When a college feminist decided, one cold night in 2014, to burn her personal copy of pseudofeminist Christina Hoff Sommers’ book The War Against Boys, the internet’s antifeminists responded as if Hitler himself had risen from the grave.
“Universities bring book-burning back, one page at a time,” declared a blogger at TheRebelMedia. After an extended comparison with the infamous book burning campaigns of the literal Nazis, he declared that “[t]he burning of Hoff Sommers’ book is a striking visual synecdoche for the malaise afflicting free expression across not only North American college campuses.” In a featured article, A Voice for Men described the burning as a “disturbing” example of “misandry in academia.”
On the Men’s Rights subreddit, meanwhile, one angry dude declared that
If you’re burning a book, you’re basically admitting to being not just a bigot, but one who doesn’t even have enough confidence in the strength of their own views to believe that they can stand up for themselves without needing to silence and censor those that oppose them.
If we set aside the fact that, unlike the Nazis, who confiscated the books they burned, a person burning their own copy of a book that is readily available to others is not actually censoring anything, he’s got a point.
So it’s interesting to see how many of the Internet’s antifeminsts and Anti-Social-Justice-Warrior-Warriors are embracing a proposal from one of their own to literally censor all academics who teach stuff they don’t like.
On Change.org, professional feminism-hater Carl Benjamin, known on YouTube as Sargon of Akkad, has started a petition demanding that “UNIVERSITIES” — presumably, every single one of them — immediately “Suspend Social Justice Courses” because he thinks that “social justice” professors are up to no good.
In vague but melodramatic language Benjamin proclaims that
Social justice has become scientifically illiterate, logically unsound, deeply bigoted and openly supremacist.
He doesn’t specify exactly what kind of supremacism he’s complaining about here; presumably not white.
Nor does he ever define exactly what courses count as “social justice courses.” There aren’t any departments of Social Justice that I’m aware of. [EDIT: Oops! Turns out there are.] Does Benjamin mean a tiny handful of, say, women’s studies courses taught by radical feminists? Or does he hope (at least in his wildest dreams) to take down the humanities and social sciences as a whole?
Social justice professors are indoctrinating young people into a pseudoscientific cult behind closed doors that is doing damage to their health, education and future.
Well, technically, I guess, virtually all college courses are taught “behind closed doors,” since the doors of lecture halls generally do get closed before class begins. Technically, I’m writing this post behind closed doors, because I don’t leave the doors of my apartment wide open. (People might wander in; the cats might wander out.) I suspect that Benjamin himself wrote up his petition behind closed doors!
Benjamin goes on to declare that
[s]ocial justice … has become another ideology fit only to pave the road to Hell, so it is time to turn around and choose another path that is concerned with reason, science and improving the lives of every human.
If only some evil Social Justice English professor has indoctrinated Benjamin in the devilish art of writing without resorting to hackneyed cliches.
But that’s pretty much all there is to Benjamin’s petition. Somehow, thought, the vagueness of Benjamin’s plan hasn’t stopped 9,878 people — so far — from signing the petition.
It is, however, possible that some of the signers are a little bit confused as to what exactly they’re signing.
Indeed, the top two most-liked comments on the petition, for example, were written by people who seem to think that Benjamin’s proposal to peremptorily censor all college courses that he thinks are excessively social-justicey is, somehow, a defense of free speech?
Benjamin has posted a video in which he explains his crusade in a little more detail. It’s possible that somewhere in it he answers the question of how exactly his plan to drive all professors he doesn’t like from all the college campuses in the world is actually a crusade for free speech.
Here’s the video in question:
Oops! Wrong video. Let me try again:
Huh. I don’t think that was it either.
No, that’s clearly not it.
Ok, ok. I found the real one here.
But it’s 40 minutes long. I sampled the first 2 seconds, and that was about all I could bring myself to watch. So I guess I’ll just have to resign myself to a life of servitude under the jackboots of the Social Justice warlords. Still, that’s a far better option than actually watching a Sargon of Akkad video all the way through.
I guess my previous questions and posts are going unanswered then. : P Oh well.
But one thing you can do to start reducing the numbers of rapists is to listen to and support rape victims. Be there for them, be willing to help, and most importantly, only give advice when asked for it.
Here’s a few more resources for learning to support victims.
@kupo
I don’t really know that there’s anything to lose. I think one of my main concerns is one of the more personal ones: my dad is an ultraconservative Republican, he and I argue enough about politics as it is, and I don’t know how much worse it could get if I switched to Democrat.
I’m glad to have the food for thought I’ve gotten here and on other sites, and now I need to take some time to decide which option (switching to Democrat and risking the intensified arguing, switching to Independent and having less of a role in the political process, going Independent first and then Democrat later) I’m most willing to live with.
9@HandsomeJack, @David, @all – While I know that sock puppets are wrong, all of a sudden I really, really want to make a Torgue account that I could use only to reply to trolls.
http://41.media.tumblr.com/ed13d65844b50dde3de16729bd656098/tumblr_o17clpOfS71u1hc2qo1_1280.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/zdpjgAI.jpg
@Nikki
Your dad doesn’t have to know. You don’t actually have to tell him.
The rape culture theory I still can’t get behind, the studies presented to me still aren’t evident enough to stand by such an extraordinary claim. Lisak’s study has been criticized by far more educated people than myself. I know that’s hard for you to believe. I don’t think I deal with 30 rapists personally every day. I work in a business with almost 600 people.
I don’t think believing in falsehoods will help any of the victims of rape. Based on the sheer number of college students currently enrolled, 20.2 million (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372) almost half of them are men and 10% of those men are rapist, that’s 1 million rapists just in colleges alone.
Lisak’s study asserts that 90%t of campus rapes are committed by serial offenders who average six rapes each. We could, by using this assertion, deduce that from that probability of 10% male rapists, a figure of 5.5 million rape victims. Four years average time in school, leads to 1.375 per year.
If an average of 68%-88% of rapes are not reported due to legal system flaws and public shaming preventing victims from stepping forward. The FBI recorded 85,593 rapes in 2010 in the U.S. We can possibly infer that would leave to 267,478-713,275 cases.
The Lisak study proposes that this is just college campuses and not a good indicator of life outside college. Even though critics of the study cite the study as allowing anyone to participate in a quote, commuter school, ages averaging 26 in the study.
What part of this am I missing? Even by conservative estimates you’d have a much higher under reported rate than current studies suggest. Rape is the most under reported crime in America, but a 10% number would be mind boggling. Do you know how many people I walk past on a given day? Does the 10% number really suggest that men and women are crossing hundreds of potential rapist a day?
No wonder women believing in feminist theory are cautious of every man they encounter. If this rape culture theory were true, this would be a pandemic of alarming proportions. I don’t believe fear-mongering tactics
are going to help fix the social stigma associated with rapists and rape victims.
I’m trying to treat this as a serious issue, but as I read what studies I do find, I find critics of those studies as well. Rape is difficult to study, we cerainly need more studies conducted. If so many people are disputing these findings, I don’t think they are all MRAs and misogynist.
Rapists are not creeps lurking in alleys. They are usually well respected community members. Just because the people you know don’t seem like rapists to you, doesn’t mean they aren’t.
Sorry that makes you feel bad, but I assure you that it makes women feel worse because we’re the ones most at risk.
Shorter Richard: Facts are scary and therefore not true.
It also doesn’t mean they are. I wasn’t debating whether or not rapist act like good people outside of their terrible disgusting crime. In fact, most rapes don’t take place in dark alleys or outside at all, most occur inside and are usually welcomed in.
It doesn’t make me feel bad, I could care less. Women are the one’s most at risk, over 90% of rapes, the woman is the victim.
1 in 10 is an extraordinary and eye opening number, it requires extraordinary evidence. It’s a big statistic, with real lives and real victims behind it. It demands more than most other crimes out there. So when multiple studies, come up with very different answers, it matters to a lot of us.
@Richard Via:
I recommend you take a remedial statistics course before continuing to argue your case.
You leap from an estimate of what percent of total campus rapes are committed by serial offenders, to suddenly assigning that percentage as the percent of college rapists who are serial rapists. This is a very basic category error.
Moreover, you are simply arguing from incredulity. It may be hard for you to believe that you walk by men who have pushed past a lack of consent everyday; but you do.
If you don’t believe the 10% number, even though it is self-reported, then what do you think the respondents meant by, “Yes, I have had sex with a woman who didn’t want to?” The question wasn’t “Have you had sex with a woman who didn’t want to, but then changed her mind and said yes?”
Finally, the existence of rape culture is not solely about the numbers. It is also about what happens to victims when they come forward. We live in a culture where rapists can be very confident that they are unlikely to face serious consequences for their actions — and it is your argument from incredulity that forms the keystone of their confidence, and victims’ fears that they will not be believed unless they are bruised and bloodied.
See, I knew I made a mistake somewhere. That number seemed too high. I make no claims of being a statistician, I usually read stats.
I’ve read into it further and found statements finding 4 out of 5 rapists were not repeat offenders. That doesn’t mean the 1in 5 are serial rapists either. With that in mind it brings total campus rape down from my 5.5 million number. Still seems high. I’m going to do more research to confirm any beliefs about Rape Culture. I’ll be sure to read some more studies to get a clearer picture of this.
It’s been a long held belief for some time, especially back in high school that rape seemed rare. To find such shocking statistics demands further research. I will read all I can to convince myself the 1 in 10 number is true.
Unfortunately for you, facts don’t change depending on whether you can “get behind” them or not.
I saw a commercial a couple of years ago for a sitcom, in which a visibly drunk woman comes up to a man in a bar and says, “I like your shirt.” He replies, “I like your impaired judgement.”
Dude, that’s a fucking rape joke. And it was accompanied by a laugh track. Under what social theory can you explain that rape is so acceptable and normalized that a prime-time sitcom can make a joke about it and accompany it with a laugh track?
Under what social theory can you explain the fact that, as a man, you are faaaaaaaar more likely to be raped than to be falsely accused of rape? And yet false accusations are puffed up into the big emergency by so many men, while those exact same men play off the rape of men as a big hilarious joke. How do you explain that without the framework of rape culture?
How do you explain the fact that – today – there are high-profile, high-influence men arguing that marital rape should be legal?
How do you explain the bizarre standard of proof and consent that we apply to rape, alone of all the crimes? If I claim that you stole my wallet, it is sufficient proof to discover the wallet in your possession. Nobody asks me to prove that I didn’t consent to you taking my wallet, or assume that consent to transfer possession of my wallet existed just because I was alone in a room with you, or left my wallet laying on the table. Nobody argues that because I gave money to a panhandler yesterday, that is proof that I am loose with my money, or presents it as evidence in your defense.
We apply, as a normal standard, the presumption that there is NO consent when it comes to you taking my wallet, an inanimate possession. If you want to defend yourself from my accusation, you need to present something more substantial than “well, I saw the wallet and wtf did you expect.” But when it comes to rape, a crime that is far more serious, far more personal, far more damaging, we suddenly switch that up and assume that consent was there until proven otherwise.
What, other than rape culture, explains this to you?
Your deduction is quite flawed, as littleknown points out. You’re assuming that all men are serial rapists. Actually 3% to 5% are serial rapists. If we use your numbers and take the low side of that, we wind up with 1 million rapists, but only 300,000 serial rapists. The serial rapists have, between them, 1.8 million rapes. The remaining 700,000 rapists have 1 victim apiece. That produces 2.5 million rapes, not 5.5.
There is a limitation in the calculation, in assuming that each rape affects a new victim and that 2.5 million rapes = 2.5 million victims. This is not the case, as some victims are raped more than once. Nevertheless, I want you to go sit on that number, and compare it with the fact that 1 in 4 women who has attended college reports having been sexually assaulted in college. Why don’t you think about what it means that the same statistic, measured in two completely unrelated ways, produces roughly the same result.
You’re erring again in assuming that a subset of the total population of rape victims has precisely the same characteristics as the total population in aggregate. This is the fallacy of division, and depending on how you apply it, it can also be the ecological fallacy.
Facts that you don’t like are not “fear-mongering.” They are just facts. And if you don’t like them, maybe your efforts should turn toward changing those facts, not in ignoring or silencing the people bringing them to you. I hope you are uncomfortable with these facts. They need to make you uncomfortable.
Now, your privilege (remember that?) means that you are free to ignore these facts. They don’t affect you much personally, so you have the capacity to prioritize your feels over the crimes being committed around you. You can just choose not to think about it anymore. Many of the people around you don’t actually have the option to make that choice, so it makes you a colossal asshole if you choose that route.
Multiple studies actually come up with very similar answers. Just because you can’t math doesn’t mean the math doesn’t work.
Again, whether you believe the big numbers or not, you have the ability (dare I say it, the privilege) of being able to affect them without much or any actual cost to you.
Stop laughing at rape jokes. When someone makes one in front of you, stare at them in a “wtf did you just say” way, and say coldly, “Not cool.” Definitely make no rape jokes of your own. Make “does not tell rape jokes” the price of admission to your friendship. Rapists tell you who they are. Listen to them and believe them.
Rapists behave in ways that are recognizable. They test boundaries, ignore boundaries, and treat women like they are commodities and prizes to be won. They touch women without consent, make invasive comments about their bodies and appearances, and harass them on the street. They try to isolate intended victims and get them drunk to lower their ability to resist.
The problem is that a non-trivial number of men who aren’t rapists also think this is fine (because: rape culture), and many of them also do it. You need to stop doing this, and stop other men from doing it. You need to stand up for the bodily autonomy of others: women, but also men, and also especially children and the non-binary. You need to treat rapist behavior as weird, bizarre, aberrant and not acceptable. You need to do this regardless of whether you think the man doing it is actually a rapist. Men who act like rapists are as big of a problem as rapists, because it gives rapists camouflage. Remove that camouflage. This means you don’t tolerate PUAs, because “game” is just acting like a rapist looking for a victim.
If one of your friends accuses another of your friends of committing rape, odds are extremely high that a rape occurred. The false reporting rate of rape is lower than the false reporting rate of auto theft. Keep that in mind. Even a woman who is mentally ill, even a woman who drinks or does drugs, even a woman who has had sex in the past, maybe even with multiple partners, is far more likely to be telling the truth than lying. Furthermore, rapists look specifically for these types of victims, because these types of victims are typically not believed. Every time you say, “Well, she’s bipolar and he’s a fun guy, so she must be lying,” you are playing directly into this. You are 98% of the time telling a rapist that as long as he keeps picking women that he can plausibly claim are bipolar, he is safe from any consequences.
These are easy fixes for you. They cost you next to nothing. If you don’t want to do them, you have a lot of explaining to do.
Richard,
You were at least indirectly arguing that. You said you find it hard to believe that of all the men you interact with on a daily basis might have raped someone. What else could you have possibly meant? Why is it hard to believe? Have you talked with any rape survivors? Because they’ll probably tell you that their rapist is a normal person with friends and co-workers.
Rapists count on people like you disbelieving that rape is so pervasive and nice normal guys rape women. You are their shield. You are an enabler. You are embodying the rape culture you don’t believe in. That’s what rape culture is! It’s non-rapists making it easier for rapists to rape and get away with it.
(This used to be a lot bigger, but i cut out a bunch of pedantic nonsense. And added a pony.)
http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/3/35/Fluttershy_coy_smile_S4E16.png
Acting Rationally With Incomplete Information
a treatise by the rationality pony
@Richard,
Ignore your “gut” feelings. Your gut feelings are built upon a mountain of instinctual drives designed specifically to preserve your life and to make you feel competent and capable. Your gut feelings are an error engine. Stop having opinions.
Surrender to the math, for it is wiser than you. If there are problems with the study, fine – no study is perfect. But that is no reason to ignore it. The proper thing to do in this case is to accept the numbers for what they are, accept the domain over which those numbers are true (college communities, for example), and then recognize that you know nothing about the rest of the related domains.
When you know nothing about a specific domain, but must make an inference on it, you look at a related domain. You take this related domain and use its values, modifying your results as new information comes in.
So, even though the study looks at college students, in lieu of evidence for the general population you must take the biased sample and accept the error associated with that bias, then correct the error as you learn.
This is how to act rationally with incomplete information.
Aaaand there it is.
I’m going to leave the stats to more qualified people (I’m an artist, not a statistician), but I do want to address this bit here.
Allow me to present you with an analogy:
Let’s say I offer you a bowl of M&Ms (any small candy you can have a handful of works as well if you don’t like M&Ms in particular).
As you reach for the bowl of candy, I stop you and inform you that roughly 10% of them are poisoned. You can’t tell which ones are and which ones aren’t, and it’s slipped my mind as to which ones I poisoned.
Would you still reach your hand in that bowl? I mean, you only have a 10% chance of picking a candy that is poisoned, though I imagine that’d go up if you took a handful.
[/analogy]
Or if you’d like a more blunt comparison:
Now, I’d also like to address your use of the word “fear-mongering”. Because I assure you, being reasonably afraid of something that can kill you isn’t “fear-mongering”.
You wouldn’t feel bad if I were afraid of West-Nile Virus, which can kill me, but you feel bad that I’m afraid of strange men whose intentions I can’t possibly know, of which could be killing me?
You know what is fear-mongering? Telling women how to act, how to dress, where to go, who to go with, what to drink, what not to drink, and even how to go about their daily lives, so they don’t “encourage” someone to rape them.
We, as a society, have built a huge fear machine to keep women in check, and to protect people who would rape them, because this helps keep women in line, and obedient.
(Not that this also doesn’t affect men who have been raped, but it mostly affects women when we talk about victim blaming like I described. Men are mostly affected by the “you’re a man, you should always want sex!” variety of toxic masculinity if their rapist was a woman, and outright homophobia if their rapist was a man.)
The funny thing to me about you claiming that feminist theory is “fear-mongering” is that women would be far less afraid of men if we cared enough about them as a society to actually punish rapists instead of insist that the victim was somehow at fault for “encouraging” it.
If I may paraphrase some wise words I read on the subject: “Rape is the only crime where the argument that it was too tempting to commit is a defense and not a confession.”
(Slightly ninja’d by PoM on this one.)
Discussing rape culture and how it can affect people (or even specifically women) isn’t “fear-mongering”, it’s a reaction to being straight-up told “We don’t care about you if you get raped. You will be the one who gets punished for it. We don’t want to protect you from people who would rape you.”
If we’re not going to be protected or helped, then we have to do it ourselves, your feelings (and the feelings of other men who don’t like the fact that they’re considered potential threats) be damned.
Our safety is more important to us than your feelings.
Here’s a short comic about risk assessment and dating if that will help cement the idea in your head.
Kupo,
Yeah, I saw that but only had the time on my break to respond to one thing.
Interesting how he went from claiming it was an important issue, how his loved one was raped, and how do we jail more rapists? to not being able to care less because he’s not in much danger himself.
I guess the only answer he wanted to hear is that it’s the victim’s fault for not reporting.
@WWTH
Yeah, that plus he’s really othering rapists. He doesn’t believe that 1 in 10 of the men he crosses paths with and works with is a rapist and he keeps using extremely othering language. He doesn’t want to see them as human and he doesn’t want them to be responsible, because he’s human and he might one day make a mistake if this I s the kind of thing normal humans sometimes do because they make mistakes. He certainly doesn’t want to believe that our culture facilitates this because he’s a part of that culture and that would mean he’s also been taught that rape I’d okay.
I’m a bit lost on where we are in this conversation. I think that by saying
he means that he doesn’t feel bad, in reply to
which was in reply to (the conversation surrounding)
So Richard, you’re saying that you don’t feel bad and couldn’t care less about the ‘rhetoric’ of 10% of men being rapists, though you don’t like it? Just trying to sort out what you actually mean by “don’t care, could care less.” It could also be read as “I don’t care about women, just da troof – I don’t think that’s what you mean, but it could easily be misread as such. Want to clarify?
EDIT: as an aside, claiming “I don’t care” about something is usually a cover for actually caring, I find. Emotions are mysterious beasts, and typically we care about *everything*. It’s how we place value on things. We lie most of all to ourselves.
Yeah, fwiw, I don’t think that Richard’s “I could care less” was intended to convey that he doesn’t care about rape because: his privilege. That looks to me like something that probably made sense in his head before he tried to write it out.
Perhaps that’s what he meant, but he followed the part about not caring with the part about women being the primary victims of rape. It sure has hell sounded to me like he was saying he doesn’t care because it doesn’t effect him. I’m not inclined to give someone who thinks rape culture is something feminists just made up to scare people the benefit of any doubt.
As with most men who ask to be educated about feminist issues, he doesn’t really want to learn. He wants to shift goal posts and waste time until we give up on him. That way he can tell himself he was right all along
How did we even get from Sargon wanting to police the way social justice is taught in school to having to prove that rape is a problem anyway?
Call me a sucker, but he comes across to me as a non-hopeless case.
Idk, maybe I jump to conclusions too quickly, but it seems like every time someone backs up a claim or asks him to back up one of his claims, he changes the subject. That’s a common troll tactic.
I agree, and I’m terrible at identifying trolls so usually defer to you guys in that (you especially, WWTH, you have a good eye for it!). But Richard seems more to be struggling with his own perceptions than being willfully obtuse. At least, from my hopelessly optimistic perspective.
(Sorry for talking about you in the third person, Richard!)
Fighting against ones’ biases is hard, and it’s very easy to slip into unconscious habits, like changing the topic or not seeing the clear results of statistics. Best to let him reply clearly, I think. What did you mean by that, Richard?
@mockingbird
Doitdoitdoitdoitdoitdoitdoit. Pleeeeease.
(Also here’s a really good Torgue RP blog and it’s amazing and everyone should read it.)