I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the differences between seduction, harassment and rape and how to articulate them clearly.

I think I’ve figured out a potential explanation based on the idea of the legitimacy of consent.

A seducer accepts their partner’s state of non-consent as legitimate, but attempts to entice them to change it.

A harasser attempts to make their partner believe they have no right not to consent.

A rapist ignores consent entirely or actively seeks out a lack of consent.

Discuss and if you don’t, you’re not a real man.

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.

Earl Silverman

Earl Silverman

Words fail.

Read more.

I’ve(typhon) installed a “bad faith spam filter” at the site.

It uses a complex algorithm that picks up on key phrases and terminology to determine if a commentator is employing bad faith in their comment. It is, apparently, 99.9% accurate although we’ll find out if this claim is true.

If someone’s comment ends up in the “bad faith filter”, it will appear as “under moderation”. If the admin team has time they will look at the comment to see if there is anything on-topic and substantive. If there is the admin team will remove anything that will trigger the bad faith filter and post it.

Off-topic posts are highly likely to trigger the filter; likely off-topic posts are identified through use of key words. Excessive use of the word “you” is also likely to trigger the filter, as well as insults.

Thanks for your patience!

Clarence is also on moderation for the time being.

(This is a joke, it just pulls into moderation every post with the word “you” in it.)

Author’s note: Subsequent to a controversy regarding the final footnote, I added a word. I now realize that the passage can still be misconstrued. Further I believe that the controversy surrounding the last paragraph of this article is an exercise in controlling speech. People are free to misread this article however they wish–I will not recognize attempts to control speech as legitimate forms of criticism. This article was originally published on A Voice For Men.

I’ll tell you first how you don’t stop rape.

Seeing a poster that says “My strength is not for hurting” or “don’t be that guy” won’t do anything that a law doesn’t.

You see an anti-rape law is sorta like an anti-rape poster except with a punishment attached for not following what the poster says.

So how is saying “men, don’t rape” going to be more effective than saying “men, don’t rape” and then adding “if you do, you go to jail?”

Because this is what these feminist inspired posters essentially are. They are a law, against rape, but without the actual criminal punishment. If the law isn’t an effective deterrent, than how is a poster going to be an effective deterrent?

Men who rape are not raping because they’ve been told it’s cool or fun or awesome, or because they heard an off color joke, saw a naked ankle or watched porn… they rape because they have a powerful emotional compulsion to do so.

Let’s get something clear. Human beings—barring the congenitally emotionally disabled such as sociopaths—don’t want to rape. They don’t like rape. Rape is the exact opposite of what a human being wants when they engage in sex. Men, who happen to be human beings just like women, want to feel desirable.

Most men are devastated after being rejected by a woman. What makes anyone think that the average man is going to enjoy enduring the most profound rejection one human being can muster for another—which is exactly what the rapist endures in order to rape.

If you saw someone eating broken glass, would you assume the glass is tasty or conclude there’s something seriously wrong with the person chowing down?

What the current crop of male targeted anti-rape posters will do is normalize rape. It won’t normalize rape for men who aren’t compelled to rape in the first place. Nope. It’ll just shame them. But it will normalize rape for men who are rapists.

Instead of seeing themselves as damaged individuals who are engaging not just in harm to others, but harm to themselves, rapists—male ones at least—will see themselves as the guys who do what every other guy really wants to do, but doesn’t have the balls.

They aren’t hurting, they’re edgy.

Rapists are in the business of rationalizing their compulsion to repeat, rationalizing their sense of powerlessness, and current anti-rape posters help them do just that. Rape is normal male behaviour, dontchaknow? Something men teach each other to do when feminists aren’t there to stop them.

But if jokes, naked ankles and porn don’t cause men to rape women, what does?

Being raped.

That’s right. In fact, having been sexually abused by a  woman[1] is a stronger risk factor for becoming a future sexual abuser in boys than having been sexually abused by a man.This is where the emotional compulsion to abuse comes from. This is the motivation. This is the manufacture process for adult male rapists.

Yet despite being sexually violated, only a fraction of these boys go on to abuse! That’s how resistant to raping the average male human is; even the most effective method of training a boy to become a rapist—by raping him–is only effective for one out of every ten boys.

The idea that a bad joke, a naked ankle or porn will cause men to rape is demonizing. The idea that there exists a “rape culture” teaching men to rape in any way but by raping them and then ignoring their subsequent emotional disorder is depraved.

And here’s the thing. Right now, in the US, there is an epidemic of  institutionalized sexual abuse that is being ignored in favor of manufactured statistics about sex trafficking of girls and other juicy sexualized and sensationalized threat narratives designed to push our buttons.

In fact this epidemic of sexual abuse makes the Catholic Church scandal pale in comparison.

Since the 1950s approximately 12,000 men have come forward to admit abuse in the Catholic Church sex scandal.

10,000 boys a year are being sexually abused by female staff in juvenile detention facilities in the US. A YEAR.

So here’s the equation. Boys learn to be rapists by having been raped(even if only a fraction of them go on to enact their abuse), and we’re turning a blind eye to women raping boys in juvenile facilities—better termed “boy rape camps”—and then we’re ignoring, denying and minimizing female-on-male sexual abuse in order to prop up a morally bankrupt feminist empire built on the backs of rape victims—both victims of actual rapists and victims terrorized by rape hysteria itself.

And then we normalize rape with posters that suggest rape is not the abnormal behavior of the emotionally damaged, but a manifestation of masculinity or male culture. Men will rape for trivial reasons because they saw a naked ankle, or porn or hear a rape joke. (Or are dope fiends or black or Jewish or…)

By normalizing rape, these posters do the opposite of what they intend. They empower rapists and disempower emotionally healthy men who would never rape. They promote a distorted, simplistic view of rape as an emergent property of maleness rather than an emergent property of sexual abuse.

As for male victims of female rapists, they never see themselves in these posters. They are never acknowledged at all. This forces the problem of female perpetrated sexual abuse underground; in fact we could see the existence of male-perpetuated sexual abuse as a symptom of our society’s absolute inability to recognize male victims and give them timely help.

So how do we stop rape?

We acknowledge female rapists. We acknowledge why boys grow up to be rapists. We provide services for male survivors of sexual abuse so they have a place to heal. Not just to stop the cycle of abuse but because men and boys who are sexual abuse survivors deserve as much compassion as women and girls. We kick the ideologs out of our institutions of healing because what matters is helping people, not perpetuating feminist pseudoscience.

We start by telling the feminists to shut the fuck up.

There is no ‘rape culture’ and if there is—if the idea of “rape culture” really is ‘a culture which enables rape’–you better start backpedaling because it’s looking like you’re the biggest purveyors of it.

[1] Salter D., McMillan D., Richards M., Talbot T., Hodges J., Bentovim A., Hastings R., Stevenson J., Skuse D., Development of sexually abusive behaviour in sexually victimized males: a longitudinal study, The Lancet, Vol. 361, February 8, 2003

(While we’re on the subject of female-perpetuated sexual abuse, most surveys that ask college age women about the sexual abuse they perpetrate find a shocking levels of female-perpetrated sexual abuse. Other surveys find that men who perpetuate sexual abuse are also sexually abused, suggesting a cycle of sexual abuse on college campuses. Perhaps rather than being victims of an indifferent system these silent female rape victims–who are part of a culture of cyclical sexual abuse–fail to come forward to the authorities about their abuse because it would mean admitting that they also are rapists? So the constant drumbeat of feminist agitprop about making these women “comfortable” never will, unless feminists invent a ray gun that neutralizes cognitive dissonance.)