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Notes -
"Did you lock it?"
A common trait among my social circle used to be that everyone shared an obsession with bicycles. Few of us had or even wanted a car in the city, and having everyone on two wheels made it much easier to roam down our house party itinerary. Between all of us we had a deep well of metis to draw from; everything from which wheels to buy to the easiest way to make derailleur adjustments. We were naturally attached to our steeds and none of us wanted our bicycles to pull a disappearing act, and so we discussed ways to keep safe.
U-locks were ubiquitous and we'd warn each other of the brands that were still susceptible to the infamous pen trick. Some of us of the more paranoid variety installed locking skewers to keep expensive saddles or wheels latched in place. We'd even caution each other to check bolts anchoring bike racks to the ground, since the U-lock was useless if the whole setup could be lifted away. It wasn't possible to reach full immunity but you never need to be the fastest gazelle to escape the cheetah, just faster than the slowest one.
Naturally, if anyone ever suffered the ultimate calamity of having their ride stolen, we would ask if it was locked and how. There was nothing sadistic about our inquiries. Our questions were problem-solving endeavors saturated with sympathy; we wanted to know what went wrong precisely to help others avoid the same fate. Maybe the local thieves discovered some new exploit in our standard security apparatus, or maybe this was just an opportunistic snatch while they left their bike unlocked outside during a quick peek inside.
"If you do X, you're likely to get Y" is the format to an unremarkable factual observation. "If you leave your bike outside unlocked, you're likely to have it stolen" is just reality and, on its own, is a statement that carries no moral judgment. If the victim wasn't previously aware of this correlation, they are now, and are better equipped to evade a rerun.
The parallels to my actual point are probably getting obvious by now.
Kathleen Stock charges right into deconstructing the surprisingly enduring ritual of affixing the "victim-blaming" reprimand to any advice aimed at reducing the risk of sexual assault. Now, in case anyone needs the clarification: I believe that rape is way worse than bicycle theft. Nevertheless the principles at play here remain the same:
Consider the victim of the unattended bike snatch again. Imparting wisdom on the implacable chain of consequences is about the most compassionate thing you could do. They can choose to accept that advice, and if it is sound then they'll be met with the disastrous outcome of...not having their bike stolen. Or they can choose to reject that advice and adhere to the mantra that instead of putting the onus on cyclists not to have their bikes stolen, we should teach thieves not to thieve. In which case, best of luck with completely overhauling the nature of man; here's hoping their bicycle budget rivals the GDP of a small country to withstand the inevitable and wholly predictable hits.
If your dad or friend tells you to cover your drink at parties to avoid being raped, they are looking out for you and are a good ally.
If the chief of police responds to questions about a rise in sexual assault rates in the city and says 'women should be covering their drinks at bars' and then does nothing else to address the problem through their office, they are blaming victims instead of doing their job.
The difference, as often happens in culture war issues, is between individual-level advice and society-levels policies.
The types of accusations of 'victim blaming' that you are talking about here, tend to happen when one person thinks it's their responsibility to give individual-level advice, and someone else thinks they had a duty to make societal-level policy proposals (or implementations) instead.
I agree, and if the accusations of victim blaming I saw on this topic were directed at officials like the Chief of Police I would agree that it's victim blaming. But the overwhelming majority of times I've seen someone accused of victim blaming they were just other regular joes and jos on twitter or reddit or some forum. And in those cases, the way I see it, the very fact someone is talking and thinking about this in terms of policy proposals is how we can tell they are the mistaken party.
Policies apply to populations, and populations are abstracts. It's terrible when any% of women are sexually assaulted for sure, but there are much better ways to affect policy than arguing with strangers on the internet. What really matters to people is when women they know get sexually assaulted - thanks to Dunbar's number that is pretty much the only time we really care. So of course people offer individual level advice, why would they offer more?
Well, I sort of precisely disagree about the purpose of publicly visible social media, which probably demonstrates why people react so differently to these types of posts.
To my mind, there's little point in a random individual posting safety tips on their social media. Anyone who wants those tips can get an actual guide from an expert source with a 3 second google, and it's much more likely to be accurate and helpful. And women get bombarded with those sentiments all the time, it's not like they aren't already aware.
To me, public-facing social media is much more a process of expressing/creating the public cultural consensus on topics of interest.
If every social media post in existence says that Trump is a corrupt criminal, his political career is probably over. If half the posts say he's a corrupt criminal and half say he's a saintly god-emperor, he probably has a good chance of being president again.
And, yes, those posts are in large sense a reflection of what people already believe. But they also get read by people and pundits and aggregated into stats and that affect what everyone else believes, both about Trump and about how to report on and talk about him and whether it's worthwhile to contribute to his campaign and etc. No individual post has a huge influence on the realty of the culture, but they have a massive determinative influence in aggregate.
Same thing here.
If 100% of posts on social media about sexual assault are saying to teach men not to rape and to reform and enhance police interventions and etc., then that's going to strongly influence us towards a world where men are scrutinized and given the burden of responsibility to address this issue rather than women, where police and politicians are held responsible for addressing the problem materially rather than rhetorically, and where victims are not criticized for their legal behaviors before an assault and there complaints are much harder to dismiss as 'regrets' or 'asking for it' or w/e.
Alternately, if 100% of posts on social media about sexual assault are telling women how to protect themselves and what precautions to take, then that's going to strongly influence us towards a world where women are constantly scrutinized for all their legal reasonable behaviors that are deemed incautious or slutty or w/e, where there is very little scrutiny or pressure on men to police each other or be good allies in these situations, where victims are blamed for their behaviors in ways that make it easier for criminals to stay unprosecuted, that applies no pressure on politicians or police to materially address the problem with the powers of their office, etc.
And then in between those two extremes there's a sliding continuum that influences how much of each of those categories of things happen, and an eternal battle for the soul of the culture between people who prefer one world over the other.
And unfortunately, that battle is fought through the medium of flame wars on social media, because we live in a hell world where recommendation engines and trending topics and the articles written about them influence much of what people believe about reality, and for social/cultural norms what people believe about reality often becomes reality.
(Also, disclaimer- I made the two sides there sound very uneven there to show one side's perspective, but obviously there are strong arguments on both sides or it wouldn't be a divisive issue.)
The thing is though, that this -
Is because of this -
This hell world of algorithms and trending topics didn't exist before social media because it was caused by social media, and more specifically it came about when people discovered they could use social media to influence public consensus and affect policy. Fortunately the tool for dismantling your hell world is in everyone's hands - stop putting any faith in social media, stop allowing it to influence you. While you might only be a drop in the bucket, so is everyone else - the more people who opt out, the less influence it has. Conversely if you refuse to stop playing the social media game, this hell world is your choice.
Also "for social/cultural norms what people believe about reality often becomes reality" is true, but if objective reality disagrees it always wins out. That's why teaching men not to rape doesn't work - men already know not to rape, those who do anyway don't care what twitter says.
Also also this is kind of nuts -
People aren't Schroedinger's rapists based on how many tweets there are saying don't dress like a slut vs keep your dick in your pants. There is also zero evidence that people saying teach men not to rape on Facebook have any influence at all on the rate of sexual assault. This is exactly the kind of unrealistic expectation that I was talking about. If complaining about it on social media was an effective strategy, the number of perpetrators of sexual assault wouldn't have climbed every year since 2012.
If there is a correlation between social media and policy decisions, it flows the other way. People in positions of power and influence determine how they would like the world to look, that seeps out into social media and then social media is used to justify what the influential wanted.
I strongly disagree about the order of events here. I've somewhat followed the development of these algorithms casually and my strong impression is that they were just made by corporate interests to maximize their profits by keeping people on their platform longer, not with any social engineering in mind. There are cases of trying to use them for social engineering but this generally happens like a decade or two after they're put into place, after everyone notices how much influence they're having.
I think if you looked at the expected impact of your actions by fighting for your side in the currently most influential arena, vs ignoring that arena entirely in an effort to make it go away, the individual activist has much higher EI by fighting. This is one of those coordination problems, everyone would be happier without the hellworld but no individual can voluntarily leave it alone without hurting their interests. Tellingi ndividuals to hurt themselves to influence coordination problems generally doesn't work, that's why they're such big problems, and it's why we form governments to solve them.
Tricking people into doing something that makes them miserable is social engineering. But it isn't the algorithms or platforms themselves that are to blame, their social engineering is relatively tame compared to the kind humans inflict on other humans when given this potemkin community and influence. It was humans who did the Arab spring, who did gamergate and metoo, who turn the internet into a war zone every four years during campaign season - deploying sock puppets and playing double agents, spreading malicious rumours and photoshopping evidence, these are the kinds of social engineering I am talking about. Back before social media these things happened pretty frequently, but without the outsized influence people ascribe to events on social media there was no sense of the arms race, and no reason to get so worked up (well, for most people).
Here's how the timeline goes imo -
1.) First there were forums, nobody gave a shit.
2.) Then came social media, and everyone wanted in.
3.) But then some shitty arguer got into an argument with a person who was better at arguing than them and they got upset, but couldn't admit they'd lost the argument for one reason or another, and they said "people shouldn't be allowed to argue things I don't like." Old internet still outweighed the new internet at this point though, so he was thoroughly mocked into silence.
4.) After time passes however, the shitty arguers who want to ban arguments they don't like outnumber the other people. Internet policies are changed to reflect this change in values from 'people should be responsible for themselves' to 'we have to save everybody from themselves!' But the only thing that unites the shitty arguers is their fragile egos, they don't have a coherent platform. So there's no logic to the way they censor arguments except who whom.
5.) Hell world.
So it's not about making it go away - I agree that is a futile waste of time. What I am saying is that the hell world you live in - your hell world - is one of your own design, and one you can leave by dropping social media. This will have the effect of lessening social media's influence, but that is ancillary to the point, which is making you less miserable. If you decide you would rather be more meat for the great political machine to grind into paste, that's your choice. Because that's the choice here, it's not a coordination problem, it's a duplicity problem - you won't hurt your interests by opting out, you will hurt the interests of Bidens and Trumps and Clintons of the world. You have been tricked into thinking you are fighting for your life when in reality they are just stealing your happiness to fuel their ambitions.
It gets worse though, because of course it does, that's the social media slogan: "It gets worse!" Because while they have harnessed the language of war - everything is a battle, there are two sides duking it out and if you miss a tweet you are letting your side down, how dare you put your happiness before your people, people's lives are at stake here! - the stakes are actually significantly diminished. Don't get me wrong - it is an utter travesty when someone commits suicide or loses their livelihood over social media bullshit, but it's a different category of fucked up to actually killing each other.
And the influence goes the other way too - we talk in these grandiose cataclysmic terms, and it affects the way we think about the issues too, so when you said "Tellingi ndividuals to hurt themselves to influence coordination problems generally doesn't work" I nodded in agreement, but actually when I think about it, that's not right is it? Martyrs have had huge impacts all throughout history, and rightly so - they can reset prisoner's dilemmas. It's never easy being a martyr, because nobody wants to suffer and there's no guarantee you'll even have an effect, but there is no denying they can have an effect. But we are conditioned to think there's no escaping social media so that we continue to sacrifice our happiness to it.
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Except, there is little police can do to address this problem other than take reports and hope the half life of the pills hasn't run. There are some crimes police pretense deters, and others where its impractical. Police can really deter DUI's by placing a checkpoint right outside the parking lot of a bar, or near a string of bars and making that checkpoint well known well in advance. People will just Uber. They aren't well positioned to stop date rape and roofie-rape. Those activities occur inside of private property and, frankly, the behavior is subtle. The people best positioned to address this problem are the women themselves and their friends/chaperones. Police can attempt to pick up the pieces for you afterwards, but rape is a very hard crime to investigate and prove in court compared to murder, assault, and other major felonies.
Well, I disagree, but my standard position here is that neither of us are going to be actual experts on this topic, and what I'm advocating for is for the people who are to be given all the resources they need to do as much as they can. If they say they can do nothing then I'll be very surprised, but ok.
However, impressions I have on this topic as a non-expert:
-There's always stories going around about such-and-such a city has a bajillion untested rape kits, and whenever someone tests a bunch they find matches indicating serial offenders that the cops could have looked for.
-Ad absurdum argument, if you enhance the penalty for any crime to being slowly tortured to death in the public square over a series of months, that will shift the incentives for that crime enough to reduce its prevalence. I don't think we should do the ad absurdum case, but yes, on the margins the police can do things to disincentivize crimes through threat of punishment.
-Very many women report being reluctant to go to police out of fear that they will be dismissed or treated with suspicion. Police departments do not always make it clear how to get a rape kit or optimize procedures to get one immediately or even educate the public enough about their existence. There is much the police could do to encourage reporting and evidence collection.
-Do tester strips for teh relevant drugs exist? Could police distribute them to bars? If not, they could at least run public outreach programs to educate bartenders on the signs of those drugs being used, how to confirm/deescalate those situations or get police involved quickly, etc.
-I actually care about sexual assaults against sex workers, something that police are notoriously uninterested or unhelpful in prosecuting.
-Etc.
I don't think police can stop all crime from happening, but I do think that even for difficult cases like this they can have reasonably powerful effects on the margins.
What exactly are you disagreeing with? My information comes from working with police as a states attorney for a period of time and working as clerk for a judge. Sex crime is very hard to investigate because a lot of it looks like normal courtship just a little on steroids. Which also is often non-criminal. Also, testing strips exist, but mass distribution wouldn't work, they'd expire just like PH strips do.
The reluctance thing is probably real, but most police I've interacted with say this is victim led. The police, unfortunately, are very resource constrained, so complaining witnesses need to be on their game, or the police don't have the resources to extract info from them and follow up. People look at prosecutors having 99% conviction records and don't look any further, they have that because they reject 90% of their cases that aren't simple possession. I've seen people blow 3x the legal limit and get off on a DUI simply by being persistent and thus only 3 of the 4 necessary witnesses are in court on the day of trial.
Imagine the work needed to prosecute these kind of cases. First, our victim needs to come in quickly to report to preserve the evidence. Often they do not. Second we need techs actually capable of doing so. Often they are not on hand. Third we need to test that. Often that is not available. Fourth they need to be confident in their story. In almost all cases, they are not. Fifth we need to get corroborating witnesses or a confession. The former are rare, as are the latter. Sixth we need to assemble all this into a coherent case. Often it falls apart. One easy fail is the verification of physical evidence fails. Or the girl herself collapses under cross.
What is the solution? IMO it is that consent is not a good mediator for sexual encounters, never has been, and likely never will be. Instead we should use a visible public acts standard. Things like marriage, shutting a door, etc are should be what is important in sexual offense law, not subjective things like consent and intoxication.
The claim that there's not much police could do, even in principle, to fight sex crimes.
And it feels like your response here points out about a half a dozen ways in which we could give the police more funding, change the priorities o prosecutors, and do public outreach to help victims come forward sooner with better evidence, which would let the police do more.
Those are the kinds of things I'm advocating.
What exactly would be those half dozen ways? All those steps that are hard to do will cost a LOT to improve the situation at each step by even 5%.
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There is a whole range of responses that range from "modern women are sluts that first jump into men's beds and then sober up and cry rape" to "while we do our best to investigate every reported case of sexual assault and put the perpetrators behind bars, there are still first-time offenders. Knowing what situations are more likely to lead to sexual assault and what actions or behaviors can identify a rapist preparing to commit his vile deed can help you protect yourself and people close to you" that all can be called "blaming the victim" and yet this range is huuge.
I am also getting strong "red button vs blue button" vibe from this discourse. Teaching women how to avoid sexual assault is teaching them to press the red button. "Don't do this, and your chances of being sexually assaulted are minuscule." And yet there will still remain some women whose literal job is wearing skimpy clothes in front of horny men and flirting with them to get them to buy them a drink. Some of these women will also have no choice but to walk home through sketchy alleys at 1am after their shift. They get raped, everyone says, "well, what did she expect".
Team blue button thinks that if they can get the majority of women to stop self-policing their behavior, we can just clog the meatgrinder. Sexual assault happens to median women, they go to the police, the perpetrator is convicted, everyone is horrified, the moral barometer inevitably edges towards the new equilibrium, soon everyone is watching out for someone trying to sneak a roofie into their date's drink and bros don't let other bros be rapey creeps. Yes, there's still a chance you might get sexually assaulted, but it's shared equitably by everyone.
Do strippers have a notably high rate of getting raped in alleys? They probably have a high rate of being sexually assaulted while actually working(either as a side gig or while on the clock), but it would surprise me if the rate of getting raped in alleys was elevated(I mean it would also surprise me if they were recognizably the same person both on and off the clock).
I mean I agree with your point, we can tell young women ‘don’t go get drunk at his place if you’re not going to sleep with him’ and some idiot teenager will do it anyways. Just seems like a dumb example.
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Or more to the point - does an individual woman following all the advice decrease the total number of sexual assaults by one, or does it just drive their potential assailant to find a different victim that night?
My strongman for the blue button take is that telling women to police their behavior will push the assaults down the chain towards the most vulnerable targets, but does nothing to decrease the overall number of assaults, because it doesn't decrease the number or incentives of potential assailants and it will never be sufficient to actually make it impossible for them to find any victim at all.
If you are a concerned father and actually would prefer that someone else get raped instead of your daughter, give her that advice for sure. But if you're in a position that has a responsibility to society in general, you should be pursuing avenues that decrease teh total number of assaults, and telling women to police their behavior doesn't accomplish that.
Of course, that take can't be 100% true, there is some marginal effect where if a large enough percentage of women police all of their behavior strictly enough at all times it would actually leave few enough opportunities that rates would go down. But the question is whether that means 'everyone has to war burkas all the time and can never be in public unless escorted by a male relative', or if you get meaningful effects at very mild levels of self-policing.
My intuition is no, until you get to really debilitating and universal self-policing the criminals will still find plenty of opportunities and overall rates won't be affected much. And requiring that level of restrictions on women's behavior is holding them responsible for preventing their own victimization (instead of trying to solve it with like law enforcement or w/e), which is semi-reasonably labeled 'victim blaming'.
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Returning to bikes, the chief of police really is apt to say, "buy a good U-lock that isn't easily defeated without an angle grinder, there are simply too many bikes stolen for us to reliably track down the thieves and recover the bike". The police can do their best to track down the most egregious offenders and can include patrols that decrease the likelihood of theft, but carelessness and villainy can't reliably be thwarted by good detective work.
I wonder if the Chief of Police is better off creating a Civic Security Chief sub-position to make these sorts of statements and take the heat from the police as a whole to divorce the role of police with personal responsibility.
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What does it mean to "do nothing else to address the problem"? What if the police is already doing (or is in the process of starting to do) everything they believe they can reasonably do given the available resources? Should they just sit it out to avoid "victim blaming" when they could give useful advice that helps them do their job and solve the problem? I mean, isn't educating people about safety part of the police's job?
Unless he's facing specific criticism and trying to deflect blame, "here's what you can do to help/protect yourself" doesn't strike me as unreasonable.
If he believes he is already doing everything he possibly can through his office, he can say that (and describe what those efforts are, what limitations they face, why they're not trying the various things people are suggesting they do, etc), and the public can decide whether they believe him or not.
The problem is framing the issue as something that is the victim's job to prevent, rather than a problem that society should be trying to fix.
But that only serves the purpose of covering his ass, whereas giving advice to potential victims helps solve the problem, which is his actual job.
The victims are part of society, and they have the biggest interest in preventing the crime. Excluding them from being part of the solution only makes sense if you're playing the blame game and want to make sure the "right"* people get the blame, not if your priority is solving the problem.
*IMHO, the people who actually deserve the blame are the rapists.
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That doesn't answer the core contradiction. Why is sexual assault the only topic that "victim blaming" is used for?
Over the years, my local police (and a few nearby and/or related organizations) have put out information on protecting yourself from break-and enter, carjacking, bike theft, scams, mugging, and incidental gang violence. None (or at most a few) of those were paired with substantive actions, and none drew serious accusations of victim blaming.
Given that the organizations in charge of societal-level policy proposals (or implementations) routinely give individual-level advice with negligible pushback, what makes sexual assault so special?
The difference between sexual assault and the other crimes you list is that unlike with sexual assault, people generally don't recognize any temptation to get victimized, tempt criminals to victimize you, or falsely claim victimization. When someone claims mugging, no one wonders "Are you sure you didn't just regret giving them your wallet?". People rarely wonder "Are you sure that guy who broke into your house and attacked you wasn't someone you invited in?" -- but you do see people using the term "victim blaming" in the Pelosi case.
If someone gets sexually assaulted, or beat by their spouse, or gets caught with their pants down drinking wine with their assailant, some people are going to wonder "Are you sure you aren't more responsible for this than you're admitting?", and some people are going to get offended at the implication. "Fat shaming" and "alcoholism is a disease" are similar in structure, though you don't hear the phrase "victim blaming" because they're one person affairs.
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Feminists object to the existence of sexual assault, not to individual advice, and they frame it this way because they are professional activists. There is no body of professional anti-bike theft activists, hence there isn’t an epidemic of utopian thinking about bike theft.
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It's because feminists have framed the question of rape as something "men" as a group do to "women". Not a highly contemptible subset men, but men in general.
If you could have a societal debate about how to stop bike theft WITH bike thieves and their solution was "lock your bike better", you would rightly answer them "no, if we're all on the same page about stopping bike theft here, then the solution is that you JUST STOP STEALING BIKES!". But of course, bike thieves are not interested in these societal debates, they don't show up to them. So it's okay to assume they will keep stealing and it's appropriate to suggest solutions that work around that.
But as I've mentionned feminists have framed the question of rape as being something "men" perpetrate, so when men show up to societal debates and helpfully suggest mitigation strategies they get the same treatment as our hypothetical bike thief who shows up at a how to avoid bike theft debate. And the contemptible subset of men who commit those rapes are not interested in the debate and obviously don't show up.
*EDIT: And I think it's important to note here that feminists aren't necessarily completely wrong here. Think of the prevalence through history of armies "raping and pillaging" after conquest. Of how recently it was that it became unacceptable for husbands to force themselves on their wives. There's a lot of men throughout history who we probably would think of as normal for their time, not a particular small subset of them, who would consider doing what you want with a conquered people's women or forcing a wife to "her duty" as normal behavior.
Sort of serious question: Is this actually true? It seems to me that we have a long history of looking at other groups, and our own people in semi-recent history and repeatedly saying, "look how they treated their women! Appalling!", regardless of the truth of it. I always hear leftists saying things like "just 100 years ago, women were treated like chattel", and the like, but to be honest, those claims don't really hold up. Yes, legal rights have changed. But that means nothing unless we understand the context around which prior people had understood and thought about (or simply not thought about) those legal rights.
A little more than 100 years ago, women couldn't legally cast a vote. But that doesn't mean they were chattel. People didn't necessarily think about being unable to vote as being chattel. Women throughout all of history have had the strong ability to get what they want, despite being unable to vote, even dating back to ancient Rome, when women successfully did things like protest austerity taxes they didn't like. Men generally listen to women, because men are actually really close with women. They're not two competing groups. Men generally define themselves first and foremost by their relationship with their most significant others in their lives, which are their wives. Do you really think that men would treat women like they owned them and be completely happy? The phrase "happy wife, happy life" is well over a century old!
So now we come back to marital rape. I don't know the true answer. I do know that marital rape was outlawed fairly recently, like within the past 50 years, in the US. But does that mean that it was socially acceptable to force yourself on your wife? Does that mean that it was common to do that? I'm skeptical, myself. It might just be a part of the repeated cascade of "look how bad people used to treat women" of our modern world.
I see no reason to believe it is any more true then than it is now. Spousal abuse has doubtless always existed. Our current system is observably quite bad at handling it, and despite attempting to engineer specific solutions to the problems, the basic failure mode is generally the person being abused. It is at least plausible that more tight-knit communities were better at handling the problem than atomized ones, given the observed failure modes with the current system.
More generally, fictionalization and demonization of the past are absolutely rampant and actively encouraged by the current dominant ideology.
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The question almost answers itself.
Part of the problem is the lack of division of forcible or similarly clear rape from things as different as "we both got drunk and had drunk sex I didn't like in the morning" or even "we had sex and I didn't like it after we broke up three weeks later". The only ways to provide advice against the second things are "don't have sex at all", "watch your alcohol consumption", "be more discerning in who you date" or "you're responsible for you're own decisions, regret isn't rape" and all of those are anathema. Advice to avoid surreptitious drugging isn't taken nearly as badly. So the difference is that advice which puts significant responsibility on women when there's a supposedly decent man who could be held responsible is verboten. You can sometimes get away with it for forcible/drugging because in that case the man is a faceless criminal rather than someone she would date.
This is a good distinction I hadn't thought of before. It seems to track with my bike theft analogy. If someone's unlocked bike was stolen and we know who did it because the thief is riding it around the neighborhood, it does seem gauche to excoriate the victim for not locking it up.
That's not the point and you know it. The difference between that and "bike theft" is that in the case I'm describing, the harm to the woman was in fact partially to wholly her own fault; the guy's error was either mutual (he got drunk with her) or non-existent (she decided she didn't like him later).
I didn't know I misunderstood your post, I apologize for that.
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Oh, sorry, I thought that was taken as read: it's because of the other type pf victim blaming, where people actually literally blame the victim for what happened to them explicitly and directly, which happens all the time in cases of sexual assault (and used to happen even much much more in the recent past).
That's why there is such a visceral and powerful narrative around victim blaming in cases of sexual assault. It's correct and justified in most cases, which are just straightforwardly shaming victims for being slutty or leading people on or w/e.
What I was talking about is why that same narrative gets extended to many of the cases that OP is referring to, which are very unlike those cases.
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I am pretty certain that you will be unable to provide even a single example where the activists, before accusing someone of victim blaming, check if the person alleged to do so, does nothing else to address the problem.
To many, the fact the problem is happening is proof enough of that. If preventing rape at a societal level is a responsibility of the police, then rape increasing at a societal level is evidence of the police not solving it
The usual point of disagreement is, I expect, at the very start of that chain of logic.
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Considering that I have no idea why anyone would document that activity in a way that I'd be able to find a permanent record of, I agree.
My point was, in case you actually missed it (which I doubt), was that
is an entirely post-hoc justification, invented to excuse the activists who just want to attack anyone who ascribed any degree of agency to a victim of one particular kind of crime. Your whole post makes an argument that’s simply entirely irrelevant in any instance of alleged victim blaming and their denouncing.
That's a bold assertion.
I disagree.
I would agree that few rank-and-file social media posters who talk about victim blaming could articulate that sentiment in the way I have.
That's not saying much, though; that's true for almost any well-considered/principled/nuanced political position.
I still think that the nuanced versions of those ideas have an effect on the rank-and-file behavior, though. Partially just by filtering down from the pundits to the masses as an attitude rather than a position, but also just because a lot of people can sense and recognize things that they can't clearly articulate.
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