For #2, it depends. Did you step out in front of a moving car that couldn’t possibly stop in time?
There is an idiotic assumption that men are animals and are driven by lust. We just can’t help ourselves, don’t you know. People who hold to that might use the moving car that can’t possibly stop in time analogy, but it’s bullshit.
I think there’s a similar concept with auto accidents, in that if you could have reasonably done something to prevent the accident and you didn’t, then you are partly to blame for the accident. For example, you have a green light and a car from the cross street pulls into the intersection. Even though you have the right away, you are expected to take reasonable actions to avoid hitting the car, such as using the brakes. If instead you willfully drive straight through the intersection and hit the car, you might be found partly to blame. Obviously the judge will take mitigating circumstances into consideration (not enough time to stop, road conditions unsafe to slam on the brakes, etc), but the court expects you to do what you can to safely avoid an accident.
For me, at least, the problem with victim-blaming as it relates to sexual assault is that women are expected to substantially modify their lives in ways that men are not in order to avoid becoming a victim. When you tell a woman that she’s not safe alone outside in the dark in a quiet neighborhood, that’s blaming female victims of sexual assault because women, in particular, aren’t safe at night alone. A man who gets mugged in the same situation won’t be asked why he was even there. General safety advice doesn’t have the same connotation to me. The problem is when it’s “as a woman, it’s not safe to do these things, and you’re at fault if you don’t adapt to that.”
That’ll teach me to ask for hypotheticals that I don’t want to deal with. 
I don’t have the answer to this, but I’m willing to mull it over as a theoretical exercise rather than dismiss it out of hand.
As I intimated in earlier posts, just as there are shades of grey in the types of scenarios people fall victim to, so are there shades of grey where victim blaming may be more permissible. Where it is not permissible is when it comes to assaults, particularly when it can be shown that no reasonable amount of caution would/could have prevented the assault.
What is the objective in having this conversation? What is it meant to achieve?
Just as with Manda JO, I think you and I agree where the line is between victim-blaming and not-victim-blaming (shifting blame from the perp to the victim). I also think filmore and I agree. I thought most if not everybody in this thread actually agreed with each other. It’s blowing my mind. Well, maybe not Velocity and BigT who made the before/after distinction.
Then you appeared to disagree with filmore about something. Two people who I thought shared my opinion apparently had different and mutually exclusive opinions. That can’t be right, can it? So I followed your responses, but filmore bowed out. So I jumped in to fill the void.
…does that make sense?
~Max
Sure. And I have no issue with “victim-blaming” being a problem and a thing not to do. I just took issue with the ‘any advice is implicit victim blaming’ stance.
The vast majority of gender-specific advice is implicit victim blaming and serves more to limit women than to increase their safety.
They are different. But we’ve had you and another poster write that nobody will learn anything from posts on the internet, which is incorrect. Well, you didn’t write that explicitly, choosing to just ask a question instead of outright stating a position.
Actually, I disagree with you here. Sina qua non is not a good line to draw when determining whether or not it is OK to shift the blame from the perp to the victim. I ask you to consider, as an alternative, the perpetrator’s state of mind. If the perpetrator acted with malicious intent, no amount of negligence by the victim should remove blame from the perpetrator.
If I was texting while driving, that should not soften my ex’s sentence after she tries to shoot me. Not even a bit.
If I was texting while driving, that might soften a hunter’s sentence when he accidentally shoots me instead of a duck.
~Max
That’s not even victim blaming; the guy lit his own firecracker - it didn’t do anything except what it’s supposed to do- if the guy in question chooses to not use it properly, then it is his fault. Nobody blames the firecracker/chainsaw/acetylene torch when someone misuses them, unless there’s also some element of manufacturing defects or something along those lines.
I think the concept of victim is centered around the idea that there’s a person who had something negative done to them that’s essentially out of their control. So if you’re misusing a tool and get injured, that doesn’t make you a victim, while if you’re properly using it and get injured because of poor/unsafe design or manufacturing defects, that does make you a victim.
A woman is raped after she accepts a coworker’s invitation to visit him in his hotel room during a conference.
Peanut gallery: What the fuck did she think was going to happen?! She is either a lying whore or she is monumentally stupid.
Explanation: She wanted sex to happen some time that evening. But instead of giving them the chance to build up some chemistry over a bottle of wine and some smooth jazz, the guy started ripping off her clothes the moment he shut the door.
So the advice “Don’t go to a man’s hotel room alone” only makes sense if you believe women should never seek out sex. It is anti-sex advice framed as anti-rape. And that is why it sucks.
Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk
I think that’s a good clarification of victim in this context.
One example I thought of that’s more abstract is raccoons getting into trash cans. Someone who moves to the country may not realize that raccoons are very good at getting into the trash, so they may initially be surprised when they find their trash turned over. Initially, I wouldn’t put any of the blame on them because they weren’t aware of the risk. After two or three times, they should begin to figure that something is up and try figure out why the trash is turned over, how to lock the lid, etc. But if they never do anything differently and continually have their trash turned over, I will assign most of the blame to them since it should be easily predictable that there will be a negative outcome and they are doing virtually nothing to prevent it.
I can agree with that.
I think the concept of victim blaming only represents a real problem when the person was victimized by another person.
If a person is victimized by a raccoon, or a hurricane, flood or other non-human phenomenon, then we don’t see the “you should really do X to avoid this problem” as an attack on the victim. It’s just good advice (depending on whether or not it’s actually good advice, of course).
When a person is victimized by another person, giving them all sorts of tips on how to avoid having another person harm them directs attention away from the person who’s actually to blame. Add to that the fact that it’s usually women who are the victims, and they already change their lives substantially to avoid being attacked by men. Giving them even more advice on how to restrict their lives so that men won’t attack them is simply egregious.
I don’t believe we are in disagreement.
I was not clear in the statement you quoted about the type of scenario under which one can legitimately be (victim) blamed for an unfortunate consequence of one’s own ill considered actions or caused by unpremeditated actions of another, i.e. stepping into traffic. These actions are entirely different because they involve no external malicious intent.
The reality is that the laws of physics say that even a driver who’s behaving properly may not be able to stop the car in time.
Rape is not a law of physics.
As Thudlow Boink said, I suspect that one of the reasons is that people want to believe ‘if I/my loved ones do everything right, then I/my loved ones won’t get raped.’
When people do get raped anyway, this only adds to the damage.
Yup.
There are multiple reasons why nobody, of any gender, at a frat party or not at a frat party, should be getting blackout drunk; at least, unless they’re in a confirmed safe location and accompanied by an at-least-mostly sober friend who can and will make sure they’re still breathing and not aspirating their own vomit, or walking into traffic, or breaking something they’ll be horribly upset about later, or about to fall down the stairs and possibly break their neck.
But the advice is mostly given specifically to women and specifically in regards to rape.
And it’s often given along with a lot of other advice that’s not remotely comparable, because it’s advice to avoid doing things that aren’t in themselves harmful and may be beneficial, and which, as has been pointed out, may well not increase the risk of rape in the first place.
(I’m not even entirely convinced that not getting drunk at a frat party reduces the chances of a rape occuring; at least, unless it’s the rapist who doesn’t get drunk and therefore, due to a better awareness of consequences or a lack of reduced inhibitions, possibly doesn’t commit a rape. The rapist who can’t find an easy victim may just rape somebody who requires more work to find or to subdue. That might be a different person; but there might still be a rape.)
Telling somebody who’s dealing with a specific situation ‘wow, that guy was entirely out of line, that’s not proper yoga technique, and it would make more sense to call the cops so he doesn’t rape somebody else than to go back there, please don’t go back there’ would be one sort of thing.
Telling women in general that they should never go to yoga retreats would be something else entirely.
Whether you were texting while driving would have nothing to do with your being shot, in either instance, and shouldn’t affect the sentence.
If you were texting while driving and therefore were unable to avoid a car accident that a person paying attention could have avoided, then even if a different driver also did something wrong that was necessary to cause the accident, your behavior was also reckless driving and a contributing factor. That’s not the same thing – your behavior in texting while driving was both related to the incident and wrong in itself.
She might also quite reasonably have gone to the man’s hotel room because she actually thought they were going to discuss an issue brought up at Meeting X; or a project they’d been working on earlier that week and would have to return to after the conference. Or, for that matter, because she thought they both wanted to watch a particular movie on the TV in his room.
I have been in a whole lot of men’s rooms, hotel and dormitory and just plain housing, without sex being part of anybody’s expectations at all.
I agree that even if she started off wanting to have sex that night, it’s still rape if he insisted on having sex in a fashion that she didn’t want – including jumping right to taking her clothes off without permission. But the advice isn’t only wrong because it’s anti-sex advice. It’s also wrong because it assumes that the only plausible reason for a man and a woman to be in the same room is because of sex.
To clarify, you wrote:
I replied:
I asked because for some reason I’m having a difficult time parsing your statement. Which part doesn’t have to be victim-blaming? Under what circumstances?
Probably just me having that issue. Still, can you help clarify what you mean?
I don’t know about that first part; if someone was seriously injured as a result of a plane crash, it would be equally wrong to push blame onto them because they didn’t sit in the exit row, or in the back of the plane, or wear fire-resistant clothing, or safety shoes or whatever.
We normally don’t blame passengers of vehicles. Unless they’re kicking the back of the driver’s seat or fighting with their siblings. Then all bets are off.
I was thinking like, I’m texting while driving and go off the road into a cornfield where some absent-minded hunter is shooting ducks and listening to loud music in some restricted area, and with his earphones in he doesn’t hear the car coming and shoots me in the arm. But not for his shooting in a no-hunting cornfield, my arm wouldn’t be in a sling. But not for my texting while driving, my arm wouldn’t be in a sling. But neither party had malicious intent.
~Max