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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24732 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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Is this a full blown victim blaming in the most influential printed medium by decorated feminist? Or am I overreacting?

New York Times: There’s a sentence in the new book that I was curious about, and this goes back to the questions about the trickiness of generalizing and of using a certain kind of rhetorical style: You’re discussing the rarity of false accusations of date rape, and you write, I’m paraphrasing, that there are mentally ill or damaged women who will make those kinds of accusations, and the only thing a young guy can do is not have sex with damaged or mentally ill women. That’s a bit of a flip way of addressing that problem, isn’t it?

Caitlin Moran: That’s possibly my most overt piece of feminism. Obviously #NotAllMen, but I have experienced enough men where the thing at a party is that you’re hunting for the girl on the edge of the pack who’s a bit drunk, bit needy. I can remember dads telling their sons in pubs where I come from, “Crazy bitches are always the best [expletive].” It’s just saying to men as a kind and loving mother with some wisdom that if there’s a woman who is mentally ill, disturbed or needy or unhappy or really drunk at a party, leave her alone. The last thing she needs is a penis. If she’s an upset, needy person and you [expletive] her and then the rumor starts going around school, she might need to, for the defense of her reputation, say, “He raped me.” You’ve put yourself in a dangerous situation because you’ve done a foolish thing.

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.

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.

The last thing she needs is a penis. If she’s an upset, needy person and you [expletive] her and then the rumor starts going around school, she might need to, for the defense of her reputation, say, “He raped me.”

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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