I liked Lucretia’s initial response quite a bit. For a small bit of context about my personal identity and background, I’m a hetero cis man who has witnessed severe problems with sexual abuse in the rat/EA and also in other subcultures over the last 10 years, and has had many conversations with women on these issues.
The following are just my thoughts. Their length, the number of conjunctions, and the fact that I’m a hetero cis man makes me a little bit anxious about posting them, even though I think they are a carefully thought-out and constructive contribution. If the balance of opinion appears to be not just disagreement but a perception that this is counterproductive toward the project of seeking sexual justice in the rationalist/EA community, then I will delete it. So please be explicit (I will weight comments/PMs including reasons for your disagreement more heavily than karma in this decision).
Before I go on, I need to make one point extremely clear:
I will be talking about the idea of sexually “risky behavior” here. What this means specifically is flirtatious/sexual acts that have the potential to be perceived as consensual/desirable by both participants, but which lack explicit consent guardrails such as verbal declarations of consent, involve power imbalances, involve intoxication, or take place quickly enough that there are real risks of perceiving desire/consent when it’s not actually there.
When I talk about sexually “risky behavior,” I am not talking about a situation in which sexual abuse actually occurred. That’s not a risk—that is a disastrous, failed, violent outcome.
These are charged topics and I am not confident I’m doing an adequate job despite my best efforts, so I am happy to constructively respond to criticism of my language choices as well as the conceptual framework.
I’d start by jumping off this portion of Lucretia’s comment:
Our society has pretty agreed-upon norms that hitting someone is bad. But due to women only relatively recently entering the legal system, media, economy, and other positions of discourse and power, the epistemics around sexual violence are currently less agreed upon and clear (the hermeneutical injustice stuff applies here)...
Lastly, I find sexual abuse to be distinctly disturbing in that it’s a perversion of something that’s supposed to be enjoyable, an act of trust, and a celebration of life.
One of the challenge with many forms of sexual abuse (and harassment, which I’m here going to lump in with abuse), is that what makes an individual act of sexual abuse harmful is often much more contextual than what makes an individual act of non-sexual abuse harmful.
Consider some typical examples of non-sexual abuse:
Physical violence
Demeaning and disrespectful language
Neglect of a dependent
Stealing, financial coercion, or nonconsensual control of finances
Spreading negative false rumors to damage somebody’s reputation
All of these forms of non-sexual abuse typically involve “atomic” actions that are almost always intrinsically negative (i.e. they are not usually “enjoyable, an act of trust, and a celebration of life”). They are straightforwaredly brutal or cruel acts. The rare occasions on which some people might consider them acceptable typically require elaborate justifications (spanking children, fighting back against an abusive spouse, conservatorships, teasing, or inaccuracies in satirical biopics like Vice).
In escalating social interactions toward increased intimacy, participants frequently want some level of ambiguity or plausible deniability in order to avoid the embarassment and awkwardness of rejection. Communicating while preserving plausible deniability is a delicate art and also a generator of misunderstandings, as well as grotesque redpill-style distortions about how women think and feel about sex. It is this force that makes people want to flirt in conventional ways, rather than having the expectation that one can straightforwaredly ask about sexual interest and receive an honest, direct answer. Sexual abuse occurs in a context where plausible deniability is felt to be a crucial part of sexual negotiation, and where a common outcome of sexual negotiation are normal hurt feelings, embarassment, letdown, frustration and discomfort. This serves as camoflage for sexual abuse.
In contrast to non-sexual abuse, sexual abuse often (but not always) involves “atomic” actions where:
A substantial amount of context is required in order to understand why those individual acts were unequivocally harmful or inappropriate, or why the harms aren’t just normal negative feelings from a failed normal and healthy sexual negotiation, but are instead the result of sexual aggression or violence.
We may have to defer to the survivor(s) in order to learn that context, because adequate hard evidence does not exist.
In order to address these problems while minimizing new ones, we often rely on a few techniques:
Looking for a pattern of behavior by the alleged perpetrator.
Relying on sufficiently accurate stereotypes and patterns of behavior on a community level. For example, the proliferation of stories of women being sexually abused in EA/rationalist/AI-safety-adjacent Silicon Valley communities by high-status men lowers my threshold for believing an accusation against a high-status SV man in these communities, even if he has a previously unblemished reputation.
Installing community norms around what we regard as a low-risk vs. high-risk sexual interaction from a consent standpoint. For example, touching a woman a man has just met on the upper thigh within a minute of meeting her is a very high-risk form of sexual interaction.
Note that the challenge here is that some individuals will mutually want to engage in sexual activities regarded as high-risk by their communities, without the encumbrance of careful, explicit declarations of consent at each step along the way. Their ability to do so on a practical level will be impaired by the community’s perceptions of these activities as high-risk. This is a tradeoff the community as a whole makes, typically judging that the loss by adopting more conservative norms around sex is outweighted by the huge gains in terms of sexual safety. Furthermore, perceptions and the reality of large amounts of sexual abuse also makes sex more difficult, further tilting the norm toward greater conservatism.
Installing a norm that failure to avoid being accused of sexual abuse is sufficient grounds for punitive action by the community, though not necessarily by law enforcement, often with a lower threshold the more high-risk the sexual interaction was.
These techniques are controversial, both in theory and in practice, because they are vulnerable to adversarial exploitation—both by people bent on destroying reputations for personal gain and especially by perpetrators of sexual abuse bent on undermining investigations into their own abusive activities. There is a principled and an unprincipled critique, and it is easy to hide the unprincipled critique as a principled one.
The foregoing is not meant as an argument in favor of one approach or another to dealing with sexual abuse. Instead, it is intended as an answer to the question in the comment I’m responding to: what makes sexual abuse different from other forms of abuse? I believe an important defining difference is the problems I’ve articulated here. The result is that it feels qualitatatively very different to deal with sexual abuse than other forms of abuse.
I’m going to take a stab at a framework. This is the first time I’ve written this down, so consider this possibly prone to errors and in draft status.
Instead of lumping all types of sexual harassment/abuse together, we could view sexual abuse/harassment as structurally similar to first, second, and third degree homicide, with varying degrees of intent.
Type 1 sexual abuse/harassment may involve calculation and intent. Epstein, Weinstein, and Ratrick’s actions above in studying red pill scripts would fall under Type I. You can see that this behavior was premeditated.
Type 2 sexual abuse/harassment may be analogous to “crimes of passion,” such as a hypothetical guy becoming overtaken with desire and not checking in on the woman. But it is not a premeditated offense.
To be clear, both types are bad. I don’t think parts of Silicon Valley take either type seriously enough. Type 1 and Type 2 is also a spectrum, and repeat offenders may have a mix of both. However, perhaps the offenses should be treated differently.
I think people get squeamish when you try to lump adolescent boy who’s learning boundaries and who is clumsy with consent, but open to correction (Type 2), with someone like Epstein, who is a calculated offender (Type 1). This may also be one reason why the #MeToo movement got cancelled; there may have been a lumping of Type 2 with Type 1 offenders in a way that made some people think parts of the movement were “unreasonable.”
I think restorative justice fails when it is assumed that the offender is a Type 2 offender who is open to correction. But oftentimes, the offender is actually a Type 1 offender who is manipulating his community into thinking he is a Type 2 offender. Or, even if the crimes are not premeditated, they are serial, and the offender is not open to correction but pretends to be, which would make him Type 1.
So perhaps severity of consequences of sexual harassment/abuse should be modulated by: a) “How premeditated was the act?” and b) “Is this a repeated offense?,” which together could classify the offense into a Type 1 or Type 2 offense.
adolescent boy who’s learning boundaries and who is clumsy with consent, but open to correction (Type 2), with someone like Epstein, who is a calculated offender (Type 1)
Two other dimensions your example also illustrates:
Relative power and status: it’s not just that Epstein was intentional in his abuse, but also that he was older, richer, and much better connected.
Relative experience: Epstein had run his process on hundreds of women and girls, with the opportunity to learn from those experiences and adapt his methods.
I think these additional considerations are also doing a lot of work in why people see these two situations differently?
I think there may be a number of related constrcts in play here, such as the culpability of the offender, amenability of the offender to restorative justice techniques, and the appropriate consequences for the offense. Many factors (such as advance planning) will load on all three constructs, although perhaps with somewhat different weights. However, I can think of factors that might load much differently on the different constructs. So one suggestion for more detailed framework building would be to consider whether the factors affect specific constructs differently.
One awkward issue is that the menu of potential consequences will vary depending on the status of the offender. For instance, a civil lawsuit probably isn’t realistically available against a first-year grad student: it’s expensive, and the survivor won’t be able to collect money that the grad student doesn’t have. On the other hand, one could envision methods of reducing future risk without booting the offender from the community that are rather expensive . . . which would require the offender to have resources to pay (or would require the offender to be seen as high-impact enough for a donor to step up to pay to keep the person in the community).[1]
For instance, I submit that in most—probably all—cases in which the offender’s use of psychoactive substances materially contributed to the offense conduct, the offender needs to go substance-free for several years at least. One could monitor compliance with this commitment via hair testing, but it ain’t cheap.
The context-dependence of some sexual abuse is also why it can take some survivors awhile to process and articulate their experiences. The process can feel like picking jagged glass out of an organ.
I don’t have great answers yet, but appreciate the frameworks you’re developing.
I liked Lucretia’s initial response quite a bit. For a small bit of context about my personal identity and background, I’m a hetero cis man who has witnessed severe problems with sexual abuse in the rat/EA and also in other subcultures over the last 10 years, and has had many conversations with women on these issues.
The following are just my thoughts. Their length, the number of conjunctions, and the fact that I’m a hetero cis man makes me a little bit anxious about posting them, even though I think they are a carefully thought-out and constructive contribution. If the balance of opinion appears to be not just disagreement but a perception that this is counterproductive toward the project of seeking sexual justice in the rationalist/EA community, then I will delete it. So please be explicit (I will weight comments/PMs including reasons for your disagreement more heavily than karma in this decision).
Before I go on, I need to make one point extremely clear:
I will be talking about the idea of sexually “risky behavior” here. What this means specifically is flirtatious/sexual acts that have the potential to be perceived as consensual/desirable by both participants, but which lack explicit consent guardrails such as verbal declarations of consent, involve power imbalances, involve intoxication, or take place quickly enough that there are real risks of perceiving desire/consent when it’s not actually there.
When I talk about sexually “risky behavior,” I am not talking about a situation in which sexual abuse actually occurred. That’s not a risk—that is a disastrous, failed, violent outcome.
These are charged topics and I am not confident I’m doing an adequate job despite my best efforts, so I am happy to constructively respond to criticism of my language choices as well as the conceptual framework.
I’d start by jumping off this portion of Lucretia’s comment:
One of the challenge with many forms of sexual abuse (and harassment, which I’m here going to lump in with abuse), is that what makes an individual act of sexual abuse harmful is often much more contextual than what makes an individual act of non-sexual abuse harmful.
Consider some typical examples of non-sexual abuse:
Physical violence
Demeaning and disrespectful language
Neglect of a dependent
Stealing, financial coercion, or nonconsensual control of finances
Spreading negative false rumors to damage somebody’s reputation
All of these forms of non-sexual abuse typically involve “atomic” actions that are almost always intrinsically negative (i.e. they are not usually “enjoyable, an act of trust, and a celebration of life”). They are straightforwaredly brutal or cruel acts. The rare occasions on which some people might consider them acceptable typically require elaborate justifications (spanking children, fighting back against an abusive spouse, conservatorships, teasing, or inaccuracies in satirical biopics like Vice).
In escalating social interactions toward increased intimacy, participants frequently want some level of ambiguity or plausible deniability in order to avoid the embarassment and awkwardness of rejection. Communicating while preserving plausible deniability is a delicate art and also a generator of misunderstandings, as well as grotesque redpill-style distortions about how women think and feel about sex. It is this force that makes people want to flirt in conventional ways, rather than having the expectation that one can straightforwaredly ask about sexual interest and receive an honest, direct answer. Sexual abuse occurs in a context where plausible deniability is felt to be a crucial part of sexual negotiation, and where a common outcome of sexual negotiation are normal hurt feelings, embarassment, letdown, frustration and discomfort. This serves as camoflage for sexual abuse.
In contrast to non-sexual abuse, sexual abuse often (but not always) involves “atomic” actions where:
A substantial amount of context is required in order to understand why those individual acts were unequivocally harmful or inappropriate, or why the harms aren’t just normal negative feelings from a failed normal and healthy sexual negotiation, but are instead the result of sexual aggression or violence.
We may have to defer to the survivor(s) in order to learn that context, because adequate hard evidence does not exist.
In order to address these problems while minimizing new ones, we often rely on a few techniques:
Looking for a pattern of behavior by the alleged perpetrator.
Relying on sufficiently accurate stereotypes and patterns of behavior on a community level. For example, the proliferation of stories of women being sexually abused in EA/rationalist/AI-safety-adjacent Silicon Valley communities by high-status men lowers my threshold for believing an accusation against a high-status SV man in these communities, even if he has a previously unblemished reputation.
Installing community norms around what we regard as a low-risk vs. high-risk sexual interaction from a consent standpoint. For example, touching a woman a man has just met on the upper thigh within a minute of meeting her is a very high-risk form of sexual interaction.
Note that the challenge here is that some individuals will mutually want to engage in sexual activities regarded as high-risk by their communities, without the encumbrance of careful, explicit declarations of consent at each step along the way. Their ability to do so on a practical level will be impaired by the community’s perceptions of these activities as high-risk. This is a tradeoff the community as a whole makes, typically judging that the loss by adopting more conservative norms around sex is outweighted by the huge gains in terms of sexual safety. Furthermore, perceptions and the reality of large amounts of sexual abuse also makes sex more difficult, further tilting the norm toward greater conservatism.
Installing a norm that failure to avoid being accused of sexual abuse is sufficient grounds for punitive action by the community, though not necessarily by law enforcement, often with a lower threshold the more high-risk the sexual interaction was.
These techniques are controversial, both in theory and in practice, because they are vulnerable to adversarial exploitation—both by people bent on destroying reputations for personal gain and especially by perpetrators of sexual abuse bent on undermining investigations into their own abusive activities. There is a principled and an unprincipled critique, and it is easy to hide the unprincipled critique as a principled one.
The foregoing is not meant as an argument in favor of one approach or another to dealing with sexual abuse. Instead, it is intended as an answer to the question in the comment I’m responding to: what makes sexual abuse different from other forms of abuse? I believe an important defining difference is the problems I’ve articulated here. The result is that it feels qualitatatively very different to deal with sexual abuse than other forms of abuse.
Update:
I’m going to take a stab at a framework. This is the first time I’ve written this down, so consider this possibly prone to errors and in draft status.
Instead of lumping all types of sexual harassment/abuse together, we could view sexual abuse/harassment as structurally similar to first, second, and third degree homicide, with varying degrees of intent.
Type 1 sexual abuse/harassment may involve calculation and intent. Epstein, Weinstein, and Ratrick’s actions above in studying red pill scripts would fall under Type I. You can see that this behavior was premeditated.
Type 2 sexual abuse/harassment may be analogous to “crimes of passion,” such as a hypothetical guy becoming overtaken with desire and not checking in on the woman. But it is not a premeditated offense.
To be clear, both types are bad. I don’t think parts of Silicon Valley take either type seriously enough. Type 1 and Type 2 is also a spectrum, and repeat offenders may have a mix of both. However, perhaps the offenses should be treated differently.
I think people get squeamish when you try to lump adolescent boy who’s learning boundaries and who is clumsy with consent, but open to correction (Type 2), with someone like Epstein, who is a calculated offender (Type 1). This may also be one reason why the #MeToo movement got cancelled; there may have been a lumping of Type 2 with Type 1 offenders in a way that made some people think parts of the movement were “unreasonable.”
I think restorative justice fails when it is assumed that the offender is a Type 2 offender who is open to correction. But oftentimes, the offender is actually a Type 1 offender who is manipulating his community into thinking he is a Type 2 offender. Or, even if the crimes are not premeditated, they are serial, and the offender is not open to correction but pretends to be, which would make him Type 1.
So perhaps severity of consequences of sexual harassment/abuse should be modulated by: a) “How premeditated was the act?” and b) “Is this a repeated offense?,” which together could classify the offense into a Type 1 or Type 2 offense.
Two other dimensions your example also illustrates:
Relative power and status: it’s not just that Epstein was intentional in his abuse, but also that he was older, richer, and much better connected.
Relative experience: Epstein had run his process on hundreds of women and girls, with the opportunity to learn from those experiences and adapt his methods.
I think these additional considerations are also doing a lot of work in why people see these two situations differently?
I think there may be a number of related constrcts in play here, such as the culpability of the offender, amenability of the offender to restorative justice techniques, and the appropriate consequences for the offense. Many factors (such as advance planning) will load on all three constructs, although perhaps with somewhat different weights. However, I can think of factors that might load much differently on the different constructs. So one suggestion for more detailed framework building would be to consider whether the factors affect specific constructs differently.
One awkward issue is that the menu of potential consequences will vary depending on the status of the offender. For instance, a civil lawsuit probably isn’t realistically available against a first-year grad student: it’s expensive, and the survivor won’t be able to collect money that the grad student doesn’t have. On the other hand, one could envision methods of reducing future risk without booting the offender from the community that are rather expensive . . . which would require the offender to have resources to pay (or would require the offender to be seen as high-impact enough for a donor to step up to pay to keep the person in the community).[1]
For instance, I submit that in most—probably all—cases in which the offender’s use of psychoactive substances materially contributed to the offense conduct, the offender needs to go substance-free for several years at least. One could monitor compliance with this commitment via hair testing, but it ain’t cheap.
This is a great answer, thank you.
The context-dependence of some sexual abuse is also why it can take some survivors awhile to process and articulate their experiences. The process can feel like picking jagged glass out of an organ.
I don’t have great answers yet, but appreciate the frameworks you’re developing.