Arthur Koestler: Brilliant writer, serial rapist?
Today I’m going to talk about Janet Bloomfield — AKA JudgyBitch — and her bizarre attack on the original Don’t Be That Guy anti-rape posters in Edmonton. But I’m going to take a bit of a detour first, so bear with me.
I recently picked up a copy of Arthur Koestler’s The Case of the Midwife Toad, a nonfiction account of a scientific feud that provided me with some diverting travel reading and put me in the mood to read more of Koestler’s nonfiction.
But doing some rudimentary Googling I made a rather horrifying discovery about Koestler, whom I’d admired since reading his bracing account of breaking with Communism in the classic The God That Failed anthology: according to a recent biographer, Koestler was a serial rapist and abuser of women.
While some doubt the evidence of rape, even his supporters have had to acknowledge, as one reviewer has written, that Koestler’s “treatment of the many women in his life [was] – even without the ‘rape’ – deeply unpleasant. He was manipulative, demanding, sexually voracious and utterly faithless.”
Koestler himself doesn’t exactly make a persuasive witness for his own defense, having once written to his second wife that “without an element of initial rape there is no delight.”
But in some ways as eye-opening as these revelations has been the response of some of Koestler’s defenders. Case in point: Michael Scammell, the author of a nearly 700-page biography of Koestler. After detailing many instances of Koestler’s mistreatment of women, he writes of the accusations of violent rape:
The exercise of male strength to gain sexual satisfaction wasn’t exactly uncommon at that time … The line between consensual and forced sex was often blurred.
Hey, it was the 1950s. EVERYBODY raped women back then.
The sad fact is that, while this is no defense of Koestler’s alleged behavior, there is an element of truth to Scammell’s claims. The line between consensual sex and rape was often blurred back then. Women were often cajoled, pressured, manipulated, and forced into sex by more physically powerful men. And neither party necessarily recognized what had happened as rape.
The fact that the line between consensual sex and rape is a lot clearer today — and that the rate of rape has declined markedly in the past several decades — is largely due to feminism. Feminism challenged older attitudes and definitions of rape and worked at changing these attitudes through education and awareness campaigns.
Feminist activists worked on teaching — and reteaching — both men and women what is and what isn’t acceptable sexual behavior.
It’s an ongoing process, which continues in awareness campaigns like this one, the Don’t Be That Guy campaign launched in Edmonton (and elsewhere):
It’s pretty clear that there’s a lot more work to be done, as the reactions to this campaign have pretty clearly shown.
Anyone who has read much in the so-called manosphere — on MRA and PUA sites alike — will have noticed a lot of alarmist nonsense about the alleged difficulties men have in determining if a sex act with a woman is consensual or not, as if it is simply impossible, if there is any confusion, for men to open their mouths and ask. MRAs and PUAs act as if obtaining consent “the way feminists want it” would consist of some complicated legalistic procedure that would ruin sex forever.
This is patent nonsense. Clarifying issues of consent about (and during) sex — making anything that’s blurry clear — can be done in less time than it takes to read this sentence.
“Do you like this?” “Yes.”
“Do you want me to [incredibly dirty thing]?” “Yes.”
But, as I said, the MRAs and PUAs complaining about the alleged difficulties of consent don’t really seem to be interested in making things clear. They would, it seems, rather have things as blurry as possible.
And that’s because a lot of them want to return to a world in which, to paraphrase that quote from Scammell above, the exercise of male strength to gain sexual satisfaction isn’t exactly uncommon, and in which the line between consensual and forced sex is often blurred.
They would prefer to return to a world in which it’s considered fair game to “take advantage” of seriously drunk women. One in which all accusations of date rape could be dismissed as the result of a fickle woman changing her mind later.
And that, I think, is why MRAs have such a problem with date rape awareness campaigns like Edmonton’s Don’t Be That Guy campaign — which they try to both ridicule as unnecessary and denounce as an exercise in Nazi-style anti-male propaganda. Sometimes both at the same time.
Consider, for example, Janet Bloomfield/JudgyBitch’s recent A Voice for Men post on the Edmonton poster controversies. Bloomfield — who apparently likes to think of herself as one of those no-nonsense women who can get by just fine without any help from feminists, thank you very much — begins by trying to ridicule the original Don’t Be That Guy posters as simple-minded, obvious and utterly unnecessary.
Referring to several specific posters from the original campaign, she writes:
No, obviously, you should not be having sex with a woman so drunk she is passed out face down on the couch with her ass in the air. …
Obviously, helping a drunk woman home does not entitle you to sex.
And in what is going to come as SHOCKING news to everyone, if someone doesn’t want to have sex with you, you should not have sex with them.
I’ll give you a while to process that information, because I’m sure that until this clever campaign came along, you were all busy screwing comatose girls at parties and gleefully hailing cabs so you could help ladies home and then rape them.
That would be very witty and pointed but for the fact that, guess what, men do attempt to “have sex” with women who are passed out or asleep, and that there are plenty of men who seem to think that this counts as a sort of “no harm, no foul, no rape” situation.
Take a look at the discussion whenever this topic comes up on Reddit, for example. Or consider all those supporters of Julian Assange who pretend that the issue is women changing their mind after sex when in fact one of the things he’s been accused of is penetrating a woman sans condom while she was sleeping.
And as for “taking advantage” of seriously drunk women, well, there are plenty of men who think this is perfectly fine — and some who make this the centerpiece of their “seduction” technique. Indeed, one prominent PUA — Roosh V — has confessed to doing just that with one woman who was clearly too drunk to consent:
While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she legally couldn’t give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated. I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do.
Somehow this confession — boast? — hasn’t, to my knowledge, earned him any condemnations from manosphere or MRA bloggers, or even, it seems, cost him any fans.
Meanwhile, on the very site Bloomfield is publishing her post, Paul Elam blames drunk women for being sexually assaulted, writing (as I pointed out yesterday) that women who drink with men are, “freaking begging” to be raped,
Damn near demanding it. … walk[ing] though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.
After dismissing the Don’t Be That Guy campaign as so much silliness, Bloomfield makes a sudden 180 degree turn and declares it the virtual equivalent of Nazi propaganda against Jews.
Which would be offensive if it weren’t so manifestly absurd. The Don’t Be That Guy campaign isn’t directed at men, per se. It’s directed at men WHO THINK IT’S OK TO RAPE WOMEN and/or MEN WHO MAKE EXCUSES FOR RAPISTS.
A good number of these men — and some women with similar beliefs — seem to spend much of their time reading and/or writing for manosphere sites like Roosh V’s blog and A Voice for Men.
I love that the programming argument goes “women won’t be discriminated against if they manage to do everything without ever interacting with anyone who knows they’re a woman, therefore discrimination isn’t a problem.”
Unfortunately being full of bullshit is really only a fallacy if it’s part of an actual logic argument. So I guess he’s at 13 points for a faulty premise?
Wrong. Try again, buddy.
It’s simply a notion that rapists don’t announce to the world that they are rapists and so being cautious is neither bigoted nor unjustified. It’s based on the idea that people’s boundaries should always be respected.
@hellkell
You win the day.
Am I seriously supposed to debate you people when you come up with stuff like this? This is reframing my argument in a completely dishonest manner. The point is: there is nothing stopping them (since I have to make it once again). There are a significant number of free software developers who work solo (I point to myself amongst them) and lets be honest, coding is fundamentally a solitary activity. If a woman really wanted to code free software, even if all collaborations were somehow barred to them (something I don’t believe–I suspect most male developers if approached by a woman would be quite open to working with them) they could still go it alone. Even if they had to have a collaborator, they could always find another woman coder. If you have sufficient passion for a subject, no amount of doors closing can dissuade you. As the numbers show, women don’t do these things ergo, the passion simply isn’t there. And if there is one thing that unites free software develpers, it is passion. Otherwise, they wouldn’t pursue an activity which offers no tangible rewards.
Just curious: who in this thread is also a free software developer?
“It’s simply a notion that rapists don’t announce to the world that they are rapists and so being cautious is neither bigoted nor unjustified.”
Hmmmm… Neither do thugs or muggers last I checked. Maybe I should just walk up to the suspicious-looking black teenagers and ask them, “Are you a thug or a mugger?”
Me.
(Damn blockquotes.)
Dammit, I wanted to link to some of my games, but I’m also a professional DBA and I’ve made a habit of doing all my programming under my real name. Not gonna blow it for this dweeb.
Not that any of that matters, because how many women are or aren’t free software developers proves exactly nothing.
“Hmmmm… Neither do thugs or muggers last I checked. Maybe I should just walk up to the suspicious-looking black teenagers and ask them, ‘Are you a thug or a mugger?'”
It’s about boundaries, you idiot. You clearly didn’t read what I said. If you actually care about understanding the Shroedinger’s Rapist analogy, look it up on Yes Means Yes. I don’t think you care, though, so my words will be lost on you.
This may be the most adorably naive thing I’ve read today. Petey, how can you type when you’re encased in such a thick layer of privilege?
Ally: thanks!
Please do.
Are you just really that dumb or not getting it on purpose?
I work in a profession that is actively looking to diversity (though not on a gendered basis, particularly, though men are certainly welcome). I don’t sit around carping that “POC don’t have the passion for librarianship” or “POC don’t have the ability to be librarians.” Instead, I make a point of promoting it as a career to POC I work with, including students, I mentor and otherwise support new librarians who might otherwise not have a lot of support, I seek out and write about the stories of librarians of color so that their contributions are recognized. It’s not that I don’t also support white librarians, I’ve just chosen a different focus.
I’m thinking that approach might work better at diversifying professions than Petey’s “Eh, do nothing, if they’re passionate/smart enough they’ll end up here” approach. Not that it’s perfect or anything.
“You say things, and those things are remarkably bothersome and sexist…”
Or perhaps I am just a realist. The sad truth is, there are differences between men and women. I was just researching this issue in regards to pro tennis. Unfortunately, not only are the differences real, they are yawning:
http://www.topendsports.com/sport/tennis/men-v-women.htm
http://www.mid-day.com/opinion/2010/jul/060710-Serena-Williams-Wimbledon-Tennis.htm
This squares with my own experience. As an undergraduate, I competed in cross-country skiing and had the dubious distinction of being one of the slowest athletes on the male circuit. On the other hand, I was often a match for the fastest female athletes.
When it comes to intellectual fields, it is harder to see that there are differences because there are so many factors that influence success, because there is now an element of subjectivity and because the differences are no longer in the averages but only appear in the higher echelons.
And unfortunately, it is very easy to be misunderstood. I might say something like, the best scientists will, with few exceptions, almost always be men and have it countered with, “but men aren’t smarter than women.” That’s not what I’m saying and if you think that, then you don’t understand statistics and probability. Here is a small primer:
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm
Granted, he is using old data, but it’s remarkable how good the predictions he’s getting are. And honestly, if you don’t understand this article, there is probably no point in having this debate.
That being said, I am certain there will continue to be women, like Emmy Noether, who defy the odds and still manage to come out on top. But I don’t believe that feminism does anything to help these people. If anything it hinders them by suggesting that they can’t make it on their own because “the patriarchy is pushing them down.” Nobody who’s done anything of value hasn’t had to deal with significant obstacles. Those obstacles will always be there, I don’t care how much you push down the “patriarchy”
Until we acknowledge these differences, very little is possible and the result is that we end up devaluing the achievements of both men and women.
So I shouldn’t be cautious around potential thugs and muggers? Please explain to me the difference again, because no, I don’t get it.
Y’all think this is Pell yet again? He already claimed to be a software guru, but there’s a certain familiarity to the smugness of the empty assertions.
“If you have sufficient passion for a subject, no amount of doors closing can dissuade you.”
BOOTSTRAPS!!
Dude, I’m fucking nuts, like, certifiably; I’m also an artist and web designer, neither of which do I persue not for lack of passion, but for retaining the shreds of my sanity. Not that that stops me from picking up a project here and there.
Which utterly tangentially reminds me! Pecunium, you ever decide if you wanted me to tweak your blog? Idk how much I can do on WP.com, but I’ll give it a look if you want.
Oh and the dancing goalposts put you at 18 points btw, you’ve hit the 5 pt max per category.
Fuck off, Petey. Just say you don’t like feminism.
Katz: writing is too good to be Pell. Unless Pell is going for the long con, which I think he is constitutionally unable to do.
The bootstraps mentality is also rather un-Pellish.
“Dammit, I wanted to link to some of my games, but I’m also a professional DBA and I’ve made a habit of doing all my programming under my real name. Not gonna blow it for this dweeb.”
I’ve got the courage to argue under my real name. What’s holding you back? Only cowards hide behind pseudonyms…
I think smug is just how Petey rolls.
Petey, are your arms tired from the goalpost moving?
Fuck off, Petey, given that so many of your fellow anti-feminists are given to death threats and doxxing.
HAHAHAHAHAHA.
Right because an asshole like Petey would be against doxxing.
Petey, are you aware of the abuse women get on the intenet? I know: bootstraps, if you can’t take it fuck off, or whatever just so story you’re about to regurgitate.
“And honestly,
if you don’t understand this article,there is probably no point in having this debate.”FTFY
It’s cute that Petey thinks what he’s doing is “arguing.”
“So I shouldn’t be cautious around potential thugs and muggers? Please explain to me the difference again, because no, I don’t get it.”
I’m not going to answer the question because it’s completely irrelevant. Read about what Shroedinger’s Rapist actually means if you want to know why. I’m done with you.
Not Pell, might be Al though.
“Do you think women can do it or can’t?”
Of course women can do it. Or rather, a select few of them can. But the reason that it’s mostly men probably–and I say probably because I’m not sure–has little to do with discrimination.
Societal programming! *rimshot*
You say it has little to do with discrimination, but you don’t know. Got a citation, or would you like to keep going with your gut.
Hey Petey, why are there so few POC programmers?
I’m really not buying the idea of a hot-shot programmer who can’t manage basic HTML.
Nobody is debating you, dumbass, nor did anyone ever indicate that they would like to. This is a misogyny mocking blog. The “are women people?” blogs are listed on the sidebar.
Actually this one looks to not be a sock. He’s got a website that, judging by the HTML, has been around since at least 1998, as well as a Blogger blog going back to 2008.
And he calls his site a “foundation.”
And he lovingly copies the unformatted text of his blog posts onto the front page of his website by hand omigodicanteven
>debate
rofl yeah sure
Funniest thing I’ve read all day.
katz, Now I want you to check out his open source code. 😀
I did read the “Schroedinger’s Rapist” article and I can’t tell how it’s any different from, “there’s a group of black teenages so I better give them a wide berth.” This is actually something I can identify with because I was once beaten up by a group of teenagers (although they were white, not black).
Maybe you could explain it to me because now I am interested?
“And he lovingly copies the unformatted text of his blog posts onto the front page of his website by hand omigodicanteven”
No, I don’t. That’s done automatically you twit.
You’re so smart, figure it out. Why should we explain a fucking thing to you?
Whatever Petey (jesus grow up already) may be, I can believe he was beaten up.
Sorry, my bad. He’s written an algorithm to automatically copy the unformatted text of his Blogspot blog posts onto the front page of his website.
That makes it much better.
Stop begging for attention, Petey, it’s undignified. If you’re such a “good reader” then you shouldn’t need anyone to help you interpret that post, since it’s really very straightforward.
But, since you asked and therefore put us in the role of teachers, I am assigning you someone homework. Go read all the comments on the Shroedinger’s Rapist post with the aim of using them to understand what the post means. If you still don’t understand by the time you’ve finished reading the comments, then read them again.
Do not comment here again until you have completely your homework assignment and can summarize the points made by the commenters. If you wish to quote as part of your summary we will expect you to do so in a less clumsy manner than you’ve been demonstrating so far.
Ugh, his poor writing skills are rubbing off on me. Some homework, not someone homework.
“I can believe he was beaten up”
Thanks for that. What is it that women so object to that they got their own statute in criminal law that only applies to rape cases? Oh yes, victim blaming…
Cloudiah: I have very little interest in fish-shark ecosystem simulation, sadly. (Perhaps Argenti is curious?) More to the point, there’s no particular reason to believe that his code isn’t competently written.
But for your further amusement:
-He wrote out his email address as “petey_at_peteysoft_dot_org” to fool spambots…and then made it a mailto link.
-His “members” page is just him. (Perhaps it’s a solipsism foundation?)
-And here’s him ranting about how Anita Sarkeesian got money and he didn’t.
So, what we went from “women can’t program” to “nothing is really stopping them, so that’s why we can see they can’t” to “women could if they did but they don’t” to “men are better at tennis”.
That’s the way it seems to me. But, whatever, really.
But yeah, sure. Allow me to show you an instructive example of differences in interpretation of data.
No one really says there are no differences between men and women. To claim otherwise is as patently absurd as claiming there’s no differences between oxygen and hydrogen, or no differences between up and down, or individual people. Obviously, there are differences. But what everyone is saying is that those differences are neither sufficient enough to be instructive, or descriptive enough to be prescriptive.
But people like to make it more than that. So, from your first link:
(Retired male tennis player beats female tennis player = women can’t play tennis well! )
(Same retired tennis player is beaten by another female tennis player = Doesn’t matter! He was retired! What point does this make, anyway, he was well past his prime…)
Let me sum with something else.
http://xkcd.com/385/
It’s obvious to you, and me, and everyone else, that there are differences between people. Just as its obvious that there are things one person can do another can’t. And clearly, we can find examples of people succeeding in different fields:
http://xkcd.com/896/
But the root of YOUR problem, Petey, is this:
Instead of assuming people succeed because of intellect, passion and drive (as you claim to), you make all that secondary. Oh, having passion is nice and being intelligent is good and I’m sure knowing things is great, but what’s important is your dick.
You’ve made the random gender assignment of the person doing the deed primary, the most important little bit, and that’s sort of strange. And that’s kind of why people respond by calling you, well, various names.
As for your second link…
Yes. The mathematical model on data gathered in 1960 as it relates to the composition of cognitive differences throughout all ages, everywhere is… Certainly something. That’s for sure.
But it’s not what you think it is. It’s an interesting data crunching exercise, but you forget that cognitive ability is slapperdash across a spectrum, so the argument might be valid (there’s a statistical significant difference of 0.12 standard deviations) (also, seriously? 0.12 standard deviation in difference is a big deal now?), and 1.20 variance across genders, but it has jack all to do with the rest of the idea.
Slot availability does not infer percentage of male / female – standards for slots do. And as everyone, obviously, tests the standards, you end up sorting through the people who are qualified – of which there might be, oh, I don’t know, slightly more males on the level of.. 0.12 general standard deviations from the mean compared to females.
So the rest of the model doesn’t hold. It tries to make something a linear relation between number of male applicants and the number of female faculty. That only holds for mathematics, and not quite real life, where the considerations are something else.
So, uh… I guess there’s no point in having this debate, since you didn’t understand the article?
Have a fantastic evening, then.
His crowdfunding campaign. (Seriously, go look at the total raised. You won’t regret it.)
Adding to what CassandraSays stated: being an obtuse asshole will drop your assignment grade by 20 points.
“I have very little interest in fish-shark ecosystem simulation, sadly. (Perhaps Argenti is curious?)”
Do I have to put up with him?
This is because he’s another Tom Martin, full of ambition and get-rich-quick schemes but completely lacking in any of the skills that he would need to accomplish them. Check it out.
Note that this is the “foundation” of which he is the sole member.
He’s a watchmaker too! You should give him lots of money for this watch which is sure to be both stylish and impressive to others, what with having the name of his foundation-for-one on it.
And he wrote a book about women! Which is pretty funny, given that he’s already admitted here that his experience with us is very limited. Hubris, thy name is “Petey”.
(Should probably be “Pete” by his age, but he’s a bit behind the curve in terms of emotional development.)