I think this is a great idea. I’ve been mulling over some things about how best to go forward with Feminist Blogs’ growth, which I’ll probably post about in a bit. But sub-sites are definitely one great idea.

What do you think about setting it up under http://uk.feministblogs.org ? I’ll be in touch by e-mail about how it might be set up…

Amanda:

Of course, even the “can’t count intoxication” argument strikes me as being really disingenous. I would say that raping drunk women happens all the time. There’s borderline cases, of course, but plenty of men prey on drunk women full well intending to rape and then try to pass it off as bad drunk sex.

Good points. I definitely agree with you that this line of criticism is bunkum. For one, it rules out a lot of indisputable non-borderline cases of rape in which men rape women after they have passed out or been physically disabled by alcohol or date-rape drugs. For two, the criticism is usually based on distortions of Koss’s question—which was not whether the woman ever had sex while she was drunk / intoxicated, but whether a man had ever had sex with her when she didn’t want to, after he had given her drugs or alcohol. That’s pretty clearly a predatory dynamic, but Koss’s critics prefer to whitewash it by changing the question. And for three, it seems to be part of a larger pattern of acting as if feminists have to rule anything that passes for normal het male dating behavior as therefore out of bounds for criticism. To hell with that!

It’s just also worth pointing out, I think, that even if you concede all the cases they complain about, the numbers stay very close to what they were, whether in Koss’s study or in later studies such as the National Violence Against Women Survey, and that these numbers are very easy to find, and that the Men’s Rights bully-boys and professional antifeminists don’t bother to even look around for 5 minutes to check them out. Not everyone who’s skeptical of Koss’s findings acts like this, but many of them are very clearly interested in dismissing entirely by innuendo and armchair speculation, rather than looking at the readily available data. And that’s pretty indicative of how they are approaching the subject.

Five comments on NDAs, and none of them at all are to the point.

The reason that Apple’s legal brickbats are problematic from a free speech standpoint is not that the First Amendment somehow prohibits contractual NDAs. It doesn’t. But the publishers of ThinkSecret, AppleInsider, and PowerPage never signed an NDA with Apple. They never made any agreement with Apple that they wouldn’t leak any information that comes into their grubby little hands, and they’re under no legally enforceable obligation whatsoever not to do so.

Apple has every right to pursue legal action against people who have breached their contract, but they have no right at all to use legal force against people who never agreed to Apple’s terms in the first place. The legal maneuvering is nothing more than high-powered bullying to try to force innocent third parties to give up their sources when they aren’t under any legal obligation to do so. Copyfight is exactly right to frame this as an issue of corporate bullies attacking protected speech.

Amanda:

I still cannot figure out what they hope to gain by insisting that rape is slightly less common than Koss’s study indicates. Okay, so what if we find one day that only 1 in 5 women has been sexually assaulted. Does this mean anti-rape campaigns are a sham? If 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 people had a car stolen, we sure as hell wouldn’t be quibbling over the numbers, but would be looking for solutions.

I fear that what they think they have to gain is explained by the simple fact that they are not acting in good faith. I try to keep conversations civil with people who repeat the hatchet-jobs on Koss (most of them copied, directly or ultimately, out of Katie Roiphe’s hatchet-job in The Morning After), but a lot of them are more interested in indiscriminately throwing mud on the survey (and therefore not having to discuss how prevalent rape is at all) than they are in finding out what the truth of the matter might be.

The standard-issue attack that Koss includes sex while intoxicated, for example, is completely trivial: Koss went ahead and ran the numbers over again with those cases excluded, and found that 1 in 5 college women had suffered rape or attempted rape if you stuck to a definition based only on direct force or threats of violence. Anyone who was honestly interested in the possible limitation of Koss’s figures or in making sure that feminists base their arguments on careful and accurate use of social science results could have found this out by reading either Koss’s primary articles or reports such as I Never Called It Rape. But they don’t, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that many of the people who do this—and certainly those who do it in print—are just a bit more interested in cooking up an excuse to dismiss feminist analyses of rape than they are in finding out the truth.

A lot of the attacks on the Koss study are, quite frankly, nut much different from the tactics that rapists’ defenders use against individual survivors in the courtroom: discredit the woman who is sitting there telling you what happened to her as crazy, slutty, unscrupulous, hysterical, etc., and you don’t have to deal with the hard question of figuring out what exactly did happen. It’s slime-and-defend without regard for the truth, whether used to dismiss personal testimony or statistical research.

Kameron: Great post. I had to hold back the vomit when I read “I bought her” too. I know Big Daddy Kristof is trying to impress us with the strangeness of the situation, but would “I bought her freedom” or “I paid a ransom” be too much to ask?

With every column Nicholas Kristof publishes, I hate his smug, patronizing, patriarchal ass even more.

Jim & Omar: in addition to agreeing with everything that Kameron has said about Kristof’s article (or rather, series of articles—it isn’t just that the guy wrote one article, but that it is the latest of six or seven now about his one-man crusade for the emancipation of Cambodian child prostitutes), I also wanted to add that Kristof’s adventures in Cambodia aren’t just a Victorian revival in the sense of colonialism; they’re also a revival of Victorian moralism towards “fallen women.” Katha Pollitt got it exactly right:

“To tell you the truth, I thought those columns were a little weird—there’s such a long tradition of privileged men rescuing individual prostitutes as a kind of whirlwind adventure. You would never know from the five columns he wrote about young Srey Neth and Srey Mom, that anyone in Cambodia thought selling your daughter to a brothel was anything but wonderful. I wish he had given us the voices of some Cambodian activists—for starters, the Cambodian Women’s Crisis Center and the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO)—both of which are skeptical about brothel raids and rescues, which often dump traumatized girls on local NGOs that lack the resources to care for them.

“…

“You can see the narrative in the process of creation: Third World women are victims; American men are saviors. Right-wing Christians care about Third World women; feminists only care about themselves. Meanwhile, Equality Now fights the good fight on “spit and a nickel,” as Bien-Aimé says, and gets ignored.”

This is connected with Omar’s comments. Yes, Kristof is allegedly trying to prick our consciences into moving for a larger solution to the problem of sexual slavery. Good for him, but the problem is that in the midst of endlessly telling and retelling the tale how he became the Great Emancipator of lovely Srey Neth and Srey Mom, he forgot to say much of anything about how this might be done. You’ll have trouble finding any discussion in his articles of the existing Cambodian groups, or international feminist NGOs, that have been doing the hard work on the ground of combatting sex slavery and the trafficking of women; the only groups he seems to be aware of at all are domestic anti-trafficking pressure groups on the Christian Right. You’ll also have trouble finding any discussion whatsoever in his endless ruminitions on sex slavery of the privileged men—for example, men from China, Japan, the United States, Australia, and Europe—whose “sex tourism” drive much of the demand for child prostitution in Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and elsewhere. How can we change the material conditions that women and girls face so that more women have options other than prostitution or starvation? How can we change men in our own culture and elsewhere so that the demand for child sexual slavery is eradicated? What can we do to aid organizations that have already begun to do this work in piecemeal fashion? These are all hard questions, but they are essential questions for any serious progress to be made. And they are questions that Big Daddy Kristof completely avoids. This is an important issue that deserves to be taken seriously, and Kristof is using his highly visible position in the Op-Ed page of the Times to inform us of the virtue and the money that he’s got to spread around.

In other words, he’s a useless wanker. To hell with that, and to hell with him.

“Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight?”

Aeon:

This is an issue that we touched on in earlier drafts but which got short shrift in later versions. So let me try to spell it out a bit more here. There’s nothing essentially wrong with trying to piece out which members of a group you find reasonable and which you do not, and making this a part of what you say. The worry with Radical Menace rhetoric here isn’t that it’s sectarian—sectarian debate is, if anything, how movements define themselves and their programme, and I, for one, happen to think that there’s a strong empirical case to be made that the most productive years of the feminist movement (as well as the abolitionist movement, incidentally) were those in which sectarian wrangling was the most pronounced.

Our worries about Radical Menace rhetoric come from different considerations. For example…

1. There is the degree to which it usually depends on problematic notions like “mainstream” and “extremist.” The problem here is that “mainstream” and “extremist” aren’t terms with any legitimate normative content, but they are typically treated as if they are. As folks like William Lloyd Garrison and Ayn Rand were fond of pointing out, if something is extremely wrong with the organization of society then an extreme response is morally in order, whether or not the “mainstream” of thought likes it. The worry here is that the frequent tendency of Radical Menace rhetoric to depend on charges of, e.g., “extremism” serves to subvert a feminist program whenever it happens to run up against “mainstream” opinion. (You might object: but look, mainstream opinion is closer to the truth than a radical feminist program on a number of issues. Okay, but that’s a disagreement with the empirical arguments that male supremacy exists more than it is to the analytical category of Radical Menace rhetorc. And I think that Ayn Rand was right to point out that the use of “extremism” as a term of criticism is philosophically objectionable even if the people so described do happen to be wrong.)

2. There is also the way in which such rhetoric typically attempts to polarize the feminist movement on terms imposed from the outside, rather than in terms of any particular tendency within feminism itself. Feminists have always recognized the distinction between liberal feminists and radical feminists, for example, but the terms on which this distinction is made are very different from the way that Radical Menace rhetoric typically construes it—not surprisingly, since the rhetoric is more or less invariably concerned with the baiting tactics of antifeminists. Because the terms being used to draw the line are so often alien to the distinctions drawn and traditions of thought developed within the feminist movement, they usually distort the positions of the group of feminists being critiqued and lump together feminists whose thought is really distinctly at odds. The issue here isn’t sectarian disagreement, but rather sectarianism in which the “sects” are divided up by alien criteria in ways that blur essential differences. (This is also why this tendency tends to invite the use of antifeminist caricatures, even by well-meaning feminists. It’s also even more clear when the categories—such as Christina Hoff Sommers’ “equity feminism” and “gender feminism”—are completely alien to the feminist tradition.)

3. There’s a general worry about rhetorical strategies that define a feminist political position mostly by opposition to other forms of feminism. Feminists may have conflicts with other feminists, but feminism is primarily defined by opposition to patriarchy. Minarchist libertarians think that individualist anarchists are mistaken, and may think that anarchists hold a position which will ultimately alienate people from libertarianism. Fine; it’s worth arguing about these things. But if a minarchist were investing substantial time and organizing effort to distance him/herself and his/her project from individualist anarchism—rather than from, say, statism—people might very well wonder whether pitching that much effort into the fight with people who are closer to your position than your critics, but have in some way or another gone further than you think they ought, is going to end up limiting your politics.

I’m sure there is still plenty to disagree about here, but I hope that I may have at least helped a bit in articulating where the disagreements may lie.

Roger Young: “In the process, we have lost freedom of association but gained the chains of race quotas, egalitarianism, and ethnic cleansing of Southern culture.”

You did leave out that minor part about the decline of lynch law and the obliteration of State-enforced racial segregation.

As for the rest, race quotas are illegal under current antidiscrimination laws. But you are aware, aren’t you, that in a free society employers and schools should have every right to impose strict race quota schemes if they should deem it useful?

As a side note, “ethnic cleansing” is a word with a real meaning that you are systematically pissing on in order to melodramatically engage in bullshit Dixie identity politics. Real ethnic cleansing involves, among other things, forced physical removal and mass killing; the word was coined by reference to the Nazi policies of “cleansing” areas of Jews, Slavs, and other undesirables during the Holocaust. What you are complaining about is people hurting some white Southerners’ fee-fees by complaining about well-known symbols of slavery and Jim Crow. To hell with that.

Roger: “To top if off, we now have our money stolen from us to pay lazy bureaucrats to take off work and march in goofy parades in his honor!”

Be serious. Would you rather have your money stolen to pay government bureaucrats to punctiliously work in their government offices? I’d rather just not have my money stolen at all, but if it is going to be stolen, I desperately wish it could go towards keeping every government agent in the country doing nothing but making goofy parades.

Roger: “The only thing to ‘celebrate’ on MLK Day is that he’s dead.”

No matter how sleazy you may think that Martin Luther King Jr. was, it could not possibly have been the sort of thing that would make him deserve to be murdered. Which is what you propose celebrating. Is that really the sort of schadenfreude that you want to indulge in?

Mike Tennant: “The results of his crusade, furthermore, were increased centralization of power in Washington and decreased freedom for states and individuals.”

Decreased freedom relative to what? It’s certainly true that antidiscrimination law has infringed on individual freedoms over the past 40 years. That’s why it should be opposed, on libertarian grounds. But talking about “decreased freedom” involves a comparison between the conditions before and the conditions after the civil rights struggle. And the only way that anyone could possibly claim that the civil rights movement decreased individual freedom from State violations of rights would be to completely ignore the massive and inhuman daily rights-violations committed in order to enforce the government-sponsored Jim Crow caste system. The daily assaults on individual freedom perpetrated against any and all Black individuals in, say, Alabama, or Mississippi, or Georgia, in the dark years from the 1870s to the 1970s are now mostly gone, and it is in no small part thanks to the long years of dangerous and painful organizing work by people such as Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, and others that it was accomplished. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they’ve accomplished a hell of a lot more for the defense of individual rights in the real world than everyone in the contemporaneous libertarian movement put together.

As for the “freedom” of state governments? God, who gives a damn? States don’t have rights to infringe. Individual people do.

Kevin,

I agree with you that the argument given by Hoppe and other paleos is hardly dealt with in our essay in its full weight. I think this is a matter of what we had time and space to emphasize more than anything, but you are probably right that at least some clarificatory comments in a footnote would be worthwhile.

I agree with both you and Hoppe that there are historical cases in which father-right and State prerogatives come into conflict with one another, and with you that part of what needs to be said to Hoppe is that just because patriarchy in the family has, in some historical instances come into conflict with State power, does not mean that it is either a good state of affairs or conducive to liberty. (If you accept, as we do the essay, the radical feminist analysis of patriarchy as, among other things, a violent political order autonomous from the violent political order of statism, that makes for good reasons to say that it’s not even consistent with liberty.)

Fair enough; but I think it’s also important to mention (as we do, if with relatively little argument, in the essay) that there are good reasons to think that Hoppe et al. drastically overestimate the degree to which father-right and State prerogatives come into conflict with each other. It’s true that there are notable cases where they’ve come into conflict with one another in certain respects—e.g., revolutionary state socialist movements have typically included critiques of patriarchy in the family, and Bolshevik governments have made direct efforts of various sorts to undermine it. But that’s mostly a fairly new feature on the scene, and the vast bulk of lawmaking for the vast majority of recorded history, insofar as it touched on the matter, has been directed at recognizing, strengthening, and perpetuating men’s power over women through coverture, protection of marital rape and battery, power over children, “protective” legislation banning women from specific fields of work, etc. (Some of these are now—mainly thanks to concerted feminist activism—gone; others remain. And many things that are nominally illegal are still widely enforced de facto, more or less with impunity.)

(Similar remarks could be made in the opposite direction, i.e., the patriarchal family’s traditional wholesale allegiance to the state. It’s no accident that the most statist wings of the Right in the U.S. today are also the people most keen on a culture of strict discipline within the family, “traditional” father-dominated households, etc. Nor is it an accident that the Princes and potentates of history have so often adopted the language of fatherhood and family in order to explain the nature of their own authority over their victims.)

There are also some points I’d like to make about your comments on comparisons between statism and patriarchy as class systems, but I’ll leave those for another post after I’ve thought about it a bit more.

In any case, you’re definitely right that this material deserves more discussion. Possibly in a footnote, possibly in expansion within the text. How exactly to handle it depends in part on where we decide to take the material we have, in terms of expansion, re-arrangement, etc.

Jeanine—points well taken. (They apply elsewhere in public life, too; one of my favorite responses, when people started going on some aimless tear about, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s appearance, was to ask whether they could think of anyone uglier than Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond.)

On exceptions:

“Catherine MacKinnon, for instance, is a beautiful woman by conventional Western feminine standards.”

This is true—it’s also been said of, e.g., Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf. But if anything these are actually used as grounds to dismiss feminist conventionally attractive feminist thinkers—“Naomi Wolf wrote a book about the corrosive effects of gendered beauty standards, but she is herself conventionally beautiful!” If some man is supposed to find a particular feminist unattractive, then she’s attacked as ugly and resentful; if some man is supposed to find her attractive, then she’s dismissed as a bimbo and accused of exploiting the patriarchal standards she criticizes. As usual, it seems, the standards of criticism for feminist writers seem to be that if you want to be taken seriously by certain people, you had best not say anything about feminism at all.