So a blog I subscribed to on (the soon to be late and lamented) Google Reader ages ago – mostly likely because I thought the author wrote something really excellent – recently began a new blog.
Clicking over, I found that the blogger’s newest update is mostly a rebuttal to a nine-year-old post of mine. It’s a small internet sometimes!
Describing the genre (of which my post is a primary example – indeed, one of only three examples given), Scott writes (emphasis his):
…the very many near-identical articles either telling men that they are scary or telling women that they should be scared of men. A necessary convention of the genre is to note that it’s dangerous and privileged to dismiss this as “just a small number of men”, and in fact that we should view it as something fundamental to men.
“A small number of men” is quoted from my post, but I never wrote that “we should view [men being scary] as something fundamental to men.” I don’t think we should view anything as “fundamental” to men.
In some contexts, women are rational to feel a little scared of a man who approaches them. Rape and attempted rape happen to around one out of four women in the United States; street harassment, which can be incredibly unpleasant and even threatening, happens much more often.
The bright side is, I can easily imagine a society in which rape and street harassment are extraordinarily rare events, like being hit by lightning. So no, it’s not at all fundamental.
Scott concentrates most of his fire on this passage from my post:
Imagine that one out of 25 men have at some point in their lives attacked and tortured an Oregonian. You don’t know which ones had done it – you just know it’s about one in 25. And they had done it simply because they had wanted to, and they consider people from Oregon to be just that worthless.
Now imagine you were born in Oregon.
How safe would you feel in your daily life? What would it do to your feeling of security and safety, knowing that “only” one out of 25 of the men you stand in line with at the bank, the male cashiers you meet at the grocery, the male cops patrolling the streets, the male students you take classes with and the male professors you learn from, and your male co-workers at the office, has attacked someone like you, because they were like you?
Scott’s primary response is a race-and-crime metaphor, accomplished with whatever statistics he could cherry-pick to make Black people look really, really violent.
I sort of hate responding to stuff like this, because it’s a no-win situation for me. If I respond by pointing out the racism implicit in Scott’s arguments, Scott will no doubt take offense and complain I’m name-calling, he was just talking about how violent black people are in order to make his argument work better, he actually intended his argument to be anti-racist, etc etc.
(I’m not saying Scott is a racist – I don’t even know Scott. I think it’s possible he got a little too enthused about his argument and erred by not seeing the quite-possibly-unintentional racist implications, and by being too uncritical about stats that seemed to support his case.)
On the other hand, if I respond by blandly responding as if Scott’s arguments aren’t full of racist assumptions, I’d be sort of “normalizing” the racism, acting as if such arguments are not something to be objected to.
So read this passage, and consider what it assumes about Black people:
America is about 50% men/50% female. Suppose that America were 50% black/50% white. We know that black people commit homicide at a rate 7.5x greater than white people, so in this hypothetical society 88% of murders would be committed by black people.
It seems almost unavoidable that in a 50% Black society, Blacks position in society will have radically changed; we’d see more Black CEOs, more Black Congresspeople, more Blacks in elite universities. Blacks would finally be in the ruling class in significant numbers.
And yet even though Black people’s position in society has radically changed, the correlation of homicide rates and race hasn’t changed. This only works if we assume that Black people are intrinsically much more likely to be murderers, regardless of all other factors.
(In real life, by the way, high-quality research (1 2 3) has shown that homicide rates are a function of poverty and neighborhood characteristics, not of race.)
(The other option is that Scott was imagining an apartheid-like society in which Black people increase from 12% to 50% of the population while still being largely shut out of the ruling class, and the “murders” committed are actually wartime deaths caused by acts of the interracial rebel alliance against the White government. I doubt a society would provide a valid comparison for the purposes of Scott’s argument.)
Scott then goes on to radically misstate a statistic, in a way that paints Black people as scary and violent:
And what percent of black people, in this society, would commit violent crimes? [...] We know that about 30% of black people will go to prison sometime in their lives.
Scott’s link is to a Wikipedia page that provides no support for this “30%” statistic. In comments, Scott cites two papers which in turn cite a 2003 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (pdf link). But the BJS report actually says is that “nearly 1 in 3 black males” in the cohort born in 2001 are likely to go to prison at some point if trends continue.
It’s irresponsible, ignorant, and disparaging to extrapolate from a projection of a subset of Black people to “30% of black people will go to prison sometime in their lives.”
There’s much more, but I don’t want to make this post the length of a phone book or a Bill Clinton speech, so let’s skip ahead to Scott’s alleged knock-out punch:
Any argument that “proves” that we are justified in suspecting all men of being rapists, equally proves we should feel justified in suspecting all black people of being violent criminals.
But this is horrible and repulsive. Therefore, we should at least consider the possibility that something is wrong with the original argument about men and rape.
Scott’s analogy is crucially wrong because sex – unlike race – is an actually relevant factor. Even after you account for other factors (race, class, whatever), sex remains important. The same isn’t true of race.
One of the comment-writers at Scott’s blog put it well:
The major reason I think the black/white analogy fails is that being wary of black people trying to rob you is simply not a practical idea. Criminal tendencies are a result of poverty, not race, and looking for signs of poverty, among other things, will probably do you much better than simply looking at race. I don’t think that any black person you run across is more likely to be a criminal than any white person you see once you control for location, dress, mannerisms, age, gender, etc.
E.g. I would be equally unafraid of an elderly black man wearing a suit on a university campus and an elderly white man wearing a suit on a university campus. I would be equally afraid of a young black man on the subway in a misshapen hoodie with a wild look in his eyes and a young white man on the subway in a misshapen hoodie with a wild look in his eyes. But if you are a woman, obviously any man you come across in any context is far, far, far, more likely to rape you than any woman.
Scott also doesn’t understand the differences between violent street crime and rape, and these differences crucially undermine his argument.
Re-quoting the passage from my post, Scott writes:
How safe would you feel in your daily life? What would it do to your feeling of security and safety, knowing that “only” one out of 25 of the men you stand in line with at the bank, the male cashiers you meet at the grocery, the male cops patrolling the streets, the male students you take classes with and the male professors you learn from, and your male co-workers at the office, has attacked someone like you, because they were like you?
This seems to be a claim that women do (or should) feel extremely afraid of every man in their life.
As I said in the paragraph before the passage Scott quoted, “rape is a commonplace enough thing so that at some level most women are to some degree kept in fear of rape, because the possibility is always there.”
I explicitly talked in terms of “at some level” and “to some degree.” It’s dishonest to describe this as me saying that women ought to be “extremely afraid of every man in their life,” or terrified by all men.
It’s sort of like my fear of street crime when I find myself waiting at a bus stop with a bunch of young men who smell of booze and are acting aggressively towards each other. I’m not “terrified,” but I am aware that guys with similar surface characteristics have sometimes gotten hostile, and on one memorable occasion chased me throwing rocks, or gotten hostile, and part of my mind is remaining cautious. (And yes, a little fearful.)
But it’s hard to talk about that stuff with someone like Scott, because he seems to have no concern at all for being truthful, and I doubt he conceives of me as a human being with feelings, who doesn’t enjoy being lied about. When Scott reads that story, will he nod and say “although I disagree with his conclusions, I understand how Barry can feel that way”? Or will he say “here’s some ammo I can use; I can say that Barry said that it’s a good idea to always be terrified of young men because they’re probably going to throw rocks at you.” Judging by his performance in the post I’m replying to, Scott is more likely to do the latter. But maybe he won’t.
Scott goes on:
I used to work for an African-American guy. [...] he was an upper-class businessman. [...] You can get a pretty good feel for whether someone is a violent criminal in a couple milliseconds, and he gave off exactly zero of these vibes. Third of all, I was in a busy office with him the whole time. It’s very very hard to get away with violent crimes in a busy office. Fourth of all, we were doing paperwork and stuff, not things like drinking in a bar or gambling or cockfighting or wherever else it is violent crimes tend to occur.
These same factors apply to women worrying about being raped. The chance your male professor is going to rape you in class isn’t 1/25 any more than the chance that my black boss was going to mug me at work was 1/10. Once you go from “average person, at some time in their lives” to “average person you willingly interact with, in the situation you are likely to willingly interact with them”, all these probabilities go down very close to nil.
The thing is, the typical rapist is someone the victim knows, or someone the victim is dating. And the rape might well take place in their own home, or at a party they chose to go to, or in a car they chose to get in, or in a back room of their workplace. The typical sexual harasser at work is a boss or coworker. There are legions of complaints from students about professors who have sexually harassed them in some way, and for that matter it does occasionally happen that a professor is a rapist.
Scott’s entire argument rests on the analogy between street crime and rape – but that analogy doesn’t hold up, and Scott’s attempt to make it, in the passage above, just shows that he doesn’t understand the first thing about rape or about sexual harassment.
Once, in a hotel, I met a journalist I’d known for ages on the internet. We were internet-friends and fellow comics fans, and at some point I suggested – perfectly innocently, albeit thoughtlessly – that we go to my room so I could show her some of my work-in-progress. She responded that she’d love to see it, but could we use the hotel lobby instead?
The point was clear – she didn’t know me well enough to be sure of my trustworthyness or intentions. At some level, she had to consider – was I hitting on her? If I was, would I get hurt, hostile or insulting if she said no? Would I take no for an answer?
She was not being unreasonable or insulting. She was protecting herself in a very minor and polite way – and if I had chosen to feel insulted, that would have been on me, not her. I made a mental note to try to avoid putting other women in that situation again, and I went up to my room to grab the art I wanted to show her. It’s not a friggin’ big deal.
* * *
Post-script: A couple of side thoughts.
First of all, I think – when we’re talking about something like “feeling of safety” – street harassment and sexual harassment has to be discussed, along with rape.
In Scott’s comments, Avantika writes “rape frequency isn’t the only relevant statistic for this calculation. There’s a whole range of harassment-behaviors that are less quantified but women actively try to avoid, and are much more common than actual rape.” She’s got a good point. Years ago, when I wrote the post Scott is responding to, I didn’t include that in my thoughts; in this post, written today, I tried to.
Secondly, Scott talks a lot in his post about small, relatively innocuous things that people say that make him feel bad as a white man. I have… mixed feelings about this?
I’m sorry Scott feels bad. I sympathize, and I hope he feels better. Given how thin-skinned he describes himself as being, I wonder if arguing about politics on the internet is really the best choice for him, but of course he’s the only one who can decide that. (For myself, a major reason I’ve slowed down my blogging so much is that I just feel better this way, and am much better able to concentrate on things like writing comic books.)
I can definitely agree that some feminists have said things to me that are just plain anti-male. This is rare, but it has happened, and sometimes it hurt.
At the same time, Scott seems to translate virtually ALL feminist discussion, regardless of what it actually says, into anti-feminist cliches about what feminists say. In my case, he seems to believe that I said totalizing things about men’s “fundamental” scariness, and that I’m calling for all women to be terrified of every man in their life. But I didn’t say those things; I didn’t say anything even remotely like those things.
Scott, in other words, seems to be determined to take offense anytime a feminist or anti-racist says anything at all. For instance, he objects to a Asian women quoting racist things white men say to them on OKCupid. If objecting to being called a “dumb chink whore” is too inconsiderate of Scott’s feelings, then I think the problem there is Scott, not the folks blogging at “creepy white guys.”
I do think there’s a place for being considerate of anyone’s feelings, including the feelings of white straight men. (I’m a white straight man myself). But Scott seems to think it’s anti-male to ever criticize sexism against women, and anti-white to ever criticize racist whites. That’s not a reasonable foundation for dialog, or anything else.
And here are her tin foil superheroes:
