The 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey Report: Even more interesting if you actually bother to read it

The Center for Disease Control recently put out a study on (among other things) sex crime victimization, the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. The most repeated figures from the study are that 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men (excluding those in institutional settings such as prison, which is a problem with the numbers but not the primary one) over the age of 18 have been the victim of rape or attempted rape, as defined by the CDC, at some point in their lifetimes. These are the numbers all the media outlets reporting on the study and everyone talking about it online are quoting; no surprise, given that that they are the ones the CDC itself is focusing on.

The numbers make quite a contrast- a staggering 1 in 5 women alongside an unfortunate but comparatively rare 1 in 71 men, a monstrous pandemic that bespeaks a grave problem with our society alongside an unfortunate statistical blip. A blip that would still comprise more than 1 million human beings, admittedly, but if you want to justify the erasure, trivialization, or victim-blaming of male victims and/or victims of women by arguing that such crimes are so rare and anomalous that for most purposes the victims can be treated as if they did not exist, the juxtaposition of 1 in 5 1 vs. 1 in 71 can certainly help to give the impression that men who complain are just whining about something petty, perhaps for some nefarious, misogynistic purpose. That's already started, and there will plenty more of that in the years to come.

There are some things about the study that are problematic. Adding the numbers for rape and attempted rape together and just calling the resulting sum “rape” is misleading, even though I think that for some purposes an aggregate figure is more useful and revealing than just the number of completed rapes. The survey question about drug or alcohol-facilitated rape is worded very vaguely and broadly and can potentially encompass not only sex that occurred when someone was unconscious or incapable of giving meaningful consent, but any sex where one or both participants were drunk or high, and so the number given is likely too high. (And has some bizarre implications, or would if applied in a nonsexist manner: a signifciant portion of the women classified as rape victims under such a standard would also be rape perpetrators, and actually became both simultaneously.) And, as mentioned above, the prison population, among others, is not included in the survey data.

However, as none of these affect my point one way or the other, I'll not deal with them here. The problem with the numbers is more fundamental than that.

The sturdiest falsehoods are not based on outright lies, but upon facts stripped of relevant context. Does the study indicate a lifetime “rape “ or attempted “rape” victimization of 1 in 5 for women and 1 in 71 for men? Yes. Why the scare quotes? Here's how the study itself uses the word, from page 17 of the PDF file of the report:

Rape is defined as any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes times when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.

Among women, rape includes vaginal, oral, or anal penetration by a male using his penis. It also includes vaginal or anal penetration by a male or female using their fingers or an object.

Among men, rape includes oral or anal penetration by a male using his penis. It also includes anal penetration by a male or female using their fingers or an object.

This is consistent with the definition used in previous CDC studies on the subject, and in other studies such as the Department of Justice's commonly cited National Violence Against Women Survey. So, what isn't rape?

Most conspicuously, forcing someone to engage in vaginal sexual intercourse against their will through violence or the threat of violence is not rape if it is the male who is unwilling. Forcing someone to perform fellatio on you is rape. However, forcing someone to perform cunnilingus on you, or performing fellatio on someone else against their will, is not. Forced genital-digital contact can be counted as rape, but never when it's a man being forced. Forcible anal sex is not rape if the victim is forced to penetrate, rather than be penetrated.

We have a laundry list of sexual acts that are rape when the woman involved has not consented, but cease to be rape when an equally involuntary and directly analogous or physically identical act occurs when the man has not consented. In fact, the only thing a woman can do to a man that is counted as rape is forcibly inserting something into his anus. Everything else that would be considered rape if it was a Worthy Victim who didn't want it goes into either “Being made to penetrate somebody else,” a new category in CDC studies included in the subsection "Sexual Violence Other than Rape," or “unwanted sexual contact.”

The estimated lifetime "rape" figure for men in the study is 1,581,000 million men, compared to about 21,840,000 million for women. If being “made to penetrate” (which, like the rape, category, includes attempted as well as completed acts) were counted as rape in the same way that identical involuntary acts the man involved did want are, the estimated number of men over 18 who have been raped in their lifetime jumps from 1.58 million to 7 million, plus however many male rape victims are currently in prison and so outside the scope of the study, plus however many of the 13.3 million men filed under “unwanted sexual contact” would also be designated as rape victims by the CDC in a reverse-gender scenario.

Going by the CDC's lifetime stats, around one in every four American rape and attempted rape survivors, at minimum, is male. Based on the statistics about the sex of the perpetrator (see page 24), well over half of those seven million were raped by a female perpetrator.

And then there's something that is written plain as day in the study itself that you'd you'd never even guess at from what almost anybody says about it- or, indeed, what the CDC itself says outside the pages of the study results themselves. The survey subject were asked not one but two questions about each category of sexual crime covered: if such an act had been committed against them at some point in their lifetime, and in the last 12 months. This is done with good reason: memory is unreliable and highly malleable over time, to the point that people not only forget events but sometimes “remember” a sexual encounter as consensual even though they did not consider it to be such at the time. People interpret and reinterpret their past perceptions through layer upon layer of filters- their general assumptions about how the world works, their mental images of themselves and people they know, what others have said, what they want to believe is true- and as an event recedes further into the past and the original memories of it grow fuzzier these things help fill in the gaps.

Thus, questions covering relatively short, recent periods of time are typically considered more accurate than asking someone to look back over their entire life. They are also more relevant to the prevalence of violence now than questions about lifetime victimization rates. which encompass decades.

Based on the survey responses to the latter question, the study estimates that 1,270,000 women over 18 outside of institutional setting were the victims of rape or attempted rape, as defined by the CDC, in the last 12 months. (There is no 12-month figure for women “made to penetrate,” and likewise no 12-month “rape” number for men, due to insufficient sample size.) Meanwhile, since we all know that women are the overwhelming majority of rape victims, the study estimates that the number of men over 18 “made to penetrate” was a paltry... 1,267,000, of which roughly one million were "made to penetrate" by a female. Which would make women the perpetrators in roughly 40% of rapes of adults and men the victims in about half of them, according to the CDC's survey data.

I do not think, as many people would, that the idea that the number of men “forced to penetrate” might be comparable to the number or women forcibly penetrated is somehow inherently absurd. With the advantage of hindsight, I don't even find it particularly counterintuitive.

It doesn't require the existence of a vast horde of female predators or Amazons who can match a man's upper body strength. A disproportionate portion of male-perpetrated sex crimes are committed by a comparatively small number of serial offenders, and typically involve tactics- social manipulation, physical and psychological isolation, surprise, shock, confusion, alcohol and other drugs that impair motor control and situational awareness or cause unconsciousness, weapons and other instruments of intimidation, etc.- that greatly reduce the amount of actual brute physical force needed. I see no reason to think that predatory women would differ greatly in those respects, and they enjoy certain advantages (near-absolute lack of public or law enforcement vigilance against them, male socialization against injuring a woman in self-defense, the ability to credibly threaten a target with imprisonment or vigilante violence via false criminal charges) over their male counterparts.

If you 1. don't think Victorian sentimentality and its modern left-wing reincarnations are necessarily a trustworthy guide to actual women, 2. credit human females with enough mental capacity to use some of the fancier hominid forebrain gimmicks like planning, social interaction, and tool use, and 3. have ever possessed a functioning penis or at least advanced your knowledge of them beyond the "boys have an outie" stage, either of which should immunize you from idiotic notions about raping a man somehow being physiologically impossible, it isn't unthinkable. And it's not as if the idea that women are obliged to concern themselves with men's sexual consent in any serious way is something the typical American woman is likely to get much exposure to, least of all from typical "anti-rape" activists.

Suppose one takes the CDC numbers at face value- as the mainstream media and most people commenting on it and treating it as something important are, and as previous CDC estimates about male victimization typically have been by the same. In that case, this is quite the bombshell. My own misgivings about the intoxication question doesn't change that, since there's no reason to think that it would inflate the male number more than the female. In either case, the CDC's study has produced startling results that are radically at odds with both traditional and feminist assumptions about rape.

And virtually no one notices. It sits in plain sight in a much-publicized report that many people have been talking about, from a source widely considered one of the country's authorities on the prevalence of sexual and interpersonal violence, and virtually no one notices or says anything. In fact, thus far the three most prominent sources I've been able to turn up that reference the study while specifically addressing the subject of male sexual victimization- sensitive feminist guy/occasional child molester apologist Hugo Schwyzer, Soraya Chemaly at Huffington Post, and Maya Dusenbery at popular blog Feministing- explicitly claim that it says the opposite of what it actually and quite clearly says! (Though Dusenbery was just quoting Schwyzer in that section of her post, which goes to show why you shouldn't outsource your research on sex crimes to someone who responds to a story about an adult caretaker being repeatedly masturbated by an 11-year-old by defending the adult and calling the child a sexual predator.) There's some online comment threads, mostly at a few sites focused on violence against men and boys or men's issues in general. There's a nice examination at a German masculist site (in English), Feckblog. There's a fourth-string libertarian blogger who occasionally refers to himself in the third person. And that's pretty much it, nearly a month after the report was published.

This isn't really surprising, unfortunately; as with so many other issues, the two recognized "sides" are just minor variations on the same theme. Most conservatives would consider the idea that female-perpetrated sexual predation was a widespread problem absurd, and are unlikely to consider such acts serious crimes even if they did acknowledge them, so they're hardly going to make noise about it. Meanwhile, on the Left, the folks who have the loudest voices and biggest megaphones in discussions of sexual violence have a long track record of "proving" that rape is overwhelmingly committed against women and almost universally perpetrated by men by citing statistics on male "rape" rates that define millions of rape victims- and their rapists- out of existence in the same way the new study's official definition does. (E.g. Past CDC studies, the National Violence Against Women Survey, the oft-repeated claim from the latter that 1 in 33 men will be the victim of rape or attempted rape compared to 1 in 6 women, etc.) And this continues. Despite the startling data in the new CDC study that so many people are seemingly taking so seriously, it doesn't look like things will be any different than they were back when a man or boy being "made to penetrate" wasn't counted as a victim of "sexual violence other than rape" because he wasn't counted as anything at all.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline and the Verizon Foundation join forces to demonize abused children

The Verizon Foundation, a nonprofit offshoot of the telecommunications company, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline, established by the United States government in 1996 through grants provided under the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, recently released a short video entitled “Monsters,” which the Verizon Foundation says “shows the immediate and long-term impact on children who witness domestic violence.” Now, this is an important issue. Subjecting children to the spectacle of one or both of their parents being attacked, degraded, or tormented by the other is a form of psychological/emotional abuse that can be devastating even if no one ever raises their hand against the child. I'd praise the video for bringing this up if only the folks at the Verizon Foundation and the National Domestic Violence Hotline were actually siding with such children, rather than against them.

Now, one can- and should- object to the fact that the ad explicitly defines domestic violence to be something men do and women suffer- if my introduction to the concept of domestic violence were this ad, the notion that a man or a lesbian could be a victim of "domestic violence” wouldn't occur to me. That would be less of an issue if the makers and the typical expected viewer of this came from a culture where it was widely understood that the male perpetrator-female victim scenario described was not the only configuration possible, and children seeking help because of a violent mother weren't ignored or called liars because of traditional prejudices that “women don't do that” or feminist claims that “domestic violence is gendered,” but this wasn't made in that world. In this case the usual erasure of any victim of intimate relationship violence who isn't a heterosexual female is only a secondary problem, however.

The ad starts off with an animated depiction of a child in a violent household. We are told of her pain and distress. She lives in “darkness,” in a “nightmare.” And it is very conspicuously HER pain and distress, and SHE who lives in a world of darkness and nightmares- the consistent use of 'she” and “her” for the victimized child is not, as we shall see, merely a byproduct of the fact that English lacks a singular third-person pronoun for referring to a human being without reference to sex.

The source of her distress is explicitly referred to as her father, which brings us to the first group of children in the ad's cross-hairs. Suppose you're a little kid who's upset because you see Mommy hitting Daddy, or pushing him down, or throwing things at him, or waving a kitchen knife around and screaming about how someday she's going to cut his balls off. Maybe the sound of people yelling or screaming or sobbing at night makes it hard to sleep. Maybe you hate yourself because you think you're somehow the cause of it. Maybe you're afraid that someday Mommy will kill Daddy, or even get so angry about something that she'll kill you. Maybe part of you wishes she would, because surely she wouldn't act this way if you were a better child- and if you were gone, maybe everybody could be happy again.

And those nice people who talk about this thing called “domestic violence,” and how it's really bad, and that it's not children's fault, and that if it's happening in your house you should tell a grown-up you trust so you can get help, and that people being hurt by it deserve help and protection? They're not talking about you. They're not there to help you. They don't care about you. They've helpfully explained who the people who need and deserve help are, and you're not one of them.

Again, this wouldn't be such an issue in a world where a child whose mother abuses her father was likely to have other sources information telling her that what happens in her family is also "domestic violence," and that she and her father also deserve help, and where an adult authority figure told of such a situation by a child was likely to have also been exposed to such information, and to have internalized it to the point that they could be counted on to treat the child's situation with due seriousness. Unfortunately, people living in that world aren't the ones seeing this.

The all but exclusive fixation on male perpetrators brought about by gender feminist domination of this topic doesn't just erase or vilify male victims; it also throws many women and girls to the wolves, if the person who hurt them has the wrong genitalia. The folks who dominate the discourse about abuse typically seem, based on revealed preference, to desire the former badly enough to consider the latter an acceptable trade-off. These children get off comparatively lightly, however; they're merely written off. There are worse things.

The ad continues by saying that the girl will be more likely to be abused herself as an adult, since she will be more inclined see domestic violence as normal. And then, finally, the existence of male children comes up. After being told in anguished tones about how much girls are hurt by living in violent household, we're told “and her brother, he'll be twice as likely to become a monster himself.” At which point a little cartoon boy appears, briefly, only to immediately transform into a grotesque, ferocious-looking monstrosity that looks like some horrible beast of Greek mythology filtered through H.P. Lovecraft, looming hideously over the fragile, prone form of his helpless sister.

The little girl, of course, remains human.

Contrary to popular myth, most child abuse victims do not go on to become abusers themselves. There are many other ways a boy can be shaped by such an experience, even if they are seldom thought worthy of mention.

Maybe he'll grow up to think of all men as sadistic monsters, and loathe himself for being one. Maybe he'll cut himself off from others, seeing his own permanent loneliness as an acceptable price to pay to “protect” women and children from what he imagines himself to be- and what the makers of the ad want us to imagine him to be. Maybe he'll grow up to let other people abuse him because the memory of his father makes him so frightened by his own capacity for anger that he doesn't dare stand up for himself. Perhaps he'll teach his sons to “respect women” by doing likewise. (In which case he is hurting others, albeit not others the domestic violence industry cares about.) Maybe he'll actually try to stop his father, and get beaten to a bloody pulp. Or maybe he'll spend the rest of his life reviling himself for “failing” to protect his mother- for not being strong enough, or big enough, or brave enough, or loving his mom enough to somehow stop a grown man when he was only a child.

But no such boy, no traumatized boy who ought to be viewed with sympathy rather than fear and horror, exists in the universe of the ad. None ever could.

In two minutes and thirty seconds otherwise saturated with descriptions of the terrible pain and suffering inflicted on innocent people by domestic violence, the heart-wrenching litany of pain, misery and tragedy abruptly stops when male children are mentioned  and is replaced with horror and revulsion- not for the abuse or the abuser, but for the victim. Once the loathsome, terrifying boy-thing departs and the narration moves to the subject of the battered wife, the original tragic, sympathetic tone resumes. The effects of systematic emotional abuse on a helpless little boy are referred to solely in terms of how they make the boy seem scary, dangerous, inhuman, or evil.

Imagine being one of those boys and seeing this. Imagine being one of those boys and seeing this while being told that this is the message of people who really, really care about how domestic violence hurts innocent people.

The dehumanization is absolute. The effects of domestic violence on women and girls are bad because- as the ad pulls out all the stops to tell us- they cause women and girls to suffer. The effects of domestic violence on boys are bad... because they cause women and girls to suffer. The boy's capacity to experience pain is utterly erased, and he is stripped of any moral value as a human being in his own right. His existence and experiences are relevant only insofar as they affect people who do have moral value- women and girls. We are thus encouraged to think of traumatized male children not as victims who warrant sympathy or protection, but as menaces to be feared and despised- as monsters.

This is not unusual, though the Verizon Foundation video makes it more explicit than usual by portraying the boy as literally inhuman. Turning abused and traumatized boys into objects of fear or revulsion is a fairly common feature in discussions of domestic violence. The same is commonly true if the boy is the direct target of abuse. In public beliefs about male victims of (male-perpetrated) sexual abuse, in particular, the myth that abuse victims typically go on to abuse others is so ubiquitous and colors people's attitudes towards abuse victims so strongly that the victim's supposed propensity to abuse others in the future is commonly spoken of as if it were the primary harm of the abuse itself- the greatest evil of the abuse is becomes something that will happen to some undefined person at some point in the future, which conveniently vitiates the perceived need to feel sympathy for any actual existing male abuse victim.

(This illustrates the extent to which attitudes towards male victimization transcend the boundaries between different sides of cultural and ideological arguments. Feminists dominate the discourse about domestic violence and efforts to encourage public awareness of it, and do more than anyone else to encourage the “hurt boy=future monster” attitude in that area. The same is not true in the case of male victims of male sexual predators, however, where such an attitude is expressed by many people from a much more diverse array of ideological backgrounds and is probably most conspicuously expressed by people of conservative views who are actively hostile to feminists. Members of both groups typically have an exaggerated view of male strength that makes it difficult to think of one as truly victimized rather than victimizer, and both often seem to think of raising boys primarily in terms of neutralizing the danger they are seen as naturally posing, so this convergence is to be expected.)

There's no need to assume that anyone at the Verizon Foundation or the National Domestic Violence Hotline had this aim in mind. It is the natural, predictable product of the mindset that dominates discourse on the subjects of domestic violence and child abuse, as well as related areas like sexual violence- one that tends to treat the well-being of males (especially once they're no longer young enough to enjoy the limited moral-value-by-association of being regarded as appendages of their mother) as having purely instrumental value, if that, which is prone to regarding even the most vulnerable males as present or future menaces to be contained, and which is at best extremely uncomfortable with the idea that males can be hurt as badly as females or should be viewed with equal concern if they are and frequently outright hostile to the idea. 

The best thing I can think of to sum up my feelings about this is something Jacob Taylor of the blog Toy Solders wrote a few years ago in his post “Being a Boy: 101.” He was talking about a different topic- a school speaker's treatment of a boy who had been sexually abused, rather than children who grew up witnessing their mothers being battered- but the subjects are closely related enough and his words so relevant that they're worth quoting here.

I wonder how many of the boys in that class have been abused. I wonder how many of them have been raped. I wonder how many of them go home to a house full of violence and say to themselves, “I won’t be like this when I grow up,” only to have someone like this woman say, “You have a penis. Yes, you will.”

There are so many monsters lying in wait for children to tear apart, yes. So terribly many.

Open season

Please note: This post concerns a sexual assault, and discusses it in some detail.

I'm opposed to the existence of sex offender registration lists, such as those created by what's commonly called "Megan's Law" legislation. They do an end run around due process by allowing governments to decree onerous new penalties  at will for crimes someone has already been convicted and sentenced for. They devastate the lives of people who have harmed no one or committed some extremely petty crime like public urination. They have far more to do with appeasing public hysteria by showing that the government is Doing Something then with actually protecting the public.There are very good reasons to be against these laws.

I'm not opposed to them because I think holding elementary school children down against their will and shoving your dick in their faces is harmless schoolyard tomfoolery.

A few days ago, there were a number of postings at various places online about 2 14-year-old boys in New Jersey who, after a decision by a New Jersey appellate court, had been permanently placed on the state's registered sex offender list due to a conviction for criminal sexual contact. The predominant response, including some from people I generally think quite well of, seems to be that it is not merely wrong that the boys would be put on a lifetime registry of sex offenders for this but silly or outrageous (scroll down a bit to the comments) that it is even being treated as a serious criminal matter at all, much less “criminal sexual contact.” The action for which the boys were convicted of a crime was, we're told again and again, something trivial, just a "prank" or "horseplay" or- in some cases- the sort of youthful character-building experience that, like vitamins and minerals and fresh air, is something a growing boy needs so that he doesn't grow up to be a complete pussy. The dominant view seems to be that's its the sort of thing that warrants a stern talking-to from dad, or at most some very minor legal slap on the wrist, not something that should be regarded as a genuine crime against the victims.

One of the things conspicuously absent from most reporting and commentary on the case is a thorough description of what actually happened. So, imagine this scenario. (The actual written decision by the court, which describes the complete incident, can be read here.)

You're in front of a local store when someone significantly bigger than you, who you have  never met, shoves you against a wall. He and his three friends then pick you up, forcibly carry you across the street, and threaten to beat you up. You attempt to flee but aren't fast enough, and they quickly catch you again. They pin you to the ground and hold you down while one of them beats and head-butts you. Finally, while you're still held immobile and helpless, one of them removes his pants and, nude below the waist, rubs his bare buttocks against your face while his penis presses against your lips.

That's the “horseplay” in question, except that in the real version it was done to two sixth-grade boys instead of an adult.

I agree that children today are frequently overprotected, though I think it would be more precise  to say that children  are overly “protected” from relatively uncommon or outright imaginary perils so that adults can feel good about how much they care without bothering with the more burdensome task of addressing actual or likely sources of harm. I also agree that there is a bias against boys in the educational system and much of the culture that treats perfectly healthy, harmless behavior and traits common among boys as if they were immoral, dangerous, destructive, or pathological. (Though, as we see here, the conservative Real Men contingent and I tend to differ somewhat on which category “elite group based on superior charisma, physical strength, social status, aggression, and adherence to gender norms intimidates, humiliates, and physically and psychologically abuses lower-status boys with the tacit or explicit approval of adults” goes under.) And I'm opposed to "Megan's Law" registration, for the reasons described above. So I'm sympathetic to some of the concerns raised by many of the people I'm talking about here.

But it was dismaying to see so many people on the same side as myself on the issue of sex offender registries make their case against offender registry laws by trivializing the violent degradation of a child.

And that is what this was. The fact that so many people are shocked at the idea of even making this a legal matter, much less a serious one, is a testament to just how normalized some types of violence are. Replace the 12-year old boy in the story with someone from a more protected group and this becomes immediately obvious to virtually everyone.  If 14-year old boys had done this to a sixth-grade girl- or to a grown woman, for all the hot air blown about protecting kids- that they had run into in front of a local store, virtually no one would have any trouble recognizing that such an act was an actual crime, and not a trivial one. I sure as hell don't think Radley Balko would be saying that the prosecutor should be fired for charging the perpetrators in the first place.

(Some people would object to charging the perpetrators as adults, arguing that they were too young and immature to understand the seriousness of such an act, but that's very different from the notion that there is nothing serious here to understand.)

The online tough guys in various comment sections bitching about how actually prosecuting this is a dismaying example of “political correctness”or the wimpiness of the modern age would be baying for blood louder than just about anyone. Cackling about the sort of “horseplay” the perpetrators might encounter in the American prison system would abound.

Opponents of registration like myself would still disapprove of it as a matter of principle in such a case, but I certainly don't think many of us would be holding such a case up as an obviously absurd and outrageous miscarriage of justice in the same category as branding a 16-year old boy as a lifelong "sex offender" for having consensual sex with someone a few months younger or prosecuting him for producing “child pornography” by photographing himself nude.

Now, part of that would be for strategic reasons- if you're trying to convince people on the other side of the issue to reconsider their position, "Registration laws can severely interfere with the lives of teenage boys who get their kicks by forcing their anuses and genitalia into the faces of frightened, struggling elementary school girls" is just about the least compelling argument imaginable. But it would also be sheer moral repugnance- the idea of a teenage boy chasing down a fleeing sixth-grade girl, pinning her to the ground, beating her, and shoving his privates in her face while she struggles is so clearly and repulsively not analogous to the sort of victimless crimes usually cited as examples of sex offense laws run amok that virtually everyone would recoil from the comparison.

None of this is surprising; violence against males in general simply don't bother most people the way  harms suffered by females do, and this is doubly the case if someone's genitalia is somehow involved. But in this case, a crime against adolescent boys isn't just taken less seriously then the same crime would be against girls or women; it's taken less seriously then the same crime almost certainly would be if it had been committed against a mature man. If a band of teenage boys had somehow seized men in their 30s or 40s off of the street and forcibly did to them what was done in this case, that would be considered- in the probably-unlikely event the victims reported it-  shocking, predatory behavior. The men they targeted would  probably receive more ridicule and contempt than sympathy, but no one would be suggesting that this was a case of normal, basically harmless boyhood hijinks gone a bit too far.

My guess- or at least my hope- is that a lot of this response is a knee-jerk reaction from people who didn't research beyond the initial news articles, which didn't describe the actual offense in detail and were laden with the sort of minimizing language common in media coverage of events like these. However, even the bowdlerized account in most of the media describes an incident that nearly everyone would have considered seriously criminal- and yes, sexual- if the victim had been anything other than a young boy.

(Yes, it's almost certainly true that the motive for the attack was not sexual gratification. The same can be said for many sexual crimes much more extreme than this one.)

If it had been, I'd like to think most of my fellow registration opponents would be able to make a cogent argument for why Megan's Law is not the solution by talking about issues such as due process, unexpected consequences, disproportionate punishment, the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders, or the dangers of public panic in the face of relatively uncommon but highly mediagenic crimes, instead of focusing on waxing indignant about how outrageous it is for people to claim that these poor, victimized fellows committed a sex offense when all they did was chase down, beat, and forcibly restrain a young girl so that they could drop their pants and rub their privates on her face.

This sort of thing has particular relevance to me as a libertarian, for reasons- which I might get to some other time- above and beyond the fact that it's a form of aggression that would be quickly recognized as criminal in other circumstances but is instead accepted or ignored. Popular attitudes concerning violence against men and boys are also, as people who've been reading this blog for a while know, a recurring focus of mine. But putting all that aside, the notion that a 12-year-old boy should have as much legal protection against being seized in the street, beaten, and forced into contact with his assailant's sexual and excretory organs as other people should not be an idea that one must be some sort of radical in order to accept.

I'm always tempted, when the issue of violent bullying comes up, to ask people if they think bands of hooligans should be allowed to storm their workplace or just grab them off the street and smack them around for a while. Nothing lethal or disfiguring or crippling, no guns or clubs or blades, just a mild beat-down that probably won't even break any bones- and, in this case, a few more exotic elements  Doing that to you should be legal, or at most warrant a few hours of community service and some harsh words, right? Simple self-respect ought to make a grown man recoil at the prospect of hiding behind the legal system's skirts when faced with something he considers so trivial that he expects elementary school-age children to take it.

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

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

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.

Letting the mask slip

Sheldon Richman's article The Anti-anti-authoritarians is the best summary and analysis of Tea Party-related events and commentary that I've read. I first read it some time ago, but the combination of the recent elections and the subject of my last post brought it back to mind. As Richman puts it:

It’s easy to point out flaws in the Tea Party. What is getting old quickly is the political elite’s criticism, which exhibits an intolerance and bad faith that it often attributes to the Tea Partiers. You don’t have to read too much of this criticism to see that the powers that be and their fawning admirers in the media and intelligentsia dislike one thing in particular: the movement’s apparent anti-authoritarianism. To be sure, at best it’s an imperfect anti-authoritarianism...

But let that go for now. What’s noteworthy is that the movement’s anti-authoritarian tone has establishment statists so upset. They seem really worried that this thing could get out of control. Any legitimate criticism they may make of the Tea Party movement is undermined by their abhorrence with anti- authoritarianism per se. They are anti-anti-authoritarian.

Richman then goes on to cite some choice examples that nicely demonstrate the traits that have characterized establishment response to the Tea Party phenomenon: the authoritarianism, the sneering elitism, and the baffled, almost panicky inability to comprehend the idea of actually wanting to reduce state power. Towards the end, he sums it up perfectly:

Here, apparently, is the Tea Party’s greatest offense: it resents the elites who presume to run their lives. How dare these know-nothings resist our good intentions and earnest efforts?

As I’ve said, the folks who identify with the Tea Party are far from consistent about this. Some of the contradictions are stunning. Still, it’s revealing that their critics are so concerned that through the Tea Party, anti-authoritarianism, anti-elitism, and anti-corporatism appear to be on the rise.

I would describe my own attitude towards the Tea Party movement as positive but not strongly so, due to the mixture of good and bad traits Richman describes in the article, and due to my memories of the Clinton years. I've seen these bursts of anti-statism on the Right rise and then fizzle out before, so I remain skeptical.

Still, they are vastly more attractive then their typical opponent in politics or the media. If nothing else, they've provided a valuable lesson by getting the mainline Left to drop the "Dissent is patriotic" pretense of the Bush era and show its fascistic true colors again. The snarling contempt and berserk, hysterical rage and hatred with which so much of the political and media establishment has responded to virtually any serious opposition or defiance, the relentless smearing, vilification, dehumanization, and demonization of dissenters, and the open calls for censorship and prosecution of Obama critics have been most instructive.
The Right in America did not cover itself in glory with the way it approached political disagreement in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to put it mildly. However, I'll say this in their defense: when conservatives started responding to anyone who disagreed with them by shrieking like the Daleks on Dr. Who, it was in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that utterly destroyed two of the most prominent buildings in America's largest city, blasted a gaping hole in the side of the Pentagon, and killed nearly 3,000 people. Liberals are doing it with equal or greater intensity because citizens are holding peaceful rallies against deficit spending, health care nationalization, and corporate welfare, there's a cable news channel where people say unpleasant things about Dear Leader, and an ultimately unsuccessful minority in Congress caused sweeping legislation desired by the Democrats to take slightly longer to get through Congress by having the outrageous temerity to actually not vote in favor of it.

On a related note, there have been good recent posts at The Agitator (Progressives for State-Sanctioned Corporate Monopoly) and Coyote Blog (Fiat Garbage), both talking about the relationship between progressives and wealthy, privileged business interests. Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog sums it up pretty well:

If you can understand why progressives attack any corporation that they voluntarily do business with for having too much power, but defend any corporation backed by government authority, you will start to figure out exactly what progressives are really after.

What they say in their posts about the present day is also true historically: progressivism/left-liberalism/moderate statist leftism has never been nearly as hostile to Big Business, socioeconomic privilege, concentrations of wealth, or powerful megacorporations as the popular image suggests. All of those things are fully compatible with an ideology based on elite management of society- what isn't is an economy overrun with independent, competing enterprises that arise, change, grow, shrink, and die according to voluntary consumer choices that the ruling elite can't control or predict. Speaking of which, at the Center for a Stateless Society's site Kevin Carson has a relatively recent paper, "The Thermidor of the Progressives" (PDF file), that is very interesting reading on this and related subjects. Probably my favorite quote:

Concurrent with the conventional liberal model of industrial organization there is, in every aspect of life, a managerial-professional priesthood controlling the range of services available and reducing the average person to client status. Mainstream liberalism extends beyond a Schumpeterian affinity for large organizations to an affinity for the professionalization of every aspect of life even in the realm of individual exchange and social relations. As with large-scale organization, the affinity seems to a considerable extent to be aesthetic: regulation and licensing—any regulation, any form of licensing, as such—is “progressive,” and any opposition to it is “right-wing.”

I've said it before, and I'm sure I will again- statism and control is not progressivism's means to some other end. It is progressivism's end. If it conflicts with the supposed goal of aiding and defending the poor and underprivileged, it's the latter who are expendable. Few of the rank-and-file would be on board with this if they really understood it, I'm sure- but no successful statist ideology is short of people good at making sure it isn't understood.

The taint of trade

The consistently execrable Jacob Weisberg recently had an article at Slate excoriating Peter Thiel for his recently announced plan, the Thiel Fellowship, that will give promising young people money to pursue their technological and entrepreneurial ideas instead of going to college. Weisberg, appalled by what he considers to be a display of "an ugly side of Silicon Valley's politics," responds with an article, "Turn on, Start Up, Drop Out Hyper-libertarian Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel's appalling plan to pay students to quit college," that seems almost intentionally designed to push as many of my buttons as possible. After some generic anti-libertarian boilerplate (Gordon Gekko! Unapologetic selfishness! Economic Darwinism! GLENN BECK!), a bit of pearl-clutching horror at Thiel's impious remarks about American democracy, and some middle school-level sneering about "computer nerds" and Thiel's interest in technology, Weisberg gets to the meat of his criticism:

Where to start with this nasty idea? A basic feature of the venture capitalist's worldview is its narcissism, and with that comes the desire to clone oneself—perhaps literally in Thiel's case. Thus Thiel fellows will have the opportunity to emulate their sponsor by halting their intellectual development around the onset of adulthood, maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible, and thereby avoid the siren lure of helping others or contributing to the advances in basic science that have made the great tech fortunes possible. Thiel's program is premised on the idea that America suffers from a deficiency of entrepreneurship. In fact, we may be on the verge of the opposite, a world in which too many weak ideas find funding and every kid dreams of being the next Mark Zuckerberg. This threatens to turn the risk-taking startup model into a white boy's version of the NBA, diverting a generation of young people from the love of knowledge for its own sake and respect for middle-class values.

Where to start, indeed? Various things that this article brought to mind:

The "basic feature of the venture capitalist's worldview" remark would be an asinine statement in any context, but the subject at hand lifts it from being just another example of the mainstream's Left's aristocratic contempt for commerce to something more interesting. Weisberg, a college-educated employee of a large media conglomerate, has dedicated a whole article to condemning Thiel for narcissistically trying trying to "clone" himself by encouraging young people to become entrepreneurs, because this will stop them from doing what Weisberg thinks a right-thinking young person ought to do- go to college and then get a job working for somebody else.

The fact that Weisberg equates young people not going to college with “halting their intellectual development around the onset of adulthood” says so much about Weisberg's view of the world. Intellectual development is something that only occurs through public gatherings with strangers presided over by officially sanctioned authority figures at large government-controlled or government-supported institutions. He simply takes this as given. If he saw me back when I was a kid, putting enough effort into school to make people leave me alone and then reading about history or science or politics on my own in my free time because I thought they were interesting, he'd probably be terribly confused.

Weisberg offers no reason to accept his assumption that Thiel's program somehow entails "maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible" or avoiding "the siren call of helping others" that allegedly exists in college, aside from Weisberg's smug sense of superiority and sneering aristocratic prejudice against people interested in business. It also says something that when Weisberg talks about the negative results he thinks Thiel's program might cause, his Chilling Vision of Things to Come is a world where “every kid dreams of being the next Mark Zuckerberg”- that is, a man who became wealthy by creating something millions of people enjoy.

It's remarkable how much contempt oozes from Weisberg's article. Contempt for entrepreneurs and businessmen, of course, but also for anyone without formal educational credentials like Weisberg's. This doesn't surprise me- I've long thought that most of liberalism/progressivism as we know it today is basically aristocratic conservatism in Enlightenment drag, with the landed gentleman's disgust and disdain for the bourgeoisie and the vulgar world of commerce, contemptuous paternalism towards the peasantry, and unthinking presumption of his own superiority. The idea that businessmen are soulless money machines was a reactionary prejudice before it was a "progressive" one.

Without college, your "intellectual development" inescapably stops forever at 18. College is also apparently a prerequisite for having an interest in "helping others," since avoiding college is apparently a sufficient condition to avoid exposure to the idea. If you went directly into the workforce or started learning a skilled trade after high school, you're a profoundly stunted human being.

(I doubt that was the thought running through Weisberg's brain when he wrote this, but that doesn't mean he didn't say it. One of the common symptoms of an ingrained belief in one's own superior value is a tendency to insult people without realizing it.)

This doesn't surprise me, either- if my knowledge of the world came entirely from what media figures and intellectuals on the American moderate Left said and wrote, I'd probably be under the impression that most poor and working class Americans, and a good chunk of the middle class too, were part of some sort of bestial race of subhuman ape-men that H. sapiens had domesticated out of pity. It's not usually this explicit, though.

I don't know how Weisberg has divined that we are on the brink of having too many entrepreneurs and not enough salarymen, or why he thinks wanting to go into business for yourself instead is a "white boy" thing. (Or how this article managed to get past however many pairs of eyes saw it before it was published without the "Maybe implying that only white boys would be interested in working for a chance to gain greater autonomy, be productive, and achieve their dreams isn't such a great idea" issue being brought up at some point.)

The chief problem with staking one's future on the slim hope of being a professional athlete, which Weisberg compares Thiel's idea to, is that the skills don't transfer to other things. If you're not a professional athlete, being really good at basketball has few money-making applications. The sort of skills a kid who wanted to grow up to be an entrepreneur would cultivate do, though that's probably hard to understand if you think that people who run start their own businesses spend all their time fondling big sacks of money, carefully avoiding any stimuli that might spur intellectual development or a desire to help others, and cackling like the Wicked Witch of the West. Besides, unless the Fellowship involves some sort of blood oath promising to never go to college, it's not as if this permanently closes off that option.

What does Weisberg mean here by "middle-class values?" The idea that going to college is going to teach things like industry, thrift, prudence, or restraint more effectively than trying to start and operate a new enterprise would- or do much to inculcate them at all, in most cases- is ridiculous. On the other hand, there's another sort of "middle-class value" that Thiel's plan does threaten. I'm from a middle-class, white-collar background. When I was growing up, there was perhaps no greater taboo among my people than not going to college. (Or "the unspeakable vice of the technical schools," as it is more politely called when ladies and children are present.) And that was back in the 90s, before the current "absolutely every child must go to college" mania had established itself, and among mundane white-collar professionals rather than people in the media or other "intellectual" fields, so I can only imagine what it's like in the sort of circles Weisberg moves in in the present day. For someone of Weisberg's socioeconomic class in modern America, foregoing college is Just Not Done. It's one of the things separating him from Those People.

Weisberg’s horror makes sense, given the elitism, credentialism, and often-venomous snobbery so common among liberal/progressive intellectuals and partisans. And if you fancy yourself part of an intellectual and moral elite, the sort of person lesser breeds need for their own salvation, someone who publicly challenges the value of one of the traits required to be part of that elite is a social menace and, for lack of a better word, impious.

For someone of Weisberg's expressed attitudes, the fact that this is coming from a lowly businessman championing things as base, dirty, and ungentlemanly as commerce and entrepreneurship would make it especially appalling. And if you place as much emphasis on social, cultural, and class markers as Weisberg’s ideological ilk frequently seem to, and despise people with the wrong such markers as much as Weisberg clearly and vehemently does, I suppose Thiel must seem like a secular Devil leading souls to damnation.