I haven't any idea where your reference to Freud came from. Certainly not from Koss's or Tjaden and Thoennes's research reports, since none of them are Fruedian psychologists and their empirical methods for gathering data (largely through large, random-sample surveys of people in ordinary circumstances) have nothing at all to do with Freudian psychoanalysis. The book I spend the most time discussing in this paper (Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will) actually contains a number of long passages devoted to extended attacks on Freud's theories about the characteristics of rapists, as well as Freud's and Helene Deutsch's theories of female sexuality. (Early second-wave feminists were in general extremely hostile to Freud, which is not surprising, since orthodox Freudian psychology was in many ways dismissive or actively hostile towards women.)

Finally, I would like to reiterate the point that I make in the footnote discussing Koss's study (note 2): "Koss’s results have, occasionally, become a subject of controversy, including within libertarian circles. This being a philosophy paper, I can happily say that, while I find most of the objections raised against Koss to be ill­-founded, often to the point of intellectual negligence if not dishonesty, the truth or falsity of Koss’s empirical claims is largely independent of the analytical point that I wish to make about the relationship between Brownmiller’s Myrmidon theory and Hayek’s development of the concept of spontaneous order, and the former, empirical question is largely beyond the scope of this paper. However, see Warshaw (1994) for a detailed discussion of Koss’s findings and a defense against some of the most common objections; as well as later studies with quite different survey instruments, such as Tjaden and Thoennes (2000). Nothing essential to the empirical case for the prevalence of violence against women depends solely on the quality of Koss’s research."

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Joe, I don't want to be too high-handed about this, but I can't really find much of anything interesting to discuss in your unsourced judgments about what seems "believable" or "unbelievable" to you off the top of your head, or based on your quick scans of mass media news stories or the textual corpus of popular novels (?!). The numbers that I mentioned in that passage do come from a couple of much-discussed and much-reviewed empirical studies. (In particular, the numbers on male perpetrators come from Koss's study on American college students in the mid-1980s, and the numbers on female victims come from Tjaden and Thoennes's large-sample study of men and women in the US conducted in the late 1990s, which are cited with some discussion in the footnotes. These sources are imperfect and aging social-scientific studies; certainly not eternal truths written in letters of fire. But they are serious studies within a decent-sized research literature, and both their results and the methods used to get those results are extensively discussed both within the articles themselves (which I cited in the essay) and also in secondary literature such as Robin Warshaw's book <cite>I Never Called It Rape</cite> (1994). I don't know where you get your number of ~90,000 rapes committed in 2008; although my best guess (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that the number comes from the FBI's number for "forcible rape" in its "Crime in the United States" (CIUS) report for 2008. Is that correct? If so, then you need to keep in mind, first, that CIUS reports are based on extrapolations from statistics reported by police departments that participate in the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The number is therefore not an estimate of the number of rapes committed in the United States in 2008. It's an estimate of the number of rapes reported to the police. But virtually all the research on sexual violence since the 1980s has demonstrated that police reports are an extraordinarily unreliable source for information about the incidence or prevalence of rape: repeated social science and public health studies on sexual assault have shown that somewhere around 90% of all sexual assaults are never reported to the police. Also that there is an important difference, which you seem to be skipping right over, between numbers that have to do with one year incidence, and numbers that have to do with lifetime prevalence. We can talk about some of these issues if you want, but in all honesty I think if you want to discuss them intelligently it is going to be more important that you take some time to read some of the background literature that I'm citing, and to talk about the virtues and defects of the studies themselves (certainly they have both). Not just riffing on how intuitively believable or unbelievable the result seems to you, without any consideration of the evidence or argument cited from which those conclusions were obtained.

Now, if you don't think that fears about the possibility of sexual violence significantly shape the day-to-day attitudes and behaviors of many women, I can only suggest that you talk to some women you know (about, e.g., what it feels like to walk home alone at night, just to take an obvious example). Or failing that, you could at least read some of the chapters of Brownmiller's book — especially the four chapters toward the end of the book — which do talk at great length both about day-to-day anxieties, adjustments and conversations, and also actually about the treatment of sexual aggression and rape in cultural products such as novels, art, film, etc.
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PeaceRequiresAnarchy: In general I would say that most people tend to stress the commander’s responsibility for the war crimes a lot, but often forget about holding the soldiers responsible.

I don’t know; it seems to me this depends on a number of factors. Notably who’s in control of the investigation and the prosecutions. Calley went to prison for what he did in Vietnam; neither Nixon, nor Westmoreland, nor Colin Powell, nor even Capt. Medina, ever did. Nobody above the rank of Sergeant ever faced more than a reprimand for Abu Ghraib; Rumsfeld certainly will never face any serious legal or even social consequences for what he knew about or what he approved or what he ordered or what he covered up for.

@Hume22:disqus: I think you’re right that a distinction between “latent” and “manifest” functions, as you put it, is important here; and thank you for suggesting it. But I think this is pretty naturally intertwined with the reading of Brownmiller that I try to offer. Here’s how, if this makes sense: Distinctions between the latent and the manifest in social practices is a pretty central part of Hayek’s discussion of spontaneous orders as *emergent* rather than *consciously designed* patterns of social order. (This comes up in the form of discussions of latent or tacit knowledge embodied in actions; but also the distinction itself turns on a distinction between, for example, latent functions and explicit motives.) In any case, this seems to me to be importantly connected with Brownmiller’s understanding of police-blotter rapists as “perform[ing] their duty … so well … that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed” (209). So this seems to me like another pretty strong prima facie reason for thinking that Brownmiller’s account might be fruitfully understood by making use of the conceptual resources of spontaneous order theories.

"Charles Johnson keeps demonstrating that he is an ultra-egalitarian reality-detached cultural communist."

Well, thanks. But you say that like it's supposed to be a bad thing. Oh well; at least I got a Facebook status out of that one.
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is back in los Estados Unidos.

Neverfox:

Thank you for taking this up, and for pointing to the comment. I don't know how much it helps, but I also talked about the sentence-parsing issue a bit in comments on the blog here: http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/05/16/women_and/#comme…

darius404:

I don't know if Neverfox's comments, or the earlier comments that have been cross-linked here, will convince you about the meaning of the infamous sentence on pp. 14-15. But I do think this thread though is a pretty good example of the reasons why I don't have much of anything to say about the proper parsing of Brownmiller's infamous sentence beyond what I've already said in the paper and in those comments. I just can't see any further utility in trying to argue about the best grammatical parsing of the clauses in a pair of programmatic sentences in the first chapter of a book, as if this were something important to settle in isolation and without reference to the arguments and analysis offered throughout the rest of the book.

My paper has a specific topic, which is more or less exclusively concerned with trying to understand the features and upshots of one of the central arguments of that book (as for example in the extended discussion of "police-blotter rapists" as "myrmidons to the cause of male dominance" in Chapter 6 of the book). I don't know whether you've read Ch. 6 of Against Our Will or not (or even if you've read all of Ch. 1). But my view is that this chapter is important and that one good way of understanding the argument Brownmiller makes is by applying concepts drawn from the literature on "spontaneous order" in human societies. But that getting the radical feminist peg to fit in the spontaneous order slot will take some creative attention to the shape and orientation of both of them; and that this may teach us something important and useful, both about radical feminist theory and also about the concept of spontaneous order.

Maybe Brownmiller's programmatic sentences in Ch. 1 are written in such a way that they make certain common misunderstandings of her natural; or maybe she wrote them in such a way that their plain meaning really is just in tension with, or flat-out contradicts the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis that she has to offer in Chapter 6. I'm not convinced that either of these problems is a problem Brownmiller actually has. But if it is, then perhaps that is a problem for Susan Brownmiller as a writer; but I think that the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis are infinitely more interesting than picking at the writing of the programmatic statements. And that coming to an understanding of the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis, and the relationship that they may have to the various senses of the ambiguous term "spontaneous order," and of what we might get to learn from all this, as radical feminists and/or as libertarians, is probably a more fruitful field for having a conversation. There is much more to be gleaned there.

Do you have any thoughts about that? About the analysis of rape culture as a malign spontaneous order; or about the delineation of three different senses of "spontaneous order" that's outlined in the paper, or any of the remarks towards the end about ways in which this might help clarify some important issues for both radical feminist and libertarian theory and practice?
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@neverfox:disqus:

Thank you for taking this up, and for pointing to the comment. I don’t know how much it helps, but I also talked about the sentence-parsing issue a bit in comments on the blog here: http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/05/16/women_and/#comment-20111207021701

@darius404:disqus:

I don’t know if Neverfox’s comments, or the earlier comments that have been cross-linked here, will convince you about the meaning of the infamous sentence on pp. 14-15. But I do think this thread though is a pretty good example of the reasons why I don’t have much of anything to say about the proper parsing of Brownmiller’s infamous sentence beyond what I’ve already said in the paper and in those comments. I just can’t see any further utility in trying to argue about the best grammatical parsing of the clauses in a pair of programmatic sentences in the first chapter of a book, as if this were something important to settle in isolation and without reference to the arguments and analysis offered throughout the rest of the book.

My paper has a specific topic, which is more or less exclusively concerned with trying to understand the features and upshots of one of the central arguments of that book (as for example in the extended discussion of “police-blotter rapists” as “myrmidons to the cause of male dominance” in Chapter 6 of the book). I don’t know whether you’ve read Ch. 6 of Against Our Will or not (or even if you’ve read all of Ch. 1). But my view is that this chapter is important and that one good way of understanding the argument Brownmiller makes is by applying concepts drawn from the literature on “spontaneous order” in human societies. But that getting the radical feminist peg to fit in the spontaneous order slot will take some creative attention to the shape and orientation of both of them; and that this may teach us something important and useful, both about radical feminist theory and also about the concept of spontaneous order.

Maybe Brownmiller’s programmatic sentences in Ch. 1 are written in such a way that they make certain common misunderstandings of her natural; or maybe she wrote them in such a way that their plain meaning really is just in tension with, or flat-out contradicts the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis that she has to offer in Chapter 6. I’m not convinced that either of these problems is a problem Brownmiller actually has. But if it is, then perhaps that is a problem for Susan Brownmiller as a writer; but I think that the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis are infinitely more interesting than picking at the writing of the programmatic statements. And that coming to an understanding of the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis, and the relationship that they may have to the various senses of the ambiguous term “spontaneous order,” and of what we might get to learn from all this, as radical feminists and/or as libertarians, is probably a more fruitful field for having a conversation. There is much more to be gleaned there.

Do you have any thoughts about that? About the analysis of rape culture as a malign spontaneous order; or about the delineation of three different senses of “spontaneous order” that’s outlined in the paper, or any of the remarks towards the end about ways in which this might help clarify some important issues for both radical feminist and libertarian theory and practice?

Jason Bessey: Rothbard of course did a lot to popularize the term “libertarianism” in the US, and to spread the idea that American libertarianism was a body of ideas and a political identity radically distinct from the emerging political conservatism of Buckley, Kirk, et al. But he was not at all the first person to use the term in the US. Here’s Benjamin Tucker using it in passing in the 1880s, for example: http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/liberty-and-the-george-theory, http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/a-libertarians-pet-despotisms (he also used it to translate the term “libertaire” in French Anarchist writing, e.g. here: http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/state-socialism-and-anarchism). Charles Sprading’s LIBERTY AND THE GREAT LIBERTARIANS (first published 1913, http://archive.org/details/libertygreatlibe00spra) was published before Murray Rothbard was born, but it was later circulated pretty widely in laissez-faire circles in the 1950s and seems to have contributed to the uptake on the term by Rothbard and a number of others in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Daniel Baber: I agree that “Intellectual Property” is a government-sanctioned monopoly, and that it ought to be abolished. But Rothbard did not. He opposed patents, but he specifically defended copyrights as a “prosecution of implicit theft.” (He also thought that in a market of total liberty (as he understands it) “Part of the patent protection now obtained by an inventor could be achieved on the free market by a type of ‘copyright’ protection.” See Man, Economy, and State, here: http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10e.asp#7._Patents_Copyrights.

I am glad that contemporary Rothbardians have more or less unanimously come out against “Intellectual Property” restrictions, and have come to see that these are in fact government privileges, not protections of any legitimate property right. They’re right to believe that. But this is a new development, and in fact a reversal of position that has happened pretty suddenly and dramatically (over the course of the past 15 years or so). There’s no basis as far as I can tell for projecting the belief back onto Rothbard himself.

MBH:

My responses are relevant to Rad Geek’s remark about the use of political liberalism.

No, they aren’t. They seem to be based on a fantasy that the remarks were made by someone who has anything less, or anything different, to say about the purposes or functions of political conservatism, or political libertarianism, or whatever this rambling digression and facile sarcasm are supposed to be about.

But I don’t. I have exactly the same thing to say about those. That is (part of the reason) why I do not waste my time on political candidates or political strategies. Here, as elsewhere, you seem to be spending a lot of time elaborately ridiculing positions that nobody present actually holds or endorses. What you think you gain from this, I don’t know.