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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   16382 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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Consider the case of a woman who is raped by a man she met at a bar. It's a terrible crime, we should change the way we teach men to behave around women.

Then you learn that she had a weird hobby of wearing revealing clothing and shamelessly flirting with men at various bars, accepting drinks from them, following them home, coming in for a coffee, agreeing to look at their collection of etchings and then laughing at them and leaving.

Should we let the rapist go free? I say no.

Should we say she got what she deserved? I say no.

Should we condemn her behavior? I say yes.

Should we update our opinion of men away from them being vicious opportunistic rapists? I say yes.

I'm on board with the object-level counterpart to the first three points, but only partially with the last one, because I think standards for federal agents (who are supposedly a selected group) about killing should be higher than standards for men in general. Likewise, with the bar story, if you replace the generic man at a bar with, I don't know, a social worker involved with prostitutes, I would absolutely consider him not being able to resist the temptation to rape a slag a signal in favour of "male prostitute counselors are vicious opportunistic rapists".

But, I mean, if you want to match the metaphors, the woman in your scenario would've also literally been yelling "rape me! rape me!" at the man she met at the bar...

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