Oh boy, it’s the SA show again.
Better hide your paper towel tubes. They ain’t safe anymore.
He ain’t blind, he has tunnel vision. 
Drunky, I snipped the rest of your post for length. I wish to note that you also rock. {{{hugs}}}
Come on ladies, it is clear that as a male (with a 14% larger brain), Starving Artist has a much better perspective into the hazards of being a woman than you ever will. So quit worrying your pretty little head (worrying is unladylike and can give you wrinkles) and let him do all of your thinking for you. Everything will be much better that way.
I’m not even going to bother examining where this topic has gone, but I wanted to share what my 13 year old daughter said when I showed her an image of the sign with no explanation other than “what would you think if you saw this in the hall at school?”
She gave me a bitter smirk, rolled her big brown eyes, and said, “Um… the boys who are mean see nice girls as prey, so no.”
This is from a middle school female who would be exposed to that quote every day passing in the hallway.
Oh, the poor deluded thing. She actually believes she can take care of herself and doesn’t need a big strong man.
If a person is to be considered free to go anywhere they like and behave in any way they like totally free of responsibility for harmful consequences, then what is the point of practical advice?
Dad to daughter: “Sure, honey, it’s perfectly all right for you to go out to the bar wearing that short dress and drink yourself into unconsciousness. And should you wind up getting robbed or raped, just remember you were completely within your rights and you’re totally a victim! You should have done nothing differently whatsoever, it’s all the bad guy’s fault.”
Or:
“Oh, yeah, sure, sweetheart! If you see some cute guy in a car with a bunch of buddies and they’ve all been drinking and he winks at you and says, “Come get in the car and let’s have some fun”, go right ahead. After all, if anything bad happens we’ll make sure the bad guy gets all the blame. You just do what you want and don’t worry about it.”
:rolleyes:
The very purpose of practical advice is to suggest possibilities for behavior modification so as to avoid dangerous situations.
If people, presumedly young girls, are supposed to be able to blunder blithely through the night behaving any way they wish without the slightest fear of consequence because rights, things aren’t likely to end well for them no matter who is to blame. The idea that to attempt to forewarn them of potential dangers and that they might therefore adjust their behavior accordingly is ‘victim-blaming’ is yet another in a long line of left-wing idiocrity that puts unthinking dogma ahead of both common-sense practicality and people’s safety.
The party of personal responsibility, doing anything they can to absolve rapists and murderers of personal responsibility, yet again.
Practical advice is one thing. Putting the onus for others’ actions on a teenage girl is significantly different.
SA what responsibility do the males have in your scenarios? Any? 25%? 50%? 100%?
Actually, I think it’s usually conservatives who are the prosecutors and conservatives who are in favor of keeping criminals in jail and murderers executed. Liberals are the soft-on-crime bunch, remember? It’s been that way a long time.
Everyone’s behavior influences the behavior of others to a certain extent. If one can behave in such a way as to bring about a better behavior in someone else, I see no problem with it. The difference lies with “onus”. If you’re referencing the previous quote above the lockers in the Houston school, I deny that it put the “onus” on girls to influence boys’ behavior. It was a suggestion, nothing more.
Further, I believe it had nothing to do with sexual assault and was merely attempting to foster a more polite and respectful demeanor on the part of young boys at the school toward their female classmates.
Wait, are you saying it’s not the bad guy’s fault?
What is this kind of argument called? Because nobody’s going to do this.
I can’t tell if it’s only the young or only the girls you mean here but hey, I think you have a skewed view of consequences. People are not robbed because they’re in a bar, they’re robber because A ROBBER behaved any way he wished. People are not raped because they wore short skirts, they’re raped because RAPISTS BROKE THE LAW and they are the ones consequences should fall on.
I’d like to know what advice this made-up father is going to hand out to his sons. Well actually I’m afraid to know.
Can you answer this please?
They are 100% responsible for the crimes. The girls are responsible, to varying degrees depending on the circumstances, for the fact that they wound up in the situations that led to their victimization.
In my opinion there are two sets of responsibility at work. One for the crime, and one for the girl for having knowingly and willingly putting herself into a potentially harmful situation. And neither responsibility cancels out the other.
In other words, the fact that the man is 100% responsible for the crime does not mean that the girl or woman in turn bears no responsibility for having knowingly and willingly put herself in harm’s way.
But like I said, this responsibility can vary. Take the boys-in-a-car scenario. If the girl were really young, naive, innocent and totally unaware of the dangers this scenario presents, and she just went with it because the guy was cute and she thought he looked nice, then in my opinion her responsibility is 0%.
Preach it, brother.
Don’t want to be a victim of sexual assault? Shoulda been a man!
ETA: If anyone calls me out on this, that wooshing sound is calling Poe.
I think if it’s practical advice, in proportion to the risks, then it’s fine. If someone is telling their daughter the right clothing is going to keep her safe, then that’s not practical. If someone is suggesting that a woman shouldn’t walk out to her car in the dark, I think that is probably not a valid risk assessment, in most cases.
Also, as a parent it’s your job to teach your kids how to handle risks they don’t know about. By all means, warn them to have a friend mind their drink if they leave it. That’s not the same as third parties after the fact saying “she should have known better, why was she even in a place like that”.
As a society, we need to look after all members. If the world is so dangerous that half the population can’t actually walk around safely, than we should be trying to fix that, not just throwing up our hands and saying “that’s their problem”.
Of course, nobody here is supporting any such idea, so you can put away your strawman. As I responded to Novelty Bobble in the very same post that you selectively replied to with the above remark:
As I asked you upthread, exactly where are you drawing the line between sexual assault and harassment on the one hand and insufficiently “polite and respectful demeanor” on the other? And is it your belief that the behavior of boys with their female classmates never crosses that line?
On the one hand, you’re claiming (unsupported by evidence) that “ladylike behavior” on the part of girls will “foster a more polite and respectful demeanor on the part of young boys”, and therefore girls should be encouraged to adopt such behavior in order to “influence boys’ behavior”.
But at the same time, you’re asserting (equally unsupported by evidence) that the boys’ behavior that the girls are supposed to be influencing “had nothing to do with sexual assault”. This suggests that you’re completely unaware that one of the typical ways that boys express rudeness and disrespect toward girls is in fact by sexually assaulting and harassing them.
The fact is that there isn’t a distinct bright line in boys’ behavior between merely lacking a “polite and respectful demeanor” and committing sexual abuse. Boys’ expression of impolite disrespect toward girls is a continuous spectrum, including everything from sexual insults to snapping bra straps to outright rape. Trying to pretend that telling girls to “influence boys’ behavior” by acting more “ladylike” is a completely separate issue from sexual assault is just plain delusional.
The sexist Catch-22 in that assignment of the girl’s or woman’s “responsibility” is that it leaves absolutely open-ended the issue of exactly how to define “a potentially harmful situation” and “in harm’s way”, as well as “knowingly and willingly”.
Girls and women can be, and often are, subjected to abuse and harassment in absolutely any situation: while leaving work after dark, while leaving work in the daytime, while dressed revealingly, while dressed modestly, while drinking to excess, while staying stone cold sober, while having tattoos, while having no tattoos, while using foul language, while using polite language, while partying with strangers, while hanging out with friends or relatives, whatever. Any situation in which a girl or woman gets harmed can be retroactively framed as “a potentially harmful situation” in which she shouldn’t have “knowingly and willingly put herself”.
Assigning that kind of open-ended responsibility to women is essentially sticking them with a blank charge sheet that you get to fill in after the fact. Whatever women do or don’t do, if somebody ends up harming them, then they get the “responsibility” of having “knowingly and willingly” made some choice that is retroactively defined as “harmful” or “in harm’s way”.
A professor of mine, after a class discussion in which a couple of my fellow students made bizarre statements indicating that at the very least they had not done the reading, told me that one of my great strengths was that I “dealt very well with irrational people.”
I think of this while reading Kimstu’s thorough and well-reasoned replies to the bizarre arguments offered in this thread by those who have clearly at the very least not done the reading.
Kimstu, my hat is off to you. I’m impressed not only by your arguments but by your patience.
Hey, just trying to be ladylike. You’d think it would have paid off better in increased politeness and respect from Starving Artist by now, if this “influencing behavior” concept really is da shizz. 
Anyway, my thanks to you (and raventhief and ETF whom I didn’t get around to responding to before) for the kind words!
Novelty Bobble asked:
Clearly he’s asking about the proper advice to give his children proactively to keep them safe. You responded:
How, may I ask, is one to caution their children about risky future behavior without prioritizing it over perpetrator blaming? Is it not obvious that at this point there is no perpetrator to blame?
You appear to be assuming I’ve drawn such a line, and that having therefore drawn it, I should delineate it to you.
I’ve drawn no such line. Nor do I see a need to.
I have to ask myself why I’m going along with this silly prosecutorial line of questioning, and I may call a halt to it before long because it’s tiresome and dishonest, but for now I’ll play along. I have not considered such a line, therefore I have no opinion as to when or how often it gets crossed.
Correct.
Again correct.
I am indeed unaware of it. And I’d still be of the same opinion in the event I were.
“Trying to pretend” it may be delusional, but thinking it may be effective to a beneficial degree is not.
The fact that a few boys out of the entire male student body might boldly and aggressively commit sexual assault does not mean that all or even most of the boys in attendance long to treat girls badly. Most people are nice, even middle and high school boys.
But young girls are a bit of a mystery to young and even high school boys, thus young boys don’t know how to interact with them. So to hide their awkwardness and insecurity, some may display rudeness and crassness and try to appear that they’re not interested in female friendship or approval, while others retreat into themselves and try to have as little interaction with girls at school as possible.
Now we come to where ladylike behavior can be beneficial. Girls who are ladylike are not threatening, they’re not foreign, and they’re not intimidating. Their demeanor says they’re friendly and they like you as a person. They make you comfortable, in other words. And if you’re comfortable with someone and you like them as a person, whatever motivation you may have had to withdraw from them or be mean to them evaporates. And so you begin to relate to them more as people and friends instead of as incomprehensible alien beings who probably disapprove of or look down on you, and out of that grows friendlier and more respectful (i.e., gentlemanly) interaction.
It is my estimation that whoever was responsible for putting the quote above the lockers in the Houston school had this sort of result in mind.
This is complete nonsense. People have brains, and they have the ability to assess risk. Thus they generally know whether the behavior they’re engaging in or they are about to engage in carries an unusual degree of risk. And of course they know that if a woman is assaulted while leaving work, shopping for groceries, etc., she is not to blame. I’m at an utter loss to understand how you come up with some of this stuff.