This and That
Kittamaru said:
For that matter, why hasn't he moved to Costa Rica yet, like he said he would do if "Obamacare" was passed?
Oh,
you hadn't heard?
Q: Why did the chicken not cross the road?
A: Because the dirty-scoundrel Mexicans in Costa Rica° have what "may be one of Latin America's longest-standing state-run programs".
Besides, he has another year to fulfill his promise. He said five years; it's been four.
• • •
GeoffP said:
The point was that, as a concept, this philosophy certainly exists. I'm uncertain how it jives with elements of classical culture, excepting in certain cases. Where do we draw its boundaries? Are we postulating a Venn diagram in order to identify and combat it?
Honestly, Geoff, the second sentence in there? Just like you might prefer a bit more precise a definition of rape culture, the phrase "how it jives with elements of classical culture" is a bit vague.
However, consider two differences:
• The difference between intention and outcome.
• The difference between blindness and sight.
On a parallel track, I sometimes make a joke about social conservatives in the United States, that they are a self-perpetuating bunch expressing certain concerns and values, but then support public policy that augments the circumstances leading to those concerns while actually making those values harder to fulfill.
It's like that bit I sometimes do about
Pam Stenzel, the abstinence educator who will not simply admit, but actually
boast that her abstinence education platform isn't about what works, but, rather, is about getting her ticket to Heaven punched.
But think about the ways in which many social conservative neighbors raise their own stumbling blocks.
My American generation remembers the scandals of unmarried cohabitation; there was even a
pop song from 1976°° about a guy looking forward to his girlfriend moving in with him. Yet across the board, for a time, social conservatives pretty much uniformly supported not just social policies encouraging more unplanned pregnancies and unmarried births, but also
economic policies that actually
encouraged cohabitation; a one-bedroom place with one's lover is less expensive than a two-bedroom place with anyone else. And listen to them today as many tout the great societal benefits of lower labor compensation benefits. A Revolutionary question you and I might acknowledge is whether or not a worker can, on wages and benefits accrued from full-time labor, afford to live independently within the community he or she works. Such a question is not on social conservatives radar; it may not be anywhere in their lexicon. They've never crafted a sound bite addressing the relationship, and as you know, conservatives in general are quick to ward off such questions by crying
wolf commie.
In the question of rape culture, the same thing happens. One need not contest the Wikipedia definition, though it's hardly a consideration on par with some of the more objective results of the natural sciences; social sciences are tricky that way.
But consider that, while rape culture, manifests variably according to broader cultural diversity, its components are generally consistent. Psychologically speaking, the difference between Simon Lokodo and Uganda's post-Christian misogyny and homophobia to the one and what we see in many Islamic communities around the world is like the difference between two shades of purple, and how much of it one puts on the house; in the end, they're still "houses", as such. That is, it's a difference of manner and degree, not one of fundamental components.
And while the difference between, say, Alaska and the Daa'ish°°° seems pretty obvious, it really
is mostly a matter of degrees.
But look what happens when our American way forbids the sort of religious extremism that we might find in, say, the Old Testament. Not only do we not cut off the hand that offends, we're way past poisoning our wives on suspicion of adultery or simply not sparing the rod. In the question of American prosperity versus Christian piety, God lost. Still, though, some relics remain.
So think of those basic societal values and virtues. Sometimes those sympathetic to the fact that women are human beings will crack a joke about the "Guardians of Female Chastity", and we do so because despite the political façades about family values, it really has been, historically speaking, about reserving masculine privilege.
A functional result is observable: We disdain rape, domestic violence, unplanned pregnancy, and other aspects of sexual conduct, all in the name of protecting women's virtue. Yet at the same time, we adopt public policies that create, maintain, or augment circumstances in which these outcomes find augmented likelihood.
Still, though, the fact that a behavior exists does not mean that it is deliberate. Hell is paved with good intentions; we know this much already. But consider that this is also why some of us are mortified by allegedly
"Christian" virtues teaching eight year-old girls submission to sex roles. There comes a point at which the question of accidental outcomes is entirely irrelevant to the public policy discussion; much like we might not send a criminal to
prison if his or her mental capacity demands psychiatric institutionalizaiton, the thing is that there comes a point when cognitive dysfunction is simply
dangerous to the community.
Rape culture is an example of mass dysfunction transcending to danger. In this context, rape culture, which is properly neither culture nor subculture, but, rather, a prevailing cultural influence, is comprised of a number of presuppositions forming fundamental components that justify, aid and abet, or encourage sexual abuse of other people. Generally speaking, rape culture targets women predominately.
Look at what happened in Rotherham. Or what's going on in Tanana. You're seeing rape culture in its full, inglorious display. Remember the Cook Islands debacle several years ago? Perhaps high school football in Ohio?
Look at the American "conservative" arguments surrounding women and human rights:
• Reduced sex education.
• Entrenched, unbalanced societal roles according to sex.
• Reduced contraception access.
• No abortions.
• Slut-shaming.
• Cynical regard for reports of sexual harassment and abuse, including attempted justification of rape, harassment, and other violence.
Colloquially, yes, it does always come down to dirty old men finding excuses to fuck little girls. More appropriately stated, of course it's more complicated than that, but, to the other, neither is it significantly removed from that general arc.
In some places, women and girls cannot expect the help of law enforcement; females learn to expect to be raped. And therein lies another quirk of rape culture:
If resignation moves a woman to not protest and simply submit, then it isn't really rape, or so the idea goes. And that's the whole point; the Guardians of Female Chastity are essentially trying to reserve that chastity unto their own privilege.
It's a complete, neurotic clusterdiddle. These are all
symptoms of deeper, more complex psychological dysfunctions. And here's the thing about normalcy:
One of the criteria for elevating a problematic behavior to mental illness is whether it disrupts or inhibits to a significant degree normal social relations. But normal is also a statistical baseline. Therefore, if rape culture or some other damaging behavior represents statistical normalcy, then we are simply erasing rape by saying it isn't really rape.
It's not supposed to make sense in any
real context; rather, it is a question of how it makes sense to those advocates of rape culture.
And think about it. Of
course it's a hard phrase. Very few would appreciate being defined as such. But, as with so many other contradictions between label and behavior, neither are they prepared to renounce the behaviors that lead to the label.
One of the more controversial identifications of rape culture I've suggested in recent months is the degree to which Infinite Prevention Advocates have established a tacit outer boundary to their rape prevention advice:
Nothing that might tell women to consider the IPAs potential rapists.
That is to say, as I've noted before, that the stuff about shoes and mobile phones and haircuts and clothes addresses a tiny fraction of rapes, and is touted as "common sense", while
obvious prevention techniques that would address the vast majority of rapes is off the table.
Start with the idea that one makes
himself a "potential rapist" in acknowledging that approach; people generally don't like indicting themselves. But think about why the obvious prevention techniques addressing
over seventy percent of reported male on female rapes is off the table:
Segregation of the sexes represents a tremendous disruption and denigration of everyone's quality of life.
However, therein lies the problem with the "common sense" techniques to guard against the statistical outliers:
Infinite Prevention Advocacy only denigrates women's quality of life. Additionally, it distracts from the
real statistical threat. All in all, it's a convenient outcome for male IPAs:
Suspect everyone, but remember, #NotAllMen, so don't suspect me. Consider some of the prevention advice women receive:
Don't let a man pour you a drink. Statistically speaking, that should be:
Don't let any man you know, including your husband or male intimate partner, pour you a drink. Self-indictment hurts feelings.
If it was deliberate, it would be evil.
For the most part, it's merely symptomatic of psychological dysfunction, but this is a
dangerous psychological dysfunction. So, yes, much like the psychiatrically deviant criminal may not be morally culpable for a crime, we acknowledge the danger they present and quarantine them from the general public. Indeed, this is so routine that we can now style perpetual sentences that continue after the statutory sentence has passed. Out here in the Evergreen State, when a male RL3 offender finishes his prison term, barring extraordinary circumstances we pack him off to McNeil Island; if you ever saw
Three Fugitives with Nolte and Cage,
that prison.
But it's not like we can confine rape culture advocates to psychiatric facilities. Indeed, over the long run we need to simply shatter rape culture and grind its broken shards into dust. But we also need to quarantine it away from the public policy discourse, so that we can figure out how to break it. It's dangerous, and the more influence it wins in society, and the longer it goes on, the worse the situation will get.
Of course, for many of these advocates, that's okay with them, because it's all women's fault, anyway.
When you are looking at rape culture, you are seeing an intersection of two paradigmatic truths:
It is a Freudian theorem that each individual neurosis is not static but dynamic. It is a historical process with its own internal logic. Because of the basically unsatisfactory nature of the neurotic compromise, tension between the repressed and repressing factors persists and produces a constant series of new symptom-formations. And the series of symptom-formations is not a shapeless series of mere changes; it exhibits a regressive pattern, which Freud calls the slow return of the repressed, "It is a law of neurotic diseases that these obsessive acts serve the impulse more and more and come nearer and nearer the original and forbidden act." The doctrine of the universal neurosis of mankind, if we take it seriously, therefore compels us to entertain the hypothesis that the pattern of history exhibits a dialectic not hitherto recognized by historians, the dialectic of neurosis.
―Norman O. Brown
† † †
The members of all communities, including nations and whole civilisations, are infused with the prevailing ideologies of those communities. These, in turn, create attitudes of mind which include certain capacities and equally positively exclude others.
The ideologies may be so ancient, so deep-seated or so subtle that they are not identified as such by the people at large. In this case they are often discerned only through a method of challenging them, asking questions about them or by comparing them with other communities.
Such challenge, description, or questioning, often the questioning of assumptions, is what frequently enables a culture or a number of people from that culture to think in ways that have been closed to most of their fellows.
―Emir Ali Khan
Those who attend politics according to its history and psychology have witnessed an incredible return of the repressed, as social conservatives obsessed with issues of sex and sexuality have fallen spectacularly from grace; looking back at some of Ted Haggard's anti-gay sermons, come on, it
should have been obvious. And the menagerie on parade? Airport bathrooms? Rentboys to lift his luggage? Wandering the Appalachian Trail in Argentina? As with Elliot Spitzer and the high-end hookers, the problem isn't the fact that their behavior shows that they're human, but the hypocrisy of screwing with other people's lives like that when hiding your own similar sins. It's the slow return of the repressed.
And as social conservatives have started losing on fronts they have traditionally expected to win—
e.g., the Gay Fray—they do seem to be cracking up at least a little. This whole thing about contraception is insane. FOX News lining up women to
justify sexual harassment is political theatre to the point of red-light circus.
There is an idea called "Puritan Pornography", that gets its name from recollections of the old Anti-Catholic League. The ACL would distribute all manner of grotesque propaganda, including the occasional review of Catholic sexual perversion; the Puritan Pornography idea is that this behavior had the effect of allowing immersion in both in sexual perversion
and self-righteous, properly Protestant moral indignation. I cannot stress to you enough how hilarious it was, in 1992, when the ridiculously-thick Oregon Voter's Guide came out (
ha!), and among the myriad arguments about Measure 9, to institute state-sponsored discrimination against homosexuals, was a bit from a guy named Phillip Ramsdell, who basically ejaculated a list of sexual perversions homosexuals might engage in. The thing was that everything on the list was perfectly accessible to heterosexuals, and it's pretty damn apparent that plenty of heterosexuals take part in things like rimjobs, urophilia, coprophilia, and bondage. Indeed, the most he probably accomplished with that was to give some of his fellow prudes some ideas for spicing up their own intimate relations with their properly submissive wives. One of my favorite political moments,
ever.
There is a powerfully influential set of ideas in our culture that would, in the name of empowering women (according to twenty-first century marketing gimmicks) see their educational, economic, and self-governing potentials deliberately constricted by force of law, leading to severe denigrations of women's quality of life. One of the symptoms within those outcomes is, indeed, rape culture. It's not necessarily that these people are specifically, explicitly evil, but, rather, that they really do seem somehow inhibited from recognizing the demonstrable outcomes of the policies they advocate.
And it is true, nobody ought to appreciate being called a misogynist or rape advocate or whatever else. But neither should we restrain ourselves, for the sake of these advocates feelings, from calling the behavior by its name.
And what we have going on in Alaska, for instance, is a flaming, emblematic example of the rape culture in effect. They're not explicitly calculating these outcomes, but they also so resent the self-indictment of recognizing what they have created that it's going to require dragging that demon kicking and roaring into the sunlight and compelling those who participate in the processes resulting in the rape culture outcome to look at what they're protecting.
And look at how binary it is. There is no question among them, "How can we achieve these values in our society
without these particular negative effects?" And while there is a good chance they are exactly correct, it would seem the problem is that they have already surrendered to the notion that we simply
can't achieve that outcome according to the present human condition. So what we end up with is insistence on policy outcomes that empower and augment rape culture and other misogynies, that in turn simply cannot accept the outcomes it brings.
It's a downward spiral. And if it was an individual, there would be no question of calling it out. Even if it was a large group, there really isn't much question of calling it out. But when that large group includes oneself, a person often, even predictably, will have trouble acknowledging it, even more so calling it out.
How much more do we owe these advocates?
____________________
Notes:
° Begging your pardon; it's just an old joke from my own life. I once had necessity of pointing out that the "Mexicans" a friend was complaining about at her work—because them Mexicans jus' shouldn't act like everyone else 'cause that jus' shows y'how lazy them Mexicans really are—weren't all from Mexico. Punch line? She nodded and explained, "We have Cuban Mexicans, too." No, really; there was so much wrong with that conversation, and then came the "Cuban Mexicans" line.
°° For four years, a graphical footnote on my mother's television reminded me the other day, Styx was the most popular band in the United States among 14-25 year-olds; approximately junior-high to college graduate, or, the target market of rock and roll). "Lorelei", the über-cheesy wunderhit, emerged at the beginning of that period:
Her eyes become of Paradise, she softly speaks my name. She brightens every lonely night, no one's quite the same. She calls me on the telephone, she says be there by eight. Tonight's the night she's moving in, it's time to celebrate!
"The way she moves, oooh-ooh-oooh! I gotta say, 'Lorelei let's live together ....'"
°°° I learned something yesterday, that the 'i' in Daa'ish is almost entirely sublimated. I had started using the word because (A) it is the word the locals in the theatre use, and (B) it's quicker to type and say than any of the Islamic State variants. There is, also, something of a joke going on in some Middle Eastern Islamic communities that has to do with the way the phrase is written; I actually think of the saba for mackerel joke. But for American purposes, the word can be pronounced "Dash", or, more appropriately, "Dâsh".
Works Cited:
Przybyla, Heidi and Eric Sabo. "Limbaugh Embraces Costa Rica Socialized Medicine". Bloomberg. March 16, 2010. Bloomberg.com. September 13, 2014. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=as29boo9FyVQ
Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959.
Khan, Emir Ali. "Sufi Activity". Sufi Thought and Action. Ed. Idries Shah. London: Octagon Press, 1990.
Luciano, Michael. "Fox News Host On Cat-Calling: 'Let Men Be Men'". The Daily Banter. August 29, 2014. TheDailyBanter.com. September 13, 2014. http://thedailybanter.com/2014/08/fox-news-women-on-cat-calling-let-men-be-men/