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Notes -
On Social Norms
One thing I dislike about critics of social norms is how bad they tend to be at understanding why people had certain norms in the past. Many people believe that everything was simply oppressive and to shit on people, without critically thinking about anything in particular.
Feminist for example, love to dunk on slut shaming, without thinking about the alternative, which is basically people getting sick as shit from disease, and various illegitimate children with multiple mothers/fathers. Of course, as long as you get checked for STD's and use protection, you could avoid many of those problems, but the fact we see large amounts of STDs, abortions, and single motherhood among various racial groups withing society (blacks, Hispanics, & native americans) doesn't make that argument convincing at scale. I've known of men & women who deliberately for go condoms because it doesnt "feel good", and then get a pikachu face when they are given diseases or get pregnant.
Its become more and more apparent to me that there are many people in our society who simply dont or cant make good decisions, even if given an optimal environment. Perhaps there is a discussion to be had around norms about dating and sex, even if we conclude slut shaming isnt an ideal solution?
Norms also exist because the law is often too rigid to deal with a certain problem and/or trying to be precise with the law results in many injustices. To harp on an adjacent topic to your "slut shaming" we look to ancient norms and laws about sex out of wedlock. It is frowned upon in a vast majority of pre-industrial societies. However, it wasn't always outlawed. A fairly common legal setup in Christian nations was that there was a strong social norm against fornication, with many unwritten rules and enforcement mechanisms, but there was a legal prohibition against adultery. In practice this meant that if two 18 year olds had some sex, and she got pregnant there were only a few things to practically do. They could get married, this was typically preferred. If they didn't, generally the girl was expelled from polite society (of course aristocrats were not subject in the same ways and they could cover up such scandals and were expected to do so, such as having their daughter fall severely ill for a year only for a magical baby appear to a 50 year old "mother"). But generally the girl is now a whore, and the impregnator is now subject to extrajudicial punishment from the girls family that the courts will not intervene on. On the other hand, if a married woman committed adultery she'd be hanged by the state, and generally so would the man, particularly if he was also married.
Informal systems are often preferred when the specific facts and circumstances of a case are important. Laws and rules simply do not work in such situations, as we have seen with "affirmative consent" rules on campus and sometimes laws to such an extent. "You got my daughter drunk and raped her" is almost never a justiciable accusation, if you make the process fair. It is something that often makes sense for the law to look the other way when the girls dad and brothers beat the piss out of ole Boozy Bobby.
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