Its also damaging to young men. The logic circuits go “if a woman makes herself attractive, she must want sex. Therefore, she is consenting. If she didn’t want sex, she wouldn’t make herself attractive to avoid being raped” Since a lot of rape is date rape or acquaintance rape, that’s a damaging. It isn’t GOOD logic, but some men don’t think too well when sex is involved. That, along with “a good girl says no, even when she means yes” and other just plain wrong setups for male female interaction just bring trouble. That’s the other side of the victim blaming - if she didn’t want it, she wouldn’t have dressed like that. And yet, the existence of women getting raped wearing burqas or in Victorian times where the defence is “she showed ankle” pretty much says that no matter how much women give into that logic, men will always take a glimpse of an ankle or a wrist as consent. There is no amount of body covering that keeps us safe - because once we cover our bodies, even the hint of the female form still creates the excuse.
We need to break the belief that women make themselves attractive to appeal to men. And yes, they do, but they also do it for a lot of other reasons (like to drive the have gotten fat cheerleaders crazy when you show up to your 15th high school reunion looking like you never did in high school - yeah, women can be petty that way).
YOU think it’s valuable because you’re not affected by it.
“Against Our Will” Susan Brownmiller.
“Men on Rape,” Timothy Beneke.
“Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes,” Helen Benedict.
“The Best Kept Secret: the sexual abuse of children.” Florence Rush.
Why is it that guys seem to strenuously avoid information about rape, yet demand womens’ time and labor, only to reject the majority of it?
Rape is caused by rapists, not skimpy outfits.
Put a hundred scantily-dressed women in a room. Nobody gets raped.
Put a rapist in that room.
Of course, if rape is “caused” by skimpy outfits, then it can be blamed on women, while men are put in the position of creatures who react to stimuli yet are somehow more fit to lead the country than women-----who don’t get violent at the sight of clothing.
No, don’t make a joke about that. There are rape victims posting and reading.
I hear what you are saying, but for me it’s like you don’t want to have the meaningful discussion. You want to quibble over this one pedantic point, which is that to some degree a woman can control her vulnerability to rape by reducing her attractiveness. I may be conflating you and Max’s views here, but it seems like where ever we take the discussion, that’s the point that is interesting to men. I feel like it’s a mostly settled question–maybe a little, but not enough to justify restrictions on how women act–but y’all are being very very pedantic about how are we sure there is NO connection? Not even a little?
Again, if we were talking about bullying and bullying prevention, how hung up would you be on whether BMI/attractiveness made a difference for victims there? Would that be the most interesting part? I don’t think so, even though it’s fundamentally the same issue. I think the reason why this is different is that hot women and the story of a hot woman is more interesting, and because talking about what gets rapists’ dicks twitching is interesting. Activating. The other possible reason is that if there is any connection at all, it provides a pretext to control women’s lives in the name of common sense safety.
I appreciate your willingness to talk and your open-minded approach.
This is like saying that since chubby chasers exist, weight makes no difference in how attractive a woman is.
The idea is not that every rapist picks his victim because of attractiveness or that none do. Different men find different things attractive, it therefore makes sense that different rapists find different things attractive as well. The ageof victims shows that almost all (70%) rapes happen to victims between the ages of 10-34. That is also the time women are most sexually attractive. That could be a coincidence but if all rapists were looking for were easy victims it seems like older women would be easier since they are less able to fight and run away.
It seems intuitive that many rapists would favor attractive targets. Hard data seems hard to come by so many people fall back on their intuition.
I think, for the purposes of this discussion, including people under the age of consent skews that statistic. Because EVERY sex act in that age group is properly classified as rape.
And I think the rate is much higher among older teenagers and women in their twenties and early thirties simply because those are the dating years. And dating provides the perfect cover for rapists to isolate their victims and cause uncertainty, and, well, get away with it.
By the time they reach their mid-thirties, a majority of women are settled in committed relationships and are less likely to provide rapists with an opportunity.
Perhaps for those who believe rape is about the kind of sexual pleasure most people enjoy… but rape is about power and domination – rapists don’t want sex, they want to rape. Maybe some rapists target women they find attractive, but others might target women who look like someone they hate (i.e. mom, big sister, ex-wife, etc.), or a group they hate (i.e. certain race/religion), or just those they think they can get away with harming (i.e. the homeless, mentally ill, prostitutes, drug addicts).
Women start being sexually attractive at 10? Generally speaking, 10-15 year olds are more attractive than 35-40 year olds? I think it’s even a stretch to assume 16-18 year olds are more attractive than 35-40 year olds. I teach high school, and by and large girls that age are more awkward than poised.
Presumably rapists look for all sorts of things, but the correlation between being targeted for rape and attractiveness seems tenuous at best–and you haven’t presented any evidence that within the pool of “sexually attractive women”, the risk of rape continues to rise in proportion as attractiveness rises.
Beyond that, you haven’t produced any evidence that if a woman uses her clothes to move up or down a step in the relative attractiveness spectrum, she’s made a difference in her chances of being victimized.
And finally, if we stipulated that it’s true that a woman dressing herself “up” the scale is so much more danger than the woman who dresses “normal” that we have to describe dressing “up” as unwise or imprudent, then why is no one advised to dress down? To fat up? Why don’t we advise women to make themselves less attractive?
I can see how it would seem that way, but I don’t feel like the men in this thread are being purposefully pedantic. Rather, it’s more that this is the way men typically discuss things. It even happens for benign things. If this thread was about which garage door opener to get, there would be lots of back and forth discussion about whether belt or chain drive is better. In the big picture they both open the garage door, but men will often endlessly discuss this minor difference in a pedantic way. Obviously that kind of communication style will be a challenge in this topic of discussion since everyone is passionate about it and has deeply held beliefs. There’s also the fact that many of the women have experienced it personally while the men are going from a more theoretical perspective. The impression that I get from the men I see posting is that they are trying to understand the disconnect between their beliefs and what the women are saying.
Even after all this, I personally still think it would be valuable to discuss the various risk factors since they could be used to identify potentially risky situations. Even if appearance, inebriation, and isolation by themselves are insignificant factors, perhaps they become significant when they are combined. So a drunk teen walking home from a pool party in a skimpy bathing suit on a deserted road might be at a significantly higher risk than a sober teen in bulky clothes on that same road. And that’s not a gender unique situation. I would guess that boys and girls would be at similar risks. Max’s broken store window example resonated with me since it’s a similar example of what someone may do when they come across a tempting opportunity. But as you’ve mentioned, having those kinds of discussions means people can cherry pick one aspect and try to apply it to the general situation. However, the fact that I want to discuss this I think comes from my male brain trying to figure out problems and solve puzzles. It seems like there should be connections, so I feel compelled to try to find them.
10-34? That’s not the age of attractiveness, that’s the age of being too small to fight back, too inculcated with patriarchal bullshit to fight back effectively and too young to be taken seriously by the legal system while also not having the resources to mount a good legal battle. Women in their 30s get savvier and more assertive and less easy to coerce and force and a goodly number of them take self defense classes or take out carry permits so they can shoot prospective rapists dead.
Seriously, guys, with all this “attractiveness” blether you’ve got going on it’s starting to look quite a lot like maybe you have something you want to get off your chests? Some acts of your own you’d like to have retroactively excused by some women so you can feel better about what you did to some other woman? Are you looking for absolution because YOU did something bad and you’re trying to excuse it by rationalizing that “well, ANY man would have done what I did if they’d been presented with as attractive a target as I was.” That’s how you’re coming across. Women pay attention to men who talk like that, because they’re quite often trying to talk themselves out of feeling bad for what they’ve done–or what they intend to do. We pay attention to our guts and our feelings about creepy guys precisely because most men have “tells” of this nature–and when a rapist tells you what he is, it’s best to take him at his word.
ETA: It must be so nice to be able to be pedantic and dispassionate and “just asking questions” regarding this subject. It would be wrong of me to wish that the universe would supply every man who does it with a concrete personal occurrence to make it close enough to home that they’d fucking well stop doing it.
I reject the idea that y’all are hung up on “do women increase their chances of being raped by being hawt” out of some sort of male pedantic nature you can’t control. If we were talking about bullying, there’s no way you’d be hung up on whether fat kids invite mistreatment. We’ve presented ten pages of arguments for why the correlation between rape and attractiveness is weak at best, and actively damaging to how we approach rape, as a society. At this point, after ten pages, what are your beliefs? Are there restrictions on appearance and dress you feel girls and women should adopt, because the benefit is not worth the increased risk to their safety? If so, what are those restrictions?
I haven’t intended to do that, although I can see how it might have come off that way. But… yes, it’s clearly damaging and severely limiting, and clearly feeds into larger societal sexism, etc. I’ve never intended to deny that.
But… it’s entirely possible for that to be true, without the rules themselves automatically be 100% useless. If that were the case, then it would be a stupid discussion: “yes, these rules are sexist and oppressive; but also they’re 100% worthless and do no one any good at all ever”. Well, get rid of the rules. But much more troubling is “these rules are sexist and oppressive, but they do in fact reduce the rate of rape when followed (however slightly)”. A lot of people in this thread obviously really hate and resent these rules, and the way they have been promulgated over the past decades, for totally reasonable and understandable reasons. The rules can certainly be argued to do far more harm than good, when viewed on the whole. But none of that in any means that they’re automatically fully 100% worthless at doing what they claim to do. And to make that claim, imho, weakens the argument against them.
That is, imagine that instead of just being some annoying stubborn guy on the internet, I was someone who you actually had to convince whether or not to further promulgate these rules. Say, I was in charge of some committee deciding what advice to include in a college freshman orientation handbook. Is it going to be more effective to say “…and in addition to being sexist and oppressive, there’s no evidence that they are more than negligibly effective” or to say “…and in addition to being sexist and oppressive, they are also 100% ineffective”? The second claim is an absolute one, and one that suggests that either you can produce a big and comprehensive study supporting it, or else you’re just assuming it’s true because you want it to be true to fit your narrative. To me, it makes the argument weaker.
(Hopefully I don’t come off as trying to pat myself on the back here for generously helping you strengthen your arguments. My motivation is just that I’m stubborn and I find the topic interesting…)
If guys were being pedantic or trying to problem-solve then they’d actually engage with the facts presented and trying to solve the problems of “Why do rapists rape? How do we decrease that number? How do we get victims to come forward more frequently?”
Instead the only problem y’all are trying to solve appears to be “Why do women allow themselves to be raped? If they did (magically undefined) X then they’d be okay”.
The connections have been pointed out, every flaw in your beliefs have been pointed out and y’all aren’t getting pedantic about them; you’re just flat out ignoring them. In your garage door opener, there’d be lots of discussion of myriad points and not the single point of “attractiveness”. Pros and cons would be discussed however I’m not seeing any factual responses from y’all. puddleglum comes the closest except his cite doesn’t say what he thought and classifying 10-16 year olds as “most sexually attractive” as opposed to being powerless is quite a look.
As Manda Jo said, Only as long as they assume that shared maleness gives them more in common with rapists than shared morality gives them with rape victims.. This is the heart of the problem.
I also echo SmartAleq that some of y’all in this thread are coming across as trying to normalize rapists.
But it’s not an either/or situation. If the car thief is in fact enamored of the Porsche, he’ll try to steal it first, and only if he can’t find an opportunity to do so, will he steal the Toyota. In this scenario, Toyotas will be less likely to be stolen than Porsches, if all other security measures are equal. But some Toyotas will still be stolen. But “hey, you might want to drive your Toyota to this party instead of your Porsche, it’s in a really sketchy area” will still be rational advice that will, in fact, reduce your risk of having your car stolen. There might be other overweaning reasons not to follow that advice… but the advice won’t be worthless.
Hey guys, you know something that would REALLY bring the rape statistics down to basically zero? Strict house arrest for all men. Yup, no men allowed out on the streets or driving down the road or showing their faces outside their own homes under pain of indefinite incarceration without trial. Rape rate would plummet! The only rapes possible would be ones that occur in the family home but those would be easily provable and punishable. Shouldn’t we immediately enact this plan, as it has the virtue of being absolutely, 100% empirically true? I mean, yeah, it might suck a bit for the guys but think how much safer the world would be! Who’s with me here? C’mon, let’s do this thing!
Your posts are incredibly creepy in this thread. It also isn’t clear if you want to discuss a hypothetical, in which case you start your own thread, or discussing the current reality. The complete self-absorption and lack of understanding that your stance is part and parcel of rape culture and causes real life harm is incredibly problematic.
I tried imagining myself walking down the street in one of my usual shopping areas and noticing that one of them has a broken front window.
I don’t then see myself going into the store and stealing a TV; or even a nice batch of plant grow light replacements, which is something I could really use. I expect what I’d do would be to pull out my phone and call the cops, or the store owners if I have their number or it’s posted somewhere visible. Because, while I’ve got my flaws, I’m not a thief.
Try this one: imagine yourself walking down the street late at night, and you come across a half-naked and thoroughly drunk 15-17 year old, to pick the peak age from the earlier cite. They’ve got exactly the figure you find most sexually attractive. Nobody else is around. Consider seriously: if this happened in real life, what do you think you’d do?
Note that I’m not asking whether you’d be aroused; that’s not the issue. I’m asking what you’d actually do. filmore, you too.
True, and not the point. You made the claim. You’re suggesting that people should act upon the claim. It’s up to you to prove it. If you can’t prove it, you shouldn’t be making it.
And I repeat: the graph in that cite didn’t show that most of the rapes were of people between 10 and 34, either. It showed that most of the rapes were of people between 10 and 21. There was a very sharp peak going up from 10, peaking at 15-17, and then going back down just as fast. The graph showed fewer than half as many rapes of people between 21 and 29 as there were of people between 10 and 14. How on earth does that line up with sexual attractiveness, as opposed to vulnerability?
Golda was too easy on 'em. Lock 'em up, the lot of them. They can work from home and keep their rapey selves away from law abiding women just trying to go about their business. Heck, institute a “shoot on sight” provision–they knew the rules, if they break them they deserve what they get. It’s the sensible thing to do.
Saddest thing I ever saw was a thread in the “Ask Women” subreddit asking women what they’d do if there were no men around, ever. Most women just wanted to go take a nice walk at night without being scared or go to the beach without being ogled or approached or said they’d go dancing without fear of some gross dude grinding all over them. It’s heartbreaking to me that so many women just want to be left alone to go about their lives but can’t because men are sick in the head and stuffed full of rape culture bullshit beliefs. Many of which are totally on display in this thread. Not that they ever acknowledge it or would take the tiniest steps to believe and help women cope with men’s rape problem.
I wish you would explore WHY you find this topic interesting, and not all the other aspects of the discussion.
I am happy to concede that taken as an entire package, the rape prevention protocols might lead to a reduction in the incidence of rape. However, I think there is a stark lack of evidence that it would be a significant reduction, and I think there is tremendous evidence that the myth that they do–that presenting them as viable, useful options to increase your safety–does does actual harm.
I am even happy to concede that the most radical of them–like never leaving the house alone after dark, never drinking or being in the presence of those who do, and never being alone with a man would dramatically reduce the incidence of rape–but I think that anyone who did those things would be a fool. And I think that presenting some of them–especially the ones about not being alone outside after dark, or around brown people (because let’s be honest, that’s part of it) or travelling–are incredibly life limiting and damaging, and are often presented as “reasonable” precautions by men who would never accept such restrictions on their own freedom.
I ask you what I asked filmore–ten pages of testimony, under what circumstances should women modify their dress or actions? What actions do you see women take that you think “wow, I wouldn’t do that. I would give up my freedom to do that, if I were her. She’s escalating her risk of rape in a way I would not find acceptable, were I a woman.”?
But he may not want a Porche. They are hard to sell. They are easy to trace. The fact that you think the Porche is the obviously better target shows that, well, you aren’t a habitual car thief.