Men are Evil Watch: "A Gentlemen's [sic] Guide To Rape Culture"*

"If you are a man, you are part of rape culture."

This is a great way to spin off into the outer space of craziness.

Start with a radically confused concept, intentionally kept vague enough to prevent claims about it from being disconfirmable--in this case, "rape culture."

Add some prejudice masquerading as cutting-edge "social justice" "thought":  all men are evil simply in virtue of being male.

Scramble

voila!

The very left is crazy. The very left has always been crazy. The very left is every bit as crazy as the very right. And if liberals continue to kowtow to the very left, they will become crazy, too.

'Rape culture,' like so many of the loony concepts on the far-ish left, is a hopelessly unclear concept--and that unclarity is, to some extent, tactical unclarity. It is left unclear in order to make sure that claims containing it cannot be rationally evaluated.

If, however, we interpret:

(1) Culture C is a rape culture

to mean:

(2) Culture C is a culture in which rape is largely condoned

Then American culture is not a rape culture. Therefore it is false to say that all men are "part of" rape culture. We don't even have a "rape culture."

But, of course, "you are part of rape culture" isn't even really what the author means. You might be part of a culture while neither condoning nor contributing to it. What he really means is: you do it. You are responsible for it. It is your fault...

...even, apparently, if you are a small boy on a trajectory to becoming a gay man who works in a women's shelter, you are a rapist, Jack.

What we have here is a big, stupid mess. There's anti-male sexism in it. There's political and social opportunism in it. There's dogmatism in it, of course--a pervasive feature of such messes. There's shitty reasoning, sloppy terminology, and intellectual dishonesty in it. And there's cowardice, too, because liberals are afraid--scared to bloody death, actually--of standing up to these people Liberals absolutely cannot bear any disapprobation from the left, and cannot bear the thought of being called racist or sexist in any way, no matter how ludicrous the charge.

If you care about this sort of thing at all, then you should care about this. You should care about this because it's stupid. And you should care about it because it's sexist. But if you don't care about it for either of those reasons, you should care about it because it also hurts the cause of actually addressing the problems of misogyny, sexual harassment and rape that got all this stuff going. I mean...I have no respect for people who think that any putative problem is only a problem if it's a problem for women and/or non-whites... I'm one of those reactionary troglodytes who thinks that people are people... But, even if you are a more enlightened type who has transcended such nonsense, you should still care about this sort of thing. **

Sure this is a tempest in a teapot sub specie aeternitatis. But anyone interested enough in this stuff to be interested in our public discussions and deliberations at all should be interested in this wave of sexist insanity.



* And, of course, what you want there in that title is the singular, 'gentleman's', not 'gentlemen's'.

** All of which is consistent with recognizing that (i) if the members of group A have been discriminated against more than the members of group B have, then each act of discrimination against a member of group A might very well be more harmful, ergo more serious, ergo more worthy of concern than each act of discrimination against a member of group B. Maybe not...but maybe so. It's also consistent with recognizing that rape is a bigger problem than some half-wits spewing anti-male sexism on the internet. And, incidentally, I shouldn't have to point out that it's consistent.