Caitlyn Jenner, Uniter Of Gender Essentialists

Suffering as I do from histamine reactions to all things Kardashian, I have studiously avoided the Caitlyn Jenner coming out party. (Jenner's ex wife was Kris Kardashian before they married, and while I have no evidence of this, I have to believe had some behind the scenes hand in the ensuing avalanche of coverage.) It has certainly opened up some dialogues long sunken beneath the murky waters of identity politics, particularly on the nature-versus-nurture divide. Of course, one expects the religiously small-minded to heave brickbats at Jenner, as for instance this regrettable piece by Matt Walsh, someone whose output I have previously praised; he called the transformation "a monstrosity" and "profoundly disturbing", which, why?

A woman is a woman. She has earned that title. She pays for that title. She suffers with that title and gives life with that title and lives from conception until death and beyond with that title. She is that title. She should not be told that it’s such a flimsy thing that a man with enough money can buy his way into it. It’s demeaning and reductive, and as a father and a husband and a son and a brother, I take exception to it. I can only imagine how women might feel if they were only allowed to be open about it.

(Emboldening mine, as always.) This is a trivially silly argument; Jenner didn't have his dong cut off and† hours of feminization plastic surgery done because of some momentary flight of fancy, but because of a self-reported life-long belief that he was born into the wrong body. It is not for me or anyone else, including Walsh, to second-guess such feelings. And yet, it isn't just the Abrahamic religions recoiling at Jenner, but apparently some faction of modern feminism as well, as witness this New York Times essay by Elinor Burkett. Burkett rejects, without evidence*, the idea that gender affiliation and behavior might be biologically determined in large measure (especially at the population level):

 I have fought for many of my 68 years against efforts to put women — our brains, our hearts, our bodies, even our moods — into tidy boxes, to reduce us to hoary stereotypes. Suddenly, I find that many of the people I think of as being on my side — people who proudly call themselves progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination — are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us.

She objects to the very idea that some behaviors and modes of dress are inherently feminine:

People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women, whether Ms. Jenner or Mr. Summers, shouldn’t get to define us. That’s something men have been doing for much too long. And as much as I recognize and endorse the right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness, they cannot stake their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a woman.

She rejects any signs of traditional femininity that ultimately draw in M-to-F transsexuals:

For me and many women, feminist and otherwise, one of the difficult parts of witnessing and wanting to rally behind the movement for transgender rights is the language that a growing number of trans individuals insist on, the notions of femininity that they’re articulating, and their disregard for the fact that being a woman means having accrued certain experiences, endured certain indignities and relished certain courtesies in a culture that reacted to you as one.

In this view, only her experiences and definitions of femininity matter; others must be crushed lest hers somehow be diminished. But she saves her most strenuous vituperation for the reasons trans people offer for their conversions:

“I was born in the wrong body” rhetoric favored by other trans people doesn’t work any better and is just as offensive, reducing us to our collective breasts and vaginas. Imagine the reaction if a young white man suddenly declared that he was trapped in the wrong body and, after using chemicals to change his skin pigmentation and crocheting his hair into twists, expected to be embraced by the black community.

First of all, there's a wide range of behaviors, attributes, and attitudes that split along sex lines; men are incarcerated an order of magnitude more frequently than women, and are much bigger risk takers, having nine times the on-the-job death rate of women. But what really surprised me here is just how much Walsh and Burkett agree on this one point: you don't get to call yourself a woman without those two X chromosomes. And don't get her started on why transsexuals might want to actually change sex:

Many women I know, of all ages and races, speak privately about how insulting we find the language trans activists use to explain themselves. After Mr. Jenner talked about his brain, one friend called it an outrage and asked in exasperation, “Is he saying that he’s bad at math, weeps during bad movies and is hard-wired for empathy?” After the release of the Vanity Fair photos of Ms. Jenner, Susan Ager, a Michigan journalist, wrote on her Facebook page, “I fully support Caitlyn Jenner, but I wish she hadn’t chosen to come out as a sex babe.”

Aside from the fact that this comes off as intrasexual competitive sniping, i.e. professional jealousy, it is also deeply hypocritical: it's fine for Burkett and her allies to define what it means to be a woman. It's even fine for Burkett et al. to engage in straw man attacks (show me Jenner's remarks about algebra). But if, in Jenner's view, being a woman means a particular set of things, and Bruce Jenner felt a certain way about who he was, he is simply not allowed to express those feelings. Daniel Davis at The Federalist wrote an essay outlining how transsexuals and feminism are mutually incompatible in exactly this way:

If you truly celebrate Jenner’s transition, you have to do it by recognizing some cultural narrative about womanhood, thereby perpetuating gender “inequality.” But if you’re committed to the abolition of gender norms, there’s no way you can affirm Jenner’s femininity, except in the meaningless abstract. It’s a lose-lose.

I simply didn't believe it would be demonstrated so perfectly, and in such a short period of time. Burkett views Jenner as a heretic whose views on femininity must be suppressed for political reasons, while Walsh has religious motives. While I cannot speak to religion, the more I see of identity politics, the more I begin to see in it the famous Emo Philips gag about religion: there's always somebody to push over the bridge.

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* I say "without evidence" largely because she cites neuroscientist Gina Rippon in a 2014 Telegraph article claiming

“You can’t pick up a brain and say ‘that’s a girl’s brain’ or ‘that’s a boy’s brain,’ ” Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist at Britain’s Aston University... The differences between male and female brains are caused by the “drip, drip, drip” of the gendered environment, she said.

Reading her online C.V. at Aston University, her research interests run predominantly to "application of brain imaging techniques", particularly as it relates to autism. For that reason alone, I find her glib dismissal of any differences between male and female brains unpersuasive, particularly because of a recent large-scale Irish study on autism that found genetic differences between males and females afflicted with that condition — which also explains the 7:1 ratio of males versus females. I'm sure she has a cultural reason for that, too.

† Update 2015-06-10: I apparently missed the fact that Jenner retained his penis, per Jo Ann Skousen at Liberty. (Should we use "her"? Okay, whatever.)

Thanks, @Nero: A Review Of Emma Sulkowicz's Sex Tape

Twitter firebrand @Nero (aka Milo Yiannopoulos) does us all the favor of reviewing Emma Sulkowicz's strange porn video:

It’s telling, I think, that in Sulkowicz’s purported college dorm room there are no books. She has the same lack of interest in aesthetics as she does in intellectual enrichment: both in her choice of sexual partner (apparently satisfactory member notwithstanding) and the grim, bare walls with which she surrounds herself. Though I expect the austerity of her room reflects her barren emotional interior really rather well.

You can tell “dad bods” are in fashion because both of the people in this video have one. But you do at least have to give an actress credit for doing nude scenes with a man who has larger breasts than she does. Sulkowicz’s size queendom apparently extends to love handles and leave the viewer sympathetic to the travails of her infamous mattress.

It’s revealing of her vanity that she insists on being filmed from four angles. Every crevasse of her unappealing naked body must be considered. Her congressional interlocutor is a gruesome sight in three dimensions, chosen, probably, to make young Emma look thinner. Which doesn’t work, I’m sorry to say.

All in all, it’s a tawdry, miserable encounter that tells us nothing about sexual assault or sex itself but quite a bit about the quasi-demonic inner workings of one Emma Sulkowicz.

Ouch. Hilarious, but ouch.

Emma Sulkowicz' Sex Tape

Word came out yesterday that Emma Sulkowicz, in what can only be described as an insane monomanical disregard of Paul Nungesser's lawsuit against her (oops, see below), has issued a sex video in which she is raped, with this introductory text:

Trigger Warning: The following text contains allusions to rape. Everything that takes place in the following video is consensual but may resemble rape. It is not a reenactment but may seem like one. If at any point you are triggered or upset, please proceed with caution and/or exit this website. However, I do not mean to be prescriptive, for many people find pleasure in feeling upset.

Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol is not about one night in August, 2012. It’s about your decisions, starting now. It’s only a reenactment if you disregard my words. It’s about you, not him.

Do not watch this video if your motives would upset me, my desires are unclear to you, or my nuances are indecipherable.

You might be wondering why I’ve made myself this vulnerable. Look—I want to change the world, and that begins with you, seeing yourself. If you watch this video without my consent, then I hope you reflect on your reasons for objectifying me and participating in my rape, for, in that case, you were the one who couldn’t resist the urge to make Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol about what you wanted to make it about: rape.

Please, don’t participate in my rape. Watch kindly.

A special thank you to everyone who made Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol possible, especially my actor (*********), my director (Ted Lawson), and those I love who have guided and supported me.

Her repeated tapdancing around what she is or isn't saying would be despicable enough; perhaps she wishes to be named in Nungesser's lawsuit against Columbia (PDF). Robby Soave at Reason points us at Megan McArdle's depressing piece in Bloomberg View, wherein she writes that she doesn't find Nungesser's complaints against the university compelling:

Columbia didn't railroad him because he's a man; the university actually found him not guilty. Nor does Columbia have the power to force Sulkowicz to stop telling the world that he's a rapist. Perhaps the university shouldn't be giving her course credit for doing so, but this seems a pretty thin reed upon which to hang a lawsuit. The rest of the complaints are even thinner, for example, that President Bollinger issued some mealy-mouthed platitudes about how distressing this all is and that the university covered some of the cleanup costs for an anti-rape rally in which his case was prominently featured.

Nungesser is not the first man to sue his college over unequal treatment of men in the campus system of adjudicating sexual offenses. I've read some of the complaints, and they are wounded, outraged litanies of arbitrary treatment by a system that is opaque and far from accountable. But the cases I've looked at generally end up getting dismissed (including a recent one against Columbia), because even if all the facts were true as stated, they didn't add up to proof that these men were treated differently specifically because of their gender. Due process complaints like this one against Michigan are probably a more fruitful avenue, but that's not available against private schools.

Which is why I think his whole strategy is flawed to start with; the real meat here is the due-process-free Title IX procedure, not the relative treatment of men vs. women in its maw.

Slate's Emily Yoffe On The Hunting Ground

If you pull nothing else from Emily Yoffe's fine investigation on the facts behind The Hunting Ground, consider this:

Like most journalists and critics, I first wrote about The Hunting Ground on Feb. 27 of this year, the day the film made its theatrical debut, and did so unaware that, the same week, the unnamed man Willingham calls a rapist was standing trial in Middlesex County on the charges stemming from her criminal complaint. I learned of [Brandon] Winston’s trial when a juror contacted me after it concluded to express dismay that Winston had been forced to stand trial—and had faced potential jail time—for what she saw as a drunken hook-up. Winston declined to talk with me directly, but I spoke extensively with Norman Zalkind, the lawyer who represented him at trial.

The makers of The Hunting Ground say they gave the young men implicated in the film a chance to comment, and none responded. But it wasn’t until February, a month after the documentary made a celebrated debut at the Sundance Film Festival, that Winston says he was first contacted by a representative for the film. He referred this person to Zalkind, who says he never heard from anyone representing The Hunting Ground. I contacted Kirby Dick to talk to him about the Willingham case. He declined to speak with me, but asked for a list of written questions. I sent him my questions by email, and he replied, “After careful consideration I respectfully decline.” I also contacted CNN to discuss the case. A representative did not respond to a request for comment.

This behavior on the part of the filmmakers is simply inexcusable, and quite possibly damning — as is Yoffe's confession that she "learned of Winston’s trial when a juror contacted me after it concluded to express dismay that Winston had been forced to stand trial—and had faced potential jail time—for what she saw as a drunken hook-up." It's hard, looking at this, to avoid the thought that Kinsman is intent on shaking down a high-value NFL draftee, and using a prominent film as the vehicle in support of that aim.

Update: Robby Soave, formerly Jezebel's "idiot"  for questioning what later became an obvious rape hoax at the University of Virginia, points us at a Radley Balko article at the WaPo asking why so many high-profile rape stories end up fizzling. The article is worth reading in its entirety, but he offers four reasons why this is so:

1. "One possibility is that the nascent anti-campus rape movement isn’t as seasoned as the activist groups to whom we’ve become accustomed. We’re used to groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (or if you’re familiar with it, the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm) who are incredibly meticulous about vetting their poster cases."
2. "A second explanation could just be that the cases that fell apart are the ones we remember — or, we remember them because they fell apart. There may be some truth to this. Exoneration stories certainly capture the public’s attention."
3.  "...[T]here’s a strong desire to find the “emblematic” case, one that checks off all the right boxes — a sympathetic victim, a privileged attacker, an indifferent administration, and so on. Real life doesn’t usually produce such clean-cut cases."
4. "Another possibility merges these two points: The alleged victims most eager to generate publicity for their stories may be the those most likely to say what activists or journalists in search of a good story want to hear."

Zealots have their cosmology, and it rarely survives any sort of substantive examination. Rape culture activists are nothing if not religious in nature, and so here we are.

Ellen Pao To Appeal Kleiner Perkins Verdict

And she may have a bit of a case here, largely on the grounds that her suit was not "frivolous or malicious". (She is appealing to prevent Kleiner Perkins from recovering their considerable legal costs.) I will be interested to see Kleiner Perkins' response (and who knows what those terms of legal art might actually mean in practice).

The Campfire Of Hate: #GiveYourMoneyToWomen And Target Assessment

Every movement needs its enemies, and something as obviously lazy and venal as #GiveYourMoneyToWomen provides an easy target. (Liz Finnegan's introductory piece at Everyjoe is a pretty good primer.) But, my problems with it are that

1. No traction from anyone of real name. (Who the hell is @ChiefElk?)
2. Almost all the tweets with this hashtag are from conservatives decrying the state of modern feminism.

Which is to say, it's something of a manufactured controversy arising from one entitled princess's delusional fantasies.

Aside: I really liked David Frum's tweet on this:

Worldwide, women earn $18 trillion and spend $28 trillion. https://t.co/ZHSnC2h3wO The #GiveYourMoneyToWomen hashtag worked!

— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 31, 2015

Laura Kipnis' Torquemada, Joan Slavin

This is incredible.

... I must emphasize that Northwestern University will not tolerate any retaliation or aggression, macro- or micro-, against students who have made complaints against faculty or each other. Such retaliation is both unlawful under Title IX and against University policy. Professor Kipnis' latest article, like her previous one, represents a deeply problematical challenge to these community values.

Public Attacks On Victims: When a student accuses a faculty member or another student of sexual misconduct, the only University response consistent with Title IX is contrition, acceptance, and support.

Professor Kipnis forces me to clarify a point that ought already be plain in an environment like this one: "neutrality" is no shield for attacks on victim integrity. Professor Kipnes' columns suggest that it is appropriate in the course of discussing an accusation to report what the target says in response to it. Unless the response is a full acknowledgement of wrongdoing and apology, it is not appropriate.

Title IX Procedure: Professor Kipnis' latest article is a brutal and biased attack on the University's procedure for evaluating Title IX complaints. I must remind the faculty that discussions of procedure and "fairness" are not excuses to attack victims. Employees should avoid discussions that imply that any particular victim, or victims in general, may not be telling the truth, or may be seeking unwarranted remedies.

Curriculum: It is our collective responsibility to avoid unlawful retaliation not only directly, but implicitly. During this period of reassurance, and whenever Title IX investigations are pending, the College of Arts & Sciences faculty should avoid undue emphasis on problem authors whose texts undermine free reporting of sexual misconduct, such as Arthur Miller, Franz Kafka, or Harper Lee. 

Thus the value of a Harvard Law degree, the comforting warm knowledge that one can add two and two, get five, and still collect a paycheck.

Update: Unclear to me whether Ken's post was meant as satire or if it's really a leaked email. The line between fantasy and reality in bogus news contexts is getting harder and harder to parse.

Update 2: Laura Kipnis was cleared of any wrongdoing in a Title IX proceeding, which is kinda sad that any such thing even happened in the first place.  "Philosopher" Justin Weinberg wrote a really dumb piece at the blog Nous which is illustrative of the mindset at play here, a great deal of which falls into the "I'm in favor of free speech, but" variety.