Earlier today, several readers alerted me to a new video out with an alarming title: Vox Day Admits to Sex with Women Without Consent, Says Gay is a Birth Defect.
The video, a 46-minute interview of Science Fiction’s biggest asshole conducted by YouTuber David Pakman, doesn’t quite live up to its sensational title (which I now see Pakman has changed).
While Day — real name Theodore Beale — does indeed say that gayness is a birth defect, he’s evasive when Pakman asks him point-blank about some of the more amazingly wrong and creepy things he’s written about rape. Indeed, he’s so evasive in his answers it’s easy to lose track of what exactly Pakman is trying to get him to clarify.
So let’s look at the actual quotes that Pakman was asking him about. In a 2005 blog post (archived here), Day wrote:
If the definition of rape is stretched so far to include women who have not given consent, then I am absolutely a serial rapist. So, too, is every man I know.
Pakman is of course correct to see this as a rather startling admission. Because the very definition of rape is sex without consent; there is no stretching going on here.
In the interview, Vox doesn’t repudiate these comments, but he doesn’t exactly affirm them either; he tells Pakman that he has indeed had sex with women without first obtaining explicit written consent, introducing a qualifier that was not there in the original. He goes on to say that he’s had sex without getting explicit verbal consent for each and every sexual act, a la the famous Antioch College rules. Again, that wasn’t the question. Pakman makes a valiant effort to pin Day down on this, but he wriggles away every time.
If you look at some of the other things Day was writing about rape around the same time of that 2005 post, you can see that he’s been using the “written permission” nonsense to muddle the issue for a very long time.
Less than a week before his “serial rape” comment, Day posted a long, victim-blamey disquisition on rape (archived here), in which he drew a distinction between “genuine rape” and date rape, saying that
most so-called “date rape” is not rape nor a crime of any kind, because he said-she said is no basis for a system of justice. If sex without written permission is a crime, then all sex is rape and all men are unrepentant criminals.
Never mind that “written permission” is never the issue in rape cases.
In another post from around the same time (archived here), he seems to suggest that the difficulty in proving date rape in court means that it doesn’t really exist:
“Date rape” is distinguished from real rape as it involves inherently sexual situations where there is seldom any possibility of obtaining evidence of either criminal activity or criminal intent, both of which are necessary to demonstrate in the conviction of real crimes.
Back to the present. Pakman asks Day about another kind of rape that he thinks doesn’t exist: rape in marriage. In a blog post last year, as you may recall, Day wrote that
The concept of marital rape is not merely an oxymoron, it is an attack on the institution of marriage, on the concept of objective law, and indeed, on the core foundation of human civilization itself.
So why isn’t marital rape rape? As Day sees it, “marriage grants consent on an ongoing basis.” So once a woman says “I do” on her wedding day, he believes, she can no longer say no to sex with her husband, as sex is part of her marital duty.
In his interview with Pakman, Day reiterates this basic argument, though he is notably elusive about just which sexual acts a married woman has intrinsically said yes to when she agrees to be married. Pakman asks Day if he believes married men should go ahead and force their wives to have sex when they’ve explicitly said no; Day allows that this might not be such a good idea.
Pakman devotes a decent portion of the interview to the troubling things Day has said about rape; he could easily have devoted an entire hour or two to Day’s odious opinions on the subject. Pakman, for example, doesn’t ask Day about his bizarre assertion, in a blog post last December, that any woman who says a white man raped her is lying. No, really. This is what he wrote:
White American men simply don’t rape these days. At this point, unless a womann claims it was committed by a black or Hispanic man she didn’t previously know, all claims of rape, especially by a college woman, have to be considered intrinsically suspect.
Even though Pakman is unable to get straight answers from Day on most of the questions he asks, the interview is well worth watching. No, scratch that: It is largely because he is unable to get straight answers from Day that the interview is so compelling.
Day is weirdly and floridly evasive on virtually every topic Pakman brings up, from rape to the intentions of #Gamergate, and while he’s never willing to say outright that he was wrong about anything Pakman puts before him, he’s remarkably unwilling to take responsibility for the words he’s written, sounding very little like the “alpha male” he so often proclaims himself to be.
Here’s the video, if you have 45 minutes to spare:
H/T — @laughnwitch on Twitter, the first of several people who alerted me to this video
EDIT: I noted that Pakman has changed the title of his video.
The gator crowd is showing their true colors in the comments now.
@Sarah:
Re: VD sockpuppeting on his blog — ha! That would explain his popularity, lol. Also Space Bunny* or whatever she’s called.
—-
Re: Mensa — I work for Mensa. Membership requires only (yes) high IQ confirmed by performance on a standardized IQ test administered by a qualified professional.
But high IQ by itself is not all that, especially when not accompanied by equally high emotional intelligence. In fact, sometimes it can be more of a liability than an asset when a person’s emotional and social skills are not up to his or her IQ — and they often are not in the highest IQ range.
It is frighteningly easy to be a total d-bag (to use clinical language) with an IQ of, say, 150+, as evidenced by, for example, the existence of manurespherians who claim to be up there. I have no reason to doubt their high IQ claims, but one should not be unduly (if at all) impressed by them. If anything, it is sad that people with so much intellectual potential are nasty human beings, wasting their lives on spreading misery and hate.
*After watching that video, I am confident that Space Bunny or whatever she’s called is imaginary.
This is all very unsurprising; I’ve been reading on Mr. SOSG (shit of shit golem) Day for years now on FtB (even back in the old SciBlog days). He seems to intermittently break out like a rash on the internets. I feel a bit like he does this deliberately for the attention and lulz to keep his awful fans interested in him.
This is so true and it does kids no good when they’re tested. I was one of those kids and I had a mild superiority complex for most of my life. I don’t think I was very obnoxious about it, but it was still there.
I figured out that I’m not all that intellectually when I started reading blogs on the internet and figured out that I didn’t even know how to argue properly, let alone reason. Luckily for me, I lurk more than I comment and don’t put my foot in it too often. Even more luckily, I learn a LOT! I’m so grateful that I stumbled on the blogs I did when I did.
There’s also a problem with quite a few people who are smart and know it even without the Mensa membership. The parade of Nobel Prize winners who’ve gone for total woo-dreck-nonsense as soon as they stepped off the narrow path of their academic endeavours is one group. There are others who have a contrarian smart aleck bent – even in their own field they like to go against the grain just because it doesn’t suit them to agree with other people.
There was a great comment about one well-known contrarian like this.
“He’s probably been the smartest guy in every room he’s ever walked into – but he’s nowhere nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”
While I don’t doubt that there are women out there who are assholes enough to gravitate to Mr. SOSG Day, and that it’s possible that some of those women are also drop-dead gorgeous, AND that said drop-dead gorgeous asshole women might be extremely publicity shy, the existence of Mrs. SOSG Day does seem a bit unlikely.
My reasoning is partly this: I’m very camera shy in general and have never put pics of myself on the internets and yet, there are photos of me floating around, despite my best efforts. If I were well-known in any small circle, I’m sure those pics could easily be found by someone with the right knowledge and skills.
I’ve only heard the beginning of this interview so far, but I already hade two major laugh out loud moments.
First, when Vox is asked to describe what GG is really about, he says (I’m paraphrasing, since I can’t remember the exact wording, althought the important part is his actual wording): “We want the right to create and enjoy the games that we like, without being criticized for it.”
Get it? Without being criticized!!! Hahahahaha. Sorry dude, that’s never gonna happen in a country with freedom of expression.
Second, Pakman asks him a question related to how some GGers have said Vox is not really supported by GG. The question goes something like: “If GG is inherently a leaderless hashtag movement, then how can anyone in that movement claim that someone else is NOT a supporter of the movement?”
Vox’ answer: “They can’t, and those people who say that are not real GGers.”
Hahahahaha. It’s a self-contradiction within the span of a split second. I literally burst out laughing and scared the cats.
“If you look on Wikipedia…” lost all credibility right there, if he hadn’t already.
We’ve gone over this several times already in the past, but I think it always bears repeating.
In my freshman psychology class, 50 years ago, the professor quipped that the definition of IQ was “that which is measured by IQ tests.” IQ probably has some meaning, but the idea that an incredibly complex phenomenon like human intelligence can be accurately measured and expressed by a single integer value is … not very intelligent. And how would you ever measure things like creativity or the quality of one’s shit detector with a test where all the right answers are known in advance and must be objectively verifiable? So much of intelligence involves making judgments about the quality of evidence available for a certain proposition. One of the defining characteristics of the MRAs and their fellow travelers is to take a small and usually mostly irrelevant anecdote and use it to make a universal categorical statement about women or feminists or whatever. The idea that you need to evaluate and weigh evidence in order to produce cogent opinions seems to escape them entirely.
Regardless of whether IQ is a meaningful metric of anything, I think the important point here is that if someone feels the need to tell you how intelligent they are, that’s pretty much an admission of failure. They have failed to demonstrate their high intelligence through their words and accomplishments, so they fall back on bald assertion. You can see VD’s problem: what does he have to show for the awesome smarts he keeps in that thing on top of his neck? His achievements are mediocre, his arguments unpersuasive, his followers an embarrassment. What can he point to?
I have to admit that I am curious about how I rated in my first ever IQ test. Before I knew the questions. But that was at 9 and my school refused to tell us the results.
Regarding Mensa and woo:
In some ways, high intelligence without proper critical thinking can actually be a detriment, as mentioned above. In particular, people like that are often much better than most at constructing rationalizations for whatever they want to believe. This on top of the usual defensiveness people tend to have when criticized on issues they’ve made part of their identity, When you have someone who is:
– Convinced they’re smarter than most other people
– Convinced they came by their current opinions rationally and are therefore right
– Convinced that they’re under personal attack for those opinions
All of those start supporting each other and it becomes really difficult to do anything to prove them wrong to their satisfaction because they keep coming up with outs and rationalizations to discard your arguments.
If anyone is interested about an in depth and exhaustively researched account about Day, the Sad Puppies, the Rabid Puppies, and the Hugo Awards, here you go. It’s a long post but Philip Sandifer really outlined what is going on and what Beale’s motivations are.
http://www.philipsandifer.com/2015/04/guided-by-beauty-of-their-weapons.html
I find Day and his views abhorrent, and disagree with pretty much everything he says, but I’ve always found this idea that his wife doesn’t exist a bit bizarre. There are a number of different photos of her, including two incredibly obvious photos of the pair of them together (one on his Twitter account; one on hers). There’s also her Facebook page (linked to on a previous thread here). And photos he’s posted on his blog. It’s all obviously the same woman. Not to mention the fact he has kids.
There are enough legitimate reasons to argue with him and his ideas without implying that an attractive woman could never consider having something to do with him. It’s a line of attack (on both him and her) that feels like it should be beneath people.
I did hear something interesting about the anti-vaxxers: most of them are rich, college-educated, white people who live in rich neighborhoods.
And most of them are trying to live a “natural” lifestyle. By allowing measles to come back.
You’re always smart enough to fool yourself.
I find studying philosophy to be a good break point. If you study a number of philosophers and feel justified in saying you are smarter than everyone else and have the most objective viewpoint, you are most likely a complete ass. Reading philosophy was both humbling and instructive. (I have a particular asshole in mind as I write this)
Gah. All this talk about IQ and “accurately” measuring a concept of humanity that is so varied and has so many factors is reminding me of Death Parade.
I just finished it last night, and I’m still recovering from the feels.
I agree with Steve Mosby. I see no reason to suppose that Heather Mulheron Beale is not real. See, e.g., this obituary of her grandfather: http://www.rhielfuneralhome.com/obituaries/345/Mulheron-Clair-C
If someone who is convinced of his* intellectual superiority restricts himself* to established areas of expertise, it is easier to maintain an attitude of smug self-satisfaction. One thing I do is try to learn about things that I do not already know. No illusion of genius can survive an encounter with the newspaper’s bridge column (you either know all about bridge or nothing; it’s like ballroom dancing that way). Me, I’m still trying to figure out what syncopation is – I can talk intelligently about a host of subjects, but music and math are not among them.
A good friend of mine is in Mensa, and corroborates everything said above.
*I would have used gender neutral pronouns, but it’s almost always men.
“I have a high IQ!” is the “My mom says I’m handsome!” of the Internet.
I find studying philosophy to be a good break point. If you study a number of philosophers and feel justified in saying you are smarter than everyone else and have the most objective viewpoint, you are most likely a complete ass. Reading philosophy was both humbling and instructive. (I have a particular asshole in mind as I write this)
Reading and learning in general ought to give a person a sense of perspective. Maybe this has something to do with the Puppies’ disdain for literary/intellectual science fiction: they don’t like to read books that are smarter than they are.
His wife is absolutely real, but “Space Bunny” comes across as a sock puppet. Her comments and tweets are vindictive and nasty, but the tone doesn’t match her facebook page, which is bland and sweet and somewhat self-deprecating about her looks. It’s odd. Given his history of socking, it’s quite possible he might have created an online persona for his wife (with or without her blessing) to bolster his own online reputation as an alpha visionary sci fi writer/thinker/War Mouse developer or whatever the hell he claims to be.
I don’t think anyone here is saying attractive women can’t possibly date and even marry assholes with no visible redeeming attributes (even Nice Guys are occasionally right). It’s just that, in addition to “mah high IQ”, Beale and supporters often play the “my wife is so HOTTTtT!!” card as a Q.E.D. to whatever horrible retrograde point they’re trying to argue. Whenever he does that, it’s just so tempting to poke holes in that balloon.
Well. It seems that Vox Day is really REALLY mad about the fallout from his Pakman interviews and vowing that he will have his revenge. See https://archive.is/WAimr and https://archive.is/o4EcC
Also the “marital sex cannot be rape” post is archived here https://archive.is/1uSly
I blocked David Pakman on twitter and I’ve been refusing YouTube recs for his videos ever since the way he treated Arthur Chu, and the way he called down the goobergate horde on Zoe Quinn when she declined his interview. I may reconsider after this, though.
Vox day is pretty much the example for why freedom of speech does not work, and certain ideas should be criminal.
Eh, I think he’s more of an example of what Freeze Peach is NOT.
Like so many people have it in their heads that Freeze Peach is them getting to say what they want with no repercussions, but they can use it to silence their critics from what they have to say, not realizing what an utter paradox that is.
“We want the right to create and enjoy the games that we like, without being criticized for it.”
You’ve betrayed Shiva, Mr. Day.
In all seriousness, unless the critics in question are threatening him with physical harm or trying to sabotage his life/livelihood/rights/etc. in some way, shape or form, he should either accept the criticism or, if he really does believe what he says is right, just ignore the criticism altogether.
I am more than happy for Vox Day to have his free speech. I would rather let the assholes prove it loudly.
I ran into what I think is a TERF post complaining about Laverne Cox. The comments really got to me. http://feministcurrent.com/11632/laverne-coxs-objectified-body-empowers-no-one/