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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24728 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"?

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.

it is “victim blaming” but the concept makes zero sense

I was whining last week about how lousy our language is about distinguishing "action X makes Y more likely" from "action X is to blame for Y" ... but it's not really a language problem, is it? We're just not good at thinking that way. Victim blaming makes sense as a concept, but it's so close to non-victim-blaming that even when you're trying to distinguish them you risk just falling down on the other side of the line. Compare "you should know better than to pay money to that sketchy-looking fraud; it's too late now" (fraud is a crime, a fraudster is to blame, and shifting the blame off the criminal is victim-blaming) to "you should know better than to pay money for that cheap-looking product; it's too late now" (caveat emptor, "no returns" policies aren't a crime, and aside from other "implied warranty of merchantability" sorts of considerations the most a customer is owed here is a chance to leave a bad review).

but it's not really a language problem, is it?

The language problem that I see, and that I think @zeke5123 is referencing, is that the concept of "victim blaming" gained currency in the first place. It's so ingrained that when someone is accused of victim blaming, their first response is apt to be, "no, I'm just saying that they adversely impacted the probability that they would become a victim", when it's actually fine to just say, "yeah, that victim is a moron and created the situation where they got victimized". In the most extreme examples, I might feel effectively zero sympathy for the victim. If someone gets mauled to death by a grizzly bear because they thought said bear looked really cute picking berries and decided to approach the animal the proper response is enshrining them in the Darwin Awards. Accusations of victim blaming in such a situation should be met with, "yeah, I blame him, he was the dumbest sonofabitch alive and he paid for it".

I never really considered it before, but where did this stupid phrase even come from? Well, Wiki has my back:

Psychologist William Ryan coined the phrase "blaming the victim" in his 1971 book of that title.[3][4][5][6][7] In the book, Ryan described victim blaming as an ideology used to justify racism and social injustice against black people in the United States.[6] Ryan wrote the book to refute Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 work The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (usually simply referred to as the Moynihan Report).[8]

Moynihan had concluded that three centuries of oppression of black people, and in particular with what he calls the uniquely cruel structure of American slavery as opposed to its Latin American counterparts, had created a long series of chaotic disruptions within the black family structure which, at the time of the report, manifested itself in high rates of unwed births, absent fathers, and single mother households in black families. Moynihan then correlated these familial outcomes, which he considered undesirable, to the relatively poorer rates of employment, educational achievement, and financial success found among the black population. The black family structure is also being affected by media through the children.[9] The Black family is usually portrayed as gang affiliated, single-parent or very violent. Aggression and violent behavior in children has been linked to television programming.[citation needed] Moynihan advocated the implementation of government programs designed to strengthen the black nuclear family.[citation needed]

Ryan objected that Moynihan then located the proximate cause of the plight of black Americans in the prevalence of a family structure in which the father was often sporadically, if at all, present, and the mother was often dependent on government aid to feed, clothe, and provide medical care for her children. Ryan's critique cast the Moynihan theories as attempts to divert responsibility for poverty from social structural factors to the behaviors and cultural patterns of the poor.[10][11][page needed]

Ah. Well, that checks out.

If someone gets mauled to death by a grizzly bear because they thought said bear looked really cute picking berries and decided to approach the animal the proper response is enshrining them in the Darwin Awards. Accusations of victim blaming in such a situation should be met with, "yeah, I blame him, he was the dumbest sonofabitch alive and he paid for it".

Right, but bears aren't moral actors.

There's a difference between "You acted stupidly by sticking your dick in the crazy and this rape accusation is a direct result of that" and "You acted stupidly by sticking your dick in the crazy and now you deserve to be accused and convicted of rape".

Sure, there’s a difference, but is it really in anyone’s interest to have a society where official organs are first and foremost about sympathy with people who make bad decisions?

Obviously there’s a certain level of hypocrisy- ‘you went back to his apartment for a drink, what did you think was going to happen?’ Is probably not going to be acceptable anytime soon. But nobody owes grizzly man sympathy.

Sure, there’s a difference, but is it really in anyone’s interest to have a society where official organs are first and foremost about sympathy with people who make bad decisions?

No, but even less should they be about further victimizing people who were harmed as a result of foolishly putting themselves into dangerous situations.

Grizzly man will still get first aid after being mauled, possibly while getting chewed out for his stupidity, and if there's triage, he might be last. He will not get a police dog sicced on him "because he deserves it for being dumb about dangerous animals".

A rape victim with a short skirt will not get raped again by the police (or if she does, it would be a scandal of the highest order.)

A man who was falsely accused of rape, however, will have the weight of the law come down on him. This is the proper consequence for a crime, but certainly not for foolishly putting yourself into a dangerous situation.

Except that false rape accusations happen in the context that rape is a serious crime that sometimes happens, and it’s impossible to tell false rape accusations from true ones without investigating first.

A man who’s accused of rape should be investigated. If he was falsely accused because he decided to have sex with a crazy chick, that’s deplorable, but it doesn’t actually change the job of the police. If the rights of the accused aren’t being respected, of course that’s terrible, but it’s also a separate issue.

If it were just about investigating there wouldn't be a problem. But it isn't. And to be fair, the police are currently doing reasonably well. But other party of society are not, and there's also a context of calls for the police to go harder on suspected rapists.

You don't just get to declare that a separate issue, it's intrinsic to how we should deal with rape accusations, and "maybe the people victimized by one failure mode deserve what we do to them" is an implication that should be pushed back against.

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