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The nice thing about helpful advice, in general, is that you can refuse to take it.
Consider the case of the helpful person who says to me “Ozy, if you ride in a car, you’re significantly increasing your chance of dying in a car accident. You should only take buses.” I would respond with “thank you, but I don’t want to spend hours of my life waiting for the perennially late bus to arrive; I will take a car.” No one finds this a strange conversation.
Or consider the person who observes me leaving my bike unlocked. “If you leave your bike unlocked, it might get stolen!” they say. “Yeah, I know,” I say, “but the bike lock hasn’t come from Amazon yet, and I need to get dinner.” Again, this is not considered a strange conversation.
Now, imagine the case of the person who helpfully informs me that walking around alone late at night in the sort of semi-gentrified neighborhood I tend to live in increases my risk of getting raped. I reply, “Yes, I know, but I enjoy the peaceful feeling I get when I walk alone late at night when the stars are shining and the world is quiet. So even though it increases my risk of getting raped, I am going to continue to take my long walks.”
Or imagine someone who isn’t me having a conversation with a friend about the risks of getting wasted in public. The friend says, “you know, if you get wasted, you might get raped.” Imagine if that person replies “I’ve thought about it, and actually I’ve decided I care more about being able to get wasted sometimes than I do about getting raped.”
If you are like most people I’ve talked to, the latter two conversations sound really weird. Those people sound careless, like they’re taking pointless risks with their safety, like they fail to understand how horrible rape is, and it is quite unlikely that their friend will go “yeah, that makes sense” instead of “but you might get raped when you walk around late at night!” Rape risk is just not the sort of thing you make tradeoffs about.
Note that this has absolutely nothing to do with how objectively bad the consequences are. Most people agree that being a rape survivor is less bad that being dead (otherwise, rape survivor euthanasia would be a much more popular program than it actually is); nevertheless, the risk assessment is done much more sensibly for car accidents than it is for being raped.
What this means is that saying “this thing increases a woman’s risk of getting raped” essentially means “no woman should ever do this thing ever again, no matter how good a reason they have for doing it.”
Furthermore, for things that are not rape, how much you get condemned for doing something tracks pretty well with how important it is to the average person to do that thing. For most people, leaving their bikes or houses unlocked is not particularly important, and so you get criticized pretty hard for leaving your bike unlocked; however, for most people, riding in a car is a pretty important part of their lifestyle, and so you don’t really get criticized for riding in a car if you have a car accident.
This is, incidentally, why “I don’t walk around in bad neighborhoods late at night waving my wallet stuffed full of cash around!” is a terrible analogy. Most people have no reason to walk around in bad neighborhoods late at night waving around a wallet stuffed full of cash, while many people do have perfectly good reasons for going on late-night walks.
For rape, how much you get criticized for doing something does not necessarily track with how much it interferes with your life. In a study of which rape prevention tips are the most common, several were things that wouldn’t interfere too much in the life of an ordinary person (“communicate sexual limits”, “leave unsafe or uncomfortable situations”, “lock your doors”). However, many would limit the lives of the average person: “be aware of surroundings” (whoops, so much for playing Pokemon Go or listening to podcasts while you walk home), “avoid secluded areas”, “walk in well-traveled areas”, and “avoid being alone.”
(There is also the separate issue that, due to the undercounting of male victims, this advice is provided almost solely to women, and therefore circumscribes women’s lives while leaving men’s untouched. Men may very well be as likely to be raped as women, and are certainly as likely to experience violence at the hands of men, so there is no reason to direct this advice solely to women. Everyone must avoid secluded areas!)
So let’s assume that you’re an average introvert for whom “avoid being alone” is advice about as good as “consider doing surgery without anesthetic on your own foot.” In what way can you respond to this advice?
Well, for rape, you can’t say “I value being alone and thus am willing to take the increased risk of getting raped.” Indeed, the thought might very well be unthinkable. Rape is something you’re not used to thinking of in terms of acceptable risk and reasonable tradeoffs; that’s utterly taboo. Deciding to increase your risk of being raped is just not a thing people do. But, naturally, you also have no desire to be around two or more people every day for the rest of your life. You can’t say “I want to make this particular tradeoff,” and you certainly can’t say “I am part of a culture in which it is unacceptable to say I want to make this particular tradeoff”; like a lot of reasoning, avoiding cultural taboos happens on a subdeliberate level and you don’t have access to exactly what your brain is doing.
So what do you say? “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”
Which is usually cunningly disguised as the phrases “don’t blame victims” and “teach men not to rape.”
Which seems super-offputting to people who just want to give useful safety advice. Of course you agree that people of all genders shouldn’t rape, and of course you agree that it is insanely douchey to tell a rape survivor that they should have stayed sober, and so you don’t see how those topics have any relevance to the thing you’re saying. And some people seem to imply that no one should ever talk about reducing one’s risk of rape– which is an attitude we don’t have about any other issue.
Well, here’s the problem: You functionally cannot have a discussion of sensible risk management if other people can’t respond with “having thought about it, I am totally comfy running this particular risk”, and particularly if the subject is so taboo that they can’t respond with “fuck you, I get to make risk tradeoffs that make sense to me.” If hopping on one foot reducing your risk of rape means that all women everywhere are going to be hopping on one foot next week, then women are going to do some hella fallacious reasoning about why they shouldn’t have to hop on one foot.
If you want to be able to have sensible conversations on avoiding rape, start by making rape risk something it’s acceptable to make tradeoffs about. Doing it the other way around won’t work.
Thing of Things 
Honestly tho, something feels weird about the way this advice is put out. Like, the act of giving random, unsolicited advice can be pretty annoying in any case, but it seems like, no matter how much we try to preface this conversation, or provide context, some guy (it really is usually a guy) has to come in and lay down the big rules about safety for women.
Or something.
I do think there is “gender stuff” going on here, like there is kind of a -splainy aspect.
Yeah I’m being vague. Gender is complicated. These conversations are hard.
To me it feels the same as that thing whenever the topic of self defence comes up, like guys-with-zero-knowledge just have to step up and pontificate about the subject, like they just have to be “the knower.”
For example, I’ll occasionally be in some online space where I’m not yet out as trans — and the topic of self defence comes up and half the dudes want to run their mouth and give endlessly terrible advice, until I’m like, “Look dude, Ricardo Liborio was my BJJ teacher, and actually I don’t know shit about personal self defence, but unless you work as a prison guard or something, then neither do you.”
Then I point out that I’m a six-foot trans gal who’s had to throw down on a few occasions, so at least then they’ll back off.
Anyway, it really does feel like there is some “male protector” psychology going on here, which I hope people can understand why (some) women grow tired of this.
Blah. The point is, the conversation is tedious. No one ever says anything new.
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Totally off topic, but holy crap did you really train grappling with Ricardo Liborio? Were you ever at ATT or BTT, or was this a separate school of his?
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ATT in Coconut Creek. I only made it to blue belt. I wasn’t some BJJ badass or anything. But still, it was a cool experience.
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That’s awesome; I am super jealous. Of all the blogs I frequent, this was possibly the last one where I’d expect someone to casually reference the fact that they’d trained at one of the top gyms in the world.
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Another blue belt non-badass here. I’m not that surprised to encounter BJJ anywhere nerds congregate – BJJ attracts a weird mixture of nerds, jocks, and combinations of the two.
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I actually miss it a lot. One of these days I’ll get the nerve to try out some local BJJ school. But, you know, I’m really not sure how the trans thing will play out. I’m 220lbs. I’ll be rolling with _big dudes_. It just takes one jerk to heel hook my ass and ruin my year.
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Try posting something on r/bjj or the Sherdog grappling forum or whatever asking about gyms that are trans-friendly and have the right vibe in general (the kind of vibe where heel hooks don’t get thrown on blue belts without a warning, for instance). The gym I go to is a super granola university-student-and-prof-heavy place right outside the gay village part of town, and this is in a fairly left-wing city. There’s a (self-identified) trans woman who’s been going there for a couple years and she fits in with the socializing on the mats and all that – I hope anybody who said nasty shit behind her back would get yelled at, because she’s such a sweetheart. I know there’s a (self-identified, again) trans woman who’s a brown or black belt teaching at another gym. On the other hand, I’ve heard rumours that a major gym in the city has an unofficial “no gays” policy, is super aggressive and cultish, etc.
It’s always a tossup with BJJ whether you’re going to get the nice hippie nerds or the stereotypical asshole meathead jocks who think hurting someone when they don’t tap quick enough is hilarious and still call things “gay” and might be more bigoted than just that.
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that sounds like it would work. After all, I’m in Boston. There are plenty of leftie college kids and tech workers here.
I just started lifting again, so I’ll prolly stick with that for a while before branching out.
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Hey, Veronica (and hi Oz!). I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I’m beginning to get the sense of what is going on for the men you are talking about. Let’s see if this makes sense to you.
I think that men are taught from an early age that they are responsible for their own safety. The world is a shitty place, and its going to be up to them to keep themselves safe. This edges into victim blaming quite frequently, actually.
So it seems very weird and unequal to them for people to say, “the culture needs to change”. I got kicked in the balls in 8th grade by Keith Freeman and had to crawl back into the locker room because it hurt so bad. I was humiliated and in pain, but it never occurred to me to demand that society change in a way that didn’t get me kicked in the balls. I don’t know, maybe I should have. Furthermore, I had no sense that anybody would take that idea seriously. They’d tell me to pay more attention, or take martial arts or something.
So these men are just repeating what’s been told to them when shitty things happened to them. But when that crosses gender lines, things get messy, as I’m sure you know.
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These days, we do get the “the culture needs to change” discussion around youth bullying…
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Well first, obviously the culture needs to change. I’m pretty sure no one here is pro-bullying.
That said, it is admirable to stand up for yourself, to handle your own problems, to fight back. On the other hand, there are issues of capability. Just because you “stand up for yourself” doesn’t mean the bullies won’t kick your ass.
(There is a reason that sports like boxing have weight classes.)
But the thing is, the men in these conversations were not necessarily bullied. Some were, I suppose. But I bet many were not. That isn’t my point. Instead, what I am getting at is the “men explain things to me” dynamic. I’m suggesting that personal self defence is a topic that frequently shows these behavior patterns.
Which fine, but when you add all the additional triggers associated with female sexuality, male insecurities over same, the history of social controls placed on women, etc., it really is a powder keg of bad assumptions and bad faith.
In other words, women have reasons to be very touchy on this subject. Public conversations on online forums have a habit of quickly degrading.
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I’d offer the alternative hypothesis that martial arts and self defense is just a fun topic to talk about (at least for many men). And if I suspect that some people in the conversation know little about the topic, I try to explain the basics a bit more, so the things I say make sense to them.
If this annoys you (and I totally get that), the easiest way to resolve this would be to offer an informed opinion on something. Once you show that you do know what you’re talking about, there is no need to explain that much – and the conversation can be deeper and generally more fun.
Of course, if the guy doing the explaining actually has no clue what he’s talking about (just a lot of opinion), that will get you nowhere. But then, why are you talking to him in the first place?
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@Autolykos — I mean, we can get into “mansplaining 101,” or not. I don’t have much new to say on the subject. The point is, it feels good to be “the knower.” It is an expression of status, to engage is magisterial speech, to take the podium.
Men do this to other men all the time. It can become a dick-measuring game.
Now add sexism into the mix. Men (some men) really dislike it when a women beats him at a dick measuring game. He can become despondent, passive aggressive, even nasty. The problem is, of course, he might otherwise be a cool guy. Furthermore, we often occupy collective social spaces. We cannot avoid him without also avoiding others. He is “in the room” taking attention. In the end, dumb conflicts are unpleasant.
So women sometimes kinda give in, just let the guy bloviate. Other times, however, a woman pushes back, which is its own kind of awful. In either case, these conflicts are exacerbated by sexism. It’s tedious.
This can happen with any topic. I’ve noticed, however, that personal self defence is often a big cause of this.
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I’ll add, it can sometimes be fun to take some guy “down a peg,” like when dudes try to be big computer experts, and assume I’m not. (Heh.) But on the hand, this is not admirable of me. This is not me at my best. On the other hand, the guy is being a pretentious jerk. So what to do?
How much better it would be if he approached the topic with excitement, curiosity, and humility.
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I totally agree. This is usually the prior assumption I use, unless someone manages to convince me otherwise.
And yeah, there are some guys (usually, but not always, guys) who like to turn anything into a pissing contest. Once you get into that, your choices are to win or to GTFO. And yes, that sucks. Dealing with assholes usually sucks. And if he’s a sexist asshole, you might have to fight twice as hard until he acknowledges defeat, which sucks twice as bad.
I prefer to select this type of person out of my circle of friends pretty aggressively (not that hard, they tend to cluster). If I have to deal with one of them because he tries to dominate a space I don’t want to leave, I tend to follow the advice of Nick Sparks (search “How to hold conversation like a man” – it should, with slight adaptations, also work for women). Basically, accept that you can’t beat him at his own game. He probably has the right character profile and way more experience with it. Let him talk, be the most interested person in the room, and ask a lot of questions. Be positive at first, and get a bit more critical over time (but never confrontational). If he choses to be the hero showing off in the arena, you can choose to be Caesar raising or lowering his thumb.
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@Autolykos — It’s pretty easy in my f2f friend spaces, but then, I’ll go out to a bar or something — cuz I like to meet strangers — and encounter all kinds of jerks. Likewise, a lot of political forums are pretty open places, and it just takes one ninnie to really poison things. Like, I don’t want to build huge walls and only live in “safe spaces.” So anyway. It’s tricky.
It’s easy enough to bait people, but I want to be above that.
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… Yeah, I do think this explains a lot of why those conversations go the way they do. (In conjunction with “the fact that someone accepts a risk tradeoff doesn’t mean they deserve the negative outcome”, which I think you talked about already.) That’s not something I realized before reading this. Thanks!
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“In conjunction with “the fact that someone accepts a risk tradeoff doesn’t mean they deserve the negative outcome”, which I think you talked about already.) ”
Yeah. I agree with the whole post, but my immediate reaction was: If I ever say publicly that this is an acceptable tradeoff, that will get interpreted by large groups of people as ‘well, you basically consented’ or ‘yeah but you can’t really complain’ if I DO get raped.
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The one about taking long walks, at least, doesn’t seem weird to me. Of course you’re making that tradeoff. It’s obviously unreasonable to never leave the house in order to minimize your risk of being raped.
The one about getting wasted sounds weird, but I think it’s because defending getting wasted is taboo. And I think that’s why people end up with such contorted logic about whose fault it is when that goes south: they don’t want to admit that they think getting drunk with strangers is worth the risk of getting assaulted. It’s uncomfortable to argue that toning down one’s partying is an unreasonable safety measure.
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This analysis sounds correct to me, on both fronts. I am completely baffled by the idea that “I value walking around after dark more than I value avoiding an actually very small risk of being [sexually] assaulted” is unthinkable, much less universally so.
Um, done?
The responsibility for responding to the statement that’s being made, and not to some wild extrapolation thereof, lies with the respondent, not the person making the initial statement. If someone saying “hopping on one foot reduces your risk of being raped” makes you causes you to have an instinctive reaction of “what, so I should just hop on one foot my entire life then!?” it’s your job, as an ostensibly competent adult, to go “Wait a minute, that’s not what they said, and it would be really douchey of me to respond as if it was[1] . . . clearly, I need to analyze why the fuck my instinct was to respond that way, because something has clearly gone wrong.”
[1] Or, if you have already done so, “It was really douchey of me to respond as if it was,” followed by apologizing to them for having done so.
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That’s a good point, Ozy. I think I come out in the same place by a different route.
If you are concerns that people read a story about someone getting raped while blackout drunk and think “he had it coming”, and you strongly want that value to stop, then then newspaper editorials saying “it’s a bad idea to get blackout drunk without a reliable wingperson” are contributing to the problem.
Ultimately, the math on this hypothetical editorial is a cost benefit analysis – how many people will change their behavior in ways that make them better off as a result of the editorial, vs how many people will be made worse off when they get judged (or when someone thinks it’s OK to assume consent with a drunk partner), or when they forego binge drinking they otherwise would have enjoyed.
My instinct is to provide tons of education, both to potential victims and potential assailants, but I don’t have the facts for the cost benefit.
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Random observation: In other contexts, there frankly is some judgment. If I and my preppy friends go to a dive bar where non-locals are known to get robbed from time to time, and when my friends are leaving, I announce that I have decided to stay and keep drinking, and will Uber home later, then when I get robbed (1) it was still a crime; but (2) my friends are likely to think I made a dumb decision.
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I don’t think this is a very good theory of mind of why people are touchy about victim-blaming. (Is it even trying to be a theory of mind or is it just a fictitious construct?)
A few other factors not considered: Victims often blame themselves already, and in some cases this is actually the worst part of being raped. There is a really strong association between causation and blame. There are a lot of thinkpieces for and against blaming victims, and that affects the context even when you are not personally writing a thinkpiece and are just giving unsolicited advice.
FWIW, I would also be annoyed at the provided examples of non-taboo unsolicited advice.
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We mostly hear about taboo tradeoffs when they’re dysfunctional, but they probably exist for a reason right?
I think it has to do with providing credible pre-commitments. I don’t want an accountant that will embezzle if upon considering the evidence and tradeoffs he deems embezzling has the best consequences. I want an accountant who would never, ever embezzle.
But what’s the pre-commitment for “never make any compromises on being safe from rape”? Is pre-commitment the wrong model for the purpose of the taboo here?
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I think it’s more general. If you say that you’re willing to make tradeoffs about a particular thing, you’re signaling that that thing may not be very important to you. In the case of accountants and embezzlement, you signal that you’re not always anti-embezzlement, which may reasonably scare off employers. In the case of admitting to making tradeoffs about rape, you’re signaling that rape is not infinitely terrible – and perhaps this is scary because some people might conclude that rape is not all that bad, and give lenient sentences to rapists or something.
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Yea that makes sense. The rule is not “never compromise on anti-rape safety measures” it’s “never say anything that could be interpreted as excusing, endorsing, or minimizing rape”. The hair-trigger on that taboo is so sensitive that saying “walking alone at night increases your risk” sounds to some people as tantamount to “if you walk alone at night you deserve it”
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Yes, thank you, that’s a better way of phrasing what I was trying to say!
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I hadn’t realised this was controversial, that’s exactly how I think of it.
Going around singing songs and telling fables about how “if you’re in a prisoner’s dilemma, cooperate, I know it doesn’t make sense, do it anyway” is effective. And the same for things like “never torture” or “never kill someone for money” — it’s SO OFTEN bad, it’s usually better to just pretend you’ll never do it, than risk thinking too long about when it might be justifiable. (Except that’s still true for many taboos, but we DO have to make tradeoffs like “how much to spend on safety regulations to save one life”)
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I think if those of us who are comfy taking that risk actually bit that particular bullet and said “yes, but I’m comfortable taking that risk, even if it makes me sound weird”, it might also have an impact on the related problem where rape is considered The Worst Thing That Can Happen To A Woman, No Exceptions, No Not Even if She Says This Other Thing Was Worse, All Other Trauma Is Eclipsed By Rape.
(And only if it’s a woman, somehow. I feel like a man could say “I’d prefer being raped to being waterboarded”. But if a woman said it – “but oh no, RAPE!” It definitely feels like there’s a “women are delicate little flowers whose pure innocence is tarnished and destroyed by brute men” thing going on here.)
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Depends on the degree of toxic masculinity around. There’s a form of hazing in Russian prisons where a newcomer would be given a choice to either get stabbed with a fork in the eye or get raped. Every “real man” is supposed to choose being stabbed, after which it turns out that it’s an empty threat, since inmates aren’t given forks or other sharp objects. But if the newcomer choses rape, they will proceed with it, and then again and again until the end of the term, all while treating him like dirt. So no, there are situations in which this taboo very much exists, and is enforced by a threat of immense violence.
Source: http://www.tyurem.net/mytext/look/039.htm
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Point taken!
I guess I was assuming “among an audience of reasonable people who are not violent rapists”, and probably, furthermore, “among an audience of reasonable people who generally exercise some thought in situations like this”. You’re right that things would be different, say, in a gaggle of gamer bros.
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Interestingly, it seems to follow the same scheme of reasoning as the taboo trade-off stuff outlined by Ozy. If you are a Person of Honor, you would do anything to avoid rape (the ultimate dishonor). If your priorities are different from that, then you must not have any honor to lose, therefore you being raped is no big deal.
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@lizardywizard ok so “gamer bros” are totally in the same category as prison rape gangs. Sigh. Toxoplasma rules us all.
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My mom once said that she’d rather be raped than lose her life savings…
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This feels like a double bind in action. Because from here it looks like the same groups loudly broadcasting that Rape Is The Worst Thing In The World, violence against women is an epidemic, 1 in 4 will be raped don’tchaknow (And therefore we expect huge amounts of tax dollars, as well as everyone’s support and deferral, to go towards combating this heinous problem)… and then getting angry when people take them seriously and expect them to act as though the rhetoric is true.
In the same respect that I’m indifferent if a business wants to make bad choices and go out of business, but get annoyed when they expect a public bailout.
Or that I’m merely indifferent if someone thinks my sex life is immoral and that I’m going to go to hell for it, but readily willing to hold them to a way higher standard if they start claiming to be the moral authority and legislating what I’m allowed to do behind closed doors.
Or that I’m sympathetic that being a cop must be really scary sometimes, but if we’re issuing you a badge and a gun and the authority to use it, I hold you to a higher standard than shooting at anything that makes you ‘feel threatened’.
Women might not get this as viscerally in this particular case, but maybe you have some situations that are similar. How do you normally feel when someone tells you “Thing X happening to group Y is a travesty, and it’s never group y’s fault. It’s women’s fault and always the women’s fault. YOU and only you need to change”, and then you watch them accept a tradeoff that increases their risk of x colossally for something relatively minor?
A factor that the author is over looking here is that people (largely men in this case) get annoyed when people make that tradeoff because they are the ones being *gently suggested* (At threat of job loss, ostracism, and lawsuit) to do the heavy lifting of solving the problem.
That’s at the heart of all the examples here. “This is terrible, and we’re all going to have to make sacrifices to fix things. Well… YOU’RE going to have to make sacrifices to fix things, anyway. I’ll be over here doing what I want to do anyway. Thanks for picking up the cheque!”
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Except the whole point of anti-victim-blaming getting brought up in the first place was that women were being told to do all of the heavy lifting on this problem. Boys will be boys, doncha know.
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I don’t think that’s true. As with any other crime, the heavy lifting was being divided between would-be victims (for prevention and mitigation) and law enforcement (for deterrence and prosecution).
The assumption you describe as “boys will be boys” might be more accurately called “telling criminals to knock it off doesn’t actually eliminate crime”: the burden of preventing crime cannot be shifted onto the criminals themselves.
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@tardinoc:
I think some of the anti-victim-blamers’ frustration came from a combination of two common retorts about the role of guys in assisting with prevention and mitigation: “boys will be boys” and “not all men.” (More specifically in the latter case, “I am not a rapist, and I don’t think my friends are, either.”) Add on top of this common teen sex comedy depictions of sex-at-all-costs protagonists, and you have a variety of contradicting arguments, nonetheless all revolving around rationalizing any given guy to not giving a damn about the issue, and furthermore as per Doctor Jay’s response above, not giving a damn about guys getting raped, either.
At that point, it seems like guys as a grouped population are not allowed any responsibility for prevention and mitigation, including of their peers. At best, a more feminine guy is given the same responsibilities as women to avoid being more rapeable.
Anti-victim-blaming rhetoric didn’t appear on its own. It’s a reaction to the preexisting situation where the rhetoric was imbalanced (women had to make all of the sacrifices to protect themselves, while rapist and non-rapist guys alike got to do whatever they were going to do anyways), and sought to address that imbalance.
Like, what heavy lifting that guys are apparently expected to carry out is Still Anon even referring to? They say, How do you normally feel when someone tells you “Thing X happening to group Y is a travesty, and it’s never group y’s fault. It’s women’s fault and always the women’s fault. YOU and only you need to change”, and that exactly was the feeling that drove the rise of anti-victim-blaming rhetoric in the first place? Like, the whole point was that slut-shaming was women being *gently suggested* (At threat of job loss, ostracism, and lawsuit) getting legislated on what they were allowed to do behind closed doors.
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What world are you living in? There has never been a time in recent history where being convicted of rape wouldn’t be harshly punished, the heavy lifting here being done by law enforcement. Who do you think is coming to rough the dude up at gunpoint and drag him to the station when you call 911 and say you were assaulted?
Each individual man’s part in this is not to rape anyone. The second you want to say that other people are obligated to come to your defense, they have every right to request that you do your own due diligence not to abuse their protection. Because free riders kill any public works system. Even firefighters let houses burn down when the owners refuse to pay their fair share, and I promise you it’s not just because they don’t care.
The biggest thing wrong in this piece is the idea that this is about “rationalizing any given guy to not give a damn about the issue”. Please, find me one guy who doesn’t give a damn about rape. News flash: Everyone gives a damn about rape. Even the ones who disagree with the methods being discussed here.
The heavy lifting I’m talking about is a) accepting the war guilt clause wherein by virtue of your gender you are either guilty yourself, or guilty of facilitating (As you so graciously demonstrated with your example of how terrible pointing out that “Not all men” is), and thus if asked you have an obligation to quietly defer to any accusation.
b) You must also attack, shun, and shut out anyone else who does not quietly defer to any accusation. Because insufficiently attacking anyone who fails to fall in line is failing to take responsibility (As you also outlined above)
c) If, and only if, you are male you must undergo extensive sensitivity training at an increasing number of jobs and schools.
Finally, huge citation needed on anything to do with rape being construed as “Entirely the woman’s fault”. (I’m limiting this statement to the first world, within the last century.) Your point doesn’t even make sense, because if men didn’t give a shit about rape, they wouldn’t have led with “This is a travesty”. The second they acknowledge that this injustice *That is happening predominantly to another group entirely*, they’re saying the opposite of “This is your fault and only your fault”. Further demonstrated by a long history of men literally lynching rapists.
If that’s your standard of blaming a group for it’s own misfortunes, I just don’t know what to tell you.
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@no one, It seems like there’s always been a distinction between some kind of idea of serious rape, which while it has perhaps not always been the worst thing in the world has generally been a big deal, and not really rape. That rape is taken more seriously than in the past, that it now often is treated as the worst thing in the world, has not removed the “not really rape” category; if anything, it has expanded it. If rape is the worst thing in the world, then nobody you know would do anything like that; if it’s a decent guy being accused, it must be one of those not really rapes. When people talk about “rape culture” or “boys will be boys,” they’re talking about the things that are geting put in the not really rape category, and arguing that no, they really are rape, and shouldn’t be tolerated. Your comment seems to be all about how people do take what are uncontroversially real rapes seriously, which completely misses the point.
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@arbitrary_greay:
Again, though, that’s the standard expectation for all crimes, and in every other case it seems to be uncontroversial. Why do third parties suddenly have the specific responsibility to prevent rape, alone out of all other crimes?
We don’t hold people responsible for preventing their “peers” from committing theft, arson, or murder, and we encourage potential victims to take reasonable precautions when possible, but it’d be disingenuous to describe this as “murder victims have to make all the sacrifices to protect themselves, and murderers and non-murderer guys alike get to do whatever they were going to do anyways”. We expect people not to murder, and we hold murderers responsible for their own actions; we just don’t expect to be able to stop every murder before it happens with a targeted PR campaign.
@Protagoras:
From what I’ve seen, the distinction is less about whether it’s a “decent guy” being accused and more about the specifics of the act being alleged. And I think that stems from the idea that, on top of rape being The Worst Thing In The World, every act that fits a general definition of rape is equally heinous: if it isn’t consensual sex between sober, eagerly consenting adults, then it’s rape which is The Worst Thing In The World and the victim will be Scarred For Life.
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It is actually extremely common for programs aimed at preventing murder to target youth who are at high risk of committing murder and communities that contain a lot of murderers, and one of the more successful programs, Operation Ceasefire, included as one of its primary components governments making people’s peers responsible for them not committing murder.
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@ozymandias: Good point, but that’s an intervention specifically aimed at gang-related murders. To the extent that gang-related rape is a problem in the US, I agree it’s sensible to discourage people from joining rape gangs.
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Gang members commit murder because they are in environments in which murder is socially approved of and expected, and making murder no longer socially approved of and expected tends to reduce murder rates. To the extent that people commit rape because they are in environments in which rape is socially approved of and expected*, making rape no longer socially approved of and expected will reduce rape rates.
*note that this is totally compatible with thinking rape is horrible; AFAICT most people just conveniently decide that having sex with a nonconsenting person in certain circumstances isn’t rape.
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Gang members commit murder because they’re in organizations that already operate outside the law, that are built on resolving disputes and maintaining power through the use of violence, and that require members to perform violence as a condition of membership. Separating them from those organizations is what reduces murder rates.
I believe the existence of environments outside a prison or war zone where rape is socially approved of and expected is questionable, and in any case, not responsible for a significant percentage of rapes. Rapists generally aren’t doing it because their friends are egging them on. They aren’t bragging about their crimes to gain street cred (but imagine how easy prosecution would be if they were!). They’re doing it for the same reasons other people commit other violent crimes: they want something, and due to impaired judgment, sociopathy, or what have you, they don’t care if they have to hurt someone to get it.
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Yes, Ozy, might you be able to give some examples of environments where rape is approved of and accepted?
Because a huge part of operation ceasefire was profiling populations of those at high risk of offense or victimhood, and directly targeting those populations to maximize Pareto advantage. From here it looks a lot like the modern #yesallmen style campaign is doing the exact opposite of that: ignoring those high risk areas like prisons, ghettos, and sharia straw headlines, preferring to go for easy targets like nerds and Robin Thicke fans.
The idea that rape occurs because it’s socially acceptable also misses the much more obvious possibility that “boys will be boys” rape apologia fits the general case of high power/status people being above the law, which we see in virtually every field. Nobody looks at Tyrone’s history of domestic assault and says “boys will be boys”, likewise for Pointdexter with a shitty mossbeard. Every case I can recall that has involved anything that vaguely pattern matches to “Boys will be boys” involves a top 1%+ earner, athlete or celebrity. (Maybe you know of some others?). Again, I don’t know if there is anyone out there who doesn’t think this is a problem, and if anyone wants to start a #NoneAboveTheLaw campaign, I’m all in. But if instead we’re just saying “You know… if we define away all the female rapists, then all rapists are men, therefore all men are possible rapists! Logically we’ll target our campaign at men!”, then dibs out.
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I sometimes wonder if there’s something odd in my head vs most people that I seem unusually willing to accept taboo tradeoffs. indeed one of the things I love about the LW/rationalshere is that people are so much more willing to talk about taboo tradeoffs.
And I find a big difference in experience between talking to someone who wants to [metaphorically] cut funding to the hospitals childrens ward while saying “yes, some more kids will die but we don’t have an infinite budget” and accepting that vs someone who screams incoherently, declares that it’s wrong to mention that more kids will die because that makes them feel bad and browbeats you for implying that there could be any downside to their wonderful budget cuts and accuses me of being a communist.
The former I see far far far more in the rationalshere.
It’s wonderful. It’s like there’s true light behind the other persons eyes.
The latter is common in everyday society.
I don’t know if it’s from your personal experience or deductions from how people react to similar statements but if I was looking at you oddly after such an exchange it would be because internally I’d be thinking “Horay! Someone who I can actually talk to as an adult!” and I’d probably suddenly seem preoccupied with trying to discuss how the country would probably function better if administrators paid more attention to QALY’s and evidence based decision making.
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People who talk about this stuff don’t care about rape, they care about women. They only care about rape inasmuch as the archetypal construct of “rape” is “a man raping a woman”. See also: domestic violence, genital mutilation, rigid gender roles, pretty much every other issue that comes up in these spheres.
Rape is just a means of talking about how bad men are and how men do bad things to women. The goal isn’t to stop or reduce the incidence of rape, it’s to get to self-indulgently yell “STOP RAPING YOU RAPEY RAPING RAPISTS” – an action that will be ignored by self identifying male rapists and will only serve to alienate other men who recognize the implicit assumption that they are rapists.
Hence you have a completely different set of rules for discussing this one specific crime (male on female rape) than exists for any others: to suggest that there’s anything a woman can do, or that women can do, is “victim blaming”. This includes analyzing how women contribute to toxic and dysfunctional cultural ideas about sex and masculinity. Anything less than agreement that, yes, men are horrible, and, yes, rape is a thing horrible men do to helpless innocent women, is victim blaming.
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This is amazingly uncharitable. You’re seriously arguing that feminists deliberately fabricated all their positions in order to victimize you?
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In general, wherever there is toxoplasma, opinions look like they were deliberately fabricated in order to victimize people. It’s like the Blind Watchmaker, except instead of designing watches, he’s designing the Most Obnoxious Opinions Ever. When you’re on one side of a toxoplasma it looks exactly like the other side is deliberately fabricating all their positions to victimize you. In reality they aren’t. In reality they’re a game-theoretic equilibrium that emerges because… you know the rest. But the illusion of design is powerful.
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Nice strawman, MugaSofer. Tell me though, please: which feminist positions or ideas don’t reduce down to “men are bad”?
Patriarchy? Men are bad. Rape culture? Men are bad. Wage gap? Man-splaining, man spreading, manpinions?
The one continuous guiding principle is that men are bad, just couched in other rhetoric so it can’t be attacked. Similar to white Republicans who couch their racism in talks about gangs and drugs and violent themes in music and crime and fashion and illegal immigration. But remove the POC aspect and suddenly those issues don’t get as much passion or vitriol (remember the last time you heard a white Republican criticise the violent themes in metal as quickly as they do rap? Probably not, and that’s because metal is white coded and rap is black coded, has shit to do with violent themes in music)
When it’s so obvious that the goal is just to find some way to substantiate an existing bias, even otherwise legitimate problems just become hateful talking points.
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Oh heavens.
Anyway, we can start with bell hooks, Laurie Penny, Julia Serano.
Really most feminists, even pretty “fighty” feminists, will spend at least some time on the “patriarchy hurts men too” discourse. This is commonplace within feminist writing.
Now, you’ll find that most feminists center the interests of women, but that is the point of feminism, which responds to a cultural framework that centers the interest of men. This might be read as “anti-male,” but that is bad analysis. Instead, it is opposed to the system itself. The perception of anti-male-ness reflects the work of that very system.
Yes, this is circular, but we read analysis of culture from within culture. There is no meta.
Anyway, the point is, Valerie Solanas was a bit of an outlier.
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Oh hi veronica. So what you’re saying is feminists have developed circular logic so that they can unilaterally advance the interests of one gender while calling it equality?
Also clearly you must believe in God because the universe is proof God exists and we can’t analyze the universe from outside of the universe. There is no meta.
Or is circular logic only okay when it behooves you?
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All social discourse is circular. There is no outside.
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“Tell me though, please: which feminist positions or ideas don’t reduce down to “men are bad”?”
-[those other feminists] are RACIST
-sex work is a good thing because it’s freely chosen
-gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if we could/vote/drive/attend school?
-it’s unfair not to draft women as well
-gosh, isn’t lipstick great and empowering?
-I’m gonna make a bunch of statues of vaginas for reasons.
-I am very very in favour of contraception.
-In fact, everything to do with sex is great. It is a feminist thing to talk about sex and give details on safe sex, men to men.
-women should be allowed to be topless in public. Which has nothing to do with sex.
-most of the more logical stuff MRAs agree on, like “people ignore domestic violence against men because of stereotypes, and that’s bad”
-feminism is just equality, if you agree with equality you already agree with [list of very complicated and controversial feminist ideas]
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@Anon
What the hell? How does wage gap of all things reduce to “men are bad”? (This is not (only) a rhetorical question, I’m really interested in your answer.)
Also like if you are interested there are reasonable formulations of “patriarchy” and “rape culture” that do not contain “men are bad” (in my experience I have in fact mostly encountered reasonable formulations but I accept that there are terrible feminists out there) but like can we start with the fact that most feminists believe that women also can and do uphold patriarchy and rape culture??
Also
I get that you probably disagree with the empirical belief of most feminists that women are currently in a disadvantaged position compared to men but do you not concede that if this is true, it is reasonable and not antithetical to equality to focus on the interests of the disadvantaged group?
(Like to give an extreme example, do you think that people who focused on ending institutional slavery when that was a thing in the U.S. were being anti-equality by not also advancing the interests of white people?)
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tcheasdfjkl, I think you’ve brushed up against the lynchpin of the whole argument here. At its core, I think the disagreement (And any others can correct me if I’m off base) with your final paragraph is that “‘women are currently in a disadvantaged position compared to men” has insufficient acuity. I would agree that the very top performing men, say 10th percentile and above are certainly advantaged over women, and at the same time I would say average to low performers, 0-60th percentile are tangibly disadvantaged compared to 0-60th women, as demonstrated in suicidality stats, homelessness rates, risk of assault, bias in police response, bias in court sentencing, women are wonderful effect, etc.
Feminists in general seem to take the fact that positions of power are almost entirely filled by men, and then backwards generalize it to mean that all men are in positions of power. For the same reason that you can’t take the fact that all fathers are men, and conclude that all men are fathers, this leads to a huge proportion of men being labeled as ‘in power’ who clearly aren’t.
Incidentally, even though I’m commonly seen as a massive shitlord when I open my mouth, I agree with every one of MugaSofer’s examples (With the minor quibble that ‘Sex work is good’ is most often implemented as ‘decriminalize the sexworker, criminalize the john’, which matches other Anon’s point).
I think the troubling thing you’ll find is that people who agree with those ‘reasonable feminist’ points without also agreeing with a bunch of ‘terrible’ ones are very quick to be labeled as the great enemy.
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Also, with reference to your last example about the abolitionists ending institutional slavery I’d say they’re doing fine as long as their outlawing of slavery applies to everyone.
If, for example, they argued that slavery was wrong, but when Irish indentured servants stood up and said “Yes, I deserve to be free, listen to these people!”, the abolitionist groups said “Woah there, White man! This is a movement for the interests of black slaves. White people have institutional power. I get that you’re having a hard time with the whole ‘involuntarily being worked to death’ thing, but it’s not the same as the institutional chattel slavery that black slaves experience! You’re part of the privileged class whether you realize it or not!”
Then Houston, we have a problem.
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I’m rather amused that that was taken as a list of “reasonable feminist” points, given I disagree with some of them myself. It’s just a list of feminist points that aren’t about hating men.
People can be silly for lots of other reasons than because they hate men!
Also … often (usually?) the “hating men” version is a distortion of a reasonable point and not mainstream, so eliminating anything that could possibly be distorted to “blame men” eliminates loads of true and reasonable things. Most of the “logical MRA stuff” I namechecked can be, and is, distorted to “women are awful” if you’re already trying to do that. I doubt my real list of reasonable points would satisfy anon, or anon’s MRA-hating equivalent.
FWIW – by “sex work is good” I meant just that, as part of the broader sex-positive thing, not “sex workers are the victims of a crime” (which is the opposite.)
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There are some pieces of cautionary advice that are less victim blaming than others.
In my experience,
Better (all of these are also better coming from a woman than a man, and better spoken in confidence than in a public forum).
– Hey, you might not want to be careful about being alone with Sean – I’ve heard some pretty gross things about xir and consent.
– Are you doing OK – you seem pretty out of it. Robin and I are headed back. Why don’t you come with us?
– That’s what happened to you? That was rape – you need to break up with Evelyn again and/or you should report it.
Worse (and again worse coming from men, and worse in a public forum than confidentially)
– You shouldn’t drink so much – it’s not safe.
– You shouldn’t go to bars/frat parties/etc. without a sober wingperson.
Worst:
– You shouldn’t dress provocatively.
– You shouldn’t lead your partner to believe that there is going to be sex and then decline. (I.e., “tease” or “lead her on.”)
I think the “worst” category is pretty much stamped out in civilized discourse, and that’s a good thing. (Although I’m sure it’s said in private conversations and internet comment cesspools). The impact on liberty and shaming from having a “don’t lead guys on” norm is IMHO worse than any benefit from warning people about that.[*]
That suggests room for a discussion about which cautionary instructions and in which contexts are unreasonable, but that’s not a discussion I think our society is equipped to have.
* Note: It’s definitely true that if I text someone “come to my room and bring a condom so we can have sex” and then I text the next morning “Good morning, beautiful, I can’t stop thinking about last night” and post a bunch of friendly facebook messages, it’s going to be hard to prove lack of consent as an evidentiary matter, even though it doesn’t create consent.
But a norm of “don’t lead your partners on” isn’t likely, IMHO, to prevent that.]
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Have you read Maggie McNeill’s description of her experiences being raped? It’s interesting that not only can she distinguish between completely differing levels of awful, but she can also claim that none of them were as terrifying as her encounter with a police officer.
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Rape is pretty much the most horrible crime an individual can commit in modern society. There are tons of movies, books, and video games with wanton death and murder, but almost none that treat rape as casually. Imagine if in the next Grand Theft Auto you could rape the NPCs as easily as you can currently kill random NPCs. Such a game would never see the light of day.
Yet death is, dispassionately, far more damaging and permanent than rape. This is why normal decision theory models don’t work; it’s like rape has infinite negative utility.
And AFAIK, this is a relatively new phenomenon. So I’m not sure if patriarchy or feminism is to blame.
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My instinct on why this is is, is that rape is a crime that can’t really be conceptualized as justified. Killing another person can be justified on various grounds – self defence, for instance. Nobody rapes in self defence. Nobody rapes to get the medicine they need to save their dying mother or get bread for their family or whatever. We cheer when the hero finally kills the villain at the end of the movie – imagine the reaction if the hero beat them up, raped them, then killed them.
Is it a new phenomenon though? Most cultures view women who have been raped as damaged or sullied. If anything, modern western culture holds this view less.
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I think modern Western society does still view women who have been raped as damaged or sullied, and that is one reason why rape is considered to be such a serious crime. The difference from traditional societies is that modern society treats being damaged and sullied as something deserving of sympathy, rather than something deserving of derision.
This is an improvement over most cultures, but it still has its problems. People who don’t display adequate emotional trauma after being raped are often disbelieved because rape victims are expected to be damaged. People who managed to recover and put their rape behind them are often viewed with anger because Rape Is the Worst Thing ever, so they’re expected to still be traumatized by it.
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I’m admittedly ignorant about historical attitudes towards rape, but my understanding is that because women were seen as property, rape was treated more like theft instead of assault. Like stealing someone’s toothbrush and using it (analogy derived from modern conservative Christians) instead of visiting physical damage upon someone.
Probably the rationale behind marital rape too: you can’t “steal” your own property so it’s not rape.
It seems as though in women going from being considered property to actual humans with agency, rape went from something akin to using someone else’s property to a fate worse than murder.
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Keep in mind: that’s probably itself shaped by what’s common in media.
If we try the same for “torture” and try the phrase “Nobody tortures in self defence.” immediately shows like “24” and similar police-state-porn come to mind where the “hero” absolutely is painted as torturing in self defense.
If networks were as relaxed about sex as they are about violence then we’d probably be seeing some police-state-glorifying “hero” shouting that “we need to know where the nuke is! According to his psych profile this is the only thing that has a chance of breaking him in time! *zzzzip*”
If people watched enough such shows I could easily imagine it entering the same domain as torture with the same sort of crowd defending it’s use for the same reasons.
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“Probably the rationale behind marital rape too: you can’t “steal” your own property so it’s not rape.”
No, the rationale historically (in most Christian countries, anyhow) was that since the whole point of marriage is you promising to be sexually available to your spouse (regardless of whether “you” is a man or woman, by the way; a legal grounds for annulment even very long ago was refusal to perform one’s marital duties), it’s obviously and per necessity not possible for that person to rape you.
Think of it as a full pre-emptive granting of consent (to intercourse, mind; anything besides PIV would be sodomy and not count) — something that we would not now see as morally acceptable or able to carry legal weight, but something past society certainly did.
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It’s not a new phenomenon, or at least not new enough to be a feminist one — see the phrase “fate worse than death”. Way too many feminists are willing to trade on it though.
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Hmm, is this unique to rape? Or is it common for risks where the person advising the risk prevention strategy doesn’t actually have to directly pay the costs of it? Eg nuclear power, it’s hard to have a rational conversation in many forums around the risks and benefits of nuclear power.
Or cell sites, people worry about the health impact of them. But, it’s noticeable that people keep using their actual cellphones, I presume because the cost to an individual of not using their cellphone is so obvious. Like cars.
So it’s not that we can’t make tradeoffs around rape, it’s that we can’t make tradeoffs unless it’s about ourselves and the costs and benefits are really really obvious. Like so obvious they could be seen by a short-sighted sloth at 4.pm on Friday afternoon in a Scottish winter.
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“Rape” and “perpetrators” are on a scale.
All of the prevention arguments reflect this.
All of the anti-prevention arguments ignore it.
The number of people who are pressured into saying yes to sex they didn’t want
vastly exceeds
The number of people who are deliberately raped by a sober predator who took advantage while they were drunk
vastly exceeds
The number of people raped while screaming “no stop raping me” and trying to scratch their eyes out
and so on.
Similarly, for rapists,
The number of people who are WILLING TO pressure someone into agreeing to sex they didn’t want
vastly exceeds
The number of people who are WILLING TO take advantage of a drunk
vastly exceeds
The number of people who are WILLING TO rape a woman who is screaming “no stop raping me” and trying to scratch their eyes out
Intelligent prevention focuses on those categories.
If you’re sober and fighting and screaming, the only people who will rape you are the very small # of folks in group 3. Unless you meet one you won’t be a victim.
OTOH, if you’re susceptible to pressure or threats of “dumping you,” then you’ll end up getting pressured by a very large group of people and you’ll more likely end up being a victim.
Anti-victime-blaming, anti-prevention, obscures those categories.
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I consider getting raped to be roughly twenty times worse than death.
That is, when I was deciding how to make tradeoffs about risks, I did the standard thing that people do for QALYs, where they ask “if we could cure your blindness, but there would be a certain chance of you accidentally dying from our cure, would you take the cure?” and they figure that since the average blind person in Africa says yes if it’s a 50% chance of death but no if it’s more than that, being blind in Africa must be about half as bad as being dead.
I spent a while asking myself “if you were going to be raped, but there was this thing you could do that would let you escape but come with a certain chance of dying, would you do the thing?” and realised I kept saying “yes, I want to do the escape thing” all the way up to 100% certainty of death, so then I flipped it around and asked myself “if I was going to die, and I could escape death but my escape method came with some risk of being raped, would I do the thing?” and if the risk of being raped is higher than roughly 5% I say no, I would not do the thing, I would rather die. Sometimes the risk I’m willing to accept drops as low as 1%, it depends how much preference drift I’m getting that day and what my gender is doing recently, so rape is somewhere between 20x and 100x worse than dying.
(This does imply that I should kill myself now to avoid the risk going forwards, but a. I think I am at much lower risk than the average individual, and b. I am under direct orders from people I care about to do no such thing.)
I do not think I am an average human. I think that my preferences are probably quite different to the average person’s preferences and I am probably an anomaly. However, I would like to point out that this reasoning is fallacious:
“Note that this has absolutely nothing to do with how objectively bad the consequences are. Most people agree that being a rape survivor is less bad that being dead (otherwise, rape survivor euthanasia would be a much more popular program than it actually is); nevertheless, the risk assessment is done much more sensibly for car accidents than it is for being raped.”
I think that rape is twenty to a hundred times worse than death. If all people were like me, you should kill twenty people rather than allow one to be raped, and kill someone rather than increasing her lifetime chances of being raped by 10%.
However, I would not support rape survivor euthanasia. It just doesn’t fix the problem and I don’t see why I would support such a thing. The bad thing is the rape, not the person continuing to survive after having been raped.
Like, imagine torturing someone for a few hours. Afterwards, if they recover and they’re not so traumatised/injured that their life is no longer worth living, they will want to continue on living because the consequences of continuing living are good (more life) and their chance of being tortured more, going forwards, is no different to the chance of anyone else being tortured. On the other hand, if you asked them BEFORE the torture whether they would prefer to go ahead and be tortured or commit suicide, they might have committed suicide at that point. Killing the torture victim is only a good strategy before the torture, because that’s how they avoid getting tortured. Killing the torture victim after they have already been tortured is just making a bad situation even worse. First you violated their preference not to be tortured, and then you also violated their preference to be alive!
Being a rape survivor is less bad than being dead, but being raped (and subsequently being a rape survivor) is more bad than being dead. So I would only support a rape survivor euthanasia program if it involved going back in time and euthanising the victims before they were raped, so that experience never happened.
The correct thing to think about is not “support for euthanising rape survivors”, but “support for building magical robots that instantly know whenever someone is about to be raped and immediately kill them before the rape can occur”. If the world was full of people like me, you should support the latter but not the former. Lack of support for the former does not mean that the average person thinks rape is less bad than death.
Personally, I’m roughly as willing to make tradeoffs about risks of getting raped as devoutly religious people are willing to make tradeoffs about going to hell and experiencing an eternity of suffering. In the same way some Jews will refuse to eat any meat with dairy because it might sort of be like boiling a goat in its mother’s milk and therefore it might carry a tiny risk of displeasing their god, I learned self defence and am going to all-female college and never get drunk because I will go to quite some lengths to reduce my risk of being raped.
(Incidentally, if lots of people are actually like me, all of the tabooing stuff makes sense. Making tradeoffs about the risk of a terrorist massacre in which 20 to 100 people die is pretty taboo, too.)
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PS: I still broadly agree with your point, I am just emotionally required to be pedantic because of who I am as a person
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