PhysicistDave:

Since I am not sure whether I would consider you male or female, this seems appropriate. . . . And, even if you choose to fill us in on that, I’m still not sure which I would consider you to be.

Dave,

Who the fuck cares whether you would deign to consider Aster male or female? I can’t see how it’s any business of yours to say one way or the other. What does it matter to you?

What does matter, on the other hand, is what Aster considers herself–at least, that is, if you want to try to have a conversation with her according to basic norms of civilized politeness.

You used some language which, whatever your intent may have been, inadvertently caused her grief; she earnestly and straightforwardly explained the reasons why, and now, rather than doing something as simple and decent as apologizing for your inadvertent fuck-up, you’ve decided to get defensive about it, and back up the defensiveness with being a dick to her about it, first by repeating the same term you used earlier, and then by adding your wildly irrelevant and pointlessly presumptuous speculations on whether or not you personally would consider her female (as if anyone asked you; as if anyone other than you cares what you think about it). You could not possibly have been more rude if you were to address a black 16 year old as “boy,” and, when he asked you to choose another way to address him, you called him “boy” again and then went on to ramble about how you wouldn’t know whether to consider a 16 year old a “boy” or a “young man” or something else again.

This kind of callous rudeness is completely unacceptable and I think you ought to apologize to Aster for it.

All libertarians I know (and all non-libertarians I know, for that matter) of course recognize that freedom does include the right to sever relations with one’s biological family, and that, in some unfortunate situations, this may be the wise thing to do.

You know, I see no reason to think that Aster’s comments about the “familialism” of mainstream Chinese culture were directed against a position that countenanced the right to sever relations with one’s biological family. As far as I can tell, there is good reason to believe that failing to countenance that right is part of what she was complaining about, and part of what Natasha was complaining about after her. Has it occurred to you that when she criticized “familialism,” she was criticizing something that she identifies with that word, not necessarily what you identify with that word?

If you want to change the subject to something else — like, say, the position that custody of children ought to default to biological parents in the absence of some compelling reason for a different arrangement (which I doubt Aster or Natasha disagrees with) or perhaps the position that, although children have a right to sever ties with their parents for whatever reason, morally speaking, they owe a (non-enforceable) duty of filial obedience and morally ought to sever ties only under extreme and unusual conditions (which I know that Aster and Natasha disagree with, but which is a distinct position from the one that began this conversation), then you should feel free to discuss that, instead. But you do owe it to your readers to make clear that you are changing the subject, and not to pretend as if you are responding to Aster’s original comments.

Furthermore, a society that rejects family ties as the basis of society, as Western societies increasingly have, is unlikely to be libertarian. If people cannot rely on their family in difficult times, they are likely to expect the government to step in as a substitute. It is no coincidence that unmarried mothers, for example, tend to be supporters of big government.

If people cannot rely on their family in difficult times, then they are likely to rely on somebody other than their family. That need not be the government, and historically, there have been many institutions developed that provide mutual aid and support outside of family ties. (For example, the many workers’ societies and ethnic mutual aid societies that have always flourished in working-class immigrant communities, where, as a matter of necessity, working folks couldn’t count on support from their mostly overseas families.)

If you want to ask why it is in this country, today, that there is so much less of a mutual aid infrastructure in place than there has been in times place, and why there is so little institutionalized support for, say, single mothers, outside of the government welfare and education bureaucracies, well, that’s an interesting question to ask. But once you start asking it, you may find that it complicates your picture of the real dynamics here, and it becomes a lot harder to scapegoat single mothers for welfare statism.

Families are the one natural, primordial human institution

This is either vacuous or counterhistorical nonsense, depending on what you mean by “families.” If “families” means “nuclear families,” then it’s certainly not true that human societies are “naturally,” or always, arranged around those. If “families” means “extended family,” the claim is vacuous; ties of kinship are extremely variable across human societies, in terms of who counts as family, how important distant family relationships are (as well as how comparatively important ties of kinship by blood and by marriage are, etc.), and there is no fixed cross-cultural definition of just what the hell an extended family is. In late 18th century America it was extremely common for young children and adolescents to be packed off for years to live with very distant relations or family friends, in ways that would be unthinkable in contemporary American “nuclear families.” Who counts as family, how much certain kinds of family ties matter, etc. are all culturally variable phenomena which change a lot over time and space, and the particular form of family ties that are now common in bourgeois American families are a very late development, which has nothing in particular to do with nature and everything to do with American culture and American standards of living.

Finally, as a strategic approach for the libertarian movement, condemnation of a familial orientation is simply disastrous. . . . most human beings, if forced to choose between a political ideology and their family will — thank Heavens! — choose their family. . . . Of course, in the final analysis, it is all moot, because Asia still generally adheres to traditional human values, and Asia will triumph, as much as that pains Aster.

I have no idea what logical point all this guff is supposed to establish. Even if you’re right, the popularity or the material success of an ideology has no bearing on its truth or falsity.

I mean, look, I’m already throwing in for an ideology that proclaims a universal and unconditional right to shoot up heroin and bid for private surface-to-air missiles on eBay, while you engage in consensual sodomy, for (tax-free) money, with an undocumented immigrant while you the two of you cross back and forth over the U.S.-Mexico border. Do you seriously think someone who goes in for that sort of thing ought to be swayed by complaints that their beliefs about family ties might not go over well at the next Homeowners’ Association meeting?

GT 2008-05-16: Women and the Invisible Fist, in which I try to offer a close reading and sympathetic reconstruction of Susan Brownmiller’s “Myrmidon theory” of stranger-rape (as presented in Against Our Will, and as against the crude but common misrepresentation of her views as some kind of conspiracy theory rather than the radical analysis of sex-class that they are), consider how the specific case illustrates important nuances that need to be incorporated into libertarian and anarchist theories of spontaneous order, and argue that considering the Myrmidon theory and the (nuanced version of the) concept of spontaneous order in light of each other helps illustrate how key parts of radical feminist and anarchist analysis can benefit from and enrich each other’s understanding of social and political power.

GT 2008-05-20: Cops are here to protect you. (#5), in which Officer Christopher Damonte, 250 pound hired thug for the city of San Francisco, keeps public order by screaming at a couple of “suspect” women, who may have been guilty of being drunk in public and perhaps also intent to commit jaywalking in the first degree, and then, when one of them — Kelly Medora, a 118 pound preschool teacher — had the temerity to ask for his name and suggest that his conduct might be out of line, proceeds to call in his posse, arrests her, and wrenches her arm behind her back, breaking one of her bones “with an audible crack.” The city’s lawyer says that “Damonte used an approved method of holding her arm, but she struggled. Then ‘in an effort to escape,’ she squatted down and ‘broke her own arm.'” The city government decided to pay out a settlement of $235,000 to Medora, while Damonte faces, at worst, “potential” administrative discipline from fellow cops — meaning that this violent, domineering control freak of a man will never face any legal consequences for this heinous assault and battery, except possibly a verbal reprimand, a forced vacation from work, or at the very worst losing his job — while a bunch of innocent San Francisco taxpayers, who had nothing to do with it, will get sent the bill for his violent rages.

GT 2008-05-14: Voyage of the S. S. St. Louis, in which I consider the ways in which anti-immigrant border laws condemn innocent people to misery, mutilation or death, in the name of segregating world population by nationality or in the name of an illusory need for control. Particularly when the victims of violence are women and when (therefore) the abuse and terror inflicted on them is categorized as a “personal” or “cultural” but not a “political” problem by the malestream opinions of a bureaucracy legally entitled to pick and choose who does and who does not count as Officially Persecuted for the purposes of the United States federal government.

• Jerry: “If she is wrong and mischaracterizes the causes, what does that say about her conclusions regarding the effects?”

Nothing at all. If Brownmiller advances a false theory of the form “X causes R” (N.B.: I’m not conceding that her theory about the causes of rape IS false; nor am I insisting that it’s true; my position is that it’s not salient to this discussion whether it’s false or true), and then advances another theory of the form “R causes P,” based on an independent argument that doesn’t refer back to the first theory, the falsity of the first theory tells you nothing at all about whether the second theory is true or false, and nothing at all about whether the theory well-grounded or ill-grounded. What will tell you something about the merits of the second theory is a consideration of the independent arguments that are given for it.

• “F => F is True. F => T is True.”

If you mean the arrow here to express a material implication, that’s an accurate description of the truth-values of material implications with false antecedents. But what has any of this got to do with the comments you’re trying to respond to?

There is no argument that I made, or which Susan Brownmiller made, in which her theory about the causes of rape is the antecedent in a conditional of which her theory about the effects of rape is a consequent. The theory in which rape is the explanans is not part of the evidence given for the theory in which rape is the explanandum, so disputing the first doesn’t undermine any of the reasons given for believing the second.

Again, speaking generally, you seem to be awfully muddled about causal claims, implication, and the proper places in which to attack an argument. This discussion is about causal claims, and causal claims are not claims about material implication. (A causal claim of the form “P’s being true causes Q to be true” is not truth-functional at all, because causal claims, among other things, have to support counterfactuals.) Maybe you are running into problems here because you believe that if someone advances a theory of the form “X causes R,” and another theory of the form “R causes P,” the direction of causation and the common middle term somehow suggests that the first theory is somehow logically prior to, a premise for, the second theory, and so that the evidential basis for the second theory somehow must depend on the evidential basis for the first theory. If you do believe that, I don’t know what to say except that it’s a hopeless muddle of really distinct causal, logical, and epistemological relationships, and you need to try to more carefully distinguish claims about complex causal chains between events from claims about complex logical and evidentiary relationships between statements asserting the existence of simple causal chains between events.

If that’s not what you’re confused about, then you’ll have to state more clearly why exactly you think a discussion of Brownmiller’s theory about the causes of rape has any evidential bearing on her theory about the effects of rape, and also just what precisely the antecedent is supposed to be and what the consequent is supposed to be in the material conditionals you keep trying to use.

• Jerry: “your post contains quotes from women that basically blame men for most violence in the world (MacKinnon’s quote especially)”

MacKinnon’s quote does not say anything at all about either what absolute quantity or what proportion of the violence in the world is committed by men rather than women. What she actually says is that men commit some violence against other men (she doesn’t say how much), and men commit some violence against women (she doesn’t say how much), and then she contrasts the different ways in which the one kind of violence and the other are committed. I’m sure she has views on that, and so do I, but those views aren’t expressed in the quote and they aren’t material to this discussion. Any claim about how far men are to blame for how much violence is a claim that you have projected into the quote, not something that was there to be found.

• Jerry: “Your claim that you are not saying men are bad and that it is just the science that makes them that way . . .”

I literally have no idea what this means. I have not advanced any theory at all about what either the causes of rape are, or what the moral status of men, either individually or collectively, may be. I also have no idea what you mean by “the science [making] them that way.” What science? What claim are you even referring to?

• Jerry: “You and Brownmiller have done none of that accounting.”

I already told you that I’m not attempting to provide a comprehensive defense of Brownmiller’s claims against all possible objections; if you want that, you should read Brownmiller’s book. My aims for a mid-length blog post are quite different. As for Brownmiller, unless you have read her book (I mean the whole thing, not just the handful of quotations that I or somebody else has pulled for brief consideration), then you have literally no idea at all what she does or does not account for.

• Jerry: “Ad hominem covers the kind of insult you used, which dismisses the argument by demeaning the target of the insult as someone that unfairly shouts and worse, shouts irrelevancies.“

Jerry, characterizing your argument as irrelevant is, I repeat, not an argumentum ad hominem. It is not an argumentum of any kind, because it has no internal inferential structure. It’s an assertion about your argument, which happens to be the conclusion of an argument drawn from a distinct set of premises. You might find the characterization, or the wording in which it is expressed, insulting. But “statements which you find insulting” and “examples of argumentum ad hominem” are two distinct classes, and their members have different logical properties.

As for that argument from distinct premises, I provided several reasons in my comments for saying that your reply was largely irrelevant to the point you were supposedly replying to. Those reasons may be good reasons, and they may be bad reasons, but they are reasons which had specifically to do with the structure and direction of the argument itself, not with any of your personal characteristics or circumstances as the person advancing the argument. You cannot simply point at the conclusion of an argument, declare “I find that conclusion insulting!” and then write off the entire argument as an exercise in argumentum ad hominem. (Or rather, you can’t do that without proving that you don’t understand what the term “ad hominem” means.) Argumentum ad hominem hasn’t anything to do with your reaction to the conclusion; it has to do with the kind of premises that the argument appeals to.

• Jerry: “‘Since kharris disagrees with you, and DRR tells you to stop, I must consider I have won the argument!!! ZOMG!'”

I didn’t say that I won an argument. I said that you were devoting a lot of energy to topics that weren’t on-topic for the discussion, weren’t responsive to the specific claims advanced in my post, and which a number of people have repeatedly said they’re not much interested in discussing at length with you.

• Jerry: “Here is a transcript of a speech from Wendy McElroy. . . .”

I’m not interested in your views on male victims of domestic violence, or the ERA, or on the debate between liberal and radical feminists, or your beef with contemporary feminism broadly. These issues have nothing to do with the proper interpretation of Susan Brownmiller’s theory about the systemic effects of stranger-rape.

dhex,

Well, “politics” derives from the Greek root “polis.” At the time the word was made, “polis” was ambiguous between (or consistently conflated) (1) the organized government of the city, and (2) civil society within the city. So when Aristotle wrote about “politics” he was talking about government processes, but about public life broadly, including many institutions within the city (religious, civic, educational, etc.) which today would be thought of as part of the private rather than the government sector.

Nowadays most people use politics to refer mainly or only to the business of the government, but some traditions (especially on the Left and in the feminist movement) use “politics” in a broader sense to include not only government processes but also struggles within civil society, especially if they have a common impact on a lot of people and if the civil society dynamics are structured by the balance of power between different social classes (such as men and women, or white people and black people, or…).

So “political” is not being expanded so far as just to mean “affects other people” (presumably remembering your friends’ birthdays affects other people, but I wouldn’t call it a political commitment); rather, “politics” is being being used to describe anything that acts to systematically structure public life in terms of the power relationships between groups of people. That includes governmental processes but it also includes a lot of other things, such as the way in which rape dramatically constrains the freedom of movement of all women, as women, and puts women in a state of greater dependency upon men.

Does that help clarify?

Incidentally, I’ve discussed the use of the term “politics” at some more length in section 2 of the Libertarian Feminism essay that I co-authored with Roderick Long.

• Jerry: “P.S. Ad hominem attack: ‘You’ll have to engage with that if you want to actually join the conversation, rather than just shouting irrelevancies at it,’ — I think it’s clear I have not been shouting irrelevancies, regardless of how you would like to characterize my argument or me.”

That’s not an argumentum ad hominem. It is not even an argument at all; it’s a piece of advice which neither draws from premises nor moves towards a conclusion. It contains an implied characterization, which you may find personally insulting; but insults may be either called-for or uncalled-for, depending on the breaks, and are not the same thing as argumentum ad hominem, which is always a logical fallacy.

• Jerry: [after a quotation from Brownmiller and a quotation from MacKinnon] “This is what RadGeek buttresses her argument with.”

No, it’s not. You seem to be having consistent problems with understanding the direction of inference in arguments. (For example, you also have repeatedly spoken as if the part of Brownmiller’s theory that was under discussion in the post was attempting to explain or make predictions about the causes of stranger rape. It’s not; it’s about the effects.) Here, you have failed to grasp that my post was intended to EXPLAIN THE CONTENT of the claims in those quotations using terms which a certain part of my audience would be likely to understand and find interesting.

The post was not intended to establish some further conclusion BY MEANS OF those quotations. The quotations are not introduced as evidence for a conclusion. They are introduced as texts to be interpreted; the evidence for the interpretation I favor is provided elsewhere in the post.

• Jerry: “RadGeek’s point of departure is dubious and weak. Her conclusion seems to be . . .”

My conclusion is that Susan Brownmiller is advancing a theory on which patriarchy is substantially reinforced by a spontaneous order arising from the effects of pervasive, random acts of sexual violence against women.

Any other suggestion as to what my conclusion “seems to be” is sure to be overreaching on your part.

As for your beefs with a random assortment of popular feminist bloggers, other claims that Susan Brownmiller happened to make about a different topic (e.g. false report rates), Women’s Studies programs in Universities, feminist analyses of domestic violence, social constructionism, zero tolerance policies, or the price of tea in China, I honestly don’t care. Judging from the response that your comments has gotten, I doubt much of anyone else here does, either. I’m sure that these issues are all very important to you, but they are not actually material to my post, or to the part of Brownmiller’s theory that’s under discussion, or to the discussion that basically anyone other than you has been pursuing. I would call them red herrings, but even an accusation of misdirection would require a degree of coherent direction that your posts have, so far, not demonstrated.

• kharris: “By the way, RadGeek admits to Women’s Studies, but so far, not to being female that I can tell.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve only ever taken one course in my life that would qualify as a “Women’s Studies” course, and it was a fairly straightforward Psychology of Sexuality course, which wasn’t especially feminist in content. (It was cross-listed as Women’s Studies but taught by regular Psych department faculty.) Not that I think there’s anything wrong with taking Women’s Studies courses; that’s just not the way my academic career panned out.

However, I will happily concede just about any empty polemical label that jerry wants to throw at me, without argument, because I don’t give much of a damn what he calls me, and I’d just as soon get it out of the way in order to discuss something that matters.

• Jerry: “I think of spontaneous order as molecules forming dna. As fines reducing speeding. As incentives encouraging good behavior.”

Look, I don’t want to be a dick about this, but if this is how you think of spontaneous order, then you don’t have a very good grip on the concept of spontaneous order.

If a government agency decides that it wants to reduce speeding, and in order to reduce speeding it institutes a fine for speeders, and, due to the threat of that fine, people don’t speed as much as they used to, that’s not an example of a spontaneous order. It’s a paradigm case of a designed order: legislators wanted a different social outcome, so they instituted a law in order to achieve it and people complied with that law in order to avoid the penalty.

Whether “incentives encouraging good behavior” counts as an example of a spontaneous order or not depends on what the incentives are and why those incentives exist. If those incentives are the unintended byproduct of things that are done for reasons other than producing those incentives, then you have a spontaneous order (for example, when ATM card issuers standardize on a common shape and size for ATM cards, not because anybody set out to encourage standardization by creating specific incentives for it, but rather because, without anybody setting out to make it that way, it turns out to be most cost-effective to make ATM cards that fit existing wallets and ATM card readers). But if they exist because someone who plans to bring about a particular social outcome is deliberately creating those incentives for that kind of behavior, then what you have is an example of a designed order, not a spontaneous order. (As, for example, in the case of fines deliberately instituted to reduce speeding, or in the case of, say, offering to reward children with honors or money for good performance in school.)

• Jerry: “Instead of ad hominem arguments against me …”

Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of criticizing an argument by appealing to properties of the person advancing it, instead of assessing the argument on its own merits. As far as I know I have not used an argumentum ad hominem against you at any point. If you want to accuse me of doing so, you had better actually produce an specific example to substantiate the charge.

• Jerry: “since you have ignored other arguments against your theory (rape in mammalia, …”

I have no idea what the ethological argument is supposed to be refuting. Are you trying to make a claim that human men are biologically predisposed to rape? If so, I think that’s absolutely false (as does Brownmiller: http://www.susanbrownmiller.com/susanbrownmiller/html/review-thornhill.html), but it doesn’t constitute an objection to Brownmiller’s theory as discussed in my post. The part of Brownmiller’s theory under discussion is about the social effects of rape, not the causes of an individual man’s decision to commit rape, and rape could have those effects whether or not it is rooted in some underlying biological predisposition.

If you aren’t trying to make the claim that human men are biologically predisposed to rape, then what claim are you trying to make, and how does it relate to Brownmiller’s claim about the social effects of the systematic threat of stranger-rape against women?

• Jerry: “mothers protecting children”

I have no idea what the objection here is supposed to be. Is the claim supposed to be that mothers don’t gain social power over children in virtue of their role as protectors against certain kind of danger? Of course mothers gain social power over children that way. Parents enjoy immense social and political power vis-a-vis children, and most of the reason for that has to do with the “protector” role that they play.

If, alternatively, this case is supposed to demonstrate that, even though mothers do gain power over children, it’s not always a bad thing for one group of people to gain power over another by serving as their protectors–well, that much is certainly true. But I don’t think that the relationships between adult men and adult women ought to be like the relationships between parents and their children. Do you?

• Jerry: “rape decreasing with increased pornography and legal prostitution”

Again, I have no idea what point of mine or Brownmiller’s this is supposed to be responsive to. If you’re right about there being a direct causal connection here (again, I don’t think you are, but even if you are) how does that refute or even respond to absolutely anything in Brownmiller’s claims about the social effects of the systemic threat of stranger-rape against women?

Suppose it were true that the best way to reduce rape would be to make pornography and prostitution as widely available to all men as you possibly can. O.K.; what then? Does that logically undermine Brownmiller’s claim that the threat of stranger-rape has the effect of substantially limiting women’s freedom and substantially increasing men’s power over women? If it does undermine that claim, how does it undermine it? If it does not undermine that claim, why bring it up?

Generally speaking, you seem to want to make this into a broad discussion about feminism and radical feminist theories of patriarchy generally, rather than about the much more specific topic (Susan Brownmiller’s analysis of the social effects of stranger-rape) that my post addressed. If you want to argue about that other stuff, fine; there are lots of arguments about that kind of stuff on the Internet and I’m not about to get in your way if you propose to have another one. But that kind of argument is not actually a reply to the points that I was making in my post, and I for one have better things to do with my time than try to rehash those other arguments yet again with someone who obviously doesn’t have much interest in or sympathy with the perspective that I’m coming from. My interest here is only with making sure that as many people as possible understand a much more narrow and specific argument.

• Jerry: “I am still curious to why you think mothers collaborate with bullies as part of their invisible fist and spontaneous order.”

I think that there is no empirical basis whatsoever for treating this as a social problem of a comparable scope to rape and its effects on women. But if there are men out there who stay in a bad relationship because they are afraid of losing a relationship with their children, should they leave, and if being legally deprived of a relationship with your children is an example of violence against the person thus deprived — a claim that I’m not at all sure I’d be willing to endorse — then, sure, I’d say that IF both those things are true, then those men’s decisions to stay in those relationships is an example of an invisible fist process. There are lots of invisible fist processes in this vale of tears; my aim was only to explain one of them, partly for its own sake and partly for the sake of making something clear about the concept of “spontaneous order” than most libertarian writers have thus far failed to make clear. It was not to discuss each and every invisible fist process in the world.

Eric:

It’s a criticism of the idea that this point is some shocking revelation to libertarians.

Well, I don’t know about “shocking revelations.” But I think that we can safely infer from the number of comments, by self-described libertarians, describing the article as making an interesting connection that they hadn’t thought of before, that this does come as “news” to at least some libertarians. It may not come as news to you, but you are not all libertarians.

Leonard:

Still, I find the tone of Johnson’s article off-putting. Part of it is the confrontational tone of it, combined with the lack of actions offered, that are any different than anything libertarians already say. How, specifically, are we supposed to “fight rape” with our new understanding of “rape culture” or whatever? Johnson doesn’t even offer the libertarian standby, of trying to convince women to arm themselves.

I understand that it can be frustrating to have a discussion of some big problem dumped in your lap without having much said about what you can do about that problem. But keep in mind that the post had a specific purpose, which was to consider Susan Brownmiller’s “Myrmidon theory” of stranger rape and the Hayekian notion of spontaneous order in relation to one another, as a means to getting a clearer understanding of each. It’s an intellectual exercise, not an attempt at offering either political strategy or personal advice. If you want to know what kind of antirape or more broadly feminist I think people should be doing, I’ve talked about that in many other places (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. etc. etc.), one of which I linked from the post, but honestly it’s a very big topic and a very hard problem, and it’s not something you can treat comprehensively, or even make much of an approach to, in the course of one article on the Internet which is already trying to deal with a related but distinct subject.

I also think that there are many sources other than me who can do a much better job than I can in providing ideas on what to do — especially women who are involved on a day-to-day basis in local antirape or feminist activism in or near your own community. My goal, as far as concrete actions are concerned, is mainly to get more libertarians to a place, in our analysis and in our priorities, where we are ready and willing to seek out those people and those groups, to ask them what they are working on and what they need help with, and to get involved. I think that’s unlikely to happen unless and until more libertarians have a sympathetic understanding of the feminist analysis of rape culture. Since that’s something I feel I’m in a good position to try to address, by means of trying to translate feminist analysis into terms that some of my readers may more readily understand, that’s where I’m trying to devote my labor and exploit my comparative advantage.

As for women arming themselves in self-defense, I think that’s a perfectly fine idea, as is organizing other forms of women’s self-defense training (e.g. Rape Aggression Defense and similar mixed martial arts systems for women). Neither is a comprehensive solution, or ideal for every woman’s individual needs, but, then, nothing is; I think that what we need are a bunch of small parts, loosely joined with each other, attacking many different aspects of the problem from many different angles.

That is, something undesigned is as evil as something designed, something intended. No. Evil requires intent: mens rea. This is a category error.

The word “evil” has many different usages in the English language. Some of them require specific individual intent and others do not. (Many do not involve individual action at all; for example, “natural evils,” often used in English to refer events like hurricanes or earthquakes, or “social evils,” often used to refer to conditions like ghettoized urban poverty, without any suggestion that the evil in question is the result of anybody’s conscious intent.)

Of course, if I were using the sense of evil you have in mind (something along the lines of a deliberate sin of commission), then I would be committing a category error. But I wasn’t. So, as far as I can see, I’m not.

Consider a village, in India perhaps, where a man-eating tiger is loose in the neighborhood. People there are constrained by fear, in just the same way as the fear of rape restricts women. They don’t go out far alone, or at night, etc. Is this a “coercive” social order?

No. Tigers are not deliberating moral agents. They aren’t the sort of being which could be said to have either coercive or consensual interactions with human beings.

Men who commit rape, unlike tigers, are deliberating moral agents, and, unlike tiger attacks, rape is a deliberate, coercive act committed by men who are morally responsible for their actions.

A spontaneous social order that emerges in response to the danger posed by a natural evil, such as random tiger attacks, will have some things in common with the spontaneous social order that emerges in response to the danger that some people within the society force on other people by committing deliberate acts of violence. It will also have some important differences, both in terms of how appropriate certain kinds moral and political criticism are, with respect to that social order, and also in terms of the best way to try to deal with the situation.

Jerry: Your theory is that the non-rapists put up with a certain amount of rape of their daughters and wives because it helps keep women down, and keeps women seeking the protection of the non-rapists.

I doubt that this is Queequeg’s theory. I know that it is not mine. Nor, on my understanding, is it Susan Brownmiller’s.

Jerry: I am talking about the explanation that rape is due to some overt/covert conspiracy of men to keep women down.

Then you’re not talking about my post, but rather something else.

Much of the explicit purpose of the post was to reject interpretations of Brownmiller’s position which, quote:

… treat this kind of analysis as if it were some kind of conspiracy theory about rape — as if Brownmiller were claiming that, say, every first Monday of the month, all the men got together in a big meeting at the Patriarchy’s underground headquarters and decided to have some men commit stranger rape as a way to keep women down. Or, to be more charitable to uncharitable critics, as if Brownmiller were claiming that ‘police-blotter rapists’ and other men who do not commit rape are consciously collaborating with one another, in some kind of social plan, promulgated from the top down, to intimidate women and bring about and sustain male supremacy.

My alternative interpretation of Brownmiller’s theory rejects this in favor of a “spontaneous order” theory, as that term is used by economists such as Friedrich Hayek. It is a hallmark of spontaneous order theories that the individual people participating in a spontaneous order do so by engaging in self-interested actions, for reasons of their own, without needing to make any conscious effort to create or sustain that form of social coordination. (Hence “spontaneous,” in the sense of “undesigned,” as opposed to forms of coordination created by many people consciously following a single plan.) In this case, I read Brownmiller as arguing that men who commit rape do so for reasons of their own, without conscious coordination either between each other or with men who do not commit rape, but that the rapists’ actions nevertheless redound to the benefit of — serve the class interests of — men, including the majority of men who do not commit rape, and who (I presume) consider rape a serious evil and wouldn’t consciously seek to benefit from it. The idea is that when the threat of sexual violence against women is intense, pervasive, and random enough, this produces systematic effects on all women’s freedom, as well as the balance of social power between women and men, whether or not any of the individual people concerned had that outcome in mind, or would have accepted that outcome if they thought about it, when they made their choices about how to act.

Maybe that explanation is right and maybe it’s wrong, but it is what it is, and not something else. You’ll have to engage with that if you want to actually join the conversation, rather than just shouting irrelevancies at it, and the fact that your summary of the explanation reads more or less exactly like a condensed version of precisely the strawman view I was explicitly repudiating, and to which I was trying to suggest an alternative, indicates to me that you haven’t done yet gotten that far.

In any case the primary purpose of the original post was to help explain what Brownmiller’s claims are, as against a common and extremely uncharitable reading of them, not to provide a comprehensive defense for the claim. If you want a comprehensive defense, then you’d be better off actually reading the book (which covers a lot of ground over the course of 407 pages of text) than trying to find it my attempt to provide exegesis of four paragraphs in which she summarizes a couple of her conclusions. But before you can understand the defense, you will need to exercise the care and charity needed to understand what the claim being defended is in the first place.

As for the sanctimonious women’s studies set, yeah, O.K., you got me, I’m a sanctimonious Women’s Student. I’m also anti-male, anti-sex, anti-America, and anti-life. Let’s move along and talk about the argument as it was actually presented.

O.K., James, you got me. I’m a poisonous hate-filled politically-correct man-hater. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m also anti-sex, anti-America, and anti-life.

Let’s move on to empirical data.

Here’s what you say:

Acquaintance rape is indeed common – but rape by intimates quite uncommon.

Here is what Tjaden and Thoennes (2000) say in the report on their randomly-sampled survey of 8,000 U.S. women and 8,000 U.S. men:

Nearly 10 percent of surveyed women, compared with less than 1 percent of surveyed men, reported being raped since age 18 (exhibit 21). Thus, U.S. women are 10 times more likely than U.S. men to be raped as an adult.

The survey found that most women who are raped as adults are raped by intimates. Nearly two-thirds (61.9 percent) of the women who reported being raped since age 18 were raped by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, boyfriend, or date. In comparison 21.3 percent were raped by an acquaintance, 16.7 were raped by a stranger, and 6.5 percent were raped by a relative [other than a spouse] (see exhibit 22). The number of male rape victims was insufficient to reliably calculate estimates for men.

Tjaden and Thoennes (2006) breaks out the data into different categories of intimate partner rapists. (The prevalence rates don’t add up the same way as in [2000], because in this passage the data is broken out by victim-perpetrator relationship but not controlled by the age of the victim.)

Information from NVAWS confirms previ­ous research that shows most rape vic­tims know their rapist. Only 16.7 percent of all female victims and 22.8 percent of all male victims were raped by a stranger (see exhibit 13). In general, female victims tended to be raped by current or former intimates, defined in this study as spous­es, male and female cohabiting partners, dates, boyfriends, and girlfriends. In com­parison, male victims tended to be raped by acquaintances, such as friends, teach­ers, coworkers, or neighbors. Among all female victims identified by the survey, 20.2 percent were raped by a spouse or ex-spouse, 4.3 percent were raped by a current or former cohabiting partner, and 21.5 percent were raped by a current or former date, boyfriend, or girlfriend.

Age has a major effect on the risks from different groups of men. If you look at victimization rates for girls under the age of twelve, the greatest danger of rape comes from relatives (67.8% of female victims who were raped when younger than 12), followed by acquaintances (24.5% of under-12 female victims), followed by strangers (10.8%). If you look at adolescent women, aged 12-17, the greatest danger of rape comes from intimate partners (35.9% of female rape victims who were raped when 12-17), followed by acquaintances (33.3% of female victims age 12-17), followed by relatives (19.4%), followed by strangers (15.8%). Women raped in adulthood are overwhelmingly more likely to have been raped by a current or former intimate partner than by any other man — as seen above, more women are raped by current or former intimate partners than by all other categories of perpetrators put together. It shouldn’t be surprising that rape by dates, boyfriends, and husbands is much more common among adult women than among adolescent women and young girls, of course; adult women are more likely to be exposed to dates and boyfriends in the first place, and much, much more likely to have husbands, than women aged 12-17 are, let alone girls under the age of 12.

Them’s the facts, as far as I am aware of them. If you have empirical studies of the prevalence and incidence of sexual violence against women which indicate something different, then your mission, should you choose to accept it, is actually to produce the specific studies in question, and demonstrate how they contradict or undermine the findings from the NVAWS. Or I guess you could just impugn my intellectual honesty again without providing a reference to any specific data.

Now, if Tjaden and Thoennes’s findings are accurate, I guess you could ask why the facts hate men so much, but the truth is that I really have very little idea what, if anything, in my remarks was supposed to be “man-hating” in the first place. At most it is boyfriend-and-husband-hating, and it’s really not even that. Lots of boyfriends and husbands are violent towards their girlfriends and wives. Does it follow (1) that there’s something intrinsically wrong with boyfriends or husbands as such, or rather (2) that there’s something deeply wrong with how boyfriends and husbands are expected to conduct themselves in this particular society as it actually exists, or rather (3) that there’s something deeply wrong with how a large minority of boyfriends and husbands in this particular society expect themselves to act, which doesn’t necessarily apply to the majority of boyfriends and husbands who don’t commit rape? My own view is (2), although for all I’ve said so far, you could just as easily take option (3), and neither case seems to me like something that you could fairly call “man-hating” or anything of the sort. (For comparison, during the 1910s black men in Mississippi were overwhelmingly more likely to be lynched by white men than by black men, white women, black women, or children of any race. Is it somehow anti-white or anti-white-male to point that fact out, or to point out that it might have had something to do with the norms and ideals accepted by the majority of white men in the racial system of Jim Crow?)

Thoreau,

Thank you for your kind words. I’m glad if you found what I wrote useful.

I understand that it’s easy to get defensive, and hard to know how to deal with the conversation, when something like the rape culture comes up. It’s natural to want to defend yourself when it seems like you’re being implicated (morally, if not legally) in crimes that you didn’t personally commit, and which you personally would oppose and condemn. What I’d want to say is that — while obviously I can’t speak for people that you’ve talked to and I haven’t — I know that, in my experience, most feminists who talk about a rape culture are much less interested in ripping on random men than they are on trying (1) to shake up a settled power and a kind of institutional inertia among the administration, (2) to make certain kinds of unhelpful responses to rape (apathy, victim-blaming, etc.) publicly unacceptable, and (3) to make it clear to their audience (sometimes men, but also, keep in mind, other women on campus) how certain sorts of danger and violence, imposed on women by a hard to identify but always present subset of the men on campus, are connected to a broader set of issues. There’s a necessary element of urgency, and impatience, and of very real and very justified anger, which may make something seem like a personal accusation when it’s not really intended as such, and would be better understood if not taken as such.

Robin Warshaw wrote a very good book, some years ago, called I Never Called It Rape, which offers a good overview of some of the research on acquaintance rape and offers a gentle introduction to some of the feminist critique of rape myths, and the role of common norms in heterosexual dating and sexuality, in particular, and rape culture. (By “gentle” I mean it doesn’t presuppose much about your ideological or academic background. It’s an unpleasant book to read, given the topic.) It may help explain in more depth part of what I’m talking about, in one area. It also provides a good walk-through of Mary Koss’s 1985 study of rape on college campuses, which has been the object of quite a bit of ill-founded, uncharitable, and sometimes downright dishonest criticism, including an unfortunate amount of it in self-described libertarian forums.

One thing I should note is that in my post and in these comments, I’ve mainly been talking about one direction of causation: the way in which certain social phenomena may be unintended ripple-effects of the prevalence of rape and the threat of rape. But feminist who write about a “rape culture” have something to say about both directions of causation: they think that what they call a “rape culture” is not only partly the effect of rape, but also a contributing cause, in that it promotes cultural norms that partly motivate rape (and encourage rapists to justify their crimes to themselves), makes it easier for rapists to act with impunity, encourages non-rapist men to dismiss or smear rape victims and make excuses for rapists, and very strongly discourages women from speaking out about their experience of rape except in those limited cases where it conforms to a stereotypical script and serves the interest of one group of men as against another group of men. So the view is not just that rape culture is the effect of rape, but that the two are mutually reinforcing of each other.

Hope this helps.