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Australian boys make spreadsheet of girls attractiveness, national media, federal minister and state premier rush to condemn them. I'm pretty surprised this got any media attention, doesn't it seem trivial? This all happened on some discord server, it's not like they were parading it around. Does anyone think this would happen in their country?
I can't see how 'unrapeable' could possibly be a threat. Saying someone is vulnerable could be a threat, calling someone invulnerable is not... OK it's very rude, suspend the ringleaders - do police need to be involved? There's a certain level of hysteria here, you get the sense that the male principal fears for his job unless he takes this as seriously as humanly possible.
It would be pretty crushing to be labelled unrapeable or 'get out' by your male peers, though I don't see how a counsellor could help.
Context: Australian media and govt have been panicking about male-on-female violence for a few weeks now. We recently had a mass stabbing by a mentally ill man, who targeted mostly women. Accordingly, male on female violence has increased statistically and the government has thrown a lot of money at various NGOs.
Additionally, there has been a lot of concern about Tate corrupting the minds of the youth. So this lets the media hit two talking points at the same time.
A related matter - youtuber argues that ranking women's attractiveness upsets the Byzantine system of female intrasexual competition, where every queen is praised as a 10/10 regardless of ugliness. I found the video pretty decent albeit a few minutes longer than it needed to be. It features the infamous Gorlock the Destroyer claiming to be a 10/10 (sarcastically?), which does make you think. There might be something to it - ranking women by attractiveness seems more dangerous than one might naively imagine.
In the male-dominated patriarchal society of the distant past, accusing men of being bastards or having incorrect lineage was a very serious matter. Legitimacy and preventing cuckoldry was deeply important to men, it informed the whole structure of European politics, inheritance and succession. Perhaps in the emerging future it's female sexual dynamics that will take priority and we'll see more of this kind of thing.
Premier (woman): "This pattern of violence against women — not only does the act of violence have to stop, but these displays of disrespecting women. Like, it's just disgraceful."
Lèse-majesté: an offence or defamation against the dignity of a ruling head of state or of the state itself.
I think that the issue with "unrapeable" is that it is not a tag that was applied to all of the classmates, the implication being 'the primary thing that keeps us from raping people (apart from strategic concerns regarding law enforcement) is people being ugly'.
If the boys had rated their classmates on a scale of one to ten, this would still be in poor taste imho (as it would be if the genders were reversed, like in that South Park episode), but probably not make national news.
Also, the one-dimensional scale of female attractiveness is certainly an oversimplification. Looking at porn categories, I think it is safe to say that while there is a common axis of attractiveness, there is is also a lot of variation in preference among men.
Finally, your physical attractiveness should mostly matter in so far as your goal is to bang all your classmates or find a partner who prefers a high status mate to underline their own status among their peers, neither of which sound like very worthwhile goals.
You don't think many teenage girls rank male classmates?
I remember ranking boys in terms of cuteness (albeit ordinally rather than quantitatively) being a repeat conversation among some girls from age about 11 onwards. How else can you work out which boys you can date without getting bullied?
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Why is it in bad taste for men to rate women's attractiveness?
It is bad taste for any group whose primary purpose is not a dating pool to systematically rate the hotness of that pool, no matter the gender.
These lists tend to become common knowledge, and some people will end up on the bottom part of the list or being rated an average of 1.3 out of ten (but people -- especially people going through puberty -- might also be uncomfortable being rated really high). If the victim had actually asked to be rated, this would be different, but in all likelihood, they do not prefer an supposedly objective (it's a number! numbers don't lie!) rating of their hotness to become common knowledge.
The outcome of these lists is not so different from writing "X is an ugly pig" on the blackboard. As that is bullying, I would classify creating such lists as at least likely to lead to bullying.
Writing "X is an ugly pig" on the blackboard is writing it where X is likely to see it. The list was private and only exposed to the public by the authorities.
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Men like discussing who is hot. There is no expectation that everything you say in a private or semi-private space becomes public. Your argument becomes close to saying that ranking any human attribute is in bad taste, because someone ends up at the bottom, which is bullying.
People discussing whether you're hot (or ugly) does not make you a victim.
I think the bad-tasteness of it depends on the group size. Three people can keep a secret (if two of them are dead) and all that. If three boys want to spend their time fantasizing about their classmates, that is very different than if three quarters of the class participate in the ranking, in my mind. (I don't know what the participation rate for that spreadsheet thing was, I am trying to make a general point.)
I don't think having rankings is necessarily bad taste. I am fine with men ranking porn stars (or participants of a dating show) by their hotness, or athletes by their speeds, or competitive eaters by how many burgers they can eat, or students by how well they did on their last math test (even though I would prefer to just tell everyone their outcome and the overall statistics in that case). In all these cases, the ranking is kind of relevant to the job. Don't want to be judged by your genitals? Then don't become a porn star.
I agree that not every inappropriate ranking implies bullying and victimization. If the bottom of the list gets rated a 4/10, the whole endeavor would still be slightly ill-advised, but victim-free. (Some feminists might disagree with me here, whatever.) If half the class coordinates to agree on an 1/10 rating for one classmate especially based on politics and this strongly influences how they subsequently treat them, that would be bullying.
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It's been awhile since I was in elementary school, back in the previous century, but even that far back, the whole "self esteem" program we were subjected to pretty much endorsed something like this — you're great just the way you are, nobody is better or worse than anyone else, everybody's equally special in their own way ("which is another way of saying nobody is," to quote Dash Parr), everybody gets a participation trophy.
It's the "equity" mindset, the moral axiom that fairness demands equal outcomes for everyone; the same thinking that, when applied to identity groups, creates our "disparate impact" regime. And to many of its defenders, whether it's true, or even if it's a "noble lie," it's the only thing holding back horrific oppression. After all, you know who else once thought some people were better than others, back in mid-century Germany?
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One of the cringiest faux pas of my lifetime was rating every single female classmate in my 7th grade yearbook. Which was then found and passed around.
There was something deeply distasteful about a mid bro such as myself a) exhibiting how thirsty I was for some of my female friends b) quantitatively showing how unattractive I found others. Even for children this was a bit of a bridge too far, I didn't recover socially from it until 9th grade.
Since then I've migrated to a more progressive, binary system in which women are either a 1 or a 0. There's not as much fidelity but it leads to richer conversations about attractiveness anyway.
It is funny, though, how when it comes to ranking attractiveness women are so vicious and unrealistic compared to men.
I also have a far less charitable reading of "unrapeable" than OP - I think it's obvious that it means someone is too ugly to rape. This is still just dumb kids getting together to say stupid and hateful shit because they have underdeveloped EQ. This has been happening since forever, and it's not a sign of some endemic issue in Australian society. Fuck Marry Kill is a classic game.
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It has been my experience that if you show (straight) men a group of women (across anything from a IRL social situation to just a set of headshots), they can pretty reliably sort them quickly by their own metrics of attractiveness. The rankings probably won't be identical, and they could change with interaction, but I bet at any given point most men, even those not looking for partners, are at least aware of who they find the most attractive woman in any given room.
But it's also generally verboten to discuss the rankings themselves in mixed contexts, and even most of the time in male spaces. But I have occasionally been party to discussion of rankings of celebrities. I would be curious of (straight) women think similarly, but I have no real information to go on.
I think your last paragraph gets to the heart of the matter. Attractiveness is tied very tightly to status, particularly for women. When men are ranking women's attractiveness, their rankings are pretty close to openly articulating the status rankings of the women in question - ranking someone last in a group is basically the same thing as just outright saying, "I think she's a loser and not worthy of the same respect as the other women". When this is done with people are members of a near-group (or worse still, a friend-group), it's a fairly aggressive action to take. On the flip side, this is why ranking celebrities can be fun even in a mixed-gender group - no one has to be personally invested in it in the same way. Of course, everyone basically knows where they stand anyway, but it's rude to say it outright! If you had a group of guys where one buddy was unathletic and low-income, everyone in the room would know he's low status, but it's still a dick move to explicitly point it out.
This gets at the heart of it. It's not that it's unusual to rate people by attractiveness, as everyone does that implicitly if not outright explicitly. But people still don't like that it occurs, and some people will be rated lower which when combined with humanity's natural "MUST PROTECT WOMEN" impulse creates situations like this, where an entire country explodes at the very normal behavior of some random adolescent boys.
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We ought to interpret “unrapeable” more charitably as “even a driven (evil/damned) rapist would pass up the opportunity because of how ugly she is”. There is no indication that the boys have formed some some crypto-pro-rapist organization which hides their aspirations by including the word “unrapeable”. That is too uncharitable to consider. It’s like, if I say I wouldn’t eat your cooking even if I’m starving, I am not making a positive value claim about the state of being starved.
In the feminist mindset, rape is an expression of power, not an act of lust, and hence it is quite disconnected with a woman's attractiveness.
Yeah but like, they're wrong.
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You know I used to think this was nonsense (along with its stronger and more generalized form, "sex for men is about power rather than lust"), but the more time I spend thinking about the way that different men conceive of and relate to sex, the more I start to think there's some truth for it.
If you look at any of the "redpilled manosphere" guys - Rollo, Andrew Tate, Fresh & Fit, anyone in that milieu - I think it's clear that they view women first and foremost as an economic resource to be managed and optimized, and the pleasure that they derive from their own status as an "alpha" is more central than the pleasure that they derive from the woman's body itself. In fact a man completely losing himself in the thrall of pleasure while in the presence of a woman would be viewed with suspicion - he's a simp, he's unmanly, he doesn't know how to control himself, etc.
I think it's true of how some men think of sexually relating to women. Also some women: a lot of romance novels are explicitly about emotionally subjugating a powerful man, with a "he gets down on his knees and begs" scene being a very common trope of the genre. Not so much "civilizing a bad boy into a mature man" as "having control over a bad boy".
IIRC, romance novels are disproportionately read by middle-aged women and AFAIK Tatism appeals to low status/young men. Two of the bottom feeder groups of their respective sexes, who fantasise about debased devotion of a partner in the absence of perceived opportunities for healthy romantic fulfillment. The equivalent submissive pathologies are femdom pornography for men and rape fantasies for women, both of which seem to be largely a matter of despair at forming a mutually loving connection.
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Wasn't there a case of someone merely rating classmates making national news? I have a dim memory of such. At a university iirc.
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