Gotta say, Louise is a surprisingly great moderator for debates. She kept the debate on track without letting either guest veer off too much from the central topic and always added good insights whenever she interjected.
This was way more enjoyable to watch than a Jubilee debate.
I believe the short transition period is a real, under-discussed thing. In some ways, Western society changed very fast.
Many adults don’t remember a time when sexism and racism were legal. Norms changed before we were born, and we grew up thinking anyone could be a doctor or lawyer if they studied hard. I was born in the 1980s and never doubted that I could get an education and have a career, that marriage was optional.
Of course there’s still prejudice, but things have changed enough that Bryan is right—it’s much better for an individual to give people the benefit of the doubt, make friends, and seize opportunities rather than fixating on historical oppression (or current microaggressions).
I lived through it with gay rights. When I was a young adult, homophobia affected me. Now I have a legal marriage, and a child, and nobody mistreats us. I know some people judge us privately, but laws and norms have changed to the point where we simply go about life, like any other family. I can say honestly that I’m not oppressed at all.
The fast transition is very hard for some people to accept, for various reasons, and this fuels a lot of the cultural left.
But individuals and groups who get on with it are more successful than those who focus on being victims. We see it constantly.
None of this invalidates Holly’s points about academic feminism or the project of improving women’s lives (which is worthy and good). Bryan was talking past her when he complained about annoying feminists who are engaged in whining more than anything. But he’s right about what’s healthy vs unhealthy for an individual.
This sums up my thoughts as well. I’m a straight woman so I don’t have your experience with homophobia, but the more I considered this debate, I just didn’t feel a relationship with any of the prejudice that women experienced even 50 years ago. I know it exists even today, at times in certain places. I’ve met and worked with misogynists, but their behavior isn’t tolerated by society at large, so I found their power limited once exposed or even just ignored. At first I found Caplan’s advice to his daughter odd. I kept thinking, “Is he telling her to be a pick-me girl?” But when I really thought about what his advice means in action, I realized it is good. I myself have adhered to such an ethos at times. It sounds more alarming than it actually is to say “Make friends with men. They can help you.” And we (women) can help them. Really, it’s just a matter of seeing good in people. Sometimes, you can just make friends/network and curate mutually rewarding relationships that push past all the talk of misandry and misogyny. Other than Holly making clear that “feminist” is a broad term used by many, and forcing Bryan to admit as much, I really think Bryan made the better argument. Which I actually kinda hate haha! I hate that I agree with ALOT of what Bryan Caplan says
If you go back BEFORE the period you were discussing, you will note that throughout history it would have been absurd to think that "anyone could be a doctor or lawyer if they studied hard".
It was absurd for women, and it was absurd for almost all men.
Go back still further, and those professions didn't even exist.
Bryan Caplan made this debate super enjoyable to watch. He’s pretty funny for a guy who works in a field as boring as economics lol. That was a really fun way to end the debate.
I enjoyed listening to this. Two clarifying questions that would have cut through some of the noise: 1) If feminism is or has been valid, when should it sunset/was the right time for it to sunset? I know Bryan’s answer, but I didn’t hear this from Holly. 2) What would change each of their minds about their core position?
Honestly, I gave up after the bit towards the beginning about effective altruism. It felt like point scoring, by both debaters, which is less interesting than were either of Ms Perry's one on one conversations with each guest.
Offering as feedback lest a format that is less effective than the typical episode become a regular thing.
It was so intellectually satisfying to hear two people really engage honestly with each other’s ideas. Both professors welcomed the moments when they could find some common ground even as they remained true to their own ideas. Occasional debates are a great way to add variety to the podcast!
I have to say that I was disappointed by this debate. It seems to focus excessively on how we define feminism. There was also this binary between either women are an oppressed class or we've completely addressed injustices facing women to a degree that there's no further work to do. Both of these can be false simultaneously, and I believe that they are. We can have political activism to address issues affecting women without getting into the degree of victim-mongering and scapegoating that seems to characterize the dominant strands of feminism in the 21st century.
Also, while there was some lip service paid to the notion that there are ways in which women are treated better than men, this wasn't really explored in much depth and would have been a really interesting discussion. Even if it were true that these were far less than what women faced in 1950 or 1850, as feminism has greatly reduced discrimination against women, the size of this difference in magnitude has clearly shrunk, and if we continue to go down the path of addressing women's issues while ignoring men's issues (and demonizing those who want to talk about them), we'll eventually reach a point where that difference goes down to zero or even reverses direction. How close are we to reaching that point, and what do we do when we get there?
I was surprised you let Brian get away with comparing the Roman law allowing fathers to kill their children with the historic laws allowing men to rape their wives. It’s about incentives.
World history has been complex and varied! So many cultures, religions, and views!
But the usual target of the claim that there were "historic laws allowing men to rape their wives" is Western civilization.
By definition, "rape" is sex without consent: the view--of men AND women--was that wedding vows actually meant something: that consent was given by that vow.
Now, you might think that's very wrong, but don't pretend that it was viewed as "rape" and that law explicitly allowed "rape".
It is often overlooked that men bare the brunt of the changes that benefit women.
Males are the trail-blazers, risk-takers, and sacrificial heroes.
(This is why God walked on Earth as a man named Jesus.)
But if there were no females to impress, secure, defend, and love then a lot less of these things would be done by males.
The sexes are complimentary and one is nothing without the other. Humanity would be nothing.
There's no value judgement here - the above statements are plainly obvious.
And this complimentary nature is not about the very modern notions of "equality" or "power". This nature is about mutual support as we strive to survive - and doing so without sin.
<< Males are the trail-blazers, risk-takers, and sacrificial heroes.>>
Women take risks, blaze trails, and women make MORE sacrifices than men do, on a daily basis, worldwide. You make it sound like only men take action, make an impact on the world, and women are passive receivers. This POV is appallingly misogynist, and not true.
<< It's not really possible to create a scoreboard of who has done the most and best things. >> Yes. And how we define risk-taking & trail-blazing would vary a lot too. There are only so many "New Worlds" to discover, despite Elon Musk's plan to create colonies on Mars. I think it's trail-blazing to reduce homelessness and child abuse, and to restore formerly degraded eco-systems.
"It is often overlooked that men bare the brunt of the changes that benefit women. Males are the trail-blazers, risk-takers, and sacrificial heroes"
So narcissistic of you. What kind of father did you have? Not one that respected women very much, that I know.
"changes that benefit women" -- such as?? Do you think that the technology around us now will always be there? Think again. It's based on easy access to fossil fuels, and nothing out there will take their place. We will all go back to living like the Amish within the next thousand years or so. That is, IF we can survive a world with widespread waste from nuclear fission that we embraced for electricity. My bets would be 50/50 on that.
Women are capable intellectually too, just denied much of the formal education until recent.
More females have died in childbirth historically than males who have died in battle. Bringing forth life from your body is the ultimate "risk taking." Your orgasm will not possibly lead to your death. When women have sex with someone who produces sperm, that is ALWAYS the possibility, even in the modern world. One of my sister's closest friends died from pre-eclampsia. Stop elevating yourself. Much of what men do is extremely destructive. I've had enough of your hero-assuming.
What you have said fits within my original observation.
I do agree that "bringing forth life from your body is the ultimate risk taking"
- but this is initiated by being impregnated in the first place.
To reiterate:
the female essence is ultimately spherical & PASSIVE
the male essence is ultimately streamlined & ACTIVE
A female can be reduced to her ova:
- each ovum is scheduled to be produced without conscious effort
- it is swept into and along the fallopian tube by the movement of the finger-like cilia lining the tube and pushed by muscular contractions of the fallopian tube itself
- the ovum floats toward the site of fertilization
A male can be reduced to his spermatozoa:
- sperm require effort to consciously deposit
- the tail of the sperm generates force through its beating motion, propelling the sperm forward through female fluids that vary in viscosity & acidity
- sperm must actively reach the ovum and penetrate it's layered barriers
Neither of these cells make any sense without the other: but they neatly represent the outward, exploratory purpose of maleness and the inward, generative purpose of femaleness.
I actually agree with Holly, but I found her performance during the first 40 minutes of the debate to be irritating. If you cannot succinctly and clearly provide a definition of key terms, you have automatically failed at the debate. I see academics do this all the time -- they make their terms so inscrutable that they can never be found to be wrong -- their intellectually interior interlocutors just haven't grasped all the nuances of their ingenious conceptualization! *eye roll*
I thought Bryan's position on definitions was far stronger. Holly's almost seemed like a motte, whereas Bryan approach of using a reportive definition is much more reasonable when talking about real life people. After all, the average woman who identifies as a feminist is much more likely to be similar to the average feminist than to hold truthfully to Holly's idiosyncratic (and overly wordy/specific) definition.
If I'm not mistaken, in one his essays Bryan actually pointed to survey data demonstrating that his definition is objectively more accurate, in the sense of being an accurate description of what real life self-identified feminists believe, as opposed to what Holly would want them to believe.
Also, when Bryan was talking about advising his daughters to explicitly say 'I'm not a feminist', I would say that's great advice. The reason men distrust feminists isn't because we're threatened by a woman undermining our carefully constructed collective system of oppression (as Holly seemed to imply) but because feminists have a tendency to treat us as members of a class, rather than individuals.
An ordinary disagreement between a man and a woman becomes a fight between men as an imagined class and women as an imagined class. This is particularly galling if that blame then extends to things that don't actually hurt women (e.g. male CEOs earning lots of money) or which happened hundreds of years ago.
One of the greatest inventions of liberalism is the norm that the personal is not political. I can have a different religion, ethnicity or political position from my neighbour without wanting to kill him, because these things can be considered distinct from our interpersonal relationship. The worst thing identity politics does is try to bring back that older, more conflict-producing norm. The kind of norm that made Catholics and Protestants kill eachother during the European wars of religion.
I really loved this episode even though I was a bit skeptical about the debate format initially. Louise is a brilliant moderator and Holly and Bryan were such good sports! This episode gave me a lot to think about!
Very interesting debate. Couple of things to say about Caplan’s arguments.
First, his argument in favour of “personal solutions” instead of collective action to address harmful or unpleasant male behaviour towards women (as in, “If your boyfriend doesn’t pick up his socks, leave him!”) was terribly shallow. I cannot help think the argument is linked to his genuine skepticism about whether women historically have really been treated as poorly as the law for centuries allowed. (He asked at one point, “How many women were actually ever raped by their husbands?”) Marital rape is very good illustration of the shallowness of his position.
The concept of the crime of marital rape was not recognised in the UK until the early 1990s. In other words, long after homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK, marital rape remained un-criminalised - and indeed was lawful. What kills (in my view) both the idea that marital rape wasn’t really a problem, and the idea that personal solutions could ever have addressed the injustice of the law, is the legal history of how the status of marital rape was changed. Importantly, it didn’t change because some feminist politician randomly decided to pass a new piece of unnecessary legislation to address a largely imaginary problem. It was in fact the opposite of that, at every level.
It occurred because successive wives complained of rape to the police, successive police officers decided (contrary to the current understanding of the law) to treat these incidents as “crimes”, reporting them to the public prosecution service here in the UK.
And successive public prosecutors charged the offence and took theses cases to the courts - again despite the fact that the law didn’t recognise the crime.
There were years when the judges simply threw these cases out, but a few were allowed through. For many more years, a convicted husband (that is, a man whose wife’s allegation of rape had been believed by at least 10/12 jurors to the point where they were sure he was guilty) could expect the Court of Appeal to overturn his conviction on the grounds that marital rape was not known to law.
Repeatedly, the judges said, “Parliament should change this law!” But the decades went by and Parliament did nothing. Until, themselves tired and outraged by the inaction of Parliament, in the early 1990’s, the courts allowed a husband’s conviction to be appealed all the way up to highest court in the land - which was then a committee of the House of Lords. The Lords in that case, unable to change the law themselves, and unable to write legislation, rectified the situation using their power to declare that the common (unwritten, judge made) law of England had actually always recognised the crime of martial rape, and that all prior judicial pronouncements to the contrary had been errors of law. From then on, prosecutors could and did charge a husband with raping a wife whenever they assessed the evidence sufficient to give a reasonable prospect of conviction.
The above history both establishes that martial rape was a real social problem
(it was common enough to lead to repeated charging decisions even before the law was effectively changed). It also illustrates that persistent action at a societal or systemic level was necessary to give redress to women coerced into sex by their husbands. Personal solutions were not sufficient.
My second point is much shorter. There was real lack of understanding of the law of divorce and arrangements for children, when Caplan (jokingly) point scored that - while, yes, historically, a divorced wife would have no right to custody of her children - nowadays “men have to fight hard and usually have no rights of custody to their children” after divorce.
This glib remark fails to recognise that nowadays, the law is not so petty as to think of the “custody rights” of the parents at all (as if children were still property in law - as both they and women used to be). The primary and dominant principle in English family law is that the interests of the children should be put first when making arrangements for the continued care of the children of a marriage after marital breakdown. There was a period in which the most common decision made by judges was that the children were better off living for most of the time with their mother. Actually, that’s changed, at least to some extent, and although I don’t have statistics on the point, I believe the more recent (and not uncontroversial) thinking is that children should generally spend half their time with each parent, if this arrangement is practically viable.
General levels of understanding of our system of laws is pretty poor - and I appreciate that Caplan isn’t British anyway. But I do think, if you are going to comment on issues which touch directly on the law, and which the law shapes to a large extent, you need to get your legal knowledge sorted.
Gotta say, Louise is a surprisingly great moderator for debates. She kept the debate on track without letting either guest veer off too much from the central topic and always added good insights whenever she interjected.
This was way more enjoyable to watch than a Jubilee debate.
Hear hear!
I believe the short transition period is a real, under-discussed thing. In some ways, Western society changed very fast.
Many adults don’t remember a time when sexism and racism were legal. Norms changed before we were born, and we grew up thinking anyone could be a doctor or lawyer if they studied hard. I was born in the 1980s and never doubted that I could get an education and have a career, that marriage was optional.
Of course there’s still prejudice, but things have changed enough that Bryan is right—it’s much better for an individual to give people the benefit of the doubt, make friends, and seize opportunities rather than fixating on historical oppression (or current microaggressions).
I lived through it with gay rights. When I was a young adult, homophobia affected me. Now I have a legal marriage, and a child, and nobody mistreats us. I know some people judge us privately, but laws and norms have changed to the point where we simply go about life, like any other family. I can say honestly that I’m not oppressed at all.
The fast transition is very hard for some people to accept, for various reasons, and this fuels a lot of the cultural left.
But individuals and groups who get on with it are more successful than those who focus on being victims. We see it constantly.
None of this invalidates Holly’s points about academic feminism or the project of improving women’s lives (which is worthy and good). Bryan was talking past her when he complained about annoying feminists who are engaged in whining more than anything. But he’s right about what’s healthy vs unhealthy for an individual.
This sums up my thoughts as well. I’m a straight woman so I don’t have your experience with homophobia, but the more I considered this debate, I just didn’t feel a relationship with any of the prejudice that women experienced even 50 years ago. I know it exists even today, at times in certain places. I’ve met and worked with misogynists, but their behavior isn’t tolerated by society at large, so I found their power limited once exposed or even just ignored. At first I found Caplan’s advice to his daughter odd. I kept thinking, “Is he telling her to be a pick-me girl?” But when I really thought about what his advice means in action, I realized it is good. I myself have adhered to such an ethos at times. It sounds more alarming than it actually is to say “Make friends with men. They can help you.” And we (women) can help them. Really, it’s just a matter of seeing good in people. Sometimes, you can just make friends/network and curate mutually rewarding relationships that push past all the talk of misandry and misogyny. Other than Holly making clear that “feminist” is a broad term used by many, and forcing Bryan to admit as much, I really think Bryan made the better argument. Which I actually kinda hate haha! I hate that I agree with ALOT of what Bryan Caplan says
If you go back BEFORE the period you were discussing, you will note that throughout history it would have been absurd to think that "anyone could be a doctor or lawyer if they studied hard".
It was absurd for women, and it was absurd for almost all men.
Go back still further, and those professions didn't even exist.
Bryan Caplan made this debate super enjoyable to watch. He’s pretty funny for a guy who works in a field as boring as economics lol. That was a really fun way to end the debate.
I enjoyed listening to this. Two clarifying questions that would have cut through some of the noise: 1) If feminism is or has been valid, when should it sunset/was the right time for it to sunset? I know Bryan’s answer, but I didn’t hear this from Holly. 2) What would change each of their minds about their core position?
Honestly, I gave up after the bit towards the beginning about effective altruism. It felt like point scoring, by both debaters, which is less interesting than were either of Ms Perry's one on one conversations with each guest.
Offering as feedback lest a format that is less effective than the typical episode become a regular thing.
It was so intellectually satisfying to hear two people really engage honestly with each other’s ideas. Both professors welcomed the moments when they could find some common ground even as they remained true to their own ideas. Occasional debates are a great way to add variety to the podcast!
I have to say that I was disappointed by this debate. It seems to focus excessively on how we define feminism. There was also this binary between either women are an oppressed class or we've completely addressed injustices facing women to a degree that there's no further work to do. Both of these can be false simultaneously, and I believe that they are. We can have political activism to address issues affecting women without getting into the degree of victim-mongering and scapegoating that seems to characterize the dominant strands of feminism in the 21st century.
Also, while there was some lip service paid to the notion that there are ways in which women are treated better than men, this wasn't really explored in much depth and would have been a really interesting discussion. Even if it were true that these were far less than what women faced in 1950 or 1850, as feminism has greatly reduced discrimination against women, the size of this difference in magnitude has clearly shrunk, and if we continue to go down the path of addressing women's issues while ignoring men's issues (and demonizing those who want to talk about them), we'll eventually reach a point where that difference goes down to zero or even reverses direction. How close are we to reaching that point, and what do we do when we get there?
Previous commenters said they "watched" this debate. I see only a recording, no video. If there's a video, how do I access it?
Love this! Great format with excellent guests
I was surprised you let Brian get away with comparing the Roman law allowing fathers to kill their children with the historic laws allowing men to rape their wives. It’s about incentives.
World history has been complex and varied! So many cultures, religions, and views!
But the usual target of the claim that there were "historic laws allowing men to rape their wives" is Western civilization.
By definition, "rape" is sex without consent: the view--of men AND women--was that wedding vows actually meant something: that consent was given by that vow.
Now, you might think that's very wrong, but don't pretend that it was viewed as "rape" and that law explicitly allowed "rape".
It is often overlooked that men bare the brunt of the changes that benefit women.
Males are the trail-blazers, risk-takers, and sacrificial heroes.
(This is why God walked on Earth as a man named Jesus.)
But if there were no females to impress, secure, defend, and love then a lot less of these things would be done by males.
The sexes are complimentary and one is nothing without the other. Humanity would be nothing.
There's no value judgement here - the above statements are plainly obvious.
And this complimentary nature is not about the very modern notions of "equality" or "power". This nature is about mutual support as we strive to survive - and doing so without sin.
Related:
For a closer look at Canadian feminism, read this
https://wokewatchcanada.substack.com/p/dissident-critique-of-mainstream
<< Males are the trail-blazers, risk-takers, and sacrificial heroes.>>
Women take risks, blaze trails, and women make MORE sacrifices than men do, on a daily basis, worldwide. You make it sound like only men take action, make an impact on the world, and women are passive receivers. This POV is appallingly misogynist, and not true.
It's "appallingly misogynist" to say that male & female are complimentary?
that, absent women, men would wither away into meaninglessness?
I assume you object to the bit where I'm just pointing out what I called "the obvious."
I'm afraid that I must be "appallingly misogynist" one more time, for I must say:
- you have a point.
Who am I to lift the tail of each human action, so that I can sex and quantify them all?
It's not really possible to create a scoreboard of who has done the most and best things.
However - it does seem like men are the literal "edge" of our species due to the nature of sexual reproduction
- that males are a sort of mutant whereas females are analogous to original, asexual life
- that males literally point themselves out and thrust themselves forward
- evolved to spread genes out into the world, literally mixing things up from the gamete through to the global levels
<< It's not really possible to create a scoreboard of who has done the most and best things. >> Yes. And how we define risk-taking & trail-blazing would vary a lot too. There are only so many "New Worlds" to discover, despite Elon Musk's plan to create colonies on Mars. I think it's trail-blazing to reduce homelessness and child abuse, and to restore formerly degraded eco-systems.
I agree with you. Females are more "home & hearth" and it is like that they solve more problems there.
And this doesn't undermine my original statement:
"It is often overlooked that men bare the brunt of the changes that benefit women. Males are the trail-blazers, risk-takers, and sacrificial heroes."
Look at history - it is men inventing and exploring.
Yes - I understand that a woman is often behind them.
But the man is literally "leading the charge."
(The Virgin gives birth to the Son - who is crucified before her own eyes.)
Again - men would be nothing without women (& vice-versa).
THAT necessity and complementarity is true equality.
"It is often overlooked that men bare the brunt of the changes that benefit women. Males are the trail-blazers, risk-takers, and sacrificial heroes"
So narcissistic of you. What kind of father did you have? Not one that respected women very much, that I know.
"changes that benefit women" -- such as?? Do you think that the technology around us now will always be there? Think again. It's based on easy access to fossil fuels, and nothing out there will take their place. We will all go back to living like the Amish within the next thousand years or so. That is, IF we can survive a world with widespread waste from nuclear fission that we embraced for electricity. My bets would be 50/50 on that.
Women are capable intellectually too, just denied much of the formal education until recent.
More females have died in childbirth historically than males who have died in battle. Bringing forth life from your body is the ultimate "risk taking." Your orgasm will not possibly lead to your death. When women have sex with someone who produces sperm, that is ALWAYS the possibility, even in the modern world. One of my sister's closest friends died from pre-eclampsia. Stop elevating yourself. Much of what men do is extremely destructive. I've had enough of your hero-assuming.
What you have said fits within my original observation.
I do agree that "bringing forth life from your body is the ultimate risk taking"
- but this is initiated by being impregnated in the first place.
To reiterate:
the female essence is ultimately spherical & PASSIVE
the male essence is ultimately streamlined & ACTIVE
A female can be reduced to her ova:
- each ovum is scheduled to be produced without conscious effort
- it is swept into and along the fallopian tube by the movement of the finger-like cilia lining the tube and pushed by muscular contractions of the fallopian tube itself
- the ovum floats toward the site of fertilization
A male can be reduced to his spermatozoa:
- sperm require effort to consciously deposit
- the tail of the sperm generates force through its beating motion, propelling the sperm forward through female fluids that vary in viscosity & acidity
- sperm must actively reach the ovum and penetrate it's layered barriers
Neither of these cells make any sense without the other: but they neatly represent the outward, exploratory purpose of maleness and the inward, generative purpose of femaleness.
I actually agree with Holly, but I found her performance during the first 40 minutes of the debate to be irritating. If you cannot succinctly and clearly provide a definition of key terms, you have automatically failed at the debate. I see academics do this all the time -- they make their terms so inscrutable that they can never be found to be wrong -- their intellectually interior interlocutors just haven't grasped all the nuances of their ingenious conceptualization! *eye roll*
I thought Bryan's position on definitions was far stronger. Holly's almost seemed like a motte, whereas Bryan approach of using a reportive definition is much more reasonable when talking about real life people. After all, the average woman who identifies as a feminist is much more likely to be similar to the average feminist than to hold truthfully to Holly's idiosyncratic (and overly wordy/specific) definition.
If I'm not mistaken, in one his essays Bryan actually pointed to survey data demonstrating that his definition is objectively more accurate, in the sense of being an accurate description of what real life self-identified feminists believe, as opposed to what Holly would want them to believe.
Also, when Bryan was talking about advising his daughters to explicitly say 'I'm not a feminist', I would say that's great advice. The reason men distrust feminists isn't because we're threatened by a woman undermining our carefully constructed collective system of oppression (as Holly seemed to imply) but because feminists have a tendency to treat us as members of a class, rather than individuals.
An ordinary disagreement between a man and a woman becomes a fight between men as an imagined class and women as an imagined class. This is particularly galling if that blame then extends to things that don't actually hurt women (e.g. male CEOs earning lots of money) or which happened hundreds of years ago.
One of the greatest inventions of liberalism is the norm that the personal is not political. I can have a different religion, ethnicity or political position from my neighbour without wanting to kill him, because these things can be considered distinct from our interpersonal relationship. The worst thing identity politics does is try to bring back that older, more conflict-producing norm. The kind of norm that made Catholics and Protestants kill eachother during the European wars of religion.
I wonder what Bryan’s daughter is like and what she will think if ever listens to this 🤣
I really loved this episode even though I was a bit skeptical about the debate format initially. Louise is a brilliant moderator and Holly and Bryan were such good sports! This episode gave me a lot to think about!
Very interesting debate. Couple of things to say about Caplan’s arguments.
First, his argument in favour of “personal solutions” instead of collective action to address harmful or unpleasant male behaviour towards women (as in, “If your boyfriend doesn’t pick up his socks, leave him!”) was terribly shallow. I cannot help think the argument is linked to his genuine skepticism about whether women historically have really been treated as poorly as the law for centuries allowed. (He asked at one point, “How many women were actually ever raped by their husbands?”) Marital rape is very good illustration of the shallowness of his position.
The concept of the crime of marital rape was not recognised in the UK until the early 1990s. In other words, long after homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK, marital rape remained un-criminalised - and indeed was lawful. What kills (in my view) both the idea that marital rape wasn’t really a problem, and the idea that personal solutions could ever have addressed the injustice of the law, is the legal history of how the status of marital rape was changed. Importantly, it didn’t change because some feminist politician randomly decided to pass a new piece of unnecessary legislation to address a largely imaginary problem. It was in fact the opposite of that, at every level.
It occurred because successive wives complained of rape to the police, successive police officers decided (contrary to the current understanding of the law) to treat these incidents as “crimes”, reporting them to the public prosecution service here in the UK.
And successive public prosecutors charged the offence and took theses cases to the courts - again despite the fact that the law didn’t recognise the crime.
There were years when the judges simply threw these cases out, but a few were allowed through. For many more years, a convicted husband (that is, a man whose wife’s allegation of rape had been believed by at least 10/12 jurors to the point where they were sure he was guilty) could expect the Court of Appeal to overturn his conviction on the grounds that marital rape was not known to law.
Repeatedly, the judges said, “Parliament should change this law!” But the decades went by and Parliament did nothing. Until, themselves tired and outraged by the inaction of Parliament, in the early 1990’s, the courts allowed a husband’s conviction to be appealed all the way up to highest court in the land - which was then a committee of the House of Lords. The Lords in that case, unable to change the law themselves, and unable to write legislation, rectified the situation using their power to declare that the common (unwritten, judge made) law of England had actually always recognised the crime of martial rape, and that all prior judicial pronouncements to the contrary had been errors of law. From then on, prosecutors could and did charge a husband with raping a wife whenever they assessed the evidence sufficient to give a reasonable prospect of conviction.
The above history both establishes that martial rape was a real social problem
(it was common enough to lead to repeated charging decisions even before the law was effectively changed). It also illustrates that persistent action at a societal or systemic level was necessary to give redress to women coerced into sex by their husbands. Personal solutions were not sufficient.
My second point is much shorter. There was real lack of understanding of the law of divorce and arrangements for children, when Caplan (jokingly) point scored that - while, yes, historically, a divorced wife would have no right to custody of her children - nowadays “men have to fight hard and usually have no rights of custody to their children” after divorce.
This glib remark fails to recognise that nowadays, the law is not so petty as to think of the “custody rights” of the parents at all (as if children were still property in law - as both they and women used to be). The primary and dominant principle in English family law is that the interests of the children should be put first when making arrangements for the continued care of the children of a marriage after marital breakdown. There was a period in which the most common decision made by judges was that the children were better off living for most of the time with their mother. Actually, that’s changed, at least to some extent, and although I don’t have statistics on the point, I believe the more recent (and not uncontroversial) thinking is that children should generally spend half their time with each parent, if this arrangement is practically viable.
General levels of understanding of our system of laws is pretty poor - and I appreciate that Caplan isn’t British anyway. But I do think, if you are going to comment on issues which touch directly on the law, and which the law shapes to a large extent, you need to get your legal knowledge sorted.