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Spontaneous Order
Submitted by Scott Scheule on Fri, 2008-05-16 14:22.
Rad Geek discusses the concept of spontaneous order.
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Spontaneous Order the Bad Kind
It is an interesting idea,I am cross posting my response
You have a program and your prefabricated explanations you think apply to the behavior of women. Your real contribution here is to point out that the fear in women being alone in certain situations arises out of spontaneous factors in the social environment and I compliment you for this observation.
I doubt if you would apply the same reasoning if the scenario were slightly modified to explain why cab drivers don’t pick up groups of young Black men at night.
What if Ms Brownmiller had said? “Black men’s discovery that his skin color could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries ----- I believe, skin color has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all Black men keep all White people in a state of fear.” She would be well received by the KKK perhaps but would be a pariah in your circles.
What if you claimed that the pervasive fact of mugging of cab drivers, and the threat that its pervasiveness inflicts on all cab drivers, produces a spontaneous (undesigned) order, so that the actions of Black muggers serve the role of promoting, sustaining, and reinforcing fear of all Black men.
I won’t go into some of the other gratuitous and unsupported conclusions you drew such as extensions of more sensible statement preceding them except to point out that things like “The desire to protect an innocent person from violence is, in and of itself, a good thing, not a bad thing. But-(for men to see themselves as) the sole protector, as a woman’s only safe option (is bad.) To see women as uniquely frail and in need of protection by nature (rather than uniquely threatened due to the choices of other men).etc, yada yada” just doesn’t follow from what precedes.
In fact people have always inhabited a somewhat dangerous world. It can be more or less dangerous for anyone. People, both men and women have always sought natural alliances with other preferably stronger persons and groups and this may have carried a price of conformity to the wishes of others. There is no reason to make this mundane fact the fulcrum of some sort of grand political statement or demand for social change.
Dave
Holy God, Dave, I tremble
Holy God, Dave, I tremble even questioning Rad Geek's grammar, but to call his conclusions "gratuitous and unsupported?" He's going to crucify you.
Re: Spontaneous Order the Bad Kind
One cross-post deserves another, I guess; here is the reply that I posted back over at radgeek.com:
Dave,
I don't think I've made any original contributions here, especially not about the role that the fear of rape plays in constraining women's freedom. The contributions, for good or for ill, are Brownmiller's, not mine, and are fully worked out in fairly explicit terms in her book. (Nor are they especially unique in the radical feminist literature, although her work was groundbreaking in that it was one of the first.) At most I have provided a translation into terms that some of my conversation partners might better understand.
In your attempted reply, you've made a few mistakes that ought to be corrected.
First, you seem to think that my purpose in this post is to prove that Brownmiller's Myrmidon theory of stranger-rape is strue. It's not. That's an understandable error on your part, because I am trying to refute some common objections to her theory (and other theories like hers), and to give a charitable reconstruction of it in terms that some of my intended audience may find plausible. But my point about the relationship between spontaneous order and Brownmiller's theory would remain true whether or not Brownmiller's theory is actually true. (Lots of false theories make sophisticated use of the concept of spontaneous order.)
It's a good thing, because in point of fact I don't even agree entirely with Brownmiller's theory. I do agree entirely with something in the neighborhood, and while I disagree with parts of the analysis in Against Our Will, I don't blame Brownmiller for anything she might have gotten wrong; the places where I disagree with that book are mostly places where discoveries made after 1975 -- such as the discovery, from the early 1980s onward, of just how prevalent acquaintance rape, date rape, and marital rape, that is, rape committed by those supposed protectors, actually is, and how much more common it is than stranger rape -- have required radical feminists to revisit their analysis. Thus there's a lot of overlap, but some important differences, in the analysis of rape culture offered in later feminist works; for examples, see Andrea Dworkin's Right-Wing Women and Intercourse.
But, to return to the main point, even if you managed to convince me that Brownmiller is just dead wrong (which you haven't), that wouldn't affect the main point I wrote this post to make.
Second, when you make your attempted analogy, it fails, because the two cases aren't actually analogous.
Brownmiller's claim isn't that some men's propensity to commit stranger-rape reinforces some kind of general conclusion that all men will commit stranger-rape. Quite the contrary: her whole point in the Myrmidon discussion has to do with the effects of the prevalent threat of stranger-rape for the relationship between (1) women threatened by rape, and (2) men who don't plan to, and who women don't expect to, rape. So, unlike the case of (non-black?) urban cabbies drawing a general conclusion about all black men from their particular experience, the issue here doesn't have anything in particular to do with the formation of collectivist prejudices or the projection of stereotypes by those threatened or victimized by violence.
Brownmiller's claim is also that spontaneous order arising from the actions of men who commit stranger-rape redound to the benefit of men who serve the role of protectors against stranger-rape. (Because it enhances their social status and makes certain women that much more dependent on them.) That makes the situation politically problematic for the men who want to hold on to those benefits, or who believe that those benefits are just the social consequences of an immutable and inborn human nature. If, on the other hand, you intend to claim that never being able to get a cab late at night -- or the general fear, among white people, of black men -- somehow redounds to the benefit of most black men, well, you probably need to think about things a bit harder.
I know that it is popular among certain circles to try to attack just about anything a radical feminist says by trying to compare them to the Klan or Neo-Nazis or other hate groups, and to compare statements about class politics in America (in this case sex-class) to expressions of racial stereotypes or prejudices. But if you want to try to make that comparison you've got to actually find something that's analogous in all the relevant respects of analysis and criticism, not just analogous in that it says something about the ways in which different groups of people relate to social power. Unless it is, you're just engaging in lazy baiting, and wasting people's time.
It's not intended to follow from what precedes. It's an argument drawn from independent premises about power and dependence that I believe much of my audience (anarchists and libertarians, in particular) have independent reasons to believe. It is not a conclusion, but rather a lemma to justify one of the premises of my main argument.
The kind of danger we're talking about -- the danger of being randomly targeted for assault and sexual torture by a complete stranger in the midst of your day-to-day life -- is not something that all people face equally, nor is it a natural feature of the world, like hurricanes or the black death. This kind of flattened-out, acontextual claim, abstracts from, and blanks out, all the actual details of sociological and political interest. Back in the real world, the prevalence of rape is a political fact, not some regrettable but immutable part of the misfortunes of the female sex.
When particular forms of danger, violence, power, and dependence affect people unequally depending on their position within a system of social class, and when they are not natural features of the world but rather the products of deliberate human choice, I believe -- and I think all other anarchists and libertarians have good reasons to believe -- that they are perfectly reasonable subjects for analysis, criticism, and political action. I don't know what your politics are, so I don't know whether you're a libertarian or an anarchist; maybe you're not, in which case the reasons that libertarians and anarchists have for concern about this issue may not matter much to you. But they matter to me, and they matter to most of my intended audience.
This certainly is a simplistic approach, but it's one that's been tried for many, many years now, and as a matter of empirical results, it doesn't seem to be especially helpful, at least not in isolation from other forms of political agitation, organizing, and comprehensive change.
You seem to want to turn this into an argument about date rape or party rape on college campuses. That's not what this post is about; this post is about a particular theory of random stranger rape, not a theory that has anything directly to say about rape committed against particular women by their acquaintances, friends, or lovers. There are lots of other posts on the Internet that are about the latter, and I'm sure that you and I would have some pretty strong differences about those topics, if we were to discuss them, but in the comments thread on this post I'd rather deal with the issue at hand rather than changing the subject.
Brownmiller's claim is also
Protection against harm is a benefit to the person protected, so it makes sense that the protector be compensated. It would be politically problematic for the protector to be compelled to protect without the right to make this protection conditional on compensation. In contrast the compensation of the protector is not problematic.
Lust arises from human nature. The potential for crime also arises from human nature. So the potential for rape arises from human nature. What aspect of the situation does not arise from human nature? Or does Brownmiller argue that there is no human nature?
In contrast the compensation
It's problematic if you see something wrong with benefiting at the expense of another's misfortune, and if you see something wrong with the kind of distorted incentives this can give the protector to keep in place the system of violence and oppression that indirectly benefits him as protector. Libertarians make this sort of critique of politicians and bureaucrats all the time; it is in a bureacrat's/politician's interest to maintain rather than eliminate a problem, so as to give the public a reason to turn to their government savior in fear. Or as Mencken put it, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Except this works even better when the endless series of hobgoblins is not entirely imaginary, but created and supported by the same government which claims to be protecting us.
Where did Rad Geek or Brownmiller claim that aspects of the situation did not arise from human nature? Of course, neither did they claim that aspects did arise from human nature. His focus here has been on the concept of spontaneous order, for which the individual choices made as a result of human nature can be considered an input. The point is that even if you believe this is all a result of human nature, and all a result of an unplanned, unintended spontaneous order, that still doesn't make it any less malevolent, or give us any less reason to actively work to ameliorate it.
How we react to any sort of analysis is up to us, regardless of what the analysis may say about the potential for rape and and other forms of crime and how these potentials may relate to human nature. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, some people have concluded that, given:
1. Lust arises from human nature
2. The potential for crime arises from human nature
3. The potential for rape arises from human nature
4. The potential for wanton sexual licentiousness arises from female nature
Therefore, women shall not be allowed to leave their homes unaccompanied by an adult male relative escort, both for their own protection and the protection of the men who might be overly tempted to rape them. Women too shall not be allowed to drive, and they must keep their entire bodies covered from head to toe, so as not to cause lust in others.
This, of course, all follows naturally from human nature. But so the fuck what? It's a pretty distorted psyche that tries to justify cultural practices in this way.
Different Ways of Looking at the Same Thing
Thanks for taking the time for your reply..
”
You and Brownmiller imply that the threat of violence empowers and advantages men. Perhaps it does in some ways but I resent the idea that I tacitly support or benefit from this situation. This is just part of the lefts attack on established institutions and the expectation that men should be protectors and gentlemen. Do you really think I benefit from the fact that my wife can’t safely take a walk in the park alone, especially at night? She can’t even go to the grocery store in broad daylight without some chance of violence. In fact she was mugged in the parking lot of the local store.
On the other hand I can sympathize with Black people as I have felt the sting of being treated as a potential rapist myself. And it is women, who treat you this way. Have you ever noticed in some situations when you are alone with a woman you don’t know well she makes sure you don’t get between her and the door? I could give other examples. Yea, man this patriarchy stuff is real fun, let’s keep them bitches in their place!
Violence against women, sadly, is more common than stranger rape. It is similar in one way; it is often committed by men. Domestic violence is not something that is just out there. For example the next door neighbor’s husband just beat her up and took the car. Another woman just had a baby but her husband has taken her other two children and left town.
You may have it backwards.
What political fact made the dude next door beat up his wife? He is a drunkard, so perhaps if we had prohibition? I don’t know about the political situation of the guy who mugged my wife. He was a young Black man .I have also been hit by property crimes by a white guys. By contrast, disease such as Bird Flu and natural disasters such as, hurricane Katrina are all politicized. Everything is politicized. That is the trouble.
Spousal or acquaintance rape, like stranger violence, is merely a subset of the typical human nastiness that people visit upon each other in this imperfect world. Domestic violence, unlike stranger violence may be due to mutual antagonism. There is no need to devise grand theories about it unless you can find mechanisms to prevent it. Really, I would entertain any social engineering scheme you can come up with to solve the world’s problems, but these schemes have no track record and when tried always fail. There is a whole area of family law and criminal law in which the government attempts to deal with these matters, so in my book this is one of the reasons we need government. Men women and neighborhoods can try to protect their families. Churches and voluntary civic organizations can help, but I know of no comprehensive solution, do you?
The only things I can come up with are that people should be taught character by their parents and that failing this, if laws have been broken, people should arrested and punished. More Church going might be more effective than a grand reordering of society so as to achieve radical egalitarianism. Dave
Everything is politicized.
Rad Geek does not mean what you think he means when he uses the term politics. Read the end of section 2 here, especially the indented quoted paragraph by Don Lavoie, to see how Rad Geek understands the term.
The government sure has been doing a swell job so far, amirite?
Nature
The degree to which rape is ultimately prevented is mutable and depends on the response, but it all comes from somewhere, and there is an underlying potential which is not mutable without changing the genetic makeup of men and women. The underlying potential should therefore, I think, be called a natural feature of the world, since by "natural" we seem in the current context to mean prior to human activity. This potential constitutes a danger, and the danger is not subject to political critique, though it may ultimately be subject to genetic manipulation.
The prevalence, the incidence of rape is a mutable outcome that depends on the response to the underlying potential, but there is an underlying potential which is, barring a genetic change, immutable. And this potential is asymmetrical, and this potential poses an asymmetrical problem and constitutes an asymmetrical danger. And the optimal (and indeed fair and just) solution to this asymmetrical problem may well be asymmetrical. Forcing a symmetrical outcome that papers over the underlying asymmetry (a) may not be optimal (by whatever criteria you choose, assuming you are not one of those egalitarians who think that equality in abject misery is preferable to unequal happiness), (b) may not be just (and libertarians are familiar with the injustice of many of the state's attempts to "correct" inequalities), and (c) may not be among the realistic possibilities in a spontaneous order. In fact it seems on the face of it unlikely that such a large underlying asymmetry as exists between the sexes would spontaneously result in a symmetrical order.
Something (the incidence of rape) is not a natural feature of the world, but as I argue above there is a natural underlying potential.
If I may be so bold, the idea you are pushing (either as yourself or as someone else's spokesperson) seems in a nutshell to be: if only women were protected from rape, then the asymmetries in the spontaneous order would go away, since they arise from rape.
To which my response is: the asymmetries are side-effects precisely of the spontaneous protection of women from rape even as described in your essay. You seem, therefore, to be hoping for women to be protected from rape by some method that takes effect prior to the involvement of the flesh and blood male protectors who derive benefits from protecting women. What do you want, do you want angels to come down from heaven to protect women against rape, so actual flesh and blood men don't have to? Alternatively, you may have in mind a realistic alternative (such as women carrying handguns), but such alternatives would presumably already be taken into account in a spontaneous solution. If women choose to forgo handguns in favor of male protectors, that is their choice. Finally, if the point is raised that women are forced to rely on men because handguns are strictly controlled by the state, this does not constitute a critique of a spontaneous order.
Impossible Dream
Having read several feminist websites I find that the direct solution of arming women is never suggested. They want a perfect world and they want it now. Practical steps for the evolution of this are not discussed. To be honest most women are afraid of or not interested in firearms. They would do little to stop the more pervasive problem of domestic violence. What is wanted is a far more pervasive modification of society to somehow do away with all hierarchy so women would be equal. This would be accompanied by power to make sure this status remained static. Any idea how this can be accomplished?
I love this new way of posting stuff.
Dave
From what I can tell from
From what I can tell from Rad Geek's post, he is not here suggesting solutions to the problem he outlines; rather, he is merely trying to establish the existence of the problem to the satisfaction of libertarians who previously had trouble seeing it.
That the problem may not be entirely fixable is not an argument against trying to fix it as much as we can, nor is it appropriate to simple redefine "spontaneous order" or "natural" to mean whatever residual effect is left over after intentional efforts to ameliorate it are exhausted, as you seem to be trying to do. The initial effect prior to intentional efforts to ameliorate it is just as natural and just as much a product of spontaneous order as the after effect.
man hating propaganda.
You wrote
That is just politically correct man hating bunkum.
Check out the victim surveys. The amount of rape reported by married women in victim surveys is an order of magnitude lower than the amount of rape reported by single, divorced, and separated women. Acquaintance rape is indeed common - but rape by intimates quite uncommon. Women in households headed by a husband or a father are at very much lower risk
Reality is that men do protect women and children, and this reality is what the poisonous hate filled rhetoric you are attempting to defend denies or rationalizes away.
Victim surveys
O.K., James, you got me. I'm a poisonous hate-filled politically-correct man-hater. Don't tell anyone, but I'm also anti-sex, anti-America, and anti-life.
Let's move on to empirical data.
Here's what you say:
Here is what Tjaden and Thoennes (2000) say in the report on their randomly-sampled survey of 8,000 U.S. women and 8,000 U.S. men:
Tjaden and Thoennes (2006) breaks out the data into different categories of intimate partner rapists. (The prevalence rates don't add up the same way as in [2000], because in this passage the data is broken out by victim-perpetrator relationship but not controlled by the age of the victim.)
Age has a major effect on the risks from different groups of men. If you look at victimization rates for girls under the age of twelve, the greatest danger of rape comes from relatives (67.8% of female victims who were raped when younger than 12), followed by acquaintances (24.5% of under-12 female victims), followed by strangers (10.8%). If you look at adolescent women, aged 12-17, the greatest danger of rape comes from intimate partners (35.9% of female rape victims who were raped when 12-17), followed by acquaintances (33.3% of female victims age 12-17), followed by relatives (19.4%), followed by strangers (15.8%). Women raped in adulthood are overwhelmingly more likely to have been raped by a current or former intimate partner than by any other man -- as seen above, more women are raped by current or former intimate partners than by all other categories of perpetrators put together. It shouldn't be surprising that rape by dates, boyfriends, and husbands is much more common among adult women than among adolescent women and young girls, of course; adult women are more likely to be exposed to dates and boyfriends in the first place, and much, much more likely to have husbands, than women aged 12-17 are, let alone girls under the age of 12.
Them's the facts, as far as I am aware of them. If you have empirical studies of the prevalence and incidence of sexual violence against women which indicate something different, then your mission, should you choose to accept it, is actually to produce the specific studies in question, and demonstrate how they contradict or undermine the findings from the NVAWS. Or I guess you could just impugn my intellectual honesty again without providing a reference to any specific data.
Now, if Tjaden and Thoennes's findings are accurate, I guess you could ask why the facts hate men so much, but the truth is that I really have very little idea what, if anything, in my remarks was supposed to be "man-hating" in the first place. At most it is boyfriend-and-husband-hating, and it's really not even that. Lots of boyfriends and husbands are violent towards their girlfriends and wives. Does it follow (1) that there's something intrinsically wrong with boyfriends or husbands as such, or rather (2) that there's something deeply wrong with how boyfriends and husbands are expected to conduct themselves in this particular society as it actually exists, or rather (3) that there's something deeply wrong with how a large minority of boyfriends and husbands in this particular society expect themselves to act, which doesn't necessarily apply to the majority of boyfriends and husbands who don't commit rape? My own view is (2), although for all I've said so far, you could just as easily take option (3), and neither case seems to me like something that you could fairly call "man-hating" or anything of the sort. (For comparison, during the 1910s black men in Mississippi were overwhelmingly more likely to be lynched by white men than by black men, white women, black women, or children of any race. Is it somehow anti-white or anti-white-male to point that fact out, or to point out that it might have had something to do with the norms and ideals accepted by the majority of white men in the racial system of Jim Crow?)
Corrected link
I made a mistake in copying-and-pasting URIs above: the first passage I quoted from is from Tjaden and Thoennes (2000): Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women. Due to my copy-paste error, the link above that claims to point to Tjaden and Thoennes (2000) actually points to a similarly-titled, much shorter "Research In Brief" report on the same data set, Tjaden and Thoennes (1998): Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey. My bad.
No one's perfect, Rad.
Ten Hail Mary's should do it.
Rad Geek Is Too Radical
Well he does say a lot of sensible things followed by some things I question. I guess what I really choke on is his ratifying radical feminist ideology.
Dave
On a Related Note
Peter Leeson released his paper "The Invisible Hook", showing the spontaneous world of pirates to be more racially progressive than their statist rivals.
They were self interested assholes, with nary a sense of conscious enlightenment on social and cultural matters, but there it is. Interesting stuff:
http://dryhyphenolympics.blogspot.com/2008/05/inadvertently-progressive-pirates.html
I don't mean to refer to this as a kind of passive "counterpoint" to Rad Geek, however, because I think the domination of the male over the female, in all those important interpersonal ways, is a much greater constant than the sustained racial antagonism between patriarchs absent a state-like apparatus.
The invisible dick
There is a mention of man discovering that his genitals can be used as a weapon. Seriously, what kind of weapon is that? Even a powerful erection is a poor weapon, you are much better of with a stone, an (actual) bone or a stick. Men are stronger than women but it has to do with testosterone facilitating muscle growth and strength, not with their penis. Come on. It's much easier to hurt a woman with a stone that with a dick. I've never tried rape, but it seems to be a pretty cumbersome way to hurt a woman.
Sure there's the argument that the consequences of a rape extend in the future, but I'm pretty sure a stone can do injuries lasting longer.
Arthur,
Arthur,
There is a reason why rape is used in prison to establish power dominance hierarchies. Rape is a more permanent and lasting form of degradation and humiliation than regular assault.
I mean, this point is just obvious to me. If I were in prison, I would much rather be assaulted with a rock or have a bone broken, than raped, even if from a pure physical pain perspective, the rape was less bad. Psychologically, emotionally, rape is much worse.
That's besides the point I
That's besides the point I am making. The dick is not a good physical weapon, period. If they are psychological traumas associated with rape, as opposed to being stoned, then you should explain why.
By introspection I believe rape in prison would not affect me more than any other form of torture producing comparable pain. (Not to say there wouldn't be psychological trauma, but I don't believe the trauma would be fundamentally different). Then again I have not experienced it nor do I wish to, so I'll probably never know.
Well, sorry, but I'm just
Well, sorry, but I'm just going to have to punt and facepalm on that - if you don't see why rape is of a different kind than regular assault, I doubt I can communicate much to you.
Well, I understand
I know perfectly well why when the Titanic sank, the lifeboats were women and children first. I know perfectly well why the common reaction to a schoolgirl who sleeps with a male teacher is pity while the common reaction to a schoolboy who sleeps with a female teacher is envy. And I know perfectly well why the crime of rape (which, let's be serious, can only properly be committed against a woman) is so much more serious than the crime of assault.
And I know why facepalm instead of explain. It would not do for you to lay out explicitly the sexual double standard that underlies your judgment, since to do so would undermine your superficially anti-sexist stance. The sexes are different. There is no way around this. Even those who are outraged that the spontaneous order does not neatly paper over the difference, are themselves motivated by a keen appreciation of the difference.
Huh?
Wait, why can rape "only properly be committed against a woman"??? Why is it not serious to suppose otherwise? Is prison rape not rape?
What is "the sexual double standard that underlies [my] judgment"? How is my anti-sexist stance "superficial"?
And who, other than your imaginary strawman, is "outraged that the spontaneous order does not neatly paper over the difference" between men and women? The spontaneous order is simply a description of an emergent process whereby no central planner or group of planners intends to produce a given outcome. How does acknowledging that such an emergent order can lead to both desirable and undesirable outcomes imply ignoring biological differences between men and women?
With Arthur, contra Micha and Constant
Actually, I believe that Arthur has the more enlightened view toward sexual assault. It is popularized as, "Rape is assault, not sex."
By identifying rape as assault, Arthur removes some (and hopefully all) of the stigma the victim feels for the way in which they are attacked. If things are done to you against your will, why should you feel more or less shame depending on what is done? You should measure your injury as objectively as possible according to the pain and disfigurement, and avoid increasing your own "psychic" pain. Gain control over your recovery by refusing to stigmatize yourself.
A year or two after we met, my wife expressed Arthur's view toward rape, and I gradually grew to understand the wisdom of it. Because we lived in a place where the threat of all types of assault was higher than in the US, it let us deal with threats more realistically and with less fear.
I certainly don't wish to be unsympathetic to the psychic pain that a rape victim could feel. But I believe that the victim who learns to adopt Arthur's attitude would be better able to recover from the attack.
How dare you
How dare you put me on the same side as Micha? This is an outrage!
And anyway, I was just tweaking Micha's nose for being such a sexist pig. As for me, I'm really only a sexist pig when it suits me. The next time I go on a cross-Atlantic cruise I'll pack a dress (size 50) just in case.
Actually, I believe that
Except this isn't the disagreement we are having here. We simply are not discussing whether rape is about sex or whether it is about power. We are discussing an entirely different subject.
Because it is a more personal intrusion, for the same reason that most legal systems treat home invasion more seriously than other forms of theft and trespass. The involuntariness of the crime is not what is at issue here; all crimes are involuntary.
I'm not disagreeing with you, and in fact strongly agree, that rape victims should try to avoid as best they can stigmatizing themselves, as the crime done is nobody's fault but the rapist. But the stigma is not the only factor here. Rape is a more personal violation that other forms of assault.
Think of the sanctity of self-ownership as an ever-expanding circle, where the things closest to the center of the circle are the most sacred, and the further you get away from the center, the less sacred things become. Breaking into someone's cubicle in a public office is not as much of a personal invasion as breaking into someone's car which is not as much of a personal invasion as breaking into a person's home, which is not as much of a personal invasion as physically assaulting someone, which is not as much of a personal invasion as rape.
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