mjg59 | 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 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 coercion is 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.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

You still can't make the assertion that Ts'o believes "people who are raped bear 'at least some responsibility' for being raped". The worst you can say about Ts'o is that believes that people who are raped while willingly impairing their judgement with mind altering chemicals "bear 'at least some responsibility'" for being raped.

Just because you think he's wrong doesn't give you the right to extend his comments to other categories and manufacture false statements and beliefs to demonize him.

No one except the radicals in your fan club agree with you on this anyway. I noticed they pulled this drek off of planet gnome.

From: (Anonymous)

I'm not matt. I keep forgetting to sign my posts, but most of the...let's steal a page from the anti-abortionist playbook and call it 'anti-rape'...posts from 'anon' here are me, adamw.

Your first paragraph is technically correct and I accept the technical correction. I don't think this damages my position one iota. Yes. Ted said that rape victims who get drunk are partly to blame for being raped. I'm glad we agree on that. I am sad that you do not seem to think this is a problem.

From: (Anonymous)

It damages your position because ever since matt's first post you guys have been misrepresenting what Ts'o said. If you want to out Ts'o as an "If two persons are shitfaced and incapable of consenting and they had sex then who's fault is it" rape apologist/denilist then state that somewhere prominently in your argument so the rest of us who have an iota of critical thinking can promptly ignore you. Don't dress it up in made up accusations and interpretations.

From: (Anonymous)

And here we are again with the misrepresentation.

The section I quoted does not involve "two persons are shitfaced and incapable of consenting". Read it once more.

"All aside from the legal question, there's also the question, in the Alice and Bob thought experiment, regardless of whether Alice is guilty of raping Bob (assume that Bob was inebriated and couldn't give consent, and she knew that Bob was drunk), should Bob be faulted for putting him into a situation where he was so drunk that he couldn't take responsibility for himself?"

It does not say that Alice is drunk. It in fact explicitly states that Alice knows Bob is not capable of consenting to the sex, which if you understand Ted's position, means Alice is _not_ drunk (because Ted stated elsewhere that he thinks if Alice _is_ drunk, she is not capable of determining Bob's consent).

The statement to which I am drawing attention is _not about two people being drunk_. It is about _one_ person being drunk.

From: (Anonymous)

I will similarly accept that correction. Both scenario's were offered for contemplation and I may have missed your point while addressing only the one.

In the passage you're now citing (since its a different passage each time) the main point was: does gender matter in the designation of an incident being rape?

In fact, until fairly recently gender did matter in the designation of rape, so I don't blame him for taking time to consider that question with an example.

From: (Anonymous)

I don't think that was the point, no. He switched genders throughout the entire mail, not just for the single example I quoted. I read it as a silly rhetorical trick based on the idea that people would be more willing to condemn a guy who got drunk and got raped (or similarly to assign blame in the various other hypothetical scenarios he posited) than they would be to condemn a woman who got drunk and got raped, at which point he could pounce and say 'aha! you're being sexist! if you condemn Bob you have to condemn an Alice in the same situation!' Only no-one did that, so he couldn't.

I have intentionally been leaving the question of gender out of this discussion as far as it is plausible, as it's not really relevant in this specific discussion (it absolutely _is_ relevant to the wider topic of rape in general, don't get me wrong on that). In what Ted says it doesn't matter whether Bob is a man or a woman. The point is that he assigns responsibility to Bob for being raped, because he got drunk. I don't care what gender Bob is, this is unacceptable to me.

From: (Anonymous)

My, kind of subtle point, was you can't take a single sentence of the email without considering the entire text. But if you really want to know what he was saying consider his conclusion.

"Personally, it's not an issue for me because I strongly don't believe in going to parties where a lot of one-night stands are negotiated, nor do I like situations where a lot of alcohol is consumed. So I'm also predisposed to not have a lot of sympathy for both parties --- male or female, attacker or victim --- who put themselves in such situations."

Clearly he doesn't approve of alcohol use or people who get victimized because of it. Just put that in your next hatchet job instead of the ridiculous suppositions and inferences gleaned by matt in his bullshit post. Maybe he's crass and wrong, but let people decide on its merits and report accurately.

From: (Anonymous)

"My, kind of subtle point, was you can't take a single sentence of the email without considering the entire text."

Well I didn't really want to. I was rather forced to, because you kept on singling out one specific hypothetical scenario which was not the focus of Ted's post and was not the scenario I was discussing at any time. :)

I started off by quoting extensively from the mail. I only focused in on a specific case because it seemed to be so hard to accurately discuss even _one_ case that if we continued to discuss the whole mail, we'd be here all frickin' week.

So let's see what Ted did. First he questioned whether gender 'matters' - well that's a complex question, but at a fundamental level, the obvious answer is no. It is theoretically possible for a woman to rape a man. What feminists entirely correctly do not want to lose track of when such 'theoretical', 'hypothetical' discussions come up is that in boring, practical, everyday reality, it's extremely rare. By any measure - court cases, self-reporting by victims, self-reporting by attackers, whether you use the word 'rape' or not - it is overwhelmingly more common for men to rape women than for women to rape men. (I'm not going to bother going into the homosexual cases, this is taking enough time already.) This is true and important; if you really insist on raising the theoretical question of 'is it possible for a man to be raped by a woman', fine, the answer is yes, but please don't lose sight of the fact that in practice it's very rare.

That's the only time he specifically raised the question of 'does gender matter' - throughout the rest of the mail he continues to gender-switch. He provides a justification for why later, which is not particularly coherent: "Now, people might complain that I'm playing games by switching the genders around. But, should the gender of the parties make a difference? Be careful, lest you start arguing that the female sex is the weaker sex, and should be coddled because they can't take responsibility for their own actions when both parties are totally or partially inebriated." As far as I can see no-one in the thread before or after said anything like that, so he was indulging in a pure straw man attack with his gender switch trick. I for one am perfectly happy to give the 'right on' answers to all his hypotheticals with the genders switched.

Next he raises the most toxic question, the one we just spent a lot of time discussing - "Suppose Bob drank the alcohol himself, willingly. And if he was still raped, does he bear any responsibility for put himself into a situation where Alice could ask and ask him until he said yes?" - can we blame the victim of a rape for being drunk? As I've explained exhaustively, I think the answer is a comprehensive no and to assert that we can is a very bad thing to do. (The bit about 'ask and ask until he said yes' muddies the waters as it introduces the really extremely difficult question of what does and does not constitute consent, but it's not really _relevant_, the assumption in this particular hypothetical is still that a rape took place).

Only _next_ - one of the three hypotheticals so far - does he introduce the possibility of the rapist (Alice, in his post) being drunk. It's only at this one point within the mail that he discusses this question. He makes an assertion about 'the way the law works' (whose law? there are lots) which I am neither qualified to dispute nor particularly interested in disputing. I really just don't see the point in excessive debate about the most murky possible hypothetical scenario - where both participants are intoxicated. We have courts to decide those very difficult cases. I don't think you can make sweeping statements about them based on hypotheticals. It bears repeating that just raising the question, in the wider context of the thread we're discussing, was counter-productive in the extreme. I will note for the record that people I count better informed than me disagree _strenuously_ with his general interpretation of 'the law' in this case.

He then briefly ropes in the original studies again, and asserts that the questions asked in some of them were such that it's maybe possible that some cases where both participants were drunk got counted into the 'rape' statistics. I don't think it's possible to say with any certainty whether he's correct. I don't think it would bump the numbers very far even if he was, but it's impossible to be sure. But on a wider level he's still being disruptive and unhelpful by even raising the damn topic, in context. Even if he could somehow succeed in proving that only half the cases were really really reeaaaaalllio rape, what has that accomplished? That's still a lot of rapes and a lot of traumatized victims.

Then he discards the question of legalities and statistical studies and starts making moral judgements, with the paragraph we have discussed at length again arguing that you can blame someone who gets drunk for getting raped. Then he gives his justification for the gender switch trick, and then he goes back to making moral judgements about people who drink and have one night stands.

Then he rather abruptly brings up the question of statistics again with another gender switch trick. For the record, the precise question Koss asked, which Ted never quoted, is:

"Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?"

Ted seems to think that if you called up a bunch of male undergrads and asked them "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a woman gave you alcohol or drugs?", you'd get a similar number of positive replies that you get when you ask women the question. I really, _really_ doubt that is true. Do you think it's true?

From: (Anonymous)

I have half a mind to go into how vague that question is for the purpose of extrapolating a rape scenario, but I know better now than to explore such issues. Even as Anonymous I wouldn't want the kind of irrational backlash Ts'o got. So consider me converted; All crimes are equal and everything is rape.

From: (Anonymous)

I think there are problems with it, and that's what one of the studies Ted cites were looking into, which I think it did in a good way. If you read it you'll note there's no silly hypotheticals and no extrapolating to infinity. It's Ted who got irrational with it; he extrapolated from 'there may be issues with the question's wording' to 'rape studies are a feminist trick to demonize men and there's no problem with rape, just drunk college kids having sex'. That's going way too far. I didn't ask you whether you thought there were problems with the wording, but whether you think the question is so bad that all you can glean from it is whether a person answering it maybe had sex when they were drunk once. Actually the gender reversal on that question is an interesting notion, because I think it rather makes clear that even though you _can_ take issue with the question, it's clearly telling us more than 'did you have sex when you were drunk?'.

From: (Anonymous)

As for why I didn't answer your question, it's because your question is moot. However, feel free to reference the colloquial terms "coyote morning" and "beer goggles" and consider which gender social order you think they originated in.

It's this witch hunt that is irrational. I understand that a certain subset of the gnome organization has been pushing against disenfranchisement of women in IT. For what it's worth I think that is a noble cause, and when an industry is 90% male causing the to have to push against an inherent frathouse mentality I agree they will have to be vocal. You cross the line when you engage in a politically motivated character assassination attempt against an individual. Matt's post made serious allegations against Ts'o based on very little evidence for the purpose of making an example out of him. The mere allegation of rape endorsement can affect his job and personal relationships. Yet, if I combine each assertion that you and matt have made together I can come up with one verifiable allegation.

Let's look at them:

1) Ts'o "called rape victims liars".
2) He believes the "case of a drunk college student raping another drunk college student in their room" is not rape.
3) "Ted Ts'o argues that only a small percentage of rape really counts".
4) "Ted Ts'o is a rape apologist".
5) You can equate Ts'o's to Jimmy Savile's.
6) "He has expressed abhorrent beliefs that damage that community".
7) "Ted attempted to argue that there was less rape than there actually is"
8) "That whole post [...] in its full, well, glory - is _classic_ rape denial.
9) Ts'o was "making excuses for rape_".
10) his comments were "destructive, offensive to the women involved, incorrect, inappropriate, and definitely constituted 'rape apology'"
11) "Ted clearly states that he believes people who are raped bear 'at least some responsibility' for being raped."

Wow look, you have supported NONE of these allegations with anything even resembling a fact. Your interpretations have been challenged almost overwhelmingly. Furthermore, the more I read about this "study" proclaiming 1 in 4 women have been raped, the more obvious it becomes that the majority of Ts'o's statements that you and matt based your accusations on are factually correct.

This entire subject has taken way more of my time than I should ever have given it, except that I felt compelled to defend someone from obvious hyperbole and misrepresentation by you people who think you're doing us a great service but whom are actually doing the community great harm. That is why this post was pulled off of Planet Gnome, and if I was the Planet Gnome maintainer I would remove matt's feed completely for abusing it.

I won't be back to read your response.

From: (Anonymous)

"As for why I didn't answer your question, it's because your question is moot. However, feel free to reference the colloquial terms "coyote morning" and "beer goggles" and consider which gender social order you think they originated in."

note the question is clear about the other party in the sexual transaction providing the alcohol/drugs. That does not accord with those terms.

I'm not speaking for all of Matt's arguments or accusations. Matt can do that. I believe I have supported all of mine sufficiently and am happy to leave this entire conversation on the record for others to look at. I do not believe it is true that "the majority of Ts'o's statements that you and matt based your accusations on are factually correct" at all. I have based my accusations not on Ted's statements directly relating to the surveys he initially posted about, but his separate pontifications on what is 'really' rape and who is to blame for it, which are not supported even by the methodological challenges to specific surveys which he originally cited. They're just Ted pontificating.

From: (Anonymous)

BTW, I didn't cite a different passage each time. The first time I quoted from Ted's mail I cited several passages, including the one that starts "All aside from the legal question". The second time I quoted from Ted's mail I cited the entire two paragraphs that follow "All aside from the legal question". The third time I quoted, I cited just the first sentence of the "All aside from the legal question" paragraph, to highlight it even more clearly, since you didn't seem to be understanding. But in all three messages, I cited the first sentence of the "All aside from the legal question" paragraph, and in the last two, I cited only that section, just different amounts of it.