Today I Learned...

There is a lot of debate on sexual assault prevention education tactics. Generally it takes the form of warning women not to do things. The argument for this is that:

1. Rapists know what they are doing.
   
2. They know it is wrong.
   
3. Rape is strictly a male-on-female crime.
   
4. Therefore, the only people with an incentive to work on the problem are women/victims and their supporters. Potential rapists and their supporters have no incentive to change
   

I don't think any of those conditions are always true, but I'm willing to grant there's a significant subset of rapists that fulfill conditions 1 through 3. Enough that 4 is a worthy angle to attacking the problem, although not one we should use exclusively. There's also a wide range of how useful the advice is, and how restrictive. "Don't leave a drink unattended at a bar" is a pretty good idea (for both sexes- robbery is a thing), and has minimal impact. "Stay indoors after 7 PM" is effective (-ish), but highly restrictive. There is never, ever a discussion about exactly how risky a given choice is and how that weights against the potential rewards.

The anti- argument focuses on the unfairness of making women feel afraid when they're doing nothing wrong. If points 1-3 are correct, this is irrelevant even if true. I think most of the people on this side are implicitly focusing on the (many, many) cases in which they are not true, but there is also an ideological component that is simply orthogonal to the practicalities. It's easy to dismiss this as a luxury to be tackled later, but I think there are second order effects that may be relevant.

The focus on "what women should do" to prevent the implicit big, scary, obviously ill-intentioned man from raping her subtly shifts rape prevention from a woman's right to a woman's responsibility. The best example of this I can think of is in children. I got what was as far as I know fairly standard little-kid molestation prevention education: "private areas", stranger danger, tell a trusted adult when something makes you feel uncomfortable, etc. If a stranger ever told me there was a box of puppies in the back of his van, I would have been prepared. But that never happened, so the main effects were: 1. I became suspicious and uncomfortable about levels of touch I hadn't before (which, to be clear, were totally non-sexual and appropriate) 2. But couldn't speak up about it, because then I'd be calling a relative a CHILD MOLESTER and that was THE WORST THING EVER. I didn't think much of this until I talked to a friend (as an adult), who had the exact same experience. I haven't run the poll, but the fact that this friend, who had a very different temperament, went to a different kind of school, in a different city, makes me think that there are enough other kids who feel this way that it's worth addressing.

What I think would have been actually helpful is to focus on our right to bodily autonomy without mentioning what we were protecting ourselves from. Actually, look at my phrasing there: protecting. That's a big job to give a six year old. I think the most we can hope for is teaching them to recognize and assert their comfort levels, and to escalate if they feel disregarded. This is not without costs: you have to teach them the difference between the discomfort of molestation and the discomfort of a doctor's visit. But learning to do things you don't like because of the future benefits is a good thing to learn. You have to teach them how to escalate properly, but that too is a useful life skill. If we do this (plus a section on how the puppies in the van are a lie), stranger danger will take care of itself, plus the much greater risk of molestation by people who are known and trusted by the family, plus it's a great foundation for enthusiastic consent when they're ready.

It's sort of like our bioterrorism effort: right now we throw a ton of money at a very unlikely problem with no idea if it will even help, while ignoring things like flu-preparedness. If we threw that money at anti-flu infrastructure instead, we would not only immediately improve our standard of living, but build a robust system that is totally reusable in event of black swan epidemic or attack. Giving kids a robust system of recognizing when something is wrong and giving them the tools to share that without making it a huge thing is the equivalent of well staffed urgent care clinics and a stockpile of tamiflu.

Emphasizing bodily autonomy is not without its costs: you'll have a lot more arguments about whether or not your kid needs to wear her mittens, and you will have to allow yourself to lose the argument about whether he hugs his gross uncle. Many embarrassing things will happen in grocery stores. I can't see how it's not worth it.

How does this translate to adults? Counterintuitively, one of the things we need to do is deemphasize the terribleness of rape to potential victims in favor of of helping people figure out what sex "should" feel like (for them), and the tools to communicate with their partners about how to get there.

I have something like 6 half-written posts on how awesome Captain Awkward is, but I never finish them because I would rather just read more captain awkward. But! now there is something I absolutely must share (also, I finished the entirety of the archives). It is in fact not something said by captain awkward herself, but by a commenter, because Captain Awkward is so amazing she even has a good comments section.

I have to agree with the Captain. Telling her now about things is a bit of a Schwyzer – i.e. “Look, I used to be awful, but now I’m a much better person. Let me tell you in excruciating and self-absorbed detail just how awful I used to be (and also how much I enjoyed it) so you’ll be able to comprehend just how much great a person I am to have changed so much.”

Yes, that.

Blogging is a weird thing and privacy matters and he does talk about current things some times (mostly relating to parenting), and honestly I've been extremely impressed with his "well, this a bunch of new information that I need to spend a long time thinking about" response to uproar, but... this rings extremely true to me. He doesn't glorify his past, but he does romanticize it to an extreme degree.

It's a fine line to tread. I think it is good and beneficial for everyone- and I mean absolutely everyone- to have a culture in which people can talk openly about mistakes they've made. It reduces the stupid things people do for fear of being found out, it helps people who listen avoid that mistake, it helps people who have been victims of someone else's mistake realize it wasn't them. I guess it's kind of like rape in media- I'm glad it's no longer so taboo we can't even talk about it, but I'm not happy with sexualizing it or using it as punishment, and I'm really unhappy with how Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is used to titillate and moralize that those sluts got what they deserved.*

Schwyzer is sort of like that. He has shaped up an incredible amount, but part of him still revels in the thing he's done and is getting its kicks the only way it can.


*In contrast, see: Bones, where murder victims have sex, even kinky sex, and may even be murdered by their kinky sex partners, and the male lead is portrayed as a prude for looking down on them for this.

I stopped reading Pandagon when it moved from being a policy blog to a political blog. I like ready about policies I disagree with, those are informative and interesting. Reading Amanda Marcotte call another Republican a dickless wonder? Less so. I gave it another shot yesterday, and have had my decision more than confirmed.

I realize it was SOP in pundit circles to think [Newt Gingrich] ever had a chance against Romney, because it is true that your average Republican voter likes him way more than they like Romney. After all, they believe he pisses off the liberals, since that's what they remember happening last time they tuned in to what liberals were actually thinking in 1995. Pissing off the liberals is the fundamental urge of the wingnut, after all. It's a primal urge that fills in the holes where your sex drive used to be.
...
(Anti-choice nuts are excluded from this, of course. They are like subway masturbators. They know they're inappropriate, and that's what gets them off.)

...because you see, people who disagree with Amanda Marcotte are not merely wrong, they are uninformed children who are deliberately wrong for the sole purpose of annoying her. And they need to be sexually shamed for it. And that is totally an appropriate tactic for an extremely prominent feminist to use.

If I was the sort of person who thought being a victim of a thing made people more sympathetic to that thing, I would be shocked by this. Feminists on the internet are constantly being called so ugly (or hairy legged) or bitter that they can't find a man, and if only someone fucked them straight they'd give up this life of blogging. To turn around and use that tactic against an entire political orientation* is abhorrent.

And I agree with her that there's some weird sexual repression going on in some members of the anti-choice movement. I just also recognize that there are some people who genuinely, sincerely believe that an embryo is a full human being and that, while it is tragic we must violate a woman's rights to honor the embryo's rights, we still have to do it. I think they're wrong, I think they're being manipulated by leaders who genuinely do have "oppress women" as a goal, but I recognize that you can sincerely believe a thing that is different than what I sincerely believe. Hell, there are statistics that prove that evangelicals' sex lives deviate further from the norm than mainstream liberal sects. But in our brave new sex-positive feminist world, that doesn't make them wrong.

And then, when she's called on this in the comments, by someone objecting to the way it portrays asexuals, people actually defender her with "Amanda is clearly a sex positive writer and thinker and her work reflects that." Why didn't they just claim Marcotte has an asexual friend and be done with it?

*and no weaseling out of this with "but some people DO do that." She said average Republican

I'm about halfway through Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters by Courtney E. Martin, and mostly it's great. It captured the appearance-related bind my generation has trapped itself in really extraordinarily well. But there's something that's bugging me.

Any time the author talks about exercise, it's always "running on a treadmill", and it's always negative, often contrasted with what a truly liberated girl would be doing. This is disappointing on several levels. I present to you this list of reasons someone might run on a treadmill that are unrelated to appearance

• Endorphin high
  
• Non-endorphin related enjoyment
  
• Stress relief
  
• Rehab after an injury
  
• Cardiovascular health
  
• Numerous other weight-independent health benefits
  
• Trying to get weight down before an athletic event
  
• Trying to up aerobic capacity in service of a job or sport
  
• Trying to up aerobic capacity because aerobic capacity is awesome
  
• It helps them think about things
  
• Induction of a medidative state
  
• Warming up before an activity that is risky to do cold.
  

and if you expand this to anything that could be theoretically classified as exercise:

• Self defense
  
• building muscles because they are useful
  
• Building muscles because they are awesome
  
• Being part of a team working together to achieve a concrete goal
  
• Experiencing parts of nature that are far away from roads
  
• Confidence building
  
• Sheer enjoyment
  
• All her friends were doing it
  
• etc
  

Which is not to say that these are all good or healthy things (Hugo Schwyzer has a great article up today about how he replaced cutting with running) or that these reasons have never been used as excuses by someone who, in their heart of hearts, was really motivated by a desire to look thinner. Or that treadmills are the best way to achieve any of these goals (I find the elliptical a pareto improvement). But there are excellent reasons to work out, even on the dreaded treadmill, and sentences like "Men prefer a woman who takes an improv class over one who spends all day on the treadmill" seem to encourage the worst kind of female competition for male attention. In a book that's all about recognizing interalized external pressure, that's really disappointing.

< a href="http://www.iywib.com/how_to_hook_up_with_chicks.jpg">How to hook up with chicks.

I suspect that, as strategies for something as complicated as human sexual attraction go, this is a pretty good one. It also comes across as pretty creepy. I know many Men's Right's Advocates* would say I'm calling it creepy because I feel that if you don't innately know how to do these things, reading a book is cheating. And honestly, there's probably a grain of truth there. But after seeing their plan in flow chart form, I am delighted to be able to tell them why they are mostly wrong.

The problem is the line "No matter what she says, you have to accept her... Even if she says "I kick puppies, am Charlie Sheen's Girlfriend, and I always cheered for Apollo Creed"". The only way that is a valid plan is if you view her as a sex delivery system. Here on planet decent human, we ask questions in part because we care about the answers.

But if you took that line out and relabeled a couple of other things, this could easily become "How to express genuine interest for people who don't understand body language or small talk." That's a completely valid thing to have a guide for.

I do think we tend to react more poorly to people seeking specific, positive instructions ("Wear a dark button down shirt with a short collar.") than we do to general ("dress well") or negative ("don't wear shirts with pit stains") instructions. It does feel a little bit like cheating. But there's no reason it's inherently cheating for some men to use a book to learn to genuinely express interest but not for me to learn how to run an argument better, as long as the women they pick up are as happy they learned those techniques as my fellow book club members are that I learned mine.

So, MRAs/PUAs: You are probably right that some people feel you are getting beyond your station by learning cues that don't come naturally to you, because they feel learning makes it disingenuous. But that blends pretty smoothly into the fact that these techniques specifically instruct you to be disingenuous. You can have the moral high ground when you stop treating people as prey.


*For those of you not keeping score: MRAs are not the male-focused equivalent of feminists, they are the creepy ones who insist American women have gotten too uppity and they'll import their women from Asia or Eastern Europe so as to preserve their g-d given right to steak and blow jobs on command.

Legally, I think selective reduction (the process of aborting some but not all of the fetuses a woman is carrying) has to be legal. Morally, going to great lengths to conceive (via IVF) and then aborting one of two healthy fetuses because you only want one does not sit well with me (higher levels of multiples are significantly less disquieting, because they present clear and present danger to both mother and children. The jury is out on twins). I can't tell you why it bothers me so much more than abortion of a singleton, or twins for that matter, but it does.

This guy, however, is an asshole:

In 2004, however, Evans publicly reversed his stance, announcing in a major obstetrics journal that he now endorsed twin reductions. For one thing, as more women in their 40s and 50s became pregnant (often thanks to donor eggs), they pushed for two-to-one reductions for social reasons. Evans understood why these women didn’t want to be in their 60s worrying about two tempestuous teenagers or two college-tuition bills. He noted that many of the women were in second marriages, and while they wanted to create a child with their new spouse, they did not want two, especially if they had children from a previous marriage. Others had deferred child rearing for careers or education, or were single women tired of waiting for the right partner. Whatever the particulars, these patients concluded that they lacked the resources to deal with the chaos, stereophonic screaming and exhaustion of raising twins.

You see ladies, whether or not raising an additional baby is right for you depends on the sum total situation of every lady who is getting pregnant, or at least every lady who's getting pregnant via IVF. If they're mostly young stay at home moms married to their first husbands, who Dr. Evans has calculated would easily be able to care for two babies, then clearly your insistence that you can only handle one is whining. I especially love the remark about remarriage.

And this is why we don't make laws based on my sense of disquiet. Any rule I could make about "acceptable" abortion would be bound to leave at least one woman with a pregnancy and eventually a baby that she didn't want and couldn't handle. And even if I was somehow right, and she "should" carry the fetus to term, she doesn't think so, and carrying a parasite that your hormones are telling you you should love and protect above all else is one of the worst tortures I can imagine.

As presented in Warrior Girls, the conversation on girls in sports goes something like this:

person 1: I am concerned about the higher rate of injuries in girls and women
person 2: The idea that sports are bad for a woman's reproductive system is preposterous. In fact, men get many more reproductive tract injuries on account of external genitalia.
person 1: ...but ACL tears.

And the thing is, they're both right. They're just not responding to each other. First, Person 1 is not suggesting that there are injuries that only occur to women, she's suggesting that there are injuries that occur in both sexes but more frequently in women. I think this is representative of a more general pattern in discussion of sex- and gender- based issues: confusing differences of kind with differences in amount. When popular articles come out saying that (straight) women value money and (straight) men value looks, feminists are quick to attack them as insane, or at best culturally based. The truth is that if you look at the actual data, you do see moderate differences in preferences- but in general, men and women have the same top five, and looks and money tend to be beaten out by things like kindness and sense of humor in both genders. It's inaccurate to say there are no differences, but it's equally inaccurate to describe women and men as wealth and boob seeking missles.

There's a really good metaphor for this in our endocrine system. We call testosterone the male hormone and estrogen the female hormone*, but the truth is that everyone has both, just in different proportions. And there are a ton hormones not affiliated with either sex, some of which have different distributions in men and women and some of which don't.

Secondly, Person 2 seems to be assuming Person 1 thinks the injury rate is a reason not to let girls play sports. She's not doing it maliciously, she's doing it because there are a lot of people who use concerns about safety as a trojan horse to getting their way, but in this case it's inacurrate. Person 1 just wants accurate statistics to make informed value judgements, and to minimize negative side effects. It's unfortunate that concern trolls will misuse this data, but you can't fight ignorance with ignorance.


*Which annoys me because estrogen isn't even a hormone, it's a class of hormones, and calling it a hormone allows people to market chemicals that match no molecule in the human body as estrogen. But this is not relevant to the story.