Misogyny, Guns, Rape and Culture..

Depends... my grandfather never used to have to lock their doors... then again, until about fifteen years ago, neither did the local schools or churches *shrug*

 

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1) You are not addressing the first question, or any other of mine. 2) That depends somewhat on whether it's accurate.

No, but I don't think their intentions - what you obscurely meant by "actively seeking", I presumed - are the deciding factor among those who use the term.

Maybe. Depends on how you regard the role of conscious intention in advocacy.

Well, anticipating reactions such as yours, I don't use the term. I think it's misleading at best, especially given the level of sophistication of its audience. I try to keep things simple. That way I can berate people who screw them up, when responding to my posts, with a clear conscience.

I directly and explicitly referenced this very thread, all 25 pages of it including this one, to "document" an assertion about the posts on the thread as a whole, all 25 pages of it. It features multiple confused and logically fouled up response posts (to the point of trolling) from women's burden defenders visible throughout, and almost nothing else from them. You can't scroll a page anywhere here without hitting a couple, meanwhile you'd have to work hard to find even one completely sensible and logically sound response post from a women's burden defender anywhere here. What the hell do you need in "documentation" beyond the explicit and exhaustive document before you now?

And that kind of denial of ordinary reason and betrayal of good faith, not any "divorce from evidence", is a problem on this thread.

Uh, really? The answer is "no", and if you think this thread is some kind of complex knot I predict you remain as twisted up as before by that or any other answer.

We have evidence, from surveys and documentaries and so forth (and my relatives, but hey) that a higher percentage of Canadians leave their front doors unlocked - even in higher crime big cities such as where Michael Moore devoted an entire segment of his gun doc "Bowling For Columbine" to walking up to people's front doors and finding them unlocked (Toronto, iirc). And a lower percentage suffer sexual assault.

As do the people in the low crime suburbs around Minneapolis, even when expecting deliveries, where I worked.

That depended on the answer to the questions that were its context - remember? You know, like, the meaning and topic of discussion?

But one doesn't, of course. That would be missing the point. It's just better at rape prevention than the US, and also features a lower rate of locked doors.

which was exactly how it was taken, in the post being avoided by all this. A sensible response would start from the content of the post, yes?

No, I didn't. My point was opposed to that, and implied the opposite. I assume a somewhat higher percentage of Canadian women who leave their doors unlocked are raped than those Canadian women who do not, at least when demographically and geographically matched. The eventual rock bottom simplified question was whether you, yourself, since you were bringing up the matter of ordinary precaution such as - specifically - locked doors, regarded the non-locking Canadian women as irresponsible. It is an actually relevant, non-rhetorical question. Possible answers are "yes", "no", and "maybe, with explanation". How many tries do you think you will need?

 

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That's a fair stance: I agree that responsibility in the context of this discussion is seen as an individual issue. This is, I think, certainly true of the 'prevention' camp (as it's being called now) and I don't think those in the... 'male responsability' camp? would disagree as part of their ethos.

 

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their in lie the rub. you want to work on the 74% trooper pretends they don't exist. that is an insult to those victims.

 

No, it isn't "being called" the "prevention camp".

Depends. Let's call one of the camps the "focus on the potential criminal" camp, and call it everybody's responsibility to do that. Sound like a plan?

 

Are you willing to answer a question, Trooper?

Or are you going to cling to the McElroy Lie?

Will you add to that another layer of ego defense projection?

No, really, are you willing to buy, beg, borrow, or steal enough courage to address a human rights issue, or are we stuck with more "secular sanity" trolling?

At what point does your Infinite Prevention Advocacy, which teaches women to fear all men as potential rapists, become a quality of life issue?

Are you willing to enumerate your prevention advice?

We're still waiting.

 

Well, it is now.

A bit unwieldy, and the latter half doesn't make sense. "Prevention" camp and "the criminal" camp are good enough. I'll solve the issue shortly anyway, so I suppose on reflection it really doesn't matter.

 

Fair enough, although that leaves me in both camps.

 

Someone appears to have put a 1000-character limit on the thread. I wonder why. I'll have to spread the response out.

Oh?

Earlier, I established that 'rape advocate' was a highly unethical term. The point is thus: how can you possibly establish - or even suppose, in all honour - that the outcome Trooper et al are looking for is more rapes? How does their philosophy warrant such a conclusion? Thus, there is no means by which one could establish support for the outcome of higher rape rates from their philosophy.



Most of the discussion at this point is just adversarial, and uncalled for. Chief among such problems recently is the unchecked supposition and assertion dumping. Do you really need to wonder as to whether or not 'rape advocate' - which, by definition means someone who actively desires more rapes and works to that end - is 'accurate'? If so, there is no need to discuss anything further, because that conclusion is simply absurd.

 

'Rape advocate' implies active, conscious intention to result in more rapes. It's irrelevant what those who use the term would like it to mean, as they squirrel about for something really nasty to throw at those on the other side of the social consciousness landscape: that's what the phrase means, and that's how it's read by we poor laymen. And, as such, it's inexcusable. I could certainly show you some people who were actual rape advocates, but Trooper et al are not them.

Good! Let us apply the above to the remainder of your camp and continue, then, while ignoring “Depends on how you regard the role of conscious intention in advocacy” altogether. Anyway, I’m certain you didn’t really mean it, since you did write the paragraph above.

 

:shrug: Three nice, explicit and in-context quotes? I've read through, and I've seen some things one might use rhetorically, but I don't recall any substantive victim-blaming as you make out. Still, I'm a busy fellow and maybe I missed it. Just three quotes that can't miss your position on the 'other camp'. Even two, maybe. Shit, if they're bad enough, I'll berate them too.

Well, I've seen quuite a bit of the betrayal of good faith argument on SF in my time. If I might paraphrase Loony Tunes - where all social ordeals are rounded up with the simple claim to gumption and good luck - "Betrayal of good faith? I'm a victim of it!" And the whole "rape advocate" issue feeds into that same problem: betrayal of good faith, decent discussion and fair dealing. I don’t think it was they that started that, but again, if you have quotes, by all means post them.



Look, I appreciate as much as anyone that people have social agendas of one form or another. We all have something good with which to cure the world, and there's only so much computer time, because Ma has her TMZ ter look at this afternoon. But that doesn't mean we can start sacrificing good people on the altar of our progress, in whichever direction it happens to point. But are these people really evil? Co-opt rather than crucify.


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Well, the linguistics alone are a little more complex than you give them credit for, seemingly, without even touching on the scanty ethics. For instance, responsibility carries several meanings.

So there are two errant dichotomies here.



The first is linguistic: one can be responsible to oneself or for oneself without being responsible for the consequences when those consequences are the result of the deliberate, malicious actions of another. That boundary is certainly crossed at the benchmark of reasonability: even in the case of the former ("responsibility to oneself"), there are reasonability thresholds to the specific issue of personal protection, much as law itself holds up "reasonable doubt" without establishing a numerical or statistical limit, since that would be impractical. Each limitation is essentially – one of Tiassa’s favourite words here - aesthetic. Obviously, no woman is responsible for sexual assault on her person. How could it possibly be otherwise, and who would make such an argument? A defense on this basis is inconceivable. (Then again, I am not a lawyer, and lawyerism does mean that all ethical bets are off.) I believe this is the sense the ‘preventionist’ camp is attempting to convey.



That being said, the counter-argument asserts without statement that people exist who will take advantage of another person in any given situation. Thus, one has a 'responsibility' to (protect) oneself. That is actually statistically true: there are such people fucking everywhere. The world is essentially an evil place. Regarding the two camps of thought in the thread, the ‘protectionist’ approach appears to consider the existence of such people as an incidental risk factor without relation to their individuality. The ‘criminalist’ approach seems to regard people as separate individuals, without respect of any inherent risk they might carry. As such, one might just as easily call the two camps ‘incidental risk’ and ‘individualist’, though with a more derived explanation.



So: which is correct? Does the existence of people and society confer an inherent risk rate, against which it is prudent or ‘responsible’ to protect oneself? Well… of course. It would be absurd to argue otherwise. Populations almost always carry a substantial number of such advantage-takers; ESS analysis demonstrates that this must be a sure thing. Each society will vary as to the actual number of such aggressors, but almost all societies will have some of them – and hence there is a (heterogenous) need for door-locking and caution-taking. I don’t wish to deviate much here, but Tiassa demands elsewhere whether it is just or fair that we consider that any man might rape – or for that matter, murder or steal, which doesn’t come up. Of course it is fair: as a citizen user in the system, every person has the right to evaluate the relative risk in any other person or situation. Any person might indeed do us harm. Any male might indeed rape. Who can say where the behavioural breakpoint lies? It is not an all-or-nothing evaluation: ethics – again, in a lawyer vacuum – dictates that we use reasoned, socially responsible elements in deciding on our own safety.



Next, is it the attacker or the victim that is responsible for crime? Well, the attacker, of course. These are questions so clear that the answer is almost tautological: there is no mitigating factor that I can think of that would make sexual assault the fault of any other person but the attacker. This answer is a little shorter than the above, clearly: but frankly requires much less explanation and so its a little more difficult to lengthen it. Let's put a test here: if anyone cites this and has read thus far, begin your response post with the word 'blargh'. I'll be checking the next sets of posts and responses to see if anyone did indeed read that far, or just scanned it to fish out phrases to misappropriate. Frankly, I suspect the latter will be more common. But, back on the track of the discussion, it is impossible to imagine any other conclusion but that the attacker is guilty of his or her own crime. Period.



And so ultimately both elements are true: one has an unavoidable responsibility to the self (and I would argue, to others), and one is not responsible for the crimes committed against the self, all other elements being equal.



The dichotomy is errant.



Done.


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My experience is different. Do you have any stats on a greater frequency of unlocked doors in Canada? Can you cite them? But even if there were, would it matter? Canada is a different nation, a different pair of societies. There are innumerable other issues there and I don't think it breaks down to unlocked doors. There is very little statistical doubt that Canada has a lower rate of sexual assault than the United States, unless reporting rates in Canada were say twenty times lower than in the US. There are bound to be innumerable factors affecting such an outcome: I’ve never seen any address of differences in the targets of social justice between Canada and the US so I can’t say how their strategies differ, or what their targets are, or whether the total volume of such material is greater in Canada. I can say that Canada is overall a more socialist nation, and surely this cannot be a bad thing; perhaps the subconscious acceptance of a small, integrated society affects it in some way. I suspect this to be true of Quebec, where the murder rate is almost nil and violent crimes are extremely uncommon (or so I recall). But does that translate into a society in which women engage in ‘riskier’ behaviour, or are less paranoid about personal safety? Do you have any information about that?

Pooossibly. I’ll wait on your posted evidence. I suspect other factors may be involved.

 

Well I now realise that I went ahead and slammed the concept of the camps while invoking the camps. So that leaves me feeling foolish.

 

It is even more accurately used for someone who opposes rape prevention measures that would stop rapes. When one's advocacy increases rape, they might want to reconsider what their advocacy accomplishes.

That's up to you. Are they worth it to you?

If they are reasonable to you - yes. Other measures might be more reasonable to you. If you implemented them, that's your decision.

Or perhaps just lock your door. Or get a better lock. Or do nothing. You are the only one who has to be OK with the level of risk you accept and what you do about it.

 

Agreed! By the same notion, you have no right to tell someone else that their suggestions for personal safety are incorrect or absurd or unreasonable simply because you do not choose to employ them. It is no one's business but the man or women who might implement them. Anyone who disagrees can (to use your language) get fucked.

We had a crime wave hit our neighborhood about five years ago. The HOA sent a letter out reminding people to lock up, check their window latches, make sure their alarm systems were working (if they had them.) That's their right (indeed, one could argue that's showing a commendable degree of care towards the community they represent.) Everyone else had the right to heed or not heed the suggestion. That is _their_ right.

 

On the one hand, I have to question the motives of anyone who goes up to a victim of a crime and tries to tell them what they could have done better... especially in the face of one so personally traumatizing as rape. What good does it really serve? It won't undo what has been done... it won't help the person overcome the pain of what has been done to them... and it won't help them get back their sense of security and safety; in fact, I would wager what it WILL do is make them feel alienated and demeaned... instead of empathy and understanding, they are being critiqued. It isn't like they've just botched a spare in bowling, where you can simply walk up to them with a smile and kindly tell them that they were twisting their wrist wrong. No... a fundamental aspect of their life has just been shattered... that will take time to recover from, if they can fully recover at all (case in point, the cases where a woman is raped with an object so viciously that she is never able to bear children due to the damage to the uterus, or if they are raped by someone with an STD). I don't care how you mean the advice and information... in that emotional state, it is likely that it will be received very badly.

To the other... I have to question if saying that "well, you could have had such and such or done so and so" is really helpful at all... as Bells has indicated, this was an action done by a relative, someone intimately familiar with both the setting (her house, security, et al) and the victim (Bells and her habits)... even IF she had a guard dog, would it have done anything, being somewhat familiar with him? Case in point... my mother has a German Shepherd and a Beagle Coonhound mix. The neighbors across the street, a rather older couple, used to come over and "petsit" for us quite frequently, even if it was just letting the dogs out to do their business and run around during the school/work day. As such, the dogs were very familiar with them, and would hardly bark or make any noise when they came over. They even had a key for our front door (this is a rapport built over YEARS, mind you)

If, for some crazy reason, the gentleman had decided one day to rape my mother... he could have simply come in, put the dogs in the garage, and had his way with her.

Doors, locked. Windows - locked. Protective dogs - on site. Cameras - installed. Familiarity with neighbors (so they know to watch for anything suspicious) - established.
Yet NONE of that would have mattered if, one day, he had decided "I'm feeling randy, I'm going to have my way with you"

No... rape "prevention" advice has a time and place... but honestly? It isn't foolproof or fallible... this is a crime that must be dealt with swiftly and severely... and yet, as a country, our laws are incredibly lax... hell, as of 2000, with the dismissal of the Violence Against Women Act being ruled "unconstitutional" in the United States vs Morrison case... there IS no national standard by which rape is investigated and prosecuted... even stranger still, the FBI's national report on rape doesn't include rape involving male victims NOR non-forcible rape (statutory, domestic without abuse, etc).

 

Not by honest posters. Everybody would be in it, so the distinction would be meaningless for them.

You appear to have mislaid the original context: the question was whether a Canadian woman living in a big city and not locking her front door - and we have, if nothing else, the visual record of Michael Moore walking up to a series of women's front doors and finding them unlocked - is, in the view of a couple of posters here, "irresponsible".

The followup, which is apparently impossible to even get to, was whether someone recommending Canadian rape prevention approaches (whatever they might be) to American citizens was being irresponsible.

Irrelevant. There are no such people as yet visible here (although we haven't begun to discuss rape prevention approaches focused on potential rapist behavior modification, so there's still room for such people to show - and I bet they do, if and when).

Irrelevant. The question would be whether anyone has the right to treat those who do not, say, choose to "lock up" or even worry about it much, as in any way irresponsible and failed and so forth, if actually burglarized - talk about them differently, investigate and prosecute the crimes against them differently, etc.

Because that is what we are seeing, almost universally in real US life and of course all over this thread, from these self styled "rape prevention" promoters who focus almost completely on modifying the behavior of potential victims, and promote "rape prevention" approaches that impose all burdens on potential victims and none on potential rapists.

And this burden seems invisible to far too many posters here, like this one:

Nobody here has objected to a anyone's suggestions on the grounds that they do not choose to employ them. There are no posts here meeting that description. And that is a quite remarkable delusion, when considered - 25 pages of explication, and still we get such utter bullshit posted in complete sincerity.

That is why the military finds boot camp necessary. You simply can't get through to reactionaries by using words.

 

?? Are you addressing me? First, we're not supposed to be addressing each other. Second, this is approaching litigation point. Careful.

It reaches considerably further. "Rape advocate" is, by definition, a loaded, deceptive term. I have been through the definition already. If it escapes you still, read it again until you understand it. If you object, choose another term, or ask the permission of your betters to select one. English is a remarkably diverse language. I think you should be capable.

Yes, of this placing the onus on the victim by people on this thread. I assume you are unable to locate such evidence, then, or prefer not to bother in your preference of frothing and raving.

Yes, the issue of the false dichotomy which the two perspectives are setting up here.

Who are you?

I was about to ask you the same.

I think I've suggested a few above. Can't you read? Do you even know what I'm referring to by 'factors'? I suppose not; and it's exceedingly unlikely that you'll be honest about what I'm even referring to, or perhaps your English will conveniently fail you again. I stopped reading at this point: there is an informal agreement not to address each other. Let's keep to that agreement, since you insist on colouring the discussion, and since it is clear no objective discussion can be had with you.

Geoff