I’m having a little trouble with this syllogism. Help me out here.
- Attractive women bear some of the responsibility when they are harassed.
- Lansbury says she has never been harassed.
- ???
- Profit!
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Gospel Law™ has a nice, marketable ring to it, don’t you think? Of course the marrying age girls, up to, say, about 16 should not be covered up, for obvious reasons.
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We have to own up to the fact that women, since time immemorial, have gone out of their way to make themselves attractive.
Um, no. I discovered long ago that we women dress to impress other women. Men don’t give a shit about our make-up and clothes.
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Men in general care less. They still perk up around nice looking people.
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"We must sometimes take blame, women."
Yeah, like did you hear that Angela Landsbury was promoting a dangerous myth that men sexually abuse women because of the way women dress? Sometimes women do share some of the blame.
Honestly I usually find the “they are from a different generation” argument to be a pointless one. It doesn’t change what a person did or said. It feels a little more compelling to me, here, though. Reading her whole comment, it seems like she’s promoting an idea that would have been progressive at a time in her life (women have to avoid tempting men, but they shouldn’t have to). I’m having trouble being angry at a 92-year-old woman who lived through mid-century Hollywood (or mid-century anything). She was never raped, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t stomach abuse every day (things that she may not think of as abuse but that we’d call abuse now).
I guess I’m sad that she thinks what she thinks, but I’m not angry at her for thinking what she thinks. And I still want Canadian Netflix to get Murder, She Wrote again.
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A point my wife still does not believe. No, i don’t have an opinion about which outfit you look slightly better in, to me you just look like you.
@Heraclito I always wondered how her character made friends as they all kept getting murdered. Maybe they kept getting raped too, and this went uninvestigated?
Apology She Wrote.
Bless her little heart. She thinks we men are incapable of making choices. To that I say, fuck you and your bullshit statements that insult every person on the planet… but in the nicest way of course.
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This is insulting to everyone. Basically it’s saying men lack agency and can’t control themselves and then blames women for being victims. JFC.
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When George H.W. Bush was accused of grabbing a woman’s butt my first thought was “this is really a generational thing”, I think adult males just did that a lot when I was a kid and earlier (I guess they thought it was funny, and I wonder if it worked as some kind of “pick up line” back then too? Maybe we should ask our older relatives.)
I think Lansbury is more evidence of that generational shift. I’m disappointed but not really surprised.
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Angela Lansbury stars in “Blame Her, She Wrote“
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Yup. Was going to reply with this point. I know a shocking number of people who’ve been raped or assaulted. The primary factor in sexual assault is opportunity: someone is vulnerable. I lean towards this idea that dressing sexy is much more an excuse that’s trotted out when someone is caught as a way of getting off the hook than it is an actual motivator in some way. But our society is misogynistic enough that a lot of people find it easier to swallow.
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Yeah, I mean groping, copping feels, ass grabbing, pinching… there is a lot of touching involved.
Bad jokes aside I think the whole premise of Lansbury’s argument and the comparison to sharks is weak. Men don’t rape, harrass, assault etc. just because a woman is dressed a certain way. Women could dress in sweaters and jogging pants and they’d still get assaulted. The problem, as ever, is that men don’t understand consent and they feel entitled to sex.
We of course can choose whether or not to go into a shark tank, but nobody can really choose not to be a part of the real world. So much of the sexual violence happens where people’s dress wouldn’t make a difference - in the workplace, family gatherings, in the context of romantic relationships and so forth.
So maybe - let’s say - there are situations where a woman’s dress might make a difference. How does one know where to draw the line - i.e. this is too provocative and it might get me assaulted by some man that can’t control himself? That is such a subjective standard to delineate, and it just reinforces the system where men don’t have to take any responsibility. How much protective equipment is necessary when entering said shark tank? Also, you talk about conduct - well, what conduct exactly? We’ll regulate women’s dress and actions, but men are another beast of course. I fail to see how this line of thinking doesn’t take western society back to the Victorian Era, and it doesn’t solve the issue of women being assaulted.
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You’d think, but I once expressed the opinion here that I generally prefer the look of a gal without makeup. I was told I probably had never seen any of my SO’s without makeup on, that it just wasn’t so.
But it’s true. I don’t care all that much day-in-day-out about the outfits (although if pressed I can summon objective opinions), and indeed I do prefer how my SO looks first thing in the morning with no makeup.
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I’ve hated that lady ever since she wrote about killing all those people.
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The vast majority of rapes don’t happen to scantily clad young women walking alone at night through a crime-infested part of town. That is a cultural myth that just serves to hide the real nature and scope of the problem.
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The problem I see is there are certain steps one can take to make it less likely to be a victim (and this ranges from theft to rape to other crimes). I honestly don’t think dress is as important and situational awareness, keeping around people you know, not taking drinks from people, and not getting so intoxicated you can’t resist.
But the other, bigger problem, as a few have pointed out, is that unlike being a victim of theft or an assault, rape or sexual assault is often NOT seen as a crime, and/or more likely to blame the victim.
I suppose walking around flashing cash makes one a bigger target for a robbery, but in this and other cases it is clearly wrong. The fact you can’t control your urges to rob or rape or whatever makes YOU the bad person.
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Unfortunately it’s a bad idea to say this without qualification. It’s a cliche that men say they don’t like makeup but they don’t realize that what they like is a “natural looking” makeup. Women who don’t wear makeup at all get asked if they are tired or sick. Also, it comes across as sounding like somehow women are supposed to dress the way you like instead of however they like.
Given that you are a probability cloud of people (and/or bots) who might have said what you said on the internet, it actually is probably the case that if you say that you are a clueless asshole. I know you have some data the rest of us don’t, but the clueless assholes think they have data the rest of us don’t as well.
Although, while we’re on the subject, there is a certain segment of women who do go out scantily clad women in “crime-infested”* areas of town who are at very high risk for being raped. Not because men can’t resist their attractive dress, but because we dehumanize them and make them vulnerable.
* Because we’ve made their profession a crime.
Yeah, exactly. The thing is, getting black out drunk in public makes you more vulnerable to all kinds of crimes. I knew someone who got very drunk and then woke up to find their wallet was gone. The difference is, if the cops knew who took their wallet, they’d go arrest the person who took the wallet (or at least have a serious talk with them and get the wallet back, since that’s a thing that can be repaired) and we wouldn’t have a huge, “But wasn’t he asking for it?” conversation.
Drinking until you wake up on a stranger’s lawn is not a good idea. What other people do to take advantage of you while you are drunk is still entirely their fault. This is crystal clear when the crime is theft or non-sexual assault, and it’s disturbing how we muddy it for sexual assault.
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Well, women in the work place is only a couple of generations old in the US.
I’m not sure when it was that you think men acted like adults.
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How long are your generations?
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