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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.
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' -
with text messages evidence
And
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)
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