A headline at The Guardian demands that we put abstractions in hierarchical order. That's a style of thinking that feminists used to consider phallocratic.
Why can't 2 things be considered important and capable of balancing and coordination, considered in context? I remember when feminists criticized men for their unwillingness/inability to engage in that kind of complex thinking.
(Note: The underlying article does not support the headline.)
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Any other crimes they want to do away with due process for?
And we cannot "do away" with rape if they keep redefining sex as rape.
Astonishing segue from rape to sexual harassment
The man-hating dystopia never came. Not only did erections survive unscathed, but sexual harassment continued to flourish. Today, we don’t see scores of men fired or denied justice because of innocent compliments or dirty jokes ...
Sir Timothy Hunt begs to differ. So does Dr. Matt Taylor and his shirt.
(Note: The underlying article does not support the headline.)
Then again, how much support does the headline need? Does anyone believe we can stop rape? If not, then you can put anything after the if and have a true statement.
We can't stop rape if we prize men's reputations over women's safety. - True
We can't stop rape if we don't prize men's reputations over women's safety. - True
We can't stop rape if we hop up and down on one foot. - True
We can't stop rape if we don't hop up and down on one foot. - True
"better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent party suffer"
Not anymore.
"Why can't 2 things be considered important and capable of balancing and coordination, considered in context? "
I feel conflicted about this.
I am Laslo.
"Why would a woman ever lie about rape?" I don't hear that one as much anymore. But memories will fade and that question will be asked again ... until there is another Duke lacrosse case, UVA frat case, or Tawana Brawley.
This Jessica Valenti's name sounds familiar. Was she the one wearing a booby shirt around Bill Clinton at that Harlem lunch?
Circa 1990 — when I wrote about and taught law school classes on the subject of rape — the feminist position wasn't just the question "Why would a woman lie?," it was a flat assertion women don't lie about rape. The point was that it's so hard to go through the process that few victims even report, so when someone does, it must be real. Once you make the process much easier, however, the dynamic is different.
Never could figure out why they thought rape was the one crime people didn't lie about.
The headline begs the question. Why do they think men who rape care about their reputations?
When I think of making the (criminal) process easier, I think of rape shield laws. The process is indeed less of an ordeal than it used to be, but I think something in the culture has changed since then. I do not think many people consider it shameful to be a victim of rape, despite all the feminist agitation to the contrary. I actually doubt it ever was considered shameful to be a victim, to be honest - although I would say squeamishness in general about sex has faded since 1990 - but now being a rape victim also entitles you to widespread "support" (i.e., attention) from others. Or, as others have said, a special status.
Re-defining rape in the non-criminal context, as they have done in California, is only going to exacerbate the risk of false accusations. The intention is to make any ambiguous or regretted sexual scenario into rape, if the woman says so later. This will creep into the criminal law.
If the concern is really about preventing sexual assault than there are things far less important than due process and the presumption of innocence that we might consider doing away with instead. Binge drinking and the hook-up culture come to mind.
So if we take Valenti's analogy with sexual-harassment law seriously, we should go haead and do what she wants on rape law because it'll turn out to be ineffectual and not make much of a difference to anyone? Noted.
No person who backs the Clintons has anything worthwhile to say about sexual harassment. Valenti apparently cares so much about sexual harassment that she is willing to provide cover for the most high-profile sexual harasser of the past two decades, and his enabler.
I think what baffles me is how unnecessary the feminist support of the Clintons is (for the feminists, I mean). It's not as though they'd be losing anything to say "sorry, you may claim to be on our side but we cannot excuse what you've done". If anything they'd save some shred of credibility. But what has their alliance with the Clintons gotten them? It's not as though they're the only electable Democrats around.
Does anybody know any good reputation jokes?
There's safety in numbers. That would be a good STEM advertisement directed at women.
Rape was a Capital Crime like Murder before the 5 Philosopher Kings ruled that was cruel punishment.
Now the lesser punishment is automatic when a sexually active woman gets herself intoxicated at an orgiastic rock concert and the goes with him to a known sexually active man's room and makes out for an hour until she has sex and then she suddenly regrets it the next week when he doesn't call her, much less send flowers.
War on women.
From the article: In fact, while the number of complaints received by the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission has gone down significantly since the 1990s, the percentage of cases found to have “no reasonable cause” has only risen.
Valenti uses this fact as evidence of a need for more-relaxed standards, I think. Either she's not too bright or she expects that her readers aren't--there are fewer complaints now and more of those complaints are found to be baseless (after having been investigated) and Valenti thinks this clearly demonstrates that 1. the problem of sexual harassment is at least as bad (if not worse) than it used to be and 2.) that we don't need to listen to complaints that innocent people are harmed by baseless allegations. Her evidence demonstrates the exact opposite! She asserts that the problem is as bad as ever but offers only an individual anecdote to support that assertion while referencing comprehensive statistics on EEOC complaints that show the exact opposite.
"Things are as bad as ever, trust me, even though these statistics I'm going to reference show the opposite. The fact that the statistics don't support my assertion is PROOF of my assertion!"
Like I said, she's either stupid herself or secure in her belief that her readers aren't bright enough to pick up on the obvious illogic on display.
The article has a picture of Emma Sulkowicz with the following caption: Emma Sulkowicz, then a senior visual arts student at Columbia University, carries a mattress, with the help of two strangers who met her moments before, in protest of the university’s lack of action after she reported being raped during her sophomore year
I might be remembering the case incorrectly but I'm pretty sure the university DID take action by investigating her complaint (and the complaints of at least two other women with whom she coordinated)...it's just that even in the highly-complaintant-favoring university investigatory system the didn't find sufficient reason to take actions against the guy she alleged committed crimes. Similarly the actual police "didn't take action" after she initially made a complaint then decided not to cooperate and left the cops with no options to pursue a case.
"Didn't take action" must mean "didn't get the result I want when no official body, no matter how biased towards me, could agree that result was warranted."
I saw on my Facebook feed that Lena Dunham is all over Bill Cosby, but then gives Bill Clinton a pass while interviewing his number one defender. It's sort as if it weren't about rape, but about ideology, Bill Cosby being sort of a Booker T. Washington type in bad odor these days among the #BLACKLIVESMATTER crowd.
"The man-hating dystopia never came. Not only did erections survive unscathed, but sexual harassment continued to flourish. Today, we don’t see scores of men fired or denied justice because of innocent compliments or dirty jokes; instead perpetrators routinely go unpunished, their victims ignored and disparaged.
Renowned astronomer Geoffrey Marcy, for example, was found guilty this summer of serially harassing women over the course of almost a decade yet wasn’t fired or suspended from his prominent position at UC Berkeley."
Hmm.. Makes you wonder if employee provisions might allow them special consideration vs mere adult male students.
Maybe a better headline representative of the alternative universe campus keeps building is...
""We can't stop rape if we keep expanding its definition recklessly.""
Juanita Broaddrick was ashamed to have been raped by Bill Clinton. She was ashamed that she had allowed herself to get into the situation of being in a hotel room with him alone.
Bill Clinton's definition of consent is "Is alone with me and possibly one or more armed security personnel."
Brian Banks could have a few things to say about false rape charges.
Brian Banks made the toughest decision of his life at the age of 17.
He had the choice between taking a plea deal for a rape he did not commit, which included a sentence of 90 days to six years in prison, or taking his case to juried trial, where he was facing up to life in prison.
The Long Beach native was given 10 minutes to pick his fate without council from even his mother. Thirteen years later, the memory of that decision remains at the center of Banks’ teachings around the world.
“We don’t always have control with our life, but we have control over our response, our reaction and what we do moving forward,” Banks said to more than 200 students, parents and staff Tuesday at Ann Arbor Skyline High School.
“It’s not what we go through in life, it’s how we let it affect us and it’s what you do next.”
Skyline athletic director Jeremy Barkey invited Banks to speak to students from the school and around the area in what he hopes to be the first event of an annual motivational speaker series moving forward.
His life was destroyed by a false rape accusation. A bit more than his "reputation."
Why are feminists so sad that there are fewer and fewer rapes.?
I wonder how she would ave felt if the editor had substituted the Duke Lacrosse Team pic and swapped Bill Clinton for Justice Thomas.
Oh yeah, poorly written, (as noted above) self contradictory and no sense of the impact of false accusations (notice no mention of men kicked from college and their records permanently marked).
Here, let me fix that headline for them:
We can't stop rape if we value "not punishing the innocent" as much as we do "punishing the guilty".
Michael K said...
Brian Banks could have a few things to say about false rape charges.
The case that most clearly demonstrates campus activist goals is that of Drew Sterrett (included in the Slate link below but any google news search will bring up numerous articles).
There are two key elements activists and institutions are normally more successful at hiding:
1. The Title IX Investigator, Heather Cowan, literally invented the facts necessary to justify her guilty finding. Even the accuser stipulated in her deposition that the claims Cowan relied on were not true and were never asserted by the accuser.
2. After what any reasonable person would understand as a debacle Heather Cowan, previously a Title IX Investigator, was hired by the U of New Mexico as their Title IX Coordinator, a significant increase in job status.
The simple truth is that campus sexual assault institutions exist to find men guilty without regard to evidence or actual guilt. Actual guilt is an irrelevant fact to them. By demonstrating her commitment to those goals Heather Cowan proved herself loyal enough to advance to the next level of these corrupt institutions.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/09/drew_sterrett_and_university_of_michigan_the_school_vacates_its_findings.html
Presumed guilty because... you're a man. That sounds a bit prejudiced.
Perhaps they should stop denigrating individual dignity and debasing human life. Both progressive morality and the pro-choice cult have been bad for humanity.
@Michael, good question. Let's ask Professor Althouse.
The man-hating dystopia never came. Not only did erections survive unscathed, but sexual harassment continued to flourish. Today, we don’t see scores of men fired or denied justice because of innocent compliments or dirty jokes; instead perpetrators routinely go unpunished, their victims ignored and disparaged.
Valenti believes more men should be getting in trouble for their innocent compliments and dirty jokes. The man-hating dystopia is here, despite Valenti's assertions. It's just not as successful as Valenti would have hoped because there are a few that still, despite the odds, believe there is some pushback.
"two strangers who met her moments before"
Those are the best kind of threesomes, aren't they?
-I am (not) Laslo.
Did I miss the term "Due Process"?
Will public prosecutors charge those making false claims of sexual assault (Whatever that means)?
The Magna Carta said it expired in exactly 800 years, didn't it?
And let me add this plea. Please put me on the jury for Nungessor v. Columbia. Please!!!
Female privilege > male right to justice
There must be hundreds of these rules. We could just write them down on a piece of paper nailed to the wall, and whenever a question comes up, we could just refer to it. Trials are wasteful, prisons provide good jobs. What's not to like?
"it was a flat assertion women don't lie about rape. The point was that it's so hard to go through the process that few victims even report, so when someone does, it must be real."
Which you challenged as complete and utter BS, right?
"Once you make the process much easier, however, the dynamic is different"
Even easier, you mean, with the "different" dynamic even more likely to railroad men?
rhhardin said...
Does anybody know any good reputation jokes?
"The British have a reputation for keeping calm even when there is no crisis."
IOW, "no".
Ann Althouse said...
— the feminist position ... was a flat assertion women don't lie about rape.
So feminists lied about rape. Shocking.
“The current frenzy to prove Jackie’s story false—whether because the horror of a violent gang rape is too much to face or because disbelief is the misogynist status quo—will do incredible damage to all rape victims, but it is this one young woman who will suffer most,” -- JV writing about the Virginia case. To me what was "frenzied" was not the attempt to show that a bunch of completely innocent young men did not commit a brutal gang rape -- it was the rush to assume that such an utterly implausible thing (at the University of Virginia) must have occurred; frenzied because so many feminists of JV's ilk so badly wanted it to have occurred, which is why JV and her ilk criticized early on those who started to question the story.
damikesc said...
Never could figure out why they thought rape was the one crime people didn't lie about.
That's easy: they're leftists, which means they're liars. They didn't claim it because they thought it was true, they claimed it because they thought they could get away with it.
"Never could figure out why they thought rape was the one crime people didn't lie about."
Because they didn't want to believe it--nuance and counterexeamples are the enemy of the ideologue. If a significant number of rape accusations were false then the push to dismantle due process rights for people accused of just this specific crime would be a lot more problematic. How could you in good conscience advocate ruining innocent people's lives? Well, you don't have to worry (as much) about that tradeoff if those innocent people don't exist.
In Valenti's world, the only woman to lie about rape was Juanita Broderick.
"Skyline athletic director Jeremy Barkey invited Banks to speak to students from the school and around the area"
Wow..at a public school..did that guy get fired?
This is one of those "shouldn't touch with a barge pole" topics with more insane notions per acre than any intellectual turf outside of North Korea.
Nowhere are people bringing up the obvious distinction of Hard Rape and Soft Rape.
I am Laslo.
At the bottom of this is the fact that conservatives think rape is a prison worthy crime and feminists think that it is not actually worth the bother to put a man in prison.
Sorry, that's Nungesser, with an 'e'. But I still want to be on the jury.
"Sorry, that's Nungesser, with an 'e'. But I still want to be on the jury."
They'll never put anyone on a jury who seems to want to be on it. You need to convey the attitude of "eh, maybe I'll do jury duty, it is my civic duty after all" or "what's a jury?"
Ann Althouse said...(Note: The underlying article does not support the headline.)
What DOES the underlying article support? I read it again and I still don't know. It makes a strong case that Valenti isn't a sharp person, isn't a good writer, or both, maybe, but I can't find much else in it. If Valenti's supposed to be a good example of her "cause" then I guess it supports the idea that her brand of feminism is illogical, fact-challenged, and disingenuous, I guess.
Ann Althouse said...Circa 1990 — when I wrote about and taught law school classes on the subject of rape — the feminist position wasn't just the question "Why would a woman lie?," it was a flat assertion women don't lie about rape.
Let's not pretend that's not still the position of lots of prominent feminists circa 2015, Professor--the "UVA gang rape hoax" case demonstrated that pretty clearly. The term they use now for anyone bringing up any question about extreme claims is "rape apologist," and the meaning is clear--either you fully believe any accusation (remember, Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has confirmed that women have a RIGHT TO BE BELEIVEED) or you support the rape culture and/or are partially to blame for rapes.
The problem with Valenti's article is that its evaluation of the current state of affairs regarding sexual harassment relies on assertions of fact unsupported by evidence.
What's more, it is a trivial issue compared to the telepathic influence of Martians on the Federal Reserve. We all know about it since the early 1990s, and from what I see, it's getting worse. And we cannot afford another cleverly disguised municipal bond issue for a canal infrastructure project on the so-called "red planet." I am completely offended.
A modest counter proposal: "We can't stop Gulags if we prize leftist speech over human life."
Given that the Left has a long history of perpetrating mass murder, or making excuses for same, I Modestly Suggest that when leftists are accused of a crime they should be presumed guilty until proved innocent. By leftist logic my proposal is entirely reasonable.
Won't someone please ask Hillary whether Juanita Broaddrick (or Paula Jones, or Kathleen Willey, or ...) has a "right to be believed"?
"Women don't lie about rape." is sort of like the Muslim tenet that the word of a Muslim is to be believed over a non Muslim in a court of law.
Islam is sort of interesting because it is all about privilege in the end, mostly male privilege, but also societal privilege. Feminism is also about privilege.
@Brando, noted.
Note: The article appends a picture of Emma Sulkowicz, whose accusations have remained unproven--at best--despite extensive investigation, and who has turned her ruining of a classmate's reputation into a fledgling career.
Won't someone please ask Hillary whether Juanita Broaddrick (or Paula Jones, or Kathleen Willey, or ...) has a "right to be believed"?
Those lying bimbo harlots? Hardly.
"That's a style of thinking that feminists used to consider phallocratic."
That is because men have had thousands of years of experience in running public life. If any "non-phallocratic" method were to be tried, it would collapse when challenged by a phallocratic society.
Where are these successful non-phallocratric societies located in time and place? Nowhere in the New World, nowhere in the Old World. Not in Africa, not in Asia, not in Australia, not in Oceania. Not in the stone age, the bronze age, or the iron age. Not in the Classical world, the Medieval World, or in modern times.
Why do bicycles have any rights, whatsoever?
At least fish have a chance at sentience.
If you believed the Leftists who promoted Leftist "feminism" in the 1990s you were a dupe or willfully ignorant, Professor Althouse.
In the old days when a man lost his reputation he would go elsewhere, often it was the start of an adventure - like out East, or out West, or down South, or some other frontier or exotic land, sometimes to serve in the Ottoman Army (Hicks Pasha, etc.), enlist in the ranks for colonial service (Kipling's "Gentlemen Rankers"), and of course there was always the French Foreign Legion, where men went to forget, and the Spanish Legion, where men went to die -
Soy un hombre a quien la suerte
hirió con zarpa de fiera;
soy un novio de la muerte
que va a unirse en lazo fuerte
con tal leal compañera.
Well, that's what we need - a hint of romance again.
When disgraced men become the subject of romantic ballads this will turn around.
Funny it hasn't happened yet. The modern imagination is stunted.
I just love it when Valenti preaches about how awful "rape culture" is but fails, again, to say anything at all about the 1,500 girls raped in Rotherham. I guess that wasn't really a rape culture.
Birth control and abortion do a great job of stopping rape by making any genetic propensity to rape less likely with each succeeding generation. Too bad this SJW isn't asking about how to stop murder, fraud, assault and theft, though. But I get it. Only one special gender gets to have a monopoly on demanding to overcome the susceptibility shared by all humans to criminal injury.
Idiocy this aggressive and insulting can only result from two things: Bad parenting and bad breeding. No, we can't do anything about that, either.
This douche-lady reminds me of the dude that Ali G tried to incite to violence in defense of his peaceful environmental views:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ9o1KHi-mY
I have a screenplay !
This will make millions -
- Boy meets girl, unfortunately in some elite college.
- Girl is young and neurotic, boy is very boy
- They fall out, and she, having fallen into bad company, makes claims of rape
- Boy is thrown out, reputation and career prospects are ruined
- Boy goes East and joins Kurdish Army, fighting ISIS or whomever
- Boy has cinematic adventures and rescues beautiful Yazidi girl from real rapists, etc.
- Romance ensues
- In the meantime girl is unhappy and joins the SJW version of the Foreign Legion, an NGO
- Girl is mixed up in some refugee-relief thing when she is kidnapped by ISIS and held hostage.
- Naturally she must be rescued, etc.
- Adventure, cinematic violence, tragedy and romantic complications !
What couldn't be done with such a setup ?
Althouse taught rape in 1990. And here we are today.
One of the best World War One memoirs I've read is Warbirds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator. It isn't quite what it seems. The author was really the comrade and biographer of the "unknown aviator" of the title, who disappeared somewhere over France in 1918.
The book is gritty. It was published before A Farewell to Arms, but is very Hemingwayesque. You learn how much American pilots drank (a lot) and what they did for female companionship when posted to Britain (enlisted men and non-coms had prostitute girlfriends, officers had "actress" girlfriends).
The anonymous aviator is a southern aristocrat who has done something disgraceful and volunteered for a deadly post in the military so that he can die with honor. He never says what the disgraceful thing was, but in later years his identity was revealed (John Grider). He was, in fact, a wealthy southerner. He was young, married to a person of similar social class, with several children. He had a reputation as a bit of a rake.
In 1917 he and his wife divorced, reason unknown. He liquidated his property, bought his ex-wife a home in another state, and gave her his remaining wealth. He then joined the army air force and shipped to England.
My guess is he gave his wife the clap.
Do you a agree with women that rape is a social gaffe that should result in ostracism?
"Warbirds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator"
I have that, in a very early edition. Great book.
Its free now on Gutenberg, and probably Google.
Fine.
Accuse all male college students of rape; kick them all out of school.
Does that eliminate the risk of rape for female students?
"Law professor Anita Hill was harangued by male legislators, her accusations of horrific harassment dismissed,"
I stopped reading after this lie. Professor Hill was treated with Kid gloves not only by the Democrats but by all the Republicans. No one wanted to be the nasty White man beating up on the Saintly Black women. OTOH, Thomas was trashed by the Democrats - a "High-tech Lynching".
Valenti needs to be subjected to her own standard. As do all feminists.
Did her hand linger on yours when you handed her a pen? Sexual assault. Report her.
Did you take her home one night and wake up with remorse? You were raped. Report her.
Did she say something mean about men? Sexual harassment. Report her.
Feminists, both female and male, reconcile individual dignity and intrinsic value with a mutated logic, used to construct an ideology that serves humanity with a dish of fava beans and a glass of Chianti.
Silence of the Lambs was a historically prescient prophecy of progressive corruption in a highly sophisticated, unprincipled society.
"Althouse taught rape in 1990. And here we are today."
Those who can't - teach.
I stopped reading after this lie. Professor Hill was treated with Kid gloves not only by the Democrats but by all the Republicans. No one wanted to be the nasty White man beating up on the Saintly Black women. OTOH, Thomas was trashed by the Democrats - a "High-tech Lynching".
Hell, Hill kept following him to new jobs, even when the new boss at her old jobs asked her to stay.
Next to the miracle of life the most amazing thing is the in the world is women complaining about a man while they're following him around. It really never ceases to gobsmack me.
Its nice how they want us to jettison the idea that you have due process rights or that that you have a presumption of innocence.
Fen wrote:
Did she say something mean about men? Sexual harassment. Report her.
Men should complain that women's studies courses are hate speech. Get them banned from colleges. Do men have courses that teach that women are the cause of the problems of the world? We need a safe space and trigger warnings to deal with al that female hate speech.
jr565 wrote:
Men should complain that women's studies courses are hate speech.
If only the czar knew!
Laslo Spatula said...
Nowhere are people bringing up the obvious distinction of Hard Rape and Soft Rape.
The soft rape of poor sexual discernment.
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