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mjg59(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.)
totallyy agree
Date: 2012-10-29 09:45 pm (UTC)Re: totallyy agree
Date: 2012-10-29 09:56 pm (UTC)When you say <
When you say <<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">> you're also lying because he's not saying that. It's your interpretation. Why I interpret for example is that half of the cases are "fuzzy". Fuzzy is, you know, that value that is between 0 and 1. You're assuming all victims of rape are real vicitms of rape, and are assuming that Ted is saying that half are not. I think Ted is just saying that half are fuzzy (that require more proofs to be certain), which is completely different.
Re: totallyy agree
Date: 2012-10-29 10:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-29 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-29 10:11 pm (UTC)A different perspective..
Date: 2012-10-29 10:37 pm (UTC)From what I just read, at any point Ted calls rape victims liars. It just seems he was making an argument regarding statistics and quite obviously not all accounts of rape are true. Maybe his argument was outside context but in principle there's nothing tabu about discussing rape statistics.
Moreover there's nothing wrong with his reply about the definition of rape. If two people are drunk and have sex without any of the two physically forcing it, I can't see why it would be considered rape. I understand any of the people involved may regret the act and even get angry, but that's it.
Regarding actual conference policy, I see it as a matter of common sense. I don't see though any necessity to enforce rules that are acceptable society-wide. Many artistic performances, motion pictures, paintings, retail stores, events and so on contain sexual content. Actually, people themselves are live portraits of sexuality, to more or less extent. So policies such as not allowing references to sexuality in presentations seems a bit of an Americanization. I mean, the American approach to sexuality is seen as almost medieval by other parts of the World, quite on par with Saudi Arabia. Too much is always too much, but as a general rule I see absolutely no issue with this. I'de have no second thoughts on using an image of a "a pig and a duck apparently having sex" to prove a point.
What a horrible approach to this discussion!
Date: 2012-10-29 10:44 pm (UTC)For the purposes of accurate risk assessment (which is really what this is all about) some levels of the crime can never really apply. Think of all the types of rape and then consider how many of those can happen at an event.
Stay with me, I know you're probably about to delete this comment for being that of another "rape apologist" but I have a point.
What you seem to be inferring from Ted is that some levels of rape are okay somehow… And that's where you lose me completely. Where the hell does he say anything like that? In fact, when I re-read his posts without your sensationalism, all I see is somebody using statistics to make a very specific point about others' fear of statistics.
And what is the block about Jimmy Saville all about? What on earth does a paedophile or the approach around that paedophile have to do with Ted? Are you somehow trying to draw a parallel between what Ted is saying and the *alleged* approach to Saville? I think you're getting dangerously close to defamy.
The only person that deserves an apology here is Ted.
Re: What a horrible approach to this discussion!
Date: 2012-10-29 10:51 pm (UTC)All of them? The only way some of the rapes couldn't happen at one of these events would be to classify them as something other than rape, which Ted carefully makes the argument for.
Is this really proportional
Date: 2012-10-29 10:55 pm (UTC)Also, where did Ted explicitly or implicitly say that rape (by anyone's definition) is ok? I.e., how do you justify calling him a 'rape apologist'? If I read correctly, Ted wanted to distinguish between different forms of rape (which may or may not be a sensible thing to do), but did he ever state that either of them were acceptable, whatever you chose to call it? The way I read it he did the exact opposite, he stressed that they were all unacceptable. But not all the same.
What you are accusing Ted of is extremely serious, and regardless of you being right or wrong it will likely do irreparable damage to his reputation (as the headline of your post is crawled by the various search engines). Moreover, if consensus becomes (as seems clear to me) that you have greatly exaggerated, if not entirely manufactured, this controversy, then I can not see how you, nor the Ada Initiative can recover from the disgrace. In short, I hope you thought this one through...
You should be very careful
Date: 2012-10-29 10:59 pm (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law
Stop deleting this Matt
Date: 2012-10-29 11:00 pm (UTC)If one were to say that 1 in 5 women are raped so it is probably not safe to jog in Central Park at night if you are a woman, is that an accurate conclusion based on the statistic? Any educated person would wonder "were 1 in 5 women raped while jogging at night?", "what percentage of Central Park joggers were raped (while jogging)?" Certainly there is a difference between rape at knife-point, and two naked, drunken friends making out, leading to dispute on whether permission for penetration was granted as frequently occurs. Yes in the latter case, if permission was not granted, then it was rape. But obviously, that scenario of rape loads the rape statistic making it misleading in many use-cases.
Should women be afraid of walking around lest they may be jumped by a stranger, should more women enroll in martial arts? Or should they be more cautious around alcohol, friends and promiscuity and do we need more sensitivity training and rape education for college boys? You cannot answer these questions when you disallow the differentiation of rape.
Finally, attacking someone personally as you have done with Mr. Ts'o, just for expressing his opinion, judgmentally inferring and broadcasting that they are a rape apologist, is disgusting and perhaps even libelous. You owe him an apology and a retraction. If I were Ted, I would sue you in a heartbeat.
statistics are meant to be questioned and challenged
Date: 2012-10-29 11:01 pm (UTC)Person B: "how did you come up with the 103% statistic?"
MSG59: "person B is a rape apologist".
Re: A different perspective..
Date: 2012-10-29 11:01 pm (UTC)Depending on the crowd, this tactic is likely to strongly alienate a few people and work as intended with many more.
If a company's recruiting/sales is based on an image of "brogrammers", this is just a marketing tactic.
I don't know anything about the talk at that conference. Possibly, this is a case of overly general wording and lack of common sense. It is up to the organizational committee to decide whether something is only going to offend the prudes and should be allowed or whether it's really unprofessional and morally bankrupt and should not be allowed. Context and delivery matter. People in charge should have the courage to make a judgement and not hide behind wordage in lists of rules.
Re: Matt keeps deleting this
Date: 2012-10-29 11:02 pm (UTC)The way I read Ted's post
Date: 2012-10-29 11:02 pm (UTC)So in the case where two people are drunk and each contributing to a [poor] decision to have sex, some define the woman involved in that act as a victim despite the fact that both are under the influence at the time.
So when asked if she was raped, the answer is no because she knows that she contributed to the poor judgement to get impaired just as the man did. However for the purposes of the questionnaire, because she admitted to being drunk the 'rape' checkbox is ticked.
I don't see Ted as defending violent or manipulative situations, but those areas where both people involved define the situation as having been a string of bad ideas rather than a rape or where both made bad decisions but one calls it rape (either sex may have been raped).
Re: Matt keeps deleting this
Date: 2012-10-29 11:09 pm (UTC)Ted was wrong in trying to be more logical than sensitive
Date: 2012-10-29 11:20 pm (UTC)In a logical argument, unless you are perfectly right (no one is perfectly right), you are bound to have some errors, some of them significant. That's the point of arguing really, so that someone who is right corrects someone who is wrong. The problem with public rape discussions is that erring on the side of the perpetrator has very harmful consequences, much more harmful than consequences from erring on the side of the victim. While I don't think that Ted is malicious, he should have left this discussion to somewhere private. In private, being wrong on either side in a discussion is not going to cause harm to victims. And discussing things in private can help wrong people come right: personally, I corrected some of my misconceptions in private argument with people who knew better.
But having said all this, although Ted may be misguided, and although he was insensitive for the sake of his idea of statistical honesty, I have to disagree when you call him a rape apologist. That is just seeing this from one perspective without trying to understand what he really is on about. I don't think he saw this as a discussion about rape per se, to me he seems like he is discussing statistical interpretation with rape as a case study, while everyone else was discussing rape.
Re: What a horrible approach to this discussion!
Date: 2012-10-29 11:21 pm (UTC)One of the surveys Ted quotes has the problem _right there_. In the survey, anyone who answered 'yes' to any of these questions was considered to have been raped:
"8. Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?
9. Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man threatened or used some degree of physical force (twisting your arm, holding you down, etc.) to make you?
10. Have you had sexual acts (anal or oral intercourse or penetration by objects other than the penis) when you didn’t want to because a man threatened or used some degree of physical
force (twisting your arm, holding you down, etc.) to make you?"
However, of the people who answered 'yes' to any of those three questions, 27% considered themselves to have been raped. The other 73% didn't. Of those 73%, half characterized the event as a 'miscommunication'.
It's pretty hard to look at that and say it's not a giant icky grey area. Clearly even people who have by a defensible but wide definition been raped don't agree with that definition of rape. There seems something odd about describing someone who's been raped as a rape apologist, but by your logic, it would appear that anyone who has been in a situation which someone else would describe as 'rape' but which they themselves would not describe as 'rape' is a 'rape apologist'. I'm not comfortable with that.
As you probably know I'm usually pretty firmly on the right-on feminist side of these issues, but I get very squicky when it comes to this. It seems inarguable that most people, however you cut it, view there as being distinctions of degree in terms of sexual misconduct, including within an area of a spectrum that some people would apply the single term 'rape' to the whole of. I'm just not sure this whole debate is subject to a 'this is right and everyone who has reservations about it is a part of the problem' approach.
I've always noted that both British and Canadian news publications these days are very reluctant to use the word 'rape', I think because of this whole miasma of messiness. They prefer the term 'sexual assault'.
Re: Stop deleting this Matt
Date: 2012-10-29 11:31 pm (UTC)Re: What a horrible approach to this discussion!
Date: 2012-10-29 11:33 pm (UTC)Re: A different perspective..
Date: 2012-10-29 11:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-29 11:38 pm (UTC)My first thought was "if two drunk college kids have sex, which one is the victim?" because presumably both of them were fairly positive about the idea at the time. But then I figured that drunk people can't necessarily give informed consent so it's quite possible that afterward both parties might genuinely feel violated.
So I *think* the actual underlying idea here is that if somebody tells you they feel violated, then that's a legitimate actual feeling that deserves respect and consideration, regardless of whether their claim has been approved by a court of law, or whether other people might make the same claim falsely.
Is that more or less the lesson I should learn from this?
Re: A different perspective..
Date: 2012-10-29 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-29 11:45 pm (UTC)"There is a spectrum of what can be considered "rape". One of the
things which I think is dishonest is when the loosest possible
definition of rape is used when creating the statistics, but when it
comes down to saying how horribly women are affected by rape, the
worst possible scenario is used.
If the statistics include cases where both college students are drunk,
and sexual penetration occurs, and since the women didn't give
consent, obviously its rape, then it's fair to ask what percentage of
the statistics are this sort of case, and what percentage of the cases
are one where the women is jumped from behind in Central Park by a
strange, and raped at knifepoint.
Surely you recognize the two cases might be somewhat different?"
Ted's only crime was not being politically correct, he went out of his way to say he wasn't trying to diminish rape or anyone's personal experience with rape. He was just saying it's dishonest to say 1/4 women were raped because most people equate the word "rape" with the worst kind of rape (violent sexual assault by an unknown assailant). And before you say it, NO I'M NOT SAYING drunk sex without consent (man or woman being drunk) is ok. But to put it all under the umbrella term of "rape" is very misleading and dishonest.
Just like saying "10 million cats are murdered each year" but not mentioning that you're factoring in cats that are accidentally run over by cars.
Of course people like you will take what I just wrote and twist it into some Gawkeresque headline "Rape apologist equates rape victims with dead cats". That's seriously all you people do, you evade the honest debate, ignore facts and instead just use name calling like "rape apologist" or "sexist". You are too blinded by your own dogma to see otherwise.
Did you even read the article Ted linked to? Here's a good excerpt.
"Only about a quarter of the women Koss calls rape
victims labeled what happened to them as
rape. According to Koss, the answers to the
follow-up questions revealed that “only 27
percent” of the women she counted as having
been raped labeled themselves as rape victims"
In other words Koss herself determined those women were rape victims even though the women themselves didn't describe what happened to them as rape.
http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/3925/Readings/RapeCultureSummers.pdf
The numbers you can cook up are endless if you have no problem being misleading and have a loose interpretation of words. You could add women who were groped in the subway as being raped (a sexual assault that doesn't involved intercourse) and you'd get what? "90% of women have been raped in their lifetime"?
Oh and if someone questions if it's honest to label groping in the subway as rape they're just labeled a rape apologist and defending subway groping.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-29 11:50 pm (UTC)