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Emile comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong
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As far as I can tell the idea that catcalling and rape are unrelated to the way girls dress is stupid, and it's as useless to pay attention to the arguments of stupid feminists as it is to the arguments of stupid liberals, conservatives, christians, atheists, etc.
I would expect a reasonable feminist to argue that yes, clothes and makeup have an effect, but that the blame still lies fully on the shoulders of the men.
Taking this line to the extreme:
Even if the way they dress and instances of catcalling and rape were 100% correlated (that is, their odds of getting catcalled/raped depend only and always on how 'hot'/'slutty'/whatever they are dressed), the blame still would lie fully with the rapists.
It's like asserting that it's your fault you were victim of theft, because you owned things, and the more things you own the more likely you are to be a victim of theft, so you shouldn't ever have anything to steal; having things means you deserve to be stolen from.
To rephrase, perhaps more clearly, if X increases the odds that (Amoral Agent) K does Y to you instead of to someone else (i.e. K selects for X as targets to do Y upon), where Ks are some subset of the population, are you morally obligated to not-X, else you deserve Y?
How much is rape displaced vs reduced, when a potential rapist decides not to target a potential victim? You're sort of assuming 100% displacement here.
As "blame" goes, of course you jail rapists and support victims and only then collect "what were you wearing?" data for statistical research. "How do my clothing choices influence my likelihood to get raped?" is a rather salient question for many people, and girls at my school certainly avoid some actions they (usually mistakenly) believe increase risk.
Very much worth looking into more, IMO, but I'm not sure I assumed this that explicitly. If you change "to someone else" to "to someone else or not at all" in the last part of the grandparent, it counters the 100%-displacement notion more explicitly, but "K selects for X as targets to do Y" doesn't necessarily imply displacement.
Nevertheless, it's something worth distinguishing when trying to do utility estimations.
You seem to be confusing "you did X, which is a risk factor for Y" with "you did X, therefore you deserve Y".
That confusion exists strongly within the social landscape; perhaps what is needed is a more rigorous distinction between "views that have to be constantly defended against" and "facts which happen to be true", whenever the two happen to be bound together by some form of social assumption.
The problem is "well, I don't think that way" has turned into a poor signaling mechanism, so stronger (and more expensive) signals need to be developed.
EDIT: In the past 5 minutes, every post and comment I have ever made on this site has been downvoted, including ones made weeks ago, and including posts and comments which have nothing to do with this topic.
Can we please try to have a discussion, rather than engage in petty anonymous retribution?
Since you were replying to me, I'd like to take this opportunity to condemn this. Seriously, people, this defeats the whole purpose of the karma system. Play by the rules.
This sort of thing happens from time to time. It means you're posting the kind of thing that petty abusers don't like.
Similar thing happened to me earlier today after a post on this same topic. C'mon lesswrong.
Okay then. I'm submitting a bug report, requesting that the karma system be updated to prevent mass-downvoting. Ideally, if a single user downvotes multiple comments or articles by a specific other user within a short timespan, and the downvoted posts are spread across multiple articles, then some sort of flag should be raised to review the downvoter's actions.
Is there a sort of meta-lesswrong discussion where we can discuss stuff like this? I feel like it's something of a derail of the current topic.
Hm. Perhaps make a post in Discussion? This seems like a pretty good idea :)
Done
As Emile said, I was attempting to stress the point that people do confuse these, but it does not follow logically by any means (and isn't even remotely implied by any reasonable moral theory I've ever read about other than "Obey The Bible" (If you accept that moral theory as reasonable)).
The second paragraph compares my distinction with "what this confusion would look like if it were about theft"; a reductio ad absurdum attempt of the conflation of risk-factors with moral deservingness.
Edit: On that note, I apologize if my use of the ";" punctuation is nonstandard. I'll try to be more careful in my use of it in the future.
... oops. Guess I misread that.
Is he actually confusing those? It seems to me that he's taking pains to stress the difference!
... oops.
Except in the real world it's not a "risk factor" because if anything the causation works the other way around. People treat it like "asking for it" -> therefore nobody looks further than her to assign blame -> therefore she won't even bother to report it because the police would laugh at her -> therefore I will get away with it, again and again and again.
Once again, the fact that clothing can influence whether a rapist will choose you is not the same as the claim that this somehow shifts the blame to you if he does choose you. As it were.
I'm claiming he chooses women who have attributes that shift blame onto the victim. There is correlation, but the causation goes the other way from what you're thinking.
But when you choose your clothing, do you really care why he will choose you if you wear that particular item?
No, but you DO care why other people will shift the blame, because that's part of the process you're (hopefully) trying to re-engineer.
I don't understand this comment.
The reasons why rapists choose (...) are correlated and most likely causally linked with the (predicted) blame-shifting process, reasons given for blame-shifting, and argumentative strength of the blame-shift.
If the only reason left for why he chooses you if you wear a particular item is "That guy is clearly completely insane and sociopathic!", then you have a lot more social recourse, more deterring power, and lots more retaliation / fixing-it options afterwards, along with more social support overall.
...if they had f-ing evidence to back that up. Otherwise "opinionated" is the label you want, not "reasonable". Before advancing an opinion, a reasonable person would go look for data.
True, my use of "stupid" and "reasonable" may have been a bit careless, my main point wasn't that believing that was stupid, but rather that one shouldn't pay too much attention to stupid arguments - in this context, MixedNuts was saying that feminist claimed X, though none in the thread who seem to identify as feminists agree with X.
But I still think that dressing in a "sexy" way does increase the chances of catcalling (for rape, probably too, but that covers a wider range of things than catcalling does). I'm not aware of any rigorous studies (your link seems like weak evidence in that favor, and most anecdotes in this thread and outside are in the same direction).
(I agree with the core of your criticism; even if my main point wasn't about stupidity in practice I was still sneaking in connotations)
That's not really the point, though. If clothes and makeup have no effect, then the blame is on the men by default, so the reasonable feminist only needs to consider the other case.
Or, of course, one could find data proving that the clothes and makeup definitely have no effect. But that's harder when you consider all the related issues: e.g. are women walking alone at night more likely to get raped? Our reasonable feminist might therefore be more interested in arguing that in all such cases the blame lies on the rapist (if for some reason this is being questioned) as opposed to nitpicking the concrete details.
???
Keep in mind which way the arguments are going. The feminist position is Y. One objection is that X isn't true and therefore Y can't be true either. However, Emile's reasonable feminists argue that even though X isn't true, Y is still true for unrelated reasons. So it's less relevant to bring up the possibility that X might be true after all.
I don't see why this merited such wide-target downvoting of my comments, but I'll bite: why didn't you direct your complaints to Emile for bringing up the apparently irrelevant tangent, rather than Morendil for correcting Emile's assumption?
I was responding to the claim that the feminists need "f-ing evidence" to claim that X is wrong.
So you think they should argue positively for "clothes and makeup have an effect", given no evidence?
There is evidence, but it's mostly anecdotes. Still, a lot of anecdotes pointing in the same direction is more than nothing.
Given lack of evidence one has to make a judgment based on priors. It is certainly not the case that we should have some sort of higher standard of evidence for one side of this debate because of, for example, the convenience it would afford for tangential but related arguments.
The comment objected to suggested looking for data rather than picking an answer and arguing for it without looking for data.
Catcalling you can know through observations. It's hard to get data on rape. The studies in Morendil's conflict, though they seem to show that the effect depends on context. There's also the confounding factor that rapists select victims who will be blamed for their rape, and that clothing is related to that.
I don't think there's one identical motivation for all rapes, but I expect through enormous extrapolation and intuitive hand-waving that power is more often a motivation than sexual attraction.