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Ted Ts'o is a rape apologist and why this matters
(This post contains some discussion of rape and sexual assault but does not go into any specifics)
There was a brief controversy at Linux.conf.au back in 2011. The final keynote speaker gave a compelling presentation on online privacy, including some slides containing sexualised imagery. This was against the terms of the conference policies, and resulted in an apology from the conference organisers and the speaker. The situation was unfortunate but well handled, and that should have been the end of it.
Afterwards, there was some pushback on the conference mailing list. Concerns were raised about the policy being overly restrictive and the potential for it to be used to stifle speech that influential groups disagreed with. I don't agree with these arguments, but discussion of why policies have been implemented is completely natural and provides an opportunity for a community to determine what its expected standards are.
And then Ted Ts'o effectively called rape victims liars[1]. At first I assumed that this was just some sort of horrific failure to understand the implications of what he was saying, so I emailed him to check. The reply I got drew a pretty clear distinction between the case of a drunk college student raping another drunk college student in their room and the case of knifepoint rape in a dark park. You know, the difference between accidental rape and rape rape. The difference between the one any of us might have done and the one that only bad people do. Legitimate rape and the "rape" that those feminists talk about. The distinction that lets rapists convince themselves that they didn't really rape anyone because they weren't holding a knife at the time.
Ted Ts'o argues that only a small percentage of rape really counts as what people think of as rape. Ted Ts'o is a rape apologist.
There's an ongoing scandal in the UK at the moment. A well known DJ, Jimmy Savile, died last year. He grew up in a working class family, but through hard work and natural talent was one of the most significant figures in promoting pop music in the UK in the 50s and 60s, and worked in various parts of the BBC for the best part of 30 years. He spent significant amounts of time raising money for charity, and it's estimated that he raised over £40 million for various causes. Since his death, around 300 people have accused him of sexually abusing them. The BBC is desperately trying to explain why it cancelled an expose shortly before it aired. Multiple people who worked there at the time claim that everyone knew he was involved in indecent activities, but saying anything would risk both their career and the charities that depended on his fundraising. Nobody said anything, and he was allegedly free to continue his abuse.
Ted Ts'o is a significant figure in the Linux kernel community. He has expressed abhorrent beliefs that damage that community. Condemnation was limited to a mailing list with limited readership, meaning, effectively, that nobody said anything. Last week the Ada Initiative published a blog post pointing out the damage that did, and I realised that my effective silence was not only helping to alienate 50% of the population from involving themselves with Linux, it was also implicitly supporting my community leadership. I was giving the impression that I was basically fine with our community leaders telling people that it wasn't really rape if you were both drunk enough. I was increasing the chances of members of our community being sexually assaulted. Silence is endorsement. Saying nothing is not ok.
In the absence of an apology and explanation from Ted, I'll be interacting with him to the bare minimum that I'm compelled to as a result of my job. I won't be attending any Linux Foundation events he's involved in organising. If I'm running any events, I won't be inviting him. At a time when we're finally making progress in making our community more open and supportive, we don't need leaders who undermine that work. Support organisations who encourage that progress, not the people who help drag us back.
Footnotes
[1]The original archive has vanished. I've put up a copy of the relevant thread here. Throughout, Ted states that he's actually arguing against the idea that women need to be frightened of sexual assault, and not against the definition of rape. Except saying things like
(Update 2012/10/30: Adam Williamson suggests in this comment that this mail is a better example of Ted's behaviour - there's some explicit victim blaming and a lot of "Is that rape" questioning with the obvious implication that the answer should be "no". Ted Ts'o is a victim blaming rape apologist.)
(Update 2012/11/05: It's been suggested that I haven't been sufficiently clear about which of Ted's statements justify my claims. So, here we go.
In this mail, Ted links to and endorses this article. He explicitly links to it because of its treatment of rape statistics. Quoting directly from that article:
Ted explicitly endorses an article that claims that a significant percentage of reported rapes are false. The study that generated that figure is held in poor regard by other researchers in the field - Australian police figures indicate that 2.1% of rape accusations were classified as false. Ted asserts that he was trying to argue against poor use of statistics, so it's a fair assumption that he agrees with the alternative statistics that he's citing. Ted believes that many rape victims are making false accusations. Ted believes that many rape victims are liars.
Again in this mail, Ted argues against a claimed figure that 1 in 4 women have been sexually assaulted. One of his arguments is that
There was a brief controversy at Linux.conf.au back in 2011. The final keynote speaker gave a compelling presentation on online privacy, including some slides containing sexualised imagery. This was against the terms of the conference policies, and resulted in an apology from the conference organisers and the speaker. The situation was unfortunate but well handled, and that should have been the end of it.
Afterwards, there was some pushback on the conference mailing list. Concerns were raised about the policy being overly restrictive and the potential for it to be used to stifle speech that influential groups disagreed with. I don't agree with these arguments, but discussion of why policies have been implemented is completely natural and provides an opportunity for a community to determine what its expected standards are.
And then Ted Ts'o effectively called rape victims liars[1]. At first I assumed that this was just some sort of horrific failure to understand the implications of what he was saying, so I emailed him to check. The reply I got drew a pretty clear distinction between the case of a drunk college student raping another drunk college student in their room and the case of knifepoint rape in a dark park. You know, the difference between accidental rape and rape rape. The difference between the one any of us might have done and the one that only bad people do. Legitimate rape and the "rape" that those feminists talk about. The distinction that lets rapists convince themselves that they didn't really rape anyone because they weren't holding a knife at the time.
Ted Ts'o argues that only a small percentage of rape really counts as what people think of as rape. Ted Ts'o is a rape apologist.
There's an ongoing scandal in the UK at the moment. A well known DJ, Jimmy Savile, died last year. He grew up in a working class family, but through hard work and natural talent was one of the most significant figures in promoting pop music in the UK in the 50s and 60s, and worked in various parts of the BBC for the best part of 30 years. He spent significant amounts of time raising money for charity, and it's estimated that he raised over £40 million for various causes. Since his death, around 300 people have accused him of sexually abusing them. The BBC is desperately trying to explain why it cancelled an expose shortly before it aired. Multiple people who worked there at the time claim that everyone knew he was involved in indecent activities, but saying anything would risk both their career and the charities that depended on his fundraising. Nobody said anything, and he was allegedly free to continue his abuse.
Ted Ts'o is a significant figure in the Linux kernel community. He has expressed abhorrent beliefs that damage that community. Condemnation was limited to a mailing list with limited readership, meaning, effectively, that nobody said anything. Last week the Ada Initiative published a blog post pointing out the damage that did, and I realised that my effective silence was not only helping to alienate 50% of the population from involving themselves with Linux, it was also implicitly supporting my community leadership. I was giving the impression that I was basically fine with our community leaders telling people that it wasn't really rape if you were both drunk enough. I was increasing the chances of members of our community being sexually assaulted. Silence is endorsement. Saying nothing is not ok.
In the absence of an apology and explanation from Ted, I'll be interacting with him to the bare minimum that I'm compelled to as a result of my job. I won't be attending any Linux Foundation events he's involved in organising. If I'm running any events, I won't be inviting him. At a time when we're finally making progress in making our community more open and supportive, we don't need leaders who undermine that work. Support organisations who encourage that progress, not the people who help drag us back.
Footnotes
[1]The original archive has vanished. I've put up a copy of the relevant thread here. Throughout, Ted states that he's actually arguing against the idea that women need to be frightened of sexual assault, and not against the definition of rape. Except saying things like
This one does a pretty good job of taking apart the Koss / Ms. Magazine study, which is the source for the "1 in 4" number. For example, it points out that over half of those cases were ones where undergraduates were plied with alcohol, and did not otherwise involve using physical force or other forms of coercionis difficult to read in any way other than "Half of the people you're counting as having been raped haven't really been raped", and favourably referring to an article that asserts that the rate of false rape reports is probably close to 50% is pretty strong support for the idea that many rape victims are liars.
(Update 2012/10/30: Adam Williamson suggests in this comment that this mail is a better example of Ted's behaviour - there's some explicit victim blaming and a lot of "Is that rape" questioning with the obvious implication that the answer should be "no". Ted Ts'o is a victim blaming rape apologist.)
(Update 2012/11/05: It's been suggested that I haven't been sufficiently clear about which of Ted's statements justify my claims. So, here we go.
In this mail, Ted links to and endorses this article. He explicitly links to it because of its treatment of rape statistics. Quoting directly from that article:
the rate of false reports is at least 9 percent and probably closer to 50 percent
Ted explicitly endorses an article that claims that a significant percentage of reported rapes are false. The study that generated that figure is held in poor regard by other researchers in the field - Australian police figures indicate that 2.1% of rape accusations were classified as false. Ted asserts that he was trying to argue against poor use of statistics, so it's a fair assumption that he agrees with the alternative statistics that he's citing. Ted believes that many rape victims are making false accusations. Ted believes that many rape victims are liars.
Again in this mail, Ted argues against a claimed figure that 1 in 4 women have been sexually assaulted. One of his arguments is that
Also found in the Koss study, although not widely reported, was the statistic that of the women whom she classified as being raped (although 73% refused to self-classify the event as rape), 46% of them had subsequent sex with the reported assailant. Ted disagrees with a statistic because some rape victims subsequently have sex with the reported assailant. This means that Ted believes that this indicates that they were not really raped. Ted is a rape apologist.)
Re: What a horrible approach to this discussion!
(Anonymous) 2012-12-09 09:48 pm (UTC)(link)I've had all of this BS I can handle, so here are my thoughts... as a freaking WOMAN who has some actual personal experience with this. Because, gotta say... I'm kind of tired of a bunch of MEN deciding how I do or should feel about an event that happened to ME.
I've been raped under the definition of rape that keeps expanding. (not alcohol, but definitely one of those gray areas where it definitely felt like rape and wasn't consensual that made me feel horrible for awhile and broke down trust in a relationship, but which I recovered from), and I would like to say that I agree with Ted.
Look, I understand the people who are fighting this battle and so concerned with women's rights, I do. With idiots like Todd Aiken out there making it seem like if you get pregnant you couldn't have been raped, then yes, this is a serious issue and women need to be protected. BUT the problem with lumping all the statistics together and then defining it all as the WORST scenario isn't only that it's dishonest (intellectually and otherwise), it's that those of us who have been victims of less horrific forms of rape are being cloaked in this group and being told: "Rape is the most horrific thing that can ever happen to a person. It ruins your life forever and you can never recover or be whole or feel safe again. It destroys you."
What is up with this INSISTENCE on traumatizing me or making me FEEL more traumatized than I would have felt otherwise? Why is it if I don't feel knife-wielding violent stranger rape PTSD trauma over what in my mind IS a lesser form of rape, I'm suddenly "repressing"?
Those statements just aren't true for every single rape victim in the less horrific types. I understand rape is rape and I understand it is NEVER okay or justified. And I understand the desire not to create a slippery slope where rape is okay in XYZ circumstances. But at the same time, why should I have to be a perpetual "broken victim" for the "rape culture" industry which INSISTS on dehumanizing me far worse than the man who had sex with me without my permission ever did?
It's dehumanizing and patronizing to speak to me as if I am some perpetual broken doll based on ONE experience in my life that was NOT the worst rape experience that could have happened. Women have a right to define their own experience and their own feelings about an experience and their own freaking trauma level with regards to that experience.
Lumping me in with the worst, most graphic and horrible examples of rape and then defining rape, ALL rape as being the emotional effects of that worst case scenario, but applied back to all of us... even those of us who feel we are not broken or damaged now at ALL... it's just wrong.
Ted is right, and I don't get how such hysterics can even exist for any woman who has had an experience like mine. i.e. one that didn't ruin her forever. I refuse to be a martyr to this cause.
I am not a "victim". I am not a "survivor". What I am is pissed the hell off that so many will not rest until they force that label upon me simply because I had a bad day one day where a bad and nonconsenting sexual experience happened.
I DEFINE MY EXPERIENCE. So no, you and every other "well-meaning and concerned citizen" don't get to define me as some broken victim of rape to suit your agenda by conveniently lumping everything together and lumping my experience in with being beaten up and raped in an alley.
It's so dishonest and Sh*tty. Stop doing it.
Rape is so much about political agenda these days. And there are legal degrees to every crime. Look, if I steal a woman's lipstick and she has a mental breakdown over it, should I be charged with a higher crime than I'd be charged with if I stole a lipstick from someone who wasn't so emotionally reactive about the whole thing?
The law is meant to be reason free from passion. We have to have levels to crimes and not act like in something with such a WIDE definition that it's all equivalent. If I was the woman who had been beaten and raped at knife point in an alley, I would be even more traumatized by the fact that a woman who had had a MUCH lesser experience than mine was somehow able to claim the same level of damage and trauma as me. It just disrespects those who have suffered true horror in their lives.
Not all rape is created equal. Period. It's ALL wrong. None of it is OKAY. But not every situation is equally traumatizing. But all women are different. I'm sure there are some women who would have been far more traumatized by my experience than I was. But should the level of punishment for a crime or the level of seriousness of a degree of a crime be determined by how one individual feels about the crime happening to them? I really don't think that it should.
Because we DO live in a rape culture... but it's not the same rape culture the feminazis want us to believe we live in. We live in a rape culture that INSISTS everything is some evil and violent conspiracy against women and that women have this HUGE risk of being the victim of violent rape and that if they ARE in some way raped in this ever expanding definition, that even if it's a lesser form, they are wrong about their own emotional reactions and repressing and just don't want to "think of themselves as a victim" so they need therapy until they have a breakdown for something that wasn't THAT traumatic for them to begin with.
Seriously STOP.
If you REALLY care about women, and our feelings about anything at all, then just stop. Stop telling us how we are supposed to feel about the things that happen to us. Honestly the way my situation is talked about by people who act like they know and don't, is far worse than the original situation was to begin with.