Missed the edit window:
And exactly ZERO responsibility to assume that she MIGHT be.
It doesn’t rise to the level of “an article of faith.” It’s the position I hold, and I hold it because it is objectively factual and beyond debate.
If the argument is, ‘If but for her clothes she wouldn’t have been groped.’ then the argument blames her clothes (in whole or part) for the groping. Women should be able to wear what they like, b/c everyone should be taught to keep their damn hands to themselves no matter how tingly their peepee feels or hows they may want to exert control over someone. That’s common courtesy today rather than ‘PC’ but it’s an evolution of what people have been taught for thousands of years about the roles and place of men and women in society.
SaneBill, maybe you shouldn’t come back if our words give you a stroke. Or you should admit how much you enjoy your faux righteous indignation.
This is the USA, not some middle east shit hole country. Women can wear what they want and don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Whether he saw skin or not means exactly jack and shit.
“You must consider the fact that there are gropers around” … maybe the gropers must consider the fact that they will get stomped and then arrested instead.
Dude, don’t bother. On this topic, hostile readings are typical. Just pepper your comments with disclaimers, and brace for a battery of accusations of victim-blaming.
The factual aspects surrounding this POV are interesting and important. I found a law journal article on the topic, but I haven’t finished skimming it (2/3 way through). Recommended.
Cut and paste, sorry for caps:
Cite: SEXY DRESSING REVISITED: DOES TARGET DRESS PLAY A PART IN SEXUAL HARASSMENT CASES? by THERESA M. BEINER, Nadine H. Baum Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law. This research was supported by a research grant from the William H. Bowen School of Law, for which the author is most grateful.
I don’t know why he groped her. I don’t know whether what she was wearing had anything to do with why he groped her. I can believe that it might have. Nevertheless, that’s totally irrelevant to whether he should have groped her (no, he shouldn’t), whether there’s any excuse for him groping her (no, there isn’t, unless maybe he had some severe mental deficiency), whether she deserves any of the blame for the groping (no, she absolutely doesn’t), or whether he deserved to “get his ass handed to him” (yes, he totally did).
Isn’t the rule that if a headline asks a question the answer is typically No?
The article is interesting. One thing it mentions:
In a study to test whether males could determine whether women were high or low in passiveness and submissiveness, Richards and her colleagues found that men, using only nonverbal appearance cues, could accurately assess which women were passive and submissive versus those who were dominant and assertive.141
Clothing was one of the key cues: “Those females high in passivity and submissiveness (i.e., those at greatest risk for victimization) wore noticeably more body-concealing clothing (i.e., high necklines, long pants and sleeves,
multiple layers).”142 This suggests that men equate body-concealing clothing with passive and submissive qualities, which are qualities that rapists look for in
victims. Thus, those who wore provocative clothes would not be viewed as passive or submissive, and would be less likely to be victims of assault.
The devil you say!
I had not reached that part of the article yet: that’s a nice inversion. The article also has other interesting twists IMHO.
My hypothesis: sure clothing might play some sort of role. But my half-assed scan of .edu and .gov articles suggests that are a ton of other more relevant factors (eg alcohol, eg being attentive as opposed to staring at your cell phone, eg OBTW lots of sexual assaulters look for easiest targets which is on them. Also, more modest dress to some extent just shifts victimhood to someone else, prior to the creep being thrown in prison. Also, what’s the magnitude of the alleged apparel effect?). But our intuitions for some reason focus on clothing. I opine that it’s wrong to overlook outerwear entirely, but we should be very careful not to over-rely on our encoded intuitions. It would be nice to be able to say factually, “Yeah clothing plays some role but X,Y,Z,A,B,C and D are more relevant, not to mention E and F.”
I think our intuitions focus on a woman’s clothing (and potential culpability in her own attack) b/c many of us are used to seeing things through the male gaze. How a man’s likely to view things becomes the default.
Why should women be the ones who have to change their behavior because someone else lacks self-control?
It’s long past time that men actually experience the consequences of their actions. I hope Mr. Ass Clutcher goes to jail for a year or two, during which he can work on learning to behave in a civilized society.
I don’t think you’re “defending” the asshole here, I think you are asking the wrong people to change their behavior. It is a subset of MEN who are misbehaving here, and THOSE are the people whose behavior needs to change.
What part of you don’t touch other people without their permission do these guys have trouble comprehending?
I used to live in an area with a large Amish population. You guessed it - some idiots would grope Amish women because they thought they wouldn’t fight back.
He may also have seen her as an easy mark because she was working, and assumed she wouldn’t fight back because she could potentially lose her job for doing so. People like this remind me of customers who act like an asshat with cashiers because the cashiers can’t defend themselves without getting in trouble.
There’s something to that I trust. More than something.
But the law article mentions a woman who sued her employer for requiring a particular scanty uniform. She also reported groping by customers and I assume a cause and effect relationship was inferred.
However. The clothing description went beyond the bounds of, say, Hooters. And the case was from 1981. Still, there was a female plaintiff complaining about employer mandated dress code, I have sympathy for her complaint, and I wish her attackers were punished.
Anecdotally, I’ve also heard reports of females blaming the victim in a sexual assault/murder case c. 1980s. The victim blaming struck me at the time as bizarre. Same case, I heard a male opine that the victim had shown poor judgment, though he made it clear in words and tone that murder was disproportionate to the error to put it mildly. tl;dr: I think discussions of dress are legit, but they should have a basis in science as well as moral sanity.
That’s supposed to be an argument? A cheap shot at France? What exactly?
It’s not a shot at France and it’s not cheap. It’s a direct attack on your nonsensical anti-PC argument.
Explain why your argument would not also be a valid argument that French women should wear burkas to protect themselves from sexual assault.
And you also didn’t state that anybody thinking that a woman is more likely to be gropped if she’s young, attractive, scantily dressed and waitressing in a bar is obviously a victim blamer and gropping supporter who wants all women to wear burkas, which might be why my post wasn’t in response to yours.
How is your argument any different from the argument of someone who says that women should wear burkas to protect themselves from assault?
First, could you quote the exact argument you’re refering to?
Because I can only deduce from your wording that you think I stated that women should dress more conservatively. I’m trying to read your mind here, because I didn’t write anything that could support in any way that women should wear burkas or anything else for that matter.
I strongly suspect that you believed you read something that I never wrote, or even thought. Here, I’m afraid that you’re confirming my actual argument which was that the ultra PC crowd ideology and reflex-response bring them to creatively read, hear, understand and respond to things that were never said, written or intended.
To expound further, I think clothes get blamed because style of dress is the most obvious way women attract interest from men. At the same time, men historically have been viewed as slaves to their sexual impulses. So the idea is that if a women is attractive in the presence of a man, then that man is los self-control. Because he just can’t help himself, you see.
Note that SaneBill used the word “trap” earlier. That’s consistent with the notion that women are setting men up for failure when they dare to look hot in public. In that sense, it’s not about women making themselves “easy prey” at all. It’s men being preyed upon by attractive women.
Why bring up or defend a statement that “scantily dressed women are more likely to get groped in a bar” if you aren’t willing to explain why anything short of a burka isn’t a valid definition of scantily dressed?
Why bring up a statement like “scantily dressed women are more likely to get groped in a bar” when we are discussing any particular case of sexual assault? What’s it’s purpose, other than to warn women (or certain women) that they should not dress in a certain way?