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.

—Susan Brownmiller (1975), Against Our Will pp. 14–15.

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 normal sexual 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.

See also:

• Charles Johnson and Roderick Long (2005): Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?
• GT 2004-03-03: She Said, She Said: the misinterpretation of Susan Brownmiller on anatomy and rape

Today, November 25th, is the first day of 2007’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. The 16 Days run from November 25th (International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women) to December 10th (International Human Rights Day). Sokari at Black Looks (2007-11-25) has a good run down on the events of the 16 Days, and a powerful statement of what it’s all about:

One fundamental problem is that because gender based violence is so common across the world that it has been normalised – through actions, language, imagery, pornography – and it is this normalisation that has to be broken. I spoke of my own personal experience of domestic violence. But the violence didn’t start there. I have had a life time of it from my child hood, of sexual harassment – touching, misogynist language, presumptions, jokes, looks, homophobia – it becomes a constant battle not to internalise the abuse. As a teenager I used to think it must be my fault – I am to sexual and that’s why this is happening. There was also the added racial element which expressed itself differently depending on whether in Africa or in the West. I did not know where to turn or how to deal with any of this. All of us girls were experiencing similar abuse. With my father acting like a – prison guard when it came to boys/men, I was way too scared to talk to my parents about it even too my mother. The strict environment left no doors open in which to try to discuss this with family members for fear of being grounded to the house. Looking back I probably thought it was normal – we girls and women are the one’s responsible for arousing men who then cannot help themselves. Unfortunately much of society still believes and accept this ridiculous explanation for acts of violence against women.

All our denials – women, men, parents, families, communities – will certainly not protect us. On the contrary it sustains and even encourages acts of violence against women………

It is a scourge that preys on women and girls of ALL nations, of ALL cultures. It is gender-based violence – and it continues to grow, encouraged by the silence surrounding the issue and excused by reference to cultural norms. At the dawn of the 21st Century it is a very negative reflection of global society that violence against women is increasing throughout the world. Gender-based violence is the social, psychological and economic subordination of women and occurs in ALL societies. Violence against women is a complex phenomenon deeply rooted in the way society is composed – cultural beliefs, power relations, economic power imbalances, and the masculine ideal of male dominance

—Sokari, Black Looks (2007-11-25): International Day Against Violence Against Women

Cara at feministe (2007-11-25) adds:

And as a blogger, I encourage all others to blog on the topic as much as possible for the next 16 days (and thereafter). Of course, blogging is neither the only nor most effective method of activism, but I also think that it plays an important role. If you read liberal blogs that don’t normally cover gender issues, strongly encourage them to participate (and demand answers if they won’t). If you run a non-feminist blog, or read other non-feminist blogs by writers that you know care about women, let them know and encourage them to blog about the issue, too. The issue of gender violence is an absolutely massive one, considering the many forms that violence can and does take and all of the intersections of race, sexual orientation, age, nationality, class, religion, location, etc. It has more dimensions than I imagine the combined efforts of every feminist blogger working diligently for the entire 16 days could fully cover. And that’s why it’s so important to say as much as we can. I will be covering the issue of gender violence as much as possible on my own blog for the 16 Days.

I would like to see my fellow libertarians and anarchists, in particular, take up this challenge. Violence against women, when not simply waved off as a fabrication of p.c. academic feminists, is far too often dismissed or marginalized as if it were an isolated personal problem in a few unusual relationships, or a freakish phenomenon of some benighted and far-away cultures, or among the tragic but perhaps inevitable misfortunes of the female sex. Male violence against women is, in fact, pervasive, systemic, and universal, both abroad and in your own neighborhood. It is the result of the deliberate and systematic practice of men — including individual men who personally commit violence against women, men in positions of political power who order or encourage or permit violence against women under the color of their authority, and also men who cultivate and disseminate a misogynistic culture in the form of jokes, artworks, ads, literature, sermons, journalism, pornography, and overt propaganda. Understanding the nature of the individual violent actions — wife beating, date rape, stalking, groping, rape as a weapon of war, etc. — is of fundamental importance; and so is understanding the backdrop of misogynistic attitudes, practices, and institutions that nurture and sustain this systemic violence through an ideology of male supremacy and men’s right to use harassment, intimidation, and force to control their women.

Libertarianism and anarchism profess to to be a comprehensive theory of human freedom; what supposedly distinguishes the anti-statist theories of justice is that they concern themselves with violent coercion no matter who is practicing it, no matter what ideological-mystical excuses may be used to cover over the violent domination. What feminists have forced into the public eye over the course of the last 40 years is the fact that we live in a society where one out of every four women faces rape or battery by an intimate partner (Tjaden and Thoennes 2000), and where women are threatened or attacked by men who profess to love them, because the men coercing them believe they have a right to control their women. Male violence against women is nominally illegal but nevertheless systematic, motivated by the desire for control, culturally excused, and hideously ordinary. For libertarians and anarchists, confronting the full reality of male violence means nothing less than recognizing the existence of a violent political order working alongside, and independently of, the violent political order of statism. As Catharine MacKinnon writes, Unlike the ways in which men systematically enslave, violate, dehumanise, 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, 161). We must recognize the systemic violence and terror of male dominance as a politically coercive order, even though it is usually carried out in society, independently of the state apparatus, and we must oppose and resist it for precisely the same reasons that we oppose the violence and terror of the State.

Although neither directed nor coordinated by any central authority, male violence against women, and the spontaneous disorder of male supremacy that emerges from these countless acts of violence and intimidation, have their own ideological rationalizations, their own propaganda, their own expropriation, and their own violent enforcement, all of which are made invisible by the same male supremacist culture, and made to pass as sex, love, and daily life between men and women. Although often in league with the male-dominated state, male violence is older, more invasive, closer to home, and harder to escape than most forms of statism. To seriously oppose all political violence, libertarians need to fight, at least, a two-front war, against both statism and male supremacy. I urge my comrades to join me, and to join the many women in every nation of the world who are organizing to expose, to resist, and finally to end systemic male violence against women — immediately, completely, and forever.

In a remark on my last post on Iraq, Sam Haque points out:

The situation is that occupation forces have taken for themselves the role of guardians by and large without the consent of those who they are ostensibly protecting.

—Sam Haque, comment (2006-05-10) on GT 2006-05-08: Why We Fight

This is true, and not just of the situation in Iraq. It is as accurate and concise a description as you could make of what governments do for a living, always and everywhere. It’s war that brings this into the sharpest relief, because the normal restraints on brutality are released, the beneficiary-victims are strangers in a faraway land, and the public intellectuals and the official press line up to shout down any serious challenge to the progress of war aims. But war and occupation are only the starkest and most explicit expression of what State power essentially means, not just with bombers and soldiers and tanks, but also with every spook, cop, G-man, prosecutor, jailer, and hangman whose paychecks we are forced to cover. Consider, for example, the local cops in New Britain, Connecticut, who protected the hell out of an 11 year old boy and his mother in the name of serving a drug search warrant without interruption, or last week’s riot and reign of terror by Mexican police asserting their authority to protect and serve the people of San Salvador Atenco, whether they like it or not.

The State is, as Catharine MacKinnon says, male in the political sense. But not only because the law views women’s civil status through the lens of male supremacy (although it certainly does). It is also because the male-dominated State relates to all of its subjects like a battering husband relates to the household of which he has proclaimed himself the head: by laying a claim to protect those who did not ask for it, and using whatever violence and intimidation may be necessary to terrorize them into submitting to his protection. The State, as the abusive head of the whole nation, assaults the innocent, and turns a blind eye to assaults of the innocent, when it suits political interest — renamed national interest by the self-proclaimed representatives of the nation. It does so not because of the venality or incompetance of a particular ruler, but rather because that is what State power means, and that is what the job of a ruler is: to maintain a monopoly of coercion over its territorial area, as a good German might tell you, and to beat, chain, burn, or kill anyone within or without who might endanger that, whether by defying State rule, or by simply ignoring it and asking to be left alone.

Or, as Ezra Haywood once put it, A cruel kindness, thought to be friendly regard, assumes to protect those who, by divine right of rational being, are entitled, at least, to be let alone. We are not among wild beasts; from whom, then, does woman need protection? From her protectors. And so it is for us civilians, facing the doorkeep before the Law.

Further reading:

• Randolph Bourne (1918): War is the health of the State
• Lysander Spooner (1867–1870): No Treason

You may recall that I complained a few weeks ago about Rebecca Traister’s interview with Kate O’Beirne in Salon which repeated a fabricated quote from Catharine MacKinnon as not only fact but indeed old news. (The alleged quote was all heterosexual intercourse is rape; MacKinnon never said this, and has explicitly denied believing it when asked. It’s a gross misunderstanding of her views, and in the one notorious occasion on which she was quoted as saying it, the quote was actually authored by critics trying to describe MacKinnon’s views, but misattributed to MacKinnon herself by an antifeminist columnist too lazy to pick up the book again to get his citations straight. O’Beirne, too lazy or too dishonest to even pick up the book, got it from the columnist. Traister, understandably, repeated O’Beirne’s assertion; for which I don’t blame her, since it’s not her job to follow every footnote before she interviews the author of the book. I do, however, blame Salon for not fact-checking their stories after they are submitted when specific authors are quoted. Particularly when any idiot with access to Google could have discovered the problem in the time it took to type the most obvious query into the search engine.)

A few weeks later, I noted that Salon still hadn’t issued a correction even though the nonexistence of the quote had been pointed out by two different commenters within hours of when the story was first posted, and even though the New York Times Book Review had recently issued a nearly identical correction in its print and online editions.

Well, credit where credit is due: Salon should have caught the error when vetting the interview, and failing that they should have posted a correction within hours when they were made aware of the problem. But Rebecca Traister did file a correction on the interview on 26 February 2003 (and says that she would have filed it sooner, but she was out of town). Here’s the correction:

In the Jan. 17 story My Lunch With an Antifeminist Pundit, Rebecca Traister questioned Women Who Make the World Worse author Kate O’Beirne about the citation in her book of a quotation attributed to Catharine MacKinnon, calling the quotation old news. Traister failed to point out that the statement was incorrectly cited. MacKinnon never said, or wrote, that In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give consent. This line is a characterization of the views of MacKinnon and Andrew [sic] Dworkin from Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies, by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge. It was attributed to MacKinnon in a March 1999 piece by Cal Thomas, which is the source O’Beirne cites in her book. A clarifying note has been added to the story. Salon regrets the error. [Correction made 02/23/06]

And here’s the corrected copy from the interview:

R.T.: I was surprised that so much of your book was about Gloria Feldt, Ellie Smeal, Catharine MacKinnon. Only at the very end do you mention someone like Rebecca Walker.

K.O’B.: Are you asking about [why I didn’t discuss] twenty- or thirty-something feminism?

R.T.: Yes. The MacKinnon quote about how all heterosexual intercourse is rape is old news. [It is also incorrectly cited. MacKinnon never said or wrote it.] There has been a whole other wave of sex-positive feminism in part in response to ideas like that. …

Thanks to Rebecca Traister and Salon for doing the right thing.

Further reading

• GT 2006-01-31: Memo to Rebecca Traister
• GT 2006-02-19: Misquotation in Media: Catharine MacKinnon never, ever, ever, ever said “All heterosexual intercourse is rape.” Ever. Ever.
• GT 2005-01-10: Andrea Dworkin does not believe that all heterosexual sex is rape

This just in…

• Catharine MacKinnon never said that all heterosexual intercourse is rape.

• Andrea Dworkin never said that all heterosexual intercourse is rape, either.

Quotations to that effect have been incorrectly attributed to both Dworkin or MacKinnon, who never said those words and denied that they believed it when asked. Interpretations of their extensive and nuanced work on intercourse, rape, patriarchy, consent, coercion, men, women, and sexual ethics (which you can find elaborated in detail in, among other places, Dworkin’s book Intercourse and Chapter 9 of MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State) that claim to find the view written between the lines have repeatedly been made on the basis of selective quotation, wilful misreading, and downright gossip. These facts have been repeatedly pointed out, not least by the authors themselves, but also by a lot of other people, over and over again. And yet the charade goes on.

Today, Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors (2006-02-19) took notice of the New York Times Book Review’s uncritical publication of a fabricated quotation from Catharine MacKinnon, repeated by Kate O’Beirne in her anti-feminist tract, Women Who Make the World Worse, and reported as if the quotation were fact by Ana Marie Cox in her review of O’Beirne’s book. The book review, in spite of having itself published a letter by Dworkin and MacKinnon in 1995 on the topic, and in spite of printed treatments of this in the media in the pages of the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere throughout the print media over Cal Thomas’s misquotation of MacKinnon in March 1999, went ahead and published Cox’s review without so much as noting that it contained a plain error of fact that any idiot with access to Google could have discovered in the few seconds it took to type out the obvious search request. Three days later, Elizabeth Anderson (2006-01-18): Bashing Feminists pointed out the error. The Times just got around to publishing an Editor’s Note correcting the error on February 6, which went into print on February 12, nearly a month after the review was published.

Readers may remember that back in January, Salon also ran an interview with O’Beirne by Rebecca Traister back in January, where Traister casually reported the fabricated “quote” not only as fact, but in fact as old news. As it happens, two different people wrote them back within a day of when the story was published — Anonymous 2006-01-16 and Mike Connell 2006-01-17. I posted about it here at GT 2006-01-31: Memo to Rebecca Traister a couple of weeks later. As of 6:39pm on February 19, 2006, they have not even so much as published a correction. I just sent them a third letter about the topic; we’ll see whether this produces any effect or not.

Why does this continue to happen? I’m not worried so much about Rebecca Traister or Ana Marie Cox — the lie is widespread, the challenges to it are evidently not widely known (in spite of being repeatedly made in public forums), and their primary job was to discuss O’Beirne’s book, not to fact-check every claim and citation made in it. Or even about O’Beirne herself — like most professional antifeminists, she makes her living on dishonest hatchet pieces, and while that needs to be exposed, it’s not much of a surprise. What I do want to know, though, is why professional publications that claim a reputation for accuracy and honesty so easily allow blatant, known falsehoods like these into print. Who fact-checked these articles? Who let them through without even minimal research on the quotations in it, and why has it taken a month to get even one correction?

Anderson puts it this way:

Here’s a measure of how much a group is despised: how much malicious absurdity can one ascribe to its members and still be taken as a credible source on what they say and do? With respect to feminists, the answer is quite a lot. Christina Hoff Sommers, former philosopher and professional feminist basher, has been widely and credulously cited for her critique of the American Association of University Women’s report, How Schools Shortchange Girls, although my fact-checking finds her critique riddled with errors, inconsistencies, and misleading claims. Many academic critics of feminist philosophers are just as bad, often to the point of ascribing claims to feminists that are exactly the opposite of what they say. Feminists, it seems, are not entitled to a minimally charitable or even literate reading of what they say.

Andrea Dworkin wrote something similar in the editorial notes of Letters from a War Zone, on her essay Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea (p. 110):

… One problem is that this piece, like others in this book, has no cultural presence: no one hs to know about it or take it into account to appear less than ignorant; no one will be held accountable for ignoring it. Usually critics and political adversaries have to reckon with the published work of male authors whom they wish to malign. No such rules protect girls. One pro-pornography “feminist” published an article in which she claimed I was anti-abortion, this in the face of decades of work for abortion rights and membership in many pro-choice groups. No one even checked her allegation; the periodical would not publish a retraction. One’s published work counts as nothing, and so do years of one’s political life.

Whether or not you agree with Catharine MacKinnon’s or Andrea Dworkin’s views, and whether or not you are even interested in discussing them or finding out precisely what they are, you do have a responsibility to make sure that articles published under your authority and with the imprimatur of your reputation don’t repeat exposed fabrications about them or about what they said. The pages of the Grey Lady or even of Salon shouldn’t read like the Horror File page of a Men’s Rights bully-boy. Professional journalists are paid to do a lot better than that, and it’s long past time that we hold them accountable for it.

You can write a public letter to the editor of Salon in response to Traister’s interview, or write privately, to let them know that they are printing documented falsehoods and that you expect better of them.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-02-17: Over My Shoulder #11: Andrea Dworkin, Preface to the 1995 edition of Intercourse
• GT 2006-01-31: Memo to Rebecca Traister
• GT 2005-10-06: Andrea Dworkin Was Right #5
• GT 2005-03-26: Fathers for Lies: Selective Quotation and Distortion of Catharine MacKinnon’s position
• GT 2005-01-10: Andrea Dworkin does not believe that all heterosexual sex is rape
• GT 2004-10-28: The rumors of feminism’s demise have been greatly exaggerated
• GT 2004-03-03: She Said, She Said: the misinterpretation of Susan Brownmiller on anatomy and rape