Redpill, you are a loathsome Neanderthal

The BBQ Pit
121

First, somebody should tell Giraffe there’s a candidate for vice president in his exclusive club of people who are against rape. Bravo.

Second, here’s a thought – you know what might be a good focus for your attention in that crusade? The rapists. You know what wouldn’t be? You know what would fuel centuries of backward and counterproductive thinking about what rape is in the real world? Sanctimonious and archaic rhetoric about who’s allowed to “squawk” about blaming the victim. Thanks for your permission, and I’ll give it every bit the respect it warrants; in the meantime, if you’re getting tired of hearing about victim blaming? Stop blaming the victim of a crime for that crime. There is no separation, in a conversation about rape in the abstract, between talking about what victims could do to avoid becoming victims, and advancing the position that a woman who does get raped is responsible for it in some measure. The act of rape doesn’t magically alter the decisions the woman made - she’s either responsible for prophylactic measures at all times, or not. She doesn’t get less foolish in her lack of defensive mentality simply by virtue of the realization of the risk. Responsibility for preventing rapes in advance = responsibility for a real rape after it happens. That’s just what those words mean.

One problem, among many (also to include stupidity and disingenuity) with the people who like to make these false distinctions between potential rape victims and actual rape victims is that they have no idea what the majority of rapes are like. You are arguing from complete ignorance. Here, with a few details changed, are the facts of the most recent actual rapes I am aware of:

[ul][li]Mother has night class. Mother’s boyfriend, hanging around at home, forces himself upon daughter.[/li][li]Double date; all four return to women’s apartment. One woman says no, date has sex with her anyway. Other male date convinces other woman nothing is going on until it’s too late.[/li][li]Woman goes to university gym. Male worker from front desk follows her home and attempts to rape her.[/ul][/li]
You tell me, you experts of risk management. What’d they do wrong? “Oh, sure, use actual examples of things that happened that aren’t the kinds of situations we’re talking about. Nice trick.” Do you know why those situations aren’t the kind you’re talking about? Because unlike whatever the fuck you’re talking about, these are real. The thing that separates a normal day or night for a woman from a day or night when a sexual assault happens to her isn’t that she puts herself in a bad position. It’s that somebody rapes her. Do you understand that? Very few rapes happen because a woman is drunkenly stumbling down a dark alley, fumbling for her keys in a miniskirt, and an ordinary dude sees her and says, well, I was going to Wii Bowl, but I guess I’ll rape that idiot instead.

Rapes happen in the course of normal lives, during normal days, under normal circumstances. Special music doesn’t play when a woman enters Rape Territory. Just as it’s spectacularly stupid to say, for instance, that we can learn from the people who died on September 11th that it’s risky to work in a major financial center, it is a position unworthy of any respect at all to take a conversation about the perceived frailty of women and turn it into a litany of things we can learn about how not to get raped. You want to prevent rapes? Figure out the rapists, for christ’s sake, and shut the fuck up about the terrible judgment your imagined martyrs must be making. A woman living her everyday lifestyle doesn’t become stupid in retrospect because somebody committed a crime against her. And you don’t get to sit here and make judgments in hindsight about the lessons we can learn from victims when in reality, if every single one of whatever stupid and unrealistic prevention measures was enacted universally, rape would still happen all the fucking time, because the actual cause of rape would remain. To be perfectly clear, it’s fine that you don’t actually know anything about rape; most people don’t. But shut the fuck up about it and try to learn something.

It’s in this thread.

122

You do understand that your car is at risk for being broken into with or without a stereo in it, no matter where it is parked? Not going back to that same parking lot does not guarantee you immunity. Same issue for women: do you not go out with male “friends”? Do you not celebrate New Year’s Eve? So, you avoid the park where a rape occurred; doing so does not make you immune to rape in your own house or another park.

This is a ludicrous argument based on wishful, magical thinking. I agree that people can (and should) attempt to “stay safe”: lock your doors or be alert and look alert for some examples. But a person can do all those things and still be the victim of a crime, even a rape. A person can ignore all prudent advice and never become a victim of a crime. Those examples I used do not so much reduce risk as they act as deterrents, an important difference. The criminal/rapist will go for easier prey. The risk remains.

123

When I was subject to an attempted rape, it was from the taxi driver who was driving me home after I fractured three vertebrae in a motorcycle accident. He knew I couldn’t run (or even walk) away.

Not sure how I was supposed to prevent that one.

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even sven, obviously your experience is valuable information and we can all learn from this that women taking taxis are putting themselves at risk. :rolleyes:

There really isn’t much you could have done to prevent that, nor was it your responsibility, and I am really sorry you had that experience.

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Eh, nemmind. “Someone is *wrong *on the internet” is never a good reason to post. :smack:

126

We have found the ticket. Acknowledging high-risk behavior and discouraging people from engaging in them is not an attempt to blame the victim, or implicit recognition that the victim is to blame. Women are discouraged from getting drunk and wandering off with strange men alone, women (and men) are discouraged from walking down dark alleys in bad neighborhoods alone at night as well. This is not to say that a rapist or mugger would be absolved of guilt. We discourage these behaviors because we want to prevent people from being hurt. That is the relevance, and it has nothing to do with assigning the victim any blame. This philosophical debate becomes largely irrelevant when dealing with the immediate need to protect people. What are you going to do? Let your 16 year old daughter roam through a crime-laden neighborhood at the wrong time of day because you’ve got something to prove?

And yes, we know that people are frequently victimized during the course of fairly ordinary activities, such as going to school or a friend’s, but why would that mean we shouldn’t encourage people to be aware of danger? And why would doing that mean we’re trying to blame the victim, rather than protect him/her?

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Yeah, when I was 15 years old walking to school, how was I supposed to prevent being dragged in a garage by a Marine who happened to be walking by at 7:15 a.m?

When I was 31 and working the Renaissance Faires (NOT drinking), how was I supposed to fend off the two guys who were drinking and decided they wanted a gang-bang, dragging me into their tent and stuffing a dirty sock in my mouth so I couldn’t scream?

As a child, should I have stopped walking to school? Obviously I should not have been at the RenFaire because that place is rife with bawdy behaviour and the girls are just asking for it.

Sheesh.

128

You are a dumb fuck. Again: And yes, we know that people are frequently victimized during the course of fairly ordinary activities, such as going to school or a friend’s, but why would that mean we shouldn’t encourage people to be aware of danger? And why would doing that mean we’re trying to blame the victim, rather than protect him/her?

129

Fuck you, too.

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I will take this as implicit acknowledgment that your feelings got in the way of reading what I actually wrote. You’re forgiven.

131

A lot of victim-blaming does go on in rape cases. She was a slut, she was asking for it. There’s a difference between ‘it’s dangerous to get drunk, and make yourself vulnerable and impaired’ and ‘nice girls shouldn’t be out drinking in bars, such sluts have it coming’. But one is can be code for the other, and they both end up the same for women: “Don’t go out drinking.”

132

I don’t think anyone is saying that it’s wrong or bad to take basic safety precautions or to share said precautions. What we are arguing against is bullshit misogyny like this:

[QUOTE=Redpill]
Now you are mixing up two things: Playing sports and going out alone at night.

Going out alone is more risky for women. Do you not think so?

Not all women are at equal risk of being raped, thus one could consider the warning a compliment instead of being offended.
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Redpill]
Looking back I can see why some women can be offended by my remark that: Hot women in a dangerous situation are more at risk for rape.

Because it can be taken to indirectly mean: If no one has attempted rape on you, you must not be hot enough.
[/QUOTE]

The fact is, whether people want to acknowledge it or not, that the grand majority of rapes are committed by someone who was close to the victim. Someone she trusted. Going alone to a bar, getting drunk and going home with a stranger is a dangerous thing to do, but that isn’t how most rapes occur and it makes any discussion about how rape actually happens really difficult. It’s insulting to those who were raped because it’s implying that somehow it was their fault.

Take child molestation. Now, we tell kids not to get into cars with strangers. We keep them supervised. We have sex offender registries to keep track of potential predators that might get near them. But it is known, understood and accepted that children are most often molested by family members. That fact is taken into account and treated seriously. When a child is molested, it’s inappropriate to discuss what risks were taken or what we can learn from the event. Instead, the focus is on “what were the warning signs in the abuser?” and “how can we identify potential abusers before they act?”

That should be the focus when it comes to rape, instead of on a risk assessment of what we can all learn from the victim. Take the precautions. Be aware of the risks. Keep the focus on the perpetrators.

133

Well obviously **Redpill **is retarded, but this thread has changed lanes, derailed into new kinds of stupid, and I wanted to address this bullcrap about telling people not to do risky shit equaling “blaming the victim.” Apparently that was some kind of acknowledgment that the victim is partially to blame, and the “relevance” of the victim’s behaviors came into question. So I answered.

No one (except crazies) ever says “Here’s what you did wrong.” It’s always “These are things to look out for,” and it’s the same with children and grown adults.

As for the likelihood that someone will be assaulted in a familiar setting, see above.

134

There might be more crazies than you realize, but speaking from my own experience there is a lot of victim blaming that still goes on out in the real world. Because of that, it can be really hard to see that line between “here’s how we can protect ourselves in the future” and “here’s what you did wrong.” I agree that there’s a difference, but there are people who start out with the first and end up saying the second. Or they say the first, but they’re implying the second.

And when you’re upset because someone attacked you, the first might just translate the first statement into the second in your own head. If there was something you could have done, well by God you can now feel guilty because you didn’t do it. Rational? No, but very human.

As an example of victim blaming, just recently there was an incident in which a woman who works for Google was at a tech convention and a man shoved his hand inside of her underwear and tried to force further sexual contact. I’ve seen a lot of comments elsewhere on the web pointing out that she’d been drinking and had “laid in the laps of fabulous people” before it occurred and so the man should be excused for thinking his assault would be welcome.

135

Fair enough.

136

Anyone who disagrees with anything Jimmy said is a victim-blaming piece of shit. Reread his post many, many times. Shut the fuck up and you might learn something.

What a great post, thanks Jimmy for showing that some people actually fucking get it. :smiley:

137

It isn’t that anybody objects to the idea of telling people to be safe, MeanOldLady. Obviously people should be safe whenever they can, and good show to anybody who encourages that.

It’s that telling people to be safe is at best orthogonal to a conversation about rape in general, and it gets pushed as if it’s of primary importance. That’s when it gets frustrating. It always comes up, and nearly always from the mouths of people prone to trivializing the issue in other ways, as if it was a universal solution, when in fact an absence of normal safety precautions would prevent a vanishingly small number of rapes. It rises to the level of victim blaming when somebody keeps insisting on it. It’s frankly pretty out of place when talking about the pervasiveness of rape - it really is mostly irrelevant to rape prevention. It’s common sense if you’re talking to your 16 year old daughter, sure, but that isn’t the context here.

And so yeah, we should encourage people to be aware of danger. But in this context it’s very difficult to disentangle that suggestion from the suggestion that rape is to some extent or another down to bad choices by the victim. I mean, just take a look at the group of people pushing that angle, and check out their other, uh, theories. It’s not 100% nutjobs, but it’s a high enough number that I think it’s fair to be suspicious.

edit: 1. I guess this was already covered. 2. that’s not sarcasm, right, rachel? I’m going with not sarcasm.

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editing

139

Not sarcasm. I’m really glad that someone managed to sum up that there is no dichotomy between victim-blaming and talking about how women should protect themselves; they are the same goddamn thing. The best way to prevent rapes is to prevent rapists from raping women, you dumb victim-blaming fucks (I’m looking at you, MeanOldLady).

In the past, I didn’t understand why a woman in this day/age could possibly blame female victims of rape for not properly protecting themselves. Now I see that it’s a smokescreen to make themselves feel invincible according to the just-world hypothesis.

The best way of looking at it, in my opinion, is that there are two primary kinds of rapists. The stranger-raper, and the date-raper. Once a stranger-raper decides to rape someone… he’s going to rape someone. If he can’t find a drunk stumbler readily available, he’ll break into a house and rape the first woman he sees; he’ll hide in the gutter and ambush the first woman who comes by walking her dog. He’ll visit random ladies in the nursing home with the intent to rape them. ETC

The date-raper is someone you know (friend or date), and is going to rape you no matter what you do.

Conclusion: There is **no **reliable way to protect yourself from rape. This is why we must focus on stopping rapists, and anything else is 100% victim-blaming bullshit.

140

It should be obvious, but when people say things like this

and this

it makes it seem as though people who encourage safety are inherently (even if implicitly) blaming the victim, which is very false.

At best? I believe we are agreed that many instances of rape include perfectly normal, low-to-no risk behaviors, and telling people to be cautious wouldn’t have prevented their rapes. I do not think pressing safety precautions is at best incidental to rape prevention, no more than I think telling people not to meander through unknown dangerous neighborhoods with valuables is incidental to assault prevention. As someone mentioned earlier, Stranger Danger is wildly overblown, and if you’re going to be raped, assaulted or stolen from, it’s probably going to be from someone you know. Still, and it’s possible I’m mischaracterizing some points of view, it seemed to me like some hold telling people to be careful is essentially the same as blaming the victim. Also, I’ve apparently come across *far *less actual victim-blaming than you have in real life.

:dubious: Am I seriously supposed to write up a response to this stupid bitch?