Links, Wednesday 3rd September

Never forget: while left-wing religious fundamentalists are okay on some issues, any commitment they have to human rights is basically accidental. Irish Times

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This in the context where many countries still require forced sterilisation or other unwanted medical interventions before a person is allowed to formally transition.

"Unlike in most of the countries that allow new gender recognition, trans people in Denmark now do not even need a medical expert statement, but can simply self-determine. There are still restrictions – the minimum age is 18, and there is a six-month waiting period before the person has to reconfirm their wish to have their gender legally changed – but the law seems to be moving in the right direction." Guardian

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What does it say about me that I sort of resent having to give credit to Nick Clegg for doing a good thing?

"The major new initiative, first announced by Nick Clegg in 2013, will see every five to seven-year-old at England’s 16,500 primary schools eligible for free dinners." Guardian

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Huh

"Your science teacher was wrong. Not about genetics as a concept -- that's pretty solid -- but about tongue rolling being an example of it. As early as the 1950s, studies had already been done that showed rolling your tongue isn't a trait passed down from your parents. It's something you learn." Cracked

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"In March 1985, Wales and Lesotho established the world’s first nation-to-nation twinning." M&G

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"The long-running attempts to break into high-profile users' accounts could explain how photos from as long ago as December 2011 – two months after Apple launched iCloud – could appear in the lists of files held by some group members." Guardian

Links, Monday 1st September

"The Commission of Inquiry into Policing in Khayelitsha has identified “serious, overlapping (policing) inefficiencies”. These include a lack of regular patrols, unanswered phones at police stations, poor detective work, wide-spread vigilante killings and policing based on “chance and luck” and not on “intelligence”." Groundup

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"I have regrets, of course. Nobody's saying we were saints. But in the whole time I was smuggling pot, I never saw a gun until those DEA agents knocked on my door. And no one died bringing that weed to America until the law came down on Steve [a cop who killed himself when he was indicted]." Cracked

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[TW: sexual violence]

This whole story is absolute horrible, and demonstrates how the police and universities continue effectively to condone rape by reinforcing impunity. Medium

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"or her book Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality, sociologist Kristen Schilt interviewed dozens of FTM (female to male) transgender individuals. One subject noted that when he expresses an opinion, everyone in a meeting now writes it down. Another noted, "When I was a woman, no matter how many facts I had, people were like, “Are you sure about that?’ It’s so strange not to have to defend your positions." When they suggested women for promotions, other men said, “Oh! I hadn’t thought about her”—they were able to promote women because their advice was taken more seriously. Personality traits that had been viewed negatively when they were women were now seen as positives. “I used to be considered aggressive,” said one subject. “Now I'm considered 'take charge.' People say, ‘I love your take-charge attitude.’"" New Republic

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"The treated monkeys were exposed to a lethal level of Ebola before receiving three doses of ZMapp starting three, four and five days after infection. The treatment reversed their symptoms including excessive bleeding, rashes, and liver damage. Three weeks after they were infected, no trace of the virus could be detected in the infected animals' blood." Guardian

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Well shit.

"Lesotho Prime Minister Tom Thabane confirmed on Saturday that the military had seized power in a coup and that he had fled to neighbouring South Africa in fear of his life." M&G

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"...research has generally shown that the strongest predictor of an accident isn't speeding, but variance from the average speed of traffic — and a car going five miles per hour slower than the surrounding traffic has a greater chance of causing an accident than one going five miles per hour faster than it." Vox

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"South Africa’s schools are a hostile environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex pupils, said gender activists this week. Because these LGBTI pupils do not conform to prescribed male and female gender roles, they get assaulted and bullied. A fifth have attempted suicide and a fifth have been raped or sexually assaulted, according to research." M&G

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"With rare exceptions, like the business meeting you wanted an excuse to miss, passengers are never happy to have their flight cancelled. But it may be good for you to have someone else’s flight cancelled. In particular, strategically cancelling a small number of flights and inconveniencing a small number of passengers can prevent delays and other hassles for a far larger number of passengers." New Republic

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:(

"China has endorsed a framework for the first direct election in Hong Kong in two years, but stopped short of allowing citizens of the special administrative region from directly nominating candidates, which activists have been demanding." Al Jazeera

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"The first woman I "healed" just had a cold. Like a lot of people who agree to stand up in front of a congregation and talk about their illness, she had a thing for exaggeration. That's one of the first things you learn about faith healing -- you're not the only one operating a con." Cracked

Links, Friday 29th August

I mean, obviously they didn't find real demons. But it's good to know they didn't even believe their own bullshit.

"When the Warrens were writing In a Dark Place, the book upon which the cosmically forgettable 2009 film The Haunting in Connecticut was based, they contacted horror author Ray Garton to help. Garton went into the project thinking that he'd be interviewing a family who truly believed they were being haunted, but quickly found that the family was deeply troubled, and no one involved could keep their stories straight. When he expressed his concerns to Ed Warren, he responded, "All the people who come to us are crazy ... just use what you can and make the rest up ... make it up and make it scary. That's why we hired you."" Cracked

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A memoir by a former white supremacist. Cracked

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"My sex utopia is not a place where no one fakes it but rather a place where sex is less numbers-oriented; where we don’t measure our own sexual prowess by charting our partner’s orgasms; and where the language of “giving” someone an orgasm is done away with altogether. Instead of asking, “Did you come?” we ask each other, “Do you want more? Is there something else I should do?”" Playboy

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"Beard observes that there is no word in Latin for “smile,” and makes the striking suggestion that the Romans simply did not smile in the sense that we understand the social gesture today." New Yorker

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"On no, our totally futile, counterproductive and inhumane policies have failed!" Guardian

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So Israel actually funded Hamas (or its predecessors) in the 1980s...

"‘The Islamic associations’, the Israeli weekly magazine Koteret Rashit observed in October 1987, ‘have been supported and encouraged by the Israeli military authorities’ who were ‘convinced that the activities [of the Islamists] would weaken both the PLO and leftist organizations in Gaza.’ While most of these activities were funded largely by contributions from the Gulf states, some former Israeli intelligence officers claim that money also came covertly from Israel itself." Ken Malik

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I think this is illustrative of how trying to determine whether a given person "is" or "isn't" a racist is kind of unhelpful. The entire white population cannot be divided up into paid-up KKK members on the one hand and totally blameless flowers on the other. Racism permeates our societies, and influences each of us in contradictory and complex ways.

"My white brother isn’t a racist – and he didn’t intentionally kill that man because he was black – but that’s not the point. In his case – in Ferguson and in so many other cases – we see the deaths of unarmed black men as “accidents”. And until the day we all recognize them as casualties of something much bigger, we will continue to see black men dead on the news." Guardian

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Hmm, this sounds a somewhat pessimistic note about the new BRT systems in South Africa. It just goes to show how much apartheid-era city planning continues to screw us over.

"Edgar Pieterse, director of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, says the predominant spatial condition of South African cities, low-density suburban sprawl, does not make particularly suitable terrain for BRT, which requires continued and very high rates of occupancy to sustain itself economically. In the arcane economics of transport planning, the relevant figure is known as the IPK, or index of passengers per kilometer. The World Bank considers that only systems with an IPK above 10 are likely to remain financially viable; the publicly available IPK figure for Johannesburg’s Rea Vaya stands at 2." Guardian

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An interesting perspective on the affordability of living in big cities with high rents (but good public transport). It's not clear how well this applies to London, since it's public transport is itself notoriously expensive.

"The New York Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit devoted to state and city government issues, recently ranked 21 large U.S. cities and found that New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., (also thought of as an expensive place to live) were actually among the most affordable. How is that possible? First, families in these cities tend to earn more. Second, they spend less money commuting. The typical New York household, for instance, pays a ludicrous amount of rent, but most don't own a car, since they can use the subway or a bus to get to work instead." Slate

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"... we do not expect straight people to become non-sexual beings at work or in public; we merely require that they have the good sense and self-control to avoid overtly expressing sexual desire in spaces where it is inappropriate. Real equality requires the same treatment for gay people. Sexual harassment is sexual harassment regardless of gender, but the almost involuntary act of noticing an attractive member of the sex(es) to which you are drawn is not a crime." Slate

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"Sex workers in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are hopeful that following the recent International AIDS Conference (IAC), held in July 2014, Melbourne, Australia, Papua New Guinea’s Health Minister, Honourable. Michael Malaba, will keep his public commitment to introduce legislation that decriminalises sex work and same sex relationships. In an UNAIDS led Community Dialogue Space session, Mr Malaba stated that he recognised that the decriminalisation of sex work was a key reform essential to tackling HIV/AIDS and that he was committed to reforming PNG’s “colonial era laws” which currently criminalise both sex work and same sex relationships." NSWP

Links, Monday 25th August

"Most of the people you talked to today were probably "atheists", in the sense that they don't believe in a personal deity who can be talked to and invoked; or in the sense that they don't give it very much thought one way or the other. But it is increasingly clear that what the "new atheists" disbelieve in is not the God of church and religion. It's also feelings and cultural meanings and subjectivity and the humanities and just about anything which isn't cold A = B logic. And if "atheism" means denying all that stuff as well, you have probably never met an atheist." Andrew Rilstone

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"In working to correct the white-supremacist media narrative we can end up reproducing police tactics of isolating the individuals who attack property at protests. Despite the fact that if it were not for those individuals the media might pay no attention at all. If protesters hadn’t looted and burnt down that QuikTrip on the second day of protests, would Ferguson be a point of worldwide attention? It’s impossible to know, but all the non-violent protests against police killings across the country that go unreported seem to indicate the answer is no." New Inquiry

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"One source close to developments in the DA, who is strongly aligned with Mazibuko’s group, told the M&G the biggest problem in the DA at the moment was Zille. “There is a lot of unhappiness with her leadership style… a lot of the problems boil down to her.”" M&G

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Related to the article I posted yesterday...

"Of the 2,850 men and women surveyed, the researchers concluded that men engaging in sex with a familiar partner have a greater chance of orgasm than women – a mean ratio of 85% of men compared with 63% of women. Lesbians, though, had orgasms 75% of the time. For the guys, it didn’t matter if they are gay, bi or straight – having a penis was enough." Guardian

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This sounds like nothing more than an accelerated form of the aid economy in general - give money to white people who want to "help", irrespective of how poorly they understand the situation, rather than to locals who could do a lot more with it.

"It was so easy to make money in Kabul that it felt like we were all citizens of some Gulf oil state. If you could string a few coherent sentences together into a grant application, odds were that there was some contracting officer out there who was willing to give you money, no matter how vapid your idea. Want to put on a music festival in Kabul? Here's a few hundred thousand. Shoot a soap opera about heroic local cops? A million for you. Is your handicraft business empowering Afghan women? Name your bid." Rolling Stone

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Various things to reflect on here. Like how so many people think it's somehow less of an abuse of human rights to incarcerate a transwoman in a men's prison just because the reason she's in prison is particularly horrible.

Also, doing the math, she's now been in jail for 21 years for a crime she committed when she was 17. Can we now even meaningfully identify her with the very troubled youth who did those terrible things? I think our use of jail time as the primary criminal sanction creates a paradox generally - the more time we give someone, the more different they'll be from the person who originally committed the crime at the end of it. So the more we punish, the less the punishment makes sense. Buzzfeed

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"Sex workers have been done with this sort of “blame the victim” stance — from both the mainstream and the political left — since its early circulation. But we are equally through with the so-called “savior mentality,” the perfumed version of the same refuse that has shamed us into silence and relegated us to the margins of movements for worker’s rights, union representation, and feminist struggles." Red Wedge

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Shit is getting real.

"Madonsela also accuses Zuma of being guilty of an attack on the constitution and the rule of law by granting Police Minister Nkosinathi Nhleko the power to review her findings... "Reports of the public protector are by law not subject to any review or second-guessing by a minister and/or the cabinet. The findings made and remedial action taken by the public protector can only be judicially reviewed and set aside by a court of law."" Times Live

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"The relationship between religion, interpretation, identity and politics can be complex. We can see this if we look at Myanmar and Sri Lanka where Buddhists – whom many people, not least humanists and atheists, take to be symbols of peace and harmony – are organizing vicious pogroms against Muslims, pogroms led by monks who justify the violence using religious texts. Few would insist that there is something inherent in Buddhism that has led to the violence. Rather, most people would recognize that the anti-Muslim violence has its roots in the political struggles that have engulfed the two nations... And yet, few apply the same reasoning to conflicts involving Islam. When it comes to Islam, and to the barbaric actions of groups such as Isis or the Taliban, there is a widespread perception that the problem, unlike with Buddhism, lies in the faith itself." Ken Malik

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A cute little story, of the sort I'm sure happens all the time. It occurs to me that you hear this sort of narrative much more often about women though, because we have this idea that women's sexuality is so much more "fluid". MindBodyGreen

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Huh, I did not know this.

"For the longest time, your best bet for seeing a Star of David was a church, or at a sketchy magician's place (the star was a common symbol in alchemy and magic). The modern Star of David didn't start to see widespread usage until the 19th century, when they redesigned a local flag for the Prague Jewish community and it struck a chord with the Zionist movement. So why did it become so prominent? Simple: Because it looks cool and is memorable." Cracked

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"Radical" feminism: guys, it's just a total coincidence that it targets just the same people despised and hounded by conservatives. Really, it's a "radical" position, promise.

"Jeffreys's work is particularly pernicious for the way it plays right into the hands of the political far right. Because Jeffreys is a lesbian who considers herself a left-wing radical feminist, Williams says, "It gives the right wing this notion, this appearance of an unbiased source" when people like Sean Hannity, who name-checked Gender Hurts on his daily radio show, cite her work approvingly." Village Voice

Links, Saturday 23rd August

In reference to Ferguson...

"As society has become increasingly divided, the police have been forced to perform the function of border control between the excluded classes and the rest, and have consequently adopted (or perhaps revived) authoritarian policing methods previously reserved to the colonies." Mimmoc

(I was linked to it from here)

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"I think that Zuma got a sense of what is coming for him. There is no hiding behind points of order any longer; the “democratic institutions” are no longer bunkers behind which he and his cronies can cower. The EFF may be vessels of populist outrage, they may be ersatz radicals in play-play costumes, they may be big babies screaming for a nipple. But this is what happens when you rule by erasure: you create a vacuum so large that something arrives to fill it." Daily Maverick

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[TW: whorephobia and violence]

"The sex worker killed in Kenilworth was a drug user. She had run away from home. She was working in a neighbourhood that, not long before her murder, had initiated a campaign against sex work called Krap (Kenilworth Residents Against Prostitution)...These residents, and indeed a ward councillor, saw Kleintjie, as she was known, as invisible at best and, at worst, a pest they wanted off their streets. No one saw her as “courageous”. No one saved her life." M&G

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[TW: whorephobia]

With reference to the last post, this is the sort of thing that some Kenilworth residents in Cape Town feel is appropriate to post in public. I am beyond disgusted. People's Post

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“...the prurience and sense of entitlement I see in anti-porn feminists is far greater than the average sex work consumer. And the latter are better at respecting boundaries.” “HOW DID YOU GET INTO THIS?: NOTES FROM A FEMALE PORN SCHOLAR.

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The usual reservations about Gladwell apply, but this is interesting. Basically an account of how members of various marginalised ethnic groups in the US have worked their way up into the middle class by way of organised crime. Importantly, they were able to do so primarily through industries that are illegal and so violent, but where the underlying interaction was essentially consensual (selling intoxicants, sex, etc).

He points out that the same mechanism appears to have failed for African Americans, which he attributes to far more stringent policing. He doesn't draw the obvious inference, but it seems unlikely that this is a coincidence. Nixon declared a "war on drugs" at around the same time that African Americans were starting to gain more control of the drug trade. The war on drugs is a war on the black population generally, but also an attempt to dismantle one of the few means of upwards mobility available to a marginalised population. New Yorker

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"There's a much slimmer chance that either of those cops would have patiently listened to the sob story of a drunk brown-skinned man about how he'd ended up on the pavement with his forearm around a white man's neck, and an equally slim chance that they'd have talked to him for a few minutes and sent him on his way and put the white man in the squad car.

Maybe the other guy was in a bad place, too. Maybe he had kids, too. Maybe he had a sad story, too.

I went home. The other guy didn't.

That's white privilege." RogerEbert.com

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"Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any “abuse” came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position." Vanity Fair

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1) State fails to use land, despite massive housing shortage
2) People use land
3) State illegally evicts people from land
4) State shoots people when people resist eviction
Groundup

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"The people you’re talking about may be in the room with you, even if you can’t visually identify them. They should have their experiences respected and reflected.

As a speaker or a source, always ask yourself: “Who is not in this room that should be?”" Sabrina Morgan

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"While faking orgasm narratives reflected themes of wanting to reinforce a partner's sexual skills, strategically ending sexual interactions, and suppressing feelings of abnormality and shame, best orgasm experiences showcased the power of interpersonal connection, the joys of masturbation and other non-penile-vaginal intercourse behaviours, and the significance of ‘transformative embodiment’. Implications for the relative failures of (hetero)sex, particularly in the context of gendered power imbalances, along with the importance of deconstructing the sexually ‘functional’ or ‘dysfunctional’ woman are explored."

(I have the pdf, if anyone wants to read the paper in full) T&F 

Links, Wednesday 20th August

I've heard similar experiences reported many times, but it's worth repeating: black people tend to experience much more racism, both overt and covert, in Cape Town than elsewhere in the country. My hypothesis isn't that this is because people there are necessarily more racist (my most shocking experiences of white people assuming I'd be comfortable with their racist rants actually happened in Joburg), but simply because they can get away with it more easily in a far more de facto segregated society.

"From Joburg? – Yes. You may just have found a friend, but remain sceptical.

Black or White? White – I wouldn’t risk it. Default mode: tactful. Jump to: “Cape Town is so relaxed so it’s great for a holiday.”

Black – breathe a long sigh of relief, you’re among friends. Default mode: Lift the floodgates of honesty. Tell them about that racist incident at a coffee shop and feel free to omit that joke you’d cautiously added to make it seem like you weren’t angry about the whole episode when really you were fuming. Exchange notes on the “blackest” hang-out spots." IOL

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"A critical insight seeped into me from working with my first few dozen clients: An abuser almost never does anything that he himself considers morally unacceptable... How many of you have ever felt angry enough at your mother to get the urge to call her a bitch?” Typically half or more of the group members raise their hands. Then I ask, “How many of you have ever acted on that urge?” All the hands fly down, and the men cast appalled gazes on me, as if I had just asked whether they sell drugs outside elementary schools. So then I ask, “Well, why haven’t you?” The same answer shoots out from the men each time I do this exercise: “But you can’t treat your mother like that, no matter how angry you are! You just don’t do that!”

If mothers are off-limits, and partners aren’t, then sex workers, whether or not they are partners (or exes, because breaking up with a violent asshole doesn’t make you safe), appear to be in a special category of “available for violence.” And it’s something that every sex worker with a partner has to think of, when they have an argument, when they decide what to share and what to hold back about their day at work, when they decide how to have the breakup conversation. Because we know that, no matter how lovely, how supportive, how kind and nonviolent our partners may be, they are that way in spite of societal messages, not because of them." Tits and Sass

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If you visit this site while logged in with your Google account, you can see everywhere you've taken your phone over the last 30 days. It's kind of cool, but it also means that a record of this information is kept by Google... Google Location History

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This is the kind of hatred that sex workers endure in our society. ANOTHER murder within a relatively short time. [CW: violence] IOL

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What fresh hell is this? This org wants to bring the "Swedish model" to South Africa, decriminalising the selling of sex but keeping the purchase of sex criminalised. But the Swedish model would still impose significant costs on sex workers. This is why sex worker-led organisations around the world are unanimously in favour of *full* decriminalisation, because this is best for the safety and well-being of sex workers. Instead of adding their voices to the good work being done by SWEAT, which has been advocating for decriminalisation for years, with increasing success, they choose to confuse the issue. Also note that the driving force behind the org is Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, who I would have hoped knows better :(

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"Even if slum life is better than rural poverty, there may be few grounds for celebration. Slums and poor people may not just co-exist; some people may be stuck in poverty because they live in slums." Economist

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"Mahmoud Mansour, 26, a Palestinian from Jaffa, has had to hire dozens of security guards after an anti-Arab group, Lehava, published details of his wedding reception online and called for Israelis to come and picket the wedding hall... Lehava, which campaigns under the slogan of 'saving the daughters of Israel', was revealed to have links with the Israeli government in a 2011 investigation by Haaretz, receiving up to $175,000 per year from the state, over half of its operational budget." Guardian

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I would highly recommend going to the exhibit (if you're in Cape Town) or checking out the Tumblr page. Groundup

Links, Sunday 17th August

This is really incredibly bad. Wow.

"Ramani is one of the very few black and female professors in South Africa. Out of the 4 000 professors in South Africa only 4% are black, according to an August 14 article in City Press. And fewer, still, are women...According to the City Press article “only 34 or 0.85% of the total number of South African professors are women”." M&G

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The only evidence-based condemnation of recreational nitrous oxide use I ever heard was from a chemist, who was basically like "It's a really powerful greenhouse gas, and only gets you high for like 30 seconds. Rather take LSD" Guardian

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"Christie is mostly confined to a wheelchair because motor tics in her legs make it difficult to walk and cause her to fall down stairs occasionally. Tics can become so violent that Tourette's syndrome sufferers have broken their own bones. Where's that scene in your shitty comedies, Rob Schneider?" Cracked

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Certainly not a complete solution (institutional racism and the actual laws being enforced are a much bigger problem), but definitely a step forward for police accountability.

"The police department of Rialto, California, has 115 sworn officers. In 2009 it became the first known police department to utilize [body wearable cameras]. A study that analyzed the use of BWCs in Rialto showed that use of force incidents dropped by 59 percent, and that civilian complaints about police misconduct decreased by 87.5 percent." Slate

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"Here's an astonishing fact about U.S. bike-shares: In seven years and some 23 million rides, not a single death has been tied to the programs." Slate

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Do different alcoholic beverages get you "different kinds of drunk"?

"In the end, our expectations can have tremendous sway over the perceived effects of an alcoholic beverage (or non-alcoholic, for that matter). In this light, the question of whether mixers or congeners affect our experiences with different alcohols seems almost inconsequential; if you whole-heartedly believe that a tequila shot is your one-way ticket to Bedlamtown, there's probably not a whole lot that can be said to convince you – or your body – otherwise." io9

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"During Operation Cast Lead, the Israel bombing of blockaded Gaza in 2008-9,  “a dog – an Israeli dog – was killed by a Qassam rocket and it on the front page of the most popular newspaper in Israel. On the very same day, there were tens of Palestinians killed, they were on page 16, in two lines.”" Independent

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"Ten-year-old girls want to believe in fairy tales. Take this pledge and God will love you so much and be so proud of you, they told me. If you wait to have sex until marriage, God will bring you a wonderful Christian husband and you’ll get married and live happily ever after, they said. Waiting didn’t give me a happily ever after. Instead, it controlled my identity for over a decade, landed me in therapy, and left me a stranger in my own skin. I was so completely ashamed of my body and my sexuality that it made having sex a demoralizing experience." Styleite

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Someone should do something about the growing scourge of policing in our society! *clutches pearls*

"New research released today by sex worker collective the Sex Worker Open University reveals that 17,318 police officers are active in Scotland, up by over a thousand since 2007; a boom some sources attribute to a rise in TV cop thrillers as well as an intense atmosphere of toxic masculinity within the force." SWOU

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Could we stop praising FW de Clerk? His only achievement was to CEASE  the systematic oppression of the majority of South Africa's population which he and his party had been busy with for decades. BD Live

Links, Wednesday 13th August

[TW: relatively graphic descriptions of violence]

"When artist Zwelethu Mthethwa goes to trial in November, will we see crowds, cameras and the ANC Women’s League? Or does nobody care very much when the accused is an artist – and the victim is a sex-worker?" Daily Maverick

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[TW: Child sexual abuse]

Very interesting piece about young people who experience sexual attraction to children and are committed to not acting on this attraction. It makes the point that stigma and mandatory reporting laws for health care providers often make it very difficult for people in this position to seek treatment. Medium

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"In the 2013 Healthy Kids Colorado survey, 37 percent of high school students reported that they had ever tried marijuana, down from 39 percent in 2011. The percentage who reported using marijuana in the previous month (a.k.a. "current" use) also declined, from 22 percent in 2011 to 20 percent in 2013. The state Department of Public Health and Environment, which oversees the survey, says those decreases are not statistically significant. But they are part of a general downward trend in Colorado that has continued despite the legalization of medical marijuana in 2001, the commercialization of medical marijuana in 2009 ..., and the legalization of recreational use... at the end of 2012" Reason

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"In yet another crackdown on shack dwellers in Philippi East's "Marikana" settlement, dozens of shacks were demolished by the City of Cape Town's Anti-Land Invasion Unit on Monday. Police providing back-up and support, humiliated, assaulted and jeered at residents as they were evicted." M&G

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And now for a completely different (i.e. more humane and effective) approach to informal urban development...

"A policy of legalising unplanned structures if they meet minimum standards means new arrivals to the Vietnamese capital can build homes without official permission, and get basic services" Guardian

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Just for a change of pace, here's one for the philosophers of science! I thought this was interesting because the author is a theoretical physicist, and he's thinking about theory change in much the way I've suggested it works, following a sort of "methodological scientific realism".

"If Einstein had gone to school to learn what science is, if he had read Kuhn, and the philosophers explaining what science is, if he was any one of my colleagues today who are looking for a solution of the big problem of physics today, what would he do? He would say, “OK, the empirical content is the strong part of the theory. The idea in classical mechanics that velocity is relative: forget about it. The Maxwell equations: forget about them. Because this is a volatile part of our knowledge. The theories themselves have to be changed, OK? What we keep solid is the data, and we modify the theory so that it makes sense coherently, and coherently with the data.”

That’s not at all what Einstein does. Einstein does the contrary. He takes the theories very seriously. He believes the theories. He says, “Look, classical mechanics is so successful that when it says that velocity is relative, we should take it seriously, and we should believe it. And the Maxwell equations are so successful that we should believe the Maxwell equations.” He has so much trust in the theory itself, in the qualitative content of the theory—that qualitative content that Kuhn says changes all the time, that we learned not to take too seriously—and he has so much in that that he’s ready to do what? To force coherence between the two theories by challenging something completely different, which is something that’s in our head, which is how we think about time." New Republic

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"The Samaritans produced a set of guidelines for the media reporting suicides some years ago, in conjunction with journalists, in the understanding that there is a genuine public interest in exploring why people kill themselves. Nobody has ever suggested a news blackout. But the Samaritans and other mental health groups like Mind say that, above all else, reporting details of the manner in which somebody killed themselves may give the depressed individual information they lacked or an idea they had not thought of and spur them to try it." Guardian

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I've said it before (http://deansassortedthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/04/culture-bound-syndromes-sexual.html) and I'll say it again: the "born this way" argument is a problem, and moreover relies on a bizarre false dichotomy between behaviour being either "freely chosen" or "inborn".

"The “born this way” argument is part of a wider trend of socially conservative LGBT campaigning. Exemplified by David Cameron’s approach towards same-sex marriage (“I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative, I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative”), it aims to use modern social advances to promote the so-called “traditional moral values” that were once used to justify the introduction of Section 28. Having drained out any ambition of sexual liberation or personal freedoms, such beliefs aim to essentially “normalise” the gay community under an imitation of “traditional”, heteronormative society. In fact, the celebrated campaigns of gay rights have almost all fallen into the trend of mimicking "traditional" relationships; with discussion of marriage, commitment and family." New Statesman

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A review of Tolkien's translation of Beowulf. Recommended solely for beautiful use of language. Prospect

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Definitely an issue that needs more attention. We've all accepted the new status quo in Egypt far too readily.

"I doubt many of us have even heard of the Rabaa al-Aadawiya Square in Cairo, where more than 1,000 protestors were massacred by Egypt’s military and police last August. This “indiscriminate and deliberate use of lethal force”, according to Human Rights Watch, represents “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history”" Guardian

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The first woman to win a Fields Medal for contributions to mathematics. Hopefully the first of many.

"Most of the problems Mirzakhani works on involve geometric structures on surfaces and their deformations. She has a particular interest in hyperbolic planes, which can look like the edges of curly kale leaves, but may be easier to crochet than explain. According to a citation released by the International Mathematical Union, Mirzakhani won the prize for her "outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces"." Guardian

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The gap in treatment for mental illness is shocking, and this is in a wealthy country with universal coverage.

"People are still routinely waiting for – well, we don't really know, but certainly more than 18 weeks, possibly up to two years, for their treatment and that is routine in some parts of the country. Some children aren't getting any treatment at all – literally none. That's what's happening. So although we have the aspiration, the gap is now so big and yet there is no more money," Guardian

Links, Monday 11th August

"He was then shot multiple times as he ran away." IB Times

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There's some good discussion in the comments about expropriation of private land versus more aggressive development of state-owned land.

Personally, I think we should be pushing for a relatively high land-value tax, the proceeds for which could be earmarked for land redistribution (preferably at market prices). It's fairer for all land-owners to be expropriated a little bit than for the few who happen to be on the land that is optimal for new housing to be expropriated a lot.

"He said the policy of evicting shackdwellers was often presented as isolated cases. “Yet, it is important to realise that they form part of a bigger process of policing urban land. Contrary to the City's justification, these evictions are not carried out to protect land for housing for the poor. They are designed to protect land from the poor.”" Groundup

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What a dick.

"Many fear that critics will have an even harder time voicing their opposition to what Erdogan calls “the new Turkey” under him as president." Guardian

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"“Bezos kept pushing for more” and suggested that Amazon should negotiate with small publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” This remark—a joke, one of Bezos’s lieutenants insisted—yielded a negotiating program that Amazon executives referred to as “the Gazelle Project,” under which the company pressured the most vulnerable publishers for concessions. Amazon’s lawyers, presumably nervous that such a direct name might attract an antitrust complaint, insisted that it be recast as the Small Publisher Negotiation Program." NY Review of Books

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This whole thing is utterly gross, from the headline on down. So little basic human empathy, so much middle-class bigotry and pearl-clutching. Times

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People who support the policies of the Israeli state tend to complain that Israel is "singled out" for criticism, and often attribute this to anti-Semitism. It is true that people in the West (including, for current purposes, South Africa) tend to be much more upset by atrocities committed by Israelis as opposed to the (in some senses) more extreme atrocities committed elsewhere in the world, but I think this is only slightly attributable to anti-Semitism.

The usual explanation, which I think is partly right, is that the Israeli state is economically and militarily supported by Western states, notably the United States, and thus Westerners are in some real sense more directly accountable for these atrocities. But I suspect a deeper explanation lies in the ways that Israel is culturally and symbolically "part" of the West. A large proportion of Jewish Israeli's are of European descent, are educated in and travel to the West, hold dual citizenship in the West, speak English and fall into the Anglophone cultural sphere, etc. Moreover, many Jewish people living in Western countries have cultural and family ties in Israel. My view is that Israel isn't held to an unusually high moral standard because its people are regarded as the Semitic "other", but for precisely the opposite reason: because we think of Israelis as part of the collective "us".

Of course, you could argue that it represents a racist/colonialist "anthropology of low expectations" to demand less of those we perceive as non-Westerners, but I'll leave that idea for another day. Thoughts?

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"A body of a 19 year old sex worker was discovered in a parking lot in Kenilworth on Sunday morning the 3rd of August by residents. The young woman was allegedly stabbed three times and left for dead. Just weeks before, SWEAT attempted to meet with Kenilworth ward councillor to discuss concerns about violence and increased stigma in Kenilworth." SWEAT

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Does anyone have thoughts about how to respond to this politically? On the one hand, I'm glad Russian efforts to destabilise eastern Ukraine appear to be failing. On the other hand, shelling of a densely populated city... Could this have been (or still be) resolved through diplomatic means? Guardian

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Come on, guy. You've done enough damage. Just go. Guardian

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No surprises there.

"Daniel Radcliffe has described his acting in one of the Harry Potter films as so "complacent" and "one-note" that he struggles to watch it." Guardian

Links, Sunday 10th August

Embarrassing, but true

"Now, there are two things you must remember about philosophers and philosopher-questioning. They do not do this intentionally, and they are not trying to annoy you.

In academia, philosophers question everything for their living. Remember, analytic philosophers love to look for inconsistencies in arguments and continental philosophers love to relate everything historically. When philosophers take someone seriously (aka they think you are great), they will question you; in fact, they will fire questions at you until you go crazy.

This is a good thing! This means that you have impressed your philosopher enough that they want to engage you. Remembering this will help you when the questioning gets aggravating." Philosiology

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Although I can see some arguments against, it seems like a solid case

"This has always been the underlying logic of the railroad time scheme — clockface times should be abstracted away from considerations of solar position. But the initial introduction of railroad time was controversial. It struck people as unnatural. Today, however, we are very accustomed to the idea that time zone boundaries should be bent for the sake of convenience and practicality. That means we should move to the most convenient and most practical time system of all — a single Earth Time for all of humanity." Vox

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"What Lockwood, Nathanson, and Weyl find is that by increasing the financial incentive for top talent to pursue careers in finance and law rather than teaching and research, the Reagan tax reforms reduced overall economic output while increasing the pre-tax share of income earned by top earners. In other words, rather than giving the middle class a smaller slice of a bigger pie and making everyone better off, these reforms gave the rich a larger slice of a smaller pie and made only them better off." Vox

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"If you want to scream or cry or complain, if you want to tell someone how shocked you are or how icky you feel, or whine about how it reminds you of all the terrible things that have happened to you lately, that's fine. It's a perfectly normal response. Just do it to someone in a bigger ring.

Comfort IN, dump OUT." LA Times

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"... autocorrect tends to enforce primary spellings in all circumstances. On idiom, some of its calls seemed fairly clear-cut: gorilla warfare became guerrilla warfare, for example, even though a wildlife biologist might find that an inconvenient assumption. But some of the calls were quite tricky, and one of the trickiest involved the issue of obscenity. On one hand, Word didn't want to seem priggish; on the other, it couldn't very well go around recommending the correct spelling of mothrefukcer. Microsoft was sensitive to these issues. The solution lay in expanding one of spell-check's most special lists, bearing the understated title: “Words which should neither be flagged nor suggested.”" Wired

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The structure of this explanation appeals too much to collusion/conspiracy (if a given business could get the same amount of work out of someone in half the amount of time and at say 75% of the pay, wouldn't they do it?), but it's an interesting point nevertheless.

"But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work." Raptitude

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"I hate to say it, but this country is not comfortable with the idea of young, intelligent black people – especially men. They're treated as the exception to the rule. It's the same with chavs – I have plenty of white, working-class friends from east London who read Max Planck and Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. But their story is never going to be told because they're not supposed to be like that." Guardian

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"Elaine's bf constantly starts texts but never sends them. E: "If I get the bubble w/ three dots I want a text!" J:"The bubble's not binding!"" Tickld

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The ANC asks allegedly non-political civil servants to contribute a fixed recurring proportion of the income to the party. Gwede Mantashe defends this on the grounds that it's not a large proportion of their income :/ M&G

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A black man has been shot and killed by police for carrying around a toy gun in a shop that sells toy guns. Also real guns. Bet

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"... as my weekend wore on, a funny thing happened: I registered the fear and displeasure of strangers less and less. I went from faking being absorbed in my book as I maintained a nervously wide stance, to actually being absorbed in my book, forgetting that my legs were splayed out like I was holding a beach ball between my knees...

I now believe that some of those men I had raged against had probably genuinely not noticed how much space they were taking up. That’s the thing about privilege: It can be mighty blind.

If I had hit that point of purposeful obliviousness after just 72 hours of acting weird on the subway, I couldn’t even imagine how much the fear of your fellow riders, combined with a lifelong shot of male privilege, would allow you to block out." Bustle

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"Not only are all the main characters White, but the servants, thieves and assassins are played by Africans. Guys. This is racist. Ridley Scott is one of those guys who’s apparently hellbent on historical accuracy but doesn’t care enough to cast a person of color as Moses or a goddamn African queen while simultaneously filling out the rest of the movie with Black servants and thieves." Medium

Colouring in the "grey areas" in sexual assault

[TW for sexual violence]

This is the second part of two posts concerning sexual consent and sexual assault. The first is here.


Introduction

In an article in Cosmopolitan magazine that was widely criticised (correctly, I think), Laura Sessions Stepp coined the term "gray rape". She uses this term to refer to:

sex that falls somewhere between consent and denial and is even more confusing than date rape because often both parties are unsure of who wanted what.

I think Stepp is correct that we are confused about sexual consent and sexual violence, but misdiagnoses the source of the confusion. The problem, in essence, is that we refer to idealised paradigm cases of "rape" and "not rape" when judging instances of sexual behaviour, and are unable to articulate concerns about problematic behaviour that falls outside these paradigms cases. This is a point frequently repeated by feminists. Indeed, the terms "date rape" and "acquaintance rape" were created precisely to pick out cases of sexual assault that differ from the old "stranger hiding in the bushes with a knife" stereotype.

I would argue that the same problem continues, however, in somewhat more subtle forms. On the one hand, as I argued in my previous post, the paradigm of "enthusiastic consent" constructed by some feminists can erase the agency of those who give genuine consent that doesn't result from sexual desire. On the other hand, the continued emphasis on coercion in the date rape paradigm leaves many of us unable to pinpoint problems with sexual behaviour that is not straightforwardly coercive. My project in this post is to colour in some of the resulting "grey areas" by trying to articulate a more complete moral picture, where coercion represents one end of a spectrum of morally problematic behaviour. Thus while the aim of the Cosmopolitan piece was arguably to avert moral discussion of ambiguous cases, and so depict them as simply unfortunate occurrences that are not the fault of anyone in particular, my aim is precisely to focus moral scrutiny upon them.

I gave a brief account of my underlying moral theory in my first post, though I will extend it somewhat here. The basic premise of this theory is Kant's principle of humanity, which states that we should not treat other people simply as means to our own ends, but treat their interests or desires as valuable ends in their own right. Following this idea, we can think of the seeking out of sexual consent as an attempt to ascertain that the other parties concerned have a genuine interest in the proposed sexual act. Conversely, the essential wrong of sexual violence is indifference or outright hostility to the interests of the other party in a sexual act. In the case of indifference, the other's body becomes a mere means for the aggressor to pursue their own sexual pleasure (or other interests). In the case of hostility, the aggressor might specifically seek to override the other party's interests, as an act of spite, or in order to assert or consolidate power over them.

The virtue of this theory is that it gives us a framework for thinking about not only the paradigm cases of sexual assault, but also the "grey area"-type cases. The essential points to be made here are: (i) that concern for another person's interests comes in degrees, and a person can exhibit insufficient concern while not being totally indifferent or hostile; and (ii) this lack of appropriate concern is often manifested in manipulative or otherwise problematic behaviour. In what follows, I will discuss some cases illustrating these basic points.


A Disclaimer
Before discussing the true "grey area" cases, however, I'd first like to discuss some cases of coercive sexual assault (i.e. which do not fall into grey areas) but nevertheless can result in moral confusion because they fail to conform to the dominant paradigm in other respects. It seems to me that most of the examples cited by Stepp fall into this category. The biggest source of confusion here is that the dominant paradigm produces certain expectations about the relationship that is supposed to exist between assailant and victim, and the way that a victim is supposed to feel during and, as a survivor, in the aftermath of an assault. In the dominant paradigm, the experience of being sexually assaulted is without exception uniquely awful and traumatising, the survivor does not have a close relationship with the assailant, and certainly does not retain any feelings of intimacy or warmth towards them after an attack, the survivor is motivated to obtain vengeance upon the attacker, and so on. While many instances of sexual assault do conform to various aspects of this paradigm, many do not.

While not diminishing the experience of those who are traumatised by an assault, we should recognise that many people report the experience as being deeply unpleasant, awkward and/or confusing, but not resulting in any lasting trauma. Moreover, many survivors are sexually assaulted by intimate partners or other loved ones, and have no desire after the assault to see these people in prison or even punished at all. Often what they really desire is simply an acknowledgement of wrongdoing and an apology. Or perhaps a survivor doesn’t want to think of themselves as a survivor of sexual assault, with all the connotations of powerlessness and being “damaged goods” that our society loads upon such a person. Someone who has been assaulted under one of these "alternate paradigms" may be left unable to articulate their grievance precisely because terms like "rape" and "assault" seem too "big" - and too laden with legal significance - to capture their experience and how they would prefer their grievance to be addressed.

For example, in the course of demanding that the full force of the law be brought to bear on rapists, Jenny Diski describes her own experience of being raped as a young teenager as follows:

It was a very unpleasant experience, it hurt and I was trapped. But I had no sense that I was especially violated by the rape itself, not more than I would have been by any attack on my person and freedom.

It is also this sort of consideration which leads Charlotte Shane to write:

I resist calling any of my bad sexual experiences rape, at least in part because their impact on my sanity and happiness was negligible in the long term.... To call it rape seems too self-pitying, too histrionic. It feels like the entry card to a club in which I have no place, a group populated by PTSD sufferers and girls who cry themselves to sleep at night. It automatically implies a level of emotional damage that did not take place.

Another recent personal account of this sort of dynamic playing out is described here. Again, this is not to deny that these experiences are rape, merely to try and explain why many survivors might decline to explain their experiences in these terms. These sorts of experiences, while undoubtedly of very serious concern, are not the main subject of my discussion.

Why there are grey areas
Although the grey area cases I present below might appear prima facie quite distinct, an important feature that many have in common is that the person performing a sex act does so in fear of negative consequences if they do not perform it. It is morally relevant whether or not those negative consequences are under the control of the person attempting to elicit sexual behaviour, but a person can also be morally culpable for taking advantage of another person’s fear of negative consequences which are under neither person’s control. What seems important is whether a person, A, knew (or ought to have known) that a prospective sexual partner, B, feared negative consequences for refusing sex, and whether A worked to lessen the impact of those consequences (as opposed to simply ignoring them or working to increase them).

That these negative consequences may vary in severity – from severe physical injury or death on one extreme, to mild embarrassment or awkwardness on the other – is precisely what creates such a broad “grey area” between coercive sexual assault and blameless sexual behaviour. We in effect define “consent”, and thus “sexual assault”, by reference to a particular point along a spectrum of increasingly constrained choices. For legal purposes, it is often worth drawing essentially arbitrary lines like this. But I will not be making any argument about where the legal line should fall exactly. Rather, I hope that I can facilitate greater moral scrutiny of behaviour along the entire spectrum.

The gendered dimension of this picture also should not be ignored: it is a feature of our society that a woman is often made to fear negative consequences from refusing sex with a man. This concern is at the heart of the radical feminists’ argument for problematising consent in heterosexual sex generally. My view is that this argument makes a worthwhile point, but risks “flattening out” the complex landscape of consent in yet another way. Even within a system characterised by gross power balances, we can and should distinguish degrees of moral culpability, and these distinctions might help us to interrogate and improve our own interpersonal behaviour.

It is also worth pointing out that an analogous set of “grey areas” arises due to differences in cognitive capacity between parties to the sex act. Broadly, the concern here is not that B will suffer negative consequences from refusing sex, but that B might be permanently or temporarily lacking in cognitive capacity in such a way that even voluntary sexual activity might not reflect their considered interests. The cases in question here may concern intoxication with alcohol or other drugs, developmental immaturity, mental disability and so on. Although I will not deal with these cases in detail, I simply wish to point out that they appear to have a similar “structure” to the cases involving fear of negative consequences, in that cognitive capacity might be diminished to various degrees. Sex with a person who is mildly drunk might be morally questionable, but not as questionable as sex with someone who is unable to carry on a conversation or understand clearly what is happening.


The cases
As I outline grey area cases involving fear of negative consequences, I will proceed roughly from “darker” to “lighter”, though I don’t intend that these rankings should be viewed as definitive. The darkest cases, naturally, are those corresponding to the paradigm of coercive assault – sexual acquiescence is obtained through threat of violence, or by actual use of force to perform a sexual act upon an unwilling person. The next set of cases worth discussing are those where coercion is not applied to generate acquiescence for a particular sexual act, but where acquiescence is obtained within a generally coercive context. For example:

1. A has been violent or emotionally abusive towards B in the past. B detects that A is building up towards abusive behaviour over an unrelated issue, and initiates sex as a way of “pacifying” A. They proceed to have sex.

It is possible that a sex act in these contexts would be prosecuted as a sexual assault under existing legal definitions. But I think attempting to determine whether B “consents” in this case, as we would have to in a legal context, somewhat misses the point. Although we should hold A accountable for the way in way they have constrained B’s sexual choices, to blame A for this alone, as we tend to do by asking whether or not this particular event counts as sexual assault, is to miss all the other ways in which A’s pattern of abusive behaviour has unjustly constrained B’s choices. B makes a choice under serious constraints, and is for setting up those constraints that A should be blamed, and possibly punished, not the choice that B makes within them.

Slightly less morally problematic cases arise as A’s relative power over B becomes less pronounced. For instance:

2. A is B's employer, and has the power to fire B and thus significantly hinder B's life prospects. A asks B to have sex, and B agrees.

Unlike many of the examples cited here, this pattern of problematic behaviour has a name – sexual harassment – and is often attached to legal sanction. However, a similar dynamic arises in relationships that involve an informal rather than formal relationship of dependency. For example:

3. A has offered to do B a significant favour, which B has gratefully accepted. Some time later, A asks B to have sex, and B agrees.

In these sorts of cases, the behaviour is more blameworthy if the threat of negative sanction is for any reason more plausible or salient. This might arise if, for instance, A is known to have fired employees for refusing sex in the past, or if this pattern has manifested previously at the company where they work.

The previous two cases concern a relationship of financial or material dependency, but similar problems can arise where there is a relationship of emotional dependency:

4. A and B are in a long-standing sexual relationship, but when B declines sex, A often becomes angry and they end up having an unpleasant argument. On one particular occasion, A asks B to have sex, and B agrees. (It should be mentioned that this sort of situation is often compounded with material dependency, for instance, if B is dependent on the income that A brings into their joint household.)

More subtle yet are those occasions when the threatened negative consequence takes the form of relatively temporary social unpleasantness. We might describe such a situation as “pressured consent”, various examples of which are discussed here under the stronger title of "forced consent". The cases generally follow this schema:

5. A asks B to have sex. B expresses unwillingness by offering some reason why sex is not possible or desirable at this time. A offers a counterargument or rejects the proffered reason as inadequate. B then assents, and they proceed to have sex.

Finally, negative consequences might arise out of general societal expectations that are never explicitly articulated between the parties:

6. B visits A’s home. While they are both there, A asks B for sex. B worries that A would be disappointed and feel rejected if B declined, and so accepts. They proceed to have sex.

What creates the negative consequence here is the general societal norm that a certain sort of context is “expected” to result in sex, and that a person who wanted sex might legitimately be disappointed if this was not the outcome. This is a highly, though not exclusively, gendered norm: women are, in many contexts, made to feel that they have been rude or even malicious if they have “led on” a man. And it is the manifestation of a more general norm that one (male) person’s desire for sex is in some sense more morally significant than another (female) person’s desire not to have sex on a particular occasion. It is, of course, ironic that this norm facilitates morally problematic behaviour precisely by encouraging a feeling of moral discomfort or guilt in the very party who is likely to be harmed by the behaviour!

The attribution of blame to A is, however, somewhat complicated in this type of case. While B is acting partly from fear of negative consequences rather than any personal interest in sex, A does nothing to actively bring about this fear. Indeed, A might not even realise that B feels this way. The coercion is exerted “impersonally”, by a general social climate, not by A directly. Moral culpability in this sort of case arises through negligence. If it is a general fact about the society in which they live that a person is B’s situation is expected to provide sexual favours, regardless of their interest in sex, then A is arguably under some obligation to ascertain this fact and act to alleviate this expectation in the particular situation. It is not my intention to develop this argument in any depth, or to define precisely the degree to which A is culpable. All I wish to state here is that, contrary to what many people may believe, this is not a morally neutral situation. A’s behaviour ought to be subject to moral scrutiny, and could be improved.


Conclusions
I have argued that the essential wrong of sexual assault lies in lack of respect for the interests another person has in having (or not having) sex, and that this lack of respect may come in degrees. The class of morally problematic behaviour upon which I focus is the application of fear to secure compliance for sex in which the coerced party has no interest (or an interest against). In practice, we define “consent” as agreement which is secured without inducing the fear of “sufficiently” serious negative consequences, and I would argue that some such definition (though not necessarily the existing one) is probably appropriate for legal purposes. I have argued, however, that sex which is appropriately deemed “consensual” may still be morally problematic, and ought to be interrogated in our interpersonal moral reckonings around sex.

Links, Wednesdy 6th August

Look at these ridiculous statistics. At my alma mater, UCT, just 4.3% of professors are black, and 87.4% are white. I know this is a problem that takes time to correct, but this seems way too slow! Scribd

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"The Sex Tape" does not look like a good film, but I do notice something interesting about it. Jason Segel (age 34) and Cameron Diaz (age 41) play a couple in a long-term romantic relationship. When was the last time we saw a Hollywood film that romantically paired an older women with a younger man and it wasn't played for laughs (like the "cougar" scenario)? Wikipedia

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"...many Palestinian speakers say—understandably—that they wish their civil rights weren’t at all dependent on how Jewish American twentysomethings judge their situation. They long for a day when they won’t have to plead their case to well-intentioned people—Jewish or non-Jewish—who possess political power but will never fully understand their reality." Slate

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I think I've posted this before, but it's worth posting again...

"Womens’ supposed greater sex drive was an argument for their inferiority, but once the assumption became reversed, no one argued that mens’ lustfulness was a sign of a fundamental irrationality that should preclude them from business and politics. Rather than a handicap, a large sexual appetite was positive once it came to be seen as a characteristic of men. Women, being passionless, supposedly lacked the drive and ambition to succeed. Much like sex, the public realm of work was dirty and distasteful, hardly suitable to womens’ delicate sensibilities. Since their instincts were maternal rather than sexual, they were best suited to staying virtuously at home with the children. Black women and poor women, on the other hand, were firmly shut out from the dainty flower role. They were still seen as suitable for both work and for satisfying white mens’ sexual urges that were no longer appropriate for their wives." Alternet

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This struck me as an interesting little anecdote, indicating just how much poor municipal performance in SA results from lack of managerial capacity.

"A municipal turnaround specialist who comes across like a bearded Superman with a Stellenbosch MBA, Sibande and his team drew up a three-year plan to move Okhahlamba from having 80 audit ­comments to securing a clean audit. They made it in two." City Press

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Too many good points to select any one out for a quotation. It's long, but just read it. New Statesman

Saturday, 2nd August

Good though slightly technical discussion. I think it's generally acknowledged that it would be better overall to shift taxation from corporations to people, though this gives rise to more problems in assessing how much is owed by investors in profit-making corporations. I tend towards a wealth tax, personally, but then it becomes hard to asses the value of non-traded assets (such as non-public corporations). Any thoughts? Slate

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Folks, if there are any white men you care about, don't praise them. They get enough unearned praise as it is, and THIS is what can happen if they start to feel *really* confident in their own opinion-forming faculties. Guardian

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I can see the rationale for this, but it seems poorly thought out. The basic problem here is supply-side restrictions on property development (especially in the nice areas that foreigners are likely to want to purchase). This creates a zero-sum dynamic, where every property of land bought by a foreigner is one less that can be owned by a South African. Although we can't create land, we certainly can create *property*, in the sense that we can built upwards and create quality improvements. There's no reason why property can't be as useful an "export" market as conventional agriculture or manufacturing. (though I add the proviso that a large proportion of the total tax take probably should come from land or property taxes). The South African

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It's a good start, but I reckon a lot of toilets at UCT could be retrofitted to be gender neutral in short order if they really went for it (often it's simply a matter of changing some signs around). Varsity Paper

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Very interesting story. An evangelical Christian doctor who provides abortion services in Southern US states where he's just about the only provider around.

"He said the kind of Christianity that does not radicalize you with regard to human suffering is inauthentic—cheap and easy grace." His "come to Jesus" moment occurred in Hawaii. He was teaching at the university when a fundamentalist administrator began trying to ban abortions in the school clinic, throwing students with an unwanted pregnancy into a panic. One day, he was listening to a sermon by Dr. King on the theme of what made the Good Samaritan good. A member of his own community passed the injured traveler by, King said, because they asked, "What would happen to me if I stopped to help this guy?" The Good Samaritan was good because he reversed the question: "What would happen to this guy if I don't stop to help him?" So Parker looked in his soul and asked himself, "What happens to these women when abortion is not available?" Esquire

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"An aggressive response to cuteness, it appears, it “completely normal.”" Sociological Images

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"Weird Al seems like a good sort, and he obviously brings a lot of joy into people’s lives. Most people who have heard it seem to love ‘Word Crimes’. On one level it’s a fun, playful tune. But beneath that it’s a disheartening example of just how routine and acceptable language shaming is in mainstream culture." Stan Carey

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A pretty thorough take-down of that terrible, extremely one-sided New Yorker piece that was presented as a neutral assessment of the conflict between trans activists and TERFs. 

"Serano’s emails also reveal that Goldberg’s omissions of any discussion of the the harassment and abuse endured by the trans community at the hands of Cathy Brennan and her ilk was not an oversight or due to lack of awareness." Autostraddle

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So the Prime Minister of an EU member state has come out against both liberalism and democracy. Dandy. 

""I don't think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations," Orban said, according to the video of his speech on the government's website. He listed Russia, Turkey and China as examples of "successful" nations, "none of which is liberal and some of which aren't even democracies."" Vox

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"This is not Rosie the Riveter. Nope, sorry. I know that a lot of people think that this is a RR picture. It isn’t. What it is is an anti-union poster from Westinghouse. If you look closely in the bottom right-ish area, you can see the W. That’s the Westinghouse symbol." What a Witch

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“transgender people end up as collateral damage in TSA’s security theater. Any security system that relies on gender and ‘anatomical anomalies’ will always disparately affect transgender and gender non-confirming people.” Autostraddle

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"rue or false, data can dictate people’s responses, which can set up a nasty feedback loop in which false data becomes more true. This is one of the biggest sources of big data contamination: It does not work on a closed system. Instead, it puts unproven ideas into the social mediasphere—for example, that certain Google autocomplete results are racist and sexist—and those ideas get bounced around, reiterated, and reflected in the very phenomena big data is measuring...That’s why big data’s greatest trick has been convincing the world that it works." Slate

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Some useful background context to the present Gaza crisis and Hamas' ceasefire conditions (though it now looks like Israel intends to end combat operations unilaterally, this STILL failing to implement the ceasefire agreement of 2012).

"During the three months that followed the ceasefire, Shin Bet recorded only a single attack: two mortar shells fired from Gaza in December 2012. Israeli officials were impressed. But they convinced themselves that the quiet on Gaza’s border was primarily the result of Israeli deterrence and Palestinian self-interest. Israel therefore saw little incentive in upholding its end of the deal. In the three months following the ceasefire, its forces made regular incursions into Gaza, strafed Palestinian farmers and those collecting scrap and rubble across the border, and fired at boats, preventing fishermen from accessing the majority of Gaza’s waters.

The end of the closure never came. Crossings were repeatedly shut. So-called buffer zones – agricultural lands that Gazan farmers couldn’t enter without being fired on – were reinstated. Imports declined, exports were blocked, and fewer Gazans were given exit permits to Israel and the West Bank." London Review of Books