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Featured Archive Post: I talk about the weirdness that is Garfield’s Nine Lives.
I write about seeing yourself as Rogue seeing yourself in Lacan
James Romberger on comics by Meskin, Johnson, Strnad/Corben and more.
Caroline Small on why David Lowry is a crappy spokesperson for copyright policy.
From the archive, Kelly Thompson on Rogue.
Richard Cook with a history of early superheroines in covers.
Marguerite Van Cook on the postmodern sublime in comics.
A downloadable mix of jazzy fuzoid.
I talk about Carla Speed McNeil, Anna Freud, and beating fantasies.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Splice Today I review Merle Haggard’s last great album.
Also at Splice I argue that more books doesn’t mean better schools. Also, a bonus drawing of an alien waiting for the bus by my son.
Other Links
Brigid Alverson profiled.
Jessica Valenti on the difference between funny and unfunny rape jokes.
Mary McCarthy speaks out for lazy parents everywhere.
And Alyssa Rosenberg dubs me an honorary hypersensitive lady.
Good grief, that Valenti article is wrong on so many things.
The Silverman rape joke, which is the funniest cited, not only doesn’t “shed light on what’s wrong with rape,” but throws in a Jewish stereotype without criticizing that, either. Black humor is absurd, yes, but in a surrealistic way, never as a direct ideological critique. That’s why the Carlin joke about Porky raping Elmer isn’t particularly funny: it’s explaining what’s wrong with rape, as if it’s not perfectly obvious what’s wrong with rape. Granted, there are people who only laugh when their morality is being upheld, but those aren’t people with a dark sense of humor.
Tosh (the criticized comedian) actually tells a pretty good rape joke (in one of Valenti’s links) about how he replaced his sister’s mace with silly string on the day she happened to be threatened on the street. I agree, however, that his reaction to the heckler wasn’t funny, but because it was said in a direct, literal manner along the lines of ideological comedy. Few are going to find this funny if they don’t agree with rape. Consider Bill Hicks (my perfect example of an unfunny comedian who is famous solely for expressing the correct views of his target audience): in one of his most celebrated bits, he suggests that ad men should kill themselves … no, really, they should kill themselves. I’ve never seen many leftists react with disgust to this joke, nor would they if he had suggested a public raping of ad men (he might’ve gotten into more trouble with joking about raping ad women). This all has to do with agreeing with him on the immorality of his target. Sam Kinison and Eddie Murphy used to do the same thing with gays: simply mocking anal sex was all they had to offer about what’s funny about homosexuality. That’s ideological comedy in a nutshell. I rarely find it funny, but many do (lots of people still love Lenny Bruce). If people don’t agree with your point, you’re not funny.
Another factor not considered here is that comedians aren’t typically very funny in reacting to hecklers (watch that film Heckler to see what I mean, or just search for ‘heckler’ on YouTube). Michael Richards was the last notorious example of this. Writing comedy takes time, so when you’re in the middle of a crafted act and some idiot interrupts you, comedians aren’t typically any better than anyone else in saying just the right thing at the right time. It’s legitimate to be angry with someone who insists on shouting through a play, so why not a comedy act? Instead, Valenti says this:
A comedian during his act doesn’t like to have “his standing privilege challenged”? No shit. People paid to hear the comedian, not the heckler. And, for the record, she wasn’t any funnier than Tosh’s reaction. (Nor was she right.) In hindsight, he should’ve made light of what she said, not reacted with anger. There definitely was not much of joke in what he said, so he needed to apologize, but so should she for interrupting a routine and destroying the comedy that night.
Finally, we get this nonsense:
Why, it’s amazing that anyone would read something like The Handmaid’s Tale as anything but a journalistic report.
The Handmaid’s tale is problematic in various ways. But women are in fact threatened with rape on a fairly regular basis online; female bloggers get that nonsense all the time. Rhetorical against women (in rap, say) is pretty standard — somewhat confusingly, it’s often presented as a way to look “edgy” even though it is quite common.
Haven’t heard Bill Hicks. Lenny Bruce always sounded fairly awful. But…suggesting that there’s not an ideological component to all comedy seems wrong. The question is how the ideology and the comedy fit together — which seems to be more or less what Valenti is saying.
I thought hecklers were an established part of comedy club entertainment? I kind of hate stand-up, so I guess I wouldn’t know.
Well, everything can be read ideologically — I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. There are comedians who more or less just state what’s wrong with something, their fans laugh in agreement, and that’s the humor (think Bill Maher). This isn’t the case with someone like Silverman whose humor lies in making statements that if taken literally and directly as humorous would be extremely problematic for anyone who wasn’t evil.
I agree about rap and I have no reason to doubt a lot female bloggers get noxious comments from anonymous sources all the time. Is that really the status quo in our society? Is that what’s considered normative? Is the majority of men in your life threatening women with rape? That’s not my circle of friends, I can safely say. Nor do most of the women I know regularly face such threats. I have a lot of friends who love rap, and none of them agrees with every sentiment expressed in the music (not to deny that there aren’t people out there who do agree with many of the more noxious elements). I love right-wing country sentiment while not agreeing with it. It provides me with a lot of humor, in fact.
And comedians tend to really hate hecklers (that documentary makes that pretty clear from a wide range of comedians).
Come on, Lenny Bruce is killingly funny.
Some classic vaudeville anti-heckler comebacks:
“You’re what we get when we let cousins marry”.
“When your I.Q. hits 50, sell.”
“Hey, if I needed shit from you, I’d squeeze your head.”
“Why don’t you put an egg in your shoe and beat it?”
“Make a noise like a hoop and roll away.”
As for that particular heckler, remember the wise words of Bill Murray:
“If you can’t handle M.I.G.s, don’t fly in M.I.G Alley.”
Setting aside thorny questions of humor, subversion, what’s funny, etc., one of the big things that separates men’s experience of the world and women’s is that men can be reasonably certain they won’t be raped coming home from work, while women cannot. It’s really not controversial to say that women live in a society in which they constantly feel threatened with rape. The fact is that rape happens with alarming frequency to women in every strata of society, from inner city projects to Ivy League dorms.
I’m cautious of being mugged, but I’m not sure of the statistical likelihood of that. Fear isn’t always indicative of the facts, you know? Doesn’t hurt to be vigilant, though. But in most instances of walking Hollywood’s streets, I’m not going to be mugged, even though it’s more likely here than in some peaceful suburb.
Bruce’s reactions are wittier than Tosh’s — I’ll grant you that.
“Fear isn’t always indicative of the facts, you know?”
I think this is a little confused. The issue isn’t whether women are accurately assessing the likelihood of rape. The issue is that *the fear of rape is itself oppressive, and is itself part of patriarchal control.*
Fear of being mugged is quite different than fear of being raped. And the fear of rape is enabled by a whole structure of sexualized violence and threat. That includes internet harassment of women as well as street harassment (which is endemic, and which men are often completely oblivious to.)
I would say that the social norms around violence against women are somewhat contested, and vary across social strata. But many women, a lot of the time, experience our society as one imbued with violence and the threat of violence. And telling a woman to shut up by threatening her with rape happens all the time.
I mean…the Handmaid’s Tale is in fact about our society, like any dystopia is about the society that produced it. It’s not the only truth, and there are ways she stacks the deck (by taking the experiences of minority women and transferring them to white women, for example.) But it’s not like she’s talking about a fantasy world, either.
The really basic fact is women are a lot more likely to get raped than men. Whether it happens to more or less than 25% of American women is rather beside the point for the reason Noah just stated. Most discipline is exerted not by brute force by it’s threat.
That last sentence was supposed to read:
“Most discipline is exerted not by brute force but by it’s threat.”
No, it was supposed to read:
“Most discipline is exerted not by brute force but by its threat.”
Isn’t it true that the fear is itself oppressive, and is itself part of losing control? That is, rape is a subset of oppressive acts involving the loss of self-control. It seems to me that this is why the fear of rape is understandable by those who haven’t experienced it: it’s related to other similarly oppressive acts.
We’re talking about something a comedian said to a female heckler in a comedy club. Does anyone really believe she was likely going to be raped in that club? Fear is being used as hyperbolical rhetoric here.
I doubt that women face more physical violence in their lives than men do: it’s just that violence is coded as part of masculinity, so when it happens, it’s just boys being boys, not a threat against selfhood. It’s dubious that the threat of being held up at gunpoint is any less oppressive than the threat of being raped, but I’m sure that women fear the latter more than men. And that’s based on patriarchal encoding and the facts of the matter represented by the stats of who’s most often victim and who’s most often the rapist. Whether women should feel any more a general oppressive cloud of violence around their lives than men is what I’d question, though. For example, boys are twice as likely to victims of physical abuse in school than girls (according to this report). But I can’t find anything on physical violence rates in men that isn’t tied into domestic abuse. I’d like to know how many men are involved in fights versus how many women? (Does anyone think of using the term ‘victim’ in barroom brawls?) That, too, has something to do with patriarchal encoding, I suspect.
Ah, I just found this:
“Most victims and perpetrators in homicides are male: Male offender/Male victim: 65.3%, Male offender/Female victim: 22.7%, Female offender/Male victim: 9.6%, Female offender/Female victim: 2.4%
‘Males were almost 4 times more likely than females to be murdered in 2005.”
I trust no one finds rape more oppressive than murder.
And one, more, time….
The issue is how women experience the threat of violence, not whether you are convinced that that threat is real, nor whether you think it’s silly for women to rationally experience that threat as real.
I absolutely believe that that woman experienced a verbal threat of rape in front of a hostile crowd as a real threat. Was she in real danger? Again, as Nate says, sexual assaults happen a lot more often than men tend to think.
And, again, the fact that men are murdered more often is pretty much beside the point. The threat of rape, and the threat of sexualized violence, is absolutely more oppressive than the threat of murder in our culture, precisely because murder is not part of a narrative of oppression of men in which male actions are proscribed by a regime of fear. Rape is a threat held specifically over women for getting out of line, or speaking up, or acting incorrectly, or for being women. Men and women understand it that way, and treat it that way — though part of the threat and part of the regime calls for men to disavow this knowledge when it suits them.
Murders and fights between men, on the other hand, are not similarly politicized, and are not enforced or linked to other forms of sexualized harassment — like street catcalls, like internet harassment. Violence against and among men is absolutely tied into patriarchal culture, and also often tied to issues of race and class…but the control doesn’t work through fear or threat of punishment in the same way, which is a fairly important distinction. (Often it centers around the threat of being feminized, I’d argue…which is perhaps another discussion.)
Telling women they shouldn’t experience threats of rape as threats of rape because really it’s men who are more likely to be the victims of violence is kind of the definition of condescending. Many women experience our culture (and not just our culture) as one in which the threat of rape is quite prevalent. You can blame the victim and quote statistics and tell them that they’re all wallowing in false consciousness and that they don’t really understand what it’s like to be a woman the way you do, I guess. Or you can take what they have to say about their own experiences seriously. If the latter, you could start by reading Susan Brownmiller’s *Against Our Will*. It’s a really good book.
Oh, Noah, you’re determined to prove Rosenberg’s description of you correct. I’m not telling women how to behave any more than women are telling men how to behave (does this have to be brought up every time someone disagrees with a woman?). I don’t buy that women walk around fearing rape all the time any more than men walk around fearing physical violence. How timid do you take them? This oppressive mindset is largely created for ideological discussions. Does anyone think this comedian was actually threatening this woman with rape? If so, why weren’t the cops called, rather than an issue being made of it on the internet? It’s just another topic of the week. Questioning one’s sincerity isn’t the same as dismissing every evil ever perpetrated on women. I’m very acquainted with the effects homicide and rape have on people, and what we’re having here is nothing more than a disagreement about rhetoric. The linked article isn’t coming from experience, but it’s an interpretation of someone’s else’s reported experience.
That doesn’t sound right at all. (1) Male rape happens, so that clearly can’t be all there is to it. (2) Where is this regulative function of rape supposed to be happening? I’d suggest instead that rape has a lot more to do with the rapist’s lack of restraint, rather than some explicit agenda to reinforce patriarchy. Rape isn’t accepted in this culture as normative. It’s encoded as one of the worse forms of violence (see your own dismissals of the other forms). In fact, raping a woman, particularly if she’s white, is likely to get much more attention than male homicide, particularly if he’s black. That is, rape is a violation of social norms, not support for them.
All of this is tied to race and class. Poor people are more likely to experience crime of all sorts, as are ethnic minorities. The life of a poor man is likely far more oppressive than that of a middle class woman, regardless of the existence of rape in abstracto. If the above incident had anything to do with the actual existence or fear of rape, I’d have a different view of all the folderol surrounding it.
Tosh is an asshole. Charles Reese’s opinions whenever rape is raised as a topic are predictable.
Re whether rape jokes are funny or unfunny, that’s an utterly unimportant tangent. If one is funny, does that then make it OK? Am reminded of this comment by Gary Groth:
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I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve come to despise the term ‘entertainment.’ It’s a trump card used to justify every form of idiocy and debasement our culture can regurgitate. It’s its own justification, an end in itself, the ultimate, circular market rationalization that makes any discussion of aesthetic, moral, or cultural values moot.
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Interview at http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/feb00/groth.shtml .
Racist jokes, Holocaust jokes, “dead baby jokes” can be “funny.” Yet that doesn’t mean they can’t express or contribute to pernicious attitudes, make cruelty or insensitivity seem “cool,” and that only the unhip would find fault.
(Not that things can’t get to a PC extreme: Why, over at HU, for saying an argument was “lame,” Noah was excoriated for being “ableist,” and “denying the humanity” of handicapped folks.)
And, a Charles Addams or Gahan Wilson can regularly feature murder and gruesomeness in their cartoons without pushing a noxious “Killers are cool! Victims deserve it!” attitude.
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Charles Reece says:
….[Are] the majority of men in your life threatening women with rape? That’s not my circle of friends, I can safely say. Nor do most of the women I know regularly face such threats.
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They may not get verbalized threats, but the danger is there.
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“Most victims and perpetrators in homicides are male: Male offender/Male victim: 65.3%, Male offender/Female victim: 22.7%, Female offender/Male victim: 9.6%, Female offender/Female victim: 2.4%
‘Males were almost 4 times more likely than females to be murdered in 2005.”
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Fair enough. But, how many of those male victims were involved in criminal activities, members of street gangs, getting into fights in bars, etc.? In other works, actively provoking, whereas the vast majority of rape victims (male or female) were not “cockteasing”?
For a woman, merely going home from work in a deserted parking garage, walking alone at night in lightly-trafficked streets can greatly increase her risk of attack.
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“A woman who signs up to protect her country is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire,” stated former California Democratic Rep. Jane Harman in testimony before a July 2008 House panel investigating the military’s handling of sexual assault reports. The Congresswoman added that her “jaw dropped” when she learned from military doctors that four of ten women in a local veterans hospital had been raped by fellow soldiers…
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http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=6299:military-sexual-abuse-a-greater-menace-than-combat
Not Safe For Work; from Tim Kreider:
http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/hidingfrom.jpg
“Male rape happens, so that clearly can’t be all there is to it.”
I didn’t say that was all there is to it. However, are you seriously insisting that rape of men is as common as rape of women? The overwhelming amount of rape of men is directed at children by other men. Women raping men happens, but very seldom.
And could you reread what you said? You’re ending up arguing that if the police aren’t called, it’s not a real threat. You realize that women are often blamed for rape, and that reporting of rape is statistically therefore very low, right? And in this case, nothing happened, so what is there to report? That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have felt threatened.
And when you insist that women aren’t telling the truth when they say that the threat of rape is in fact a real issue, you are very much saying that you understand their experiences better than they do.
There’s tons of feminist writing about how the regulative function of rape occurs. One way is that, when women speak up, or question male authority, they are threatened with rape. When they dress a certain way, or go to certain places, they are threatened with rape (via catcalls, comments, etc.) Rape is in fact figured as one of the worst things that can happen to you…but that is also part of the regulatory function.
“I’m very acquainted with the effects homicide and rape have on people, and what we’re having here is nothing more than a disagreement about rhetoric. ”
Sharon Marcus has an excellent article where she talks about rape as a rhetoric, which is used to regulate women’s lives and in fact to define what it means to be a woman. Rhetoric matters. If you didn’t think it did, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. And one of the ways rhetoric can be used is to deny other people’s experiences, and to regulate those experiences.
James,
I’m surprised you’d say that.
Mike,
You can think it’s immoral to laugh at a joke all you want, but if you laugh, then you find it funny. My politics don’t perfectly align with my sense of humor.
And, yeah, danger is always possible, but much less so in a comedy club than “in a deserted parking garage, walking alone at night.”
Noah,
You said, “Rape is a threat held specifically over women for,” so I pointed out a fact that contradicted your “specifically,” namely the existence of male rape. In no way does that entail male rape is just as common as female rape.
All the problems involving the reporting of rape has nothing to with this particular incident, because (1) no rape was involved and (2) the supposed threat of rape was, in fact, reported online, to the public. Since there clearly wasn’t a fear of reporting here, questioning why a report to the police wasn’t filed when the heckler supposedly felt threatened would seem judicious. I think everyone really knows that there was no threat involved, but some are choosing to act as if there was for rhetorical purposes. Here’s what the heckler said about it:
So she knew there was no real threat, but was terrified and threatened “all the same.” That’s a questionable transition. There’s a big difference between being actually threatened and feeling uncomfortable. She and her friend were offended, weren’t happy with the way this incident was dealt with by the club, and then chose to write about it online with the hope that it would cause the comedian some damage.
As for the rest, (1) I don’t agree that a catcall or some such comment is a threat of rape; that’s ridiculous. (2) Rape as regulative in the taboo sense isn’t the same as a regulative social schema which guides daily interactions between men and women. (3) Rape rhetoric is also used to shut down rebuttals to possible nonsense: you can’t find the heckler’s statement problematic without denying her experience, etc. — argument closed!
Charles: You on “Browntown”: “Calvin came back, ‘willingly.'”
You on the beating and sodomy of Sally Jupiter in “Watchmen”: “I don’t think it matters that much if penetration occurred, except if it didn’t, Sally isn’t physically hurt as much, so she might be able to suppress or forgive the act a little more easily.”
You on that idiot Tosh: “I don’t buy that women walk around fearing rape all the time any more than men walk around fearing physical violence.”
See a pattern here?
Noah:
““Male rape happens, so that clearly can’t be all there is to it.”
I didn’t say that was all there is to it. However, are you seriously insisting that rape of men is as common as rape of women? The overwhelming amount of rape of men is directed at children by other men.”
Your point being…? Are you saying that man-on-man rape can be discounted from the discussion?
In fact, hundreds of thousands of man-on-man rapes take place every year — in our prison system, where rape is tolerated by the management as a means of control.
That said…Tosh’s remark is absolutely inexcusable, and put the heckler in real danger by creating an atmosphere where her rape was presented as acceptable…in fact, desirable.
That sort of speech is assault. Tosh is lucky she didn’t have his sorry ass arrested.
I’m afraid I don’t, James. Those are 3 separate issues. Maybe it’s that I don’t reduce people to victims.
Alex:
I corrected the sentence for clarity, not for grammar or mechanics. But hey, thanks for keeping me honest.
And frankly, any time I see male-on-male rape brought up in a discussion that starts out being about male-on-female rape my fallacy radar starts up. What we have here is a false equivalence happening. Man on boy rape is rape, but it’s not equivalent to male on female rape, female on female rape, or even female on male rape (with a sample size of 6 billion anything can happen). This is because we live in a country in which, as Charles notes, there exists a regulatory schema that consistently disenfranchises women. So the threat of male on female rape, as well the act itself, contributes to that regulatory schema in a way that other varieties of rape do not. That said, it can be helpful to think through the similarities and differences.
Hey Alex. I actually think that rape in the prison system is a pretty important topic; I just didn’t think of it.
In regards to male on male rape though…in the prison system, it’s pretty insistently gendered. That is, men who are raped are specifically denigrated as feminine, and the rape is in large part about asserting power by feminizing them. It’s a reproduction of male-female rape in terms of power dynamics in a lot of ways.
I recently read Judith Herman’s book about father-daughter rape, which traces it to traditional hierarchical family structures (that is, it most often occurs according to her clinical work in situations where mothers are weakened.) The point being that very often when men are raped by men it occurs in situations that are critiquable through a feminist lens, where boys are in danger because they are being put in the position that not-men (either women, girls, or boys) are placed in in patriarchy. As a result, I think the best way to prevent male-male rapes is actually to take male-female rape seriously as a political and gendered act — rather than do what Charles is trying to do, which is to insist that the existence of male on male rape means that rape is not gendered, and can have no political aspect. Rape is not just about the failure of men to control themselves; rather, it exists in a cultural setting where men feel entitled to assert power over women (and sometimes over other men) through sexualized violence.
I would recommend, as I have in the past, I Spit On Your Grave, where the rape is very clearly about status among male peers rather than about uncontrollable urges or really even about lust at all.
Charles, I actually talked to my wife about this, since she’s a woman and I figured would have more insight than me. She said that she suspected that the woman did not actually fear that she would be raped, but rather felt humiliated…and possibly frightened and scared for any number of reasons, including possibly being the target of sexual assault in the past (pretty statistically likely) or having had friends sexually assaulted. The fact that later, while she was home safe, she was willing to come forward and talk about it, doesn’t invalidate her story, any more than a woman who is raped would have her story invalidated if she was wearing a mini-skirt. Again, you are tending to do what is often done by men in instances of rape or reported rape, which is decide that you’re in a better position to arbitrate what does or does not qualify as frightening or traumatic than the person who was actually in the situation.
I agree that it’s important not to see people as only victims. I would argue that by going online and talking about her experience, this woman was in fact making herself not a victim; she was challenging Toth in a way which seem like it was quite effective. As far as I can tell, you’re not upset with her for taking the victim role; you’re upset with her for (a) talking back to Toth when he was onstage saying stupid shit, because for some reason you feel more sympathy for a comedian saying stupid shit than for women who are the victims of verbal assault, and (b) going online afterwards and making her case. You’re insisting that the fact that she spoke out means that she can’t be a victim…and thereby essentially turning her into a victim again, because if she defends herself, she deserves it, and if she doesn’t, it’s fine.
Women need not to be victims — but the way that that happens is not for men to unilaterally declare that women don’t actually face harassment or oppression. The way for it to happen is for women and men to speak out against misogyny and harassment. To the extent that you want to pretend that misogyny and harassment don’t need to be called out, or shouldn’t be called out when some random cultural arbiter is doing his misogynist thing — to that extent, you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Hey Noah, you substituted “Toth” for “Tosh.” Gee, he had his faults, but he wasn’t a tasteless unfunny so-called comedian.
Argh. I knew I was going to do that eventually. My apologies.
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Charles Reece says:
Mike,
You can think it’s immoral to laugh at a joke all you want, but if you laugh, then you find it funny. My politics don’t perfectly align with my sense of humor.
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I’m not saying “it’s immoral to laugh at a joke”; one’s laughter (or sexual arousal) are hardly under the control of our higher moral functions.
(Am reminded of the great old “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode of the “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” when Chuckles the Clown, while dressed in a peanut costume, is killed by a circus elephant. After criticizing her co-workers for their sick jokes, at the funeral Mary finds herself overcome with embarrassingly inappropriate laughter… [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuckles_Bites_the_Dust ])
However, a joke can be funny and still vile, immoral. One can laugh, and also be aware of the gag’s noxious dimensions.
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And, yeah, danger is always possible, but much less so in a comedy club than “in a deserted parking garage, walking alone at night.”
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Certainly that jerk of a comedian’s comments posed no actual threat. However, the creep’s rubbing it in that indeed women do occupy such a terrifyingly vulnerable situation is a pretty repugnant way to respond to heckling behavior.
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Charles Reece says:
So she knew there was no real threat, but was terrified and threatened “all the same.” That’s a questionable transition. There’s a big difference between being actually threatened and feeling uncomfortable.
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Physically, yes; psychologically, whether the threat is actual or perceived can make little difference. Try telling a child horrified of the boogeyman or a frail senior citizen hearing noises in their house late at night that remind of a burglar creeping around that their being afraid makes no sense, can be dismissed.
And, there’s a big difference between feeling “terrified and threatened” and feeling “uncomfortable.”
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…In regards to male on male rape though…in the prison system, it’s pretty insistently gendered. That is, men who are raped are specifically denigrated as feminine, and the rape is in large part about asserting power by feminizing them. It’s a reproduction of male-female rape in terms of power dynamics in a lot of ways.
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Yes, definitely.
About the “political aspect” of rape, in Darfur to the mass rape of women is added the twist that they end up ostracized from their fundamentalist Muslim communities. I guess that they get gang-raped shows what sluts they are: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-scheffer13-2008nov13,0,4968269.story , http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3791713.stm .
The issue of women being raped en masse in wartime and then being shunned by their communities has been a serious issue in a number of wars. The war in East Pakistan in (I think?) 1971 was a particularly painful example. Brownmiller talks about it in her book, and it’s been discussed elsewhere as well.
I’m not sure if this has been mentioned, but I think prison rape jokes are kind of accepted by the mainstream. There was a joke on some Friends-like show where one of the young, hot female characters said, “If we were in prison, you guys would be my bitches.” Also, I once watched a report on some cutesy quasi-news show about a dumb (non-violent) criminal who got caught, and the female newscaster ended it by saying, “All I can say is… Don’t drop the soap!” I guess “Men’s Rights Activists” would say the difference is that women are considered more sacred in our culture, but the fact that no one gives a shit about prisoners probably has a lot to do with it.
Yeah, I think it’s that people hate prisoners. It’s not because their men; it’s because they’re poor and marginalized.
Although…part of it is that the men are feminized, and feminizing anyone is automatically funny, because weakness and femininity is funny. So…I’d say it’s partly contempt for the marginalized and partly misogyny (as Julia Serano says, feminists, as well as everyone else, are much more comfortable with misogyny directed at femininity than they are with misogyny directed at women at this point.)
Noah,
Did I say any of this? No. I merely pointed out that you neglected some victims in your summary of what rape’s about. Now, you’re using a quite familiar radically feminist strategy where the oppressed is defined as structurally Feminine, so by definition all rape is targeted at the Woman … even if it’s a man (not Man, who’s “always already” the Rapist). Can’t argue with that. This is a linguistic shell game. However, I actually accept that structural approach to oppression, as it universalizes the oppressed, makes it possible to see how anyone might fit into the role of the oppressed. The problem comes in when you conflate the capitalized structural position with the uncapitalized beings placed into that position. (That’s why I argued not too long ago that a feminist utopia would be no better than a masculinist one: the Feminine-oppressed wouldn’t disappear, but be filled with a different sex.) As demonstrated again and again, the empowered don’t have to constrain their desires as much as the disempowered. We need laws and morality for that, and rape is not legitimated in the US by either. It is a failing of our normative values. (Liberalism was used to justify colonialism and slavery, but expressed values that would lead to such practices being seen as immoral.)
As for I Spit on Your Grave, I think you’re only focusing on the first half of the movie, not the revenge. The woman uses her sexual attraction to lure the men to their deaths. Their uncontrolled lust led them to their demise. And, in the end, her own sexuality has been contaminated by violence. The men’s power in the first half is that they don’t have to constrain their desire.
How did we get here? Oh yeah, the comedian and the heckler. My basic take is that this was a skirmish between two assholes, not a rallying cry for online feminist theorizing. (For the record, the audience members who interrupted the premiere performance of The Rite of Spring were assholes, too. Just leave if you don’t like the art, don’t try to interfere with others’ ability to receive it as they see fit.) I’m in no better position than anyone else to know whether the heckler was truly traumatized by this event. All I can go on is what I’ve read. The heckler said she knew that she wasn’t likely to be raped, so I’m skeptical that this was a truly traumatic moment. And it seems pretty clear that the comedian didn’t really want her to be raped. I’m suggesting she’s not a victim, not because of what was written on a blog, but because if you punch someone in a nose and that person hits back, you’re not a victim. And this has zip to do with whether I accept that rape has ever been used ideologically (it has), that misogyny exists (it does), or that women have historically been oppressed (they have).
I’ll accept that paying to see Tosh live in person already displays questionable taste and sense of itself
Mike,
That’s the perplexing core of black humor, isn’t it? It’s why I wouldn’t lump Silverman’s style of comedy in with Carlin’s.
We agree on that, James.
But your point was that the lust caused the rape. In I Spit, it doesn’t. I didn’t claim lust didn’t exist, just that it doesn’t account for rape.
As for the second half of the film…what kills the men is not so much their lust, as their inability to believe that Jennifer doesn’t conform to their fantasies of her. They don’t just rush on her as soon as they see her; she manipulates their assumptions about femininity and rape, which are very much social, not biological. The point in the second half is that *she* is the actor; it isn’t their lust that controls them, it’s her. And in doing so, she damns herself, not through her violence, but through actively becoming the thing they see in order to destroy them.
Pointing out structures and history isn’t a linguistic shell game; distinguishing between discrimination against women and hatred of femininity (which is not constrained to women’s bodies) is not a linguistic shell game. Saying that patriarchal society is responsible in large part for the rape of men in prison and for child abuse isn’t a shell game. What is a shell game is raising the issue of male rape in order to pretend that patriarchy has nothing to do with rape of women. Which is what I hear you saying — you’re claiming that rape is not political, right; that it’s just individual aberration? Or am I misreading you?
I don’t find your claims of what is and is not normative convincing. Yes, many people now speak out against rape, which is a triumph of feminism, and a good thing. On the other hand…isn’t it possible that some norms are contested or confusing, and that violence directed at women is one of those? Certianly, many people believe that rape is wrong and that violence against women is wrong. And yet, somehow, lots and lots of women experience violence and abuse and harassment, even quite frequently from people in positions of authority. I suppose your response is, well, men can’t help themselves — but isn’t it possible that that very line of argument is part of how our society (partially, but still too much) excuses and legitimizes violence against women?
Which leads me to the final point: your reading of the woman’s post is based on the assumption that you are better positioned to determine how she felt than she is, and that you better understand how threats of rape do than women do. I find those assumptions extremely unconvincing. And while it’s true that punching someone and having them hit back does not make you the aggrieved party, contradicting someone and then having them spit on you does in fact make the spitter an asshole and a shithead who should be reprimanded.
Noah,
A lot of your reaction can be boiled down to not having the word ‘sexism’ in your mental lexicon. Not all patriarchal values make it okay to rape women. Believe it or not, there are men who believe in traditional households where they’re the head, but don’t think it’s okay to treat their wives as punching bags. Chivalry is patriarchal, but it’s not an endorsement of rape. All men didn’t go around raping women until feminism told them not to.
We’re not disagreeing on this, but whether it’s normative. I don’t see rape as inherently political, that it always serves a certain purpose, namely supporting patriarchy. If a woman is raped by another woman, is that just due to the patriarchy? Is the woman acting like a man, or is she acting like a person with power? The rapists in I Spit had a desire, and they acted on it figuring they could get away with. If there was nothing taboo about the act, then why did they insist on having the doltish former virgin kill her to get rid of the only witness? Invisibility has a lot to with their empowerment. Patriarchal privilege can aid invisibility without necessarily justifying the act that’s being covered up. The rapists knew that they had transgressed a normative social boundary. That’s why they wanted to cover it up. See Salo on this: the combination of unconstrained power and desire doesn’t turn out too well for those not so empowered. But I don’t really disagree with your reading of the film, unless you’re claiming that patriarchal power alone is what causes the rape. (The film’s scenario isn’t the same as a now rescinded law in Texas where it was permitted to beat a cheating wife with a rod provided it was no bigger than a quarter in diameter. That is very much an instance where violence to women is part of the patriarchal order.)
Regarding the privileging of interpretive positions, we can play that into an infinite regress: your reading of my reading of the woman’s post is based on the assumption that you are better determined to know how she felt than I am, and my reading your reading of my reading, etc.. Maybe you always believe every written expression of a person’s supposed feelings. Maybe you never question a politician’s sincerity. I do, and think it’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do when his or her statements don’t add up.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Although…part of it is that the [males raped in prison] are feminized, and feminizing anyone is automatically funny, because weakness and femininity is funny.
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Is a little girl falling, hurting herself and crying funny?
More precisely, it’s that any male — who is straitjacketed into the “be strong, domineering, self-sufficient; don’t ever admit to weakness, loneliness, or feeling pain, even if it means the cancer’s advanced too far to do anything about it by the time the wife gets you to go see a doctor — being in a “feminized” position is contemptibly weak, thus funny.
Why, even a husband not being the domineering master of the household is funny. The great Caspar Milquetoast: http://www.oeconomist.com/blogs/daniel/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/tim18.jpg
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Charles Reece says:
…[Re] the comedian and the heckler. My basic take is that this was a skirmish between two assholes, not a rallying cry for online feminist theorizing.
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Earlier, I’d hopped onto the debate and skimmed over the part where the actual “heckling” was described. Was earlier wondering (ina section deleted from a post, once I noticed that Kiristi Valent had synopsized the event)…
…come to think of it, what was her actual heckling? Was it “your jokes stink,” or “it’s not right to make fun of women getting raped”? Rather late in the game, I followed the links and read…
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So Tosh then starts making some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc. I don’t know why he was so repetitive about it but I felt provoked because I, for one, DON’T find them funny and never have. So I didnt appreciate Daniel Tosh (or anyone!) telling me I should find them funny. So I yelled out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”
I did it because, even though being “disruptive” is against my nature, I felt that sitting there and saying nothing, or leaving quietly, would have been against my values as a person and as a woman. I don’t sit there while someone tells me how I should feel about something as profound and damaging as rape…
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Pretty admirable behavior, actually. (Not that I actually expect typical comedy club patrons — I hate 99% of stand-up, too — to be an exactly enlightened audience.)
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Charles Reece says:
(For the record, the audience members who interrupted the premiere performance of The Rite of Spring were assholes, too. Just leave if you don’t like the art, don’t try to interfere with others’ ability to receive it as they see fit.)
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Um, please don’t tell me that you’re calling a noxious fratboy-type comedian’s “rape is always hilarious” routine art, much less comparing it to “The Rite of Spriing”…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Saying that patriarchal society is responsible in large part for the rape of men in prison and for child abuse isn’t a shell game. What is a shell game is raising the issue of male rape in order to pretend that patriarchy has nothing to do with rape of women.
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I’ve gone on at length here at HU about how much I detest the term “Patriarchy,” which works on the premise that all men are powerful exploiters, given infinite perks by “patriarchal society,” while all women are helpless, exploited victims.
Needless to say, it’s not as simple as that; and that a more accurate description is that this is an exploiter society, where anyone in a position of vulnerability (yes, women disproportionately in that group, then children, then weaker male prisoners) seen as contemptible, weak “fair game.”
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Charles Reece says:
…Not all patriarchal values make it okay to rape women. Believe it or not, there are men who believe in traditional households where they’re the head, but don’t think it’s okay to treat their wives as punching bags. Chivalry is patriarchal, but it’s not an endorsement of rape. All men didn’t go around raping women until feminism told them not to.
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indeed! If moved through time and finding themselves in a sinking Titanic, would modern feminists decry the “women and children first” policy for the lifeboats?
I’ve nothing to add to this conversation, but I do note that rape crops up a lot in HU comments. And the discussion is almost exclusively among men.
This is uneasy-making. The longer the discussion lasts, statistically the greater the chance of someone making an oafish, stupid comment.
On the other hand, it is definitely true that men simply don’t talk about rape enough. So I guess one should assume good faith.
Wishy-washy Alex over and out.
Mike, patriarchy does not work on that assumption. Men are often exploited under patriarchy.
Charles, I’m going on the assumption that the women in question is in a better position to interpret her own experiences than you are. That’s different than saying I’m in a better position to interpret them than you are.
And the idea that rape and exploitation are political is really, really basic to feminist thought. If you deny women’s oppression theoretical weight, then it’s not clear on what basis you think women experience sexism. Or, I guess, the point is that to understand women’s oppression, you need to look not to what women say, but rather to the law code, right? It’s simply a matter of tallying up the legal language. Any lawyer of whatever gender therefore understands women’s experiences better than women themselves. You get why feminists have found that kind of thinking unhelpful and condescending, right?
You seem to be assuming that patriarchal power and oppression can only occur if the law sanctions them. Therefore, by your reasoning, black people today don’t experience oppression because there are civil rights laws and a black president, right? Online harassment or racism, or various abuse directed at black people, is just because whites can’t help themselves and has no other theoretical meaning. Again, do you really want to be saying that?
Women very rarely rape other women, and very, very rarely rape men. Again, you’re trying to use statistically tiny cases to invalidate the general experience of rape as a feminist subject for inquiry. Why do you want to do that? Who exactly does it help? I mean, I think it is actually potentially useful to think about these marginal instances of rape and talk about how they work and why — those are real people who suffer after all. But it seems like it’s important to actually know how they suffer and think about that and listen to what they have to say rather than use them as argumentative chits to try to refute the extensive discussion of rape, much of which is written by explicitly feminist writers, and which has been directly responsible for getting rape taken seriously and empowering women to be taken seriously when they report it, and indeed to have ways to resist it.
It was legal not that long ago for men to rape their wives; it was seen as children’s precocious sexuality not that long ago when children were raped. Both of those were changed because feminists saw rape as political, and organized around it. Are you saying that they were so successful that rape is no longer political? Because what I see you saying instead is that rape is never political unless all women are raped all the time. Which seems, again, like a pretty thoroughly ridiculous position to hold.
I Spit on Your Grave is also significantly about class; the resentment the men feel towards Jennifer is towards her privilege. The rape is then in part an act of class warfare — which makes it more political, not less. It’s true that the men don’t want to be caught — they’re not politically powerful, after all, and they have violated the law. But Jennifer doesn’t go to the police either…just as many women don’t go to the police when they’re raped, because (believe it or not) our social norms are not actually always on the side of the woman who is raped.
Laws are important, but they’re only one source of social power and hierarchy. Another is, for example, in a small way, the power given to people with a platform and an audience, whose words and opinions are supposed to be more important than those who listen to them. The woman in question wasn’t just being rude to Tosh; he was making a very politicized point, and she was disagreeing with him. For that, apparently, she deserves to be abused and essentially called a liar.
Alex, HU comments always skew male — moreso than posts, and I think at least somewhat moreso than audience. I wish that wasn’t the case, but am not sure exactly what to do about it. And yes, it’s especially uncomfortable in a conversation such as this one.
The rape conversations are certainly enough to make some of us wonder what we are doing here.
Well, James, wouldn’t you agree that men tend not to speak enough about rape?
You could probably argue that men maybe need to do less talking about rape and more listening, I suppose….
Um, hanging around with a bunch of dudes3SHT who talk about rape? Not my idea of funtime.
A few general notes: (1) My original post wasn’t really about rape per se, but about black comedy and its reception. (2) If you don’t want rape discussed, don’t bring it up. (3) I was actually going to make a joke about how all we needed was a comment about how men are the only ones posting to make this discussion complete, but now don’t need to. (4) There’s always The View, which probably covered this topic, or the number of female blog entries that were linked to by Valenti.
Mike,
Sigh, do I really have to claim this comedian isn’t on the level of Stravinsky? However, yes, comedy is an art, even The Diceman. Listen to Marc Maron’s insightful interviews with comedians on his WTF podcasts. (I’m not a particularly big fan of standup, either, except when it’s good, which is rare.) Anyway, imagine the cultural significance of The Rite of Spring, now imagine the cultural significance of this Tosh routine. See the big, fucking, gaping difference in magnitude? And, yet, I still object to the way some in Stravinsky’s audience reacted to having their minds blown. If I don’t find that a just cause for what you call admirable behavior, then you can see why I’m even more dismissive of the current heckling incident.
Noah,
The law, patriarchal and otherwise, sets up the standards for its own transgression. Transgressing the law isn’t the same as the law endorsing that transgression. That doesn’t mean that many won’t still transgress whatever prohibition is in place, only that the transgression isn’t normative.
Let’s say that 2 people are arguing about the treatment of art as objects. Both agree that art is just an object, but one suggests that it’s not okay to destroy art, whereas the other thinks it’s okay. Then another guy comes along and says that both share the problem of objectifying art, that art isn’t really an object, but different in kind from any old rock. It’s much more ontologically important, and that it’s mere objectification that has resulted in all the destruction of art throughout time. And then I come along and say that, while I don’t agree with the objectifying of art, not all objectification necessarily leads to the destruction of art. One can believe that the destruction of all objects isn’t equal, while still believing both are just objects (e.g., destroying a painting is on a different level of magnitude from destroying some plastic bauble in the same way that a mountain is different from a molehill, but destroying a human, any human, is always considered far worse). Nope, rebuts the 3rd fellow, “you’re dismissing the destruction of art due to its objectification.” And here we are.
No, I’m using very real social facts to refute your reductionistic equation of patriarchy = rape. Why do you ignore them? We wouldn’t be arguing if your claim was that some, even many, patriarchal assumptions increase the likelihood of rape.
“while still believing both art and non-art objects are just objects”
Charles Reece:
” My original post wasn’t really about rape per se, but about black comedy and its reception.”
But Charles, here’s a point that has been totally obscured on every website where this incident has been discussed: Tosh didn’t actually make a joke!
Here’s what he said:
” “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now?”
Sorry, but that’s not a joke. Not even black humor, not even sick humor. It’s pure, naked aggression. If not rape, it’s a close kin to rape.
You want a funny rape joke? Here you go:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/daniel-tosh-chuckles-through-own-violent-rape,28769/?ref=auto
Here’s Tosh’s half-assed — no, make that quarter-assed– apology on Twitter:
“All out of context misquotes aside, I’d like to sincerely apologize,The point I was making before I was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them #deadbabies”
EEYEW!
Charles, your facts don’t mean anything if they’re not embedded in a theory, or in some explanation. I’ve discussed at some length why I think it makes sense to think of child rape and rape within the prison system in terms of patriarchy. Nate has pointed out that trying to draw an absolute equivalence between very prevalent rape of women and other much less common types of rape is theoretically dicey. In response, you’ve just asserted again and again that there are other kinds of rape. To which I say, okay, why should that invalidate the claim that rape is overwhelmingly (not always, but for the most part) a patriarchal form of control directed mostly at women, but also encompassing people who are structurally placed in the position of women for various reasons? Lynching was not always directed at black people; does that mean that it wasn’t a political tool of oppression of blacks? Black people aren’t the only people who are imprisoned under our crazed drug laws; does that mean that those laws are not racist? You seem to think that citing other kinds of rape has some sort of theoretical force, but without explicating that force, or explaining what it means or why, it’s hard to credit that you actually care about the experiences of the people you’re citing. It looks more like you’re making excuses.
I really don’t know if there’s been writing on female-female rape, or female-male rape, or in what sorts of situations they occur. I think they’re both very statistically small occurrences, which doesn’t mean at all that they don’t matter, but does mean that you might want to think about why they’re uncommon, rather than just asserting that their very existence means that all feminist accounts of rape ever don’t matter. Your refusal to do that, or even to acknowledge the possibility that it might matter, suggests to me that you’re not really thinking through your arguments very carefully.
I think that my comparison of racial oppression is a lot more useful than your comparison of women to objects. As if often the case with you, you’re unwilling to think about historical oppression, and instead move to empty structural metaphors, which are mostly useful in showing that taking oppression out of history obscures a lot more than it reveals.
For instance, as I’ve said before — the law isn’t a single thing. I mentioned lynching, which was against the law, and yet was common and used as means of political oppression. Similarly, rape laws have been around for a long time, but were often effectively nullified because juries wouldn’t convict and the legal process was so miserable that women wouldn’t use it. Things are better now…but are they all better? And do you even acknowledge that they’re better? Your claim that rape is not a political issue seems to basically entirely ignore any possible historical circumstance, with the result that you don’t seem able to acknowledge that treating rape as a feminist issue has in fact changed women’s lives, and children’s as well. Why doesn’t that matter? Why is that not political? How does the fact that men are occasionally victims of rape change that?
Again, I’ll suggest that people upon whom power acts may possibly be in a better position to testify about the workings of that power than bystanders who know only that the power is not working on them. This is why female voices in a conversation like this are always welcome and useful. Your apparent contempt for the idea that someone with a different experience might have something to add to the conversation is depressing.
Noah:
“Charles, your facts don’t mean anything if they’re not embedded in a theory”
This is the fatal Achilles’ heel of the Hooded Utilitarian: this ultimately unthinking submission to the “necessity” of theory. It explains, to my mind, Noah’s persistent hostility towards the scientific method.
Facts trump theory every time.In all contexts.
Incidentally, female-on-female rape is VERY common, particularly in women’s prisons. It can’t just be dismissed as an ultrarare abberration.
Oh for…I thought that was by Charles, not Alex, and had a long response which is now pointless.
Anyway…Alex, the scientific method is a theory, not a fact, and it’s one which is much disputed by scientists, many of whom thinks it’s hogwash.
I poked around online and the statistics seem to be that 99% of rapes are committed by men, so I think calling female-female rape very common is maybe a little excessive.
In any case…as I said, male-male rape in prisons occurs in a pretty patriarchal context…and is also very politicized, from my understanding, used as a way to control or threaten prisoners by guards, and used to establish hierarchy by prisoners. I suspect that something similar is the case with women’s prisons (though probably to a lesser extent.) Prisons in general it seems to me make a strong argument for rape as an illegal but very real politicized instrument of power, violence, and control.
Well, it’s like murder in that it can be either a powerful person’s political act or a fucked-up loser’s personal abberation, don’t you think? In the infamous “Rape Issue” of Answer Me, Jim Goad goes into a long argument about how rape is about sex and not power, citing research on how plenty of animals rape when they can’t score mates otherwise. But in the same issue, he describes Bosnian rape camps and gang-rapes as a male bonding activity. I think it comes down to the fact that a crime can have all kinds of motives.
Yes…though I strongly suspect animals use rape to establish hierarchy too.
People have different motives, but those motives exist in a particular society and structure. Feminists have put in a good deal of effort to show that rape is about power rather than (or perhaps more convincingly in addition to) about sex. And if it’s about power, then it’s political, more or less by definition.
Rape, and threats of rape, are very often about putting women in their place. Certainly Tosh’s comments were meant to do so.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Yes…though I strongly suspect animals use rape to establish hierarchy too.
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Even more telling, some male animals “feminize” themselves — offer their hindquarters as if available for screwing — to show submissiveness to a more powerful male.
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…the scientific method is a theory, not a fact, and it’s one which is much disputed by scientists, many of whom thinks it’s hogwash…
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Eeesh…where to begin? The “scientific method” is a systematic working approach, not a “theory.”
Don’t just take my word for it:
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scientific method
?
a method of research in which a problem is identified, relevant data are gathered, a hypothesis is formulated from these data, and the hypothesis is empirically tested.
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the·o·ry
1. a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena: Einstein’s theory of relativity. Synonyms: principle, law, doctrine.
2. a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural and subject to experimentation, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact. Synonyms: idea, notion hypothesis, postulate. Antonyms: practice, verification, corroboration, substantiation.
3. Mathematics . a body of principles, theorems, or the like, belonging to one subject: number theory.
4. the branch of a science or art that deals with its principles or methods, as distinguished from its practice: music theory.
5. a particular conception or view of something to be done or of the method of doing it; a system of rules or principles: conflicting theories of how children best learn to read.
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(Both from dictionary.com.)
As to the scientific method being “much disputed by scientists, many of whom thinks it’s hogwash,” that’s a familiar bit of rhetorical manipulation.
How many scientists think it’s hogwash? (A ballpark figure will do. )
To say “many” — in a profession likely numbering in the millions — might technically be accurate, yet only describe an infinitesimal portion of the group, like the jackasses among them who deny global warming. And certainly a useful tactic to demonize a group: “Many homosexuals are murderers!”
And that “much disputed”; who are they disputing it with? Science-bashers who see every researcher as a Mengele or a Frankenstein?
If with each other…really? Credulity strains at the seams.
Any scientist doubting that method is a ding-dong. The kind of person who’d thrive under Stalin, such as the vile Lysenko ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism ), whose “science” found favor with Stalin because it fit the Communistic view, or the Nazi doctors who claimed to prove the inferiority of Jews, or the pseudoscientific Creationists.
Where the sacred Theory trumps mere reality…
Nah, man; the scientific method is just nonsense they teach to high school students because high school sucks. Here.
That doesn’t invalidate the scientific method at all. it condemns the imperfect application of the scientific method.
Hmm, this just keeps sprawling further out of control. Lynching: well, you yourself have already diminished the value of your own analogy when you previously argued against me that the threat of nonsexualized violence is never (‘absolutely” not) as oppressive as that of sexualized violence:
Or are you now agreeing that the threat of murder can be just as oppressive as the treat of sexualized violence, maybe even more so? This sort of analogy is why I suggested:
Anyway, the central problem with making a simple analogy between lynching and rape in relation to some regulating system of values has already been implicitly answered: a rapist isn’t always upholding patriarchy, whereas the lynch mob is always upholding racism. Why is this? Well: (1) Sometimes a rapist is just a sociopath and doesn’t give a damn about morality. (2) A woman is sometimes raped by another woman — how is that a political stand for patriarchy? (3) Violence to women directly contradicts certain patriarchal codes of behavior, which served traditional families well for many years, independent of feminist victories. “Don’t hit girls because they’re weaker than you and need to be protected” isn’t exactly a message of equality, but it still suggests violence to women is immoral.
Too lazy to make the following disagreements into a coherent paragraph:
“you’re unwilling to think about historical oppression” — You weren’t speaking of history, but making a claim about how in the modern day US, the threat of rape is used in a systemic, normative way to regularly oppress women. This remains bullshit.
“rape laws have been around for a long time, but were often effectively nullified because juries wouldn’t convict and the legal process was so miserable that women wouldn’t use it.” — How does this contradict rape being a transgression of the law and social standards, but that patriarchal positioning can provide “invisibility” for a transgressive act? It seems to perfectly support what I was saying.
“Your claim that rape is not a political issue seems to basically entirely ignore any possible historical circumstance” — I never said rape wasn’t a political issue, only that it isn’t necessarily caused by some ill-defined “patriarchy.” A political view might not cause an illicit act, while helping to determine how that act is received.
“Your apparent contempt for the idea that someone with a different experience might have something to add to the conversation is depressing.” — What contempt? I find it condescending to women when others say that we shouldn’t treat their expressions with the same amount of skepticism that we treat men’s. (No one’s bothered to ask whether the comedian’s discussion was accurately transcribed — why is that? He says he was quoted out of context.) I just don’t care whether a questionable statement comes from a woman or man. Does it make sense? That’s all that matters to me. Simplistic identity politics depress me. If a woman has never has never been raped, nor had a friend who was raped, is she still in an inherently privileged position to comment on rape over a man with a close friend who was raped? Maybe we need spreadsheets to determine what’s appropriate for each of us to discuss. Which brings up something I forgot to address from your previous post:
“I’m going on the assumption that the women in question is in a better position to interpret her own experiences than you are. That’s different than saying I’m in a better position to interpret them than you are.” — But the disagreement isn’t over whether she’s in a better position to interpret her internal feelings (aren’t you opposed to such old-fashioned notions of the self and authorship, anyway?), but whether the written statement makes sense and who’s in a position to evaluate it. I’m skeptical for the reasons I stated and you completely believe it for some reason (maybe women never misstate the facts of the matter, or only other women can truly understand a woman’s statements, or that it oppresses women to disagree with them — sorry, I’m getting tired and snarky).
Alex,
I think Tosh was joking, but that it was about as funny as that Onion article.
And who are you question the sincerity of Tosh’s apology?
I think that’s enough from me on this topic. Sarah Silverman makes me laugh, George Carlin doesn’t — that was mostly what I wanted to say.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Nah, man; the scientific method is just nonsense they teach to high school students because high school sucks.
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And, arithmetic is just nonsense they teach to elementary school students because elementary school sucks. Brilliant!
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Here [ http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-05-22/stuart-firestein-ignorance-how-it-drives-science ].
The scientific method was a huge mistake, according to Firestein. He said nobody actually follows the precise approach to experimentation that is taught in many high schools outside of the classroom, and that forming a hypothesis before collecting data can be dangerous. “The trouble with a hypothesis is it’s your own best idea about how something works. And, you know, we all like our ideas so we get invested in them in little ways and then we get invested in them in big ways, and pretty soon I think you wind up with a bias in the way you look at the data,” Firestein said. There is an overemphasis on facts and data, even though they can be the most unreliable part of research.
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Congratulations, you found ONE scientist who condemns the scientific method! And he wrote a book about it, so like the prophet who begins a new religion, or any other ideologue — from Marx to Freud — their way must be defended against all critics, attacks brushed aside, dismissed, attacked as blasphemy.
That book (like the one telling how cockroaches are actually fragile little flowers that would go extinct the moment humans weren’t around to provide them with food and shelter) totally impressing you, so that the great mass of evidence to the contrary is brushed aside. In the fashion that religious converts, “Truthers,” Creationists, believers in “HIV does not cause AIDS,” “immunization injections cause autism,” “global warming is not caused by human activities,” “Obama is a Muslim from Kenya” will let no accumulation of contrary facts have the slightest effect upon their total certitude.
There is substance to some of Firestein’s charges, such as when — like cops immediately focusing on a likely suspect and ignoring contrary evidence, other possibilities — a scientist becomes overly emotionally attached to a pet theory and rejects what doesn’t fit their brainchild.
Am reminded about the paleontologist who rejected the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs, said he’d only be convinced if they found a dinosaur fossil with feathers on it. And when one was indeed found…he still wasn’t convinced!
(Or the “Hemingway was a mysogynist, and nowhere is this more clerly shown than in his story, ‘“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ ” chap. Who, when I pointed out the only character saying misogynistic things about American women was one who illegally beat his young native servants (and thus hardly an admirable mouthpiece) and other details casting doubt upon the premise, in response just expressed vexation about the length of the story quotations, before thumping some more on the drum of the story being misogynist.)
Now is that a fatal flaw with the scientific method, or a glaring example of the insecurities of the “We’re not lost, I don’t need to stop and ask for directions” male ego in action?
Those are flaws with human nature, which, as AB noted, “condemn the imperfect application of the scientific method.” One might as well say, because democracy isn’t perfect, that it should likewise be kicked into the dustbin of history.
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“I think science and medicine has set it up for the public to expect us to expound facts, to know things. And we do know things, but we don’t know them perfectly and we don’t know them forever,” Firestein said.
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So, because the insecure public, always looking for heroes and comfortingly rock-solid certitudes in a scarily shifting world, expects science to know everything about everything, to have reached an end-point of omniscience where no new discoveries can shake things up any, therefore we must dismiss the scientific method.
In the same fashion that Creationists dismiss science with contempt because they don’t claim to have explained every single detail of the workings of the universe for all time. Unlike the Bible, which they maintain does…
What’s next, will I have to defend the existence of gravity? “It’s only a theory…”
Jesus Christ, you guys, argue about rape all you want — guys talking about rape, at length, is exactly what the comics internet needs more of — but don’t get Noah started on the scientific fucking method…have we learned nothing from History?
Charles, I didn’t say that rape was the only possible manifestation of political violence, or that it was the worst possible manifestation of that violence.
And who said patriarchy was simple, or that rape always in every situation had to reinforce it in a simple way? Again, it’s an argument about history and about how rape is used to oppress women in the past and today. I talked at some length about how that might map onto other situations, and about how particular areas could be exceptions. But Tosh’s use of the threat of rape to get a woman to shut up seems to fit feminist discussions of rape quite well — as does your refusal to believe that the person threatened was actually threatened, and your insinuation that she deserved it for speaking out of turn.
Finally, you seem to be vaguely gesturing towards admitting that rape has been historically used in an oppressive way, while still insisting that that has no impact on the present and that therefore you don’t have to think about it at all. The insistence that the conversation must be restricted to the present is exactly what I’m talking about when I say that you’re unwilling to look at oppression historically, and that that tends to make nonsense of your evaluations. And yes, it also makes nonsense of your ability to look rationally and objectively at whether something does or doesn’t make sense, unfortunately. Those evaluations exist in history. What exactly is this view from nowhere you’ve got where you are able to ignore history and nonetheless understand historical events?
For example; chivalry is a double-edged sword when it comes to women and violence. In the first place, it only applies under certain circumstances; certain women deserve chivalry, but it’s entirely possible for women to put themselves outside that sort of protection — and one way they do that is by contradicting male authority, or behaving as sexual beings…or by being raped. Chivalry and patriarchal codes also for a long time gave husbands caret blanche to rape their wives. Again, looking at something like Bangladesh in 1971 shows pretty clearly that the patriarchal code of protecting women flips very easily into blaming women for not being protected even in cases where rape is clearly documented. The idea that chivalry is somehow opposed to rape, or that patriarchal culture is committed to protecting women from violence, is simply nonsense if you take a minute to think about the past at all rather than spending all that energy insisting it doesn’t matter.
And yes, women are generally in a better position to talk about whether or not women are threatened by rape than men are. Different people have different experiences, but the experience of being harassed because you are a woman is a position that men do not tend to have. That’s not simplistic; it’s a recognition that discrimination means that people are treated differently. I think it’s simplistic to believe that your body and your position in society doesn’t matter, personally.
Mike, most scientists don’t think about meta-scientific theory at all, pretty much. They’re focused on their particular practice, which doesn’t have much to do with a set group of rules. You’re mistaking high-school science textbook balderdash for how science actually works.
And gravity’s a theory, not a fact. It’s a mathematical system for describing a set of phenomena. It works very well for doing that, but to call it a fact is just really confused (the facts would be that things fall down…but you could explain that in any number of ways). The truth is, scientists still don’t understand how gravity works…they probably understand it less well than they have at some points in the past, in fact, when it was less a subject of inquiry and so more stable. I think current speculation involves string theory…which, contra the scientific method, is pretty much unprovable, but nonetheless very productive.
Alex, your defense of the scientific method is pretty funny, insomuch as it involves rejecting, or at least abusing, the scientific method. Instances that contradict a theory are (in theory) supposed to invalidate and/or cause a reconsideration of the theory. But instead you’re using the theory to invalidate the contradiction, by labeling the contradiction an aberration. Scientists do this sort of thing all the time, which is part of the reason that their practice is not well described by the scientific method.
But it is an abberation. Scientific method is a pragmatic application of epistemology; the fact that many scientists fail at a perfect application of it in no wise invalidates the underlying premise.
It is true that, contrary to orthodoxy, science advances as much by induction as by deduction; in other words, the scientist doesn’t draw his hypothesis from the experimental results, but formulates a hypothesis and tests it by seeking confirming data. And this of course is the moment of maximum danger, because humans are subjective beings prone to cognitive abberations.
This is why proper scientific method must meet extremely strict standards of proof. Examples of this include such methodology as double-blind experiments, statistically large subject populations, reproducibility of results, estimation of margin of error. And even when the hypothesis appears to be confirmed, such confirmation remains provisional, even when the probability of truth remains 99.9999% sure. (To take Popper’s famous example, the proposition that ‘all swans are white’ seemed valid until Europeans discovered the native black swans of Australia.)
You write:
“Instances that contradict a theory are (in theory) supposed to invalidate and/or cause a reconsideration of the theory.”
But a theory can remain robust despite such instances: it’s the basic principle of falsifiability. What we call the theory of evolution remains robust despite the many, many falsifying instances and new data that have come to light since Darwin’s time, for example.
In the case you cited, we have a description of bad practice and of pitfalls in the application of the scientific methods. But the methods themselves cannot be defined by their opposite. That’s like claiming a law is bad because some people break it!
Alex, basically you’re saying that the scientific method isn’t what scientists use. Which I agree with.
I think the difficulty is maybe in the terminology? There’s the scientific method, which is taught in high school and pretty much nowhere else and which presents a pretty straightforward and supposedly universally applicable series of steps you’re supposed to do if you’re doing science. That’s balderdash. Then there’s the scientific method, which most people think of more amorphously as “whatever scientists do when they do science.” I think the first gets conflated with the second.
I think you’re discussion of falsifiability is confused? Falsifiability means that scientific theories have to be able to be contradicted. So contradictions are supposed to cause you to jettison the theory — though of course in practice this rarely happens. Most theories have unresolvable contradictions or aberrant data floating around; you just skip over them until someone puts them in a context where they have theoretical weight. That’s why separating facts and theories doesn’t really make any sense; facts are just random noise (mistakes, instrument error, human error) until there’s a theory that makes them worth paying attention to. Again, your dismissal of the problems with the scientific method is a perfect example of this. And your analogy only points out the problem; actually, laws that are systematically broken can often be seen as bad laws for that reason. The drug war is a good example…though of course people will also argue that the law is not wrong (can the law ever be wrong?) but that the problem is that people violate it.
“Again, your dismissal of the problems with the scientific method is a perfect example of this.”
But they aren’t problems with the scientific method. They are problems that arise when the scientific method is not correctly applied; they therefore tend to reinforce the validity of the scientific method.
“Falsifiability means that scientific theories have to be able to be contradicted. So contradictions are supposed to cause you to jettison the theory — though of course in practice this rarely happens.”
Not necessarily; evolutionary theory is a good example of falsification causing modification of the theory.
For example, after Darwin published ‘The Origin of Species’, the most eminent geophysicist of the time, Lord Kelvin, calculated that due to the rate of cooling of magma the Earth couldn’t possibly be more than 400 million years old– far too short a time for Darwinian emergence of species through mutation and selection.
This tormented Darwin, who tried to save his theory through an incorporation of Lamarckism (the discredited idea that acquired traits can be inherited.)
But the discovery of radioactivity pushed the planet’s origins back to four billion years ago. At the same time, the laws of genetics were promulgated; Original Darwinism was justified.
Over the past ten years, progress in epigenetics has been causing a paradigm shift in evolutionary theory; it turns out that some acquired traits can indeed be inherited. But this will only modify Darwinism, however profoundly, not invalidate it.
The scientific method as taught in high schools (and I don’t know that anyone else really ever even talks about the scientific method as one method, or even as such) doesn’t do anything to incorporate such complexity, as far as I’ve seen.
The scientific method doesn’t even really rise to the level of a theory by it’s own terms, does it? I mean, you can’t test the scientific method in terms of the scientific method; you have to assume the thing you’re trying to prove.
Science operates in various ways, sometimes by starting from theories, sometimes by starting from facts, sometimes through ad hoc justifications or excuses or just rule of thumb. Nobody arrests scientists if they’re not doing it right (though maybe they should; falsification of data is apparently rampant in most fields.) You don’t need the scientific method to explain or justify science. It’s just a catechism to reassure people that there’s a predictable structure and that the folks in charge know what they’re doing. The fact that it’s often used to bash theists is a predictable irony.
Sorry…just thinking about this more…I presume that it’s supposed to be Popper as the creator or interpreter of the scientific method, right? I really should read him; he can’t possibly be as idiotic as the interpretation that shows up in textbooks. But either way, I think it’s important to recognize that he’s a theorist…and not even a scientific theorist, but a social scientific and/or philosophical one. And his views are very much contested. Again, what sort of evidence could you use to prove that science works this way, or that science should always work this way, without presupposing the theoretical system that you’re trying to prove?
Wow, you keep banging on in your quixotically weird crusade against science, don’t you?
Scientific method is not a theory. It is a praxis based on epistomological theory dating back to Francis Bacon, namely, empirical evidence as foundation for theorising on the nature of material fact.
This is in contrast to foundations based on dogma, pure logic,mysticism or tradition– all of which are to a greater or less extent worthless.
I honestly don’t understand your constant carping on high schools. And, no, it is not in the slightest degree true that the scientific method is ONLY taught in high schools! It is taught in every undergraduate and graduate school of hard science, medecine, or technology in the developed world (and in most of the developing world, as well.)
Your sour experience with writing textbooks for the public school system seems to inform your attitude towards science. Does that seem unfairly ad hominem? Well, what about your remarks about Popper?
I’m reminded of the irrational, almost hysterical postings of Caro when I brought up the Sokal Hoax. She was reduced to accusing Sokal of being an accomplice to mass murder.
Noah, for you attacking good science is an intellectual game.
It certainly isn’t for the children now being killed by anti-scientific glory-hound liars such as Jenny McCarthy, of the anti-vaccine crusade.
We need, more than ever, good science, unencumbered by the corrupt agendae of giant multinationals and their hired government lackeys; by media-enabled hysterical ignoramuses; and by votives of “soft” academic “disciplines” who enviously try to discredit real searchers after truth.
Yeah, I remember that thing with Caro. I was on the verge of saying, “Geez, I didn’t think the Sandinistas were all that bad, at least compared to the Contras. I kind of admire Sokal for helping them out.” But defending Communist governments usually leads to regrets.
(Just helping the thread to go as far off-topic as humanly possible.)
Yeah…I just deleted my last, and I’m going to close the thread. Thanks for commenting all, but I think we’ve probably far passed the point of diminishing returns.