The Wind Is Only Violence If You Resist It


I happened to see this first thing this morning.  It's very much worth reading in full, but I was particularly struck by these two observations.





There are probably an infinite number of applications of this that you could come up with, but the one that jumps out to me is in reference to the statement by President Trump that, if the accusers of Brett Kavanaugh are believed, it will be "a very scary time for young men in America."  It doesn't take a deep thinker to suss out what he is getting at--men should be afraid that their careers, livelihoods, and even freedom, will be at risk from some sort of random, intentionally false sexual assault allegation.

On a surface level, that's not a particularly credible threat.  The National Sexual Violence Research Center, collecting research, says that the rates of false sexual assault allegations are no greater than between 2 and 10%, and likely much lower given the ways that "unsubstantiated" reports (i.e. one's that law enforcement cannot come up with sufficient evidence to pursue) are often lumped in with "false" reports, when they are clearly not the same thing.  The FBI's uniform crime report for 2012 says that there were a little over 61,000 forcible sexual assaults of women reported to law enforcement in the US.  If we assume, for simplicity's sake, that each of these events involved a different alleged perpetrator, and the 2% false reporting rate, that works out to a little over 1200 false reports.  There are about 75 million men between 19 and 55 in the United States, and if we assume that these false accusations are going to be randomly distributed through the population (unlikely, but let's go with it), a given man in a given year has a 1 in 62,140 chance of being falsely accused of sexual assault.  To put that in perspective, you have a far greater chance (1 in 44k) in any given year to be killed in an automobile accident in which you were a pedestrian than to be the falsely accused of a sexual assault.  Being the victim of a false accusation is the equivalent of being hit by a bus while crossing the street and killed, even assuming that all of this is completely random, which it is not.  Life is random and unfair sometimes, and if we don't worry overly about the possibility of being hit by a bus, then men shouldn't worry about being the victim of a false accusation. 

But let's pretend for a moment that this is a real threat, and examine the notion of men (here, in this context, straight men) being scared of women and what women might do to their careers and livelihoods.  Any women reading this are no doubt thinking, "what, you mean like the way women have to be afraid that men will ruin their careers and livelihoods (or threaten their lives) in any one of a number of ways?"  And that's the point.  No one is saying that it's OK for men to be wrongfully accused of something they didn't do, especially something that speaks so directly to character like sexual assault.  But being placed in a position where one is vulnerable to false accusations is to be in the place that most of the non-straight male population already is, and has been for a very long time.  It's not like this is some weird, unique singling out of straight dudes for some heretofore unprecedented punishment.  It's just becoming like everyone else.

And that's before we talk about the other dimension of this, which is race.  Men might be punished for false sexual assault allegations?  You mean like Emmett Till?   Since I know I have some non-US readers who might not know the story, Emmett Till was a 14 year old African-American boy who was lynched in 1955 in Money, Mississippi, ostensibly for whistling and harassing a white lady.  Turns out the white lady made the whole thing up, but in any event two men beat Till to death and dumped him in the river.  The point is that men being afraid that women will make up sexual assault allegations is certainly not some new or revelatory experience to African-American men in the United States.  And now that you have a President who calls Mexicans "rapists," it's not exactly news to Latino men, either.

What Trump and his ilk are really crying over is the idea that white, straight men might have to worry about false sexual assault allegations, in the same way that all other people in the country have been worried about related issues for a very long time.  You will forgive me for not having tremendous sympathy for the other members of my tribe on this one--"being just like everyone else" is not actually a punishment.  People like me being a little more uncomfortable than we have been in the past is not some catastrophic injustice, but a bit of growing pains surrounding the birth of something new and better.  It may mean that some folks will be accused and treated unfairly and unjustly while the pendulum swings a bit too far the other way.  Those individual, discrete events should be called out when the occur, but that in no way invalidates or calls into question to basic project overall.  As Martin says, the wind is only violence if you resist it. 

What does it mean not to resist the wind here?  Well, it means that white, straight men like me should be more conscious of our behavior, especially toward women.  We would be wise to talk less and listen more.  We would be wise to be more conservative in our romantic interactions--if we find ourselves in a situation where we are not entirely sure of the intentions of the woman we are with, it's best to default to the answer being no.  Does that mean that we are going to get laid less often?  Yup, probably, but it's not like that's some world-historical tragedy or anything.  It means deferring, falling back, taking a lesser place.  That, too, is not going to kill us, either individually or collectively. 

We are not as fragile as the behavior and constant pissing and moaning of many of our number would indicate.  It's all going to be OK.  So long as we don't try to stand in front of the wind and try to make it stop.     

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

I was introduced to The Body's Grace by Frank from Letters to the Catholic Right in this post , where he quotes Williams saying: It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…? I want to talk about the first part of that quote here, regarding the clitoris.  I am not aware of any theology that has been done on the clitoris, but there should be.  As Williams alludes to, the existence and nature of the clitoris is a theological "problem," especially if you want to hold on to traditional Christian sexual morality.  It is especially problematic if you want to hold that sexuality needs to be understood through the...
Read more

On a Pelagian Politics, and Why It Would Be Good

I have two very hot takes.  The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong.  The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong.  But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take.  I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion. Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes. 1. Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out ...
Read more

A Reflection on the Past, and Also on Art

Exactly twenty-two years ago, in February of 2002, I was living in River Forest, Illinois, finishing up my undergraduate degree.  I was living in an enormous old priory, hoping that I would be able to join the Dominicans when I was done with school in the summer (which, in fact, happened).  The priory was built in the 50s, when the Dominicans would have classes of a fifty or sixty students a year.  Those days were long gone, and so I was the only person living on the hall, on the far other side of the building from the actual Dominicans.  Other than meals, I was basically living entirely by myself. In my evenings, after getting done with my homework, I had a ritual on weekdays.  I would turn on the radio to the Chicago rock radio station Q101 and listen to the syndicated show Loveline .  Loveline  was a call-in show, focused on giving sex and relationship advice to teenagers and twenty-somethings.  The hosts of the show were comedian Adam Corolla ...
Read more