Scott Adams

In a blog post that divides the world as he sees it into “Pegs and Holes,” Dilbert creator and occasional sock puppet master Scott Adams stirred up quite the online crapstorm earlier this month. Unsurprisingly, a number of critics took him to task for his assertion about “tweeting, raping, cheating,” that “the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable…. society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness.” Jezebel’s Lane Moore took him to task for suggesting “that ‘boys’ are pretty much designed to be rapists” and Mediaite’s Alex Alvarez took on the “misandrist notion that men are base, selfish creatures who cannot control their impulses and, thus, require something else – like women – to act as the gatekeepers of morality.” Here at Salon, I called Adams’ post, among other things, “spectacularly bonkers” and “extremely lunkheaded,” and noted “the world is full of men who can distinguish between sexual urges and violent, aggressive ones.”

In response to his critics, Adams laid down the gauntlet in a follow-up post: “I’d like to offer an opportunity to one of the writers at Salon, Huffington Post, Jezebel, Mediate, or Mediabistro. Allow me to interview you, by email, for this blog, on the topic of why you so vehemently disagree with your hallucination of my opinion. (Fair warning: It won’t work out well for you.)”

Well, how could I resist an offer like that? (Jezebel’s Irin Carmon also took up the challenge.) I wrote Adams that if he would let Salon run the interview as well, I was all for it. On Wednesday, he replied, asking me to “BRIEFLY describe your main objection to my blog post, Pegs and Holes,” and we have both agreed to run our responses unedited. This is what transpired, on Adams’s blog. 

MaryElizabeth: Why did I object to your post? Perhaps you meant it humorously, but let’s start with the way you lump “behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world” together. Cheating is “behaving badly.” Raping is a crime. Right off the bat, you’re working off fuzzy logic, in which a consensual affair and an act of violence are somehow on the same plane. You do so again later when you suggest that if men were to “lose the urge for sex,” there’d be “no rape, fewer divorces,” as if rape was all about the “urge for sex.”

You state 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…society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness. No one planned it that way.” Your presumptuousness over the natural instincts of men is surpassed only by your wild second-guessing regarding those of women. And society, by the way, is plenty planned. Ours here in America, in fact, was planned by, and its government and businesses are still largely run by, men. So instead of going on about the “instincts” of men and women, consider what our culture deems acceptable behavior from all its members, of both sexes. I would furthermore submit that if our society is “a virtual prison for men’s natural desires,” you’ve never been to Vegas.

Now let me ask you – do you believe that rape is a “natural” instinct, or that our culture doesn’t differentiate between the “urge for sex” and forcible violation?

Scott: I’ll start by answering you closing question. I think sex is a natural instinct, and it manifests differently in different people. A person who is simultaneously horny, prone to violence, and has sociopath tendencies might act in the worst possible way. That person would be abnormal, and I favor the death penalty for rape. Violent behavior is natural in the same sense that cancer and hurricanes are natural. Natural doesn’t mean good. Everything I just explained was obvious to many if not most readers of my Pegs and Holes post. You can verify that claim by reading the comments on this blog and on Huffington Post.

On your other points, let me see if I can break them down to bullet points and get your agreement on what you are saying before I respond to them individually. I believe you are saying…

1. Men who have no sexual desire and no erections will still rape because it’s not about the sexual urge.

2. If an author lists three things that are bad, he means all three things are equal to each other. For example, if I say blizzards, ulcers, and head lice are bad, I am implying that they should be treated the same way.

3. Society didn’t evolve as the result of millions of people making millions of independent decisions. It is mostly the result of planning by men who successfully designed society to meet their needs.

4. Men can get their natural urges satisfied by, for example, traveling to Las Vegas. Their wives and girlfriends won’t mind. There’s no real downside.

5. You can’t tell when I’m trying to be humorous.

Did I accurately summarize your points?

MaryElizabeth: So to be clear, you’re saying do believe that “horniness” is a factor in rape. I wonder, have you ever known someone who was raped? Are you aware that rape is used as a weapon of war? Men who have “no sexual desire and no erections” do rape, Scott. Ask someone who’s experienced it. Ask Abner Louima, as just one example.

Further, I wonder why you’re backing off from your own use of “tweeting, raping, cheating” and “no rape, fewer divorces” in the same lines of thought. You may facetiously compare your post to saying “blizzards, ulcers, and head lice are bad,” but I would argue that if that had been your original statement, you’d have been rightly accused of posting utter gibberish.

Instead, you referred, in the most blanket-like of terms, to the “natural instincts of men” as “shameful and criminal.” You’re the one who called men “square pegs” and referred to “males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges.” You made no such distinction, as you do now, for the more “prone to violence” and “sociopathic.”

And let me see if I understand you correctly – society has evolved from “millions of independent decisions”? I guess the Constitution can go suck it.

Finally, just because someone can tell when you’re attempting to be humorous, it doesn’t follow that you’re succeeding at it. Likewise, just because people disagree with you, it’s not always a sign they’re just not as smart as those HuffPo commenters. Perhaps if there weren’t so many of us with what you deem poor reading skills, you wouldn’t have the need to create imaginary defenders. I’d like to believe that you’ve reached out to your critics because you have a genuine curiosity to understand why your remarks were so offensive to so many, Scott. Or is that one more thing I’m apparently all wrong about?

Scott: If you’re lumping together every type of rape from war crimes to date rape to child rape to prison rape, most generalizations fall apart. I will grant you that when rape is used as a weapon of war, horniness is not the inspiration for the act. And I will grant you that if an erect penis is not used in the crime, horniness is probably not involved. And I will grant you that if someone who is seriously insane commits rape, it might not involve any horniness. And I will grant you that there are probably dozens of other twisted motivations that don’t start with horniness.

My original reference in my Pegs and Holes blog involved the IMF chief and his alleged rape of the hotel maid. In that case, I don’t think he first had an urge to do some violence and decided that his penis was the go-to weapon of choice.

Chemical castration drugs already exist, and have proven extraordinarily effective in reducing recidivism rates among sex offenders. The science is on my side. If you have a link that shows otherwise, I am happy to look at it.

And yes, I’ve known a number of rape victims. I don’t draw conclusions from anecdotal evidence, but horniness was obviously a factor in those cases.

If we can set aside for a moment the clarity, or lack thereof, in the writing of my original blog post, can you tell me what view you think I hold that is different from your own? And please put your answer in bullet point form if you can.

…to be continued

And here’s my latest reply:

Let’s look at how you’re changing your narrative here. “My original reference in my Pegs and Holes blog involved the IMF chief and his alleged rape of the hotel maid.” Your original post about “tweeting, raping, cheating” declared 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? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male?” That’s not a specific reference to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who, by the way, is not accused of “horniness” taken to an extreme, but of orally and anally assaulting a woman. A refusal to take no for an answer may be a “factor” in some sexual assaults, but “horniness” does not lead to rape, Scott.

You go on to state, “Chemical castration drugs already exist, and have proven extraordinarily effective in reducing recidivism rates among sex offenders.” Yet in your original post you said, “Society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires…” and whimsically imagined that “science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it.” You didn’t say, “sex offenders.” You said “men.” The entire tone of your post suggests the two are indistinguishable in your mind, and that “if a man meets and marries the right woman, and she fulfills his needs, he might have no desire to tweet his meat to strangers” ie, the burden of responsibility falls upon women to keep “bad behavior” in check. It’s a very cynical and incredibly depressing way of looking at the world.

What views do I think you hold that are different from my own?

-That, as you stated earlier this year, “women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently.” I don’t regard my sex as a differently abled subset of society.

- That society forces males to exist “in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness.” (Perhaps you could clarify what society you’re speaking of. Is there an Unhappiness Island I’m not aware of?)

- That “It’s a zero sum game. If men get everything they want, women lose, and vice versa.” I’m not convinced this general “men” you speak of all want the same things. The men right now fighting for the right to marry their same-sex partners in New York want something very different than the men of the National Organization for Marriage. Hugh Hefner, whom you claim never got “a round hole for his round peg,” likely has damn near everything he could want,  and it’s probably not what Justin Bieber wants. And I don’t believe in a world where one gender always has to win and another has to lose. I think better of humanity as a whole.

Let me pose another few questions. What are you hoping to communicate in posts like “Pegs and Holes”? Is this just elaborate satire, for satire’s sake? And if so, why then bristle when people take the bait? 

UPDATE:

Here’s our latest exchange:

Scott: On your first bullet point, you are making my point for me. The actual point of the earlier blog post you mentioned was that men don’t argue in situations where the cost of doing so is greater than the gain. The world is watching you make that true for me right now. This debate will probably reduce my income by a third, as feminist forces have already mobilized and started to ask newspapers to drop Dilbert. That’s the sort of risk that men don’t have when they engage in a debate with other men.

The exception would be when anonymous men on the Internet debate with women. In that case they have no downside risk and are willing to fully engage. But nothing is gained by it beyond entertainment.

On your second bullet point, regarding men existing in a state of unfulfilled urges, I’m referring to the fact that men (gross generality alert) have hearts that want a relationship with one person and penises that want a thousand different women. Neither marriage nor single life can satisfy that condition. And our current society discourages any other sort of arrangement.

Woman (gross generalization alert) are biologically less inclined to crave continuous sexual variety. That’s a statement about evolution. If you have a link that disproves that notion, I’m happy to look at it.

Someone will mention that men and women cheat at about the same rate. But research has shown that cheating isn’t about sex for either gender. Cheaters generally just want someone to treat them the way they want to be treated.

Obviously it wouldn’t be a point of disagreement if you were to say that many people differ from my gross generalizations. I said the same thing in Pegs and Holes: “Everyone is different.”

On your third bullet point, you argue that life is not a zero-sum game for the sexes. That’s probably true for economics. But my blog post was about natural urges. If a man you barely know wants to have sex with you, and you’d rather not, you can’t both be winners. Society has to pick sides, and you won. I think we both agree that is the best solution. Even the man who wants to have sex with you is glad he lives in a world where his mother/daughter/sister can safely say no.

You asked what I’m hoping to communicate with posts such as Pegs and Holes. My only goal is to be interesting. Ideas are society’s fuel. I drill a lot of wells; most of them are dry. Sometimes they produce. Sometimes the well catches on fire.

My next question: Do you support the death penalty for rape, as I do, or are you relatively pro-rape compared to me?

My reply: First of all, Scott, your continued assertion regarding the risks “that men don’t have when they engage in a debate with other men” is a stellar example of why people find your views offensive. It’s insulting, it suggests that talking to a woman isn’t worth your time and effort, and when you stoop to do so, you face retribution from the “feminist forces.” Here’s a thought: if as you claim anyone is asking for your strip to be dropped (and for the record, I am not among them) can you consider that maybe it’s because of the things you say, rather than because you’ve so benevolently deigned to engage in a conversation with a female?

Now, let’s consider your idea that “If a man you barely know wants to have sex with you, and you’d rather not, you can’t both be winners.” So much to unpack! What if it’s a man you know well? It gets back to what you wrote about how “the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal.” You’re not making the distinction between wanting to have sex with someone and wanting to force her to have sex. And to couch sexuality in terms of “winning” and “losing” just sounds really juvenile. If a woman says no to sex, the man “loses” and the woman has “won”? I will however cop that for a man who views the world that way, the burden of male “unhappiness” you spoke of earlier must be great indeed.

You say, “My only goal is to be interesting. Ideas are society’s fuel.” I think that sums up the essential difference in where we’re coming from. I don’t write to be “interesting” (go ahead, peanut gallery, take the straight line). I’m not bored or jaded enough to write just to get a reaction. My Irish firmly in the “up” position, I’m here because I care about passionately about these issues, and about the world in which my two daughters are growing up. I don’t want their ideas and opinions dismissed as too troublesome for a man to squander his energy on, or to have to put up with what you refer to as “gross generalizations” about their sex.

Now, regarding your question, “Do you support the death penalty for rape, as I do, or are you relatively pro-rape compared to me?” Oh Scott. Oh really. You’re just messing with me now, aren’t you? What’s next, you going to ask when I stopped beating my wife? You can’t honestly believe that being opposed to capital punishment is tantamount to be in favor of sexual assault, can you? Where’s that great logic you pride yourself so much on?

UPDATE II:

Scott: I think this would be a good place to stop. I’d like to thank MaryElizabeth for being a good sport and for trying to make the world a better place in her own peculiar way.

I feel as if this has been an Internet-wide conversation, with many websites joining in the debate. I leave it to readers to decide whether it was wise for me to engage in an honest conversation on this topic or whether it would have been smarter to apologize for any alleged offenses and slink away. Here’s a link that should help you answer that question.

To the women who are not batshit crazy, and fortunately that is most of you, I apologize for any lack of clarity on my part was deemed offensive. I’m reasonably sure we agree on all of the important stuff.

My reply: I’m not sure I fall into your category of women who aren’t batshit crazy, but I do appreciate the invitation to have a conversation, and your willingness to engage. I’m glad we did this, and I’m grateful for the time and thought you have given the issues we’ve discussed. Thank you.

In an unfortunately named blog post titled “Pegs and Holes,” Adams notes that of late “Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world.” Could this, you ask, possibly be the beginning of a critical line of new thinking about the abuse of power? Adams even boldly declares that “Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims.” That’s mighty big of you, sir!

Then he goes spectacularly bonkers. “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,” he continues, explaining that civilization “has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness … society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires.” He then fancifully concocts a futuristic scenario involving chemical castration, oxytocin drugs, and artificial insemination to bring about “no rape, fewer divorces, stronger friendships, and a lot of other advantages,” a “society of huggers.”

There are two important rebuttals to be made here. First and foremost: thanks for all the gags about casual Friday, but Scott Adams sounds like he’s lost his freaking marbles. And since Adams has complained in recent months of his words being taken out of context, please, by all means, go and read the whole breathtakingly strange post in its bizarre entirety.

Second, as a colleague pointed out recently, remember the old sexist argument that women weren’t qualified for positions of power because their lady hormones would make them act all crazy and emotional? Remember when we were the irrational, out of control ones and men, with their cooler man heads, were assumed innately better suited to run the world? You don’t hear that one so much anymore, do you?

Adams, in contrast, represents a different extreme — and extremely lunkheaded — version of an alternate line of sexist thought. And in his own clumsy way, he articulates something many of us have heard repeatedly over the course of our lives, an argument that boils down to boys being boys. 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. They’re just being men, and doggone it if this pesky thing called civilization keeps getting in the way.

It bears repeating, as I do every time I wind up writing about sex and gender, that no duh, men and women are different, both culturally and biologically. By virtue of our hormones, body mass and cultural conditioning, we can make generalizations about behavior based on gender, and we can give the human sex drive its due as a driving force to be reckoned with.

That does not now, nor will it ever, presume that men are natural born rapists, or that to behave in an unrapey manner leads to “unfulfilled urges” and “unhappiness.” Those kind of dumb statements do a vast disservice not only to women, who are once again shunted into the unasked for role of moral guardians based on our ostensibly more restrained “natural instincts,” but it deeply insults the vast majority of men, who somehow manage to get through life without being sex offenders. I’d wager further that the world is full of men who can distinguish between sexual urges and violent, aggressive ones, and that for them, forgoing rape and harassment is not a great source of unhappiness or even difficulty.

The old “all men are animals” trope is certainly a convenient way of identifying yourself as one, but speak for yourself, pal. And if you truly believe the problem is that men are just square pegs in a world of round holes, maybe you should consider that men are not mere slaves to their pegs, and that women are a whole lot more than a pack of castrating holes.

Mr. Chaos has apparently long been a fan of Adams; Gawker noted Monday that early this year, he was posting on Reddit that “It’s fair to say you disagree with Adams. But you can’t rule out the hypothesis that you’re too dumb to understand what he’s saying. And he’s a certified genius.” How fortunate for Adams there are people in the world not “too dumb” to understand the certified genius. It just happens that they’re all Scott Adams. On Friday, the cartoonist admitted on MetaFilter that he and plannedchaos are one and the same.  My tie! It’s curving upward in astonishment!

Adams didn’t invent the art of defensively conversing with or about oneself on the Internet – the practice of sock puppetry has a long and ignoble history. Five years ago, New Republic scribe Lee Siegel was suspended after the revelation that he’d been posting on his blog’s forums as “sprezzatura,” a fan who opined that “Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than [Jon] Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep,” and told another poster who’d questioned his identity flat out that “I’m not Lee Siegel, you imbecile.” And in 2007, Whole Foods’ chief executive John Mackey, celebrated advocate of truth in labeling, was revealed to have spent eight years hiding behind a fake identity on Yahoo boards to disparage competitors, promote his company’s stock, and even praise his own alleged good looks. His alter ego, Rahodeb, once took the time to note, “I like Mackey’s haircut. I think he looks cute!”

In Adams’ case, his exposure as a self-aggrandizing Internet troll who enjoys talking about himself in the third person brought no apologies or admissions of shame. He instead rationalized his stunt, pouting to the MetaFilter community, “I’m sorry I peed in your cesspool,” and adding, “smart people were on to me after the first post. That made it funnier.” Ah, yes, like when he posted, “I hate Adams for his success too,” when he really was that awesome, successful Scott Adams in disguise — hilarious! It’s like when Lois Lane gets all worked up about Superman, and Clark Kent is just standing around like, awww yeaaaah.

As MetaFilter moderator Cortex gently explained to the certified genius, “If you wanted to sign up for MetaFilter to defend your writing, that would have been fine. If you wanted to sign up for MetaFilter and be incognito as just another user, that’d be fine too. Doing both simultaneously isn’t; pretending to be a third party and high-fiving yourself by proxy is a pretty sketchy move and a serious violation of general community expectations about identity management around here.”

Adams further countered on Monday with a fabulously self-congratulatory blog post account of his actions, explaining, “Conflict of interest is like a prison that locks in both the truth and the lies. One workaround for that problem is to change the messenger. That’s where an alias comes in handy. When you remove the appearance of conflict of interest, it allows others to listen to the evidence without judging.” Oh, it was about the evidence! The evidence that, as plannedchaos wrote, “Everyone on this page is talking about him, researching him, and obsessing about him” — especially plannedchaos. Adams also draws parallels between his situation and that of Orange County Republican Party central committee member Marilyn Davenport, who has been attacked for forwarding an email with Obama’s head Photoshopped onto a chimp. (Both she and Adams, he argues, were victim of the Internet’s lack of “context.”)

Adams’ extraordinary hubris — which he justifies by reminding us of his “twenty year career of daily self-deprecation” — is surpassed only by his remarkable ability to remain ethics-proof. “When my spunky alter ego weighs in, people generally focus on the facts presented,” he wrote. “The masked vigilante worked very well until recently. And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun.” Well, we wouldn’t want you to have to lie about anything, Scott Adams. Unless it’s about how great you are.

Anyone can be anyone on the Internet, and for many, anonymity offers a freedom and safety necessary for self-expression. But when someone deliberately misrepresents himself, because he claims his own adoring “invisible friend” is an “unbiased messenger,” when he lies about who he is because it’s “fun” playing the “vigilante,” it’s a profound statement of cynicism about the nature of online community and contempt for his readers. Adams is right when he says his actions were funny, but I doubt he meant they were so funny-strange, instead of funny-ha-ha. He did, however, get one thing right in all of this. Writing on the nature of his little sock puppet, he said Monday, “A hammer can be used to build a porch or it can used to crush your neighbor’s skull. Don’t hate the tool.” Whether you’re hated now for your ego and dishonesty is up for grabs, Scott Adams. But I’m glad we can all agree you’re a total tool.