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"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.
The old Feminist trope of 'just teach men not to rape' has been around for years and is a clear non-starter. I used to get really wound up about this (along with lots of other feminist arguments), but now I see it as potentially anchoring a negotiation for additional resources to be spent on women's safety. Not that I find the argument fair or compelling in any way shape or form.
It's another example of feminism exploiting hyperagency/hypoagency when it suits their needs. In this case the argument is that women have no agency around whether they are victims of crime or not and men (as a group) are 100% responsible for the rapes that happen in the world. Men are presumed to have so much agency here that they are responsible for the crimes of other men. You can see this with statements like 'its up to men to stop rape' and dedicated organisations built around this concept.
I'm libertarian leaning and have a strong valuation of agency and an internal locus of control. I despise those that are emotionally manipulative and try to get others to shoulder their personal responsibilities (including the responsibility for personal security). It's probably a large part of why I despise Feminism as an ideology.
As always, motte/bailey... you can absolutely go to a highschool and describe 20 different borderline scenarios to 16 year old boys and ask 'which of these are rape/assault and which are not' and you may be shocked and alarmed at the answers that 5% of them give. Not because they are evil or cruel but from genuine ignorance or misunderstandings or cultural baggage. Education can absolutely fix a lot of that.
And the bailey is stupider than that, sure, it always is. But the things that seem obvious to us aren't always obvious to people until they've been taught, especially in a culture where we obsessively shield young people from all sexual topics so they have no idea what they're doing. There really is a role for education there, as one among many avenues.
Why don't we teach young women 'please never send mixed signals to men about your sexual interest as ambiguous coquettishness muddies the water around consent'? Why is it 'No means no and if you don't have a yes, it's a no' in the face of all observed human mating practices? All the responsibility for miscommunication around consent is placed onto the shoulders of men by the groups advocating 'education'.
To be fair, I do think there should be some education about consent in the basic Sex Ed taught in schools, but it shouldn't be the ideologically captured garbage that is pushed now (eg 'enthusiastic consent' or its rape). There are consequences to not having any nuance around this delicate subject. As it stands there are a certain amount of sensitive empathic young boys who will take the narrative at face value, twisting their sexuality into a pretzel in order to never violate a girls consent, or even make her uncomfortable by making a pass. This is a recipe for involuntary celibacy and dissatisfaction on both sides.
Because a small but influential portion of society decided that while marriage norms solve this problem nearly entirely, they are the enemy to their political goals.
It's cold outside...
It is extremely common for a woman to put up a small amount of resistance before sex. It allows her to tell herself (and her friends, and her family, and her boyfriend/husband) that the sex "just happened", thus giving her plausible deniability, and allows her to weed out any man who would be so weak and spineless as to back off at the first sign of friction. It is a normal part of the human mating ritual, and part of becoming a romantically successful man is learning how to identify and power through these token protests. If you believe the feminist crap about how "no means no" and back off the second she fails to demonstrate enthusiastic consent, then you will never get laid, because that is simply not how women work. See "anti-slut defense" and "last minute resistance".
The modern definition of rape as "sex without consent" is an anti-concept. Women are simply not logical and coherent enough to have or lack such a thing as consent. She says no, but if she really meant no, she could easily stand up and leave or call the police, so she means yes, but when she gets discovered by her family she will not only say that she tried to get away and that she was pressured into sex, but she will sincerely believe it, so she retroactively meant no.
The original definition of rape, the one that actually made sense, was when a man who was not allowed to have sex with a woman, that is to say, a man who was not her husband, had sex with her, thus transgressing against the man who owned her, be that her father, her oldest brother, or her husband. If he was married to her, the sex was not rape, and if he was not married to her, then the sex was rape, regardless of her consent, to the extent that a woman can even have such a thing. Of course, in such a society a woman would never have been left alone with a man who she was not married to in the first place, because in such a society everyone knows what happens when a man and a woman who are not first degree relatives are behind locked doors for thirty seconds.
Yes, that's my point: OP claimed that traditional marriage norms used to make these situation never ambiguous, I'm pointing out that's never been true.
You seem to be implying that basically in fundamentalist Muslim or other strict religious societies where women are essentially not allowed to be alone with a man outside there family, there's no ambiguity and therefore 100% of cases of sex outside of marriage are publicly known to be rape and punished as such. Is that correct?
Because I think that claim is just massively wrong empirically. Women in those types of society are punished or executed for adultery when they get raped, or the man is forced to marry them meaning they have to live with their rapist for life and be subject ot their demands, or etc.
We've tried this system, it doesn't work, afaik.
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