CASR: On Rape

I have a lot of complaints about this book

I.

One of the primary differences between men and women that matters for their sex lives, Louise Perry argues in her book The Case Against The Sexual Revolution (my review here), is that men are far more likely to commit rape and women are far more likely to be victims of rape.

This is actually not as true as Perry believes. Studies normally define rape as penetration, such that a man forcing a woman into PIV is rape, and a woman forcing a man into PIV isn’t. Many studies simply fail to collect information about rape by envelopment. NISVS, which does, (if you sum up the “made to penetrate” and “rape” numbers) finds that about a third of rape victims are male. It’s also important to note that NISVS only surveys currently nonincarcerated people. Prison rape is so common that it’s plausible that an accurate survey of the American population would find that half of rape victims are male.

As usual, even when gender differences exist, they are greatly exaggerated by sexists (Perry says “no, I’m afraid that rape is a male crime”).

Perry argues against absurd claims by feminists that rape doesn’t exist in the animal kingdom. Because rape is common among animals including our closest relatives and is a human universal, we can assume that rape was selected for by evolution. In at least some circumstances, committing rape increases a person’s inclusive genetic fitness, a dubious honor it shares with infanticide, abuse of low-status individuals, and murdering all those people over there and taking their stuff.

Perry concludes, therefore, that there is no social effect on rape whatsoever, and in particular that rape is unrelated to patriarchy, misogyny, and men’s entitlement to women’s bodies. I know that these are jargon words which are associated with a certain group of people that many of my readers don’t like very much. Perry relies on this fact heavily to make her argument, because if she actually dug down into concretes it is obviously absurd. Like, the basic claim here is that absolutely none of the following beliefs have any effect on the rate of rape:

• It is impossible to rape a man because they always want sex.

• Raping civilians is a normal reward for soldiers after a successful battle.

• It is okay to both have slaves and to have sex with your slaves.

• It is impossible to rape your spouse, because they consented when they got married.

• Women usually say “no” to sex when they really want it, so you should ignore her “no.”

• If a woman doesn’t fight to the point of risking serious bodily injury, she didn’t value her purity very much, so it’s not really a crime crime to force her into sex.

• It is impossible to rape a woman who has already had sex.

• When men are aroused, they can’t stop themselves from committing rape.

We would also have to argue that the rate of rape is totally unaffected by:

• Whether it is legal to divorce your spouse because they raped you.

• Whether marital rape is legal.

• Whether threatening to punch someone in the face if they don’t have sex with you is legal.

• Whether raping men is legal.

• Whether, if a single woman has been raped, the usual penalty is to force her rapist to marry her.

• Whether women have access to their own money, so being unmarried doesn’t mean starvation.

• Whether women get to pick their own husbands.

My counterclaim is that there was probably a lot more rape back when people thought that it was impossible to rape your spouse and marital rape was legal. While there are no reliable statistics, I think we have already succeeded at massively decreasing the rate of rape primarily through changing social factors. This fact makes me optimistic about future progress in this area!

II.

Perry estimates that about ten percent of men are rapists. I don’t trust her numbers, not least because she provides absolutely no citation, and I’ll talk about that more later in the post. But at least it seems order-of-magnitude correct. If 80% of men were rapists, they wouldn’t have criminalized marital rape; if one in a thousand men were rapists, they would be so busy raping all the rape victims in the world that they wouldn’t have time for anything else.

Perry completely fails to engage with the implications of ten percent of men having committed rape.

Let’s say that we’ve solved all issues related to proving beyond a reasonable doubt that someone committed rape. Maybe everyone who has committed rape woke up bright blue tomorrow. You still could not imprison every man who has committed rape. The US has the highest imprisonment rate in the world; it imprisons a third of one percent of its residents. Imprisoning every rapist would require mass concentration camps at a scale absolutely unprecedented in human history. We couldn’t afford to have so many people idle; by necessity, we would become a slave state.

Here’s an exercise. Go on Facebook, scroll down your friends list, and imagine the sheer devastation that would be wrecked by putting every tenth man in prison. The children without a father, the family members thrown into poverty without their income, the essential jobs left undone.

One of my beta readers pointed out that this is only true given present rape sentences. If you imprisoned rapists for two years each, it would result in a mere doubling of the U.S. prison population. However, even if that policy saves us from concentration camps, the economic and social effects would still be dire.¹

Perry writes:

I could hardly have more contempt for rapists – I joke with my friends that I want to market a range of tiny guillotines to deal with rapists in a very direct manner.

This is a fundamentally unserious way of dealing with the problem, even as a joke. You cannot castrate ten percent of the male population, you cannot imprison them for lengthy sentences, you cannot kill them.

For most crimes, adopting a non-carceral approach is a matter of principle. Prison abolitionists believe in rehabilitation, in second chances, in treating every person with kindness, in setting aside vengeance. For rape, a non-carceral approach is sheerest practicality. We must teach people not to rape because our justice system otherwise can’t handle the number of rapists.

Perry claims:

There are two ways of reducing rape. The first is to constrain would-be rapists, for instance by imprisoning them, and the second is to limit opportunities for them to act on their desires.

It is a very remarkable claim that rape is the one crime where the number of perpetrators is fixed and constant, where deterrence and rehabilitation and prevention cannot have an effect, and where no one responds to incentives. It’s a good thing that this isn’t true, because in that case we’re at the “mass concentration camps?” option.

Deterrence is legitimately very difficult for rape. In general, for maximum deterrent effect, criminologists believe that punishment should be swift, certain, and fair. If you expect that if you shoplift, you’re definitely going to get arrested right away, then you aren’t going to shoplift. If you think you might get away with it, or if the punishment is going to happen in six months and so is a problem for Future You, you might shoplift.

I think this is actually a major reason why rape is so common. Punishment for rape isn’t and can’t be swift, certain, and fair. It is extraordinarily difficult to prove most rapes beyond a reasonable doubt. For most rapes, the only witnesses are the victim and the perpetrator. While physical evidence can establish that sex happened, there usually isn’t physical evidence that the victim didn’t consent. Rapists commit rape because they expect that they will get away with it.

I think feminists need to put more serious thought into how to enable swifter and more certain punishment for rape, even if the punishments are less severe. The punishment may have to be social, because you ought to require a much lower burden of proof to ostracize someone than to put them in prison. I don’t have the answers here, but I think this is worth more thought that people have put into it.

III.

If you accept Perry’s views, marriage is dangerous. One in every ten men is a rapist, Perry suggests. If you have a one-night-stand with ten men, you will in expectation have sex with one rapist (who may or may not actually rape you, since even rapists often have consensual sex). If you get married to a man, you have a 10% chance of marrying a rapist, who on Perry’s view can’t be convinced to behave otherwise and doesn’t respond to incentives. He will definitely rape you at some point in the marriage, almost certainly multiple times. Because very few people just commit rape and are otherwise very nice people, he will probably abuse you in other ways. And it will be extraordinarily difficult to leave him—even more so if The Case Against The Sexual Revolution’s preferred policies are implemented and divorce is made more difficult.²

You can, of course, try not to marry rapists. But one third of rape victims experienced rape at the hands of a current or former romantic partner, and I think very few of them were like “I am going to specifically date a rapist on purpose.” Sometimes people hide their true colors until you’re far enough into the relationship that they can make it nearly impossible to leave. Further, if no one dates or marries rapists and everyone is monogamous, then 1 in 10 women will be single, purely because of math. Perry completely fails to address what the 10% of women doomed to celibacy should do. Personally, I think we should engage in a little light polyandry, but no one listens to me about anything.

If I sincerely believed that 1 in 10 men were rapists whose behavior couldn’t be changed except through imprisonment or castration, I would not marry a man, and I would accept that no woman should want to marry me. That high a risk that the person you sleep naked next to every night wants to rape you is a totally unacceptable risk to run. I don’t think that any amount of screening gets it to an acceptable level—at least until all the rapists suddenly turn blue.

Honestly, nothing makes me support lesbian separatism more than reactionaries. “A bunch of men are uncontrollable rapemonsters, and one of the biggest purposes of your life should be to marry one"? No! If many men are uncontrollable rapemonsters, every woman should move to a woman-only community in the woods, well-stocked with frozen sex-screened sperm, vibrators, and shotguns.

I have a girlfriend, so you can tell I don’t believe this.

There has been remarkably little research about the vast majority of rapists who were never caught—especially undetected rapists off college campuses. But the little research we have is suggestive.

In general, undetected-rapist studies involve asking men³ questions like “have you put your penis in a woman’s vagina without her consent by using force?” A surprising number of men respond to this question with a “yes,” but I want to highlight that undetected rapist research inherently suffers from the twin problems of:

1. People who do not admit to committing felonies on surveys.

2. People who think it is funny to claim to have committed rape when they really didn’t.

But we go to war with the data we have, so let’s see what we can find out.

According to Trajectory Analysis of the Campus Serial Rapist Accusation, about 11% of college students have committed rape.⁴ However, men’s sexual perpetration follows one of three “trajectories.” The largest group, 93% of men, have a low/timebound risk of committing rape: either they don’t commit rape, or they do so on a single occasion. 5% of men have a decreasing trajectory: they committed rape in high school or early in college, but then stopped. 2% of men have an “increasing” trajectory of rape: they didn’t commit rape before college, but started committing rape in college.

And that 2% of men do a lot of rape. Although they make up only a fifth of rapists, they are responsible for three-quarters of rapes.

My read of this study (and the other undetected-rapist studies) is that there are roughly two groups of male rapists.⁵ By far the largest group of rapists is the “one-offs”: men who commit one or two rapes and then stop. I don’t know, because no one studies undetected rapists outside of college, but my suspicion is that they are almost all young. In general, men tend to age out of committing violent crime, and we know that most rape victims are young.⁶ The fact that most one-offs are on the “decreasing” trajectory points to this narrative being accurate.

While the concept of marrying a one-off makes nearly everyone (including me) uncomfortable, it seems likely to me that one-offs can make fine husbands. Many teenagers use drugs to excess, shoplift, or get in fistfights, and most of them grow up to be upstanding members of society; I think the same is true for many rapists. Indeed, realizing what you did was wrong and never doing it again speaks well to your character—although of course it does not erase the harm you did.

The appropriate approach to the one-offs is prevention. They eventually stop committing rape; we need to figure out how to get them to stop committing rape faster, ideally before they commit any rapes at all. Given the total absence of data about what one-offs are like, it’s difficult to come up with good prevention methods.⁷ This, however, will not stop me from wild speculation.

I suspect that one-offs often fall into bad social groups that make them think rape is normal and okay; this is a common cause of crimes like shoplifting or assault. Usually there’s no way to convince people that their friends suck and they should get new friends, but some steps can be taken: for example, colleges should be proactive about shutting down rapey fraternities.

While I’m not aware of a randomized controlled trial of its effectiveness, I’m personally excited by bystander intervention training, which teaches people to identify high-risk situations (such as someone taking a very drunk person off to their room to have sex with them, or a friend implying that they rape their romantic partner) and gives them strategies for intervention. Bystander intervention training has the potential to prevent rapes by itself, of course—both directly and by causing attempted rape to be met with swift and certain social punishment.

But it’s even more powerful as a way of teaching men not to rape. “Don’t rape! Rape is bad!” is moralistic and preachy; worse, it makes it sound like everyone kind of expects you to commit rape, and people tend to live down to expectations. “You would never commit rape, obviously, but those guys might commit rape. We think you can help stop them” communicates the social norms, creates the expectation that you are not a rapist, and in fact gives you a narrative where you’re a hero.

Finally, we must discuss alcohol. Alcohol disinhibits people in a way that increases their risk of being violent. It seems overwhelmingly likely to me that alcohol plays a role in many, if not most, one-off rapes. Perry urges young women not to drink to excess because they might get raped; I think young men⁸ shouldn’t drink to excess because they might commit rape. This is a common feminist gotcha, so I’d like to clarify that I’m completely serious here. Unfortunately, the young men who will take my advice are the most conscientious about not raping people, so just saying so won’t do much; but I think there’s a lot of potential for tighter alcohol regulation aimed at reducing drinking among men aged 14-25.

The second group is serial rapists. Male serial rapists are a relatively small percentage of the population, probably less than 2% of men.⁹ Serial rapists commit the majority of rapes. I think there are two appropriate approaches to this demographic.

First, they should removed from the population so they can’t hurt people. In my opinion, there should be an option to report your rape to the police without necessarily pressing charges. If three or four different people report the same person as a rapist, charges can be brought. An individual rape is a he-said-she-said case where it is very, very difficult to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If four different people who don’t know each other report that the same person raped them, that doubt is looking a lot less reasonable. As serial rapists commit the majority of rapes, putting them in prison puts everyone outside of prison at lower risk.¹⁰ Similarly, if someone has been accused of rape by multiple independent people, do not assign them a Rape Babysitter that keeps them from committing rape; kick them out of your friend group.

Second, individuals should screen serial rapists out of their dating pool. Fortunately, serial rapists are not very nice people, so this is not difficult. David Lisak, who specialized in studying undetected serial rapists, described their personalities:

When compared to men who do not rape, these undetected rapists are measurably more angry at women, more motivated by the need to dominate and control women, more impulsive and disinhibited in their behavior, more hyper-masculine in their beliefs and attitudes,¹¹ less empathic and more antisocial.

Serial rapists also seem to commit other violent crimes, such as non-penetration sexual assault, domestic violence, and physical and sexual abuse of children. Serial rapists test their victims’ boundaries to see if victims will put up with someone pushing past their “no”; as such, you should have a zero-tolerance policy for potential sexual partners who push past any no.

There are two very important caveat about these findings. First, it is pre-replication-crisis, and therefore perhaps fake. Second, the studies are of people who admit to felonies— it’s likely that they’re more likely to admit to other negative personality traits. However, I think that little is lost by not dating unempathetic, antisocial people who hate women and push boundaries. Maybe give the masculine, impulsive men a second look, but in general the most likely serial rapists are people no one should be dating.

IV.

Louise Perry has a great deal of advice to give to women. Some of it is pretty good (don’t date men who have traits correlated with being a rapist); some of it is good for some people and not others (don’t have sex with men who wouldn’t be a good father to your kids); most of it is terrible. In general, she believes that women should do what their mothers would have told them to do. Unclear how this is feminist, but whatever.

Perry’s advice about avoiding being raped is, characteristically, lacking:

If you wanted to design the perfect environment for the would-be rapist, then you couldn’t do much better than a party or nightclub filled with young women who are wearing high heels (limiting mobility) and drinking or taking drugs (limiting awareness). Is it appalling for a person even to contemplate assaulting these women? Yes. Does that moral statement provide any protection to these women whatsoever? No. I made this mistake many, many times as a young woman, and I understand the cultural pressure. But, while young women should feel free to get hammered with their girlfriends or highly trusted men, doing so among strange men will always be risky.

The perfect environment for the would-be rapist is and has always been the home. Perry has almost no advice for avoiding the rapes experienced by the eighty percent of rape victims who are raped by someone they know.

I am not like a Nightclub Expert personally—I have in fact never been to one—but I understand that nightclubs not only have a lot of observers but also have bouncers, whose entire job is interrupting this sort of thing. If bouncers are turning a blind eye to rape, then it seems the solution is not for individual women to avoid nightclubs, but for the government to shut down nightclubs with such a lax attitude towards preventing violent crime on their property.

Perhaps Perry means that, if you are at a nightclub, you might go home with a stranger while intoxicated, which is quite risky (although in that case I don’t know what the high heels have to do with anything). But, again, this seems very solvable. You could have a sober tripsitter whose job is to make sure that, even if your judgment is impaired, you stay with the group and don’t go home with anyone you’re not supposed to go home with. Perhaps you could have two, one to mother-hen the entire group and another to break off and search for stragglers. I am still not a Nightclub Enjoyer but I understand this practice to be quite common.

A few pages later, Perry gives further advice:

So my advice to young women has to be this: avoid putting yourself in a situation where you are alone with a man you don’t know or a man who gives you a bad feeling in your gut. He is almost certainly stronger and faster than you, which means that the only thing standing between you and rape is that man’s self-control… I know full well that this advice doesn’t protect against all forms of rape, including (but not limited to) incestuous rape, prison rape, child rape and marital rape. I wish I could offer some advice to protect against these atrocities, but I can’t.

Ooh! Ooh! I have an idea about what can stand between you and rape other than a man’s self-control! God made woman, but Samuel Colt made her equal.¹²

I understand that Perry is British, and the British have criminalized carrying any weapon for self-defense.¹³ But fixing that stupid law seems much higher-priority than, say, making divorce harder to get—especially if, like Perry, you believe that all men can beat all women in a fight, no matter how fit and well-trained the woman is.

Here in reality-based land, preliminary evidence suggests that non-weapon self-defense training significantly reduces a woman’s likelihood of being raped. Of course, whether you carry a weapon or practice martial arts, you have to train regularly for self-defense training to do any good at all.¹⁴ The time commitment means the tradeoff isn’t worth it for all or even most women. And many people are, say, disabled in a way that makes them unlikely to be able to meaningfully defend themselves. But if you’re in a high-risk group, I think it’s well worth considering doing Krav Maga as your form of exercise.

Both self-defense and more prosaic responses (like yelling “help!”) require a more basic skill, one that many women lack: being an asshole. In fact, self-defense training seems to reduce the rate of not only completed rapes but also attempted rapes—probably because self-defense training makes women more willing to confidently assert their boundaries and less likely to be easy prey for predators.

Harriet J, from Fugitivus, put it well:

If women are raised being told by parents, teachers, media, peers, and all surrounding social strata that:

it is not okay to set solid and distinct boundaries and reinforce them immediately and dramatically when crossed (“mean bitch”)
it is not okay to appear distraught or emotional (“crazy bitch”)
it is not okay to make personal decisions that the adults or other peers in your life do not agree with, and it is not okay to refuse to explain those decisions to others (“stuck-up bitch”)
it is not okay to refuse to agree with somebody, over and over and over again (“angry bitch”)
it is not okay to have (or express) conflicted, fluid, or experimental feelings about yourself, your body, your sexuality, your desires, and your needs (“bitch got daddy issues”)
it is not okay to use your physical strength (if you have it) to set physical boundaries (“dyke bitch”)
it is not okay to raise your voice (“shrill bitch”)
it is not okay to completely and utterly shut down somebody who obviously likes you (“mean dyke/frigid bitch”)

If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways.

And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes.

On the margins, most women and trans people should shift towards being more of a mean, crazy, stuck-up, angry, dykey, shrill, frigid bitch. Now, I’m not saying you should never be polite or give someone the benefit of the doubt. But if you never make a scene when your boundaries are crossed—if you are always nice and apologetic and give in easily—if it’s a greyed out option to repeat “I don’t want to talk about that” until the other person drops the topic, or to say “fuck off and leave me alone”, or to stand up and walk out, or to shove someone away if they’re touching you without your consent—you are not going to do that if someone tries to assault you, and you will be at higher risk.

Perry doesn’t advise you to be a mean, crazy, stuck-up, angry, dykey, shrill, frigid bitch. Of course.

V.

Sorry, I’m still stuck on the nightclubs thing. The above is my genuine anti-rape advice that people might actually do. But, um, actually it is easy to make hooking up with strangers far safer than marital sex?

In my home city, the San Francisco Bay Area, there are any number of sex clubs. When you have sex in a sex club, there are plenty of observers; at many clubs, there are also monitors who will step in if something unsafe or nonconsensual is happening. All you have to do is yell the house safeword and, if your sex partner doesn’t comply, they will be rapidly removed. Unfortunately, sex clubs are illegal in many cities, and even in San Francisco they are mostly used by kinky people and gay men.

In principle, if making casual sex safe were taken seriously, you could balance safety and privacy by having private rooms with a button which summons a monitor. These private rooms could even be attached to nightclubs!

I feel very comfortable having sex with strangers who are members of my community, because everyone lives in group houses. An individual stranger I’m sleeping with might be a rapist. It seems much less likely that all eight people in their house would ignore me yelling “Help! Rape! I’m being raped!”, given what I know about the average community member’s attitudes about rape. If you’re in an area with less insane housing prices or with a lower level of community trust, you can achieve the same outcome by insisting on hosting and having a housemate.

I realize that there’s not really a heterosexual constituency for these ideas: they’re really weird, they involve being publicly known as a slut, they involve planning ahead for casual sex instead of letting it just happen, some people don’t want housemates for some reason. But if I were a pseudo-Marxist evopsych feminist I would at least try to be a bit creative, you know?

VI.

Why does Louise Perry give such bad advice?

Susan Brownmiller is a radical feminist most famous for her claim that rape is “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” I disagree with many parts of this claim, including “conscious” and both “all”s, but I do think her argument has a correct core, at least for the way sexism manifests in our current society.

I read a lot about the 1920s lately, and social histories of the 1920s have this tendency to include paragraphs like (Dope Girls by Marek Kohn, pg. 52-53):

The most basic terms referring to women’s public presence are sexually loaded. A ‘public woman’ was a prostitute; so, still, is a woman who ‘walks the streets’. As Elizabeth Wilson notes, the issue in the nineteenth century was whether all women in public did not become public women; whether it was possible for female respectability to survive the promiscuous turmoil of the city. During the Great War, the boundary between public women and respectable women in public, already unstable, was felt to be undergoing further deterioration.

In some instances, women’s occupation of new territory met with neutral or approving comment. In the autumn of 1915, the Daily Mail reported on ‘Dining Out Girls’: ‘The war-time business girl is to be seen any night dining out alone or with a friend in the moderate-price restaurants in London. Formerly she would never have had her evening meal in town unless in the company of a man friend. But now, with money and without men, she is more and more beginning to dine out.’17 The significance of this was a feminine move into the nocturnal city. From the 1870s, an increasing number of establishments, such as the Criterion in Piccadilly Circus, had begun to cater to women at lunchtime. Now women at night were not necessarily women of the night. Their incidental behaviour in these places was also noted. Women began to smoke in public, and, as the ever-dependable Fischer and Dubois remark, they ‘began to make up not only in the presence of company in the most exclusive drawing rooms, but also in restaurants, cafés, and anywhere else in public’.…

Just as the euphemisms imply that prostitution is the fundamental condition of women in public, the complementary expression ‘working girl’ suggests the same of women earning money.

That is: there are two kinds of women, the Madonnas and the whores. If you have a job, or dine out in public, or walk around at night, or participate in public life in any way, you’re a whore.¹⁵

In this view, whores are not so much likely to be raped as they are metaphysically unrapeable: protection from men’s violence, sexual or otherwise, is for Madonnas; nothing you do to a whore matters. As late as the 1920s, the discovery that a sixteen-year-old girl had a boyfriend was enough to convince the newspapers that her murder was her mother’s fault for raising a whore (Interwar London After Dark by Mara Arts, pg. 47-48). Sometimes people work out that this is horrible, and instead retreat to “what do you expect?": “we’re not saying it’s okay to rape and assault and murder whores, but obviously men are going to rape and assault and murder whores, so if you don’t want to be raped or murdered, don’t be a whore.”

And of course this functions to limit women to their appropriate sphere, through a threat that is no less violent because it is diffuse. If you step out of line, you’ll be a whore, and whores get raped.

This is, I think, what Perry means by “do what your mother told you to do”: don’t be a whore.

Today, we have made quite a lot of progress. Almost no one would advance the theory that employed women or women who eat alone at restaurants can expect to be raped. The Madonna/whore divide is mostly vestigial, a cultural hangover from a worse time. Most women simply ignore claims that they’ll be whore if they get drunk, go to nightclubs, have casual sex, or hang out alone with men they don’t know well; the threat that once had teeth is now a yappy little dog barking to make itself feel important. And, for most women, nightclubs, casual sex, getting drunk, and alone time with men they don’t know are a fairly small part of their lives; women’s life chances usually aren’t fundamentally altered by avoiding those things.

But, man, it is predictive of Perry’s advice, isn’t it? BDSM, casual sex, nightclubs, high heels, drunkenness, alone time with men you don’t know: those are bad, nice girls don’t do that. Fucking at a sex club, avoiding masculine men, getting a divorce, seeking self-defense training, carrying a weapon, making a scene if your boundaries are pushed, being confident and loud and angry and (yes) even a bitch: whores do those things. It can’t be that being a whore makes you less likely to be a victim.

And of course Perry isn’t going to notice that the logical conclusion of “I have no advice on how to avoid marital rape, and 10% of men are irredeemable rapists” is “don’t get married.” Madonnas get married. Marriage is, like, the most central thing a Madonna does, other than have kids and be a virgin. Marriage has to protect you, right? It can’t be that men are as violent to good girls as they are to bad ones.

The Madonna/whore system is a tool of social control, not a serious method of risk avoidance. Even historically, there’s no reason to believe that there were more whores raped or beaten by clients or pimps than Madonnas raped or beaten by their husbands. Rape is a serious risk, and people should decide thoughtfully how much risk of rape they are willing to run to get other things they want. But, ultimately, you shouldn’t let fear of rape keep you in a cage.

All women and trans people should take a walk at night sometime. It’s beautiful, and it’s quiet, and you’ll discover that nothing bad will happen to you. Overcoming the fear of being a whore is important for women to be free.

1. As that would be a long tangent in an already very long blog post, I refer the interested reader to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

2. I have no response other than a keyboard smash to “we should be very worried about male violence” being followed by “we should make divorces harder to get.” No-fault divorce saves lives.

3. Yeah, no one asks women whether they committed rape.

4. This is presumably where Perry got her ‘ten percent of men are rapists’ number, although I have no idea why it didn’t occur to her that some men commit rapes after the age of 22.

5. My prior is that female rapists have different dynamics, although I don’t know because no one studies them.

6. Perry acknowledges this fact, and then concludes from it that men evolved to be into young women, instead of that maybe the people at highest risk of being a victim of violent crimes are the ones hanging around with the people at highest risk of committing it. Like, I in fact agree that men tend to prefer young women, but this is pure Perrycore. “I came up with an incredibly stupid argument for an obviously true fact!”

7. What would be ideal is qualitative research exploring one-offs’ narratives of their experiences, but unfortunately even men who admit to violent felonies on surveys are unlikely to admit to them face-to-face. If you are a one-off though, I’d appreciate you sending me an email from a burner account talking about what you did, why you did it, and why you stopped—for the sake of my own curiosity.

8. If it turns out alcohol plays a role in young women committing rape, we can try to get them to stop drinking too. However, my guess based on anecdote is that it doesn’t and that, when women commit rape, it’s usually in relationships and because they don’t realize men can be raped.

9. I expect that some men in the “increasing” trajectory will eventually grow out of committing rape.

10. And people in prison at higher risk, but fixing prison rape is a more complicated subject that I can’t fit in this blog post.

11. A lot of my readers are going to shudder at “hyper-masculinity”—does that mean being a masculine man is bad? The bad news is that the metric used in the study captures a common-sense definition of masculinity: men who are aggressive, decisive, unsentimental, independent, and action-oriented.

The good news is that the effect size was rather small. Because serial rapists are relatively rare, and masculine men are very common, it is clear that the vast majority of masculine men are not serial rapists. All things equal, it is probably better to avoid dating masculine men, but a sexist, boundary-pushing, feminine man is far worse than a nonsexist, boundary-respecting, masculine man. No one is dating with the sole goal of minimizing their chance of being raped: if you prefer independent, unsentimental, aggressive men, that’s a good reason to date them. And, of course if you’re an unsentimental, decisive, independent man who isn’t a rapist, you shouldn’t feel any guilt by association because those other masculine men suck.

12. While I enjoy my snappy one-liner too much to cut it, I do want to say that guns are not a good solution for marital rape, as the presence of a gun in the house increases the risk of an abusive husband impulsively escalating to murder. The National Domestic Violence Hotline has a useful safety planning tool that can help people in abusive relationships stay safe.

13. Including knives! Including pepper spray!

14. No, you cannot just get a gun and be able to use it for self-defense without regular practice. Guns are not, in fact, point-and-shoot weapons. If nothing else, if you carry, the person you’re fighting can take your gun from you and then you might die. Please carry responsibly.

15. This is why a lot of beliefs that seem nice at first glance are actually harmful to women. “Women are pure and good and incapable of doing wrong” usually comes along with the beliefs “women prove their purity and goodness by not being able to do anything interesting” and “impure, bad women deserve to be raped. Sluts.”