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There's been some discussion here on the "incel" phenomenon recently, with several commenters reiterating the popular claim that the reason women have such a visceral dislike of incels is because they fear being raped by them, and arguing that this fear is entirely reasonable.
I would like to take this opportunity to reiterate that the available evidence points in the opposite direction: men who have numerous sexual partners, one-night stands, concurrent sexual partners, visit prostitutes etc. are more likely to commit rape or sexual assault than men who do not meet this description. In light of this evidence, Brand probably sitting in the 99th percentile for sexual partners should significantly raise our priors that he is guilty of what he is accused of. The fact that he's famously promiscuous isn't dispositive, of course, but it's highly relevant to the accusations.
The "incel" phenomenon is adjacent to the disability theorists' concept of desexualization: unattractive enough and it is straight up transgressive and gross for you to want sex. At a stretch it might be a special case of it, although that is conflating the likes of Elliot Rodger with decent but lonely people. This applies differently to both men and women, but Bertha in the wheelchair is gross and makes people uncomfortable for having any sexual or romantic desires whatsoever, while her wheelchair-bound twin brother Bob is also a bit creepy.
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I'm not sure if you're interpreting that review correctly. Specifically, I think you're flipping around the numerators and denominators, and the "rates" that the studies look at aren't the "rates" that affect women.
As an illustration of how that can lead your reasoning astray, consider a toy model where a playboy has sex with 1000 women and assaults four of them (a 0.4% rate), while a group of 1000 no-longer-incels has sex with 1000 women (one each), and assaults 10 of them (0.01 each, or a 1% rate). By my reading, the studies included in that review would conclude that playboys commit assaults at 400x the rate of no-longer-incels. However, a women looking only to avoid assault would look at the per sexual encounter rate, and (under this model) there is 2.5x the risk from the incel group.
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Its really hard to do proper Bayesian analysis when the base rates differ by orders of magnitude between subpopulations.
What fraction of the attractive, single, 16-35 year old women Russell Brand meets in a given year want to have sex with him? 20%? I know it's a lot higher than for you or me. He simply doesn't need as many bits of evidence in order to have the same confidence level that the woman he's with consents.
The huge numbers involved lead to some interesting scenarios. If Russell Brand sleeps with 1000 women, and 998 of them are perfectly consensual, +EV experiences for both parties (I am ignoring society-wide social consequences for the moment), but 2 of them are honest misunderstandings where the woman did not actually consent, is 99.8% an unreasonably low confidence level to act upon? Human social interaction is complicated. Are you sure you'll ever be able to get it much above that? Would it even be fair to Brand and the other 998 women if we insisted on a 99.99% confidence level instead? What's the utilitarian calculus here?
You mentioned that more sexually-active men are more likely to be sexual assault perpetrators, and I totally believe that, but I do wonder what happens if you do the normalization per encounter instead of per person.
I agree, and there's also the fact that (a) most men have a partner of some kind, and (b) men who are not sexually active are - despite the presence of incels - also a population that contains many low-libido men, voluntarily celibate men etc.., who are presumably much less likely to commit acts of sexual assault. It stands to reason that sexually active men are more likely to commit sexual assault than sexually inactive men because the former tend to be more interested in sex than the latter.
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