Why is men getting raped funny?

Remember that hilarious movie Horrible Bosses, where one boss is lazy, another is greedy, and then Jenifer Aniston plays the rapist one?

A game I enjoy playing while watching movies is How would this be played if these characters were genderswapped? Would a young, female dental hygienist being stripped and molested by her middle-aged, male superior while under anaesthetic be played for comedy? Would one of her friends asking in a strained voice due to barely controlled laughter to see the photos her boss took during such an incident be treated as a reasonable, if slightly insensitive, reaction? Would the same friend sleep with the rapist boss because he was ‘really hot’ and ‘eating suggestively in front of a window’ even after she knew of the boss’s history? Probably not.

I came upon the article above after thinking back to that old 2002 comedy, 40 Days and 40 Nights. It's the one where a man tries to go 40 days straight without having sex.

There's this critical part at the end of the movie where the man is on his 40th day of abstinence. His ex-girlfriend breaks into his home, and rapes him while his arms are tied to the bed post. And this is really funny because it's on the very last day of his pledge, so to watch him get raped is like, "oh man how could things get worse for this guy?" He dreams about his love interest while it's happening, but at the end he discovers he has just been raped. After the rape she says, "relax, it's over," and then leaves.

And that's it. The movie didn't take a dark turn or twist, it's not a crime and not tragedy, it's just an unfortunate thing; him getting raped in his sleep.

What other times have men been raped, usually for laughs?

It happened on The Mindy Project, when guest star James Franco is raped while passed out drunk.

And on The Wedding Crashers, where Vince Vaughn falls in love with his rapist.

And on Get him to Greek where Jonah Hill is raped. It very much feels like the apex of the laughs are when the man openly calls the thing that has just been done to them rape.

Disclosure: rape may be defined as
looking at someone the wrong way

There are some off the deep end feminists who claim men can't get raped. I think the problem with this is both that pleasure is not a synonym with want, and want is not a synonym with consent. You need to really distort the language is weird ways to make this men can't get raped argument to work.

A healthy male's body responds 99% of the time when stimulated even if its against his will. A person could be yelling, kicking and screaming while being raped and still become aroused from stimulation. That stimulation may be pleasurable but doesn't mean he wants it.

Besides that, there are many things we want. Consent is about choosing between competing wants. I want an oreo, but I also want to lose weight, so wanting an oreo doesn't amount to consent towards your shoving oreos down my throat.

It feels stupid to say, because this is how we use language in literally every other situation. Heroin is also pleasurable, so when I force you to take heroin does that equals consent?

I've also heard that men can't be raped because men have patriarchy, or privilege, or structural oppression or something like this. Let me put on my fem-extremist accent, "Rape is nothing more than a vile act to exert social power and women have no historical or social power to offer up, being the victims of sexism for so long."

There argument contains more than one problem, but it seems to me that the person immediately above you in ranking is far more important than who the president is. Your boss has all the important effective power over you. They fire you, they hire you, they tell you what to do, they set your wages. While the authority very distant from you, some CEO or the president, only has some vague theoretical power. And when you start pulling century's past into the mix, the power gets even further and vaguer compared to the here and now powers.

So social power is irrelevant. What matters is the power of the rapist. Nobody is thinking about social powers while they're raping, they're thinking about sex. And their ability to take sex forcibly from another person has little to do with the powers the feminists keep talking about.

There is this way of thinking where every possible power is funneled through the narrow channel of gender oppression. This seems like epitome of narrow mindedness. I've never heard any argument like, "well, politicians have certain facial features, so there's structural oppression against all those who don't possess those facial features, so certain crimes don't count for these victims." It occurs to me that many people may not make every decision ever based on how it's going to effect some gender war that most people don't even agree exists.

Sometimes I hear a claim of special revelation you can only get by being a woman. This argument basically goes, "men and women have different experiences, their experiences inform their reason, and so you could never understand."

 I don't know exactly how to deal with people who deny serious thinking and instead choose to embrace secret truth known only to them. But it reminds me of Joseph Smith, who received secret messages from God through a rock in his hat and ended up founding mormonism this way. This is the way most fundamentalist religions and cults grab their believers. They get you to believe some fundamental truth that can't be overturned by reason, and build an cockamamy theory from there.

Am I saying feminism is a cult? Maybe.

Maybe not. It bares repeating that these kinds of  may not represent most feminism. I can't stress this enough. They may just an overly zealous subgroup that has hijacked the image of the main group. It's easy to take them as representative samples because they're claims are so unthoughtfully provocative that they stick in the mind, but there are lots and lots and lots of examples of feminists saying, "men can be raped too." And when I talk to feminists that personally I've worked with, they usually don't make these kinds of arguments.



SlateStar says that he doesn't understand Rape Culture. Neither does Christiana Sommers. And neither do I. Instead, it seems like rape is a special kind of evil, unless it's done to men. Weird how gender oppression works, eh?

Trump lost the Popular Vote, but it doesn't matter

I don't think people on the left like this take on things. They face cognitive dissonance when they hold to their Democratic Fundamentalism and have to face reality that Trump won. Trump's failure to receive the popular vote gave them the perfect opportunity to square those two ideas.

The problem is that elections are sports, and campaigns change depending on the goal of the sport. If the goal is, "get as many electoral votes as possible," the campaign will be different from if the goal were, "get as many popular votes as possible." It's quite likely that we would still be stuck with Trump even if the election were based on popular votes.

Dear Abby, could you stop Fear Mongering?

Dear Abby got is wrong when she suggested,

When you take your children to a public place, they should remain under your or your husband’s supervision at all times until they are aware enough that they can’t be lured away by a stranger, and big enough to fight off a predator.

Another organization I follow, LetGrow has an answer to that,

Of course — and obviously — when kids are 5 and 3, it makes sense to keep an eye on them, mostly because if they wander off, it is a miserable experience for all involved. But the idea that stranger danger is ever-lurking has been debunked even by the group that put the kids on the milk cartons:

"The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is now encouraging parents to steer away from using the phrase “stranger danger,” a slogan that has been taught for decades to emphasize to children the potential threat posed by strangers."

The comments section is filled with great stories,

I read that Dear Abby out loud to my husband (who promptly rolled his eyes, prepared for the tirade I was about to unleash) when my daughter, age 5, piped up, “Mom? Who would go get the bananas when you forget them if I can’t go do that? We would never have bananas in the house. And why would I have to fight anyone? That doesn’t make sense.” Thank you, kiddo, I rest my case. (And, in my defense, the banana thing only happened once. Or twice. Maybe three times…)

To want someone else's kids assumes a set of bizarre values. Children do not poop gold and even attempting to kidnap a child can land you 5-20 years in jail, or life in some states.

Huemer on Checks and Balances

People often tell me that we have a system of checks and balances. When I ask why, they say that it's the way our founding fathers designed our system of government. That's really cool, but then I look around and notice the supposed checks and balances aren't working.

So when I dig deeper it seems like there is no reason why these checks and balances exist other than the founding fathers said they exist. It's very nice to have three different powers, but if they have no reason to check and balance each other then its useless. You have to explain why you have put it in the actors interest to check and balance the other actors, you can't just say it and walk away.

Michael Huemer:

Americans are taught that they live under a system of ‘checks and balances’, whereby the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government each restrain the others from abusing their power. This idea derives from Montesquieu, who influenced the framers of the American Constitution. 45 Thus, the judiciary has the power to strike down unconstitutional laws, thereby serving as a check on the power of the legislature. The executive branch has the power to appoint judges, which the legislature must approve; thus, the executive and legislative branches act to ensure the integrity of the judiciary. The legislature has the power to impeach the president, and the legislature may thus check the power of the executive branch. And so on. No branch of government is supreme, and each has important powers over the others. 

This theory is missing one crucial element. That is an account of why each branch of government should be expected to use its powers to prevent the other branches from abusing their powers rather than, say, to assist the other branches in abusing their powers or to prevent the other branches from carrying out their legitimate functions. Again, it does not matter what our theory labels as the proper function of government officials. What matters is the incentive structure. Do the three branches of government each have an interest in ensuring that the other branches function properly without overstepping their constitutionally prescribed bounds?

The bold is mine.

Jonathan Blow left the left

Last year, my favorite game developer Jonathan Blow Tweeted against the illiberal left.

Many many people are looking at the words and actions of those on the left and when they ask themselves, "do I want these people to be in power?" The answer is clearly no...

I say "people on the left" because that doesn't include me any more. I used to consider myself comfortably on the left. My Facebook feed is 100% people on the left. But over the past couple of years I have been repelled from the left, because I just see too many stupid people doing stupid things; it's all about following a dogma, very little about critical thinking and trying to understand the truth. It is, at this point pretty far divorced from reality, which in part is what allowed Trump to happen.

And this goes along with what I think is Trump's super-weapon, trolling:

I suspect Blow would agree with what Jonathan Haidt is doing about viewpoint diversity.

I also recommended Jonathan Blow for Tyler Cowen's series Conversations with Tyler. Blow has interesting views on morality, and video games as art. I notice his twitter includes Lesswrong/Rationalist types like Julia Galef and SlateStarCodex, which gave me a serious worlds collide moment.

Reason's Nick Gillespi on Democracy

The best part of this Capitalism vs Socialism debate was Nick Gillespi on Democracy:

Maybe it's worth defining what we mean by democracy. Democracy is majority rule. 

How many of you are Republicans?

Silence.

And how many of you want absolute Democracy now that the Republicans own the white house, and both houses of congress?

Anybody out there? I'm sorry I can't hear you.

Because this idea that Democracy is some absolute good is bullshit, and we all know that. The single biggest achievement in 500 years of western political philosophy has been limiting the state.

Of course someone could say, "well Trump didn't win the popular vote." Which is true, but that doesn't really matter because he could have. If the election was won by popular vote, then we would have just barely escaped the Trump presidency, which is hardly an advertisement for Democracy.

Besides that, Trump might have won the popular vote, if that was the Sport he was playing

Why Christian Art is so Bad

Here is Hollywood screenwriter and author Brian Godawa on the Rethinking Hell Podcast. He talks about the many prophesies in the New Testament that came true in the first century A.D., about conditionalism, among other things.

At one point, they talk about why Christian art is so bad. Brian godawa explains:

The question is how well can you incorporate your worldview into the choices of the characters, rather than plopping it on top by having scenes where people explain everything. That's the problem with Christian stuff, they feel they have to explain things because if you don't it won't be clear. It's good intentions. They want the meaning and the message to come across clearly. But but in so doing, they don't understand how art incarnates meaning so you don't always have to be explicit in words.