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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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I don’t think any historical system can be said to ‘actually work’, but especially not the chimera of incoherent nonsense embodying our sexual mores these last years. And even if the old ones did, technological advances like the pill have made them obsolete.

I don’t propose my strict rape standard as some glorious RETVRN point, it’s just the best, most legible standard, gender-neutral, as liberal as it gets and in line with the rest of (less emotionally and religiously charged) jurisprudence.

(the minimum age to babysit in those days was about 13 and the age of consent was 16),

I feel like you’re trying to sneak in ‘underage’ into your draconian ‘babysitter rule’ from earlier. I was thinking, schwarzenegger.

The old school understanding of rape related to the subset of illicit sex where the man was wholly guilty and the woman wholly innocent, not to the boundary between licit and illicit sex.

Most of what they considered illicit sex (between two unmarried adults, between men, with vestal virgins, etc) has rightly been declared licit, because sex is of little consequence in the modern world. So its ongoing criminalization in eg the workplace, is a pure loss (while being quietly tolerated as long as the woman feels like it, which is also harmful to the rule of law).

But what some ancients considered illicit-innocent-women-sex is an actually decent, generalizable standard for illicit sex. The rest is yesterday’s garbage.

In the instant cases (both "Caroline" and Pavlovich) the woman would have been unemployed and homeless within 24 hours of calling the police on Gaiman - that is something you need to make plans for, and making those plans can take weeks.

I find that a far-fetched scenario, no one needs weeks. But even if the women were ready to flee, were they going to starve on the street? Again, I expect people to show just a little bit of courage, instead of warping the justice system to accommodate them.

I don’t fear luca brasi. The state protects me from luca brasi’s superior force (which is a gun btw) , like it protects women from mine (and I don’t even have a gun). Equality before the law works. Let’s not make up arcane rules about -if citizen A is heavier/smarter/more famous than citizen B, give B retroactive consent-cancelling power on all his contracts.

If your boss says "Can you run down to Fatbucks and fetch me a coffee-flavoured double sugar-water with extra lard?" then you might be able to give an excuse, but a simple "no" is what Sir Humphrey would call a brave career move. Is it different when your boss asks you "Will you kneel down under the desk and blow me?"

No? I don’t get your point here. People fetch their boss’ coffee, and do other tasks they feel queasy about for the paycheck, all the time. This doesn’t give them the legal right to attack their boss five years later.

The equilibrium in societies where quid pro quo sexual harassment is a normal incident of being a woman in the workplace is that women with options stop working outside the home.

And in societies where fetch me coffee is a normal incident, people with options stop working outside the home, because working sucks.