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thomblake comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong
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Yes. It would be oh-so-convenient if "It doesn't actually impact frequency" were true, but I suspect we don't live in such a convenient world. And made more uncomfortable if the calculation were made explicitly ahead of time, and benefits-plus-catcalling was a conscious choice.
To increase the squick factor of this discussion by orders of magnitude, substitute "catcalling" with "rape".
Yeah, that's the fairly heavy subtext here. But here the Internet feminists seem correct in saying that looking like easy prey - pressure not to fight back or not to report rape, plausible deniability for the rapist, physical weakness or incapacitation, circumstances favoring victim-blaming - is a much stronger factor than attractiveness. Never heard of anyone getting catcalled in a nursing home.
My mind immediately called up non-specific instances of the "dirty old man" trope catcalling anyone and everyone. I don't know if I've heard of that actually happening.
I'm pretty sure what MixedNuts is referring to is the phenomenon of nursing home residents being raped by staff/family, not nursing home residents raping people - I don't actually know how common the former actually is, but when I worked in a nursing home we were specifically trained to be on the lookout for it and told that it is indeed a thing that happens, mostly (according to the training) because the victims are, as MixedNuts mentioned, easy targets - they have limited access to people who they can report abuse to and are often written off as confused, among other issues. (Also, I never saw any instances of catcalling in the four years I worked in a home, and I mostly wouldn't expect to given the dynamic of seeing the same people all the time - main exception would be someone who got hit particularly hard by the disinhibition effect that dementia sometimes has, in which case catcalling from that person would be the least of your worries and they probably wouldn't be kept with the general population of residents. (My home sent such people to a facility that specialized in such things, which on one hand sucked but on the other let us keep our non-dangerous dementia patients integrated with the facility, which was pretty awesome for them.))
I've seen claims that the way women dress doesn't affect their risk of getting raped, but I haven't seen any cites on the subject, nor do I have any strong intuitions. I've seen enough evidence to be sure that there's no way of dressing which drives the risk down to zero.
This seemed too obvious to mention to me. But to put in context of inferential distance, I've seen enough evidence to be sure that there's no way to eat or even act which drives the risk down lower than 1%, let alone getting near zero using only superficial changes in appearance like clothing.
This comes partially from groundbreaking-sounding study results like "overweight women don't actually have statistically-significant lower chances of being abused, even sexually!"¹, which isn't nearly as surprising when you approached the question from "How do rapists select their victims?" or more generally "Who rapes who and why?" instead of the default internal model that translates to "Which women would I (men) want to have sex with?".
¹. Read two studies to that effect years ago, do not remember sources. Strong possibility of cherry-picking / other biases.
It should be, but people give advice in such absolute terms that I'm not sure it's generally known.