Being Gay is Disgusting

Bare with me here; I'm going to piss some people off, but things need to be said, in the name of Reason.

On 15 June 2011, Dilbert-writer Scott Adams wrote a blog titled Pegs and Holes that said certain impulses, including rape, are natural. Several sites have interpreted this to mean Scott Adams condones rape.

Here is what I think is a very fair truncation of the blog (or just read the whole thing, linked above):

If a lion and a zebra show up at the same watering hole, and the lion kills the zebra, whose fault is that? You probably conclude that both animals acted according to their natures, so no one is to blame. However, if this is your local zoo, you might have some questions about who put the lions with the zebras in the same habitat.

Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn't blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control.

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that?

[But] if we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose. All I’m saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges."

[To Scott Adams: If you read this and my summary is not representative of your whole blog, let me know and I'll correct it immediately]

Notice that "rape" was included in a short list of bad things that some men have done recently. Notice also that Adams agrees that men who do bad things to people should be punished. Fast forward to lower in his post, and we see Adams saying society has rendered the "natural instincts of men [to be] shameful and criminal."

Adams makes no direct comment about whether this societal trend is good or bad, only that it has happened. At the end of the blog, he predicts a future in which men are on a "chemical castration pill" until they want to procreate. This prediction is quite in line with others he has made, such as those in his book, The Dilbert Future.

And here's a selection of the extrapolated headlines and key quotes from what Adams calls the LRC community:

• Huffington Post: Scott Adams Says Rape Is A 'Natural Instinct' For Men -- "Yes, Scott Adams believes [rape] is all society's fault."
  
• Salon: Scott Adams' defense of rape mentality -- "Left to their own devices, men apparently would just go about raping and pillaging all the livelong day, with occasional breaks for grilling and watching ESPN."
  
• Mediaite: Scott Adams Believes Rapists, Philanderers Are Just Behaving Naturally -- "Adams is careful to make sure we don’t blame the victims of sexual violence while we proceed to blame the victims of sexual violence."
  
• Jezebel: Scott Adams Weighs In On Rape -- "...[Adams is] saying that boys are pretty much designed to be rapists and we'd better get used to it..."

And more, a petition has sprung up at Change.org with the title, "Tell Scott Adams that raping a woman is not a natural instinct." It explains:

"Scott Adams has written a blog insinuating that the act of a man raping a woman is a natural instinct and that society is to blame for these things, not the man who committed the rape."

The trait that all these articles have in common is that they come nowhere close to representing the content, context or intent of the blog they're referencing. The text, which was simply a commentary on nature and a prediction on how mankind humankind hupersonkind might eventually manage to 'switch off' such inconvenient urges, has been interpreted as apologia for rape. Bit of a stretch, no?