Then back away from the sexual assault of women and pick some other instance where a person is the victim of violent crime. How about the one I listed upthread: walking through a high-crime neighborhood at night in fancy clothes and jewelry while counting hundred-dollar bills. Is it reasonable to advise someone that this is risky behavior (and therefore they shouldn’t)?
“Counting hundred dollar bills” takes it into the realm of the absurd. Absent that fact, which is basically without any reasonable parallel in a realistic scenario, no, it’s not reasonable. It’s “don’t walk through a high crime neighborhood being the person you are.”
Fair enough, I can dial the hypothetical down a bit. There are in fact neighborhoods where I - a suburban middle-class guy dressed in run-of-the-mill jeans, shirt and shoes - would probably be putting myself at risk by going for a midnight stroll. I expect it would indeed be smart for me to not walk through such neighborhoods being the person that I am, and I can’t imagine myself getting bent out of shape if someone so advised me.
If I did get robbed and beaten under those circumstances, I can well imagine everyone I know wondering why I would do such a thing.
Really? Because it seems to me that if you put the components of your story together, that’s entirely unreasonable.
So you, a suburban middle-class guy dressed in run of the mill jeans, shirt and shoes, find yourself a few blocks from where you need to be, in a “neighborhood where you would probably be putting yourself at risk by going for a midnight stroll.” Which is to say, presumably, just about every populated neighborhood, since there’s crime everywhere. Let’s say it’s because you have a friend who just moved to this neighborhood, and you were visiting. And you get mugged on an adjacent block.
Since it would be smart for you not to have been there, what were you supposed to do, and what was the thing nobody can understand why you would do it, and what important lessons do you need to learn? Call a cab to drive you to your parking spot? Police escort? Never see your friend?
I live in a neighborhood in DC that has some rough edges. In the past year, it has been flooded with new arrivals who engage in behavior that I find really risky. I’ll see people walking home from the Metro late at night with their ear buds in scrolling through their iphone, head down, and not really paying attention to their surroundings.
I just can’t get my head around how naive, or clueless, or inexperienced you’d have to be to do that. DC isn’t Mayberry, people do get mugged, often when they are not paying attention to their surroundings. A woman I work with moved into my neighborhood and told me about a very dicey situation she got in when she was walking home looking at her phone, listening to music and got surrounded without noticing until it was too late. Fortunately, she got out of it, but I had to really bite my tongue not to say “what were you thinking!”
Plenty of threads around here to argue that with you.
Would motorcyclists be offended if I had a bumper sticker saying “Look Out For Cars”?
Let’s say you got robbed in broad daylight in your own neighborhood.
Wouldn’t it bother you if someone insisted there must have been something you did for that to happen to you?
Maybe motorcyclists are special. But I know when I make life-threatening errors, I don’t need someone else to help me learn where I went wrong. Like, take today for instance. I was walking to get lunch, and my attention was focused on the data analysis I’d just been working on, not the street traffic. I stepped out of the building without looking both ways and almost got hit by a guy on a bicycle. Then I was almost hit by a car.
I know what I did wrong in both of these instances. I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t need anyone to help me figure out where my responsibility lies, because I’m not an idiot (despite behaving that way). I assume that most people are the same as me.
Sure, when I hear a story about a woman hooking up with a random guy on Tinder, only to be raped later on, there is a part of me that thinks “what an idiot!” But I also think that way about motorcyclists who are killed on the road. That’s because the benefits of either activity are completely lost on me. It has nothing to do with how wise I am.
A woman who is raped by a random Tinder hook-up who doesn’t learn anything from this experience is probably not going to benefit from someone lecturing to her. Because there’s something obviously wrong with her.
I’ve never been mugged or robbed before. But when I tell people about my daily travels on foot, walking through the streets of Richmond, I frequently hear variations on “WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!” Because apparently being a woman means that you’re putting yourself in danger whenever you spend more than five minutes outside in an urban setting. The scolding comes from other women, nine times out of ten. And they all live out in the suburbs.
So I know that if I’m ever to find myself victimized by street crime, I’m not going to tell anyone about it.
I will continue to listen to my podcasts while walking the dirty mean urban streets. I have my own techniques for keeping myself safe, but I’m not under any delusions that I’m safe. I know I’m taking risks. But sometimes taking risks are worth it. Those biddies who scold me about my dangerous lifestyle are all fat and unfit and scared of their own shadows. And they are boring as hell. I don’t want to be like them.
My biggest difficulty in thinking about this type of issue is that I consider terms such as rape, date rape, and sexual assault are overly broad and poorly defined.
In my male 50+ yr old mind, there is a world of difference between getting groped in a bar, having a date go too far after both drank too much, being violently assaulted by a stranger, and every permutation in between. I’m not saying any of those is all right. But so many people view all of these actions so differently it makes it next to impossible to discuss unwanted sexual actions - not to mention reach any agreement.
I’ve spoken with several women I’m close to who relate instances when they woke up the day after a drunken hookup and their thought is, “Boy, was that stupid of me.” Not, “I was raped” or “I lacked the capacity to consent.” I’ve spoken with another family member who adamantly believes she was sexually assaulted because a HS boyfriend was pushing her to go further than she wants, and eventually she gave in - with no alcohol involved. As a guy, it isn’t my position to tell either of them they are right or wrong.
Dress however you want. Don’t act surprised if it elicits unwanted attention in the forms of looks or words. Of course, uninvited touching should never occur, and any guy should acquiesce if you tell him to stop whatever he is doing that bothers you.
It is unfortunate there are assholes out there who are little more than predators, the same way there are sharks in the oceans and bears in the woods. You wouldn’t catch me blaming the victim of a shark attack unless they were splashing around in waters they knew to be shark infested after rubbing themselves with blood…
Well said.
There are two issues here.
One is history. “We are just looking out for your safety, dear” has a long history of being used to discourage women from doing ordinary stuff-- working, attending school, etc. I still get it to discourage me from traveling. It always seemed nonsensical to me. Men face plenty of hazards traveling, too. I’m not sure why being vulnerable to that one crime is the deal breaker.
Elsewhere in history, “she was asking for it” has been used again and again to defend rapists (and shame victims.) Whole classes of women were deemed “asking for it,” no matter what their preferences or behavior was. There is just a lot of baggage with this particular lens, especially when used by people who have not lived with the actual real threat of rape nearly all of their lives. I don’t think it’s a topic that can’t be discussed, but it’s one that exists in a tough context.
The second issue is that in order to escape blame, a motorcyclist basically has to use safety equipment and follow the rules of the road. If a lot of people are being killed respite doing these things, we start looking at external solutions- traffic lights, motorcycle lanes, etc.
In order to escape “blame” for rape,
Women would basically have to isolate themselves. Every single woman does things that, if they got raped, people would be able to point to. Every woman.
We get dressed, generally not in burkas. We move from point A to point B unaccompanied. We work in workplaces where we are sometimes alone with men. We exist at night. We sleep in un-fortified homes. We have lovers. We date. We do countless of ordinary things, which are an ordinary part of life, that occasionally put us in less than perfect security. Keep in mind, most rapists are people you know, not people in dark alleys or sleazy discos. We are warned a million times not to do to much interesting stuff, but the real risk is “knowing people.”
What’s the answer? I pass through a short band of woods on my way home from work. I think about the risk every darn time I pass through. But what can I do? Move? Carry mace? Find a male escort (who might, you know, rape me)?
At some point, you have to say “women have to do stuff in their lives, and there had to be some way to become one of the countries with a low rape rate rather than a higher one.”
To continue the motorcycle analogy, much of the “advice” is not coming from a group of people who have been in similar situations talking about how they can modify their own behavior. It’s instead a group of people who have never been on a motorcycle and never plan to be on one giving a list of advice that is either painfully obvious (he should have been looking around), horrifically inaccurate (motorcycles should be on the sidewalk) or so limiting as to be useless and insulting (never drive a motorcycle out of residential streets, in daylight).
The thing is, I bet you’ve yourself been irritated by this kind of “advice” from people that are well-meaning at best, and more often pretty smug about the fact that such a thing would never happen to them. Rape prevention advice is exactly like this–it’s developed and conveyed by people who have decided what will prevent rape based on basically, what makes sense to them based on, well, vague imaginings about what rape is, who rapes, what the sequence of events that leads up to rape usually is, and how various prevention strategies would work, hypothetically. It’s like armchair quarterbacks explaining how they’d have won the Superbowl, or the new intern explaining how he’d reorganize the whole division after 3 weeks in the mail room.
If it weren’t possible or prudent to, say, go to the store by yourself, because so many people who shopped in your neighborhood were attacked, would you shrug your shoulders and say “well, we can’t change other people but we can change ourselves” and restrict stopping by the grocery store on to times when you could find someone to go with you? How high would the risk to your personal safety have to be before you quit engaging in that perfectly normal behavior? What other normal, routine activities would you be totally sanguine about giving up?
On the other hand, if today you were mugged leaving your local grocery store, and a well meaning friend pointed out that the risk would be less if you only shopped during daylight, would you really find that useful or meaningful advice?
I am not a motorcycle.
I am not a house.
I am not a wallet.
The problem with all of these analogies is that they, literally, objectify my body. They equate my body with property. They equate people who rape with people who damage motorcycles and houses and wallets.
They implicitly endorse the notion that another person is entitled to use my body if I don’t take adequate measures to protect it.
What I have never heard is people saying that a man who got his face bashed in by a stranger at a bar shouldn’t have been walking there, or shouldn’t have had that beer, or shouldn’t have talked to that guy. Heck, I don’t even hear that when a woman is physically assaulted but not raped. She’s not held responsible for a simple assault the same way she is for a rape.
Yes, this. I don’t have a problem with risk mitigation, and of course I teach my teenaged children to never leave their drink unattended, to follow their instinct and get out of a situation that feels unsafe, to never take intoxicants unless they really trust the person providing them and they’re in a safe place, because I do, of course, want to minimize their chances of being raped before they’re raped. But that’s not what I hear (or read) in the vast majority of post-rape armchair quarterbacking. What I hear then is not mitigation, but blame. It’s a fine line, and I’m not sure how to instruct you in mitigating your risk of coming off as a tone deaf asshole, except to suggest that the time for such advice is before an attack, not after.
Another problem with the motorcycle analogy.
There are a number of indications you can look for to gauge how safe you are as a driver. Are other motorists honking their horns at you? Are they swerving to get away from you? Have the cops pulled you over a lot? “Near-misses” are very obvious to you. If you need someone to point out when you’ve almost collided with another vehicle, then something wrong with your driving abilities.
But there aren’t any signs to look out for that you’re about to get raped. Non-rapists use the same pick-up lines that rapists use. It’s not like you can look at a guy beforehand and know that he’s a rapist. It’s not there’s a big flashing light that goes off when a rapist is about to attack you. It’s only after the rape has happened that you learn what the red flags were. And at that point, how helpful is it to be lectured to by someone who wasn’t even there and who doesn’t know exactly what you did or didn’t overlook?
So women who wear the “wrong” clothes are asking for it, right?:dubious:
And men are no better than sharks or bears. Why does this line of thinking not offend men, is what I want to know. :dubious:
IMO the victim of a crime should usually (not always) bear some of the responsibility for situation.
Whenever I am the victim of theft, for example, I ask myself, “What should have I done differently?” When someone broke into my car and stole a bunch of CDs a number of years ago, I concluded it was stupid of me to have them sprawled out on the front passenger seat. From then on I stored them in an enclosed container, and was extra diligent in keeping the doors locked.
Same goes for rape. I teach our daughters that there are common-sense actions they can take to minimize the chance of it occurring. Not dressing provocatively is one of them.
Is there ANY evidence that provocative clothing increases your chances of rape? At all? Or is that just something that makes sense to good men–like yourself–who would never, ever rape a woman and are looking for a reason that makes sense to you? Because I never actually see that play out in real life. What I do see play out is that a rapist has reason to believe (or thinks he does) that he won’t get caught/will get away with it.
The things women are asked to do are not minor, like leaving your CDs in the trunk or under the seat. They are life limiting–limiting what careers you can go into, how successful you can be in those careers, limiting your ability to form and maintain relationships, limiting your ability to function as a full member of society. You can’t work late because it’s just “risk mitigation” not to go in the parking garage after work. You can’t travel alone with a co-worker. You can’t give or accept a ride from a friend of a friend. You can’t linger at a bar to talk to some new people you met, even though they seem cool, even though you have your own ride, because your friend is leaving. You can’t drive six hours alone on the Interstate to visit your mom. And, you have to do all these things without giving the impression that you are scared of rape, because that’s treating every man like a potential rapist, which is rude and bitchy.
Worse, though, they aren’t really relevant. I bet as many women have been raped by the “friend” who walked them home as by the hypothetical rapist-in-the-bushes that we are told we should be protecting ourselves from. I bet as many rapists have gone after the woman with the loose skirt to her ankles because they thought it’d be easy to throw over her head as have raped a woman in a short skirt because they were driven mad with lust by her thighs.
And finally, even those behaviors that do increase risk do so in incredibly small amounts. It’s riskier to drive after dark, but no one expects people to drive after dark only in emergencies. But when a woman gets raped in a parking lot after dark–an extremely rare thing, which is why it makes the news–everyone shakes their head and says 'Why was she there alone?".