Female sex offenders: the devil's advocate post

My pet peeve is fake sexual abuse. I am more upset by false legal definitions than factually false claims, because the system at least in theory contains mechanisms to correct the latter. What upsets me most is when the law is most perverse, and the law is nowhere more perverse than in its insistence that women are equally culpable for sex crimes against victims. What I call the female sex offender charade is therefore my pet peeve within my pet peeve of fake sexual abuse.

But let's make this a little more interesting than the usual arguing with idiots whose intellectual ability is limited to asserting that the sexes are equal. Suppose you wanted to argue that women can be sex offenders -- how would you go about it if you weren't just an idiot or catering to idiots? In reality, it is sufficient to use an idiotic justification such as the lie that the sexes are equal, or no justification at all, because the public will go along with it just like they will with any old witch-hunt (I have explored such reasons here). As an intellectual exercise, however, I thought I might be fun to speculate how a halfway rational person would justify punishing women for sex crimes under the "abuse" paradigm. If you take the view that sex is inherently immoral or sinful, you don't run into such problems, but that's not how our laws work anymore, as I've noted previously. Thanks to feminist victimology, the law now needs to contain a rationale grounded in "abuse" rather than the will of God, crimes "against nature" or similar.

The position I would argue if I wanted to advance this view to a rational audience is that women can sexually abuse, but not sexually exploit boys, and here is why.

First we need to define sexual abuse. Upon years of reflection, it is clear to me that real sexual abuse must do at least one of the following: reduce the victim's reproductive fitness or be an aversive experience (there is also an element of sexual exploitation, but more on that later). Female-perpetrated "sexual abuse" as currently defined most often does spectacularly the opposite on both counts, but since this is my devil's advocate post, I will give serious consideration to the fringe cases. I have previously argued that female sexual coercion can indeed be an aversive experience, but not aversive enough, on average, compared to other violence to merit inclusion in the sex laws (for example, see this debate). The sex laws are all based on the idea that sex is an aggravating factor beyond other violence or exploitation, and thus meriting harsher punishments, which is absurd when applied to women. It has always been my position that for the purposes of severity, female violence can only incidentally be sexualized, not aggravated by any sexual aspect, and should therefore be prosecuted (if at all) as simple assault rather than rape, or whatever other nonsexual crimes the violence merits. But let's say you wanted to argue that I am wrong. How would you go about it?

Firstly, the feminists would need to make a concession to truth. Absent aversive experiences or physical damage, reasonable men know that female sexuality is harmless. We feel zero sympathy -- and often a great deal of envy -- towards supposed victims to female sexuality per se, so constructed by the mere fact of having had sex with a woman. In other words, women cannot sexually exploit boys or men. Sexual exploitation is the ingredient in what is currently claimed to be "abuse" that is so horribly out of place when applied to female offenders.

The rationale I would use for arguing that female sexual coercion nonetheless can raise to the level of sexual abuse is that aversive and/or sexual fitness-reducing experiences can harm males sexually even if they don't constitute sexual exploitation, just like cutting off a man's penis or testicles will demolish his sex life without being sexual exploitation per se. It is plausible that female sexual coercion can degrade a man's sex life because he will be afraid of women or whatever. These acts are still not sexual abuse in my actual opinion, but since I am playing devil's advocate here I am making the leap of equating violence with a negative impact on your sexuality with sexual abuse. This is the only tenable way to argue that women can be sex offenders to intelligent people who do not buy absurdities like the denial of sex differences or the pretense that women can sexually exploit boys.

Let us look at some examples. Father-daughter incest can be argued to be abusive on the fitness-reducing criterion because it would tend to lead to offspring with lesser fitness than the girls would get from other mates. Mother-son incest cannot be argued to do the same since sperm is so cheap, or at the very most spectacularly less so, so it's not in the same ballpark on that criterion. It could, however, be aversive, so let's for now grant that women can sometimes sexually abuse boys.

This view requires a strict distinction between sexual abuse and exploitation which is not currently employed. Unfortunately, any sex crime can be called "abuse" as it is, and this needs to change. In order to qualify as abuse by my proffered definition, the experience needs to be either aversive at the time it is going on or physically damaging. "Iatrogenically" induced harm, as from "therapists" brainwashing a boy to feel that he is a victim, does not count. Crimes constructed solely by age of consent or "abuse of position" therefore do not count. These crimes can at most be exploitation and only apply to male offenders. One consequence of this view is that statutory rape or abuse of females (and boys by men) would be downgraded to crimes of exploitation rather than abuse. Society is currently not going to accept this, but it is the truth. The rationale for having crimes of sexual exploitation is to protect the value of a child's sexuality from being given away too readily, just like children are not trusted with managing a lot of money even if they own it. This rationale makes sense for girls and for male homosexuality (up to a point, say 13 years old, when self-determination becomes more important), but is utter nonsense when it comes to boys versus women because the boys don't lose any value by having sex with women. On the contrary, all reasonable humans understand that they are lucky rather than victims as far as exploitation goes.

Crimes of sexual abuse, as distinct from exploitation, can thus arguably be perpetrated by women because the argument does not impute any harm from the giving up of sex itself, but from an aversive experience or a negative impact on sexual fitness. This is not what I actually believe. I believe the sexual aspect plays such a minor role in women's violence that it should be ignored altogether. Women cannot rape because rape is an aggravated form of assault, and there is no sufficient aggravation from sex with a woman over what the violence would otherwise constitute. But if proponents of the idea that women can be sex offenders and subject to some of the same sex laws as men wanted to argue their case without seeming like drooling retards to sensible people like me, this is how they would do it: remove all the exploitation nonsense and keep the rest. Then we could at least take them seriously, which is impossible today. You need to make this concession to truth before we can speak as equals! And now I've met you halfway, so how about doing the same?

We still cannot argue that women deserve the same punishment, because crimes of sexual abuse subsume exploitation, and that element would be absent. When a woman is raped, she is also sexually exploited, but we don't punish this aspect separately or think of it independently because it is so embedded in the concept of rape (which is the main reason why it's silly to use the word gender-neutrally). The trauma of real rape is also largely due to the exploitation rather than violence, which is the evolutionary reason why rape is such a big deal in the first place even if the victim doesn't consciously know it. If women are going to be charged with "rape," however, we must tease out the difference and subtract the culpability for exploitation because women aren't capable of that. Female sexual coercion can be harmful due to the aversive experience of the violence itself, and even damage men in sexual ways down the line, but it cannot reasonably constitute harm due to the male having been sexually exploited, since there is nothing to exploit in any meaningful sense. Any jurisprudence of female sex offenses which fails to take this into account -- like the present feminist one -- is flagrantly misogynistic and wrong on so many levels.

You cannot exploit something which consensus reality holds as worthless, just like you cannot steal from a pauper who owns nothing. You can abuse him, however, and interfere with his ability to earn a living later. Sex is a female resource, which means that men are sexual paupers who at most can be abused. To claim that males can be sexually exploited is to lie about their sexual value. In my view, women cannot sexually abuse them either by virtue of giving them sex, but abuse can incidentally be sexualized, which in practice is irrelevant to the severity of the crime. I am letting this distinction slide in this post and will instead equate sexualized abuse with sexual abuse. Few people understand this distinction anyway even when I explain it, but everyone ought to be able to understand the difference between exploitation and abuse, which is the truly significant distinction.

The consequence of this view is to dismiss most supposed female sexual abuse as nonsense or trifles anyway, just like I have been arguing all along. All the crimes created by age of consent laws or "abuse of position" are automatically invalidated by this view, as is most female-perpetrated incest. It is absurd to claim that a woman is a sexual abuser just because she is a teacher, for example, because that claim rests on the insane notion that boys can be sexually exploited by women, that they are somehow worse off by the fact of having sex itself independently of whether it is a traumatic experience or lowers their sexual fitness.

What remains are the cases where women cause genuinely aversive experiences or adverse consequences of a sexual nature. These are so few that I can't recall any actual credible cases, but this is an academic exercise anyway. The female sex offender charade is the most profoundly disturbing travesty going on in the world today, in my view. By implementing a clear distinction between sexual abuse and exploitation, and declaring that women can commit abuse but not exploitation, most of the injustice of the female sex offender charade could be removed. This would be a compromise that I could live with. I know none of this will register to the true believers in feminist sex-hostility, but if you are a reasonable person reading this, please take note and try to promote my vision.