I Am Shocked, Shocked, To Find That Libertarians Are Misogynistic Assholes!

I was going to write something a little more serious today but fuck it, it’s Friday and I’ve been engaged in a really stupid Facebook argument for the last day or so that’s made me pretty pissed off. So here we go.

If you are a breathing human being who has any interest in politics, you probably know who Elizabeth Warren is; I don’t need to sing her accolades because she’s awesome and she’s running against Scott Brown for a seat in the Senate from Massachussetts in the 2012 election. So here’s Warren, campaigning, and in the course of doing so gives what in saner times would have been a completely uncontroversial defense of the democratic social contract:

I hear all this, oh this is class warfare, no! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea – God Bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Keep in mind that this is a campaign stump speech given to supporters and not an academic treatise explaining why the social contract is justified (although I have no doubt that Warren could produce one of those too, given the time and inclination). It’s a statement of a sort of basic reciprocity that was once a fundamental pillar of civic life in this country, namely, that when you benefit (disproportionately, one might add) from the existence of public goods, it is incumbent on you to share in the upkeep of those goods. That’s how things work in countries that haven’t lost their fucking minds.

Now of course libertarians and Republicans (two groups which for political purposes are nearly identical in American political life; if you want to talk to me about No True Libertarians, kindly fuck right off) have worked themselves up into a lather over this because being forced to pay taxes is a whisker’s breadth short of being castrated and thrown in a Soviet gulag (i.e. because they are idiots). And while one could make (incorrect but at least) consistent arguments against Warren’s assertion, that simply won’t do for some people because that’s hard and requires thinking and it’s just easier all around to call Warren an uppity bitch and feel very smug about yourself.

And of course that’s pretty much what happens. There’s a picture floating around the web in which a photograph of Warren speaking (it’s a close-up photo that basically has nothing but her face and hands in it) has been image-macro’d (is that a word? is now!) to contain the following text:

There is no woman in this country who got hot on her own. You have a really nice ass and a great boob job? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You got to the gym on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired a plastic surgeon the rest of us paid to educate. You’re safe from hotter, foreign women because of INS agents and boarder [sic] security the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that Colombian or Polish women would come and steal your boyfriend. Now look. You work out and wear nice makeup and look fantastic - good for you. A big chunk of the sex you have should be with people you choose. But part of the underlying social contract is that you take a chunk of the sex you have had and have that sex with people the government chooses.

Contemplate for a second, if you will, the sheer level of assholitude and general hatred of women that is required to write something like this.

It doesn’t take a Socrates to see why this doesn’t hold up analogically, and we’ll get to that, later. For now, I just want to point out how horribly misogynistic this is for anyone who is too dumb to read and understand the meanings of words. The first major red flag here is at word #4; it’s quite telling that in this example, it’s the hot woman who somehow owes sex to others (presumably men, though that’s a tacit assumption). This is of course entirely in line with the male libertarian ethos of entitlement, whether it be to money or to sex (but especially sex). Of course it would never occur to a self-declared Randian paragon of rationality that the reason women don’t want to fuck him is because he tends to treat them like objects and not like people (as one might surmise from seeing someone share this image on Facebook, say). The reference to boob jobs and a great ass further reinforces this point: women are eye candy and must conform to pornified male standards of beauty to be desirable (the implicit reading being: shut up bitch, we’ll judge your social worth by whether you’re hot or not). Also interesting is the implication that somehow the INS is responsible for keeping hot foreign women out of the country because otherwise all you oh-so-smart American women would be replaced by the submissive foreigners of our masturbatory fantasies who would never do such un-womanly things as engage you in political debate or run for public office or refuse to have sex with you because you’re a jerk; this of course is a common trope one finds among so-called men’s rights advocates, a group that tends to intersect fairly heavily with libertarians and Republicans. And of course the most egregious part of the whole thing being that if you’re hot, you owe people sex, because paying taxes, which people do all over the civilized world, is the same as being raped (because that’s what it means when you’re forced to have sex with people you don’t want to have sex with, you guys).

Now of course, upon being called out on their misogynistic behavior, people who share this image start moving goalposts. It’s all just a joke! It’s an analogy to what Warren is saying about taxes! It’s an argument about “legitimate interests” that “should not be arbitrarily taken away” (that one is something that was actually written!). These are all abusrd and easily dismissable, the last two first: Warren has never argued to the best of my knowledge that arbitrary confiscation of property was an unalloyed good. Taxes are not, in fact, arbitrary confiscation; one can reasonably debate what level of taxes we should be paying (or even whether we should be paying them at all) but that’s a debate that’s had by laying your philosophical assumptions on the table and making the actual argument, not by twisting the original into a stupid non-analogy about government allocating sex. Yes, of course you have legitimate interests in property, and in your bodily autonomy. Thankfully, most reasonable people realize that your interest in not being raped is a lot stronger than your interest in not paying taxes (or really, pretty much any other material property interest). On these grounds, the analogic argument fails entirely.

As for the joke, well: if you find this funny, then you find degrading women funny, and that makes you a misogynistic asshole. Yeah, chances are you don’t go around actively beating or raping women, but you’re still an asshole because you’re perpetuating the attitude that women’s social worth is to be judged by their sexual appeal (to you) and that equating taxes and rape constitutes a valid political argument. When pointed to these facts, the response is always “waaaaah you called me a mean name!” Oh, you don’t want to be called mean names? Then don’t do mean things, you ass! There’s nothing about this image that in any way refutes any point that Warren makes and its distribution is nothing more than an attempt to put a woman in her place by means of sexist remarks and implications.

ADDENDUM: Secondary to the above is the fact that the analogy fails even if you accept its basic premises. Consider this: Ryan Gosling is hot. First, it doesn’t follow from this fact that Gosling has in any way acquired his hotness by means of any contribution from me or from anyone else. It’s much more probable that Gosling has simply won the genetic lottery and that his favorable genes combined with a bit of exercise (or possibly even without it) make his career possible (I guess he also knows how to act, but whatever, that’s not the point). But ok, let’s accept the fact that we as a society have made some contribution to Gosling’s hotness; we have certainly made a contribution to his overall success because not only did he drive to the gym on public roads, but he also went to work on public roads and there was a whole infrastructure in place that made his career possible. The logical end-point of this argument is not that Ryan Gosling owes you or me sex, any more than my being educated in public schools obligates me to become a school teacher; the logical end-point is that we as a society, having made Gosling’s success possible, have a legitimate interest in reclaiming the fruits of that success in the form of taxes. So even given the basic assumptions of the “argument” we still wind up with the conclusion that what we’re really after is not fucking Ryan Gosling (well, not as a society anyway) but rather the resources (i.e. taxes) that make it possible to maintain the public infrastructure.