I expect that the OP would approve of this comment, but it’s kind of unclear what purpose this thread is serving at this point.
But do you understand that using the argument that rapist might have specific preferences based on vague intuitions to justify advising women to substantially modify their daily life creates a culture of victim blaming?
“Megan, you’re a red head with a kewpie doll face. Research shows that 10% of rapists have a preference for victims with your look. I’m not telling you what to do, but I think it would just common sense for you to go outside with a paper bag on over your head. I’m just saying…”
It isn’t even just a matter of this line of inquiry leading to victim-blaming. It’s ridiculous because the only practical advice that can be extracted from it is crazy, useless, and oppressive.
Right. Which is part and partial to the victim blaming–no matter what you do, you’re probably doing something someone somewhere could decide was maybe possibly dangerous.
In the context of the original thread topic: you’d also need to figure out whether rapists who have preferences, presuming that some do, tend to have the same ones or have wildly differing ones. If the preferences vary, then advice to avoid appearing to present one type of preference might be advice that results in presenting another type of preference; making such advice effectively useless, or even actively damaging.
A person needs to also figure out if there geographic patterns to rape preferences. The average rapist on a national scale probably isn’t going to be representative of rapists in your locale.
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I do not personally take pleasure in hurting people or seeing people hurt or afraid. It is a major turn-off sexually and sometimes digestively.
~Max
The connection is indirect, but I recommend you read the whole article if you haven’t done so already. I can’t quote the whole thing because, you know, copyright.
Serial rapists don’t get caught by definition, and fall under (b). The claim that serial rapists are motivated by attractive things is presumably based on the motivations of generalist criminals. Based on the snippet alone, theoretically the claim is an unfounded generalization.
If you go and read the article they get into motivations for rape too.
~Max
What makes this such a tricky and interesting question is that, as far as I can tell, any advice has the potential to create a culture of victim blaming; regardless of whether the advice will in fact reduce the risk of rape; and regardless of how much modification of women’s daily lives it requires.
But should advice just never be given? Not even in the fairly few situations (advice for incoming college freshmen suddenly exposed to a vastly different culture) where it seems appropriate?
Do you reject the entire idea of society as a whole (which is course on most levels male-dominated) giving women advice on how to reduce their risk of being raped?
If you aren’t sure the advice is helpful, it’s not even worth risking. But yes, victim blaming is an entirely different calculus: does the recipient think you are shifting blame from the rapist? Are you encouraging a culture where blame is shifted from the rapist?
~Max
Presuming you’ve read the rest of this thread: what advice, precisely, do you think it would be appropriate to give them?
Maybe they aren’t the ones needing advice?
I don’t think everyone in this thread is making that distinction the same way you are. Look at Manda Jo’s post 602, for instance. As far as I can read it, she’s basically saying that giving advice at all contributes to a culture of victim blaming. Certainly, victim blaming could occur with both good advice and bad advice.
I feel like I’ve answered this question about a dozen times, but… I have no idea, and don’t feel qualified to comment. But some random guy on the internet not knowing doesn’t mean that the optimal answer is “none”.
How about “don’t forget that most rapists are people you know, not strangers in an alley”
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Quite possibly they aren’t. I was specifically asking MaxTheVool, who seemed to want to have them given some.
That’s fair enough, I suppose. Though you do seem to have the idea that some advice really ought to be given.
But if the advice to be given is bad advice, no advice would indeed be better.
– if a college wants to give entering freshman as a whole, of all genders, a speech about warning signs that somebody’s a predator whether they’re after your money or your ass or your body to join their gang or your brain to support their conspiracy theory, and while they’re at it a bit about what active consent is and why it’s important and the information that birth control / disease prevention information and methods can be found over there at Student Health for anybody who wants them, I’ve no objection to that. But if they’re going to give the speech to female students specifically, let alone if they’re going to tell them that they need to dress to try to avoid being raped, they’d be far better off leaving the whole thing alone.
You seem to be implying that there is NO useful advice to reduce one’s risk of rape, other than general advice that is effective against crime in general and applies equally to men and women. If that’s your intent, that strikes me as a pretty surprising, even extraordinary, claim.
…I think that it would be fair to say that there is nothing that **you **could say in this particular thread that would be useful advice to help reduce one’s risk of rape. I don’t think that would be an extraordinary claim at all.
This has literally been the point of the whole thread. There is very little, perhaps nothing, a woman can do to reduce her risk of rape other than follow the common sense protocols that are good sense for everyone . . .don’t use mind altering substances in excess, avoid high-crime areas, trust your instincts, don’t be afraid to tell persistent people to fuck off, always have a way to leave on your own if you decide something is a bad scene.
You seem very invested in the idea that this can’t be true. It seems important to you that women accept that in some times and places, they just can’t have the freedoms boys enjoy, at least not without special risks. But you won’t say what those freedoms are.
Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
If so, please present it; though we’ve had a whole long thread about this in which nobody has done so. If you don’t, then why do you find it surprising, let alone extraordinary, that lacking any evidence that something exists I don’t believe that it does?