The easy bit: Yes, women can change their behavior to reduce their chances to be sexually assaulted.
The hard bit: They’re already doing these things every single day, but still get assaulted.
SamuelA says what sounds like the easy bit, but is applying it to the hard bit. There’s an unspoken “more than they already have” tucked in there after “change their behavior”
Pointing out that he’s technically just saying the easy bit is letting him off the hook for the implication that women need to do MORE to prevent their rape.
The argument that he needs to hear is that maybe women have already done enough from their end, and it’s high time the men did a bit more of the heavy lifting.
I find myself saying maybe women should do this, or not do that, and I need to remind myself that they have already done enough and it’s not right to just keep pointing at them to demand more changes.
Aah, I see now. Huddling at home in fear (and burka!) as “agency”, I get it. Sorry, I’m still not fluent in right-wing doublespeak. I thought he was talking about actual liberal thinking (even couched as the thinking of “evangelical left”) , rather than the strawman caricature he was actually presenting.
So, the OP asked two questions, but only one is in the title and it’s been the primary focus of the thread. I don’t think enough attention has been paid to the second part - was it a racist statement?
I’m inclined to think so, because of the gratuitous burka bit, but does anyone else agree?
Yes, and just to clarify: Acting in accordance with the law and not trying to force sexual activity on an unconsenting partner is “doing enough”. That is all that women (or men) are obligated to do to prevent rape.
Everything else that women are counseled/encourage/scolded to do to “reduce their chances of being assaulted” is just putting an extra burden on women to compensate for men’s failure to live up to their basic obligations for preventing rape.
Maybe this would become clearer if we replaced standard weaselly passive-voice constructions like “chances of women’s being assaulted” with phrases that make it clearer where the responsibility really lies, such as “chances of men’s assaulting women”.
When we keep describing the act of men’s assaulting women as “women being assaulted” or “women getting assaulted”, as though sexual assault were some kind of impersonal accident like getting caught in a rainstorm, it naturally inclines us to focus on how women could avoid it rather than on how to shut it down from happening in the first place.
I similarly would warn rich white men to keep their head on swivel in certain neighborhoods or to avoid them altogether. For them to indignantly stamp their foot and demand a change in culture would be absurd. Although I do believe changing the violent culture of the US is very important.
So, no. Giving advice is not misogynistic. In fact it is a good way to show that you care. I would hope someone would give me or my family members good advice to avoid bad characters in an unfamiliar area.
Imagine that, I could value advice and cultural advancement at the same time.
Because that’s not what that quote says. “Is not a simple fact” is not the same thing as “never has any effect”.
You’ve had it explained to you six ways from Sunday in this thread why it’s “not a simple fact” that staying home, let alone wearing a burka, reduces chances of being sexually assaulted.
It’s not a “simple fact” that taking self-defense classes reduces those chances, either. I wasn’t trying to claim that, but to point out that a recommendation for such might come across as less offensive, because it offers a suggestion other than giving up one’s life and going into hiding. And I find it telling that that’s almost never the example that people give who say that women’s behavior can control the problem of rape. ‘If most women were able and prepared to seriously damage a would-be rapist some percentage of rapists might be deterred’ doesn’t seem to be what’s on their minds. The examples given are just about always either ‘stay home’ or ‘hide your body’; you managed to get both of them into yours.
Even if all women were fully trained in self-defense, it still wouldn’t be a “simple fact” that that would help. More rapists might just start with a gun to the head and three buddies. The only cases in which women’s behavior actually can control the behavior of rape are the cases in which it’s a woman who’s the potential rapist. In those cases, if that particular woman controls her behavior so as not to rape, then that will reduce the number of rapes. In cases in which it’s men who are the rapists, it’s their behavior which needs to be controlled.
– MrDibble, I think the burka part is bigoted; at least, presuming that manson1972 is not a Muslim, in which case it might just have been the clothing that first came to mind. If manson1972 is from a Christian culture, whether or not a practicing or believing Christian, I think a reference to a nun’s habit (while still offensive for reasons given above) wouldn’t be bigoted; a deliberate choice to instead reference concealing clothing worn for religious reasons by a different culture does seem to me to denigrate that culture.
One is the idea that playing Devil’s Advocate is somehow a sacred trust and that “Well, to be accurate, in the most technical sense, you are wrong” is a pure and holy way to score points. It’s what Smart People do, and people that resist the Devil’s Advocate are illogical and emotional. This is especially jarring when the issue is entirely hypothetical and an academic exercise for the person playing Devil’s Advocate, but of real and immediate implications by the audience. Treating someone’s actual life like hypothetical ethical situation in Philosophy 101 is off-putting and not productive.
The second is the persistent belief on this board that presentation doesn’t matter, it’s the idea that matters. I’ve said this before–racist and misogynistic statements are allowed to stand because the most charitable interpretation of the underlying idea reveals a possibly interesting discussion, and preserving the possibility of a good discussion is given as enough reason to let the phrasing pass. The example I used is that threads like “Hey, pick: Ginger or Maryann?”, often with flavor text like 'A genie appears and gives you a choice . . . " are offensive because they are objectifying. Then we are off to the races about whether or not the idea of having different levels of attractiveness to different women is inherently offensive, but that was never the issue. The issue is the flavor text, the idea of actresses being a prize genies can give out. It’s like the defenders of the thread don’t even SEE that–it’s like flavor text in a video game no one even reads, so it doesn’t count. But it does–especially if, as a woman, when you read the premise you see yourself as the woman in the narrative–the prize, not the person making the choice. That’s gross. In that same way, manson1972’s original statement was flippant and creepy: the image of a woman draped in cloth, locked in a room is unsettling, if you see yourself as the woman. And the word “Just” makes it sound trivial. So had the statement been something like “If a woman utterly withdrew from society and refused to participate, she could substantially reduce her chances of being assaulted–but that’s obviously ridiculous”, I don’t think we’d be having this conversation.
I think describing cultural traditions of covering women for modesty as “for religious reasons”, as though they are socially neutral, is disingenuous. Culture is complex, there may be neutral ceremonial elements in some cases, but such traditions - certainly including Muslim traditions - derive principally from precisely the misogynistic victim-blaming mentality that is being discussed and criticized in this thread, the notion that it’s the responsibility of women to dress in a manner that does not “provoke” men to be sexually attracted to them, that it’s women’s responsibility to be less “rapeable”. It’s an aspect of culture that should be criticized wherever it occurs. In the modern world it’s more prominent, formalized and respectable in Muslim culture than other cultures, and it’s not racist to note the Muslim case as a prominent example of a misogynistic cultural tradition.
But I’m not really sure this relates to the OP in any significant way.
I don’t think this is a valid use of the statistic. People are more likely to die in the hospital than at home, but that doesn’t mean being at home is inherently safer. It means that there are other factors that affect the death rate, or the rate of sexual attack. Can women do things to lessen their risk of being sexually assaulted at home? Yes, they can - deadbolt locks, don’t bring home or date or marry men you can’t trust, etc.
How to tell which are the untrustworthy men is a lot harder. And saying “it’s entirely the man’s fault if he attacks women” is both completely true, and not always useful.
Sure, and the “not always” cases might include (for example) a concerned parent giving guidance to a post-pubescent daughter on staying safe in a dangerous world. Nobody is going to slam that parent for enabling a culture of victim blaming.
But there are many other contexts in which any emphasis on the behavior of potential victims may risk being perceived as a continuation of our cultural tradition of slut shaming and holding women responsible for the egregious behavior of men.
OP is apparently unable to distinguish between such cases, and feels that the context in which a statement is made is irrelevant if it is factually true.
There’s a third issue–often the behavior of that is targeted as being risky is not. For example, blanket advice to “stay locked in your room” is not particularly helpful in the majority of sexual assault cases, where the perpetrator is known and either the victim does trust them or the victim has no ability to block access (a child living with their abuser) or the perpetrator breaks in. I mean, we tell women it’s not safe to walk outside at night because they will get raped by a stranger, but in all honesty, allowing a male friend to walk you home probably increases your chances of being assaulted.
Other advice is often presented without any sense of relative risk or recognition of the costs. So well-meaning advice to, say, avoid traveling with men might in fact reduce your absolute chances of being sexually assaulted, but it can also substantially reduce your career opportunities and lifetime earnings potential.
The only advice that seems to be genuinely helpful is “don’t get so shitfaced you don’t have any situational awareness or the ability to extract yourself from a bad situation”. Everything else is based on misguided ideas about what makes a woman vulnerable and serves more to restrict opportunities and create fear than to actually make someone safer.
Yes, I was speaking only to one issue in the OP - the claim that context doesn’t matter if we stipulate that a statement is true; that factual accuracy is an absolute defense to making any statement in any context. One might think this could be quickly dismissed, but apparently not.
The more interesting question is whether some of the claims in the OP are actually true, i.e. what pragmatic strategies are actually valid to reduce risk, and the answers (as you and others have pointed out) are certainly not so obvious as OP implies.
There are a lot of bad statistics in this thread, but I’m just going to highlight this one.
There is not enough information to make this claim. You need to know the relative amount of time that people spend inside and outside the home.
If I told you (let’s imagine that this is true for a moment) that only 0.005% of head injuries occur in Michelin Starred restaurants, the conclusion should not be “we should spend more time eating in gourmet restaurants for safety”, it should be “wait, how much time do people even spend in those restaurants?”
I would guess that the average person spends more than 55% of their time in their home than out, which would make the home a safer environment than outside, with respect to head injuries.
But that’s exactly the point people are trying to make regarding manson76’s claim–he said it was self-evident that a woman who remained in her home would meaningfully reduce her chances of being sexually assaulted. It’s not at all clear that that is true at all, and certainly it’s not universally true (the statement “women and girls who live in homes in which no one willing and able to sexually assault them has access are significantly safer in their home” is pretty circular.
I’m not so sure. If I were to take a rough guess, my circle spends probably 45% at home, 25% at work or commuting and the rest out-and-about (from movies and theatre and clubbing, to eating out or barhopping, to visiting friends, to, you know, out in nature and shit) but I think you’ll find it highly variable. I’d think some firm numbers would be better.
I think if you read the thread more carefully, you’ll see that most of the data that were brought up are to challenge OP’s assumption that he has adequate information to support his claims as “simple facts”, to point out that he is making unwarranted assumptions that certain things are obviously true when they are not. Starting at LHoD post #14, for example.
At post #50, OP apparently fails to even realize the obvious possibility that staying home could increase your risk if bad things happen at home too, and that the answer depends on unknown information.
A lot of the schisms I see between posters around seem to happen along these lines. One person/group is approaching a subject from an abstract, detached POV, where others in the thread have a more personal, empathetic approach to the subject. And both sides think the other is being unreasonable. Being <cough> of a certain age, I’ve heard the “Ginger or Mary Ann” question a gazillion times, and I confess I wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow at the example you gave of the genie as the “flavor text.” But I also wouldn’t twitch if it were “Sam or Dean?” using the same premise, because I take it as given that there’s a strong element of objectification inherent in these fantasies regardless of how they are presented or which gender is doing it. I would indeed be utterly blind to the idea that somebody might take offense to that thread as presented, at least until it was explicitly pointed out as you did.
To the OP: While it’s self-evident that women can do things to help reduce their chances of being assaulted, I can also see how a lot of the advice given-- no matter how well-meant-- can sound patronizing or like an attempt at victim blaming. Rapists are 100% responsible for rape, but I still want my daughters to be careful and take reasonable precautions.
If a woman tells the fifth guy at the gangbang to stop, and he doesn’t stop, it rape. Her prior behavior is not relevant in assessing his behavior. The repeated reference to what victims of assault “might have done” or “might do” may have some validity in some arguments, but they have no significance in an argument for “justifiable assault” because there is no justification for assault. It remains a crime no matter how much the victim “took risks.”
Would I have advice for the woman? If she was a friend of mine, yes, I would. I would deliver that advice in private, if it was asked for. I have no advice for the man, I want him held accountable for his actions, not his perception of her desires. He should be tried for rape. If the woman subsequently continued to have her gangbang with other men, that doesn’t change the fact that she told him to stop, and he didn’t. Is it sad that he is such a repulsive sexual looser that he was rejected by a woman who obviously does enjoy sex with many other men? Sure. He is a repulsive looser. He is a rapist. The first is sad, the second is illegal. I think the actual reason some men make the judgement that she should be responsible for limiting her behavior in order not to be assaulted is that they fear the they are pathetic repulsive losers, and don’t want that to be an acceptable judgement for a woman to make.