Excited to see what you make of Bowling Alone! I taught a course around it last year (twice) and thought the book was just so moving and masterful. It’s written like a whodunit. So much care taken with the evidence.
That said, I’m also a little skeptical of the concept of social capital, and part of me thinks that the political ideal of the book really doesn’t make that much sense—a resurgence of social capital, but without its “dark side” of out-group hostility? Isn’t that like a donut without the hole?
One of the signal facts about this issue is that for sexual violence, we have a vastly higher standard of proof, and allow defenses, that we don't for other kinds of interpersonal violence. To take an example that was in the news recently, if you say "my Uber driver beat me up", and provide the level of evidence that many women have, that is considered proof. Testimony that you didn't want to be beaten is sufficient.
“True equality for women cannot exist in a world where girls are afraid to walk home from school alone and women have to remain on high alert while going about their normal lives. The unfortunate fact is that you can’t legislate freedom.”
Until we achieve that, we have not fully civilized ourselves. The suffering is women’s but the toleration of this iniquity is all of ours, especially men’s.
Will read the transcript later, but my immediate thought is that there is frankly only so much society can do. The reality is that most men are physically stronger and larger than most women. Society can punish men who hurt women after the fact, but it cannot realistically deprive them of their physical ability to do so. At most it can 1) ideally have men restrain themselves or 2) failing that, have men restrain each other. But in either case, that ultimately leaves women’s safety in the hands of men, which I suspect still leaves women uneasy (though as a man I cannot realistically comment on that).
An year or so ago, I was at a bar with a (male) friend, and we somehow ended up having an extended argument over metoo that basically boiled down to “was this a good thing?” He was on the “no” side and made some of the same arguments as Matt. It was an eye opening experience for me because I basically took the “goodness” of metoo for granted, and trying to figure out a way to argue for it, especially quantitatively, was not straightforward. Your conversation touched on similar topics.
I think: 1) you can plausibly argue that, of all the plausible ways a society-wide reckoning over sexual harassment and inequality could go, what happened in the US in the mid-2010s was below the median in terms of whatever outcome you prioritize. But arguing that no reckoning is better than reckoning is a bigger and more challenging claim. 2) I think Demsas touches on this but if you could somehow freeze the definition of sexual assault and sexual harassment to what the average person considered it to be in 2014, and then measure that, and that only, through 2026..I hypothesize that it would have declined materially, and been driven by metoo. And that would be the clearest benefit of metoo. But this is a hard analysis to execute. 3) The loose and hard-to-quantify benefits of metoo are difficult for me to grapple with as an otherwise fairly quantitative lib who likes to follow the evidence. I think conservatives or people who are anti metoo could understandably accuse me of hypocrisy and say that when an issue touches on my personal prejudices and I don’t have the evidence to support my claims, I default to arguments like the above, and show that my commitment to evidence and data and reason is BS. To this, all I can do is shrug. It’s a reasonable objection.
Excited to see what you make of Bowling Alone! I taught a course around it last year (twice) and thought the book was just so moving and masterful. It’s written like a whodunit. So much care taken with the evidence.
That said, I’m also a little skeptical of the concept of social capital, and part of me thinks that the political ideal of the book really doesn’t make that much sense—a resurgence of social capital, but without its “dark side” of out-group hostility? Isn’t that like a donut without the hole?
One of the signal facts about this issue is that for sexual violence, we have a vastly higher standard of proof, and allow defenses, that we don't for other kinds of interpersonal violence. To take an example that was in the news recently, if you say "my Uber driver beat me up", and provide the level of evidence that many women have, that is considered proof. Testimony that you didn't want to be beaten is sufficient.
“True equality for women cannot exist in a world where girls are afraid to walk home from school alone and women have to remain on high alert while going about their normal lives. The unfortunate fact is that you can’t legislate freedom.”
Until we achieve that, we have not fully civilized ourselves. The suffering is women’s but the toleration of this iniquity is all of ours, especially men’s.
Will read the transcript later, but my immediate thought is that there is frankly only so much society can do. The reality is that most men are physically stronger and larger than most women. Society can punish men who hurt women after the fact, but it cannot realistically deprive them of their physical ability to do so. At most it can 1) ideally have men restrain themselves or 2) failing that, have men restrain each other. But in either case, that ultimately leaves women’s safety in the hands of men, which I suspect still leaves women uneasy (though as a man I cannot realistically comment on that).
An year or so ago, I was at a bar with a (male) friend, and we somehow ended up having an extended argument over metoo that basically boiled down to “was this a good thing?” He was on the “no” side and made some of the same arguments as Matt. It was an eye opening experience for me because I basically took the “goodness” of metoo for granted, and trying to figure out a way to argue for it, especially quantitatively, was not straightforward. Your conversation touched on similar topics.
I think: 1) you can plausibly argue that, of all the plausible ways a society-wide reckoning over sexual harassment and inequality could go, what happened in the US in the mid-2010s was below the median in terms of whatever outcome you prioritize. But arguing that no reckoning is better than reckoning is a bigger and more challenging claim. 2) I think Demsas touches on this but if you could somehow freeze the definition of sexual assault and sexual harassment to what the average person considered it to be in 2014, and then measure that, and that only, through 2026..I hypothesize that it would have declined materially, and been driven by metoo. And that would be the clearest benefit of metoo. But this is a hard analysis to execute. 3) The loose and hard-to-quantify benefits of metoo are difficult for me to grapple with as an otherwise fairly quantitative lib who likes to follow the evidence. I think conservatives or people who are anti metoo could understandably accuse me of hypocrisy and say that when an issue touches on my personal prejudices and I don’t have the evidence to support my claims, I default to arguments like the above, and show that my commitment to evidence and data and reason is BS. To this, all I can do is shrug. It’s a reasonable objection.