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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"?
Yes but sage advice. Just like the sage advice to a young woman is “don’t drink a lot especially around young men you don’t know” or “don’t dress like a slut.” Sure — it is “victim blaming” but the concept makes zero sense. The world isn’t perfect. Telling people “don’t put yourself in a shitty situation” isn’t victim blaming but trying to prevent victims in the first place.
I think the point of "don’t dress like a slut" being "victim blaming" is that you are supposed to be able to dress whatever you like and that your dress is never an invitation to be raped. I actually agree with the concept of "victim blaming" and disagree with you.
How you dress is never an invitation to be mugged, but that doesn't make it a good idea to wear a flashy diamond Rolex in a bad neighborhood. You have every right to do so, and if you're robbed the perpetrator is still 100% at fault, but that doesn't make it a smart idea.
In a vacuum, sure. The entire discussion is about what type of society we're trying to create, an what things it makes safe or unsafe.
For example: in a vacuum, it seems dangerous to live in a giant opulent mansion while there are droves of homeless people living in camps less than a mile away. They massively outnumber you and are living desperate existences, surely they will just come overpower you and take your stuff to survive. They probably want your mansion and the food and goods inside more than almost any rapist wants to rape someone in skimpy clothes.
But we've set up a society where actually that is an extremely safe thing for a rich person to do, they do it all the time, and the idea that poor people would rise up and occupy their mansion and steal their stuff is something close to laughable. That's because we've built a social order in which there a lots of safeguards against that ever happening, both physical and ideological, and we promise overwhelming consequences against any group that would try it.
The ask here is that we take the same types of steps in order to make a society where women are as safe against rapists at a party with them as billionaires are against the homeless encampments a few blocks away from their mansion.
Of course, the crux of that argument is whether we are trying hard enough to create that type of society vs how possible that even is to accomplish (or how much we'd have to give up).
One side thinks that we don't have a society that ensures the safety of women as well as it ensures the safety of billionaires because we care about the finances of billionaires far more than we care about the sexual safety of women, and we could extend that protection if we wanted to take systemic steps to do so.
The other thinks that this is a genuinely harder problem because it happens behind closed doors and leaves little evidence afterwards, and also trying harder to solve it would involve tradeoffs in freedoms and due process and etc that would not be worthwhile, so effectively we're already pretty close to the optimal boundary and it's just unfortunate this is a hard problem.
(as per usual, my opinion is that the truth is somewhere in the middle, I do think there's room for some improvements - especially ideological ones - but it's definitely a harder problem and there isn't a ton of low-hanging fruit that's easy to grab her e in terms of improvements)
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Difference between victim blaming and common sense advise is when the narrative impacts the perception of the crime and makes it more common.
Flashing a diamond in a bad neighbourhood is an extreme example. Better example is locals in a bad neighbourhood closing an eye to a normal tourist getting mugged there, and even buying stolen goods, because everybody knows he should have know better? The general narrative you repeat influences the reality.
Just like with Murder and Cancer, the optimal amount of victim blaming is non-zero.
Not giving certain kinds of advice also makes certain types of crimes happen more often, e.g. not locking your front door when there's been lots of thefts in your area, or e.g. not warning people of pickpockets in a tube station and telling them to keep any eye on their belongings. The blame for the thefts lies 100% on the thief, but you are an idiot for not locking your door at night and calling out your stupidity serves to get other people to lock their doors more. Yes calling you out here hurts you, the victim, but it is a good deal for society if it prevents further thefts. Same with many other things. Western society does not victim blame anywhere near the optimal amount.
The optimal amount of crime-avoidant advice-giving is non-zero.
The optimal amount of crime-avoidant advice-giving right after the recipient was just raped is zero.
This quickly gets interpreted into, "The optimal amount of crime-avoidant advice-giving right after anyone is a victim of a crime is zero." Which, of course, means that since crimes happen pretty much every hour of every day, it can be easily rounded off to, "The optimal amount of crime-avoidant advice-giving is actually always zero, due to Rule 2."
Alternatively, we can just ask you to give one example of an acceptable time/place to give crime-avoidant advice. Note that the OP here has literally nothing to do with anyone in particular being raped.
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This is assuming the advice is meant for the person who just got raped, it's not, the advice is meant for the rest of society, and giving it temporally close to when a incident happened when the event is fresh in society's minds is actually the best time to do it. The person who got raped is irrelevant, they could spontaneously combust and the right amount of advice to be given would be unchanged.
Even better would be to give the advice right before the rape happened, because the victim might have benefited from it beforehand an the incident may never have taken place (just like how "best practices to avoid getting struck by lightning" advice is normally given close in time to events with lots of lightning), but unfortunately unlike the weather we can't predict when a rape will happen with much degree of accuracy, so we're forced to give it after the event.
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I agree with you in many things and disagree in some.
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Seems a bit like positivism/normativism. This is the current state of the world I think the optimal behaviour is X is not endorsing the current state of the world.
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