you can give, never been abandoned by a lover and left to fend for yourself, never been driven to the abortion clinic at midnight by your best friend because the father of the baby was nowhere to be found, or never been divorced because your husband sought after a younger and prettier trophy-wife, then let me not disturb the curtain of candy-colored clouds in which your romantic hopes for life are wrapped. My view of the world is darker. I have friends and family members, people I know well, to whom all these things have happened. Time will tell which of us is closer to the truth.

I hope any feminists reading these words – if so impossible a chimera can be imagined as a feminist reading anything written by John C. Wright – will agree with me that females have been disadvantaged, exploited, and betrayed by the lusts of men since the dawn of time, and men seek to keep women in a position of weakness, to rob them of their natural rights, because both masculine indifference and masculine ego urges them to do so.

Well, I’m a feminist, and here are my thoughts:

If I actually believed everything John C Wright said about men, my conclusion would not be “men are so awful that each woman should spend the rest of her life with one of them, live with him, share her finances with him, sleep next to him at night, and generally place herself in a vulnerable position in which he may rape or murder her at any time.” That is a bizarre conclusion. In general, the correct way to respond to threats is to escape from them, not to marry them.

If I believed what John C Wright believed, I would encourage women to start a separatist commune. Any men who tried to enter should be expelled violently. (Men are physically stronger than women, you say? God made man, but Samuel Colt made them equal.) We won’t be unreasonable; heterosexual women can go off-commune for sex and even brief flings, although we will encourage them to be appropriately armed at all times. All male fetuses should be aborted. As this commune grows to slowly include all of womankind (as it no doubt would, given how horrible John C Wright thinks men are), we will shift policies. Now, only ninety percent of male fetuses will be aborted; the rest will be confined in brothel/prisons under strict guard, and any woman who wishes may visit for sex. (Naturally, men will be permitted to refuse sex with those they don’t like; we’re not monsters.) We will research into creating artificial sperm and into transforming all women into lesbians, so that men can be finally, painlessly eliminated.

The observant reader of my blog may note that I do not advocate this policy. Unfortunately, human evil is not so easily eradicated.

I do not wish to disturb the curtain of candy-colored clouds in which Mr. Wright’s romantic hopes for life are wrapped, but: Women rape. Women dump men without a word after he has given her as much as he can give. Women abandon their lovers and force them to fend for themselves. Women divorce their husbands to search for a stronger and more handsome man. And, unfortunately, all those disadvantages, exploitations and betrayals, those keeping women in positions of natural weakness and robbing them of their rights, were supported by women. Women crippled their daughter’s feet so they would never again walk without pain; women circumcised their daughters, causing them tremendous pain and taking sexual pleasure from them; women taught their daughters to throw themselves on the pyre when their husbands died, to graciously accept being raped because they have no right to refuse sex from their husbands, to be secluded so they would never see the sun.

There is, I suppose, one large difference between women and men, which is that men are more likely to hit you, and women are more likely to lie about being on birth control so they can trap you in the relationship because if you leave you are abandoning your child in a situation where you can’t protect them. I am not entirely certain that the latter is superior.

Let me ask the mythical feminist reading these words think about a particular example: when a powerful and well-connected World leader, let us call him Bill, has a young intern working for his staff, let us call her Monica, a lady perhaps half his age, not only convinced that he means to divorce his wife to cleave to her, but also convinced to kneel in his office and suck on his crooked penis, do you think the social rules and institutions surrounding sexual acts were successful in this case in protecting her from exploitation and betrayal? Were they successful in protecting his wife, let us call her Hillary, from exploitation and betrayal? Were the successful in protecting his daughter, let us call her Chelsea, from exploitation and betrayal? If any feminist were ever to read these words (an unlikelihood, I admit) I would wish to ask her whether the interests of the women involved, Monica, Hillary, and Chelsea were being served or betrayed by the Sexual Revolution and the mores and customs it ushered in to predominance.

Do you think the Sexual Revolution invented the concept of mistresses? That would be news to Nell Gwynn and Madame de Pompadour; indeed, it would be news to Maria Crofts Halpin, Lucy Mercer, Sally Hemings, Nan Britton, Carrie Fulton Phillips, and Lucia Calhoun, to name just a handful of presidential mistresses before the sexual revolution.

Today, a woman whose boss coerces her into sex may file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and receive damages. A wife whose husband cheats on her may divorce him without going through the humiliating process of revealing her private struggle to a judge to obtain a fault divorce, and without the fear that the judge will decide to not grant it. These are small improvements, yes, but they are improvements. Prior to the sexual revolution, the hypothetical Bill would have experienced no consequences; now, there is at least a chance he will receive some.

5.1 The Sex Act 

John C Wright provides two reasons why only PIV intercourse ought to count as sex proper.

First, he points out that in the common law consummation is required for a marriage to be valid, which means PIV sex (even if contraception is used or the partners are sterile), but not oral sex, anal sex, etc. I am unclear why a Catholic appears to be such a strong supporter of a law that would judge the blessed Mary ever-virgin to have a non-binding marriage. I am equally unclear why the common law says things about the fundamental nature of sex. Notably, nonconsummation is not necessarily grounds for annulment in the civil law, which leads one to the curious position that PIV intercourse is the only proper form of sex as long as one does not happen to be in France at the time.

The purpose of marriage, in the common law, is to minimize the number of bastards. If no act that could possibly produce a bastard has occurred, then there’s no harm to ending the marriage. Oral and anal sex are treated differently because they cannot produce bastards. When the common law was being devised, there was no effective form of contraception and the causes of infertility were not understood, so naturally no exception was made for sex between infertile or contraception-using individuals. Admittedly, in the 1100s people did know that postmenopausal women couldn’t conceive, but also women who got married after menopause in the 1100s and who wished to end their marriages were a tiny percentage of the population who were probably ignored for the sake of a clean rule. While this is all very interesting, this does not mean that the rules devised for minimizing bastards in the 1100s are remotely useful for a philosopher trying to discern the nature of sex nine hundred years later.

Second, Wright argues:

Imagine begin a young bride, wafted off to the Honeymoon, only to hear your loving and devoted young bridegroom, his eyes shining with romance, announce that he will not now and never will consummate the marriage. Instead, you and he will engage in sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, and mutual masturbation. Assume moreover that there is nothing physically or mentally wrong with him: he is not suffering from an old war wound to the thigh. You will never mate with your mate. Does that seem like a proper culmination of romantic love to you, or does there perhaps seem to be something missing, even if you cannot at first put your finger on it?

This is a fun thought experiment, and I fully expect that half the comment section will be people sharing their opinions on it. I admit that many people would be annoyed at not getting to have PIV, but many people would also be annoyed at not getting to have oral sex, manual sex, seeing their partner naked, kink, etc. This does not mean that cunnilingus is the true kind of sex and PIV is a mere imitator, it just means that people don’t like it when you take popular sex acts off the table for the rest of their lives. (Personally, I’d rather never have PIV again than never give a blowjob again, but that’s me.)

John C Wright goes off on a tangent about how the “natural” in natural law is different from the “natural” of what trees do when left to their own devices, which I agree with and shan’t argue with.

John C Wright’s conclusion is as follows:

Let us leave this old-fashioned language to one side, and merely point out that copulation with a sterile partner, or during a sterile time of the month, is necessarily and legally in the same category as copulation with a fertile partner, whereas sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, mutual masturbation, even if done as preliminaries, or “safer” substitutes, are not only not copulation, in any sense of the word, and they are sexual only in their inessentials, a mockery or substitute for sex, a way to enjoy the sensations without the thing itself, the way vomiting up a meal is an inessential substitute for eating, a way to enjoy the taste of food without the act of really eating and digesting it.

On an emotional level, while the same feelings, base or sublime, lustful or devout, and the same physical sensations which attend the sex act may indeed accompany these surrounding sexual-ish acts, as a matter of biological fact, they are not the same. To confuse the feelings or sensations with the reality is the core the issue: an emotion can be false-to-facts in the same way a statement can be. The thing the emotion represents does not exist; the emotion is false.

I do not consider his evidence to have established his point. Human sexuality is, to take a phrase from the Catholic church, unitive and procreative; I would add a third, that it is pleasurable. That is, human sexuality leads to the production of children, it leads to warm feelings between the people who are having sex with each other, and it leads to feelings of pleasure and enjoyment. Unlike other species, we have concealed ovulation. We do not have sex only when it is possible to conceive a child. Instead, we have sex as an expression of caring, affection, and often love, and we have sex because it feels nice and we like it.

(A caveat: as a card-carrying libertine, I do not consider it my business to meddle in the everyday lives of others. I personally happen to consider unitive and pleasurable sex to be the best form of sex, and I attempt to convince others of the same. However, if someone insists that for them non-unitive or non-pleasurable sex best serves their overall eudaimonia, I do not consider it my place to question them; I recognize that mental diversity exists, and anyway the costs of imposing my viewpoints on others are much higher than the benefits gained. Given that my argument is “non-unitive/non-pleasurable sex makes you less happy”, I trust that people can observe their own levels of happiness themselves.)

Mr. Wright has belabored the obvious point that sex other than PIV cannot produce a child, and that institutions primarily intended to regulate procreation (such as marriage in the 1100s) naturally show a great deal of interest in PIV. But he has failed to establish that they cannot serve the unitive and pleasurable purpose of sex, nor would it be possible for him to do so, as it is obviously the case that all the wide variations of human sexuality– from married PIV for the purposes of procreation to the people who fuck cars– can sometimes be used to express people’s feelings of fondness for one another and are sometimes enjoyable. He could perhaps argue, as the Catholic Church does, that it is not permitted to separate the procreative purpose (at least in formal cause, if not in material cause), the unitive purpose, and the pleasurable purpose from each other. But he does not do this. Instead, he makes bad, fallacious arguments to attempt to show, in defiance of all human experience, that the unitive purpose cannot be served by blowjobs.

5.2 Passions Related To The Sex Act 

John C Wright argues that the passions associated with the sex act are lust, infatuation, devotion, and love, and gives reasonable definitions of each. I do not actually necessarily disagree with Mr. Wright here, except for his characterization of lust:

Lust is the physical attraction. This lust can either be friendly (as when it is accompanied by infatuation, devotion, or love) or unfriendly (as when it is without anything more.)

Lust without anything more is how we describe the attraction felt toward whores, or, for that matter, airbrushed pictures of Playboy bunnies. Neither respect, nor any tender emotion is necessarily provoked by lust without anything more. Indeed, to judge from locker room conversations, hostility and contempt seem to be the frequent, if not inevitable, by-products of lust without more.

Now, I’m inclined to agree that lust accompanied by hostility and contempt is all too common in this fallen world. I am even inclined to be against having sex out of pure lust; it rapidly loses its interest compared to masturbation. And there is an obvious reason for Mr. Wright’s observations: people who like casual sex a lot are awful people. But I utterly disagree with the idea that the only emotions lust can be accompanied by are infatuation, devotion, and romantic love.

I think people fall into two categories here. First, there are those for whom lust for someone they like naturally produces feelings of infatuation, which later naturally ripen into devotion if all goes well. Second, there are those for whom lust may be accompanied by other friendly feelings: affection, friendship, admiration, sympathy, even pity. I do not mean to say that the former are monogamous and the latter are polyamorous; indeed, I know many a monogamous person who does not experience infatuation at all, and whose romantic relationships are purely motivated by the combination of lust with friendship and affection. But I do think that the former group is likely to have a quite miserable experience of sex outside of romantic relationships– either unrequited love or dark contempt– and for them it is wise to reserve sex for romance. For the latter group, however, sex because you think someone is nifty, even without romantic feelings, often leads to joyous outcomes for everyone involved.

(To be clear, this is not a stance that is against sex with strangers, assuming one is capable of having positive feelings about strangers and associating them with sex. As Samuel Delaney writes, “Because feelings, emotional and physical, are so foregrounded in sexual encounters, the orgy is soon the most social of human interchanges, where awareness and communication, whether verbal or no, hold all together or sunder it”…)

Psychological studies tend to suggest that people who like casual sex a lot are awful people, and that my observations suggest that people who like casual sex a lot are kind, agreeable individuals with a good word to say about everyone. I think the difference is that in the sex-positive communities I’ve been in, sex is an accepted way of expressing positive feelings for people. Naturally, those who have more positive feelings for people have more casual sex. Conversely, in communities where that is not a norm, those who have lots of casual sex are mostly those who want to get sexual pleasure out of others without having any sort of emotional connection to them whatsoever no matter how brief, i.e., mostly assholes.

Part three tomorrow!

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

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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?

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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.

Against ‘Enthusiastic Consent’

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ozy blog posts, rape tw, sex positivityr

A lot of feminists support ‘enthusiastic consent’ as a model for sex. If a person is not enthusiastic about the prospect of having sex, they argue, it is unethical. Sometimes this is expressed as “if it’s not fuck yes, it’s fuck no.”

First, I don’t think “enthusiastic consent” draws the lines properly around ethical and unethical sex. For instance, it’s possible that there’s a thirteen-year-old who’s very enthusiastically consenting to have sex with me. They’re horny and they want sex right now! However, I still think– knowing that the vast majority of thirteen-year-olds are not ready for sex, that early sexual initiation is correlated with a host of problems, and that there are serious power dynamics in relationships between adults and teenagers– that it is a terrible idea for me to have sex with a thirteen-year-old. Similarly, if someone who’s extraordinarily drunk is enthusiastically consenting to sex, and I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t want to have sex with me if they were sober, it behooves me not to have sex with them.

On the other hand, a lot of unenthusiastic sex is perfectly ethical. A couple that is trying hard to conceive a baby might not be feeling terribly erotic: “honey, my cervical mucus looks like an egg white!” is few people’s idea of dirty talk. Nevertheless, there’s nothing wrong with planning your sex around trying to conceive. Similarly, a sex worker may not feel terribly enthusiastic about sex with her clients, but that doesn’t mean that her or her clients are doing something wrong.

Second, enthusiastic consent is androcentric. Sexologists sometimes distinguish between responsive desire and spontaneous desire. Spontaneous desire is when you’re walking along, minding your own business, thinking about the grocery list, and suddenly you’re like “man, I really want to get laid right now.” Responsive desire is when you’re not really in the mood for sex, but your partner is, and you start kissing and cuddling and touching each other and wow now you really want to fuck. People can experience only responsive desire, only spontaneous desire, or both. However, there is a gender difference in how likely people are to experience responsive desire: a minority of men experience responsive desire, while the majority of women do, and a significant minority of women only experience responsive desire and never spontaneous.

Some people have a tendency to equate ‘good sex’ with ‘being similar to the average man’– another example is the bizarre instance by many people that vaginal orgasm is absolutely necessary for a woman to have good sex. ‘Enthusiastic consent’, I fear, is an example of this– it sounds a hell of a lot like “only have sex when you are experiencing spontaneous desire.” But for a lot of women, good sex doesn’t begin with spontaneous horniness: it begins with a willingness to have sex even though sex doesn’t sound super-appetizing yet. A lot of them feel broken or like they’re doomed to an unenjoyable sex life, when in reality they have a perfectly ordinary variation.

Third, I feel like ‘enthusiastic consent’ is sort of disrespectful of people’s agency. If it is someone’s own personal body and their own personal decision, I’m not sure why sex-positive feminism gets to have an opinion about whether their motivations for consenting to sex are pure enough. I do not mean to adopt the full “if I say I want it, you don’t get to say I don’t want it” position. As I mentioned above, it is perfectly reasonable to say “you might want it now, but I’m not convinced you’re going to want it later” to young teenagers and the very drunk. And if I’m in a close relationship with someone, I think there are times it’s okay for them to say “I think you’re having sex with me because you feel guilty (or whatever), and I don’t think that’s good for you, so we’re not going to have sex now.”

Nevertheless, if I am a sober adult, I think my decisions should prima facie be respected. Certainly by casual sex partners, who definitely do not know me well enough to have an opinion about whether I am doing something wrong. But also by feminism as a whole! If a person says “I had sex when I wasn’t enthusiastic about it, and it was a perfectly fine experience and I don’t think it was morally wrong”, we should respect that and incorporate it into our understanding of sexual ethics. At a certain point, one must switch from “okay, everyone needs to do these specific things” to “everyone needs to figure out what works for them and then do that”– and I think whether or not you choose to only have sex when you experience spontaneous desire is well past that line.

My preferred way of discussing ethical sex is ‘affirmative consent’ (which, fortunately for me, seems to be winning out over ‘enthusiastic’). Affirmative consent means that everyone involved in the sex agrees to it voluntarily, noncoerced, and for the entire time the sex is happening. There are various ways to convey such an agreement. The most obvious and the most common is both people actively participating in the sex. You might make an agreement to keep going until the person says “no” or safewords. Or a person might convey with their body language that they would like the sex to continue.