Thursday, February 10, 2011

Breathing is also a privilege, not a right

Whenever the subject of the health insurance mandate comes up, one of the most common- perhaps the most common-  rejoinders directed at people who oppose forcing everyone in the country to give money to the insurance companies whether they want their product or not is to cite the precedent of mandatory automobile liability insurance.

Now, like virtually all statist arguments that take the form of, "If it's OK for the government to do X, it's OK for it to do Y," the desirability of X is simply assumed without argument. (New Hampshire has no mandatory insurance laws for drivers, and has somehow avoided becoming an apocalyptic Mad Max-esque hellhole.) Leave that aside for the now. There are a number of important dissimilarities between the two types of insurances and the mandate laws concerning them that make the analogy dubious, but put that aside for the moment as well.

Suppose they are analogous, such that if mandatory automobile insurance for drivers is unobjectionable then insurance mandate is likewise unobjectionable. For that to be the case, the argument that justifies one must also work as a justification for the other. What is the argument for mandatory automobile insurance?

The stated purpose of mandatory insurance is to prevent people from potentially imposing costs on others by incurring debts to others- lawsuit damages from a collision, in this case-  that they cannot pay. The reason it's generally considered unobjectionable to fulfill this objective by requiring drivers to buy insurance is that operating a vehicle on a government-owned road is, we are told at great length, a privilege and not a right. Therefore, the reasoning goes, it is reasonable for the government to impose conditions that a citizen must fulfill or "agree" to before he or she may exercise that privilege.

This can include things that would be considered unreasonable, unconstitutional, or outright tyrannical if applied to legally recognized rights. No one seriously advocates requiring insurance for possible defamation suits or unpaid child support for anyone who speaks in public or has sex, or making people apply for a government permit and pass a test before choosing what religion to practice, for instance, whereas landatory automobile insurance for drivers inspires little criticism or controversy.

This allows various moral and constitutional inconveniences to go by the wayside when mere privileges are involved. It's why constitutional rights concerning search and seizure and self-incrimination are a dead letter if the police decide, as they have the legal power to do in some states, to hold you down and forcibly stick you with a needle to draw your blood for a blood alcohol level test- you gave your "implied consent" in return for the privilege of driving. It's why, as we've been shown recently, you can be required to submit to having your genitals groped by government agents before boarding an airplane. It's why the federal Terrorist Screening Center can forbid you from traveling by air with the stroke of a pen, legal niceties about due process and bills of attainder notwithstanding.

A privilege, by its nature, is not something you are owed by others, or have a right to demand, or are entitled to possess and keep . It is something someone else has the right to grant or withhold at their pleasure. Privileges are something you must prove yourself worthy of, by the standards of whoever has the power to grant them. They exist so long as they are compatible with the interests and desires of the one dispensing them, and no longer.

So goes the standard justification for mandatory automobile insurance, our supposed precedent for mandatory health insurance. The commonality between the two pointed out by people drawing an analogy between them is that a person without health insurance can also impose a financial burden on others. This aspect of the analogy has its weaknesses. Leaving that aside, however, that's only part of the argument for mandatory driving insurance, and not the most important part. If the precedent of mandatory driving insurance justifies mandatory health insurance, then the activities for which people are required to buy health insurance must likewise be a privilege rather than a right. Otherwise, the analogy falls apart and the argument with it.

You fall under the scope of state automobile insurance mandates by driving an automobile on government roads. You fall under the scope of federal health insurance mandate by being alive. You don't have to actually do anything, beyond metabolizing enough oxygen in your nervous system to not be declared legally dead. The auto insurance mandate is only a relevant precedent for the health insurance mandate if being allowed to live at all is not a right, but a privilege that the government can impose conditions on, revoke, or make conditional on whatever factors those in power deem relevant to their goals for public policy.

I certainly don't think the average person using the auto insurance analogy intends that implication. On the contrary, he'd probably recoil from it if he understood it. Nevertheless, it says something when so many people so readily take something that is the quintessential example of an activity that is not regarded as a right, only a privilege that the government can grant, revoke, or set almost unlimited conditions on, and blithely treat it as analogous to being able to live at all. Though I suppose "being allowed to live at all" would be more accurate.


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Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Carrion birds

You know, say what you will about hysteria-mongering right-wing 1980s clergymen who went around claiming that America was under siege by a vast cabal of murderous Devil-worshiping occultists and tried to blame youth murders or suicides on heavy metal or Dungeons and Dragons, they had this going for them: They usually focused on kids who had actually listened to rock music or played role-playing games. It's a pity that so many American left-of-center commentators, journalists, politicians, and Nobel laureates just can't match the demanding standards of thoughtfulness, rationality, and epistemic rigor that fundamentalists at mass public burnings of fantasy books and Judas Priest records hold themselves to.

Looking back in the aftermath of Jared Loughner's shooting spree, it's impressive just how quickly, eagerly, and ferociously the idea that the attack was the fault of antigovernment political rhetoric was embraced on the basis of nothing whatsoever, aside from liberal desire for some corpses to club critics over the head with, and how tenaciously so many clung to that belief. There was a barely-concealed note of triumph in much of the reaction to the murders of Stephen Johns and George Tiller at the respective hands of a white supremacist and a militant antiabortionist, but the response from liberals in the media- and countless others all over the internet- to the near-fatal shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was little short of orgasmic.

(It's also a rather graphic demonstration of where the average citizen stands in the great chain of being, with Giffords' wounding drawing more horror, outrage, and sympathy than the other twelve people who were wounded and the six people who died, one of them a nine-year old girl, put together. The line dividing the person whose life and well-being actually matters to the media and the political class from everyone else was so stark and undisguised as to seem almost feudal.)

The narrative was established literally before the bodies were cold, and since then we've seen an eruption of condemnations of President Obama's critics for their supposed role in causing the shooting. Some, such as Paul Krugman, are quite explicit in laying blame at the feet of conservatives or libertarians; others contain enough weasel words for the speaker/writer to say effectively the same thing without explicitly committing themselves, or are clearly intended to encourage the belief that critics of liberals are to blame but have some sort of "just asking questions/I'm not saying I know for sure that Obama isn't really a citizen, but..." hedge. The latter sort has grown more common as actual information about the shooter streamed in and the assumption that Loughner was motivated by right wing rhetoric went from being merely baseless to outright falsified.

This assumption was not shaken by the first actual information revealed about Loughner, such as the fact that he had a list of favorite books that included both the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. (The Communist Manifesto is the book that had its Amazon.com sales rank shoot up after Glenn Beck endorsed it, right?). Nor was it shaken by Loughner's own words from Internet postings and YouTube videos- repetitive, nonsensical rants filled with the hallmarks of schizophrenic thought disorder but devoid of any endorsement of right-wing or libertarian politics. The closest anything ever came to actual supporting evidence for the conclusion the media instantly pounced on was the discovery that he supposedly had an interest in the gold standard- which turned out to be part of another set of nonsensical ramblings with no relationship to the ideas of actual gold standard supporters.

(There's also the question of how "antigovernment" many of the designated villains in this farce actually are, of course, partly because of opportunistic use of libertarian-sounding rhetoric by conservative statists and partly because many liberals still haven't mastered complex concepts like "Frederic Bastiat and Francisco Franco were not the same guy.")

When the sheer weight of evidence finally forced liberal commentators to back off from their desperately longed-for "murderous right-wing militant" scenario, the result was an orderly strategic withdrawal to a functionally identical fallback position: Perhaps Loughner was not directly motivated by any recognizable political ideology, but his actions were still caused by overly vehement criticism of the Democrats, or government more generally, that pushed him over the edge.

This back-up argument is also based on nothing, and is further discredited by the fact that Loughner's hostile fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords predates the Tea Party movement's existence and apparently started because of her failure to answer one of his nonsensical questions at a public event in mid-2007. But Loughner exists, people saying nasty things about Democrats exist, and no one has direct access to Loughner's thoughts or exhaustive records of every single moment of his life, so you can't prove with absolute certainty that there isn't a causal connection.  It's still no better supported by actual evidence than the idea that Loughner was somehow motivated by leftist propaganda, or the Rev. Fred Phelps' "divine retribution for insufficient homophobia" hypothesis, but it's good enough for politics.

I say "functionally identical" because the lesson everyone is supposed to draw from it is unchanged: The only legitimate, responsible form of "debate" or "dissent" is that which takes the goodness of the state's existing powers and the desirability of further state expansion as given, and anybody who doesn't accept that starting point needs to shut the hell up before their deviance from center-left statism causes another horrible tragedy.

Still more disingenuously, some have taken up a third line of defense: OK, so maybe there's no reason to believe that people who criticize liberal policies more vigorously than liberals would like had anything to do with this, but isn't the ferocity of (the other side's) political rhetoric still a cause for concern and something we should condemn? So, why not discuss that now? This is an especially repellent ploy because it tries to continue to encourage a mental connection between violence and hostile political rhetoric without even trying to argue for any link between them.

Well, perhaps the state of political discourse is worth discussing. We could also use this as an opportunity to talk about the ongoing war in Afghanistan, or gender discrimination in the provision of government services to victims of domestic violence, or occupational licensing laws, or American society's stigmatization of introverts. What relevance do any of these things have to what happened in Tuscon? The same relevance as the harshness of antigovernment political rhetoric: None whatsoever, aside from the fact that I could probably make a more emotionally compelling case discussing them if I had a few bullet-riddled bodies to use as stage props.


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Saturday, January 08, 2011

Walking out your front door is a privilege, not a right

Among all the other reasons they're appalling, the Transportation Security Administration's new "enhanced pat-downs" and the willingness of many people to defend them are another example of how quickly a scenario that used to seem like an intentionally ridiculous reductio ad absurdum can become reality. If anyone in 2001 had suggested that in less than a decade the expansion of the national security apparatus would've brought us to the point where having one's privates manhandled by government agents would be a common, unexceptional procedure for getting on a plane, it would've been held up as proof of how silly, hysterical, and unreasonable civil libertarians were in their opposition to even the most reasonable, commonsensical, Serious People-approved measures to protect the American people in the post-9/11 world. If something like this appeared in a book or movie or TV show set in some dystopian future America, it would seem like bad writing- too implausible, too hamfisted in the way it pushes at people's sense of revulsion to make the bad guys seem like cartoon caricatures, too obviously a cheap attempt to manipulate the emotions of the audience rather than thoughtful speculation about what the future might hold. (Even the name of the company that makes the machines that scan through people's clothes, "Rapiscan Systems," sounds like something some especially lazy and unsubtle dimestore hack would come up with.)

And yet here we are, with precisely that happening and no shortage of people lining up to defend it. Many valuable lessons can be learned from all this- about the mainstream media's revolting combination of sycophancy towards the government and smug, sneering condescension towards any dissent among the peasantry, the tribalism and authoritarianism of so many liberals/progressives even on the civil liberties issues they're supposedly "good" on, the bigotry and intolerance of many of the same people who pride themselves on how accepting and live-and-let-live they supposedly are. What's most interesting to me, though, is just how implicitly totalitarian some of the more popular justifications are.

(This primarily applies to the honest defenders of the TSA's current methods.  The loathsome "As a liberal I nominally disapprove of degrading attacks on people's privacy and dignity, groping little kids, turning air travel into a potentially nightmarish ordeal for rape survivors, autistics, and anyone else who has issues with being manhandled by strangers, and leaving cancer sufferers humiliated and/or spattered with their own urine, but I disapprove of people who actually speak out against it or challenge it far more" subspecies is a separate case.)

Quite typical are arguments along the lines of, “You consented to this when you bought a ticket. No one is forcing you to fly.” The rather creepy similarity this argument shares with the sort of "You knew you what you were getting yourself into" abuse directed at victims of rape and sexual assault has been ably discussed by others, so I'll stick to the more general libertarian point about the abuse of the concept "consent." These procedures are mandated by the government. They are not the result of property owners freely choosing to set particular conditions to be allowed on their property. If you wish to engage in a consensual commercial exchange with an airline, you are forced to submit to the government's procedures. This is obvious, but when dealing with such elementary mistakes it's necessary to restate the obvious.

Yes, you can choose not to fly. If I assembled a gang of club-wielding hooligans, lined them up by the door of your local supermarket and forced shoppers to run the gauntlet as they entered, you're free to buy food somewhere else, or grow or hunt your own. If I announced that I would kill anyone who tried to go out with my sister, you are free to not date my sister. If you think the TSA rules are supposed to be more legitimate because they're from the government, fine; suppose that the duly elected legislature has decreed that supermarket shoppers must run the gauntlet or that dating my sister is a capital crime. (Yes, the latter is effectively a bill of attainder, but if we're already reducing the 4th Amendment of the Constitution to a meaningless blot of ink I don't see a minor creative reinterpretation of Article 1 doing much harm.)

This sort of argument based on “consent” is among the most commonly used defenses of state power in general, of course-the state is legitimate and thus has the right to make you do/not do X because you supposedly consented to it by choosing to remain within the territory the state claims jurisdiction over rather than leave. (And the state has the right to claim jurisdiction over the territory and demand obedience within it because the state's power is legitimate. And that power is legitimate because, of course, you've consented to it. It's never a good sign when the justification for your political ideology resembles the episode of Futurama where the cast accidentally travels back in time and Fry discovers, to his horror, that he's his own grandfather.) But hearing this kind of reasoning used to justify and whitewash coercion in the course of an abstract discussion about the government's power to use force in general doesn't have the same visceral punch as seeing it used in a more concrete scenario, especially when that scenario is “If you enter a voluntary commercial transaction with a private business, you have no grounds to object when some third party gropes your genitals against your will.”

Similarly with the common and supposedly important point that flying is not a constitutionally guaranteed right, and that the government is therefore justified in setting onerous conditions, including waiving basic constitutionally guaranteed rights, on people who choose to fly. Or, as it is often put,"Flying isn't a right, it's a privilege." It's certainly true that the Constitution says nothing about a right to airplane travel. It also says nothing about any right to travel by any means, including your own legs. It says nothing about the right to buy food, or walk down the street, or go to a doctor, or to have a job, or to not have a job. There's no constitutionally enumerated legal right to perform basic biological functions like eating and drinking. I suppose a right to breathe is implicit in the right to freedom of speech, so at least we've got that going for us.

If the TSA search is voluntary, anything done to a person is voluntary provided that they are warned beforehand what will be done to them and under what circumstances it will be done. If subjecting unwilling flyers to degrading intrusions on their person and depriving them of their legal rights under the Fourth Amendment is excused because there's no constitutionally enumerated “right to fly,” then the government can legitimately place all sorts of onerous conditions on almost any activity imaginable.

Having accepted these premises, if some government agency decreed that anyone who entered a shopping mall could be required to submit to a police strip search at any time, or that anyone who traveled by car/taxi/train/boat/whatever had thereby waived their First Amendment rights, or that anyone who worked in the skilled trades was required to perform sexual favors for government licensing officials and their pals, what objection is possible? You could still criticize such requirements on the grounds that they're not effective for whatever their supposed purpose is, but you couldn't reasonably say that they were somehow oppressive or unjust. These things aren't rights, after all, and no one is forcing you to do any of them.

(It's especially amusing how often, now that Bush is out of office and many of his critics on the Left have dropped their pretense of caring about civil liberties, these argument are so often coming from the same quarters as arguments that consensual economic transactions are really coercion because of unequal bargaining power between the parties to the exchange or an insufficient number of available alternatives.)

A lot of people likely would regard this as a feature rather than a bug, to be sure. The standard pattern in American politics for any respectable political ideology is to regard almost every aspect of life as a legitimate area for technocratic government control, aside from a few exceptions set aside as more-or-less immune. Your right to talk/pray/copulate as much as you want is sacred; anything else you choose to do or not do in your life is a privilege, and you'd damn well better be grateful for it.


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Thursday, December 16, 2010

Take it like a man

Warning for readers: This post discusses both acts of sexual violence and some extremely ugly attitudes concerning them. For an archive of my previous posts on this and related issues, please click here.

For reasons of length, I have split this post into sections, linked below


Part One: Introduction

I held off on posting this after my two previous posts on the subject because I didn't want to turn this blog into the Feminist Rape and Child Molestation Apologia Gazette, but this post by Meghan Murphy at The F Word: Feminist Media Collective is too fine a specimen to go to waste even if it is a few months old now. “Can women rape men? I’m not sure I care” is a true tour de force. (Originally found via Toy Soldier.)

On the one hand, there is nothing in it's basic assumptions that I haven't seen time after time from left-wing feminists, especially those of a "radical" persuasion. It merely takes some premises common in modern feminism and explicitly carries them to their pitilessly logical conclusions. And yet the ideas and attitudes about men, women, and sexual violence expressed in this post are, in all of their essentials, something that a rock-ribbed conservative circa 2010, or 1950, or 1850 could heartily agree with. It's a more literate version of some stereotypically macho meathead ranting about how Real Men don't suffer or get hurt or dominated by anything, least of all a girl.

If Meghan Murphy had referred to men and boys who had the temerity to actually complain after being raped or sexually abused by women as “pussies” or “queers” or “faggots,” it would not have seemed terribly out of place.  Luckily, with a sprinkling of lefty jargon you can do your part to encourage victims of sexual crimes to keep their mouths shut without sounding so distastefully blue-collar.

Murphy's post was written in response to this post by Cara Kulwicki at The Curvature, and this post by RMJ at TeleVism. To summarize the parts Murphy found objectionable: RMJ objects to the fact that popular media is more likely to treat sexual violence against men committed by women as cause for amusement than dismay and so further marginalizes victims of it. Similarly, Kulwicki comments critically about an incident on a late night talk show in which a male guest's sexually traumatic past was made light of, and more generally on the trivialization of sexual abuse and statutory rape committed  by women. I liked both posts (though some of Kulwicki's subsequent remarks were rather less edifying) and was happy to see two feminists in fairly well-known venues talking about the subject.

Others were less enthusiastic. Murphy, ever vigilant, is not about to let misogynistic backlash like "Marginalizing and ridiculing rape victims is bad, even if the victim has a penis" go unchallenged.


Part Two: They Don't Feel Pain Like We Do

Murphy starts off by helpfully informing us that:
In speaking to the men I know who consider themselves to have ‘lost their virginity’ at a very young age (for example Lil’ Wayne’s first sexual experience, discussed in Cara Kulwicki’s article, was at 11. That counts as very young), they have all made it clear that they consider these experiences to be consensual. They don’t call these experiences rape and they don’t remember their experiences as being rape. Instead they tend to feel proud of this early introduction to intercourse. Women, on the other hand, do not tend to share this perception of their early sexual experiences.
Murphy presumes that, if these unspecified men did have any negative feelings about their experiences, they would speak openly to her about it. The possibility that these men might be reticent when talking to someone who explodes with outraged anger and disgust at the very idea of actually giving a damn about male rape victims strikes me as a plausible alternative explanation, but considering that hypothesis would entail wasting precious empathy on Unworthy Victims I can understand her disinterest in pursuing it. Still, I'm happy for her- I wish every human being could enjoy the sort of place in society that would allow them to blithely assume that everyone they know feels free to talk about painful emotions and experiences.

But this speaks to a larger phenomenon than one woman's rampantly unexamined privilege or blackly humorous, Master Shake-esque lack of self-awareness. Victims of violence and abuse, be it sexual, physical, or emotional, routinely reframe, bend, distort, or selectively deny their own perceptions, experiences, and reasoning processes when faced with a reality that is too painful, too disturbing, or too sharply at odds with their beliefs about themselves, their friends and family, or how the world in general works, and so convince themselves that the way they were treated wasn't abusive, or wasn't harmful, or was actually beneficial, or must have been something they actually wanted, or was something they deserved or brought upon themselves

One thing feminists frequently talk about is how women who are raped or sexually abused often blame themselves for the crime or frame it as not "really" rape, and how our culture's attitudes about women and sexuality can encourage and facilitate this denial, as well as discouraging women who do identify what was done to them as criminal from speaking about it for fear of being disbelieved, despised, or humiliated. It shouldn't be necessary to point out that these psychological mechanisms and these fears are a part of human psychology in general not the result of some uniquely feminine frailty of spirit, but not infrequently it is.

Likewise, it shouldn't be necessary to point out that the social and psychological mechanisms that shape reactions to victimization are given ample material to work with in a culture where men perceived as weak are objects of contempt, ridicule, and disgust, females are thought of as too nurturing and innocent to ever want to commit sexually violent, abusive, or exploitative acts and too weak and passive to carry out such a thing out in any case, the very idea of a male not consenting to sex with a woman is dismissed because it is presumed that any and every male old enough to have two digits in his age is an indiscriminately hypersexual animal that will screw anything and everything with a vagina and a pulse, and the concept of rape itself is routinely defined and talked about in ways that implicitly or explicitly excludes the very possibility of a female perpetrator. But not infrequently, it is.

When feminists talk about men, some of them have an unfortunate habit of abruptly forgetting everything they previously knew about the way psychological coping mechanisms, social stigmas, and deeply ingrained cultural assumptions can shape the way people react to violence and exploitation. Consequently, it sometimes doesn't seem to occur to them that male victims of rape and abuse might actually act like victims of rape and abuse. This can take the overt form displayed here, or be shown in more subtle ways- for instance, uncritical acceptance of data about sex crimes against males produced by methods that they would quickly recognize as seriously flawed if used to argue that sexual violence against women was a trivial problem.

(The NIJ/CDC Violence Against Women Survey is a perennial favorite, and no wonder- unsatisfied with merely using questions worded in ways that cause male underreporting, it goes the extra mile by defining female perpetrators almost completely out of existence with a laundry list of male-female sex acts that are classified  as "rape" when the woman is unwilling but magically cease to be so if it's the man or boy who's been forced or threatened or terrorized or beaten into submission. I guess the vagina is just too inherently beneficent an organ to be used for evil.)

Of course, considering how a person's behavior might be affected by trauma and feelings like shame, shock, fear, or confusion requires at least some degree of empathy and sympathy for that person- the ability and the willingness to think of that person as vulnerable, as a being that can be weak, that can be hurt, that can suffer, and to think of that fact as something that actually matters.

Part Three: Carpet Bombing

Murphy's remarks are pretty standard so standard so far: Nothing you wouldn't find reiterated dozens of times in the comments section of any well-trafficked online news article about a female middle school teacher caught fucking a 7th grader, albeit with less excuse. Murphy continues:
I feel very strongly that, to speak as though men raping women is the same as women raping men, is both deceptive and dangerous. Men and women aren’t the same. It is because we don’t live in an equitable society that, to talk about rape happening equally or in an equally significant way between men and women, is just not ok. I get the feeling that both authors want these men’s experiences to be viewed as equal to women’s experiences. As though they are equally at risk, equally victimized, as though men, just like women, are in constant danger of being raped. Bullshit.

...why are we, feminists, talking about men and women experiencing sexual assault in the same manner. Why is it that both these writers do not (seemingly) understand why this might be something that is joked about around men whereas it is in no way, ever, acceptable to joke about women and rape?
Note the conflation: Murphy jumps from rape as it is experienced by individual rape victims to rape as it affects aggregates as if they were the same thing. The average member of women as a group is more likely to be raped than the average member of men as a group, therefore the experience of any individual women who is raped is worse than the experience of any individual man who is raped- Sort like the well-documented ability of women to rise from the dead after being torn to pieces in industrial accidents, protected from the more severe "permanently dead" male experience by the fact that women comprise only a small minority of occupational fatalities. And, therefore, expressing serious concern for male victims of rape is bad because you're giving undue attention to people who haven't been hurt badly enough to warrant it.

I will accede to this if, in the spirit of reciprocity, feminists likewise cease making any references to female victims of homicide, suicide, war-related injuries and fatalities, occupational injuries and fatalities, homelessness, and any other problems disproportionately affecting males. Or, if they absolutely must mention them, to not do so in a manner that implies that anyone should care. I confess I find the prospect of declaring millions upon millions of dead, maimed, or brutalized women to be unworthy of public mention somewhat distasteful, but apparently thinking that a woman being torn limb from limb by factory machinery or cut in half by shrapnel is just as bad as a man being torn limb from limb or cut in half is “bullshit.”

Summarizing her thoughts on the idea of taking male rape victims seriously:
Fuck off. Rape is gendered. Domestic abuse is gendered. This is not to say that men aren’t raped. It is to say that or to imply that women are capable of raping a man in the same way that men are capable of raping women is damaging and unclear. A man can penetrate a woman. A man can penetrate a man. He has that power. A woman does not.
Like many feminists, much of what Murphy says parallels traditionalist attitudes, but here mere parallel gives way to outright convergence. The only tip-off that this was written by someone who fancies herself an enemy of "Patriarchy" and not its champion is the use of the word "gendered;" that aside, it's nothing one of the right-wing hyenas at Pajamas Media who swarmed over James Landrith couldn't have written. Perhaps she and Bill Donohue have been cribbing from each other- their shared passion for discouraging people from noticing or caring about predatory sexual acts committed against boys gives them plenty of common ground.

Despite her apparent zeal to stand up for victimized women, Murphy completely throws women and girls raped or abused by other women under the bus. The conception of rape presented here, in which the badness or importance of a rape and the concern-worthiness of its victim is dependent on the sex of the perpetrator, has no more space for them than it does for males, and so they become collateral damage. Nothing sexual a female can do can matter in the way a man's actions can matter. Rape is gendered.

(Taken as written, Murphy's explanation of why her sex is entitled to the privilege of having the people they rape and abuse excluded from public awareness, concern, or sympathy also excludes female victims of men from the front of the bus in the case of rape by instrumentation. Though if one wishes to take a less literal and more charitable interpretation, perhaps a broom handle/dildo/bottle/whatever gets promoted to honorary phallus when a man holds it but loses its mana when a mere woman is forcibly shoving it into somebody's rectum or vagina.)

Murphy does not say that female victims of other females don't exist, or don't matter, or don't warrant as much sympathy or concern as other victims, or are less victimized or wronged than other victims. Instead, she defines and describes the issue in a way that logically entails these things. This sort of marginalization or outright erasure of females victimized by other females is common in both traditional and feminist discussions of sexual violence. Whether or not this further marginalization of a group of women and girls already almost totally ignored by a culture that can barely even imagine their existence is problematic depends on whether raped women and girls are of interest primarily because they are people who have suffered an injustice, or because they're a convenient blunt object to swing at the enemy. And, if the latter, how much collateral damage is acceptable.

This is the principal means by which male victims are marginalized or attacked, as well; The sort of openly expressed balls-to-the-wall loathing and abuse in something like Murphy's post, or in the Pajamas Media thread about male rape victims linked above, kicks in primarily when the primary line of defense has been breached. Defining people out of existence is effective precisely because it doesn't require that sort of unpleasant spectacle- if it's doing its job, most  people don't notice that there was ever a job for it to do. It's seldom the result of malice or ill will towards its victims; it works because it reflects, and in turn strengthens and sustains, an environment where it rarely occurs to either speaker or listener that there is a victim. It's not just who you don't talk about, it's who you talk about all the time without realizing or acknowledging it.

Part Four: It's Not "Rape-rape"

The most striking paragraph, however, is this one:
BUT when a person experiences something from a position of power and control it is different than when a person experiences something from a place where they do not have power, where they have been coerced, where their lack of power has been taken advantage of, ie. when they have been victimized. I do believe very strongly that people should be able to define their own experiences and therefore, if a man feels he has been raped by a woman, then it is rape. What I take issue with, is feminists, in particular, taking the rape conversation and applying it to men in an equal way as it as been applied to women. Are we not losing something very important when we do this? That something being GENDER?!...
So, now we know: Men and boys who are raped by females do not experience a situation where they have been coerced, or been taken advantage of, or lacked power. They do not experience being victimized. Both the forcible rape of adults and preteen boys deflowered by grown women in a position to exert a degree of quasi-parental authority are explicitly included in this.

So, the answer to the question “Can women rape men?” turns out to be: Kinda, technically, in a way that satisfies the strictly literal definition of the word “rape” but is largely devoid of the things that make rape a bad thing that people shouldn't do.

If a woman forces a man or boy to penetrate her vagina with his penis while he is being held at gunpoint, or at knife point, or while he is being held down or restrained, or is too badly injured to defend himself, or has been terrorized into submission by threats, he experiences this from a place of power. He does not experience being coerced, or being powerless, or being victimized. James Landrith, about whom I've written before, was not coerced or victimized when a woman began attacking him in his sleep and, when he woke up, extorted his submission by threatening to accuse him of rape if he resisted his rapist. When- to cite an example that was in the news a few months ago- a woman in her thirties begins sexually abusing an emotionally troubled 12-year old boy who "looked at her like a second mother” and continues to do so for a half-decade, exploits her relationship with the boy's family to have that boy move in with her as a "boarder" after her divorce, and uses threats and blackmail to squelch his attempts to escape from his role as her ambulatory sex toy, the boy is in a position of power. Rape is gendered, so man up and stop whining.

Murphy doesn't elaborate on whether she thinks the same applies to nine-year-old boys or five-year-old boys or toddlers, but it's logically entailed by all the all-consuming prominence she gives to the gender of victims and victimizers. A third-grader being sodomized with a broom handle or forced to perform cunnilingus on his mother may look like he's being horribly abused, but the very fact that you would think such a thing- or worse, think that it matters-  just goes to show that you don't understand the patriarchal context in which he's being sodomized with a broom handle or forced to perform cunnilingus on his mother.

Part Five: Mighty White of You

To give credit where it's due, Murphy magnaminously says that:
Let me be clear. I don’t think it is appropriate for anybody to have sex with anybody else without consent. But taking gender out of the equation and comparing the two situations as though they are equal to the experience of hundreds of thousands of women who are raped BY MEN every year is fucked.
A word of advice for anyone interested in writing about the issue of sexual violence: If your explanation of your thoughts and feelings on the issue requires a disclaimer clarifying that you do not consider rape and child molestation to be good things, you are doing it wrong. Show, don't tell.

Note that she conspicuously did not say that she thought it a significant moral wrong- or wrong at all, for that matter. A woman having sex with a man or boy without his consent- raping him, to use the more succinct and precise term that Murphy conspicuously avoids here- is doing something that is not "appropriate."

To not be appropriate is to be unfitting, or unsuited, or incongruous. It is not appropriate to wear flip-flops and speedos at the office, or a suit and tie at the beach, or a propeller beanie while testifying at a trial. It would not be appropriate for me to address my grandfather as "Cueball". A chemical engineering textbook is not an appropriate bedtime story for a three-year old. Fucking an unwilling man by threatening him into submission is not appropriate. It's gauche, albeit apparently less so than the man is being if he gets upset and calls attention to himself. Getting a job as a school teacher and sexually exploiting a boy in your charge is not appropriate, like running in the halls or using your outdoor voice in the library.

This is not mere semantic nitpicking. Language matters. Nevertheless, Meghan Murphy's willingness to refrain from outright endorsing the activities of rapists and child molesters is much appreciated, even if she found it necessary to immediately follow up her clarification that she does not actively support or advocate rape with another insistence that a male victim's connection to the Patriarchy Hive Mind somehow protects him from being sufficiently harmed by the experience to warrant the sort of concern Murphy considers people like herself entitled to, combined with a none-too-subtle attempt to divert attention to the vileness of the victims' sex and thereby reframe the issue in a way that discourages sympathy for those rape victims.

In the same caring spirit, let me just affirm that George Sodini's shooting spree was not polite or gentlemanly, and that he should have found a way to deal with his feelings towards women more constructive than riddling several of them with bullets. Bad form, that, even though having a bunch of holes punched through your vital organs by high-velocity metal projectiles is no doubt less unpleasant when you're a member of the sex comprising less than 1/4th of American homicide victims.

Part Six: Father's Daughter

I was taken aback when I first read this post, but I shouldn't have been- I had read its like many times before. What I said in my posts about feminist apologists for female child molesters such as Hugo Schwyzer applies here as well. Like many feminists, Murphy is saying nothing that- rebellious paintjob aside- differs significantly from the traditional conception she ostensibly opposes. (Though some heterodox feminists are also among the more conspicuous dissenters from this assumption, Wendy McElroy being probably the most prominent example.) Males are nigh-invulnerable and omnipotent, females are weak and helpless. Males sexuality is aggressive, predatory, and polluting; females are damaged by it in a way that they can never damage males. It follows that violence by the latter against the former is not a matter of serious concern, and that this is especially true of sexual violence. It further follows, naturally enough, that getting worked up about such violence and treating it as a big deal is at best ridiculous and foolish, and perhaps shameful or contemptible.

Taking the rape conversation and applying it to men in an equal way as it has been applied to women is the last thing your average traditional "Real Man," or female partisans thereof, would support. We'd be losing something very important when we do this, that something being gender. Though he'd probably replace “gender” with “sex,” and perhaps say something disparaging about what pussies modern men have become for someone to actually suggest the idea.

Does a Real Man think that men like those under discussion do not have power, or have been coerced, or been harmed because their lack of power has been taken advantage of? Certainly not. Men can't be overpowered by women that way; everyone knows that. Female aggression isn't a serious threat to a Real Man; it's irrelevant, or amusing, or at worst annoying. If our Real Man were to acknowledge that the victim really did somehow lack control in a particular situation, it's still his fault for allowing himself to be so weak as to be dominated by a woman in the first place, and thus still under his own control. And in any case, the idea that a man or boy could somehow have been victimized by sexual contact with a woman is absurd.

Does a Real Man think of these men as victimized, or believe that women are capable of raping a man in the same way that men are capable of raping women, or that men raping women is the same as women raping men? Of course not. Men and women aren’t the same. Women are damaged or diminished by sex, not men. Rape is gendered, as any of the Real Men who pop up to heap ridicule and abuse on men who come forward about being raped or abused by women will vehemently tell you.

Murphy takes it further than most, but her position differs from some much more common and typical ideas in degree, rather than in kind. It's the logical conclusion of the collectivism, myopic focus on the upper levels of male status hierarchies, and thinly disguised reiterations of traditional gender stereotypes and assumptions that pervade much of feminist thought. More next time.


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Thursday, December 02, 2010

New and upcoming changes at The Superfluous Man

I've been working on reorganizing various aspects of this blog, primarily by taking advantage of the fact that Blogger can now do stand-alone pages. One of the things I've been doing is collecting sets of posts by theme, and so I've created a page that links and briefly summarizes all posts I've done concerning rape, abuse, and related subjects that you can check out here. I originally thought of creating it mostly because I get some visitors via sites about abuse issues and wanted to make my posts on the subject easily found without needing to wade through years worth of vitriol on unrelated subjects, but hopefully it will be useful to others as well.

Other additions and changes to come soon. I'm not terribly skilled with this sort of thing, so if you swing by here over the next few days and the layout is confusing or the fonts are screwed up or spacetime has fractured and John Markley's The Superfluous Man has been replaced by an evil parallel universe blog where a suave, sharply-attired centrist named Yelkram Nhoj calmly extols the virtues of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., or whatever, please bear with me.



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