The reality of being born female
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https://twitter.com/vonny_bravo/status/958296899152437248
Tip Jar
https://twitter.com/vonny_bravo/status/958296320808292352
https://twitter.com/vonny_bravo/status/958296899152437248
These sexual abuse cases commonly involve inequality of power.
A baby girl and a baby boy are equally helpless if in the hands of an adult with this sort of agenda in mind.
The laws of all jurisdictions, and as far as I am aware in all societies and cultures regard regard a ‘child of tender years’ as primarily the responsibility of the mother.
So “this is the reality of being born female. This is the world we enter” should be rephrased IMHO: to something like “this is the reality of all human infants: the most helpless of all newborn mammals.”
Fight or flight. A newborn gazelle, wildebeest, impala or whatever has to be able to keep up with the (fleeing) herd within about half an hour of being born. Not so a human infant, even on the plains of Africa.
So what was the role being played by the child’s mother while all this lifelong damage was being inflicted by this callow and perverted young man?
I’m not sure if I’m reading too far into this, but I was really bothered by the phrasing, “Police said the youth took the child to a room on the top floor of the house…” Based on this, I anticipated learning that the perpetrator was a teenager… only to discover “the youth” was a 28 year old man.
Obviously, it would make little categorical difference if the rapist had been aged 14-18. It just feels fishy that the police would be referring to a 28 year old as “the youth”. It reminds me of how conservative news sources (e.g. Fox News) consistently leaned toward language of “women” rather than “high school girls” in reference to Roy Moore’s accusers.
@Omar
Female:male ratio of child sex abuse victims…. 5:1.
@Omar:
The mother was out at work, thinking her baby daughter was being properly taken care of by her sister-in-law. Who would have expected that also having a 28yo man in the house would have created an unsafe situation?
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/656705/eight-month-old-rape-victim.html
Seriously?
You’re stretching pretty far to try and exonerate men here. All Babies Matter, Pervs happen, The Mother Was To Blame For Not Being There.
@Lady Mondegreen
You said it before I could craft a response. Why is there always a blaming of someone who perhaps provided access to a perpetrator rather than the perpetrator? It would be nice if bad people had tattoos to identify them as such, but this is generally not the case. And blaming the baby girl’s mother is particularly cruel. Should we now ask what the baby was wearing? (Omar – your comments are generally thoughtful, but this one missed the mark, I think)
Ugh, god, I’ll say. Sometimes women actually have to leave their babies in the care of other people, for instance to make a living so that baby and mother and all don’t starve.
(And primates aren’t actually the most helpless of all newborn mammals. Marsupials for example are more so.)
The person who did this is a deranged monster, so this really has no bearing on sexism in society. No part of our culture, male or female, condones baby rape. Every now and then some human does something horrible, but drawing conclusions about mainstream society from such sickos isn’t going to get anyone anywhere.
What makes you so confident of that? You could say no part of our culture, male or female, condones ripping out a woman’s intestines after raping her, either, and yet some men did that very thing.
Are you really 100% certain that in a country where the birth of a girl is often seen as a disaster the rape of a girl baby is just completely arbitrary?
Humans (certainly men) have difficulty coping with sex in religion
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/naked-in-the-mirror-stephen-greenblatt-on-our-obsession-with-adam-eve-1.4403055
and socially.
Everyone agrees, this example is horrific. Another inhumane, psychopathic instance. The roots are prehistoric. Recall the display of many small statues of Aurignacian Venuses in the museum in Kiev (they were, apparently, ubiquitous in this region in prehistoric times) and the taming of Enkidu (Gilgamesh’s alter ego) in the epic of Gilgamesh. The sexist sociopathic syndrome (adopting the terminology of Jane Jacobs) has to be addressed starting with boys (the film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring,_Summer,_Fall,_Winter…_and_Spring is affective).
This video (https://vimeo.com/253135841?ref=fb-share&1) is effective because it uses sexual dimorphism. Poor Moses (or whoever he is) in the video confronted with so much! How many of these reductive iconic depictions (some prehistoric) were created by by men?
Jade Hameister
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2018/your-sandwich-awaits-you/
https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/26/world/jade-hameister-epic-sandwich-response-trnd/index.html
made a point of mentioning that it’s difficult to pee at the North Pole. (https://youtu.be/eMXQ6ebbC1c) Men are also vulnerable in this context but the take away from this point in her TED talk is that the specific sexual dimorphism that she, born as female, had to cope with was not a roadblock to her epic mental and physical challenges reaching the North Pole. Her talk was not intersectional, but this is no reason for trolls to criticize her for being racially insensitive, and did not mention gender identification, but this is no reason for trolls to label her a TERF. It was a talk about her accomplishment specifically as a woman. This should be the reality of being born female.
Omar, we would like to think this isn’t part of our culture, or blame it on India or wherever, but the reality is that while ‘right minded’ or ‘sane’ people within all cultures find this sort of act appalling in the extreme, it happens. It happens within our culture(s) and therefore we have to wear it. To argue otherwise is to stray into No True Scotsman territory.
I generally find your comments worth thinking about, but much about this one is rubbing me raw I have to say.
I was raised by a single mother, who enrolled me in an after-school care program because she worked until 5-5:30pm daily, and thus could not pick me up at the close of classes. Is it your belief that she is to blame if I had been molested by staff in this gap in her direct supervision? Hell, school itself is a gap in the direct parental supervision of virtually every child; are mothers do blame for molestation during school hours? During babysitting? And so on.
Parents by necessity must place their trust in other adults for the responsible supervision of their children. Betrayal of that trust falls on the perpetrator.
Also, shouldn’t ‘children of tender years’ be the responsibility of fathers too?
What do you think the odds of rape would have been if the baby had been male? We can’t know of course, but those men that believe the female body exists for their convenience frequently overlap with those men that view gay sex as dirty, sinful and the like. And India, by and large, is steeped in both of those beliefs.
@Omar:
Both parents are equally responsible for their offspring. This is generally true in law – as far as I understand – and in most cultures, at least so far as the child’s safety is concerned, not so much the actual looking after of the kid, unfortunately.
Why don’t you blame father for not being there? If the child had been with its father and was stolen, would you blame the mother for not being there? The father for being insufficiently vigilant? The baby stealer for stealing babies? Or the baby for not saying “no” loudly enough?
If we are going to make weak analogies to animal societies, what about all those who leave offspring in the care of family/herd/pack members as a matter of course, including most primates? Elephants share care of infants too. Older elephants have been known to take over some of the roles of less experienced parents, including playing with the infants and protecting them from danger. Even feral cats will leave their kittens in the care of other cats they are ordinarily mutually antagonistic toward, in a very explicit display of reciprocal altruism. They make temporary trust agreements which seem in the most part to work out.
This kind of thing is extremely common in nature and in human societies. Human parents are not in error for leaving their children with people they trust, even if that trust turns out to be ill-founded or if the unexpected happens. And mothers are sure as shit no more in error than fathers when something bad happens.
An anecdote: in the olden days, when I was between the ages of 4 and about 6, my parents left me with a babysitter after school until my mother got home from work and could pick me up. There was every reason to trust the babysitter. She was a family friend. She was a dinner lady at my school. Her kids were often at our house playing with my older siblings. But she abused me. Not sexually, in this case, but sometimes physically and always through cruelty. I don’t know why. But the points is that I don’t blame my parents for this. They couldn’t know that their trust had been misplaced. And the idea of my mother being more responsible for what happened than my father is just plain ridiculous.
Of course, after my parents found out what was going on, they continued to leave me with the same woman after school for several months at least. I certainly blame them them for that. Equally.
@Skeletor:
I think Ophelia is right. We can’t be sure of the motives of this particular monster, but female babies are abused a hell of a lot more than male ones.
@Homs:
NINJA’D again ;)
I have no children but I often look after a young niece and nephew. 20 years ago I often looked after some nieces from another branch of the family.
If something happened to them while they were in my care it would be my fault. Responsibility – at least immediate responsibility commutes. It wouldn’t be their parents’ fault for not being there and particularly not especially their mother’s fault. It wouldn’t be their fault for trusting me; I have the outward appearance of an adult and I’ve known their mother for 25 years. She lived with me and my wife for a while.
So if I pulled a David Cameron and left one of them at a pub, I think the fault and responsibility would be mine.
Rob @ #10:
I take it by ‘we’ above you mean all members of our culture, or of our societies; implicitly all its male and all its female members. Sorry, but I cannot for the life of me see how THE QUESTION I posted above has anything to do with the so-called ‘No True Scotsman’ so-called ‘fallacy’. So please enlighten me as to how it is.
Nor have I blamed anything here on India, Pakistan, Islam, Zoroastrianism or any other culture, religion or whatever. So before you reply, if at all, please read it again.
My offence at this ‘freethinking’ site was to ask one simple question: “So what was the role being played by the child’s mother while all this lifelong damage was being inflicted by this callow and perverted young man?” I have not laid any blame anywhere. I have simply committed the cardinal sin of asking what for most around here is a wrong, wrong, wrong, question.
I seem to have triggered a groupthink response, from all bar one: Skeletor.
Well as Hamlet said: “to thine own self be true.” He was, and look where it got him.
Mine was a sincere, genuine and simple question that has stirred up something of a hornet’s nest at this so- called freethinking site. A question for Christ’s sake. Just a question.
So – apart from groupthink – can you think of any other reason why people on this ‘so-called’ freethinking site might take issue with your post after spending their entire lives listening to men JAQing off and talking about how atrocities that disproportionally affect women and girls have nothing to do with misogyny?
Bloody hell, Omar, do you really not see what’s informing* your “sincere, genuine and simple question”, nor why you are being perceived as trying to shift at least some of the responsibility from the perpetrator?
Why? Just think for a moment. Why are you asking Ophelia what the mother’s role was? In what way is it remotely relevant? The bloke – at 28, a fully adult human being with all the responsibility for his behaviour – he stole the baby. He cruelly raped her. No-one else is to blame in any way. So why on Earth are you trying to find a way to point the finger of responsibility at someone else? Think.
*Hint: rape culture. The way society tries to rationalise horrific acts by attempting to pin at least partial responsibility for the monstrous actions of uncontrollable people onto controllable ones. Victim blaming.
Funny how no-one ever takes seriously the suggestion that we could prevent almost all sexual violence by ensuring all men are bound, gagged, have their hands shackled behind their backs, have to wear a chastity belt, and are locked up in solitary confinement from puberty onwards. No, we have to make the outrageous behaviours of men the responsibility of their victims. It’s easier to tell the difference between potential victims (i.e. all women and children) and perpetrators (almost entirely men) than between decent men and the monstrous ones. So, for fear of restricting the liberties of innocent men in order to control the guilty hiding amongst them, we restrict the liberties of women and children. Right? That’s fair? And then find some way to blame the already heavily restricted and entirely blameless women and children for not being vigilant enough when an unrestricted man attacks them anyway.
That is why people are reacting the way we are, why you feel ‘attacked’. Because you failed to put 100% of the blame where it belongs. On the man who did the crime.
Oh come on, Omar. You aren’t being persecuted, you are being questioned. A few people here (including me) think you’re blaming the mother because – clearly – you are.
You made the dubious assertion that mothers are somehow more accountable for the safety of their children than are fathers then asked why the mother wasn’t there to protect the child in this particular instance, but not where the father was.
Your question wasn’t a wrong one. It’s one that is easily answered. The mother’s role in this instance was “breadwinner”. But I don’t think that’s really what you were asking. I think you were asking “why didn’t the mother prevent this from happening?”
It’s disappointing that you’ve decided that several people disagreeing with you constitutes “groupthink”. A more thoughtful person might conclude that perhaps there was something wrong with what they said or that they should question their assumptions.
Seriously, Omar. If you post here, you’re occasionally going to be called out for thoughtless or just plain wrong statements. I certainly have been, from time to time. I like to think I’ve learned from it.
My advice is don’t take it personally and don’t take your bat in. Stick around, read what others have to say, agree or disagree, argue.
We might well have misconstrued what you said. If so, convince us of that rather than taking offense. Or we might have nailed what you said, in which case convince us that we’re wrong.
Like some others here, I felt your comments were something of a contrast with things you’ve said previously. I was surprised. I think you’re wrong. But I don’t want you to stop commenting here.
Tgger put it well. The expectation that mothers are somehow more accountable than fathers is an excellent example of the restrictions women the world over are expected to endure.
Take Tigger’s advice, Omar, and think. Challenge your own assumptions. Ask yourself why you think the things you think. And then come back with arguments rather than tears. Then perhaps we’ll take you seriously.
People who cry groupthink and burst into figurative tears and rend their metaphorical garments when, like, four people disagree with them have no business deciding what is and isn’t freethinking, I reckon.
Anyone else bewildered about the scotsman fallacy accusation, by the way? Have we done that?
I think Rob’s comment about straying into “No True Scotsman territory” #10 was referring to the idea that if something like this happens in “our” society it doesn’t say anything about “us” in general (since in that case the perpetrator isn’t really one of us – a.k.a. No True Scotsman), but if it happens in India it does indeed say something about Indians (because in that case the perpetrator really is one of them – a.k.a. a True Scotsman). To be fair I too didn’t read anything like that into Omar’s post.
It’s something we old-skool skeptics are susceptible to.
Skeletor:
Perhaps you didn’t read the preceding post, but I think this is relevant:
This is one country; I have no statistics from other countries at this time, including my own. I don’t know how hard those are to find, because I am at work and have very little time to search right now. But this figure suggests that cases of baby rape are not actually uncommon and not just one human being breaking out from the herd and doing something horrible.
In addition, there are a myriad of other ways that children suffer from abuse that is not sexual, and much of that goes unnoticed or unreported until such time as we get something like a young beauty queen found dead in a freezer, or something like the 17 children (actually, several adults in the mix) abused by their parents from a recent post. But babies are abused in lots of ways all the time, including sexual, so can we please get off the track of people not condoning hurting babies? We (I am not saying we here personally, but we are part of the greater society, and perhaps have done our best not to look too closely from time to time) look past this sort of thing. We tolerate this sort of thing until a case makes big news, after which we have a 9 days wonder (actually, in the Internet, it’s usually more like a 9 minutes wonder) and then go back to our business with nothing really changing.
The idea that children are universally valued, loved, and nurtured is an insidious one, because it allows us to pretend that the cases that are brought to our attention are horrifying aberrations. In reality, a lot of children are abused every day, many of them from babyhood on. A young woman of my acquaintance ended up in foster care, eventually adopted away from her birth mother, who had felt the need to put out lit cigarettes on her child before she was even a year old. Many of the women I know were sexually abused as children, many very young.
The fact that such numbers as the one cited above can pile up before a case comes to our attention that ignites universal outrage – that is a symptom of a civilization that does not care for the most vulnerable, for the weakest, with any degree of vigor. Even if we do not ourselves participate in the child abuse that happens all around us, in nearly every (or perhaps every) culture that has children, we manage to remain within our comfortable lives without letting it touch us daily. In short, we permit it to happen, and beg ignorance when it does, because most of us fail to hear the cries of children until they are too loud to ignore.
Oh my god, drop the persecution complex. You asked a question that implicitly placed blame on the mother, and people pointed that out to you. Her ‘role’ in this rape was to entrust her child to a child carer that was a relative, and he betrayed her trust. She had no role in the rape, and no culpability by trusting family.
Balls. Is it groupthink that we agree with one another on most topics this blog discusses? What about the ones where you join with us in that agreement? Groupthink! This is just a silly, accusative version of the word ‘consensus’ uttered only when a person no longer finds themselves with the group on a topic.
(Oh my god, there is broad consensus on climate science, evolution, heliocentrism – groupthink!)
Oh. My God. Spare the pity party. All you did was ask a question, and all we did was point out our disagreement with the implications of that question. There was no punishment.
John Wasson @ 10 – sorry your comment was held for so long – links & I’m late starting today.
Omar – it wasn’t Hamlet who said it, it was Polonius. Also, the joke is, it’s become something of a bromide but in the play the whole point is that it’s pious hypocritical bullshit coming from Polonius who is a lying flattering courtier and also a tedious blathering bore. It’s rather like Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Jeff Sessions giving us solemn advice on truth.
Omar, again – I know it stings when a bunch of people jump on a comment – but still – “this ‘freethinking’ site” – really?
(Just for one thing, when do I ever call it that? When do I brag about it in that way?)
I refer you to the About page, which describes B&W this way:
My words. I deliberately framed it as a matter of focus and interest as opposed to pretensions to titles like “freethinking site.”
I’ve been quite ill this week, so possibly I haven’t expressed myself clearly. Then again, maybe that’s normal. Let me try to clarify.
Omar, you said
[emphasis added by me]
So, when I refer to ‘our’ I’m referring to the collective global bucket of cultures and societies. Not any one or any general grouping.
As to your sensitivity to being called out by so many of us, well, I think there have been sufficient responses to that. I and others think you are wrong because we have reason to do so, not through any group think. To claim that is lazy and insulting to the spirit of this forum. If you think you’re right, present arguments as to why. We can have a civil argument.
Omar et al, apologies re the confusion with the NTS reference. That was actually in response to Skeletor, not Omar – and for that I do blame the fever.
Skeletor claims that whoever did this is a deranged monster. I certainly agree that they’re not a good person. They may even been mentally ill of have a personality disorder. Then again, this type of crime happens all too often and apparently normal people have a well displayed ability to behave in appalling ways given the impetus. Crimes like this happen in India, Europe, the mid-east, the USA, even New Zealand. Basically everywhere. I don’t believe ‘we’ can disavow the responsibility that ‘our’ societies carry for this happening. To try to write it off as an exception, the work of a deranged monster, is to fall into the NTS fallacy.
I hope that clears it up.
Nobody should have to expect a 28-year-old to rape an 8-month old.
The funny thing is I sort of agree with the earlier part of your post with regards to the idea that this may have happened to a male infant, but this bit sort of reinforces the point Ophelia was making.
The person who raped the baby is the one responsible, yet as you put it:
What you’ve done is put some of the responsibility for what the 28-year-old did onto the mother. Nobody should be in a position where such an act should be foreseeable, and thus something that can be guarded against.
Yet somehow there is this sort of drive. culturally imbued into a lot of us, to look at how the mother could have let this happen.
Though I suffered abuse as a child, I was quite fortunately born male. That means I only perceive it hazily, through second hand accounts and observation rather than direct experience, but I think this is more what it means to be born female.
It isn’t simply the higher risk of suffering abuse, but also the higher risk of being blamed for the abuser’s actions, even when it is the sort of thing you just wouldn’t be able to see coming.
It is how so much of our cultures both reduce the power given to women and increase the responsibility they are assigned when things go wrong.
The mother earns less than if she was a father, yet she is expected to maintain the child. She has to work more to do so, thus she has to find someone to care for the child, that someone betrayed her trust, it is her fault for having trusted them.
That is not a healthy dynamic.
Bingo. Give this man one internet. He deserves it.
It is also the case that most people seem to notice sexual abuse against males in a different way. I point out to people that young girls and women have been abused by Catholic priests (and some sources are reporting that they are in higher number than the young boys abused) and they refuse to believe me. I have a couple of hypotheses about that.
(1) We value girls less than boys.
(2) Abuse against boys is less common, therefore newsworthy
(3) Abuse against girls is seen as a validation of their womanhood, while abuse against boys is seen as a violation of their manhood
(4) We see sexual force against women as being part of her role rather than an aberration
(5) Male on male abuse is simply more titillating
If asked which hypothesis has the greatest likelihood of being correct, I would say all of them are probably part of the story. Abuse against females that fails to leave permanent physical scars or lead to death is simply not a crisis on the part of most people, and on top of that, we have been conditioned to think that a woman “deserves” bad things if she dresses or acts like a “fallen woman” or a “slut”…and that particular designation can apply extremely broadly, since I have tended not to wear revealing clothes, and I do not flirt, yet it was still seen as appropriate (the one time I actually got the nerve and reported the abuse) to tell me “you should be flattered”. And it was also implied that it was my fault, because I was not so cold and hard that I refused to speak to anyone who spoke to me – yes, that is what I was told “you talked to people”. Not about the abuse, that wasn’t even implied. Not about sexual things. Not about lewd things. Just “you talked to people”. Never mind that most of those people were women in the office I had struck up a friendship with…I had “talked to people”. I was, in short, open and willing for sexual encounters with men I did not like or wish to be intimate with because I had held lunchtime conversations with the woman in the office next to mine and across the hall from his. Wow.
First, I would like to take this opportunity to float Omar’s Hypothesis of Blog Orthodoxisation: Any blog on the Web will gradually develop its own canon: propositions of expected consensus, even if only by a process of attrition. Just as in Darwinian natural selection, where the environment selects the fittest organisms for survival in it and organisms to the extent they can in turn choose the environment they find themselves fittest for, so it is with blogs and bloggers.
The culture here at B&W is built around a set of core propositions which all who do not wish to attract ire should accept, if only to avoid the said ire. (This I have found typical of many sites on the Web, not just this one.) But Ophelia started this site as I recall when Post Modernism was all the go in universities. B&W tore into PoMo savagely and without mercy or quarter being given, and taking no prisoners. PoMo definitely deserved the debunking. Her books Why Truth Matters (2006) and Does God Hate Women? (2009, with Jeremy Stangroom) are standout works, if not on their way to becoming outright classics in their genre. B&W’s founding and core culture, as I have read it, was and still is the primacy of reason as against religious and other traditional assumptions governing human relations. (Her point at #28 noted none the less.)
Then she copy-posted B&W to Freethought Blogs (FTB) (https://freethoughtblogs.com/) while maintaining this site as well. It did not last there but from that I assumed it endorsed ‘freethought’.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Freethought_Blogs
Ah well. I found as a visitor to B&W at ‘Purethought Blogs’ that it attracted a few commenters who would brook no disagreement whatever in exchanges with me. So rather than get locked into endless acrimonious verbal brawls, I rapidly came back here (with time out for a spot of brain surgery; successful so far I am glad to say.) But I maintain that the free thought bit of it is an essential part of the Enlightenment tradition. (And OB, I hope that answers your question at #27.)
But B&W nonetheless has its own canon; ideas which are questioned at the questioner’s risk.
1. The primacy of its feminism. I asked “So what was the role being played by the child’s mother while all this lifelong damage was being inflicted by this callow and perverted young man?” And thereupon began the combination feeding frenzy plus shitstorm. If I had asked ‘So what was the role being played by the child’s FATHER while all this lifelong damage was being inflicted by this callow and perverted young man?’ I doubt anyone would have turned turtle in their blogging chair over it, particularly if I had added something like ‘isn’t it about time FATHERS worldwide took a bit more responsibility for their infants?’ And that would have been OK until someone cited a study of the incidence of father-infant rape as against those already done on father-daughter rape.
2. Acceptance (please correct me someone if I am wrong) of the ‘rape culture’ thesis of Margaret Lazarus and Renner Wunderlich, and taken up and brought to prominence by Susan Brownmiller, in which ALL men are seen as potential rapists, and ALL men theoretically benefit from the rape of any woman. And endorsed by commenters of both sexes at B&W. But not by me. Though perhaps I am just not with it.
( https://jezebel.com/5279283/is-there-a-rapist-in-waiting-in-every-guy ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_culture )
At which point, I would like to read my text for today: Luke 15:7 KJV “I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.”
There may be joy in heaven over sin repented for, but we can I think assume that there is far less joy over heresy, and doubts and reservations all round among the Host of Angels even when it’s heresy repented of.
The full information posted here on B&W was concerning a rape case in India of a baby girl: “Rape of an eight-month-old baby has sparked outrage in India. An eight-month-old baby girl was raped by her 28-year-old cousin in the country’s capital. Delhi’s Commission for Women chief, Swati Maliwal posted online that the infant underwent a three-hour…. Police said the youth took the child to a room on the top floor of the house on the pretext of playing with her and sexually assaulted her. He had gagged the child’s mouth so that her cries were inaudible…. “ My question was: “So what was the role being played by the child’s mother while all this lifelong damage was being inflicted by this callow and perverted young man? [Emphasis not in original.]”
As I read it, the mother (presumably with confidence) passed responsibility for care and control to her sister (call her Carer 1) who in turn passed the responsibility for the child to her own son, the male abuser (call him ‘Carer’ 2). How much responsibility the mother and Carer 1 must take for what later eventuated, if any, must depend on how well they knew Carer 1’s son, ‘Carer’ 2. If they hardly knew him or his predilection for abuse, does that increase or decrease either ‘s responsibility? If they knew him well but had no idea of what he was really capable of, what effect does that have on Carer 1’s responsibility? Because the child was in Carer 1’s care.
The primary victim here is definitely the infant child. I am not blaming HER or on the face of it anyone other than the MALE rapist at all. My question did not imply any blame necessarily for the mother, though the implication from many comments here is that under no circumstances could ANY blame be passed to her. (‘Rape culture’…. Perpetual female victimhood…. Misogyny…. Why don’t you blame the father for not being there?… Blame the victim…. If it happens at all the culture must condone it….[Jeeziss!!!!]… Exoneration of men… [ALL men?]…. “Female:male ratio of child sex abuse victims: 5:1”…. drop the persecution complex…. Oh my god..!!!… have no business deciding what is and isn’t freethinking… blaming the mother…. trying to shift at least some of the responsibility….. after spending their entire lives listening to men JAQing off…” )
But the prize response (to her own interpretation of my comment) has to be Lady M.’s:
Like the epicycles within epicycles proposed by the the Medieval geocentrist astronomers, there are assumptions within assumptions in Lady M’s little effort. (With stress on the ‘little’.) I did not, repeat, not, blame the mother, though (mea culpa) I should have realised that some local theoreticians of ‘rape culture’ might read it that way.
I maintain that while all people must be treated as equal (with due allowance for age, infirmity etc) all cultures are definitely not equal. But as far as I am aware, no culture on this planet officially allows or encourages rape, with the obvious exception of the Islamic culture, in which the Holy Bloody Book positively encourages rape to be inflicted on Unbelievers in certain circumstances, particularly in times of open hostility. There is reportedly no shortage of Believers among the Muslim refugees now flocking into Western Europe who are willing to act on the relevant suggestions of The Prophet (pbuh). Spokespeople for Islam do their best to defend their indefensible Holy Bloody Religion on this point, but never convincingly IMHO.
But I digress. Across all cultures I am aware of, primary responsibility for infants is taken by their mothers, and for fairly obvious reasons. But again, let’s get it clear: in my view, ‘Carer’ 2, the cousin, the bastard who destroyed the future of this child should be banged up for life, if not for punishment then for the protection of others; or satisfactory reason shown to a court as to why he should not be so treated. The phrase I used: “callow and perverted young man” IMHO implies that he is not someone I would trust to wash a shitty nappy and hang it out to dry, and it would appear that a lengthy term in porridge is in order anyway. The bastard as good as murdered the helpless 8-month old baby girl.
OB:
With respect, if a mother in whatever circumstance of wealth or poverty, and with or without an adult partner, chooses another person to care for her baby, and her choice turns out to be disastrous for the baby, does the mother have any moral responsibility for her choice of carer; particularly if that care will possibly be passed on without her necessarily knowing? That carer might easily turn out to be a monster if her investigation is inadequate, and if that is the case, who should bear responsibility? I maintain that it will depend on the circumstances. ‘Carer’ 2 is an obvious target, and on the face of it WOULD HAVE TO BEAR ALLTHE RESPONSIBILITY. But relevant questions are ‘did he ever arouse suspicion?’ and ‘did he already have form?. It is possible that he had, and did. And does the mother on grounds of hardship, work imperatives etc, have a way out of ANY responsibility? Obviously, circumstances will vary greatly, but the moral is clear here: if in any doubt, leave him or her out.
In practice I suggest that across many cultures, women trust women relatives with their offspring more than they trust male relatives, and the closer the relationship, the greater the trust likely: which can at times prove disastrous nonetheless. But the above ‘rape culture’ idea that all or even a significant portion of the male population are potential rapists is IMHO bullshit. Pure bullshit.
Standard entry-level feminism appears to have it that if a man is involved, he must automatically be to blame for any and all shit that happens, and carry all, repeat all, moral responsibility for it. But that sort of ethics-made-easy does not get us very far. Certainly not in this case on the information posted. The mother may have been the very quintessence of virtue in every way. Alternatively, she may have been an habitual drunk and an irresponsible slob, or a ruthless and calculating bitch: not revealed in the initial information. But in all cultures I know anything about, infants and small children are primarily the responsibility of the mother, and for pretty obvious reasons: like it or lump it.
If Carer 1 were to subscribe to the outlook that ‘any man can be a rapist’ promoted by the theoreticians of ‘rape culture’, then there would be no way out for her. She would not be able to have it both ways, and she would on her own terms be just as liable for placing the child in danger as if she had left it locked in a room with a savage dog or a venomous snake. End of my input on that matter.
Sorry, OB, but again I must disagree. (Though I may be wrong, and I have confidence that you will point out any errors in what I say below. )
A baby marsupial just after birth is pretty short on prenatal development. Red kangaroos are the largest extant marsupial species, but the baby is only about the size of a French bean when it is born. However, it is not strictly ‘helpless’, because on it climb though her fur from vulva to pouch it has help available from its mother. After she has helped it climb to the pouch, that mother is always there to carry it, nurture it, help it and protect it. It gradually learns confidence to move further and further away from her as it grows, and becomes gradually independent. Same with all marsupials.
Baby placental herbivores of the smaller species (deer, antelopes, wildebeest etc, as well as North American bison) have to be able to keep up with the herd about half an hour after being born. Any stragglers become food for the carnivores: big cats and hyaenas on the African savannah; wolves, mountain lions etc in wilderness N. America; tigers, wolves and bears in Eurasia. (Australia has seen the almost complete extinction of the large carnivores, and is in the process of being overrun by wild goats, camels, horses, pigs and donkeys, easily a match for the largest carnivores still extant: wild dogs.)
Worldwide, in the oceans and on land, the larger herbivores are somewhat different. Elephants, buffalo species, giraffes etc depend for their survival on the group being strong enough to ward off the predators by both day and night. Whales and dolphins, walruses, (and probably) narwhals likewise. But the smaller-bodied seals and dugongs are more vulnerable to the larger carnivores of the oceans.
Placental carnivores are pretty helpless at birth, which is the price for long placental development in utero way beyond the possibilities of a marsupial pouch. They too develop independence at differing rates depending on the species, with the human infant’s development being slowest of all. The big carnivores are at the top of their food pyramid, and have the more helpless of the non-human infants, but compensate by having social groups in which a number of (usually closely related) females supervise the infants in turn and commonly guard them from any male not closely related. Fathers in both lion and the closely related tiger species have also been recorded as caring for young cubs, though they are more often hostile to cubs not their own, to the point of killing those cubs if the biological father is gone.
In all pre-agricultural (and many agricultural and pre-industrial human societies) the females take charge of the infants and small children, while the men and pre-initiation youths perform male roles in the division of labour. Typically in hunter-gatherer societies, men hunt large game, and maintain boats and fishing gear while women hunt small game, gather plant products and tend small children of both sexes. Though that is by no means a hard and fast rule.
The newborn human baby, as the most helpless of all mammalian babies, is not able to even turn itself over if laid on its back: even more helpless than a newborn baby kangaroo, which can at least climb with maternal assistance to the pouch. Where the mother kangaroo has a pouch, the human female has fully upright posture and arms free to hold and carry the infant if needs be. In human evolution increasing infant brain size and infant helplessness, tool-making, bipedalism, upright stance and grasping hands each with an opposable thumb to all the other four fingers of the hand, appear to have formed an almighty feedback loop promoting rapid development towards modern Homo sapiens.
Sexual division of labour diminishes as technology advances, freeing women from their traditional domestic roles, and allowing men the option of stepping out of the primary breadwinner role. But nursing mothers definitely have fewer options, unless of course they have wealth enough to employ appropriate others.
Omar, that’s a massive post, possibly the longest I’ve ver seen from any commentator anywhere. Say what you like about orthodoxy, you can’t claim to have been silenced. Instead, you were invited to put forward your arguments and you have. I’m only going to comment on a few broad themes, rather than specifics.
Orthodoxy
I think your quite right. Over time blogs do develop a level of orthodoxy amongst the frequent commentators. The dynamics of how this is achieved vary from site to site and the tightness of self policing certainly varies. B&W I think is actually pretty good at accepting comments from anyone who does so in good faith and who actually adds in some way to a conversation or argument. I’ve been disappointed at a couple who have left when disagreed with and more disappointed with one who has stayed (not you). In any event, claiming you were subjected to a feeding frenzy and shitstorm is at best to grossly overstate. Every regular commentator here has been taken to task at some time by either OB or one or more commentator. OB once rebuked me for describing someone as inhuman. Another called me ‘some dude’ because we disagreed over the artistic merit of a statue. I we’ll recall the reaction when another commentator defended their use of porn.
Everyone who has kept their head has remained part of the community and is accepted, although not necessarily agreed with in all matters. I feel it’s a pretty loose and broad orthodoxy here administered with a light touch. The keystones being inquisitiveness, rationality and respect.
Are All Men Rapists?
In a literal sense? No. And quite honestly I’ve only ever met one women who ever claimed such. The phrase is certainly galvanising though, for better or for worse. More accurate hypotheses might be ‘are many men rapists?’ or ‘are many men potentially rapists?’ The answer dep nds on how you define rape. If rape requires violence or physical restraint; if women are not allowed to refuse certain people under certain conditions, then that lowers the number of offenders and you may answer no. If you define rape as occurring in the absence of crystal clear enthusiastic consent, then yes, probably most when are in fact rapists. It’s a rare teenage male that hasn’t sulked and nagged or cajoled a girlfriend into doing something she didn’t really want to. The definition and the answer are elastic and depend on the point you are prepared to defend. As I’ve got older I’ve moved dramatically to the requirement for unequivocal consent.
In my view in absolute terms not all men are rapists, but I can see the validity in wemen taking the view that all men are schrodingers rapists.
Fathers
If you had made that claim about fathers I would have had a go at you, just as I did for you making the claim about mothers. I put money on it that others would as well.
Responsibility
This I feel was your most confused, or at least confusing argument. You’ve argued that mothers and female carers should take primary responsibility for such events for not having properly vetted the attacker. A man they had known his entire life in this instance. Yet you claim that the concept of all men being potential rapists is pure bullshit. You really can’t take both stances. While I do believe that most men are capable, or have been so, of what I would describe as rape at some point in their lives, most men would not commit a crime such as this. Most women would be quite justified in assuming an infant safe when left with their son or close relative for a short time. Societies have to function, so unless women and children are to be kept in the seraglio, some ex Erica of normal judgement is required and the responsibility for crimes rests with perpetrator in the absence of compelling evidence elsewise.
Cultures
It’s simply untrue to claim only Muslim cultures encourage and permit rape. The Old Testament is full of ways in which rape was sanctioned and even encouraged. Christian armies throughout history have usd rape as a conscious and planned weapon of war, including in the Balkans as recently as the 1990s.
Rape culture is alive and well in every part of the world in one form or another. To deny it, to marginalise it, is to deny that human societies have a very fundamental weakness which patriarchal power structures actually perpetuate rather than seek to eliminate. To argue that it is pure bullshit, while at the same time arguing that women should take responsibility for their rape or a child’s rape is, is… I don’t know, wordss fail me.
My mother used to use the phrase ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’. A statement made an apocryphal tailor trying to sell cheap but poor quality suiting fabric. Omar, I feel you’ve woven a broad, but very loose cloth. I’m not going to wear the suit.
Omar – First, sorry your comment was held; it was because of the links.
Next – I’m a little baffled at your bothering to have an eponymous Theory of Blog Orthodoxificationittude that explains the astonishing! flabbergasting! fact that people have likes and dislikes.
It’s my blog. I have likes and dislikes. I have views. People who choose to read and discuss here can, surely, be assumed to do so because they share or are interested in the same likes and dislikes and views. What else would you expect to happen? Should people read and converse on blogs that don’t interest them? What for? Don’t you yourself even read and discuss for the same reason? You don’t do it because you’re bored and irritated by ever word, surely?
I realize it was a lot of people at once, and as I said I realize that can sting, but I don’t think it amounted to an attack on Free Thought or The Enlightenment.
Sorry to hear you had to have a spot of brain surgery but glad it went well.
I forgot to say where I was going with the point about likes and dislikes. The overall point is that a certain amount of homogeneity is inevitable in this kind of enterprise. Some people hate blogs for just that reason; others like them ditto. I like them, myself, although there are some that are too ferocious about policing the orthodoxy; I stay away from those.
OB: Re blogs and their orthodoxies:
So do I.
But the way to find where the limit is (particularly if it is a physical one of your own) is to go past it.
Rob:
[My emphasis. ] Me likewise, because that is not what I said. More below.
I have never murdered anyone, but as an 18-year old in my compulsory military training unit vintage 1958, I and my fellow conscripts were taught a variety of ways of doing it, if it came down to unarmed combat. We were taught by skilful and experienced instructors, who were all WW2 or Korean War veterans. I also went on to study a very powerful martial art for 28 years: a study inspired and brought on by having been attacked once in a street by a professional wrestler. He was fortunately severely drunk at the time, but sober enough to allow himself to be restrained by his vociferous but much smaller wife. So I have an ‘inner murderer’ if you like, who I keep locked away like some Frankenstein’s Monster in an inner dungeon, and the only circumstances conceivable to me under which I would release him would be if I was fighting for my life, and/or the lives of those near and dear to me. (That has never included allowing myself to be shipped overseas to fight in colonial wars like the 1965-75 war that transpired in Vietnam, such were the destinations and destinies that Sir Robert Menzies, that old Royalist windbag PM of Australia, had in mind for my intake of trainee troops.)
But search as I may, I cannot find my inner rapist. After a childhood during which I witnessed far too much family violence, nothing disgusts or enrages me more than a man violently assaulting a woman. And I think ALL of my male friends coming out of their separate youth experiences, are the same.
So Rob, your statement above is NOT a universal truth by any means, IMHO. No society could function and prosper if it was.
Omar, I fear we’re in danger of talking past each other. You talk about your inability to find your inner rapist. Your disgust at “… a man violently assaulting a women.” But I defined rape and rape culture much much more broadly than the hold them down, choke, beat and abuse scenario that so many people accept as the definition of rape (and some not even that). It’s not at all clear to me how you define rape.
For the sake of the discussion, I’ll of course stipulate that the number of men who have committed a violent rape, involving restraint, punching, kicking, choking or other extreme violence is likely to be a minority. I don’t know the figures, but I bet it’s not as small a minority as we would all like to think.
But that’s only a nasty subset of rape. That’s the headline on the news, the unnecessary scene in a Tarantino movie, the punchline to a certain type of ‘joke’. There’s a spectrum of behaviours that slide all the way back to ‘persauding’ The girl to let you kiss or pet her. No violence, but not taking no for an answer. Proceeding when she’s gone passive. Proceeding when she’s drunk. Going further than she agreed to. The stories we hear from women about this scale of behaviour are legion. I assert with a high degree of confidence that it would be a very rare man who has not crossed that threshold of behaviour at least once at some point in their sexual lives.
Does that make all (most) men rapists? Well, it depends exactly how you define rape doesn’t it. But it likely makes very many men who most societies and also themselves consider decent rapists. It also makes a very great majority of men complicit in a low grade type of behaviour that allows more overt, predatory or violent rape to occur. They don’t even have to have behaved that way all their lives, or even more than once to have been part of what we call rape culture. It’s not a pleasant thought and I can understand many men shying away from it.
I feel your last statement almost makes my case. In point of fact our societies really don’t function especially well at large scale. Certainly not compared to who they could function if discord, strife, inequality etc were eliminated. Imagine a world where women could live their personal choices and optimise their lives free from fear. Pretty much every world society and culture is stunted by multiple issues, with rape culture being a major universal factor.
So Omar, maybe you’re a better man than me. Maybe every sexual experience you’ve ever had has been nothing but glorious rip the clothes off enthusiastic consent. Even if that’s the case as a global society we are in my opinion steeped in rape and sexual domination of women.
Rob,
I don’t have the links handy, but there have been studies that show that a surprising number (not a majority, but more than a fringe) of men to admit to having committed rape as long as the question doesn’t use the specific word “rape.”
OB:
My sincere apologies if I appeared to you to be churlish or terse. I did not mean to be. And I realise that in many another blog context the question would be neither here nor there.To some extent there is debate here at B&W, but as elsewhere it gets confined within limits set by the House Philosophy. (If you want to take part in a bit of across- the-spectrum verbal brawling, visit one of The Guardian’s websites.) And a question was more pertinent to the wife’s sister, and re the history of the offender.
What has most interested me about this site has been your trawling of sources that I would never have the time or the background knowledge to even think of visiting (ALL search engines are biased on way or another in my experience) and extracting interesting stuff out of them.
On most other sites on the Web, my question: “So what was the role being played by the child’s mother while all this lifelong damage was being inflicted by this callow and perverted young man?” would have probably been on a par with “so what was the role being played by the local weather while all this …. ?”
But here it was taken to imply that I thought that the mother should have not gone out, to work, or for any other reason, or had some arrangement like eyes in the back of her head, a state-of-the-art drone flying overhead 24/7, and total monitoring of the infant regardless of who was temporarily caring for her; which of course is ridiculous.
Child molesters are often likened to sharks: opportunists, cruising around out there looking for prey. Most, but not all of them are male, and most but not all of their victims are female.
I know about them from first-hand experience, believe me.
Rob:
My paternal grandmother was a radical feminist and a suffragette in London around the early 1900s, and she carried my father as a prenatal child into Holloway Prison after she and her fellow suffragettes were found guilty of whatever, and were booked in to do a stretch of porridge. Some time after her release, and after my father’s birth, the family moved to New York, where my father spent his childhood, and then on to Sydney, where he spent his adolescent years. (After they settled in there, she on one occasion got suspicious of my then young father’s pubescent wanderings, and found him in a local movie theatre that was showing that daring movie Flaming Youth! (link below) and dragged him, with him loudly protesting, out by the ear into the street. She was not one to muck about when she meant business.
On my mother’s side, the contrast could not have been more extreme. My maternal grandmother was the daughter of a refugee from the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, and was the only survivor among the 11 children her mother (my great grandmother) gave birth to. The other 10 children died, probably of the TB which was then rampant. She finished up married to a knockabout Jack-of-all-trades Australian bushman, and rapidly learned all the tricks of survival in the Australian bush. As a child growing up in Sydney, I knew both those women, and came to admire (a condition beyond mere respect) each of them enormously: though there was friction between them on the few occasions they happened to be together. (Two vastly different queen bees in the one hive?)
Shortly after I hit puberty, some rape case came into the local Sydney legal news: rape in the sense of a gang of louts catching some young woman and forcing her against her will to have sex with the lot of them, one after the other. They each copped a heavy sentence from the judge. Listening to this beside me on the local radio news, my mother turned to me and calmly said: “if you ever did something like that I would kick you out forever… if I didn’t blow your head off with a shotgun first.”
I found that warning completely unnecessary. I had never even thought of it: not even a possibility.
After I got my driving licence (on my 17th birthday: no wasting time) I would invite young women I knew out to the local picture show, or best of all, to the local drive-in theatre, otherwise known as The Passion Pit: a common enough term for them then. As we all did.
We at first commonly went as two couples: one couple in the front seat, and the other in the back. Later, I would confine it to a single young woman I might be seeking as a steady date, with varied success. As we grew older, and in the (pre-pill) circle I moved in, there were six recognised permissable levels of beyond-mere-kissing intimacy:
1. Nothing doing
2. Outside upstairs
3. Inside upstairs
4. Outside downstairs
5. Inside downstairs, and
6. ALL THE WAY!!!
Level 6 was best if achieved in the back seat, as the steering wheel tended to get in the way. By then, of course, I had graduated to the only-one-couple-per-car stage, and I only ever once got a “stop! – I don’t want you to!” response to an attempt on my part to make a move upwards on the above escalator. (As I recall, it was only from 1 to 2. – see table.)
But learning from that, if I wanted to raise the stakes, I always left it to my female guest to propose the next move (eg she might have suggested “If you reach round behind my back, you will find the hook of my bra strap….” Thus moving us from 2 to 3 – see table above again.) Stuff like that. I found that easier to take than a caution like “that’s as far as we go” or the even worse: “that’s as far as YOU go.”
I could not afford a car of my own, so I always borrowed my father’s, next day filling the tank for him without fail. (Well, most next days, depending on how far I had driven it.) There was the odd embarrassment, like the morning he was cleaning out the interior and found an overlooked item of female underwear that had managed to make its way under the front seat.
But at every stage of my life, being party to rape has been so far off the planet as to be somewhere beyond the farthest galaxy. ALL the youg men I knew likewise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_Youth_(film)
Thanks Omar.
Or Twitter. But I don’t want to take part in verbal brawling! Discussion, yes, but brawling, no. And yes, I’ve already agreed that I have some views on things and that people who enjoy discussing here probably do so because they broadly share those views; I just don’t agree that that’s very remarkable or inhibiting.
Hi Omar
It’s an interesting piece of family history (sincerely meant). Amazing what you find when you go digging. My partner is a direct descendant of a well known prison reformer. We both have strong female influences in our lives who pushed the limits of societies tolerance for women at the time. I was raised by my mother alone. She taught me to treat all people as I would wish to be treated and to respect a persons character and ability, not their sex or race. Violence was anathema to her, so I was never threatened with any form of retribution.
All that aside, we’re not making progress, so I guess this is my last reply. While you have provided a vigorous defence of both your own character and that of every young man you grew up with, what you haven’t done is:
1. Advanced any argument at all that justifies holding a women responsible for a crime committed by a male whose she had no good reason to suspect; and
2. Advanced any argument or evidence that disproves the concept of rape culture as a widespread phenomenon.
For the sake of this discussion I’ll accept your stipulation that you have never engaged in any action ever that you feel constitutes rape or sexual assault. Possibly you’ve never done anything I would call that either. It really makes no odds to the discussion. You being a saint, your friends being saints, doesn’t change the fact that a significant plurality of men at least, and possibly a majority, have and do engage in a spectrum of behaviours that I and others call rape culture.
We see this behaviour daily. It is reported daily. It is reflected in the art, music, writing and movies around us daily. We see the comments discussing all this news, art and media defending, denying and clouding the issues daily. It has been reported and discussed on this blog as recently as today.
This isn’t (just) about you. This is about you having advanced statements without evidence that left me surprised and more than a little shocked.
Rob:
1. “…holding a women [sic] responsible…..” That is not what I did, and to do so would be to defy reason and logic.
2. a. Movies often show murders, gunfights etc, yet few I think would cite them as evidence that we live in a ‘murder culture’.
b. In Medieval Britain, down to some time after Shakespeare’s life, those who could afford to wore swords, not in order to wade through blood* as they made their progress down the street, or home from a night out at the Boar’s Head Tavern, but as a precaution against meeting the odd ruffian from the outside of the bell curve. Yet going by The Bard’s plays alone, some would say that his was a ‘murder culture’ indeed. Except it wasn’t. And here endeth my case.
3. My advice to both of my own daughters has been to learn self-defence. (Believe me, I have encountered women of average build on the tatami mats whom I would advise any man not to get on the wrong side of.) A small amount of training is better than none, and the ideal weapon to carry is one which cannot be captured and turned against its owner. An innocuous container with a flip-top lid and carried in pocket or purse can cause an assailant to lose interest in everything but getting to the nearest bathroom if its contents are delivered by surprise, point-blank straight into his face. Particularly if the contents are finely ground black pepper or fine-ground hot red chilli peppers.
NB: If attacked by a gang, go for the ringleader. Once he is dealt with, the rest are more likely to choose discretion over valour.
*MacBeth, Act 3, Scene 4
Omar – that sneer about a typo? Really? What on earth for? Just to be pissy, obviously, but why?
I silently correct a lot of typos in comments when I notice them (it’s easy to do), because they’re typos. They’re just the accidents we all make when typing. They’re not worth being pissy about.
Elizabethan and Jacobean culture were not murder cultures? Is that right? From what I know of the period it’s not right at all; they were a very murderous bunch. You don’t explain where you get your confident “Except it wasn’t. And here endeth my case.”
I don’t see any typos though. High five.
OB:
Granted we all make typos, and they are nothing to get all superior about when spotted in another’s work. But [sic] just means ‘as in the original’. I use it not to sneer (though some might) but to quote the original faithfully and to simply show that I am doing so. Correcting typos can also be interpreted as condescension.
At one stage of my career I was training to become an historian, and that habit was drummed into me by all of my teachers, one of whom was the renowned Manning Clark.
Henry VIII according to Nigel Cawthorne* qualifies as one of the “100 most evil despots and dictators” of all human history. But the people most at risk were his wives and courtiers, such as Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn. It was in Ireland, from Oliver Cromwell’s time onwards, that the mass murdering really began, and that was also arguably the beginning of the British Empire, and of Imperial England, beside which Shakespeare’s ‘Merrie England’ was a land of sweetness and light. (If I had lived in England in the 1640s, I think I would have been a Royalist.)
Of course, violence is done somewhere in all countries all the time. Ambition, court intrigues and the varieties of murderous behaviour fascinated Shakespeare’s audiences, and kept them coming back to him for more. Lacking much of the staging resources of later years, and having to play in broad daylight, he compensated with brilliant use of language, putting something in for everyone who came. Besides being a wonderful playwright, he was quite an entrepreneur. But he probably would not have done so well if his audiences had all had TV sets at home, and could tune in to Fox and CNN, where there are battles and blood galore, sufficient to assuage the wildest of curiosities and passions, and every night of the week.
https://www.amazon.com/Tyrants-Historys-Most-Despots-Dictators/dp/0572030258
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/tudors/elizabeth_ireland_01.shtml
I have had a long standing interest in medieval history. I certainly don’t claim expertise as such. Tudor and Elizabethan England were deeply violent places, both politically and socially generally. Punishments were gruesome in the extreme. The murder rate in Elizabethan England was around 5x current, and property crime made less than 70% of total crime as opposed to 94% today with the bulk of other crime being broadly ‘unpremeditated violence’ (taken from an article in The Independent, but it matches my recollection from other reading). This was a society in which the publicly sanctioned punishments included hanging, drawing and quartering, racking, scavenging, burning, beheading, stocks, pressing, whipping and slavery on a galley. When those are the state sanctioned punishments, shit flows down hill.
As to claims that Omar didn’t claim a woman/ women in general are responsible, here’s Omar’s words…
Read all of comment 1 for context, then the ever so rhetorical
Multiple intelligent and linguistically competent people took that as you placing blame on the women involved.
And at 32: (emphasis mine)
A long quote, which I have edited without, I believe, changing meaning. I also resisted, just, the temptation to [sic] the hell out of your comments.
So, Omar, lot’s of rhetorical flourish and dodging in all that, but a clear thread of argument in which you push blame at the mother, because …mother.
I’ll go further based on the extensive correspondence above. You appear to be a whole lot more comfortable and accepting of male privilege and the status quo of society in terms of traditional gender roles and responsibilities than you make out. Possibly even than you think you are. You seem pretty fuzzy on the concept of what rape and coercion is and outright hostile to the concept of rape culture. Despite claiming to be absolutely opposed to violence, you seem remarkably ignorant of the extent of the violence around you, how that shapes your own responses and how much violence has been an integral part of the majority of world cultures.
I think you’re wrong on a number of points. You have failed to actually argue a coherent case for why you may be right and have instead just charged of into detailed exposition of irrelevant side shows, all the time claiming that because you aren’t violent or a rapist, our societies aren’t steeped in such behaviour.
Come up with something cogent, coherent and concise or move on for craps sake. I know I want to.
Omar – what’s Henry VIII got to do with anything? You said Shakespeare’s culture wasn’t a murder culture. Henry died years before Shakespeare was born. Also, one monarch doesn’t represent a whole culture. Shakespeare’s culture, i.e. the Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, was massively violent. There was epidemic inter-state violence, state violence, communal violence, street violence. Ben Jonson killed a fellow player in some minor quarrel; Marlowe was murdered in a tavern one bad night.
OB:
Henry VIII was Queen Elizabeth I’s father, and while Shakespeare wrote a play about him, it is rarely performed. There was much violence and wars in the period, as you say.
There was not only fighting and killing in London and wider afield in England, there was also a mighty contest going on between England and Spain for control of Europe and for a roll-back of Protestantism. Shakespeare was 24 years old when the Spanish Armada arrived to do battle with the King’s Navy: itself largely a creation of the opportunistically Protestant King Henry VIII.
Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare got on pretty well, but the effect of Henry’s tyranny on England and her writers was probably similar to the effect of Stalin’s on Soviet literature in the thrities through to the fifties, and beyond, right to the present day. (His influence and his creatures are there in the Russian state bureaucracy right now. ) Literature certainly bloomed after Henry VIII’s death.
I am against the death penalty: for the one reason that there can be no undoing of a legal system’s mistakes. But I somewhat reluctantly support it in the case of tyrants (like say Saddam Hussein) because there is never any doubt over their guilt, and people rightly fear a vengeful return to power on their part.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/stalin-rises-again-over-putins-russia-six-decades-after-his-death-a6893826.html
Henry VIII was Elizabeth Tudor’s father!! No, really?!! How did I manage to miss that?!
@49
Stand by for a lecture on the history of sarcasm ;)
Hahahahaha
Hmmm.
Much as I do enjoy Shakespeare very much, It’s also important to recognise that playwrights and players of that day where not just thespians. Under Henry VIII and indeed Mary Tudor players occupied a social strata just barely above vagabonds. They required a licence to perform and to travel. Things lightened up a bit under Elizabeth I to be sure. Players tended to be sponsored by nobles and even the Crown. That came at a price. Shakespeare, for all his brilliance, is a propagandist (think Richard III or Macbeath), but the punishment for writing the wrong things was torture and/or death.
A Merrie England indeed.
@50, LOL.
The status of playwrights and players was evolving a good deal while Shxpr was one of them. The settled London companies were a new thing as he was getting started, and they (both of them – there were only the two at first) got richer over the course of his career. They were sort of part riffraff and part…something else, I guess a sort of emerging class. Entrepreneurs, partly, and…sources of something that both the proles and the toffs had a huge taste for. There wasn’t a language for it yet but I think they weren’t seen as quite so much on a level with vagabonds by the time Will retired. But it was in flux. It was seen as very eccentric and grandiose to collect a whole bunch of plays in a big expensive Folio…and yet they did it.
Ophelia @ 53. Indeed. They were exciting times. If you were rich, powerful, male and survived the turmoil.
Good Rob:
Well, that just goes to show that being of multiple competence and linguistic intelligence won’t stop you from being wrong: neither you nor your cheer squad. Particularly if you have a ‘rape culture’ mindset. But can I state again: never in my randiest teenage dreams did I EVER even fantasise about raping some young woman. Not once. Ever.
Re that, I strongly recommend ‘It’s Time to end Rape Culture Hysteria’, the 2014 TIME article by Caroline Kitchens at http://time.com/30545/its-time-to-end-rape-culture-hysteria/
“RAINN [Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network] is especially critical of the idea that we need to focus on teaching men not to rape — the hallmark of rape-culture activism. Since rape exists because our culture condones and normalizes it, activists say, we can end the epidemic of sexual violence only by teaching boys not to rape.
“No one would deny that we should teach boys to respect women. But by and large, this is already happening. By the time men reach college, RAINN explains, ‘most students have been exposed to 18 years of prevention messages, in one form or another.’ The vast majority of men absorb these messages and view rape as the horrific crime that it is. So efforts to address rape need to focus on the very small portion of the population that ‘has proven itself immune to years of prevention messages.’ They should not vilify the average guy.”
If my “ever so rhetorical” question had been duly asked by, say, an investigating police officer, or a journalist, and the reply was given: “Victim blamer! … rape culture… !!” and so on, then I put it to you that the responding ‘rape culture – all men have their inner rapist’ theologian, with blinkers fashioned by the best artisans around in Medieval Spain, would leave theirself hanging by one finger from the underside of a cornice half way up the North Face of Mt Sophistry, or find theirself triumphantly at the summit of Mt Bullshit. Does the validity of a question depend on who asks it?
There were at the time a whole bunch of possibilities as to where the mother was, and I didn’t have enough information to even hazard a guess. Now, according to Twitter (a place I normally stay clear of) both the parents are poor day labourers. The mother could have been slaving away in some non-unionised sweatshop for starvation wages. That was not the only possibility, but in any case I did not blame her for what happened to her child, as she had passed responsibility for the infant to her sister. And I grant you that the whereabouts of the sister probably would have been a more pertinent concern. But the possibilities were pretty wide, if not vast, given the information, and I did not blame the mother in any case. And if the son already had form, (on the face of it a more than average probability) that would change everything, as I said already, while definitely not blaming the mother. And I did not blame the mother.
Well [sic] away, [sic] tomorrow and tomorrow and the morrow after that, good Rob. I’m not stopping you, though it seems to me you have the idea that the expression is just there to be used as a lump of ammunition in any occasional online shitfight.
And wouldn’t you know it? Right now I feel an iambic pentameter or two, rising like a birthday cake on the balcony of Elsinore! And a ghost is approaching! By George, its Old Bill! And he’s whispering in my ear! He’s telling me what to say!!!
“Well then, sic on, MacRob; sic on. Sic in!; Sic wherever, and forever, but I suggest you don’t never ever /Chuck no logic bomb, before you pulls its pin…/Sic away, MacRob; And damned be him that first cries, ‘Stop this job!’ /Stuff your gob! Who cares if the mob doth consequently sob?”
Yep. That’s his style, and that’s him!
For sure!
A purely rhetorical question… ever get the feeling you’re talking to one of those postmodern essay generators?
Omar, you say ” I did not blame her [the mother] for what happened to her child”
But you asked “So what was the role being played by the child’s mother while all this lifelong damage was being inflicted.” In what universe does this NOT equate to assigning blame to the mother?
Regarding rape culture, I am happy to hear that you and those you associate with are now and have apparently always been fully respectful and supportive of the idea that sexual activity requires consent. For me, I have been lucky enough to escape without incident in those few cases in my own experience when it became clear that my consent would not have been requested or required (well I guess I don’t know for sure – perhaps I was over-reacting when I made my rapid departure). And the 18 years of education seems to have not caused the “vast majority” of the properly educated to call out the significant minority in cases such as the university students chanting “No means yes! Yes means anal!”, or the still recurrent September images of fraternities posting “drop your daughter here” signs.
Latsot, yes indeed I do. I’d tell Omar ‘never change’, but they’d be no point, as I doubt he ever will.