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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   24779 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"?

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"?

Who/whom.

You also, as walterodim points out below, have a situation where there’s no language to describe sexual bad behavior other than ‘unconsensual’. I think everyone acknowledges that making a move on a vulnerable woman when she’s a bit drunk is taking advantage of her, but it’s not rape. And feminism simply doesn’t have the vocabulary for ‘it’s a scummy thing that everyone involved has consented to’, nor does it have any ability to conceptualize the need for that vocabulary.

I think everyone acknowledges that making a move on a vulnerable woman when she’s a bit drunk is taking advantage of her

I don’t acknowledge that. She probably got drunk partly to get laid. Declining her invitation to jump in the sack because she’s drunk is a grave & insulting violation of her autonomy as an adult, her wishes, and her well-being.

How do you distinguish between someone who got drunk partly in order to get laid and someone who did not? Surely you agree that not every drunk girl at a party is trying to get laid and that there is some level of drunkenness where someone's failure to dissent (or even positive consent) should not be taken very seriously (e.g. if your friend got falling-down-drunk and asked you to help him jump off a bridge into shallow water you would be an awful person if you helped him do so).

How do you distinguish between someone who got drunk partly in order to get laid and someone who did not?

Questions of false accusations and such aside, I will say that I think I can probably identify the difference here with pretty high accuracy. The party girl that knows how to drink aggressively but still be mostly doing what she wants behaves differently from the girl that accidentally had too many and is out of it. I might not be able to tell the difference if I'm only encountering them at the end point of drunkenness, but if we were hanging out and drinking together, I think I know the difference.

Let's suppose for the sake of argument that you can perfectly tell the difference. Even so, many other young men probably cannot and for these young men, Moran's advice is probably useful.

Also, it's sort of funny that you are confident you can always tell the difference and fuckduck9000 thinks it is impossible (though in a slightly different context).

To be clear, I'm one of the people that thinks Moran's advice is good advice. I also know that I've hooked up with drunk girls, received no complaints, and married one. I'm not saying my judgment is literally perfect, but I also don't think this is anywhere near impossible.

I don't think @fuckduck9000 thinks it's impossible either just that the difference doesn't matter. Unless I'm misunderstanding.

Okay, thanks for the clarification. I agree that it's certainly possible to make an accurate guess in many situations but I also don't think everyone possesses this skill.

I don't think @fuckduck9000 thinks it's impossible either just that the difference doesn't matter. Unless I'm misunderstanding.

He said "How would you know/foresee this?" in response to my comment "I think having sex with someone that you know they will later regret carries some moral weight" which was in the context of potential problems with having sex with drunk people. It's not quite the same as saying it's impossible to know when a drunk person really planned to get drunk in order to have sex and when they didn't, but it's not so different.

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