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Is this a full blown victim blaming in the most influential printed medium by decorated feminist? Or am I overreacting?
nytimes.com: https://archive.ph/tZn3B#selection-457.82-457.95
How is this different from "You’ve put yourself in a dangerous situation because you’ve done a foolish thing by flirting with that guy wearing that dress"?
I'm very confused. How it is not the exact opposite? This seems like a fairly central example of "don't teach women to not get raped; teach men to not rape". The advice can be paraphrased into "if you see a woman at a party and you think she's not in the right headspace to meaningfully consent to sex, don't try to have sex with her". It fits very cleanly into a sex-positive consent-focused framework.
Sorry, but yes, you are confused. The discussion is not about rape, the discussion is about false accusations. Moran is talking about a hypothetical situation where women already gave a clean consent after which she "might need to, for the defense of her reputation, say, “He raped me.”"
So instead of "don't teach women to not get raped; teach men to not rape" say "don't teach men to not get falsely accused; teach women to not falsely accuse". Sadly, Moran is teaching men to not get falsely accused.
The advice should be perhaps paraphrased into "If you are not in the right headspace and you made a young man at a party believe you gave a clear consent to sex, don't falsely accuse him afterwards just because you might need to defend your reputation."
I'm not saying this is what happened in this situation, but I've certainly noticed that when it comes to rape, the concept of false accusations tends to cause a lot of confusion. Any time I see a rape accusation, I tend to hope that the accusation is false, because, as awful as being falsely accused of rape is - particularly in the case that it's knowingly and maliciously false - it still seems far less horrible to go through that than to be raped (for the typical cases of these, anyway), and so a world in which someone experiences the horrors of a false rape accusation while not having imposed the horrors of a rape on someone seems better than a world in which someone experienced the horrors of a rape. But I almost never express this hope, because I've noticed that when other people express such a hope, the hope is almost always confused for belief. The very idea of entertaining the possibility - which is necessary for hope - is tantamount to belief and therefore doubting of the original claim. And whoever expresses this hope gets tarnished as if they're someone who holds this belief. I think there's something about the extreme emotional nature of this crime that makes it easier for people to get confused about these issues.
And since "victim-blaming" in the context of rape is almost always about the victim of rape rather than the victim of a false rape accusation, this particular confusion here doesn't seem too surprising.
Thanks for sharing your point of view - I never thought about it this way.
From my perspective, the average false accusation is worse than the average rape. Hear me out. When we say rape, we imagine blodied women in torn clothes left to die in a ditch, right? But that is far from the average case. When I look around me, when I read the media, I mostly see very different rape. They were both 16 and he is now accused of statutory rape (she is not). Or they both had couple-lot of drinks, he is now accused of rape (she is not). Or he was in position of power and she was sleeping with him for years until she realised he was actually raping her the whole time. Or he was rich and famous and now he does not want to pay. Yes, there is lot of the he was pressuring her too much, she did not really wanted it, she did not really know how to say no. Then there is the she changed her mind afterwards, she was embarrassed, afraid for her reputation, afraid of her family, her friends socially pressured to report it as a rape. There are the scorned lovers. And of course all the accusations in custody and divorce battles.
I would trade any of those for being falsely accused, any time. Firstly, you have to prove your innocence, not the other way around. Even if you are super lucky and there is a physical evidence in your favour, this may not help you at all. You will be tried in a kangaroo court. Your boss/employer will much rather face your lawsuit for wrongful termination than face the negative public image of protecting a rapist. Your career is over, your social life is over, your private life is over. You will probably be arrested, you will be threatened with a long prison sentence, you will be blackmailed by a prosecutor offering you a sweet deal if you confess to what you did not do. Exonerating evidence will be withheld by rogue police and prosecution. Your reputation will be ruined. You will be depressed, bankrupted, marked for life, registered as sex offender. You will forever loose access to your children. (Do you have children? Can you imagine someone can legally take them away from you for ever?)
Again, I would much rather suffer average rape than average false accusation.
Notably, Moran is talking about exactly such "average rape". I quote: "woman who is mentally ill, disturbed or needy or unhappy or really drunk at a party, [...] If she’s an upset, needy person [...] she might need to, for the defense of her reputation, say, “He raped me.”"
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Does the author believe that a woman being "mentally ill, disturbed or needy or unhappy or really drunk at a party" makes her unable to meaningfully consent? It's not totally clear from the text, but to me it reads like she acknowledges that not all of those conditions would remove a woman's ability to consent.
This quote suggests to me that the author thinks a woman who's upset and needy might simply regret any sex she had while in that state after the fact, not that it would be rape. But she goes on to say that if a woman in that position accuses a man she agreed to have sex with of rape "for the defence of her reputation" (so, not because it's actually true, but just because it would be less embarrassing for her if people thought that's what happened), well, it's basically his fault for being a jerk and a dumbass, even if he didn't actually rape her.
This seems to actually go beyond victim-blaming to the point of justifying false rape accusations so long as they're aimed at men who acted sufficiently sleazy and callous according to some vaguely-defined, subjective standard.
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