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.
I’m almost an absolutist when it comes to free speech but there are things people seem to forget:
1. People calling out your comments for being, offensive, inaccurate or just plain daft is not an interference with your rights.
2. Free speech just means you are entitled to say things; it doesn’t mean anyone has to listen to you.
3. You *should* shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre if there is an actual fire. At least that’s what the Coroner told me at the Inquest.
Actually “he said-she said” is THE basis for our system of justice…although we also see it in its permutations of “he said-he said” and “she said-she said.” Our courts are full of cases which ask judge or jury to weigh one person’s testimony against another, with or without other supporting evidence being available.
I agree that her Twitter persona is very different from her Facebook one (as much as I can tell; there’s little of the latter to go on), but I’m not aware that Day has a proven history of socking. Is there evidence of that? I’ve read a lot of his comment threads – god help me, etc – and I don’t buy the idea that it’s all him pretending to be other people, and that he doesn’t have loads of support. I think he does, hence the relative success of the rapid puppies campaign.
I want to clarify that I have no actual evidence of whether he sock-puppets; as a matter of fact I was rolling my own eyes at the idea until I read that one blog post (which I will go and dig up to post). Since goobergate started, and since this whole puppies thing blew up in everybody’s faces, he’s gotten a lot more attention and he may not have have had a need to sock-puppet on his most recent posts, to get high comment counts. Anybody who wants to go through his older posts and read his comment threads to try and determine whether the grammar and syntax comes off as the same as in his posts “proper,” is welcome to do so; I don’t care enough to make that much effort.
And here is that blog post. Warning: massive wall of yawn-worthy text. https://archive.is/tvgGJ
That post was more boring than the story Vox wrote.
Seriously, months? How petty and tedious is he planning to be about this interview? A whole lot it seems.
Vox, honey, you don’t retroactively perform better during an interview by crafting what you deem superior answers months later.
“I don’t care at all about that interview, so much so that I’m going to obsessively discuss it for months.”
@Steve Moseby – PZ Myers actually caught him socking on at least one occasion on Pharyngula and called him out for it (it was either VD, or one of his supporters spoofing his email). He has a reputation for doing it other places too; RDNet for example. And of course, this year’s Rabid Puppy slate is nothing but sockpuppets. He seems to be surrounded by them wherever he goes.
It’s an odd tactic for someone who’s supposedly smarter than everyone else. Can’t he just persuade everyone to accept creationism, anti-vaxx, and racism using the sheer brilliance and correctness of his 140+ IQ?
Yes, dear, and so’m I. And I’ve also learned to be smart enough not to use that as the basis of any “I’m right, you’re wrong, that settles it” arguments. Even people who score 99th percentile on scholastic-aptitude tests still have to learn how to write a competent, proof-heavy 10-page essay on the regular if they’re gonna be English majors, after all.
What is it the French call it? L’spirit d’escalier?
Yeah, that’s true. I apologize.
I didn’t want to give him any page clicks and I don’t do the Twitter thing; I barely do Facebook.
Go away, Pelagic. This is the third time I’ve seen you try to wheedle us into a gotcha and fail.
I’ve never really understood how one could measure intelligence as a whole. I know how to design complex sewer networks and do a complete hydrologic balance of a catchment area, but if you asked me to fix a car engine I would be entirely useless. Some people know the exact tempo and intricacies that it takes to create a specific kind of music, some people know how to care for dozens of different species of plants and other wildlife found in their gardens, some people know how to speak a dozen different languages. There’s millions of skills that are out there, and there’s no way that any one human being can pick up ALL of them. Which of these knowledge sets is ‘better’ than the other?
Alright, you could argue that intelligence isn’t a measure of WHAT you know, but how easily you are able to process new information or pick up/progress in your skills. But again, people are specialists. Someone who can easily grasp deeply complex mathematical formulae probably wouldn’t be able to quickly pick up how to perform brain surgery. Is one better than the other? By what metric is that measured? Would children, whose brains are more able to process and pick up new information be considered more intelligent than adults under this criteria?
I suppose you could try measuring intelligence by picking a field of expertise that the person has absolutely no exposure to, give them a bunch of material, and time how fast it takes them to pick up the skill to a measure of proficiency, but there’s a problem there too, because people learn differently. Some people can learn tons from a pile of books, other people prefer having hands on experience, or having a discussion with their peers, or any number of other techniques. There’s no real way to standardize that.
Testing ‘common sense’ or ‘problem solving’ might be more actionable, as you could present people with issues and ask their input, but that’s only one facet of human intellect.
TL;DR Intelligence as a whole isn’t really able to be boiled down to a single number, and IMO doesn’t exist on a single linear spectrum of ‘stupid’ to ‘genius’, but instead varies among numerous specialties.
Vox isn’t “alpha”, he is a “sigma”.
It’s a category he made up for himself. It basically means “like alpha, but better”.
@brooked, over on File770, VD recently claimed to be planning revenge on John Scalzi and the Nielsen Haydens for some slight he suffered on Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s blog ten years ago.
He’s been carrying that grudge around on his blog too. He mentions getting slighted by Teresa Neilsen Hayden when he didn’t know who she was nor never interacted with her. If that’s true, I’m guessing that she must have heard his name as somebody who was trying to break into sci-fi and fantasy and searched for him online – he was still writing columns for World Net Daily, wasn’t he? – saw what he had to say about women’s rights, race relations, and other things of progressive concern, and voiced aloud an opinion to the effect of, “geez, what an asshole,” which got back to him and made him very mad. For all he likes to yammer about how he doesn’t care what other people think, he likes to overreact to perceived slights. One of the memes that he has going is “punch back and punch harder.”
Bigots warning us that civilization as we know it will end if certain people achieve equality just don’t get it, do they?
Civilization as we know it is horrible. We’ve done worse but we can do so much better. If same sex marriage ends “traditional marriage” that’s a good thing. If men being unable to rape women and girls with impunity ends a civilization, I welcome that civilizations demise.
BillB,
Sigma male? Lol.
Is there a Greek letter that hasn’t been claimed by the manosphere yet? How about theta? From now on, I am a theta female. That means I am better than everyone else. Nobody is allowed to question this because it is science. You can tell it’s science because I used a Greek letter and that automatically makes something smart and sciencey.
Paradoxical Intention,
That’s not surprising to me. I think it has something to do with them feeling so safe. They think their kids are special. Their kids aren’t going to die of Measles. You know why? Because their special parents are smarter and know better. What the facts say is irrelevant.
At least that’s my guess. I think on a level they feel disease, war and starvation happen elsewhere. They happen to poor brown people who aren’t as smart and special as they are. The over confident tend to take risks they shouldn’t.
It reminds me of a documentary I saw once about lemurs. The most pampered baby lemur in the troop ended up dying from a fall. He had been the strongest and best fed young lemur, but he also became the most reckless.
That sounds like well off white people I’ve known. The privileged can afford to make mistakes. They can afford to be uninformed. The idea that they could be terribly, horrifically wrong and suffer dire consequences may be difficult for them to wrap their heads around. They think too highly of themselves to see what fools they are or how evil what they’re doing is.
It’s a bit like Tom Cruise and Scientology, isn’t it?
I’ll jump in to agree with the people who say intellectual intelligence =/= worldly intelligence. Ted Cruz, the guy who headed the government shutdown because “Obummercare”, went to Harvard and did very well (unlike many other prominent politicians, who bought themselves C’s and a diploma). But Ted Cruz is a whining sack of shit and a darling of the Tea Party. He literally bitched about the FCC coming down on the side of net neutrality because “BIG GUBMINT”. Ted Cruz is an idiot, and so are some technically “smart” people. I’m sure him and Vox would get along real well.
I don’t know if anybody’s still interested at this point, but apparently Vox Day is conducting legal research to determine what US states do not require consent to have sex with a legal spouse. So far he’s identified three – Minnesota, Virginia and South Carolina. He’s livetweeting this investigation to his twitter feed. (Right now, so if you see this, go look!) Apparently the point of this is to do some sort of show-up to David Pakman. I could have sworn that marital rape has been illegal in all 50 US states for at least 20 years, but I could be wrong. At any rate, this might be worthy of future discussion or another blog post.
Marital rape by force has been a crime in all 50 states since 1993. But in Minnesota, for instance, the marital exception still exists for rape by coercion or simple lack of consent. A number of other states have, or had until recently, marital exemptions for lesser forms of sexual assault. Washington State, for instance, only recently (2013, I think) got rid of the last vestige of marital exception (third-degree rape, indecent liberties).
@Wanda:
He apparently used the phrase “liberal fascism” recently, without breaking into the gales of laughter that such a concept rightfully provokes. Either he’s in on the joke, or he’s out of his depth.
(Liberal Fascism was the much-vaunted magnum opus of Lucianne Goldberg’s trust-fund baby, Jonah Goldberg, about eight years ago. Yeah, there’s a reason you don’t remember it.)
@wwth:
Ooh ooh! Can I be an omicron female? I’m not quite sure what that means yet but it will involve craft beer and soul music.
even if you got “written permission”, if you do something to a person’s body they do not want you to do to them it is rape. Prior “permission” or no, the moment someone says or indicates stop, you stop.