He met a lot of sex offenders
Another front in the war:
Also, why would sex offenders not do that? Why would they ignore a golden opportunity like that? Being sex offenders and all? It takes deep enthrallment to an ideology to think otherwise.
And, again, why wouldn’t they?
So a couple of days later we get:
I’ve volunteered in a prison and I’ve met a fair number of sex offenders also. What Mr. Treadwell is saying has merit, but I can’t agree with “All [sex offenders] groom, seek to exploit and control.” What I have seen is that although many people who groom, seek to exploit and control in other areas of life become sex offenders, the guys I know were themselves victims of sexual abuse as children and, no surprise really, grew up to have distorted (or absent) ideas of sexual boundaries and consent as young adults. Now they’re all men in their 30s to 50s who pose no threat to anybody, yet they’re serving long prison terms and will be branded for life, being on sex offender registries and on lifetime parole.
Even psychopaths can’t help being psychopaths (and I don’t think any of my incarcerated acquaintances are), and although it is necessary to sequester dangerous people from free society in order to protect the vulnerable, we should be doing our utmost to find ways to heal them, and to break the cycles of abuse that continue to make more of them. What we’re doing now, meting out draconian punishment after the offense occurs, helps no one. The criminal justice system is very Old Testament that way.
So Lavery thinks sexual assaulters, groomers and the like are not manipulative?
I doubt it. I think he’s just pretending to think that.
Gray Slavery knows perfectly well how manipulative sex offenders can be. How else could he post pictures of women who he has bitten on the face?
I hear this all the time: abusers were abused as children. That’s not necessarily the case. Some were, yes. Most of the ones I knew were not. My rapist was not sexually abused. My abusers were not themselves abused.
I don’t think becoming a rapist is a matter of being sexually abused. I think it’s a matter of power. It may be that their own abuse made them feel powerless so they took it out on someone weaker. That I will accept. But for others (all the ones I’ve known) it rose from a sense of male entitlement and the desire to humiliate women. They were raised to believe in themselves as the masters of the universe. So some of them grow up and find out they’re on a bottom rung of the ladder and want to make sure those below them recognize their power, because they’re entitled to it. Others find themselves situated in a position of power and abuse that power to debase and humiliate those below them, particularly women. None of this requires an assumption of them being abused. It merely requires an assumption that they were raised male in a patriarchal society.
Young men believe they are entitled to women. And, apparently, not just some woman, but the hottest woman. The women are not always cooperative. So they take it for themselves.
I will not excuse rape by positing abuse for the rapist. Even if the rapist was abused as a child, it is still their responsibility not to rape. It is not necessary for me to forgive my rapist because he was abused as a child (even if he had been, which he wasn’t). The vast majority of abused children grow up to be non-abusive adults. Some of them grow up to be abusive, and too many levels of society seem to want to give them some sort of excuse by pointing out that they were abused. This then seems to have morphed into what I hear all the time, even from people who should know better: all abusers were once abused themselves.
And I agree that our system is draconian, and I would rather we deal with the problem before it happens than punish afterwards. Unfortunately, that isn’t going to happen, not in my lifetime, and possibly not in anybody’s. So for the time being, until we can inhabit a perfect world, can we please just keep trans women out of women’s private spaces? Even if none of them did harm to women, it is still a problem for many women to see penises waving when they just pop into the bathroom to tidy up a bit.
I’d push back a bit on the idea that rape is about power (sometimes it is obviously)… It’s probably an evolutionary strategy and going far enough back probably many of our ancestors were conceived that way.
Whereas not raping becomes progressive cultural technology: can rape foreigners/can’t rape the tribe, can rape slaves/can’t rape women of property, etc. Doesn’t excuse the behavior, but humans are choosing (or seem like they’re choosing) to do stuff at odds with what evolution wants to do all the time. From that tendency we get morals, science, and mathematics.
There’s two claims to be made:
1.) There is every reason to believe that some male predators will take advantage of women’s single-sex spaces being redefined as “woman gender” to attack, abuse, leer, or otherwise exploit vulnerable women. We are at risk from men pretending to be transwomen.
2.) There is currently no reason to believe that males who sincerely consider themselves transgender are uniquely different from other males when it comes to violent or predatory behavior. This is either assumed or considered irrelevant “because they’re women.” We could also very well be at risk from transwomen.
I’ve seen many GC emphasizing the dangers of the first by denying there are any concerns about the second. “We can’t tell a fake transwoman from a REAL one! Nobody can! That’s the problem! We totally trust YOU, of course.”
This might be a tactic, but it often sounds sincere. Coming from the GC, however, it’s an odd argument. It tacitly accepts trans doctrine: they’re women like other women on the inside, it’s just that their bodies are different. That’s why, even as a tactic, I think it a mistake. It’s both.
BKiSA, I’ve seen that evolutionary argument. It might have some truth to it, but there are too many things that speak to it being a power play. Including things like high-level Hollywood men who would have no trouble finding women who want to sleep with them, but instead they force women, and usually in a humiliating way. Could that be a remnant of our evolutionary past? Sure. Show me evidence. Until then, it’s a just-so story.
It is also obvious that men in positions of power often use that power to sexually abuse those in their power. What evolutionary basis is there for a priest to rape an altar boy? It does nothing to propagate his genes. It asserts power, and provides pleasure for the priest. When they rape women or girls, that could be a way for celibate men to pass on their genes, but it is also likely to be an assertion of power. And so many things in rape are done specifically to humiliate.
How exactly did sLavery get involved with this? (I’m not on twitter.) Is he saying that Treadwell is lying when warning that male sexual predators will scheme to get access to female victims? Is sLavery saying that pointing out this danger hurts trans people so Treadwell should stay silent?
BKISA, I’m afraid I can’t agree with the suggestion that ‘humans are choosing (or seem like they’re choosing) to do stuff at odds with what evolution wants to do all the time. From that tendency we get morals, science, and mathematics’, as opposed to going out and, if we are male, raping everything in sight, it seems, because evolution ‘wants’ us to do this. But does evolution ‘want’ us to do that, and how? Evolution doesn’t ‘want’ anything. You seem to be of the ‘nasty, brutish and short’ persuasion – that Hobbesian myth. Regarding morals, we have evolved as social animals of a particular kind, and I do not see how morals can be separated from our animal nature to be placed in some higher metaphysical sphere. Yes, having language, we are in a position to discuss ethics, and I have found philosophers of ethics like Mencius and Sidgwick of great interest. Nor do I see that mathematics and science are uninvolved in our nature as social animals. Even honey-bees can count, it appears. Again, mathematics and science do not exist in some Platonic space beyond the world, but are a human activity.
I’m missing something. Why is Lavery invoking lawyers?
He wants the people he called out to sue him, and he’s drawing his line in the sand with piss.