The implication being that women never learn to take responsibility for their actions, that men do, and that therefore…?
Using the same sort of “evidence” as @thaumatechnicia, I aver that by the time young people graduate high school, women have become much better than men at accepting responsibility for their actions – as demonstrated by the fact that women are, on average, more responsible than men. There’s plenty of statistics on young men engaging in more dangerous and anti-social behavior than do young women.
I suspect that if we bothered to analyze this use of the word “provocatively” we would end up in a very different place than we would when speaking of a woman dressing “provocatively”. And, of course, there’s little to no evidence that dressing provocatively actually increases the risk of rape or sexual assault. That’s an important part of the analysis that is always left to the reader’s common sense. (Suppose dressing provocatively actually decreases the rate of rape or sexual assault. Should more women do so in that case? Would anyone actually be swayed by evidence on this, or would they continue to default to their intuitions?)
Men speaking “provocatively” in this case presumably means picking fights. “Fighting words” cannot be used as a defense for a retaliatory assault – the one legally at fault is always the one who throws the first blow (excepting a situation where any reasonable person would feel the need to defend themselves, yada yada). Surely, from an ethical point of view, someone who responds to fighting words with felony assault and battery should feel some degree of embarrassment for having been so provoked as to open themselves to criminal penalties?
Whence the embarrassment of the loud-mouthed victim, then? Is the man embarrassed to have provoked someone into slugging him? Doubtful. It seems more likely that his embarrassment stems from having lost a fight.
Which proves nothing about either legal or moral culpability in the case of the rape or sexual assault of a woman accused by some parties of having dressed or acted “provocatively”.
TL;DR: The notion that men are simply and uncontrollably overcome by lust when confronted with naked thighs or breasts is not consistent with the assertion that men are better at taking responsibility for their actions. Kinda the opposite.
I think we have to be very careful here. Of course the victim is not to blame and at no time is rape acceptable. But we want to make sure this doesn’t send the message that there is nothing a woman can do to reduce the risk. I believe this is what Chrissie was trying to communicate.
A woman who drinks whatever is put in front of her, a woman who accepts a ride alone from an obviously dodgy man, a woman who allows herself to be separated from her friends, these women are increasing their risk.
It only makes sense for a woman to be aware of the risks. There is nothing wrong with saying so.
I’m not sure who “we” are here. I haven’t seen anyone supporting the Saudi’s treatment of women lately.
Also, calling women “chicks” is not necessarily sexist, no more than some women calling men “boys”. It’s just slang, and all movements, and all genders within those movements have it. Further, we need to be both working on the sexism in our society, AND focusing on other societies where sexism is truly lethal, and often crosses the line into human rights violations. We, for all our myriad faults, are at least progressing. And no one is getting stoned, or state-sanctioned raped here, at least. This isn’t saying that there aren’t problems in the West, or justifying our own problems; it is saying there are also very, very, large problems somewhere else too.
You’re right. Of course, people aren’t really upset for her saying “Hey, be careful out there, don’t take stupid risks”. They’re upset at her for saying “it’s a rape victim’s fault if they get raped”.
I agree broadly with your sentiments (although, to my eyes, calling Hynde “confused” is also narrow-minded and not compassionate), but I think the disagreement here is even more of a bummer since, IMHO, it’s mostly a semantic construction. Though her words appear quite clumsy to us youngsters who are supersensitized to social justice hot-buttons, I believe what she is essentially saying is this:
There are people presently out in the world who may rape you if given an opportunity.
Some of us are trying to change this so that some day there are no such people, but regardless of whether or not we eventually succeed, we cannot change it right this instant.
Given this, it would be wise to avoid situations where one knows oneself to be at great risk of being raped.
She claims a lot of things are her fault- but what do you (the royal you) really think she means by that? Nowhere* does she say that rapists shouldn’t be imprisoned, or that laws prohibiting rape should be repealed- and I very much doubt she believes these things. And, if she doesn’t believe them, then implicit in these omissions is an attribution of “fault” to the rapist, whether she says as much or not. He is responsible for his actions, and she, if she knowingly put herself in risky situations is responsible for having taken those risks. YES YES, I know that rankles your modern ear- it rankles my modern ear too. But if we can stop, just for a second, trying to sniff out all the red flags in her statements, I think we can see that what she’s really “saying” is simply “don’t knowingly put yourself in dangerous situations”. Is that REALLY so controversial? Is that REALLY a claim of full responsibility?
*At least not in the excerpts I read, since the actual interview in question is behind a paywall.
Yes I read the part where she takes full responsibility, but I believe that if you give her just a sliver of credit, you’ll conclude that she’s taking responsibility for her own actions, not the rapist’s. Do I think her language is imprecise? big time, but I don’t think she means what’s being ascribed to her. I.e.: I think, because I’m giving her a sliver of credit, that she believes that rape is and should remain a heinous crime and rapists should be punished for it, and, despite what she may clumsily state, that if they deserve punishment, that they are therefore “at fault”. And that therefore she doesn’t take “full responsibility” for the rapist’s actions. If she states somewhere in the unabridged transcript that she doesn’t think rapists should be imprisoned, I will change my tune in a heartbeat.
I think that to which something negative is being ascribed is her words, not whatever meaning we can try to glean behind them. No one (as far as I know) is seriously claiming that she thinks rapists shouldn’t be imprisoned.
A big problem here is the effect of her words. She’s mostly blaming the victim, in this case herself, but by implication, others, and by doing that in our current cultural and political context, she’s providing support for the wrong side (a side that yes, she obviously wouldn’t actually support if pressed on it). Words have effects, no matter what one supposedly means by them, and her words do little to support victims, and instead add to their very common and damaging tendency to blame themselves. She’s not helping, especially when her basic message is the same advice that women hear ALL THE TIME, and already usually follow, because it’s obvious and so well known and so often repeated. The problem is less that women fall into dangerous places with dangerous rapists, and more that that those dangerous places and rapists even exist in the first place. Our culture at large talks too much about the former and not enough about the latter, and she’s doing the same damn thing.
I wanted to add to this. Rape is not caused by sexy clothes. Men don’t see a women and become so turned on that they must rape to satisfy their desire. If any man ever tells you its sexy clothes, ask them if they have ever thought about raping someone because of how they were dressed.
Rapists do, however, look for victims that they can get away with raping. That’s no surprise, people who commit crimes are usually trying to get away with crimes. Women with dementia in nursing homes are victims of sexual assault, and it’s not because they are dressed sexily, it’s because their attackers are almost positive they can get away with it.
But if society blames women for being provocatively dressed, then being provocatively dressed becomes a factor that makes it more likely a man can get away with sexual assault by blaming the victim for leading him on. If society blames women for being drunk then, again, the it becomes the case that the attacker is able to pin the blame on the victim and escape punishment (obviously intoxicated people are already vulnerable, but we’re adding to that vulnerability).
By insisting and by acting on the idea that the person to blame for an assault is always 100% the person committing the assault, we are narrowing the circumstances in which people are likely to think they can get away with assault. By partially blaming victims for putting themselves in a vulnerable position, we are creating more circumstances in which people think they can get away with it, we are increasing the number of assaults.
There is an element of self fulfilling prophecy to this. If you want to live in a world where it is dangerous to go in the streets after the sun goes down, all you have to do is convince everyone that it is dangerous. Next thing you know you’ll have dark deserted streets that are perfect grounds for robbery and assault. Let’s not create spaces for those who commit sexual assault to hide in - not even metaphorical ones.
I feel disappointed, but going over my comments and those of others, I haven’t really noticed anything trashing Ms. Hynde personally. I feel bad for her because she seems to need to blame herself for something that wasn’t her fault, something that has happened to me personally. As for her being “a confused rape victim”, she doesn’t come off as confused to me; she comes off as being plain wrong. This doesn’t make her an evil or bad person in my eyes; it makes her a person in need of help. The worst part is that she IS well-known and admired, so many people, male and female, may think that if it’s okay with her, it’s okay, period. It’s not okay to blame yourself for being raped.
It seems to me that saying, “What she actually said is so beyond the pale that we need to interpret her as saying essentially the opposite” is not really giving her “just a sliver of credit”.
Her suggestion is to “keep to yourself.” What a great way to live life. Maybe instead the rapists should keep to themselves? Maybe just stop raping? Seems like a better solution, then everyone gets to be social instead of 50 - 51% of the world’s population needing to be shut-ins.
Punk was a 1970s genre, and I was writing in the context of the 60s/70s, which is also what this article is about. What you are talking about now is a different thing in a different century - thirty years on.
(Please remove yourself from my lawn).
But in the future I will be giving advice to my daughter to take measures to avoid being a target in the first place. It would be awesome where one could freely go anywhere and do anything they want, but that isn’t reality. Situational awareness and some precaution goes a long way.
If I get mugged some day, it will be 100% the fault of the mugger. But at the same time I am not going to walk down a dark alley an high crime area counting a wad of 20s.
I absolutely agree. On my campus in university there was a “safewalk” program where volunteers were available to walk people home if they felt they needed it. No one is accusing safewalk of creating a sexual assault problem. Everyone advises people not to leave laptops sitting visible in the backseat of their cars.
But I feel like with many crimes advice on how to prevent being a victim never seems to blur over into people getting away with doing it. When that thief steals that laptop, if they do get caught, their lawyer never talks about how you obviously wanted it stolen if you just left it there. And my understanding is that some states still don’t have “rape shield” laws, so the thief could be using the equivalent of “Well, you’ve given possessions away on freecycle in the past, so clearly you want to have your stuff taken.” (and actually having members of the jury swallow that tripe)
I think sexual assault has its own unique context in crime and needs special consideration when we talk about it to make sure we aren’t perpetuating that kind of nonsense.
