So, according to you, someone who advises women to avoid high-risk behavior is running a protection racket, and according to Jimmy Chitwood, anyone who says “there are things you can do to reduce your risk of rape besides complaining about the patriarchy” is a rapist.
Uh huh.
Regards,
Shodan
Sure. But the question of what “precautions” we are willing to accept as being “sensible and necessary” and “common sense” is not just some arbitrary law of nature: it’s part of how we set up and maintain our society.
For example, as even sven pointed out, in most residential areas we consider the “sensible and necessary precautions” required to protect our property to be pretty minimal. In some places elsewhere in the world, “sensible and necessary precautions” include walled communities, armed guards, 24-hour alarm systems, etc.
What precautions you consider reasonable and “sensible” says a lot about what kind of society you live in. If most Americans had to put up with the necessity for walled communities and armed guards, etc., just to have a reasonable expectation of safety in our own homes, we’d probably be pretty damn angry about it.
Likewise, there is nothing natural, necessary or inevitable about the danger of drink-drugging for women going to bars or parties. When I was a young adult in the early 1980s, nobody took the precaution of “watching their drink like a hawk” at all times during campus parties, because drink-tampering as an aid to sexual assault was pretty much unheard of.
We as a society have now decided that drink-tampering as an aid to sexual assault is a reasonable danger that women in particular should just have to live with when they go to bars or parties, and that watching their drink like a hawk at all times is just a “sensible and necessary precaution” that women should expect to take the responsibility for. If women get angry about that unjust and rape-normalizing expectation, we tut-tut about how irresponsible they’re being.
[QUOTE=Novelty Bobble]
If I knowingly went into a bar frequented be football fans, on match day, wearing a rival’s shirt and was hassled (or even assualted) because of that, I would say that I had opportunity to lessen the risk and didn’t take it. The arseholes that hassled me are of course fully responsible for their actions and I did not “deserve” it but surely I would have been wise to consider my options.
[/quote]
Sure. But again, as in Blake’s example above, you are asymmetrically comparing a special precaution that you need to take in an unusual circumstance with restrictions placed on women’s behavior routinely.
Refraining from wearing a specific “Team A” item of clothing into a specific “Team B” bar on the specific day of the match between Teams A and B is nowhere near as restrictive as what women are told to do constantly as “sensible and necessary precautions” to guard against sexual assault.
For example, suppose you were told that you should avoid going into any bar on any day if you happened to be wearing anything that vaguely resembled Team A’s colors, because there was a good chance that a Team B supporter might hassle or assault you. Would you just accept that much more draconian restriction as a reasonable “sensible and necessary precaution”?
Or would you get kind of pissed off that Team B supporters get so much power to harass and intimidate Team A supporters in the ordinary behavior of their everyday lives?
[QUOTE=Novelty Bobble]
In a nutshell, are you saying that we shouldn’t teach our children how to behave and how to avoid risk? or are you merely wishing that it wasn’t necessary in the first place?
[/QUOTE]
Well, if you’d read my post thoroughly you’d have seen that I said very clearly that I’m not saying that women shouldn’t take such risk-avoidance precautions.
But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t think long and hard about why we just blithely accept such unfair and burdensome precautions as “necessary”, as though women’s high risk of sexual assault even under ordinary social circumstances is just a natural and inevitable hazard of human life.
I know you did. I asked you how you thought the boys would react if given similar, hypothetical rules to be hypervigilant against a different danger, i.e., pickpocketing instead of sexual assault.
You misunderstood, as usual. Telling somebody it’s their responsibility to ensure that somebody else doesn’t commit a crime against them is wrong, whether you’re a business owner shaming your firebombed neighbor for not paying their protection money, or a bystander shaming a rape victim for wearing short skirts and/or getting drunk.
When we know that we’ve got a population of would-be criminals ready to commit violence against potential victims who refuse to pay protection money, we don’t tut-tut about how it’s the potential victims’ “responsibility” to pay up as a “sensible and necessary precaution” to “reduce their risk”.
But when we know that we’ve got a population of would-be criminals ready to commit sexual assault against potential victims who fail to be hypervigilant, suddenly we seem to think that the important thing is to emphasize the potential victims’ “responsibility” to be constantly hypervigilant as a “sensible and necessary precaution” to “reduce their risk”.
Again, nobody is saying that it’s not smart for women to take such precautions. What we’re saying is that it’s hella sexist to react to the problem of high risk of rape by focusing on such precautions as the responsibility of the potential victims, rather than by focusing on the responsibility of the potential rapists to refrain from raping people.
Good thing no one suggested “rather than” instead of “in addition to”.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ll suggest that unless you’re talking to mentally impaired people (or children) and you make sure to highlight the fact that it’s absolutely never their fault if they are raped or sexually assaulted (and that no one ever deserves it), then you’re being disrespectful to victims and women in general, in my opinion.
This is an idealism vs. pragmatism thread.
Ideally, rapists would never rape, and terrorists would never attack. But the fact is that they will.
So there will always be a need for anti-rape measures, just like there will always be a need for the TSA/CIA/NSA/FBI.
The moral fault lies with the perpetrator, but pragmatism requires anti-perp measures.
Great. Now imagine it’s not that you wore the wrong shirt to the wrong place, but rather that you were simply recognized somehow (maybe your team alliances are stamped on your forehead at birth?) and it wasn’t just the wrong bar, but all bars. Indeed, all public places. You were guilty of being you, in the vicinity of people who feel that raping you is “ok,” and you were raped as a result. Maybe you should have worn a hat, so people couldn’t see that you are a fan of whatever team you like. Maybe you shouldn’t have gone to a bar.
The problem with the example I highlighted above is that you could have avoided being hassled or assaulted by simple wardrobe choice. I can’t avoid the risk of rape entirely by not wearing a skirt. I may be able to lessen the risk, in your opinion, but eh. Maybe not. Plenty of women get raped who weren’t wearing skirts. I can maybe lessen the risk by watching my drink like a hawk, but eh. Plenty of women get raped even if they don’t drink at all. I guess I could avoid going out in public altogether. Eh. I had someone break into my house once, and a friend of mine had a serial rapist break into her house and rape her. So what’s the solution? You can choose not to wear a team shirt. What can I do? At what point does “well, you should not dress like that in public” become you “shouldn’t be a woman, because that makes you vulnerable?”
Yes, I understand that you think it is disrespectful to tell people to avoid high-risk behavior. The trouble is, it’s not.
Precisely because women are not children, or mentally defective. They are not helpless, and they do not have passively to accept that nothing can be done at anything but a societal level.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s not an “unjust and rape-normalizing” precaution. It’s just a precaution that people advise to take based on the reality around them. There’s nothing “rape-normalizing” in saying : “things are this way, so you should take this precaution”, not anymore that telling you that you should lock your door when you leave your home is “burglary-normalizing”. And if women are angry, they should be angry at the reality, not at the people who point at this reality. Nice way of shooting the messenger. People giving advices aren’t normalizing anything. They’re describing facts.
Assuming that it’s actually facts, rather than their paranoïa talking. Because I’m not convinced at all that spiking drinks with drugs is so common that women should watch their drinks like hawks. But whether they’re right or not, warning about this perceived danger is in no conceivable way condoning rape.
These aren’t incompatible. You can both be pissed at team B supporters unchecked power to harass and take precautions which would indeed be “sensible and necessary” if the situation is that bad. It might be sensible and necessary even when you think that in an ideal world it wouldn’t be “sensible and necessary”.
What you can’t do is blaming the person who tells you that in this neighborhood it’s dangerous to wear the colors of team A and accusing him of condoning and normalizing hooliganism. This person was just trying to be nice and to prevent harm. Once again you’re shooting a perfectly innocent and well-intended messenger.
You might think that people should reflect long and hard about hooliganism, but you cannot point the finger at people who say that hooliganism exists. As you mentioned yourself, basic safety precautions in some countries is living in a guarded compound. Doing so is “sensible and necessary” in these places, and the department of state warning you about this situation when you travel to this country isn’t “normalizing violent crime”.
Some other poster made a comparison with drivers, and it’s exactly the same. When there are threads about bad drivers, road rage or such, the advice given here is typically “drive defensively” or “better wrong than dead”. Definitely not “there are dangerously bad drivers out there, but you should act as if they didn’t exist”. Warning about dangers, and giving advices about how to minimize this risk isn’t supporting/partaking in “rape culture” or “burglary culture” or “drunk driving culture”.
If this is responding to me, I’m not sure how, since it doesn’t seem to attempt to refute anything I said. I don’t believe it’s necessarily disrespectful to tell someone to avoid high-risk behavior (though it sometimes is – you’ll probably agree with me that telling granny “don’t whore yourselves out to sailors on the docks” is disrespectful), and I don’t believe women are helpless, nor do I believe they have to passively accept that nothing can be done at anything but a societal level.
Could you, kind of, make up your mind?
And I have not seen your answer to this -
In what way is reducing the incidence of rape not “fighting rape”?
Regards,
Shodan
Apparently it’s a pointless reductivism thread now too.
There’s nothing pragmatic about repeated insistence on “advice” that isn’t effective at accomplishing the thing it’s supposedly intended to do. Pragmatic anti-assault intervention measures are not targeted at victims.
You know, like those silly idealists have been saying.
Not close to what I said.
However, since you asked so nicely for my response on the matter: wouldn’t place any bets against you.
Regards.
They don’t conflict – that’s why I used words like “don’t… necessarily” and have an “unless” for my exceptions.
I answered this question directly in #197.
Except that in actual practice, all these discussions seem to have a “rather than” instead of “in addition to” bias. People pay lip service to the idea that it’s also important to stress the responsibility of rapists not to rape, but what they actually seem to care about and want to talk about is the importance of stressing the responsibility of women to take anti-rape precautions.
Like I said, the type and extent of precautions that you think are “realistic” and “reasonable” to take against a certain risk reflect the type of society you live in.
If I told you that when you leave your home you should not only lock your door but have an armed guard with attack dogs on round-the-clock duty to protect it, you would probably be appalled at the idea of such extreme measures being “reasonable precautions”.
If you lived in a society where people of your racial identity needed armed guards with attack dogs to have a reasonable expectation of protecting their property, while people of other races only had to lock their doors, you would probably be pretty pissed off at the blatant injustice of that discrepancy.
If somebody who was advising you to get the armed guards and attack dogs, because of your racial vulnerability to housebreaking, just blithely accepted it as normal and unremarkable that a different-race person wouldn’t need to take such precautions, you might even be a bit annoyed at this person’s apparent indifference to injustice.
:rolleyes: Another asymmetric comparison between specific precautions to take in identified specific circumstances, and the constant restrictions placed on women’s ordinary everyday behavior.
Yes, when you encounter a drunk or road-ragey driver on the road, you should absolutely use defensive measures to protect your safety for the few seconds or minutes that you’re near them. Just as when a woman actually encounters someone trying to sexually assault her, she should take all the recommended defensive measures to protect herself.
But suppose you were constantly being expected to take “routine precautions” like these?
“Never drive after dark if you can possibly avoid it, because there are more drunk drivers on the road then!”
“Always have another person in your car when you drive, to alert you to erratic or road-ragey behavior on the part of other drivers!”
“Never change lanes if another car is less than ten car-lengths behind you, because they might get road-ragey from your moving in front of them! It’s better to keep driving in the other lane, even if you miss your exit, till you can safely change lanes with no following cars anywhere near you!”
“Never drive within half a mile of a bar before closing time, because that’s where a higher percentage of drunk drivers are likely to be found! Always know the locations and closing times of all bars near your route, so you’re aware of the places to avoid!”
“It’s your responsibility to take these precautions to reduce the risks to your safety! These are just reasonable reactions to the reality around you!”
Would you say “Yup, better to be safe than sorry, it’s a pity that this is the way things are but this is just a matter of taking sensible precautions!”?
Or would you be more inclined to react with “Why the fuck should I have to be constantly and drastically modifying my behavior to avoid the possible consequences of other people’s criminal acts? If drunk and road-ragey drivers are such a huge danger, why aren’t the police cracking down on them? Why should I have to avoid so much of ordinary driving in my everyday life just so criminals won’t harm me?”?
And again, remember that these precautions are being presented as specific to your own group identity in a supposedly equal and free society. Members of other identity groups aren’t being targeted by drunk and road-ragey drivers anywhere near as much as you are, and you’re being told it’s your responsibility to compensate for that with draconian restrictions on your own everyday behavior.
Imagine if these were typical responses to a driver being killed or injured by another driver who was drunk or road-ragey:
“Well, it’s a terrible thing to happen, but he should have known better than to be out on the highway after dark on a holiday weekend.”
“I’m not excusing road-rage, but everyone knows it’s risky to drive on a crowded commuter route at rush hour. If you have to take back roads or wait an hour or so to go home, it might be inconvenient, but it’s better than exposing yourself to that kind of risk.”
“Oh, it was definitely the drunk driver’s fault, but what on earth was she thinking, driving right through a green light without even slowing down? Drunk drivers frequently run red lights from cross streets, so it’s your responsibility to make sure you don’t get hit when you go through an intersection, even if you have the right of way!”
Yet people seem to have no problem applying that kind of tut-tuttery to victims of rape for not having sufficiently or successfully restricted their own law-abiding activities to protect themselves against the criminal acts of others.
The only “rather than” that ever comes up is from the side that says we can never tell women how to reduce their risk, because that’s slut shaming. You know - your side.
Regards,
Shodan
Strawman, as usual. Nobody is actually saying that “we can never tell women how to reduce their risk” of being victims of sexual assault “because that’s slut shaming”.
What we’re saying is that constantly framing the discussion of sexual assault to emphasize the responsibility of women to take constant hypervigilant precautions to reduce their risk is a form of slut shaming.
As with the analogous examples of “driver shaming” remarks that I posted above, the problem with that approach is that it skews the responsibility issue from the criminal to the victim. Because it focuses on how the victim “should” have taken extreme measures to avoid the consequences of other people’s criminal acts, while disregarding the extent to which such measures hamper and restrict the victim’s ordinary and fully legal activities.
who exactly on this thread has made an argument that even remotely comes close to the comments above?
Nobody that I know of. I didn’t claim that any posters on this thread are explicitly slut-shaming rape victims.
What I do claim is that several posters on this thread are distorting the responsibility issue by using false analogies between certain specific risk-avoidance measures applied in specific situations and the constant severe restrictions on everyday behavior that are prescribed for women as “sensible and necessary” anti-rape “precautions”. And that is part of a general societal tendency to slut-shaming around the issue of sexual assault.