This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link