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MugaSofer comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong
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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.
Well, wearing attractive clothing might make you, y'know, more attractive, and thus a "better" target for the rapist. My point is that, as long as you value not -being-raped, it's a good idea to avoid any clothing that increases the odds of rape, whether because it makes it easier to get away with or for some other reason.
I think it is important not to conflate desirability risk and getting-away-with-it risk.
Being targeting because the perpetrator will get away with it - even if caught - is a societal failure mode. Often, it comes in the form "Society does not believe you are a crime victim because you were not behaving the social role that society expected of you." I challenge you to come up with even one other defensible (or actually defended) circumstance where failure to follow social roles leads to a captured perpetrator being released without appropriate punishment.
The social roles are particularly aggravating because the assigned roles are ridiculous.
- Don't dress like you are partying (even though you'd be ridiculous if you didn't).
- Don't drink alcohol (except that personal enjoyment is the purpose of the activity)
In short, don't go out and party at the club. Because enjoying yourself how you want to enjoy yourself is apparently not allowed.
Most importantly, the content of the social rules is outside the victim's control. Until she is the victim of rape, there's no way to know whether the outfit was "too sexy" or "very fashionable." It's hindsight bias and more concerned with enforcing social roles than protecting personal autonomy.
Personally, I suspect that desirability risk doesn't really exist. But regardless, getting-away-with-it-even-if-caught risk is not even vaguely under the victim's control. We ought to change society so that it doesn't exist.