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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31672 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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There’s no rational reason to be targeting women for their bags specifically. He could easily just grab them from a luggage store. Your really bending over backwards to give this person the benefit of the doubt - why?

Or if he wants used women’s clothing, specifically, he can just buy it. Either from fetish sites or from thrift stores.

Why are you bending over backwards to insist that a person you know very little about has some kind of fetish involving luggage or other people's clothing?

I’m not - using base rates alone this seems obviously tied to some kind of paraphilia. I’m using statistics and probability which admittedly doesn’t come intuitively to most people

Base rates of what? Is there some data suggesting that people who steal luggage are fetishists? Not saying there isn't, but I'm interested to see the statistics themselves.

Stealing womens clothes can be done for profit or for sexual satisfaction. That the clothes in question were used, lowers their resale value thus increasing the probability that the latter case is true.

But there are obvious, rational reasons to target women for their bags. Women tend to be weaker and less likely to start a confrontation than men, for starters. Targeting a woman means you're less likely to get beaten up (by the victim, at least).

Maybe if you’re literally purse snatching but taking luggage from airport carousels is the most covert way to do this. And again you can shop lift with impunity in most urban American cities so this makes less sense as an explanation

Nobody's saying stealing purses is a good thing, just that it might not be a fetish. There's doubt about "whether the theft is motivated by sexual deviancy" (although they are a 'sexual deviant' just by common-sense meaning anyway - drag queen, kink, etc), but not doubt about "whether they stole the bags and that is dumb".

  1. Two thefts is not enough to show a definite pattern. Randomly grabbing bags and getting women's bags is going to happen 1/4 of the time (or thereabouts, because it's unlikely the bags are evenly split between men and women).

  2. Nobody says there was necessarily a rational reason for this theft. If he's a kleptomaniac, that's certainly not rational.

  3. I'm not in the least "bending over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt". I'm simply not willing to jump to conclusions like others are as to his motives for theft.

Two thefts is not enough to show a definite pattern.

Sure it is. Baggage isn’t gender neutral - you can tell from name tags and often aesthetics which gender it belonged to.

Kleptomania is pretty much unheard of among men, which he is. It’s a female gendered disorder so again the paraphilia explanation fits the statistical profile. It’s just base rates people!

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