Our wise and wonderful friends, the feminists, have a wise and wonderful saying that you have undoubtedly heard. Yes. In their wonderfully wise way, our feminist friends have made known to us that
"men can stop rape." Now, you might wonder if that maxim contains any wisdom at all, or then again, you might wonder if I am only being a wise guy. So watch closely. I am going to insert this wondrous wisdom into the bench-vise of intellectual violence, cranking the jaws tighter and tighter until the specimen cracks open and parts fly out upon the floor. That way, we can scrutinize them! You would remark nothing phallic in the manner of force applied to the task.
Very well, keeping hardlogic on track in the spirit of rhetorical discipline, what does it mean to say that "men can stop rape"? On the face of it, very little. And yet quite a lot. But here, let me break it down by stages, sparing no pains either to myself or to my audience. Everything in this examination turns upon two major points, or rather questions: who or what is "men", and what does it mean to say that men can "stop" rape? I will address these points in order.
To address the first major point, the subject noun "men" is the plural of "man" -- meaning an adult male human. So if we say that "men can stop rape", we must understand that more than one adult male human is involved in the projected action. This plurality of male participation may be classified under a dual heading: men severally, and men jointly.
To speak of men stopping rape
severally: almost any man is theoretically able to stop rape, either by personally ceasing a rape action once started, or by intervening to terminate such an action. And any number of men, at separate times and places, will have the like capacity. So even if these men act alone and unknown to each other, they are endowed with the same potential -- to either personally cease a rape action, or intervene to terminate one. Therefore it is permitted to class these men as a set or ensemble, from whence we may fairly conclude that
men severally can indeed "stop rape".
And to speak of men stopping rape
jointly: if two or more adult human males happen upon a rape action in progress, it is possible for them to intervene and terminate this by acting in concert. Since they are more than one in number, it is here permitted to say that "men have stopped rape" rather than "a man has stopped rape." In the unusual case of gang rape only one man at a time is raping. Hence it is theoretically possible that his gangmates will have a change of heart and intervene jointly at any given moment to stop him. So again it is permitted to say that "men have stopped rape."
To sum up, I have noted that "men" is the plural of
man. I have further noted that "men" can have two distinctly different senses, so that the possibility of a solitary male stopping rape is not excluded. And I think that exhausts the possible meanings of "men" in the statement "men can stop rape".
But a final nuance bears consideration. It is possible not only for men jointly or severally to stop a rape action in progress, but for them to intervene in a scenario in order to forestall a merely
contemplated rape action. That is to say, the parties would intervene in the scenario before the would-be rapist had effected penetration. In such case it would not be correct to say that they had stopped rape, but only that they had prevented it.
The matter thus far given, is laid out with monotonous clarity and thoroughness. It merely states something that most people could work out for themselves if they would so inhumanly tax their own mental endurance. All in all, it does not meaningfully advance the project of human understanding. It is trite. And it has no utility. Yet the subject of the talk is important. So I have treated it, accordingly, as a matter of import.
I will now address the second major point, referred to in the beginning. The verb "to stop" must be disambiguated even as the noun "men". I paved the way to this task, in the first part of the talk, when I sketched rape scenarios. But now I must take it a step further. The proposed or imagined project of "stopping" rape may be understood under a dual heading:
concretely stopping it, and
abstractly stopping it.
We have already made clear what it means to concretely stop rape. It means to either personally desist in a rape action, or to compel somebody else to so desist. We have also underscored the distinction between stopping rape and preventing rape. The talk can now move forward in the light of these understandings.
So, to abstractly stop rape does not mean to stop a precise episode of rape, but to make rape vanish as an earthly phenomenon. Thus, to declare that "men can stop rape" might also mean that men can terminate the very
existence of rape. But if you think for a minute, you will see that "stopping" rape in this globally existential way can only mean to prevent rape -- any rape -- from
ever getting started in the first place. That is what it would take.
So it is easy to see that if "men" are to make rape entirely stop existing on earth, they must operate
preventatively. Very well, how might they go about this? Briefly, in one or both of the two ways which follow.
The first way, already touched upon, is that men would physically intervene to prevent rape from happening. Now, if this is to be effective toward ending the very existence of rape, one would need to mobilize enormous numbers of men for the task, and to organize these men for both patrolling and intelligence-gathering purposes. Effectively, one would need to create an anti-rape police state. I am sure that most feminists, male and female alike, would find nothing to
not like about such a scenario. The female feminists would find ample opportunity to make life miserable for men in general, while the collaborationists (and their white knight helpers) could make life miserable for particular classes of fellow men whom they wish to bully.
The second way, would be for men to never attempt rape under any condition. This would count as prevention by self-restraint, and it would occur through moral persuasion, simple fear, or a combination of these. Either way, the operative force would be
mental pressure to not rape. To make such a thing happen, one would need to launch a preventative teaching campaign, a preventative terror campaign, or both. Theoretically, if men
en masse were sufficiently lectured, or terrorized, they just might never commit any rapes -- and so rape would cease to exist as a phenomenon.
And so we could say that "men" had "stopped rape" -- meaning that they had stopped rape in the abstract by preventing rape in the concrete occurrence. But please note that men could effect this only as a
joint project. They could not do it
severally. For although it is possible for a solitary male to intervene in a concrete rape episode, and stop it, it is not possible for a solitary male by any personal action short of magic, to abolish rape in the abstract. He, as an individual, has no such capacity. That would be a manifest absurdity. So if you confront some individual man with the imperative that "men" should stop rape
in the abstract, that man would be quite within his rights to say, "don't look at me. I am not 'men'!"
Now, concerning anti-rape moral persuasion efforts: these are already underway, since anti-rape preaching and pedagogy -- targeting the young especially -- have been a great industry for many years. This can certainly be ramped up a lot more.
As for the terror campaign: that was earlier sketched, in part, when we spoke of an anti-rape police apparatus. Another way to foment terror, is to lubricate the criminal justice machinery with more innocent blood by making it easier to obtain rape convictions. Feminists similar to Catherine MacKinnon are working hard, mostly behind the scenes where they can't be seen, to make this dream come true by securing the necessary innovations in the legal system. The beauty of this strategy is, that even though it would punish a lot more actual rapists by locking up everybody who got hauled into court in the first place, it would be effective as terror EVEN if none but the innocent were destroyed. Eventually, men would shun the company of women altogether for the sake of their own survival, so that in theory no women would get raped. Of course, this does not take male-on-male prison rape into account, but since the feminists don't care about that, I'm sure they'll be happy with the solution. As for the collaborationists and white knights, they won't care because they think that false rape conviction only happens to MRAs, proletarians, losers, and assorted goofballs.
Very well. I think I have squeezed everything that you could ever hope to squeeze from the feminist wisdom that "men can stop rape" -- unless somebody can think of anything I missed. It is difficult to understand why they keep saying this, since what they are saying is either insignificant or morally grotesque. Personally, I think it is just a way to rape your mind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs708GxGGuQ
I am aware that some people might think it was a bad thing that women couldn't vote. And I am aware that other people might think it was a good thing.
Well as you might expect, I am a third way thinker upon this subject. I would submit that women's historical lack of voting rights was neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Rather, it was a morally indifferent state of affairs, based on a cultural consensus that was shared by men and women alike in the past.
Our ancestors lived in a very, very different world than we do, and their cultural norms were very, very different from ours, yet undoubtedly befitting to their world -- a world mysterious and unknown to us nowadays. Who are we to judge?
So was it really, inherently, such a horrible thing after all, that women could not vote? And WHY was it inherently horrible? Why should it even matter? Did the average woman in those days honestly feel that voting was "all that"? Seriously. . . who are we new-fangled ones to judge the men and women of past times for their very different way of life, with its very different demands and pressures that we can no longer entirely fathom?
And needless to say, we all know that most men could not vote during most of those same years in which women could not vote, and that there was only a trivial time lag between full manhood suffrage and full womanhood suffrage.
Something else that nobody to my knowledge has pointed out, is that electoral politics as we nowadays know it is a VERY recent historical innovation. It virtually did not exist before the French Revolution, and came into focus gradually beginning in the early 1800s. So it is utterly vacuous to say that women were deprived of the vote for "centuries", in case anybody wanted to say such a thing. In fact, the time window in which women couldn't vote was historically very brief, and for most of that same stretch most men were similarly deprived. Yes, the more you whittle this down, the more trivial it looks.
As above, was it really such an unspeakable crime that the female population couldn't always go to the polls during that comparatively trifling span of years?
Or is that entire concept nothing but feminist historiography, meant to wring pathos out of history for present-day political purposes by the device of retrojection? That would certainly conform to standard feminist tricknology, wouldn't it?
Once again, I believe that women's historical lack of voting rights was neither a good thing nor a bad thing, but a morally indifferent thing which ought to concern us very little at the present day. And I even think I am being generous, for to be intellectually honest I believe a case might be constructed that it was a positive good in the context of those times. However, I am willing to settle for "morally indifferent", and call it quits.
Look, it's simple. Once upon a time, women didn't have the voting franchise because societal norms found nothing amiss about such a lack. Then times changed, norms changed, and women were admitted to the franchise. That's all. And women were never, at any point along that general story-line, "oppressed." Only within the feminist narrative were they "oppressed" -- but there are other narratives.
Furthermore, women were never at any time deprived of any rights. You see, women's "right" to vote simply did not exist in the first place -- or not during the period when the so-called deprivation occurred. I mean that "rights" are only a figment. Only a mentation. Only a notion. Only a construct. Rights do not exist in their own right. They are not some mystical pure essence which hangs in the air all by itself -- they must be conjured into existence by a strictly human will-to-power, and fixed by law or custom within the frame of a social contract. Through the entirety of human history, people have been inventing new "rights", in train with new appetites, where none existed previously. And I expect they will continue to do so.
Of course, the idea of repealing women's voting right NOWADAYS, is silly and not to be recommended. It would be a counterproductive measure, to say the very least.
But in conclusion, I wish that second and third-wave feminists would shut the hell up with their dishonest, self-laudatory agitprop on the theme of "women couldn't vote". Women can vote now. Okay? So the feminists need to get over it, and move on, and quit tooting on that rusty old horn. It is getting really, really old.
It really is.