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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25500 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"?

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

The motte of the feminist complaint about "Victim Blaming" type methods as a rape-prevention strategy for women, is that they are being asked to not do very basic things. People accused of Victim Blaming are often telling women not to dress in such and such a way, to go to such and such a place, to never drink to excess, to never trust a strange man, to never trust her boss, to never put herself in a position where a man might have leverage over her, at some point to never leave the house without male escort.

Men, here, are being asked to not fuck crazy, drunk, sluts. There are plenty of happy, relatively sober sluts to fuck instead.

To be fair, I cosign both forms of advice, within reason.

Except that the advice given to women is in you example is pretty exaggerated. The places women are asked to avoid are generally places that are dangerous to men as well. General safety means not going to seedy bars, not walking in dark alleys and not getting blackout drunk. Other than “wear clothes that fully cover your reproductive organs and breasts” I’m not seeing anything that would seriously curtail normal life for most people. Nobody is telling women to stay home and wear a burka except in their imagination.

I think there's a distinction here between 'advice reasonable people would give to women as a preventative measure' and 'details unreasonable people pick out to blame a woman after the fact.'

Unfortunately you can find examples of really heinous after-the-fact victim blaming, especially when the alleged perp is someone people like, like a celebrity.

The heinous examples stick in people's minds when they condemn victim blaming, and the reasonable examples come to mind when someone defends giving advice, and the sides often talk past each other.

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