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Women and the Invisible Fist (posted 16 May 2008)
A lot of libertarian analysis makes use of the concept of spontaneous order
. As well it should; it’s an important concept, and especially important for understanding how many problems of social coordination can be solved in a free society without any government intervention or institutionalized central planning. But I think there are a couple complications involved in the concept which need to be noted, but often fail to be. (I figured it would be worthwhile to mention it now, because these points happened to come up recently in discussions over at Distributed Republic.)
First, the concept of spontaneous order,
as it is employed in libertarian writing, is systematically ambiguous, depending on whether one is using spontaneous
to mean not planned ahead of time,
or whether one is using it to mean voluntary.
Thus, the term spontaneous order
may be used to refer strictly to voluntary orders — that is, forms of social coordination which emerge from the free actions of many different people, as opposed to coordination that arises from some people being forced to do what other people tell them to do. Or it may be used to refer to undesigned orders — that is, forms of social coordination which emerges from the actions of many different people, who are not acting from a conscious desire to bring about that form of social coordination, as opposed to coordination that people consciously act to bring about. It’s important to see that these two meanings are distinct: a voluntary order may be designed (if everyone is freely choosing to follow a set plan), and an undesigned order may be involuntary (if it emerges as an unintended consequence of coercive actions that were committed in order to achieve a different goal). While Hayek himself was fairly consistent and explicit in using spontaneous order
to refer to undesigned orders, many libertarian writers since Hayek have used it to mean voluntary orders, or orders that are both voluntary and undesigned, or have simply equivocated between the two different meanings of the term from one statement to the next. It’s important to be clear about the difference between the two, because if you equivocate you are likely to expose yourself to certain confusions, and to find yourself wearing certain kinds of conceptual blinders.
The second point, which is related to the first, is that not all spontaneous orders are necessarily benign. Libertarians tend to write as if they were, probably because most of the examples of spontaneous order that libertarians are most interested in are examples where the process is benign — especially cases where a benign spontaneous order (say, the adjustment of prices to reflect changes in relative scarcity of goods in a market economy) provides an alternative to central planning, and does something important and worthwhile that State planners cannot do at all, or cannot do as well. But if widely distributed forms of intelligence, knowledge, virtue, or prudence can add up, through many individual self-interested actions, into an benign undesigned order, then there’s no reason why widely distributed forms of stupidity, ignorance, prejudice, vice, or folly might not add up, through many individual self-interested actions, into an unintended but malign undesigned order. Moreover, if you consider that spontaneous orders can emerge as unintended consequences of certain widespread forms of violence, then it ought to be especially clear that not all undesigned orders can be considered benign from a libertarian point of view.
Here’s a concrete example: Susan Brownmiller’s Myrmidon theory
of stranger rape, which she explains in Chapter 6 of Against Our Will (The Police-Blotter Rapist). Brownmiller famously wrote, near the end of the first chapter of Against Our Will:
Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.
Critics of Brownmiller have often misunderstood this passage, mainly in ways which seem to come from not having read any further in the book than that paragraph. I’ve discussed some of those misunderstandings in the post and comments for GT 2004-03-03: She said, she said (for example, if you think that Brownmiller is claiming all men are rapists,
you need to re-read the final sentence more carefully, and pay particular attention to what the verb in that sentence is). But my point in bringing it up here is that one way to get clearer on Brownmiller’s meaning is to look at how it connects with the Myrmidon theory,
as presented in Chapter 6, and to think about both of them in light of the concept of a malign spontaneous order:
As described by Warden [Clinton] Duffy [of San Quentin] or as defined by the statistical profiles of the sociologists and the FBI, America’s police-blotter rapists are dreary and banal. To those who know them, no magic, no mystery, no Robin Hood bravura, infuses their style. Rape is a dull, blunt, ugly act committed by punk kids, their cousins and older brothers, not by charming, witty, unscrupulous, heroic, sensual rakes, or by timid souls deprived of a
normalsexual outlet, or by super-menschen possessed of uncontrollable lust. And yet, on the shoulders of these unthinking, predictable, insensitive, violence-prone young men there rests an age-old burden that amounts to an historic mission: the perpetuation of male domination over women by force.The Greek warrior Achilles used a swarm of men descended from ants, the Myrmidons, to do his bidding as hired henchmen in battle. Loyal and unquestioning, the Myrmidons served their master well, functioning in anonymity as effective agents of terror. Police-blotter rapists in a very real sense perform a myrmidon function for all men in our society. Cloaked in myths that obscure their identity, they, too, function as anonymous agents of terror. Although they are the ones who do the dirty work, the actual attentat, to other men, their superiors in class and station, the lasting benefits of their simple-minded evil have always accrued.
A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe for it may turn into a weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent. Myrmidons to the cause of male dominance, police-blotter rapists have performed their duty well, so well in fact that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed. Rather than society’s aberrants or
spoilers of purity,men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.—Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, pp. 208–209.
One extremely common, rather coarse way of misunderstanding Brownmiller (or, mutatis mutandis, other radical feminists, when they say things like this) is to treat this kind of analysis as if it were some kind of conspiracy theory about rape — as if Brownmiller were claiming that, say, every first Monday of the month, all the men got together in a big meeting at the Patriarchy’s underground headquarters and decided to have some men commit stranger rape as a way to keep women down. Or, to be more charitable to uncharitable critics, as if Brownmiller were claiming that police-blotter rapists
and other men who do not commit rape are consciously collaborating with one another, in some kind of social plan, promulgated from the top down, to intimidate women and bring about and sustain male supremacy.
The truth is that there are historical cases where groups or movements of men have consciously collaborated with one another to keep women down. (What else, for example, would you call the gynocide in Basra, or the psychiatric analysis and treatment of hysteria
in Europe and America, or the Taliban, or 19th century American family laws, under which white husbands posted advertisements about fugitive wives
— almost as frequently as they posted advertisements about fugitive slaves
— and used the law and bounty-hunters to forcibly recapture wives who chose to leave home?) So that happens, but Brownmiller’s analysis of stranger rape doesn’t claim that that’s what’s happening when rapists reinforce the system of male supremacy. What she claims is that the pervasive fact of rape, and the threat that its pervasiveness inflicts on all women, produces a spontaneous (undesigned) order, so that the actions of rapists serve the role of promoting, sustaining, and reinforcing male supremacy.
It’s not controversial, or it shouldn’t be by now, that the threat of rape imposes constraints on women’s behavior: Don’t go out at night alone. Don’t make yourself noticeable on the subway. Don’t dress like that. Don’t act overtly sexual
. Don’t go to that party. Don’t drink at that party. Or, if you do, then you better like whatever happens to you and you better not complain, because baby, you were asking for it.
And also: you better find the Right Man and enlist him to protect you from other men. (By walking you home at night. By slipping into a situation to block off the Wrong Men who are hassling you. By becoming your boyfriend or fiance or husband and looking out for you.)
The natural consequence of these restrictions is that women in our society are systematically constrained in their action by the fear of men. Women are not free because they must figure out how to live with the fact of widespread, intense, random violence against women. That fact has profound ripple effects on where women feel they can safely go. When they feel they can safely go there. What women feel they can safely do or say—especially what they can safely do or say in the presence of men. How they dress, how they take up space, how they react to social interactions that are wanted or unwanted. Some of this is conscious adjustment to fears and explicit warnings; a lot of it is the sort of small-scale, subconscious acts of vigilance and self-protection that we all carry out, as a daily routine, or as an expression of felt anxiety.
Another natural consequence is that men who don’t commit stranger rape, and who are genuinely concerned for the safety of women who are their daughters, their sisters, their friends, their lovers, or what have you, are in a material and emotional position where it is very tempting to see themselves as needing to protect the women they care about from the threat of male violence. The desire to protect an innocent person from violence is, in and of itself, a good thing, not a bad thing. But the danger here is that it’s an unethical and corrupting, but a very tempting and easy, psychological step for these men to come to see themselves as the sole protector, as a woman’s only safe option. To see women as uniquely frail and in need of protection by nature (rather than uniquely threatened due to the choices of other men). And to try to make sure that women seek and depend on and stay within the scope of a man’s protection, whether or not they really want it, by use of those intimidating and restrictive warnings, by harassing women (seen as foolish or bad) who step outside of the stiflingly close boundaries of those safety tips,
in order to try to intimidate them into staying in the boundaries, and ultimately by blaming the woman, rather than her attacker, and writing off her suffering as nonexistent or unimportant, if some other man should choose to rape her after she has ignored those safety tips.
And many women will naturally look to men who act like that — that is, as Protectors — because they are realistically afraid of other men’s sexual aggression, and afraid of stranger rape, and they may like this particular guy, for other reasons, anyway, and so it is worth seeking out his help.
All of this can happen quite naturally when a large enough minority of men choose to commit widespread, intense, random acts of violence against a large enough number of women. And it can happen quite naturally without the raping men, or the protecting
men, or the women in the society ever intending for any particular large-scale social outcome to come about. But what will come about, quite naturally, is that women’s social being — how women appear and act, as women, in public — will be systematically and profoundly circumscribed by a diffuse, decentralized threat of violence. And, as a natural but unintended consequence of many small, self-interested actions, some vicious and violent (as in the case of men who rape women), some worthwhile in their origins but easily and quickly corrupted (as in the case of men who try to protect women from rape), and some entirely rational responses to an irrational and dangerous situation (as in the case of women who limit their action and seek protection from men), the existence and activities of the police-blotter rapist
serve to constrain women’s behavior and to intimidate women into becoming dependent on some men — and thus dependent on keeping those men pleased and serving those men’s priorities — for physical protection from other men. That kind of dependence can just as easily become frustrating and confining for the woman, and that kind of power can just as easily become corrupting and exploitative for the man, as any other form of dependence and power. (Libertarians and anarchists who easily see this dynamic when it comes to government police and military protection
of a disarmed populace, shouldn’t have any trouble seeing it, if they are willing to see it, when it comes to male protection
of women.)
Thus stranger rapists become the Myrmidons — the anonymous shock troops — of male supremacy, and the fact that nobody involved intends quite that, exactly, is quite irrelevant, because they serve their function in an violent undesigned order well enough whether anyone intended that or not.
I’ve been talking about stranger rape
all this time because that’s what Brownmiller’s theory is about, and Brownmiller’s theory is a good case study in the point I’m trying to make. But similar remarks, with different but importantly related consequences, could be made for forms of violence against women which feminist activists and researchers have, over the past 30 years, demonstrated to be even more prevalent and even harder to escape than the threat of stranger rape — date rape, rape in marriage, battery, and so on. Because these forms of violence are committed by different men, in different circumstances, from stranger rape, and because they are widely experienced by women (about 1 in 4 women in the United States will be sexually or physically assaulted by an intimate partner), but far less widely and insistently discussed as an everyday threat to women’s safety than stranger rape is, there was comparatively little public knowledge about them at the time Brownmiller first published her book, and what we now know is that they have different functions in a violent undesigned order that exploits women, hurts women, and circumscribes their behavior to a limited sphere
under the control and for the benefit of men. But those roles are more easily seen, and more fruitfully discussed, when they are seen as other expressions of a similar underlying phenomenon. Because of the central role that the pervasive danger of violence against women plays in sustaining it, and the way in which that pervasive, diffuse threat of violence constrains the liberty of women in everyday life to move and act and live as they want, libertarians and anarchists must recognize patriarchy as a system of violent political oppression older, no less invasive, and no less powerful, than the violence of the police state or the warfare state. But unlike the kinds of State violence to which male anarchists and libertarians are accustomed to discuss — violent restrictions of freedom handed down according to explicit State policies, ratified through political processes, promulgated from the top down and consciously carried out by officially appointed or deputized agents of the State — patriarchy expresses itself in attitudes, behaviors, and coercive restrictions that are largely produced by bottom-up, decentralized forms of violence, committed by many different men, who wouldn’t know each other from Adam, freelance terrorists who commit violence of their own accord, out of a desire to control but without any grand unified social plan, without conscious collaboration or conspiracy, sometimes in conflict with the explicit provisions of the law (though rarely investigated and ineffectively prosecuted in the male-dominated legal system). This is part of what I take Catharine MacKinnon to mean when she writes that:
Unlike the ways in which men systematically enslave, violate, dehumanize, and exterminate other men, expressing political inequalities among men, men’s forms of dominance over women have been accomplished socially as well as economically, prior to the operation of the law, without express state acts, often in intimate contexts, as everyday life. (1989, p. 161)
It’s important to recognize that the coercive social order that arises from this kind of diffuse gender violence, both as a direct consequence and as social, psychological, or economic ripple effects from the direct consequences — is no less real, no less effective, no less important, and no less evil, for being undesigned, for battering women into the social position they currently occupy as if by an invisible fist.
Far too many libertarian men still write as if the misogynistic oppression of women
and spontaneous order
were two radically different, and incompatible, explanations for differences in the socioeconomic status of men and women; as if anyone who sees anything systematically wrong here, something that merits exposure and resistance through conscious activism, must therefore be simply ignorant, or in denial, about the ways in which social outcomes can emerge, undesigned, from spontaneous order processes. But this is only the result of failing to pay attention to, or failing to charitably understand, what your interlocutors are saying. Libertarians have no reason to believe that all voluntary orders, much less all undesigned orders (which aren’t even guaranteed to be non-coercive), will be benign. And radical feminists, far from being socioeconomic creationists,
are actually well practiced in using the concept of a spontaneous order — indeed, make significant use of it themselves in their own analysis of the differences between men and women’s socioeconomic status.
They happen to be right about that, and those of us who believe that freedom is for all human beings, and who work for an end to all forms of systematic political violence, have to fight, at the very least, a two-front war: against the violence of the State, and against the violence of patriarchy. But in order to fight back effectively we will have to see it for what it is, and to take it on on its own ground. It may very well be the case that the best methods for resisting the planned order of State coercion are not the same as the best methods for resisting the unplanned order of Patriarchal coercion. At the very least, a clear understanding of the dynamics of patriarchy — of the way in which an account like Susan Brownmiller’s is best understood, and the way it fits in with our understanding of spontaneous order — will be necessary to get a firm grip on what needs to be exposed and resisted.
Update 2008-05-20: Grammatical slips corrected, for the sake of clarity.
Will Wilkinson replied:
Great post. Thanks.
x. trapnel replied:
Really well-put.
LP replied:
Wow… this post just blew my mind. Really insightful and well-written — thanks for this.
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Dave replied:
You have a program and your prefabricated explanations you think apply to the behavior of women. Your real contribution here is to point out that the fear in women being alone in certain situations arises out of spontaneous factors in the social environment and I compliment you for this observation.
I doubt if you would apply the same reasoning if the scenario were slightly modified to explain why cab drivers don’t pick up groups of young Black men at night.
What if Ms Brownmiller had said? “Black men’s discovery that his skin color could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries ——- I believe, skin color has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all Black men keep all White people in a state of fear.” She would be well received by the KKK perhaps but would be a pariah in your circles.
What if you claimed that the pervasive fact of mugging of cab drivers, and the threat that its pervasiveness inflicts on all cab drivers, produces a spontaneous (undesigned) order, so that the actions of Black muggers serve the role of promoting, sustaining, and reinforcing fear of all Black men.
I won’t go into some of the other gratuitous and unsupported conclusions you drew such as extensions of more sensible statement preceding them except to point out that things like “The desire to protect an innocent person from violence is, in and of itself, a good thing, not a bad thing. But-(for men to see themselves as) the sole protector, as a woman’s only safe option (is bad.) To see women as uniquely frail and in need of protection by nature (rather than uniquely threatened due to the choices of other men).etc, yada yada” just doesn’t follow from what precedes.
In fact people have always inhabited a somewhat dangerous world. It can be more or less dangerous for anyone. People, both men and women have always sought natural alliances with other preferably stronger persons and groups and this may have carried a price of conformity to the wishes of others. There is no reason to make this mundane fact the fulcrum of some sort of grand political statement or demand for social change.
A more simplistic approach seems to more helpful. Lock up all convicted rapists and muggers for a good long time. And don’t get the phenomenon of drunken college students doing stupid thing with their bodies mixed up with rape.
Rad Geek replied:
Dave,
I don’t think I’ve made any original contributions here, especially not about the role that the fear of rape plays in constraining women’s freedom. The contributions, for good or for ill, are Brownmiller’s, not mine, and are fully worked out in fairly explicit terms in her book. (Nor are they especially unique in the radical feminist literature, although her work was groundbreaking in that it was one of the first.) At most I have provided a translation into terms that some of my conversation partners might better understand.
In your attempted reply, you’ve made a few mistakes that ought to be corrected.
First, you seem to think that my purpose in this post is to prove that Brownmiller’s of stranger-rape is strue. It’s not. That’s an understandable error on your part, because I am trying to refute some common objections to her theory (and other theories like hers), and to give a charitable reconstruction of it in terms that some of my intended audience may find plausible. But my point about the relationship between and Brownmiller’s theory would remain true whether or not Brownmiller’s theory is actually true. (Lots of false theories make sophisticated use of the concept of spontaneous order.)
It’s a good thing, because in point of fact I don’t even agree entirely with Brownmiller’s theory. I do agree entirely with something in the neighborhood, and while I disagree with parts of the analysis in Against Our Will, I don’t blame Brownmiller for anything she might have gotten wrong; the places where I disagree with that book are mostly places where discoveries made after 1975 — such as the discovery, from the early 1980s onward, of just how prevalent acquaintance rape, date rape, and marital rape, that is, rape committed by those supposed actually is, and how much more common it is than stranger rape — have required radical feminists to revisit their analysis. Thus there’s a lot of overlap, but some important differences, in the analysis of rape culture offered in later feminist works; for examples, see Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women and Intercourse.
But, to return to the main point, even if you managed to convince me that Brownmiller is just dead wrong (which you haven’t), that wouldn’t affect the main point I wrote this post to make.
Second, when you make your attempted analogy, it fails, because the two cases aren’t actually analogous.
Brownmiller’s claim isn’t that some men’s propensity to commit stranger-rape reinforces some kind of general conclusion that all men will commit stranger-rape. Quite the contrary: her whole point in the discussion has to do with the effects of the prevalent threat of stranger-rape for the relationship between (1) women threatened by rape, and (2) men who don’t plan to, and who women don’t expect to, rape. So, unlike the case of (non-black?) urban cabbies drawing a general conclusion about all black men from their particular experience, the issue here doesn’t have anything in particular to do with the formation of collectivist prejudices or the projection of stereotypes by those threatened or victimized by violence.
Brownmiller’s claim is also that spontaneous order arising from the actions of men who commit stranger-rape redound to the benefit of men who serve the role of against stranger-rape. (Because it enhances their social status and makes certain women that much more dependent on them.) That makes the situation politically problematic for the men who want to hold on to those benefits, or who believe that those benefits are just the social consequences of an immutable and inborn human nature. If, on the other hand, you intend to claim that never being able to get a cab late at night — or the general fear, among white people, of black men — somehow redounds to the benefit of most black men, well, you probably need to think about things a bit harder.
I know that it is popular among certain circles to try to attack just about anything a radical feminist says by trying to compare them to the Klan or Neo-Nazis or other hate groups, and to compare statements about class politics in America (in this case sex-class) to expressions of racial stereotypes or prejudices. But if you want to try to make that comparison you’ve got to actually find something that’s analogous in all the relevant respects of analysis and criticism, not just analogous in that it says something about the ways in which different groups of people relate to social power. Unless it is, you’re just engaging in lazy baiting, and wasting people’s time.
It’s not intended to It’s an argument drawn from independent premises about power and dependence that I believe much of my audience (anarchists and libertarians, in particular) have independent reasons to believe. It is not a conclusion, but rather a lemma to justify one of the premises of my main argument.
The kind of we’re talking about — the danger of being randomly targeted for assault and sexual torture by a complete stranger in the midst of your day-to-day life — is not something that all face equally, nor is it a natural feature of the world, like hurricanes or the black death. This kind of flattened-out, acontextual claim, abstracts from, and blanks out, all the actual details of sociological and political interest. Back in the real world, the prevalence of rape is a political fact, not some regrettable but immutable part of the misfortunes of the female sex.
When particular forms of danger, violence, power, and dependence affect people unequally depending on their position within a system of social class, and when they are not natural features of the world but rather the products of deliberate human choice, I believe — and I think all other anarchists and libertarians have good reasons to believe — that they are perfectly reasonable subjects for analysis, criticism, and political action. I don’t know what your politics are, so I don’t know whether you’re a libertarian or an anarchist; maybe you’re not, in which case the reasons that libertarians and anarchists have for concern about this issue may not matter much to you. But they matter to me, and they matter to most of my intended audience.
This certainly is a simplistic approach, but it’s one that’s been tried for many, many years now, and as a matter of empirical results, it doesn’t seem to be especially helpful, at least not in isolation from other forms of political agitation, organizing, and comprehensive change.
You seem to want to turn this into an argument about date rape or party rape on college campuses. That’s not what this post is about; this post is about a particular theory of random stranger rape, not a theory that has anything directly to say about rape committed against particular women by their acquaintances, friends, or lovers. There are lots of other posts on the Internet that are about the latter, and I’m sure that you and I would have some pretty strong differences about those topics, if we were to discuss them, but in the comments thread on this post I’d rather deal with the issue at hand rather than changing the subject.
Dain Fitzgerald replied:
“Brownmiller’s claim is also that spontaneous order arising from the actions of men who commit stranger-rape redound to the benefit of men who serve the role of ‘protectors’ against stranger-rape.”
Is being in the role of “protector” a benefit? I don’t particularly want that challenge, nor the burden to “man up” that it implies.
Bunty replied:
A further point, which you possibly allude to, is that potential spontaneous orders are multiplex (for the same system), even a small change in conditions can lead to one collapsing and another replacing it. The neo-liberal/libertarian approach seems predicated on the idea, that given ‘freedom’: The Spontaneous Order will emerge, and it will be Natural and Good (order implying divinity, as it were). This is rather tending towards an ideological belief. To be honest even that Wikipedia article is wandering a little towards the astrology end of the astrology/astronomy scale, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence is far better and less mono-cultural in apparent authorship—all IMHO of course :D
An example I co-incidentally recently linked in a comment on another blog regards the emergent property of systems, in which preferential attachment is a part, to lead to the formation of aristocratic spontaneous order.
Another would be rape/patriarchy one, there have been (are?) societies which were either gender-egalitarian or matriarchal, these were also the result of spontaneous order.
This ‘freedom’ thing isn’t a sufficient condition to auto-magically lead to the emergence of a beneficial order, and in many cases could lead to a worse (and more hierarchical) order than the one we have.
Robert Hutchinson replied:
That’s been a hell of a thing, just by itself, I’ll have you know. Your blog entries such as the one above, “unpacking” these ideas into (for me) more understandable arguments, have given me a good solid kick in the rear over the past couple of years. I don’t (yet) embrace it fully, but I feel I was a fool to ignore and belittle radical feminism in the past, and you have had a tremendous amount to do with it.
(Plus, you just taught me the word “redound”. I don’t know how I never ran across that one before.)
Anon73 replied:
I guess you should be glad you don’t live in Japan Charles; their culture is twice as sexist as European culture and also much more acceptable.
kipp replied:
Your and Brownmiller’s explicit framing of these ideas does, at least, translate them well into the language of the libertarian - but I would think any considerate person has reflected on how the danger of physical violence falls inordinantly on women. Rape is certainly a particularly nasty form of violence, but even if rape didn’t exist, women would still have to fear walking home alone in the wrong parts of town. Random violence against the vulnerable (children, the disabled, the elderly) has a systematic effect on how we all interact in the world.
I’m not so sure I would want to frame these ideas so squarely inside the loaded framework of the evil patriarchy. The threat of violence against the vulnerable is not confined to (all) women as victims nor to (some) men as perpetrators. Parents use such threats against their children and adults use them against their elderly family members. It stretches the definition of “patriarchy” a little too much if we include the female perpetrators of these threats (and acts) of violence, doesn’t it? Likewise, do we conceptualize the spontaneous social habits engendered by prison rape as the patriarchy oppressing itself?
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Nathaniel Tapley replied:
Thank you for this post. I thought it was excellent: thoughtful and refreshing.
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Grant Gould replied:
Bravo. Bravo.
You are doing the heavy lifting of rehabilitating radical feminism into the libertarian sphere, and it is appreciated.
Rad Geek replied:
kipp,
I’m sure that many people other than movement feminists have thought about these issues. But the important question is what they have made of those facts in their personal reflections (like, say, whether certain large-scale social phenomena having to do with the relations between men and women might be ripple effects of those diffuse constraints on women’s freedom), and whether they have integrated those reflections into their overall political outlook in some way that matters. (Even though male violence against women is one the most pervasive, most intense, and hardest to escape forms of systematic politically-motivated violence in the world at large, and in the United States in particular, and even though it has tremendous and terrible effects on women’s freedom in daily — or nightly — life, I can find very little discussion about it, or practical activism against it, in most self-identified libertarian or anarchist outlets. Why is that?
I’d say because, while lots of self-identified libertarians and anarchists may have thought about it on a personal level, not nearly as many have recognized it as a political issue worthy of serious discussion and organized resistance. Probably in part because, depending as it does on an invisible-fist process carried out by many different men without central coordination, but on behalf of masculinity and male supremacy, rather than a well-organized, uniformed, centralized enemy which a libertarian or anarchist man can easily identify, dissociate himself from, and single out for condemnation. Patriarchy is a peg that doesn’t fit very well into the conceptual slots that radical men are familiar with in their thinking about political oppression and political opposition, so analysis and criticism of patriarchy tends to get ignored, or, when discussed, misunderstood and often unfairly dismissed.
To push the metaphor to the breaking point, part of what I’m trying to do here is to get libertarians and anarchists to look more carefully at the board, and to see that the peg fits a slot which they already knew about, but which they were used to putting differently colored pegs into. Those who can understand the benign effects of certain kinds of nonviolent undesigned orders can use that understanding to help them better understand the malign effects of certain kinds of violent undesigned orders, and thus to better see what radical feminists like Brownmiller are on about.
Well, yeah; sure. But vulnerability and violence against the vulnerable are neither equally nor randomly distributed in actually existing societies. There are very distinct systematic class differences in terms of who is put in a vulnerable position and who faces violence — between adults and children, between men and women, between white people and people of color, between native-born people and immigrants, between straight people and gay people, etc. etc. etc. Some of these differences are partly rooted in unavoidable natural differences (like the obvious physical and mental advantages that adults have over young children), but most of them are also largely the results of law and custom (like raging homophobia, the legal privileges of parents to force unwilling children to stay under their lynch law under Jim Crow, common that excuse rapists blame rape victims for what happened to them, etc. etc. etc.). Where they are substantially the result of unavoidable natural differences, it is still worth discussing what we might do to undermine those differences or ameliorate or contain their effects. Where they are substantially the result of law and custom, the class structure of vulnerability should be considered a political fact, subject to criticism and worthy of serious opposition.
Well, O.K., but I don’t know how far this constitutes an objection to anything that I said. I never claimed (and don’t know of any radical feminist who has ever claimed) that patriarchy is the only system of oppression that exists today. Of course there are other systems of oppression, many of which are expressed (in part) in terms of threats of violence against those who have been made vulnerable. I think that violence by parents against children is another; so is gay-bashing; so are a lot of other things.
But patriarchy is one of those systems of oppression, and a very old, deep, stubborn, intense, and widely-experienced one, at that. In some sense, if you abstract away from the social and psychological facts that make women disproportionately vulnerable to rape, men disproportionately likely to commit it, and which motivate actually existing rapists to commit their crimes, you could lump it together with a bunch of other forms of oppression as part of some more generalized phenomenon (the fallen world, Homo Homini Lupus Est, or whatever), I’d say that the process of abstraction involves abstracting away from almost everything of political and sociological interest, and, in particular, makes it very tough to intelligently discuss what we ought to do to try to end it. If your goal is to try to stop all violence against the vulnerable, or all evil everywhere, that’s a laudable goal, but it’s very hard to know where to begin unless and until you get more specific. Unless you get down into some details about systematic forms of violence that you can identify, analyze, and target, it’s hard to know what you could do at all other than minister to the hurt and resign yourself to the suffering in this vale of tears. But if you are setting out to end some particular form of systematic violence, and you take into account the norms, institutions, attitudes, etc., which structure how the violence is committed, by whom, and against whom — e.g., rape, which men commit against women, and which is supported by a particular set of rape myths, a male-dominated culture that closely connects masculinity with violence and control over women, femininity with weakness, male sexuality with aggression, female sexuality with either submission or wantonness, etc. etc. etc., well, then, it becomes that much easier to see what you might start challenging, opposing, and trying to change.
As I said, I don’t intend to include every form of violence under the heading of Just certain specific forms of prevalent, systemic, class-structured violence. Other forms of prevalent, systemic, class-structured violence, like the ones you mention, may not be expressions of patriarchy, but rather of other systems of oppression.
For what it’s worth, though, the examples you mention are pretty clearly closely associated with, although not identical with, patriarchy. In the specific case of prison rape, the idea that fucking is a way of establishing a hierarchy of dominance has a very clear connection to the politics of male supremacy over women. So do the feminizing terms ( etc.) used to refer to the men who are repeatedly raped by dominant men.
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Aster replied:
“…[Y]ou could lump it together with a bunch of other forms of oppression as part of some more generalized phenomenon (the fallen world, Homo Homini Lupus Est, or whatever)[.]”
May I ask your opinion, specifically as a feminist, of the view of life and humanity expressed by phrases such as ‘the fallen world’ or ‘man is a wolf to man’?
Sergio Méndez replied:
Charles:
Excelent post. I wish my command of english language gave me the capacity to praise it as it deserves.
Rad Geek replied:
Aster,
I don’t have very strong opinions about the myth of the Fall per se. As a feminist, I do of course object to the notion that the Fall ought to be mythically blamed on the weakness or deceitfulness of women. In the hands of the Church Patriarchs that version of the myth has, at times, been incredibly toxic. I think that the myth of fallenness is useful for conveying the fact that this world we live in a marred world, a world which is not what it could be and ought to be, and in which we are not what we could be and ought to be. Also the fact that we live finite and fallible lives, within which limitation and tragedy (in the old Aristotelian sense) are real and present parts of the human condition. Not defining features; not the most important features, even; but real features, nevertheless, which it is dangerous, but sometimes tempting, to forget. On the other hand, it has real dangers which ought to be avoided; for example, the way in which it presents the healing of the world as if it were the recovery of a romanticized and mythical past, rather than an achievement of a never-yet-realized future.
As for I think that it’s mainly an excuse that powerful men use to abstract away from, and blank out, serious analysis of the dynamics of power and violence. It’s an accurate enough general description of how some people treat other people within the political context of inequality and oppression, but the problem is that it’s presented in a way which sidetracks any useful discussion of the particular factors that nourish and sustain the many particular forms of inequality and oppression that actually exist. Women aren’t attacked as human beings, but rather as women; people of color aren’t attacked as human beings, but rather as people of color; and there are specific cultural and material reasons for that, which are not inevitable, and which are proper objects of political analysis, criticism, and resistance.
By abstracting from that, its common use takes the context of inequality and oppression for a given, as if it were a sorrowful fact of nature rather than the result of identifiable human choices and historical processes. In fact love, mercy, courage, peace, compassion, solidarity, cooperation, etc. are all as much a part of human potential as meanness, pettiness, arrogance, and violence; the question is whether the social political context is one of inequality or equality, authority or liberty, violence or peace. That is to say, whether you live in a community where cultivating the best parts of yourself is punished and the worst parts of yourself is rewarded; or a community where cultivating the best parts of yourself is rewarded, or at the very least left alone in peace.
The interesting question about a chestnut like is why, so to speak, certain groups of men are able to make sure that they more or less always appear in the nominative in that sentence, and other men, women, and children more or less always appear in the accusative. But those men who use that sentence are almost always using it specifically in order to head that kind of social inquiry off, or to make it seem irrelevant by changing the subject to some kind of ahistorical, quasi-theological, and ultimately useless reflection on the sins and sorrows of the human race.
Rad Geek replied:
Dain,
You’ve probably already seen this reply to your (similar, but extended) comments over at The Art of the Possible, but I’ll repost it here for the benefit of others:
Dain,
I don’t like being in either the position of being feared, or in the position of being depended on for protection, either.
I don’t mean to suggest that male supremacy is all a bed of roses for men. Patriarchy Hurts Men Too (tm), and all that. But the reason I’m willing to endorse Brownmiller’s claim, that the threat of rape redounds to the benefit of men as a class, including (especially) those who don’t actually commit rape, isn’t because playing the role of a “protector” is supposed to be pleasant in itself. Truth be told, it is pleasant for many men, or at least ego-stroking, and a lot of men have historically been quite explicit in expressing how much emotional satisfaction they get from providing for and protecting their wife and children. But that’s not the main point here.
The more important point has to do with ripple effects, and (1) the indirect payoffs that come from assuming the social role that men, as men, assume, as well as (2) the disadvantages that restricted mobility in physical space imposes on women, as women, vis-a-vis men.
Taking (2) first, living with certain spaces or times closed off to you by the threat of physical violence, without being able to safely and comfortably walk through many public spaces in a big city, or in certain male-dominated spaces (certain kinds of workplaces, certain kinds of clubs and bars), or much of anywhere at night has direct effects on what you can and cannot realistically do with your time. The lack of freedom that comes from the realistic fear of rape, sexual harassment, and other forms of sexual aggression directly effects women’s ability to participate in civic life, in politics, and in certain kinds of work. It has direct effects on women’s prospects for business, on women’s prospects for work, on where and when and with whom they can socialize, and in any number of other ways on their economic, social, and political participation. It also has indirect ripple effects: the effects of living with constant warnings and a constant feeling of confinement, as well as the effects of having to find, please, and satisfy the Right Man in order to safely navigate everyday situations that most men have no worries about navigating. (It’s worth considering how much of stereotypical American femininity is linked, either directly or indirectly, with the threat of rape and with the need for male “protectors.”) That works to the systematic disadvantage of women, which means that it works to the systematic advantage of certain men who are, or would otherwise be, in competition for jobs, promotions, socio-political status, etc. (The connection between the traditional “protector” role and the traditional “provider” role for the male “head of household” is not accidental.)
As for (1), those indirect payoffs have largely to do with the way in which women are socially expected to defer to men, both in public forums and in interpersonal relationships, and to focus on finding, pleasing and satisfying the Right Man. How women are expected act as sexual “gatekeepers” and not to be assertive about their own sexual desires, and to have a sexual experience more or less on the man’s terms. Also with corresponding, often subconscious entitlement that men have acted on and continue to act on. Expectations used to be very strong, and quite explicit in social norms; in these days — by which I mean the last 40 years or so; the change was very dramatic and quite recent, in the grand scheme of things — we have largely shifted towards unspoken, or covert versions of the same thing. But they are still there. If you see more or less what I’m talking about in your own life and the lives of people you know, then that’s what I’m trying to point out when I endorse Brownmiller’s claim that stranger-rape serves to promote male power and male privileges over women — even, or especially, the power and privileges of men who do not themselves commit rape. If you don’t see it, then I’ll just plead that I don’t have the talent or the space to really get you to see it within the space allowed by a blog post or a comments thread. What I’d want you to take away is an some idea, even if only in rough outline, of the kind of stuff I mean when I say that non-rapist men get concrete privileges out of the violent undesigned order that arises from the violence of male rapists against women. For a fuller and more convincing elaboration of the specifics, I’d just have to point you to extended treatments in the feminist literature, starting with Brownmiller’s book itself—which, after all, only had a few short summary paragraphs quoted and discussed in the course of my post—and with other work that discusses sexism in contemporary language, media, culture, sexuality, etc. My post wasn’t really intended to give you a full panoramic view of Brownmiller’s theory of rape, let alone her whole theory of patriarchy; my aim was just to help point certain of my readers towards the right lens to use when you try to get the view.
This is really a separate issue. The reason that white stereotyping of black people as violent or criminal — and the fear that results — is harmful to black people is that that fear is projected onto all black people, and then used by politically and socially well-connected white people to justify individual practices and large-scale policies that hurt black people (e.g. economically deserting certain neighborhoods, or the racist War on Drug Users, or increasingly violent policing and punitive imprisonment). There’s no real equivalent in the situation between men and women as depicted by Brownmiller. Firstly because the fear is not universally projected onto all men, or at least not equally onto all men. (The key move in her theory has to do with men who are seen primarily as protectors, rather than as rapists.) Secondly, because the fear of rape is not usually used to justify increased violence against men as such. (After all, it’s men, not women, who have the advantage in terms of access to economic and political resources; so women’s response, by necessity, is to depend more upon the “good” men as a defense against the bad, rather than to push through policies and practices that punish the “good” men along with the bad.)
Hope this helps.
Jeremy replied:
I could not agree with your larger point about spontaneous order more. If the market (according to the agorists) is the sum of all voluntary interaction, still the set of involuntary interactions exert an influence and, to an extent, constrain the former set of actions. In that sense, every order is “spontaneous”; all obedience is voluntary (a la De La Boetie) . The question is whether that spontaneity arose from natural or contrived conditions.
This is an extremely important argument for left libertarians. We can idolize “the market” and make it a good in and of itself, rather than understanding that the spontaneous ordering it represents is just a means to an end; it is not, itself, the end. The ground rules for society set by political bodies, social custom, external conditions, etc. do much to determine how that order will manifest.
That is the great genius of corporate capitalism: benefiting from the informational and allocating features of a market while setting the rules so that only certain outcomes are likely. Of course, if we didn’t self-order to some extent, the entire system would fall apart. They need our buy-in in order for the system to function, but they need to maintain control of our expectations so that we only use the system in ways they allow.
I think Brownmiller’s point is 100% true without necessarily being complete. People can threaten you, but they cannot make you afraid. Ultimately, a person has control over his or her own emotions. The idea that conditions “out there” have to change before I can be free or happy is the kernel of all oppression. All tyrants around the world could be deposed in a matter of days if people were only to release their fear and take control of their own expectations and values and lives.
The weakest part of the leftist ideology - and I say this as a self-identified leftist - is its emphasis on victimhood. Oppressed people don’t revolt; fearful people don’t revolt. Only people who have decided to no longer be oppressed and afraid revolt. People who think their freedom is subject to others’ decisions will always see the manipulation of those others as their salvation. And so, the leftist tries to capture authority and turn it to his own ends out of fear, rather than abolishing authority out of a love for liberty.
Jeremy replied:
BTW, I should say that one of the most frequent arguments I got into with my wife the first year we were dating was her outrage at my reluctance to walk her back to her dorm at night. I just didn’t understand the amount of vulnerability she felt. The protector role is not one that all men are eager to adopt, but it is important to understand the fear women have, if for no other reason than to better get along with them. That doesn’t make the fear justifiable, rational, or warranted - it does, however, explain it so that we can better understand how to help each other overcome our fear.
Rad Geek replied:
Jeremy,
Thank you for your kind words. I agree with you that many libertarians are operating with too naive an understanding of spontaneous order even when they apply it to the market; hence my interest in labor organizing, mutual aid, etc., my impatience with lazy apologetics for corporate capitalism, which has its own share of malign voluntary orders and invisible fist processes going on.
I’m not sure what to make of your comments about fear.
I think that women’s fear of rape is justifiable, rational, and warranted. Or, perhaps more to the point, I don’t think I have any business telling a woman who is afraid of rape anything about whether her fear is justifiable, rational, or warranted. What would I know about that? What I do know from the experience of my friends, and other women that I’ve tried to listen to, is that rape is a terrible thing, sometimes life-threatening, and it happens to a lot of women. For many women trying to ignore or suppress that fear is not an option.
It’s true that resistance takes courage. But courage is mastery of fear, not insensitivity to fear; it consists in overcoming and appropriately channeling reasonable fears, not in trying to make yourself numb to them. And if you want to encourage people to resist more than they do, which is a perfectly noble aim, I don’t think you’re going to help that cause by trying to tell people that they don’t have a reason to feel vulnerable, afraid of what might happen to them, grief about what has happened to them, etc. Particularly not when you’re speaking from a position where you have the privilege of not facing that fear as part of your daily experience, while the people you’re addressing don’t have the same luxury.
quasibill replied:
With respect to voluntary vs. spontaneous orders, I think you might be splitting hairs a bit too finely here. Compare your distinction to the argument that even coerced decisions are voluntary, as you always have the option of allowing yourself to be killed.
From a strictly objective, definitional standpoint, the argument is true. But if we’re talking about ethical norms that most humans share, and the way people normally use the moral concepts involved, it is not true.
I think the same can be said for your distinction of voluntary and spontaneous orders. In other words, as we all, thanks to Kevin, readily recognize now, it is dangerous to equate actually existing society to spontaneous in any meaningful way precisely because the state has intervened so extensively into everyone’s life.
One counter-factual that springs off the top of my head are the many, many women I know who a) are unafraid despite past history just because they are generally confident in themselves; or b) or are unafraid because they could literally kill an untrained attacker in under a second - in a world where states, almost entirely dominated by males, have claimed territorial monopolies on security and law, these women can’t form their own societies, social aid societies, etc. One woman I know was threatened with prosecution by a local DA (at the behest of cops) if she formed her own guardian angel type group to patrol the streets near a local campus.
I’m not claiming that absent the state, such societal norms wouldn’t exist; quite the contrary, I think there are quite a few problems whose genesis starts with social attitudes as opposed to the state. I’m just saying that it is dangerous to call anything that currently exists “spontaneous” given the pervasive nature of the state, and that includes social attitudes, such as patriarchy, rape culture, etc.
Other than that, I second (third? twentieth?) the notion that this is an amazing explication on feminism in terms that libertarians can grok. I learned alot from it.
Thank you.
Jeremy replied:
I’m a libertarian: as such, I’m required by law to find some flaw in your reasoning, no matter how insignificant or petty. :)
I agree with your point about suppressing fear: the goal is to not act out of fear, not to simply sublimate and ignore it. So with that said,
Let me see if I understand you. Taking control of one’s own emotional well-being is not an option. But changing the entire society in which one lives, is. Is this what you’re saying? I’m honestly not trying to put words in your mouth, but this seems to be the implication of your statements.
Nobody is saying women should not have the freedom to feel the way they feel. In fact, I think we’d have a very different world if people actually accepted and dealt with their emotions. The system excels at churning out people who are emotionally stunted and therefore, because they cannot feel deeply, they often cannot act out of a deep love, or deep compassion, or deep, well, anything.
What I’m saying is that the way one feels is one of the limited things in this world that one has control over. None of us have control over mass society, and it’s absolutely anti-individualistic, in my opinion, to say that no woman can be free or happy or fearless until everything else changes. That’s the problem, as I see it: conflating individual healing and empowerment with external social change.
True. As you put it, what do I know about that? By that rationale, why should encourage anybody to do anything?
But I think there is great utility in reminding people that they have control over their own feelings and reactions to things, and that fear need not control them. You’re right: I don’t have any place to tell people how they should heal themselves psychologically and emotionally. But I do think that’s much more important than demanding that society change (if for no other reason than because society is composed of individuals who each have to change for society to change). We talk about this far too seldom in our movement because, like most movements, we see the world as the problem, not ourselves.
I also think leftists don’t do these victims any service by telling them that they can’t be happy and secure until other people change. IMHO, that is the great problem with feminism and leftism in general, as practiced politically: it fetishizes victimhood. And so it is only natural for victims to seek justice and protection from institutions like the state, instead of healing themselves sufficiently to be able to promote true independence from authority.
Rad Geek replied:
Jeremy:
No, I’m not saying that, or anything remotely like that.
I’m saying that ignoring or suppressing the fear of rape is not
Fear as such is not an emotional defect. And a fearful situation is not made better by just ignoring or suppressing rational and appropriate fears.
The claim that until rape is no longer a prevalent threat is a claim you’re attributing to me. It’s not a claim I ever made.
The claim that until rape is no longer a prevalent threat is trivially true, if you’re using to mean what most libertarians use it to mean, i.e. freedom from systematized coercion. Nobody at all can be free until they are no longer coerced by prevalent, systemic violence. People labeled crazy can never be free until coercive psychiatry is abolished; kids can never be free until child-beating and Fugitive Child Laws are abolished; you and I can never be free, ultimately, until the State as such is abolished; etc. etc. etc. That doesn’t mean that none of us can never live happy or fulfilling lives; it does mean that there are certain ways in which our lives are not as free as they might and ought to be. And certain things which we have every reason to be afraid of. There’s nothing wrong with being afraid of those things, because violence and coercion really are fearful, and it would be irrational to act as if they were not.
Maybe you mean something different by the word than what most libertarians mean. If so, then, given that I was using the libertarian usage in the discussion about the ways in which the fear of rape hinders women’s freedom, you’ll need to spell out what you do mean by and how your remarks using it are responsive to the remarks I made using the libertarian usage of the term.
As for I don’t know what you mean by that. If you mean a state of being literally without feelings of fear, then I have no idea whether or not any individual woman or man can achieve that when threatened with violence. Maybe so, maybe not; probably depends on the person. But why would they want to achieve that? Fear per se is not a defect.
If you mean something more like what people usually mean by — that is a form of courage, in which you feel fear but master it and act, in the face of fear, with a certain amount of serenity or resolve — then I never said that women cannot do that. I know of many radical feminists, in particular, who I would say exhibited that (just consider any Take Back The Night march). But that’s not the same thing as not feeling any fear. It’s certainly not the same thing as denying that fear is
I don’t know what this has to do with anything that I said. Feeling vulnerable, being afraid, going through grief, etc. aren’t mutually exclusive with Often they are part and parcel of what we do; sometimes of the most courageous and world-changing actions. (Think of Antigone. Think of the “Joe Hill” or the Letter from Birmingham Jail, which are suffused with grief. Think of the Mountaintop speech. Etc.) And actions that come from that place certainly do not always involve seeking protection from some more powerful authority. (“Joe Hill” called for workers organizing among themselves and fighting back. Antigone and King used their grief, and their fear, to act in direct defiance of the State.)
If you want to encourage someone to do something, please do so. My concern here is that you not wave off women’s fear or grief about rape (1) as being less than or (2) as something it’s necessary to dispense with for the sake of individual or social uplift. Claim (2) is just false. Claim (1) is incredibly presumptuous, and something you have no real-life basis for claiming to understand.
Women are not the individuals that need to change in order to end the systematic threat of rape. Men are.
There’s nothing wrong with women, singly or cooperatively, working to change themselves in various ways, either as a matter of personal well-being or as a matter of more effectively resisting patriarchy. That’s great; more power to them; movement feminism has done a lot towards creating new ideas and new spaces in which women can better heal, or better flourish.
But the basic demands of feminism for change are not demands on women to change. They are demands on the men who oppress women. Rape is not the result of a problem with women; it’s the result of a problem with rapists. Men, not women, are the main people whose feelings, emotions, anxieties, anger, attitudes, reactions, etc. need to be subjected to scrutiny, and put under pressure to change.
Jeremy replied:
OK, fair enough - I agree with you. So at what point does the fear of rape enter into the area of unreasonable fixation? Certainly we’ve established that I’m not a legitimate party to this conversation, as I am not a woman, or a rape victim, or an unconditional supporter of a particular agenda towards a less violent world for women, but it does puzzle me, even as an outsider: if too little fear is not a solution, is there perhaps an equally ineffective solution in excessive fear?
Or maybe the solution is actually helping women deal with their fear so that they can act with the greatest degree of security and effective freedom. And maybe that freedom should be used, not to demand others should change, not to help us live more comfortably in a sadistic culture, but to compel them to change by refusing to cooperate with their behavior.
You know, I would love your permission to talk about tangential and supplementary concepts, theses, and ideas without fear that you might interpret them as attributed to you or in direct reply to something you’ve written. I mean that sincerely; you seem hyper-sensitive to misattribution, and conversations that meander in the slightest from the topic you’ve established. I’d be grateful if you let me know how to proceed respectfully here, as I can tell from your responses that I’m transgressing terribly here.
I was probably imprecise with respect to emotional issues in my first comment. For the record, so we can put this counter-argument of yours to rest, I am not saying fear is bad. I am saying that it lies within the realm of possibility for an individual to choose how to deal with that fear, and that it’s possible to not let it dictate your life. It can be integrated and healed. It is not an external condition, the solution to which lies outside the individual. We choose how to respond to things - we may have behavioral patterns, but they are not insurmountable. I honestly don’t see how one can be an individualist if one believes that one is not in control of ones thoughts, feelings, expectations, and responses.
If that is true, then why do women participate in activism in order to change the culture? Isn’t the change from not participating to participating a change they make themselves? Obviously, they are changing to respond to the situation. That’s good - they shouldn’t wait for men to change.
I’m simply suggesting that they can change even further to effect even more radical change. But they can’t do this if they’re waiting on a group or an entire gender to act. They can only do it if they act themselves, if they change their own priorities and expectations and tolerances until they are willing to take the necessary steps. And that’s a change that only comes from within the individual. It’s a change that you’ll never hear any anti-rape group talk about, because it would make their group useless.
If you presume that society exists as an entirely male operation, with no tacit consent from females. But that, of course, is absurd, and you would never presume that (before you claim I’m trying to attribute that presumption to you).
Perhaps.
judgesnineteen replied:
Well Jeremy, since you know better than all the anti-rape activists, why don’t you tell me what exactly I should do?
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Aster replied:
Let me see if I can translate Jeremy’s position:
“Women who are raped should suck it up and take it like men.”
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Bryan replied:
While you’ve demonstrated that it is possible to make a feminist argument about the social effects of rape without suggesting any sort of wildly implausible conspiracy theories, it doesn’t seem like a “crude misunderstanding” of what Brownmiller actually says in the quoted text to see her as suggesting just such a conspiracy theory. The key word in the first quote is “consciously”. In the second quote, I would point out that she compares rapists to the myrmidons which, by her own account, were used by Achilles. The myrmidons were not independent actors whose actions just happened to benefit Achilles without consciously intending to so— they were the agents of his conscious plan.
Rad Geek replied:
Jeremy,
Courage is a mean between a vice of excess and a vice of defect, so presumably there is such a thing as being too afraid, or being afraid of the wrong things, or being afraid in the wrong way. But how much fear is too little, and how much is too much? I don’t know; don’t ask me. That sounds like a personal question that individual women have to judge for themselves while making their way through the world, not something I could pronounce a one-size-fits-all answer on.
As for sure, that’s great. Just remember that dealing with fear is not the same thing as ceasing to feel fear, and also that dealing with fear is someone that the person who is afraid has to do on her own. You can help, but you can’t do it for her, and you can’t get her to do it just by telling her that she ought to deal with it. Of course, if you want to get out there and do things (like providing emotional support, intervening against other men, volunteering money or labor to support events like Take Back The Night, etc.) to make it easier for individual women to have less fear, that’s great; more power to you.
Well, O.K. But I don’t believe that, either. What I believe is that fear, like most other emotions, is a complex passionate response to external situations, and can be either apt, or inapt, depending on what the situation is. It can be encouraged, discouraged, unleashed, controlled, altered, channeled, etc., both by active habituation and by rational conscious effort. But the issue here has to do with whether the situation in question really is fearful — that is, really is the sort of situation to which fear would be an apt response — and if so, what someone in that situation should do with any fear that she reasonably feels. Fear itself is not an external condition, as you note, but external conditions can be fearful in relation to a particular person; that is, they can be the sort of situations in which you ought to feel fear. Stoic maxims like seem to me to be missing the point: in some sense it’s true that it’s within your power to ignore or suppress your fears when other people have forced you into a genuinely fearful situation, but it’s not clear why you should want to cripple your own emotional faculties like that, any more than you should want to gouge out your own eyes.
It seems that now you’ve shifted tack somewhat, to the claim that feminists writing or talking about rape should encourage women to the fear of rape, in some sense, rather than just getting rid of it as unjustified. I don’t have any problem with exhorting women to resist, but you do need to be careful about doing so in a way that acknowledges the realities of the situation, and which offers a lesson by example and a helping hand rather than a stern lecture and a gut-check. Besides being cruel, that kind of approach is also just counter-productive.
Me:
Jeremy:
Because as a matter of empirical fact it seems that men aren’t doing much to change on our own. So women are organizing and resisting rape as an instrumental means to the end of either persuading, or if necessary compelling, men to change as we ought. If it were possible for rape to end forever simply because all men choose not to do it, then there would be no need for women’s organizing and resisting.
As I said in the last couple paragraphs of my earlier remark:
Jeremy:
Look, changing yourself as an individual is great and all, but I really don’t know what kind of concrete personal changes you are suggesting here as a means to reducing, containing, or eliminating the threat of rape. Could you explain in more detail?
I don’t want to be a dick about this, but anti-rape groups (I’m including both service outfits like rape crisis centers and activist outfits like radical feminist groups) are doing a lot of extremely important and incredibly exhausting work on the ground to undermine rape culture, to provide material resources for individual women to live more safely, and to help women who have survived all kinds of hell begin to recover and piece their lives back together. Certainly a lot more than I am, and probably a lot more than you are, too. The work that they do is never enough, because the groups are small and the problem is huge and incredibly difficult. And I’m sure that for any individual group there are some things they are doing that they shouldn’t, some things they aren’t doing that they should, and some real ways in which their overall approach is limited and limiting. If you want to make some concrete suggestions for improvement, or to lodge some concrete criticisms about the limits of particular groups or approaches, that’s fine; I certainly have plenty of things I could say along those lines, especially about professionalized medical and counseling service providers, if you want to discuss it. But the on-the-ground work that anti-rape groups do, anyway, every day, is nothing short of heroic (in the real sense, not in the LewRockwell.com sense), and you really should think twice before bad-mouthing the people who do that work or impugning their motives in this way.
I’m pretty sure that women don’t tacitly consent to the threat of rape.
It’s certainly true that there are many things women could do, severally or cooperatively, which would probably have an impact on the overall threat of rape. (Taking women’s self-defense classes, for example. Or organizing, publicizing, and marching in Take Back The Night Marches. Or, or, or….) But those things aren’t matters of withdrawing from rape culture; rape culture is a violent undesigned order, with its base in the deliberate actions of men, which women never consented to to begin with. And when women adopt strategies other than constant confrontation and open defiance for surviving life in a rape culture, they usually have their own reasons for doing so, and the reasons are usually pretty good ones, given the circumstances. The primary problem to keep in your sights is the behavior of the people making the threats, not the behavior of the people getting threatened, and the primary solution has got to be to either get the people making the threats to change of their own accord, or else to neutralize their capacity to make the threat. If that involves the person being threatened making some other changes for the better in her own personal life, then that’s great; but it’s a means to the primary goal, not the goal itself.
I don’t mind supplementary conversations or discussions that go off on tangents. However, I don’t like to feel like words are being put in my mouth, and especially not when it comes to discussions about radical feminism, because my experience is that radical feminism has often been refused a serious hearing because critics (mostly, but not exclusively, male critics) simply don’t exercise the necessary care or charity to get clear on what positions are, and what positions are not, being argued. I also don’t mind — I even relish — tangents, but I really don’t like to see a more or less subtle change of subject being confused for a direct response. Side-trips are great, but only as long as you don’t forget that you’re no longer on the main road. In discussions about radical feminism, comment threads tend to get derailed and it’s often the case that critics don’t ever come around to saying much of anything at all that responds to the original claim. Hence, due to the topic and how I have seen that topic treated in the past, I do tend to be more demanding than I might otherwise be about charity and precision in interpreting claims, and in shepherding the thread of the conversation.
If you want to discuss something tangential to the conversation, feel free, but I would ask that you clearly note that you’re going off on a tangent rather than trying to respond to the main point. If you want to condemn a view that nobody has yet expressed in the thread, then I would ask that you make clear you’re not attributing that view to anyone in the thread, or, better yet, give some specific details about who you are attributing to. If you’re not sure whether or not to attribute a view to me (or Brownmiller, or whoever), based on what’s been said so far, I’d just ask that you ask (straightforwardly and non-rhetorically) whether or not that’s my view. If you think that something is implied by view, which I have not yet stated as my view, then give me an argument to show me how you derived one from the other, and the discussion can proceed more fruitfully from that argument.
I don’t want to be a hard-ass here, but I am always impatient with arguments where a lot of rhetorical firepower is targeted at a strawman of a position, or worse, unleashed indiscriminately on several different positions, which may or may not include the real position under debate, all without making it clear which shots are being aimed at what. It’s a much bigger deal to me in this conversation than in some other conversations, because I’ve noticed it happening a lot where feminism and, in particular, feminist claims about violence against women, are the topic. Just so we’re clear, I’m not accusing you of doing that, on any large scale, but that is why I’m being a stickler about things like misattribution of positions or more or less subtle changes of subject: because I want to encourage a high standard as far as those are concerned, and to head off certain conversational dynamics before they get much of a start.
Hope this helps.
Rad Geek replied:
Bryan:
Well, I think that it is clearly a misunderstanding; how crude a misunderstanding it is is better appreciated by thinking through the relation between the two quoted passages, and by reading the book in its entirety. (And I should say that any misunderstanding which could easily be dispelled by reading the passage in the context of the rest of the book, instead of just trying to puzzle it out from a select few sentences at the end of the first chapter, is therefore a crude misunderstanding; part of what you need to do not to be crude in your misunderstandings is putting in the effort to do the necessary background reading.)
It’s also important to keep principles of interpretive charity in mind here. If there are two possible readings of a text, one of which involves a position that’s plausible enough as it goes and the other of which involves a position wildly implausible, then, all other things being equal, you generally ought to give your interlocutor the benefit of the doubt and deal mainly in interpretation that grants your interlocutor the stronger argument or the more plausible position, rather than the weaker argument or the less plausible position.
Well, what she says is that rape is But Brownmiller doesn’t directly say who is doing the conscious intimidation in that sentence. Many people who mischaracterize Brownmiller’s views treat as if it were obviously the subject of the entire sentence. It’s not. In a presumably the person who would be either conscious or unconscious is the intimidator, which in this case means the rapist. We know from elsewhere in the book (especially the passages on the Myrmidon theory) that Brownmiller isn’t claiming that all men are rapists (after all, part of what she’s explicitly interested in analyzing is how the actions of men who rape affect the status of women vis-a-vis men who do not rape). So we don’t yet have any reason to believe that Brownmiller is claiming that anyone other than the rapist alone is consciously intending to intimidate women (maybe all women as such; maybe some group of women; maybe the one particular woman he has targeted for attack; Brownmiller doesn’t make it explicit which, and not much turns on it in this discussion). Which is true enough; if he weren’t intending to intimidate, he wouldn’t be a rapist.
So then what’s the function of that clause about , if not to say that all men are somehow consciously trying to intimidate women? Well, again, looking at the rest of the book, and especially the passages on the Myrmidon theory, one interpretation that suggests itself is that Brownmiller is making a statement in that clause about the political effects of rape — that all women are kept in a state of fear by all mean, as an effect of the conscious process of intimidation carried out by some but not all men—an effect which not all of the men in question, or perhaps even none of the men in question, may have consciously intended.
If Brownmiller doesn’t mean to use the word to suggest conscious intent by all men to keep all women in a state of fear, but only to say that rapists consciously intend to intimidate women, then why include the word at all? Can’t it just be taken for granted? Well, no, it can’t be. I’d argue that Brownmiller includes the word because it has to do with a distinct claim made in the book, which is not directly discussed in this post — that rapists are motivated in part by the desire to intimidate and control women, not just by some uncontrollable lust or the lack of consensual sexual
Well, sure, but metaphors are rarely meant to, and anyway almost never manage to, capture every last detail of the situation with complete precision and accuracy. As people who are familiar with writing on spontaneous orders, evolutionary processes, and self-organizing systems know, it’s often necessary to write *as if* you were describing deliberate actions, conscious purposes or perceived interests, in order to give a compelling picture of the interplay of unconscious processes and functional roles in a system with not-consciously-intended results. Here, in the Myrmidon metaphor, the counterpart of Achilles isn’t some particular man or some organized group of men, who might be said to have conscious desires, plans, and intentions; it’s, first, the unorganized mass of or, second, the abstract entity of I don’t think there’s much of a compelling reason to take the metaphor as somehow claiming that are actually united by a common plan to use police-blotter rapists as Myrmidons, or that is a plan centrally promulgated by some coordinated body. Moreover, Brownmiller quite explicitly states: I don’t know how you could reconcile the boldfaced clause with any kind of conspiracy-theory interpretation; if there were some kind of big conscious plan for male dominance being handed down to the police-blotter rapists, then presumably the Patriarchs would already be consciously aware of the plan, and thus of the true meaning of the police-blotter rapists’ acts. (Brownmiller’s pretty clear that the writers and critics who have mistaken the meaning of police-blotter rapists’ acts are very largely composed of men, and often rather overtly sexist men, at that.) In order to take the boldfaced clause seriously, we would have to give up on the idea that police-blotter rapists are being used to further a conscious plan in the way that the Myrmidons are; rather, they serve their function in an undesigned order, whether or not anybody knows or plans that their actions will serve it.
Rad Geek replied:
quasibill,
Thank you very much for your kind words, and for your reply.
To a great extent I agree with this, but what I’d want to stress is just that the issue here does just turn on what you mean by If means voluntary, then it’s true that there are virtually no orders at all in this society which are fully voluntary orders, at least not on any large scale, due to the way in which both State violence and diffuse freelance violence pervade almost every aspect of everyday life, either directly, or else through their rippling effects.
But if means undesigned, then I’d say that there are lots of actually-existing large-scale orders which are unintended consequences of dispersed action that was carried out from a bunch of different motives and not from a conscious plan to bring about that social result. The wrinkle that I’d want to add is that that kind of order may be the result of dispersed voluntary action; or it may be the result, in part, of dispersed coercion, or dispersed responses to coercion. The process by which the fact of rape produces rape culture is one example. But another example is precisely the sort of economic ripple-effects from coercion that Kevin, for one, has done such a good job of explaining. For example, the kind of anti-poor government economic regimentation that I talk about in Scratching By tends to produce entrenched, ghettoized urban poverty, in the form that we know it, as an unintended consequence of a lot of little, interlocking coercive policies, some of which were crafted more or less as deliberate screwjobs against poor people or deliberate direct attacks on their survival strategies, but most of which (building codes, government seizure of abandoned lots, that sort of thing) were mainly intended to accomplish something else, which had little directly to do with poor people’s survival strategies. That they lock together to create geographically confining forms of concentrated, despairing, dependent, long-term poverty, to make poor people extremely vulnerable to sharp dealing by landlords or bosses, etc. etc. etc. was not part of anybody’s rationally constructed plan; it’s an order that arose spontaneously (meaning undesignedly) from the way in which all those different regulations interact with each other, and the way in which poor people and privileged people each react to the material predicament in which those interlocking regulations place them. So what you have is an order that’s not at all spontaneous, in one sense (it’s so shot through with coercion that I would say that the coercion is the defining feature of the situation), but entirely spontaneous in another (in that it’s the unintended result of dispersed interactions rather than the object of a conscious plan).
The other part of the reason for stressing the distinction, which I didn’t get to in this post, but which Roderick and I briefly mentioned in the old