Today I Learned...

Long, long ago, a blogger I liked posted about the prison healthcare system. It's atrocious everyone in the USA, but especially in her state of California. CA has tried to save money by using private prisons, which were handling prisoner health care horribly (although it's not clear to me how it compared to state-run prisons). She had a longstanding fascination with libertarianism, and asked "Libertarian readers, I think private prisons are a thing you support, and I think they're doing really horrible things here. What is your stance? What health care do you think prisoners should have, and how should we get it to them?" As I remember it, she was talking less about responses to obvious, acute things like stabbing, and more about things that were fuzzy and chronic.

My response? "I think the biggest contribution we could make to inmate health is to stop putting them in rape factories. Until we've dealt with the prison rape problem, worrying about cancer treatment is misplaced." Which, I will admit, sounds dangerously close to "you can't have feelings about men violating your clearly stated boundaries while female circumcision is practiced". But I don't think it's the same, and not just because we're actually talking about the same people and institutions in my example. What I wanted to convey was that the institutional rot in prisons was deep, and leading to worse outcomes than prisoners dying of cancer, and removing the rot would require a complete rethinking of how prisons work. This would probably incidentally help with the health care issue too. Libertarianism has a lot to say about whether jail is ever justified, and if so for what crimes, and how do we determine that, but by the time someone is in prison? Consumer choice is by definition absent, and libertarianism is irrelevant.

That was how I felt reading Emily Yoffe's widely disparaged piece on alcohol and sexual assault First, I wanted to punch her for acting like she was a lone brave voice fighting against a feminist conspiracy to leave women ignorant of gender-specific dangers.* Then I wanted to punch her for conflating "drunk but functional woman consents to acts she wouldn't have while sober" and "alcohol renders woman incapable of physically preventing an assault." Then I wanted to punch her for saying it was her daughter's "responsibility" to prevent her own rape but merely "advantageous" for her imaginary son to avoid being accused of rape. But after I got the punching out my system, I realized I was punching at ants. Yoffe is looking at the intersection of two different systemic rots and concluding the symptoms are the problem.

The first is rape culture- the fact that a man can get a reputation for "if you're drunk and he's around, you have sex with him" and still get invited to parties. The solution to this is enthusiastic consent culture, which involves less teaching teenagers "drunk people can't say yes" and more "sex with someone who genuinely wants it is amazing, settle for nothing less, and don't tolerate people who do." This won't work on people for whom predation and violation are the point, but if Yoffe thought they were the major problem she would have written a very different article. Solving the interaction of rape culture and binge drinking by ending binge drinking still leaves rape culture in tact.

The other is why college students are binge drinking at all. What are they getting out of it? It doesn't look like fun to me even if it was a rape preventative. She briefly touches on it, but her best solution is "more friday classes", which makes me think she has not fully considered the issue. One possibility is that binge drinking is a vulnerability ritual- in which case, warning women of the dangers is about as effective as warning teenage boys driving fast is dangerous. If that is the case, we need to ask why a ritual type generally performed privately with a trusted few is being done in public with strangers. The answer could be gendered (in that women are pressured to place trust in men who haven't earned it), but I suspect there's a large gender neutral component that has serious implications for the state of our social fabric.

Of course, we don't want to wait on those issues to be solved to stop rape. It is entirely possible that the best choice for a woman is to curtail drinking she would otherwise enjoy because of the risk of rape. And she should be given accurate information to with which to weight that risk. But her drinking was never the cause of the issue.



*Because that's what feminism is known for. Seeing situations where women face more risks or penalties than men, and insisting everyone ignore it.

Long long ago, Penny Arcade made a comic that included the phrase "raped to sleep by dickwolves." I though the original comic was fine- not safe space appropriate, but not trivializing rape either. To the extent it was a cheap shock-laugh, that was sort of the point of the comic.

Lots of people weren't okay with the comic. Some of them were perfectly respectful about it. I've seen claims that others were not, although I haven't seen direct links to back this up. Penny Arcade responded with a strip that really definitely trivialized rape and dismissed all criticism of them as hysterical. Meanwhile, some of their supporters on twitter were threatening to rape their critics (no direct link for that either, but enjoy the #teamrape hashtag).

Penny Arcade responded with a Team Dickwolves t-shirt. I thought this was annoying when I first heard about it but just now put together that they essentially sold a shirt that said Team Rapist while their followers were threatening to rape people. I think that is the point where they lose the benefit of a doubt. Some time later they pulled the shirt.

3 years later, !Gabe was asked what he regretted most in his time running Pax, and he said something that could have been interpreted as "pulling the dickwolves shirt". Later he posted a clarification on his blog.

So let me start by saying I like the Dickwolves strip. I think it’s a strong comic and I still think the joke is funny. Would we make that strip today? Knowing what we know now and seeing how it hurt people, no. We wouldn’t. But at the time, it seemed pretty benign. With that said I absolutely regret everything we did after that comic. I regret the follow up strip, I regret making the merchandise, I regret pulling the merchandise and I regret being such an asshole on twitter to people who were upset. I don’t think any of those things were good ideas. If we had just stopped with the strip and moved on, the Dickwolf never would have become what it is today. Which is a joke at the expense of rape victims or a symbol of the dismissal of people who have suffered a sexual assault. the comic itself obviously points out the absurd morality of the average MMO where you are actually forced to help some people and ignore others in the same situation. Oddly enough, the first comic by itself is exactly the opposite of what this whole thing has turned into.

What I read from this is that !Gabe genuinely regrets hurting people, and also the tremendous amount of work doing so created for him. He does not understand why people are so upset about this and does not plan on any effort to dp so.

Ta-Nehisi Coates had this to say about white Southerners grappling with the Confederate flag:

If you accept that the Confederacy fought to preserve and expand slavery, then you might begin to understand how the descendants of the enslaved might regard symbols of that era. And you might also begin to understand that "offense" doesn't even begin to cover it. Reading Penthouse while having Christmas dinner with your grandmother is offensive. Donning the symbols of those who fought for right to sell Henry Brown's wife and child is immoral.

Nothing is changed by banishing the Confederate Flag out of a desire to be polite or inoffensive. The Confederate Flag should not die because black people have come to feel a certain way about their country, it should die when white people come to feel a certain way about themselves. It can't be for me. It has to be for you.

This is about how I feel about dickwolves. To the extent people who want a Team Dickwolves t-shirt exist, I want them to wear it so I know who they are. What I want from !Gabe is an understanding of why people found the comic and especially his follow up and really especially the Team Rapist T-shirt so hurtful and so scary. I don't think he gets that he's not the the victim in this situation

I've been very sick for days, and like I always do when I'm that sick for that long, I run out of emotional cope and old wounds reopen. So what do I decide to watch? A documentary about two women confronting the man who molested them as children.

The plan went not as badly as you might think. The metatheme of the movie isn't child molestation, it's the need to make things normal. But sexual abuse is only the worst of many things you can't make normal, and the damage done in trying... I can't say is worse than the initial assault because we'll never know, but it's certainly more insidious. It's also fascinating to watch them desperately try to force normal when it's not there, but then casually mention something really horribly not normal that they clearly think is.

I'm still running a fever so that's all I got right now.