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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24757 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"?

Perhaps this counts as "victim blaming" according to the way the phrase is generally used in popular culture, but it also seems like relatively good advice and to me, that's the more important thing. To slightly steelman the argument, I think there are a few key points:

  • There are actions that you can take to reduce your personal risk. Yes, maybe in a perfectly just world, people who don't lock their bikes would never have their bikes stolen, but that's not the world we live in. In practical terms, advising someone to never lock their bike because advising otherwise would be "blaming the victim" would be doing them a huge disservice. Advising young men (and young women) to be careful about who they sleep with is good advice for a whole lot of reasons.
  • Not every false accusation is completely false. In reality, viewing everything as a dichotomy between "totally rape and a horrible crime" or "totally consensual and completely fine" is wrong. There are lots of things that are not clearly rape but still bad. For example, most people would agree that having sex with an unconscious stranger is clearly rape and having consensual sex with a sober person is fine. But what about in-between? How intoxicated or incoherent does someone need to be before it counts as rape? The most accurate view is that there's a sliding scale of badness with "unconscious" at one end and "sober" at the other. So if you have sex with someone in the middle of that spectrum and they accuse you of rape then maybe it could be considered a false accusation, but you still did something wrong.
  • Some things that are legal are still wrong. This seems to be one of Moran's main points. Suppose you are a young man and you meet an emotionally unstable young woman, have (consensual) sex with her and then ignore her. Yes, you haven't raped her and you haven't broken any laws, but you still haven't treated her well and her life is probably worse because of you. And if you did so knowingly and intentionally to fulfill your own sexual desires, that's even worse.
  • The optimal amount of crime is not zero. Reducing the incidence of some type of crime comes with costs and it is usually the case that the costs outweigh the benefits before the amount of crime is literally zero. False accusations of rape are the same. Adjudicating "he-said-she-said" cases are difficult, especially when one or both of the parties was intoxicated at the time of the incident. Always believing the accuser is probably not optimal, but neither is always discounting what the accuser says. In this environment, advising young men to try to avoid potential "he-said-she-said" situations is both good advice on an individual level and potentially makes adjudicating such cases easier in general since it decreases the number of false accusations.

You could equally steelman the argument of those who oppose "victim blaming":

  • Not taking an action to reduce your personal risk does not make what happened to you (being raped or falsely accused) more deserved or justified. Victim blaming creates an atmosphere where the crime is slightly more acceptable thus slightly more likely to happen.
  • Not every consensual sex is 100% consensual (to be honest this is BS and your corresponding argument is BS too).
  • Even if you are doing something illegal or wrong it does not mean rape or false accusation is justified. Just because you are full of coke and dancing topless it does not mean your rape is somehow deserved or justified. Even if you are deliberately banging a psycho chick that you don't really like, because you don't want to be a virgin any more, it does not mean that her falsely accusing you is somehow deserved or justified.

I don't find your response very convincing.

  1. I didn't say that "not taking an action to reduce your personal risk" makes what happened to you "more deserved or justified." I simply said that advising people to take actions to reduce their personal risk is good advice. I think it's less clear what Moran meant but she does not every unambiguously say that simply not taking an action to lower your risk means what happened to you is more deserved or justified. She does seem to say that some men who are falsely accused of rape have done something wrong but here argument seems to be more "the circumstances that most commonly lead to false rape accusations also tend to include some wrongdoing on the part of the man" rather than simply that the man is to blame for being imprudent.
  2. Calling my argument BS with no explanation is simply not a convincing reply to anyone who doesn't already agree with you. I stand by what I said: classifying every sexual act as either totally-rape-and-completely-horrible or totally-consensual-and-completely-fine is simply an inaccurate picture of the world. There are sexual behaviors that I view as less bad than "jump out of the bushes and attack a stranger" rape but still not completely okay. There's a reason that we have categories like manslaughter which are in-between murder and self-dense/no-fault accident. The world often does not consist of sharp dichotomies and does not necessarily perfectly match the categories we try to impose on it.
  3. "Even if you are deliberately banging a psycho chick that you don't really like, because you don't want to be a virgin any more, it does not mean that her falsely accusing you is somehow deserved or justified." I never said this and I don't think it's clear that Moran would agree with it either (though I am not certain about her beliefs). Saying that something is good advice does not mean that the consequences of not following it are "deserved or justified." Saying that even in a situation where someone has been wronged they may have also acted badly does not mean that they "deserved" the wrong that was done to them. Honestly, you and I probably agree on a lot. I think that false accusations are more common than the media often makes it seem, that a false accusation is often really horrible and completely screw up someone's life and that even when a falsely accused person has acted badly, it's still very wrong for them to be falsely accused. But I can think all of those things while at the same time acknowledging that there are some behaviors that put you at greater risk of false accusations, that it's (often) worth avoiding these behaviors, and that some people who are falsely accused of rape have done something wrong (even if it wasn't rape and they don't deserve to be accused of rape).

Aside from these specific responses, I want to make a broader point. You say "You could equally steelman the argument of those who oppose 'victim blaming'" and the main substantive argument you present seems to be "Victim blaming creates an atmosphere where the crime is slightly more acceptable thus slightly more likely to happen." Actually I mostly agree with this. The kind of advice Moran gives might well contribute to an atmosphere where false accusations are slightly more acceptable. So we have a tradeoff here: there's some value in giving people good advice and in trying to say true things that you believe but there are also some downsides to doing that. Different people may have different opinions on where the balance of that tradeoff lies; I think in this case the downsides are smaller than the upsides. Perhaps you disagree. But the broader point I want to make is that this type of tradeoff is completely normal and the existence of downsides to something does not mean the upsides don't exist (or vice-versa). So sure, you can steelman a case against Moran's advice. That doesn't mean the case for it is wrong, it just means that Moran's advice may have both upsides and downsides, which is not surprising.

I didn't say that "not taking an action to reduce your personal risk" makes what happened to you "more deserved or justified.

Correct, you did not say that. You steel-manned your argument, I steel-manned mine. That does not mean my argument represents a direct refutation of your argument.

Calling my argument BS with no explanation is simply not a convincing reply to anyone who doesn't already agree with you.

You are right. Your argument that not every false accusation is completely false is partly appeal to ignorance and partly middle ground fallacy. Better?

I never said this

Again, you you steel-manned your argument, I steel-manned mine. That does not mean my argument represents a direct refutation of your argument.

So we have a tradeoff here

I think this is a false dichotomy. Moran could have easily used different words to both give a good advice to young men while not victim blaming falsely accused.

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