The sexual revolution was caused by cowardly men

The sexual revolution is largely a product of the failure, and in particular the cowardice, of men. But this is true in a particular way.

It is easy (and entirely appropriate) to morally condemn the behavior of sexually loose men. It is difficult (and entirely appropriate) to morally condemn the behavior of sexually loose women.  Cowards who condemn sexually loose men while making excuses for sexually loose women are “bravely facing the applause”.

The conflation of rape and fornication is just the kind of rhetorical shield from responsibility that craven cowards need. Cowards and sluts go together as the engines driving the sexual revolution.  The cowardice runs so deep that conservatives who supposedly oppose the sexual revolution will readily (and appropriately) condemn a man for trashy talk while making excuses for women who deliberately murder their own children.

So a more complete picture is that the sexual revolution is a product of the cowardice of men and the sluttiness of women, working together.

If you really want to turn back the sexual revolution, the place to start is with yourself.  Don’t be a coward or a slut.

At least one party gets screwed

Our society positively celebrates and encourages fornication, to the point where any undesired consequences of fornication – even consequences to which the perpetrator has explicitly agreed ahead of time in writing – are considered merciless tyranny; the perpetrator, a victim.

At the same time, modernity views consent as what determines justice.  Because of this, precisely (and only) because of the absence of consent, rape is still considered a terrible crime (as long as women are not spending millions of entertainment dollars fantasizing about it).  And of course the scope of “consent” continues to expand, to the point where any foreseen or unforeseen regret for making a free choice, or any subjectively perceived pressure at all to choose one way rather than another, is thought to retroactively nullify consent.

This leads many conservatives to join forces with sexual libertines when it comes to campus rape hysteria, #metoo, and the like.  Because when consensual sex that the woman later regrets is defined to be rape, at least one party to fornication – the man – suffers real consequences.

What game theory says about negotiating with terrorists

Wikipedia describes the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a construct in Game Theory, like this:

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They hope to get both sentenced to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to: betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The offer is:

• If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves 2 years in prison

• If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve 3 years in prison (and vice versa)

• If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve 1 year in prison (on the lesser charge)

The thing to notice about the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a one-off situation is that each prisoner is better off betraying the other, no matter what the other prisoner does.

However real life does not consist of a single one-off choice, and the PD can be re-imagined as an ongoing game with repeated rounds, where years in prison are replaced by points in the game: “less years in prison” equals more points, if you will, and the more points you get the better you are doing in the game.  Each round of the game a player chooses whether to cooperate or defect, and the game is played for an indeterminate number of rounds.  The goal is to maximize how well you are doing “against the House” not against the other player: to minimize total years in prison, if you will.

In this iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, wherein two players engage in the game repeatedly, actual human beings use the game itself to communicate with each other and collaborate.  A very effective strategy in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (played against another human being) is not betrayal but “tit-for-tat“: cooperate with the other player unless he defects; if he defects then ‘punish’ him by defecting on the next round.  In this way a pair of “prisoners” can optimize their score against the house over time, by learning to cooperate.

Iterated “games” are fundamentally different from one-off situations.  This is why intelligent decision makers learn, over time, not to negotiate with terrorists.  Terrorist negotiations may (or may not) change the outcome in a particular case, for better or worse.  (The choice there is ultimately up to the terrorist, not the negotiator, since presumably the negotiator is not proposing to do something evil himself).

But choosing to negotiate with terrorists in general is what gives terrorists power; and in an open-ended iterated “game” this means that in the long run the evil party wins.  Each negotiation increases the power of “team terrorist”. If this goes on long enough morality will invert: “team terrorist” will be seen as victims rather than perpetrators; opposing their wanton slaughter of the innocent will come to be seen as oppressive tyranny; and the mountains of corpses will pile up to the sky.  (I say “will” as if this were a future prediction rather than a retrospective).

At least we’ll all be able to pat ourselves on the back and feel like we are taking a nice pastoral, conservative, live-and-let-live approach, though.

Victim status

Rejecting the death penalty for women who murder their own children raises the question of what punishment a properly ordered society ought to have in place for murdering unborn children.

There is an enormous amount of room between the death penalty and, not only no punishment whatsoever, but a general freakout over the very suggestion that this form of murder ought to carry some sort of punishment — any punishment at all.

Voluntary abortion only has “two victims” in the same sense that any kind of voluntary murder has “two victims” – that is, when we cast the perpetrator as a kind of victim. There is some truth to that, but it doesn’t keep us from punishing murderers.

Raped by dart-throwing monkeys

Christendom college and other backward troglodyte institutions – those which still require actual evidence before taking punitive action against students accused of committing sexual assault – really need to get with the #metoo program. Everyone knows that very few rape accusations are false. Modern research proves it. And how could the experts possibly be wrong?

Women should be tried as adults

Some days it seems like I am the only person on earth who actually respects women.  Men and women are different, both individually and when considered as populations.  But one of the ways we are the same – at least in my view – is that both men and women are moral agents, responsible for the behaviors we choose.

Yet a great many people – notably feminists and the mainstream pro-life movement, though those two are hardly exhaustive – really don’t seem to think this is the case at all.

In the comment thread below reader Jay posted a link to the following image:

This image was allegedly posted in a Facebook advocacy group started and governed by the very same young woman who accused her ex-boyfriend of rape (a year and a half after the alleged incident), in a case we discussed here.

There are several things to observe about this image.  I’ll point out a few.

First, the image characterizes the distinction between rape/sexual assault (a very serious matter) and consensual sex (at best a minor matter, probably nobody else’s business) as something which occurs strictly and only in the woman’s mind.  If she was subjectively afraid to say no and did not actually say no, he is guilty of sexual assault or rape.

Personally I would have no problem with colleges punishing extramarital sex – as demonstrated by actual evidence – severely, independent of consent.  The idea that consent turns extramarital sex into a minor matter in the first place is simply wrong.  Premarital sex is a grave, despicable, life-wrecking moral wrong.  Consenting to fornication is a grave moral wrong.  Physically forcing someone else’s participation in a morally despicable act is itself a morally despicable act, but the idea that fornication is just no big deal while rape is a terrible moral violation is false.  They are both grave moral wrongs and should be treated as such.

Second, we would never buy the “I was afraid to say no” line of argument if the action was, for example, murder. The particulars matter, as always, but the most the particulars could do – even when in fear for your own life – is mitigate some of the guilt for actively participating in a murder.  Saying no, resisting attempted persuasion or compulsion to do evil, is a basic obligation of every moral agent without exception.  Failure to resist evil is itself a moral failure.  And yes, this of course includes women – at least if you have any respect for women.

Third, if this image in fact comes from the alleged source – from the actual young woman who years after the fact accused her boyfriend of “rape” in the Shenandoah wilderness where she drove him – it appears to be a tacit admission that, whatever actually did happen between them, she didn’t actually say “no”.

Believe the man, not the woman

When a man and a woman meet privately they often come away giving different accounts, to the rest of us, of what happened in the encounter.

When this sort of “he said, she said” situation arises the important thing is to believe the man, not the woman; at least according to recent critics of Christendom College who favor a gossip-based approach to justice over an evidence-based approach.

(HT Ian).

Justice on the gossip standard

Consider two college classmates, Bob and Fred.  For a time they seemed to be friends; later they stopped being friendly.

Fred talks to a professor about his falling out with Bob.  Fred claims that a year and a half prior Fred had driven Bob out into the Shenandoah wilderness to go hiking.  He says that the two had disagreed about how far into the wilderness they were going to hike, and that when Fred insisted that they go no further the larger and stronger Bob attacked him, beat him up, and forced him to go all the way to Old Rag.  Then Fred drove the two of them back to campus and said nothing about the incident for a year and a half.

The professor (correctly) tells Fred that if this story is true he was a victim of criminal assault and battery.

Bob denies that he ever threatened (criminal assault) or hit (criminal battery) Fred, and says that Fred was the one insisting that they go on a longer hike.

As an administrator at this small college with a very small campus and very limited resources, you have to decide what to do.  Fred already has a psychiatrist/counselor, and in the course of investigating one of the things you do is ask Fred if you can talk to his counselor.  The college is far too small, maybe a few dozen classrooms in total, to enforce a regime of strict separation every time two students don’t get along and accuse each other of wrongdoing.

Knowing all this Fred’s parents continue to send him back to the college, where his alleged attacker also continues to attend, because apparently they themselves don’t think he is in any danger.  Bob is subjected to special scrutiny; is reprimanded and punished in a few cases where there is evidence of obnoxious behavior toward Fred.

Seven years later a flock of shrieking harpies descend, demanding justice for Fred’s victimization to “assault and battery,” carefully avoiding the inconveniently truthful word “alleged.”  The form of justice they demand is to insist that the college must “take accusations seriously” — that is, the college must treat (some^[1]) gossip and rumor as if it were true for the purpose of making administrative decisions.

It is at this point that you, gentle reader, have to decide what sort of society you really want to live in: a civilization where public justice is carried out based on evidence available to third parties, third parties who out of necessity have to make authoritative decisions about what to do; or a banana republic in which public justice is carried out based on unverifiable gossip.  It is indeed a weakness of evidence based justice that some people get away with wrongdoing; though of course this is also true, to an even greater extent, in a gossip-based system.

Be careful what you decide; because the most common refrain some time after saying “what could it hurt?” is “how were we supposed to know?”  You are setting up your own daughters to fall victim to a future transsexual/non-cis gossip system of justice; since natural, surgically unaltered women are not at the top of the liberal victim hierarchy.

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[1] The gossip and rumor which must be treated as authoritatively true are the gossip and rumor that the harpies favor.  Other gossip and rumor is to be discounted.  The criteria for accepting some gossip and rejecting other gossip is ambiguous, but definitely does not involve evidence.

Dog bites man, women and children hardest hit

Apparently an attention starved Catholic mommy blogger wrote a hit piece against Christendom College.  I won’t link to the two part article itself because I’m not interested in driving traffic to trolls; but what follows is easily verifiable.  As usual with hubbubs like this I have a few specific things to point out, and no intention of addressing everything that everyone is saying on the subject.

The central ‘stage setting’ incident in part one of the hit piece took place in 2009.  Apparently a young female student drove herself (she was the driver with the car keys) and her boyfriend away from the college, past the local town with its hundreds of businesses and thousands of residences, deep into the Shenandoah mountains, to an isolated location in a national park.  A year and a half later she was talking about it with a professor and claimed she now realized that she was raped, in a classic “he said she said, long after the fact” scenario.

I find this story perfectly plausible. It is also manifestly unverifiable.

By all accounts the college did everything it could do in as professional, compassionate, and (nontrivially) legal a manner as anyone could reasonably expect.  The young man was investigated and punished for actually verifiable behaviors on campus, etc — the details (putative and otherwise), again, are available elsewhere so there is no need to rehash them here.

At least one of the individuals cited in the article series claims, in the combox, that the blogger’s citation is a tendentious misrepresentation of what was said in the interview.  So the veracity and fairness of the article is publicly disputed by one of its own sources.  But even if we grant the entire factual situation as reported, the articles are a complete hash of emotive nonsense.  The young woman who claims she was raped explains, as paraphrased by the blogger using her as clickbait:

But several former and current students say the school’s sheltered, highly structured campus culture actually facilitates sexual assault …

She says that the rules against romantic public displays of affection were so restrictive, it drove couples off campus.

So the central point of the article (its very title is “Are Women Safe in Christendom’s Bubble?”) seems to be that the College does such a great job enforcing decent behavior on campus that this forces students to go off campus to drink, engage in sexual debauchery, etc.  Horrors!  Christendom is so well-governed that it is virtually impossible, certainly in comparison to most colleges, to sexually assault women on campus!

And apparently in this specific case the mere proximity of the campus was so oppressive that it was necessary for the alleged victim herself – again she was the driver – to motor, not just a few miles into the nearby town, but to far off in the isolated Virginia mountain wilderness.  How else to fully escape the aura of moralistic oppression at Christendom and make possible the campus rapeyness that everyone in the Current Year has come to expect?

The logic doesn’t get any better as the lengthy articles progress.  The young woman’s father complains that students are punished for being drunk on campus but are not punished for “being a rapist” on campus:

“I always find it interesting they always try to punish students for drinking off campus, if you come back to campus drunk,” [the father] said. “I say, if you rape off campus, when you come back to campus, you’re still a rapist.”

In case the category error isn’t obvious, consider a different situation — streaking, say.  Nobody would fault the college for punishing a student caught running around naked on campus.  Everyone with any modicum of sanity would fault the college for punishing Student A with no evidence other than that Student B unverifiably claims to have seen Student A streaking deep in the Shenandoah wilderness after she drove him there.  (“But women very rarely lie about streaking” come emotion-laden shrieks from the Estrogenic Cloud).

A commenter suggested that the risk men bear of being falsely accused of sexual assault or rape is analogous the risk that women bear of getting pregnant: that this somehow balances things out (which is the important thing).  The obvious difference is that a man can be falsely accused of rape even if he did nothing wrong at all; whereas pregnancy only comes about in a very specific, concrete, well understood way.  No woman needs to adopt the (at this point well vindicated) Pence rule to refrain from sexual intercourse and avoid pregnancy. But any man who doesn’t follow the Pence rule is taking on the risk of being falsely accused of sexual harassment or worse.

The question of actual evidence and its relation to “victim blaming” gets to the heart of the matter.  If this young man in fact legitimately raped this young woman, as demonstrated by actual solid evidence, by all means punish him in the harshest manner as a rapist. There is no statute of limitations on rape, and nobody is responsible for an act of rape itself except the rapist.

But punishment in this case – indeed public rendering of the truth at all – is not (as reported at least) possible, because there isn’t any evidence. The only people who actually know what actually happened are the two people who were there at the time: he said, she said.

A more pertinent question then is, who is responsible for there not being any evidence?  Who put us in this situation?  Was it Christendom College with its overbearing and oppressive institutional success, when compared to pretty much all colleges everywhere, in keeping rapeyness and even consensual debauchery off campus; or was it someone else?

The most proximate person responsible for the impossibility of determining the truth in an objective, public way is the person in the literal driver seat who chose to drive the two of them, alone, deep into the Virginia wilderness.  And in close proximity to that person – perhaps carrying the greater responsibility, because responsibility comes along with age, wisdom, and authority – are parents who give driver’s licenses to young women and send them off to college hundreds of miles distant without any inkling that a seventeen year old driving deep into the wilderness with a random boyfriend is every bit as imprudent as a ten year old getting into a car with a stranger offering candy.

Close behind are trolling mommy bloggers who write self-serving hit pieces against an obviously well managed Catholic college precisely because of that college’s undeniable success, versus all of its peers, in keeping rape at the status of an off campus problem rather than an on campus problem.

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UPDATE 1/21/2018: Added the sentence “So the veracity and fairness of the article is publicly disputed by one of its own sources. ”  Corrected the word “estrogenic”.

Doing violence to prison statistics

Cane Caldo recently objected to my contention that violence is the besetting sin of incontinent men, citing federal prison statistics.  One problem with citing federal prison statistics — even stipulating the veracity of official methods which categorize various crimes proximate to violence (e.g. burglary) as as nonviolent — is that the federal prison population is not representative of the prison population in general:

Obama made this a key point in his NAACP speech: “But here’s the thing: Over the last few decades, we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before. And that is the real reason our prison population is so high.”

This claim, which is widely accepted by policymakers and the public, is simply wrong. It’s true that nearly half of all federal inmates have been sentenced for drug offenses, but the federal system holds only about 14 percent of all inmates. In the state prisons, which hold the remaining 86 percent, over half of prisoners are serving time for violent crimes, and since 1990, 60 percent of the growth in state prison populations has come from locking up violent offenders. Less than a fifth of state prisoners — 17 percent — are serving time for nonviolent drug offenses.

…

In other words, for all the talk about nonviolent offenders, a majority of our prisoners have been convicted of a violent act, and even more have some history of violence.

(Emphasis mine)