Here are a couple of, well, let’s just call them very intriguing questions asked of me by a Men’s Rights Redditor. Since I can’t respond to them on the Men’s Rights subreddit — I’m banned — I thought I’d respond here:
Mr. Levelate, allow me to answer your serious questions with some equally serious questions of my own:
I’ve wondered for a long time how people like you react to the men’s rights mantra of ‘all women are wombats’, when you see a woman who isn’t a wombat, how do you explain this?
Also, many MRAs advocate turning all squirrels into bologna, what makes you think squirrel bologna would taste better than regular bologna, and what would the world do with all those extra uneaten nuts, were it ever to come to that?
Here’s the thing, Mr. Levelate: those things you think feminists believe? FEMINISTS DON’T ACTUALLY BELIEVE THEM.
That “all men are rapists” quote from Marilyn French you guys like to pass around? That was from a character in a novel.
The number of radical feminists who seriously want to get rid of men, or a significant number of them, you could probably count on your fingers. I’m not sure how many MRAs want to make squirrel bologna, but the numbers are probably similar. And, fyi, there are actually more than a few MRAs who fantasize about breeding certain types of women out of existence, like this dude on The Spearhead, and a small army of MRAs and MGTOWers who pine for the imaginary future where babies are gestated in artificial wombs and women are all replaced by sexy sexbots.
Listening to MRAs talking about feminism is a bit like sitting in on a book club in which no one has read the book.
By “slammin” I assume that Arks means that he’s been drinking heavily.
Oh hey, long time lurker, first time poster, amateur statistics nerd.
So, the MRA sites I found that invent the “80% of male rape victims report a female rapist” statistic out of the ether (since really, that’s the only places I could find that include that little non-factoid, which seems to be from one article reprinted a bunch of different places) also include the claim that “98% of women report a male rapist.”
So even if this whole rapists have a 60/40 gender split thing is true, it only applies to men. Not women. That split for women is, according to the same MRA site, 98/2.
These two statistics are then used to shame women as being insane for considering that men could, in fact, possibly rape them. Because rape is theoretically not gendered…for male victims. Only men. Not women. So this whole “Schrodinger’s Rapist” thing is crazed misandry because, you know, 2%.
Uh, what?
slavey:
What does that mean? Or are you saying that the term “rapist” has been redefind to mean “man” at some point? If so, maybe some source for that can go with all those other citations I’m waiting on.
On reflection I also wanted to address this:
Arks:
That’s pretty fucking ridiculous, man.
The Schrodinger’s Rapist article is online, anyone can read it so don’t act like I haven’t. The woman who wrote that article is completely out of her mind and she spells it out pretty clearly that she thinks rape = something a man does to a woman.
I’ve read it and I didn’t get that impression at all. Could you quote some specific lines you thought were crazy and explain why?
I don’t have submissive sex fantasies, so you have to take me seriously.
Arks: You’re comparing the lifetime vs. last 12 months statistics. Lifetime statistics are inherently unreliable because you’re at more risk of false negatives when it comes to recalling childhood trauma.
Citation needed (though that was a more clever assertion as to why a single year is a better barometer of a woman’s lifetime risk than most use).
The thing that really bugs about NWO arguing about this shit is, he actually believes most, if not all, men are rapists.
You can’t claim on the one hand that men can’t control themselves because women are Slutty McSluttersons, and on the other that it’s not faaaair that women suspect some men might be rapists.
I mean you can, but it makes you look like a stupid asshole. You have to actually believe in the human capacity for good in order for these ideas to have any amount logical consistency.
Arks: Rape is not gendered.
Dracula: There is a third option: NWO doesn’t think being a rapist is a bad thing.
Therefore the real problem is that women (er, “feminists”) are being oppressive, and evil, for trying to convince men that rape is bad.
He will make an exception (a la Meller) that a woman who is owned can be violated, but that’s an offense against her owner. A property crime, more than an offense against a person.
The problem is that we keep thinking women are people. If we understood how wrong that was, then all the rest would be simple.
@Uncognitive I think I love you. Post more, please.
cloudiah — “Except shit, “sample size” is not the concept I’m going for. I mean a sample covering a larger time period.” — sample size works
Arks statistical failure —
First, you basically can’t use 12 month data instead of lifetime because — “*Estimate is not reported; relative standard error >30% or cell size ≤ 20.” — in non-math terms, that means they have no 12 month data on male rape victims because it’s too rare to do statistics on. (And before you claim statistics are MISANDRY, modern statistics were invented by a man, Sir Francis Galton)
Second, the math, using 12 month data anyways because Arks wants it.
women — 1.1% for rape, and since Arks is using sexual coercion, 2.0% for that = 3.1%
men — 1.1% for made to penetrate and Arks’s sexual coercion now breaks his theory with 1.5% = 2.6%
And this is the full paragraph his one citation is carefully copied out of —
Since Arks has thrown out the lifetime data, male rape victim are literally not being counted here btw, see “first” above.
So, complex math time, please try to keep up, I’m not repeating this —
98.1% of 1.1% =
1.0791% of all women were raped in the 12 months of data by a man
0.0209% of all women were raped in the 12 months of data by a woman
92.5% of 2.0% =
1.85% of all women experienced sexual coercion in those 12 months at the hands of a man
0.15% of all women experienced sexual coercion in those 12 months at the hands of a woman
79.2% of 1.1% =
0.8712% of all men were made to penetrate in the 12 months of data by a woman
0.2288% of all men were made to penetrate in the 12 months of data by a man
83.6% of 1.5% =
1.254% of all men experienced sexual coercion in those 12 months at the hands of a woman
0.246% of all men experienced sexual coercion in those 12 months at the hands of a man
For women then, there was a 2.9291% chance of experiencing either rape or sexual coercion at the hands of a man in the 12 months of data; and a 0.1709% of such at the hands of a woman. For men, there was a 0.4748% chance of either being made to penetrate or sexual coercion at the hands of a man in the 12 months of data; and a 2.1252% of such at the hands of a woman. (Arks, you might want to reconsider your “rape is not gendered” theory about now, as it’s gendered even if you’re a male victim)
Assuming adding men+women=population, because I’ve done enough complex math I’m just going to keep playing gender binary (and honestly, I don’t want to look, I’m sure the statistics would make me unhappy) — add 2.9291% + 0.4748% = 3.4039% of the sorts of crimes being looked at, in those 12 months, were committed by a man; 0.1709% + 2.1252% = 2.2961% were committed by a woman.
3.4039% of perpetrators were men
2.2961% were women
That’s closer to 70% than 60% Arks, even when I play to all your absurd rules — 67.4549%
Now to address the assumptions of “the rules” — lifetime data is not more inaccurate because:
First assumption — “the further back a traumatic event happens the less likely someone is to remember it” — sort of true, but gender neutral, so irrelevant
1b — “You get more false negatives from people forgetting events than you would if you look at a smaller time frame.” — false negatives would be gender neutral, and you get many with a recent time frame due to trauma (and traumatic events are unlikely to be forgotten, much like you remember really happy events, except in reverse, basically) — you want a larger time frame to also account for outliers in terms of particularly bad, or good, years; you don’t want to accidentally being look at such a narrow window you don’t get the general trend (or end up with so few data points you can’t do statistics at all)
Second major assumption — “Especially with men who are less likely to even recognize their experiences as rape” — the questions specifically say “rape”, “made to penetrate” etc to account for that, please don’t assume the people who do this sort of research can’t handle forming proper study questions.
addressed that above
does not mean wtf you think it means
fixed that for you
Feminism really isn’t *for* men directly, we’ll happily take on the social structures that affect men and women, but with birth control up for debate in 2012 somehow, we kind of have other shit going on. Feminism will also happily embrace causes that support primarily men, so long as it isn’t at a cost to women. It is apparently the enemy of the MRM, but only because you insist on making it so, really, we’ll happily support men’s rights, just stop being assholes and demanding women shouldn’t be allowed to vote even. This is actually a pretty simple concept to reasonable people.
WHUT? I’m not sure you know what a single one of those words actually means. (No, not even “the”.)
I wasn’t kidding that I’ll teach some basic statistics too as long as you stop butchering math. A teaser — if correlation is causation, then ice cream prevents death from the flu.
holy shit my novella length comment didn’t go into mod — everyone but Arks is free to ignore that statistics lesson
@Uncognitive — “Oh hey, long time lurker, first time poster, amateur statistics nerd.” — your version is much more readable than mine. Hello fellow nerd! 🙂
I know NWO doesn’t rape is bad, but like harassment and violence, he still thinks it happens, and yet he acts like it’s absurd and unjust for a woman to think it might happen to her.
He thinks “rape rape” happens, and women call things that aren’t rape rape, because they hate men.
Here’s a thought…what if one day I’m out in the summer and I’m head to toe covered. Blue jeans and a turtleneck. An MRA asks me, why are you all covered up, aren’t you boiling? I respond that I’m afraid if I wear something that shows more skin a guy might rape or harass me.
BAM. Head explosion. MRAs are the loudest and most hostile towards “sluts” and continuously perpetuate the myth that slutty clothes means higher chance of being raped or harassed and that women should expect it if we show skin. They are also enraged by slut walk for this reason. Yet if women take precautions like I did in my hypothetical up there, we’d have them rant and rave about misandry, assuming all men are rapists, blah blah blah like what’s happening in this thread. Even though I would be doing EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT. Not taunting any men by showing skin.
Y U SO ILLOGICAL MRAS???
My guess? Because want they really want is an excuse to harass women, and have the women be at fault.
Much like our very own NWOslave and his inconsistent views, it has fuck all to do with modesty or morality, and everything to do with creating plausible denial.
*what they
NWO’s fail —
“In the theoretical game of Schrodinger’s Cat, the question is, is the cat dead or alive?”
assumption — it’s called Schrodinger’s Cat because what’s in the box is always a cat (that’d be a simple mistake, but Morton’s Fork isn’t about forks)
“There is no guess work for Schrodinger’s Rapist.”
follows from assumption then that what’s in the box is always a rapist — except that’s not really how philosophy problems get named, the problem was never about a cat, but about how you can’t know if the cat is alive until you check, you can’t know something until you know it to get philosophical (it is a philosophy problem)
“Any man placed in the box is a rapist, hence the term rapist.”
follows from the above idiocy
“Or is the question still the same?”
that you can’t know until you know? yep, still the question
“Is the man, dubbed a rapist by the name on the box, dead or alive?”
not the question unless you fail at basic philosophy, or are being intentionally obtuse (pretty sure I know which it is)
Summary of wtf NWO was trying to get at, maybe — he thinks feminists mean all men are rapists, because any man could be a rapist (and he fails philosophy), and that since the original Schrodinger dilemma involved death, we want all men dead
NWO, you hurt my logic more than statistical errors, please go back to failing math, it’s much easier to correct. Schrodinger Rapist means that any man could be a rapist and you can’t know he isn’t until you know if he is (ie he rapes you) — that’s conclusively knowing, 100% certainly, one can also get to the “fairly certain” range by not acting like a rapist — a point you fail at.
They actually come out of the same study the Arks is (mis)citing. It’s on page 24.
Arks mental gymnastics on why he should get to use the 12 month data and ignore the lifetime data were ridiculous, but now I’m a little curious why they’re so different. The 12 month numbers on made to penetrate are almost 1/4 of the lifetime number, while the corresponding numbers for rape in women are only about 1/16. This is especially weird because more men report only one perpetrator of sexual violence against them in their lifetime (92.1%) than women do of perpetrators of rape (71.2%).
I don’t know where I’m going with this. It just seemed odd, and I’m at a loss for why the numbers would come out that way.
“Listening to MRAs talking about feminism is a bit like sitting in on a book club in which no one has read the book”
God that’s good stuff. Bless you, Futrelle. Also- you have a cool name
Don’t try to convince NWO with appeals to logic. NWO is the anti-logic. I’m pretty sure we’ve tried to get him to understand basic syllogisms, and he failed. I mean, this is the guy who believes that justifying your knowledge with evidence is a fault. (Facts are apparently things you just believe upon thinking them, i.e. you pull them out of your ass.) The only thing NWO knows about rationality is that it is something you can blame women for not having. He interacts with reality only through a tiny window which is made up of half technical manuals for milk bottle machines and half websites with pictures of pyramids with eyeballs on them. NWO doesn’t just troll Manboobz, he trolls the very idea of having a coherent belief system or standards for human communication. This is why you should avoid any attempt to figure out what he meant by a statement at all costs; you will disappear down a hole into a shadowy mirror-world after questioning whether it is possible to mean anything at all, where understanding is impossible and you will no longer even know your own thoughts. NWO is like a reverse-Socrates who questions you not to arrive at the truth, but to arrive in a twilight world where up is down, right is left, and 5 year-olds wear see-through miniskirts to the mall.
Most of the perpetrators of rape are male- even when males get raped. Apparently in certain Mexican gangs, gang raping new male initiates is considered a “rite of passage” and is used to bring the group together more closely. Gang raping “bitches” is common as well, and goes beyond initiation into the gang. They “own” the women who join their gang, and any gang member at any time often feels justified in “using” her however he wishes. I’ve met plenty of male people who have been gang raped or raped by foreign objects as young adolescents and teens by groups of cruel boys using the crime to “bond” with one another.
And as for “rape culture”- it’s something that most guys honestly just don’t think about. Ever since I was 8 years old and the whole Polly Klass thing happened, my mom sad my sister and I down and told us the nasty details about what happens when someone rapes you. It was all over 60 minutes and pretty much every gritty crime drama featured some woman getting raped or some girl being forced into terrifying sex with someone who saw her short skirt as an invitation. There were magazine articles, even in young adult magazines about this. Rape was an ugly and scary cloud that hung over your head every single day- wondering if you were walking home the “back way” might find you in the company of someone looking to do ill to you- steal your money and then violate your body or even kill you.
When someone finally *did* rape me, I was almost relieved. It was like- here’s this threat over your head 24/7, that one day, at some point in your life, someone *IS FOR SURE* going to do this horrible thing to you. And when it finally happens, you realize that the terror and uncertainty of the act was more terrifying than actually experiencing it, because it’s so easy for your brain to come up with a rape that is 1000% worse than the one you actually experience. Well, that and the way that everyone around you acts like you deserve it, or when rape comes up they either laugh about it or make light of it, or talk about “shared responsibility” as though women trick men into raping them. (Disclaimer- this is my experience and should not be taken to mean anything in regards to the experiences of other rape victims).
It was like, before being raped I had already been raped, because everything in this society basically grooms women to expect sexual harassment and the utter disregard for her bodily integrity AT ANY TIME simply because she is female. So the worry about possibly being raped was like a specter that just followed me around and got in the way of me being able to do things without a care in the world (like most of my male friends who were incredulous when I brought up how unsafe I felt walking around downtown at night without people with me-it had never occurred to them).
Sometimes, all this stuff just exhausts me and I wonder if I should just allow people to rape me whenever they want. I’ll just disassociate and they can leave and at least I won’t be killed. Maybe it would make it a lot easier to deal with this shit.
Of course, the MRAs I’ve been reading seem to think that for being a lumpy non-perfect, over 18 lady I should be killed or something, so now, simply for being a woman, I am now a target for men who think that I should NOT BE ALLOWED TO BE ALIVE simply because of how I look. On top of the whole “someone could rape you at any time because you are inherently smaller and not as strong and anyway you were wearing a skirt so you were asking for it” bullshit.
You know what? Fuck that shit. Seriously.
I also find it humorous that most MRAs seem to argue that not being able to have sex with any [supah hot] woman whenever they like in whatever way they want is TANTAMOUNT TO DEATH FOR A MAN.
And then they turn around and talk about ACTUALLY KILLING ALL WOMEN WHO DO NOT SUBSCRIBE TO VERY NARROW APPEARANCE QUALITIES/WILL FUCK THEM AT ALL TIMES ANY TIME THEY WANT.
The mind, it reels.
>Rape culture is the idea that rape is so common as to be considered normal and trivial… which is not remotely true.
I remember when I first heard the term thrown around and wondered where it had originated from… and it turned out that it generally got attatched to instances of authorities being pretty dismissive of instances of systematic rape. And that exists – see prison rape, see the franternity gang rape scandals and the first reactions to it.
And in general, even property crime is punished more severely than rape.