Menswork

So there's an article on NPR that notes a growing sex disparity in new jobs and employment. As manufacturing continues to contract, and health care grows, women are finding it easier to land these roles than men. And the experts that NPR spoke with have some ideas on changing that.

 "If Trump really wants to get more Americans working," Betsey Stevenson, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, wrote in a December 2016 op-ed, "he'll have to do something out of his comfort zone: make girly jobs appeal to manly men." She notes in the NPR piece that there are ways of framing what had been seen as feminine roles, like nursing and preschool teachers, in more stereotypically masculine ways, such as emphasizing the need to lift people, or being able to engage in rough and tumble play.

But as someone who started their working life in a female-dominated profession, residential child and youth care, the problem wasn't that I felt that didn't belong in the job. It's that a lot of other people, regardless of gender, didn't feel that I belonged there. I still remember being at a party, back when I was in my twenties, where we were talking about my job, and a latecomer to the conversation was appalled that adult men were allowed to work with children. Surely, she reasoned, the only reason why a man would want to be around children was grooming. She was suitably embarrassed to be informed that it was me she was talking about, but that's different than rethinking the position.

[Richard] Reeves[, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men] notes that for years, the country has embraced policies and programs aimed at getting more women into science, technology, engineering and math, and the share of women in STEM jobs has grown.

I think that this is, in large part, because STEM jobs come with two things that people want: greater status, and higher pay. Healthcare and children's education come with neither. And it's unlikely that the people who currently have high status and well-paying jobs are going to want to share them.

And reducing the expectation, across society, that men are going to have to start moving into work that offers lower pay and status en masse, is going to be heavier lift than I suspect it's given credit for. Not to mention just the idea many families are going to have to get by with lower incomes across both partners. I've noted before that "I've come to understand that 'traditional masculinity' is a box, and any attempt to leave it is punishable." Attempting to show how what are widely considered "girly jobs" have somehow become more masculine is about piling more things into the box, when the box itself is the problem.

Panic Button

Participant homophobia was found to be the driving force behind their willingness to accept the gay panic defense as legitimate. Higher levels of homophobia and religious fundamentalism were found to predict more leniency in verdict decisions when the gay panic defense was presented. This study furthers the understanding of decision making in cases involving the gay panic defense and highlights the need for more research to be conducted to help understand and combat LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) prejudice in the courtroom.
When Is "Gay Panic" Accepted? Exploring Juror Characteristics and Case Type as Predictors of a Successful Gay Panic Defense

There is, of course, no "straight panic" defense that attorneys generally deploy when seeking to defend people against charges of violence. Because one suspects that it would be open season on stalkers, jackasses and abusers if juries could be counted on to decide that women being targeted, being bothered "over and over and over again" and having unwanted sexual advances made to them justified killing their tormentors.

But given the fact that homophobia and religious fundamentalism are positive predictors of leniency in such cases, it's not surprising... In such circles, the crime is treating a man as one would a woman, rather than a lack of respect for other people as a whole. I would guess that women have to find it extremely frustrating, understanding that there are people who feel that the sort of behavior that many of them put up with on a regular basis justifies violence based on sexual orientation, and that lawyers are willing to play on that in order to help their clients; and that with the right juries, it works. If straight men have a right to expect gay men to take "no" for an answer, why don't women have a right to expect the same from gay men?

The "obvious" answer is that sexually-aggressive straight men are a norm, and sometimes, an expectation. A perhaps less-obvious answer is the overall fragility of many standards of masculinity. If men are so tough, and so able to withstand hardship, why are they given a pass in this way? Simply because having a gay man come on to them risks their self-image as men?

But I guess it's easy for me to say... I'm not staring down the barrel of life in prison because someone threatened my sense of myself as a man, and I responded with lethal violence. Were never setting foot outside of a prison again a real possibility, maybe I'd be all in favor of my lawyers looking to use the jury's deep-seated prejudices in my favor. I like to think that I'd be adult enough to own up to what I'd done, though.

Not that I can see myself doing it. And I guess that's the paradox that rubs at me. I'm not "man enough" to want to kill someone for making an unwanted pass at me, and that's what allows me to be "man enough" to not want to use unjustified prejudices to bail me out. Maybe that's not the correct framing of the issue at hand. Maybe linking those two things, expecting that a masculinity that permits the use of violence over relative trivialities should also demand taking ownership of one's actions (or loss of self-control) is simply playing into a different set of prejudices; one that's just as limiting and unjustified?

Masculinity is a box, one that many segments of American society have decreed that men shall not leave. I don't find it terribly stifling, because I'm not really at all motivated to move any farther from the center of the box than I already am. But I'm also not in a place in that box that compels me to need to defend the actions I take (or don't take) to maintain that place. My tendency towards crankiness prevents me from having much sympathy for those who do, and maybe that makes me part of the problem, as well.

Hidden Away

An old co-worker shared an article about a teen who committed suicide after being targeted by an extortionist. The scheme has become known as sextortion, and, from what I understand, has become fairly common. Tragic endings to it, fortunately, are still fairly rare. It's the sort of thing that gets people up in arms, but I think that there's a social component to it that's often missed.

While often described as a scam, it's more accurately seen as a form of blackmail. Here's how one Reddit group describes it:

This scam occurs when you meet a woman/man on dating service/social media site/forum/wherever and they ask you to go on Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram, or another messaging system. They will ask you to exchange naked pictures, and they will usually ask you to include your face in the pictures. They will then threaten to reveal the pictures to your family/friends if you do not pay them.

Where things go entirely off the rails is when a teen doesn't have the money to pay the escalating demands for money (since extortionists don't stop with a single payment) and is convinced that being dead is better than being outed.

American society, while not perhaps literally Puritanical about it, tends to be uncomfortable with sexuality, especially young adult sexuality. High school and college students are often expected to be effectively neuter, with no sexual feelings or even an understanding that sex exists. And this is what the extortionists play on; a young person's desire to live up to this unrealistic expectation. Accordingly, there is a need to hide this part of themselves. And society often plays along with that. Consider this description of sextortion from the article:

The scheme is when scammers target people, often young boys, and coerce them into sending explicit images.

Casting the young person involved as having been coerced into sending the photos that are then used against them avoids recognizing that young people are quite often easily prompted to act without thinking when there is a promise of sex, a relationship or even being seen as sexually desirable.

Greater understanding and acceptance of this would, I think, go a long way towards averting some of these tragedies. A person letting their sexuality get the better of their good sense shouldn't be something that young people feel will result in them being cast out of the families and peer networks. The shame that America society uses as a means of social control can come with a higher cost than makes any sort of sense.

Happiness Is A Warm CPU

There was a short piece on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday; "Exploring concerns around users building emotional dependence on AI chatbots." To be sure, it didn't at all live up to the title. Rather it seemed to be an opportunity for banter between the hosts. They did play some commentary from Arizona State University's Liesel Sharabi, but she was given only around 100 words, not nearly enough to really open the topic, let alone explore it.

Which was unfortunate. This really should have been a longer story, or maybe even a podcast episode of its own, because the disappointments and complications of having relationships with actual humans have already led people to have relationships with life-sized dolls and virtual boy/girl-friends. To be sure, the numbers don't seem to be very large. I suspect there's a reason why every story I've encountered about men have dolls as girlfriends features this guy who goes by the name of DaveCat.

One of the recurring worries about these sorts of surrogate relationships is that they will normalize unrealistic expectations of what being in a relationship should be like. But it seems to me that particular train has already left the station. After all, DaveCat was talking about his relationships with his RealDolls in fairly unrealistic terms when I encountered his story in The Atlantic some ten years ago.

In this, I suspect the "danger" of automation and robotics in this instance isn't that it will change what people want. Rather it will become good enough to give them what they already want, but can't currently obtain. Replicant partners that are captive enough to be utterly reliable, yet offer just enough pushback to not seem captive? I can see the lines for that going around the block. It simply takes so much of the perceived risk out of being in a relationship. And that's part of the reason for so much of the automation that we currently have. After all, I've had dishes be broken during cleaning before, but never by the dishwasher.

For all that I find hand-wringing about how people are too selfish these days to be moronic, I understand the critique that people go into relationships mainly as a path to personal happiness, mainly because it (among other things) lowers people's patience for rough edges in potential partners. But then again, most people wind up marrying other actual people in their lives, so I doubt that this is ever going to be a big problem regardless of how alarmist one's take on it is. What I think it will become, however, is mediagenic, precisely because it can be spun as a looming crisis that could spell doom (doom, I tell you!) for humanity. And nothing drives ratings like the promise of a good crisis story. Sometimes, even when the promise isn't at all delivered on.

Equally

Not the first thing that I think of for LGBT+ progress, but okay...

Every June now, like clockwork, someone posts this sentiment. And I've always been curious as to what end; is the point really to trade discomfort for discomfort? I've always been suspicious of people who make it a point to wish negative things on other people, regardless of their motives. Mainly because the world is a bad enough place as it is, and adding to that makes nothing better.

But maybe I shouldn't say that, because I think that there are people who take a certain amount of pleasure in the pain of those they understand to be their enemies. And I would venture for those people, knowing that being celebrated hurts other people does make their life better. And that's what matters to them. After all, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people (and everyone else who identifies as queer) aren't really any different than anyone else. Why should they be above being jackasses to their fellow people any more than anyone else is?

And I suppose that's what bothers me about it. This invocation of Pride Month to take note of the negative aspect of equality; to remind everyone that queer people can be the asshole just like straight people can. Or, perhaps more accurately, that as a species, humans are assholes. And nothing really gets in the way of that. Not safety and security, histories of oppression, or time spent calling out people for being assholes.
 

And Statistics

One of the side effects of regularly listening to the 538 Politics Podcast, especially their "Good or Bad Use of Polling" segments, is that I've become better able to understand data when it's being presented in the media. Because few things are really what they're cracked up to be. Take the following story from Axios:

Married people are happier than single adults: survey

Brought to you by the wedding-industrial complex. Not really. It's actually brought to you by a conservative think-tank, that's looking "to strengthen marriage and family life." Because headlines need to be punchy, Axios somewhat misstates things.

Gallup, the organization that conducted the surveys, doesn't set out to directly measure happiness. What they're measuring are people's self-reported positioning on the "Cantril Self-Anchoring Scale," which asks respondents to place themselves on a 0-10 scale of worst to best possible lives for themselves 1) in the present and 2) in five years time. Using these scores, Gallup places people into one of three buckets: Thriving, Struggling or Suffering.

What the Institute for Family Studies is touting, is the fact that the Gallup data show a correlation between being married, and attaining a "Thriving" rating in the Gallup groupings. Their point, which is to be expected, given their mission is that "In America at least, it looks like well-being ebbs and flows with marriage." The column does, however make an important caveat: "Marital status is not randomly assigned." And this is important, because the article is at pains to point out "that marital status is a stronger predictor of well-being for American adults than education, race, age, and gender." While it notes that the data can't prove a causal relationship, the piece maintains that marriage is an overall good. Which makes sense for an organization that's looking to boost marriage.

Looking at the actual data, what stood out for me was 2017. With the exception of divorcées, this is the high-water mark for all groups' thriving percentages. And 2018 was a bit worse for all groups. 2020 was a disaster for everyone, and only the never married cohort continued their recovery into 2023. Divorcées were on track to take over the second-place spot before the pandemic derailed everything, and they've barely recovered any ground since 2020. All groups are much lower in the rankings as of last year than they were in 2017, and married couples are on a downward trend. The Institute for Family Studies article speaks to none of this. Which is unfortunate, because there is likely to be insight there.

Instead, it shifts, and focuses on the fact that "People living in metropolitan areas with higher rates of marriage enjoy higher subjective wellbeing." To demonstrate this, it take the metropolitan areas with the ten highest and ten lowest rates of marriage, and plots their Gallup "Thriving" rates, along with their rates of "deaths of despair," defined here as "deaths from suicide, drug or alcohol poisoning, or overdose." (As an aside, "deaths of despair" has become something of a buzzword, and like most buzzwords, it's not strictly accurate. After all, drug and alcohol poisoning/overdose deaths may also happen at parties.) But to do this, it relies on an analysis done for The Brookings Institution. That analysis shows something that the Institute for Family Studies alludes to; the deaths of despair rates for the top and bottom ten metro areas by "Thriving" rates. Provo-Orem, Utah holds the number one spot on both lists, having the highest percentage of married households and of people who say that they are thriving. But, notably, other than that, none of the top ten metro areas for "Thriving" show up on the top ten list for marriage rates, and there is no overlap at all in the lists for the bottom 10 metros. Brookings, rather than focusing on rates of marriage when evaluating whether people are likely to self-report as thriving, points to demographics and location, noting that different ethnic groups have different "Top Ten" lists. It doesn't mention marriage at all as a factor.

In the end, I found myself looking for a data point that wasn't there. Mainly because I don't believe that Gallup asks about it in their survey. Is there a correlation between whether people want to to be married or not, and whether they report themselves to be thriving? Policies designed to help people who want to be married become married would look significantly different than policies designed with marriage for everyone in mind.

Coverage of the benefits of marriage, especially when promoted by marriage boosters, tend to view the institution as something that's good for everyone, regardless of other concerns. "Married people are happier than single adults" and "Married People Are Living Their Best Lives" being just two examples. But "People who have the relationships they want are happier than other adults" and "People Who Have the Relationships They Want Are Living Their Best Lives" are just as likely to be true.

The Corner of Mis and Trust

One of the side effects of increasing political polarization in the United States, and the erosion of social trust that has come with it, is a greater unwillingness to see other people charitably. (And given how often I can be uncharitable, I feel odd typing that.) For example:

The Washington Post published an editorial last month noting that political polarization is increasing along gender lines, with young ("Generation Z") women starting to lean more liberal, and young men starting to lean more conservative. Since assortative mating is also starting to take politics into account, the Post's editorial board was concerned that this could lead to a reduction in marriage rates.

Cue teapot tempest. According to Salon, "It's a good thing most women don't want to date Trump voters," portraying a "no Trump voters" requirement as "the bare minimum." A writer for Medium questions the Post's intentions, asking: "First of all, doesn’t it seem like maybe we’re talking about something else here? Like how worried we are, as a nation, about protecting and cultivating the proliferation of white families and white babies, perhaps?" An author for Lawyers Guns Money accuses the Post of "Malicious false equivalency" and "Refusal to acknowledge right wing violence."

The Daily Kos also had some slings and arrows for the Post's editorial board, taking issue with the following:

As a whole, men are increasingly struggling with, or suffering from, higher unemployment, lower rates of educational attainment, more drug addiction and deaths of despair, and generally less purpose and direction in their lives.

Not so fast, said the Kos author, noting: "Higher unemployment? Really? It’s 3.9%. 'Lower rates of educational attainment?' Nope. Those rates are higher than ever, for both men and women," and then proceeding to flog the editorial board for not blaming the problem on things that liberal America stereotypically cares about, like "stagnant wage growth, out of control housing, and health care costs" and "the male ego and a wounded sense of their assumed primacy in our society."

But here's the thing. I understood, when I read the section quoted from the Washington Post, that they weren't speaking in absolute terms over time, but about men relative to women. Because according to The Education Data Initiative, while "Male and female educational attainment rates both increased between 2010 and 2022," it's also the case that "There is a greater percentage of women who obtain each educational tier compared to men from high school to master’s degree." And that for the current crop of 18 to 24-year olds, while men are more likely to have a high school diploma, they're also more likely to have not attained one. And women convincingly own the post-secondary degree statistics. And this is nothing new.

Likewise, the Department of Labor notes that the unemployment rate for men is higher than it is for women. Again, this isn't something that popped up out of the blue in late November, when open season on the Post was declared.

This isn't to say that the editorial was above reproach. It's paywalled, so I haven't read all of it myself, but the coverage of it pointed out valid limitations in the sample they were using, and like many such things, the employment data is too generalized to be of real use.

Of course, there's nothing unusual going on here. People are seeking to validate, and then amplify, the beliefs of their audiences. Because that's how one attracts, and retains, said audiences. And unlike myself, a number of the people that I've taken note of here write for money; they're charging for subscriptions, selling advertising on their pages or both. And that requires an audience who is willing (or at least perceived to be willing) to share disposable income. I write because I want to write, and Alphabet doesn't charge me anything to host my blog. It takes time, but no money on my part, so I lack a profit motive.

As polarization grows (which it can't do forever) and the camps define themselves more and more by their opposition to the other, we can expect to see more of this sort of thing. And that's partially because the country is at a point where being uncharitable is seen as the correct thing to do. I'm somewhat Left-leaning overall, but not particularly partisan because I don't believe that there are a number of people in the political and media spheres who are engaged in deliberate wrongdoing. I might not agree with what they're up to, but I would still submit that they're actively engaged in doing what they think will make the world a better place. It may turn out to be a road to nothing but sorrow and pain, but it's genuinely paved with good intentions.

P.S.: It's also worth noting that the American Enterprise Institute noted that attitudes towards Donald Trump was becoming a deciding factor in who people would or would not date some three years ago... The Washington Post isn't the first to see something here.

The Kids These Days

“The people we consider to be ‘adults’ are married with kids, sharing houses, sharing finances,” says [sex educator and therapist Liz] Powell. “Whereas ‘wayward adults’, like myself, who live alone, unmarried, are examples of everything wrong with society.”
Does ‘solo polyamory’ mean having it all?

As someone who lives alone, and is unmarried, I have never heard the term “wayward adult” before. No-one has ever described me, to me, that way, certainly. “Failed human being” in the context of being “childless by choice,” yes, but never “wayward adult.” But I wonder: Who is the “we” that Ms. Powell refers to? Part of the reason why I decided to stop using the word “we” when referring to large groups of people that I might be a part of is specifically because it fails to actually point the finger at anyone. And while I understand that there are still noticeable numbers of relatively conservative (or Conservative) people out there for whom nothing less than a monogamous marriage to one’s first and only sex partner resulting in multiple Christian children is acceptable, attributing that attitude to society at large is overstating things.

There is, I think, a certain narcissism that goes into some persecution complexes, stemming from the supposition that whatever it is that one is doing is so threatening to others that they’re motivated to pull out all the stops to put an end to it. This is not to say that there aren’t people who understand that putting a stop to all “non-biblical” forms of human relationships wouldn’t magically fix everything that ails humanity, but their chances of that wish coming true anytime soon are pretty much zero.

There are always going to be people for whom their chosen way of living is seen as the one true way that everyone should follow. That’s not going away. Being aggrieved about it isn’t useful. Change takes time, and while that time is often frustrating, it’s simply part of the process. It doesn’t need to be a matter of us versus them.

Mix and Match

When certain activities, places and institutions are segregated, such as men's (or boys') and women's (or girls') sports, men's and women's bathrooms or men's and women's jails, what is the criteria for segregation? Biological sex, or gender identity?

When these segregations were conceived, their wasn't a widespread idea of gender as an identity, if the concept existed at all. "Sex" and "gender" were considered synonymous terms, more or less universally. But now that there is, at least in some quarters, the understanding that "male" refers to sex and "woman" refers to gender, when we speak of the various segregations drawn along those lines, how are people being categorized?

National Public Radio has decided that it's self-evident that since we speak of "men's" versus "women's" that gender identity is the divide. "A transgender beauty influencer was put in a men's jail after her arrest in Miami" is written with an assumption that the Miami-Dade County corrections department has done something obviously wrong. Independent evidence, however, is not presented. Now. it's possible that the arresting officers and jail staff knew who Nikita Dragun was, and deliberately placed her in a men's unit, but no evidence is given for that. Likewise, the statement that Ms. Dragun is "legally female" came from a public relations representative, not from any sort of document. So I'm given to believe that when Ms. Dragun was arrested, someone had some reason to understand that while Nikita Dragun identifies as a woman, her original (and maybe current) sex is male.

And that takes us back to the question of who "men's" jails are for: biological males, people who identify as men or some combination of the two. (I suppose that one could ask the same question of women's jails, but a cursory Google search did not reveal any cases of transgender men going to jail...) It's worth a broader social conversation, rather than one driven simply by activists, because as more and more people decide that the way out of narrow gender-role expectations is to change their gender identity, it's going to become more of a concern; although likely still quite rare in the grand scheme of things. Still, given that it's the corner cases where things tend to fall apart, clarity on the topic couldn't hurt.

The media conversation about these sorts of things tends to be driven by the audience of a given media outlet. NPR tends to attract a young, and left-leaning audience, for whom the transgender community are another set of victims to be embraced and championed. I'm sure that Fox News, for example, leans in the other direction. But the mediated conversation between these outlets and their audiences is only part of the conversation that can happen. Society, writ large, is unlikely to become particularly involved. Most people simply don't care enough about the topic, as neither side holds any real terror for them. But still, voices a little less invested in one outcome or another can provide useful input into areas of contention.

Unknown Structures

All manner of commentators—from Turner’s friend, who chalked up the assault to “clouded judgement” on both [Chanel] Miller and [Brock] Turner’s part, to Malcolm Gladwell, who devoted a chapter in his most recent book to raising doubts about Turner’s culpability—stepped in to share their theories about Turner’s intent and Miller’s desires.
Christina Cauterucci "Why Not Go to the Police?"

I happen to have a copy of Malcolm Gladwell's "most recent book," otherwise known as Talking to Strangers, and, last night, I read the chapter "devoted [...] to raising doubts about Turner's culpability." It's Chapter Eight, "Case Study: The Fraternity Party." It's the last of three chapters that Mr. Gladwell devotes to the ways in which we think that we understand other people, and get it wrong, because we mistakenly think that people are more transparent than they actually are. Brock Turner's rape of Chanel Miller is the backdrop for a quick consideration of consent and then a much larger consideration of alcohol, two factors that, in Mr. Gladwell's telling, result in many of the countless encounters between people at parties going badly awry.

I'd read "Case Study: The Fraternity Party," prepared for the possibility of being disappointed with Mr. Gladwell's analysis. But in the end, it was Ms. Cauterucci's analysis that seemed lacking. There was nothing in the book that was particularly sympathetic to Brock Turner, other than perhaps the acknowledgement that expecting a drunken teenager to correctly read another human being is a bad idea. But what that does is cast Mr. Turner as something other than a deliberate predator, someone who set out to victimize someone that evening, with alcohol as an accomplice.

But when I considered the podcast that Ms. Cauterucci linked to, I saw the basis for her disdain.

By the end of the chapter, Gladwell is arguing that sexual assaults can be basically boiled down to a misunderstanding - a misreading of signals, often between two people too drunk to know what’s really going on.

While I understand the upset, I didn't read it this way. Rather, I felt that the point that he made at the beginning of the chapter was that a misreading of signals between two people too drunk to know what’s really going on often resulted in sexual assaults. The two statements are not equivalent.

The disconnect, however, speaks to differences in the way people see the world, and the differences between the law and the court of public opinion. As a matter of law, rape is sexual contact without consent. And the reasons for that lack of consent go beyond simple unwillingness. "Under California law," Talking to Strangers tells us, "Someone is incapable of giving consent to sexual activity if they are either unconscious or so intoxicated that they are 'prevented from resisting'." But our understanding of "assault" doesn't really concern itself with matters of consent. Lack of consent is taken as a given. It's the perpetrator, and how they behave, that is front and center when the word "assault" is used.

The who of the Brock Turner case was never in doubt. The what was determined by the jury. But that still leaves the why. How did an apparently harmless encounter on a dance floor end in a crime.

This is the question that Mr. Gladwell sets out to answer. For me, as the reader, and I suspect for Mr. Gladwell, as the author, "the why" has no bearing on Brock Turner's culpability. He was caught in the act of sexual activity with someone who was unconscious and so intoxicated they were prevented from resisting. Enough said.

But for the cast of The Waves podcast and to Ms. Cauterucci, "the why" is manifestly important. Because that's where the structural issues that are important to them lie. And casting Brock Turner as simply a sexually aggressive teenager who drank his way into a criminal act sets aside those structural issues. Likewise, when Mr. Gladwell accurately points out that there is no way to know what happened between Brock Turner and Emily Doe/Chanel Miller during their encounter at the Kappa Alpha party, he's likely also thinking of it as unimportant. After all, it has no bearing on whether there was consent to sexual activity later; Emily Doe/Chanel Miller was legally unable to consent, and that was that.

But if you view the crime as a matter of respect or of structural sexism, then what happens is important. But who should it be important to? If I determine that Brock Turner is culpable even though he suffered from self-inflicted, alcohol-induced "clouded judgement" at the time, what does Chanel Miller lose? For me, the understanding that if Brock Turner had been sober, he may not have done what he did does nothing to invalidate any of the criticisms that she made of him or any of the impacts that the assault had on her.

I understand that there is an argument that Chanel Miller does lose something, and that something is invalidated, but I can't access what it is, and so I can't adequately respond. Nor can I really adjust my thinking. I could simply parrot the lines I think are expected of me, but that would be parroting; repeating without genuine comprehension. And, oddly, that seems to be the point behind Talking to Strangers; that there are so many things about other people that we don't know, and maybe can't know, that we have to be wary of thinking that we know them.

Rules

"I don't trust the perception that the world puts on people when they see things and they don't ask a question, they don't look to find out the truth," [Mississippi Republican gubernatorial candidate Reprentative Robert Foster] said.

"Perception is a reality in this world, and I don't want to give anybody the opinion that I'm doing something that I should not be doing."

Mr. Foster said following the #MeToo movement, "men are under attack all the time".

"I'm not going to allow myself to be put in a situation with any female where they can make an accusation against me" without someone else in attendance, he said.
US politician insists on chaperone for interview with female reporter

The BBC goes on to state that "Some argue the practice [of the 'Billy Graham Rule,' popularized most recently by Vice President Mike Pence] is a matter of professionalism in the workplace while critics decry it as sexist and unfair to women in professional settings." My first thought was that one could likely draw a clear partisan division between those who see at as professionalism, and those who see it as sexism. There is, of course, more to it than that.

But then again, I'm not above being somewhat twitchy about the idea of being in those sorts of situations, myself. As a Black person in the United States, a good number of well-meaning people effectively told me that if I weren't careful, I would be seen as a predator, and that would have serious consequences. But it's worth keeping in mind that my parents and many of my aunts and uncles were old enough that Emmett Till's lynching happened within living memory. Even so, it strikes me as paranoid when I worry that going out to dinner with a friend, or watching a movie together could end very, very, badly.

My friends, however, see those worries as sensible, if perhaps overblown; even though it's not particularly likely that I'd wind up in a situation where I'd be staring jail time (or worse) in the face due to a casual get-together gone aggressively sideways. There's a history there, mostly of dismal race relations in the United States, and that's enough that my worries would seem founded to them. For my part, I try not to worry about it anymore. But I will admit that this is partially out of the sense that there's really nothing to be done about it. Sometimes, one is the windshield, and sometimes, one is the bug. It's just like that. Representative Foster is apparently under the impression that even though "perception is reality in this world," that he can still protect himself by controlling the optics. "In this world," though, a lot of the time, what people may perceive about someone doesn't necessarily have anything to do with that someone. If he honestly thinks (and I'm not sure that he does) that always having women chaperoned in his presence for public and business will be enough to protect him, he's setting himself up for a potentially rude awakening.

That bit of cynicism, and American history, aside, I really do understand that an otherwise innocuous situation is unlikely to genuinely go anywhere nearly that far off the rails. After all, this is 2019, rather than 1959. I can go to the bank, and they'll have a picture of a mixed couple out house hunting without needing to worry about bricks or Molotov cocktails being thrown through the windows. The world that my parents and other relatives warned me about is long gone. I don't have to be as careful about whom I'm seen with, and what impressions people may receive from that, as my grandfathers would need to have been.

So why not look as askance at my concerns as Representative Foster's? (Although, to be sure, I've met people for whom my own concerns about being seen as predatory are also nothing more than misogyny veiled in false caution.) Part of it is, I think, the potential partisan divide that I noted before. I don't really hang out with anyone who buys into the whole "men are under attack all the time" thing. To them, it just sounds like Representative Foster is attempting to ingratiate himself with conservatives by claiming that a vast, left-wing feminist conspiracy is out there looking to make life difficult for innocent men like himself. There is also the fact that my concerns are also very tied up in race. The exact reasons for that are many and varied (and perhaps somewhat sad), but the end result is that I was socialized to be more cautious around some women than others.

In the end, I find Representative Foster's position to be somewhat ironic. In a world where it's supposed to be understood that while not all men may be harassers or worse, any man can be. And Representative Foster is reacting, or perhaps overeacting, to that understanding that he's no longer viewed as above such things due to his position. And he's reacting in a way that's familiar to me; even if that isn't the reaction that some people may have wanted.

Aspirations

While I will admit to being somewhat surprised to find it on Physics.org, I found this article to be an interesting one. I signed up for an online dating site back in the day, at the behest of an ex-girlfriend who'd roped me into helping her out with some speed-dating events that she was hosting, but never really put much time into it, and so I find data on how they work to be fascinating.

It turns out, that out of four online dating markets studied, sending a longer message to a more-desirable potential partner one aspires to doesn't increase one's chances of having that person message back. Except here in the Seattle area, where a longer message does, in fact, increase the chances of having someone who's otherwise "out of one's league" send a reciprocal message. (How the fact that the Seattle area is considered a difficult market for men plays into this, I don't know.)

Like most academic papers, this one is written in "science-speak," which I have to admit didn't put me off reading it. There's something about the incongruity of the sentence: "Here, we report results from a quantitative study of aspirational mate pursuit in adult heterosexual romantic relationship markets in the United States, using large-scale messaging data from a popular online dating site (see the “Data” section)," that I find remarkably amusing. Not being much of a romantic myself, I'm of the opinion that one can quite easily apply the tools of science to understanding how people go about seeking partners for themselves, and so I tend to find these sorts of studies to be quite helpful in understanding how people see the world around them.

Although perhaps "people" is the wrong word to use here. After all, this is a study of online dating messaging patterns in four big-city markets. There are an awful lot of people who wouldn't have been captured in this, and the way they go about things could potentially be quite different than the urban and suburban hopefuls who found themselves gamely sending messages to people more desirable than themselves.

So I suspect that it's more accurate to say that in reading this, I have learned something about the particular segment of society that I inhabit. And that's always useful.

Box-a-Bye Baby

So I found this story on the BBC about Baby Boxes; boxes designed to keep infants alive so that their mothers can drop them off into the care of professionals without needing to perform a warm handoff to another human being, who might ask uncomfortable questions, know the person involved or cause other complications that the presumably desperate parent is anxious enough to avoid that their efforts to do so may place the child's life in jeopardy. While I'd never heard of the concept before landing at the story online, this is an international phenomenon and one that goes back to the middle ages.

Of course, not everyone is a fan. The BBC doesn't spend much time speaking to people's objections to the concept, but it does take a moment to toss out this mostly throwaway line:

Fathers' rights groups object, saying they allow only one parent to make the decision.

And, me being me, that was the line that caught my attention.

Back when I was a child and youth care worker, and then a foster-care case worker, I'd developed a rather low opinion of the men who were the fathers of the children that I worked with. While I'm not going to claim that they were a representative sample, only one of the children appeared to have a father who cared about them more than their mother did; and the mother in question was a remarkable piece of work, the sort made sterilizing people unless they qualify for a parenting license seem like a good idea. Typically, if a child was only going to have a single parent ever show up for anything, it was going to be the mother. But the idea that nearly the entire gamut of these mostly low-income (if not simply unemployed) men were of the infamous "love 'em and leave 'em" type was uncharitable, and I've mellowed as I've grown old.

So while it's easy to dismiss the concerns of fathers' rights groups as disingenuous or even actively dishonest, I do find myself wondering about the circumstances that prevent men from being more available to the women who bear, but cannot bear to keep, their children. And how many of those circumstances could be prevented if either or both parties had more access to support. To be sure, I understand that men can simply walk away from a responsibility that they don't want. But I wonder how many of them find that they're effectively pushed away.

I'm curious as to what the actual, verbatim, objections of fathers' rights groups to drop-off boxes for infants is, because the irony of "saying they allow only one parent to make the decision," is not lost on me. Back in the day, I worked with a number of single mothers who didn't have a choice in no longer being with their child(ren)'s father. He had simply disappeared, and that was that.

I understand the objections that people have to the boxes. The UN's objection, that nations would do better to address the factors that cause people to give up their infants, is well taken. The boxes are, like any number of other things, a means of making a broken system less damaging, rather than less broken. But I don't think that many people are willing to do what would need to be done to repair that particular system, which I suspect has been damaged by the technological and social progress of the past several decades (or even the last century or so).

And in that respect, the concept is here to stay. Everyone will have to become used to it.

Danger Zone

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he believes the reaction to the allegations of sexual assault and other misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh makes it "a very scary time for young men in America."

"It is a very scary time for young men in America, where you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of," Trump said. "This is a very, very -- this is a very difficult time. What's happening here has much more to do than even the appointment of a Supreme Court justice."
Jeremy Diamond. "Trump says it's 'a very scary time for young men in America'" Tuesday, 2nd October, 2018.

More recently, "The USC chapter of Young Americans for Freedom set up a table on Trousdale Parkway Wednesday, displaying a poster that read, 'It’s a Dangerous Time for Men — Change My Mind'." So much for profiles in courage.

These comments have sparked heated discussions about what "dangerous" means or what should count as "scary." Or what is a person justifiably afraid of. But perhaps all of this misses the forest for the crooked, frightening shadows of trees.

President Trump and the University of Southern California's Young Americans for Freedom are basically saying that the current culture that demands greater accountability for sexual assault and misconduct makes it dangerous to be a young man (although the cynic in me questions the degree to which the President and USC YAF are referring to all men) and as a result, men have legitimate reason to be afraid for themselves.

Being a Black man (although no longer a young one) myself, I am acquainted with this concern. But I'm also well aware of the difficulties in quantifying this concern. Between 1980 and the mid 1990s, the rape conviction rate per 1,000 male population doubled, from about .1 to about .2. Now, I haven't been able to find any more recent numbers than that (although I'm sure they're out there and my Google-fu is simply weak), but let's suppose that in the intervening 20+ years, the renewed focus on sexual assault and misconduct has lead to that rate doubling again, to .4 men out of every 1,000. That's about 1 in every 2,500 men. Of course, this is an annual number, so it doesn't give us lifetime statistics. And it's both a snapshot in time and a wild-ass guess, so it's not particular useful to long-term estimates. But it's the number that I was able to come up with, so I'll work with it.

Wikipedia tells us that "In 1994, African Americans accounted for between 45 percent and 50 percent of crimes for murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault." Of course, this is likely inaccurate, since I doubt that the clearance rate for crimes in 1994 was a) 100% and b) completely accurate. In other words, there's no way of knowing these percentages for actual crimes - you can only work with arrests and convictions, or other items that are statistically counted. But since convictions are basically what we're after, this will work with our back-of-the-text-file calculations. As Black people are about 13% of the population, a rate between 45 and 50% represents being over-represented by a factor of somewhat over three and a half. So our .4 per 1,000 rate jumps to about 1.46 per 1,000 or about 1 person in every 684. Given an overall exoneration rate of about 11.6% or a little under one in eight, and my chances of going to jail in any given year these days for a sexual assault that I didn't commit, is somewhere in the area of .17 out of one thousand. That becomes 1.7 out of one hundred, or about 1.7%. Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that Black people are also over-represented in exonerations, but this is wonky and inaccurate enough as it is.

Now, the point of that exercise was to attempt to put an actual number on my chances of being incorrectly convicted of sexual assault. It's not a simple task, as you can see, but it comes up with a fairly low number, that's still likely on the high side. Of course, that 1.7% annual chance, compounded over time, becomes fairly substantial, but not likely enough to keep me up at night.

But what if it was? What if my chances of being convicted of a rape that I didn't commit were high enough that it felt like a clear and compelling risk? Well, there wouldn't be much that I, as an individual, could do about it. (Which is part of the reason there's no really point in losing sleep over it.) But if there was, the most effective path would likely be to understand what lead to that elevated chance and address it.

Dealing with the uncertainties of criminal prosecutions would be one way to approach the topic. Are police and prosecutors doing everything readily available to them to weed out potentially innocent parties when choosing who they are going to arrest and prosecute? Are they incentivized to do these things? If not, why not?

And that's where we get to a deeper part of the problem. President Trump and the University of Southern California's Young Americans for Freedom are attempting to push back against the current social drive to do more to hold people accountable for sexual misconduct by pointing to the fears of being wrongfully accused, rather than addressing the fears of being subjected to sexual misconduct. In other words, they're focused on their own fears of someone else's fear response. But if women were less afraid of being assaulted...

Of course, that's a tall order. Changing someone else's emotional response to the world around them is difficult. Once a woman has come to understand that any given man may be ready, willing and able to attack her sexually, it may be too late to substantially alter that perception. And, as so many other things, safety is a perception. I had it drilled into me from a young age that I was not safe from accusations of sexual misconduct. And even having an understanding of how one would go about calculating the numbers (even though I don't have accurate statistics at hand) doesn't completely remove the concern. And I will admit that my day-to-day behavior reflects those concerns.

And that's in part because no-one cares about them, which doesn't leave me room to ignore the causes of those concerns. People being afraid of me is bad for me, and so I have learned to take steps to mitigate those fears. But this isn't a new thing for me. USC's Young Americans for Freedom, on the other hand, may be coming face-to-face with this for the first time. And they're young people. Learning to understand why other people may be afraid of them, rather than afraid for them in the way they they're afraid for themselves takes time. And a willingness to take responsibility for people's fears of them, in the absence of personal fault for those fears take longer. (And the President isn't helping.)

No Takers

So there was (note the use of the past tense) a discussion about what a sincere apology for having been abusive to women might look like, and one of the participants pondered:

I wonder if there was a hashtag for men to admit they've wronged women in the past if that would be a positive thing, or if it would be seen as an excuse because "every guy has done it."

Well it turns out, we don't have to speculate about that: such a hashtag already exists: It's hashtag IDidThat. There's also hashtag HowIWillChange.

Now, I'm not on Twitter or Facebook, so I don't actually know how this is working out over there. On Google+, while there are a few links to the BBC article on this (the one that I read which clued me into it), most of the uses of the hashtag are people referencing food they made/ate, weight loss/exercise, hairstyles and the occasional silly thing they've done. It didn't come up in the conversation being had, perhaps because the original poster locked comments after a few hours, but it sort of struck me that no-one had heard of this. Granted, I knew because I read the BBC. But perhaps that's the point - it seems to be more of a thing in Europe. Will it catch on here? Part of me says, "I doubt it."

Having a bull's-eye on your forehead is one thing. Painting it there yourself is likely quite another, and while most people don't spend their time worrying about the Internet Mobs, I suspect that they're leery of jumping out into the street and shouting to those "mobs": "Hey! Over here! Come get me!"

When it first occurred to me to search out hashtag IDidThat to see if it was going anywhere, it was a couple of days after the BBC article ran, which was nearly a year ago. When I looked again today, no one had actually used the hashtag to confess to having wronged a woman in their past. And I didn't expect that anyone would have.

Gynophobia

I was taking one of the company shuttles back from a meeting, and was chatting with the driver to fill the time. She was from Chile, and she'd told me that she'd met her husband while she was visiting the United States, and stayed after marrying him. Then she asked me how I'd met my wife. I told her that I wasn't married, and then she asked me if I was a divorcé. I told that, no, I'd never been married.

"Afraid of women?" she asked.

I chuckled. There was a phrase that I hadn't heard in a long, long, time. It reminded me that Latin America is still a more socially conservative place, by in large, than the United States. I found myself wondering if that concept even still existed in the United States, and so I quickly Googled a couple of variations. Nada, except for perhaps a couple of articles about "fear of commitment."

Personally, I'd always thought that "being afraid of women" was something like "confirmed bachelor," in that it was social code for homosexual men at a time when homosexuality wasn't commonly spoken of. This would explain why the concept has more or less disappeared from the American social consciousness. Homosexual men can openly have relationships, and even marry, and so the don't need the coded descriptors anymore.

But in much the same way that the link between a "confirmed bachelor" and a homosexual man isn't intuitive to me (I tend to think of it as intentional bachelorhood, in the sense of simply choosing to remain single), the phrase "afraid of women" doesn't immediately strike me as being related to homosexuality. Instead the first thing that comes to mind is a literal fear of women. And so, back in the day, I'd always found the idea confusing.

Because women, as a whole, could be a lot of things, but, generally, scary wasn't one of them. Sure an individual woman, especially if angry and/or armed, could certainly be frightening, but the idea that one would find women in general to be scary never made any sense to me. One of the prices for being single, however, was to forever be accused of being, essentially, a coward. Whether it was fear of commitment, of rejection or of meeting someone who wouldn't simply roll over on demand, I remember being told that I was afraid of this, that or the other time and time again, whenever I'd forgotten that I was supposed to keep the fact that I was intentionally single a secret. (Or, I simply couldn't hide the fact anymore.) For a time, the constant accusations of cowardice were infuriating. (I think perhaps I understood then, as I understand now, that no one was calling me a coward out of concern for my well-being.) But when I moved from Chicagoland to the Puget Sound, it pretty much stopped. Why that was, I'm not sure. Perhaps it had something to do with being in a social circle that had many more single people in it, or maybe I had aged enough past the common age of first marriage that people figured that nothing was going to change.

Thinking back on this morning, I know that it was the more literal part of my brain that parsed her phrasing, hence the chuckle, but now I wonder if she wasn't using the coded connotation. Who knows. In any event it was an interesting reminder of a time in my life that I'd nearly completely forgotten.

Life on the Inside

So there's an interesting article on The Atlantic about how common notions of masculinity are stifling. Like the others that I've read, it's written by a woman. There's no real problem with that, as many women are excellent writers. Every so often I come across a critique of masculinity from a transgender man. But what seems missing from the materials, at least the ones that I've read, is a critique of what it's like to be a man, written by someone who's always lived it. I presume that they're out there, and that some work on my Google-Fu would turn up one or a hundred of them, but they seems to be missing from the media outlets that I typically read. My working theory is that I don't spend time on feminist media; maybe that's where the action is. I don't know whether or not that's accurate, but it makes sense to me because so much of the discussion seems to center on the gender/sex relations aspect of the whole thing.

In my own understanding, masculinity as a fortress that kept women out is falling by the wayside. It's not completely dead, and it may never be, but it's not as powerful and idea as it used to be. But, at least in my own understanding, it's still a prison that keeps men in. And while I'm not really a fan of that, in the end, I don't mind the life of an inmate. In other words, I more or less conform to a fairly broad notion of what it means to be "a man," even if I've taken a pass on drinking beer, watching football or driving pickup trucks. I'm perhaps more in touch with a nurturing side of myself than fits the general stereotype; after all, I was a psychology major in college, and I spent four and half years as a child care worker, a profession where being nurturing was a necessary skill. But I don't think of myself as being anywhere near as tuned into to people's emotional states as women are typically described as, and listening to someone talk about a problem, rather than rushing in with a fix, takes effort on my part.

I'm fortunate, I think, in that I don't move in circles where really strong gender-role expectations in either direction are the order of the day. While I've never been very invested in proving that I can out-man anyone, I do have a bad habit of not backing down from challenges; which can be a problem in and of itself. Likewise, I don't have to prove to anyone how non-conformist I am, which is also nice. If settling into a comfortable, but conforming, role is like living in a small town, I'm the person who genuinely likes it there, and somewhat resents the more well-traveled calling them out for their lack of broader experience.

But by the same token, I feel that I honestly do understand that masculinity can be a prison, and so while I may be perfectly content to hang around within the walls, I get that it's not for everyone, and I'm perfectly happy to assist other people in jailbreaks. As long as they're okay with me waving goodby to them from the walls.

Mind the Step

Okay, here's the quick and dirty synopsis.

At some point in the past, college student Jane Roe alleges sexual misconduct on the part of college student Harry Poe to the Title IX office. Harry is found guilty and expelled from ROTC program, of which they are (or were) both members.

More recently, college student John Doe (also in ROTC) and Jane Doe have an alcohol-fueled one-night stand. John alleges sexual misconduct to the Title IX office, and Jane is found guilty and suspended from school until John graduates.

Jane sues, claiming that John and Harry are friends, and John's sexual misconduct complaint is actually an act of revenge against Jane for her complaint against Harry, and his subsequent punishment. "On information and belief, John Doe was motivated to file a Title IX Complaint in retaliation for a prior Title X Complaint Jane Roe had filed against his friend."

Following all that?

This is one of those things that falls into the bucket of "You can't make this stuff up," because if you did, you would likely run into accusations of attempting to undermine protections against sexual assault on campus, because it neatly encapsulates some serious problems with the way things work.

• Jane Roe alleges that John Doe is cynically abusing the system to punish her for complaining against Harry Poe. And the way the system is set up, this is plausible.
• It's also plausible that John Doe genuinely feels that Jane Doe is sexually predatory, and Jane is simply being held to the same standard that John would have been had she complained about him first.
• Jane's attorney, Josh Engel, says that it's unfair that if they were both drunk, and they both engaged in the sexual contact, that only Jane is being punished, citing Doe vs. University of Miami, which effectively says that if both students are inebriated, and therefore neither can consent to sexual activity, both students must be investigated for sexual misconduct against each other. (To take this silliness a bit further, I'm waiting for someone to be caught masturbating while under the influence and be investigated for sexual misconduct against themselves. It just doesn't seem as far-fetched anymore as it genuinely should.) Not that this argument, that a regime that says that "alcohol precludes consent" effectively means that two drunken students are effectively assaulting each other, hasn't been made before. But it tends to be countered rhetorically with common gender-role stereotyping and procedurally by the fact that the first complainant wins. The Sixth Circuit, however, says that this is a discriminatory lack of due process.
• Reason's Robby Soave, meanwhile, posits that John Doe's motive was to do unto Jane before Jane did unto him. Which makes sense, given that since both students were intoxicated, a finding that their (barely) sexual encounter was non-consensual was effectively a foregone conclusion; which meant that if Jane had gotten the jump on him, John would have been the one suspended until her graduation.

And the issue is, that while three of the proceeding four theories might fall into the category of unintended consequences, they're not unforeseen consequences. Whether the system is being intentionally abused or has just fallen into absurdity, these are outcomes that are perfectly predictable, as the process was very clearly set up to presume a certain level of both good faith and knowledge of intentions without taking any steps to ensure either of them. And while I understand the idea that an imperfect system may be a useful first step to solving a problem, the rest steps also have to be taken. And it seems that they're slow in coming, if they're in the pipeline at all.

This is not to say that the perfect should be the enemy of the good. Rather, that the deeply flawed should not be considered "good enough," and therefore, not in need of urgent improvements; especially when the flaws are understood from the outset. A system that cannot protect itself from either cynical manipulation or simple silliness is not good enough to be a workable solution to a problem. And it doesn't make sense to wait for it to fail to attempt improvements, especially given the understanding that the ease of abusing it can easily lead people to conclude, for whatever reason, that such abuse is, in fact, an intended consequence of the system.

Part of the issue is that a standard that says that regardless of any or all other factors, sexual activity with a student who is intoxicated is sexual misconduct. Not because I'm discounting the idea that plying someone with alcohol to lower their inhibitions and then claiming consent is reprehensible. But because it was, in part, designed to automate the system. It seeks to remove old biases and stereotypes by taking people out of the loop, while not being sophisticated enough to replicate human judgement in nuanced or edge cases. In this, it reminds me of the corporate sexual misconduct training that I've had to sit through when starting a new job. The situations put forward are so obvious that it's difficult to understand how anyone could possibly screw them up, and so I've never learned anything useful; because the intent seems to be to allow Human Resources to check a box that absolves the company of responsibility should I do anything criminal to another employee. It's not designed to help me understand where the line is, but to protect the company when they fire me for crossing it.

I don't know if many students perceive campus sexual misconduct rules in the same way. But they seem to have the same M.O. That should be an encouragement to take the further steps needed to improve them.

For Sex or Money

So I read the blog post by Professor Robin Hanson that started the whole "redistribute sex" hullabaloo, and I think I agree with his point (way down at the end) that most of what people are reacting to is their reflexive disgust at the "incel" movement.

And I suspect that this is something that people should tune into a bit more. The ire that Professor Hanson has brought down upon his head is mostly, I suspect, driven by the idea that "If a person cannot find a partner who is willing to sleep with them, then they should become used to the idea of celibacy." And people who find that unpalatable are "stupid rude obnoxious arrogant clueless smelly people" of little "moral or personal worth." Okay fair enough. But, and this is what the Professor is asking, why is "If a person cannot find an employer who is willing to pay them well for their labor, then they should become used to the idea of poverty," considered heartless by so many?

If it's legitimate for those of us who are satisfied with the amount of sex we have in our lives to be completely unsympathetic to the plight of those who don't, why should there be anything wrong with those who are satisfied with the amount of money they possess being similarly unsympathetic to the poor?

I'm going to hazard a guess that a lot of it has to do with general public attitudes towards sex, and the relative ease of obtaining it. People understand that one can be effectively locked out of the world of a well-paying job through no fault of one's own, but if one is effective locked out of romantic love and sex, it must be through a direct personal flaw, and one that's easily correctable at that. An acceptable sex life then, is infinitely easier to obtain than an acceptable financial life.

And as I understand it, Professor Hanson's point is that this distinction is fundamentally arbitrary. It's a social convention that most of us never give any thought to. People understand how capricious societal standards of attractiveness can be; there are even people who see the shunning that not living up to those standards can produce as harmful. But our sympathies end when someone goes from being desperately lonely to violently angry, even if we tolerate violent anger in other contexts. This isn't something that we have any real need to change. It is, however, worth understanding.

Bring a Torch

As the hashtag MeToo movement continues to line up and bring down targets, there have been complaints, of varying levels of reasonableness that it's becoming something of a witch hunt, and will end up with some number of men going down for offenses that they didn't commit. And there have been just as many rebuttals to that line of complaint, also with varying levels of reasonableness.

I, of course, having nothing better to do, have also come up with some thoughts on the matter, namely: Yeah? So? What were you expecting?

There are some seriously flawed systems of justice in the world, and the Court of Public Opinion is among the worst of them.It has poor to non-existent standards for evidence, sentencing guidelines that are wildly arbitrary at best and doesn't recognize any right to effective counsel. And that's just a very short part of a very long list. And MeToo is just another division of the Court of Public Opinion. So why expect it to somehow be better at dispensing justice that its parent?

There is a component to many people's understanding of justice that is about the restoration of a sense of power in one's life. As many forms of victimization directly attack people's sense of being powerful, justice that attacks and injures accused perpetrators salves it. And in doing so, becomes a form of power itself. And in the end, power isn't really power if it can't be abused. Not to say that power must lead to abuse (although there are any number of examples that would point to that being true), but that the potential for abuse is a central component of power.

So why not expect the power granted by the MeToo movement to wind up in a certain amount of abuse, and why think that MeToo's supporters should be above participating in that abuse, intentionally or otherwise? The cynic in me thinks that a lot of the concern comes from people who have never really had to deal with the arbitrary nature of the way justice is applied. Consider Harvey Weinstein. Despite the sheer number of allegations against him, he hasn't actually been criminally charged with anything, as I write this (although that might change before too much longer). And a lot of the high-profile men that have been brought down by MeToo could otherwise have been considered untouchable under normal circumstances. While they may not have been at the level of being able to stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot someone, they had enough social currency to shield themselves from the consequences of bad actions for years. (Note that this is not to say that everyone who has thus far run afoul of MeToo is guilty - having the ability to get away with something is not the same thing as getting away with something.) And given that MeToo, like the Court of Public Opinion overall, tends to take a dim view of due process, it's not hard to imagine that someone who was heretofore shielded from the vagaries of the legal system could suddenly find itself in the crosshairs.

As an Black man in the United States, I grew up with well-meaning relatives constantly warning me that the criminal justice system would just as soon put me away for life as look at me, and if that meant needing to come up with fabricated evidence for fictitious charges, then so be it. And while that's a view that may be extreme to the point of cartoonishness, the fact of the matter remains that fairly or not, being Black in the United States carries with it a higher degree of the risk of incarceration than some other groups, even accounting for differences in the actual rates of criminal behavior. Who wouldn't appreciate not having to deal with that?

Fair a place where pigs go to earn prizes, and that's simply a fact of life in my world. The choice as to whether or not to hold people accountable for things is related just as much, if not more, to how people feel about themselves and the person in the dock as it is to what that person may have actually done. Perfect justice, or even a reasonably close facsimile, requires, in most cases, far more knowledge that most of us can actually have of events that we weren't a party to. And for all of the rules, processes and procedures that they may (or may not) have in place, formal systems of justice are typically only perfect to people who are convinced that they'll never be on the sharp end of them. And MeToo is not a formal system of justice. It's an expression of anger, hurt and frustration. And to expect anything approaching objectivity and rationality from a process driven by emotion is inane.

So MeToo goes hunting witches and decides that being burned is the best proof of guilt. So what else is new?