"Plus, inevitably people pop up to say: Why don’t we teach men not to rape instead? I’ve never found this credible."
When people try that on me, I ask if they think we don't teach people to not commit armed robbery. 9 times out of 10, I get no response. (The tenth time the speaker doubles down and tries to claim that American society in fact glamorizes armed robbery through films, etc. about bank robbers.)
Oh man, that "giving women practical advice on avoiding dangerous situations is victim blaming" bit really takes me back, as I had some truly vicious arguments about it circa 2014. The one that sticks out in my mind involved some students who had designed a nail polish that changed color when exposed to common date rape drugs, so that a woman could test a drink for contamination by discreetly dipping a finger in it, and these deranged feminists on a forum I used at the time shrieking about how misogynistic this invention was because it made women responsible for avoiding getting drugged rather than teaching men not to drug. Iirc my response was something along the lines of explaining how just about everyone is taught not to steal, attack people, rape, etc, but that I still carried a pistol anyway just in case, which didn't go over particularly well. I did get the two worst offenders kicked off of that forum for misandry, which was satisfying, but the attitude has only metastisized online in the years since.
My brother worked in a shipyard for a while. Lady started working there, so a bunch of meth heads and tweakers started to try to “subtlety” harass her by casually discussing how promiscuous they would be if they were a woman who worked there whenever she was near. Management figured they had to do something so they showed some basic anti harassment video. I guess a couple of the guys had a genuinely eye opening moment about it.
I always think about that story whenever this stuff comes up. I also don’t think any of those guys were ever at any point in their lives anywhere near a college or a professional office type setting.
Ms. Sonmez has a history that one finds pretty easily on the internet that could engender some shall we say skepticism about her motives and her claims. That might well have played into some of the reactions to her Tweets and claims.
I think there's an important distinction here between some cases that produces the concern with not "victim blaming".
We generally think of getting in a car driven by a drunken driver as a decision that can be made in clear anticipation of danger. You know the driver, you know the driver is drunk, and in the hypothetical, you yourself are sufficiently sober to appraise the driver's impairment and to decide not to get in. (That some people get in anyway is an interesting thing to consider, and perhaps not irrelevant to some of the reasons why people stay in harm's way in other circumstances.)
When people are thinking about something like the scenario for acquaintance rape you present or being attacked on social media and they say "don't blame the victim", e.g., don't transfer moral responsibility from the transgressor to the person harmed by the transgression, they're thinking about two things. 1. That you are in danger from a situation that has developed while you were doing your own thing in an ordinary way. 2. That you shouldn't be in danger in that situation.
We know that we're in danger if there's a drunk behind the wheel; there is no sense in which "drunken driving" is an ordinary situation that ought to pose no danger at all. Once the driver is drunk, the driver is a danger. What people are saying about the other situations is that it ought to be that you are in no danger from your roommate's boyfriend or some other acquaintance, and that the signal that the acquaintance is a danger is one that is so commingled with common masculine behavior ("being pushy") that we might as well say "any man is a danger to women in situations where they are allowed into private or domestic spaces." Which means we're telling women that they have important decisions to make every single time a man is present or is trying to be present in a woman's private or domestic space. What people are saying about Twitter is "you should be able to make a reasonable point in a careful and responsible way and not receive death threats; you shouldn't have to log off for a few days, especially if access to Twitter is professionally important or useful."
What the discourse on "victim blaming" amounts to is a roundabout way of saying "you shouldn't have to be making decisions about your own behavior or actions in these contexts, where you are just going about your own business safely and responsibly in your own fashion." Getting in the car as a passenger is an active decision to do something, to go from being outside the car to being in it. Sitting in your own dorm room or being present on Twitter is part of the everyday flow of your life. It may be that there are in fact things in the everyday flow of our lives that we pragmatically do have to think about in terms of danger or risk caused principally by the misconduct or unethical behavior of other people, but that *feels* like more of a violation of what ought to be than "don't go with that guy in his car--you don't *have* to, and he's going to put you in danger incidentally because of something he's done *to himself*."
Looking over the Somnez tweets, I gotta say, she's not a great advocate for herself. Most of the pushback she's getting is positively tame and focused on her _professional_ actions, i.e. reporting she's done or public statements she's made as a reporter for the Post. Anyone looking at the top-level tweet and seeing her describing this horrific harassment she's receiving, then scrolling down and seeing "Felicia seems like she wouldn't be a good person to work with" is just going to think “this person is insane and self-destructive". Now of course, there is some legit sexist crap in there, but nothing threatening, and most of it is focused on her _actions_, the ones that got her in trouble in the first place. The only takeaway from someone who doesn't know her is that she has a massive god complex.
Really good comments on concept creep, as usual! Not only does stopping tweeting not give people further material to work with, but it also gives you distance from what is USUALLY not a supremely threatening situation. Of course, online harassment can get physical (or financial) but it's generally not, and even if it is the kind of harassment that can get that bad continuing to tweet doesn't magically help then.
"But rape is something that has always happened, and although the U.S. is a fairly safe country in this regard as compared to some poorer and more violent ones, it seems unlikely that any amount of training or awareness-raising will lead to men having successfully “been taught,” as a monolithic group, not to rape."
Correct, men know what rape is and they do it because they want to. Punishments could be much more severe than they currently are if we actually want to make further dents particularly since we know "programs" don't work for adult men.
It's frustrating to me that interventions for women are often hand waved away with "well teach men not to rape," but the impulse is obviously understandable. It sucks that this is women's burden on top of the actual rape too. I will never understand why liberal feminists think men can be taught not to rape.
On the other hand programs for women to learn how to recognize sketchy situations with men they know are such a surface scratch that I understand the impulse to dismiss them completely. These kinds of things shouldn't be limited to women, or to college-aged/attending women. There is no type of woman who doesn't struggle with asserting her boundaries. Men sometimes escalate precisely because you tried to enforce a boundary!
My first thought was "national public health campaign about signs your male acquaintances might be a danger to you, plus explicit acknowledgment that women's boundaries are often expected to be crossed" but would-be rapists would just note that they should avoid those behaviors. So, back to punishment, lol.
“ When you have a spotlight on you on Twitter, every new tweet you post — especially about that spotlight — only draws further attention from the people who are mad at you.”
Every state has anti-stalking laws and there's a federal anti-stalking law. During Gamergate and other high-profile harassment campaigns like The Fappening, I think the Obama administration was reluctant to apply the federal anti-stalking law to "mob harassment" that occurs entirely online other than "true threats" (cruelty or being a misogynist asshat by itself isn't a "true threat" even if it is "anti-woman violence" from a sociological perspective) because of free speech concerns and worries that the law could be used in the future to prosecute journalists for gathering information (or something like that). In the case of The Fappening, people were prosecuted who actually hacked into someone's iCloud account but nobody was prosecuted for sharing nude photos of celebrities in a harassing or immoral way.
The downside of all this, of course, is that it turned a lot of the left against the very *ideas* of freedom of speech and civil liberties right before they had to fight an authoritarian narcissist who's out of touch with reality and doesn't believe in the separation of powers.
Am I crazy to think that a guy being pushy in non-sexual areas of his life might correlate with an in the aggregate increase in likelihood to commit rape, DOES NOT mean that person should be considered dangerous or a likely rapist?
This just sounds like some extreme attenuation that should have very little if no impact on how you're interacting with someone. I'm imagining the numbers are like a 0.011% chance that an encounter is an attempted rape, to a 0.012% chance for "otherwise pushy" men. And I suspect that a 10%+ increase in likelihood is probably generous.
Speaking in terms of just practicality here there are likely bigger factors to consider that would actually merit modifying your behaviour.
Be honest, how proud of yourself were you for, “death by a thousand channels”?
"Plus, inevitably people pop up to say: Why don’t we teach men not to rape instead? I’ve never found this credible."
When people try that on me, I ask if they think we don't teach people to not commit armed robbery. 9 times out of 10, I get no response. (The tenth time the speaker doubles down and tries to claim that American society in fact glamorizes armed robbery through films, etc. about bank robbers.)
Twitter is like a shitty, fight-prone Boston nightclub that people keep going back to against their own better judgement.
Oh man, that "giving women practical advice on avoiding dangerous situations is victim blaming" bit really takes me back, as I had some truly vicious arguments about it circa 2014. The one that sticks out in my mind involved some students who had designed a nail polish that changed color when exposed to common date rape drugs, so that a woman could test a drink for contamination by discreetly dipping a finger in it, and these deranged feminists on a forum I used at the time shrieking about how misogynistic this invention was because it made women responsible for avoiding getting drugged rather than teaching men not to drug. Iirc my response was something along the lines of explaining how just about everyone is taught not to steal, attack people, rape, etc, but that I still carried a pistol anyway just in case, which didn't go over particularly well. I did get the two worst offenders kicked off of that forum for misandry, which was satisfying, but the attitude has only metastisized online in the years since.
My brother worked in a shipyard for a while. Lady started working there, so a bunch of meth heads and tweakers started to try to “subtlety” harass her by casually discussing how promiscuous they would be if they were a woman who worked there whenever she was near. Management figured they had to do something so they showed some basic anti harassment video. I guess a couple of the guys had a genuinely eye opening moment about it.
I always think about that story whenever this stuff comes up. I also don’t think any of those guys were ever at any point in their lives anywhere near a college or a professional office type setting.
Ms. Sonmez has a history that one finds pretty easily on the internet that could engender some shall we say skepticism about her motives and her claims. That might well have played into some of the reactions to her Tweets and claims.
And some “harassment” is criticism or mockery which should be fair game for a big time journalist.
I think there's an important distinction here between some cases that produces the concern with not "victim blaming".
We generally think of getting in a car driven by a drunken driver as a decision that can be made in clear anticipation of danger. You know the driver, you know the driver is drunk, and in the hypothetical, you yourself are sufficiently sober to appraise the driver's impairment and to decide not to get in. (That some people get in anyway is an interesting thing to consider, and perhaps not irrelevant to some of the reasons why people stay in harm's way in other circumstances.)
When people are thinking about something like the scenario for acquaintance rape you present or being attacked on social media and they say "don't blame the victim", e.g., don't transfer moral responsibility from the transgressor to the person harmed by the transgression, they're thinking about two things. 1. That you are in danger from a situation that has developed while you were doing your own thing in an ordinary way. 2. That you shouldn't be in danger in that situation.
We know that we're in danger if there's a drunk behind the wheel; there is no sense in which "drunken driving" is an ordinary situation that ought to pose no danger at all. Once the driver is drunk, the driver is a danger. What people are saying about the other situations is that it ought to be that you are in no danger from your roommate's boyfriend or some other acquaintance, and that the signal that the acquaintance is a danger is one that is so commingled with common masculine behavior ("being pushy") that we might as well say "any man is a danger to women in situations where they are allowed into private or domestic spaces." Which means we're telling women that they have important decisions to make every single time a man is present or is trying to be present in a woman's private or domestic space. What people are saying about Twitter is "you should be able to make a reasonable point in a careful and responsible way and not receive death threats; you shouldn't have to log off for a few days, especially if access to Twitter is professionally important or useful."
What the discourse on "victim blaming" amounts to is a roundabout way of saying "you shouldn't have to be making decisions about your own behavior or actions in these contexts, where you are just going about your own business safely and responsibly in your own fashion." Getting in the car as a passenger is an active decision to do something, to go from being outside the car to being in it. Sitting in your own dorm room or being present on Twitter is part of the everyday flow of your life. It may be that there are in fact things in the everyday flow of our lives that we pragmatically do have to think about in terms of danger or risk caused principally by the misconduct or unethical behavior of other people, but that *feels* like more of a violation of what ought to be than "don't go with that guy in his car--you don't *have* to, and he's going to put you in danger incidentally because of something he's done *to himself*."
Looking over the Somnez tweets, I gotta say, she's not a great advocate for herself. Most of the pushback she's getting is positively tame and focused on her _professional_ actions, i.e. reporting she's done or public statements she's made as a reporter for the Post. Anyone looking at the top-level tweet and seeing her describing this horrific harassment she's receiving, then scrolling down and seeing "Felicia seems like she wouldn't be a good person to work with" is just going to think “this person is insane and self-destructive". Now of course, there is some legit sexist crap in there, but nothing threatening, and most of it is focused on her _actions_, the ones that got her in trouble in the first place. The only takeaway from someone who doesn't know her is that she has a massive god complex.
Really good comments on concept creep, as usual! Not only does stopping tweeting not give people further material to work with, but it also gives you distance from what is USUALLY not a supremely threatening situation. Of course, online harassment can get physical (or financial) but it's generally not, and even if it is the kind of harassment that can get that bad continuing to tweet doesn't magically help then.
"But rape is something that has always happened, and although the U.S. is a fairly safe country in this regard as compared to some poorer and more violent ones, it seems unlikely that any amount of training or awareness-raising will lead to men having successfully “been taught,” as a monolithic group, not to rape."
Correct, men know what rape is and they do it because they want to. Punishments could be much more severe than they currently are if we actually want to make further dents particularly since we know "programs" don't work for adult men.
It's frustrating to me that interventions for women are often hand waved away with "well teach men not to rape," but the impulse is obviously understandable. It sucks that this is women's burden on top of the actual rape too. I will never understand why liberal feminists think men can be taught not to rape.
On the other hand programs for women to learn how to recognize sketchy situations with men they know are such a surface scratch that I understand the impulse to dismiss them completely. These kinds of things shouldn't be limited to women, or to college-aged/attending women. There is no type of woman who doesn't struggle with asserting her boundaries. Men sometimes escalate precisely because you tried to enforce a boundary!
My first thought was "national public health campaign about signs your male acquaintances might be a danger to you, plus explicit acknowledgment that women's boundaries are often expected to be crossed" but would-be rapists would just note that they should avoid those behaviors. So, back to punishment, lol.
Twitter ... where it's always high school.
We discussed it at length on Blocked and Reported this week... It was last Friday. This is what's known as "week creep."
“ When you have a spotlight on you on Twitter, every new tweet you post — especially about that spotlight — only draws further attention from the people who are mad at you.”
I learned on last week’s Freakonomics episode that this phenomenon is called the Streisand Effect (https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/words-were-watching-streisand-effect-barbra) Perhaps, It should be renamed the Somnez effect.
Here’s the Freakonomics episode: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-is-sportswashing-and-does-it-work/
Every state has anti-stalking laws and there's a federal anti-stalking law. During Gamergate and other high-profile harassment campaigns like The Fappening, I think the Obama administration was reluctant to apply the federal anti-stalking law to "mob harassment" that occurs entirely online other than "true threats" (cruelty or being a misogynist asshat by itself isn't a "true threat" even if it is "anti-woman violence" from a sociological perspective) because of free speech concerns and worries that the law could be used in the future to prosecute journalists for gathering information (or something like that). In the case of The Fappening, people were prosecuted who actually hacked into someone's iCloud account but nobody was prosecuted for sharing nude photos of celebrities in a harassing or immoral way.
The downside of all this, of course, is that it turned a lot of the left against the very *ideas* of freedom of speech and civil liberties right before they had to fight an authoritarian narcissist who's out of touch with reality and doesn't believe in the separation of powers.
Am I crazy to think that a guy being pushy in non-sexual areas of his life might correlate with an in the aggregate increase in likelihood to commit rape, DOES NOT mean that person should be considered dangerous or a likely rapist?
This just sounds like some extreme attenuation that should have very little if no impact on how you're interacting with someone. I'm imagining the numbers are like a 0.011% chance that an encounter is an attempted rape, to a 0.012% chance for "otherwise pushy" men. And I suspect that a 10%+ increase in likelihood is probably generous.
Speaking in terms of just practicality here there are likely bigger factors to consider that would actually merit modifying your behaviour.