Based on the fact that they only measure that which is reported, not that which actually happens.
Bolding mine.
NO NO NO it is NOT a very different line to cross. It’s only a different line to cross because we as a society have decided it is. Rape HURTS. Rape is forceful, It’s not a gray line about whether or not it’s okay to sucker punch your buddy because you are in a bad mood and that would make you feel better. Boys only think it might be sorta okay to ignore her saying no because they are taught that. And in any case, how the fuck would changing how a woman dresses, where she goes, etc., stop any of that?
Again, what restrictions do you think a woman has to accept as part of being a woman? What personal freedoms do you think a wise woman should give up in the name of safety?
Good insight. I hadn’t considered that. The moms complaining about the dance team are influenced by the comments and actions that other men are making while they watch the dancers. Men would probably do the same if the moms in the stands of the swim meet were drooling over the boy swimmers. Unfortunately, a lot of this is uncharted territory for men since we really haven’t ventured through it ourselves, so it may take a while to educate men.
Also, complaining about the dance team may be because of other concerns than rape. Over-sexualization of girls can have other negative impacts outside of risk for sexual assault.
Actually, a lot of the comments on facebook were from moms saying their daughters felt uncomfortable if they didn’t fit that image. My daughters have said similar things. If the dance team was made up of all different kinds of girls rather than just fit girly-girls, it would be a healthier image to present.
MaxTheVool, is this an accurate representation of your opinion? Do you think that the set of circumstances under which you might rape a woman in any way excuse you from full responsibility for raping that woman?
~Max
Really? They’re more prone to get away with it, unless black guys achieve some privilege by virtue of money or joining the club in some way that leads to white male adoration. Ken Starr-----yes, that Ken Starr-----was fired for protecting rapists at Baylor, both white and black, while attacking their victims.
White men make up the power structure in this country out of proportion to their representation in actual numbers. Boys who get dinged by dress codes tend to be black, not white. The police are majority white and male and they skew conservative to the point that there have been several incidents where cops were actually chumming around with white supremacists. Firefighters are almost entirely male, still, these days, but MOC are making inroads. The judiciary and Congress remain dominated by white males. The Presidency is all male.
Of course not, as I believe I have made quite clear several times.
One other general comment (risking being pulled back in): there have been a number of comments in this thread pointing out (in a very negative light) how much of this thread has been focused on rape rules for women, specifically involving dress, as opposed to teaching young men about consent, or anything else other than putting restrictions on women.
So I think it’s worth pointing out that this thread is not “Let’s discuss how to most effectively reduce the incidence of rape”. If that were the topic and purpose of the thread, and I and some other guy kept coming in and derailing the conversation into a very nitpicky quibble about precise wordings or levels of efficacy of specific rape rules for women without even addressing all the other side effects of those rules, not to mention all the way to reduce rape other than putting restrictions on women’s lives; then I think people would be generally justified in getting upset and telling us in no uncertain terms that we weren’t helping, shut the hell up and listen and learn.
But that’s not this thread. This thread’s literal purpose in life is to discuss what is and is not victim blaming, and the fuzzy boundaries concerning well-intentioned advice to women. Rules about how to dress are precisely what this thread is supposed to be about. Which isn’t to say that my posting was perfect and without fault, but there’s absolute no reason to think that just because 95% of what I typed in this thread was about rules concerning dress, that I therefore believe that by far the most important and useful tool to address and reduce rape is rules involving dress.
Good to hear. We just cannot have that misunderstanding and expect to move forward. You see, I think a statement becomes victim-blaming when blame is lifted from the perpetrator and shifted onto the victim. So when you do give advice or have discussions about how women can reduce their exposure to rapists, whether the advice is based on facts or fiction, remember to be very clear that the rape victim is never to blame for being raped.
If you are entering a discussion about rape, such as this one, it is important to state for the record that you are not blaming the rape victim for her own rape. There are contexts where it is inappropriate to discuss mitigating factors at all, such as when you are a stranger talking to rape survivors. Your focus might be how to prevent innocent people from becoming rape victims in the future, but our species has a strong history of victim-blaming and it is not unreasonable to assume that people who focus on the victim blame the victim.
~Max
However one cannot ignore the unintended consequences of well-intended advice, no matter how noble it may be intended or carefully placed.
We are saying that the advice, in and of itself, can have the effect of perpetuating victim blaming and alleviating guilt from the rapist.
Whether you’d like it to be so, all the good intentions in the world won’t change that impact.
Believe us or not, but you can’t say you weren’t told.
That is an excellent point. The giver of advice might not realize that the recipient interprets it as victim-blaming. As mentioned early on and throughout the thread, context is key. If you aren’t totally sure that your advice will not be misinterpreted as shifting blame onto the victim, then you don’t know whether you are giving advice or victim-blaming.
~Max
Assuming you’re responding to me, there’s a big difference between discussing advice and actually endorsing or giving that advice. Certainly it’s easy to conflate the two, particularly over the internet where subtlety and tone are so easy to lose in the shuffle.
I am talking about the societal impact of the habit of giving advice (especially life curtailing recommendations that are gendered and not substantiated), not on the individual.
The same rule of thumb applies when discussing advice as to when giving advice. If you aren’t sure whether the advice will be interpreted as victim-blaming, you don’t know whether you are discussing advice or discussing victim-blaming.
~Max
I prefer to focus on individuals rather than the societal impact of advice and victim-blaming in general. The societal impact is built on individual actions, and I think the practical benefit of having this very discussion is to directly influence individual actions. If people only gave advice when it is absolutely clear that no blame is shifted from the perpetrator to the victim, that societal impact you speak of would mirror the individual distinction.
But then again, I continue to think everyone participating in this thread fundamentally agrees with each other as to where the line is between advising someone to take steps to protect themselves, and victim-blaming.
~Max
Well, that maybe what you prefer, and that’s your right, but continuing on without factoring in the larger harm you may be doing is not serving the people who seem to want to help.
You don’t think there is harm to black men with all the advice about what to do to keep a cop from shooting them? Living in a society where that is part of the conversation is harmful. Living in a society where you routinely hear advice about keeping yourself safe, that is life curtailing and gendered, is harmful.
It may be harmful, I’m not going to bring that debate into this thread. I’ll admit it for the sake of argument. But let’s say that each and every bit of advice you hear, first-hand, second-hand, third-hand, etc, all of it makes perfectly clear that the victim is not at all responsible for their own assault. You appear to be saying this causes some sort of institutional harm, simply because so much attention is given to avoiding assault. But the relevant question here, is that victim-blaming? Who is doing the blaming, and how do we stop them?
~Max
What do you suppose would happen to rape incidence if women continued to do pretty much what they do now, except they chose to dressed like business women and church ladies when they partied and went out late?
Would rapists stop bring ruphies with them to put in unsuspecting cups? Would rapists who wait in alleys for strangers to pounce find that the thrill of the hunt is gone? Would date rapists suddenly take “no” like champs simply because their dates are wearing pants suits instead of…whatever it is you think that might be wearing that is elevating their risk?
I’m trying to figure out why you seem to there might be utility in treating clothing as a risk factor. It seems like you might have in mind some very specific kind of scenario, but you haven’t come out and said what that scenario is and whether it comes anywhere close to what is typical with rape.
Where I was going is not where I’m going to be able to go. I wasn’t expecting you to change my posited scenario almost entirely, but OK, fair enough.
I don’t, however, accept that it’s simply normal behavior for teenage boys to be rapists. Some are, yes; just as some adult males are, and for that matter some girls and women are. I’ve never been a teenage boy; but I’ve been a teenage girl living around, and with, teenage boys; and I have violated a whole lot of your anti-rape rules, though not the particular one about never pass out drunk at a frat party. (Does fall asleep half drunk in the woods count?) And yet none of those boys turned out to be rapists – not even the one who did assume that the fact I was in his room with nobody else there meant that I wanted to have sex with him, right then on the first date. Once we got our assumptions straightened out, that was the end of it. Also the end of the date, because that turned out to have been his sole purpose in asking me out; but he was nevertheless entirely able to take no for an answer.
I do think it’s very likely that teenage boys raised with the assumption that girls and women shouldn’t get drunk at parties and shouldn’t be surprised if they’re raped if they do, and with the assumption that girls and women who look sexually attractive must be doing so in an attempt to attract every male who sees them, and with the assumption that boys and men are supposed to press for sex and not take the first no for an answer, and with the assumption that any (heterosexual) sex is good sex and therefore women would always enjoy it if they’d just relax, and with the assumption that it isn’t rape unless the raped person specifically said no and also fought back, are a whole lot more likely to commit rape under such circumstances than boys who aren’t raised with such assumptions. That pack of assumptions leads them to believe that they wouldn’t be doing any harm, that they’d only be behaving like proper men, and that it was the woman/girl’s responsibility to avoid the situation. Some of these boys, as they grow up, may come to understand that they’d be doing actual serious harm, and may therefore not be rapists or would-be rapists when they’re adults.
Changing those assumptions would help a great deal. But even a lot of teenage boys raised to a large extent under those assumptions don’t commit rape every time they get a chance.
And yet here we are, talking for pages and pages about dress. And not about dress in the sense of ‘wear something you can fight in’ or even ‘wear something you can run in.’ I think it’s telling that that sort of advice about what to wear hasn’t come up at all in the discussion. (The woman wearing gym clothes is meeting both parts of it.)
No, what gets brought up, over and over, is sexual attractiveness. And that’s exactly the thing that can’t be changed.
Women are sexually attractive to heterosexual men. (And vice versa; but that’s not really the point here.) Women are sexually attractive to heterosexual men in societies in which nobody wears anything more than a string around the waist. Women are sexually attractive to heterosexual men in societies in which nobody shows any more skin than hands and faces and women don’t show anything more than eyes. Women are sexually attractive to heterosexual men in all the societies inbetween. There is no way women can make ourselves not sexually attractive to heterosexual men. People want to talk about the reality, that’s the reality. And the reality is, that what women are wearing is not the issue.
If you really want to tell women to dress to decrease that individual woman’s chance of being raped: tell her to wear clothes she can fight in, and clothes she can run in. And teach women how to do both.
It really doesn’t work, though, to start off by saying ‘For the record, I’m not blaming you’ but then to continue ‘but you shouldn’t have done x, y, or z.’ It’s kind of like starting a sentence by saying ‘I’m not a bigot, but . . .’ If the next thing said after that is bigoted, or is blaming, sticking that disclaimer on the front of it doesn’t help.
Where on earth are you getting that from? I’m not seeing that at all.
And the big thing about this very basic truth is that we’d all be just fine if the goddamned men would just KEEP IT TO THEMSELVES. We don’t CARE about penisfeelings with the exception of those that are personal to us as individuals coming from men we want to hear from at a time that is appropriate and private. All others are not welcome and invasive and need to stay firmly inside the minds of the men who have them until and unless we ask for their opinion regarding our looks. If men would just learn some fucking self control, learn that their thoughts and wishes aren’t important to and don’t affect anyone but themselves and if there were swift, decisive, unpleasant real world consequences for those who can’t master self control (you know, like the ones handed out regularly to women who “misbehave”) then that would go a long way toward making the world a much more pleasant place for everyone to exist.
I also want a pony.