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Imagination, truth is your creation
This past weekend, my girlfriend and I went to see the new Barbie movie. I had heard the movie was a new battle in the culture war, so I was going into the theater with trepidation. My girlfriend is woke-adjacent, so navigating these culture war topics with her can feel like the glass bridge in Squid Game. I will spare you commentary on the movie, since I’m sure most people here are already familiar with the details.
Fast forward to our discussion of the movie afterward. My overall opinion was the movie was an extremely inaccurate portrayal of reality, exaggerated to such a degree as to make the modern world unrecognizable. My girlfriend thought it was brilliant, and a searing indictment of patriarchy. I was navigating the glass bridge as well as I could, until I said I thought the scene was unrealistic where Barbie was sexually assaulted in broad daylight next to her boyfriend 5 minutes into their entry into the real world. Cue glass shattering and me plunging onto the concrete. This led to a fight about the state of women in the US in 2023, with the frequency of sexual assault coming up. My girlfriend stated 1 in 4 women experienced sexual assault in their lifetime and I needed to “educate myself”. We did talk things through and ended with a better understanding of each other’s views.
Not having too much familiarity with sexual assault stats, I couldn’t comment on it at the time, except for having a slight bias to thinking that was exaggerated. Either in terms of including a whole bucket of actions we wouldn’t consider sexual assault, or activist data cleaning and feature engineering.
Today I started investigating and found one of the luminaries on the subject, RAINN. RAINN has detailed statistics with citations. According to their victims of sexual violence statistics page, 1 in 6 women are victims of rape or completed rape. We aren’t talking catcalling on the street here, or clumsy come-ons in the workplace.
Fortunately, they posted their citations in detail. Chief among them is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). From the “Understanding RAINN’s Statistics” section:
Fantastic, let’s take a look at what the NCVS says. Zooming in on the sexual assault statistics in particular reveals some incredible details.
Table 1: Number and rate of violent victimizations by type of crime, 2015-2019 (only including Rape/sexual assault for brevity)
Year | Number | Rate per 1,000
2015 | 431,840 | 1.6
2016 | 298,410 | 1.1
2017 | 393,980 | 1.4
2018 | 734,630 | 2.7
2019 | 459,310 | 1.7
Note: this table includes completed, attempted, and threatened occurrences of those crimes.
First impression is 2018 as a massive statistical outlier. My instinct is this was caused my me-too rather than reflecting an underlying increase in violence. It could be either it’s become more normalized to speak up against sexual violence, people more likely to identity threats of sexual assault, and/or participate in a social movement.
In terms of the rates themselves, about 90% of sexual assault victims are women, so let’s adjust these rates. Just some back of the envelope math, but (rate per 1,000) * (proportion of women SA victims) * (adjusting rate to only include women) = 1.6 * .9 * 2 = 2.88. So about 2.88 women per 1,000 are victims of sexual assault.
So how do we get to the lifetime figure? Well, just multiply the figure by average life expectancy! 2.88 * 80 = 230.4 and there you go! 1 in 4 women experience sexual assault in their lifetime.
Of course we need to factor in revictimization and then disinter threatened from committed/attempted. Let’s look at the second first.
Table 21: Number and percent of persons who were victims of serious crime, 2015-2019 (only including Rape/sexual assault excluding threats and no-force contact for brevity)
Year | Number | Percent of persons
2015 | 164,880 | .06%
2016 | 131,760 | .05%
2017 | 144,280 | .05%
2018 | 254,320 | .09%
2019 | 168,860 | .06%
Note: Excludes threatened rape or sexual assault, and unwanted sexual contact (not rape) without force.
Adjusted percent would be 0.108%. Multiply by average life expectancy, and you get 8.6%. So if we completely ignore revictimization, then you are looking at an absolute upper bound of 8%.
This is the most favorable possible analysis I could give, and I can’t get anywhere near that 1 in 4 to 1 in 6 level. You would need to have some inflation factor based on lying on survey responses. Maybe 90s crime boom would factor in as well to get you there.
Given what we know about crime clustering, I wouldn’t be surprised if revictimization rates dropped the figure closer to 1%.
What are your thoughts?
The point of Barbie being "sexually harassed" five minutes after arriving in the real world is to illustrate that her luxury beliefs and wokeism is delusional. The Barbie dream world represents everyone who lives in a woke simulacra of the real world where the horrors of reality are shielded from their view. The point of the harassment isn't to portray the dangers of sexual assault, it is to illustrate the dangers of living in a fantasy world when other people are exposed to real horrors every day. Barbie brought the sexual harassment onto herself by dressing in a sexualized way and not anticipating the realities of interacting with people who aren't in on the luxury beliefs that Barbie got to hold previously.
Isn't "sexual harassment is enormously common to the point where it happens in five minutes" itself wokeism?
I guess I made the mistake of conflating wokism with luxury beliefs in my comment. It would probably be more accurate to interpret Barbie as someone with luxury beliefs and the Latino daughter in the "real world" of the movie as woke. Barbie's luxury beliefs echo and reinforce wokeness in a way, she believes the daughter will agree with whatever she has to say but the girl rejects and attacks her as a fascist and Barbie is hurt by the reality of interacting with the real world beliefs of this girl.
I see where your argument is coming from but I don't think the point of the harassment Barbie faces is to punch down at the "incessant sexual harassment of the lower classes" like the woke/luxury believers would argue about, it's depicted to make Barbie and Ken look ridiculous and out of touch with norms of reality, like that the construction workers aren't all women or the president isn't a black lady or whatever, and that she can't parade around in a miniskirt as a sexy blonde because people will catcall you and cops (or anyone else) might make lewd remarks toward you. I don't see that as a ridiculously woke statement, they're not saying we should all have the freedom to run around with our tits out without consequence, the point is that if you disregard the norms and customs of people around you they will feel empowered to disregard the norms and customs toward you as well. The mom and daughter characters weren't victims of sexual harassment, only Barbie was.
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I sort of saw that as the Barbie equivalent of Buddha leaving home for the first time and seeing the Four Sights. But rather than disease old age death and asceticism; she sees ogling/catcalling, sexual assault, and old age, capped by defiance from the old lady.
I'm not sure where a discussion of realism fits into a film that features both tiny girls replaying the 2001 monolith scene and multiple extended musical numbers.
I wasn't familiar with the Four Sights before your comment but I just read the wikipedia entry and it does seem like a good parallel to the Barbie movie. Barbie's shock at the things she sees and experiences make her look ridiculous, even if she is changed by the experience of seeing them. We're not meant to empathize with her character's initial state, only once she sees the suffering of others does she become more human.
Well, metaphors point to reality. Realism is the main theme of the movie as it's contrasted with the artificial Barbie dream world. The mom and daughter pair are the most apparent representation of reality in the film as they have to deal with the realities of humanity while Barbie gets to ignore them all in her perfect dream world. Extended musical numbers can be used to express great truths about reality even in their artifice. Effective art can mirror and illuminate reality rather than abstract or distract from it.
Siddhartha is equally ridiculous in seeing the Four Sights, the pampering is often taken to comical extents in retellings of the story. It's the idea of someone so pampered seeing our world for the first time, with eyes uncallused, that they see things we accept and are horrified by them, as perhaps we ourselves should be horrified.
It's just an odd complaint on realism to me because it is, at core, a frequency argument. I don't think anyone is arguing that getting your ass smacked by a stranger is unrealistic. I'd go so far as to say it's a normal experience, for most men and women, at some point in their lives.
So the argument isn't that the occurrence itself is unrealistic, it's that the occurrence happens too fast to be realistic. That it portrays harassment as something that happens to every woman every day, when it's probably more like a couple incidents in there course of a lifetime.
That's gonna seem really nitpicky. It's meant to portray all of real life on an accelerated timeline. The movie doesn't have months to noodle about between interesting occurrences. So it comes out sounding like no woman ever gets her ass smacked, and that's just a silly point.
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