Where's the line between advising someone to take steps to protect themselves and victim-blaming?

[Max_S]

@Ann_Hedonia

I’m not saying Max and Max And Fillmore are rapists. I’m saying they aren’t and never could be. They might THINK they could be, because they understand sexual frustration and temptation and opportunity.

I don’t think I could be a serial rapist. I do not personally take pleasure in seeing people in fear or pain or anguish.

I do think, under certain circumstances, I could be a one-off rapist. That circumstance would be me not realizing that I am committing rape. Also, at my age I could easily commit statutory rape without knowing it.

I have to take conscious measures to keep myself out of situations where I might rape someone. That’s just part of life, for me. But what I have to do pales in comparison to what women are pressured to do.

~Max

[puddleglum]

@SmartAleq

Yeah, to any man who gets tempted AGAIN to try to equate rape to whatever property crime suits his fancy, try this–substitute “torturing a small child with pliers and red hot metal and knives for several hours” instead of whatever bloodless, essentially harmless crime you’re imagining. Imagine the blood and the screaming and the smells as the child shits herself, imagine him crying for his mother to come save him. There you go, that’s a whole lot closer to the reality of what a rapist does to his victim. Then see if you can put yourself into those shoes and imagine the situation that would lead to you doing that to a child. Women aren’t cars, or bags of money, or any other type of property and if you can’t see why it’s a huge problem that simply huge swathes of men are able to dissassociate and dehumanize women to the point where they think it’s a fair comparison to equate car theft to rape then, well, see a fucking therapist.

In this analogy is it okay to tell kids not to get into cars with strangers, or is that victim blaming?

[margin]

@puddleglum

In this analogy is it okay to tell kids not to get into cars with strangers, or is that victim blaming?

You’re comparing children with adult women? Gee, nothing insulting there! Silly women, getting in strangers’ cars.

The advice being offered here reminds me of when the Italian Supreme Court decided that the fact that a rape victim had worn tight jeans meant no rape had occurred, as she must have “helped” get the jeans off. Italy, home of the Mafia, apparently contains no guns, knives, fists, or scissors within its borders, or groups of men.

That decision was made by several people. It went through layers and layers of the judiciary. Everyone found it acceptable.

So, yes, let’s assume women are children, that’s not incredibly, almost viciously insulting at ALL.

[puddleglum]

@margin

You’re comparing children with adult women? Gee, nothing insulting there! Silly women, getting in strangers’ cars.

The advice being offered here reminds me of when the Italian Supreme Court decided that the fact that a rape victim had worn tight jeans meant no rape had occurred, as she must have “helped” get the jeans off. Italy, home of the Mafia, apparently contains no guns, knives, fists, or scissors within its borders, or groups of men.

That decision was made by several people. It went through layers and layers of the judiciary. Everyone found it acceptable.

So, yes, let’s assume women are children, that’s not incredibly, almost viciously insulting at ALL.

We don’t know if SmartAleq meant to be insulting in her analogy, maybe she just had not thought it through. Give her a chance to apologize before comparing her to Italians.

[puddleglum]

–

[Czarcasm]

@puddleglum

We don’t know if SmartAleq meant to be insulting in her analogy, maybe she just had not thought it through. Give her a chance to apologize before comparing her to Italians.

Pretending that someone else was being addressed when you were the one quoted pretty much tells us why you are here.

[Max_S]

@puddleglum

In this analogy is it okay to tell kids not to get into cars with strangers, or is that victim blaming?

Victim blaming isn’t a part of that analogy. The analogy given to show how unreasonable it is to identify with a rapist.

~Max

[Jonathan_Chance]

@puddleglum

We don’t know if SmartAleq meant to be insulting in her analogy, maybe she just had not thought it through. Give her a chance to apologize before comparing her to Italians.

That sort of nonsense earns you a warning, puddleglum. Do not denigrate other posters nor distort their intent to score points.

[SmartAleq]

Thanks–I tried to figure out an answer to that which would NOT draw a warning and came up shooting all kinds of blanks so I appreciate the assist.

[MaxTheVool]

I decided to take a few days away from this thread, which has clearly gotten hostile and unhealthy. But I also didn’t want to be the guy who says something incendiary and then just walks away. So I’ll address what I think are the most-hanging questions addressed to me, and hopefully do so in a more well-thought-out fashion now that I’ve had some time to decompress a bit. If there’s anything else anyone feels like I’ve been ignoring, please bring it back up and I’ll try to get to it, depending on how many posts fly around.

So the first one is a response that a bunch of people had, which I don’t blame them for having, but which I think precisely illustrates the disconnect between what I’ve been trying to discuss and how it’s been being heard, succinctly expressed by monstro:

No woman is ever going to ask you that, bro.

Of course no woman is going to ask me that. I have zero desire to be advising women on how to act. I’m not saying things in this thread with the anticipation, or even the possibility, that women seeking advice on how to act have started reading this thread and will read things I wrote and will modify their behavior based on them. I suppose it’s possible that some young woman whose behavior patterns are still flexible enough that they might be affected by the vague ramblings of some guy on the internet has read this thread, and might modify her life choices based on the extremely minor claim I was making, and if so, I would be both shocked and apologetic. I only made that comment (if a woman asks me “hey, how should I act to minimize my risk of rape”) in the first place because a couple of people (specifically Amara_ with this statement “And you’ve ducked every time someone has asked you what specific restrictions and how should that be weighed against women’s freedoms.”) were specifically asking me (as I read it) to go from the theoretical to the practical, stop making vague hand-waving statements, and commit to exactly what rules/advice I would endorse.

So I was attempting to communicate (a) I’m not trying to endorse any specific rules/advice, it’s not my place to, and I lack the knowledge/experience to do so and (b) if the extremely unlikely occurrence came up in which some woman asked me for advice, I would basically say “beats me, let’s do some research”.

Clearly I did not communicate that clearly… and part of why is likely because I’m not doing a good job of realizing how what can be a purely theoretical discussion to me carries so much emotional weight and heft to women. It’s easy for me to say “I think X might be true, but maybe only very slightly, and I’m not meaning to actually have that modify anyone’s behavior”, and even be sincere about it, but if X is part of a package of insulting and patriarchal commandments that have caused great harm for many years, it’s almost impossible for it not to be interpreted far differently than I intended it.
Secondly, Amara_ specifically called me out for ignoring posts she had made showing the statistical connection between rape and alcohol use. I am certainly aware of, and do not dispute, that connection. I apologize if she felt that I was ignoring her posts. But what’s unclear to me is the connection from there to the point I was trying to make. If she would offer some clarification I’m happy to pursue the issue, but am also perfectly OK not doing so. But I apologize if it seemed like I was blowing her off, chickening out, etc.
The final and most difficult point I’d like to make concerns the advisability of analogizing rape to property crimes. Clearly this is something that is INCREDIBLY painful for women, for understandable reasons, so I will do my best not to do so. That said, I want to push back slightly on one aspect of that, which is that you may not view rape as similar to a property crime, and I may not view rape as similar to a property crime, and objectively rape is clearly not similar to a property crime; but none of that means that rapists don’t, at some level, view it as they would view a property crime. We all know how much of sexism in Western culture has, and still does, involve viewing women as property, acquisitions, conquests. Does a rapist view his victims that way? Prizes that he is hunting down and possessing? That’s a horribly disturbing mindset, but of course the mindset of a rapist would be horribly disturbing. If there were some similarities between the mindset of a rapist and the mindset of, say, someone walking around looking for what purse to snatch, and if exploring those similarities could help us figure out how to reduce the number of rapes, then I certainly think we should do so, even if the comparison was painful and distasteful. Women are not purses. Women are nothing like purses. And only a sick fuck would view a woman as a purse. But rapists are sick fucks, so…

But I will try to make that the last time I make any such comparison or analogy. Any conceivable benefit that could come from such a discussion would only come from people far more knowledgeable about, and sensitive to, the topic than I am.

[Max_S]

@MaxTheVool

That said, I want to push back slightly on one aspect of that, which is that you may not view rape as similar to a property crime, and I may not view rape as similar to a property crime, and objectively rape is clearly not similar to a property crime; but none of that means that rapists don’t, at some level, view it as they would view a property crime.

The mental state of serial rapists is not something you want to speculate about from a comfy armchair. Not only is it dark and disturbing to try and put yourself in their place, but you have no way of knowing whether you are being accurate or helpful or just purposely fucking with your own sanity.

There are real experts (some are listed in this NYT article) and if you are actually interested in preventing serial or stranger rape by understanding serial rapists, you either go to them or you do the hard work of interviewing rapists and doing surveys yourself.

So as acknowledged, your original answer was the correct one, which is that you just don’t know and if the need was there you would do some research.

~Max

[you_with_the_face]

@Max

If there were some similarities between the mindset of a rapist and the mindset of, say, someone walking around looking for what purse to snatch, and if exploring those similarities could help us figure out how to reduce the number of rapes, then I certainly think we should do so, even if the comparison was painful and distasteful. Women are not purses. Women are nothing like purses. And only a sick fuck would view a woman as a purse. But rapists are sick fucks, so…

There is a whole body of research on the attitudes and behaviors of rapists. If you’re truly curious about the subject, go to pubmed.gov and search the abstracts.

I doubt you will find any studies that show rapists have the same mindset towards their victims as property thieves have towards theirs.

[you_with_the_face]

^ Sorry, should specify that quote came from MaxTheVool.

[MaxTheVool]

@you_with_the_face

I doubt you will find any studies that show rapists have the same mindset towards their victims as property thieves have towards theirs.

To clarify, are you stating that you are confident that it is a general psychological/criminal-justice consensus among experts in the field that rapists do not have the same mindset towards their victims as property thieves have towards theirs? Or are you just saying that you find it unlikely that they do, and thus find it unlikely that any studies would show that they do?

[Max_S]

@MaxTheVool

To clarify, are you stating that you are confident that it is a general psychological/criminal-justice consensus among experts in the field that rapists do not have the same mindset towards their victims as property thieves have towards theirs? Or are you just saying that you find it unlikely that they do, and thus find it unlikely that any studies would show that they do?

From the New York Times article I linked,
*Early studies relied heavily on convicted rapists. This skewed the data, said Neil Malamuth, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been studying sexual aggression for decades.

Men in prison are often “generalists,” he said: “They would steal your television, your watch, your car. And sometimes they steal sex.”

But men who commit sexual assault, and are not imprisoned because they got away with it, are often “specialists.” There is a strong chance that this is their primary criminal transgression.*
~Max

[you_with_the_face]

@MaxTheVool

To clarify, are you stating that you are confident that it is a general psychological/criminal-justice consensus among experts in the field that rapists do not have the same mindset towards their victims as property thieves have towards theirs? Or are you just saying that you find it unlikely that they do, and thus find it unlikely that any studies would show that they do?

From what I’ve read, rapists as a group have an antipathy towards women that you don’t see among other criminals, which suggests to me that they rape because they take pleasure in hurting and controlling their targets.

Guys who steal TVs don’t think like this.

[Kearsen1]

@Amara_1

I agree with all of this as well. Especially when attractiveness includes behavior.

Further, it allows most men to focus on stranger rape which is the rarest type of rape. That’s how Kearsen can post about how he is telling his son that date rape isn’t really rape and still pat himself on the back that he’s doing the right thing. It puts all of the focus on the actions of the victim and not the rapist.

Boy oh boy, have you gone off the rails. I would in no way tell my son that

[MaxTheVool]

@Max_S

From the New York Times article I linked,
*Early studies relied heavily on convicted rapists. This skewed the data, said Neil Malamuth, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been studying sexual aggression for decades.

Men in prison are often “generalists,” he said: “They would steal your television, your watch, your car. And sometimes they steal sex.”

But men who commit sexual assault, and are not imprisoned because they got away with it, are often “specialists.” There is a strong chance that this is their primary criminal transgression.*
~Max

I hate to sound dense or combative, particularly in this thread, but that snippet seems to say two things:
(a) some rapes are committed by men who are just generally criminals, presumably lacking in respect for the law, morals, empathy, etc.
(b) other rapes are committed by men who really get off on committing rape, and don’t necessarily commit other crimes.

If there’s a direct connection between that claim and the question of whether rapists approach rape with the same mindset that criminals approach property crimes, I don’t see it.

[MaxTheVool]

@you_with_the_face

From what I’ve read, rapists as a group have an antipathy towards women that you don’t see among other criminals, which suggests to me that they rape because they take pleasure in hurting and controlling their targets.

Guys who steal TVs don’t think like this.

I think a key question is whether rapists have preferences among potential victims. But it’s a supremely unpleasant question to discuss and one which I have no knowledge of at all, so I won’t even begin to try to answer it.

[nelliebly]

@Max_S

I don’t think I could be a serial rapist. I do not personally take pleasure in seeing people in fear or pain or anguish.

I do think, under certain circumstances, I could be a one-off rapist. That circumstance would be me not realizing that I am committing rape. Also, at my age I could easily commit statutory rape without knowing it.

I have to take conscious measures to keep myself out of situations where I might rape someone. That’s just part of life, for me. But what I have to do pales in comparison to what women are pressured to do.

~Max

Perhaps you could clarify what you mean by that second sentence.