No we can’t, that’s your point to make if you wish to do so.
Again, concern driving trollies.
You are only giving her enough credit to mansplain your point of view, you should give her enough credit to understand that she knows what she’s saying and that she really means it.
@Duderino and @RedTower might be laboring under the missconception that telling a victim not to blame herself is robbing her of agency. They are in reality agreeing that it is her fault.
Its very easy to be an idiot in hindsight and it is in fact so hard to avoid being an idiot while human(ing?) that we don’t give a pass to con-men for taking advantage of human nature. Rapists somehow do get such a pass.
Case in point:
But, but. Do bikers hate people on qualuudes so much that they’d beat the men and rape the women? Is that why its dumb? Is there a list of intoxicants you should not imbibe while in the presence of Hell’s Angels? Is Vodka riskier than a beer? Clearly bikers bars only have bikers for fear of them beating up any other clients, its a wonder they let women in to a biker bar, what is she? Stupid? Doesn’t she (and by extension we) know what’s going to happen to her if she goes in there? (Guess she must want it right?)
/sarcasm
Its not that people shouldn’t do everything in their power to keep themselves safe, its that the hidden assumption in your comment is that an intoxicated person will do something to provoke an attack. Otherwise, might as well Blame it on the rain
I’m pretty sure I know what to do if I wan’t to provoke a biker into a fight, but for the life of me, I don’t know what I’d have to do to provoke him into raping me. And I’ve actually been to a shady bar full of bikers in Tijuana, being drunk next to a biker doesn’t earn you an automatic beating you know?. Nice guys, decent music.
I don’t see anyone here saying women shouldn’t be careful. The main problem, as has been said here so many times now, is that Hynde fully blamed herself.
If the very suggestion that people take some measure of responsibility for their own safety is “victim blaming”, then surely the only alternative—that they entrust their safety 100% in the good behaviour of a potential rapist—must by that same logic be “rape enabling”.
Seriously? There is a responsibility to keep safe, so if you walk around in your underwear in the snow, you could be held responsible for the cold that resulted from that. There’s also a responsibility that comes from committing an action such as attacking someone. When you’re dealing with rape, i.e. the unilateral decision by the rapist to attack you, you do not mix those two responsibilities, as happened in this paragraph:
Who else’s fault could it be? Well, gee…
She may be right that she would not have been raped by motorcycle gangs if she had been wearing a modest dress and had stayed away from certain areas of the city, but this whole argument is toxic. The rapist was 100% responsible, however easy she made it for him. Look at what actually happened:
A member of an Ohio biker gang said he would take her to a party but instead brought her to a vacant house and forced her to perform sexual acts under the threat of violence.
There was no consent here, no question that she was sort of willing if he threatened her with violence and took her under false pretences, no justification for the suggestion that it was her fault for accepting a ride to a party while wearing clothes that you might wear at a party. Sure, stay away from creeps, but it is 100% on them if they commit rape.
I am {not at all} struck by how {often} the {metal} and {punk} subcultures {encourage} the inevitability of {any} violence against {pretty much anything}
Some of it is rhetoric and bravado, some nihilism, some victim of circumstance, some shitstorm, and some biting off more than you can chew. But this whole saga is hardly any more surprising than a war reporter getting shot in the leg, surely? Good, gritty, discussable drama.
Unless the bullet got some modicum of pleasure for entering said reporters leg and threatened the the reporter that it would do further damage if the reporter didn’t allow it to enter the leg, then no. False analogy.
When men can drink as much as they want, they highly raise their risk of (getting into a situation involving) physical assault (+ hospitalization, permanent injury, death).
Men can party with whatever bikers they want, they WAY highly raise their risk of (getting into a situation involving) physical assault.
Men can do as many Quaaludes as much as the want, they highly raise their risk of dying in an alley (but really, WTF?).
Men who try to act like women get called “{way to many abusive terms to list}.” Repeatedly. Incessantly.
This is what current culture looks like.
This is what hominid culture looks like - there are still territorial, bully, and pseudo-dominant homo-sapiens that sometimes exert physical force against others, both male and female, to establish dominance or just get their own way.
That sucks, and should be addressed.
But being aware that it happens, and avoiding those situations if you choose, is a human prerogative.
You do realize that is classic victim blaming right? “What did she expect, going off with a _____ to an unknown _____, she should have expected to get _____.” you literally could not describe victim blaming better.
Also, no one seems to have addresses this at all, but this whole argument is painting biker gangs in a rather terrible light. I’ve known bikers, I’ve partied with them, and gotten intoxicated with them, and yet magically I was not raped! Why its as if my actions were not the determining factor at all! (I bet I was even wearing a short skirt at the time!)
Parties with biker gangs =/= rape.
This is what rape culture looks like. - there, I fixed that for you.
Of course, it wasn’t just “the very suggestion that people take some measure of responsibility for their own safety” that has people up in arms. It was her saying that it was entirely her fault that she got raped.
Except that her comment is also very hurtful to other raped women, struggling with what happened to them. Hearing “it’s all your fault” from someone who might be inspirational for them must really suck and reinforce their sense of guilt at being raped. That’s a serious problem, too. I don’t think we shouldn’t treat her with compassion, but I do think we should point out how her saying this isn’t particularly compassionate itself.
I am fully aware of the risk of “victim blaming” someone who was aware of the risks they put themselves in. Yes, it’s an unsexy comment in an online forum.
All I am doing is acknowledging the self-determination of someone making their own choices, value judgements and risk assessments. I think humans are human enough to acknowledge that their choices are their own.
I have partied with “biker gangs”. And hippies. And yuppies.
I have no problem with or gripe against “biker gangs” - provided you acknowledge you are in a somewhat different (sub)culture, and social rules differ. The likelihood of a broken nose vs a shirt-full of red wine is different when you piss different people off.
I have been raped (by current definitions of non-consensual rape).
Not at (personally) the same time, but I totally accept (and have witnessed) that some situations put you more at risk of unwanted things happening . Physical assault, abuse, rape, violence, getting robbed, getting ripped off, getting insulted, gettting irritated, being held up in a queue, feeling like you were a cog in an unfeeling universe, not winning the lottery etc. Bad shit happens, all of it avoidable in retrospect.
And those situations were avoidable if you thought that was a thing that should be avoided.
Or, you could just take it as a shot in the leg you risked, and a cultural choice you took personal responsibility for, or just didn’t fecking dwell on.
I’m sorry that happened to you, sex assault is never trivial, I hope you got any help you needed.
We can agree that covering a war zone will put you a higher risk of being shot than say going to a party. But going to a party should not put you at a higher risk of getting raped. That is the point. And personally, I refuse to accept that going to a party would put you at higher risk of getting raped, even if the victim blames herself 100%, I don’t accept that. No one is to blame but the rapist. That is the person that committed a crime. No one else.
Everyone has to process trauma in a way that works for them, and obviously she’s doing that here, but I don’t have to accept that reasoning, and I won’t. Parties =/= rape.
Both of us have a trivially narrow lens (one, throw-away sentence) on what the real story was (x decades ago) with all the colouring that memory adds and subtracts …
I still suggest that the idea that
“going to {unknown} with {unknown} to do {unknown}”
is inherantly risky.
without saying that “going to a party with a friend you know” is always bad.
Importantly - i also think that the self-determination to choose to go to {unknown} with {unknown} (and own the consequences) makes you a stronger and better human being and should be defended at all times!
Despite fearing we are veering off into pedantic land… and yet still I’m typing… it wasn’t:
It was going to a party with a person she knew to some degree, to I assume party/drink/etc. The variables were known to some extent, save the rapist variable, which unfortunately we never about until someone is raping us.
So yes, blah blah blah, personal responsibility is all well and good, but I am always going to chafe at the idea that a) only victims have “personal responsibility” and b) if only the victim had done ____ they wouldn’t have been raped. Its crap, and it does nothing to stop rape. If it does anything at all it just moves the target from oneself onto someone else, and I’m not comfortable with that, either. That is why I dislike “personal responsibility” conversations, it makes an “us vs. them” dynamic of victims vs. potential victims without ever addressing how to stop the victimizer! And thats shite.
We are mostly aligned here. I’m not disagreeing with you any more than you are with me.
{unknown[location1]} and {unknown[activity3]} all 100% depend on the trust you place in {unknown[human2]}.
And - I think we all have seen - humans can be shit sometimes. That’s not news.
The only friction I want to introduce into this (well balanced so far) discussion is about the difference between the concept of risk (shit can happen because some bad people do bad things) and characterisation (all men == bad, all women == victims)
I say : risk sucks, humans suck, violence and abuse (to all genders) sucks, lets avoid situations where shit goes wrong predictably. AND do what we can to make this not happen.
BUT, while the incident we are trying to discuss occurred the 1960’s (actually the Times paywall doesn’t let me expand) - then the best we can do is take steps to NOT let it be a thing that happens or is tolerated this year?
We agree on that, but we disagree on the “how” of it.
Telling potential victims to further police their actions, words, dress, movements, substance intake lest they get raped and thus it is their own fault, is not “how” we get there. Talking to potential assailants about what is consent, what is assault, what is a crime, is a step in the right direction. (There have been some super illuminating/terrifying articles of late about the kind of person who “rapes”, how they did it, did they know, would they do it again. Thats where we need to start, IMO.)
SPIN has a great article up about this right now, its really good, and captures better than I have what my point is, and also that this is all so tiring and depressing.
I am really not wanting to be on this side of this argument, but it feels like we are at the usual impasse:
vs
So long as humans persist in being A: assholes and B: dipshits,
then Bad Things [tm] will persist.
Assuming that the best and only way out is for the assholes to police themselves is - {not something I would bet money on}.
I don’t have as much faith in human nature as that, sorry.
