It’s a dangerous business, going out your door. You never know who you will meet, what will happen to you, or where you will get carried to, if you don’t keep your feet.
Yeah, I went there.
Most people tacitly accept the dangers of leaving their home before they do so. The world is scary. People are unpredictable. You have to accept the possibility that you might not ever make it home.
Reflecting on how these particular dangers affect women, A. V. Flox writes on BlogHer about the harassment she faces as a beautiful women when she enters the world. Men feel it is their duty, obligation, or privilege to approach her and comment on her body, or to strike up a conversation. She describes how and why these comments feel threatening to her, and how men can generally not be creepy.
Colin Schultz on his self-named blog comments on this article from a male perspective, describing a situation in which he sees a young woman in a coffee shop attempt to, unsuccessfully, rebuff an older man who hits on her.
Both articles are thoughtful, well-written, and worth reading. However, I believe both authors make a crucial mistake. They attempt to advocate for women, but in the end they make a common mistake: by scorning men’s actions in these scenarios, they make women victims.
You are not a victim
Both authors call on the men in the situation to change their actions. By shifting the responsibility of the situation entirely onto the man, both authors gut the potential power the women have in the situations. They seem to accept that there is no power a woman can have in those scenarios. By chastising the men, they take away the power of the woman to take charge of what is happening. They make the woman a victim. By their accounts, the woman is powerless, a receiver of action by the man in question. They neglect that the woman is an agent in the situation, with equal power and force over her own destiny.
I have been waiting for an excuse to use this picture
Remember always that it takes two to tango. In any given situation, either agent can give or take power. The real disadvantage of women is that they are conditioned to believe that they cannot or should not take control. But they can! And they should! Women should have power over every aspect of their lives, and by wagging a finger at the man while not helping the woman realize what she could have done to fend him off, these authors only make a victim of the people in their situations.
Criticizing men and asking their behavior to change does nothing to empower women — in fact, it only cowers them more. It keeps the power in the situation with the man, and it becomes up to him to act well or poorly. Instead, we should realize that people will very often act poorly. Women should be taught how to defend themselves and keep their own power, rather than expecting everyone to give it to them.
Self Defense 101
Some of the best self defense lessons I got from my mother. They didn’t have anything to do with strikes, blocks, or the best places to hit someone. They all had to do with being aggressive, confident, and taking charge of the situation.
Women need to learn -- they need to be taught – to exhibit signs of self-assurance and a desire to keep power in a situation. This is all psychological warfare, and it is the subtle ways in which some people are able to take control of situations while others submit control. Very often in our society, men are conditioned to take control of situations. Women need to be taught how to do the same.
Until then, you are not empowering women, you are crippling them.
Do you think she took shit from anyone?
One final note
I’ve heard several people comment that an aggressive woman is called a bitch (or other variations), and this is why they avoid confrontation with people who make them uncomfortable.
Okay, maybe I missed this day in social conditioning class (I missed a lot of days…), but what is more important 1) being secure in your mind, body, and surroundings, having control of the situations you’re in, and being able to fend off people who would hurt you? or 2) The opinion of some asshole you don’t know? Forgive me, but I’ll take power and security over the love of some jerkoff any day of the week.
Do yourself a favor. Google “powerful women” and look at those faces. Do you think any of those people care about being called a bad name?
I understand that most women are fighting lifetimes of social engineering in this, but I honestly think that women will get nowhere if we expect everyone to bend over backwards, give us power, and love us for taking it from them. It is foolish to let petty insults get in the way of your security of mind and body.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
~V.A. Luttrell
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Here at Thoughts on Liberty, we love hosting up and coming writers and bloggers who are inclined towards freedom. I am especially excited to introduce our newest author to the site: one J.R. Luttrell.
I have 
There has been a bit of a debate about what this panel really means. My interpretation of it is to say that the cartoonist does find some tenants of libertarianism very appealing. Like ending the drug war, police abuse, and war. Naturally, these are common causes we have with progressives.
I’ve written on 
This is another one I chuckled at. There are indeed some libertarians who think that Rand created the universe. Many objectivists are funny in their fervor, candor, and thought that IF ONLY everyone read Rand, the world would be a better place. Clearly, though, they are not all this way.
See, this one made me laugh, too. There ARE certain populations of libertarians that are one-issue libertarians, and one of the issues that libertarians focus on is marijuana legalization. I think it’s funny to portray them this way, because, well, it is.
This is one of my favorite thoughts about libertarians. There are, of course, people who don’t get success via hard work, sacrifice, or talent. Most of us have bosses like that. However, this claim is not central to libertarian thought nor is it exclusive to libertarians.
This one I will freely admit is a problem. Many libertarians who haven’t done much economic study will claim this. It’s a pretty simple argument, but it’s only wrong in its simplicity. This goes back to the 
This is another panel that I thought was hilarious. It obviously pokes fun at what I do (blogging), and there are people out there who get WAY into their blogs. They have an inflated sense of self-importance and think that what they do is more important than it actually is. I can laugh at that, and I can laugh at what element there is of that in what I do.
This is another one I thought was hilarious — it seemed to be playing the absurd card for those of us libertarians who seem to focus on one issue and don’t depart from that.
Let’s get something straight here: the founding fathers are essentially mythological figures in American culture. So revered are they that one can win a certain amount of people over to a cause by simply stating that the founding fathers wanted it. Conservatives, progressives, and libertarians all use this tactic.
Oh, goodness. I love gun-owner-haters. They usually show that they don’t really know very many people with guns. There are, of course, people like this. I actually know someone who has a serious gun fetish. But I’ll tell you right now, most people own guns for self-defense or for hunting. Libertarians more than any other population, I think, would own guns for defense against tyranny.
The Disturbing Truth about “In Time”
The concept of the movie is fairly simple: in the future, people are genetically engineered to stop aging at 25. There’s a catch, however. When you hit 25, you only have a year left of time. That year is currency which you can spend and earn. When you run out of time, you die.
Justin Timberlake is our ghetto-raised protagonist who is given over a century of time. Timberlake is accused of stealing the time by a “time keeper,” and, like any good street rat, decides to run from the police. He takes an at-first-reluctant Amanda Seyfried along for the ride. Timberlake and Seyfried embark on a crusade to steal time from banks and give it to those who need it. Along the way, the pair uncover a worldwide conspiracy to allow a few people to live forever, while many die.
What “In Time” attempts to accomplish is a social commentary about the station of the rich and the poor in our society. Obvious statements as “For a few to live forever, many must die” and a rich man’s love affair social Darwanism make it clear to the audience that it has ulterior motives.
This movie utterly fails at commentary, but I doubt few will notice. Many of the reviews I’ve seen have praised it as a timely critique. None have seen the gaping holes in the universe that make it a poor match for our world, because this is how many see it.
1. How do the rich get rich?
How do people get rich? Our main Rich Fat Bastard (Vincent Kartheiser) is presumed to be a banker, but what do other people in this society do? We are missing this crucial piece of information, yet we are meant to believe that the rich have stolen time from the poor. Why? There is no evidence to suggest that he stole time from anyone, any more than the super rich steal money from the poor today. We are to take it at face value that the time is stolen, rather than peaceably attained.
We do know a good bit about how the rich get their money in our society, though. 80% of millionaires are the first generation in their family to become rich. Something less than 15% of the rich in our society were bankers. Most were entrepreneurs of some kind.
This is not the portrayal of the rich that we see in this movie, and such it doesn’t seem to fit as an applicable commentary for us today.
2. Who controls the system?
Plus, I kind of want his coat.
The police in this movie are portrayed through the amazing Cillian Murphy. He begins as a simple cop who attempts to catch a thief and then is revealed to be more of a enforcer of the status quo. His enforces the caste-like time zones, but it is not clear where he get this power, and what laws (if any) he is enforcing.
There is also a large controlled attempt to kill off the poor by setting prices and taxes high simultaneously. But who runs this system? What kind of government exists here, and to what extent are the super rich and the government entwined?
Unfortunately, there is not enough here to work with to do a full overlay with our society. There is a system which raises prices — The Federal Reserve — but they do it indirectly through inflation. Prices aren’t raised arbitrarily, and aren’t set by a central system.
3. How do trade, markets, etc. work?
At the end of the movie, the Ultimate Enforcer reveals that he found a way to cheat the system and get ahead. He does not reveal how this is accomplished, but only that he doesn’t want anyone else to follow in his footsteps.
The In Time Universe appears to have strictly quartered-off time zones like castes, but movement between them is free — as long as you have the time. Social mobility is fairly unheard of, but not illegal. However, doing so arises suspicions.
This is fairly unlike markets in the real world. Though there is much de facto class segregation, movement between them is not as difficult as it is in In Life’s world. It is not enforced, at least in the United States, by large walls and toll gates. Some studies suggest that class mobility in the United States is actually fairly fluid, despite what others purport.
The Disturbing Truth
Most disturbing about the so-called “social commentary” of In Time is that it is a reflection of how many people think the world works. People believe that the rich are rich because they steal money from the poor, that this system is either tacitly or actively enforced by the government, and that they have no means for improvement. There is the supposition that the super rich gain their wealth in isolation, and at the expense of, the poor. None of these things are true.
The world built in In Life was shallow, simple, and incomplete. So too is the view of the world of many who see it as a sharp, accurate, and well-timed social critique. In fact, it is simply the result of an incomplete knowledge and misinformed picture of our world.