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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"?
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 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).
I don't. If you consent to sex, whatever your motives, drunk or not, it's done. It's just sex. It's not like jumping off a bridge. No necks get broken. Nothing morally relevant is happening.
This is one of the Big Lies at the heart of the whole Woke/Progressive meme-plex and the fact that so many people seem to believe it is one of the major reasons (if not THE reason) that gender relations in current year are so fucked.
I will say this idea is the most compatible with maximal freedom and legal equality. I don't think it has been tried and found wanting. It has been found counter-intuitive; and left untried. Very few people believe this. Look at how @hydroacetylene assumed no one was even biting the bullet, or standard feminist discourse like the op.
[Preface: I'm defining "corruption" to mostly mean "there are kinds of subterfuge that human beings engage in to get ahead in zero-growth socioeconomic environments that generate a dead-weight loss for those not participating in said subterfuge. Normative statement is that this is bad, the people who do this and encourage more of it are bad, even if the terms are "lead or silver", and there's probably a good argument to be made that it applies.]
We tried "nothing morally relevant is happening" in the '60s and '70s, back before women regained the upper hand in the gender wars thanks to the end of the economic golden age in the West that elevated men-as-class to what very well might be a global maximum of their political power.
As I understand it our implementation of it was working just fine.
Of course, it is counter-intuitive to women that men shouldn't have to fully commit to them for evolutionary biology reasons (even though the economic boom made it possible for women to support themselves independently, pregnancy is still a problem, and concern about pregnancy needs multiple generations with the safety tech to evolve out of it), so the literal first chance they got, they took an axe to this system and completely destroyed it. The existing backdrop of Western Christian sexual ethics made that shift easier, as did the re-emergence of a literal death sentence STD that modern science still hasn't fully cracked (the previous one, syphilis, met its end through simple penicillin 40 years prior).
The trick is that going completely and utterly to the male side of the equation (which is what the sexual revolution ultimately was, and why it happened when male sociopolitical power was at its peak) with technology that actually made that viewpoint feasible (to say nothing of the advancements that have made sex even safer than it was 60 years ago) actually is the correct call if your goal is to minimize the amount of total social corruption(1).
This isn't to say that there still aren't problems with this approach, of course- since this still converges on the Pareto distribution of sex that young men complain about today (socially-enforced monogamy helps with this, but you don't get that without objective consequences for sex, so destroying them through technology means that's out the window), it does nothing by itself to tackle the fornication-pro-quo problem (the motte of #metoo) and related corruption, unsophisticated ideological consistency combined with certain initial social conditions means the end point actually is pedophilia(2), and a couple others I'm probably forgetting.
And there was real progress at fixing this from both men and (the non-corrupt) women right as Western society was descending into its current state of corruption- "man pays for everything" divorce laws [in terms of the end effect] are specifically meant to stop men from trading up to newer, younger women once they had dependents (the higher time preference that certain statistical US populations tend to have mean this isn't as effective a deterrent for them), "workplace harassment" laws are specifically meant to curb the "no, ass-grabbing as you walk the cubicles isn't OK" thing that inherently-diminished female power to control who touches them when inherently leads to, and so on(3).
The problem, of course, is that the conditions that enabled libertine sexual ethics which required those compromises no longer exist, but it is in the interest of the corrupt that the thumbs (with painted nails or not) remain on the scales just the same.
(1) Freedom, especially sexual freedom, is inherently incompatible with the sociobiological incentives of the statistical women-as-class even if they're expected to behave identically to men to earn a living, which is why when the economic pie shrinks (inherently favoring them) a small number of men are inherently able to leverage the instinctive need for social sanction of a large number of women against the rest of the men. Economic progress is the only bloodless way out- corruption cannot drive out corruption.
(2) Traditionalist-conservatives tend to have this blind spot where they're just parroting Boomer observations without thinking critically about whether the initial conditions are still true. The parents were correct- Tradcon anger over Liberal/Progressive pedophilia is correct if you're stuck in, or reacting to, 1970s sexual ethics- but their modern Rightist [millenial] children are almost completely off base when they claim the Left is still driven by this in 2020 given the Progressives hate straight sex and the men who want it far more than the Right [in living memory] ever did.
(3) Consent laws may or may not be an exception to this progress; I argue it's difficult to separate what ended up being imposed/"compromised on" as distinct from the more general complete and utter wrecking of under-18 rights that occurred in the '80s. Of course, given a choice between dealing with the occasional pregnant 9 year old and the "any woman has unilateral ex post facto legal authority to deem any past sex rape, but 10 year old men are still liable for child support after being [statutorily] raped" our current attempt to avoid pregnant 9 year olds has directly resulted in...
That’s vastly overstated by redpillers and incels anyway, for example by using that misleading archeological Y-chromosome 17:1 ratio.
I had a guy here literally link me to the wiki pareto distribution article (which said nothing about men and women) to justify his belief that it was four stacies to one alpha.
fornication-pro-quo is a minor efficiency loss, not worth the gigantic legal resources expanded to root it out.
You kinda lose me in the last two non-numbered paragraphs. What do you call the ‘present state of corruption’, if it does not include the one-sided divorce laws, one-sided consent laws? Why are those things compromises when they seem straightforwardly pro-woman, and your thesis is that women took back power ? Then you say they lost their reason to compromise, but do it anyway – the obvious conclusion is that they were never compromises.
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I agree that there's a reason the sexual revolution happened at the apex of male power. But ultimately it doesn't really serve most men, it serves a proportion of high-status men, and it always has, as you kind of imply here:
Libertine sexual ethics don't serve women, who get neither sexual pleasure nor status from these encounters (often the opposite on both counts), and who risk shaming, social sanction, actual physical danger and so on to get it.
What young women want, if anything, from men is attention. And as we were discussing with @raggedy_anthem last month, young women in 2023 don't actually get any more attention from young men than their equivalents did in 1923 or 1823 or 1023. The only difference is that today they're expected to put out for it. How that "serves" women in any way is unclear, but it was always going to be something that women realized eventually.
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