I have a class assignment where I need to discuss the ethics/morals of a controversial issue. What do you think about slut shaming?
Sorry, we don’t help with homework assignments. Reported.
Really?
I think it’s great. Should be more of it. Put that in your class assignment. Should get you an A+.
We don’t do homework assignments, but we’re willing to help with them, as I understand it.
It would be impossible to have a General Questions or Great Debates if we were unwilling to help people do homework. We cannot, after all, know every possible homework question or debate prompt, and a number of our evergreen topics are used in schools for the same reasons they’re chestnuts here: They’re relevant, engaging topics which are easy to say interesting things about, even after decades or centuries of debate.
Aside from that, getting help with sources and using debate partners to straighten out an argument is hardly cheating. The student is putting in the effort and earning the grade. Where we draw the line is where we always draw the line: When someone is obviously not even trying and is therefore not going to be very interesting to converse with. Which, as it happens, seems to be anon12’s problem: they’re just naming a topic and saying “go!”, which is a bit less than what we expect of OPs around these parts. This doesn’t have much to do with their homework, as we dislike old people who do the same thing. Laziness is laziness.
I don’t think it’s a very good choice for a class discussion. You can’t go all that far with it and, if you have to read it out, you might get heckled by your classmates, especially if it’s not a well disciplined class.
The rules, - here
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/faq.php?faq=vb3_board_faq#faq_sdmb_rules
- say this:
“Please do not ask other members to do your homework or provide input for your article, paper, or other off-board project. We may waive this rule if you obtain prior permission from a moderator or administrator.”
That would seem to disallow asking our input on slut shaming (which is a dumb topic anyway, as others have pointed out).
Of course, if the mods want to rule it in-bounds it’s no skin off my nose.
You want a moral argument for slut shaming? That would certainly be controversial in a college environment. Your fellow students would probably throw things at you.
One argument would be that slut shaming could be useful for constructing stable societies. It’s men’s way of guarding against paternity uncertainty and women’s way of policing the sexual marketplace and protecting their value. But it doesn’t follow that its utility holds in the age of readily available birth control and women’s liberation. At this point conservative rhetoric usually points to the precautionary principle or negative aspects of promiscuity, such as the high incidence of single motherhood and its attendant social ills, STDs, or the welfare state. There are liberal responses to those but then you’re really getting off track into the role of the state and so on.
Slut shaming is often a more immediate means of social and political control, particularly in more conservative and religious cultures, from denouncing protest groups to whipping and stoning in the most extreme forms. Justification for this can get pretty outlandish (the Iranian cleric who blamed adulterous women for earthquakes). If anything, looking at modern societies the best places to live have the least slut shaming. You’d have to find a way to explain that.
I’d do another topic. Maybe animal ethics, suicide, anti-natalism, voluntary human extinction, something like that.
I think shut slamming is a worthy topic of discussion.
I shut slam ONLY when I’m really pissed-off though. It’s not something you want to do on a regular basis, because not only does it lose it’s emotional power if you do it all the time, you might weaken your door jambs and that would be no good at all.
What?
What? You know what.
Shut slamming is dangerous. If someone has their fingers in the door they could sustain a serious injury. Horseplay with doors is an absolute no-no in our house
Tsk, tsk, tsk.
There’s no mention of such a thing. The OP needs to discuss the ethics and morals of it, not make a moral argument for or against it. And of course there are ethical and moral points around this issue. It’s a long way from being black-and-white. The most obvious talking point is the one that is brought up every time this is discussed: the total inability to suggest that women have any responsibility at all in minimising their risk of becoming a victim of crime, but only if the crime is sexual.
If a woman leaves her car unlocked outside a notoriously bad bar at three o’clock in the morning with a $2000 laptop sitting on the front seat, and it gets broken into, the standard response from the whole world is “she deserved it”.
If a woman writes her PIN on her bank card, and it gets stolen and her account emptied, at the very least the response will be “she shouldn’t have been so careless, everyone knows that’s risky”.
And almost nobody considers those responses to be inappropriate. Indeed banks and police issue official notices with advice against those very acts all the time because they put people at a high risk of becoming victims of crime.
But if a woman gets drunk, dresses in skimpy clothing, does the horizontal bum-n-grind with a dozen complete strangers and then passes out in the back alley behind a notoriously bad bar at three o’clock in the morning, nobody can suggest she is in any way responsible if she becomes the victim of crime without being accused of “slut shaming”.
That’s a fairly obvious ethical discussion point: should a person bear any responsibility at all for avoiding becoming the victim of crime crime? If they do not, then why do we accept the “shaming” of the victims of assault, theft, fraud and every non-sexual crime but have street protests against “slut shaming”? And if they do, then why is any suggestion that women can avoid becoming the victims of sexual crimes branded as “slut shaming”?
Do you honestly think that millenials are so intolerant, narrow minded and violent? 
I don’t think “slut shaming” refers to what you think it refers to, Blake.
Men who sleep around are ‘studs’.
Women who sleep around are ‘sluts’.
:smack:
Only if they’re tops.
Do you have any reason to believe that? Because millions of people disagree with you. For instance, the issue that really popularised the term:
How about:
[I wasn’t inclined to like Emily Yoffe’s recent Slate column, entitled “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk.”… Yoffe’s argument — that female binge drinking enables rapists — puts the blame for sexual assault in the victim’s hands. I for one have seen quite enough victim-blaming this year. “
Nobody forced her to drink … What did she expect to happen at one in the morning after sneaking out?” The obvious answer is: Not rape. Perhaps she should have expected a hangover. Maybe she should have expected to be grounded. She definitely should not have expected to be sexually assaulted.](slut shaming Archives - Brown Political Review)
Is that clear enough for you? An article that says that a woman who drinks herself to the point of unconsciousness at 3 o’clock in the morning should not expect to be sexually assaulted is on a page titled “Slut Shaming” and states that such a repsonse is victim blaming. It references another article that says that “women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them” and the author states outright that such a statement is victim blaming and it is wrong to suggest that female binge drinking enables rapists.
How much more explicit can I make it? Suggesting that a woman is in any way to blame for being sexually assaulted, ever, is slut shaming. Stating that a woman who passes out drunk anywhere can expect to get raped is slut shaming. Stating taht a woman can in any way provoke sexual assault is slut shaming.
In contrast, suggesting that a woman is to blame for writing her PIN on her bank card is standard bank policy. Stating that a woman who leaves her car unlocked with valuables on the seat can expect to to get them stolen is utterly uncontroversial. Stating that a man who swore at another man’s girlfriend provoked a punch in the nose is so normal it’s passe.
I’m quite happy to bury you under cites if you like. But first I would like one single reference to support your position that this is not what slut shaming refers to. Just one. Not a reference that talks about other things that slut shaming refers to. A reference that says tha this is not one of the things that slut shaming refers to. Because millions of people disagree with you.
Women who expose their genitals are liberated. Men who expose their genitals are perverts. :smack:
Women who become pregnant without the consent of their partners are “single mothers” if they give birth and “exercising their rights” if they adopt out or abort the child. If the man wants nothing to do with the kid, he’s a “Deadbeat Dad”.:smack:
And so on and so forth.
The problem with the “slut shaming is unforgivable” crowd is that
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they tend to hear “your behaviour was sub-optimal in your own interests” as “you are to blame for what occurred”, yet these are not equivalents;
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they adopt a zero-sum game attitude towards blame ie they seem to assume that to say she has some blame necessarily means he is less to blame, yet blame isn’t finite, and
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they tend to hear “maybe in your own interests you shouldn’t do X” as “stop oppressing me I’ll do whatever I want” but actually there is no contradiction between someone being entitled to do something, and it being a bad idea for them to do it.
The other side of the coin is that there is perhaps too much focus on the blameworthiness of the victim for probably two reasons. Firstly there is an unintended underplaying of the blameworthiness of the criminal, not because people think that the criminal isn’t to blame but because that the criminal’s blameworthiness is so obvious no one bothers to talk about it. Secondly, many people do frown on certain kinds of female behaviour [for reasons that are a long and controversial essay in themselves] and so such people use rape and sexual assault as a kind of “serves you right, I told you so” club to bash females over the head with.
There’s plenty of blame to go around.
Geez, we get it; you’ve got a Ph.D. anon12 is just doing an undergraduate thing on slut-shaming. They might not even be a misogyny major!
This is an excellent post.
As to that first point, though, if you operate on the assumption that “the criminal’s blameworthiness is so obvious” you’ll run into a number of other contradictions. The criminal justice system certainly doesn’t behave that way, either historically or right now. All of these “are they victim-blaming or not” commentaries, whether or not that’s how everyone always intends them, are things that you’ll hear on a regular basis from police, from prosecutors, from judges and from legislators in connection with sexual assault.
Meanwhile, if you operate on the assumption that actually a lot of people’s victim-blaming actually is a zero-sum thing, and that those people actually aren’t blaming the criminal, to a degree that is commensurate with the extent to which they are blaming the victim, those contradictions go away. And that’s the source of all the frustration from victim’s advocates when it comes to victim-blaming. Of course I believe you, Princhester, if you say that when you talk about what a victim was wearing, or what party she went to, you’re building a firewall in your head and you actually just take it as a given that the person who raped her is 100% culpable and should have the book thrown at him, and there’s nothing else to say about that so you aren’t saying anything about it on a message board.
It’s just that once or twice a month, I hear the same stuff out of the mouth of a police officer who is refusing to follow up on a complaint for exactly the same reasons. So they must not be doing the same thing you’re doing.