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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 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.
Are you saying powerful men created the sexual revolution for their own benefit?
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.
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.
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?
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.
I certainly am not in the business of defending Enlightenment philosophers, but perhaps you could be specific?
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.
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?
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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