Hell yeah Steve Bannon

Following his hilarious public emasculation, Steve Bannon scuttled back to his fetid lair to lick his wounds, largely out of the public eye. But he’s back:

The former White House chief strategist argued the movement against male-dominated politics was going to advance similarly to the Tea Party – a conservative movement loosely associated with the conservative branch of the Republican Party – but would surpass it in terms of impact.

…

He added: “I think it’s going to unfold like the Tea Party, only bigger. It’s not Me Too. It’s not just sexual harassment. It’s an anti-patriarchy movement. Time’s up on 10,000 years of recorded history. This is coming. This is real.”

Cool! If ever there were a social institution that should’ve been snuffed out in the cradle, it’s the fucking patriarchy. This will likely be the only time I hope he’s right. I like this idea much better than his silly apocalyptic war fantasies.

Here’s some more:

“You watch. The time has come. Women are gonna take charge of society,” Bannon said, according to Green. “And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch.”

In this context, Trump is like the final boss of an early 90’s video game. He is everything rotten about this country fused together in the form of one repellent man-child, whose final defeat will usher in an era that will see his most odious beliefs destroyed. Bannon sees the would-be patriarchy smashers as the plucky heroes to get it done. I know life doesn’t work like this, but it’s a nice thought.

Aziz Ansari and the plight of Good Men

The striking thing about the Aziz Ansari situation is how familiar it feels. If the story, as relayed by his accuser were to have extended over a period of a few days, it could very well have been an episode of Master of None – a meet-cute centered on a shared interest in photography leads to several dates, which include the main character clumsily trying to get laid. I’ve little doubt Ansari would’ve treated it with the nuance fans of the show, of which I am one, have been accustomed to.

Of course, this fictionalized version would include the woman, you know, actually wanting it, despite initial misgivings. This basic narrative can be found in any number of examples from the entertainment industry in the last 30 years. Women are prizes to be won by plucky male protagonists. But in the specific real-world example referenced above, it’s pretty obvious the woman didn’t actually want it, and was worn down by persistent and coercive attempts by Ansari.

That Ansari is a powerful multi-millionaire is almost, though not entirely, besides the point. This situation, a first date between a man and a woman who don’t really know each other has to be more applicable to women than Harvey Weinstein-esque situations. Anecdotally, I know far more women that have experienced the latter than the former. Within the context of the perils of dating, it’s both ironic and fucked up that Louis CK so adequately summed it up:

A woman saying yes to a date with a man is literally insane and ill-advised, and the whole species’ existence counts on them doing it. I don’t know how they…how do women still go out with guys, when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number one threat to women. Globally and historically, we’re the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women.

It’s a harrowing and, despite the source, completely valid thought that I’m not sure I considered or understood until I was in my 30’s, married, and blessedly done with dating. To me, dating was mostly horrible, largely because I didn’t particularly like myself, and was a bit socially awkward. Any reticence on the part of someone I was interested in entailed an immediate cessation of efforts, followed by varying degrees of pitiful self-loathing.

I can’t imagine doing anything like Ansari did and not coming away with the thought that, no, this person is not into me. I would be mortified. But apparently he wasn’t able to comprehend that a woman could possibly not want a handsome, culturally relevant, “woke” multi-millionaire. But again, this type of situation goes beyond the numerically privileged and powerful few and extends across class lines in terms of cishet female/male dating.

(The vast majority of people who read this have not and will never meet me. You are right to consider that perhaps I’m not being completely forthright in the broad description of my personal experiences and may want to extend that line of thinking to any asshole like myself who moralizes on the internet. I know I do. On a related note, I’ve wrestled with writing about #metoo and its adjacent topics for a while now. If you think the last thing anyone needs is another cishet male meditating on it, that’s perfectly understandable and I’m aware this is a valid criticism.)

***

Men are scared. “How,” they wonder, “can I navigate this changing landscape? Everything I say can be put under a microscope – not all men are serial harassing rapists!” they whine. I’m of the opinion that it shouldn’t be too difficult. If you’re interacting with a woman, ask yourself if what you’re going to say might be interpreted as something that may make the recipient uncomfortable. If the answer is yes, don’t say it. Even if the answer is no, maybe still don’t say it. That flirting is now fraught with more peril than in the past should be the least of anyone’s concerns within the overarching discussion of contemporary and historical gender violence. If anything, it should make one do a little self-introspection and consider how they approach those they are sexually interested in.

Good Men are accustomed to being granted the right to be judged on their own actions. A priori judgment is unconscionable. Such Good Men don’t do such things – after all, we live in a post-race, post-gender meritocracy where everyone should be, and generally is, judged on the basis of their character and actions. Perhaps that hasn’t always been the case, but surely in 2018, we have arrived. After all, there’s been a black president and a woman won the popular vote, despite not winning. Why should the Good Men have to answer for the behavior of Bad Men?

In all seriousness, I can’t imagine a group of people (cishet males) less deserving of a privilege so long denied to other groups, especially given the disproportionate amount of violence and destruction they’ve wrought over the past few millennia. When they perceive they are not getting the benefit of the doubt, or *gasp* persecuted, they lash out and cry “not all men!”

It’s here that I leave “they” as a pronoun” and turn it into “we.” I identify more with a man wrongfully accused than a woman being raped/assaulted/harassed. This is an extreme privilege: at no point in my life have I ever been concerned with being the victim of rape/assault/harassment. And this process of identification is where many stop in their stunted quasi-analysis. I know of no evidence to back this up, but I think most (certainly not all) cishet men think along these lines – we’re just not concerned with being victims.

Take, for example, TJ Miller, a shitty comedy person and even shittier human. He is alleged to have raped a former girlfriend, something he vehemently denies. We will never know for certain whether or not Miller did what he’s accused of. We weren’t there. Due to this, Good Men will claim to be agnostic to what actually occurred. Unless there’s a conviction, the only supposedly objective way of knowing for sure, there’s no reason to ruin this man’s life with slanderous accusations. Hell, this could happen to any one of us!

These Good Men are deserving of scorn for not using an essential tool, one of our few saving graces as a species – empathy. They are only able to put themselves in the shoes of those they identify with. They think of how fucked up their life would be if they were falsely accused. This is easy to do. However, they are unable or unwilling to extend that consideration to those they have a hard time identifying with. Any reason for doubt will immediately seized upon. Moreover, they are able to creatively ascribe any number of nefarious motivations to reporters of rape/assault/harassment, in an exercise that can roughly be described as an inverted type of empathy.

Perhaps it’s not that simple (though I think it generally is). One could suppose that a man may have an adequate amount of empathy, but isn’t persuaded that patriarchy or rampant rape/assault/harassment is a huge issue or just isn’t pervasive enough to be a big deal. If this is the case, the gap is intellectual and not necessarily empathetic. They could be presented with statistics, but unable or uncaring to sufficiently comprehend the methodology and results. Of course, it doesn’t have to be any one particular thing. Lack of empathy and dismissal of research are mere strands in a larger web of ignorance, myopia and selfishness.

***

Shitty men are finally getting a small bit of reckoning. Honestly, it’s pretty benign. Dave Chappelle accused Louis CK’s victims of taking “everything from him,” which is fucking nonsense. Sure it might be hard for him to work right now, but none of his wealth, possessions or ability to maintain a privileged lifestyle was “taken.” He’ll probably be back in a few years with a triumphant return to Netflix.

Ansari will probably get to do a third Season of Master of None, though he may want to wait a few dozen news cycles for his story to get buried under the unending avalanche of bullshit that is our culture. His situation has enough of a grey area that it likely won’t affect him too much. A Google search will show just how polarizing it’s been across various media outlets, blogs and social media. He’ll be back sooner or later, none the worse for wear.

If you’re consuming the various stories and thinkpieces related to #metoo, and your first instinct, how this will affect you, is followed by hand-wringing over potentially innocent male victims and fear of interacting with females within a new and scary social landscape, you suck. Stop being a fucking child. Do better.

Solutions to the sexual violence epidemic

Before I begin, this post is about sexual violence, as the title implies.

Even if the current paradigm is shifting towards believing victims of sexual violence, which may or may not be true, it doesn’t alter the fact that justice for victims is rare. When I learned that Harvey Weinstein (whom I’d never even heard of prior to a few weeks ago) was being investigated by the NYPD I was stunned. I didn’t even consider that there would be legal ramifications, and obviously there still may not be. Though disgusted, I was satisfied that he is probably miserable due to losing his career and prestige. It’s not nearly enough but at least it’s something.

Some time back, Aeon had two thought-provoking articles on actually solving this persistent, endemic problem: one describes boosting conviction rates via better funding and systemic tinkering, the other pushes for radical legal changes.

Sandra Newman suggests that men may chose not to rape if they have reason to expect consequences. Currently, to say nothing of the last few millennia, there aren’t sufficient reasons to expect meaningful consequences. Sure accusations may accrue and cause discomfort or annoyance, maybe even prompting acquaintances to look askance at alleged perpetrators, but the minuscule chance of legal punishment is a huge reason victims don’t come forward:

[T]he overwhelming majority of the men assumed that they would never be punished. As one rapist said: ‘I knew I was doing wrong. But I also knew most women don’t report rape, and I didn’t think she would either.’ As Scully put it, her subjects saw rape as ‘a rewarding, low-risk act’.

It’s worth pausing here to underscore just what this implies. For a man to commit sexual assault, he must be a relatively, but not strikingly, antisocial person – enough that he isn’t too constrained by empathy for his victims. These seem like preconditions for any crime that has a victim; and indeed, the measured character traits of convicted rapists are identical to those of muggers and burglars. But a man who is capable of rape generally commits the crime only if he believes it will be excused by his peers, and that punishment can be evaded. There seem to be a remarkable number of men who meet these criteria; most of the college-age rapists studied were not only unafraid of punishment, but blissfully unaware that what they did was criminal. Looking at this general picture, Scully concluded that most rapes are the result of a ‘rape culture’ that tells men that, in many situations, raping women is not only normal behaviour, but completely safe.

This is an excellent explanation of what I think most would regard as intuitive (and, to me, is the most important part of the article). Thus, while victims may not explicate it in this manner, they are abundantly aware that consequences are rare. The posited solution is, as mentioned above, increasing conviction rates:

We can give police and prosecutors more funding for sexual-assault investigations, which are still woefully likely to be dropped in the early stages. We can monitor their efforts to ensure they follow best practices. We can fund the testing of forensic evidence, which is currently subject to long backlogs, and often simply lost or abandoned. Most of all, we can make it easier for victims to approach police; of all violent crimes, rape is the least likely to be reported. What we must not do is pretend it’s a different, easier problem, or act as if the solution for rape is a profound and unfathomable mystery.

Perhaps this is nothing earth-shattering to FtB readers, but the lack of meaningful consequences is crucial to understanding the magnitude of what we face as a society. The conclusion is okay, but I don’t think it goes far enough. This leads to the second article, by Christopher Wareham and James Vos. They argue persuasively that sexual violence accusations should not be subject to reasonable doubt as the standard of evidence.

While certain segments of the population (i.e. shitty men) are likely to empathize more with the accused, they tend to neglect the manifold ramifications of false acquittal. The authors make an elegant argument comparing the relative harm suffered by the different parties and why reasonable doubt is worthy of being reexamined within the context of sexual violence:

In considering whether or not a standard of proof is justified, we should consider not just the harm done to the one man wrongly convicted, but also the harm done by the 10 men wrongly released. This means that the justification for a standard of proof should also consider the accrued harms of false acquittal to the initial victim, to future victims of those criminals and to society.

In the case of sexual assault, these harms are extraordinarily severe. The victim suffers horrendously through the trial and is often badgered into reliving disturbing details of the incident. When the false acquittal is reached, all this is for nothing. Worse than this, she is falsely branded a liar, with all the psychological trauma this entails.

The harms of false acquittal to future victims and their loved ones amplify and extend this harm. Indeed it has been suggested that the trauma of sexual assault is greater than that experienced by war veterans.

Moreover, sexual offenders are likely to offend multiple times. In one study, rapists self-reported an average of 10 violent crimes, even before their ‘careers’ had ended. Consequently, to paraphrase Blackstone’s ratio with reference to sexual violence would mean saying it’s better to have the harm of 100 sexual assaults than the harm of one false conviction – a conclusion that is untenable.

The solution, they conclude, is the following:

As it stands, the legal system is weighted unfairly in favour of perpetrators of sexual assault. In addition to sending out a powerful expression of intolerance for gender violence, a lower standard of proof can decrease these harms by reducing the likelihood of false acquittal. Reasonable doubt is inappropriate, but what standard would do better?

Of the standards commonly employed in law, only the ‘preponderance of the evidence’ standard has been used on a consistent basis to decide cases of sexual violence, albeit in civil trials. Indeed, given the high probability of false acquittal, civil trials have increasingly become a first port of call for female victims of sexual violence in the US. Rather than calling for the absence of doubt, this standard judges a case on what the evidence leads one to believe most strongly. If a woman’s testimony provides a stronger reason to believe that she did not give consent, this should be enough.

In addition to increasing the likelihood of conviction, this could halt the accusation of greed levied against victims of sexual violence opting for civil court. Such apparent greed for monetary compensation is supposed evidence that the victim isn’t behaving in an appropriate manner. The stigma associated is a powerful one and ammunition for those already predisposed to not believing accusers. The idea is prevalent enough that one or more of these assholes who think this way are likely to end up on a jury. Any deviation from the Platonic ideal of a rape victim [1] and they morph into vindictive liars. Most defense attorneys are more than adept at discrediting plaintiffs along these lines. As a recent Cracked post states “justice is vague, while the promise of more pain is concrete.”

So are we (by we I mean America) close to implementing something similar to what the authors suggest? The articles are almost a year old and surely the ideas aren’t new. I’d also add that the solutions aren’t mutually exclusive.

It’s hard to what extent police departments are attempting to maximize the likelihood that an accuser will receive justice. Progress is both hard to determine and hard to quantify. If the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network’s (RAINN) findings are any indication, we have a long, long way to go. Research may be able to discern which institutional changes correlate to more convictions and how replicable it is spatially, but obtaining actual justice will continue to be an uphill battle in the short term.

As for overhauling the legal system to make sexual violence allegations subject to “preponderance of the evidence” standards, googling doesn’t really yield any evidence that this kind of transformation is on the horizon. And, unfortunately, the authors do not discuss mechanisms that could produce such a radical shift in our code of law.

The articles discuss the aftermath of sexual violence, both in terms of what does and doesn’t happen to the perpetrator, and how those consequences will effect potential perpetrators in the future. Of course, none of this precludes the idea that men shouldn’t rape, regardless of whether or not there are consequences. From a young age, they need to be taught about consent and how they can play a role in ending rape culture. It’s deeply shitty, though, that large amounts of people, many of them in positions of power, do not even think it’s a problem that needs solving.

[1] “It is well established in feminist legal critique that female complainants are discredited if they fail to conform to an archaic stereotype of the genuine or ‘real’ rape victim. This victim is not only morally and sexually virtuous she is also cautious, unprovocative, and consistent. Defence tactics for discrediting rape testimony involve exposing the complainant’s alleged failure to comply with the sexual and behavioural standards of the normative victim.”

Donald Trump is bad

I’m not good at coming up with good blog titles.

I never really thought Trump would win. Surely there weren’t enough angry, bigoted white voters to outnumber the various other voting blocs. I was eager to marinate in the schadenfreude of his imminent defeat, and then for him and his ilk to fade away into the shadows where they belong. Such innocent times.

One of the reasons I was never able to believe in the God of Christianity is the existence of terrible humans who have good things happen to them. Roughly speaking, the problem of evil has never been satisfactorily addressed by the Abrahamic religions. The Eastern traditions posit the karmic cycle of samsara, which I think is a rather elegant philosophical solution: shitty people will get what’s coming to them in the next life. It’s nice to think of Trump reaping the reward he’s so justly earned in his next life. How about as an insect preyed upon by parasitoid wasps? But alas, only the emptiness of nonexistence awaits us all. Bummer. Maybe he’ll die soon? Like next week? A boy can dream.

Here are some kind of positive things:

  • Trump appears to not be a fan of continuing America’s role as world police. That’s probably good, right? US hegemony has been an abject failure. But really, he’s changed his mind so often and is so thin-skinned, it’s easy to see ISIS goading him into their desired apocalyptic war with the west.
  • Ummm… Hmm. I guess having someone so odious in the White House that has the backing of the House, Senate, and SCOTUS could galvanize opposition of all kinds, from those working within the system, to more radical anti-state/anti-capitalist types (full disclosure, I was a teenage anarchist).
  • That’s all I got. This is a bad list.

In adulthood, I haven’t been able to transition philosophically into the, in my eyes, benign ideologies of liberalism/progressivism. I voted for Hillary, but I did so feeling that performing my “civic duty” made me complicit in a sociopolitical system I think is shit. Historically, America has been irredeemably racist and sexist (in addition to other bigotries), and works best for the wealthy. Profound, heady stuff, I know. If you voted, you played the game and the end result, instead of being merely not great, is catastrophically bad. But that’s our hallowed democracy, right? Incremental progress has been made, but that progress, hated by the now fully de-closeted bigots, is being confronted with vengeance.

This is not to boil this year’s election to the very familiar “lesser of two evils” refrain. Nor is it to focus on my insipidly heart-wrenching complicity in that which I do not condone: Trump is far worse than Hillary. I am a straight, white, cisgender male. And I wish the worst for those among that wide swath of privilege that enabled that waste in human form’s rise to power.

I’ll end with two things from two friends. First:

I am scared for our country, for minorities, and for my family, my kids. My young kids watched the election all night because they were afraid of trump winning. Over the last year, they have been told because they are “brown”, when trump is president they have to leave. (They are 2nd generation American born citizens) My kids do not deserve to live in fear. They deserve better than trump.”

Infuriating and heartbreaking. I’ll never know what that feels like, due to my privilege. Second, from my good friend and proprietor of the fantastic metal label/distro Gilead Media:

I will protect women, people of color, immigrants, those of non binary gender identity, and non Christians, and by force if required. Be ready to do the same. If you see someone being harassed, you must act in some way.

“Those with unjust hate in their hearts think it’s open season on us and the ones we love. But this is when we see the faces of those that would oppress us. They will crawl out of the shadows and reveal their true face. Remember every face.”

“They will crawl out of the shadows and reveal their true face,” indeed. This is a good thing. Add that to list above.