Tuesday, May 18, 2010

The Misandry Bubble - Part 1!

Oh lord. Before I even start this, I want to make something really clear: this is just a mockery, not a rebuttal. You know the old adage about wrestling a pig? I am not, just not interested in engaging in an open and fair debate on "Resolved: Women are horrible monsters." My monstrous nature precludes it. (Comments on how this failure to honestly engage the serious issues is just typical of a woman can go piss up a rope.)

Anyway if someone has a huge, deep-seated, years-in-the-making problem with women, it's not like I'll find just the right bit of logic to undo it all. Blogging is the fine art of preaching to the choir, and I don't expect this post to transcend that.

That said, let's read The Misandry Bubble!
Executive Summary : The Western World has quietly become a civilization that undervalues men and overvalues women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to conduct great evil against men and children, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is celebrated. This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020.
Well, I'm glad women are "otherwise good," but I wonder who exactly makes up this state. It's not men clearly, but the women are otherwise good... oh god, it's feminists. The evilest third gender of all.

And I don't like that "the costs will be borne" bit at all. "This isn't really me hurting you, this is just the wages of your sin."

Take a look at the collage of entertainers below, which will be relevant if you are older than 30. All of them were prominent in the 1980s, some spilling over on either side of that decade. They are all certainly very different from one another. But they have one thing in common - that there are far fewer comparable personas produced by Hollywood today.
Yes. Because there are no men on TV today.

A single example like Jack Bauer is not sufficient to dispute the much larger trend of masculinity purging.
Mkay, how about Jack Bauer and Jack Harkness and Jack Sparrow and Jack O'Neill and Jack McCoy and Jack Skellington and that's just the Jacks.

This trains women to disrespect men, wives to think poorly of their husbands, and girls to devalue the importance of their fathers, which leads to the normalization of single motherhood (obviously with taxpayer subsidies), despite the reality that most single mothers are not victims, but merely women who rode a carousel of men with reckless abandon.
Oh yeah, I want to be a single mother when I grow up! It seems so easy and fun! All the joy of tremendous responsibilities, none of the hassle of adult companionship! That's why when I get pregnant I'm going to ditch the father no matter how much he begs and pleads to give me his love and support!

Let us define the top 20% of men as measured by their attractiveness to women, as 'alpha' males while the middle 60% of men will be called 'beta' males. The bottom 20% are not meaningful in this context.
It's good to start your argument by making up numbers, then deciding that those numbers you just made up won't work and throwing out the bits that don't fit. Also, what is with this misery-loves-company 80% shit? You have to be very isolated to believe that, because any observation of a normal social circle would give you some goddamn perspective.

Research across gorillas, chimpanzees, and primitive human tribes shows that men are promiscuous and polygamous. This is no surprise to a modern reader, but the research further shows that women are not monogamous, as is popularly assumed, but hypergamous. In other words, a woman may be attracted to only one man at any given time, but as the status and fortune of various men fluctuates, a woman's attention may shift from a declining man to an ascendant man.
"Research across ants, termites, and bees shows that people naturally live in huge colonies with a queen!"

Anyway, most women have more than one relationship in their entire lives, and that's terrible. How dare they. SLUTS.

What is wrong, however, is the cultural and societal pressure to shame men into committing to marriage under the pretense that they are 'afraid of commitment' due to some 'Peter Pan complex', while there is no longer the corresponding traditional shame that was reserved for women who destroyed the marriage, despite the fact that 90% of divorces are initiated by women.
So do you want to be married or not, dude? In one sentence you're cruelly manipulated into marriage, then cruelly forced out of it. Make up your damn mind!

Societies that enforced monogamous marriage made sure all beta men had wives, thus unlocking productive output out of these men who in pre-modern times would have had no incentive to be productive. Women, in turn, received a provider, a protector, and higher social status than unmarried women, who often were trapped in poverty. When applied over an entire population of humans, this system was known as 'civilization'.
I thought civilization had a lot more to do with farming replacing hunting-gathering, specialization and trade replacing subsistence, and the creation of permanent settlements, but shows what I know.

The key piece of logic here is that a man supporting a family is somehow more "productive" than a single man and a woman supporting a family, or any other arrangement. My only answer to that starts with "productive of what" and ends with marveling at how single men are just notorious for not participating in the economy.

Oh, and the people who invented marriage umpty-zillion years ago did it not to be sure of the paternity of children, and definitely not because anyone wanted to live in a pair-bond, but because they understood concepts like "we have to make the beta males more economically productive," people definitely thought in those terms then. Just as they think in those terms now, really.

Now we get to "The Four Sirens" that are destroying civilization.
1) Easy contraception (condoms, pills, and abortions): In the past, extremely few women ever had more than one or two sexual partners in their lives, as being an unwed mother led to poverty and social ostracization. Contraception made it possible for females to conduct campaigns to act on their urges of hypergamy.
...and that's terrible. Also, wow, "campaigns." Also, do you really want to choose between having very little sex or having nineteen kids?

2) 'No fault' divorce, asset division, and alimony : In the past, a woman who wanted to leave her husband needed to prove misconduct on his part. Now, the law has changed to such a degree that a woman can leave her husband for no stated reason, yet is still entitled to payments from him for years to come. This incentivizes destruction because it enables women to transfer the costs of their behavior onto men and children.
God I wish I were married just so I could get divorced. I fucking love divorce. It's like a chocolate orgasm pizza. Mmmm, shouting and lawyers and loneliness, I'm planning that from the start.

If I were good to my man I'd stay in a miserable, barely-speaking, sleeping-on-the-couch marriage forever, and we'd both be so happy.

(I'm kidding. There's no way this guy would let me get away with sleeping on the couch.)

3) Female economic freedom : Despite 'feminists' claiming that this is the fruit of their hard work, inventions like the vacuum cleaner, washing machine, and oven were the primary drivers behind liberating women from household chores and freeing them up to enter the workforce. These inventions compressed the chores that took a full day into just an hour or less. There was never any male opposition to women entering the workforce, as more labor lowered labor costs while also creating new consumers.
LRN2HISTORYPLZ. Anyway women never stayed home just to wash things all day; there were these little things called "children" that you may have heard of, two points ago you wanted nineteen of them? The amazing labor-saving device that will do their daily care in one hour has not yet been invented.

And "there was never any male opposition to women entering the workforce," besides the surface ridiculousness--DUDE YOU'RE OPPOSING IT RIGHT NOW.

4) Pro-female social engineering : Above and beyond the pro-woman divorce laws, further state interventions include the subsidization of single motherhood, laws that criminalize violence against women (but offer no protection to men who are the victims of violence by women, which happens just as often), and 'sexual harassment' laws with definitions so nebulous that women have the power to accuse men of anything without the man having any rights of his own.
Yeah, just to deal with all these false accusations that happen one million times every minute because as previously established the legal system is just so fun, we should make violence and harassment against women legal. That'd fix it.

Also, a woman beating a man isn't illegal or anything.

There seems to be a strange idea in all this talk of The Scourge of False Accusations that it's not enough for a guy to be acquitted or have charges dismissed; for justice to be done, he has to never be accused at all.

And I know this is just like a woman to say, but I can't hear about The Scourge of False Accusations without thinking that the guy who's so concerned is worried because he likes to abuse women, but just a little, not in the bad abuse abuse way, just sometimes he can't deal with all her manipulation and cockteasing, and he'd hate to be falsely accused of abuse when that happens.

These four forces in tandem handed an unprecedented level of power to women. The technology gave them freedom to pursue careers and the freedom to be promiscuous. Feminist laws have done a remarkable job of shielding women from the consequences of their own actions.
So having nineteen kids, being trapped in a marriage, being unable to work, and being unable to report abuse are the consequences of my actions? Shit, I must have done something horrible.

Women now have as close to a hypergamous utopia as has ever existed, where they can pursue alpha males while extracting subsidization from beta males without any reciprocal obligations to them.
The typical woman in America today is buying Manolos with alimony checks while banging a hockey player. IT'S SCIENCE.


And here's a good breaking point. Or a terrible one? I can't even tell. It's a breaking point, anyway. Let's break.

37 comments:

  1. I feel totally ripped off. I'm female-- got boobs and a pussy and two X chromosomes and everything-- and yet I haven't slept with /any/ famous people. In fact, I have dry spells. What kind of failbot woman am I?

    Apparently dude's logic is that a single man can make enough money to support himself in two months (because, clearly, an entire agricultural season is two months) and so there's no incentive for him to work any more than that. And women can't work at all ever, so they're gonna be poor. The Neolithic Age Looks Exactly Like The 1950s. SCIENCE!

    Also, note that the Crappy-ass Bubble cites roissy. Six Degrees of Misogyny?

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  2. Ozymandias - I don't get the "two months" thing either, but what I really don't get is why a (man+woman+kids) is more productive than a [man+(woman+kids)]. You'd think that sort of thing would be commutative.

    More like one degree. They're both members in good standing of the misogyny community.

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  3. Wait, he's saying there aren't comparable models of masculinity today to the people in the collage? There's almost exact parallels to each of those characters.

    * Wrestling is still quite popular, though I couldn't tell you who's the equivalent of Randy Savage. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson probably has the most mainstream success.

    * Older authority figure in a science fiction show? O'Neill or Adama, take your pick.

    * Cosby's the toughest to find an equivalent to. If you're going for the "good-hearted but slightly bumbling older father," then Jay Pritchett from Modern Family works just fine, or Tim Taylor from Home Improvement before that. Straight-up dom coms aren't as popular as they were during the 80s, but I suspect that has less to do with masculinity and more to do with demographics (in the 80s, you had a lot of dom coms because you had a lot of Baby Boomers with families).

    * The success of Indiana Jones gave rise to plenty of scholar/adventurer heroes. Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, Noah Wyle as the Librarian, Nicholas Cage as that guy in National Treasure, etc.

    * If you want an A-Team like show, the closest you'll find these days, I suspect, is Leverage.

    * Arthur Fonzarelli, meet Barney Stinson.

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  4. JFP - Isn't it funny how we can get sucked into criticizing the deckchairs on the Titanic? Proving that there are masculine men on TV ought to be like proving that rabbits have ears, it feels strange even having to say it.

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  5. Thank you for this. You took it from brain-meltingly stupid to hilarious.

    Favorite line: "LRN2HISTORYPLZ."

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  6. Oh noes! Men opposed women being in the worforce - and continue paying those who do work less than their male counterparts - and so some women look to men to help and support them! WHO EVER IMAGINED THAT WOULD HAPPEN?

    Then men invented birth control so they could fuck whenever they wanted without the consequence of pregnancy - and women decided to fuck as much as they wanted, too! And as it turns out, they don't want to fuck hateful buttmunches! So everyone's having superhappycrazyfuntime except the hateful buttmunches (who've decided to name themselves "betas")! It's a travesty!

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  7. Anon - No, don't you get it, unequal pay is a lie because female CEOs and surgeons make the same as male CEOs and surgeons. It's not anyone's fault if women, um, freely choose not to be CEOs and surgeons very often.

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  8. I'm enjoying your mockery, but there's one thing in it that really fucking sucks.

    "There seems to be a strange idea in all this talk of The Scourge of False Accusations that it's not enough for a guy to be acquitted or have charges dismissed; for justice to be done, he has to never be accused at all."

    Gee, why on earth would someone be upset about being falsely accused of a horrible evil disgusting act if the charges were dismissed due to lack of evidence? Wait, maybe Holly can help explain that in the next paragraph:

    "...I can't hear about The Scourge of False Accusations without thinking that the guy who's so concerned is worried because he likes to abuse women..."

    Oh.

    Maybe because the false accusation haunts you. Maybe because your friends have to work out whether you're really innocent or a disgusting worm who's just clever and subtle about hiding it. Maybe because with everything you say and do, for a long time, people can't help but first consider the words or acts in the light of whether the mask is slipping. Even if the only thing they know about you is that you told them you were once falsely accused, they still wonder if you were actually guilty. Because they can't help thinking that, it's human nature. Closest analogy I can think of is another false accusation, when a date-rapist accuses the victim of changing their mind afterwards and using the rape story to cover it up; but people are more likely to believe the abuse accuser than the accused rapist. For good reason. But that's not much of a consolation when you're falsely accused.

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  9. Mousie00 - False accusations suck. They really do. But I'm uncomfortable with the huge emphasis creeps place on false accusations as if they were the biggest blight ever on society. Often the implication seems to be "women get abused, men get accused of abuse, it all balances out," and it's really not like that, numerically or in terms of impact.

    I also, frankly, don't know what to do about them. I mean besides not convict anyone who can establish reasonable doubt, but we already try to do that. Eliminating false accusations would require either changing human nature (good luck), or having some sort of algorithm for when to ignore and not investigate crime reports (wonderful idea).

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  10. @Holly: I think they're saying that unmarried men will do the minimum work to survive and then goof off all the time, while married men will work to support their families? Which makes sense if you accept their bugfuck crazy premises. A lot like most Christian fundies in that way.

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  11. Ooh, I want to play the masculine pop culture game!

    - "Arthur Fonzarelli, meet Barney Stinson"
    Totally! But I'm sure that's nefarious undermining of Real Men too, because NPH is gay in real life and masculine gay men do not exist, because gay = womany.

    For the Jack list I submit:
    - Jack Donaghy
    - Jack Hodgins

    - Adama, yes! (and swoon)
    - Coach Eric Taylor - I defy you to find a more well-rounded example of a strong masculine role model.
    - Capt. Kirk reboot, nothing weak there.
    - new Robin Hood doesn't look like a buffoon.
    - Christopher Chance & sidekicks
    - Seely Booth
    - Jim Halpert
    - Gil Grissom, for another science nerd example
    - Greg House
    - Don Draper (hello???) Oh, are anti-heroes disqualified?
    - Lost is full of masculinity, but I'll use probably the single most popular character: Desmond Hume - lover, father, universe bending fulcrum
    - my TV boyfriend Jeffrey Dean Morgan is looking pretty swaggery in his new movie, speaking of which,
    - how about frakkin SAM AND DEAN WINCHESTER????

    And these are just off the top of my head. Wait, do these men not count for the point if they're alpha males? It's all so confusing. If I were to use a stupid system like that, I'd call some of the above awesome characters not alphas. And perhaps the whiners would argue back with comedic buffoons, like Michael Scott. But that would miss the point of "comedy."

    In fact, I submit that today's boys are positively swimming in aspirational masculinity.

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  12. I'm impressed you're actually taking this on. It seems like painful reading.

    WTF, there are no men on TV or in the movies? Most dramatic movies center around white dudes. As do most action movies. And comedies.

    Re: Hating on single moms. They must be punished for their reckless abandon! By raising kids without any kind of support! Because children are a form of punishment, not people with a right to a minimum standard of living! That is so fucking typical of MRAs. Kids are not people with rights that parents have a responsibility to nurture. They're a punishment, a way for women to suck money from their sexual partners. At most they're a symbol of one's status as a father, and he has a right to them.

    Re: Primates and "primitive" human tribes. The way relationships operate is related to the environment and availability of resources, and which gender is responsible for contributing the most calories to the tribe's diet. When gathering is more important, women are responsible for more of the food, and tribes are more egalitarian. Also when there aren't too many things that can sneak up on you and kill you. There are no "declining" or "ascendant" men. And relationships are entered into and terminated very easily. The more violent the environment and the more hunting required, the more patriarchal the society tends to be.

    Also: Bonobos. Sex is their solution to everything.

    Re: shaming into marriage vs. women easily terminating marriage: He's talking about two opposing sets of social norms. No shit they don't make sense when amalgamated.

    Re: "civilization": This is the perfect example of the definition of "patriarchy" that I was talking about in your recent posts. It's up to individual guys whether they want to treat women like shit, but women were structurally oppressed by being forced to be dependent on men.

    One of my profs theorized that when people developed agriculture and the family became the unit of production (rather than the community) it suddenly became important to men to know which children were "theirs", since children were your workforce. The mother's position of authority was unquestionable. If women could continue to enter into and terminate sexual relationships as easily as they had done before, and if men couldn't claim parental authority over children, then men would have become dispensible. So it was in men's economic interest to control women's sexuality.

    I find it an interesting and compelling theory.

    Re: hypergamy. Because women don't just enjoy sex because it's fun. They want status out of it. Maybe if women had historically been able to support themselves without men, they wouldn't have been so interested in marrying for status, now, hmmm?

    Re: asset division and alimony: is compensation for hours upon hours of unpaid domestic labour.

    Re: LRN2HISTORYPLZ
    Or, fuck, just watch Mad Men.

    There seems to be a strange idea in all this talk of The Scourge of False Accusations that it's not enough for a guy to be acquitted or have charges dismissed; for justice to be done, he has to never be accused at all.

    Yes! Because just being accused will ruin his life! It's not like people ever belive rapists over their victims. ZOMG WILL SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE MENZ!1!!!1ELEVENTY!!!11!

    The typical woman in America today is buying Manolos with alimony checks while banging a hockey player. IT'S SCIENCE.

    LOLS

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  13. That last Anonymous was me. My google account is acting strangely.

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  14. I'm vaguely baffled by the underlying assumption that contraception only prevents women from having kids while presumably having no effect on whether or not men have kids. Or is this another EvoPsych argument about how it's awful just awful that men can no longer scatter their seed far and wide without any personal consequences whatsoever.

    So confused in my stupid little girl brain.

    God, even with the Holly filter I feel vaguely sick after reading this.

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  15. @jfpbookworm and chi

    Re: models of masculinity in pop culture

    Plus it totally ignores the huge wave of superhero movies that we've had over the past, what, decade now? Since Spiderman, anyways. And it only looks to be intensifying, with a whole wad of Avengers movies and another re-boot of Superman in the making. Every superhero can be analyzed as presenting a certain ideal of masculinity.

    And the fact that what with the proliferation of cable networks, people aren't all watching the same TV shows, so it's harder to find widely recognized archetypal characters.

    And yes! I was just thinking about the Winchester boys! I think Supernatural is very interesting in terms of how it presents masculinity. Particularly how Dean is so archetypaly macho, but did all the emotional work and caregiving in his family (typically coded as feminine) before Sam left.

    @Mousieoo

    ...people are more likely to believe the abuse accuser than the accused rapist.

    And yet there are plenty of stories about friends turning against women when they've finally mustered the courage to say something about being abused, assuming that she is lying, attention-seeking, and/or crazy.

    I would really be interested in seeing a scientific study of how people on average react to reports of domestic abuse and sexual assault, both from neighbours and from friends.

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  16. Marissa - "white dudes"
    Yeah, I didn't get it while typing my off the cuff list, but non-white men have more of a bone to pick with pop culture, especially in terms of "who is at the center of this story."
    In terms of masculinity, you've still got plenty of great examples. Morpheus, Sayid Jarrah, anything Chi McBride does, anything Will Smith does. Outside of some comedic stuff (again, because it's supposed to be FUNNY), the supposed point about modern men in pop culture being totally wimpified is just obviously wrong.

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  17. Is he saying the bumbling men on sitcoms are misandrist? They're certainly misogynist -- promoting the idea that men can't do any better, and that women need to take care of us, and that a woman certainly shouldn't leave a husband/boyfriend for being thoroughly incompetant as a human being.

    Despite 'feminists' claiming that this is the fruit of their hard work, inventions like the vacuum cleaner, washing machine, and oven were the primary drivers behind liberating women from household chores and freeing them up to enter the workforce.

    I notice he doesn't mention the dishwasher, whch was invented by a woman.

    * * *

    Maybe because the false accusation haunts you. Maybe because your friends have to work out whether you're really innocent or a disgusting worm who's just clever and subtle about hiding it.
    It doesn't happen all that often, however. It really doesn't. Even if you group every acquittal as a "false accusation" (some of them are, of course, but guilty people are acquitted on occasion).

    Again, numbers aside, what's so beneficial about dragging innocent men through the mud that we're supposed to act as though it's a reasonable a priori assumption?

    So fine, false accusations are bad. But you're getting worked up about the idea out of proportion to how bad they are taking their frequency into account. That's where the assumption comes from that the people who make a fuss over false accusations are fearful of them for a particular reason: it's not a common enough occurance to be a rational abstract fear. There are so few false accusations that one has to wonder what makes a person think he's likely to draw one. There are so few false accusations that I would wonder what made a person the target of one.

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  18. You know, I'd be pretty devastated to be falsely accused of killing someone. It would be awful, I'm sure. It would be a hassle to get the charges dropped. I might lose my job. I might lose some friends. What friends I don't lose will certainly be wondering whether or not I'm really the person they thought I was. Even if I was acquitted, it would royally suck. I'm pretty sure everybody agrees with me on that one.

    Funny how that subject never seems to get brought up when people start talking about murder, though.

    tl;dr, being falsely accused of rape would suck. Being raped would suck a lot worse.

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  19. @aebhel: I agree with your summary, but I want to point out an important difference between abuse and murder. No one gets accused of murder unless someone dies/disappears. There are no he said / she said false murder accusations.

    I agree with Holly's comment above that false accusations suck, but any means of preventing them that we're not already doing seems to suck much worse.

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    1. What she wanted to prove is that false accusations in general are bad, not just false rape accusations.I don't see any way of preventing them because it's a matter of one's morality and good nature not to abuse the law.Compare false rape accusations with false abuse accusations especially when it comes to children.Anyone can make this allegations several times and he can't be ignored even if his accusations were false.Somebody wrongly accused with child abuse will have as much of a bad time as somebody falsely accused of rape, but he won't blame the laws who protect children, he will blame the person who falsely accused him.

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  20. @Marissa: Also: Bonobos.

    Thank you! Last I checked, Bonobos and Chimps diverged after the genus diverged from early species of humans, which means that we are EXACTLY as closely related to bonobos as we are to chimps.

    I sort of want to make a rule that whenever anyone cites chimps in an evo-psych argument, they have to reconcile that assertion with bonobos. It would make those arguments so much more fun, really.

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  21. LOL @ "hypergamy" being used in every other sentence. Wow dude you must be intelligent, you learned a scientific-sounding word.

    This type of dude always makes a bunch of accusations about how today's males end up stuck paying for some woman's kids/lifestyle while she goes off to party and bang "alpha males." This makes me think these dudes are big wussbags who can't ever assert themselves in real life. (And hence are abusing the blog manifesto format to drastically overcompensate.) Here in the real world it's pretty easy to tell someone to fuck off if she thinks she's too good for you, or expects you to buy her things and be monogamous without being faithful and loyal in return. If someone was trying to "extract subsidization" from me, I'd dump their loser ass right away. Misandry Bubble guy seems to think he's expected to be nice to women even if they hit him & cheat on him. If he's actually doing that, it's not because of The Feminists, it's because he needs to grow a pair.

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  22. A few notes on the side:

    THAT ISN'T WHAT HYPERGAMY MEANS. You know what "hypergamy" means? Marrying "out of your league", generally defined economically or, in caste societies, by caste!

    And in the West, serial monogamy - which is what this idiot is calling "hypergamy" - is the social norm. But note, for bonus fun points, the assumption that women are, again, the (serially) monogamous class. Tiresome, but not unsurprising.

    (Meanwhile, getting married makes men productive because bachelors require neither food nor shelter.)

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  23. @LNC: This one seems to have cuckold fantasies. Which like any weird fetish is fine if you're into that sort of thing, but don't assume everyone's like that.

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  24. Hershele Ostropoler,

    "There are so few false accusations that I would wonder what made a person the target of one."

    As a falsely accused person myself, this common attitude incenses me. The accusation is all the evidence necessary for the punishment, like trial by ordeal for witchcraft. In my case, what made me a target was unknowingly marrying a woman with a mental disease, tentatively identified as Borderline Personality Disorder. BPD is not that terribly rare and repeated false accusations against varying targets are normal; they are done for sympathy. By no means all of the charges are physical or sexual abuse, lots of times they're just rudeness.

    Where do the numbers come from for your assertion about how few false accusations there are? How does anyone know how many accusations are false vs. true? I simply do not believe that they are so vanishingly rare. It's surely pretty rare that they go as far as criminal charges, at least in the absence of Al Sharpton, but I know a few cases of reputation-attacking accusations that I'm pretty sure were false.

    Given that there are just as many women that are crazy or evil as men, why would false accusations be so rare when the real crimes are not? Seems to me that you have to posit that women are superior to men, to conclude that it's as horribly common as it undoubtedly is (just in cases with physical evidence) for a man to strike a woman, but still vanishingly rare for a woman to lie about a man striking her. The profit motive of sympathy or attention-seeking is easy to see.

    That brings up something I think the author of "The Misandry Bubble" glosses over. False accusations are not behavior of a normal woman any more than rape or beating is normal for men. As in the case of men who commit the real abuses, the false accusations are only from the rare women who are crazy, evil, or both.

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  25. Holly - I agree with your points about not knowing what to do about false accusations. Certainly I can't think of any changes to the legal system I'd like to see.

    What I want to see changed is the attitude reflected in so many comments here that the accusation is almost proof of the crime. There are just as many horrible and/or insane women as horrible and/or insane men out there.

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  26. All the evidence I've seen suggests that false accusation levels for rape are consistent with false accusation levels for other crimes. Which, y'know, makes a whole lot more sense than "OMG so many more false rape accusations than any other kind!"

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  27. aebhel said - "being falsely accused of rape would suck. Being raped would suck a lot worse."

    I'm sure that's true, though I have no personal experience with either.

    On the other hand, where I do have personal experience with both, I can tell you that I'd much rather be hit than be falsely accused of hitting my wife.

    That of course isn't how it goes; the abuser doesn't hit once. If anyone is reading this that's been hit, GET OUT. It will keep happening, and escalate. And he or she deserves the loss of reputation that comes from telling people.

    Part of what bothers me so much about my false accusation experience is that I HATE abusers. My Christian love for my enemies totally fails in this area. I had just enough Christianity to keep me from horrible mistakes when my first wife accused a number of other people before moving on to me (it was a pattern). If I thought some women were "asking for it", or "needed to be hit", or some such bullshit, the accusation wouldn't be such bad thing. If you called a Nazi Party member a racist, it wouldn't bother them.

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  28. As a falsely accused person myself, this common attitude incenses me
    As someone who doesn't hate women, the idea that when accusation was made, our knee-jerk response should be to dismiss it as false (what the bubble guy is saying) incenses me. The statement made was that it happens all the time; I'd say that actually, you were accused more often, by more people, than most men. When you argue with me and others who say it doesn't happen all the time, you are saying it happens all the time. It's not clear to me that "it happened to me" is evidence it happens all the time.

    The feminist-run misandrist FBI says 8% of rape accusations are "unfounded" (PDF).

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  29. Hershele Ostropoler - You and others have not just said it doesn't happen all the time, nor have I said that it does happen all the time. At least in my definition of the rather fuzzy number "all the time". What you have said is that it's so rare that you are automatically suspicious of anyone who claims to have been falsely accused, and what you have implied is that automatic suspicion is justified by the numbers.

    Hershele Ostropoler >> "There are so few false accusations that I would wonder what made a person the target of one."

    Holly >> "I can't hear about The Scourge of False Accusations without thinking that the guy who's so concerned is worried because he likes to abuse women"

    8% unfounded (that's forcible rapes, not rape in general) is a lot. From
    http://www2.ucsc.edu/rape-prevention/statistics.html,
    I find that 77% of rape victims know their assailant and 17% of victims are over 25 years old. So about 4% of rapes are stranger rapes of women over 25. Wow, 26 year olds can relax as long as they don't know anybody, right? Hershele says "it's not a common enough occurance to be a rational abstract fear"! In fact, since 8% isn't rational, this must be less than half the risk of a rational abstract fear! If some 30YO reports a stranger rape, Hershele would say, "There are so few ... that I would wonder what made a person the target of one." Of course Hershele wouldn't really say that, and it is a rational abstract fear. Women should still take precautions, even if they're over 25 and with strangers.

    I also think that in cases where accusations are stated but no charges brought, the percentage of false accusations is likely to be much higher. (I said I know a few cases of physical or sexual abuse accusations that I was pretty sure were false; all of them were word-of-mouth accusation without any police involvement).

    I don't want people to be more automatically suspicious of anyone who claims physical or sexual abuse; actually it's be better if they were less so. I'm sure even in just the cases not reported to the police, most of those claims are true.

    What I want is people to be less automatically suspicious of the accused. I want more innocent until proven guilty in people's attitudes. Mostly I want people to stop painting the false accuser as a mythological monster, and realize that it's a thing that some real humans sometimes do.

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  30. So the accuser is telling the truth about being a victim, and the accused is telling the truth about not having done anything. Is that the assumption you want people to make?

    Personally, I'm not worried about being falsely accused or about being attacked.

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  31. "So the accuser is telling the truth about being a victim, and the accused is telling the truth about not having done anything. Is that the assumption you want people to make?"

    Yeah, that's pretty much part of how innocent until proven guilty works. It's been a hard sell over the more traditional guilty until proven innocent, which still prevails in many countries the Misandry Bubble guy would like, but I think here in the USA it's worked out pretty nicely.

    "Personally, I'm not worried about being falsely accused or about being attacked."

    Fine. That's just a different attitude. I was an early seatbelt adopter and nonsmoker; I carry blankets in my car in winter and use snow tires; I have smoke alarms and fire extinguishers around my house. It's fine as long as you don't go around implying that the seatbelts are because I'm a reckless driver, or the alarms and fire extinguishers are because I'm an arsonist.

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  32. Does this guy know anything about chimpanzees? Females have sex with every male they can find when they're in heat; does that mean they are shifting their attraction every 10 seconds, or that they're, you know, poly?

    And that's just the common chimpanzee, ugg.

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  33. Did you read the whole thing? If one party is asserting A, and the other is asserting Not A, we can't treat both of them as true. Or as false.

    Furthermore, "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in the justice system. If I don't have the power to give someone a criminal record, I don't have to pretend to believe the person didn't Do It just because there's a way for them not to have that technically fits all the known facts.

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  34. Mousie's stopped being an asshole, but I want to address this pour discourager les autres:

    8% unfounded (that's forcible rapes, not rape in general) is a lot. From
    http://www2.ucsc.edu/rape-prevention/statistics.html,
    I find that 77% of rape victims know their assailant and 17% of victims are over 25 years old. So about 4% of rapes are stranger rapes of women over 25.

    The discussion this statistic was used in seemed wrong to me, and I wasn't sure if there was an actual reason or I just didn't agree with it, and then I figured it out. The odds that a woman was raped are small, but the odds that a woman was raped given that she says she was are actually a bit higher -- if 8% of accusations are unfounded (and I don't think all of those are false, and I'm not sure they're all wrong), more than nine in ten women who say they were raped have been raped.

    So in a population of 10,000 women, 400 are sexually assaulted, yielding 435 rape accusations, 92% of which are completely true. We can expect pretty much all the 435 (?) accused to proclaim their innocence; I still have not been given a reason why we can expect a significant number of women to invent rapes.

    Most men are not rapists and most women are not victims. But few men are specifically accused of rape.

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  35. Sorry to jump in late, but this discussion makes me think of the movie "The Life of David Gale."

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  36. Hi holly, jumping on board this thread train way late, but I had a few thoughts on this subject you might enjoy:

    http://farmerdyke.tumblr.com/post/16516811086/a-thought-about-convictions-and-rhetoric

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