Women's Issues

It's not really a matter of what you should do. It's a matter of whether a certain change in habit or actions will make it safer or not, and whether or not that's something you're willing to go through with after considering the costs. You can either do something or not. There are pros and cons for both, which differs depending on your situation. I mean, if I decide to head out jogging in the middle of the night, the only risk I significantly increase is to twist my ankle stepping on a rock I didn't see. Or I could take a different route I don't like, which is harder because it's on asphalt rather than a track through the forest. It's a completely different risk than the one you'd take for doing the same thing, but I'd still reach the same conclusion.

I mean, if you drink alcohol you're going to increase the risk of something bad happening, pretty much no matter what you do, and it's up to you to determine if that's worth it. It's not about what you should do. It's about knowing about the consequences, and making sound decisions based on that.

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Which is still falling exactly into the issue I described last time. The way the world is versus the way it should be

Meaning, this doesn't say anything about the issue at hand. Social Justice says I want to go out jogging in my neighborhood and feel safe. Common sense, on the other hand, is that what I want is fine and dandy, but the reality is what it is. Where the problem lies is when someone does something "dangerous" or "risky" and when we call them a victim or say "there's a problem here", others answer "that's just the way the world is and you should have known better".

(This is general response to people who rail against reality and demand "ought" world, not jsut towards King Zeal)

Because the world "ought" to be one way, does not mean it is. Get over it. In two words: Shit happens.

Just because you "ought" to be able to jog through a neighborhood without fear, does not mean it will be. You should not discard responsibility you have towards yourself just because the world "ought" to be some way. World does not comfort to you. You either have to work towards the world you want, or adapt to reality.

Discarding the common sense for delusion is never a good thing. It is better to work towards the "ought", but prepare for "is" and use common sense. Just because you "ought" to be able to get horribly drunk and not have bad things happens, does not mean it will work that way. Quite frankly, that would very irresponsible of you. Much better option is to go drinking but use common sense to stop when you are still aware of your surroundings. You can still have fun and if you can't, you should question is this the correct way to have fun for you.

I don't know how the saying would translate, but I am always told when I head out to drink or something else, to "Have fun, but keep sense in hand". Always think.

Demanding for people to discard the common sense for delusion of "ought" is irresponsible. Calling people advocating use of common sense "victim blamer" is being irresponsible and making more people potential victims, since rather than work on prevention, you work for "awareness" that does jack shit to actually help people.

edited 13th Mar '14 4:21:32 PM by Mandemo

You can only act in the world as it is. You can't act in the world as it should be. However, you can both act to handle the world you live in better, and you can act to make the world closer to how it should be. They're not mutually exclusive.

As for victim blaming, any interaction has (at least) two people involved. Anyone who places the blame on a single person fails to understand what an interaction is, or treats one of them as an object without agency.

Though that's not the same as determining if a law has been broken, and who's responsible for that. That usually has a single perpetrator (or a group).

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Again, that's really nice, but it does jack to actually address the problem.

I can't go for a jog in my neighborhood for fear of being shot. What's next? Should I put armor plating on my car to prevent jackings, too? Who are you to decide what "common sense" I should live with? Why do I have more "responsibility" than you or anyone else? Why should I settle for shit like this?

And what, pray tell, does it have to do with acknowledging and trying to fix the damn problem? Why should I just give up on the way things ought to be and settle for the bullshit way that they are?

edited 13th Mar '14 4:40:27 PM by KingZeal

You miss the point, I assume on purpose because you desire freedom from responsibility, from the way you rail against "Try to think before you act" arguments.

Thing is to work towards the ought, but acknowledge the is and act on it.

If there is a mugging problem in the neighborhood, you should work towards fixing the problem, but in the mean time, take precautions to not to get mugged. Those muggers won't respect the "ought". If there are muggers, you should take precautions against them, at least until the problem is fixed.

Common Sense. I suggest studying it, rather than delusions.

No, if there's a point that was missed, it was mine.

First of all, as I already said, acknowledging the "is" is fine. Demanding the "is" be the standard is bullshit.

The problem is NOT that someone should not realistically look out for their safety from predators. The problem is that when we call this something that should be fixed, everyone pulls out the "common sense" nonsense. Again, why should it be "common sense" that I can't walk my freaking dog in broad daylight?

Because this whole thing sounds like telling Rosa Parks that it was her fault for not just sitting in the back of the bus, like common sense should dictate. Or better yet: that I shouldn't date white women, in a red state.

edited 13th Mar '14 5:07:11 PM by KingZeal

No. Argument has been, from the start, that people should use common sense to avoid the situations, work on prevention and not make themselves targets. Argument has never been "not to do anything about the problem".

Reduce the risk of being targeted is not a bad thing to do. You might as well then start arguing that you despite the fact that you supposedly unable to walk your dog in broad daylight, you should do it anyway despite everything telling you that this is not possible.

You want to enter delusion of world comforting to you, that is fine. It's your life. Telling other people to enter that delusion? Not cool. Reality does not respect your wishes. You have to actually work to change the reality. Something everyone here has argued for, that people should work to change the world so that the need for prevention methods, the need to use common sense to shield oneself, is no longer there.

Actually, that is the problem. That's what those articles about "raising awareness" were all about that started this discussion. When you (generic you) claimed you should look out for your own safety, you'd be blamed for blaming the victims, and that what you're talking about has no place in a world as it should be. It's basically denying that there are ways of alleviating the problems while (not to the exclusion of) working on a more permanent solution.

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Demanding for people to discard the common sense for delusion of "ought" is irresponsible. Calling people advocating use of common sense "victim blamer" is being irresponsible and making more people potential victims, since rather than work on prevention, you work for "awareness" that does jack shit to actually help people.

Awareness campaigns are highly effective, though. Vancouver's famous 'Don't Be That Guy' campaign, for instance, is credited with being one of the chief factors in stopping and reversing the city's rise in sexual assaults over a mere six months. Similar falls in rape stats have been highly correlated with anti-rapist measures like tougher law enforcement, more frequent pursuit of rape cases, and discouragement of rape culture through bystander intervention campaigns. By contrast, there's evidence to suggest that the effectiveness of rape prevention strategies on the women's end is severely overestimated. In other words, you stop rape not by having women defend themselves better, but by discouraging rapists from trying to rape people in the first place.

So no, what you're arguing for isn't common-sense acceptance of reality. It's victim-blamey bullshit with little proven effectiveness other than keeping women paranoid, stressed, and locked away in their homes… where, since ninety per cent of rape is by close acquaintances, they're likely to get raped anyway.

What's precedent ever done for us?

You beat me to it, but yep. That's what a lot of this comes down to.

edited 13th Mar '14 5:25:25 PM by Aprilla

Problem with that is that reality doesn't just change itself. If I should just so happen to take a walk tomorrow and get brutally beaten, raped, and forced to watch Honey Boo Boo, then the appropriate response I'd hope for is that everyone takes a stand against this kind of crap and actually do something to make the streets safer. If someone wants to criticize my decision to, you know, dare leave my house or something as being a "dumb delusion" or something, then screw whoever that is.

There is no reason, at all, that I should accept your definition of "common sense" and "delusion", as if I'm doing something wrong by going half a mile from my house.

Edit; Triple ninja'd.

edited 13th Mar '14 5:30:38 PM by KingZeal

This discussion points to a basic problem of talking-past I observe when the matter of "Is vs. Should Be" comes up. The short answer is, we need both discussions.

Yes. Society is far from perfect and it is the right of the oppressed to seek better treatment in their daily lives. We can and should have this discussion...in the safety and comfort of abstraction. In the context of this thread, we should have a dialogue about the inequities women face and how best to rectify them.

But, we also need the pragmatic "things are what they are, here's how you get around" discussion as well. As we look to the future, we need to know how to function in the present. When an individual woman is faced with an individual man who doesn't want to respect her boundaries, she needs to know what to do. If she doesn't, she's going to get hurt.

Shutting down any discussion about risk management or choice ownership by howling "VICTIM BLAMING!" is just as stupid as shutting down any discussion about inequity by scoffing and muttering "live in the real world, dumbass, you should have known better" at someone who finds themselves on the shit-end of the stick for arbitrary reasons.

One of the crucial things that is often missed when the discussion of personal responsibility comes up is the necessity of a blame-free environment. People who want to own their shit need to be rewarded for doing so. Example; alcoholism. Back when addiction to booze was treated as a character flaw, very few people sought treatment. Even admitting you were an alcoholic was traumatic, so nobody did it. Now, society is starting to see alcoholism as a treatable condition...and more importantly, people who have beaten that problem are lauded for their efforts. Result; alcoholism rates have gone down, as people who have that problem have gained access to treatment and the socio-cultural validation they need to begin the process. It is both funny and sad, how society keeps having to re-learn this lesson.

Another important line that needs to be drawn when it comes to personal responsibility; education vs. indoctrination. A lot of you have mentioned the "well, she shouldn't have been wearing that" riff as well as most of its wacky children. For my money, that's not education in how to survive. It's indoctrination, an attempt to control the situation by stimulating a woman's fear, rather than replacing it with knowledge. It is the basic flaw with "Do/Don't" styles of teaching; at that point you aren't being taught how to think for yourself, you're being taught how to think the way somebody else wants you to think. Which is probably why that shit goes over so poorly - it should, because it is somebody appropriating a situation (in this case, sexual assault) to impose their will on a person.

However, encouraging people to ask questions like "how did my choices put myself in this situation? What is my agency here? What can I do differently next time? What do I need to know?" is education. It is encouraging a person to take ownership of their situation and giving them the tools needed to do so. There is very little real education out in the world, when one stops to think about it this way.

I point out these two differences so that hopefully people can spot real attempts at educating from fake attempts at just reinforcing the status quo. There are plenty of people who piss in the pool of personal responsibility. I hate those people almost as much as the rest of you do, and it is good to know how to spot them.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

I looked through that report about prevention strategies. First, saying the effectiveness is overestimated doesn't say it's completely ineffective. Second, there's a discussion about the people filling in the questionnaire misinterpreting what the numbers were supposed to represent. Third, all numbers being estimates about how people (women, men, experts) think the strategies are effective, rather than any actual numbers for how effective they are (which was asked for).

In other words, I don't see how that report indicates anything. I did just skim it, though, so I might've misinterpreted the numbers (and feel free to correct me), but it's not convincing evidence to me either way.

As for the Vancouver campaign, 10% might not sound like much, but every averted case helps.

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You need to think opportunity costs. Basically, 'does this reduce my chance of being raped enough to compensate for the reduction in quality of life (through stress, anxiety, and reduced social opportunities) it causes and for the amount of resources it costs to train me this way?' There does not seem to be much concrete evidence that defence strategies for women give good value-for-money in this regard, especially when compared to policies directly targeting rapists, which have been found to be highly effective and require women to spend less of their lives in a climate of fear. If it's a choice between a formally-untested strategy that limits victims' opportunities whilst targeting only ten per cent of the problem versus a proven-effective strategy that targets one hundred percent of the problem without contributing to our culture of fear around rape, then I know which one I'm going to pick.

edited 13th Mar '14 6:28:04 PM by Iaculus

What's precedent ever done for us?

I'd like to say something that I thought of while reading this conversation. And it's that while they are both violent crimes, being mugged/generally assaulted has some notable differences from being raped, not only who is most likely to do it (at least in the case of mugging) and how the victims are viewed by society. Thus, while there are some similarities in methods to avoiding rape and avoiding being violently attacked in general, there are also some notable differences.

The first is one that I could be wrong on, since I'm not an expert in crime statistics, but so far as I know, most rape is committed by someone that the victim knows personally, perhaps even in a romantic manner (there is even the case of marital rape and people being raped by their relatives). While there are certainly cases of people being raped by a stranger, from what I have heard, it is less likely than being raped by someone the victim knows personally. On the other hand, I would guess that mugging is more likely to be committed by a stranger. I'm not sure about assault in general, I could imagine that going both ways and I honestly don't know if one is more likely to be assaulted by a stranger or by someone that one knows personally. The point is, a lot of these "this is how you avoid being raped" tips seem to focus on avoiding being raped by a random stranger rather than dealing with being raped by someone the victim might know, love and trust. The other issue is that being raped has the stigma in many cultures (and time periods) of being Defiled Forever while being a victim of a non-sexual violent crime doesn't usually have that stigma. I do know that rape tends to be viewed very differently by society than other types of violent crime, and that would have an effect on making comparisons between avoiding rape and avoiding other types of violent crime.

edited 13th Mar '14 7:13:49 PM by Rainbow

But it isn't a choice between one or the other. And as for prevention strategies, you can cherry pick the ones you think are worth it, and modify them to suit your situation.

What do you mean with the numbers of ten and a hundred percent targetting the problem?

I know here one of the more common form of muggings are by school-age children who mug classmates and other known people.

edited 13th Mar '14 7:14:40 PM by AnotherDuck

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@Another Duck: I didn't think about children in school mugging each other, although I would guess that in those cases, the muggers aren't necessarily friends with their victims, so it still wouldn't be quite the same as rape within a romantic relationship.

I guess my point is that not all rapes are committed in the same type of circumstances, and that different circumstances would have different ways to avoid them or deal with them. And also different ways of educating people to not rape in the first place, like, someone might know that they shouldn't go and force a random stranger to have sex with them but that same person might think that they are entitled to have sex with their wife or girlfriend whether she wants it or not (or boyfriend/husband in the case of men being raped) or simply not being aware of what counts as rape and what counts as consensual sex (like having sex with someone who is drunk or otherwise has their judgement impaired or tricking someone into having sex under false pretenses).

edited 13th Mar '14 8:29:01 PM by Rainbow

I think that last bit, education about what counts as consensual sex or not is probably the best approach, especially if you can do it without pointing fingers. With that in mind, I wonder how much of rape is planned, and how much is the result of what happens in the heat of the moment.

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Okay, here's something I've always been unclear on: just how drunk does someone have to be before they can no longer consent to sex? I mean, obviously if someone's so drunk they're not even cognizant of what's happening, that's wrong, whereas if they simply had a beer or glass of wine at dinner, that's okay. But there's a pretty wide gulf between those two, and I've never gotten a straight answer on where the dividing line is.

@Raven: the reality is this...the line you're asking about does not exist. They chose to get as drunk as they are, and you're choosing to seduce them in that state. Both of you have to deal with the consequences of your decisions, whatever that ends up being.

As a former bouncer and current heavy drinker I'm not a fan of the "they were drunk, therefore they deserve a pass" model. However I'm not down with the "well, they chose to get drunk therefore I can do whatever I want to them" model either.

I think the answer to Raven's question lies in the situational variables.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

I don't think there is a clear line where drunken sex becomes a rape, because every person has a different reaction to alcohol.

There's no real boundary. If a person is strongly influenced by alcohol then even one beer could alter a person's mental state enough to make them do things they wouldn't normally do. If you don't know the person it's probably best to air on the side of caution and not have sex at all if any alcohol has been consumed. Being in a relationship complicates matters to the point where I don't know what to say.

I think what we're missing in this conversation is a big part of rape culture and the flip side of victim-blaming: rape apologism.

It's not just saying that the woman should be more careful-it's giving whoever raped her a free pass because she wasn't careful enough. It's automatically assuming that she must be lying for attention or to ruin some innocent mans life, despite rape being falsely reported no more often than any other crime, despite most rapists never seeing jail time or even facing trial. It's "she was drunk" being a sign of her irresponsibility and "he was drunk" being an excuse.

It goes right back to awareness and bystander campaigns being more effective than "prevention" tips.

Everything happens for a reason. The reason is a chaotic intersection of chance and the laws of physics.

One problem I have with that reasoning is that if she's drunk, it's his fault. If he's drunk, it's his fault. If both are drunk, it's his fault.

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