• 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.

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.