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This is basically just Dennis's implication process right? Only unintentional. There is an implication of danger (the gun, or being on the open ocean with no way to escape). Given that men are generally bigger and stronger than women, an interpretation would be, that the implication is always there, the nowhere to run or possession of a gun just makes it more text and less subtext, perhaps.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-yUafzOXHPE
Dennis: We’ve gotta pop by the department store, pick up the mattress. I’m gonna get a nice one too.
Mac: The what? The mattress? What do we need a mattress for?
Dennis: What do you mean what do we need a mattress for? Why in the hell do you think we just spent all that money on a boat? The whole point of buying a boat in the first place is to get the ladies nice and tipsy topside, so we can take em to a nice comfortable place below deck, and you know… they can’t refuse. Because of the implication.
Mac: Oh, uh… okay. You had me going there for the first part. The second half kind of threw me.
Dennis: Dude, dude, think about it. She’s out in the middle of nowhere with some dude she barely knows. She looks around and what does she see? Nothing but open ocean. “Ahhh, there’s nowhere for me to run. What am I going to do? Say no?”
Mac: Okay… that seems really dark.
Dennis: Nah, it’s not dark. You’re misunderstanding me bro.
Mac: I think I am.
Dennis: Yeah, you are. Because if the girl said no, then the answer is obviously no.
Mac: No. Right.
Dennis: But the thing is she’s not going to say no. She would never say no. Because of the implication.
Mac: Now… you’ve said that word, “implication” a couple of times. What implication?
Dennis: The implication that things might go wrong for her if she refuses to sleep with me. Not that things are going to go wrong for her, but she’s thinking that they will.
Mac: But it sounds like she doesn’t want to have sex.
Dennis: Why aren’t you understanding this?
Mac: I don’t…
Dennis: She doesn’t know whether she wants to have sex with me. That’s not the issue.
Mac: Are you going to hurt women?
Dennis: I’m not going to hurt these women!
Mac: Oh okay.
Dennis: Why would I ever hurt these women?
Mac: I don’t know.
Dennis: I feel like you’re not getting this at all.
Mac: I’m not getting it.
Dennis: God damn... (looks over at woman shopping nearby) well don’t you look at me like that. You certainly wouldn’t be in any danger.
Mac: So they are in danger!
Dennis: No one’s in any danger! How could I make that any more clear to you? Okay. It’s an implication of danger.
Mac: (Stares silently at Dennis in response)
It's subtly different. In the implications gag, it could never be proved that Dennis raped anyone, but if in our hypothetical omniscient court all his intentions were known perfectly, he intended to rape her by threat of force even if he had no intention of following through with the threat, the modern law does not expect women to test the seriousness of threats before submitting to them.
In my hypothetical, our oblivious man does not realize that any threat of force is involved. Taking off his gun is no more a threat of force than taking a wallet out of his pocket would be an offer of payment or taking his phone out is an offer to order a pizza. Of course, in other circumstances, those things can be true threats and offers. You read intent by context, which can be (mis)read differently by different people.
But the takeaway is the same either way if you assume Mac to be oblivious to the implications when he sleeps with a woman on the boat. A woman experiences a rape, but no man committed rape because he did not intend to.
Right, Dennis and Mac could do exactly the same things on the boat, the woman experiences exactly the same things but Mac is clueless and Dennis is not. How much does that change the scenario? probably depends on how you would expect a reasonable person to understand. Pointing a gun at the woman, even if you were some idiot and weren't trying to intimidate her into sleeping with you would probably count because a reasonable person should have known that would be a threat. Waving a gun? Just showing it? Just putting it down? Mentioning it? Where exactly the line would be is likely to be blurry.
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I always see people, even on the Motte, talk about how women are constantly fearing that they're at risk of getting the killed if they don't comply with men. Then they go along and do everything they think the men wanted them to do (based on no concrete evidence), and then blame men for their own stupid, interpolated to the nth degree, actions. Often, they even blame individual men who didn't intend anything in the first place.
I can't stand this. Men are not mind readers, and most men are not bad people who would take advantage of women like this. At some point, we have to say that the woman was irrational, and wrong to blame innocent men for her own decisions. If someone is terrified about something with no evidence, and they act based on their fear, they don't get to blame random people that they've projected their fears onto.
Eh, the behavior is mostly fine, I'll never criticize a woman for avoiding a situation in which their relative weakness can be abused. The errant step is when the heuristic becomes an accusation, it is wise to avoid being alone with strange men, it is irrational to confuse the lone strange man's latent threat with induced threat.
Agreed.
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Is there no evidence? I would suggest that the OP and Dennis are correct. There is an implication, always. And if you are weaker than the other person then it likely behooves you to consider that at all times. They cannot know if the person will act on said implication or not, but it should be factored in to the assessment. Social behaviors are not decided on an individual basis but a group one. No point in pretending that isn't true I feel.
You cannot blame someone else for something they aren't even cognizant of.
"sorry officer I didn't know I was speeding"
At the end of the day, "making a woman uncomfortable" is verboten and human society has long shaped itself around sexual differences like this. The topic under conversation is just way #109.
Could it be you just don't think women's comfort is all that important? That could be discussed for a millennia and still be unresolved.
I hold a similar stance to haroldbkny, and here's my reasoning. Note, this is coming from someone who is small and short in stature and would absolutely be crushed by most other men around me in combat - no one has any obligation to be continuously cognisant of themselves around me or anyone physically weaker than them, as long as their behaviour isn't actively intended to be intimidating. People need to come to terms with their fears and manage them appropriately, they cannot continuously walk around expecting to be coddled by others. Especially when what makes people intimidated and uncomfortable is poorly defined and basically requires people to do mind-reading in order to reliably avoid these situations. You can't use other people's feelings as a yardstick for socially acceptable behaviour because feelings are inherently by their nature irrational, mercurial and difficult to predict, and if these are the standards which are to govern male-female interactions the only reliable way of avoiding accusations of wrongdoing is to stay away from women.
I believe that female baseline greater neuroticism, rather than any rational risk assessment about their probability of being physically victimised, is a bigger driver of the difference in reactions between men and women, especially considering that women are no more likely to be violently victimised than men (if anything, the reality is the polar opposite of women's feelings). I also think that our reactions to this are related to a protectiveness of women that we simply do not have for men. There are intra-sexual strength differentials too, but it's not very common to see this logic invoked in a scenario of physical power disparity between men. Virtually all discussion about physical strength differences are forever about how men can accommodate women and how men are to blame if women do something idiotic out of fear, it's never applied in an impartial manner.
And perhaps I would be less annoyed with this expectation if our ideas surrounding women in our current society were full traditionalist, which would make it at least consistent. But they're not. I have to act in line with the modern progressive ethos of women being just as Strong and Powerful and Capable as men in contexts where it would benefit them, then accept "But women are so weak and incapable and afraid, and are uniquely capable of being made to do things they don't want" in contexts where this reasoning could be used to justify special favours for women. Our modern attitudes surrounding women are this incongruent mish-mash of "Women Can Do Everything A Man Can Do" ideology as well as traditionalist ideas that prioritise their protection and require men to defer to their sensibilities, and these beliefs are selectively invoked to benefit women. It allows women to capitalise on the upsides of both strength and weakness, and avoid the downsides that these perceptions would normally entail.
Thanks, I agree with this largely, just one minor nitpick:
On more traditionalist, or traditionalist-friendly places like the Motte, they may say "But women are so weak and incapable and afraid, and are uniquely capable of being made to do things they don't want". But when it comes to actually dealing with progressives and feminists, it's even more insidious. For 100 years, people were pushing towards women having more rights along with responsibilities like men. Then the 3rd wave feminists came along and started to push back on this. They started insisting on special privileges for women. They claim that this is not because "women are so weak and scared" but because "men are evil and privileged" or "society uniquely hates women". I cannot abide this explanation, because I still see so many privileges for women, where women are already elevated over men.
So for this example, they'd claim that men need to be constantly cognizant of not making women uncomfortable, not because women deserve special consideration, but because women have historically been oppressed, and men and society don't care about women's feelings, and men need to correct this.
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I think if women want to be treated like adults, and have the privileges of men in modern society, then they should have corresponding responsibilities, and they should not get to lean on antiquated notions that their comfort and dealing with whatever irrationality they have has to be prioritized over other people's interests. If women still want such consideration, we should not pretend like they're not being treated specially.
Note before people accuse me: That's not to say men don't have irrationality too. But IME, men don't usually expect the rest of society to make it their problem.
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For the Dennis skit, he is relying on the woman modelling his behavior given the vulnerable position she is in. He won't do anything if she says no, but he understands that she doesn't know that and so counts on that to change her behavior. It's hard to prove as rape but it is certainly manipulative.
Now imagine Mac as FiveHourMarathon mentions below does exactly the same things as Dennis but cluelessly. Is he innocent of rape or attempting to manipulate? Absolutely. But should he have known of the implication and therefore taken steps to avoid putting the woman in that position? Maybe. It depends on whether a reasonable person should.
I think most men know that if you are sharing an empty subway station late at night with a woman, and you are the only two there, that walking up and standing right behind her, even innocently is likely to make her nervous. If you do it anyway, you're not breaking the law, you shouldn't be arrested, but you are probably being a bit of an asshole.
Learning the social conventions and being cognizant of them is a duty of members of society. For the obvious ones, failing to learn them certainly is blameworthy. It's pretty much the most important thing to learn. They are the rules of the road for society. Just as I shouldn't drive without learning the rules, and if I hit someone because I blow through a Stop sign because I didn't know what it means it is still on me.
That's a terrible analogy. The equivalent to the current situation would be if a pedestrian saw someone driving and assumed that they were going to blow through a stop sign and hit them. So the pedestrian then ran into the street in the opposite direction to avoid the car, because they were terrified of getting hit, and then they subsequently got hit by another car, or something.
And then blamed the first driver for driving like they were going to blow through the stop sign. And a big chunk of society then goes "yeah come on man, you should know better than to drive like you are going to blow through a stop sign!"
Also nobody actually explains how you avoid driving like you are going to blow through a stop sign - except for stuff like don't go too fast and start slowing down well before the stop sign - and when the first driver shows video proof he did that, that chunk of society offers sympathy but immediately forgets anything happened and insists the next driver who didn't blow through a stop sign is still somehow to blame.
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I feel the same. Now that we have decent traffic and road data, and decent computers in cars I have always quietly wondered why we don't make cars that can only go the speed limit. Like if it's a 70 zone, the car tops out at 70 (adjusted for external factors like wind and slope and so on), with maybe a toggle (push the accelerator pedal sideways or something) to go faster for emergencies. I have to wonder it quietly though, because I mentioned it to my dad (a car enthusiast) once and he looked like the only thing stopping him from murdering me on the spot was our genes.
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Sure there can be an over-reaction, no dispute there, but the driver still is (contra your point) at a minimum partially to blame if they do not make themselves cognizant of the rules of the road.
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