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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"?

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.

Strangely enough, this license isn't given to male rapists to portray them as 'damaged or mentally ill'. No, rapists are completely culpable. Actually the men around them are culpable for the act too.

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.”

This is literal apologia for a false rape accusation; "she might need to". Ok if she needs to commit a crime to protect her reputation, seems like she gets a pass.

I'm being a bit trite here and I know this conversation is framed towards actions that men can take to protect themselves. I'm actually a fan of internal loci of control and would give similar advice to young men. My issue here is just that this attitude is clearly unidirectional and feminists in the majority would never give practical advice like this towards women to keep themselves safe from rapists. Including avoiding spending time with 'damaged or mentally ill' attractive men.

Everything about the exchange in the article is to preserve hypoagency to be used as a shield by women if necessary. Someone else has already coined this term, but this sort of 'Schrodinger's Agency' where women can be agentic or not according to whether it suits them in the particular circumstances (even applied or withdrawn retroactively) is one of Feminism's great Motte and Baileys.

Which raises the question of ‘do women genuinely have less agency?’

I mean we know that there are some major sex differences in things that it seems like should be correlated with agency(conformity, risk taking). And it seems like the whole point of affirmative consent was that (some)women don’t say no even when they feel no, which points in that direction. That feminists want to use weird vocabulary terms doesn’t make them wrong, at least not inherently.

That feminists want to use weird vocabulary terms doesn’t make them wrong, at least not inherently.

No, but that they are flip-flopping on their view of women makes them inherently wrong.

As @The_Nybbler points out, if you really believe women have less agency, you should oppose women's suffrage. If you, @hydroacetylene do, that's consistent.

But how many feminists do you know who oppose women's suffrage?

I do, in fact, oppose women’s suffrage, and my mental model of feminism is less ‘aiming at peaceable gender relations for a healthy society’ and more ‘class interest movement for professional class urban women to get the best possible deal, even if that defects on the commons a bit’. With that as a terminal goal, it is consistent to both talk about false rape accusations as if women have less agency and support women’s suffrage.

Of course I don’t have that as a terminal goal, and I think feminism is bad for that reason. But there’s no logical incoherency there.

But there’s no logical incoherency there.

Yes, there is. It's exactly what logical incoherency is.

Having a rational strategic reason to employ flawed arguments doesn't make them any less flawed or the the self-contradicting position any less wrong.

We were talking about whether feminists were wrong, not about whether they were acting irrational in support of their goals, and you shouldn't confuse "logically inconsistent" with the latter.

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