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Notes -
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,
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 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.
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.
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