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PaperclipPerfector  28d ago (text post)   25100 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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Whenever the subject of feminist narratives comes up on this forum, one of the recurring arguments is that feminist messaging is ineffective, self-defeating even, the usual reason being given that it doesn’t reach the men it’s supposed to reach, and only reaches men who don’t need feminist messages in the first place because they’re pretty much acculturated in a feminist milieu anyway. (I know all this doesn’t necessarily sound fair or unbiased, but let’s ignore that for a moment.)

The most fitting example of this that is usually mentioned is the message that “we need to teach men not to rape”, which is supposedly a favorite of feminist activists on college campuses, corporate HR boards and elsewhere. Apparently they promote essentially the same idea as a great tool to combat sexual assault and harassment.

I don’t think I need to explain in detail why this argument sounds so dumb to the average man. Even when I come up with the most benevolent interpretation of this tactic that I can think of, it still seems misguided and, well, dumb. But then it occurred to me: the message makes 100% sense if we start from the assumption that modern feminists, eager to right cultural wrongs of the past that they perceive, really want to make sure their messaging never ever entails even a hint of the notion that women need to exercise any level of agency in order to avoid rape, assault or harassment of any type i.e. avoid bad men, because in all cases that would be “victim blaming” and horrific etc.

From that perspective, it all makes sense, sort of. Am I correct, or is there something else going on as well?

It's true that the men who are most receptive to feminist messaging are overwhelmingly those who already know exactly what the term "rape" entails and would never dream of committing it. It's equally true that feminists are not tilting at windmills when they talk about the importance of teaching men not to rape. There really are men (and boys) who believe that a woman who dresses provocatively is "asking for it", that a man taking advantage of a woman who's so drunk that she's drifting in and out of consciousness doesn't constitute rape, that married men are entitled to have sex with their wives whenever they damn well please. These attitudes may not be as common as they used to be, they may be far more common among "men of colour" and working-class men than among the middle- to upper-class white men who seem to attract so much ire from feminists - but they do exist. The people who hold them may be weak men, but they are not straw men.

On a more general note, "the people paying attention to the message are the people who don't need to hear it" is probably a problem common to essentially all political activism in democratic societies.

On a more general note, "the people paying attention to the message are the people who don't need to hear it" is probably a problem common to essentially all political activism in democratic societies.

Indeed, so much so Scott wrote an article about it a decade ago.

Talk to actual high school students from not-very-well-educated areas about what does or doesn't count as rape or consent some day. 'If you paid for a nice meal doesn't she kind of owe you at least a blowjob' is far from the most troubling thing you will hear. Don't even ask about drugs and alcohol.

It's easy for well-educated affluent adults to think that 'teach men not to rape' sounds absurd, and must be some kind of dumb metaphorical power-grab in the culture war over where to place societal blame. But it is very much an extremely literal statement that is reasonably commensurate with how bad sex education is in many parts of the country.

Such attitudes are broadly predictable in a society that normalizes both drug use and premarital sex, and where the proportion of women engaging in casual sex reaches a critical mass, so to speak.

Are you saying that you expect such attitudes to be more common in a society that allows for frequent sex and drugs?

I'm like 98% confident that they are way more common in societies that vilify those things, since in those cases anyone engaged in them is 'clearly' already a criminal/demon/idiot/slut/etc and therefore can't really be a victim/deserves what they get/must secretly want it/etc.

Having society disapprove of sex and drugs doesn't mean no one does sex or drugs, it just means there's no societal narrative about how to do it ethically or safely. I'm pretty confident you could go to almost any repressive society and find worse attitudes about this stuff.

Are you saying that you expect such attitudes to be more common in a society that allows for frequent sex and drugs?

Yes. In a society where drug use isn't normalized/tolerated, it's not a common pastime to ply women with drugs in order to manipulate them into sex. It will only remain a rare, isolated occurrence. The same applies to binge-drinking. Also, in a society where extramarital sex is not normalized/tolerated, the general consensus among men will be that only a small minority of women are available for casual sex, so pressuring/manipulating them into having casual sex will not be a common pastime.

You're confusing between acts and attitudes here, I think.

Unless your claim is that when acts are rare, no one will bother to form attitudes about them. But I think that's hugely wrong, people form attitudes and opinions about everything, and attitudes towards rare and taboo things are ussually more extreme and dangerous.

with how bad sex education is in many parts of the country

You mean "what cultural attitudes about consent to sex look like". I guarantee you these kids are not getting their ideas from sex ed, and I guarantee you that if sex ed addresses consent these kids don't listen to it.

Look, I went through fairly high budget abstinence+ sex ed. It didn't work on the kids that it wasn't going to work on- as it turns out, schools actually do a remarkably bad job of changing social attitudes. You can't educate teenaged boys out of what rap songs educate them in to, at least not in an institutional setting. In person mentorship maybe, but nobody with feminist attitudes wants to do it.

Isn't sex education, whether it's done efficiently or not, mainly about 1. contraceptives 2. pregnancy 3. periods 4. STDs? Covering just those four subjects is enough of a daunting task in itself, I'm sure. This notion that sex education needs to mostly focus on proper norms of consent has to be a rather recent phenomenon, mostly confined to feminist activist circles.

I guarantee you these kids are not getting their ideas from sex ed,

Yes, that is what I am referring to by 'how bad sex education is'.

and I guarantee you that if sex ed addresses consent these kids don't listen to it.

Strong disagree. You do have to hit them younger before the culture has fully established other ideas, but if the curriculum is handled well and it's the first time they're hearing about it in a realistic setting with enough detail, you can form their first impressions on the topic, or heavily influence their existing impressions.

'If you paid for a nice meal doesn't she kind of owe you at least a blowjob' is far from the most troubling thing you will hear.

The distaff counterpart being "if you regretted it afterwards isn't that kind of at least not consensual"; but maybe that doesn't count since it's not the poorly-educated that most often claim this.

and must be some kind of dumb metaphorical power-grab in the culture war over where to place societal blame

The main population repeating this line are well-educated affluent women, generally used as a stick to beat over the head of the [well-educated affluent] men who weren't the problem in the first place. It's trivially true this is a power grab.

with how bad sex education is in many parts of the country

A lack of education is not the cause of that problem (and "bad sex education" is more just a refusal to teach basic biological facts and hype up risks that don't exist; father-placating/traditionalist "if you have sex you'll die of turbo AIDS" sex ed is stupid and harmful just like mother-placating/progressive "sex is rape by default also if you aren't on puberty blockers by 12 you'll die of suicide" sex ed is). A lack of conscientiousness is, but that's true of anti-social behavior by default anyway.

I understand you’re going for hyperbole, but try to avoid caricaturing the positions you’re arguing against.

You're missing at least one thing that's going on - some rapes (or at least rape-adjacent behavior) are genuinely dissimilar to other crimes in the lack of mens rea from the perpetrator. The canonical example is a guy that takes a girl that's obviously blitzed out of her mind upstairs at a party. Sure, you can provide the admonishment that she shouldn't have gotten so drunk in the first place and you're going to be correct, but it's also plausible that it's feasible to shift the culture around hooking up with very drunk girls from it being funny to it being socially unacceptable. You're not going to convince Ted Bundy to not rape with a social awareness campaign, but you might convince some men that it would be a bad thing to take advantage of a girl that doesn't have her wits about her.

There are many objections to the above that can be offered, but my impression is that this is the type of thing that "teach men not to rape" is referring to.

The canonical example is a guy that takes a girl that's obviously blitzed out of her mind upstairs at a party

Intercourse with drunk women should just be illegal.

Either be 100% confident that the woman in question is not going to report you or abstain.

Then if we have a conviction of a rape of a drunk woman, we can also charge the bartender who poured the drinks.

You're probably right. But I dislike this behavior of expanding the definition of rape. At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else. Not something someone could do by accident. Mens rea was almost definitely necessary for a rape to occur.

Expanding this definition makes it so that people who probably haven't done anything that terrible or didn't intend to do anything that terrible, and maybe made a bad decision now are lumped in with violent psychopaths. It also takes away nuance from language. It may have also had the effect that you're positing, too, of making people less likely to hook up with drunk girls.

At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else.

This definition changed more like 150 years ago than 15. Webster's dictionary lists rape as "In law, the carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will" in 1828, but as "Sexual connection with a woman without her consent." in 1913.

I do think it's a better policy in general to make up a new word when you need one, rather than overloading an old one... but more than a century?! At some point thou movest on.

Whether or not the 1913 definition means what you're implying it to mean probably depends on exactly how you define consent, and how you define the boundaries of consent. Suffice it to say, based on what I was exposed to growing up in the late 20th century, it was my impression that rape referred to a violent brutal crime, and I'm sure that most others of my generation and geographic location would agree with me. Ymmv, perhaps

At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else.

It is common to focus on the most extreme and most rare version of a problem as a rhetorical tactic to avoid addressing the most commons forms of the problem that actually affect the most people.

15 years ago no one though Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein were committing 'real' rape, so why bother raising a fuss over it? And AFAIK (IANAL), what we now call marital rape was legal across the country until the 1970s.

The expanding definition is a necessary step in actually confronting and preventing bad behavior.

I am also a high-decoupler (ie autist) who likes words to have crisp, unambiguous, and unchanging definitions. But I also acknowledge that words are actually just tools that we invent to help us get things we want, and these type of shifting and ambiguous definitions are very often a result of someone tuning the language to accomplish something important and valuable.

words are actually just tools that we invent to help us get things we want

This might be the best summary I've ever seen of a particular engagement style, thank you. I have a long post in the works about how to handle an ongoing discussion where people are using different and mutually contradictory forms of engagement, and was struggling to find a phrase to explain this particular one.

Sneaking in new definitions while still maintaining the previous emotional attachments of those definitions is necessary? In rationalist communities, I think we have words for things like this, such as motte and bailey. And I think that most of us are in agreement that such tactics are sneaky and underhanded, and make it unnecessary difficult to argue against, and very easy to turn into mob mentality and moral panics.

I think that most of us are in agreement that such tactics are sneaky and underhanded, and make it unnecessary difficult to argue against, and very easy to turn into mob mentality and moral panics.

Yup, those are absolutely some of the very strong and important reasons for not doing that.

In this case, one of the countervailing reasons for doing it is, in theory, preventing or getting justice for very very large numbers of sexual assaults.

That's the tough reality of being a consequentialist, you can't just give one persuasive reason why something is bad and therefore decide not to do it, you have to actually ask what the full positive and negative consequences are and try to make a balanced judgement.

I'm not even claiming that the balance trivially obviously falls on the side of distorting the language in this case, I'm just saying an argument that doesn't weigh the intended benefits against the expected costs isn't really saying anything.

That's horribly short sighted from a consequentialist perspective, and not particularly rational to indicate that short term gains are worth degrading the value of truth and language. Just because you can't see the immediate negative consequences, or they're obscured, doesn't mean that they're not there. All of this lowering the sanity waterline is to blame for all the horribly contentious political strife going on, and increasing divide. If there's a civil war that happens, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that this sort of sophistry is not an insignificant factor.

Furthermore, I doubt most of the people who actually are promoting this sophistry would actually be okay with other people doing it as well. Saying "it's okay when we do it" isn't exactly a good look, or anything I think people should be aspiring to do.

I'm not even claiming that the balance trivially obviously falls on the side of distorting the language in this case

So I agree that if we lived in a perfectly rational world where no one ever did linguistic maneuvers like this ever and instead all language was maximally precise and informative, because having perfectly accurate information is what let everyone engage in sophisticated and dispassionate object-level debates about the empirical outcomes of different policy proposals to find the utilitarian optimal approach, then the first person to do something like this would be breaking a sacred trust and destroying a public good and committing a grave sin.

But we very, very, very, very, very... ... very, very, very, very much do not live in a world like that.

So given the fallen world we already live in, it's not clear how much marginal damage the 92,252nd instance of that happening does past the marginal damage done by the 92,251st instance.

It would certainly be better if everyone did it less, and I am actually an active proponent of doing it less in many contexts.

But it's not obviously clear that the utilitarian optimal policy is to be an extremist about never doing it ever, when it's already a standard tactic that everyone uses and not using it puts the other things you value at a severe rhetorical disadvantage, and when the marginal damage of one more case is mitigated by all the other case.

It's certainly not right to be a selective extremist about it, where you notice and call out whenever your opponents do it, but turn a blind eye when your side does it ('abortion is murder' much?).

As for 'the people doing it would object to the other side doing it'.... yeah, obviously. That's exactly what an isolated demand for rigor is, people do it all the time to fight their opponents, that's exactly what this instance of calling it out and objecting to it is. That's kind of my point.

Hooking up with a girl who's too drunk to say no is, in fact, very bad behavior.

I think everyone agrees with that. But there's a wide spectrum from sex with someone physically unable to say no, i.e. passed out, to a guy who's had a few beers hooking up with a girl who's had a glass of wine. The culture war as it relates to this issue seems to be about what "too drunk to say no" means, from those who say that situations like the latter are fine, and those who say that having any amount of alcohol whatsoever renders a women unable to consent. I imagine it's the possibility of society being at the point where something like the latter situation is viewed as SA/rape that @haroldbkny is referring to when he says that people are just going to be less likely to hook up.

that people are just going to be less likely to hook up.

I am entirely OK with a little gender discrimination as the price to pay for this outcome.

What does "too drunk to say no" actually mean? Obviously the motte you're trying to imply with that phrasing is "passed out or literally too drunk to slur out a 'nooo'," but that's not what happens in 99% of cases. The bailey is "Jake was DRUNK, Josie was DRUNK, Josie could NOT consent!", or the "if you think she's out of your league it's rape" thing lagrangian is pushing below.

Unless you can actually phrase your rule in a sensible way that people will understand how the legal system will interpret a given situation, vague social conservatism is just providing cover for California style "yes means yes except when yes means no, and isn't there someone you forgot to ask?"

I agree. But it's not rape.

Would it be rape to have sex with someone who was asleep? Comatose? Sedated? I think almost everyone would say yes.

Yes, because they didn't consent.

And if a girl is so drunk that she's drifting in and out of consciousness, how can she consent?

That's certainly an edge case. But I don't think it invalidates my position.

How often is that the case? How is your rule distinguishing between incapacitation and "might not make the same decision while sober, or uses that as an excuse to dodge shaming afterwards"?

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If she's "too drunk to count to ten" let alone passed out, it strikes me as very similarly morally to rape-at-knifepoint. Not quite as bad, but not "obnoxious liberal word expansion" levels of different.

I'm curious, to any older commenters especially: does usage like this of "rape" strike you as euphemism treadmill, or is this just the natural range of the word? I suspect it's the latter, but maybe I'm young(ish). I'd think to use "rape" for the above and knife-point when that detail isn't central, and say "violent rape" when the knife (/threat/etc) is central to the discussion.

Say a man runs through someone else's house with a bulldozer. Everything in it is crushed, the walls collapse, the whole thing is completely destroyed. When people find out, they start calling the man an arsonist, who committed 'cold arson.' After all, destroying someone's home is a terrible thing to do. Does that make it arson?

No, but I don't think the analogy tells us much. They are certainly both destruction of property, even if only one is arson-y; similarly in the rape side of the analogy both are rape, even if only one is violent-y.

(There's a weaker argument I could add that both forms of rape are violent, but that's sufficiently far into repurposing words that I won't stand by it real strongly.)

So if you drug someone and have sex with them that isn't rape?

Assuming they can consent, no. It's very bad and should wind you in prison for a long time. But it's not rape, because that word means something specific. "Rape" is not a catch all term for "any evil behavior involving sex".

Drugging someone so they can't meaningfully resist has been a central example of rape for as long as I can remember, and I seem to be on the older end of this forum. I definitely agree with the complaint that modern feminism has expanded the definition beyond reasonable limits, as the "social justice" crowd is prone to doing with all sorts of terms, but this is not an example of it. The solution to revisionist history is not revisionist history in the opposite direction.

Assuming they can consent, no.

The assumption was "too drunk to say no", just the opposite.

I took "too drunk to say no" as "they will say yes to anything because their inhibitions are lowered", not "they're so drunk they can't even respond". The latter case would be rape, but the former isn't.

This is a special place.

  • -15

If you can't decouple your sense of moral outrage at bad acts from a discussion over what words mean, you're going to have a real bad time on this forum. My position here isn't even that spicy. We have a guy who literally argues for pedophilia being OK, we have people who think that the Jews are to blame for everything, etc. Saying "I think x act is immoral but it doesn't fall under the definition of y" doesn't even register compare to some of the arguments here.

So if you drug someone and have sex with them that isn't rape?

Assuming they can consent, no.

...Speak plainly. What's your actual disagreement with the above?

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This is a fully semantic argument, and in a semantic argument there's not a much stronger rebuttal than 'no one else is using the word that way, so if you do you're just failing to communicate.'

Also: if you agree it's bad behavior and that some people might do it without realizing that, do you agree they should be taught not to do that?

If so, you agree with the feminist message of 'teach men not to rape' in substance, and just have a semantic disagreement about one word.

'Rape' isn't a natural category. It's a term for having sex with a woman who doesn't or shouldn't want it in a way that's sufficiently bad. That's why the term 'statutory rape' exists uncontroversially despite generally not referring to any use of force.

So this is really an argument about whether hooking up with a drunk out of her mind girl is bad enough to be considered rape. Now, I presume that we agree that giving a girl valium to hook up with her is bad enough to be justifiably called rape, just because most people do in our culture- there's a specific word for that kind of it. I presume we agree that if a man bought an eighteen year old woman- so old enough to consent to sex with him, not old enough to drink in the US, and not old enough to be presumed to know her limits with alcohol- alcoholic beverages until she was too drunk to say no, then took her back to his hotel room, we would agree that this qualifies as rape.

So is the difference the idea that getting taken advantage of is a natural consequence of sufficient public drunkenness? Because although there's a sense in which it obviously is, it also seems to be sufficiently horrendous that using the term rape is at least founded, if non-central, and if referring to it that way reduces the incidence thereof(which is entirely possible) then I'm all for it.

getting taken advantage of

I think a key detail here is that alcohol is a helluva drug. It's quite easy, especially as a smaller, younger woman to overestimate your tolerance. Either of you also might not know what's in the punch exactly, or how long you hit the keg.

So, the ethical thing is to look at the person as you're getting to bed and ask "ok, but really, is it OK to have sex here?" I think if she'd never in a million years have sex with you after a moderate amount of alcohol, no. If in the heat of the moment and a bit buzzed, she'd probably have said yes, you're at least in grey territory, potentially fine, depending on the details.

In most other situations "I made a bad decision because I had too much to drink" does not carry much legal weight. Assuming the women in your scenarios do in fact consent "in the moment", how can you invalidate this consent without also invalidating (for example) a woman's decision to go driving while in such a state?

ie. 'drunk woman decides to drive and crashes into a pole' --> prosecute her (I think?); but 'drunk woman decides to sleep with some gross nerd' --> prosecute him (?!)

Your framework seems to be denying women significant agency; seems a bit patriarchal to me.

The key difference is that only in the rape story has anything been done to her by someone else.

When driving, the damage is to the pole. Heck, let's say she ("S") kills someone else ("E"). S has violated E's rights, so S should be prosecuted for murder (or property damage to the pole). No one did anything to S, except insomuch as S did it to herself, so no one should be prosecuted (or held morally responsible) for anything that happened to S.

When S is raped, the damage is entirely to S. This was done to her by someone ("R"[apist]), who should be prosecuted. Debateably, S did something to herself too, but undebateably (well, it is themotte, but I feel pretty good about this one), there is the key difference that something was done to S in this one.

Further, in my version of the setup, she really hasn't decided to sleep with the nerd ("can't count to ten"). Past some level of drunk, you're on autopilot, and anyone who steers you transgresses. So yes, I absolutely do deny people agency once they are blackout drunk. I put that agency in the hands of society/morality to protect them. Enormously practical? No, so go be monogamous and sober, but still better than a free-for-all on drunk coeds.

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There's a word for a guy who consistently engages in that sort of reasoning (not just in this particular case, but in general) and that word is "virgin". It's very easy for a certain sort of guy (think Scott Aaronson) to convince himself that any particular woman is out of his league. The kinds of guys who think they're God's gift to women aren't going to engage in that sort of reasoning, and if they did, they'd always answer "it's fine". So all this sort of rule does is ratify turning the self-abasing into volcels.

Plus, of course, the guy in this situation has probably also been drinking.

Plus, of course, the guy in this situation has probably also been drinking.

The hypothetical as I am thinking about it is that the man is knowingly much less drunk. If everyone is very drunk, I think that's less of rape and more of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" all around.

There's a word for a guy who consistently engages in that sort of reasoning (not just in this particular case, but in general) and that word is "virgin"

I think your point stands for a smallish group of those you're describing, "white knight" types, who should yes in fact move in the drunker/less-rigidly-consent-requiring direction.

But, in general, I prefer the word "adult." I found dating got exponentially easier as I started advertising being a ~sober, boring, responsible adult instead of being maximally able to consume booze/etc.

I think if she'd never in a million years have sex with you after a moderate amount of alcohol, no.

How am I supposed to know this? What does even mean? She’s at a bar/club/house party - a milieu where everyone is aware that at least some number of people there are interested in meeting prospective sexual partners. She’s unaccompanied by a man, so I have no reason to believe she’s spoken for. She’s talking to me and hasn’t wandered off or thrown a drink in my face or whatever, so clearly she’s at the very least not actively repulsed by me. So why would I assume she would “never in a million years” have sex with me?

If you have to ask, the answer is no. I.e., I think the moral thing is to view the default as "no consent" and require positive evidence to move to "consent." If you can't count to ten, you can't give that evidence. I don't even think that's overdone liberal nonsense, of which there's a lot on this subject.

Concretely, if she's so much drunker than me and hotter than me that I can not picture her feeling less than grossly violated tomorrow, then the sex feels very rapey. If I think we're both buzzed and we might both feel a little gross about it tomorrow, then shrug, she made her choices.

I in practice solve these complex moral dilemmas by being old, boring and sober. It's remarkable how much complex modern feminist 'BUT WHAT IS CONSENT EXACTLY' goes away if you allow the answer to be even as serious as "a thing two people who are multiple dates do while sober".

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That's why the term 'statutory rape' exists uncontroversially

This term is, in fact, controversial - at least in the discourse space you and I are participating in. It is, in fact, an extremely tendentious framing, and I do in fact reject it. (The mere fact that the “age of consent” differs so dramatically between different jurisdictions worldwide illustrates that people do in fact disagree substantially about the validity of the framing.)

I presume we agree that if a man bought an eighteen year old woman- so old enough to consent to sex with him, not old enough to drink in the US, and not old enough to be presumed to know her limits with alcohol- alcoholic beverages until she was too drunk to say no, then took her back to his hotel room, we would agree that this qualifies as rape.

We absolutely do not agree on this. First off, we would have to ask a number of very important questions which you hand-wave away. Does the man know she’s 18, rather than 21? (If he met her in a bar, the answer is almost certainly “no”.) Does he know that she “doesn’t know her limits”? Why would he assume that a grown adult is unable to exercise basic agency over her own decisionmaking?

Your scenario doesn’t mention anything about misdirection, subterfuge, etc. (i.e. spiking a drink without her knowledge) He’s just offering her drinks, and she’s willingly accepting those drinks.

And once she’s finished all of those drinks, how “visibly drunk” is she, actually? Surely you are aware that there is a wide spectrum of intoxication; someone can be buzzed or tipsy without being genuinely unable to exercise basic control over his or her faculties. Someone can be drunk enough to make decisions which one would not make if stone-cold sober, and in some cases that’s the whole point of drinking in the first place. (“Liquid courage” is a term for a reason.)

And an observer cannot always reliably detect, based on observing outwardly-obvious behavior, a person’s internal level of confusion/inebriation. Nor can simply knowing how many drinks she has had reliably tell you the extent to which she has lost control of her faculties. I know plenty of people who can down five shots of tequila and still maintain quite a bit of mental acuity and functionality; I also know plenty of people who will have one mixed drink and then be a stumbling mess.

You are requiring this man to be able to accurately gauge everything about this situation, at penalty of going to prison for a substantial chunk of his life, and having a permanent felony record, if he misjudges any of it. I thought I was one of the more authoritarian and pro-law-and-order posters here, but apparently you put me to shame.

All of this would, of course, be quite different if we lived in a culture in which it was widely understood to be extremely aberrant behavior for a woman to consume alcohol and then have sex with a man she just met, or barely knows. If we lived in a culture where the vast majority of women were chaste, monogamous, and averse to the mere thought of having casual hook-ups, then in the rare scenarios when a woman does do that, we could at least assume that foul play and predatory behavior on the man’s part may be involved.

However, in the culture we do live in, women do in fact willingly and enthusiastically consent to hookups all the time - very often after consuming some amount of alcohol! In such a milieu, any man who capitalizes on this opportunity now has to accurately - usually while intoxicated to at least some degree himself - whether this particular woman is hooking up with him because she is so plastered she’s lost all control of her mind and body, OR because that’s just a normal thing that tons of women do willingly all the time these days.

I am strongly in favor of a sea change in cultural morality toward a far more sexually-conservative set of cultural norms. However, that whole suite of norms would have to develop basically simultaneously, with all parties involved holding up their respective ends of the bargain. In the meantime, you’re asking far too much agency from men and none at all from women, with predictably disastrous consequences.

This term is, in fact, controversial - at least in the discourse space you and I are participating in. It is, in fact, an extremely tendentious framing, and I do in fact reject it. (The mere fact that the “age of consent” differs so dramatically between different jurisdictions worldwide illustrates that people do in fact disagree substantially about the validity of the framing.)

In Bahrain, a man who violently rapes a woman can escape all legal culpability if he agrees to marry her. The fact that Bahrainis "disagree substantially about the validity of the framing" (namely, that rape is a heinous and despicable crime, and not just because it may be harder for the victim to find a husband) does not give me cause to update my views on rape or reject the conventional western framing.

controversial

I don't think the moral importance of age of consent in general is controversial even on here. Don't get me wrong, I'd welcome any interesting discussion you'd like to have here.

But, I think the fact on the ground is that while posters would disagree on exact ages, allowances across cultures, etc, most people think there should be some age and/or age-gap that makes it definitionally impossible to consent.

But women do have massively less agency than men. They're called the meme gender for a reason and that goes both ways. There is a reason that for all 5,000 years of recorded history men have led and women, with very rare exceptions, followed- that's just the way it shakes out. Again, that goes both ways- insisting on women's empowerment is usually dumb, but so is counting on women's agency to get anything done.

Making plans on the basis of 'women will have agency to change cultural morality' is a bad plan. Particularly around sexual norms; do you think women are initiating these encounters at a rate that even cracks the high single digits?

That's even ignoring that open and liberal sexual norms aren't particularly what women want anyways. They're something that's mostly desired by men, for biological reasons.

However, in the culture we do live in, women do in fact willingly and enthusiastically consent to hookups all the time - very often after consuming some amount of alcohol! In such a milieu, any man who capitalizes on this opportunity now has to accurately - usually while intoxicated to at least some degree himself - whether this particular woman is hooking up with him because she is so plastered she’s lost all control of her mind and body, OR because that’s just a normal thing that tons of women do willingly all the time these days.

This is an inherently hazardous activity and my sympathy for such men is limited. If they get it wrong they deserve to pay the price because there's a high chance of getting it wrong and that seems generally foreseeable and known.

And

This term is, in fact, controversial - at least in the discourse space you and I are participating in. It is, in fact, an extremely tendentious framing, and I do in fact reject it. (The mere fact that the “age of consent” differs so dramatically between different jurisdictions worldwide illustrates that people do in fact disagree substantially about the validity of the framing.)

One can recognize the need for some sort of line to draw without thinking that every particular line is obvious rather than arbitrary. Almost nobody thinks that an adult should be allowed to have sex with a 13 year old. On the other hand, having sex with a 17 year old doesn’t seem any different from having sex with an 18 year old. But having sex with a 16 year old doesn’t seem different from having sex with a 17 year old and having sex with a 15 year old doesn’t seem different from having sex with a 16 year old and having sex with a 14 year old…

At some point ‘if a=b and b=c then a=c’ breaks down. This point is necessarily arbitrary, but it does exist, so the important thing is to find a common point to draw the line.

I don't know if men in our society would have a problem with having more responsibility than women, provided that women admitted this. If the messaging was "men need to protect women because men are stronger and have more agency", that might be acceptable. It was acceptable for almost all of recorded history. That's the tradcon way.

The problem is that feminist messaging refuses to say this. Instead they say that women are just as capable as men, except for the fact that men are holding them down, and therefore it's men's responsibility to help women, in order to apologize and make women more powerful. It villainizes all men, most of whom have never wanted to hurt women and have always wanted to protect them.

FWIW, I'm not a tradcon, I probably think something in the middle. But mostly, I think women are strong, and need to embrace this and take responsibility, and actually act as such, and stop blaming men for their problems. How does that look for rape situations? Dunno, maybe they should start carrying around guns so if they find themselves in compromising situations, they have the actual firepower to overcome the man's brute strength. But that's for more of the violent rape situation. For the "I'm too drunk for my decisions to matter", I think the solution is for women to actually take responsibility. And I think that feminism's focus on victim-based empowerment isn't helping them.

Okay fine, again, I’d be very happy with a return to traditional sexual morality, in which a man is guilty of criminal seduction if he has sex with a woman before getting to know her family and asking her father for permission to marry her. However, that world is very far away from the world we live in now. You are, for practical purposes, proposing a world in which women have exactly the same degree of recognized agency as they do right now in every single aspect of life except for sex. (If not, how do we get from here to a world in which women lose all of this agency they’ve accrued?) This is obviously insane and unsustainable, and I hope you would understand why so many men would vociferously object.

This is very simple. If you consent (no matter how ill founded the consent is), then it's not rape. I similarly think that statutory rape is very much not rape, and that the only reason it's called such is because people torture the meaning of words to try to give something moral weight.

One of the problems of American culture (or perhaps even human culture in general) is that people try to make everything maximally bad as a rhetorical tactic. They aren't willing to say "this is bad but not (really bad thing)". Well I'm willing to bite that bullet. If you have sex with someone too drunk to effectively say no, even if you were feeding them drinks to achieve that, it's not rape as long as they consented. We can, and should, frown on and punish that behavior. But it's not rape.

Bob puts a gun to the head of Alice and says you either consent to sex with me right now or I shoot. Alice, who wants to live, makes a rational decision and says yes and then Bob has sex with her. According to your definition what just happened wasn't rape. However most people would absolutely say that it was.

It's an interesting point, but I don't think that edge cases existing mean that the definition is wrong. Sure, if we wanted to we could spend probably hours to hammer out a definition which solves all the edge cases. But that's true of any definition.

statutory rape is very much not rape

To be clear, are you espousing the belief that an adult (e.g. a 30 year old man) is in no way morally transgressing to have sex with an enthusiastic twelve year old? Nine year old? Toddler?

  • -13

No, of course not. I frankly am surprised you think I said that, because I was very clear that we should punish someone who gets a girl drunk just to have sex with her. Just because something isn't rape doesn't mean it's morally permissible.

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We can, and should, frown on and punish that behavior. But it's not rape.

Reading him as charitably as I can I'd say he's advocating something like what the French had before they brought in age of consent laws a few years ago. You still got sent to prison for having sex with a minor but it wasn't called rape, and you got sent to prison for much longer if your case satisfied the coercive bar needed for a rape conviction.

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The point of the comment is that not all immoral sexual acts should be called "rape". I can imagine a framework where the 30-year-old has sex with a "consenting" 9-year-old, and then is prosecuted, not for "statutory rape", but for fraud—because he falsely stated or implied that there was little or no chance that the sex would result in physical harm to the 9-year-old, and the 9-year-old was too ignorant to know otherwise.

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Jesus dude...

  • -20

I think you’ve got to look at it this way- feminism is a class interest movement for college educated liberal urbanites. It is not, and hasn’t been for years, about women qua women. You’ll notice feminists are typically very concerned about rape on college campuses and blissfully ignorant of rape in the military, any guesses as to which one actually happens at above average rates? It’s because the type of women(and it is mostly but not entirely women) feminism represents pretty much all go to college and very rarely spend time in the military.

So with that in mind, ‘teach men not to rape’ is about generating assabiyah within the cohort. It’s a form of indoctrination into class interest through a universal right of passage for the group feminism is intended to represent. It’s not really about rape prevention; liberal sexual norms and substances can’t really be combined without having a rape problem(and I am not claiming that that’s the only way you have a rape problem- see the military, above. I’m claiming that it’s probably impossible to reduce the incidence of rape in heavily feminist-influenced strata below where it already is because of it, and the low hanging fruit has mostly been picked).

Now that being said, there’s probably men somewhere who could be influenced not to rape by consent-based sex Ed. Picture a fresh off the boat afghani migrant, for example- this guy probably literally doesn’t know that a girl walking down Main Street unescorted with her hair showing isn’t a hooker. It’s just not what consent based sex Ed is aimed at doing.

This is what I think is going on:

  • like all women, feminists want to be 100% safe at all time
  • yet they want to partake in fornication, which is a very unsafe activity
  • additionally, they are not interested in men who follow feminist principles, ie constantly asking for consent is not something they associate with an attractive man

So perhaps what we can deduce from these observations is that the 'don't rape' seminaries are in fact shit tests (Usually unconscious effort by a woman to test man's worthiness and social status).

They do want the men that they are not attracted to not to make any kind of conventional romantic gesture (ie 'rapey' attitude or 'pre-rape' or what not), which is completely understandable.

They also expect the men that they are attracted to to be bold enough to push past these rules. After all, 50 shades of Grey is a best-seller.

In essence, the 'Hello HR?' meme, institutionalized. Plus it's a nice grift.

The men smart enough to fall for the training will eventually find out that successful men disregard it as needed, that's not gonna help with the I.N.C.E.L. terrorism, such as ;

More women report being randomly attacked while walking in New York City

Since you bring up Afghanistan, I keep coming back to this article. Ignorance is not sufficient, malice is involved: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ive-worked-refugees-decades-europes-afghan-crime-wave-mind-21506?nopaging=1

Let’s leave aside the reprehensibility of this conduct for the moment and focus instead on its logic or lack thereof. Can these men possibly expect that their attempts will be successful? Do they actually think they will be able to rape a woman on the main street of a town in the middle of the day? On a train filled with other passengers? In a frequented public park in the early afternoon? Are they incapable of logical thought—or is that not even their aim? Do they merely want to cause momentary female hysteria and touch some forbidden places of a stranger’s body? Is that so gratifying that it’s worth jeopardizing their future and being hauled off to jail by scornful and disgusted Europeans? What is going on here? And why, why, why the Afghans? According to Austrian police statistics, Syrian refugees cause fewer than 10 percent of sexual assault cases. Afghans, whose numbers are comparable, are responsible for a stunning half of all cases.

Others are merely baffling. Public swimming pools are confronted with epidemics of young Afghan men who think it a good idea to expose themselves, whipping off their pants and standing there until tackled by the lifeguards and removed from the premises with orders to never return. Let’s be charitable: let’s assume that at some point, one or two of these young men might have heard stories of nudist beaches and thought to join in. But that’s hardly an explanation. Seriously; in a foreign country where your legal standing is tenuous, wouldn’t you cast a quick glance around to ensure that you are not the first and only man thus flaunting his ornamentation, before engaging in conduct that your entire upbringing has taught you to consider unthinkable? Come on!

Consent-based sex ed is not sufficient for cases like these, we should take a leaf from the Taliban's book (the leading authority in the field of governing Afghans) and publicly execute the above kind of rapists. Not the 'couldn't consent due to being too drunk' kind but the 'run out and assault women with their babies' kind.

Solving rape by teaching men not to rape has the same kind of energy as solving inflation by teaching men not to print money. You actually need to target rapists and central bankers.

I....don't think that follows?

Inflation happens due to collective action. It doesn't matter what you teach a given man; there's nothing in it for him personally. Central bankers (or the politicians who appoint them) are much more insulated from their actual decision.

My thoughts meandered to a financial analogy, prompted by the phrase "zero lower bound". One sees the phrase "zero lower bound" in the context of macroeconomics and interest rates. Governments like to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates, but once they are cut to zero, they cannot go any lower. They have reached the zero lower bound.

Ordinary men have a similar problem with reducing the amount of rape they do. They are on board with the message "Don't rape" and would like to help women by raping less, but they are already at the zero lower bound. To do less, they would have to find a way to go negative and unrape. Ordinary men just aren't in charge and cannot actually do anything, just like ordinary men dislike money printing and inflation, but aren't consulted and cannot say "No!".

Okay, but the margin is what matters.

Every man, woman and child starts out at the zero lower bound. Some of them will get the opportunity to divert and take a nonzero policy. It’s reasonable to “teach” those specific people whether doing so is a good idea, even though their current decision is the zero bound.

“Teach men not to inflate” is silly not because of the lower bound, but because of the upper. Most men will never have the opportunity to steer the Federal Reserve. “Teach economists not to inflate” is more defensible, and “teach (or tell) the chairman not to inflate” is just normal politics.

Most men will have the opportunity to commit a rape. They won’t, because they’ve been taught that it’s immoral and/or will be punished. That seems like the correct mechanism to me.

Besides, most men will have the opportunity to shame, discourage, mock or halt rape. "Teaching men not to rape" also includes "teaching men to teach men not to rape", and I'd wager the impact of that second-order teaching is higher.

Do you not think that having a financially literate public who understands a little bit about how inflation works will help us combat it in the long run?

it doesn’t reach the men it’s supposed to reach, and only reaches men who don’t need feminist messages in the first place

This is asserted a lot in spaces like this with a kind of nerd-smugness but I don’t think it’s true. Why would one expect the proverbially socially adept frat bro who never heard of /ssc/ to have worse social awareness than the only-rarely-interacts-with-women loser who receives this messaging? My Bay Area female friends/fwbs/hookups/etc have showed me plenty of receipts from respectable seeming nerds who very clearly need some social education.

Why would one expect the proverbially socially adept frat bro who never heard of /ssc/ to have worse social awareness than the only-rarely-interacts-with-women loser who receives this messaging?

I don't think the OP was talking about "social awareness" so much as "understanding of what does and doesn't constitute rape, and commitment not to committing it". The fact that nerdy men often say things that women find weird or creepy doesn't make them rapists. The fact that sexually promiscuous men are far more likely to face prosecution for rape than non-promiscuous men seems strong evidence in favour of the theory that nerdy incels have already been successfully "taught not to rape".

The fact that sexually promiscuous men are far more likely to face prosecution for rape than non-promiscuous men seems strong evidence in favour of the theory that nerdy incels have already been successfully "taught not to rape".

Not sure it is strong evidence. It's possible in theory that suppose the lowest SV occurs at average number lifetime number of sex partner (which is about six) and grows at extremes.

My Bay Area female friends/fwbs/hookups/etc have showed me plenty of receipts from respectable seeming nerds who very clearly need some social education.

They are not raping her. They are revealing their interest in her without being sufficiently attractive themselves, which is a big difference.

Fortunately none of them were raped, but it goes way beyond the MRA strawman of “trying to flirt while being unattractive.”

Being autistic is very literally not rape. Saying creepy shit out of social awkwardness is worth discouraging, but it's not an indication that a man is about to commit rape.

But then it occurred to me: the message makes 100% sense if we start from the assumption that modern feminists, eager to right cultural wrongs of the past that they perceive, really want to make sure their messaging never ever entails even a hint of the notion that women need to exercise any level of agency in order to avoid rape, assault or harassment of any type i.e. avoid bad men, because in all cases that would be “victim blaming” and horrific etc.

You could do this while admitting that rape is disproportionately carried out by Dark Triad types (especially when society has already been trying for decades to grab all of the low-hanging fruit of "normal men who just think this is okay") and not harangue Robin Hanson types as well. From what I recall from my early internet days when Jezebel was strong, feminists were insistent on rejecting this sort of point.

There's an element of class guilt that is also useful.

Also, if you believe rape is about power or some patriarchal ideology not sex, I suppose "teach men not to rape" sounds more appealing as an actual solution and not just a cynical messaging tactic.

Why is "victim blaming" in quotes? You're actually blaming the victim. This is the second post I've seen this morning asking women to have more agency over being raped or assaulted.

You shouldn't have to actively cover your drink at a bar or avoid walking through a busy park in broad daylight because you may be forced into a portapotty and raped by a vagrant, or not take the subway becauss you mignt get groped.

Don't rape messaging isn't going to reach the criminals perpetrating these acts. But if you're correct in that is about avoiding putting blame on the victims, it is clearly still needed.

There must be some distinction to be drawn between "victim blaming" and "victim warning" though right? If a woman is raped, it would be victim blaming to tell her "well that's too bad, maybe you shouldn't have walked through the park", but the idea that teaching women to avoid walking alone in a park in a bad part of town is victim blaming and must be avoided at all costs just seems like an overextension of the concept to me.

There are signs all over San Francisco warning people not to leave valuables inside their cars, but this is never presented as some awful example of victim blaming. The only time this over-extension of the concept seems to take place is when anyone is asking women to have any agency over their own safety.

Crime can typically be thought of as a supply and demand problem and the best way to prevent crime is to attack both sides of the problem.

Yeah, the difference between victim blaming and victim warning is whether you think public policy and social norms should be shaped to protect victims as much as possible.

You can want that and also warn victims, or you can 'warn' victims as an alternative to doing that.

OP seems to be pretty explicitly saying that those things should be shaped to protect victims less, and place the burden of self-defense on the victims instead. That's not 'warning.'

Yeah, the difference between victim blaming and victim warning is whether you think public policy and social norms should be shaped to protect victims as much as possible.

I'm not sure I understand your view here. Warning victims seems like it would fall pretty squarely under protecting victims as much as possible, even if it isn't the only thing that would fall under that heading.

Maybe this is an example of two movies on one screen, but I didn't get that impression from the OP at all. OP isn't saying that public policy and social norms shouldn't be shaped to protect victims, but rather that the current attempts to do that are not very effective and are needlessly narrow in scope.

IANAL, but I think in legal terms I would be referring to mens rea.

Basically, you cannot distinguish whether or not someone is victim blaming from the simple fact of 'they mentioned something women could do to be safer'; that is an act that both victim-blamers and victim-defenders might do. What determines it is how that warning falls into their larger worldview on the topic, and what they are intending to accomplish with the warning.

If your view is 'society as a whole needs to do everything it can to protect potential victims, and giving them important knowledge about how to avoid danger is one part of that effort', you're not a victim-blamer and your warnings are fine and good.

If your view is 'people need to take individual responsibility for their own safety, we should educate them about the dangers but if they don't protect themselves after that then it's on their own heads,' then you are a victim-blamer, and your warnings are kind of sinister and instrumentally harmful.

Is it confusing that the same action can be good or bad depending on the intent behind it and the larger framework it is embedded in? Yeah, it sure confuses the shit out of me all the time! But that's unfortunately just true sometimes in the highly complicated realms of society and culture and politics, and us high-decouplers just have to acknowledge that reality and do the hard work of thinking about it.

Because at some levels of obliviousness/recklessness it is on the victim. Especially when the fate has thrown her a warning or two. Like a girl going to a bar where you have warned her is junkies watering hole and then she follows one of the said junkies while he was high to his apartment when you pleaded her not to, and then she calls you panicked two hours lately while she is locked in the bathroom after attempted rape. Thankfully i got there in time and she got away from the whole ordeal with only a big scare.

Life is like a horror movie - after you ignore the side character, commons sense and pure luck's warning to turn back - whatever happens after you open the dark door and enter inside is on you.

Because at some levels of obliviousness/recklessness it is on the victim.

This but for continuing to make racist/sexist comments at your job or on social media. If you get canceled for this stuff, it's not like you can say you had no warning.

  • -13

Even here, very few people have a problem with this when it really is "continuing to". I think even some of the overt racists would see that as a case of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". It's when you get in shit for doing it once five years ago in a completely unrelated context that people start taking issue.

Why is "victim blaming" in quotes? You're actually blaming the victim. This is the second post I've seen this morning asking women to have more agency over being raped or assaulted.

Either it's not victim blaming because we tell other people in similar situations (e.g. leaving a car unlocked in a bad neighborhood) to take preventative measures without that label. Or it is but it's a specific thing where we don't apply the same logic to other places, which raises questions.

Either way, I can get people putting it in quotes.

I don't think it's "blaming" to tell people they need to take responsibility to ensure negative things don't happen to them in their lives, to the extent that they can control those negative events. Some might say a better term than "victim blaming" would be "prevention". I shouldn't have to lock my house when I leave town for a week. But if I did that, would that really be wise? Why are we not teaching robbers not to rob, instead of teaching people to lock their doors?

I think there is good and bad victim blaming. Victim blaming means that there is some sort of self-protective behavior that you need to engage in, otherwise people will have less sympathy for your situation. It is bad if this self-protective behavior is unreasonable (walking through a park at daytime, taking the subway, never going out to party, taking self-defense classes, wearing a burka,...) or ineffective (drawing a blank here, is there any victim blaming that is entirely ineffective?).

It is good if the self-protective behavior can be expected and is effective. "Don't get blackout drunk.", "Don't lead a guy on, then deny him at the end.", "Don't go out to party alone.", "Don't go home with a guy you have just met, especially when you are drunk.", etc. These are all perfectly reasonable things that we can expect from anyone without restricting their freedom much. If they don't follow these rules, they are probably not mature enough to be drinking or having sex in the first place. Even under the best of circumstances, you should follow these rules because there are always bad people around.

Then there is another category of advice that isn't tied to victim blaming. It's just good advice like "Communicate openly what you consent to and what not", "If someone does something sexual you don't want, verbally and physically fight back, don't freeze up." Here, it would not necessarily reduce my sympathy for someone, who didn't follow this advice, but it's still good advice.

It's in quotes because it's not victim blaming. The idea that any argument other than the one that men need to be taught not to rape is essentially victim blaming i.e. accusing women of inviting rape upon themselves is dishonest and nonsensical. Yes, you should not have to be vigilant about getting roofied. There should be no social context where that is advisable. But there still is.

And why is feminist messaging clearly needed when it's not reaching the rapists? I'm all ears.

How about walking through the park or on the subway? Not much you can do about that unless escorted by bodyguards at all times. I guess i don't get your message here. Yes telling men not to rape is stupid, anyone willing to listen is already not going to rape. I get that part.

You go on to make claims about agency and the true message being not to victim blame, if that is the case then it isn't stupid and probably a message that still needs to get out there.

The notion that average women are routinely mansplained by mainstream society that walking in busy parks in broad daylight is to be avoided is preposterous. If, however, the argument is generally about the potential threat posed by mentally ill / drug-addicted aggressive homeless and vagrants, then I'd say that's a different kettle of fish, with all the political baggage that entails.

if that is the case then it isn't stupid and probably a message that still needs to get out there.

Unfortunately feminists instantly shout down even the mildest, most sympathetic form of this message as "victim blaming". I've seen it happen many times. The idea that one should take any steps to try to avoid being a rape victim is very much taboo in the public discourse.

I think this is overthinking/projecting too much theory behind what is a pure power move similar to those Trump is renowned for on the other side of the aisle. "Teach men not to rape" infuriates the political opposition (being loaded in the classic, "when did you stop beating..." way), but there is no way to speak out against it without either flagging yourself for cancellation (if your response is something similarly laconic of opposing valence) or looking weak (if your response is nuanced/lengthy/cautious).

"Teach men not to rape" infuriates the political opposition

The political opposition was routed out of places like university campuses where this stuff runs rampant. It's aimed at fellow traveler men.

The vast majority, even in campuses, is neutral and politically unengaged, but might range from mildly for to mildly against SJ if pressed. The latter group is a natural target for this.

This seems pretty much correct and is a staple for all of modern identity politics. You never blame the oppressed group, always the oppressor. You don't blame Blacks for underachieving, cultivating violent norms of behavior, reproducing in an unconscientious manner, etc. You don't blame gays for their sexual behavior when contracting HIV. And you don't blame women for getting blackout drunk when they had an unwanted sexual encounter. The main point is to wrestle power away from the oppressor towards the oppressed, never the other way around. That is the main purpose of identity politics, not solving the individual problem. Otherwise, the focus would be to a significant degree on the things that are already in the power for the oppressed to do.

Pretty much. “Teach men not to rape” is less consistent with a general principled stance on victim-blaming and more consistent with the usual Who? Whom? and efforts to maximize female freedom and minimize female accountability.

Hence why “teach men not to rape” is A Thing, but “teach men not to murder” sounds farcical and “teach black men not to murder” would be considered hateful and offensive by many.

Those who shriek against “victim-blaming” when it comes to advising women to be responsible for their own safety are disproportionately likely to immediately suggest that a victim of black-on-white or black-on-Asian violence said or did something to provoke the attack, a victim of pitbull-on-pretty-much-anything-not-a-pitbull nannying did something to trigger the pibbie’s reactivity (such as making a sudden movement, making a loud noise, or breathing).

They may also advise to leave your car windows and trunk open when you leave it as a good faith signal to Persons of Burglary that you have nothing to steal, and if you don’t it’s your own fault that your windows got smashed.

The question is whether they want to reduce the incidence of rape or if they want to lecture men who are not rapists.

The answer is in their behavior and rhetoric.

I don't think these people aren't interested in reducing the incidence of rape. I think it's pretty common to want a certain outcome while also being emotionally invested in the idea that there's a single correct way or achieving that outcome (the obvious similar case being environmentalists who protest nuclear power).

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