Angelyn
Female
Let me give my take on the recent controversy and how it pertains to male-female relations.
One – despite often sounding conservative I am not a Republican voter. I vote for independent parties generally considered on the left, like many of my fellow academics.
Two – as an academic who earned her way through life I have always hated the White Male Patriarchy. I’m not just saying this because we’re an interracial website that loves making fun of white males. I really do not believe white men are automatically superior to other demographic groups, and I believe that in any genuinely meritocratic environment, white men should not make up more than 50% of the important people, recognized high achievers, etc out there.
I know it sounds selfish and self-promoting, but there are many white men in academia who are holding tenure when their places should be mine.
So I have zero sympathy for prep school drunkards who used their *******’s names and wealth and social connections to rise. I am 100% more sympathetic to Deborah Ramirez because I am way, way more like her than I am like Kavanaugh.
Regardless of whether K is guilty or innocent, I simply do not think adding another ex-frat boy white man to the Supreme Court will make the Supreme Court better.
But I still see many problems with the current controversy.
One – the accusers’ poor memory is very dangerous. Memory is fallible. Check out any book on how eyewitness evidence can be faulty.
Too many important details are lacking. Practically nothing is usable evidence, no concrete and verifiable details. It’s like a thesis that can’t be disproved because the thesis is arguing nothing.
When using witness evidence, you should interview them separately. Don’t do it in an atmosphere of media attention. Otherwise we might have a case where ten women were raped or attacked by ten separate frat idiots/ prep morons none of whom was K, and all ten end up fixating on K as their attacker just because he looks more or less like your standard white male frat idiot/ prep moron.
Ask all three, four, whatever number of accusers for details without having these details splayed across front news.
I fear that K isn’t going to have a fair hearing no matter what. Too much media speculation and attention. I believe K’s accusers were indeed attacked, but I’m not convinced that they remember correctly whether K was their attacker.
Unbiased juries have to be sequestered for a very good reason. To prevent them from being influenced by the media.
Two – how much is K to blame?
I have no doubt most frat boys are idiots and super dumb when *******. But in many cases it was a case of people doing the worst things because the social environment was set up for them to act stupidly and harmfully.
The vast majority of Nazi concentration camp guards were not even Nazis or lifelong racists. They were poor Ukrainian or ethnic German young villagers from central and eastern Europe who got conscripted and didn’t want to fight the Russians. So they took the easy way out. Abusing defenceless prisoners was a whole lot safer than fighting an enemy that all Central and Eastern Europeans have regarded as a bogey for centuries.
Most concentration camp guards were moral weaklings, cowards or lemmings. They weren’t Hannibal Lecter-grade sadistic psychopaths.
The social system matters. In Central America you have hundreds of thousands of young gangsters who do the most ******* things not because they were born evil but because their social environment distorted them. Lots of Central Americans have fled to the US because they don’t want to join gangs. Central Europeans under the Nazi regime didn’t even have that choice.
I think even the dumb antics of frat boys is some kind of ‘mutual guilt’, ‘we’re in it together’ kind of bonding ritual. It binds people together in guilt and stupidity and the knowledge that they were stupid and shameful.
These rituals are bad because they create factions in society. They exclude other genders, races, ethnicities, religions, etc. They are useful only to the patriarchs who want to perpetuate their patriarchy. EG just by looking at the resume that says Pi Stupid Pi, the hiring partner at an investment bank will know that his potential hire went through the same stupid hazing rituals.
I would argue that seventeen year old teens are scarcely capable of being responsible, much less when they were *******. What you should go after, are the criminals who caused them to get ******* in the first place. Who were the people that sourced the alcohol and gave it to underaged party goers? Who owned the premises on which such shameful acts took place? These people have responsibility. If you are a parent and plied your young ******* with alcohol and left him and a bunch of other young boys with some younger girls, you can’t be that naive to think that nothing inappropriate would happen. You know very well that ‘boys will be boys’. The girls would be, if not raped, at least pressured into sex.
There is always someone responsible, because seventeen year olds don’t own or rent houses. Even if they could sneak an occasional bottle under the table, a seventeen can’t buy many kegs and crates and cart them all home without people knowing.
It’s not really constructive to go after the 17 year old dumb mean drunkards. Go after their parents and the ******* store owners and anyone else in a position of responsibility. If a ******* took place on their premises, let the parents cough up $500k in compensation per victim – or see their ******* named and listed as a young sex offender. If a shop sold a bunch of crates to an underaged person, let that shop licence be pulled, until there are no more alcohol sellers in the neighbourhood.
Three – how bad is are the guys’ conduct?
You need to remember, these were literally boys. Not legal adults. It’s totally not cool, and should be stopped and discouraged and condemned. But I do not believe K’s conduct at the age of 17 is relevant now. If there was a problem, his accusers have had decades to bring it up.
Justice delayed is justice denied. Both for the criminal, as well as for the victim. At the age of 17, K was not a big deal. He wasn’t a big shot. Even a 15 year old girl recognizes hierarchy, and young males are definitely low on the totem pole. Most fathers and male relatives will believe a young girl vs another young boy. I would even say that the accusations by young girls are more credible than the denials of young boys. Because everyone knows that ******* young males are likely to *******, and that young girls are often the targets of sexual assault or unwanted advances, a 15 year old Blasey would have found it easier to be believed than a 17 year old K.
To wait for decades is unfair, even to K the purported attacker, because he now has to contend with accusers who have a few vague memories rather than solid proof and strong testimony. When everyone’s memories were fresh and easily corroborated, he could have been investigated by his school and either expelled or given a humiliating censure by school authorities in front of his parents.
Young girls are rarely sexually predatory, and rarely use *******, and don’t act in a confrontational manner. So we girls generally do not have a sexual abuse problem. But young girls have also done a lot of things that we’re ashamed of. I certainly played my own pranks as a teen. Vandalism, shoplifting, gossip, plotting against someone else, minor car sabotage. To be true, girls’ machinations tend to be social rather than physical. But people are hurt bad also.
I’m sure we all know someone who attempted suicide. In many cases, the victim was a young girl who was prey to the bullying of other young girls. I am alert to this because I was part of an uncool clique in school that bonded together because of the need to protect ourselves from the cruel manipulations of higher status, Heather-like girls. If I did not have the benefit of my clique, I might have ended up like someone who attempted suicide.
Deborah Ramirez and Christine Blasey (and also Hillary Clinton) are not the mean-girl types who formed cliques and bullied others into suicide. But for every mean ******* teen guy, there is a mean bitchy teen girl out there. And I’ve always feared the mean girls much more than the mean guys. If you avoid rowdy parties and conduct yourself in nondescript, low profile fashion, mean guys don’t bother you. But there is nothing you can do to protect yourself if mean girls want to pick on you.
I’ve seen an asthmatic girl bullied by other mean girls for breathing.
Four - Guys exposing themselves at a ******* party?
Please!
This kind of crap happens. If you want to grow into an adult woman, you always come across crap men acting in a crap fashion.
The correct thing to do to a guy exposing himself like that is to smile and take his balls in your hand. Let everyone see you doing that. Then squeeze hard.
No girl will call you a slut for squeezing a sex harasser’s balls. The guy’s friends will laugh. The guy will back off and never disturb you forever. A girl I know actually did that to another boy who exposed himself in the presence of others, and her status went all the way up. For the rest of her school career she was treated with total respect by both boys and girls. (Admittedly, she was called nicknames that aren’t flattering from an adult POV, but the nicknames certainly sounded good to most of us youngsters so she wasn’t traumatized by the nicknames.)
The best thing about this?
13 or 15 years later, the guy actually apologized to the girl when he met her at a high school reunion.
The girl told him they were even. She did put him in a world of hurt, after all!
And?
They’re friends now. They may even have had sex together, but I can’t be sure.
Face it, men can be stupid. But if you can handle them in manly fashion, you can win their respect. And more important than that, you keep your own self respect.
Rather than spend the next few decades feeling traumatized by some guy who exposed himself, Deborah Ramirez could have punished the guy immediately, and wound up feeling damn good about herself instead.
The blame? I put it on the Catholic Church male patriarchy. They made Deborah Ramirez fear the penis, and fear touching the penis.
My parents protected me, but never taught me to fear the penis. It’s just a soft and sensitive organ.
One – despite often sounding conservative I am not a Republican voter. I vote for independent parties generally considered on the left, like many of my fellow academics.
Two – as an academic who earned her way through life I have always hated the White Male Patriarchy. I’m not just saying this because we’re an interracial website that loves making fun of white males. I really do not believe white men are automatically superior to other demographic groups, and I believe that in any genuinely meritocratic environment, white men should not make up more than 50% of the important people, recognized high achievers, etc out there.
I know it sounds selfish and self-promoting, but there are many white men in academia who are holding tenure when their places should be mine.
So I have zero sympathy for prep school drunkards who used their *******’s names and wealth and social connections to rise. I am 100% more sympathetic to Deborah Ramirez because I am way, way more like her than I am like Kavanaugh.
Regardless of whether K is guilty or innocent, I simply do not think adding another ex-frat boy white man to the Supreme Court will make the Supreme Court better.
But I still see many problems with the current controversy.
One – the accusers’ poor memory is very dangerous. Memory is fallible. Check out any book on how eyewitness evidence can be faulty.
Too many important details are lacking. Practically nothing is usable evidence, no concrete and verifiable details. It’s like a thesis that can’t be disproved because the thesis is arguing nothing.
When using witness evidence, you should interview them separately. Don’t do it in an atmosphere of media attention. Otherwise we might have a case where ten women were raped or attacked by ten separate frat idiots/ prep morons none of whom was K, and all ten end up fixating on K as their attacker just because he looks more or less like your standard white male frat idiot/ prep moron.
Ask all three, four, whatever number of accusers for details without having these details splayed across front news.
I fear that K isn’t going to have a fair hearing no matter what. Too much media speculation and attention. I believe K’s accusers were indeed attacked, but I’m not convinced that they remember correctly whether K was their attacker.
Unbiased juries have to be sequestered for a very good reason. To prevent them from being influenced by the media.
Two – how much is K to blame?
I have no doubt most frat boys are idiots and super dumb when *******. But in many cases it was a case of people doing the worst things because the social environment was set up for them to act stupidly and harmfully.
The vast majority of Nazi concentration camp guards were not even Nazis or lifelong racists. They were poor Ukrainian or ethnic German young villagers from central and eastern Europe who got conscripted and didn’t want to fight the Russians. So they took the easy way out. Abusing defenceless prisoners was a whole lot safer than fighting an enemy that all Central and Eastern Europeans have regarded as a bogey for centuries.
Most concentration camp guards were moral weaklings, cowards or lemmings. They weren’t Hannibal Lecter-grade sadistic psychopaths.
The social system matters. In Central America you have hundreds of thousands of young gangsters who do the most ******* things not because they were born evil but because their social environment distorted them. Lots of Central Americans have fled to the US because they don’t want to join gangs. Central Europeans under the Nazi regime didn’t even have that choice.
I think even the dumb antics of frat boys is some kind of ‘mutual guilt’, ‘we’re in it together’ kind of bonding ritual. It binds people together in guilt and stupidity and the knowledge that they were stupid and shameful.
These rituals are bad because they create factions in society. They exclude other genders, races, ethnicities, religions, etc. They are useful only to the patriarchs who want to perpetuate their patriarchy. EG just by looking at the resume that says Pi Stupid Pi, the hiring partner at an investment bank will know that his potential hire went through the same stupid hazing rituals.
I would argue that seventeen year old teens are scarcely capable of being responsible, much less when they were *******. What you should go after, are the criminals who caused them to get ******* in the first place. Who were the people that sourced the alcohol and gave it to underaged party goers? Who owned the premises on which such shameful acts took place? These people have responsibility. If you are a parent and plied your young ******* with alcohol and left him and a bunch of other young boys with some younger girls, you can’t be that naive to think that nothing inappropriate would happen. You know very well that ‘boys will be boys’. The girls would be, if not raped, at least pressured into sex.
There is always someone responsible, because seventeen year olds don’t own or rent houses. Even if they could sneak an occasional bottle under the table, a seventeen can’t buy many kegs and crates and cart them all home without people knowing.
It’s not really constructive to go after the 17 year old dumb mean drunkards. Go after their parents and the ******* store owners and anyone else in a position of responsibility. If a ******* took place on their premises, let the parents cough up $500k in compensation per victim – or see their ******* named and listed as a young sex offender. If a shop sold a bunch of crates to an underaged person, let that shop licence be pulled, until there are no more alcohol sellers in the neighbourhood.
Three – how bad is are the guys’ conduct?
You need to remember, these were literally boys. Not legal adults. It’s totally not cool, and should be stopped and discouraged and condemned. But I do not believe K’s conduct at the age of 17 is relevant now. If there was a problem, his accusers have had decades to bring it up.
Justice delayed is justice denied. Both for the criminal, as well as for the victim. At the age of 17, K was not a big deal. He wasn’t a big shot. Even a 15 year old girl recognizes hierarchy, and young males are definitely low on the totem pole. Most fathers and male relatives will believe a young girl vs another young boy. I would even say that the accusations by young girls are more credible than the denials of young boys. Because everyone knows that ******* young males are likely to *******, and that young girls are often the targets of sexual assault or unwanted advances, a 15 year old Blasey would have found it easier to be believed than a 17 year old K.
To wait for decades is unfair, even to K the purported attacker, because he now has to contend with accusers who have a few vague memories rather than solid proof and strong testimony. When everyone’s memories were fresh and easily corroborated, he could have been investigated by his school and either expelled or given a humiliating censure by school authorities in front of his parents.
Young girls are rarely sexually predatory, and rarely use *******, and don’t act in a confrontational manner. So we girls generally do not have a sexual abuse problem. But young girls have also done a lot of things that we’re ashamed of. I certainly played my own pranks as a teen. Vandalism, shoplifting, gossip, plotting against someone else, minor car sabotage. To be true, girls’ machinations tend to be social rather than physical. But people are hurt bad also.
I’m sure we all know someone who attempted suicide. In many cases, the victim was a young girl who was prey to the bullying of other young girls. I am alert to this because I was part of an uncool clique in school that bonded together because of the need to protect ourselves from the cruel manipulations of higher status, Heather-like girls. If I did not have the benefit of my clique, I might have ended up like someone who attempted suicide.
Deborah Ramirez and Christine Blasey (and also Hillary Clinton) are not the mean-girl types who formed cliques and bullied others into suicide. But for every mean ******* teen guy, there is a mean bitchy teen girl out there. And I’ve always feared the mean girls much more than the mean guys. If you avoid rowdy parties and conduct yourself in nondescript, low profile fashion, mean guys don’t bother you. But there is nothing you can do to protect yourself if mean girls want to pick on you.
I’ve seen an asthmatic girl bullied by other mean girls for breathing.
Four - Guys exposing themselves at a ******* party?
Please!
This kind of crap happens. If you want to grow into an adult woman, you always come across crap men acting in a crap fashion.
The correct thing to do to a guy exposing himself like that is to smile and take his balls in your hand. Let everyone see you doing that. Then squeeze hard.
No girl will call you a slut for squeezing a sex harasser’s balls. The guy’s friends will laugh. The guy will back off and never disturb you forever. A girl I know actually did that to another boy who exposed himself in the presence of others, and her status went all the way up. For the rest of her school career she was treated with total respect by both boys and girls. (Admittedly, she was called nicknames that aren’t flattering from an adult POV, but the nicknames certainly sounded good to most of us youngsters so she wasn’t traumatized by the nicknames.)
The best thing about this?
13 or 15 years later, the guy actually apologized to the girl when he met her at a high school reunion.
The girl told him they were even. She did put him in a world of hurt, after all!
And?
They’re friends now. They may even have had sex together, but I can’t be sure.
Face it, men can be stupid. But if you can handle them in manly fashion, you can win their respect. And more important than that, you keep your own self respect.
Rather than spend the next few decades feeling traumatized by some guy who exposed himself, Deborah Ramirez could have punished the guy immediately, and wound up feeling damn good about herself instead.
The blame? I put it on the Catholic Church male patriarchy. They made Deborah Ramirez fear the penis, and fear touching the penis.
My parents protected me, but never taught me to fear the penis. It’s just a soft and sensitive organ.
