Amp:

But we won’t do it, because it would require spending precious tax dollars, and too many Americans would rather see some poor pothead or shoplifter raped than pay higher taxes.

Well. There’s a lot of reasons to condemn popular attitudes towards prison rape (a lot of people continue to think that it’s absolutely hilarious when made into a broad joke). But I don’t think that the issue has anything in particular to do with tax rates. Legislators routinely raise taxes or issue bonds, with no particular political consequence, for building more and larger prisons and have been doing so for years. (Sometimes they even manage to Mau Mau 51+% of ordinary people into signing on to it in a local referendum on, e.g., building a new county jail.)

Voters ought to take rape in prisons seriously enough to ensure that something is done about it, and it’s a sad commentary that they don’t. But the primary source of the problem isn’t voters at all; it’s corrections officers and the prison bureaucracy, who have repeatedly shown their willingness to encourage a climate of sexual violence and terror as a means of internal control—either directly or by turning a strategic blind eye—and to protect each other behind a Blue Wall when guards are negligent or are committing the assaults themselves. Power corrupts, and unaccountable power corrupts without limit.

There’s plenty of money to solve these problems already. The problem is that the legislators don’t care and the corrections officers’ unions block serious reform efforts at every step.

Aegis:

I don’t know if I buy the claim that society as a whole pretty much condones rape of the vulnerable. Please explain.

Well, there’s lots of data collected on rape-myth acceptance over the past three decades. For example, here are some results published in 1995. Among high school students in the Midwest:

The Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance tests identified significant differences between females’ and males’ responses for five of nine knowledge items. … Likewise, females (45%) were significantly more likely than males (31%) to agree that the guy is totally at fault if a gift dresses very sexy and gets raped on a date (item 7). Finally, significantly more females (81%) than males (62%) disagreed that you have no right to change your mind and keep your partner from having sex with you after you both get “turned on” (item 9).

— Telljohann, Price, Summers, Everett, and Casler, “High school students’ perceptions on nonconsensual sexual activity.” Journal of School Health (March 1, 1995)

Among American eighth graders:

Significant differences between females and males were seen in a number of specific rape myth statements (Table 1). Adolescent males were twice as likely as adolescent females (56.8% and 27.5%) to believe “A woman who goes to the home or apartment of a man on their first date implies that she is willing to have sex” (Item 1, Table 1). Males were twice as likely as females (45.1% and 22.9%) to accept the rape myth “A woman who is stuck-up and thinks she is too good to talk to guys on the street deserves to be taught a lesson” (Item 9, Table 1). Males were more likely than females to agree with the statements, “If a girl is making out and she lets things get out of hand, it is her own fault if her partner forces sex on her” and “In the majority of rapes, the victim is loose or has a bad reputation” (Items 6 and 7, Table 1).

—Boxley, Lawrance, and Gruchow, “A preliminary study of eighth grade students’ attitudes toward rape myths and women’s roles.” Journal of School Health (March 1, 1995).

That’s a lot of people, and a lot of young men specifically, who buy into the idea that forced sex is OK under certain conditions. They learn these things from somewhere, and there’s plenty of research on where they get the idea from, too. The answer tends to be: from male peers, from older men, from popular culture, and from pornography. (It’s worth noting that radical feminists and pro-feminist men identified these realities and wrote a lot of books and articles about them a good 10-20 years before professionalized social science caught on. The best work on what is sometimes called “rape culture” remains the work done by authors such as Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, Timothy Beneke, and others.)

Young males are expected to play a very difficult role: that of the initiator,

Expected by whom?

which requires confidence, social skills, and assertiveness. Yet men are given no practical training on how to initiate things (let alone in a way that women are actually comfortable with!), but rather expected to figure out how to do it “naturally.” But not all men are confident, socially skilled, or assertive (especially not during youth), so not all men can play their role “naturally.”

Hence, we have an obvious recipe for disaster. During highschool, males have a high desire for sex, but only a limited ability to interact with girls.

I hear that during high school, females have a high desire for sex, too, but may have only a limited ability to get what they want from young men. Yet the rate of young women raping young men in high school is very low.

Generally speaking, people desire lots of things. A lot of males, for example, desire political power, but only a limited ability to interact with voters and lobby officials. Yet the rate of men forming gangs to enact violent coups d’etat is pretty low. What do you suppose makes the difference?

One thing that confuses me is the use of “forcible rape” – isn’t rape forcible per definition? Anyone know?

The usual distinction is between “forcible rape,” where overt violence or threats of violence were used to coerce sex and “statutory rape,” where meaningful consent could not be given because of the age of the victim.

MOM goes on to suggest that “instinct” may be responsible for this disgusting act: “Instinct in a young, roving band of teenage boys dictates imposing sexually upon a vulnerable girl…” In MOM’s view, young boys have an instinct towards gang-rape, which they need to be guided away from. …

I don’t think boys have a natural instinct for gang-rape.

Jiminy Cricket. And anti-feminists complain that feminists are “anti-male?”

That something like “I don’t think boys have a natural instinct for gang-rape” still needs to be said in our culture is embarassing. Look, we are talking about rational human beings here, not beasts. If they have come up to their late teens with a more-or-less unreflective desire to sexually assault young women then that’s deeply disturbing, but it’s not something that they are compelled by an inborn drive to do. It’s something that they have chosen and have been taught by other men in the culture at large to think is O.K. An appeal to mythical “instincts” to explain why they don’t think or care enough about a young woman’s humanity not to assault her amounts to nothing more than a cheap way to let young men off the hook when it comes to their own humanity.

“The women who choose this work are going to be the women who have been so badly damaged by their parents or by others that their sense of self-worth is just destroyed – they truly see themselves as objects.”

Robert, the women who “choose” to work in pornography generally do it because they need money, often pretty desparately so. Often it’s because they are fleeing, or have fled, violence at home; sometimes it is for other reasons. They are not “damaged”; they are reacting rationally to an irrational but hideously ordinary situation.

There are lots of good reasons to think that the pornography industry is abominable and that the sooner it dies, the better. But the reason it exists is because men make it and other men buy it, not because women are “damaged.” Making men stop acting like dicks is the goal here, not “fixing” women.

funnie:

by contrasting some phrases of littleviolet’s with your opinion of the answer to my question, perhaps in order to make your assumption seem perfectly reasonable and my question seem unnecessary and/or misguided.

I’m sorry that I put your questions alongside littleviolet’s remarks, and that I misspoke. I was mainly trying to ask about littleviolet’s remarks, not to answer your questions—much less to butt in and answer them for Amp, or to try to make your questions seem unnecessary or misguided (nor do I think littleviolet’s concerns about feminist space are unnecessary or misguided either; I’m wondering about how far the concept applies). I shouldn’t have set your questions beside littleviolet’s remarks at all, since those were my main concern and I misunderstood the direction from which you were raising the questions you raise for Amp anyway.

In other words, I apologize for butting in confusedly.

Pete Guither on pornography:

It’s been around forever and will continue to be around forever.

Pornography exists because men make it and men consume it. (Yes, I know, some women control porn production companies and some women buy pornography. So what? Look at what sustains the market as a whole.)

And again:

If, instead, you take a positive approach — educate people, change the conditions, offer something more positive that fills the same need — then you might be able to get somewhere.

“Getting somewhere” in what sense? If you think that pornography will continue to be around forever, then what sort of progress is being made?

Part of this, I suppose, has to do with the phrase “fills the same need.” What needs do you think pornography fills?

None of this, by the way, is to endorse a policy of litigation or State censorship. It’s a question of what you take the ends of activism around pornography to be, rather than the (very important, but different) question of what means you choose to adopt it.

littleviolet:

Your argument is that you provide a space for feminists to interact with people who oppose us. I’d say we’ve got the rest of the world where we do that all the time and the rest of the internet for that matter. I don’t think feminist discourse is assisted by sexists who continually try to elbow their way into feminist spaces and attempt to disrupt the discussion. It’s not a refusal to engage with arguments, we do engage, we have to engage, it’s a refusal to engage in feminist space with the bigots who make those arguments.

funnie:

Again, whose interests is this platform expected to serve? What is the point?

Amp’s trying to run a weblog that speaks out from a feminist or profeminist perspective and to keep active discussion going in the comments section. That much is clear. But do all feminist projects aim at creating feminist spaces in the sense intended here? Is Amp trying to do that? Should he be? (Is a public weblog run by a man really suited to creating the space of a c-r group?)

Raznor:

The thing is with bigotry, is it is possible that a person can say something bigoted out of purely innocent ignorance.

I’m not sure what you mean by “innocent ignorance” here. Do you think that (say) men’s ignorance is innocent? I know that, for myself, I’ve messed up and done the wrong thing many times in my life, and most of the time I either knew what I was doing (and defended or made excuses for it) or else bloody well should have realized it if I’d stopped ot think about what it meant for a couple seconds. (I think that both of these apply, for example, to different cases of my using pornography as a teenager.) And judging from what I have seen and what other men and women have told me, I’m hardly the only man for whom this is true.

You don’t have to be a Phelps-style monster to have shady motives and chalking up a mistake to ignorance isn’t necessarily enough to make a difference for how you ought to treat the person making it. I don’t think I’ve seen Q Grrl or Crys T or others make any real distinction on the basis of “innocent ignorance” or “culpable dishonesty”—mainly because the issues that they are calling attention to have a lot more to do with:

(1) whether the man making the mistake is belligerently defensive about it (as I think novalis obviously was) or listens to criticism (especially when that criticism comes from women), and

(2) whether contempt and belligerant defensiveness are being thinly veiled by “polite” diction (as I think Robert obviously was), and

(3) what it means when male interlocutors and male moderators seem to pay much more attention in comments to the veil than to what’s under it

I think (1) and (2) make much more difference for how productive it is to try to talk patiently with someone than questions of “innocence” do, and (3) seems to be at the root of worry much more than whether or not anyone happens to say anything bigoted in Amp’s comments section.

Of course there are more things going on here than just those points and I’m probably missing a lot. But I do think that both of those two are much more clearly important to the points being raised than the question of “innocent” vs. “dishonest” bigotry.

FoolishOwl:

On the first point, no. Ultimately, bosses aren’t necessary at all — we’ve long since passed the point at which there was real economic scarcity, and therefore a need to have social classes.

Ultimately, are men necessary at all? (I don’t mean human beings with a Y chromosome and testes; I mean as a cohesive group identity that confers some social role more substantial than, say, having hazel eyes or detached earlobes.)

Most men have problems in their lives which are clearly the result of sexism, and I find that many men will agree that this is the case.

Of course, bosses usually have problems in their lives as the result of capitalism: they are often extremely busy, may not have time to see their kids as much as they would like, may have feelings of ennui or spiritual emptiness, may find themselves subject to an unpleasant pecking order or to unfair office backbiting. There are whole movements of literature devoted to telling us how the managers and bosses of the world may have money and control, but don’t have happiness or spiritual fulfillment.

But does that have any burly consequences for how workers should agitate or organize? Should the labor movement spend a lot of time—or any substantial amount of time at all—pointing out that “Capitalism hurts bosses too”?

Of course, you might object that the salient difference is this:

On the second, strictly speaking, bosses are hurt by capitalism, but they benefit so much from it that the hurt is trivial in comparison.

This is not the case with men and sexism. Most definitions I’ve seen of male privilege seem to amount to, men don’t suffer as much as women from sexism. That’s not to say that men don’t suffer.

But that just raises the question: do you think that men don’t get benefits from sexism that benefit them so much that the hurt is trivial in comparison?

(It might help also to look at the classic examples of the ways in which sexism is said to hurt men—and what the hurt in those examples accomplishes.)