Virus Outbreak Illinois

Coronavirus attacks the elderly, but we can’t resign ourselves to shorter lives - The Washington Post

Some 10 years ago, I wrote a novel called “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Country-Ice-Cream-Star/dp/0062227114">The Country of Ice Cream Star</a>,” now one of the many postapocalyptic novels whose authors are in the uncomfortable position of being congratulated for their prescience. My book was set in a world where everyone is born with an illness which kills them by the time they are 20 years old, a state of affairs that is accepted as normal by 99 percent of this society’s child population. This concept was universally perceived as dystopian by readers and reviewers, despite the fact that the children in the book are generally happy — at least until they or someone they love begins to sicken and die. The premise was designed to pose an implicit question about what constitutes a natural life span — a question that has become suddenly topical in the time of coronavirus.

As we were continually reminded, the novel coronavirus seemed to primarily kill the old. (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/19/younger-adults-are-large-percentage-coronavirus-hospitalizations-united-states-according-new-cdc-data/" target="_blank">New evidence suggests</a> that may not be the case.) In fact, it was so notorious for selecting for people past retirement age that, in the darker recesses of the Internet, it’s being called “Boomer Remover.” Media outlets have seized the opportunity to frame the disease as a new battleground for generational warfare. The New York Times opened hostilities with an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/travel/coronavirus-travel-deals.html">article</a> implying that young people were too excited by a $50 plane ticket to care if they spread a virus that might exterminate their grandparents. But there’s also been a <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/convincing-boomer-parents-to-take-the-coronavirus-seriously">slew</a> of <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/coronavirus-parents-grandparents-boomers-millennials">pieces</a> that commiserate with millennials whose foolhardy boomer parents won’t stay home. On “The View,” Meghan McCain even <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/media/488123-meghan-mccain-blasts-baby-boomers-and-millennials-for-ignoring-crowd-warnings">attacked</a> both boomers and millennials for ignoring health warnings.

There seemed to be a real medical basis to this generational framing. In China, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/10/coronavirus-is-mysteriously-sparing-kids-killing-elderly-understanding-why-may-help-defeat-virus/">fatality rate</a> from the coronavirus for people ages 10 to 39 is less than 0.2 percent, and almost all children under 10 are mysteriously unaffected by the virus. Meanwhile, among Chinese patients over 80 years old, mortality has been 21.9 percent. Among the first 105 Italian fatalities, the <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/boomer-remover-meme-trends-virus-coronavirus-social-media-covid-19-baby-boomers-1492190">average age</a> was 81. If hospitals worldwide become overwhelmed, this effect is likely to be magnified as doctors perform a kind of wartime triage, in which scarce beds and equipment are allocated to the patients considered most likely to have a chance of survival. Already in some Italian hospitals, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/15/coronavirus-rationing-us/">older patients</a> are being denied treatment.

(This demographic understanding is evolving. On Wednesday, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm?s_cid=mm6912e2_w" target=_blank>a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study</a> found that 38 percent of those sick enough to be hospitalized in the United States were younger than 55.)

If life must be rationed, it’s perhaps understandable that the young are preferred to the old. Old people have already had long lives, so what they have to lose — crudely judged as a number of years — is less. We easily fly to the palliative idea that the years after 80 aren’t that worth living; after all, who wants to die in a nursing home? Even beyond that, young lives are perceived as inherently more precious. You can prove this to yourself by imagining the mass hysteria that would result if 21.9 percent of children who caught coronavirus died, and what would happen to a public figure who dismissed the seriousness of such a disease by saying it “only” killed children — as Sean Hannity repeatedly suggested with regard to the coronavirus’s toll on the elderly.

As the accidentally “prescient” author of a novel that posits a world where life span is dramatically reduced, I’m uncomfortably aware of the malign potential of this attitude. Already in the United States, we don’t perceive it as a crisis that the average citizen of Monaco lives almost 11 years longer than the average American (89.4 years vs. 78.5), and that disparity is not perceived as a sign that the health policies of the U.S. government kill tens of thousands of people a year — even though that’s exactly what it means. Americans may believe we’re opposed to euthanasia for reasons of age or disability; the results of our public policy show that’s not true.

This seems like as good a place as any to underscore the scale of the coronavirus crisis. As the disease has spread, some <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-infection-outbreak-worldwide-virus-expert-warning-today-2020-03-02/">have warned</a> that between 40 to 70 percent of the world’s population will catch it in its first year. If this happens too quickly, hospitals will be swamped worldwide, other patients who need emergency care won’t be able to access it, and tens of millions of people will die. The coronavirus is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/coronavirus-pandemic-immunity-vaccine/2020/03/12/bbf10996-6485-11ea-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html">then likely to recur</a>, killing a new set of mainly elderly and immunocompromised people in each wave, until its effects and spread are finally dampened by the effects of herd immunity. If the fatality rate among the very old remains at or near that 21.9 percent mark, the disease is likely to leave the world subtly but significantly demographically changed.

Coronavirus will linger long after the pandemic subsides

It’s worth noting that this cull of chronically ill and elderly people will fall disproportionately on the world’s poor, especially those living in areas with failing health care systems, dysfunctional governments, and/or ongoing wars. These deaths most of all are likely to be perceived as somehow obviously less tragic — except, of course, by the people living in the communities affected. A world that has largely ignored the death toll of the war in Yemen is unlikely to be moved by the premature loss of its elderly people from a virus. This selective callousness is also likely to affect perceptions of the deaths of poor and middle class victims in the United States. Indeed, such attitudes are already part of our everyday lives; after all, life expectancy for the top 1 percent of American earners already rivals that of the citizens of Monaco, while the bottom 25 percent of Americans die not 11 but 14 years earlier. In the current crisis, there may even be those who will covertly (or overtly) welcome a mass cull of elderly and relatively impoverished people. After all, if 10 percent of the over-80 demographic were to go, the young would be spared some portion of the burden of a growing population of disabled seniors, a burden that is described in some quarters as “apocalyptic.” A significant reduction in the number of old people could affect a score of other issues, from the math of Social Security to the electoral fortunes of Democratic Socialists. As the crisis further intensifies, which now seems inevitable, we can expect social media to be riddled with devil’s-advocate-style opinions about the silver linings of the deaths of millions of people.

Still more disturbing, however, is the way the Trump administration leaped to a left-field solution for the coronavirus’s effect on the economy: temporarily eliminating the payroll tax which pays for Social Security and Medicare. Some government sources reportedly added that Trump would like to make this elimination permanent, and somehow fund these programs — which cost over a trillion dollars annually — from general revenue. Given the long-standing Republican dream of ending these entitlements, and the extreme unlikelihood of them raising other taxes sufficiently to cover the shortfall, the suspicion must be that the real intent was to eliminate Social Security and Medicare — and leave millions of elderly people without the necessities of life. After all, America’s elderly poor are already losing 14 years as compared to the people of Monaco — and Beverly Hills — and no one seems to mind. What’s a few more? Trump’s expansion of Medicare payments for telemedicine, which replaces doctors’ visits with Skype calls, is by contrast an obviously sensible policy during a pandemic which disproportionately kills old people. However, it’s doubtful that this policy will go away when the pandemic ends, given that one of telemedicine’s most obvious benefits is that it’s far cheaper. Thus, the legacy of this provision may be that Medicare recipients ultimately find it difficult to see a doctor in person.

At the beginning of “The Country of Ice Cream Star,” the 15-year-old heroine is radicalized by the sickness of her old brother, and sets forth across a devastated, post-plague America to find a cure for the disease that afflicts her people. As happens in such stories, she must convince others to believe in her vision — that they can and should live beyond their “natural” life span of 20 years. We are now being subjected to the opposite argument; a subtle effort to downgrade our expectations of longevity downward. The world of my novel may seem so extreme as to be pure fantasy, but in the early 19th century, workers in some English cities had an average age at death of 19; this grim reality was altered less by medical advances than social change. The coronavirus will not be the last health crisis or the last economic crisis we face in the 21st century. We cannot at this early stage accept being told it’s comforting that our lives will “only” be abbreviated by a few months, much less that we may need to die a little earlier still. We need to remember that we deserve to live.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/03/19/im-an-er-doctor-coronavirus-is-already-overwhelming-us/" target=_blank>I’m an E.R. doctor. The coronavirus is already overwhelming us.</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/03/16/grandparents-child-care-coronavirus/" target=_blank>The coronavirus means I can’t take care of my grandchildren while their parents work</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/03/13/hugging-my-grandkid-coronavirus/" target=_blank>Should I stop hugging my grandkid in the name of ‘social distancing’?</a>

Sandra Newman has written widely about sexual assault and is the author of several books, including the novel The Heavens.

Sandra Newman

washpost

Coronavirus attacks the elderly, but we can’t resign ourselves to shorter lives

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WASHINGTON, D.C.  Toni Morrison poses for a portrait at the 

How Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders got Toni Morrison wrong - The Washington Post

When the great author Toni Morrison <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/toni-morrison-nobel-laureate-who-transfigured-american-literature-dies-at-88/2019/08/06/49cd4d46-b84d-11e9-a091-6a96e67d9cce_story.html">died in August</a>, the world responded with a familiar public ritual: the online sharing of her most popular quotes. <a href="https://twitter.com/kamalaharris/status/1158753329364766720">Sen. Kamala D. Harris tweeted</a>: “Something that is loved is never lost.” <a href="https://twitter.com/berniesanders/status/1158762920374931459">Sen. Bernie Sanders chose</a>: “If you are free, you need to free somebody else.” Rapper <a href="https://twitter.com/common/status/985638491336904704">Common</a>, actress <a href="https://twitter.com/kerrywashington/status/1158757608037031936">Kerry Washington</a> and Democratic presidential candidate <a href="https://twitter.com/BetoORourke/status/1158751858967666697">Beto O’Rourke</a> all went with: “You wanna fly, you got to give up the s--- that weighs you down.” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-quotes.html">News</a> <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/toni-morrison-author-dead-quotes_uk_5d498349e4b0d291ed06e9e0">outlets</a> (including <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/08/06/honoring-toni-morrison-through-words-she-shared-with-world/">The Washington Post</a>) offered <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/toni-morrison-death-quotes-books-1452794">compilations</a> of favorites like “You are your best thing” and “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”

If you didn’t already know who Morrison was, you might have imagined the world was mourning a celebrity self-help writer, rather than a Nobel Prize-winning novelist known for the idiosyncratic, Gothic richness of her prose, and whose preoccupations were the most gruesome and traumatic episodes of American racism. You would certainly never have guessed that Morrison was famed for writing unflinchingly and graphically about torture, infanticide, incest and child abuse, or that her books are full of uncensored rage at the monumental crimes of white people. The Toni Morrison mourned in August was a comforting, folksy, wise-woman figure who was only concerned that everyone believe in themselves and chase their dreams.

Of course, Morrison is not alone in receiving this treatment. Maya Angelou’s career has been almost completely buried under cherry-picked inspirational quotes such as: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.” And although there’s an aspect of race and gender to this phenomenon, there is no absolute protection in being white and male. Kurt Vonnegut, whose books’ most persistent message was that life is meaningless and death inevitable, is popularly remembered by the mawkish catchphrase, “Babies, you’ve got to be kind!” The bleak, nihilistic works of Samuel Beckett — a typical character description from his plays is “has no legs and lives in a dustbin” — have been boiled down to a chipper exhortation to “Fail better!”

Maya Aneglou taught us how to talk about ourselves

There are even some quotes that are apocryphal. We can all agree that the poster-ready Morrison gem, “Something that is loved is never lost,” generally attributed to her novel “Beloved,” is satisfyingly wisdom-shaped and truthful. However, it doesn’t really appear in any book by Morrison or any interview or speech with her available online. A similar quote (“Nothing loved is ever lost or perished”) does appear in a poem in Madeleine L’Engle’s book “A Ring of Endless Light,” and it’s all too easy to imagine how this sentiment might have seeped from one beloved female author to another. The public imagination turns all great authors into one cozy, folksy character dispensing facile and comforting sayings, as if all world literature were just raw ingredients for the next edition of “Chicken Soup for the Soul.”

It may be tempting to treat the counterfeit “Something that is loved is never lost” as a gotcha moment and indulge in mocking laughter of Harris’s staff for being taken in. But there’s something insidious about these distortions, even when they don’t involve blatant errors. Take the popular quote: “Wanna fly, you got to give up the s--- that weighs you down.” Out of context, this seems like common-sense advice about giving up your emotional baggage. In context, as spoken by a character in Morrison’s novel “Song of Solomon,” it refers to the need to renounce one’s attachment to material things — “life, safety, and luxury” — for a higher cause. It’s also noteworthy that flight is a central theme in “Song of Solomon,” which ends (SPOILER ALERT) with the main character taking “flight” by leaping off a cliff. It’s left to the reader to decide whether he has killed himself or escaped into the mythical flight of his ancestors. The implication is that, for black people in America, the only real freedom has historically been in the mythical imagination or death.

Obviously, Morrison’s intention was not to inspire anyone to jump off a cliff. Rather, the quote lives in a complex fictional world where there are no easy formulas; where even the wisest characters can be crushed by the atrocities of racism; where the distinction between right and wrong has become murky. Like all great literature, it leaves us to grapple with the profound difficulty of life, rather than soothing us with simple answers.

To some, this kind of distortion may seem like one of the more harmless side effects of fame. Is it so terrible if people imagine Toni Morrison said a simplistic thing she didn’t say? If you repackage “Wanna fly, you got to give up the s--- that weighs you down” as an encouraging morsel of wisdom, isn’t it still just a harmless morsel of encouragement? After all, as David Foster Wallace said (in the easy-listening commencement speech “<a href="https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/">This Is Water</a>,” the source of many of the quotable quotes by which he is remembered): “The fact is that in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life-or-death importance.”

I read books by only minority authors for a year. It showed me just how white our reading world is.

But Toni Morrison didn’t win the Nobel Prize for dispensing banal platitudes; she got it for writing scabrous, gorgeous, complex books like “Song of Solomon.” It is not only disrespectful to her, it is unhealthy for us to sand down her words until they tell us what we want to hear — not least because Toni Morrison had real wisdom to impart. This is especially true when we include implications with which she publicly disagreed. For instance, the problem with Harris’s “Something that is loved is never lost” is not just that Morrison didn’t say it, but that Morrison’s work is explicitly about how, through the bad choices of the powerful, people can lose everything they love, and this loss can echo through generations. Multiply this distortion by all the authors who were ever memorialized with massaged, out-of-context quotes, and it begins to seem less like an honoring of literature than an Orwellian campaign to erase its influence. Meanwhile, you can easily mourn a writer’s death without the use of quotable quotes, as former president Barack Obama did in his <a href="https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1158764847800213507">memorial tweet for Morrison</a>: “Her writing was a beautiful, meaningful challenge to our conscience and our moral imagination.”

Of course, we all need comfort sometimes, and if repeating “Something that is loved is never lost” makes you feel better, there’s nothing wrong with that. But you can only really comprehend Morrison’s legacy by reading her books. And whenever we’re honoring the memory of a writer, the least we can do is respect what they actually wrote.

How Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders got Toni Morrison wrong

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How not to mourn a beloved author

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Turkey & Raw Ingredients for Thanksgiving Dinner Preparation Horizontal

What’s with all the ‘racist uncles’? - The Washington Post

It’s holiday season again, that magical time of year when families gather, feasts are prepared, and media outlets tell you <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/stevens/109617621-132.html">how to argue</a> with your <a href="https://feministfrequency.com/video/7-ways-to-talk-to-your-racist-uncle-this-thanksgiving/">racist uncle</a>. To judge by these articles, millions of Americans heading home for the holidays are dreading a confrontation with an uncle — <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/22/dealing-with-the-racist-uncle-and-other-christmas-dilemmas">always an uncle</a> — who expresses heinous opinions during an otherwise congenial supper. And yet people don’t want to spoil the holidays for everyone by fighting.

There are many peculiar things about this genre, which has taken the shape of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/opinion/thanksgiving-family-argue-chat-bot.html">bots</a> and <a href="https://splinternews.com/forced-to-dine-with-a-racist-uncle-on-thanksgiving-tex-1820647967">hotlines</a> that promise to assist you in outsmarting your uncle. Strangest may be the implied conviction that if it weren’t for racial politics, families wouldn’t get into ugly rows over Thanksgiving dinner. But perhaps more striking is the way this trope papers over the existence of broader familial racism. Racist parents are nowhere to be seen in these fables, nor are racist brothers and sisters. There isn’t even a whisper of a racist aunt, never mind a racist niece or nephew. In the happy world of the racist uncle, bigots stopped reproducing in the 1960s and survive only in the form of childless, middle-aged males who go to their siblings' houses for the holidays.

The holidays aren't a big happy family celebration for everyone. And that's okay.

Of course, “Seven Ways to Argue With Your Racist Mom” is an inherently more depressing title, and in the name of fun holiday fare, it’s tempting to just let this pass. But, especially at Thanksgiving — a holiday that already requires us to overlook quite a lot of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2018/11/20/making-indian-headdresses-school-is-terrible-way-teach-kids-about-thanksgiving/?utm_term=.2fe88ac030a3">ethnic baggage</a> — it’s worth pausing to look at the ways these articles perpetuate common fallacies about racism.

For one, racist aunts are just as real as racist uncles. Studies show white women are <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1519836?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">not significantly less racist</a> than white men, news that should come as no surprise to anyone who has studied the demographic trends of recent elections. But there’s also ample reason to beware the racist niece and nephew; white millennials are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/07/white-millennials-are-just-about-as-racist-as-their-parents/?utm_term=.ebd906a8de71">only marginally less racist</a> than their parents. In surveys, 31 percent of white millennials believe black people are lazier than whites, as opposed to 35 percent of white baby boomers. Millennials, boomers and members of Generation X are markedly less racist than previous generations, but given that the oldest boomers are now in their 70s, this isn’t especially heartening. We’ve apparently made little to no progress in eradicating racism since the ’60s.

One might imagine racism persists across generations because it’s passed down from parent to child, with bigoted parents raising bigoted children and tolerant parents raising tolerant ones. If this were true, at least the social difficulty of facing bigoted parents over Thanksgiving dinner would disappear, since these families could eat their turkey in a perfect harmony of racism.

There's more to fighting racism than getting rid of a confederate statue

For better or worse, this seems not to be the case — at least not after a certain age. A study published in the journal Political Psychology in 2017 <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2017/04/what-shapes-your-political-beliefs-at-18-35-and-50.html">found</a> that children’s political views do tend to be similar to those of their parents at age 18, but then diverge rapidly. By the time a person reached age 35, the political attitudes of the county the person lived in were twice as likely to predict their political beliefs as the politics of their parents. By age 50, parental influence had almost entirely disappeared.

Of course, it’s also now common for political differences to weaken our ties to other people — and not just our outlying uncles. In a 2017 <a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2016/40_say_election_has_hurt_a_close_relationship">poll</a> by Rasmussen Reports, 40 percent of Americans said the 2016 election had harmed a close relationship. Another recent casualty is the holidays themselves. In a <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/23/how-donald-trump-ruined-thanksgiving-215862">study</a> at Washington State University, two economists tracked the movements of 10 million Americans and determined that people who traveled from Democratic-leaning areas to Republican-leaning areas and vice versa spent 20 to 30 minutes less time with family in 2016 than in 2015.

So, the problem many people face this year as the holidays approach is more troubling than the lighthearted scenario of the “How to Argue With Your Uncle” articles. Those who are not bigoted but who have bigoted parents or other relatives face a real risk of alienating the people with whom they have the deepest, strongest bonds. Some are even grappling with the question of whether they should feel different about bigoted parents or whether their parents' feelings have changed toward them. Some are having to decide whether it’s safe to bring home partners who aren’t the same race or ethnicity. For these holiday travelers, the next argument at Thanksgiving could be the last. And when that happens, they don’t lose just an uncle they never particularly liked.

Of course, this brings us back to the question of what to say at the dinner table. Of all human frailties, the reluctance to risk losing a loved one is the most forgivable, so a person might be excused in this one instance if they choose to avoid an argument. But one hopeful lesson from the research into familial racism is that arguing about these subjects can make a difference. Those kids who left home with the same convictions as their parents but later altered their politics often did so because of conversations they had over years with people who disagreed with them. It may not be easy, and it may not be pretty, but people can change their minds. So those people who do have ugly scenes with their families over this subject and feel guilty about spoiling the holidays should remember that these arguments matter. It may feel as if you’re getting nowhere, but it might just take years to get to somewhere.

And if the only racist you have to face at Thanksgiving really is an uncle — give thanks.

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What’s with all the ‘racist uncles’?

Staff

Getty

President Trump's Supreme Court Justice Pick Brett Kavanaugh's Nomination In Jeopardy Over Past Accusations

Want to help prevent rape? Withdraw Kavanaugh’s nomination. - The Washington Post

When Christine Blasey Ford came forward with allegations that Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her at a party when he was 17, it was no surprise that Republicans were quick to deny it ever happened. What was surprising, however, was how many insisted that, if it happened, it didn’t matter.

Minnesota state Sen. Scott Newman breezily <a href="https://twitter.com/SenatorNewmanMN/status/1041758288440950787">tweeted</a>: “Even if true, teenagers!” In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Lance Morrow <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-spectral-witness-materializes-1537225498">said</a>: “No clothes were removed, and no sexual penetration occurred. The sin, if there was one, was not one of those that Catholic theology calls peccata clamantia — sins that cry to heaven for vengeance.” On MSNBC, Bari Weiss <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018/09/18/ny-times-bari-weiss-other-instance-brett-kavanaugh-has-reputation-being-prince-man/221347">mused</a>: “Let’s say [Kavanaugh] did this exactly as she said. Should the fact that a 17-year-old, presumably very drunk kid, did this, should this be disqualifying?”

It’s a question that can only be answered affirmatively. And not just because what Kavanaugh allegedly did is so terrible. It’s also because making a show of just how terrible it is on the world stage might help stop other men from perpetrating similar abuses.

There's nothing unusual about the time of the Kavanaugh allegations

The most charitable explanation for the laissez-faire attitude of Kavanaugh’s defenders seems to be that sexual assault is so common that many people find it normal. As Weiss went on to say, somewhat disjointedly: “And that most men we know — it’s a horrible reality. I’m just saying — I’m interested in the deeper cultural thing, it’s a disgusting reality about our broken sexual culture.” The idea that “most men we know” have committed sex crimes is a wild exaggeration, but research does indicate that rape and attempted rape are far from rare. Across 10 different studies <a href="https://www.davidlisak.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/RepeatRapeinUndetectedRapists.pdf">undertaken between 1985 and 1998</a>, between 6 percent and 14.9 percent of men admitted to having at some point committed rape or attempted rape. Roughly half of this number had done so repeatedly. This means that, for most of us, at least one person we know has probably committed such a crime. This produces a strong incentive to believe some rapes are worse than others; that the rapes on crime shows are atrocities, while those that our acquaintances or ideological allies perpetrate are regrettable mistakes. The high prevalence of sexual violence can also produce a feeling of helplessness: If it’s so common, perhaps it’s just a given of male sexuality that nothing will ever change?

However, the evidence suggests we can prevent rape. First, it occurs at radically different rates in different societies. It may seem shocking that 6 to 15 percent of American men admit to serious sex crimes, but the percentage of <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/action/showFullTableImage?tableId=tbl2&pii=S2214109X1370069X">men who say they’ve committed rape</a> in China is 23 percent, and in Papua New Guinea, it’s a staggering 60.7 percent. The percentages of women who say they’ve been raped in these countries are similarly high. This large variation makes it clear that rates of rape are highly malleable. Sexual assault in wartime is notoriously high — but it <a href="http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/cpworkshop/papers/Wood.pdf">also differs dramatically</a> from army to army, and the rate changes rapidly in response to policy changes from above. For instance, the notoriously high rate of sexual violence by the Red Army at the end of World War II decreased abruptly when the Soviet leadership decided it was a political problem and instituted rules to discourage it. In the Salvadoran civil war, rapes by government soldiers plummeted once the United States threatened to withdraw military aid if the government’s human-rights record didn’t improve.

The crucial elements seem to be whether a rapist fears punishment and whether he feels it will be viewed as a serious crime by peers. In her study “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415911087/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thewaspos09-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0415911087&linkId=edae4b18bef28af65f6a025729197207">Understanding Sexual Violence</a>,” conducted for the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health in 1990, Diana Scully conducted extensive 89-page interviews with more than 100 incarcerated rapists. Her first significant finding was that rapists assumed they would never be punished. As one said: “I knew I was doing wrong. But I also knew most women don’t report rape, and I didn’t think she would either.” The rapists were also remarkably preoccupied by what other people would think of them, talking about their victims’ moral failings and lying about details of their crimes to make them seem less violent. They overwhelmingly saw the kind of rape they had personally committed as normal. As one subject put it, “When you take a woman out, woo her, then she says: ‘No, I’m a nice girl,’ you have to use force. All men do this.”