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.

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.

Dain,

I don’t like being in either the position of being feared, or in the position of being depended on for protection, either.

I don’t mean to suggest that male supremacy is all a bed of roses for men. Patriarchy Hurts Men Too ™, and all that. But the reason I’m willing to endorse Brownmiller’s claim, that the threat of rape redounds to the benefit of men as a class, including (especially) those who don’t actually commit rape, isn’t because playing the role of a “protector” is supposed to be pleasant in itself. Truth be told, it is pleasant for many men, or at least ego-stroking, and a lot of men have historically been quite explicit in expressing how much emotional satisfaction they get from providing for and protecting their wife and children. But that’s not the main point here.

The more important point has to do with ripple effects, and (1) the indirect payoffs that come from assuming the social role that men, as men, assume, as well as (2) the disadvantages that restricted mobility in physical space imposes on women, as women, vis-a-vis men.

Taking (2) first, living with certain spaces or times closed off to you by the threat of physical violence, without being able to safely and comfortably walk through many public spaces in a big city, or in certain male-dominated spaces (certain kinds of workplaces, certain kinds of clubs and bars), or much of anywhere at night has direct effects on what you can and cannot realistically do with your time. The lack of freedom that comes from the realistic fear of rape, sexual harassment, and other forms of sexual aggression directly effects women’s ability to participate in civic life, in politics, and in certain kinds of work. It has direct effects on women’s prospects for business, on women’s prospects for work, on where and when and with whom they can socialize, and in any number of other ways on their economic, social, and political participation. It also has indirect ripple effects: the effects of living with constant warnings and a constant feeling of confinement, as well as the effects of having to find, please, and satisfy the Right Man in order to safely navigate everyday situations that most men have no worries about navigating. (It’s worth considering how much of stereotypical American femininity is linked, either directly or indirectly, with the threat of rape and with the need for male “protectors.”) That works to the systematic disadvantage of women, which means that it works to the systematic advantage of certain men who are, or would otherwise be, in competition for jobs, promotions, socio-political status, etc. (The connection between the traditional “protector” role and the traditional “provider” role for the male “head of household” is not accidental.)

As for (1), those indirect payoffs have largely to do with the way in which women are socially expected to defer to men, both in public forums and in interpersonal relationships, and to focus on finding, pleasing and satisfying the Right Man. How women are expected act as sexual “gatekeepers” and not to be assertive about their own sexual desires, and to have a sexual experience more or less on the man’s terms. Also with corresponding, often subconscious entitlement that men have acted on and continue to act on. Expectations used to be very strong, and quite explicit in social norms; in these days — by which I mean the last 40 years or so; the change was very dramatic and quite recent, in the grand scheme of things — we have largely shifted towards unspoken, or covert versions of the same thing. But they are still there. If you see more or less what I’m talking about in your own life and the lives of people you know, then that’s what I’m trying to point out when I endorse Brownmiller’s claim that stranger-rape serves to promote male power and male privileges over women — even, or especially, the power and privileges of men who do not themselves commit rape. If you don’t see it, then I’ll just plead that I don’t have the talent or the space to really get you to see it within the space allowed by a blog post or a comments thread. What I’d want you to take away is an some idea, even if only in rough outline, of the kind of stuff I mean when I say that non-rapist men get concrete privileges out of the violent undesigned order that arises from the violence of male rapists against women. For a fuller and more convincing elaboration of the specifics, I’d just have to point you to extended treatments in the feminist literature, starting with Brownmiller’s book itself–which, after all, only had a few short summary paragraphs quoted and discussed in the course of my post–and with other work that discusses sexism in contemporary language, media, culture, sexuality, etc. My post wasn’t really intended to give you a full panoramic view of Brownmiller’s theory of rape, let alone her whole theory of patriarchy; my aim was just to help point certain of my readers towards the right lens to use when you try to get the view.

I don’t know why this would be any more beneficial for males in general than would the negative actions of some blacks be beneficial to all blacks.

This is really a separate issue. The reason that white stereotyping of black people as violent or criminal — and the fear that results — is harmful to black people is that that fear is projected onto all black people, and then used by politically and socially well-connected white people to justify individual practices and large-scale policies that hurt black people (e.g. economically deserting certain neighborhoods, or the racist War on Drug Users, or increasingly violent policing and punitive imprisonment). There’s no real equivalent in the situation between men and women as depicted by Brownmiller. Firstly because the fear is not universally projected onto all men, or at least not equally onto all men. (The key move in her theory has to do with men who are seen primarily as protectors, rather than as rapists.) Secondly, because the fear of rape is not usually used to justify increased violence against men as such. (After all, it’s men, not women, who have the advantage in terms of access to economic and political resources; so women’s response, by necessity, is to depend more upon the “good” men as a defense against the bad, rather than to push through policies and practices that punish the “good” men along with the bad.)

Hope this helps.

GT 2007-11-16: Urban homesteading, on how city governments force poor people into the rental economy against their will, and the people-power actions that can be employed to resist this form of government-backed exploitation.

GT 2007-11-25: International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence.