Here’s a thought experiment: some woman invents a small holographic projection device that a woman can clip onto her belt, and then when she presses a button, it changes her outward appearance. For yada yada reasons you can’t use it to actually like go to a party and interact with people and look different, but it will be 100% effective at changing your appearance to strangers while walking around outside. For more yada yada reasons you can’t use it to alter your apparent gender.
But you CAN use it to quickly and instantly make yourself appear to be older, change your level of apparent attractiveness, or change what you appear to be wearing. So an attractive young woman could get all dressed up in some nice clubbing clothes, but at the click of a button appear to be an old, unattractive woman while walking from her house to the subway, while on the subway, and while walking from the subway to the club. Then at the club, bam, she’s herself again, and then again, click of the button, same illusion for the walk home.
And one more bit of the hypothetical… this invention is a closely guarded secret that only women know about, so no reason for potential attackers to doubt the illusion at all.
So, women of this thread: are there situations (depending on where a woman lives and/or her habits) in which you would think it prudent/reasonable for a woman to use this device?
I have a tendency to start with a point and expand on it. And if you read the later replies, they point out that the testing of rape kits revealed that one in five rapists is a serial rapist. As for the rest, look at how many coincidences again have to align for them to complete a rape. We look at victims as being unsuccessful in protecting themselves, but we need to regard those other rapists as predators.
As a general comment, there was an FBI agent who remarked that so many rapists in court would say, “Her? She’s one of mine?” They didn’t even care or remember about her appearance. Her situation was the relevant factors.
They were looking at those factors that they could manipulate around her till she was vulnerable enough to attack.
As far as the “Don’t wear this, ladies,” guys how do they explain the rape of elderly women, babies, children, and women in burkas?
No. Not at all. Drag-em-in-an-alley rape, along with other types of violent assault, appears to be overwhelmingly a crime of opportunity.
You probably don’t believe me. You probably think I’m just saying that. But I’ve been all different levels of attractiveness in my life, and I’ve never felt more at risk from stranger assault because of my relative attractiveness.
Back in my younger days, I longed for temporaryinvisibility. There used to be a time when I couldn’t go outside for five minutes without some peanut-headed guy leaning out of the passenger window of his best friend’s ride, trying to holler at me.
Even now that I’m not young, I still manage to catch uncouth male attention occasionally. Not too long ago, a guy old enough to be my father stalked me for a good twenty minutes, giving me his life history and an exposition on why I should go out on a date with him.
Those experiences are annoying for me. Sometimes they are scary. Like, with that older guy I was afraid his stalking was going to turn into a thing. But I wasn’t afraid of him raping me. I was afraid of him following me like a puppy dog day after day.
Guys shouting, “Hey shortie! You wanna ride?” is not an act of violence. It is not a crime, and I wouldn’t even want to make it one. Because I can appreciate that lots of women love that kind of attention. No woman wants to be raped.
You don’t give us a cost of this magical device. I think for this sidetrack to be relevant to the conversation, you need to present the costs.
I would again caution about throwing around these numbers. Test kit analyses suggests 1/5 rapists is a serial rapist, but people who go and get a rape kit performed are not a randomized sample of rape victims. My hunch is that it leans more toward rape by strangers.
I don’t want to assume you think old and unattractive women are immune from attacks, but…is that we’re youre going with this?
Sure, there might be some narrow set of hypothetical circumstances in which I would prefer to present as an less enticing target. But old and unattractive is the last thing I opt for, because these qualities don’t preclude looking vulnerable. If I were truly in a scary situation, I’d add 50lbs of muscle to my appearance and give myself ripped arms like a boxer.
Honestly, though, I can’t readily see myself eschewing my appearance even in a scary situation. Looking young and attractive has lot of benefits that shouldn’t be overlooked. For every bad guy who wants to do harm to a pretty woman, there is a good guy that might rush to her rescue if they hear her screaming. And these good guys pay attention even from a far. Being older and unattractive often makes you invisible, and that has consequences in both directions.
Oh, I’d probably use the hell out of that thing, because there are SO many life situations where being able to change one’s appearance would be supremely convenient. Avoiding unwanted attention would be one of the top reasons. But I’m not sure that avoiding assault would be one of them. And if I wanted to avoid assault, the LAST person I would morph into is a little old lady. I wouldn’t do that because I think it would make me more vulnerable to assault, and a little old lady is more likely to be victimized than a sober healthy 25 year old, even if she’s pretty. It’s about vulnerability.
Anyway, read what I posted about studies showing most rapists have felony criminal records, if not for rape then other violent crimes. So I think the best case that you can make for your device is that if you encounter a criminal while wearing your device he might knock you down and steal your purse and beat you up but not rape you. But, even then, You might encounter a violent criminal that’s in a robbery mood instead of a rape mood, and he might pick the little old lady over the pretty girl.
My hunch is that there is a lot of rape that goes unreported BECAUSE lots of victims know their attackers. I know I’d be more reluctant to accuse someone I see on a regular basis of rape than a perfect stranger. Especially if that someone is an upstanding pillar in the community–the altar choir chess club boy. Because then I would have to endure being called a lying whore by the whole town. Being raped by a stranger doesn’t come with that shitty baggage.
That’s kinda my thinking. As a teenager I was pretty femme, and had a couple of pretty scary encounters in alleys. The way I changed my appearance after that wasn’t to get ripped, it was to learn to hunch forward, stride angrily, glower, and mutter under my breath when I was walking alone at night, trying to project a “not worth fucking with crazyperson” vibe.
But that has nothing to do with how much cleavage I was showing.
@onstro:
That’s what I was thinking, actually, too. I am not sure what you’re disagreeing with. I merely said that rape victims who report and get rape kits done are not a randomized sample and you should hesitate extrapolating it to rape victims in general.
But the point of the study was that these were rape kits that weren’t prosecuted specifically because the rapist was already known. So that’s a non-random factor headed the other way.
I agree it’s not random but the confounding variables are not simple.
I may be confused about what point you’re trying to make here, but if we were absolutely confident in that stat, then I think it would actually argue strongly AGAINST you. That is, if 20% of rapes were committed by serial rapists, and if each serial rapist committed multiple rapes (which is a tautology), then the vast vast majority of rapists (ie, person-who-commits-at-least-one-rape) would NOT be serial rapists.
Sorry if this comes off as rude, but that’s a fairly spurious objection. I don’t think anyone (in this thread or elsewhere) has said “if you dress conservatively (and follow other so-called-common-sense safety advice), you will be 100% safe from rape”.
Do you have a quote for that. It is definitely not the impression I’m getting from endthebacklog.org – some were, some weren’t cases of “we know who did it”. For instance
In post 301, an FBI agent, no less is cited talking about “provocative clothing.”
I find it odd that people—not you---- are apparently assuming that the rapists who committed just one rape----hell, the ones who committed more than one----didn’t plan and execute that plan.
And oh Board? Stop bloody logging me out while I’m typing out a bloody reply.
I’m not claiming that every rapist is a seasoned serial rapist. That’s mathematically impossible, there’s a first time for everything. I’m saying that men that find that they are capable of acting on that impulse and raping a woman tend to do it again, and that committing rape requires a degree of sociopathology (is that even a word?) that most men do not possess.
Come to think of it, it’s kind of like adultery in that respect. There are guys that cheat on their wives, and guys that don’t— and the ones that do it once tend to do it again. Once you’ve crossed that line once you keep crossing it.
I’m not going to say that all serial rapes are preplanned crimes. There may be guys that go out with lots of women without raping them, but have a trigger (maybe being teased by a woman wearing provocative clothing or a women that looks like his mean big sister), that causes them to rape maybe once every year or so. That guy is still a rapist.
All I’m saying is that most guys aren’t capable of actually raping a woman, and that the guys that are capable tend to do it more than once. The fact that some men have lustful, even violent fantasies, about underdressed women is not relevant to me. It’s normal, acting on those fantasies isn’t.
It’s not the rapists that are the problem, if we took it seriously. Which we don’t. It’s all the guys who step up to defend guys they don’t even know and accuse the accusers of lying. Accuse a guy of rape? You’re lying. How many of those guys are there per rapist? They NEVER defend women from being falsely accused, only men.
But it’s part of the same thing, right? For whatever reason, we don’t treat rape like other crimes. Maybe it’s because it’s perceived as so gendered: even though it’s not true in reality, the social idea of rape demands that the rapist is a man and the victim is female. So when you hear a story about rape, unlike theft or murder or any other crime, the gender roles are inherent to the story. So when men hear a story about rape they always identify with the accused rapist on some level. Women always identify with the victim. I don’t think this is true about other crimes. Hearing a story about a rape, most men don’t think “that could be me” about the rape. I mean, in popular culture, it’s always phrased as “that could be my wife/daughter”, because that’s as close as a man can come to projecting himself into that narrative in the role of the woman. Our society really, really discourages men from directly identifying as women.
So men seek to understand rape as “why would I do that?” and imagine ways to reduce rape that would prevent them from doing that–a thing they would never do in the first place. And when there’s an accusation of rape, they think “what if I was the one accused?” They know they would be innocent, so they approach the situation from that perspective. If, on the other hand, a person was robbed or murdered or mugged and a man accused, it’s much more possible to identify with the victim–which means the rapist is “other” and they don’t worry about false accusations.
Race plays a big role in this, too. A lot of people can’t identify as members of a race their culture oppresses, so then it’s easy to believe accusations of rape, and to attribute very different motivations to them.
Elderly women, babies, and children’s chances of being raped are far less than others. 65% of rapes happen to women between the ages of 15 and 24. A woman is more likely to get raped between the ages of 15 and 19 then after 30.