Author Archives: Ginkgo

FEMALE PRIVILEGE – Gendering Class, Part I

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Commenter Schala has remarked several times that the way the gender system in our societies works is that women are a functional aristocracy and men are a functional proletariat. (Of course there is a kyriarchal class above all of this, composed of both men and women in about equal numbers, the elites we are constantly told are all men. The men are merely more visible, but the women benefit equally with the men.)

Schala’s thesis pulls a lot of disparate cultural norms into a framework with a lot of explanatory and predictive power. I haven’t worked this out into any kind of final form, the list of norms and features of the culture is likely incomplete, there will be connections I do not yet see, but I want to pull together what I do have for comment.

Let’s look at some of these cultural norms:

Dress – Women are allowed, expected in fact, to dress stylishly and even flamboyantly. Men are generally not allowed this, and in fact even showing an interest in dress is policed.

Work – Outdoor work tends to be a male preserve; indoor work tends to be a female preserve. (Certainly there is plenty of low-status indoor work, but even low-status indoor work is higher-status than equivalent outdoor work and when men get indoor work it is often as a reward or considered a raise in status.) This indoor/outdoor dichotomy means that men have the job of dealing with strangers, and that ironically means that men deal with warfare, politics above the clan level, commerce and all the other things that are the source of economic and political power. The price of course is all the risk and injury that entails.

Physical violence – A woman who inflicts physical violence on a man is often supported and justified by various gender stereotypes around violence, while a man who inflicts violence on a woman is considered at the least unmanly and at the worst some kind of beast. This is encoded in the “You never hit a girl” rule.

Coarseness and refinement – Gender norms for males allow or even require coarseness of manner while women are generally policed for coarseness, even now. These days women can engage in a whole spectrum of previously forbidden rude behaviors, but if you look carefully, they have to compensate with some kind of hyper-refinement in some other area. It may be daintiness of diet, to the point of rejecting certain foods as coarse or “gross” or it may be exaggerated disgust at the crudity of men.

How does this relate to class? When we look at modes of dress, types of work and norms around physical violence , we see that the female end of the spectrum aligns with the prerogatives of aristocrats – expensive and conspicuous modes of dress, staying in out of the sun and cold, and protection form physical violence from below, and that the male end of the spectrum aligns with the lot of peasants and laborers – drab and functional dress, outdoor work being considered more manly, and vulnerability to physical violence inflicted with impunity.

How did this system arise? Obviously it was not some female conspiracy to grab power. Women wouldn’t have had the power to pull that off anyway. I think it evolved as a confluence of various lines of historical development.

The Indoor/Outdoor Dichotomy – This seems to be one constant across cultures around the world. Men deal with everything outside the home or the clan. They defend the land and resources the community needs, they deal with strangers, either in war or in politics – even with divine strangers, which is how men figure so prominently in the Old Testament over women – and outdoor work is for men – working fields, tending livestock, resource extraction in mines and forests and on the sea. Women on the other hand have the job of maintaining the base camp for all of this. Women do the initial norming of children, they process crops and the catch into actual food and they often set the norms of behavior for everyone in the this base camp. But as soon as an activity normally associated with women starts being done for outsiders it becomes men’s work, and this is why baking, pottery, cooking, even weaving become men’s work as soon as someone is paying for it – because it’s only strangers who have to pay for any of this.

Conversely transgression of this division are policed. Within living memory little girls were punished for trying to climb trees, barred from athletics celebrated like oddities for being able to shoot well, drive a car of fly an airplane. Even now farting is considered somehow unfeminine, as if women’s bowels work differently from men’s.

Modes of dress – Here I think the split is due to the rise of capitalism and industrialization. We often think of capitalism as the triumph of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, but in fact it was the triumph of the bourgeoisie over the aristocracy, with the bourgeoisie wresting power over the proletariat form the aristocracy. This process took centuries and the two contesting classes kept distinct in a number of ways – snobbery on the aristocratic side and prudish moral superiority on the bourgeois side. So where male aristocrats decked themselves out like drag queens – just watch the opening scenes of Dangerous Liaisons for a taste of this – the rising bourgeoisie kept to sedate and drab colors and sturdy materials for their business suits. These naturally have evolved into luxury items of clothing, with luxurious materials, but the drab colors remain. And in any case, jeans and Carhartt are still more macho.

Coarseness and refinement – this is a huge area and I don’t have this mapped out much at all.

 

So that’s the first cut. Please comment and contribute and I will thank you. And if that process of contribution and refinement leads to junking this thesis, thanks for that too.

THE PRINCESS AND THE PEA – “Female” as a slur

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Believe it or not……

Did you know that “female” is now considered a misogynistic slur in some quarters? Oh yes, and you are a woman-hating oppressor if you don’t fall into line.

There several kinds of dysfunction on display in this one:

First there is the appropriation of opprobrium over genuinely offensive and more to the point, actually dangerous terms such as “nigger’ or “faggot” that have a long history of licensing actual violence, both mid to high level terrorist violence up to and including murder by torture. “Female”? Not so much.

But that doesn’t stop them from trying, does it? It doesn’t stop them from putting on the wounded little voices and let their big, round eyes brim with tears and when that has worked its usual magic of painting them as righteous victims, putting on their anger face and getting all serious and demanding that people take them and their heinous oppression seriously. Heinous indeed – you’d think they had come home and found you had washed their favorite jeans or something.

Of course there can be gender discrimination that doesn’t quite reach the level of horror of lynching. So they are free to make the case as to how “female” gets us there.

Then there is just the Orwellian totalitarianism of the exercise of power in presuming to dictate what words are acceptable or not. It’s straight out of 1984. We’re all very used to this kind of thing by now but it really never loses its power to disgust.

And then finally there is the irritating attempt to make a mountain out of a molehill we call the Princess and the Pea. Is this all just about projecting power, imposing their will on the language? Is this about showing how dainty and hyper-sensitive they can be? Who knows, but it sure is pathetic.

GENERAL – New words, Part III

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Some new expressions I have come across that I want to share:

SPINE UP – Typhonblue asked a while ago why there was no really suitable term for “man up”. “Man up” and it’s equally stupid variant “nut up” and useless for a couple of reasons. One is that they are misandrist, as part of the Real Man narrative. The other is that they are misogynist, since they imply that adulthood and fortitude are somehow something that only males have to do. So I am proposing the truly non-gendered term “spine up.”
(Yes, I am aware that the term is “specieist”, or rather “phylumist”. I’ll take the hit.)

CREEPY BITTER GIRL – This is a specific reference to a particular person, but I think it can be a useful general term. It really describes very well a subset of internet feminists who serve so well to discredit feminism. I know feminists must grind their teeth over this.
You have all run across these people – hateful, bigoted, able to distort anything to fit their worldview and unable to empathize with anyone who differs in the least from them. (This is hardly a female problem; this culture induces this kind of acquired narcissism in lots of people. It is horribly adaptive in a lot of modern-day settings.)
These are the self-styled “feminists” who pour bile on men, on trans people, on straight women, on MRAs, the list is endless and the sanctimonious ego inflation is addictive, apparently.
It has taken me more than five years to see past these people. Now I don’t have to react to these people or dismiss them as weird. I can just acknowledge their woundedness and put their hatred and bitterness in context.

LEGBEARD – I saw this one in a thread in Reddit MenRights. It apparently refers to the stereotypical hairy-legged radfem and is a comeback-by-analogy to “neckbeard” a disparaging redfem term for MRAs.

BIGOT FACTORY – This is a parent who makes bigots out of his or her kids, with an added semantic feature – this parent makes bigots who hate her or his demographic. This is the mother who makes a misogynist of her son or the father who makes a man-hater out of his daughter. Another keeper from Reddit MensRights

PRINCESS FEMINISM – Femdelusion coined this one.
This refers to the feminism of young privileged women on campuses. This is the feminism that privileges the interests of young women over old women, girls, men and basically anyone who is not part of the group. This is the feminism that splits into in-fighting factions busy excommunicating and anathematizing others as anti-feminist, and has turned feminism from a sisterhood into a series of sororities, complete with their own version of frat parties, busy defining terms and identifying oppressions and taking offense over the littlest pea they can find. It reeks of entitlement.

LADIES’ AUXILIARY OF THE PATRIARCHY – Feminists, radfems and trad-fems – not a dime’s worth of difference

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Barbarossaaaa has a post introducing the trad-fem. He focuses on the entitlement mentality that both radfems and trad-fems share, and that sits coiled like a worm at the center of all their claims and pronouncements and demands.

A trad-fem is a woman who opposes feminism because it disrespects men doing their duty by women. This trad-fem expects men to do their duty by women, by the way. Because after all that’s what makes a man a real man. And feminists are mean because the disrespect these men. (That’s not the real reason feminists are mean though, the real reason is that men are starting to question this arrangement themselves, and feminists are giving them cover and terminology, however ironic that is.) And as Typhonblue pointed out somewhere else it can hardly be any coincidence all these trad-fems are coming out of the woodwork just at this particular juncture.

This article is for all those MRAs who fantasize about going back to some mythical Golden Age, some kind of good old days when everything was just wonderful for men. Bullshit – these trad-fems were what men back in the bad old days all faced – women who thought a man’s value was in his usefulness to women and who had no qualms about gender policing man to hard labor and death while they stayed comfortably at home.

This is why MHRM is anti-traditionalist.

Radfems and trad-fems appear 180 degrees out on their views of everything, and feminists in general insist that they are the true crusaders against the old order, but that claim crumbles under scrutiny.

If you look at all their core assumptions they are traditionalist. Every feminist trope requires that you accept female hypoagency and male hyperagncy as fact – the rape and DV narratives all assume female innocence regardless of actual conduct – hypoagency – and male guilt, regardless of who is actually aggressing whom. That is the macho white knight heart of “patriarchy”.

Core feminism is basically indistinguishable from tradcon patriarchy once you peel off the mask of modernism.

And this extends beyond core assumptions to actual working relations. If you look at the history of feminist advocacy and activism, the one constant is reliance on the power of the patriarchal state. The suffrage movement didn’t resort to armed violence – and this was an era of extensive violence between workers and capitalists – because they did not have to. They asked for the vote and they got it. The same goes for entry into the wage economy or the corporate world, or for equal access to universities – they asked and access was granted, and in a very short time, in one or two generations, against basically no real resistance. Pushing against an open door.

Actual working relations – commenter Tamen has found an apposite example in this statement from Michigan NOW. Michigan NOW is so opposed to father’s and children’s basic human rights in their opposition to equal parenting that they are partnering with Focus on the Family on this. Dalrock regularly comments on the anti-male nature of a lot what churches advocate in the area of family life and here you have a clear example.

Despite white feminists’ protestations of broad-church concern for all oppressed people, they are really not all that different from their suffragette forebears who were solidly white supremacist in their rhetoric and justifications for extending the vote to themselves. The parallels between feminist rhetoric and policy positions about rape and that of the KKK are obvious – disdain for due process, centering rape as the ultimate crime (beyond murder of suspected rapists even) and definitions of rape that privilege women as fragile victims, and never, ever as perpetrators.

This point has been made over and over and it needs to be made over and over until it starts to sink in.

MALE DISPOSABILITY – Jodi Arias found guilty of 1st degree murder. What do you know.

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This just in – Jodi Arias has been found guilty of the premeditated murder of her former boyfriend, Travis Alexander. Genderratic discussed this case earlier with special attention on the way Arias and one of her expert witnesses were relying on gander stereotypes favorable to Arias to portray the murder as self defense against abuse.

So now the jury has rendered its verdict. They apparently didn’t buy Arias’ and La Violette’s narratives. I wonder what the gender ratio on the jury was and what difference that made. In public commentary it seemed like women were leading the pack in decrying her lies and manipulations. Good for them; now if the men would just wise up too.

Is the culture coming to a tipping point? Did disgust over the Casey Anthony acquital figure in this? We won’t know unless the tipping keeps tipping to a point where the tilt becomes obvious, the point where the courts look at facts instead of relying on gender stereotypes. But this looks like a start

 

IT’S SHIT LIKE THIS, FEMINISTS – This is how deep the rot goes – #killallmen

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A blogger calling herself stavvers at Another Angry Woman has an interesting post up. It is a real ball of sociopathic self-justification and gendercide fantasy. She starts out:

“Well, well, well. It seems the latest thing feminism is fighting about is the phrase “kill all men”.

Because apparently there is some debate to be had on whether or not this is problematic formulation. And this article just goes on and keeps getting worse, staring out with the usual bogus disclaimers, “This is all just a completely harmless hypothetical that reveals nothing about our entrenched bigotry…” before launching into denialism and self-justification.

“So, before I launch into this defence, let me point out that nobody is actually planning to kill all men. Not even some men. It’s just a phrase, an expression of rage, a rejection of a system which is riddled with violence.”

Well then it’s a completely ignorant expression of rage, since men are overwhelmingly the victims of deadly violence, usually at the hands of men – this is usually the only time these killings are punished and recorded as crimes –and often at the behest of women. If it’s intended as a rejection of violence, one has to wonder why it is directed at the primary victims of that violence.

One has to wonder at this blind spot and what might be causing it. One does not have to wonder for long; it will become very clear.

“Kill all men” is a shorthand war cry, much the same as “ACAB” or “tremble hetero swine” or “die cis scum”. It represents a structural critique, presented in a provocative fashion.

The difference being, and the reason this is dishonest, is that women are hardly the relatively powerless minority that gay or trans people are, so there is no real equivalence between these battle cries. Women are the majority of voters, have complete control over child rearing and enculturation in society and control the majority of disposable income.

Exhibit A: Manipulation (Appeal to pity)

“Patriarchy harms men, it’s true, but it oppresses the fuck out of women, and there are few, if any men who are not complicit in this oppression. Most men are not rapists or abusers, but many are complicit in perpetuating this violence by spreading rape apologist myths, by failing to stand against violence against women and girls, and by simply not nailing their colours to the mast and acting as allies.”

Let’s look at this a piece at a time:

Patriarchy hurts men too. Such a deep insight. Patriarchy oppresses women with food and shelter and protection and modern medical care, but it KILLS men to make that all happen.

Now we get the Pure Vessel thing: “if any men who are not complicit in this oppression.” Apparently no women are complicit in any of this, not even women who kill or rape other women, or who send men off to die in war.

Rape apology? Oh we know about rape apology. How’s this for some rape apology – “B-b-b-but it’s not real rape because patriarchy and rape is a crime of gendered oppression, and besides it’s not systemic, just him individually and it’s always really, really rare and anyway it’s not as bad when it happens to a boy as it is when it happens to a girl and he’s the real rapist here anyway, he forced her to do all this – the fact that he was an infant doesn’t mean he doesn’t have male privilege. Oh, and he got lucky so he should be grateful.” You can every one of those points in feminsts spaces when male rape victims are mentioned (with some shining exceptions).

And the appeal to White Knights – “by failing to stand against violence against women and girls,” – apparently stavvers is unaware of the degree and scope of violence that men will visit on other men in the defense of women and girls. There are plenty of examples of this from recent news articles in her own country, but we have our share of this mentality here too– this is how these people have acted in the past when a man offended the sacred person of a white woman – or even was simply accused.

And finally, “and by simply not nailing their colours to the mast and acting as allies.” Apparently for stavvers the alliance is all one way, women owe men nothing in return in loyalty as allies, men exist for and their value depends protecting women and nailing their colors to women’s flagpole. This the form of objectification Martha Nussbaum calls “Instrumentality”.

She goes deeper into this:

Exhibit B: Denialism (Lying)

“And this is because misogynists completely fail to understand how power works. They miss the fact that in this society, violence against women and girls is rife,…”

Well for one thing, all misogynists grow up under the control, nurture and guidance of mothers, so they almost certainly know exactly power, absolute power over food and shelter and punishment, the power of life and death, works.

And for another, the scale of violence in stavvers’ society is probably the same as in mine – several times greater than against men and boys. That probably is not apparent to stavvers because those deaths are invisible to her, probably because they are of no importance to her. They simply don’t count. This the form of objectification Martha Nussbaum calls “Violability”. This lack of empathy is sociopathic.

Exhibit C: Gaslighting

“I suppose it is hardly surprising that utterances of killing all men draw such ire, even from feminists. Under patriarchy, violence is the domain of men.”

So apparently India is not patriarchal at all, and not just India. Apparently neither is China.

“Even from feminists”? The mind vomits. Is this how a feminist refers to feminists who happen to have some human decency?

“There is no serious threat of the women rising up and actually killing all men, all the while the hum of background noise of another women raped, murdered or beaten by a man. That this culture of violence is gendered, and the system is set up in favour of keeping things that way.”

Then she really doubles down on the sociopathy:

“Part of the power of SCUM is the effect it has on men. At my reading group, the men present were allies, and I remember vividly one saying “I don’t think she went far enough at the end, letting some of the men live and act as the Men’s Auxilliary”. All of the other men nodded along. They got that this idea is just fantasy, just a satire.

On the other hand, it’s pretty difficult to mention SCUM (or indeed just cry “kill all men”) without the misogynists crawling in, crying misandry.”

So she sees value in a gendercide fantasy because its sociopathic bigotry offends men, and then she passive-aggressively ties it up with a swipe about “crying misandry”. There’s probably a clinical name for this kind of behavior.

“So no, we’re not actually advocating killing all men, but what we need is for men to understand why we might. A secondary function of this powerful little phrase is to seek out allies. Some men simply cannot fathom that we might be this furious.”

Oh the irony, this coming from someone who cannot fathom why men might be furious, and who thinks she can dismiss it with her ….

“And of course, all men are not deserving of death. In fact, most of them aren’t. I can think of a fair few I do wish painful, violent death on, although this remains but a fantasy. Patriarchy would destroy me were I to ever touch a hair on their head. Patriarchy already tries to punish me for merely expressing these thoughts, because they are unbecoming of a woman.

And of course, all men are not deserving of death. In fact, most of them aren’t.”

Oh how very generously lenient of her.

Patriarchy would destroy her…? This is denialism taken to the point of delusion. Patriarchy protects women like her and finds all kinds of excuses to dismiss her violence. The Battered Woman syndrome scam comes to mind, but more systemically the female sentencing discount is well-documented for almost any crime of violence a woman can commit, if it even gets labeled a crime of violence at all.

And when any of us finds any of this troubling, ha ha, it’s all a joke, are we really so stupid as to take any of this seriously? Are we really so crass as call it what it is and try to rip the gaslighting veil away? Besides, where do we get off privileging our own preceptions, so tainted by male privilege, over her reassurances? This is the form of objectification Martha Nussbaum calls “Denial of subjectivity”.

The Sociopathic Subtext

This is the sociopathic subtext to this attempt to explain all this away – that this is no big deal, that men are supposed to be men and just shrug this off. And “men being men” means men being tough and just sucking it up – an appeal to machismo. And men are just so big and strong, so all powerful, that a woman could never, ever harm a man, and he’s just a pussy if he has the temerity to complain. I thought feminism called machismo “toxic masculinity”, I thought feminism opposed all that.

The sociopathic subtext to just trying to pass this off as some kind of harmless joke and not the reflection of deeply entrenched attitudes with real-word consequences is that men just don’t matter enough for any of this to matter. It’s perfectly alright to treat men as violable and as instruments of women’s welfare and to dismiss men’s own perceptions of thier situation, because hey, they’re just men. Objectification is the center of sociopathy and the lack of empathy we see in stavvers’ post.

 Solidarity with sociopathy

So this is the quality of the thinking and the depth of the pathology at work in this article. I have seen a lot of pushback in feminist spaces on this article, but tellingly not one person goes the distance and just says “She’s not a feminist”. Simple as that.That’s all it would take to prove that feminists really don’t tolerate this kind of bigotry in their movement. They just have to denounce it as anti-feminist. That’s all. Then again maybe that silence is consent.

And they wonder why we distrust them and their motives and their explanations.

FEMALE PRIVILEGE – Evidence collection -Police violence and who it targets

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By now most of us in the US are aware of how much “special attention” the police seem to give black men in general but especially young black men. Cases like that of Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima make the news, but Oscar Grant my not be as familiar. And these black men don’t have to men at all; the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in March of 2013 that police had acted properly in handcuffing and then tasering a minor for approaching a woman who happened to be his mother. (The police said they acted out of caution for the women’s safety; they ended up arresting her too so it’s not likely she felt very threatened until the police went after her son.) To be sure, white men are often roughed up by the police, get shot for no particular reason. Whiteness helps but it is no guarantee of your civil rights.

What does appear to guarantee your civil rights is being of the right gender. I am looking for examples of similar police violence, to the point of death, inflicted on women. I do not recall any and I can’t find any. I suspect if we do find instances, the incidences for various dempographic groups will resemble that for incarceration.

This is an appeal for assistance in finding these cases of police violence against women. It will be interesting to see how much of this is directed against white women.

I have heard at least anecdotally that youngish white women are targeted for traffic stops and that sounds plausible to me. I don’t know if they are cited at disproportionate levels and I doubt they are arrested, even at the same level as other demographics. Thanks for your help in this.

Also I think we will find this is a Western pattern of discrimination, if in fact it exists. Ni Yulan’s gender certainly did not lead the Beijing police to spare her at all.

Again, thank you for your assistance in this.

MALE DISPOSABILITY – Erasing male rape victims, Part II – Tamen evaluates a British and a Norwegian study on rape victims and finds invalidating methodological errors

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Typhonblue asked Tamen about a British study of crime, the CESW, especially about the rape statistics:

“I looked at the source documents. Is the reason why there is such a low rate of men reporting “serious sexual assault” in both the alternative and current questionnaires?”

Tamen answered:

“Yes, there are two reasons I can see right away.

1) The number is low because it doesn’t count men raped by envelopment (I guess you knew this):

Serious sexual assault in the current questionnaire only includes rape by penetration by a penis or an object (sexual assault by penetration) and doesn’t include “being made to penetrate”. This in line with UK’s Sexual Offence Act of 2003 which defines rape in a way that requires that the perpetrator has a penis he penetrates the victim with (no female rapists in the UK, although I believe a woman has been convicted for accessory to rape when she encouraged, enabled and abetted a man who raped another woman).

Serious sexual assault in the alternative question set includes in addition to a comprehensive list of ways to be penetrated by a penis, body part or object the choice “Did some other sex act not described above” alternative which might be a fit for rape by envelopment. But if one read the methodology report carefully one finds that any respondents who answered “Did some other sex act not described above” is counted as non-victims.

As we know from the NISVS 2010 Report a large portion of men who are raped are raped by envelopment. In the NISVS 2010 it was 1.4% vs 4.8%, In CWES it’s impossible to say since “being made to penetrate” is not a single category, but is lumped in with “sexual touching”, but 0.5% – 0.3% are raped and 1.1% – 2.5% report sexual touching. I am afraid that doesn’t tell us much as I suspect sexual touching will not catch many of the male victims of rape by envelopment. I for one would never label what happened to me for mere “sexual touching”.

2) The number is low because it doesn’t count a large subset of victims who have been raped (as defined by the SOA2003):

The CSEW asked about incidents happening since the respondents turned 16. NISVS 2010 also included CSA in the lifetime numbers where they found that 25% of the men who experienced rape (as defined by CDC) did so when they were 10 or younger (12.7% for women). What percentage of male victims were victimized before the age of 16 is not reported in the NISVS 2010. If the age demographic of male victims in the UK is similar to male victims in the US then a large subset of victims are not reported in the tables in the linked report.”

Tamen expanded on this in an earlier comment at Reddit MensRights

http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1dbc0h/crime_survey_for_england_and_wales_victims_of/

” It has been brought to my attention that the Crime Survery for England and Wales (CESW) did a split-sample experience to evaluate a new question set. I have criticized the published report of the CESW (which apparently is based on the answers from the original question set) in a comment at FeministCritics.

Home Office published a methodology report titled Analysis of the 2010/11 British Crime Survey intimate personal violence split-sample experiment with an analysis of the differences between the old and the new questionaires. Among some of the more interesting findings was that the rate of men reporting victimization increased with the new question set. In fact the new question set found that more men than women reported having been sexually assaulted by their partner the last year (Table 2 page 22).

So what question does this prompts from the analysts?

If the alternative question set is favoured then are further amendments needed to minimise the risk of reporting experiences that should not be classed as IPV? Should these be limited to the stalking questions, less serious sexual assault questions or to others?

The cynic in me is pretty sure which incidents they think are overreported (not really IPV).

But then I was really floored. What I will quote here is related to the following question (NIPV35AA- NIPV35AF) in the new CSEW questionaire:

You said that someone has forced you to have sexual intercourse or take part in some other sexual act when you were not capable of consent or when you made it clear you did not want to. What did they do to you?

If this has happened more than once since you were 16, please select all those that apply.

We need this level of detail to allow us to classify the exact type of sexual assault experienced.

Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis
Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers)
Penetrated your mouth with their penis
Did some other sex act not described above
Don’t know
Don’t want to answer
Any male who has been made to penetrate someone else would answer “Did some other sex act not described above”. Let’s see how that is analysed:

In the analysis presented here those respondents who said that they had only experienced ‘some other sex act not described above’ were categorised as non-victims to ensure that the category of serious sexual assault retained the same definition as in the current question set (this is not an option in the current question set).

WHAT!? Non-victims!?”

This is the comment at Feminist Critics that Tamen refers to:

“I recently was made aware by a feminist Redditor of a report of sexual offences based on (among others) the Crime Survey for England and Wales. The report found a much higher victmization rate for females than for men. I took a closer look and what follows is a slightly edited version of the reply I made her:

The UK uses the archaic common law definition of rape in its Sexual Offences Act 2003 – it defines rape in a way that requires that the perpetrator must have a penis.
It defines Assault by penetration in a way that requires that the victim’s body has been penetrated by an object or part of the perpetrators body.

The Brits have their own version of the NCVS called CSEW – Crime Survey for England and Wales. The most recent one was published January 2013. The Ministry of Justice, Home Office and the Office for National Statistics published in January a report looking specifically at the sexual offences part of the CSEW as well as police reports, court proceeding, sentencing, duration of cases, offender management and offender histories (recidivist rates, multiple convictions etc.). The report was published January 10th 2013 and is called:

An Overview of Sexual Offending in England and Wales.

Let’s examine to what extent this report counts male victims of rape (including rape by envelopment) to see if it’s possible to estimate the number of male victims in the UK in a similar manner to how one could find the male number of male rape victims in the US by looking at the “being made to penetrate” category.

Rape and Assault by penetration are grouped by the report in a category called: “Most serious sexual offence.”

A man being forced to have oral, vaginal or anal intercourse with a woman without his consent is a victim of sexual assault by the law. The definition of sexual assault is:
Section 3 of the Act makes it an offence for any male or female to intentionally touch another person sexually without his or her consent. A person found guilty of this offence could be sent to prison for a maximum of ten years.

Meaning that by UK law a man raped by a woman forcing him to have unprotected vaginal sex with her without his consent are put in the same category as a woman being touched on the butt by a man — not to defend the latter, but there is a difference between those two.

It’s even worse in the CSEW survey because there it’s being categorized as “Other sexual offences”, which includes exposure, sexual activity with children (excluding rape and sexual assault) and sexually threatening behaviour.

In fact, when I look at the questionnaire used for the CSEW survey they base their findings on, I actually found a set of questions which male victims of rape by envelopment may answer affirmatively:

Since you were 16, has anyone ever forced you to have sexual intercourse or take part in some other sexual act, when you were not capable of consent or when you made it clear you did not want to?

By sexual intercourse we mean vaginal, anal or oral penetration.
This may have been a partner, a family member, a friend or work colleague, someone you knew casually, or a stranger.

If the respondent answered yes to the above they are asked another question (NIPV35AA- NIPV35AF):

You said that someone has forced you to have sexual intercourse or take part in some other sexual act when you were not capable of consent or when you made it clear you did not want to. What did they do to you?

If this has happened more than once since you were 16, please select all those that apply.

We need this level of detail to allow us to classify the exact type of sexual assault experienced.
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers)
* Penetrated your mouth with their penis
* Did some other sex act not described above
* Don’t know
* Don’t want to answer

Here one would think that any male victims of “being made to penetrate someone else” must answer “(4) Did some other sex act not described above” to be counted correctly. However, the question itself listed “some other sex act” as something separate from sexual intercourse — thus perhaps confusing the respondent. Conceivably, victims of a forced kiss, a grope and so on could also answer “yes” here, as those could be understood to be some sex act other than intercourse. As I understand it, respondents are more likely to respond to questions which describe the acts rather than the name of the act or a bag-name of a set of acts. It also really doesn’t matter that this question was under the heading “SERIOUS SEXUAL ASSAULT”, because if the answer is “4″ then it’s being put in the category “Other sexual offences” in the summary, tables and charts in the report.

Contrast that with this question asked under the section: “SERIOUS SEXUAL ASSAULT”:

Since the age of 16, has ANYONE ever done any of the following things to you, when you made it clear that you did not agree or when you were not capable of consent? This may have been a partner, a family member, someone you knew casually, or a stranger.

* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis, even if only slightly
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers) even if only slightly
* Penetrated your mouth with their penis even if only slightly
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis, but did not succeed
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers) but did not succeed
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your mouth with their penis but did not succeed
This is very specific, just about every possible combination of a way a victim can be penetrated is listed. It is therefore likely to catch more respondents.

There is a follow-up question to those who reported more than one sexual assault: they ask about the nature of the last one (SSA6A- SSA6I) and the answer alternatives are:
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis, even if only slightly
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers) even if only slightly
* Penetrated your mouth with their penis even if only slightly
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis, but did not succeed
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers) but did not succeed
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your mouth with their penis but did not succeed
* Something else
* Don’t know/can’t remember
* Don’t wish to answer

Here our hypothetical male victim of forced intercourse with a female perpetrator has to answer “7 Something else”.

Again, as soon as he does answer 7 he is put into the “Other sexual offences” category in the report.

This survey does a poor job of capturing men who have been raped by envelopment. The way questions are designed almost ensure that it will under-report male victims who were made to penetrate someone else. Grouping the percentage of men who actually had been made to penetrate someone else together with the likely-higher percentages of victims having been groped, flashed and so on effectively hides how many men are victims of “being made to penetrate someone else”. It also helps maintain the belief that women are victimized by sexual offenses more than men.
It reminds me of the commonly-voiced notion that more girls than boys experience childhood sexual abuse (CSA). Statistics and studies often leave it at that. However, the picture does change a bit when another study found that while more women have experienced CSA, women are more likely to report “touching,” and it turns out that an equal number of girls and boys experience CSA in the form of rape (intercourse).
[Comment slightly edited for clarity. —ballgame]

http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2009/01/05/can-women-rape-men-rp/#comment-504891

 

In answer to a question with regard to the situation in Norway on the comment thread for Mary Koss post Tamen responded:

“Thank you for your question Dr. Ramore.
I wasn’t aware of any studies done on male victims in Norway. Now you have spurred me on to dig a bit more to see what there is and I found that there has been a few studies done among youths, for instance:

Mossige S, Huang L. The prevalence of sexual offences and abuse within a Norwegian youth population Nor J Epidemiol 2010; 20(1):53-62 (in Norwegian with a short english abstract. It uses numbers from two large national youth surveys done in 2004 and 2007.
I haven’t read it in detail yet, but I haven’t found any clear description of the definition of rape which they use. They operate with some categories called “unwanted intercourse” (one for oral, one for anal and one for vaginal) which is separate from rape. I presume this is due to rape requiring physical force or threat of physical force in Norwegian law (unless the victim is incapable of giving consent, for instance by being unconscious). Amnesty and others have been lobbying for removing the requirement of physical force (or threat of physical force) from the legal definition of rape – making it only dependent on absense of consent.

They found the following:

About 1 in 10 rape victims are male (4.3% vs 0.4%)
About 1 in 10 victims of attempted rape are male (7.1% vs 0.7%).
Unwanted sexual experiences:
Someone has exposed themselves to you
Someone has touched in a sexual manner
You have touched yourself in sexual manner in front of others
You have touched someone else in a sexual manner
You had to masturbate while someone watched
You’ve had intercourse (vaginal)
You’ve had oral sex
You’ve had anal sex
You’ve had another form of sex
You have experienced one or more experiencesfrom the list
I’ll list the results from the more serious experiences:

1 of 3 who report unwanted vaginal intercourse are male (12% vs 6.5%)
7.7% of girls vs 5.8% of boys reported unwanted oral sex
2.5% of girls vs 1.5% of boys reported unwanted anal sex
35.6% of girls and 22.5% of boys report that they’ve experienced one or more items on the list of unwanted sexual experiences.

They survey asked about the perpetrator in the first and in the last experience. Girls report 99% male perpetrators and 1% female perpetrators – the same for both the first and last. Boys report 50-60% female perpetrator and 50-40% male perpetrators.
The largest category for perpetrator for both girls and boys are “friend, boyfriend/girlfriend or acquaintance”.

What form was the first unwanted sexual experience – voluntarily or under duress/force.
The question was; how well does the following statements describe what happened
Type: Girls vs Boys who answered that the statement described the experienced well.

Too young to understand: 25.8% vs 15.3%
Participated voluntarily, but regretted afterwards: 11.8% vs 8.9%
Was tricked/conned: 27% vs 13.9%
Was persuaded: 20.3% vs 10.5%
Mild pressure: 26.9% vs 10.3%
Strong pressure: 23% vs 7.4%
Physical force (constrained/pinned down, threats of violence or violence): 31.1% vs 9.6%”

Genderratic thanks Tamen for his analysis of these two studies.

He makes his case pretty conclusively that they appear structured to conceal male rape victimization. What makes this especially is that both these studies were government funded, funded by the very citizens who these studies erase.

PARENTING – Custody battles and dirty tricks

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Stories of mothers resorting to dirty tricks to get custody and/or total control of their children away from their fathers are legion – and when I say dirty tricks, I mean the lowest kind of abuse of process and the legal system and utter contempt for any kind of decency – false accusation of sexual abuse, false accusations of domestic abuse, false rape accusations. Fathers and Families has a huge archive of these stories.

Well here’s one that flips the genders. It’s out of Des Moines, WA, where it’s the father engaging in dirty tricks. He and his ex-wife were in a custody battle – he had the kids while she had been in a voluntary drug rehabilitation program and now she wanted custody. So he doped the kids cookies with meth so they would fail a drug test after staying with their mother. How’s that for “fatherly goodness”?

“The children’s mother had been clean for nearly a year in September, when she failed a drug test. Concerned about the positive result, the woman recalled a pair of unappetizing cookies she’d eaten with her children the day before.”

Hmmmmm

“According to charging papers, the woman and a court-appointed monitor picked up the children at Holm’s home that day. Their 7-year-old son brought two pink-frosted cookies that Holm made for his ex; the woman and her 5-year-old son split one cookie, which they were unable to eat because it “tasted terrible.”

And guess what:

“On a subsequent drug test, the 5-year-old tested positive for meth, the Des Moines detective continued. The woman suspected Holm or his girlfriend were trying to sabotage her prefect drug test record before an upcoming child custody trial.”

It turns out she had very good reason to want to get those kids away from their father. It turns out that’s just what he was doing. That’s about as depraved as it gets – right on the same level as accusing someone of child rape or sexual molestation to pimp a judge into granting the mother custody. It turns out that kind of depravity is not gendered, even if the family court system’s response to it is. Here is one example of that.

GENERAL – Language – the Etymological Fallacy

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Now and then in the course of a discussion somewhere someone will claim “X means Y because X…” and then either quote the first or original usage of X, or else break X down into its constituent elements and then insist that the sum of these parts is what “X really means.”

I call this second type of fallacy the etymological fallacy. It is a fallacy because the standard for what a word or expression means, at least the empirical standard necessary to make anything else about language make sense, is that a word means what the language community says it means, and the language community says that in the way it uses that word – actual observable language behavior. Any other standard is solipsistic peevology based on nothing more than what the peevologist personally – “logically” - thinks the word should mean.

Logic is wonderful but even the most rigorously logical theory cannot be allowed to trump the data.

“Quite a few” – So here is an example of what I mean. Any English speaker knows what the expression “quite a few means”. It means “many”, it has nothing whatever to do with “a few” and it is quite immaterial that the sum of the parts of that expression does in fact mean ”a few” – what the sum of the parts is supposed to mean does not trump the observable use of that expression.

Oh and a side note – the standard of meaning is what the pertinent language community deems the word to mean, not how you hear it, not “Well, that’s what it means to me.” No. Consumerism is not the Unified Field Theory of reality and you are not the customer and you are not always right no matter what legions of salesmen pandering to you have been telling you from the time you were first propped up in front of a televison to start your indocrination and your “own truth” is very likely not true, especially when it comes to language.

Ahuacatl and guacamole – The Nahuatl word for ‘testicle’ is “ahaucatl” and very early (pre-Nahuatl) it was applied to the avocado by extension – imagine a nutsack hanging in a tree and you can see the resemblance immediately. (ahuacatl > aguacate > avogato > avocado) The Nahuatl word for ‘sauce” is “molli” (The -tl in “ahuacatl suffix is not part of the root. The –li in “molli” is the same suffix in the form it takes when it follows an “l”.)

So when you put the two together you get “ahuacamolli” which is original of the word that was borrowed into Spanish and on into English as “guacamole”.

The etymological fallacy – Is there anyone here who thinks “testicle sauce” is any kind of good translation for “guacamole”, that it accurately represents the meaning of that word?

I hope not. And believe me, there are hundreds and thousands of similar if not so obviously ridiculous examples of this. We see this kind of mistake all the time.

Man – etymologically “man” meant “human”. It is still used that way in some contexts and not in others and so we have to say that the semantic load of the word is in flux – fluxxy enough that we see some real bar brawls over it.

Woman – Yes of course the etymology of “woman” includes “man” in the sense of “human” mentioned above. It also includes “wīf”, the ancestral form of the modern word “wife’, but that hardly “means” that “woman” implies that someone is married.

Then there is false etymology.

Woman – This one is from Commenter Paul: “I’ll admit that the majority of this pretty much went straight over my head, but it brought to mind the time I read some yahoo making the argument that “woman” was derived from “woe of man” and it made me want to punch faces.”

Me too, Paul, me too.

Human – I have seen this spelled, and unironically, as “humyn”. Makes me want to punch faces. This one is just illiterate. It  relies on fucking up on the syllable boundary.

 

So that’s the etymological fallacy. Kill it whenever you see it.