News
We’re going to start an Octavia Butler Roundtable next week! Be here or miss the apocalyptic tentacle sex, as they say.
On HU
Featured Archive Post: me on Octavia Butler and submission in the Xenogenesis trilogy.
Lilli Carré with creepy flower drawings for the Gay Utopia.
Marc-Oliver Frisch on why comics need comics criticism.
Jog on AR Murugadoss, Bollywood’s crass analyst of the popular.
Benjamin Rogers on concertina comics, long film shots, and time dilation.
Roy T. Cook on how to interpret comic book covers, for PencilPanelPage.
Chris Gavaler on Fantomas and the dada of supervillainy.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I wrote about:
—Barry Posen’s new book, Restraint, and the moral argument for America to do less.
— a study showing that people harassed online have few legal remedies.
At Salon I wrote about 10 musicians influenced by Dylan who are better than Dylan.
At Splice Today, I
—made fun of Damon Linker for thinking that Hillary’s gaffes matter.
—made fun of NPR for thinking that independent voters are a thing.
I was on HuffPost Live talking about the fact that George Will is an idiot. Hannah Groch-Begley and Jaclyn Friedman were both a lot more articulate than me, but I did start babbling about the connection between misogyny and anti-intellecutalism, causing the host to look at me as if I’d lost my mind.
Other Links
Tressie McMillan Cottom with an awesome essay on hick hop, or country rap.
Rachel Riederer on how paying college teachers nothing is not good for students.
Amanda Hess on why having a bunch of white men talk about sexism isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Yasmin Nair on the poor handling of race in the 2nd season of OITNB.
DC excited that Bob Kane is getting a star on Hollywood, fans eager to explain why DC sucks (and Bob Kane too.
No one in that discussion (at least to the point where I quit) seemed to understand Will’s point about basic math, but he is, barring some other stat not mentioned by anyone so far, correct. Something’s seriously wrong with right-left debate when the AEI provides the temperate voice.
No, something’s seriously wrong with that Will column. He quotes a woman who has obviously been raped in order to sneer at her and claim that women aren’t raped. Then you wonder why the ensuing conversation isn’t especially temperate? Come on.
That column is way more about Will sneering at colleges for being feminized and about him indulging in paranoid and offensive fantasies about rape victims being privileged than it is about expressing any kind of concern, or even interest, in sexual assault victims. He makes some reasonable points — I’m not super enthusiastic about trigger warnings either; male sexual assault victims do often get erased. But his bad faith is so manifest that it’s difficult to have anything like a useful discussion. He only cares about sexual assault as a way to make sneering partisan talking points and fulminate idiocy about a country feminized by an overactive government.
Here’s someone arguing that AEI is full of shit,, if you’re interested.
This is probably the most important bit:
“The statistic that one in five college women has been sexually assaulted while in college is quite similar to findings from other studies. Two other independent nationally representative studies have found that 5 percent of college women have been sexually assaulted in one calendar year. ”
I think the HuffPo response is really pretty convincing. So…yeah, AEI is not the voice of reason, they’re doing their usual fairly transparent hack job.
I am interested in that. Thanks.
Hmm, I agree that the numbers between the 2 studies being used don’t line up in any conclusive manner. But I’d ask what do we have to assume as the sheer amount of unreported cases to get to a 1-in-5 stat? I see a couple of major assumptions being made there in that Huffington rebuttal that are no where justified:
1. That victims are less likely to report to campus authorities than the police about campus sexual assault. (“When researchers asked female college rape victims whether or not they had reported the assault to police, 12 percent of college rape victims said that they did — but that doesn’t mean that they reported to campus police.”) Why?
2. That about 98% of campus sexual assaults are unreported to campus authorities of whatever type. (Assuming only female victims, in order to get the 1-in-5 stat out of the OSU’s female population of 28,000, there need be 5600 cases. So, the actually reported 98 cases can only account for slightly less than 2% of the hypothesized total cases (1.75% to be precise). That means that 5,502 cases were unreported. Does that sound like a reasonable jump to make to dismiss the 12% stat that AEI uses? Where does this (implicit) assumption come from?
The around 90% unreported stat has been thrown around for a long time, and is now in a White House report that lumps it (as the 12% reported stat) under the heading “Campus Sexual Assault: A Particular Problem.” if the 12% stat is irrelevant to campus sexual assault reporting, why was it used there? I think it was a reasonable use by AEI to show what that assumption would produce for the amount of college sexual assaults. The rebuttal was to make the assumption regarding unreported sexual assaults even larger for no discernible reason that I can tell, other than convenience. At best, the rebuttal demonstrates that we have no way of knowing how many sexual offenses take place over and above the actually reported ones. That’s not really helping the anti-Will side, though.
Here’s another similar analysis that sticks with the amount of hypothesized sexual assaults vs. the ones actually reported the campus authorities at 3 universities. There’s something really funny going on with the really large discrepancy between what’s reported in some interview-based research and crime stats.
“There’s something really funny going on with the really large discrepancy between what’s reported in some interview-based research and crime stats.”
Well, sexual assault is traumatizing, and I think folks are pretty aware that reporting it to authorities who are not always especially interested in helping nor especially sympathetic can be traumatizing as well. I think there are lots of reasons people might not report.
As to whether the 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 statistic is really accurate — I think it’s difficult to say, precisely because people don’t often report. However, even if the statistic is lower, that doesn’t mean that rape is a privileged status, nor that sexual assault on campus is a problem that shouldn’t be addressed.
This looks like a pretty good discussion of the questions around the statistic.
In particular, I think they make a useful point when they say we don’t have any way of knowing whether this is particularly a problem at college campuses, or if the numbers there are similar to numbers for other people of that age.
Neither Will nor the AEI guy said or suggested being raped is a privilege or that sexual assault isn’t a problem.
Your link doesn’t work.
Will said precisely that, actually. Because he is awful. AEI guy didn’t.
Huh. Not sure why the link isn’t working. Here it is again:
http://jacksonville.com/reason/fact-check/2014-05-16/story/fact-check-was-biden-accurate-saying-1-5-women-are-sexually
You forgot my piece on Golden Legacy: “The More Things Change. . .” Golden Legacy, Affirmative Action & Black Comics” ;) http://themiddlespaces.wordpress.com/2014/06/17/the-more-things-change-golden-legacy-affirmative-action-black-comics/
I am hoping to have something for HU in July.
Thanks!
It’d be great if folks used the comments to link other articles…maybe I’ll start encouraging people to do that.
Agree or disagree with the actual points, this conservative read Will correctly.
Something funny’s going on around here. I’ve had to go through captcha some and now the software took my link, but doesn’t go anywhere. Anyway, here’s the link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/06/19/misreading-george-will/
Huh…I don’t know what’s happening? There shouldn’t be captcha at the moment; I turned it off; I’ll poke around.
Not very impressed with that article. “Will doesn’t think she’s a victim of sexual assault, so obviously he’s not making fun of people who are sexually assaulted!” Sexual assault victims are routinely told they haven’t actually been assaulted; that’s how the rape culture you claim doesn’t exist works. That’s how people pretended for centuries that marital rape never happened. Will describes a clear case of rape, said it didn’t exist, then sneers at the victim. Because he is a shit. Making excuses for that really does not impress me even a little bit.
The captcha problem happened last time I posted, not this time. I was guessing that it was somehow related to the linking problem that we both had. But maybe we both just fucked up the coding.
I didn’t expect you to be impressed with that article. Claiming rape culture to shut down discourse is just one of those privileges that supposedly doesn’t exist with victimhood ideologues. Arguing against such demagoguery isn’t sneering at victims — I mean, doesn’t have to be, but talk radio dipshits are another matter — but, rather, it’s opposing the diminishment of one the world’s worst crimes by falsely equating it with merely boorish behavior. (And rape culture leads to racist conclusions, which is a good enough reason to oppose it.) There are at least a few of us who prefer a rational left.
I don’t want to have the rape culture argument again, really. But when a woman says “no” and you then have sex with her, that’s rape. That’s what happened in that incident; it’s what George Will is excusing. Not really sure how you get around that, or why it’s “rational” to shame rape victims, or what kind of privilege it is to have a national columnist take your rape and use it as a way to spit on you on a national platform.
According to that definition, i’ve been raped (unless only the woman’s ‘no’ counts to you). Force and/or threat seem important to me, but aren’t part of your definition. Kinda QED.
There was force in the incident in question, and threat.
Men can be raped, sure. I don’t know the details of your particular incident. The fact that you don’t feel you were raped doesn’t mean this women wasn’t. And force and threat can come in a variety of ways. This is why the recognition of marital rape was important.
“The fact that you don’t feel you were raped doesn’t mean this women wasn’t.”
Did I claim this? No. You gave a definition that was bullshit and I pointed out why it was so (that it left out certain necessary features). No need to invent positions for me. And unless you’ve read something other than this, neither force, nor threat are mentioned in summarizing the incident in question. There might very well be more to the incident, but there’s no evidence cited in that particular article. I have no problem admitting I’m wrong, if you’ll just quote the relevant passage.
He forced her in that passage. She said no, he continued, she says she didn’t feel in a position to stop him. Will therefore appears to think she should be mocked. You find that position defensible. I disagree.