What's the Matter with YouTube's Alternative Influence Network?

Skipping over to YouTube and noting the subscription levels for various content creators deemed to be part of the right wing "Alternative Influence Network", I make the following observations. Note that these figures are rounded approximations, not exact figures as these fluctuate as subscribers come and go:

Styxhexenhammer666: 329,000 subs
Lauren Southern: 675,000 subs
Milo Yiannopoulos: 839,000 subs
Sargon of Akkad: 865,000 subs
Stefan Molyneux: 883,000 subs
Dave Rubin (Rubin Report): 899,000 subs
Jordan B Peterson: 1,670,000 subs
Steven Crowder: 3,168,000 subs

This is just a sampling of so called right wing YouTube. There are dozens more. I could go on. Now a quick detour for those of you who don't know, YouTube's "Alternative Influence Network" was a term coined by researcher Rebecca Lewis in a New Data & Society report entitled Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube.  Read a Guardian article on the subject here. The Alternative Influence Network apparently consists of "65 political influencers across 81 channels" that tend to lean right to varying degrees (though some vehemently deny this, with varying degrees of accuracy), do tend to be affiliated with one another despite numerous personal and political disagreements and play a prominent role in the alleged radicalization of socially marginal young men. Does this sound familiar?

As a matter of comparison:

Feminist Frequency: 222,000 subs
Kat Blaque: 135,000 subs
Chescaleigh (MTV Decoded): 247,000 subs

These being among the more prominent feminist and social justice channels. The new punching bag (as of this writing) of the YouTube reactionaries, Edinburgh University professor "Tiny" Tim Squirrell's channel has a whopping 364 subscribers as I type this, and he boasts 2,770 followers on Twitter, as of this writing. Proving that sometimes people really do live up to their names.  My own Samizdat Broadcasts on YouTube dwarfs this (I have the big 513 subscribers, and I haven't really done any work in ages). Progressive media watchdog Sleeping Giants, allied with Squirrell who apparently claim responsibility for Alex Jones's deplatforming and was instrumental in Sargon's being kicked off Patreon, claims 214,000 followers on Twitter and 55,000 on Facebook.

To be fair, some leftist YouTube presences are substantial. The flagship here would be The Young Turks, with over 4 million subs. For ways of thinking closer to my own, Kyle Kulinski's Secular Talk has around 618,000 subs, David Pakman has around 558,000 subs, the Jimmy Dore Show has around 427,000 subs, and the Amazing Atheist has just over a 1 million subs, as of this writing. The later four would not participate in a deplatforming campaign against Sargon, I'd wager to say.

Still and all ... does anyone else see what I'm getting at here?

Now I get the fact that the social justice crowd has influence beyond their numbers. Their presence in academia and mainstream media is commanding. Despite a recent study finding that only 8% of Americans identify as "progressive activists" and that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of Americans believe that "political correctness is a problem in our country" and that these figures are remarkably consistent across all demographic lines, race and gender included.

Which is really the problem here. How did we end up in such a tail wagging the dog kind of situation? Are progressive activist dollars just worth ten times more than those of the subscribers to supposedly reactionary YouTube channels? Patreon and PayPal must certainly think so. How else does one explain the rapidity with which the mighty tech trusts of Silicon Valley, truly the robber barons of our era, knuckle under to the demands of social justice warriors so swiftly and readily, despite the greater numbers of reactionaries on these platforms?

Sargon of Akkad boasts approximately 865,000 subscribers on YouTube. For perspective, this is slightly higher than the current membership rolls for the United Steel Workers (currently about 860,000) and dwarfs the total number of employees for each single private employer in America except Walmart. This is greater than the total membership of all three of Canada's major political parties combined (near 300,000 for the governing Liberals, around 260,000 Conservatives and about 125,000 New Democrats).

Granted that many of these are generally passive followers, many no doubt haven't followed his channel in any real sense in years, or are not necessarily loyal true believing subscribers to his ideology but who agree with him on some things (I'd be among these). Never the less, he manages to continually get six digit view figures. "You can't Trust Patreon", detailing his expulsion from the platform, published 8 December of 2018 boasts a bit over 373,000 views as of this writing.

So the obvious question is: why can't this kind of subscriber base be wielded as a significant political or even cultural force? Can a constellation of social media personalities with millions of followers between them (granted a considerable degree of overlap) not use that to leverage access to more mainstream media platforms, and from there commandeer the narrative regarding what it is they exactly stand for, making them less vulnerable to "alt right" smears from pseudo leftist outlets with lower subscriber bases? This might have to entail some research and study into media and public relations, marketing, political strategy and similar disciplines, but I'm sure that's not beyond the capacities of the intellectual dark web. These guys aren't stupid.

One fourth of Sargon's subscriber base surpasses the number of twitter followers Sleeping Giants has. And that's just Sargon. So why are Sleeping Giants and not the legions of Kekistan calling the shots here? Is there something preventing them from, at their emperor's call, exerting their own leverage in the marketplace and leaning on advertisers a bit themselves? I can't help but wonder if that isn't why these faux progressives are actually so afraid of this alleged dark web of YouTube reactionaries. If they got their act together and flexed their muscle - really strategized and organized effectively - who knows what they could accomplish?

I'm here to tell you that with 865,000 followers, I'd be seriously discussing a general strike. When I wasn't hiding or running for my life from C.I.A assassins, that is.

So why is this Alternative Influence Network so vulnerable to social media deplatforming? They've hurt Patreon via a substantial exodus already. Imagine what a truly well coordinated strategy involving even a half dozen or so content creators close to Sargon (Jordan Peterson is an obvious choice here) could accomplish. It's not like they don't have the loyal and dedicated fan base.

Is it those dirty rotten SJWs refusing to listen to reason? Are social media executives fanatical SJWs themselves, or just stupid? If they're so willing to hemorrhage loyal paying patrons to appease a vocal ideological minority, than the CEO's basic competency must be called into question. Boards of directors, who hire the CEO, have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to maximize shareholder value and run the company responsibly. Notice that the fiduciary responsibility is to their shareholders, not to the women's studies department of their local college or university. Are you paying attention to this, libertarians and reactionaries? This is how the capitalist system you claim to so love works. There's more of you than there are social justice warriors if YouTube subscription rates and social media following figures are any indication. So take the hint. Anyway, is it the influence of George Soros? Of the "globalists?" Of the "cultural Marxists"  or of (((you know who?)))

Or is the real problem deeper and more subtle? A fundamental weakness embedded in the very deep structure of conservative, classical liberal and libertarian thought? A weakness that isn't so much a falsehood in the direct claims that this constellation of ideologies tend to assert, but rather something that's more nebulous and metapolitical, if I were to call it anything.

To illustrate, let's compare libertarianism with its opposed strands of critical theory. Deriving ultimately from Marxism, critical theory both in its specific formal Frankfurt School form and more generally as a tendency in political thought, tends to posit some sort of oppressed/oppressor dynamic as being at the heart of how western civilization operates. This has deep and significant implications: Individuals belong to broader classes of people, and different classes have different interests and thus naturally antagonistic relationships with one another. Marx's bourgeoisie vs proletariat dualism is, perhaps the ur-example of this. Other variations I'm sure we're all familiar with posit people of color vs. whites, or men vs. women and non cisgender heterosexuals.

Contrast with libertarianism, which tends more towards the kind of belief that "there is no such thing as society, just individuals and their families" or something similar. For the critical theorist, social inequality is seen as the result of some or another kind of social power structure, and its role is to ensure the dominance of one group of people over another. In this world view, inequality isn't a bug, but a feature, so to speak. The upshot of that is that there's an impetus to change the system.

Contrast with libertarianism, which isn't necessarily opposed to equal outcomes provided they occur on a free market and are thus "voluntary" or "volitional" as they'd put it. But let's be honest here. These transactions are often taking place between the owners of productive capital on the one hand and a proletariat who have only their own labor power to sell on the other. So the outcomes are going to be very unequal, and the libertarian is much more okay with this than they are with government intervention into the process to level the playing field at some point. This makes libertarianism fundamentally conservative, however different a policy direction they would go from dominant neoliberalism or neoconservatism. Reactionaries go further, and insist that inequality is indeed the natural order of things. Attempts at social change in a more egalitarian and inclusive direction is "cheating" as far as the reactionary and the libertarian are concerned, since this involves the imposition of more equal outcomes where more unequal outcomes would be more natural or even desirable.

The important takeaway here is that for the critical theorist, the marginalized and oppressed categories of people are individually weaker than their power wielding counterparts, it is therefore necessary for them to organize, which is to realize strength in numbers and to strategize, which is find and exploit choke points in institutional systems so that marginalized groups can achieve what they believe to be more balanced outcomes - social justice so called.

A very brief peek into the Alternative Influence Network and into libertarian, conservative and reactionary spaces is all it takes to quickly gather their opinion of this way of looking at the world. This is the "cultural Marxism" or the "postmodern Marxism" they're always railing against. Libertarianism (the purest form of what conservatism and classical liberalism are) denies the existence of competing power interests among differing groups in a capitalist society, where conservatives and reactionaries view society as something in which all have a shared stake. Some people earn more because they work harder or smarter, or fulfill a more important place in the social structure, and therefore deserve it. 

Now, read this next sentence closely, because it's the crux of the whole problem for the the right on social media and by itself the entirety of the reason they're losing the culture war against the social justice warriors: This denial of class, race or gender based antagonisms in western civilization obviates the necessity for organization and strategization on the right. That statement is bold red because it's that important. It's absolutely foundational for understanding why things like Sargon being booted from Patreon happen. If you don't get it yet, the core of the problem is that the conservative, reactionary and libertarian world views mitigate against their adherents organizing politically, except perhaps to exchange views or, at most, achieve electoral victories so as to reduce the tax burden on higher income earners. But electoral politics are fundamentally limited in liberal democracies, and a separation of politics and culture is actually a fairly crucial thing in classical liberal and conservative thought. This is precisely why the critical theorists and the social justice crowd long ago deemphasized traditional politics in favor of culture war long ago. 

The right simply has no idea how to effectively wage a culture war, because as far as they're concerned, culture is taking place in a realm consisting only of individuals and maybe their families. Not society and certainly not anything systemic or structural for the benefit of some people at the expense of others. If you don't believe me in that assessment, go and use words like systemic and structural in your next conversation with reactionaries or libertarians of any stripe and see what kind of response you get. 

So they don't think in terms of a "long march through the institutions" or of organizing any kind of wide scale political activity targeting the institutions they claim have been hijacked by social justice warriors. That sort of "playing dirty" is precisely what they despise about the SJWs. Some libertarians explicitly reject all forms of political activity, for it implies collective action.  For their part, the SJWs, on the other hand, have zero qualms about doing any of that. Indeed, the need to do so is likewise built into their ideology. There's no such thing as fighting dirty against the beneficiaries of structural oppression. 

The Alternative Influence Network, the Intellectual Dark Web, the Skeptic Community, the Cultural Libertarians, the Kekistanis or whatever they're calling themselves in current year cannot defeat the social justice warriors, even if they enjoyed five times the numerical advantage they already enjoy. They would never consider any kind of organized strategy for dealing with of any of these supposedly leftist social media platforms. They may seem to depart one for another in tandem, but only because each has decided on his own to do so for his own reasons. Hardly a recipe for changing the world in any sort of serious way.

The libertarian core of their philosophy was quite deliberately designed to mitigate against any kind of sustained organized activity against corporate power. We have them to thank in good part for four decades of neoliberal hegemony. The reactionaries may claim that feminism is cancer - a good metaphor since feminists operate by invading both public and private spaces of all kinds and shift the purpose of those spaces towards the promotion of feminist ideology. Very much like how a cancer cell operates. Could we not likewise suggest that libertarianism is AIDS. The capacity of individuals within the polity to politically organize is its "immune system" against tyranny, and libertarianism attacks that immune system to such a degree that the polity becomes vulnerable to capture by any interest with the desire and capacity to do so. As such, I sometimes find them hard to feel sorry for when they get kicked off of social media, though I certainly don't condone or support it. Hair of the dog that bit you, boys. Maybe learn your lesson here.

What then can defeat the social justice warriors?

Only one thing: the use of their methods of analysis and activism against them. That would mean viewing current year critical theory, feminism and social justice, however radical they may have at one time been, as being themselves systems of power designed to benefit a certain class of people at the expense of another.

The democratic centralist vanguard party in the Soviet Union is a clear and obvious example of a left wing version of an oppressive system of power - regressive leftism, so called. They appropriated the moral force of the worker's struggle and socialism - considerable at the time - to legitimize their claims on power, but never altered the fundamental relations of production because they were now the beneficiaries of those relations. Marxist ideology became mere slogans legitimizing Bolshevik claims to absolute power while upholding precisely the kind of alienating productive relations Marxism so rightly criticized.

The highly educated professional activists that make up the core of current year social justice activism are the cultural version of a democratic centralist vanguard party, as they were envisioned by the critical theorists who came to see it necessary to wage a cultural revolution as a prelude to the establishment of a centrally planned economy. They've merely replaced socialism and the worker's struggle with feminism and anti-racism as sources of moral legitimacy. Since totalitarian methods were not available to the self styled revolutionaries of the west, this kind of Marcusian kulturkampf became necessary instead. Where the power structures constrained by liberal democratic norms are forced to manufacture consent for their oppressive policies, the self styled revolutionary vanguard must manufacture dissent to achieve its own regressive goals. 

This has been a failure, and no metric more closely measures that failure than the historical materialism that so brilliantly animated Marx's initial critiques of class structure. 

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Why That Guy Got Defensive Over Your Me Too Hashtag

Why "That Guy" Got Defensive Over Your Me Too Hashtag, and Why he Really Shouldn't Have

I'm writing this as if my reader was any woman who's used the #MeToo hashtag in the days since the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal broke out of Hollywood.  I doubt that I have many such readers, but if you are, thank you for taking the time to consider things from another point of view, as it were.  That seems to be a challenge for people in all segments of the political and cultural spectrum these days.

My understanding is that the me too hashtag has been posted and/or commented on several million times on numerous social media sites, worldwide.  That is indeed a substantial outpouring of emotion over a serious issue.  However, not all responses have been positive, or at least what many women using it have hoped for.  Some men have also posted their me too confessions of harassment at the hands of women, and some have responded with a not-all-men kind of response that feminists on social media find so infuriating.  To be fair, many women, including many feminists, have expressed support for men using the hashtag to articulate their own negative experiences.

I do not doubt that many of these me too posts from women are valid.  I am sorry such things happen to so many of you.  Were it in my power to prevent it, I would.  As someone who's survived some kind of sexual assault, perhaps you feel invalidated when men post similar stories about their own experience, or post some "not all men" type of response.  Doubtlessly, some men out there are truly indifferent to your suffering, and a few most definitely have contributed to it in some way.

While I do see where you're coming from, dear female survivor of male maleficence, I also see where the guys who post their own me too stories or not all men kinds of hashtags are coming from.  I think there is more to be gained from mutual understanding, and I probably do have at least a rough idea why it is that guy in your Twitter or Facebook feed posted his own me too story, or a not all men kind of hashtag, or referenced false rape accusations or the like.

The most crucial thing to understand is this: just as your me too hashtag was not directed at that guy specifically and deliberately, so too was his response not directed at you specifically and deliberately.  Just as you know that not all men are harassers, he knows that not all women make up false allegations of harassment.  If there is no need for him to therefore get defensive, there is likewise no need for you to do likewise.  He's not trying to silence you.

Social theories prevalent on college campuses and in the media today speak of social demographics: males, women, whites, blacks and so on as if they were incorporated bodies whose actions are guided by the collective will of the majority of its members.  This corporate metaphor will not be directly stated.  It is implicit in the manner in which demographic groups are spoken of, especially when the privilege of one is stacked against the marginalization of the other.

This will sound patronizing, but it needs to be said.  There is no annual general meeting of the male gender, whereat they collectively elect their directors and decide what their collective future policy will be.  There was no motion that was passed deciding that women should be paid less than men or that men are entitled to women's bodies at their whim.  Men are not acting as agents or representatives of the corporate body of the entire male gender when they grope or cat call.

At the most, he's been exposed to a subculture wherein a disdainful attitude towards women was expressed.  I've seen many over the years.  I would hope that he would not allow this subculture to rub off on him, but he's less capable of challenging and changing it than you might think.  So what that guy is trying to tell you is that ultimately, he's nearly as powerless as you are.  Perhaps moreso.  You'd be very surprised at how little control he, or any guy, has over the collective conduct of the male gender as a whole, or even of the conduct of any guy other than himself.

There's a good chance even that boorish and shitty behavior is as a result of  powerlessness, not
power.  This is not, and should not be a consolation to you nor a defense of his actions, but in the moment when he's a boor or even a rapist, he has power that he otherwise does not have.  There's also the possibility that he's mentally ill or else has a personality disorder of some kind or another.  Neither of which are at all related to his gender or his societal attitudes towards women.  Of course, it's quite possible that he is a male chauvinist or even a misogynist.  There's no sense denying that they exist, and there's more of them than we'd like.  But human motivation is, if anything, complex.  There is very rarely a single cause of why people behave the way they do.

I do get the appeal that concepts of male power and privilege have, especially for women who've been hurt by men.  If only the male of the species could exert their collective will and remedy the ills that befall womankind at their hands.  As a woman who's been hurt by the conduct of a male, you have neither the power nor the responsibility to make that change.   That men are not collectively doing this must mean that they are unwilling to give up on their power and privilege.  And from there, they have the gall to demand your sympathy for their Mickey-Mouse feelings of injustice at being targeted by a social media hashtag campaign!

If only it were so easy.  That guy in your social media feed is giving you really bad news, and I understand why you don't like it.  What he's telling you is not that he won't stop the ills that travail women.  It's that beyond the reach of his own actions, he can't.  That is the limit of his, or any of our power.  And that means that the problems of rape and sexual harassment will not be so easily solved.  That's not what you wanted to hear.  I get that.  That's not what I wanted to say either.  But that's the cold, hard truth.

It's worth considering that if he really didn't care, or he regarded you as the object your feminist theories tell you he does, he wouldn't be trying to communicate his own sense of powerlessness to you.  I do not suggest in saying this that you should prioritize that guy's emotional struggles over your own.  He needs to own his insecurities, just as we all do.  Unless he too has been a victim, his insecurities do not match the pain you've suffered if you've been sexually assaulted.  I do not suggest otherwise.  But it might lessen your own angst somewhat to understand that he is not so ill intended as you might think.

Of course, that guy may well be guilty, and we can only hope that he'll reflect upon his conduct and change his ways.  But if that guy is not guilty, than lumping him in with the men who are simply because they have "male privilege" will not only be ineffective, it may well be quite counter productive.

When that guy hears feminists attacking and denouncing him, he quite understandably begins to question the validity of the entire feminist enterprise.  After all, acknowledging that things might not be so great for him does not in any way nullify your own very real and legitimate pain.  If anything, it's a greater recognition of how serious a problem sexual assault and harassment really are.  Yet time and again he hits walls of ideologically driven self righteousness and denialism when he attempts to articulate his own viewpoint on the matter, which again is not done with the intent of silencing your viewpoint.  It is not a zero sum game.  He wonders why it is being treated as such.  Isn't this about equality, after all?

So he harbours doubts.  And as time goes on, those doubts will only grow as his inquiries are met with increased self righteousness and sanctimony.  Those are harsh words, I know.  But I really do think we're at a moment now where real motives must be questioned.  He will, as I have, come to the conclusion that most feminism today is not about equality at all, but about the maintenance of a cultural myth of feminine purity and moral superiority.  He might not know this intellectually, but he senses it instinctively.  And he knows it's wrong.

This means using privilege theory as a legitimizing way of erasing or rationalizing away instances of  female misconduct towards men, or of silencing dissent and criticism of feminist ideology, since they jeopardize the narrative of monolithic male power and female victimhood that the myth of innate feminine morality depends upon as an axiomatic foundation.

If women are so powerless, he wonders, then why is feminist theory virtually hegemonic in colleges and universities?  Why does it enjoy such favorable media bias?  Why is it rarely subject to any kind of real fact checking or scrutiny, except from rival ideologies with their own sets of problems?  Why do they have the willing ear of legislators on a whole bevy of issues?

Feminists claim that males are so rarely told that they are not entitled to women's bodies or emotional labor.  He, like I, don't know whether to laugh or cry when we hear such claims.  Most of what he and I are exposed to day in and day out on social media is feminist sloganeering from people who think their self declared marginalized status exempts them from all the moral strictures they expect us to live by.

It seems to that guy, as it does to me, that feminist claims of universal male privilege and female marginalization are more a kind of "big lie" - an ideological rationalization that escapes scrutiny because it underwrites too many cherished assumptions of too many people with the clout to insure that it remains uncriticized, and repeated often enough by enough credible enough sources that to even think of questioning it will strike many as beyond the pale.

When that guy tries to speak his peace, he is told that he is derailing conversations, and buzzwords and slogans are unloaded accusing him of "making everything about men."  Again, tell a big enough lie and hope the ensuing confusion ends the discussion.  Truth is, the discussion is already about men.  It's been about men, about all men and collective male responsibility at least as far back as Susan Brownmiller's 1975 polemic Against our Will: Men, Women and Rape.  Wherein it was made very explicit that rape is "a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."

The disingenuous voices in this discussion, then, would be those calling men out for making a discussion "all about men" when men is what the discussion already is all about.  What feminists object to is men daring to assert themselves and to have their own points of view in relationships with women, private and public, at all levels of society.  That guy, like myself, fails to see how this is conducive to positive relationships and an atmosphere of mutual respect, though if he's anything like me, he's long since given up believing that feminist ideologues, at least as they represent themselves in all their maternal sanctimoniousness on social media, care a whiff about positive relationships or mutual respect.

I would hope that they do in real life, leastwise given how many of them do seem to be in intimate relationships of some kind or another with men. At times I wonder how sincere the whole thing really is.

Remember, my thoughts here are not about you, female readers.  Nor do I think it wise or accurate to simply reverse the feminist narrative and declare all women privileged and men the marginalized caste in society.  And I certainly don't doubt your very real negative experiences at male hands.  Instead, I think we need to go beyond these ideologies of collective identity and responsibility.

That will be a long time in coming.  In the meantime, I will agree with you on one thing, however.  That he should not interject his own issues into feminist discussions.  He should simply bow out of them entirely.  Not because he, or I, do not care about the very real problems women face.  It's because we lack the power feminists attribute to us, and we really oughtn't subject ourselves to the moral judgement of those who seem to us to be more interested in exploiting issues like harassment and rape so as to feel superior to us than they are in solving the actual issues. 

Many feminists do not seem willing to listen to anyone who does not confirm their faith in the moral and intellectual infallibility of feminist theory, and use "power plus prejudice" kinds of formulations to rationalize their ideological hubris.  Real social justice involves huge amounts of listening and dialogue rather than ceaseless one way sermonizing.  Other people, male and female, are to be valued as ends in and of themselves with every right to their own dignity, not merely as instruments for the pleasure of others (as the sexual abuser sees them) or merely as heathens to be converted to the one true faith or sinners to spend their days in ceaseless repentance for sins they did not commit, as many (though not all) feminist theorists see them.

It's regrettable that things have to be this way, but I've long since concluded that my time and effort are not well spent on this kind of egocentrism and emotional parasitism.  What's passing for feminism these days has more in common with a cult than it does with any meaningful movement for positive social change.

I would suggest to this guy that he should not have relationships of any kind with women or men who exploit feminist theory in these kinds of self righteous and self serving ways.  He sure shouldn't waste his time arguing with them on the internet.  I've seen far too many battle of the sexes kinds of discussions online, and they've all generated far more heat than light.  Fragile egos are what matters in these situations.  My observation is that repetitious talking points, buzzwords, slogans and copy pasta continually get trotted out and presented with all the reverence of holy incantations.  As if they were the word of God, or perhaps more appropriately Goddess rather than the tentative theories of fallible human beings.  Discussion with this kind of irrationality is futile. I prefer reasoning to liturgy and problem solving to self indulgent ritual.  The only way to win is not to fight.

I would instead suggest to him that he take his concerns to alternative media spaces where gender issues are discussed more openly and freely and with less emphasis on dogmatism and ego.  There is no sense in trying to reason with the kinds of ideologues we now see so prevalent on social media and in partisan media outlets.

Men like he and I and the women who likewise reject gender theory dogmas need instead to organize and strategize on how we can one day claim the commanding heights of our culture: academia, media, government and civil society more broadly, for those who reject the ideas of male chauvinism and female moral superiority alike.

If you are not that feminist, you have nothing to worry about.  And even if you are, you'll find mutual respect and partnership far more satisfying in the long run than the temporary ego boost granted by institutionalized feminist theory.  And it will probably eventually result in less rape and harassment of women (and men) in the long run.