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I'm bringing back the Cornell incident from last week, because I think I have something to add to the topic (albeit that it took a little while rolling around in my head). For those who have already said it outside of my notice, please accept my apologies for the terrible crime of being dull.
Most discourse around the Cornell incident is about whether it was rape. From a fact-finding perspective, I find the first account submitted to the police most plausible, and that does not sound like rape to me. But what I notice is that we, the audience, have been forced to accept the form of the question. As in, is the relevant question about this event whether or not it was rape? (If you are one of the defendants or are on the jury, obviously it is, but I don't think any of us are.) What question has been suppressed by the overpowering presence of the rape question?
Again, I believe that the first account given to the police is most likely true. If so, what happened here? Seven men, one women, and a substantial amount of alcohol and ketamine spent an evening experimenting with different configurations of which was inside, outside, or on top of which. The events seem to have been broadly consensual but severely underinhibited and quite inadvisable. After this, the human participants went their separate hungover ways, and their relationship swiftly deteriorated. This apparently reached a tipping point after the men's fraternity's president disinvited the woman from a Halloween party, at which point she started accusing them of rape. What are we to make of this?
The natural direction to look is in the direction of the woman. Was she sober enough? Was she just some crazy slut? Was she vindictive, hell hath no fury yadda yadda? I don't see a need to. Obviously I disapprove of the actions she took and would be appalled if my daughter were to do anything like it (and, of course, wondering how I raised her so). But she's not my daughter, she's in no way involved with my life, and being free means being free to make bad choices. But overall, prior to the rape accusations (again, obviously a big deal, but only after the fact), her only crime was that she "loved too much," as it were. She did not hurt anyone with her frankly wildly out of control actions, except possibly herself. What I'm interested in here is the men. What do I note from them, what do I see? How did they treat her?
They treated her like a piece of meat. Sure, they had a couple of consensual if intoxicated threesomes with her, and that much is fine if fairly gross. But after that, they started texting each other about "free pussy." The latecomers wandered in awkwardly looking for action, and the original parties just let whoever come in, what's the matter? They barely knew her at this point. After the event, they seem only to have been involved with her as far as making sure the event wouldn't reflect badly on them, no interest in her whatsoever. (I think the slant most people draw from this is that they were worried about being accused of rape; I'm wondering if they were actually worried about everyone knowing how much they loved having sex with their bros.) "Wow, that was a wild night, huh? Well, good knowing you." And under mysterious circumstances, general knowledge of this wild night starts getting around, so the fraternity president now knows enough about this one chick to disinvite her specifically from a party.
Listen, I get that people are gonna have wild and crazy and frankly stupid sex sometimes, stuff that I look down on. But this chick was putting out for them, putting herself out for them, and a man has at least some obligations in response to that. These guys just tried to get laid and then drop her like a hot potato, and while it's not absolutely clear to me that it was them spreading the knowledge that she'd been fuckin', it seems a little more plausible than that her sorority sisters wanted it common knowledge that they harbored sluts. They felt entitled to her body at face-value terms, that "consent" was the only thing needed, and they weren't even obliged to provide the "thank you ma'am." In short, they disrespected her severely, and by disrespecting her so severely, transmuted her essence from "fun woman" or even "nice, sweet girl who made a mistake" into "crazy slut," because the only person you can get away with doing that to is "crazy slut." So, in her rage, she decided to become "victim of sexual violence" so that they would have to stop being "lucky horndogs" and start being "frat bro rapists." But once she does that, it's not just those men who become "rapists," it puts people like the DA and the school into that category, so now it becomes a much larger problem. And now everyone starts fighting over whether that last move was legal or not, whether she has to do a takeback or get issued a game loss, and nobody looks at the earlier move. Were they allowed to turn her into a slut just because she slept around?
This is what I think is supercharging the debate. The seven young men, individually and as a group, acted like total fucking cads, and they were getting away with it. There's no law against acting like a cad, and worse, there's not even a real social punishment. My own personal feelings and standards aside (where yes, I'd probably ice a boy like that out without very strong evidence he'd reformed), the general attitude is that all they needed to do was get consent, and that's the end of their obligations. After that, they just "got lucky" and who cares what's up with her, she can take care of herself, she's got equal rights. They got to go to the Halloween party and she didn't. Excuse me? Then why did she have all that sex? Just for the love of the game? I'm not going to accuse every swipe-addicted TikTok drone of having such deep thoughts about it, but the zeitgeist WILL make itself known. She was mistreated by those men, who allowed her to have sex with them even though they had no intention of returning any of that favor. Her sex was taken for granted, taken advantage of, but we do not punish that, not when it's Cornell frat bros, not when it's fuckboy ghosters, not when it's long-term live-in boyfriends who won't fucking propose. The only thing we do punish is rape, and so it had to be rape.
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I know this has been a long and meandering post, and expect it will be appreciated if I lay out a pretty explicit thesis. If you like rhetoric as an art, sorry, pretend this doesn't exist.
The rape accusations are born out of women's rage as a collective. Not all women individually, and individual women are not here obligated to avow or disavow this rage, but as a group it suffuses them. The rage is over men's, as a collective, perceived ability to dodge consequences for sex. Again, not all men individually, etc. The rage does not have to be proportionate. It does not have to be satisfied in the ways it demands; indeed this is a poor way to handle rage. But it is aggravated by any incident where a woman is forced to pay for sex while a man is not. The only way out I personally see is to deny that asking her consent is sufficient repayment for a woman's sex, and look down on men who attempt that. But that is a stance I was already happy to take.
If you don't want to risk being thought a slut, don't have a drug-addled gangbang, it's really not that hard.
Nobody's going to bail me out if I blow up my account by abusing leverage recklessly. I won't be a 'rich guy who made a mistake', I'll be poor because the value of my wealth has declined. It won't be unjust, it wasn't as if I got robbed. I made a risky decision and it went poorly. If I made that decision while drunk or drug-addled, that doesn't change the outcome, I still have to own it.
How can the bad element here be 'disinviting her from a Halloween party' or 'being considered a slut by her sorority'? Who cares, it's just a party. Not getting invited to a party does not remotely justify a rape case.
It's not like she was an 11 year old being groomed over a period of time into performing these sex acts, with an implicit threat of violence if she refused. If it were actual grooming and actual rape, then it would be a really serious matter.
How can the collective/zeitgeist of women possibly be appeased of these frustrations? How does she force a fuckboy to commit without taking away his ability to consent? Is he to be a male sex slave? A virgin until he chooses his forever wife? I appreciate that it might be frustrating to have a live-in boyfriend who won't propose but what's the problem with that? As long as he loves her, what does marriage matter? He hasn't gotten down on his knees to give her a ring he paid for, he hasn't legally shared half his stuff with her if they break up. He might just decide to leave and upend her life, damn, imagine how that would feel...
The state doesn't punish cuckoldry, it doesn't punish women belittling men, it doesn't punish e-girls extracting huge founts of cash from lonely loser men... Should it? Do we need thot police regulating how female streamers act online, as a criminal offence, rather than purely platform-based codes of conduct? Put them in a burkha perhaps, so they can show their personalities rather than their bodies? There are endless male complaints about women that women sure wouldn't enjoy if they were enforced by weaponizing the legal system.
The messy grey areas of sexual relations are unsuitable for law, they should be dealt with by shaming and rumours and informal methods. Same with sluts or cads for that matter. Law shouldn't be used as a mallet to hammer every problem humans face in life, it's already grossly overused.
I don't mean to be aggressive against you personally, you're making a light-shedding descriptive argument about how some feel frustrated. But the descriptive argument if true seems pretty ugly.
I subscribe to the idea that literally everyone involved was degenerate for their participation in the act (the girl and the guys alike); her escalation into rape accusations is another matter entirely and does not reflect kindly on her or her ability to own her mistakes. But:
I really just think progs and trads alike would only be satisfied with the reintroduction of The Patriarchy™ (and probably not even then). They are literally stating that women do not have the capacity to regulate their own sexuality and cannot take full responsibility like adults when they get themselves into situations that make them feel shame or do not yield the outcomes they want, and that the responsibility should be displaced onto men collectively, who must decide on their behalf what would be good for them or read their mind to divine what they Really Want, then regulate their sexuality for them by preemptively stopping them from making stupid decisions and putting out in a way that won’t yield results. They are all just babes in the woods who cannot be expected to assess risk or bear the consequences when their gambits fail, the poor dears. If a woman doesn’t get what she wanted or expected, someone must be hung for it.
Of course, you can’t expect every single man on earth to take responsibility for a woman’s Honour and Dignity, so the practical implementation of this is to provide her father and brothers and other male relatives who would naturally care about her the most with the authority to make sure it is preserved. Frankly the discourse surrounding this is some Islam Is Right About Women-tier shit, and I struggle with not believing that women’s lib was a horrible mistake when women en masse seem intent on demonstrating that they are radically unsuited for the “empowerment” they so value. If I didn’t know better I would think this was a conspiracy to turn people into misogynists; it’s just so farcical that I could not have dreamt up better ammunition if I tried.
Hello problem redditor, big fan of your contributions that brings light to mens issues. I wanted to ask something about DV. Why does using modified CTC by Stratus in these reasearch (in India and other Asian countries) found no gender symmetry at all?
Eg: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30983711/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30533949/
These studies show almost no gender symmetry even though they have used modified CTC. They describe it as male perpetrated and tell no gender symmetry exists(the sample size is too small but the findings I don't think I can dismiss)
So what goes on in studies like this and what exactly do they do in their methodologies that leads to data like this? Because in PASK I can see that they found near gender symmetry. But for some reason in asian or middle eastern countries it is not the case. They almost always mention it is done by men over women citing a vague patriarchal motive i.e men are inherently bound to harm thier spouses. Though I will admit in those countries male victimization is understudied and virtually no literature exists about it.
Does PASK address these studies showing male perpetration and still come to conclusions that DV is nearly gender symmetric? Especially government surveys like NFHS and so on.
Also studies like this https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1077801214521324
I wouldn't say that in Southern Asia it is exclusively male perpetrated as there is involvement of in-laws who are mostly or always women so that skews things a bit.
But I wanted to know what causes this disparity. Why do research in western countries show gender parity while in other countries it shows the opposite? Does a country becoming more egalitarian increase violence by women? If so wouldn't that prove the patriarchy conjecture as it tells that men are inclined to control women when they have power thereby oppressing them?
Where can I know more about these things and be aware of bad researches on DV?
Firstly, thank you. Secondly, I see people are coming off Reddit to find me now. I stopped doing this because I'm now supremely busy (and dealing with the absolute state of gender research and discourse was like trying to stem a river of diarrhoea with my hands for no good reason), but since you went to the trouble of actually getting here I'll try to respond.
Regarding the two studies you linked from India, you're correct that the sample size is small, but in my opinion an even bigger issue is that the "modified CTS" (from what I see, these studies are actually using questionnaires based off the modified CTS) is being utilised here in two separate studies conducted a year apart, one which only studies men and one which only studies women. I'd be very careful with this. Since they were conducted in two different sessions these studies can feature subtly different questions, interviewing norms, and methodologies, and the "methods and materials" section of the study is very high level and does not provide a whole lot of methodological detail other than really high-level coverage of basics; they may very well have adapted their approach over time. Without detailed methodological information, it's possible that the questions administered or the approach taken to the respondents in both studies may have been subtly different. Timing is also itself a problem - different survey waves mean different historical contexts, and there may be real changes in prevalence or in willingness to disclose over time. This confounds any attempt to compare between the two studies.
From a cursory read of the studies it does appear that there were differences in the questionnaire administered; e.g. economic violence was assessed in the female study, while it was excluded in the male study, and it's hard to know how differences like that would affect respondent behaviour within the study. As an example of how this can work, it's possible for there to be a priming and framing effect wherein a longer module with a broader list of behaviours signals a wider definition of violence, and can change what respondents recognise and count as abusive, including in other domains like physical violence. In general it's always better to source either a meta-analysis featuring a very large curated swath of studies that harmonises definitions, assesses study quality, and models between-study heterogeneity, or to use a singular study where the explicit goal is to provide comparative data for the sexes, instead of picking out two different studies conducted at two different times and then trying to compare figures from these to come to an overall conclusion.
There have, however, been studies conducted with the goal of providing a large slate of comparative data that surveys men and women in many different countries; a pretty early example of this is the International Dating Violence Study, with results summarised here. They asked students regarding their domestic violence perpetration, and if an incident was reported they asked about bidirectionality. The results from India show that approximately equal proportions of men and women perpetrated minor violence on their partners, and a higher proportion of women perpetrated severe violence compared to men. Of those relationships with violence, 8.3% featured male perpetration only, 16.6% featured female perpetration only, and 75% was bidirectional. You'll note that if you look at the Middle Eastern countries on that list there's also gender symmetry. This isn't the only one either; there are many studies like that around, showing the same patterns.
Oh, this is Johnson. To be quite frank, this is probably one of the single worst domestic violence researchers I have ever come across; his entire body of academic work on domestic violence has entirely been him trying to create two different categories of domestic violence: "Common couple violence" and "intimate terrorism", with the first occurring out of routine frustration and the latter being perpetrated out of a desire for control. He claims that the former is largely gender symmetrical and the latter is mostly male-perpetrated, and around the '00s and '10s he basically tried to launder a false idea of gender asymmetry into academia. When he first attempted to prove this claim he literally used samples that included either known female victims of male violence or samples drawn from crime surveys of women’s victimisation using only women's reports. When this was actually tested by other researchers using non-selected general population samples, it was repeatedly found again, and again, and again, and again that intimate terrorism as per his own typology was either gender symmetrical or majority female-perpetrated. Johnson of course does not want to acknowledge all this research as it delegitimises his ideology and his "contribution" to the field.
In this study, in order to try and save face he claims that asking people about their experiences with "ex-spouses" is much more of a better measure than asking them about their current relationships, and says that in survey data he finds more intimate terrorist ex-husbands compared to intimate terrorist ex-wives. But his data source for this study is the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS), which isn't the best source to draw from, to say the least. As this blogger notes; "The study was never intended to measure domestic violence in both genders. It was developed by feminist researchers for the purpose of exclusively surveying women [7]. Indeed, for the first three months of the study, only female respondents were interviewed [8]. The CDC later decided to add a male sample as well. However, the male respondents were not treated equally in this survey. While all female respondents were assigned female interviewers, only half of the male respondents were assigned a male interviewer [9]. A further bias, or a consequence of the above mentioned biases, was the much higher refusal rate among men in the survey (45% vs 36%) [10]. Because of these methodological and statistical biases, the findings of this study are far from the last word on the subject." Given the issues with the survey and its methodology, such research operating off the NVAWS is definitely not to be taken as definitive proof of, well, anything. Yet the state of the academy is such that this is the kind of research people are touting as "evidence" for their pet theories.
Honestly, dissidents are dispersed all over the internet and many of the old guard that were critical of SocJus academia have dispersed now. And given my inactivity lately on gender issues, I'm probably not the best person to ask for up-to-date, centralised sources which actually go in-depth on the problems with progressive academia. It also increasingly seems to me like the popularity of the old identity politics hobbyhorses of the 2010s have largely waned in popular discourse as well, and the focus has shifted to new things like AI and the Iran War and so on. While feminism/women's studies is still an extremely powerful lobby and still produces a lot of crap academic work, in popular-discourse circles these kinds of topics seem to have gotten increasingly stale.
Or maybe I'm just less terminally online. Hard to say.
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