Perhaps it’s easier to pretend that there was something, anything you could have done different in these scenarios 
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Aka, being a woman.
It was a different time. It’s not just that women in punk/rock spaces felt it was a given. This is the time of Bill Cosby and all those women thought it was a given. I was in high school at the time and we had teachers involved with students. I knew girls who were involved with their Youth Ministers. The Catholic church was actively covering up priests’ improprieties (more than the sexual abuse of minors). Oh, and Bill Clinton and Clarence Thomas also acted like they were entitled to the women around them.
The change between then and now has been hard. Rush Limbaugh and We Hunted the Mammoth remind us of that on a daily basis. But it’s been worth it.
Personally I’m sad that Hynde hasn’t gotten help. Healing from the trauma would be good for her and it would be great to have another women with her strength and backbone to set a higher bar for the industry.
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Look, I know this is BoingBoing and not an academic journal, but I wrote “tolerate”, not “support”. Their meaning is very different.
Tolerate means that we allow things to happen despite our disapproval (e.g. “tolerance of prostitution”). US and allied policy in the Middle East is not to interfere with Wahabi practices in Saudi Arabia, while trying to promote women’s rights in Afghanistan. That is toleration.
Support means we provide means or give approval to things (e.g. “support progressive taxation”)
If I didn’t think you were just being very careless with words, I might think you were creating a straw man to try to discredit a comment without having a valid reason.
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And you never know, maybe if that’s what was said and the point that was being made maybe the conversation would be different? Not sure of the relevance here though.
And I’m sure most women wouldnt crouch in high-rape spots counting their pubic hairs. What’s your point?
It’s tough to draw an accurate parallel, because it’s such a dumb thing to attempt a comparison with. But how about allowing someone to see your wallet at the bar, and then not getting a taxi home on your own. Still blaming yourself?
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It is an over-the-top example. But an example of how one’s behavior can increase your chance of being a victim of something. But of course you can do everything “right” and still be a victim. And you can do everything “wrong” and it still is the fault of the attacker. Just an obvious but practical reminder to stay vigilant and listen to your instincts, that’s all.
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I think there are differences between “responsibility”, “fault”, and “blame”.
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The number one thing a woman can do to protect herself from sexual assault is pick very carefully the country, time period, and family she is born into. And even then, she’ll have to be equally careful in picking out where she goes to school, worship, and work. And of course, whom she dates/marries. Every day, for her entire life.
Her rapist just has to not rape her.
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Been reading 50 Stories by Kay Boyle and one of them is titled “Army of Occupation,” about a young woman war correspondent entering a compartment of the Seine-Main train, the train that took Occupation soldiers on leave in Paris back to duty in Germany during the Occupation after WWII. It is devastating in terms of the violence implied by the men toward the woman and perpetrated on each other.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1947/06/07/army-of-occupation
I read the title as a sardonic commentary on the place of women in the world. Still.
I think it depends on the time and the scene, frankly. I think some punk scenes, especially post-hard core indeed had problems with masculine violence. The NYC hard core scene, after Bad Brains moved up there in the early 80s, and the LA scene when hard core evolved. There are plenty of punk scenes that were much more diverse, welcoming of women, and protective of their members, but not all.
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Why is it that people offer this condescending advice as if it’s ever been helpful in not-getting-raped?
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As I said in my reply to @Flies below, I think it’s actually the shift to hardcore where you see most of these problems - so very late 70s in LA and early 80s in NYC and then not always. I’d also hesitate to call punk a liberationist movement, although I think it has liberationist elements and scenes that are more politically active than others. Of course, she’s talking about her time in the 70s, and it happened in Ohio, not within the context of the punk scene, anyway. At least not from what the article said.
Right? Especially when it’s not even the particular topic at hand. It almost seems like an intentional distraction, and at best, an inability to keep an eye on the ball.
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That really makes that Pretenders song feel different.
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And your point? She feels that, in that specific instance, it was all her doing. Maybe it was. That is a long, long way from “blaming the victim” in general.
And rightly so, only I don’t see where she said that. It looks like she was saying SHE was responsible in that specific instance.
How could getting raped be “all her doing”? It can’t, and yet she takes full responsibility. Which is messed up, and not at all a pointing of the blame finger in the direction it should be pointed.
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I think it was relevant to my original post and an addition to someone else’s comment. Then one line got cherry picked out and I felt the need to defend it and now I am seen as not contributing…
YMMV
And I don’t think that general statement was condescending. I think people consciously working to stay safe helps keep them from being victims, be it rape or assault, or robbing, or theft, or what ever. In College Freshman orientation they had what I assume you would find condescending and non-helpful advice that was pretty basic and “common sense”, but many 18 year olds, especially people like me who grew up in smaller towns, never had to give some of these things a thought before.
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That is not at all what she said.
She said she shouldn’t have gone flaunting it around in front of people she knew to be unhinged deviants. That is less blaming the victim that it is saying don’t be an idiot.
It is much like when Chris Rock joked “If you’re in a strange town and you find yourself on Martin Luther King Boulevard, get out of there!”
Donald Trump criticized political correctness because it affects his ability to say offensive things. That’s BS. What isn’t BS is looking at what someone says and instead of hearing what they actually said, hearing the thing you wish they’d said that you could then condemn.
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