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Glosswitch points out what ought to be obvious: that men don’t have a “right” to access to women’s bodies.
Maybe, rather than just raging at "incels", we should question the idea that any man has a right to violent porn, paid-for sex and women's bodies in general. This entitlement doesn't come from nowhere. Even Amnesty have suggested men have a "right to sex".
— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) April 25, 2018
Maybe, rather than just raging at “incels”, we should question the idea that any man has a right to violent porn, paid-for sex and women’s bodies in general. This entitlement doesn’t come from nowhere. Even Amnesty have suggested men have a “right to sex”.
I think they ended up walking that back. I found this Q&A where they explicitly reject the obvious implication:
7. Does Amnesty International believe that paying for sex work is a human right?
No. Our policy is not about the rights of buyers of sex. It is entirely focussed on protecting sex workers, who face a range of human rights violations linked to criminalization.
Nor does Amnesty believe that buying sex is a human right (but we do believe that sex workers have human rights!).
To be clear: sex must be agreed between people at all times. No one person can demand it as their right.
I think they wouldn’t have had to say that “to be clear” bit if they hadn’t previously babbled about a “human right to intimacy” while defending their decrim policy.
Think Progress has more on the “incel” uprising and Facebook:
Alek Minassian, 25, was charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder during a brief court appearance on Tuesday. Minassian had previously posted a status on Facebook praising Elliot Rodger, the socially-awkward mass shooter who killed six people in Santa Barbara in 2014 before turning the gun on himself.
“Wishing to speak to Sgt. 4chan please…. The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” Minassian wrote on Facebook Monday, at around 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time — around the same time the attack begun. “We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”
Facebook later confirmed that the post was authentic.
Facebook says the post from Alek Minassian referencing the "Incel Rebellion” and Elliot Rodger is real, and was posted publicly on his profile before Facebook shut it down.
— matthew braga (@mattbraga) April 24, 2018
If he’d simply shot up a women’s college it would have been no big deal, but the trouble with these scattershot drive down the sidewalk things is that you risk mowing down real people, i.e. men, along with the sluts.
It’d be reasonable and fair to suppose that consenting adults have a right to sex with one another. If you’re not getting consent from anyone else, your right to sex is between you and you.
I’d put it like this: People have the right to have sex, if they can find a willing partner, but they’re not entitled to it.
I think part of it depends on what definition of “right” you’re using.
One definition of a right is “something the government is not allowed to deprive you of”, like the right of assembly and protest. So one reasonable definition of “having a right to sex” means that the government is not allowed to say that you’re not allowed allowed to have sex with someone – which they might want to do because you’re the same sex as each other, or there’s more than two of you, or because there is also money involved.
But another is “something the government must ensure you have”, like the right to an education. It’s not enough that the government can’t say you’re not allowed an education (although plenty of governments have done that to various sub-groups in the past), but rather the government must provide one for you (unless one is already being provided). This is different from the right to protest, because the government is not obliged to organise your protest for you!
The third main type of right is that which exists between citizens, where our actions are limited insofar as they would harm others. “Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.” is a perfect example of this – people have the right to not be punched in the nose. Property rights are another example – ownership of “things” is a right that other people are not allowed to infringe on by walking off with a “thing” that “belongs” to someone else. (Going back to the right to assembly – in terms of this type of right, a right of assembly does not mean that other people are obliged to join you!)
Thinking about a “right to have sex” in the third sense of “right”, clearly the most natural interpretation of that kind of right is “your right to swing your genitals ends at my body”, and mutual consent is required for things to go further. Of course, that only works if you consider the person you want to have sex with as also being a person with rights. It’s only if you’re incapable of considering that point of view, you end up with the twisted idea that “your right to say no to sex ends at I REALLY WANT TO!”
I think there’s a lot of confusion when people start talking about “rights” without specifying which kind of right they’re thinking of. If two people start talking about different types of right, both without realising that the other person is talking about a different type of right, then you can get horrible misunderstandings, outrage, and bad blood. Worse, you can get that between people who fundamentally agree with each other, and end up alienating people who could be allies.
I’m not saying that AI’s position perfectly matches that of the feminist organisations they’ve been at odds with recently, but I don’t think their positions are as far away from each other as the volume of disagreement would seem to indicate.
(Of course, I’m now trying to figure out what a “right to sex” would mean in the second sense of “right” above. Like, would the government be required to run some kind of national dating agency in which single people were required to join – whether they wanted to or not (poor asexuals!) – until everyone found someone they were willing to have sex with who was also willing to have sex with them? Or maybe run some kind of mandatory education system where people would learn how to better themselves and respect others until they got to the point where potential partners genuinely saw them as people they’d want to be with? Mandatory “How to not be an asshole” training, in effect. Actually, that does kind of sound like a good idea…)
I’ve often thought that that would be one reasonable goal of primary education. Folks really ought to have an education that helps them not to be an asshole if they don’t want to be – if they insist on being assholes after that, it’s clearly and entirely on them, and hopefully vastly less common.
It’d also help the poor asexuals – if someone’s not an asshole, getting that the asexuals just aren’t interested, no matter how cool you (hypothetically) are, is going to be much easier. Same for every other incompatible orientation or significant preference.
More generally – yeah, rights talk runs on these ambiguities and there will always be these confusions. It’s a bit of moral philosophy that runs right over Shermer’s head and may have been part of Bentham’s gripe. I much prefer cashing in every talk of rights with talk of duties: duties not to interfere, duties to protect against interference, duties to provide, etc. Duties are centered on the agent but specify the patient as needed; rights center on the patient and agency is left in limbo, both leaving all the important questions and hiding the fact that they exist.
Jeff, I will say that there was a lot of how not to be an asshole training in my school. Too much of it was couched in Christian ideals and values, but it was there. The boys were regularly given talks about this topic, and the girls were given talks on how to be “feminine” (whatever the hell that means at the particular time – in the 1970s, it actually wasn’t as horrible as some of the things I see now, but did include quite a bit of submissive nurturing of the male of the species).
A lot of the guys in my high school grew up to be assholes anyway. Not all of them, but interestingly, I noticed that the ones that grew up not to be assholes were not assholes before the training. I suspect you can train them all you want, but as long as you are bathing them in entitlement in movies, music, television, sports, and parenting, all the mandatory “non-asshole” training will be useless. If you aren’t raising them in an environment where they are learning all that, the training may not be necessary.
Re #6 – All fair points. I wonder though how many went from non-asshole before values education to asshole after it – that would be the best measure of failure of the education or the overwhelming negative influence outside it. And it may’ve been problematic values education overall – submissive-indoctrinated women (assuming THAT took) would signal men that, in critical ways, not being an asshole would not penalize them when it came to relating to women, in addition to all that other surrounding negative influence.
Certainly it’s at best only a part of a solution, and it points up the need for a radical re-evaluation of our culture. I’d never suppose it’s sufficient. The only necessity for it I’m pretty sure of is to cut off sheer stupid cluelessness making an asshole of someone who isn’t already inclined to it. I won’t contend that that’s an origin of all assholery; I just think it counts for more than none and enough to be an issue.
I think you’re being very cynical to assert that shooting up a women’s college would be non-news. I very much doubt that would be the case.
Skeletor, that wasn’t a literal truth-claim. I use hyperbole quite a lot.