A Spontaneous Order: Women and the Invisible Fist

RadGeek produces what I can only call the intellectual love child of Susan Brownmiller and Friedrich Hayek. Extremely well done:

Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-05-16 – Women and the Invisible Fist: All of this can happen quite naturally when a large enough minority of men choose to commit widespread, intense, random acts of violence against a large enough number of women. And it can happen quite naturally without the raping men, or the protecting men, or the women in the society ever intending for any particular large-scale social outcome to come about. But what will come about, quite naturally, is that women’s social being — how women appear and act, as women, in public — will be systematically and profoundly circumscribed by a diffuse, decentralized threat of violence. And, as a natural but unintended consequence of many small, self-interested actions, some vicious and violent (as in the case of men who rape women), some worthwhile in their origins but easily and quickly corrupted (as in the case of men who try to protect women from rape), and some entirely rational responses to an irrational and dangerous situation (as in the case of women who limit their action and seek protection from men), the existence and activities of the police-blotter rapist serve to constrain women’s behavior and to become dependent on some men — and thus dependent on keeping those men pleased and serving those men’s priorities — for physical protection from other men. That kind of dependence can just as easily become frustrating and confining for the woman, and that kind of power can just as easily become corrupting and exploitative for the man, as any other form of dependence and power. (Libertarians and anarchists who easily see this dynamic when it comes to government police and military protection of a disarmed populace, shouldn’t have any trouble seeing it, if they are willing to see it, when it comes to male protection of women)...

Comments

[bugly]

hence, all women should carry guns and know how to use them.

[JFred]

Ideas like this that make tremendous intuitive sense should really be questioned. They are hypotheses waiting for confirmation or denial by well-run studies.

Actually observing people, en masse, turns up sometimes surprising results.

The same logic that seems to work on a day-to-day basis, women seeking protection from men, might also work on a long-term cultural or even genetic basis. Scientific investigation is needed.

The ideas put forth by RadGeek are obviously true. However, we must remember that it was once equally obvious that the earth was flat.

[reason]

And the solution is? Surely this story stops short. (And yes, I do think that is the problem with Libertarian theories - they ignore the very real SUCCESS of social democracy.) Read David Brin on reciprocal accountability.

[Matt]

Better cooperation among women for self defense?

[kharris]

Reason,

Is stopping short really a fault? If you believe in labor specialization, discussion, or both, then there is great value in identifying a problem, even if you don't have a solution. If everyone who identifies a problem is required to suggest a solution before telling the rest of us, we are going to have a pretty limited discourse.

Nobody should ever write a 100+ word sentence with 3 parenthesis and hope to sell the idea it contains.

[jerry]

Great story, has no data. Let's talk about men and the invisible chastity belt and monogamy and honey do lists. In other words, this is more junk science and makes about as much sense as any good conspiracy theory.

Social orders developed based on many contributions, not just the men.

Rad Geek posits herself and rad feminists as something she is not: an outside observer. With her theory, she can explain why radical feminists are morally superior to rapist men, non-rapist men, as well as non-radical feminists. She and her other rad feminists are the only ones to have taken the red pill. She is Feynman in the water tank, but she is not Feynman when he came out.

[anne]

I have no idea what the post is about, though it seems distasteful enough.

[jerry]

It is important to remember that radical feminism is one of many feminist viewpoints and it has many feminist critics. Though it calls itself "radical", it is actually the viewpoint expressed in much of our top tiered blogrolled feminist blogs (and so I suspect with little evidence that it is what is emphasized in most women studies departments.)

For a very different point of view, and also very interesting and well written, I would point you to Renegade Evolution and see the variety of different feminists who comment there and discuss their frustrations with radical feminism and it's common strategy of removing rationality, agency, and even humanity from men, women, AND feminists that disagree with radical feminism. http://renegadeevolution.blogspot.com

And though the modern mainstream radical feminists hate to mention it, you can also look at the libertarian feminists, the equity feminists, at http://ifeminists.com or the free speech feminists like Wendy Kaminer at http://thephoenix.com/TheFreeForAll/

[Matilde]

..."the existence and activities of the police-blotter rapist serve to constrain women’s behavior and to become dependent on some men — and thus dependent on keeping those men pleased and serving those men’s priorities — for physical protection from other men."

When I read this I thought of the almost universal reaction of my family when I came out as gay in college - "But you need a man to protect you". A cab driver even told me this, once, when I mentioned that I wasn't married. Even my very progressive friends describe their male lovers this way, "he makes me feel safe". I'm afraid that many women find in men a refuge from fear, a protector against a world that they've been taught is unsafe for women on their own.

[jerry]

Matilde, you should live as you want to live, and best wishes to you.

But what if "he makes me feel safe" is really, to use a real geniusism, a biological imperative? I'm no zoologist, but throughout mammalia, we see sexual dimorphism with males (usually?) being larger, dominant, and protective of mates and family. Throughout mammalia we see harems (polygamy), we see rape (and we see gay behaviors.)

To conclude that we have a socially constructed "rape culture", or that only men are responsible for rape, or that there is either some over conspiracy we'll call the patriarchy to keep women down and controlled sexually or some bizarro world collective spontaneous would seem to ignore much of what we know about biology and mammalian behaviors. Which may be correct, but is not as simple an explanation as believing it is just a mammalian behavior we see throughout the class. Hence Occam's Razor suggests that all else being equal, the explanation is not correct. We need far more data than just a glib truthy to the women's studies set story.

[gwrnji]

What is this all about? That if a woman is being robbed or raped, a man should not try to defend her? Because that kind of dependence can just as easily become frustrating and confining for the woman, and that kind of power can just as easily become corrupting and exploitative for the man, as any other form of dependence and power. So I'd rather slap the bitch myself, you hear me, ho?

[Lawrence Krubner]

What RadGeek writes is true for men as well - the behavior of men is constrained, not only by the crime they experience, but by the crime they think they might experience. Ideally, a person (male or female) should be able to walk down any street, even at 3 AM, even alone, without the slightest fear of becoming the victim of violence. But in reality, all of us need to calculate, at all times, which of our actions might lead us into danger, and we need to contrain our behavior to avoid that danger.

Businesses need to do this as well, and the economic costs are high. A business needs to defend itself not only against the crime it experiences, but against the crime it might experience. The most obvious expense that this causes are alarm systems and video cameras, but there are other, more subtle costs, too. The worst and the most subtle of all these costs are the activities that never get initiated, the business models that can not be pursued, because the threat of crime is too high.

We end up with a social order that is shaped by the possibility of crime. All of us, and all businesses, order our lives with a concept in our head of certain activities that we should avoid because they might expose us to violence. This is so natural that we do not think of it, any more than we stop to think how much our houses are designed to deal with the reality of gravity. RadGeek elaborates how this effects women, but its good to remember that the effects are widespread.

[nick]

radgeek is offering an analysis of society; the absolutely consistent resistance to anything other than the mildest form of feminism, in even the smartest quarters of the non-feminist blogosphere, never ceases to amaze me. is it that the net is overpopulated by libertarians and misogynists?

[nick]

oh, and lawrence krubner: what, exactly, would be the point of mentioning that sometimes men also are scared to walk around in public? are you offering an argument against a feminist analysis?

"all of us need to calculate.....": ok, I calculate my chance of being raped by a woman in a dark alley as effectively nil. how many women can make the same calculations with respect to being raped by a man?

so much resistance; so much dishonesty....

[jerry]

"in even the smartest quarters of the non-feminist blogosphere, never ceases to amaze me. is it that the net is overpopulated by libertarians and misogynists?"

Yes, nick, disagreeing with rad geek's radical feminist analysis is misogyny.

Thank you for demonstrating the problem with the women's studies set.

[jerry]

"what, exactly, would be the point of mentioning that sometimes men also are scared to walk around in public?"

Not being Lawrence, I would say that while in an ideal world it should be safe for anyone of any sex and any age to walk anywhere, in the world we have we don't compare to rape to zero violence, we compare rape to the steady state, which is I gather, the rate of assault/muggings of men and women in that alley. We also compare the "victim shaming" that occurs to women with the victim shaming that goes on with men. "Jane, wtf were you doing walking down that alley after midnight?" "Bob, wtf were you doing walking down that alley after midnight?"

[kharris]

Ain't we arguing pretty far from the merits by just labeling the initial post the result of the some radical "women's studies set"? If the argument is logically consistent, which it seems to be, and drawn at some level from reality - rape is overwhelmingly a crime committed by men - then what does it matter whence the argument comes? No matter how bad the prose (really, I can't make that point often enough), we ought to debate this notion on its merits, rather than our ability to line up behind labels.

[Queequeg]

When I was a newspaper reporter and I had to cover the cop shop, I hated to write rape articles because I considered these stories to be a way of keeping women in their place. That, after all, is the function of rape itself -- to make women dependent upon non-raping men. By writing the articles, I felt like I was cooperating with the rapist. It seemed obvious to me, but I kept my mouth shut because I knew that my midwestern colleagues would think I was some sort of wild-eyed radical.

As far as whether all this is a biological imperative: We have a biological imperative to kill our enemies and be unfaithful to our spouses. We vote against warmongers anyway. We strive to be faithful to our spouses anyway. What is culture, but an effort to rise above our animal natures?

[kharris]

Queequeg,

Let me get this straight. Rapists do what they do as a favor to non-rapists? I can see the argument that rape may lead to female dependence on males for protection, but I see no evidence that this provides the motive for rape.

[Queequeg]

K, It doesn't matter what the rapist's intent is; other men benefit from rape because the threat of rape forces women to seek men's protection. In my admittedly muddle-headed way of thinking, I see this as rape's social function. I'm not sure what the rapist gets out of it, but I see what I and my fellow men get out of it.

I see similarities between rape and lynching. Lynching kept black people in their place, to the benefit of the white non-lynching population.

[jerry]

Please read carefully.

Rad Geek's argument may have internal consistency and be a fine "argument" (in the Monty Python sense.) But as an explanation of behavior, as a hypothesis, Rad Geek has provided no data to back it up. I am not talking about the data regarding numbers of rape, and who commits them, I am talking about the explanation that rape is due to some overt/covert conspiracy of men to keep women down. In contrast, we see rape throughout the animal kingdom. What I and others asked for is data, experiment, control. The explanation, such at it is, is at the level of hypothesis, and one that is not favored by Occam Razor's. It is similar to the ice cream causes shark attacks hypothesis.

I used "biological imperative" to describe my own "what if". What if women seeking protection from men was a biological imperative and not a result of some invisible fist? I did not use it to describe people raping each other, although, I am told, there is evidence for that. All rape IS bad, and there is no reason to condone rape but we need to understand what rape is about in order to stop rape, regardless of why rape occurs.

Right now the "women's studies set" claims that rape is about power and control, and insist that rape is not about sex. I don't know why they say this, I presume it is because they feel it makes it easier to ask for long sentences. And yet, there are apparently studies that show that at least some rape is about sex. For instance, with the rise of internet porn, rape has decreased. And just yesterday, Thomm Hartmann (who typically takes a pretty strong feminist line) on his show was mentioning that countries with legalized prostitution tend to have lower rates of rape. And google can be used to find websites that cite studies that backup both of these points. To the extent this is true, it also goes against Rad Geek's hypothesis that rape is a way of keeping women in place line.

"women's studies set" is a reference to a "famous" Internet War that still rages concerning Markos Moulitsas. Actually the compleat googleable reference is "sanctimonious women's studies set" and "pie".

I can propose invisible fist theories too. Here is an example of one:

Right now, the National Organization for Women lobbies Congress to veto laws that make "a rebuttable presumption of joint shared physical custody" the norm in custody battles. And they lobby for sole custody as the norm. In contrast, Father's groups beg Congress for laws that make "a rebuttable presumption of joint shared physical custody" the norm.

Many radical blogrolled feminists insist there is no court bias against fathers, and they in fact claim that fathers that ask for custody get sole custody something like 80% of the time.

If NOW lobbies against a rebuttable presumption of joint custody, and Father's lobby for it, what does your spidey sense tell you what happens in court?

So if fathers as a group are afraid of losing custody of their kids, what can you hypothesize husbands would do when faced with domestic violence AGAINST them? Would they stay, or would they go?

Here is one recent study, showing that husbands, when faced with domestic violence against them, tend to stay in the marriage:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-05/ghcc-med051508.php

Why would they do that? Perhaps it is the spontaneous reaction to the invisible fist.

Of course, because I like Feynman so and dislike cargo cult junk science like Patriarchy Theory, I'll bend over backwards to tell you what's wrong with my theory: the press release summary of the study I'm quoting from doesn't mention if these men are fathers. Or even if they're married. There might be other reasons for this. What researchers classify as domestic violence that should cause the breakup of a relationship, may in some circumstances for men and women be acceptable and not seen as domestic violence. Men may have reasons other than the court to stay in the relationship -- it may be our own biology as men that keeps us from understanding it is time to leave. The invisible fist may not be the plausible threat of losing custody of children, but may also be the plausible threat of failing to find a sex partner. I am sure there are other reasons too. We need data.

There are lots of potential spontaneous orders and invisible fists. Just because someone posits one is no reason to believe it is real without asking for more data. Asking for more data and critiquing the hypothesis is not a sign of misogyny. Except for the sanctimonious women's studies set. Pie.

[jerry]

Queequeg,

So being very reductive there are two types of men: rapists and non-rapists. Rapists "plunder" from the set of all women, including the children and the wives of the non-rapists.

Your theory is that the non-rapists put up with a certain amount of rape of their daughters and wives because it helps keep women down, and keeps women seeking the protection of the non-rapists.

Elsewhere in the class mammalia, we see rape, and we see harems, and we see protective behavior of males and females. We apparently also have studies that show increased internet porn and legalized prostitution both work to keep rape down.

I think your hypothesis is worth discussing. Do you have any data to back that up? That shows that non rapist men have utility functions that prefer the occasional violent and sexual abuse of daughters and wives if that tends to cause women to seek protective mates? That explains why men even want to be protective of women? That explains why we seek a different explanation amongst homo sapiens than we do for other mammals. That explains why mammals show sexually dimorphous body types with males being larger and usually showing more aggression?

If we believe rape is about power and control versus about sex, what does that tell us about laws regarding prostitution and porn? What if we believe rape is about sex, what would that tell us about prostitution and porn? If we want to stop rape, it seems important to understand what rape is about, and seems like a bad idea to cast those who ask for data as misogynists.

[kharris]

jerry,

If you are "I am talking about the explanation that rape is due to some overt/covert conspiracy of men to keep women down", then I am not sure you are talking about the original post. I read no implication of conspiracy there. The implication of conspiracy would be an issue for debate. But unless you can show where that implication exists in the original post, why don't you cool it with the "Monty Python" business?

[jerry]

kharris, two points, easier one first, Monty Python:

I love the argument clinic, and when I said it was a fine argument in the Monty Python sense I was actually paying a compliment. "An argument is a connected series of statements intended to support a proposition." I was saying it was a fine argument, worthy of a forensics style debate, take any side you wish. I was also saying the argument as given has no data linking it to the real world.

harder one: overt/covert conspiracy.

In some sense, I think what I refer to as covert conspiracy is what Rad Geek refers to as spontaneous order. No one has to tell you what the "orders" are, the system is designed so you just consciously or unconsciously recognize them and fall into line.

If you read the article, we see statements like:

"Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."

and

"Unlike the ways in which men systematically enslave, violate, dehumanize, and exterminate other men, expressing political inequalities among men, men’s forms of dominance over women have been accomplished socially as well as economically, prior to the operation of the law, without express state acts, often in intimate contexts, as everyday life."

Many of us would associate words like "conscious" and "systematic" and "socially" as buttressing either an overt or covert conspiracy. (I also like how all wars and social ills are laid out an men's feet, apparently women had nothing to do with this. Presumably, their vaginas are magic organs of peace and flowers, thatcherism, golda meir, and boadacia aside.)

Rad Geek wants us to understand it's neither overt nor covert conspiracy, but as some inherent part of some mystical patriarchy. Now my understanding is that feminists do not consider patriarchy to be some biological thing, but something socially constructed.

So we have Rad Geek saying, it's not overt nor covert conspiracy. It's not something arising from biology. It is conscious and systematic and inherent in the patriarchy. That's quite a fine line.

As you point out, it's not a behavior that non-rapists want for their wives and daughters, and most non-rapists I assume do not want it for any one in society. It's a behavior that is shared in the class mammalia. It is not supported by data. It's a behavior that Rad Geek's predecessors say was conscious (but whose explanations Rad Geek tells us we misinterpret.) It's not an overt conspiracy. It's not even a covert conspiracy. We set up physical, financial, moral incentives to stop it. The majority of men consciously and actively oppose it but because of the evils of patriarchy we are all destined to fail to stop rape because it aids us so well and because it will structurally self organize due to patriarchy. Do we see other spontaneous orders like this arising? If so, what are they? If not, why not?

We're damned if we do rape. We're damned if we don't rape. We're damned if we don't rape and do all that is possible to stop rape. And all because we hypothetically enjoy the pleasure of being protectors, and apparently we also enjoy the pleasure of being falsely accused of rape, of the pleasure of being considered to be threats to children, the pleasure of being the sex most likely hauled off to jail regardless of who initiated the violence in a domestic dispute, and the pleasure of having a court bias against fathers gaining custody of their kids.

You are correct: I have no way to describe this as other than conspiracy theory. If it's not an overt conspiracy, I make it out to be a covert conspiracy. I don't see a whole lot of difference between covert conspiracy and spontaneous order.

Me, I'm still left Grasping Reality with Both Hands holding Occam's Razor. And asking for data. And genetics and tests that indicate to me that whatever evil a man can do, a woman can do too.

[jerry]

When children look to mothers to protect them from other children, or other people, is that a spontaneous order and an invisible fist? Are mothers and women enjoying the pleasure of protecting their kids and so somehow unconsciously encouraging bullying and violence against kids?

[Rad Geek]

Jerry: Your theory is that the non-rapists put up with a certain amount of rape of their daughters and wives because it helps keep women down, and keeps women seeking the protection of the non-rapists.

I doubt that this is Queequeg's theory. I know that it is not mine. Nor, on my understanding, is it Susan Brownmiller's.

Jerry: I am talking about the explanation that rape is due to some overt/covert conspiracy of men to keep women down.

Then you're not talking about my post, but rather something else.

Much of the explicit purpose of the post was to reject interpretations of Brownmiller's position which, quote:

... treat this kind of analysis as if it were some kind of conspiracy theory about rape — as if Brownmiller were claiming that, say, every first Monday of the month, all the men got together in a big meeting at the Patriarchy’s underground headquarters and decided to have some men commit stranger rape as a way to keep women down. Or, to be more charitable to uncharitable critics, as if Brownmiller were claiming that 'police-blotter rapists' and other men who do not commit rape are consciously collaborating with one another, in some kind of social plan, promulgated from the top down, to intimidate women and bring about and sustain male supremacy.

My alternative interpretation of Brownmiller's theory rejects this in favor of a "spontaneous order" theory, as that term is used by economists such as Friedrich Hayek. It is a hallmark of spontaneous order theories that the individual people participating in a spontaneous order do so by engaging in self-interested actions, for reasons of their own, without needing to make any conscious effort to create or sustain that form of social coordination. (Hence "spontaneous," in the sense of "undesigned," as opposed to forms of coordination created by many people consciously following a single plan.) In this case, I read Brownmiller as arguing that men who commit rape do so for reasons of their own, without conscious coordination either between each other or with men who do not commit rape, but that the rapists' actions nevertheless redound to the benefit of -- serve the class interests of -- men, including the majority of men who do not commit rape, and who (I presume) consider rape a serious evil and wouldn't consciously seek to benefit from it. The idea is that when the threat of sexual violence against women is intense, pervasive, and random enough, this produces systematic effects on all women's freedom, as well as the balance of social power between women and men, whether or not any of the individual people concerned had that outcome in mind, or would have accepted that outcome if they thought about it, when they made their choices about how to act.

Maybe that explanation is right and maybe it's wrong, but it is what it is, and not something else. You'll have to engage with that if you want to actually join the conversation, rather than just shouting irrelevancies at it, and the fact that your summary of the explanation reads more or less exactly like a condensed version of precisely the strawman view I was explicitly repudiating, and to which I was trying to suggest an alternative, indicates to me that you haven't done yet gotten that far.

In any case the primary purpose of the original post was to help explain what Brownmiller's claims *are*, as against a common and extremely uncharitable reading of them, not to provide a comprehensive defense for the claim. If you want a comprehensive defense, then you'd be better off actually reading the book (which covers a lot of ground over the course of 407 pages of text) than trying to find it my attempt to provide exegesis of four paragraphs in which she summarizes a couple of her conclusions. But before you can understand the defense, you will need to exercise the care and charity needed to understand what the claim being defended is in the first place.

As for the sanctimonious women's studies set, yeah, O.K., you got me, I'm a sanctimonious Women's Student. I'm also anti-male, anti-sex, anti-America, and anti-life. Let's move along and talk about the argument as it was actually presented.

[Rad Geek]

Jerry: "Many of us would associate words like 'conscious' and 'systematic' and 'socially' as buttressing either an overt or covert conspiracy.

"Systematic" and "socially" only suggest a conspiracy if you believe that the only ways in which large-scale social coordination can come about is by a process of crafting and consciously following a common plan. But that just is to claim that there are no spontaneous orders. In which case your problem is with Hayek, not with Brownmiller or with me.

"Conscious" only suggests a conspiracy if the word "conscious" is being used *to apply to participation in the form of social coordination in question*. But Brownmiller doesn't say that the "conscious process of intimidation" is something that all men participate in (if you think it is, re-read the sentence, paying particular attention to which clause "all men" is the subject of). In a "conscious process of intimidation," presumably the person who would be either conscious or unconscious is the intimidator, which in this case means the rapist. We know from elsewhere in the book (especially the passages on the Myrmidon theory) that Brownmiller isn’t claiming that all men are rapists (after all, part of what she’s explicitly interested in analyzing is how the actions of men who rape affect the status of women vis-a-vis men who do not rape). So we don’t yet have any reason to believe that Brownmiller is claiming that anyone other than the rapist alone is consciously intending to intimidate women (maybe all women as such; maybe some group of women; maybe the one particular woman he has targeted for attack; Brownmiller doesn’t make it explicit which, and not much turns on it in this discussion). Which is true enough; if he weren’t intending to intimidate, he wouldn’t be a rapist.

So then what’s the function of that clause about "by which *all* men keep *all* women in a state of fear", if not to say that all men are somehow consciously trying to intimidate women? Well, again, looking at the rest of the book, and especially the passages on the Myrmidon theory, one interpretation that suggests itself is that Brownmiller is making a statement in that clause about the political effects of rape — that all women are kept in a state of fear by all mean, as an *effect* of the conscious process of intimidation carried out by some but not all men—an effect which not all of the men in question, or perhaps even none of the men in question, may have consciously intended.

If Brownmiller doesn’t mean to use the word "conscious" to suggest conscious intent by all men to keep all women in a state of fear, but only to say that rapists consciously intend to intimidate women, then why include the word at all? Can’t it just be taken for granted? Well, no, it can’t be. I’d argue that Brownmiller includes the word "conscious" because it has to do with a distinct claim made in the book, which is not directly discussed in my original post — that rapists are motivated in part by the desire to intimidate and control women, not just by some uncontrollable lust or the lack of consensual sexual "outlets."

Maybe you disagree with Brownmiller on that point; if so, fine, but that's a different disagreement, which has to do with what a rapist's conscious intent in committing rape is, rather than with Brownmiller's effect of the social effects of rape.

Jerry: "I also like how all wars and social ills are laid out an men's feet, apparently women had nothing to do with this."

Who are you arguing with here? I can't find anything in either the Brownmiller quote or the MacKinnon quote that you single out that would suggest anything of the sort, or anything at all about some kind of universal theory of who's responsible for all wars and social ills.

[jerry]

Hi Rad Geek, I see you like to do what so many in your peergroup like to do. Misrepresent others and then claim that you are being truthful and toss around ad hominems in doing so:

"Maybe that explanation is right and maybe it's wrong, but it is what it is, and not something else. You'll have to engage with that if you want to actually join the conversation, rather than just shouting irrelevancies at it, and the fact that your summary of the explanation reads more or less exactly like a condensed version of precisely the strawman view I was explicitly repudiating, and to which I was trying to suggest an alternative, indicates to me that you haven't done yet gotten that far."

If you had read through the thread, and were being truthful, you could see I have engaged in yours and Brownmiller's arguments many times, and that my position is that asking for data, looking at others in the animal kingdom, and looking at similar behaviors in our species is not *shouting irrelevancies* at you. You would also see that my "summary of the explanation" is not my summary of your explanation, but my paraphrase of Kharris' summary of Queequeg's post (that may have had little or nothing to do with your post). My counter to Kharris regarding yours is that between you Kharris, et. al., you have made a very complex theory using no data that is neither biological, nor overt conspiracy, and the since you have ignored other arguments against your theory (rape in mammalia, mothers protecting children, rape decreasing with increased pornography and legal prostitution) I have no word to characterize your theory of spontaneous order as anything other than covert conspiracy.

I think of spontaneous order as molecules forming dna. As fines reducing speeding. As incentives encouraging good behavior. I think we should be able to posit forces and measure them. It's not what's left when you have consciously ruled everything else out.

I didn't claim you were anti-sex or anti-America or anti-life. If you are going to complain against strawmen, please don't construct any of your own.

I apologize to you if my critique of your post did not address all 407 pages of Brownmiller. Instead of ad hominem arguments against me, instead of saying I have done things to you I have not, instead of dismissing my arguments as irrelevancies, instead of positing your own strawmen,

you might wish to address my criticisms in your post. Gosh, my stating the evidence behind Brownmiller's claims or explaining why data cannot be obtained or or explaining how your explanation is simpler than made out to be and so is Occam preferred, or by explaining why your hypothesis need not fall into the scientific method of valuation, you might actually improve your post and your argument.

I am still curious to why you think mothers collaborate with bullies as part of their invisible fist and spontaneous order.

[Emma Anne]

"I have no idea what the post is about, though it seems distasteful enough."

I guessed as soon as I read it that the comments thread would be dominated by long, hostile antifeminist screeds, though. Actually it turned out better than I thought it would!

[Rad Geek]

* Jerry: "I think of spontaneous order as molecules forming dna. As fines reducing speeding. As incentives encouraging good behavior."

Look, I don't want to be a dick about this, but if this is how you think of spontaneous order, then you don't have a very good grip on the concept of spontaneous order.

If a government agency decides that it wants to reduce speeding, and in order to reduce speeding it institutes a fine for speeders, and, due to the threat of that fine, people don't speed as much as they used to, that's not an example of a spontaneous order. It's a paradigm case of a designed order: legislators wanted a different social outcome, so they instituted a law in order to achieve it and people complied with that law in order to avoid the penalty.

Whether "incentives encouraging good behavior" counts as an example of a spontaneous order or not depends on what the incentives are and why those incentives exist. If those incentives are the unintended byproduct of things that are done for reasons other than producing those incentives, then you have a spontaneous order (for example, when ATM card issuers standardize on a common shape and size for ATM cards, not because anybody set out to encourage standardization by creating specific incentives for it, but rather because, without anybody setting out to make it that way, it turns out to be most cost-effective to make ATM cards that fit existing wallets and ATM card readers). But if they exist because someone who plans to bring about a particular social outcome is deliberately creating those incentives for that kind of behavior, then what you have is an example of a designed order, not a spontaneous order. (As, for example, in the case of fines deliberately instituted to reduce speeding, or in the case of, say, offering to reward children with honors or money for good performance in school.)

* Jerry: "Instead of ad hominem arguments against me ..."

Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of criticizing an argument by appealing to properties of the person advancing it, instead of assessing the argument on its own merits. As far as I know I have not used an argumentum ad hominem against you at any point. If you want to accuse me of doing so, you had better actually produce an specific example to substantiate the charge.

* Jerry: "since you have ignored other arguments against your theory (rape in mammalia, ..."

I have no idea what the ethological argument is supposed to be refuting. Are you trying to make a claim that human men are biologically predisposed to rape? If so, I think that's absolutely false (as does Brownmiller: http://www.susanbrownmiller.com/susanbrownmiller/html/review-thornhill.html), but it doesn't constitute an objection to Brownmiller's theory as discussed in my post. The part of Brownmiller's theory under discussion is about the *social effects* of rape, not the *causes of an individual man's decision to commit rape*, and rape could have those effects *whether or not* it is rooted in some underlying biological predisposition.

If you aren't trying to make the claim that human men are biologically predisposed to rape, then what claim are you trying to make, and how does it relate to Brownmiller's claim about the social effects of the systematic threat of stranger-rape against women?

* Jerry: "mothers protecting children"

I have no idea what the objection here is supposed to be. Is the claim supposed to be that mothers don't gain social power over children in virtue of their role as protectors against certain kind of danger? Of course mothers gain social power over children that way. Parents enjoy immense social and political power vis-a-vis children, and most of the reason for that has to do with the "protector" role that they play.

If, alternatively, this case is supposed to demonstrate that, even though mothers do gain power over children, it's not always a bad thing for one group of people to gain power over another by serving as their protectors--well, that much is certainly true. But I don't think that the relationships between adult men and adult women ought to be like the relationships between parents and their children. Do you?

* Jerry: "rape decreasing with increased pornography and legal prostitution"

Again, I have no idea what point of mine or Brownmiller's this is supposed to be responsive to. If you're right about there being a direct causal connection here (again, I don't think you are, but even if you are) how does that refute or even respond to absolutely anything in Brownmiller's claims about the social effects of the systemic threat of stranger-rape against women?

Suppose it were true that the best way to reduce rape would be to make pornography and prostitution as widely available to all men as you possibly can. O.K.; what then? Does that logically undermine Brownmiller's claim that the threat of stranger-rape has the effect of substantially limiting women's freedom and substantially increasing men's power over women? If it does undermine that claim, how does it undermine it? If it does not undermine that claim, why bring it up?

Generally speaking, you seem to want to make this into a broad discussion about feminism and radical feminist theories of patriarchy generally, rather than about the much more specific topic (Susan Brownmiller's analysis of the social effects of stranger-rape) that my post addressed. If you want to argue about that other stuff, fine; there are lots of arguments about that kind of stuff on the Internet and I'm not about to get in your way if you propose to have another one. But that kind of argument is not actually a reply to the points that I was making in my post, and I for one have better things to do with my time than try to rehash those other arguments yet again with someone who obviously doesn't have much interest in or sympathy with the perspective that I'm coming from. My interest here is only with making sure that as many people as possible understand a much more narrow and specific argument.

* Jerry: "I am still curious to why you think mothers collaborate with bullies as part of their invisible fist and spontaneous order."

I think that there is no empirical basis whatsoever for treating this as a social problem of a comparable scope to rape and its effects on women. But if there are men out there who stay in a bad relationship because they are afraid of losing a relationship with their children, should they leave, and if being legally deprived of a relationship with your children is an example of *violence* against the person thus deprived -- a claim that I'm not at all sure I'd be willing to endorse -- then, sure, I'd say that IF both those things are true, then those men's decisions to stay in those relationships is an example of an invisible fist process. There are lots of invisible fist processes in this vale of tears; my aim was only to explain one of them, partly for its own sake and partly for the sake of making something clear about the concept of "spontaneous order" than most libertarian writers have thus far failed to make clear. It was not to discuss each and every invisible fist process in the world.

[jerry]

Rad Geek: Occam's Razor from the Wiki: "Occam's razor (sometimes spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae ("law of parsimony" or "law of succinctness"): "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", or "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity".

This is often paraphrased as "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood."

I am saying that you and Brownmiller seem to propose and require a very complex theory in order to explain phenomena that seem just as easily explained with much simpler theories.

That your theory isn't as predictive as simpler theories: (it doesn't predict the relationship of porn and prostitution to rape)

That your theory predicts behavior that holders of your theory then exclude from your theory, for instance, your theory suggests that mothers collude with and are corrupted by school bullies (and other bullies) so that mothers can feel good protecting their children.

(Or perhaps as your commenter Dave suggested: "What if Ms Brownmiller had said? “Black men’s discovery that his skin color could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries ——- I believe, skin color has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all Black men keep all White people in a state of fear.” She would be well received by the KKK perhaps but would be a pariah in your circles.")

That your theory lacks empirical data. That you have failed to support your theory with ANY data.

That your theory is unfalsifiable since no one knows how to measure degrees of patriarchy or measure degrees of formation of your spontaneous order or degrees of invisible fistness.

I say that Occam rejects your theory in place of other simpler alternative theories. And I'd say your theory comes down to junk science and conspiracy theory.

Now, if you turned this in any of the anthropology courses I ever took, much less a physics, chemistry, or biology course, I think you'd get a well deserved "F".

Just because it is a soft science doesn't mean it shouldn't be:
a) testable and falsifiable
b) rely on empirical data
c) predictive
d) simpler than alternative theories and better in terms of prediction

(I am not even clear on why you posted your own summary of Brownmiller. If your claim is that people cannot disagree with you or critique you without taking on all 407 pages of Brownmiller, why do we need your summary?)

Please redo and resubmit.

On the other hand, I do love this statement: "if being legally deprived of a relationship with your children is an example of *violence* against the person thus deprived -- a claim that I'm not at all sure I'd be willing to endorse." Knowing the relationship is one of either fatherhood or motherhood, well you should try saying that into a mirror. Do you burst out laughing too like I did when I read it?

P.S. Ad hominem attack: "You'll have to engage with that if you want to actually join the conversation, rather than just shouting irrelevancies at it," -- I think it's clear I have not been shouting irrelevancies, regardless of how you would like to characterize my argument or me.

[JRossi]

I'm not advocating this, but I think pre-pubertal castration would decrease aggression. Absent that, hard to think of a solution to the problem of normal male behavior.

[Julian Elson]

Are people really so uncomfortable with the idea that they may benefit from bad things that happen to other people, even if they aren't personally responsible? I'm not sure whether it's true that all men benefit from rape committed against women, but certainly there are many, many cases where it's true. It doesn't imply anything bad about the beneficiary. Oncologists benefit when people get cancer. Oil companies benefit when there's chaos and instability in the middle east. Counselors benefit when people go through emotional, financial, or whatever turmoil.

This doesn't mean oncologists, for instance, are bad people. Certainly, if cancer were spread by men who forcibly injected carcinogens into their girlfriends, stepdaughters, etc, that would be awful. Those guys ought to stop doing that. It would be awful if oncologists aided and abetted those guys. However, even if cancer were spread by malicious men, that wouldn't make oncologists bad unless a specific oncologist also happened to be one of the men who injected carcinogens into someone. Nonetheless, oncologists in this scenario benefit from the actions of the cancer-spreading men. They might think cancer is awful, and prefer losing their jobs if it could mean that cancer could be stopped, but they still benefit.

[Julian Elson]

Whoops. I edited my thoughts into unclarity. I meant that there are "many, many cases where it's true" that people benefit from bad things that happen to other people, not "many, many cases where it's true" that men benefit from rape against women.

[jerry]

Julian,

We don't see entire departments dedicated to the proposition that cancer is a socially constructed concept, we don't see academics and activists denying there is a biological component to cancer, and we don't see academics and activists stating that cancer is used to by everyone without cancer to oppress and keep cancer patients down.

If you and Rad Geek want to say that perverse incentives incent people perversely, well I agree.

But beyond that, I think you need data and I think it is reasonable to ask how your theory stacks up against competing theories.

What do we do when we see people selling the idea that cancer is socially constructed and only in your head? We deride them as quacks. But when radical feminists claim that all men benefit from rape, and make the claim we live in a rape culture and they ignore any evolutionary, biological components to this, and we don't ask for data, what do we do? We put in place policies and laws that hurt all of society but mostly men based on little data.

We put into place mandatory speech codes and mandatory diversity programs that are often unconstitutional. We put into place bureaucrats whose job is to root out and punish people who say the wrong things. (See thefire.org for many examples of this.)

We put into place harsh idiotic zero tolerance policies that expel students engaged in stupid, but playful, and consenting activities. We suspend four year old boys that hug their teacher.

We tell police that they must arrest one person in any domestic violence case AND we tell them NOT to arrest the person that initiated the violence, but we mandate they consider factors of "comparable size; comparable strength; the person allegedly least likely to be afraid; who has access to or control of family resources (i.e., who makes more money); and others. Given these factors, it is very difficult for officers to arrest female offenders." (see Glenn Sacks, predominant aggressor". They we insist DAs prosecute all domestic violence cases and tell them they are not allowed to drop any of them, regardless of what their investigations find, or what "the victim" has to say about the prosecution (see Glenn Sacks, "no drop" policies.) We tell judges they must grant just about any request for a temporary restraining order, even when the other party is not present to defend themselves, and even when the request is ludicrous on its face (see temporary restraining order against David Letterman)

All of this introduces real and harmful biases against men, and usually against people that cannot afford the lawyers to defend themselves. All of this ends up stripping good fathers of relationships with their children. Which Rad Geek is not sure is an act of violence.

We pretend that women cannot make or would not make false allegations of rape, domestic violence or child abuse, even though a) books have been written about similar behaviors of girls against other girls when they were in high school (queen bees and wannabes) and b) we see ample examples of actual data and evidence that says otherwise (Kanin, FBI stats, Duke students), and c) we have micro-economists telling us about the problems with setting up poor incentives causing havoc in the system ("On the Wisdom of Rewarding A While Hoping for B")

We perpetuate myths about domestic violence pretending that men initiate most of it, that men are not harmed by it, and that men have no need of domestic violence victim's resources, when in fact actual studies show that men and women both initiate domestic violence on a pretty equal basis, that men are often severely injured by domestic violence, and that men are often trapped into abusive relationships for fear of leaving that would keep them from being able to intercede on their children's behalf, or fear of losing custody of the children. (See Glenn Sacks, myth of domestic violence.)

Why do we do this? Well, I think we do this so we as society can feel good about being protective of our women. And I think we have been bullied by the women's studies department and a gross abuse of academic freedom and politically correct speech. But as Rad Geek and Susan Brownmiller complain, that's sexist, and corrupting, and fixes in place these myths and unfair and definitely socially constructed gender biased policies. (See Daphne Patai, Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies, and then Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies.) (See Wendy Kaminer, feminist, free speech advocate, and ACLU board member. See Nadine Strossen, head of the ACLU.)

What should we do? Ask for data and respect the scientific method. And investigate and just say no to the sanctimonious women's studies set. We should grasp reality with both hands, and not say yes to pseudo-science cult theory and conspiracy theory just because it makes us feel good about ourselves and just because "hey, I'm not an abuser or rapist, I have nothing to fear and hence, no man does."

For more, see the very reality based, progressive blogger, Glenn Sacks. Pick any month of his posts and compare them to any month of posts at Shakesville, Feministing, Feministe, or Pandagon. Come back and tell me which blogger is more reality based and more progressive.

(By the way, Glenn Sacks has a source page in which he references the studies (you know, data and all that) that he frequently cites that form the basis of his opinions. http://www.glennsacks.com/source_page.htm)

[kharris]

Jerry,

Here's the thing. Your initial response to the post implied things about the post that, to me, seemed incorrect. In particular, I thought you had taken an objective attempt at identifying a potential social implication of rape as a veiled attempt to foster a "men are bad" story. It sounded to me like you were reading things into the post that were not there, at least not overtly. Now, the author has shown up and said this is not a "men are bad" story, that the things you seemed to read into weren't intended to be in it. Your most recent response is a lengthy defense against the "men are bad" notion, specifically as it has to do with rape. In making that response, you are missing the point of the original post and ignoring what the author is saying to you.

If it is important to you to complain against women's studies, feminism, the treatment of rape accusation and rape suspicion in our culture, go right ahead, but maybe do it without misrepresenting what somebody else has to say in the process. You can't legitimately round up RadGeek as an example of the things you are complaining about. You also do your reputation as a thinker no good by carrying on about what a meanie RadGeek is if the specifics of your meanie case don't hold water.

Go forth and complain, but do it legitimately.

[jerry]

Kharris,

Her theory has no scientific merit, though she insists it does. Neither does her claim that this is not a "men are bad" story, though she insists it does not.

I have tried to lay out my reasoning with plenty of googleable information stating exactly why her theory has no scientific merit, and exactly why her story ends up being a men are bad story.

F => F is T. The simplest way of saying that bad science is used to justify bad policies. Her psuedo-scientific theory isn't that men are bad, it just (conveniently) ends up that way, and ends up justifying many policies based on men are bad and we live in a rape culture and all men benefit from rape.

Look, it's not the Negro's problem that they are dumber than us whites, it's just science. Negroes are not bad people. They are just dumber than us whites. It's why it is okay for us to pay them less, not promote them, and not let them live in our more refined neighborhoods or eat in our more refined restaurants. They wouldn't enjoy it or have any ability to appreciate it. But don't take my story as saying that Negroes are bad people. It's just science followed up by logical policies. F => F is T.

My most recent post had little to do with RadGeek and was a response to Julian Elson's question. For you to claim that it was some sort of illegitimate attack on RadGeek seems bizarre given how my post started off with the address, "Julian," and responded directly to his question.

On a more personal level, I have two daughters (and an ex-wife), and I do not benefit from rape of any woman. What does rape get me? Rape gets me a real and palpable fear for the lives of my children. Rape gets me the inability to let my kids have sleepovers with their friends at my apartment. Rape gets me the suspicion along with all men these days that I am a likely child abuser. If I were a teacher, rape gets me the requirement I should not be left along with a female student. At work, rape gets me the requirement I have to be very very careful in my words whenever speaking to anyone of the opposite sex because of our non-judicial sexual harassment panel. On the bus, holding hands with my daughter could get me arrested (http://wbz.com/pages/2137781.php?contentType=4&contentId=2007117). Rape costs me taxpayer dollars, it costs me my own dollars, it creates considerable anxiety, it limits my freedom, and it takes away my personal liberties. Rape doesn't get me anything, and I suspect it doesn't get you squat either.

People who claim that all men, or just men in general benefit from rape are delusional and trying to create a wedge in society. And on its face, anyone that claims that non-rapists benefit from rape are telling you a men are bad story, regardless of how they want to claim otherwise.

Don't let bad science drive out the good. Question authority. If you want peace, work for justice.

Though RadGeek dismisses me by saying I _shout_ out _irrelevances_ at her, I have not once claimed she is a meanie. All I have said is that her theory has no scientific merit, no data to back it up, and has led to terrible policy that is often ardently espoused by the women's studies department. You are free to regard my "reputation as a thinker" anyway you wish, just as I am free to judge by the errors, and inaccuracies in your latest post about your skills as a thinker.

If you want to claim that her theory is objective and has scientific merit, please do so. As I and others have asked, let's see the data. Show me how the theory is testable. Show me how it stacks up against competing theories. She hasn't been able to do that. You haven't attempted to do that. All either of you can do is berate me for the temerity of my argument. (Even the invisible hand that she wants to compare her theory too has far more in the way of testability and predictive value to it.)

All we have is her story. I see RadGeek and other people claiming this story has face validity. My gut tells me her story is truthy. My head tells me that examining data, facts and logic, her story lacks even face validity.

Legitimately yours,

jerry

[jerry]

From the article:

Brownmiller: "A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe for it may turn into a weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent. Myrmidons to the cause of male dominance, police-blotter rapists have performed their duty well, so well in fact that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed. Rather than society’s aberrants or spoilers of purity, men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known."

MacKinnon: "Unlike the ways in which men systematically enslave, violate, dehumanize, and exterminate other men, expressing political inequalities among men, men’s forms of dominance over women have been accomplished socially as well as economically, prior to the operation of the law, without express state acts, often in intimate contexts, as everyday life."

This is what RadGeek buttresses her argument with. I don't know how you can read these two quotes and not think these are "men are bad" arguments. RadGeek's point of departure is dubious and weak. Her conclusion seems to be it is not men who are bad it is patriarchy that it is bad, nevertheless, all men benefit from rape, but somehow she wants you to think she is not saying that men are bad.

(She even claims to fail to see how the two quotes lay the responsibility for war and other ills at men's feet.)

[kharris]

jerry,

You have forgotten, all the way through, to include, "in my personal view" in each and every one of your assertions. If you can't tell an ad hominem from hominy grits, why on earth do you think you are qualified to tell whether some argument has "scientific" validity? All that is, from stem to stern, is another way of saying "I'm right, she's wrong". (By the way, RadGeek admits to Women's Studies, but so far, not to being female that I can tell.) You are expected to demonstrate the rightness of your views, not just assert it. I'm sure you have done so to your own satisfaction, but it was more or less the point of everything I've written in response to you that you have not done so to my satisfaction, and I don't have a dog in the fight.

You are coming perilously close to padding yer paper here by admonishing the rest of us, or me anyhow, not to let "bad science drive out good" to "question authority" and all the other nonsense that more or less presumes your intellectual superiority. You have mastered these warnings, and we haven't. You can stop that now. It's offense, and tends give the impression, again, that you are claiming to know, rather than showing that you do.

There is also a pong of the old Soviet style of argumentation here. RadGeek's was a logical argument, not a scientific one. No data were presented. To claim that it is "unscientific" is either just weird, or your version of "Comrad, we have made our production plans according to the most modern scientific principles."

[jerry]

Sorry Kharris, but when I show you where you can google this stuff, that's more strong than mere personal view and opinion. Which of course, is true of everything you read in the blogosphere including your own material. Which is one reason that people don't go around adding "in my personal view" to most every utterance they make.

But to say that his argument is a logical argument and needs not be a scientific argument beggars belief when a) the components of her logical argument can be tested empirically, b) when he concludes with policy on what to fight for, why, when, and how. If she is advocating fighting, or policy, or real world impacts, shouldn't we strive to be reality based? Doesn't that necessarily imply we should examine arguments with a scientific mind?

If you want to claim the argument and the conclusion are purely logical, debate style, with no real world impact, do so. I've already said it's a fine Monty Python style argument in the best sense. What I have done is pointed out where in the scientific process (not in my opinion) his argument falls short: it is not testable, it is not falsifiable, there is no data to support it, it is as predictive as other competing theories, it predicts things in the theory that the owners disagree with, and it is more complex than competing theories. Yes, that's my opinion, but I also provided googly links as to why.

It does you no good to claim I am some sort of Communist or Authoritarian by asking for data. Remember the title of this blog: "Grasping Reality with Both Hands". I know of no better way to do that than by paying attention to the scientific method. If you're speaking of offense in the name of rhetoric, check out the mirror.

So now we have you: upset with my temerity, claiming everything I say is my opinion only, being some sort of authoritarian communist, but I do applaud you for making your claim as to why RadGeek's argument does not need to meet the crucible of the scientific method and needs no data to back it up. That's more than RadGeek herself has done.

(And you're right, RadGeek is one Charles W. Johnson of Las Vegas, but not the same Charles Johnson as owns LGF.) Perhaps Charles has benefited from the rape of women, but not me.

[jerry]

Elsewhere at this blog about a soft social science, even today, people ask for more data, but if anyone asks for more data in response to a feminist argument they are either misogynistic as nick claims, or a crypto-soviet as kharris claims.

These same people wonder why other feminist academics studying the women's studies department write about feminist indoctrination, and other people in general worry about enforced political correctness, thought policing, and actual lack of academic freedom in the women's studies department.

Kharris, et. al., I would like to point out to you this link: "The Truth Behind Legal Dominance Feminism's 'Two Percent False Rape Claim' Figure", http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v33-issue3/greer.pdf . This 2000, Loyola Law Review article actually traces back "consensus fact" regarding false rape claims to a poorly sourced speech quoted by Susan Brownmiller. The author of the paper goes through many articles and pundits claiming that the rate of false rape claims is 2%, and even when the articles cite two or more sources, each source inevitably is an unsourced 1974 speech given by a New York City Appellate Court Justice that Susan Brownmiller heard and wrote about. When asked directly, the author of the speech could not source the 2% rate to anything further.

That 2% has now been bandied about in all sorts of papers and given an air of well known, indisputable scientific truth, and used as the basis for legislation, for funding, for zero tolerance policies, and has created all sorts of havoc.

It's just science, it's not that men are bad. They are just drawn that way.

[kharris]

jerry, my reference to Soviet science was intended to leave you an exit, as an irony. There is no "scientific method" at work in your effort. None. It is mere pretense. The more you say "science, science, science" the sillier you become. What you have failed to do is address the initial post on its terms. You have pretended it was something it wasn't in order to "answer" it in a way that doesn't asnwer it. And then you pretend that your failure is a virtue.

[jerry]

kharris,

RadGeek proposes an argument to explain many human behaviors, for example, why women seek out men as protectors. What men/patriarchy does intentionally or not to collude with that. What incentives we have in our culture and why. These are scientific claims. His theory examines past behavior, hypothesizes a reason for that, and makes predictions about future behavior. It is a scientific claim and a scientific argument and from that RadGeek concludes with real world implications and real world policies.

(I believe many psychologists, economists, and other social scientists would disagree with you that his argument was purely logical, and not scientific and did not make scientific claims.)

You are right though, there was no "science" in my critiques. I was not "doing science", I did not make a theory as to why RadGeek proposed his theories. I performed no experiments. I had no control. I was critiquing his scientific claim about behavior and critiquing his policy conclusions by examining how well his argument and its conclusion conformed to the scientific process. That's not science, and you're right. I did no science in my arguments, and nor would I claim to.

What I was doing, was discussing the theory and philosophy of science and the scientific method -- for this is how I best know how to understand the world. To observe, to hypothesize, to test, to conclude.

Your claim that you can make an argument about human behavior that is logical only, that does not involve science or need to be tested, but that can be used to dictate policy and draw conclusions about society and culture, well I would like to know more about that.

Because I don't think I have ever come across a claim such as yours.

If you can state once again and perhaps a bit more slowly for me, how we can make logical arguments about behavior that conclude with policy, arguments that do not need data, and do not need to be tested, and do not need to be compared with other arguments, I would very much like to know more, because it would seem to be much more efficient in terms of time, space, and resources, than the poor methods I use now.

(With my western, white, male, privileged point of view, I just consider stringing together arguments with no basis in observable data and drawing conclusions from them to be junk science, pseudo-science, religious hokum.)

[DRR]

jerry seriously, just stop.

[Rad Geek]

* Jerry: "P.S. Ad hominem attack: 'You'll have to engage with that if you want to actually join the conversation, rather than just shouting irrelevancies at it,' -- I think it's clear I have not been shouting irrelevancies, regardless of how you would like to characterize my argument or me."

That's not an argumentum ad hominem. It is not even an argument at all; it's a piece of advice which neither draws from premises nor moves towards a conclusion. It contains an implied characterization, which you may find personally insulting; but insults may be either called-for or uncalled-for, depending on the breaks, and are not the same thing as argumentum ad hominem, which is always a logical fallacy.

* Jerry: [after a quotation from Brownmiller and a quotation from MacKinnon] "This is what RadGeek buttresses her argument with."

No, it's not. You seem to be having consistent problems with understanding the direction of inference in arguments. (For example, you also have repeatedly spoken as if the part of Brownmiller's theory that was under discussion in the post was attempting to explain or make predictions about the *causes* of stranger rape. It's not; it's about the *effects*.) Here, you have failed to grasp that my post was intended to EXPLAIN THE CONTENT of the claims in those quotations using terms which a certain part of my audience would be likely to understand and find interesting.

The post was not intended to establish some further conclusion BY MEANS OF those quotations. The quotations are not introduced as evidence for a conclusion. They are introduced as texts to be interpreted; the evidence for the interpretation I favor is provided elsewhere in the post.

* Jerry: "RadGeek's point of departure is dubious and weak. Her conclusion seems to be [...]"

My conclusion is that Susan Brownmiller is advancing a theory on which patriarchy is substantially reinforced by a spontaneous order arising from the effects of pervasive, random acts of sexual violence against women.

Any other suggestion as to what my conclusion "seems to be" is sure to be overreaching on your part.

As for your beefs with a random assortment of popular feminist bloggers, other claims that Susan Brownmiller happened to make about a different topic (e.g. false report rates), Women's Studies programs in Universities, feminist analyses of domestic violence, social constructionism, zero tolerance policies, or the price of tea in China, I honestly don't care. Judging from the response that your comments has gotten, I doubt much of anyone else here does, either. I'm sure that these issues are all very important to you, but they are not actually material to my post, or to the part of Brownmiller's theory that's under discussion, or to the discussion that basically anyone other than you has been pursuing. I would call them red herrings, but even an accusation of misdirection would require a degree of coherent direction that your posts have, so far, not demonstrated.

* kharris: "By the way, RadGeek admits to Women's Studies, but so far, not to being female that I can tell."

For what it's worth, I've only ever taken one course in my life that would qualify as a "Women's Studies" course, and it was a fairly straightforward Psychology of Sexuality course, which wasn't especially feminist in content. (It was cross-listed as Women's Studies but taught by regular Psych department faculty.) Not that I think there's anything *wrong* with taking Women's Studies courses; that's just not the way my academic career panned out.

However, I will happily concede just about any empty polemical label that jerry wants to throw at me, without argument, because I don't give much of a damn what he calls me, and I'd just as soon get it out of the way in order to discuss something that matters.

[jerry]

Hi Rad Geek, good to hear from you again.

I think your recent post is disingenuous at best. Let's hit the highlights:

"For example, you also have repeatedly spoken as if the part of Brownmiller's theory that was under discussion in the post was attempting to explain or make predictions about the *causes* of stranger rape. It's not; it's about the *effects*"

If she is wrong and mischaracterizes the causes, what does that say about her conclusions regarding the effects? F => F is True. F => T is True. You're the philosopher and computer scientist (logician).

You are mistaken to not question the assumptions. So I questioned them. And asked for data to back that up as well as to back up the conclusion. As I've said, it's one thing to make a forensics style argument for fun, to see how well it all hangs together, but if you're going to draw evidence from the IRL world and make conclusions about meatspace, and call people to action to overthrow the patriarchal and state hegemonies, then it is reasonable to question the assumptions, and the conclusions and ask for theories tested with data. I mean, before I get killed marching up to city hall with my tar, feathers, and AK-47s because you've told me I need to, don't I get to ask if you have any real world data to back up your claims?

Regarding your conclusion: your post contains quotes from women that basically blame men for most violence in the world (MacKinnon's quote especially). Your post agrees with unproven and untested assumptions about the cause of rape, and your post agrees with unproven and untested assumptions about the impacts of that rape. Your conclusion is that people have to know this stuff in order to best fight against this stuff, and you explicitly call for people to fight against this stuff.

Your claim that you are not saying men are bad and that it is just the science that makes them that way is dishonest. As I said above, it compares well to the rationalizations white society, men and women both, used to oppress blacks and other minorities. Blacks are fine people, we know though they are just dumber and cruder than us. Men aren't bad. It's just that all men benefit from rape. I laid out above many of the numerous ways that I and other men do not benefit from rape. So your claim that all men, or even most men benefit from rape is terrible accounting. Next to your assumption that men get some sort of utility by having women fear us, you need to add in the liabilities that I mentioned: the fear for our own children and our wife, and mother, and sisters, and aunts, and cousins, the loss in terms of taxpayer assets or community resources, the increased irrational fear me and men in general. You and Brownmiller have done none of that accounting. Your claim that all men benefit from rape doesn't have a logical consistency within your own argument, and you have provided no real world data to back it up. F => F is True.

Regarding ad hominem: a straight insult would be something on the order of Rad Geek is a pretentious git. Ad hominem covers the kind of insult you used, which dismisses the argument by demeaning the target of the insult as someone that unfairly *shouts* and worse, *shouts irrelevancies." Saying I am shouting, and dismissing the arguments as irrelevant, tells the reader about personal characteristics you ascribe to me and bullies the reader to ignore my arguments.

D00d, you refuse to take responsibility for any of your writings. For someone with as much philosophy background as you claim, I find it telling how often you need to resort to insult, to misdirection, to avoiding responsibility for your writing, and also to bullying the readers, "jerry shouts irrelevancies at me!" and "Since kharris disagrees with you, and DRR tells you to stop, I must consider I have won the argument!!! ZOMG!"

"I'd just as soon get it out of the way in order to discuss something that matters." Hey Rad d00d, since all I am doing is *shouting* *irrelevancies* on a board you have almost no interaction with, I am not sure why you are blaming me for how you occupy your time. (Perhaps you think my "irrelevancies" ain't so irrelevant?)

[jerry]

Here is a transcript of a speech from Wendy McElroy. I had not read it before a few minutes ago, but you can see how it parallels what I've been saying here in many ways.

More interestingly, she describes the many different feminisms of the 60s and 70s and describes how and why a liberal feminism lost its voice in the 1980s after failure of the passage of the ERA to the radical and gender and non-liberal feminism we see today.

http://www.ifeminists.net/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.333

[Rad Geek]

* Jerry: "If she is wrong and mischaracterizes the causes, what does that say about her conclusions regarding the effects?"

Nothing at all. If Brownmiller advances a false theory of the form "X causes R" (N.B.: I'm not conceding that her theory about the causes of rape IS false; nor am I insisting that it's true; my position is that it's not salient to this discussion whether it's false or true), and then advances another theory of the form "R causes P," based on an independent argument that doesn't refer back to the first theory, the falsity of the first theory tells you nothing at all about whether the second theory is true or false, and nothing at all about whether the theory well-grounded or ill-grounded. What will tell you something about the merits of the second theory is a consideration of the independent arguments that are given for it.

* "F => F is True. F => T is True."

If you mean the arrow here to express a material implication, that's an accurate description of the truth-values of material implications with false antecedents. But what has any of this got to do with the comments you're trying to respond to?

There is no argument that I made, or which Susan Brownmiller made, in which her theory about the causes of rape is the antecedent in a conditional of which her theory about the effects of rape is a consequent. The theory in which rape is the explanans is not part of the evidence given for the theory in which rape is the explanandum, so disputing the first doesn't undermine any of the reasons given for believing the second.

Again, speaking generally, you seem to be awfully muddled about causal claims, implication, and the proper places in which to attack an argument. This discussion is about causal claims, and causal claims are not claims about material implication. (A causal claim of the form "P's being true causes Q to be true" is not truth-functional at all, because causal claims, among other things, have to support counterfactuals.) Maybe you are running into problems here because you believe that if someone advances a theory of the form "X causes R," and another theory of the form "R causes P," the direction of causation and the common middle term somehow suggests that the first theory is somehow logically prior to, a premise for, the second theory, and so that the evidential basis for the second theory somehow must depend on the evidential basis for the first theory. If you do believe that, I don't know what to say except that it's a hopeless muddle of really distinct causal, logical, and epistemological relationships, and you need to try to more carefully distinguish claims about complex causal chains between events from claims about complex logical and evidentiary relationships between statements asserting the existence of simple causal chains between events.

If that's not what you're confused about, then you'll have to state more clearly why exactly you think a discussion of Brownmiller's theory about the causes of rape has any evidential bearing on her theory about the effects of rape, and also just what precisely the antecedent is supposed to be and what the consequent is supposed to be in the material conditionals you keep trying to use.

* Jerry: "your post contains quotes from women that basically blame men for most violence in the world (MacKinnon's quote especially)"

MacKinnon's quote does not say anything at all about either what absolute quantity or what proportion of the violence in the world is committed by men rather than women. What she actually says is that men commit some violence against other men (she doesn't say how much), and men commit some violence against women (she doesn't say how much), and then she contrasts the different ways in which the one kind of violence and the other are committed. I'm sure she has views on that, and so do I, but those views aren't expressed in the quote and they aren't material to this discussion. Any claim about how far men are to blame for how much violence is a claim that you have projected into the quote, not something that was there to be found.

* Jerry: "Your claim that you are not saying men are bad and that it is just the science that makes them that way [...]"

I literally have no idea what this means. I have not advanced any theory at all about what either the causes of rape are, or what the moral status of men, either individually or collectively, may be. I also have no idea what you mean by "the science [making] them that way." What science? What claim are you even referring to?

* Jerry: "You and Brownmiller have done none of that accounting."

I already told you that I'm not attempting to provide a comprehensive defense of Brownmiller's claims against all possible objections; if you want that, you should read Brownmiller's book. My aims for a mid-length blog post are quite different. As for Brownmiller, unless you have read her book (I mean the whole thing, not just the handful of quotations that I or somebody else has pulled for brief consideration), then you have literally no idea at all what she does or does not account for.

* Jerry: "Ad hominem covers the kind of insult you used, which dismisses the argument by demeaning the target of the insult as someone that unfairly *shouts* and worse, *shouts irrelevancies.*"

Jerry, characterizing your argument as irrelevant is, I repeat, not an argumentum ad hominem. It is not an argumentum of any kind, because it has no internal inferential structure. It's an assertion about your argument, which happens to be the conclusion of an argument drawn from a distinct set of premises. You might find the characterization, or the wording in which it is expressed, insulting. But "statements which you find insulting" and "examples of argumentum ad hominem" are two distinct classes, and their members have different logical properties.

As for that argument from distinct premises, I provided several reasons in my comments for saying that your reply was largely irrelevant to the point you were supposedly replying to. Those reasons may be good reasons, and they may be bad reasons, but they are reasons which had specifically to do with the structure and direction of the argument itself, not with any of your personal characteristics or circumstances as the person advancing the argument. You cannot simply point at the conclusion of an argument, declare "I find that conclusion insulting!" and then write off the entire argument as an exercise in argumentum ad hominem. (Or rather, you can't do that without proving that you don't understand what the term "ad hominem" means.) Argumentum ad hominem hasn't anything to do with your reaction to the conclusion; it has to do with the kind of premises that the argument appeals to.

* Jerry: "'Since kharris disagrees with you, and DRR tells you to stop, I must consider I have won the argument!!! ZOMG!'"

I didn't say that I won an argument. I said that you were devoting a lot of energy to topics that weren't on-topic for the discussion, weren't responsive to the specific claims advanced in my post, and which a number of people have repeatedly said they're not much interested in discussing at length with you.

* Jerry: "Here is a transcript of a speech from Wendy McElroy. [...]"

I'm not interested in your views on male victims of domestic violence, or the ERA, or on the debate between liberal and radical feminists, or your beef with contemporary feminism broadly. These issues have nothing to do with the proper interpretation of Susan Brownmiller's theory about the systemic effects of stranger-rape.

[jerry]

If you advance an argument of the form:

P => Q
Q => R
Assume P
Therefore Q.
Therefore R.
QED.

If we find P is not true, or not evident, then while we cannot be sure there is no R, the specific argument fails because you have not discussed any other way to achieve Q.

If you want to say that Q => R is still true, you may be right. But your specific argument still fails unless you can provide Q.

If a person says A causes B, and B causes C and so we should really look at how awful and terrible C is and if that person, you RadGeek, encourages people to take up arms against the violence of the state and of the patriarchy because of how awful C is, it is quite reasonable for IRL people to say, hold on, A doesn't cause B. I see no C when I look around, can you provide some evidence of A, B, and C and the causal links you claim between them? In addition, that IRL person might say, can you prove B actually causes C? Because I think B causes D and D prevents C.

You keep on claiming that all you are merely doing is discussing how to interpret Brownmiller and that what you say has no bearing on other issues in the world, nor do other issues have any bearing on how we should interpret Brownmiller. And yet, I am struck by the conclusion of your post, in which you advocate violence against the real world state and your invisible sky enemy patriarchy.

(On a side note, when after reading your long evidence free exegesis about the invisible fist you tell people they should take up arms against the state and the patriarchy to resist this violent effect that you have provided no evidence for, I am amused to read on your "about page" that you are not "a sociopathic warmongering blowhard" like that other Charles Johnson from LGF, because that's uh, exactly how you come off.)

Regarding MacKinnon's quote, her essays stands for itself. Her quote stands for itself. Men dominate men. Men dominate women. I don't see her giving any room for women dominating men. And I don't see how her plain words regarding "men systematically enslave, violate, dehumanize, and exterminate other men" combined with how men dominate women leaves open any interpretation of "men" to actually be "men and women collude" to dominate others.

"You say, well, we can't really tell from that how she feels about women dominating men, or men and women dominating others." And I think you are being disingenuous and ignoring the plain language.

Back to your ad hominems: when I say "Rad Geek is a poopy head and he smells of poop and so you shouldn't listen to him because he's a big ole doody head" I think we can all agree that is an ad hominem argument. But when you say "Jerry is shouting and he shouts irrelevancies" and leave the conclusion for the reader, you tell me that's not an ad hominem attack and so therefore your poop smells clean. Your poop smells and no matter how much you want to chop and parse, your reader is smarter than that and you know it.

Have you ever taken responsibility for your words or do you just do this weaseling all of the time?

Regarding how I spend my time in this thread, I'll note as I noted to Kharris, that I was not responding to you in this thread, so I am not sure who appointed you "directorate of thread related ontopicness". My naive suspicion is that I was responding to Brad as well as to Julian Elson, who specifically raised some of these questions in his post. You may wish to take a course in astronomy, you'll find it's been ages since we thought the world revolved around you.

You may wish to read McElroy and other feminists or philosophers (or language theorists) that disagree with Brownmiller. McElroy discusses Brownmiller and Against Our Will quite often, and I believe she uses and understands the language of language theorists that you use to a much better degree than I. In doing so, maybe you will better understand how other people interpret Brownmiller and MacKinnon, and better shape your posts to reflect those arguments.

This google search should help yout:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:wendymcelroy.com+brownmiller

I'll point to one post, slightly truncated so this comment is not interpreted as spam. In that one post, she specifically responds, near as I can tell, to the same passages in Brownmiller you write about and the claims as she puts them (before she argues they are false)
1. rape is a part of patriarchy;
2. men have created a 'mass psychology' of rape; and,
3. rape is a part of 'normal' life.

THE NEW MYTHOLOGY OF RAPE, POLITICIZING WOMEN'S PAIN, by Wendy McElroy
wendymcelroy.com/rape.htm

In the meantime, I will conclude by relying on the language of science, and say:
You have not proven your claims, your theory is not as predictive as simpler theories, your theory predicts results that you deny, and the form of your argument is false.

[Lawrence Krubner]

"oh, and lawrence krubner: what, exactly, would be the point of mentioning that sometimes men also are scared to walk around in public? "

RadGeek was making the point that our social order (and, in fact, any social order) can be shaped by non-planned, non-governmental sources of coercion. I was agreeing with him. He is critical of the lazy-libertarian argument that suggests that all coercion comes from the government. I was pointing out that this is so universally known that most of us no longer notice the reality of it.

[Lawrence Krubner]

"When children look to mothers to protect them from other children, or other people, is that a spontaneous order "

Obviously. You're not going to argue that this is mandated by the government, are you?

[Lawrence Krubner]

"On a more personal level, I have two daughters (and an ex-wife), and I do not benefit from rape of any woman. What does rape get me? Rape gets me a real and palpable fear for the lives of my children. Rape gets me the inability to let my kids have sleepovers with their friends at my apartment. Rape gets me the suspicion along with all men these days that I am a likely child abuser."

Your resistance comes from a place of fear, that much is clear. You have a profound emotional need to deny the possibility that the evil actions of others might have sometimes benefited you.

[J Thomas]

Jerry, you are not making any sense.

You are reading things into the argument that are not there.

It's like -- it's like Rad Geek was saying "Under some circumstances chlorofluorocarbons catalyse the breakdown of ozone, and a few CFCs can break down many ozone molecules".

And then you respond "Aha! You're telling me that oxygen molecules *collude* with CFCs to get the result they want! But I know O2 molecules don't want anything like that! You claim that oxygen is the cause of all the ozone depletion in the world. Well, let's see some scientific evidence. Until you prove that oxygen atoms are evil you haven't made your point at all."

I'm sorry to be snarky but this is really how it sounds to me. Rad Geek isn't talking about collusion and not about "benefits". Just about consequences. Is it in any way controversial that some women try to find specific good men to protect them from random evil men? To say that the good men benefit from this is like saying that US soldiers benefitted from the Cold War and the russian army, because without the bad guys ready to blow us all up the soldiers wouldn't get to be important and have expensive toys to play with, and therefore US soldiers wanted to have the russians there always about to start WWIII because that was good for US soldiers. It's silly.

We can find clear examples. Eg:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/16/features/bookwed.php

Surely we all agree this sort of thing does happen occasionally.

You argue that it isn't proven to happen. But:

"Libertarians and anarchists who easily see this dynamic when it comes to government police and military protection of a disarmed populace, shouldn’t have any trouble seeing it, if they are willing to see it, when it comes to male protection of women."

By placing the argument in this familiar form, he should make it believable for people who believe the same claims in a different context. Do you want to make your same attacks on the idea that people tend to fear governments, or that people try to get governments to protect them from other things they fear (particularly other governments)? Surely this is no more proven than similar claims about women and men.

If there were no threats would governments be unimportant? I don't see it. They could concentrate on disaster relief and ways to encourage people to cooperate to make things better etc. It would be a different relationship. Similarly, if somehow women never feel threatened would most of them avoid men? I don't see it. There might be subtle or not-so-subtle differences in the relationship. Men might likely be better off and like the situation better, depending on various details that have been left undetermined in this quick counterfactual.

I don't get why you do this. Is it that you are shouting at your own demons, and you've mistaken their arguments for Rad Geek's? You definitely don't seem to be responding to him, but to things that come out of your own mind.

[jerry]

J,

I believe I have detailed my issues with RadGeek above. Shorter, it's what J Fred said at the very beginning. His theory is obviously true and hence needs no proof however we must always remember that we once thought it was obviously true that the earth was flat.

I think RadGeek's story is a story and nothing more. I think it is overly complex compared to alternative theories at explaining what he thinks it explains. I think it is less predictive in many ways than the alternative theories. I think it predicts behaviors that he and others do not agree are the result of his theory.

He has no evidence for his theory. He and others and now you say that he needs no evidence for his theory. Disregarding all other forms of science, and disregarding the experimental scientists found in biology, evolution, economics, anthropology, psychology, and yes even in marketing, he and you believe that telling a good story is sufficient. I disagree.

Contrary to his claims, he uses his story to provide a moral backdrop to other conclusions that I dispute, precisely, that all men benefit, consciously or not with rapists AND that rape plays a critical function in how men consciously intimidate women and that in fact it is man, and not women to any degree responsible for the violence and wars in society.

Those conclusions are not supported by science, logic, biology, anthropology, or history. They have led to many pernicious evils in society. And in fact, his conclusions actually work to strip women of the rationality and agency that he claims for them.

His theory is circular and comes from his RadGeek biases as described at his various webpages. He subscribes to various belief systems that postulate that all men are bad, and so it is no surprise that he has come up with a theory that results in all men being bad.

But perhaps you misunderstand RadGeek and me:

"Is it in any way controversial that some women try to find specific good men to protect them from random evil men?" This is not what RadGeek says.

"Surely we all agree this sort of thing does happen occasionally." Yes, we do, but that's not what RadGeek says.

"You argue that it isn't proven to happen." That is not what I am arguing.

"Surely this is no more proven than similar claims about women and men." No it's not, and I am not making those claims.

In the meantime, why is it okay to absolve RadGeek or Susan Brownmiller from having to produce empirical evidence for their theories? Why is it controversial to even ask for that evidence?

If you have a moment, check out "armchair anthropologists". It's described in the wiki, but the wiki doesn't do it justice at all. It's better described
http://www.hartfordinstitute.org/ency/Anthropology.htm
and
http://savageminds.org/2005/05/19/armchair-anthropology-in-the-cyber-age/

RadGeek and Susan Brownmiller are armchair anthropologists. (In fact, they are not even at that level yet, since they have absolutely no evidence for their theories.)

[jerry]

J,

I believe I have detailed my issues with RadGeek above. Shorter, it's what J Fred said at the very beginning. His theory is obviously true and hence needs no proof however we must always remember that we once thought it was obviously true that the earth was flat.

I think RadGeek's story is a story and nothing more. I think it is overly complex compared to alternative theories at explaining what he thinks it explains. I think it is less predictive in many ways than the alternative theories. I think it predicts behaviors that he and others do not agree are the result of his theory.

He has no evidence for his theory. He and others and now you say that he needs no evidence for his theory. Disregarding all other forms of science, and disregarding the experimental scientists found in biology, evolution, economics, anthropology, psychology, and yes even in marketing, he and you believe that telling a good story is sufficient. I disagree.

Contrary to his claims, he uses his story to provide a moral backdrop to other conclusions that I dispute, precisely, that all men benefit, consciously or not with rapists AND that rape plays a critical function in how men consciously intimidate women and that in fact it is man, and not women to any degree responsible for the violence and wars in society.

Those conclusions are not supported by science, logic, biology, anthropology, or history. They have led to many pernicious evils in society. And in fact, his conclusions actually work to strip women of the rationality and agency that he claims for them.

His theory is circular and comes from his RadGeek biases as described at his various webpages. He subscribes to various belief systems that postulate that all men are bad, and so it is no surprise that he has come up with a theory that results in all men being bad.

But perhaps you misunderstand RadGeek and me:

"Is it in any way controversial that some women try to find specific good men to protect them from random evil men?" This is not what RadGeek says.

"Surely we all agree this sort of thing does happen occasionally." Yes, we do, but that's not what RadGeek says.

"You argue that it isn't proven to happen." That is not what I am arguing.

"Surely this is no more proven than similar claims about women and men." No it's not, and I am not making those claims.

In the meantime, why is it okay to absolve RadGeek or Susan Brownmiller from having to produce empirical evidence for their theories? Why is it controversial to even ask for that evidence?

If you have a moment, check out "armchair anthropologists". It's described in the wiki, but the wiki doesn't do it justice at all. It's better described
http://www.hartfordinstitute.org/ency/Anthropology.htm
and
http://savageminds.org/2005/05/19/armchair-anthropology-in-the-cyber-age/

RadGeek and Susan Brownmiller are armchair anthropologists. (In fact, they are not even at that level yet, since they have absolutely no evidence for their theories.)

What field of thought or academic study do you believe RadGeek's "theory" fits into? Based on my own experience, it seems to be cultural anthropology. But from what I was taught 25 years ago, it's at such a rudimentary level, that no cultural anthropologist would accept it, without requiring proof, operational definitions, data, and a testable hypothesis.

More on "armchair anthropology" can be found here:
http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/gl/queerant.html

And in google books here:

(These google book results came from googling for armchair anthropology which sometimes finds "arm-chair" anthropology.)

http://books.google.com/books?id=nqAuhKBw8x