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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28026 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Russell Brand Accusations

Russell Brand has been accused of sexual misconduct and/or rape by four women in a large exposé by the Sunday Times [2]. The mainstream consensus online is that the testimony of these women is absolutely correct. I wonder, though, how many false accusers we should expect given the context of Russell Brand.

Russell Brand is not just some guy, he was at one point a party icon in the UK. As such, he has slept with 1000 women. And these are not just some women, just like Brand is not just some guy. This is not a sample size of the median woman in the UK. The women he slept with would differ psychologically from the average woman: more likely to make poor choices, more likely to be partying, more likely to be doing things for clout (like Russell Brand), more likely to be involved with drugs and mental illness. A study on the lives of “groupies” in the heavy metal scene found that groupies were more likely to use sex for leverage, to come from broken homes, and to have issues with drugs and alcohol. (This is not a one-to-one comparison; heavy metal is different than the rock n roll persona of Brand).

Scott has written that up to 20% of all rape allegations are false. But with Brand, we have a more complicated metric to consider: how many false accusers will you have sex with if you’ve had sex with one thousand women who make poor choices? Scott goes on in the above article to note that 3% of men will likely be falsely accused (including outside of court) in their life. If this is true, we might try multiplying that by 125 to arrive at how many accusers Brand should have. That would bring us to four, rounding up — but again, this would totally ignore the unique psychological profile of the women he screwed.

There’s yet more to consider. Brand is wealthy, famous, and controversial. His wealth and stature would lead a mentally unwell woman to feel spite, and his controversy would lead a clout-chasing woman to seek attention through accusation. What’s more, (most of) these allegations only came about because of an expensive and time-consuming journalistic investigation, which would have lead to pointed questioning.

All in all, it seems unfair to target a famous person and set out your journalists to hound down every woman he had sex with. It’s a man’s right to have consensual sex with mentally unwell and “damaged” women, which would be a large chunk of the women Brand bedded. Of course, this cohort appears more apt to make false accusations. Quoting Scott,

in a psychiatric hospital I used to work in (not the one I currently work in) during my brief time there there were two different accusations of rape by staff members against patients […] Now I know someone is going to say that blah blah psychiatric patients blah blah doesn’t generalize to the general population, but the fact is that even if you accept that sorta-ableist dismissal, those patients were in hospital for three to seven days and then they went back out into regular society

Bit of an update on some things I saw this week on this.

Looks like Youtube has already demonetized his account. Guilty until proven innocent.

https://apnews.com/article/russell-brand-youtube-sex-assault-ecf7aeecb3b66a02a4f3eb74282dc1c8

YouTube said Tuesday that Russell Brand will no longer make money from the video streaming site after several women made allegations of sexual assault against the comedian-turned-influencer.

The BBC removed some of Brand’s material from its streaming archive, joining a growing list of organizations distancing themselves from the performer, who denies sexual assault and has not been charged with any criminal offenses.

YouTube said monetization of Brand’s account, which has 6.6 million subscribers, has been suspended “following serious allegations against the creator.”

“This decision applies to all channels that may be owned or operated by Russell Brand,” the Google-owned video service said.

Something that popped up in my feeds today that seems even more concerning is this from alt-media site Rumble though.

https://twitter.com/rumblevideo/status/1704584927834960196

They received an email from British parliament inquiring as to whether Russel Brand was still monetized on their website.

Dear Chris,

I am writing concerning the serious allegations regarding Russel Brand, in the context of his being a content provider on Rumble with more than 1.4 million followers.

The Culture, Media and Sport Committee is raising questions with the broadcasters and production companies who previously employed Mr. Brand to examine both the culture of the industry in the past and whether that culture still prevails today.

However, we are also looking at his use of social media, including on Rumble where he issued his pre-emptive response to the accusations made against him by The Sunday Times and Channel 4's Dispatches. While we recognize that Rumble is not the creator of the content published by Mr. Brand, we are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform.

We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr. Brand is able to monetize his content, including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him. If so, we would like to know whether Rumble intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr Brand's ability to earn money on the platform.

We would also like to know what Rumble is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior.

It's twitter and rumble along with a few other alternative media sites like post-millennial reporting on it so far, so it could be a hoax. It would be interesting if true. It looks like they are using this not just as a way to silence Brand entirely by cutting off his income, but also as a pretext to "examine the culture of the industry," i.e. pressure media both old and new in a more general sense beyond Brand.

He certainly has a high base-rate of false accusations. But, absent anything else, I'd think sleeping with a lot of women in those circumstances, especially those who have issues with alcohol and drugs and alcohol would lead to a high base-rate of true accusations as well. Both directly because of drug/alcohol use, and because personality traits and individual tactics that lead to success in casual sex include being aggressive and pushy, and in that frame of mind one can easily cross the line to violations of consent with miscommunications, with drugs, or if you just pushed a bit too far this time.

Just for an example of media incompetence, I saw a (presumably serious?) online celebrity rag publicising a FistedbyFoucault tweet mocking the witness.

Russell Brand then proceeded to sexually assault her on broken glass in his living room, while forcing her to listen to Goebbels' "Total War" speech recorded live at the Berlin Sportspalast on February 18, 1943

https://wegotthiscovered.com/celebrities/why-did-russell-brand-and-katy-perrys-marriage-end/

This is so surreal. The rest of the article doesn't look like a joke. Some kind of next-level joke? (Admittedly effective) clickbait to get more views? Total credulity on the part of the journalist (perhaps they don't know FbF's general slant on things)? Epic fuck-up by the intern in charge of linking tweets? Editor was high on crack and thought it was fine? OK, the editor probably doesn't even exist in this kind of 'journalism'.

Makes you wonder how many people will read and believe this nonsense. I had a lecturer credulously reveal to the class some so-fake-even-Snopes-condemned-it nonsense about how Trump called the Italian President 'Mozzarella'. Ironically she taught history...

Yeah. Hell, even if he is being unusually careful to stay out of situations where consent is dubious...and does that successfully 99.9 percent of the time...that still leaves him pretty likely to get into a sketchy situation. I'm thinking things like this guy has sex with a woman that's experiencing a first break of mania or psychosis, genuinely seems fairly lucid and coherent if maybe a little bit hyped, and then three days later is completely out of touch with reality and a week after that has a genuinely poor recollection of things and was told that she had sex with this Brand guy, something she would never have considered when not manic. Things like that might well fool even a cautious, prudent person assessing the situation into thinking that she's just a normal person.

On the other hand, you have the Jimmy Saviles and Bill Cosbys of the world.

But that isn’t rape. It isn’t sexual assault. Consent for criminal law purposes must be the reasonable 3P standard. Otherwise you really run into a mens rea problem

The 3P standard?

What would a reasonable objective person believe.

Thanks.

I think the MSU football case is even more interesting. He fooled around with literally a victim surviving counselor. Those are the type of people who dream about getting to go after a high ranking person. I don’t know if he went too far but I do know I would never mess around with someone with that type of job and that goes 10x if your a powerful person.

A friend of mine recalled how she was worried about sexual harassment from this creep in the workplace, only to be appointed as departmental sex harassment officer by her quick-thinking boss. She didn't have any problems from then!

I don't understand what the relevance of the number of false accusations in expectation is. Surely accusations are true or false because of facts in the world, not dubious statistical expectation. If we want to determine if the accusations are true or false we should examine the facts of the accusations themselves. At least one of them appears to have a great deal of contemporaneous corroborating evidence. Or did a woman go to a Rape Crisis Center and spend 5 months in therapy so that, a decade later, her false accusation would appear more credible?

I don't understand what the relevance of the number of false accusations in expectation is.

If I claimed that got shot at with a man-portable particle cannon yesterday, you would dismiss the claim out of hand without some compelling corroborating evidence, because the base rate of getting attacked with sci fi weapons is very low for all segments of the population.

If I claimed that I was shot at with a RPK machine-gun yesterday, and you know me to be an office worker in Paris, you would place a very low level of credence in my claim because the base rate of getting shot at with military weapons is very low for the French middle class.

If I made that same claim but you know me to be an infantry soldier in Ukraine, you'd probably just take me at my word because the base rate for being in combat is quite high for infantry in a warzone.

The base rate determines the level of evidence necessary to evaluate a claim as likely to be true.

Well yes, the base rate is important but you don't just look at the base rate and then stop your analysis. what /u/gillitrut is saying is that in order to properly judge this case we need to look at the actual facts on the ground too.

I don't understand what the relevance of the number of false accusations in expectation is.

I don't understand what the relevance of the number of false accusations in expectation is.

The argument goes: someone to a first approximation either is a rapist or not, but both rapists and non-rapists can expect roughly the same chance of false accusations per sex act. So by Bayes' rule, someone who has sex once and is accused of rape once is probably a rapist, but someone who has sex 10,000 times and is accused of rape once should be expected to be a rapist roughly at the base rate of being a rapist, because non-rapists in that situation would get (falsely) accused almost as often as rapists getting (falsely or truly) accused.

This Outside View argument is relatively-weak evidence (something like a factor of 10-20 in likelihood?), and can be overcome by sufficient Inside View evidence, but it's relevant for informing priors.

The sexual revolution involved worsening the lives of a substantial proportion of the population (both men and women) to benefit a tiny minority of men. This was probably always an untenable state of affairs, given that even the men in question often had daughters (by contrast, billionaires and kings do not typically have family who are paupers or peasants). Society - even liberal society - is governed by countless rules, minor and major, designed to prevent some parties taking advantage of others even if it is "consensual". You can't pay someone $2 an hour even if they consent, you can't sign up to 30 years of indentured servitude even if you consent, you can't practice as a self-taught surgeon even if all your patients consent. You can't engage in duels or cannibalism even if both parties consent. So we agree that clearly 'consent' isn't everything; we're not (for the most part) ancaps. Some things are social negatives, and it is understood that tolerating them is bad for society, period.

Part of reversing the sexual revolution is making sure that promiscuity has consequences. Yes, that includes for women (although as Red Pillers seem to delight in reminding them, 'hitting the wall' is the consequence for women anyway, and most slut shaming has always been by other women, which continues comfortably well into the 21st century even in progressive circles). But it also means consequences for men. The '60s rocker lifestyle of fucking a thousand 14-16 year old girls while on tour across the country is a net negative for society. It benefits a small number of men at the expense, in many ways, of everyone else (who is impacted directly or indirectly by mountains of damaged women created as a consequence). Sexual libertarianism is as degenerate as any other form of liberalism, and therefore I really do support measures to give it more consequences. If cases like these act as a deterrent for the next generation of Russell Brands, they will have served their purpose, whatever the truth.

And in Brand's case, he really is an infamous asshole, a pseud, and has a proven record of being a huge piece of shit. So it's hard to feel bad for him.

The sexual revolution involved worsening the lives of a substantial proportion of the population (both men and women) to benefit a tiny minority of men.

The benefit to the women is that they get to have kids with a higher quality man than they'd otherwise be able to get commitment from. It's a solid sexual/evolutionary strategy, which is why the drive exists.

Single motherhood from the start (as in mothers who were never in a committed relationship with the father of the child) is still relatively rare among whites, and there’s mo evidence that baby daddies are on average higher quality than the hypothetical ‘alternative man’ who would commit. It’s more that in some communities, there are very few men who would commit nowadays.

Society - even liberal society - is governed by countless rules, minor and major, designed to prevent some parties taking advantage of others even if it is "consensual".

Sure but these rules need to be clearly laid out. You seem to be saying that since you can't use consent in all situations, consent is useless.

And in Brand's case, he really is an infamous asshole, a pseud, and has a proven record of being a huge piece of shit. So it's hard to feel bad for him.

This was a lot of words to basically say; you don't like him, so fuck him. So do you get to decide who the rules applies to? Do you really think you're so morally correct?

Well said. Completely agree

Are you saying powerful men created the sexual revolution for their own benefit?

Cui bono?

If we're to believe the stats, nobody.

It was also good for women too. Women were second class citizens until the 1960s. This isn't even a debatable. And it was worse the further back you went.

That post is ridiculous cherry picking to attack a strawman. I never claimed women had no agency ever and nothing they said would disprove they were second class citizens compared to men.

It was also good for women too. Women were second class citizens until the 1960s. This isn't even a debatable.

It's entirely debatable to anyone with the slightest knowledge of historical fact. The anti-suffragettes were likewise women, and they argued vociferously against having the franchise extended to women as a class. One of their tactics to try to prevent it from happening was to demand that any plebiscite on the matter be voted on only by women, since if the question was limited to women only, both the suffragettes and anti-suffragettes expected the plebiscite to fail. And in fact, it was passed by having both men and women vote on it together, as the Suffragettes had demanded.

Feminists demanded that men have an equal say on whether women should get the vote, because it was unpopular enough among women that it couldn't win without the men's help.

This history, of course, has been buried down a mineshaft ever since, because of course the March of Progress has been an unquestioned benefit for all involved and its aims always succeed. If one is willing to tell unlimited lies about the past, the present is always the best of times, and the future is always sunny.

And it was worse the further back you went.

That too is quite debatable. Sure, marital rape was only recently criminalized, from which we infer that prior eras were a horror show of unrestrained sexual violence against women. In a similar fashion, we've only recently begun systematically searching schoolchildren for weapons when they enter school grounds, which has at last addressed the rampant and unrestrained schoolchild murder spree that stretches back to the endemic child-murderers of ancient Rome.

But at least in our own era, we've solved intimate-partner violence, right? ...Right?

What evidence specifically has led you to the above conclusion? Primary sources? Court records? Diaries of women in the 17th century? Historical writings conveying attitudes toward women? Is there something solid your view is based on, or is it just a story you were told?

In the just West? From Roman's views on women, to the Bible, to what Enlightenment philosophers wrote about women, to laws in the US and Europe, etc. Or just go back and read what women wrote about their life in the past, how they were portrayed in films and television, whatever. It all paints a pretty obvious picture. What evidence specifically has led you to the your conclusion that the opposite is true?

From Roman's views on women, to the Bible,

Women are at least half of Christianity, and considerably more in America. I assure you that they too have read Romans in particular, and the Bible generally. The large majority of the women who take Christianity seriously, who are in fact likewise half of their respective population, do not seem to find anything objectionable in either. You thinking they ought to find these passages objectionable observably does not compel them to object, probably because of a number of other verses which you appear to be ignoring, which speak at length of husbands and wives, men and women treating each other with love and respect.

My wife's sister attends a church that's gone quite Progressive. My wife and her mother don't like attending that church because they are moving to include women in leadership roles, something my sister-in-law is leary of, and my wife and mother-in-law consider flatly unacceptable. You are of course free to assemble a stepford-wife caricature of all three women in your mind, but the reality is that they have views on the proper interaction of men and women very different from the liberal consensus, and that they arrived at these views quite consciously, value them deeply, and intend firmly to keep them. It seems to me that the standard Progressive response of smearing such women as brainwashed is itself straight-up misogynistic. Despite endless propaganda to the contrary, Womanhood is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Progressivism Inc.

to what Enlightenment philosophers wrote about women

I certainly am not in the business of defending Enlightenment philosophers, but perhaps you could be specific?

Or just go back and read what women wrote about their life in the past

I have, a bit. Generally I find descriptions of a life of joys and sorrows, hopes and worries, different in some ways than my own, but similar in many others.

how they were portrayed in films and television

At this point, you're up to the beginning of the last century, well into the progressive era and something like a generation past the point that feminism has started shaping the culture on a grand scale. And yet, how were they portrayed specifically? My wife watches a lot of TV, and being generally conservative, she watches a fair amount of old TV. Women are generally portrayed as kind, thoughtful, empathetic and generally decent. One of my favorite movies is from 1950, and features a prominent female lead; I see no reasonable objection to her portrayal. One of my wife's all-time favorite movies is The Taming of the Shrew, a movie so dangerously based that it made me more than a little uncomfortable the first time we watched it together while dating. She sees nothing objectionable in that movie's portrayal of its female cast, and on reflection neither do I.

Early TV and movies were not shy about marketing themselves to women. Which do you think is likelier: that they pursued at least half their audience by insulting them, or that you don't have the best understanding of people who lived in a world very different from yours?

What evidence specifically has led you to the your conclusion that the opposite is true?

Reading historical letters of husbands to wives, of women to other women an men to other men on the occasions I've come across them. Historical accounts of how men and women have lived together, what their concerns were, and how they addressed them. Observing the lives of old people I know, some of whom have been very old indeed. Observing my parents' own marriage first-hand. A number of historical anecdotes about the oppression of women that I've confirmed to my satisfaction to be false. Watching old movies, listening to old music, reading old fiction, and noting the themes therein. The observation that humans don't change that much, and the observation that our current society lies about this fact with wild abandon to cover its own failures. Complaints of contemporary women unsatisfied with the "progress" our current society has gifted them. Reading some small amount about the anti-suffragettes, who they were and what they argued for. A lifetime of observing the intellectual bankruptcy of popular feminist arguments, and the general forms that bankruptcy take, especially the way they argue by assertion and then use their purported moral authority to shout down any counter-argument. A lifetime of conversations with my mother, sister, female friends, and six years of conversations with my wife, her sister and her mother.

That, and the observation that people making arguments like yours don't actually make an argument and provide evidence to back it, but simply act like your correctness should be self-evident. We're a couple comments down in the chain, and the most specific evidence you've cited is "the book of Romans".

I ask again. What specific evidence leads you to the conclusion that women in the past lived as second-class citizens, or otherwise suffered unusual oppression relative to men?

Are people who can't own property and vote second class citizens to those that can or are they equal? To me, if you don't have the same rights as other citizens, then you are a second class citizen. There weren't many powerful institutions in the West going back to the Roman Senate, to the Anglican Church (until very recently), all the way up to the Catholic Church now where women had equal rights to men. This isn't even debatable to me and I don't how anyone could say otherwise. Whether or not that is a good thing and whether or not some women preferred that is irrelevant.. If you have less rights than others, you are a second class citizen (in my opinion). Obviously women weren't the only people this happened to.

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Yes! Although it’s better to say that they took advantage of a series of unique cultural and economic circumstances that had developed in the two decades after the war to accelerate it for their benefit.

The start of the sexual revolution is hard to pinpoint. It involved male students protesting at the University of Paris to be allowed into girls’ dormitories at night (the true trigger of the ‘68 riots btw); it involved a slow decline in religiosity from the early 60s; it involved the abolition of a lot of lewdness censorship laws in Western countries; it involved the invention of the teenager by advertisers because of a newly prosperous society. It involved a lot of things. But yes, ultimately it was steered and accelerated by powerful men who wanted access to a conveyor belt of cheap pussy.

They already had access to that if they were powerful and they couldn't have stopped it if they tried (many did).

They had access to a much smaller sampling of whores, actresses and loose women, after the sexual revolution they had access to a much larger group, that’s a big difference.

Society - even liberal society - is governed by countless rules, minor and major, designed to prevent some parties taking advantage of others even if it is "consensual". You can't pay someone $2 an hour even if they consent, you can't sign up to 30 years of indentured servitude even if you consent, you can't practice as a self-taught surgeon even if all your patients consent. You can't engage in duels or cannibalism even if both parties consent. So we agree that clearly 'consent' isn't everything; we're not (for the most part) ancaps. Some things are social negatives, and it is understood that tolerating them is bad for society, period.

One man's modus ponens and so on. While I'm not a full on libertarian, it seems clear to me that society has no business interfering in any of those situations.

I dispute that most of those are even societal negatives. Being unable to pay less than minimum wage prices out subpar but better than nothing labor, leading to marginally nonproductive people on welfare, and why kids these days in the West struggle to get a summer job when it would cost the same to get a grown adult to stand behind the counter at McDonald's.

Indentured servitude is just one extreme of the practise of selling one's labor for money, and I see no reason any sane individual shouldn't be allowed to do so, even if it's a stupid idea unless the payoff is crazy.

Cannibalism? It's no skin off my back, pun intended. Duels? Duel culture is bad, but not so bad I would legislate it away, especially when you can just say no without losing all social status.

Kids are subsidized by their parents. Letting them get jobs where they can underbid people who need the jobs to put food on the table and pay rent is basically legalized dumping. And parents subsidizing their kids isn't subject to market forces.

I never considered it from this angle before. I'm usually in favour of letting kids work for the character benefits but you do raise a good point.

Indentured servitude is just one extreme of the practise of selling one's labor for money, and I see no reason any sane individual shouldn't be allowed to do so, even if it's a stupid idea unless the payoff is crazy.

In most cases, contracted indentured servitude is nothing but a way to take advantage of people - or, put another way, a way to burn shared surplus to take rent for yourself. The average case of (bad) indentured servitude will end up looking like someone who's desperately poor, stupid, or in a temporary state of bad judgement agreeing to a contract that pays them much less than they would in a similar position, and one a reasonable person in their situation wouldn't agree to.

Nevertheless, there are cases where something resembling a contracted transfer of personal authority is probably good. Consider rehab, mental institutions, halfway houses. Maybe a drug addict is net/net better off if they can enter a program that'll force them to act in a certain way for a few months or years. Maybe habitual criminals too. And maybe private slavery indentured servitude is the best way to achieve that. It probably isn't though, and such institutions should probably be regulated or otherwise exist in sufficiently different social systems that 'contracted indentured servitude' is a poor description of them.

Duels? Duel culture is bad, but not so bad I would legislate it away, especially when you can just say no without losing all social status.

I don't have a strong position on this, although duels are very bad.

Indentured servitude is just one extreme of the practise of selling one's labor for money, and I see no reason any sane individual shouldn't be allowed to do so, even if it's a stupid idea unless the payoff is crazy.

I suspect the word "sane" is doing a lot of work there, and that this is relevant to its worth to society. Most people who will consent to long-term indentured servitude in modern society are, by selection, going to be people with a serious case for non est factum, and that's going to gum up the court system.

Don't get me wrong; in a colonial era (past or future) the institution makes a lot of sense; in that societal circumstance a lot of sane people will agree, and the societal benefit is also greater because of the Parfit's hitchhiker problem. But we're not in one of those now, so it's less work to just ban it outright.

(I think I agree on duels.)

The first argument that I find convincing against the standard libertarian positions is that most people are actually really stupid and a paternalistic government that treats them like children generally creates better outcomes(this is the real secret to Singapore). Take a normal Algebra or English class at a middle of the pack state school, most of the people in the room are still just guessing passwords. I am skeptical that anyone under 110 IQ can actually understand Algebra or get anything from text beyond the explicit meaning of the words without heavy priming. I would put the bottom 60% of Americans in approximately the same bucket as thirteen year-olds and think a kind government should make more choices for them, not less.

The second argument is zero sum positional status games, we would all be better off if society could collectively agree that all jobs get two months paid leave(or whatever) and don't allow any 'sane individuals' to trade that away for higher pay, because they all will, even though the marginal value of an extra dollar is trash, because humans.

Let’s say they are dumb. It doesn’t follow from that government is the rigger decider. First, government is also staffed with a lot of stupid people. Second, government suffers from Acton’s problem coupled with little skin in the game. Third, dumb people with local knowledge will outperform smart people lacking said knowledge (Hayek’s key insight and proven with the Soviet experience). That is, even a government of angels often will underperform.

Singapore is interesting but my perhaps faulty understanding is that Singapore depending on the issue is either super authoritarian or super liberal. It doesn’t get stuck in the middle.

I think things like clean air and water, cfc ban, lead, seat belts, and social security are all examples of governments being able to do exactly what I think they can do/want them to do, so I don't feel much need to argue about the platonic ideals of various organizational structures which imply that my preferences are impossible. They are possible, we live in a world where they are being satisfied to an extent, and I just want more.

I am skeptical that anyone under 110 IQ can actually understand Algebra or get anything from text beyond the explicit meaning of the words without heavy priming

I think I disagree. I have limited experience teaching dumb-seeming people algebra and they were able to solve simple linear systems of equations eventually.

My experience teaching dumb-seeming people is just tons and tons of password guessing with no fundamental understanding of what they were doing or why. I was constantly confronted with what I started to call 'magical-thinking' where I would notice that students had no underlying grasp on or seeming belief in a consistent reality governed by legible rules. They were just memorizing strings of characters that they were told produce certain other characters. The learning plateau is so short for these people I doubt education beyond basic reading and arithmetic has much real value. Anything they don't use for a month will be lost.

I suspect that there are IQ thresholds for 'cognitive milestones' in the same way that a new born is incapable of object permanence, the two big ones that have stood out to me are reading comprehension and algebra. Again, in a school environment these people can pass a class that is ostensibly testing this skill, but my single biggest frustration as an educator was noticing how good students are at guessing passwords. I also saw this as a student, I am not as highly educated as the average motte users, I took classes at a community college and three different middle-tier state schools all of which are full of students who can pass these classes(and plenty who can't), but try digging into what they read even a little bit outside of the script that they memorized for class and they have no idea what is going on. I suspect that smart people in general overestimate the cognitive toolkit that average and below average people are working with and underestimate the ability of such people to fake it.

I presume they weren’t referring to “2x + y = 10, y = 4, what’s x?”.

While I use the content of HS algebra daily, I remember nothing about how it was taught in high school, lol. That said, looking up 'algebra 2 exam pdf' on google, and I think an average IQ person could, with high-quality instruction, get a B or A. Things like the quadratic formula, factoring, reduced form, solving equations equations with polynomials, multiple variables, and ratios, drawing graphs, word problems, etc. My memory of tutoring is the slower students (still not below-average iq I think) were able to grasp that eventually, but maybe there was still some selection bias. This is the sort of thing one's default intuition might be bad for.

Looking for data on algebra knowledge for current students, the closest measurement I can find is that "Only 26% of 12th grade students scored at or above the proficient level on the NAEP math assessment". 38% were basic, the remaining were below basic. But apparently NAEP proficiency measures a significantly higher level of skill than grade-level, algebra is grade 8-11. Some of this is just guessing passwords I suppose. But when tutoring, students who were blatantly guessing passwords on specific kinds of problems, even things as basic as 'x + 1 = 2 ... durr .. x = = 3 ????' were perfectly capable of learning the real thing if you taught them well, so I think that with good tutoring most median IQ people could grasp most of algebra. I'm not entirely confident in that though, and I can't find any very strong evidence on this.

I'm not sure about calculus, and anything above that is probably beyond the limits of most, although I'm uncertain where the lines are.

I note you didn’t reply to the idea of letting anyone declare themselves a doctor, though.

More from laziness, in that I expected most people to have a ready argument, than anything else!

I'll bite the bullet, medical practise itself should not be regulated, but terms such as doctor, general practitioner etc should be protected.

Let anyone give medical advice, or perform procedures, as long as the patient is clearly aware of the credentials involved. The government should be enforcing truth in advertising.

After all, I'm honest in admitting that modern ML systems are competent enough that you should be willing to trust their judgement, or at least only check up details on anything serious, rather than treat them as a magic 8-ball.Would it thus surprise you that I'm not fond of medical regulations in general, even if they sometimes benefit me in terms of salary and job security?

Even Scott agrees that FDA delenda est.

That’s not an especially hard one for the ancap to resolve; you can just let private medical licensing authorities award medical-qualification ratings based on their preferred criteria and create an accreditation marketplace. If I choose to go to an amateur surgeon despite him having low ratings, that’s up to me.

Of course, I wasn’t implying that professional licensing is an issue ancaps haven’t discussed. But the person I was replying to isn’t an ancap!

Society - even liberal society - is governed by countless rules, minor and major, designed to prevent some parties taking advantage of others even if it is "consensual". You can't pay someone $2 an hour even if they consent, you can't sign up to 30 years of indentured servitude even if you consent, you can't practice as a self-taught surgeon even if all your patients consent. You can't engage in duels or cannibalism even if both parties consent. So we agree that clearly 'consent' isn't everything; we're not (for the most part) ancaps. Some things are social negatives, and it is understood that tolerating them is bad for society, period.

Do you believe there's any liberal society anywhere that will ever have the moral confidence and courage to declare certain sexual acts to be criminal even if everyone involved is a consenting adult? (The examples you mentioned are technically against the law.) After all, surely any hope of "reversing" the sexual revolution, if that is even possible, is moot if you don't actually believe that.

Incest is already illegal in many Western countries, not too long ago so was homosexuality.

I think possibilities for radical cultural change are always underestimated.

Homosexuality was illegal in the US for ages, as was miscegenation. You can be a liberal society with doublethink characteristics, just like how the People's Republic of China has ruthless working conditions for a workers state, just like how the US espouses anti-racism but there are few consequences for anti-white rhetoric. Bernie Sanders "If you're white you don't know how it feels to be poor" for instance.

I can get behind this. Sexual promiscuity has been heavily discouraged for the vast majority of human civilization for a reason. With the creation of birth control, we naively assumed that the only reason that state of affairs existed was so that you wouldn't have unwanted children. And so the floodgates opened.

really is an infamous asshole, a pseud,

Also what is a "pseud"?

Also what is a "pseud"?

Pseudointellectual

For those who want direct evidence of Brand being one: here

Yes, that includes for women [...]. But it also means consequences for men.

And yet the consequences for men keep coming, and the consequences for women don't. There isn't any reversing of the sexual revolution going on here. Just the perpetration of a new double standard where men get responsibility for both their own choices and those of women.

Undo rape shield laws. Actually punish single mothers who commit child neglect or abuse. (As of now this is pretty much not happening.) Just two ideas off the top of my head.

If you send single mothers to jail the kids become wards of the state (at what, $100,000 per year minimum?) while they’re there.

Foster care doesn’t cost anywhere near that.

Unfortunately foster care has such high rates of abuse that it’s probably better to just let the kids be abused by their parents most of the time.

What about stripping them of custody and putting the children up for adoption? I'm pretty sure that'd objectively be warranted in many cases, even if it's currently not done.

Unironically, bring back slutshaming.

Promiscuity looks to be, by every measure, a very bad thing that hurts women(and men, but especially women). Women are extremely influenced by societal pressure and the best way to influence them is to tell them that it’ll change their social status.

If it wasn’t about sex I would agree with you, but I just don’t think humans are capable of being nonjudgmental about it.

Slut shaming never disappeared. A favorite Gen Z TikTok topic is slut shaming women based on their ‘body count’. Women still slut shame each other the same way they always have, this is a fundamental way of in-group policing / mate guarding for women. Hoe, thot, ‘for the streets’, all common terms, the problem is more mixed messages from media and conflicting messages from young people which are confusing for teenagers.

Slut-shaming happened in the social context of monogamous patriarchy, where women had neither economic independence nor reliable means of contraception, where early marriage was the norm, and which no longer exists. You know that perfectly well.

I see parts of it repackaged into FDS-like content where women encourage each other to not put out for any random fuckboy. They don't use the word slut and put an emphasis on "they don't deserve you" rather than "you're a worse person for fucking them", but the message remains.

Fair point. It doesn't surprise me. I remember people in the Manosphere making this prediction more than a decade ago, namely that women who feel duped by the message of sex-positive feminism will start advising their daughters or younger female relatives to avoid casual sex in general. But this message is not anchored to any moral code, conviction or worldview, and has no structural basis in current society. Rejecting the sexual revolution out of nothing but spite, regret and resentment will not change anything.

Average age of marriage in some conservative Muslim countries (eg. parts of North Africa) is well over 25, in Algeria it’s 28 for women and 32 for men; it’s unclear that sexual conservatism requires early marriage.

Seriously?

When delayed marriage is normalized, it creates more incentives and also opportunities for promiscuity. Isn't that self-evident?

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This isn't convincing at all - The trendlines for men and women largely track each other and women commit suicide less than a quarter as often.

Wait a second.

Race to the bottom to get male attention at all? I think you are being hyperbolic here.

Everywhere I see innumerable women complaining about.. too much male attention not a lack of it! All those pesky guys sliding into their dms, bothering them at the gym, bothering them at the coffee shop, on the train, on the library, etc. Certainly of all the things women are suffering from a lack of male attention isnt one of them.

What you meant to say was. Attention from the top decile of men, who can dictate the terms. Yes attention from them will require you to race towards the bottom. But as the apex fallacy goes, CEOs and billionaires are not the only men in the world.

Ill actually make an effort post about this soon, with a radical solution that will never happen.

Attractive women wanting to sleep with attractive men is the natural order. Unattractive women also wanting it is natural (who doesn't want better?), but them wanting that and nothing else is what is causing the rip.

Its not as simple as that but correction.

It's not that we need more of these kinds of posts, but you have to admit the phrasing was unfortunate. It's hard to square it with all the "don't even look in my general direction" complaints you see all over the internets.

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great post

Absolutely loved Eighth Grade, and agree that it's a great opportunity to see the perspective of a modern young woman.

I see a lot of assertions that this state of affairs was all young women's idea, and that they need to be punished in order for it to change.

I think both genders collaborated on this group project. I don't want anyone to be punished, but we have the rock of consequences and the hard place of changing tastes. Brand was able to sleep with 1,000 women not despite his reputation but because of it.

How do we make his sexual personality repugnant to women instead of attractive? That seems insanely difficult. Very intelligent people - male or female - tend to pick potato chip partners over celery on a consistent basis.

In return, they don't get the sexual pleasure or status that a rake enjoys.

My hope would be that at least some fraction of his partners derived some pleasure from this, but given the description of what he considered fun sex I'm not sure that's the case. I also struggle to find where a starfucker would cash in on their status beyond maybe getting lucky and being invited to various parties and stuff afterward. It's difficult to steelman.

Honestly I think like a lot of things socially shaming and thus lowering the status of bad actors would do a lot to fix things. If he was socially shamed as a cad, a bore, and so on, women wouldn’t want to be around him because that behavior would make him low status. And he wouldn’t be openly sleeping with thousands or even hundreds of women because he’d lose status not only with women but with other men.

I mean the counterpoint is ‘yes, the sexual Revolution and porn culture is largely men’s fault, but it rests on convincing women to act against their own best interests. The only way anyone can see to fix it which has ever worked involves restricting the range of socially acceptable decisions for women to make, and that might not be fair, but life isn’t fair’.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that’s an oversimplification. Actually undoing the sexual Revolution entails things like making it harder for promiscuous men to find non-prostitute female companionship. But that, again, is the sort of thing that’s usually affected by restrictions on women’s freedom(her father has to approve before you can date or w/e). But the rat race can only be stopped by stigmatizing running it, and that means that yes, the restrictions are going to fall disproportionately on young women- just like they did historically.

and women commit suicide less than a quarter as often.

That’s because women try to take pills(which has a high failure rate) and men shoot themselves(which does not). For mental health suicide attempts(which are higher in women), not completed suicide, is the better metric to look at.

Suicide attempts that fail because of incompetence (a good metric for mental health) and suicide attempts that fail because they're not honest attempts (which are not) are impossible to disentangle.

Women realising that a failed suicide attempt is a great way to get a bunch of sympathy points/attention/clout would be upstream of the choice of method in this model.

Usual QALY given for depression is something like 0.7 IIRC; suicide is generally considered a much worse outcome than "being depressed for a while".

This assumes that all attempts are equally serious and reflect similar levels of mental anguish. It is also possible that some attempts are less serious and driven by different emotional states. For example, maybe some people are desperate for attention/support/accommodations from the people around them, and understand that an attempted suicide will give them those things. Obviously there are other reasons women might prefer softer options, while still being 'equally depressed', but its not a given that that is what is happening when looking at attempt numbers.

That’s because women try to take pills(which has a high failure rate) and men shoot themselves(which does not).

Sure, but why is that? You imply it's something inherent to men that they happen to choose more dangerous suicide methods, but they could easily choose those methods simply because they're more serious about actually going through with it.

For mental health suicide attempts(which are higher in women), not completed suicide, is the better metric to look at.

This is a very bold claim and seems intuitively wrong. Those who go through with suicide must on average be less mentally healthy than those who are less serious about it.

Young women are depressed and suicidal in record numbers.

The issue is consequences imposed by others, not the essentially mechanical consequences of one's actions.

What consequences do you want for them?

Penalties for false rape/sexual assault accusations, for starters. Serious ones, on the same level as the accused would have gotten if the lie had not been discovered.

Penalties for false accusation wouldn't discourage Russell Brand. But they would be a demonstration that something is going on that has (externally imposed) consequences for men and women. 2rafa is, as I read it, trying to justify the consequences to Brand as part of some sort of reversal of the sexual revolution, which would have consequences for women as well. This is something many of those opposed to consequences to Brand would be in favor of, so it's a way of telling them they're actually getting what they wanted. But they're not; the consequences to Brand are NOT part of any reversal of the sexual revolution and in fact no consequences to women are forthcoming.

other parents

It seems like other parents mostly have your back on this. Your child’s peers, on the other hand…

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Can you believe that I, at least, am sincere in this?

Sure. But it doesn't matter; I do not believe those attempting to punish Russell Brand are doing it for that reason.

But if we want to discourage this extremely familiar pattern of a high status man very publicly using and discarding (often extremely young) women for decades, to zero social censure, with all the abusive behavior that very predictably ensues? We probably don't want to scare off women who come forward and say, "Actually, it wasn't all in good fun."

If it was, indeed, in good fun, we (or at least I) DO want to scare them off. And this logic has been used to justify non-questioning and non-punishing of all sorts of false accusers, from Aziz Ansari's accusor's (where the accusations weren't even of wrongdoing, just ridiculously cringey behavior that she went right along with) to Sabrina Erdely's (she, as you may recall, fabricated an entirely unbelievable story and ended up getting a number of men's organizations punished for it). But in this case that's not my point. In this case, my point is that punishing women for wrongdoing would be evidence that all this is done in furtherance of fixing a problem, not making it worse. Russell Brand would be punished by anti-promiscuity people, feminist activists who just want to stick it to men, and those who want to punish Brand for opposing COVID vaccines. The lack of any attempt at consequences for women rules out the first; that's not the motive here.

How are penalties for false rape accusations going to roll back the sexual revolution and prevent more Russell Brand type lotharios? That’s a complete non sequitur for discouraging male promiscuity.

The non sequitur is claiming that the consequences to Brand are somehow part of rolling back the sexual revolution and therefore OK. You're starting from a consequence, claiming a cause, and then claiming that cause justifies the consequence, when that cause does not exist as can be determined by the lack of the other consequences. That is, you're using "rolling back the sexual revolution" as a pretext to justify the consequences to men of something entirely different.

What would the consequences for women be that they aren’t already? Women are already a main group of losers in the sexual revolution and (as I note) Redpillers already argue that women face great, dire consequences of promiscuity - eg. low social status for having a reputation as a slut, spinsterhood, hitting ‘the wall’, being an ‘alpha widow’, unhappiness, loneliness and becoming a cat lady. By contrast, Brand faced no consequences until now.

Do some napkin math to explain how women are the losers of the sexual revolution. Without any of the variables being plus or minus infinity.

Because this isnt computing.

I could tell you, but I’d rather just copy @raggedy_anthem’s excellent comment:

I'm saying that women are more depressed and suicidal than they have ever been. They are more depressed and suicidal than they were in the Bad Old Days of supposed patriarchy. Like men, they are struggling to find fulfilling relationships or lasting contentment, because the current regime isn't good for them either.

Women are suffering the direct consequences of letting men like Brand loose to enjoy themselves. They are getting raped, taken advantage of, or just used in that sad, grubby way that doesn't amount to a crime. They are getting the resulting STIs and raising the resulting babies by themselves. In return, they don't get the sexual pleasure or status that a rake enjoys. All they get is the fleeting satisfaction of being desired. This is a terrible deal for women, and to be honest it's not one that most women ever even wanted. It's a race to the bottom, where you have to do things you aren't comfortable with in order to get male attention at all. If you want to know what it's like to grow up female post-Sexual Revolution and post-Internet porn, this is a great place to start. Little girls didn't choose this.

I see a lot of assertions that this state of affairs was all young women's idea, and that they need to be punished in order for it to change. That perspective... really lacks empathy or insight into who's actually driving the bus. It's blaming some of the least powerful people involved.

Okay here's my line of thought;

  • "Sexual Revolution" happens.
  • Some winners, a lot of losers.
  • We can do arithmetic all day about as to whether the average, median, modal man/woman is worse off on net on average, etc.

But I do think barring any and all aggregate statistics. The women are still the winners.

Why? Simple. Women are the choosers. They can choose a man of equal status to them and mostly avoid the pitfalls of the sexual revolution. Most women have this option. Most men don't they either get chosen or not. Not doing something is a lot easier than doing something.

Now is it realistic to expect women to do this? Well, no. But on the individual level, this is a non-issue for women.

I think when people talk about these widescale societal issues there is too much meta-talk happening, but a majority of women can avoid the pitfalls, men can't. Focussing on the individual makes this patently obvious.

The elephant in the room remains. Women would rather have this than choose a man of equal status. Revealed preference makes it clear.

Women being choosers, are the only ones who can fix this.

Women in the fifties mostly became married stay at home moms. This is statistically what most women figure out they actually want, eventually. It is also an option that most women do not have access to anymore.

Ergo women have lost something important with the sexual revolution. That’s even leaving out that while yes, it’s easier than ever for women to have casual sex with chads, almost none of them actually want to do so.

So what's stopping an individual woman from marrying a Brad?

I know women as a group don't do this because they are subject to.. a lack of agency, social pressure, retarded messaging, etc.

THem not being able to be SAHMs is more of an economic problem than a sexual one.

My point is yes women as a group have indeed lost something, but that's because they act as a group! Any individual woman can still "defect" and avoid the pitfalls. If anything I will wager it's easier than ever for a woman to get "what they really want a la 1950's" because competition among men is so much more that many will provide it at considerable cost, just to have some coochy.

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having a reputation as a slut, spinsterhood, hitting ‘the wall’, being an ‘alpha widow’, unhappiness, loneliness and becoming a cat lady

We've already been at a point for pretty much decades where any public discussion of these phenomena and their negative social and personal consequences is practically exiled by the controllers of public life to obscure online message boards universally reviled by polite society. In any other place, they're a completely taboo subject. You know that. Let's not fool ourselves.

My impression was you can complain about it all you want, if you blame men.

That's a fair and difficult question. I think this can be achieved if a blanket condemnation/rejection of mainstream feminism and a simplified scapegoating of men in general are both avoided.

Oh, touché. Productive and in the mainstream is indeed a tall order.

Discussion of the consequences is exiled by many corners of public life. But the consequences themselves, as manosphere types will say, occur nonetheless, and they do so whether they are written about or not.

If society denies the existence of something, then it's no longer real, and is not considered to exist.

It is real, society didn’t talk about the opioid epidemic for a long time and clearly the deaths still mounted. I’m not opposed to Deleuzian theories of reality and I suppose your view is ultimately very French, but in a very real sense the consequences do still exist, yes.

Women are already a main group of losers in the sexual revolution

Sure, and the primary victims of war, too, right? The 'consequences' they received have been getting what they want, but not liking it.

That is how Gods punish people that they really hate.

I am not sure that applying the same severe logic one might use for homeless drug addicts to the child-bearing half of humanity is tenable long-term.

The whole ‘women as legally children’ thing was the norm for most of human history and it’s the norm for a minority of societies today. ‘Undesirable’ is possibly a fair criticism, but ‘just can’t happen’ or ‘unsustainable’ are easily disproven objections.

No they are not. Many things which were sustainable in the past are unsustainable today to any noteworthy extent. Example: hunter-gatherer lifestyle (unless you are also willing to cut down the global population by orders of magnitude).

It is trivial that the society can in principle be radically restructured to cope with disenfranchisement of women, but the way from here to there should be more clearly imagined, as well as the costs of the journey – all facets of our world that will not be sustained, as it were.

And specifically, Nybbler's logic of "they reap what they sow" might be unsustainable even in the previous era. Contrary to the feminist narrative, contempt for femaels wasn't an overwhelming consensus among Hajnalis of a few centuries ago.

When the world was harsher to women, TFR was higher. I'm not claiming that's cause and effect, but I am claiming that there's no evidence against such long-term tenability.

Again, why do you think 16 year old girls in 1965 had more power than rock musicians, Hugh Hefner, Hollywood and the ad industry? Blaming women for the sexual revolution just doesn’t stack up.

This is a non sequitur.

  1. I agree we should view it as terrible awful behavior. Not sure it should be criminal.

  2. Question is whether there is the possibility of forgiveness. Brand seems to have gotten his life together and decries what he did previously.

I don't think Brand should face criminal charges unless there's good evidence for the criminal allegations; presumably, as in eg. Weinstein's case, that's something that the police and prosecutors will determine. Social sanction? Well, if people want to judge him for fucking a 16 year old girl when he was 35, that's their right.

I'm curious - how do you actually coordinate on enforcing social sanction besides something like a religion? Aka "wokeism" or the ol' faithful of Christianity.

I think this question is confused.

The non-woke and non-christian parts of our society have large and well-used mechanisms of enforcing sanctions. The courts, being fired by your employer or kicked out of an institution, distributed social rejection. I don't see how this is different in kind from the Church proscribing a behavior or exiling someone. And the Church's moral commandments were developed in ways not dissimilar to our own - some were debated by powerful men and legislated, all were evolved and spread among individuals of varying intellect and interests. Fraud and theft are immoral actions too, and we enforce social sanction against it all the time, both via courts and social media.

You don't. It's emergent based on what catches on and what doesn't. It's a social sanction so society is the arbiter as a whole.

That's the point really. It's the distributed judgment of your fellow citizens. And when enough agree, a new convention coalesces and through social shaming and gossip it spreads to a critical mass.

Even with Christianity it only works when enough people agree with the tenets. But if Christianity fails to convince enough people, its reach falls. It still spreads through the same mechanism as every other social judgement.

I’d say social sanction is exactly what he’s facing now, it’s essentially cancellation.

I’m not sure Weinstein got a fair trial. He was basically convicted first in public opinion.

Didn't stop Spacey from somehow dancing through an endless bunch of raindrops.

Or Depp for that matter, where Heard clearly had a 3-0 lead for years.

IMAO if you have sex with ~1000 women selected for drug use and poor emotional regulation, this is an inherently hazardous activity and the inherent hazard(or at least one of them) is that they will spread damaging rumors and make accusations about you. Obviously he deserves a fair trial, but it's hard to feel bad for him.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If you're talking strict liability...

What I am about to say is NOT to defend this sort of conduct, or to offer an excuse.

Hell. He might wind up having sex with a girl who is actually 15 but has a very high quality fake ID saying she is 21. And she genuinely looks 21 as well, has older friends, and her story superficially checks out. Is this terrible? Yes. Should he have done more due diligence? Yes as well. I've known guys that have had full beards at 14 and could pass for - and were frequently confused for - college students. I knew a 19yo guy that was frequently confused for a teacher, when I went to high school. Long story but he came to the US from Slovakia when he was 12 and needed to be held back to learn English.

No test or person is perfect, and if you wind up succeeding 99.9 or even 99.99 percent of the time at not fucking up and having sex with someone that can't really consent legally because of age or altered mental status, that works great at keeping you out of trouble if you have about ten partners during your lifetime. Not so much for quadruple digits. As such it is arguably morally risky to do this as well...

I'm surprised no one has commented on the far more ominous and frightening thing happening here. The very obvious political motivation behind the hit pieces.

Brand has been a, "rock star" sex pest and drug addict for pretty much ever. More recently however he's become increasingly disillusioned with the establishment and used his platform to criticize everything from vaccines and the covid response to russiagate. I don't follow him much, but it seemed to be around the 2020and covid when he fully divorced from his controlled opposition, Bernie Sanders with a bit of anarchy, type politics and started interacting with the Assange, Greenwald, Tucker style deplorables. It appears that in response to this the same media that gave him a platform for years and cheered on his lifestyle started calling up every one of his "1000 women" in order to get dirt on him.

This to me is far more frightening than the rapes, assuming they happened. It's more evidence that we live in a fully captured regime. Even if Brand were an out of control rapist existing in a world that had no modern safeguards against crime, at most he could harm, what? a few hundred or so? Before a ticked off relative is going to smash his skull in. The increasing merger between the political class, media and intelligence agencies in the west has, based off historic examples, the potential to get millions abused or killed. The sense of entitlement journalists seem to believe they have to "the narrative", history, truth, culture, etc. is rape on an industrial scale.

Come on, there have been political motivations for rumors, true and false, since the first city and the invention of large-scale politics. And even before that, hunter-gatherers in bands of twenty levied rumors against each other. Romans accused political enemies of sexual misconduct. It's absurd, lacking even historical context of the past ten years, to consider this evidence of 'a fully captured regime'. It isn't even particularly partisan, Republicans will jump on anyone in democratic media accused of sexual assault or pedophilia, too. Just googling, what about this CNN talking head, a dem?

The increasing merger between the political class, media and intelligence agencies in the west has, based off historic examples, the potential to get millions abused or killed

"Increasing". Do you have any evidence that 'accusing guy on the other team of sexual assault' happens more than it did 10, 20, 40, 80, 160, or 320 years ago? I'm confident if you look into any of those timeframes, it'll happen just as often (when you adjust for the volume of reporting available, there just wasn't as much news in 1700 as there is today)

Bingo -- the similarities with the Assange story are right there in our collective face.

It appears that in response to this the same media that gave him a platform for years and cheered on his lifestyle started calling up every one of his "1000 women" in order to get dirt on him.

Orrrr, Brand knew the allegations would surface at some point and cultivated a following that believes in conspiracy theories and doesn't condemn men for sexual misconduct.

Brand larping for years as an alternative media icon in order to get ahead of potential rape allegations is a level of 5D chess that I find difficult to accept.

It's absolutely wild, the article doesn't hide the vast scale of the investigation in any way, and even almost suggests that it kicked off as he shifted into this latest persona.

Why should they hide it? It works just as well if they do it out in the open, and is better at inspiring fear that way.

Whilst I can identify with the sentiment in your post it's also a weird position to be in.

I don't have anything in common with Brand. He seems like an extroverted weirdo with enough self awareness and sociopathy to do some real damage on those who are more earnest and innocent in their social life. At the same time I probably have very little in common with the kinds of people Brand hangs out with. Given a lot of them are probably no sheep when it comes to malicious social games. For some reason, however, I find myself siding with the guy just because enough journalists don't like him.

I have no dog in the fight. I don't even seen much utility in guys like him espousing their rhetoric. Why do I feel like his fight is being foisted on me?

As much as I want some sort of signal out there that goes against the mainstream lunacy, I don't want to become a golem that gets animated into the opposite direction of the mainstream just because. Opposition for the sake of opposition just isn't enough. It turns you into the mirror image of a progressive like Vaush or similar where nothing matters except surfing the wave of the current media hype. I can see how obviously ridiculous people who do that look. I'd prefer not becoming one even if I feel the emotional pull to side with Brand because of who seems to be gunning for him.

The thing is that everyone has a dog in the hunt when it comes down to political persecutions, simply because it makes everyone that much less free. Letting then get away with silencing dissent simply means more and bolder suppression of dissent.

Letting then get away with silencing dissent simply means more and bolder suppression of dissent.

I have really come to dislike this particular framing/phrasing. If someone were to, for example, talk about how the ordinary people of North Korea "let the Kims get away with oppressing them," I imagine most people would see the problem with that. To say that Alice is "letting Bob get away with X" implies that Alice has a meaningful ability to stop Bob from doing X. But that is not always so, and is, IMO, the sort of thing that needs established first. Otherwise, it results in shifting some of the blame for a thing onto those powerless to do anything about it.

So when you talk about "[l]etting the[m] get away with silencing dissent," just who is it that you think has the power to stop "them," but isn't exercising it?

Yep. There are tons of people I don’t like (rather agnostic about Brand — I did like him in Forgetting Sarah Marshall) that seemed to have a coordinated media smear. I hate the coordination because it suggests when the eye of Sauron turns on you (for political reasons) none can withstand. I would give the devil the benefit of the law for my own sake.

It's a bit of a first they came for Russel Brand feeling situation I guess? Though we're well past 1st.

I think pushing back against power is just a constant. Everyone has their grand solutions for the perfect political system, but none of them actually are perfect. Eventually loopholes are found and power begins to accumulate. I don't think it's wrong to always be opposed to that and it's different from just always being contrarian. It's why people like Tucker and Brand can find common ground despite having very little in common ideologically.

Russell Brand is an idiot and we're better off not hearing from him. One of the most annoying and vapid commentators around.

More effort than this, please.

Once you just start looking for a crime, you’ll find something. Really is disgusting UNLESS the article is poorly written and some allegations happened first followed by investigation.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but notice the man hours spent by the media to try to prove this yet the amazing lack of curiosity into Joe Biden’s corruption.

This is essentially my read as well.

The Jeremy Corbyn-style Labour types were all in when he was skewering "capitalism" but now that it is thier ox getting gored (covid lockdowns, cancel culture, etc) "something must be done"

Russell Brand is a far-left anticapitalist. Yeah, he went a little Greenwald re. Ukraine and Covid (although that's less uncommon on the hard left than you think), but Brand built his political reputation as a hardcore Occupy Wall Street, pro-Corbyn, end capitalism, mass redistribution of wealth, "nationalize all corporations" type grift. He reaps, in part, what he sowed.

Isn't Greenwald that as well? I mean maybe not as far left as Brand. Brand always seemed more of an anarchist to me, anti corporation but anti-state as well, so I don't see it as reaping what he sowed, as he was opposed to communist style centralized power iirc. I mean he was a celebrity not a politician though so I don't know how consistent he was with his ideology.

Yeah Greenwald has always been far left and still is. He ‘associates’ with Tucker’s crowd to some extent because he hates American foreign policy, but he is still literally a gay Jewish Marxist, he’s not joining the hard right lol.

I do think Greenwald is becoming…more conservative. His core convictions relate to free speech and military isolationism. Hanging out in that crowd has I think impacted some of his views on other things making him a bit more rightist compared to where he was a decade ago (though he did publish even in Cato like 20 years ago so he was never opposed to working with more libertarian publications that were outside the mainstream left wing publications).

IMO, the kind of person who has sex with more than a critical mass of people was already broken to begin with or will be sufficiently broken by the end of it. This applies to both men and women.

An endless supply of sex completely distances you from the intimate nature of it, converting it into a bare transaction. When viewed as a transaction, you can't help but view everything about it with contempt. This is especially true about rock-stars who can clearly see the proportionality between their rising fame and rising body-count.

When a girl say[s] NO it means no.

I believe this, but it is womankind's responsibility to enforce this on all other women. When 50%+ of the 1000 women this dude has slept with has said some variant of 'noooo stoooop' before actively engaging in sex, No does not mean No.
"No means No" is something I and a good few of my principled peers actively practice. That being said, almost all of them have stories where women expect men to make non-consensual moves by 'reading their signs'. Signs that I can confidently tell you, are NOT consistent. It is a good principle to always ask for consent, but it is a well-acknowledged losing-move if you want to get laid.

during an emotionally abusive and controlling relationship that lasted for about three months

Things get even more fucked, when a guy has some impression of initial consent and then exploits that for increasingly extreme sexual fantasies.

Russell Brand sounds like a terrible human. He is one among thousands of typical frat-boy assholes who treat women like trash. If a woman ever speaks out against them, they're either ignored or bullied by other women. At the same time, men like Russell Brand keep getting bodies thrown at them, as long as they are on the side of the system. Ideally, these men would get cancelled

The present form of accountability culture is completely broken. It involves further scaring the principled and paranoid, while the brazen and unaccountable continue to live life as they always had. Every once in a while, the iconoclast (Brand) has the hammer brought down on him. But only after the damage has been done.

David Mitchell's legendary rant remains as relevant as ever.

If women want to explore extreme kinks on 1 night stands with the same top 5% of physically desirable men and have consent be conveyed through soft-hints, then you will inevitably incentivize habitual line-steppers into occupying that 5% space.

I am all for a society where everyone has the freedom to do what they want without patriarchal oppression holding them down. BUT, we need to be practical about 'cause and effect'. People are going to behave according to their incentives. And in this world, narcissists like Russell Brand are incentivized to be aggressive, abusive and unaccountable liars. As long as that's the case, more Russell Brands will keep popping up. And No, being cancelled after fucking 1000 women is not what accountability looks like. You have to nip it in the bud.

David Mitchell's legendary rant remains as relevant as ever.

You call that a rant?

Serious question, I'm not a native speaker.

This one wasn't a rant, but David, specifically is known for his rants. So calling it a rant comes naturally when its David.

It involves further scaring the principled and paranoid, while the brazen and unaccountable continue to live life as they always had.

Yes. Let's break it down to a 2x2 quadrant.

Brazen and Competent

Brazen and Incompetent

Principled and Competent

Principled and Incompetent

The brazen, competent people live like rock stars; the brazen, incompetent people get their heads kicked in literally or figuratively. The principled competent people do okay, while the principled and incompetent people wind up like Scott's comment 171 and choose lifelong celibacy.

I suppose this too might be a feature, not a bug; if a Brant gets way too big for his britches and angers the wrong person too many times he might be brought to justice, via the courts or otherwise.

I’ve never been a fan of the current iteration of no means no simply because it’s often the case where the signals are at best ambiguous. It’s not a woman saying a hard no “I don’t want any sexual activity from you,” it’s quite often “no” while not removing herself, not putting clothes back on, and in a lot of other ways continuing the activities.

My personal rule is I will not leave a public place for a private one unless I’m prepared to have sex. And once I’m there, if I decide not to have sex, I say no, and I get into my car and leave. Anything else is simply entrapping the man because you are acting as if you want sex. If you’re taking off your clothes in the presence of a man you’re telling him you want sex. Even going to private places like parks where you can find corners away from other people is telling the man you want sex.

I’ve always felt like it’s absolutely on the woman if she doesn’t want sex to make it absolutely perfectly clear with no contradictory signals.

The issue is not every girl is emotionally capable in these situation, supposedly Brand had a 16 year old. Her acting a appropriate and knowledgeable is a stretch.

I have no doubt Brand raped a few of these girls.

Girls are expected to not act super slutty so no doubt he’s gotten plenty of no’s that actually meant yes.

There continues to be no possible correct social solution in the modern environment. Men need to take sex when they can get it. Sometimes that aggressiveness leads to long term relationships. Being that females will never directly communicate as a group it will expose some weaker member of the group to more aggressive behavior they can’t handle. Men need to be social sophisticated.

Men need to take sex when they can get it.

No, they don’t.

Men need to take sex when they can get it.

No, they don’t.

If you don't, Brand will, because there is nothing to stop him. So you might as well take what you can get. Like unto a communal plate of French fries; such is the tragedy of the commons.

To solve the problem, need to privatize the commons.

The current iteration is worse than that, because it goes beyond "no with a bunch of other signals saying 'yes'" means "no", and it even goes beyond "an earlier 'no' with a later 'yes' means 'no'", it goes somewhat past "a not quite enthusiastic 'yes' means 'no'" all the way to "A 'yes' which when re-evaluated in the cold light of morning should have been a 'no' means 'no', and he should have known that."

I don't think just going to a private place means 'yes'; even when it's part of the dance it's an earlier part. But your example of her taking off her clothes in front of him (in a private place)... that obviously invites the next move being physical.

I think that’s the issue though. If women want “no means no” that no has to be clear and you have to mean it. It cannot be a woman doing everything up to a point, with a suddenly you went to far thing at the end.

It cannot be a woman doing everything up to a point, with a suddenly you went to far thing at the end.

Why not? I mean, you may feel "like it’s absolutely on the woman if she doesn’t want sex to make it absolutely perfectly clear with no contradictory signals," but it looks like quite a lot of our society disagrees. (I have a somewhat relevant story about overhearing one side of a cellphone conversation waiting in line at the welfare office which illustrated cultural differences on this topic between modern Western norms and Native Alaskan ones, as well as the human tendency to interpret people's motives through our own cultural lenses.) You say they cannot, and yet many clearly are. There's no requirement for them to follow your "personal rule." If they decide instead that consent can be withdrawn at absolutely any time, for any reason (or none at all), no matter what previous signals, ambiguous or not, she has previously given, then why can't they just enforce such a rule?

Except that a consent that isn’t really clear and can be altered or withdrawn on a whim without even having to make it clear to the other person is simply unfair to that person, especially if it can have very serious consequences for the other person. If I can get your life ruined for a mistake, I don’t see how it can be fair that I not give you clear communication about when I don’t want you do do something. If I will shoot you if you come into my yard, I’m at th3 very least an ass if I don’t tell you that if you step on the grass you die.

If you have enough power you can do what you want with enforcement, but if women want men to act as if 'no means no' or 'no means never' they do have to mean it. Otherwise the incentives don't work out; you can't ratchet up the penalties high enough to discourage Chads (especially not in western society, but not even if death by torture is on the table), because they think they can get away with anything -- and they often can.

Men chase and women choose. One of the ways they choose is by putting up barriers to filter out the easily discouraged. If you add formal punishment (beyond the rejection itself) to guys who challenge these barriers and are rejected, you reduce her false positive rate -- men who pass that "challenge my barrier" test but are rejected anyway. You also increase her false negative rate -- men who fail the "challenge the barrier" test but should have been accepted, but she doesn't care, there's a surplus of available men on dating apps. The net effect is the Chads have less competition and the others are wiped from the board.

Men chase and women choose. One of the ways they choose is by putting up barriers to filter out the easily discouraged. If you add formal punishment (beyond the rejection itself) to guys who challenge these barriers and are rejected, you reduce her false positive rate -- men who pass that "challenge my barrier" test but are rejected anyway. You also increase her false negative rate -- men who fail the "challenge the barrier" test but should have been accepted, but she doesn't care, there's a surplus of available men on dating apps. The net effect is the Chads have less competition and the others are wiped from the board.

And if you're not one of those "wiped from the board," then what's wrong with that outcome?

I’ve always felt like it’s absolutely on the woman if she doesn’t want sex to make it absolutely perfectly clear with no contradictory signals.

...taps the sign...

There's been some discussion here on the "incel" phenomenon recently, with several commenters reiterating the popular claim that the reason women have such a visceral dislike of incels is because they fear being raped by them, and arguing that this fear is entirely reasonable.

I would like to take this opportunity to reiterate that the available evidence points in the opposite direction: men who have numerous sexual partners, one-night stands, concurrent sexual partners, visit prostitutes etc. are more likely to commit rape or sexual assault than men who do not meet this description. In light of this evidence, Brand probably sitting in the 99th percentile for sexual partners should significantly raise our priors that he is guilty of what he is accused of. The fact that he's famously promiscuous isn't dispositive, of course, but it's highly relevant to the accusations.

The "incel" phenomenon is adjacent to the disability theorists' concept of desexualization: unattractive enough and it is straight up transgressive and gross for you to want sex. At a stretch it might be a special case of it, although that is conflating the likes of Elliot Rodger with decent but lonely people. This applies differently to both men and women, but Bertha in the wheelchair is gross and makes people uncomfortable for having any sexual or romantic desires whatsoever, while her wheelchair-bound twin brother Bob is also a bit creepy.

...and arguing that this fear is entirely reasonable.

I would like to take this opportunity to reiterate that the available evidence points in the opposite direction:

I'm not sure if you're interpreting that review correctly. Specifically, I think you're flipping around the numerators and denominators, and the "rates" that the studies look at aren't the "rates" that affect women.

As an illustration of how that can lead your reasoning astray, consider a toy model where a playboy has sex with 1000 women and assaults four of them (a 0.4% rate), while a group of 1000 no-longer-incels has sex with 1000 women (one each), and assaults 10 of them (0.01 each, or a 1% rate). By my reading, the studies included in that review would conclude that playboys commit assaults at 400x the rate of no-longer-incels. However, a women looking only to avoid assault would look at the per sexual encounter rate, and (under this model) there is 2.5x the risk from the incel group.

Its really hard to do proper Bayesian analysis when the base rates differ by orders of magnitude between subpopulations.

What fraction of the attractive, single, 16-35 year old women Russell Brand meets in a given year want to have sex with him? 20%? I know it's a lot higher than for you or me. He simply doesn't need as many bits of evidence in order to have the same confidence level that the woman he's with consents.

The huge numbers involved lead to some interesting scenarios. If Russell Brand sleeps with 1000 women, and 998 of them are perfectly consensual, +EV experiences for both parties (I am ignoring society-wide social consequences for the moment), but 2 of them are honest misunderstandings where the woman did not actually consent, is 99.8% an unreasonably low confidence level to act upon? Human social interaction is complicated. Are you sure you'll ever be able to get it much above that? Would it even be fair to Brand and the other 998 women if we insisted on a 99.99% confidence level instead? What's the utilitarian calculus here?

You mentioned that more sexually-active men are more likely to be sexual assault perpetrators, and I totally believe that, but I do wonder what happens if you do the normalization per encounter instead of per person.

You mentioned that more sexually-active men are more likely to be sexual assault perpetrators, and I totally believe that, but I do wonder what happens if you do the normalization per encounter instead of per person.

I agree, and there's also the fact that (a) most men have a partner of some kind, and (b) men who are not sexually active are - despite the presence of incels - also a population that contains many low-libido men, voluntarily celibate men etc.., who are presumably much less likely to commit acts of sexual assault. It stands to reason that sexually active men are more likely to commit sexual assault than sexually inactive men because the former tend to be more interested in sex than the latter.

So for one we have the receipts, the other 3 are plausibly bad. So not good for him, and even if two of those are Christine Blasey Fords, he is in deservedly hot water.

But why after describing four rapes you waste our time with bullshit like this that diminishes the allegations.

In December 2007, another serious complaint was made by BBC staff to Douglas about Brand’s behaviour in the Radio 2 studio. Sources who were involved said the complaint was made after an “alarming display of aggression and disrespect” by Brand in the studio, which included Brand hurling objects across the studio “in fits of rage” and “urinating in a bottle in full view of everyone”. Brand had done this, the sources said, in front of production staff and guests, including a young person who “appeared to be a minor” and had been sent to appear on Radio 2 by a charity. This alleged complaint and any others that had been made were not mentioned in subsequent official reports into Sachsgate.

and

During other Radio 2 episodes, Brand made a series of sexual remarks about the newsreader Andrea Simmons, describing her on air as “erotic” and a “sex bomb”, and telling listeners that he would like to “go under the desk” while she was reading the news. Several times after this it is implied that Brand was forced to apologise by BBC production staff.

He is already rock star cool, no need to try and make him cooler ...

I had always had a high prior that Russel Brand was a rapist since he prank called an actor to boast about having sex with his granddaughter, a joke that is only funny if you have contempt for the women you sleep with.

The existence of the allegations doesn't raise my posterior probability very much above the prior, although if there is hard evidence that the woman went to a rape crisis centre at the time then that would do.

It’s a man’s right to have consensual sex with mentally unwell and “damaged” women

This is the point at which I stop going along. Haven't you heard the good old "don't stick your dick in crazy"? And nobody, man woman or other, has the "right" to have sex with anyone.

I think Brand's in a grey area; he did like to get involved in some tacky shit in order to keep the edgy image going. He probably did sleep with women who were flaky, crazy, or unstable. And those women probably were in some sense vulnerable, thought that pulling a big name famous guy would result in more than it did, might even have hoped for a relationship. Years later, they've imbibed the notion that they weren't able to consent or that he coerced them into sex.

And y'know? If they are mentally unwell, they aren't able to fully and properly consent. So are the accusations false? They're in that fuzzy area of "not quite false, not quite true".

Consider it karma for the shit he pulled back when he was being an edgelord: the Andrew Sachs prank phone call. Andrew Sachs was an actor, a genuinely nice guy, and best known for his role as Manuel in "Fawlty Towers". He was also of Jewish ancestry and his family had settled in Britain after fleeing the Nazis:

Sachs was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Katharina (née Schrott-Fiecht), a librarian, and Hans Emil Sachs, an insurance broker. His father was Jewish and his mother was Lutheran, with Austrian ancestry. The family moved to Britain in 1938 to escape the Nazis.

In 2008, when Sachs was 78 years of age and Russell Brand was 33 and his co-presenter Jonathan Ross was 48 years of age, they were going to do a pre-recorded section for Brand's radio show. That didn't go as planned, because the two shitheads Brand and Ross (and I've always thought Jonathan Ross was a dickhead) thought they could be so funny by being loons:

On Thursday 16 October 2008, Sachs, who portrayed Manuel in the 1970s BBC television sitcom Fawlty Towers, was scheduled to be a phone-in guest on Brand's evening radio show. The show was pre-recorded due to Brand's work commitments. Brand had briefly been in a relationship with Sachs' granddaughter Georgina Baillie.

After being unable to reach Sachs on his home telephone, Brand and his co-host of the week, fellow Radio 2 DJ Jonathan Ross, left Sachs four voice messages on his answering machine. In the first message, Brand joked about Fawlty Towers and the fact that both he and Sachs had appeared in The Bill, but was interrupted by Ross shouting out "he fucked your granddaughter". The rest of the message and the following three messages were all characterised by Brand and Ross attempting to apologise for Ross' outburst, but each quickly descended into farce; for example, Brand sang to Sachs: "It was consensual and she wasn't menstrual", and Ross asked to marry him. Brand later said that listening to the calls was like hearing "two idiots dancing towards a canyon"

On 25 October, Brand presented his last edition of his radio show with co-host Simon Amstell, which they performed live. Shortly before going on air, Brand was informed that The Mail on Sunday would be running a story about the phone calls. During the show, Brand apologised to Sachs, but also devoted much of the show to deriding the Daily Mail for its support of Nazism in the lead-up to World War II. In his apology to Sachs, Brand said: "What's worse – leaving a swearword on Andrew Sachs' answerphone or tacitly supporting Adolf Hitler when he took charge of the Third Reich?"

Sachs later stated he had not given permission for the messages to be broadcast. The BBC originally stated that they were "not aware of any complaint by Mr Sachs", but later confirmed a complaint had been received, and apologised. Brand issued an apology for making the calls but stated it was "funny" during his last radio show, before the Mail had printed the story.

So broadcasting to the public stupid messages where you yell at an elderly man about fucking his grand-daughter, then 'apologise' by invoking Hitler to that same man whose family had to flee the Nazis is so thigh-slappingly funny. I hope Russell is laughing as heartily now with these accusations, it's all only a bit of lewd fun isn't it!

And y'know? If they are mentally unwell, they aren't able to fully and properly consent. So are the accusations false? They're in that fuzzy area of "not quite false, not quite true".

What a questionable assertion to make.

Do you want to take that line of thought to the conclusion that if a married woman develops, say, a bout of mild depression, it's the job of the police and her psychiatrist to stick on a chastity belt against the wishes of her and her husband?

A mild case of OCD? BPD like the women Brand was probably fucking?

In medicine and law, it's not just a matter of having "a" mental illness, unless the person is a ward of the state or their family, then it's incredibly dumb to refer to them as incapable of extending sufficient consent for sex, an incredibly common and fundamental activity, when they're not disbarred from doing a great deal more they can't weasel out of on grounds of mental incompetence.

Not that I think that even the grossly retarded, like a person with Downs, should be stopped from having sex, but even broader society doesn't hold the insane assertion you make as true, de facto or de jure.

Let's bite the bullet here. We've both got significant experience in the medical field, you more than me. But we both know that even the best psychiatrists aren't perfect. We also know that college age is prime time for development of psychotic disorders and bipolar disorder. So what's the odds, given that, that a woman that is mostly OK but maybe a little manic, maybe just an energetic person that can totally consent...when she has sex with Brand becomes floridly psychotic three days later, winds up in a psych ward, and then truly doesn't recall whether the sex happened before or after she was manic or psychotic?

Hell, it is possible (although unlikely) that someone that is a ward of the state (or otherwise in State custody/guardianship) manages to bust out of their group home or whatever, get to Brand, and seem like a more or less sane and put together person. Maybe 99 percent of the time or even 99.9 percent of the time wards of the state don't look competent, but 0.1 percent of the time on any given day they do, and occasionally they break loose or run away from their group homes to live on Christmas tree farms or follow rockstars or something. Intelligent schizophrenics can cook up at least superficially plausible bullshit from time to time...it is a matter of slinging enough bull feces at enough walls and ultimately something sticks.

So what's the odds, given that, that a woman that is mostly OK but maybe a little manic, maybe just an energetic person that can totally consent...when she has sex with Brand becomes floridly psychotic three days later, winds up in a psych ward, and then truly doesn't recall whether the sex happened before or after she was manic or psychotic?

A) Brand is screwing hundreds of women, maybe thousands, over his career.

B) Such groupies are significantly more likely to be BPD, manic, or just a little off kilter in a million ways. The kind of people who are jumping at opportunity to do blow and blow rockstars aren't quite the average women, even if I wouldn't pathologize them outright.

Then now, does it strike you as particularly unlikely that over a career of several decades, one of them would experience such an episode?

The odds per any given groupie might be miniscule, but when you consider the massive number of them he's fucked over the years..

If someone has slept with hundreds of women, then you shouldn't be particularly surprised if one documented incident overlapped temporally with something concerning. It's just not nearly as damning as for a dude who's getting poon every 6 months in college.

This is kind of my point. Joe Average has like ten partners in a lifetime. If he's more or less prudent he has let's say a 99.9 percent chance of not sticking it in someone that might not be able to consent. That's probably going to keep him out of trouble. Not so for Brant.

Do you want to take that line of thought to the conclusion that if a married woman develops, say, a bout of mild depression, it's the job of the police and her psychiatrist to stick on a chastity belt against the wishes of her and her husband?

Hello, hello, guess why the offence of marital rape was created in law?

A depressed woman may not feel like having sex with her husband. If her husband goes ahead and insists on his "marital rights", maybe even forcefully, then whaddya know - it's rape!

You're being obtuse here, intentionally or not.

You claimed that any kind of mental illness (without bothering to specify degree or type) makes a woman unable to consent, presumably above and beyond plain old saying "nah dawg, not feeling it tonight" and turning over.

So the relevant comparison is where a woman with depression voluntarily has sex with her husband, not where she denies it. It might be begrudgingly, but couples regularly do things for the sake of the other they find less than maximally enjoyable. Marital rape where the husband forces himself upon her, this is clearly not.

Perhaps you might well beg to differ, but society broadly doesn't consider "get thee to a nunnery" to be the appropriate response when encountering women with any kind of mental illness. If I couldn't fuck because I was depressed, I'd be more depressed.

You're ignoring the quoted part that this comment is, obviously a response to.

And y'know? If they are mentally unwell, they aren't able to fully and properly consent.

That's the same language we, as a society, use for minors. That seems arguing for making consensual sex with a mentally unwell person count as statutory rape, or at least I feel this is a valid interpretation.

That seems arguing for making consensual sex with a mentally unwell person count as statutory rape, or at least I feel this is a valid interpretation.

It is, more or less. Certainly with mental retardation and possible with schizophrenia. If you're consulting a lawyer regarding your sex life, you had better have a damn good reason to be swimming in those murky waters.

And y'know? If they are mentally unwell, they aren't able to fully and properly consent. So are the accusations false? They're in that fuzzy area of "not quite false, not quite true".

If they're not children and aren't subject to conservatorship, they should be presumed to be able to fully and properly consent. Again, when it comes to "guilty" or "not guilty" there is no middle ground.

Ah come on, Nybbler, we have the concept of impaired consent by reason of drugs, drunkenness, mental state at the time, which doesn't have to reach the level of "so impaired that they need to be under conservatorship".

I'm pushing back against "a man has a right to fuck crazy bitches" with "stick your dick in crazy but don't be surprised what happens after". It's the equivalent of "how was I to know the leopards would eat my face?" If you're having sex with someone unstable because she's easy and will do wild shit in bed, you have no right to be surprised when she later goes on to claim crazy stuff about you.

Ah come on, Nybbler, we have the concept of impaired consent by reason of drugs, drunkenness, mental state at the time, which doesn't have to reach the level of "so impaired that they need to be under conservatorship".

Some of these tend to be abused rather often, and very one-sided; nobody's going to find him not guilty of rape because he was on drugs or drunk or depressed when he did it, so I view their use in negating consent (except in cases like surreptitious administration of drugs) as special pleading.

I'm pushing back against "a man has a right to fuck crazy bitches"

A man has no right to fuck crazy bitches (in that said bitches can always refuse) and is properly advised against it. But 'crazy bitches' in that phrase is only vernacular, not psychiatric or legal. If a man does fuck crazy bitches with their consent at the time, claims by said crazy bitches that they didn't consent because they are, after all, crazy bitches with bad judgement, should be laughed out of court.

The leopards eating my face is about crazy people doing the same thing to you that you like them doing to someone else.

It's not about crazy people doing any crazy thing to you, because all crazy things aren't equal.

Unless the women came on to him with the sales pitch "I falsely accused my boyfriend of rape so I could dump him and be with you" or something similar, this isn't like leopards eating his face.

It's not being too fussy about who you sleep with, even if they are observably unstable, because you don't care and you only want to get your dick wet.

Then the time bomb goes off. And you are all "how could this happen?" Well, it happened because you couldn't keep it in your pants and took a risk, and now the risk has happened.

Well, it happened because you couldn't keep it in your pants and took a risk, and now the risk has happened.

There is a large difference between something being a bad idea that carries risk, and those risks being a good thing that the rest of society should make worse. There may be cases where it's better to leave people to their fates, but only when the actual costs of doing so are high enough, like if putting up more safety fences or warning labels is too costly compared to the benefit. The obvious topical comparison would be that, if a woman gets raped because of choosing to keep questionable company or choosing to date an abusive man or walking down a dark alley, we still put the rapist in jail if feasible. We certainly don't help domestic abusers on the basis of "you took that risk when you chose to date a crazy person, so society will punish you on the abuser's behalf". Not even feminists creating policies that help female abusers who use accusations of abuse/rape/etc. as weapons generally do so on purpose, they are just biased enough to genuinely think that such accusations from women must be true.

Okay. But then these women shouldn’t be allowed to make any decisions (eg they shouldn’t be able to drink, shouldn’t be able to sign contracts, shouldn’t be able to vote). If that isn’t the standard, then they have agency and can consent to sex.

I am at the stage that if people are going to be crying about "this poor 25 year old infant had no agency about the guy she slept with", then yeah - they should not be allowed behave like adults.

On the other hand, for both women and men, there are people it is too risky to sleep with, and if you go ahead and do it because you're too horny or careless or whatever, then it's like running the risks of STIs- you can't be surprised you got a dose of the clap if you've been promiscuous, have not used protection, and have slept around with people who are in impaired states or none too careful about their sexual experiences.

There's allegedly a graffito from Pompeii:

VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1882: The one who buggers a fire burns his penis

I am at the stage that if people are going to be crying about "this poor 25 year old infant had no agency about the guy she slept with", then yeah - they should not be allowed behave like adults.

That's where we are. I believe Evan Rachel Wood is the superannuated poster child for this one.

But then these women shouldn’t be allowed to make any decisions (eg they shouldn’t be able to drink, shouldn’t be able to sign contracts, shouldn’t be able to vote).

Yes_Chad.jpg

Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. If we are not willing to let such women suffer the consequences of their mistakes, which we obviously aren't, then they cannot be permitted the freedom to make those mistakes in the first place.

The inverse, how many women can you hookup with without raping one?

By rape I don't me beat up, drag into an alley and wrestle to the ground while she screams and fights, I mean women who really wasn't into it or ended up getting something different than she expected. These loose sexual encounters are difficult to read and people aren't communicating clearly. If a women can change her mind half way through, have blood alcohol content above a certain rate or be ok with x but not y without giving a manual before hand it isn't strange that women have had miserable experiences.

False rape is a common trope on line. The reality is more like a middle ground. A lot of these cases aren't a man consciously trying to rape a women, they aren't a women enthusiastically participating in sex and then changing her mind the day after. They two drunk people steared by horniness having an akward encounter that went wrong. The women in these college rape cases have a point. A lot of women are having deeply uncomfortable experiences that they really didn't want. The men also have a point, they didn't put on a mask and bring a gun in order to execute a planned crime.

The fundamental issue is that all forms of training for how people should behave, what is expected and norms for sex has been replaced with do what you feel like. This is going to lead to a greater than 0.1% instance of someone clearly not getting what they bargained for. By replacing norms with do what you feel like we have entered a behavioural sink. The feminists wanting consent laws probably aren't evil man haters, they are probably women who have been legitimately hurt and are deeply unhappy about the state of things. However, their solution of throwing men in jail for years based on hearsay worsens the situation and furthers the rift between men and women instead of healing it. Having removed romance, deep bonds and love from sex as well as the stability of marriage we have created the grounds for bitter encounters.

TLDR; Don't expect to be happy the day after you sleep with a drunk/high guy who doesn't know or care about you.

The inverse, how many women can you hookup with without raping one?

By rape I don't me beat up, drag into an alley and wrestle to the ground while she screams and fights, I mean women who really wasn't into it or ended up getting something different than she expected.

About as many as people you can say meet without murdering them (and my murder I don't mean deprive of life, I mean slightly inconvenience).

Having removed romance, deep bonds and love from sex as well as the stability of marriage we have created the grounds for bitter encounters

This particular kind of bitter encounter may have increased in frequency, but this isn't the only effect of the sexual revolution, it's worth considering things in total. The 'stability of marriage' could refer to no-fault divorce - many people, both anecdotally and in survey data, were trapped in unhappy, abusive, or sexless marriages before that. Also, marital rape was legal in the US prior to 1970. (not that my position is modern sexual norms are good)

Also, two events described seems more like central cases of sexual assault than miscommunication or awkwardness or 'bad sex' -

Nadia says Brand took her to a wall and kissed her and made a comment, something along the lines of: “I’ll keep you safe.” He then told her that “a friend” was already in the bedroom and that he wanted her to join them, according to Nadia.

“I’m like, no, that’s not happening, I don’t care, that’s not happening, we’re not doing that,” she says. “I tried to get away from him and I slipped away from the wall. And then I went to another wall that had a painting on it. A huge painting. And my bag got actually stuck underneath that, and it’s still on my arm. And at this point he’s grabbing at my underwear, pulling it to the side.”

Nadia alleges that she told Brand to get off her and that she wanted to leave, but he carried on. “I’m stuck underneath the painting and he’s pushing up against me,” she says. “He’s a lot taller than me. And he has that glazed look in his eye again. And I can’t move. And I told him, ‘Get off, get off.’” Nadia claims that Brand pushed her up against the wall and raped her, without a condom.

with text messages evidence

And

“I was screaming, and I was like, ‘What are you doing, stop, please, you’re my friend, I love you, please don’t do this, I don’t want to do this’ . . . I think he had his hands down my trousers but I was fighting so hard and I was screaming so hard, hoping that I could get through somehow.” She says: “I don’t know what the actual definition of ‘sexual assault’ is, but it feels like that. He didn’t rape me.”

She says she kept begging him to get off her and eventually he relented, at which point she says he “flipped” and was “super angry”. Phoebe says Brand was shouting “f*** you” and “you’re fired” and she says she fled Brand’s home in tears, stopping only to grab her shoes before running barefoot to her car.

It'd take a lot of creative misinterpretation on the part of this accuser to take an 'awkward encounter that went wrong' to this. It's possible, though, some people are very creative when they recount things.

I think another component of the phenomenon you describe, which is more common than actual rape, is that being aggressive and ignoring some signals to stop is a good strategy for success in casual sex. Part of the 'game' is women giving mixed or negative signals that the man needs to be a bit aggressive in pushing through to get what he wants, and if you do it well you'll often get a positive response. And when a guy is trained by repeated experience to do that, it encourages the kind of personality that, with a little random variation caused by miscommunication or bad judgement in the moment, can cross over into violating consent. The man's and woman' actions here are in large part instinctive, and (imo, I have little legible evidence though) those instincts are related to an evolutionary history where a lot of sex wasn't entirely consensual. So the whole thing's a mess.

I don't think just 'bad sex and rape-adjacent things happen' is a good reason to roll back the sexual revolution, tbh. There's just a lot more great or fine casual sex or fun serial monogamy than there are actively traumatic experiences, and the rate is comparable to other fun but dangerous activities that should be legal. You need to believe that the average case of 'fine' fling or longterm relationship that doesn't lead to children is bad, despite both parties enjoying it.

This isn't my hobby horse, so I don't keep links on hand, but didn't people have more sex, and report greater satisfaction on average back then? Loosening the norms was supposed to increase happiness, but now that it failed, the fact that things weren't perfect is used as an argument for bringing back a system that worked better than what we have today.

If I had to guess, 'reported having more sex' is true, and a product of both a younger population, and probably that, when you're in a relationship with someone, you'll have more frequent sex than if you aren't, in large part due to ease of access. It's definitely true today that between ages 20 and 80, frequency of sex declines, and I'm pretty sure that should contribute to an overall trend. This figure seems to support the second claim. That's not really incompatible with a large number of unhappy or abusive marriages. I think reports of happiness or general satisfaction are pretty uninformative for anything more fine-grained than 'starving africans say they're less happy than westerners', because the way people conceive of happiness and a good life varies. You could totally imagine a liberal centrist position that it's good that people have sexual freedom, and it's also good for more people to partner up than are today, and that the combination of those two is both achievable after norms randomly drift a bit more and is better than either the 1950s or today.

(note that arjin's comment was posted before I edited in 8 paragraphs into grandparent comment)

The fundamental issue is that all forms of training for how people should behave, what is expected and norms for sex has been replaced with do what you feel like. This is going to lead to a greater than 0.1% instance of someone clearly not getting what they bargained for. By replacing norms with do what you feel like we have entered a behavioural sink.

Great post overall, and I have to especially double down on this section.

Uncertainty, in any context, is hard for humans to deal with. Cultural rituals and norms exist in some part to reduce uncertainty so people can be more confident in the situations they find themselves in and be prepared to make decisions.

An interest counter-intuitive reality in the sex-culture-wars; the BDSM community is full of pretty elaborate and almost legalistic consent procedures with very little room for interpretation. Nothing gets you exiled faster than even a rumor of coercion. In many ways, it is pretty close to literally exchanging grocery lists of sexual acts with one another (or more!) and then going line by line through them with "yes", "no", "maybe - and here's my stop word." For more extreme acts, written documents aren't at all unheard of. This is all in the context of a community that is unrelentingly sex positive. Suffice it to say, even the real freaks understand the importance of rituals and norms.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s drafted on its own acceleration through the 1970s into the present and is now something more like sexual nihilism. Nothing matters (besides consent, of course), a monstrous appetite isn't something to be worried about, and partners can be as temporary as tee-shirts. When you allow that kind of madness to flow over a fundamental human activity that is also core to societal functioning, you're going to get alarming results.

TLDR; Don't expect to be happy the day after you sleep with a drunk/high guy who doesn't know or care about you.

I absolutely think this counts for women as well as men. Don't decide it was rape because you both got drunk, or he didn't call the next day, or years later you wish you hadn't done it.

Hearsay is when a witness testifies about what he heard someone else say he witnessed, not when a witness testifies about something he experienced first-hand.

Hearsay is the wrong term, but there are hard-coded exceptions to evidence rules which only apply to sexual assault and not to other crimes.

In otherwords when their friends give a statement about what the "victim" said the mornng after

The women in these college rape cases have a point. A lot of women are having deeply uncomfortable experiences that they really didn't want.

I don't think that's having a point at all. Those women were entirely free to not do that to themselves. Just don't go home with the guy. If he then crosses the line into actual rape, then and only then, she has a point. Her having unrealistic expectations and a random man failing to meet them is not and will never be a serious problem in need of solving.

People's choices aren't products of some wholly independent life philosophy consciously derived from first principles. We're products of society and we act like it. If you had been raised from birth in an Afghan village the sum of your philosophy, identity and belief system would be radically different to what it is, even mediated for genetics. Expecting young women to wholesale reject 60 years of the sexual revolution as teenagers (when all almost everyone wants to do is fit in) is ridiculous. It's up to the adults in the room to change norms.

Hugh Hefner and the ad men of Madison Ave weren’t teenage girls. Teenage girls wanted male attention as much in 1865 as they did in 1965, the difference was the adults who surrounded them and the culture they were raised in.

It feels good in the moment, and consequences come decades down the line. Even then, it needed a few generations to take hold.

Sorry but the fact that something is not a crime doesn't mean it is not a serious problem. The problem is that half of the solution - use your judgement, don't put yourself in peril, listen to your mother and so in is anathema to the modern safetism feminists. The other half is to actually have men abide to some semi formal dating rules (if you didn't get to second base outside of the house, don't be pushy inside for example) and dating language. This will minimize the communication errors and unpleasant experiences.

Feminists don't seem to want the other half in practice either. Obviously getting rid of those kinds of situations entails good behavior but feminists don't want that, they want institutional control.

I largely agree. However, the sexual market place is bigger than the individual. The sexual revolution has limited the bargaining power of women and the extent to which men will wait for sex. In a hook up culture competing by showing more skin and sleeping faster has become widespread. Trying to make the demands a women could make decades ago such as waiting for sex, demanding that the man provide for the family etc isn't really feasible.

It has only limited their bargaining power with Chad, who now has four other girls on his booty call list just waiting for a text from him. But women have more bargaining power than ever over the ever-increasing percentage of men who are incels.

If a woman actually wanted to marry a provider and remain chaste until marriage while she was still young and hot and virginal, she would have her pick of the litter.

But women only want Chad, and would rather fuck a dog than an average-looking beta provider. They only hold their noses and marry such men when they hit the wall and stop getting attention from Chad, or when they end up as single mothers looking for a bailout.

Women debase themselves by having sex after a few dates and performing degrading sexual acts because that is the only way to compete for Chad, and the alternative to competing for Chad is accepting a man that is not Chad, which is a fate too terrible to countenance.

I have a hard time seeing this as women having a point.

...women only want Chad, and would rather...

Post about specific groups, rather than general groups, whenever possible. Write like everyone is reading, and you want to include them in the conversation.

As a rule, if you can't differentiate between "women" and "some women," you're going to have a hard time.

If a woman actually wanted to marry a provider and remain chaste until marriage while she was still young and hot and virginal, she would have her pick of the litter.

This is not my third-hand anecdotal experience. Even conservative-leaning men want premarital sex even more than the women of similar cultural leaning do.

And even in past societies, among the masses, (note: vague guess on my part based on reading a few historical sources, could be wrong but I doubt it, there's definitely better scholarship on the topic I haven't read yet) sex before marriage was very common, and the strictly enforced rule was more 'marry the women you have sex with and raise the children'.

It seems like redpill/PUA/manosphere adjacent people have these theories about the whole of modern sexual behavior that are exclusively based on the way < 20% of the population behaves, and then exaggerate even their behavior. Ugly men and ugly women have casual sex AND date, even in college! On dating apps specifically, and i guess on social media, women have a massive advantage - but that's in large part because connection there is mediated by looks and very short-term interactions, which men are more interested in than women. And as a result dating apps have 5x more men than women. But if you're dating friends, or people you know from shared activities, non-Chads do quite well.

But women only want Chad, and would rather fuck a dog than an average-looking beta provider. They only hold their noses and marry such men when they hit the wall and stop getting attention from Chad,

This just seems false, if I interpret it literally, compared to the experiences anyone I know has had?

If a woman actually wanted to marry a provider and remain chaste until marriage while she was still young and hot and virginal, she would have her pick of the litter.

Really? The average guy (not Chad) is happy to date a woman who wants marriage first, sex after? When he's young and horny and wants to have sex with as many women as he can realistically manage to get, because he wants fun and experiences and not to be tied down aged 18+?

It takes two to tango, and for every guy who says he wants a nice girl fiancée, there's one who means "when I've sown my wild oats and am ready to settle down".

Really? The average guy (not Chad) is happy to date a woman who wants marriage first, sex after? When he's young and horny and wants to have sex with as many women as he can realistically manage to get, because he wants fun and experiences and not to be tied down aged 18+?

It takes two to tango, and for every guy who says he wants a nice girl fiancée, there's one who means "when I've sown my wild oats and am ready to settle down".

The average non-Chad guy doesn't get a chance to sow his wild oats while he is still young and horny. That is precisely what would make such a marriage a good deal for him; he could trade commitment and financial support in exchange for guaranteed, exclusive sex.

Sure, he would like it even better if he could have sex with a bunch of women, but, not being Chad, he doesn't have that option. Having the opportunity of an early marriage would be a strict improvement over his current situation of masturbating to porn and maybe getting laid once or twice a year if he tries really hard every weekend (there is a reason they call it "getting lucky").

As fortaleza84 put it:

It occurs to me that looking at paying for dates and trips actually understates the problem. There is also the possibility of making a long-term serious financial commitment to the woman by marrying and/or fathering children with the woman.

When you think about it, this is the average man’s best hope of competing with some handsome player, i.e. making a hard-core financial commitment for 20+ years.

Which is why “open marriage” is so gynocentric and unfair to men.

But the average man doesn't get that option anymore, because women are not actually interested in getting commitment from a beta provider. The only reason they ever got married to such men was because their fathers, who had legal, social, economic, and religious control over their sexual choices, forced them to. The sexual revolution ended that.

Now, a beta provider is expected to wife up a woman in her 30s after she has finished spending her youth, beauty, fertility, and purity getting pumped-and-dumped by Chad:

This has been said a thousand times around these parts, but I’m pointing it out again:

If you are decent guy, most everybody expects you to get shit on romantically and just take the lumps for a decade, then get the used-up, washed-out, emotionally-wrecked left-overs of the assholes’ pillaging.

Wendy just dismisses this, like it’s just the way it is. There’s no condemnation of the attitude, no real thought as to how thoroughly poisonous this is.

Does nobody else think there’s something disastrously wrong with this attitude?

Does nobody realize what a destructive message this sends to young men?

Does anybody even care?

How can we just casually accept that anti-social assholes get the prize, while the decent, honest builders and maintainers of civilization get the dregs, if they’re lucky?

This is how civilization dies, tiny cut, by tiny cut.

From "The Archetypal Modern Woman":

So, in a nutshell, Tracy Clark-Flory is the the stereotypical, nay, archetypical, modern woman. She fucks uncountable alphas, ignoring the beta who likes her, throughout her years of youth and prettiness. She realizes how empty it all is, but only once the wall approaches and the good times are coming to an end, so she uses the last of her fading feminine charms to husband-up the barely tolerable beta.

All that’s needed now is her complaints about how beta boy won’t divide the chores properly, followed by a story of how she’s falling out of love with him, followed by her divorce within the decade. Then there will be stories about how being a single mother is hard, how dating as a single mother is hard, and how there are no good men left.

If we’re lucky (and beta boy isn’t) there might even be a hilarious story of how she pined for Steve throughout the years of her marriage to beta boy.

But, increasingly, men are saying "thanks, but no thanks" and leaving those women to become bitter cat ladies and single mothers. In the immortal words of Michael:

Now at 32 and successful these women are hitting me. In my mind these are the same women who rejected me. I’m not interested. The Bible says something to the effect of “don’t forsake the wife of your youth” or something like “remember your young wife”? Something like that. How am I supposed to remember something I never had? I have no history with these women. Ticking ovaries are scandalous. They will lie and say anything to get what they want. Which is: BABIES AND A LOVING HUSBAND TO PAY THEIR BILLS. Yet these women did not even give a few good years of their youth!

As a man I am very visual. God made me this way. I cannot help finding a physically beautiful woman attractive. Why did these women not at least give me a few years of their youth so I would have time to fall in love with them and permanently burn their image in my mind’s eye? I need something to remember when we are 50 and married. Yet she spent her 20’s parceling herself out to guys who gave her nothing and offers nothing to the guy who gives her everything. I’m expected to commit hard earned resources to raising children with what is ultimately a suspect woman whose history I know nothing about. A 30+ unmarried women has very high chance of having a questionable past and baggage. I believe the more men a woman has been with the less likely she is to be emotionally committed each subsequent one. When you have handed out little pieces of your heart over years to dozens of different men what is left for the husband you proclaim to truly love? What value do the words “I love you” mean when she has stared into the eyes of 10-100+ different men and said the same thing?

At 30+ women’s physical appearance has nowhere to go but DOWN. Is this what women mean by “saving the best for last”? Marrying at 30+? How can women spend trillions of dollars a year on beauty products yet at the same time claim a women’s age “shouldn’t be important” to a man? And what about children? Did they ever think their husbands might want to have children? What’s more likely to naturally produce a quicker pregnancy and healthy offspring? A fertile 24 year old in her physical prime… or a 35 year old aging womb? What if I want multiple children? At 30+ a women can easily before infertile after her first pregnancy.

As a result of everything I’ve seen and experienced in my life I would like to make an announcement to all the desperate 30+ year old women out there: I would rather suffocate and die then spend my hard earned income, love, trust, and substance on you. Your entitled, ageing, feminist, jaded, baggage laden and brainwashed. And if I cannot marry a women in her 20’s I REFUSE TO EVER GET MARRIED. Given my high income this should not be a problem. However I’m concerned at some point I will have to start looking overseas (Ukraine, Russia, Eastern Europe etc.). I’m not going to marry one of these 30+ ageing entitled females who clearly have an agenda of their own. I intend to get married once. Marriage is meant to be forever. I will not be a starter husband for one of these used up women.

Not to worry, though; the government is perfectly happy to steal the fruit of men's labor to help pay for Chad's bastards.

In the welfare state, every working man is a cuck.

If a woman actually wanted to marry a provider and remain chaste until marriage while she was still young and hot and virginal, she would have her pick of the litter.

In secular urban circles in the modern West (and no, suddenly deciding to leave your family, friend and community and become a Mormon or an Orthodox Jew at 17 isn't a realistic option for most women), what percentage of eligible young men do you think expect or consider it reasonable to wait until marriage?

People are products of society, even as they participate in shaping it. Young women who grow up in the shadow of the sexual revolution had no choice about which society they were born into and what its norms were and are. Yes, everyone has free will, expecting every teenage girl to rebel against the entirety of modernity is absurd.

In secular urban circles in the modern West

Isn't this kind of like saying "in vegetarian urban circles in the modern West, what percentage of eligible ladies want to have steak every Friday"?

If you want steak, you shouldn't be hanging out with vegetarians -- even urban churches should have no shortage of men who are OK with waiting until marriage for sex -- so long as the wait is not too long ofc.

In secular urban circles in the modern West (and no, suddenly deciding to leave your family, friend and community and become a Mormon or an Orthodox Jew at 17 isn't a realistic option for most women), what percentage of eligible young men do you think expect or consider it reasonable to wait until marriage?

The answer depends on your definition of the word "eligible".

and would rather fuck a dog than an average-looking beta provider.

I read a fair bit into the link you provided, and found nothing that could be reasonably read to support your claim. The link claims that a small minority of women have bestiality fantasies (hardly surprising), that a very small minority of female participants in surveys report having engaged in bestiality, and that bestiality-themed dildos are popular (yes, furries are a thing.) None of that adds up to women, as a class, preferring sex with dogs to sex with non-chads, or even preferring it to sex with outright incels; there is no evidence provided that "women's" preference for sex with dogs is a significant factor in the sexual marketplace at all.

Your statement appears both highly inflammatory and entirely unsupported. The sexual marketplace is woeful enough without resorting to absurd caricature, and in fact your comment would be greatly improved by its absence. Don't say things because they sound good, say them because you've thought about them seriously and concluded that they're true.

Not him, and don't necessarily support his claim, but I think the logic goes something like

  • ~0% of women want to sleep with your average incel (definitionally)
  • Some percent, say 5%, of women want to have sex with a dog.
  • Therefore there is a not-trivially-small group of women (millions!) that would prefer some dog action to poor old incel.

I think it's less about the idea that it has a major impact on the marketplace (though the complete non-existence of dogs would probably have some infitessimally small impact) and more just one of those realizations where people are hit with the fact that they are literally less fuckable than a literal dog.

Of course, this all falls apart if the focus is on "average looking" rather than "beta," as it only works if talking about incels specifically.

My own view is that what I laid out above is roughly true, but mostly just the fault of the bottom-tier men for sucking that badly. It's not even really a bad or shocking thing. As you said, furries exist, and they're a much larger group than loser-philes.

Zoophilia is not that common a paraphilia, practicing zoophilia even less, removed from contexts like degradation or zoosadism yet rarer still, and female non-degradation-focused zoophiles even more uncommon.

((I don't recommend using Bad Dragon as a metric, since regardless of Varka's issues the median Bad Dragon sale or advertisement revolves around the fantasy of a sapient and often bipedal partner, but a) the median customer has or had a dick, and b) an overwhelmingly male ratio applies to self-reports among actual-bestialists, too.))

It's just more visible, in the sense that someone getting arrested and/or publicly shamed for animal abuse (whether in any remotely less-violent way, or as the degradation or animal-sadism sense that very few incels would want) shows up in the news for incels to talk about, where "woman with kink for ugly/submissive/pathetic men" doesn't in any visible or identifiable way. But the later is more common than you'd think; if more generally spaced among written fiction than visual pornography.

And, of course, the broader "average-looking beta provider" is far better off, even before considering all of the ethical and pragmatic problems with actual animal abuse.

((Peter Singer's impact on the Wider EA Community isn't the worst thing that hit the tumblr ratsphere, but that I know this stuff is definitely not a benefit.))

But the article linked in the post you linked mentions that 4% of the female population had a sexual experience with an animal, with much higher rates among certain sub-populations (particularly farmers). I mean that's not exactly the 5% I mentioned off the cuff but cut me some slack. That just becomes more significant when taking into account that actual practicing zoophilia isn't even required for the overall point.

As to that data, my understanding is that the data is pretty all over the place, women fantasize about animals more often, men actually engage in the actions more frequently (but typically don't fantasize about it even if they do normally fuck animals,) and the actual rates of interest in it are pretty close.

The points about the pathetic-man-fetish are all valid though, and I'm not too attached to the overall point anyway, though I expect for anyone who does care about it, any nitpicks are unlikely to remove the emotional damage of "there are attractive women who have fucked dogs but wouldn't touch you with a 10-foot-pole."

More comments

It is not ~0% of all women who don't want to sleep with the incel, it is tilde 0% (Zorba fix markdown escape pls) of all women he ever met (more plausibly, approached).

He probably haven't met any dogfuckers, either.

  • 0% of women want to sleep with your average incel (definitionally)
  • Some percent, say 5%, of women want to have sex with a dog.

It is not ~0% of all women who don't want to sleep with the incel, it is tilde 0% (Zorba fix markdown escape pls) of all women he ever met (more plausibly, approached).

He probably haven't met any dogfuckers, either.

To demonstrate the problem a different way: Go to an incel forum, select a thousand incels. Go to a dog competition, select a thousand charming, beautiful, intelligent, expensive male dogs with female owners. Which group do you think will have more sex with female humans in the next five years?

The "incels are less fuckable than dogs" doesn't hold up unless you redefine "incel" much more narrowly than anyone actually does. Your average unemployed 5'6" recessed chin guy on those forums is still more sexable than a chocolate lab.

Yeah we have a word for that…boorish. Something can be socially condemned without calling someone (socially and criminally) as a rapist. Being a boorish man is bad; being a rapist is evil.

The testimony from one of his accusers is interesting. She was 16 at the time (the UK age of consent) and her parents felt they couldn't do anything to stop her seeing Brand. It's as if they considered the limits of their own parental authority as extending to the letter of the law and not a jot further. I personally would have expected a good mother to stop her daughter 'dating' a celebrity sex addict, age of consent be damned. The girl herself comes to the conclusion that the law needs to be changed to protect 16-18 year olds.

Although to answer your rhetorical question, it's pretty easy to have lots of consensual sex without doing the stuff Brand is accused of. Holding a girl's mouth open so you can spit into it isn't a case of blurred lines and miscommunication.

It's as if they considered the limits of their own parental authority as extending to the letter of the law and not a jot further.

The problem is, if she's legally the age of consent, what can they do? Lock her in her room? That's abuse and the second she calls the child abuse hotline, social services and maybe the cops will be at the door. Stupid young 16 year olds are going to threaten to run away or kill themselves or other stupid stunts if their parents interfere with "True Love".

Tell her she's too young to have sex? The entirety of society is going to condemn such shaming and controlling and repression.

Stupid young 16 year olds are going to threaten to run away or kill themselves or other stupid stunts if their parents interfere with "True Love".

Mutually assured destruction, motherfuckers. See you after the cops brought you back from running away. Or in the hospital after your suicide attempt. Or the morgue.

And in America preventing 16-year olds from dating older men is a thing that parents probably do more often than they allow it. 16 is a common age of consent in the USA. Britain's legal and cultural environment is probably not that different unless you can point to relevant differences.

Yes, there's parents that are unable or unwilling to put their foot down and stop their teenaged daughter from being a toy for an adult man. While parents who are able and willing to do so have somewhat less support from society at large than they would have had in 1200 AD, lots of them still manage it. Thus we can conclude that the former subset of parents generally have some hangup in themselves rather than being stopped by broader society from controlling their daughters.

And in America preventing 16-year olds from dating older men is a thing that parents probably do more often than they allow it. 16 is a common age of consent in the USA.

True. Which makes it so hilariously sad two years later when those same parents send their daughters off to college in another city/state without a second thought, where they will completely lose the ability to prevent their daughters from making such mistakes.

How many fathers who proudly subscribe to the "Rules for Dating my Daughter" would react with shock and outrage if you suggested that maybe paying for their little princess to spend four years away from parental supervision in an environment full of sex, drugs, and alcohol is not the best idea? Probably most of them.

I think there's some major cultural differences based on filter bubble about what is acceptable parenting as far as intervening in your 16-18(/21) year old's personal life. Obviously these parents lived in a bubble where they considered it unacceptable intervention to stop their sixteen year old daughter from dating an adult male celebrity with a bad reputation for treatment of women; lots of parents would think that a pretty reasonable intervention based on just one of those factors, let alone all of them.

There isn't a middle ground when you're talking about "guilty" vs "not guilty". In this case talking about a middle ground is usually finding an excuse to punish the man. You can bite one bullet and say that "when a man and a woman have an awkward encounter that went wrong, no rape occurred". Or you can bite another and say "when a man and a woman have an awkward encounter that went wrong, he raped her". If you talk about a middle ground and put out a lot of words but ultimately conclude the man should be punished, you've decided it's rape, and if you put out all those words but ultimately conclude he should not, you've decided it's not rape.

I see it as the revolution entering its authoritarian phase. In the early Soviet union the farmers were going to be free and run themselves without any oppression. The result was mass starvation. When cannibalism becomes a major concern in cities, getting farmers to produce becomes a legitimate concern. Shooting lazy farmers for being tsarist spies and having soldiers patrol farms while enforcing strict counting and documentation of production was awful for the people who lived through it. Yet millions of people weren't starving to death in the 1950s. We are experiencing something similar on the dating market. Free love became freedom to act selfishly. This has caused wide spread and genuine hurt among women. Some of them are now demanding the state clear up the sea of bad behaviour using the legal system. Total sexual freedom didn't work, instead tradition will be replaced by commissars.

We can't have a society in which men more or less use 16-year-old girls to get off. Having large numbers of women have deeply uncomfortable experiences and having genuinely psychopathic men take advantage of the freedom of the sexual revolution is a travesty.

With that said it obviously won't work. The NKVD can't be everywhere, and people cheat all the time. Show trials designed to maximize convictions don't create functioning societies.

Commissars rather famously didn't work; the USSR was supported by US grain exports in the 1970s and 1980s, and was dissolved in late 1991.

Of course it didn't work, but it worked better than it did at the most zealous, most extreme, most euphoric and most radical phase of the revolution. The Cultural Revolution was shitty even by the standards of Chinese communism. The sexual revolution was a catastrophic disaster for a huge number of people (I'd argue both men and women) to the benefit of a small minority of men. Reining it in is going to involve punishing those men disproportionately, it is what it is.

Agree, but the punishment is only the first half of the re-calibration. You can point to something and say "That's bad, don't do that," but people will naturally respond, "Well, fine, what's good?"

And then society, culture, and all of the relevant institutions are going to have to start really getting behind the idea of stable nuclear families, courtship rituals that are defined (heavily) by gender roles, and explicit pro-natalism. Personally, I think of these are stellar ideas. But there are some absolutely bananas divergences in opinios on that. This is why, I think, the trashfire that is contemporary dating endures - there isn't a well articulated alternative and even vague attempts to develop one are only at the margins and oriented around fine-tuning and optimization. The recent article-and-comments on "Date Me" docs over at Scott's Blog is case in point.

Then again, what's old is new. People really like to fuck. Like, a lot a lot. Society has been dealing with this with great difficulty forever. At the societal, pro-social level,packing away women in burlap bags probably isn't a good move, but neither is broadcasting luxury strip clubs as empowering art. I'm not going to weasel out and say "it's a balancing act." No, the assertion that ought to be made is "sex is one of the most basic social contracts you engage in. Yes, it's personal and fun, but it isn't something to be taken lightly." Then, taking the next step up in the responsibility chain, "you should have sex in an already stable pair bonded relationship with an eye towards longevity." No, don't criminalize one-night stands and don't jail the town harlot or village lothario - but hold them up as examples of what not to do.

The result was mass starvation. When cannibalism becomes a major concern in cities, getting farmers to produce becomes a legitimate concern.

What are you talking about? The Soviet Union was exporting grain to support the growth of it's heavy industry in the early 1920s which led the USA to withdraw it's massive famine relief efforts. In the early 1930s famine was caused by collectivization and wasn't required to feed the cities. It isn't like collectivization helped productivity in the long run. That they eventually stopped being so insanely oppressive that starving their citizens was a step to far is more due to politics than anything.

Are you deliberately choosing bad examples to make a point?

Soviet Union had reintroduced free market economy in early 20s, because of a total carnage of the actual communism as practiced in the early years during of the Russian Civil War and after it. Before that, the commies would seize the food from peasants, who as a result stopped bothering to grow much. The shortage of food in early 20s was extremely severe.

By the end of NEP in 1928, the agricultural production has recovered to pre WWI levels, though the Soviet Union food exports throughout its history have never been even close to the Imperial Russia exports in 1913.

False rape accusations certainly happen. A schoolfriend of mine had one made against him before the judge threw it out of court, as the accuser kept changing her story.

But you don't need to have a strong opinion on whether false accusations are common or rare to examine the merits of this case. We can just look at the specifics. And based on the Times article linked, I think that most or all of the accusations are true. Specifically, the woman who attended a rape crisis centre immediately after the alleged assault (which can be verified). If her accusation was false, you would have expected her to make the accusation at the time, rather than only revealing it when interviewed by a journalist years later.

Brand is a (self-confessed) sex addict, and has slept with a lot of women. It's easy to imagine him getting so used to women saying yes that he crosses the line into sexual assault.

Specifically, the woman who attended a rape crisis centre immediately after the alleged assault (which can be verified)

Can be... but has it?

I'm reminded of the false accusations against Chris Avellone. Part of the accusers story is that Avellone was such a sex pest at Dragon Con 2012, her and several other men and women who had witnessed his behavior had him banned from the event. This should be a part of the story which could be verified. To the best of my knowledge, it never was one way or the other. Just repeated. However, a recording emerged during a podcast where the same accuser was bragging about hooking up with Avellone at Dragon Con 2012, and that she could connect people with him since they were such good friends. So, despite journalist's best efforts to go out of their way to not verify facts which could be verified, it appears the lady herself, on camera, seriously undermined her own story.

I keep trying to read the article, except the archive link doesn't work for me, and the Times link expects me to subscribe. Oh well. Sometimes I think these smear merchants like it better when you physically cannot read anything beyond the headline. Lets them lie easier.

It's a shame you can't read the article, because yes, the accuser handed over her file from the rape crisis centre to the Times.

All the factual claims in the article (except the he said she said stuff obviously) has been verified by the journalists as far as I can tell.

If her accusation was false, you would have expected her to make the accusation at the time, rather than only revealing it when interviewed by a journalist years later.

Would you? I would expect a false accusation to come up later than a true one. Someone who cares about getting justice would have DNA evidence logged immediately and start the process while the incident is fresh in mind, while someone who was making a malicious accusation might wait until there's something in it for them, or for favourable conditions for success (say, a global movement valourising and promoting the infallibility of self-identified victims?) and until the memory of what exactly went on that night has likely faded from their target's mind somewhat. It's unlikely someone will be able to recall where exactly they were and what they were doing all day on a specific day many years ago, let alone have held onto any evidence of that.

Accusers can also build up what happened in their own minds over time, embellishing the actual events through faulty or motivated-faulty recall. I think we all saw this with the Kavanaugh circus.

Did you read the article? Do you think that this is what happened in this specific case?

I know that the Kavanagh hearing was an utter travesty, but simply pattern matching between those accusations and these accusations isn't going to get us closer to the truth about Russell Brand.

It’s surely different than BK. But…apparently the investigative reporter was doing this for a very long time and gave Brand 8 days and anonymized the alleged victims? Seems like that isn’t really truth seeking.

The victims are only anonymous for us. Brand obviously knows who these women are. One was 16 years old, one has provided text exchanges between herself and Brand, one met him at an AA meeting, and the fourth lived with him for several months. The accusations are extremely specific. If he wanted to rebut them specifically, he could do so easily.

UK libel law isn't like the US, it's much stricter. If a civil court found any of these accusations to be false (on the balance of probability) Brand could sue the Times for millions. Whether they are false or not, the editor at the Times clearly believes they are and is willing to risk his career on it.

This is worlds away from Kavanagh, which was a show trial based on constantly changing, ludicrous testimony from decades ago.

The article stated that the alleged victims were anonymized when provided to Brand. So it isn’t clear what exactly he has been provided

A sex addict. So addicts are sleeping with addicts. Sounds like compromised ability to consent all around.

Are you talking about the women who made the accusations? There's no suggestion that any of them were sex addicts (especially not the 16 year old girl).

Brand is a (self-confessed) sex addict, and has slept with a lot of women. It's easy to imagine him getting so used to women saying yes that he crosses the line into sexual assault.

He was also a drug addict right? Probably doesn't help.

In regards to the rape crisis centre, we have to ask whether it’s normative for a promiscuous woman (in the UK, in that era) to use those services to screen for STDs. That center would do free screenings, right? If this is the same woman as in the texts about sex without a condom, it seems the contention was that he did not use a condom when she requested he do so (like in the previous time they had sex). Which is bad! But probably not what the reader has in mind when they hear about forceful rape. At least, I think rape conjures up something much more significant than taking a condom off with a woman you recently had consensual sex with on a different occasion.

I'd suggest reading the archived article. That particular accusation ('Nadia') happened in LA, not the UK, and the various corroborating elements (the records from the centre, the evidence she provided to the police, records from her therapy at the centre afterwards, the text messages between her and Brand) suggest that her version of the story is correct, although I admit that the text messages could support either the 'he raped her against the wall' version or the 'he took off the condom without her knowing' version.

As an aside, STD testing is freely available in the UK from the NHS. You can get test kits sent to your house or visit a sexual health clinic (which are very common, the medium-sized town I grew up in had one). Going to a rape crisis centre would be a very unusual way to get an STD test.

It does count as rape according to UK law though, and a quick google tells me that in 2019 a man was sentenced to 12 years for doing it.

So it may not be rape rape (to paraphrase Whoopi Goldberg), but that will be cold comfort for Brand if the claim can be proven in court.

EDIT: Never mind, just saw that the act occurred in LA, not the UK. Stealthing is not a criminal act there.

I feel assaulted every time I have to listen to him talk, so I can see where these women are coming from... In all seriousness, I don't see why the general public needs to have an opinion about this. If there's evidence, let him be prosecuted and then give his side of the story in court.

Once in a RPG, a new player said

"wait, this character has Int 9, Wis 10, and Cha 16. How do I portray that?"

And I said

"Easy. Speak the way Russel Brand does."

I've never heard someone say so little, so eloquently. He's a treasure.

My knee jerk (anecdotally based and non-researched) reaction is that Brand is largely blameless. I say this from experience in the (now largely defunct) pick up community and social experience with men who have a notch count running into the triple figures. Via forums and the internet I've come across men who have claimed an absurd 4 figures; a very small fraction of whom I've believed.

If you took someone comparable in the public sphere like Gene Simmons of Kiss fame and canvassed his history of groupies in a witch hunt, I think it's highly likely you would find some girls with buyer's remorse. Also, I think any lothario running those numbers would have a situation under alcohol or other drugs that was borderline to a casual observer and clearly guilty to the modern inquistion.

Brand has become an alternative media icon in recent years which would have made him a target. I can't say he is innocent, but I can say there are incentives to destroy his reputation.

there are incentives to destroy his reputation.

Surely this is a fully general counter-argument.

I understand that I'm throwing out an argument that is largely unfalsifiable and you would be wise to be suspicious. As the kids say 'if you know, you know.'

No?

It's a fully general counter-argument to "accusers have no reason to lie". Which seems reasonable.

I think the bigger issue is if you go looking for a crime without regard to some impetus you will end up finding some people who will claim XYZ if you are famous and there is plausible deniability. This is especially true in the context of rape where we as a society have significantly expanded the context of what constitutes lack of consent in the mind’s of women.

By finding multiple women, it elicits people’s perception of “where there is smoke there is fire.” This is probably a useful heuristic for Joe six pack down the street; less useful for someone like Brand.

A lot of this post seems to be riding on Brand and the specifics of this case rather than a more general talk about the issue.

In service of this here is an archived link


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