I have only just noticed this old piece by Andrew Brown. Brown writes (slightly patronizingly) about disagreements at a meeting of the Council of Ex-Muslims at Conway Hall:
"The only time these disagreements were overcome was when someone made a little speech about how no one minded religion as a private activity: it was only obnoxious when the religious tried to force their opinions on everyone else. The whole hall joined in applauding this sentiment, so obviously and unarguably right.
Perhaps it's just my limited tolerance for high-mindedness that gave me a sudden flash of insight that this doctrine was in fact obviously and unarguably wrong."
Actually, I think Brown is wrong and the applauded doctrine was largely right. In this article it becomes clear that Brown (though perhaps also his target) is muddling up the kind of secularism (my kind) that makes equal public space for religious and non-religious views without privileging either [and which says you shouldn't, by state or by other means, compel others to adhere to your specifically religious, or atheist, views], with the kind of secularism that insists that only atheist and/or non-religious views can be publicly expressed. The religious must bite their tongues. This is a muddle that anti-secularists promote and trade on.
Shame Brown is perpetuating it (incidentally, how many secularists do you know who believe people should not be allowed to publicly express a religious point of view? I have only ever come across one. Yet that's how opponents of my kind of secularism typically caricature it.)
The bit about "forcing doctrines on everyone else" is interesting. But of course secularists don't typically want to force secularism on society, but to persuade society to embrace a religiously-neutral, secular position (which is not to say such a society is officially neutral on everything of course - it clearly isn't [it's not neutral on the value of secularism and freedom of religious belief, for a start).
True, as a result of a society being secular, some freedoms will be curtailed. I won't be free to send my child to a state-funded school promoting atheism, for example. Good thing too.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Tim Chambers on rape and sex
NO, YOU CAN’T STEAL A KISS
Timothy Chambers
Here, Timothy Chambers argues that rape is not a sex act. In a piece further down, I suggest that it is.
I guess my first feminist role-model was Marilyn Sokol. She played ‘Stella,’ the boisterous best friend to Goldie Hawn’s ‘Gloria,’ in the 1978 blockbuster, Foul Play.
I first saw it when I was eight or nine years old.
There’s a scene where Gloria reveals that she gave a ride to a hitchhiker.
Stella is incredulous. ‘Really, Gloria! Do you know the percentages of rapes from hitchhikers?!...And look at you, with no protection.’ (By ‘protection,’ Stella means mace or brass knuckles, both of which she owns.)
‘Well,’ Gloria considers, the hitchhiker ‘didn’t seem to be after sex.’
‘Rape is not an act of sex,’ Stella booms. ‘Rape is an act of violence! Remember that.’
I can’t speak for Gloria, but I surely remembered it. I’m reminded of it every so often. In her tantalizing attempt to define sex (entitled, ‘Are We Having Sex Now Or What?’),
Greta Christina declares what should be a deal-breaker for any candidate definition. ‘Even the conventional standby—sex equals intercourse—has a serious flaw,’ she writes. ‘[I]t includes rape, which is something I emphatically refuse to accept. As far as I’m concerned, if there’s no consent, it ain’t sex.’
And yet, I’m unsure whether this truth has percolated into society at large. I’m reminded of this every so often, too. Sometimes it’s a careless phrasing, which I spotted in the New York Daily News in 2005 (‘…who lost her virginity at gunpoint in 1991 when a gang of thugs…’). Or else it’s a potentially misleading headline, compliments of a 2007 article in the London Daily Mail (‘Doctor rejects evidence of patient who says that he hypnotized her and took her virginity’). And then there was the Aug. 17, 1999 story in the New York Times, citing a rising demand for ‘virginity tests’ in South Africa. The article never notes the obvious: if a woman had been assaulted, then the ‘test’ would yield a false negative. The list goes on and on.
All of these cases, which describe rape survivors as having had their virginity ‘taken,’ get matters dead wrong. To me, it’s axiomatic: a survivor who was raped didn’t thereby ‘have sex’; a person is not a virgin only if they have ‘had sex’; ergo, it’s conceptually impossible for a rapist to ‘take’ or ‘rob’ his target’s virginity.
Now, I’m an academic philosopher by training and temperament. This means I can only tolerate cognitive dissonance and mixed messages for just so long. At last, I find myself needing to sit somewhere comfy, put some jottings on paper, and sort out the truth once and for all.
II
Why does Stella find it obvious that rape is not an act of sex? And why has society been so slow on the uptake of this obvious truth?
It helped me to notice how many amorous activities require reciprocity before we credit the act as happening. Take holding hands. It’s not enough that my hand comes into contact with another’s hand—otherwise, I’ve held hands with everyone whose hands I’ve shaken.
Hand-holding also seems to preclude coercion, however subtle. Suppose I spot my friend, Grace, on a date at an uptown bistro. The next day, I remark to her, ‘It looks like your date went swimmingly.’
Grace scowls. ‘As if.’
‘But you were holding hands,’ I protest.
‘We weren’t ‘holding hands,’’ Grace corrects. ‘He took my hand—practically grabbed it. The feeling wasn’t mutual. I didn’t pull away because I already sensed the guy was a jerk, and I didn’t want him making a scene in my favorite restaurant.’
Dancing provides another activity with links to reciprocity. I once witnessed a friend of mine, Cerrisa, at a dance-party. Some young guy, dripping with desperation, approached her. She declined, politely.
Then the man starts to dance in front of her.
My friend was unmoved. ‘I’m not dancing with you,’ she said, and stalked off.
Did Cerrisa and her wannabe suitor dance? Obviously not. He danced for her. But since she didn’t join his motions, it would be false to say they danced. (Just curious: would it be possible for two people to dance for one another, simultaneously, without thereby dancing with each other? With mirrors, maybe?)
The situation grows more nuanced with kissing, though. I’m reminded of the 1988 film, Dangerous Liaisons. There’s a scene where the villain, Valmont, calls upon a young woman, Cecile, very late at night. She asks him to leave.
Valmont promises to go on one condition: ‘I just want you to give me a kiss.’
Afterward, the villain still refuses to leave. ‘I promised to go when you gave me a kiss,’ he explains. ‘You didn’t give me a kiss. I gave you a kiss. Not the same thing at all.’
Valmont’s dastardly designs aside, his semantics ring true. If I kiss you on the lips, but you don’t ‘kiss me back’ (as we say), then we didn’t kiss.
At the same time, we do have phrases like ‘stole a kiss,’ as in ‘Valmont stole a kiss from Cecile when she was distracted.’ This sends a different message: the coercive or deceptive kisser got a kiss from the victim. After all, I can’t very well ‘steal’ something unless I somehow take possession of it.
This is most unfortunate. One wants to protest that speaking of ‘stolen kisses’ sins against the very institution. Kisses are meant to be tokens of shared affection—between parents and children, buzzes between friends, linkings of lovers. The very idea that someone could ‘steal a kiss’ seems a contradiction in terms. Yes, a man can extort certain bodily movements from a woman. But this cuts completely against the freedom of choice implied in saying, ‘We kissed.’
In other words, you can speak of coercing (or deceiving) a woman into kissing, but only if you turn a blind eye to the woman’s autonomy and consciousness. ‘Stolen kisses’ can only make sense if you view the woman’s participation as purely passive—as if ‘she acquiesced and allowed him to kiss her’ still means ‘they kissed.’ But the image this suggests is eerily asymmetric. Eerie, too, is how the myth of the ‘stolen kiss’ commodifies a woman’s gestures of intimacy, parsing them as if they were property which could be ‘stolen.’
III
All of this helped me illuminate the two questions which puzzled me at the outset.
Why isn’t rape an act of sex? Because, as Stella knew well, having sex (like holding hands or dancing together) presumes reciprocity. A rapist coerces a person into certain bodily motions. But to term these forced motions as ‘having sex’ adds insult to the initial assault. It only makes sense if, as we saw with ‘stolen kisses,’ our image of sex is seriously stunted: an image which renders irrelevant a woman’s state of mind and whether she exercised her autonomy. But that’s just obscene.
Why hasn’t society grasped this fact yet? I’m not sure. Call it the Inertia of Unchallenged Falsehoods. The very idea that a rape-survivor thereby had sex, or that virginity can be ‘stolen,’ seems to stem from a deeply-entrenched myth which casts women as ‘passive recipients’ in intimate transactions. In her insightful essay, ‘Date Rape: A Feminist Analysis’, Lois Pineau points to ‘a number of mutually supportive mythologies which see sexual assault as masterful seduction, and silent submission as sexual enjoyment,’ including ‘belief [in] the natural aggression of men and natural reluctance of women’ in intimate encounters.
How might we correct this marred image? For starters, we’ll need to call out the false picture when it makes media-appearances (which, as Lexis-Nexus assures me, is quite often). We would also do well to replace the image of sex which deserves discarding with an image of sex we can cherish. Towards this goal, Pineau makes excellent strides: ‘In honest sexual encounters,’ she writes, ‘this much is required. Assuming that each person enters the encounter in order to seek sexual satisfaction, each person…has an obligation to help the other seek his or her ends….But the requirement of mutuality means that we must take a communicative approach to discovering the ends of the other, and this entails that we respect the dialectics of desire.’
Sex, in this sense of the word, is a dialogue. It doesn’t happen when I only care about raising the points I want raised. It doesn’t happen when I ignore the points you want treated. It happens when we invite one another to perceive our most personal perspectives, with the hope that it will enhance the empathy we share.
Timothy Chambers teaches philosophy at the University of Hartford.
Timothy Chambers
Here, Timothy Chambers argues that rape is not a sex act. In a piece further down, I suggest that it is.
I guess my first feminist role-model was Marilyn Sokol. She played ‘Stella,’ the boisterous best friend to Goldie Hawn’s ‘Gloria,’ in the 1978 blockbuster, Foul Play.
I first saw it when I was eight or nine years old.
There’s a scene where Gloria reveals that she gave a ride to a hitchhiker.
Stella is incredulous. ‘Really, Gloria! Do you know the percentages of rapes from hitchhikers?!...And look at you, with no protection.’ (By ‘protection,’ Stella means mace or brass knuckles, both of which she owns.)
‘Well,’ Gloria considers, the hitchhiker ‘didn’t seem to be after sex.’
‘Rape is not an act of sex,’ Stella booms. ‘Rape is an act of violence! Remember that.’
I can’t speak for Gloria, but I surely remembered it. I’m reminded of it every so often. In her tantalizing attempt to define sex (entitled, ‘Are We Having Sex Now Or What?’),
Greta Christina declares what should be a deal-breaker for any candidate definition. ‘Even the conventional standby—sex equals intercourse—has a serious flaw,’ she writes. ‘[I]t includes rape, which is something I emphatically refuse to accept. As far as I’m concerned, if there’s no consent, it ain’t sex.’
And yet, I’m unsure whether this truth has percolated into society at large. I’m reminded of this every so often, too. Sometimes it’s a careless phrasing, which I spotted in the New York Daily News in 2005 (‘…who lost her virginity at gunpoint in 1991 when a gang of thugs…’). Or else it’s a potentially misleading headline, compliments of a 2007 article in the London Daily Mail (‘Doctor rejects evidence of patient who says that he hypnotized her and took her virginity’). And then there was the Aug. 17, 1999 story in the New York Times, citing a rising demand for ‘virginity tests’ in South Africa. The article never notes the obvious: if a woman had been assaulted, then the ‘test’ would yield a false negative. The list goes on and on.
All of these cases, which describe rape survivors as having had their virginity ‘taken,’ get matters dead wrong. To me, it’s axiomatic: a survivor who was raped didn’t thereby ‘have sex’; a person is not a virgin only if they have ‘had sex’; ergo, it’s conceptually impossible for a rapist to ‘take’ or ‘rob’ his target’s virginity.
Now, I’m an academic philosopher by training and temperament. This means I can only tolerate cognitive dissonance and mixed messages for just so long. At last, I find myself needing to sit somewhere comfy, put some jottings on paper, and sort out the truth once and for all.
II
Why does Stella find it obvious that rape is not an act of sex? And why has society been so slow on the uptake of this obvious truth?
It helped me to notice how many amorous activities require reciprocity before we credit the act as happening. Take holding hands. It’s not enough that my hand comes into contact with another’s hand—otherwise, I’ve held hands with everyone whose hands I’ve shaken.
Hand-holding also seems to preclude coercion, however subtle. Suppose I spot my friend, Grace, on a date at an uptown bistro. The next day, I remark to her, ‘It looks like your date went swimmingly.’
Grace scowls. ‘As if.’
‘But you were holding hands,’ I protest.
‘We weren’t ‘holding hands,’’ Grace corrects. ‘He took my hand—practically grabbed it. The feeling wasn’t mutual. I didn’t pull away because I already sensed the guy was a jerk, and I didn’t want him making a scene in my favorite restaurant.’
Dancing provides another activity with links to reciprocity. I once witnessed a friend of mine, Cerrisa, at a dance-party. Some young guy, dripping with desperation, approached her. She declined, politely.
Then the man starts to dance in front of her.
My friend was unmoved. ‘I’m not dancing with you,’ she said, and stalked off.
Did Cerrisa and her wannabe suitor dance? Obviously not. He danced for her. But since she didn’t join his motions, it would be false to say they danced. (Just curious: would it be possible for two people to dance for one another, simultaneously, without thereby dancing with each other? With mirrors, maybe?)
The situation grows more nuanced with kissing, though. I’m reminded of the 1988 film, Dangerous Liaisons. There’s a scene where the villain, Valmont, calls upon a young woman, Cecile, very late at night. She asks him to leave.
Valmont promises to go on one condition: ‘I just want you to give me a kiss.’
Afterward, the villain still refuses to leave. ‘I promised to go when you gave me a kiss,’ he explains. ‘You didn’t give me a kiss. I gave you a kiss. Not the same thing at all.’
Valmont’s dastardly designs aside, his semantics ring true. If I kiss you on the lips, but you don’t ‘kiss me back’ (as we say), then we didn’t kiss.
At the same time, we do have phrases like ‘stole a kiss,’ as in ‘Valmont stole a kiss from Cecile when she was distracted.’ This sends a different message: the coercive or deceptive kisser got a kiss from the victim. After all, I can’t very well ‘steal’ something unless I somehow take possession of it.
This is most unfortunate. One wants to protest that speaking of ‘stolen kisses’ sins against the very institution. Kisses are meant to be tokens of shared affection—between parents and children, buzzes between friends, linkings of lovers. The very idea that someone could ‘steal a kiss’ seems a contradiction in terms. Yes, a man can extort certain bodily movements from a woman. But this cuts completely against the freedom of choice implied in saying, ‘We kissed.’
In other words, you can speak of coercing (or deceiving) a woman into kissing, but only if you turn a blind eye to the woman’s autonomy and consciousness. ‘Stolen kisses’ can only make sense if you view the woman’s participation as purely passive—as if ‘she acquiesced and allowed him to kiss her’ still means ‘they kissed.’ But the image this suggests is eerily asymmetric. Eerie, too, is how the myth of the ‘stolen kiss’ commodifies a woman’s gestures of intimacy, parsing them as if they were property which could be ‘stolen.’
III
All of this helped me illuminate the two questions which puzzled me at the outset.
Why isn’t rape an act of sex? Because, as Stella knew well, having sex (like holding hands or dancing together) presumes reciprocity. A rapist coerces a person into certain bodily motions. But to term these forced motions as ‘having sex’ adds insult to the initial assault. It only makes sense if, as we saw with ‘stolen kisses,’ our image of sex is seriously stunted: an image which renders irrelevant a woman’s state of mind and whether she exercised her autonomy. But that’s just obscene.
Why hasn’t society grasped this fact yet? I’m not sure. Call it the Inertia of Unchallenged Falsehoods. The very idea that a rape-survivor thereby had sex, or that virginity can be ‘stolen,’ seems to stem from a deeply-entrenched myth which casts women as ‘passive recipients’ in intimate transactions. In her insightful essay, ‘Date Rape: A Feminist Analysis’, Lois Pineau points to ‘a number of mutually supportive mythologies which see sexual assault as masterful seduction, and silent submission as sexual enjoyment,’ including ‘belief [in] the natural aggression of men and natural reluctance of women’ in intimate encounters.
How might we correct this marred image? For starters, we’ll need to call out the false picture when it makes media-appearances (which, as Lexis-Nexus assures me, is quite often). We would also do well to replace the image of sex which deserves discarding with an image of sex we can cherish. Towards this goal, Pineau makes excellent strides: ‘In honest sexual encounters,’ she writes, ‘this much is required. Assuming that each person enters the encounter in order to seek sexual satisfaction, each person…has an obligation to help the other seek his or her ends….But the requirement of mutuality means that we must take a communicative approach to discovering the ends of the other, and this entails that we respect the dialectics of desire.’
Sex, in this sense of the word, is a dialogue. It doesn’t happen when I only care about raising the points I want raised. It doesn’t happen when I ignore the points you want treated. It happens when we invite one another to perceive our most personal perspectives, with the hope that it will enhance the empathy we share.
Timothy Chambers teaches philosophy at the University of Hartford.
Monday, June 1, 2009
David Price, Francisco Liriano, and the Saga of the Super Twos
On Saturday evening, the middle game of a three-game series between the Minnesota Twins and the Tampa Bay Rays, Francisco Liriano and David Price, were the starting pitchers for their respective teams. Price picked up his first regular season win in the game after throwing 108 pitches in five and two-thirds innings, while Liriano dropped to 2-7 and his ERA increased to 6.60 in the 5-2 victory for the Rays. Early in the season, a number of reporters and bloggers were surprised that David Price, the 2007 number one draft choice from Vanderbilt, was being sent down to Durham for more minor league work. Jayson Stark of ESPN was one who offered some observations in “Believe it or not, Price headed to minors.” Although his spring performance included a 1.08 ERA, Stark reviewed Tampa Bay’s reasoning and argued that the move was not done for financial reasons because the terms of Price’s initial six-year deal protected the Rays. However, when looking closer at the terms of Price’s $8,500,000 contract, it appears that he has the right to void the annual salary in the original deal and file for arbitration in any year where he reaches arbitration-eligibility.
There are three basic groups of players in major league baseball. Those who are not eligible for arbitration, the arbitration-eligible group, and those who are eligible to be free agents. All of these categories are established by service time. Article XXI of the Basic Agreement covers credited major league service. One year of credited service equals 172 days. Under the CBA, the first group eligible for salary arbitration is the Super Twos group.
The language in the second paragraph of Article VI, F.(1) Eligibility establishes the criteria:
“a Player with at least two but less than three years of Major League service shall be eligible for salary arbitration if: (a) he has accumulated at least 86 days of service during the immediately preceding season; and (b) he ranks in the top 17% (rounded to the nearest whole number) in total service in the class of Players who have at least two but less than three years of Major League service, however accumulated, but with at least 86 days of service accumulated during the immediately preceding season.”
By spending the early part of the 2009 season in the minors, Price will not complete this season with more than one year of credited service even when adding his limited time on the Tampa Bay roster last season. Even if he is on the roster for all of the 2010 season, he will still be under two years of credited service. Either the Rays sign him to a new deal before his eligibility for arbitration as they did with Evan Longoria in April 2008 or they can maintain the original deal beyond next season depending upon his service time and those of the class each year beginning in 2011.
As to Liriano, the Minnesota Twins did not recall him from Rochester until August 1, 2008. Liriano started 19 games for Rochester last year with a 10-2 record and a 3.28 ERA in 118 innings. He also had a solid strikeout-to-walk ratio. Low walk totals are a hallmark of the Twins pitching philosophy. It appeared that he could have been recalled earlier last season, and some reporters and bloggers addressed this at the time.
Liriano’s salary for 2009 is $430,000, a modest amount above the league minimum in part because his service time at the beginning of this season was not quite enough to land in the group of Super Twos. Although Liriano is off to a rocky start with the Twins this season, the cost of his services is low.
There were four starting pitchers in the Super Twos group this year. Brian Bannister of the Kansas City Royals made $421,000 last year, but after exchanging numbers he signed for the midpoint figure of $1,737,500 this season. Ricky Nolasco of the Florida Marlins received $390,000 for 2008. As a Super Two, he negotiated a salary of $2,400,000 for the 2009 season. Bannister started the season at AAA Omaha, and Nolasco was recently optioned to the New Orleans Zephyrs. The star of the starting pitching class of 2009 Super Twos is Cole Hamels of the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies. Hamels was able to improve his 2008 salary of $500,000 to $4,350,000 for 2009 on the basis of his 84 starts during his three years with the Phillies. Because he spent part of the 2006 in the minors, he was not credited with three years of service at the end of last season. The fourth starting pitcher in the Super Twos class was Shawn Hill of the Nationals. Hill was one of the three players to proceed to a hearing this past year. After defeating the Nationals, Hill was released by the Nationals. He found a spot on the San Diego Padres roster for $500,000 (the Nationals’ offer) plus his settlement with the Nationals, but after pitching in three games he was placed back on his familiar spot on the disabled list on April 26.
The point of the post is the importance of service days and initial eligibility in the Super Twos category. Either by design or financial fortune, the Twins were able to keep Liriano from becoming a Super Two in the 2009 class.
There are three basic groups of players in major league baseball. Those who are not eligible for arbitration, the arbitration-eligible group, and those who are eligible to be free agents. All of these categories are established by service time. Article XXI of the Basic Agreement covers credited major league service. One year of credited service equals 172 days. Under the CBA, the first group eligible for salary arbitration is the Super Twos group.
The language in the second paragraph of Article VI, F.(1) Eligibility establishes the criteria:
“a Player with at least two but less than three years of Major League service shall be eligible for salary arbitration if: (a) he has accumulated at least 86 days of service during the immediately preceding season; and (b) he ranks in the top 17% (rounded to the nearest whole number) in total service in the class of Players who have at least two but less than three years of Major League service, however accumulated, but with at least 86 days of service accumulated during the immediately preceding season.”
By spending the early part of the 2009 season in the minors, Price will not complete this season with more than one year of credited service even when adding his limited time on the Tampa Bay roster last season. Even if he is on the roster for all of the 2010 season, he will still be under two years of credited service. Either the Rays sign him to a new deal before his eligibility for arbitration as they did with Evan Longoria in April 2008 or they can maintain the original deal beyond next season depending upon his service time and those of the class each year beginning in 2011.
As to Liriano, the Minnesota Twins did not recall him from Rochester until August 1, 2008. Liriano started 19 games for Rochester last year with a 10-2 record and a 3.28 ERA in 118 innings. He also had a solid strikeout-to-walk ratio. Low walk totals are a hallmark of the Twins pitching philosophy. It appeared that he could have been recalled earlier last season, and some reporters and bloggers addressed this at the time.
Liriano’s salary for 2009 is $430,000, a modest amount above the league minimum in part because his service time at the beginning of this season was not quite enough to land in the group of Super Twos. Although Liriano is off to a rocky start with the Twins this season, the cost of his services is low.
There were four starting pitchers in the Super Twos group this year. Brian Bannister of the Kansas City Royals made $421,000 last year, but after exchanging numbers he signed for the midpoint figure of $1,737,500 this season. Ricky Nolasco of the Florida Marlins received $390,000 for 2008. As a Super Two, he negotiated a salary of $2,400,000 for the 2009 season. Bannister started the season at AAA Omaha, and Nolasco was recently optioned to the New Orleans Zephyrs. The star of the starting pitching class of 2009 Super Twos is Cole Hamels of the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies. Hamels was able to improve his 2008 salary of $500,000 to $4,350,000 for 2009 on the basis of his 84 starts during his three years with the Phillies. Because he spent part of the 2006 in the minors, he was not credited with three years of service at the end of last season. The fourth starting pitcher in the Super Twos class was Shawn Hill of the Nationals. Hill was one of the three players to proceed to a hearing this past year. After defeating the Nationals, Hill was released by the Nationals. He found a spot on the San Diego Padres roster for $500,000 (the Nationals’ offer) plus his settlement with the Nationals, but after pitching in three games he was placed back on his familiar spot on the disabled list on April 26.
The point of the post is the importance of service days and initial eligibility in the Super Twos category. Either by design or financial fortune, the Twins were able to keep Liriano from becoming a Super Two in the 2009 class.
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