Can anything be deduced from books? Reading them is pretty tedious. It is hard to detect anything about social processes from the scribbles of a single person. Books have plots, story lines and other nonsense. However, if one were to take all books and conduct a meta-analysis at the level of the words alone, one might detect a bigger picture.
Consider the simple words: “men” and “women”. The relative frequency of those words may reveal the importance of these items in the popular mind, or at least the minds of readers, probably the slightly brighter, richer and supposedly more refined of the citizenry.
Sure enough, in the 1800’s men (0.0753) were discussed almost 8 times more frequently than women (0.0079). Not until 1983 did they achieve parity of mention at 0.032, and after a brief surge in which women were ahead they are at a rough parity again. Seekers of refinement should be gratified to learn that “lady” and “gentleman” showed no such disparity. Although more common two centuries ago, those genteel words are paired together, with lady (0.004) ahead of gentleman (0.002) as they should be.
The somewhat colder terms “female” (0.0048) and “male” (0.0028) are much less frequent than man and woman, and despite small differences effectively can be ignored.
Finally we get down to the very small numbers for words which are infrequently used like “rape” which was rarely used in the 1800s (0.00027), and then became slightly more rare till the 1970s. Feminism first appears in 1910 or thereabouts, and in the 1970 there is a sharp rise in unison in both these words, peaking in 1997 and falling thereafter. Compared with stalwart words like men and women, both these word have always been rare in books.
At this point in social science reporting everything pauses, like in the Hitchcock murder movie “Psycho” where a psychologist is called in to give The Explanation. I can only advance a few cautionary words: I do not think that rape was low throughout the last two centuries, rising only in the 1970’s for two decades and then falling back. It is notoriously difficult to collect data on rape in any era, but this looks like a consequence of openness of reporting and discussion. The fall since 1997 is less easy to explain. If openness has been achieved one would expect sustained use of the word.
I think this little analysis illustrates a larger point, which formed part of the critical evaluation of “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better”. By choosing what to measure one can frame and potentially distort the search for causes. For example, the word “dominance” rises in a similar way, but the match is not so good with rape. “Masculine” also rises, but is not so good a fit. I have tried a bunch of others which might conceivably be informative: “manly, seductive, powerful, arrogant, forceful, brutal, entitled” and they are all a poor fit. The match between feminism and rape remains strong.
At the moment it seems that, as is often the case in social science musings, “more research is needed”.
Try "virile".
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. Very low frequency, peaks in 1918 and declines thereafter, very poor fit. Suggests that virile was a casualty of the First World War.
ReplyDeleteFlorida storms tonight knocked out my long essay but Dr. Thompson's challenge requires a reply. Here is my second try.
ReplyDeleteFeminism and rape are logical partners. If feminism in America emerged without a huge increase in rape, I would be supremely puzzled. Feminism is simply one part of the grand liberal movement driven primarily by latent Marxism and aimed at wealth redistribution in an egalitarian utopia. The empowerment of women became entangled with the empowerment of blacks and Hispanics, two groups that treat women as raw meat for male domination and pleasure. Furthermore, blacks were torn asunder by emancipation. Given billions in government largesse, blacks gradually learned to enjoy special treatment and a PC atmosphere in which they are almost worshipped as special people. Here was a race with a mean IQ of 85, highly impulsive, highly aggressive, and emotionally unstable, enjoying not just equal opportunity but very excessive favoritism. Emancipation removed the historical constraints of Christian America and the black family never recovered from this abyss of freedom. A society celebrating diversity by saturating schools with liberal propaganda soon created a whole generation of white Americans in love with hip-hop and absolutely ignorant of the negative history of black people. Instead, the PC climate has tamed them into simple-minded liberal clones.
The National Crime Victimization Survey is a national study done annually. From 2004-2008 Black Americans, who were 13% of the population, committed 30% of aggravated assaults, 60% of the robberies, and 35% of the rapes.Since NCVS counts Hispanics as white, the size of the gap between blacks and whites is really astronomical.
In 2008 blacks committed 83% of all the interracial violent crimes that were single-offender. Think about it. Black criminals chose white victims 54% of the time.White criminals chose black victims less than 5% of the time!
For rape it is astonishing.There were about 19,000 black on white rapes in 2008-a rate of 53 per day!The NCVS found that there were ZERO CASES of white-on-black rape in 2008. Feminists, being good liberals, are torn between their firm liberal beliefs and the fact that their sisters are being raped on every college campus in America, with many murdered in the process. College athletic departments are notorious for hiding their black criminals because sports is very big business today. White women are actually under siege these days with feminists usually quiet because of the PC mandate to shield black perpetrators.
Multiple-offender crimes: in 2008 there were 142,000 black on white crimes.White-on-black was ZERO! of these, 89,000 were gang assaults, while 49,000 were gang robberies, and 4,000 were gang rapes.
Every college in America teaches feminist ideology and victimization. However, the very freedom feminists applaud is the freedom used by blacks to devestate their own family structure, commit staggering amounts of crime, and to rape white women with abandon. The reaction to Trayvon Martin is basic to the enormous public sympathy for blacks despite the facts about rampant criminality. Like stealing a nice BMW, raping a pretty white girl is high on the priority list of many criminals.The increase in feminism, like the increase in rape, is precisely caused by the general decline of morality in a liberal society dedicated to increasing free expression so long as it bows to PC. The chaos is a predictable outcome but ignorance of crime data can be deadly for pretty white girls in America.John Derbyshire became notorious for warning his children about black violence but in the end statistical regularities are vitally important if we are to exercise caution living in a country with dangerous people.