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MugaSofer comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong
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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.
... how?
Yes, it is. That's the whole point of this discussion: dressing a certain way can, to a certain extent, increase risk of rape; and it is reasonable to take this into account when choosing clothing.
Obviously. Until then, however...
Dressing in a certain way will make people believe you that you actually didn't consent to sex. But other than judging based on social rules, what is the relationship between consent and dress?
I'm open to additional evidence, but I suspect a rapist given a choice between the tipsy but extremely hot girl and the falling-down drunk but average girl will pick the average girl >90% of the time. This analysis assumes hotness is related to dress - which I think we all agree is true. But the advice "don't get falling-down drunk" is totally unrelated to "don't dress so that you look hot."
Plus, "Don't get falling-down drunk" is very controlling advice. And we don't acquit muggers because the victim was drunk.
I think we need to separate our long-term and short-term goals.
To use an analogy: in the long term, we need to create a world where accidental death from hypothermia (among other things) is virtually impossible -- due to, say, satellite-guided nanotech. But in the short term, we don't live in such a world. Thus, when people go out cross-country skiing in the winter, they need to balance risks and rewards. Naturally, the safest course of action is not to ski at all, but this option sacrifices too much reward. The next best course is to go skiing anyway, while taking as many precautions as is practical. What counts as "practical" depends on the individuals involved, and on the weights they place on all the sub-tasks of skiing.
Similarly, a woman who goes out to a club faces a very real danger of rape. Rapists are part of the environment there, just as cold is part of the environment out in the wintry wilderness. Yes, we do need to change the world to eliminate this danger; but until that's done, every woman needs to balance risk and reward, and take as many precautions as possible without reducing the reward below her acceptability threshold.
Just as there are other options besides "go skiing alone without warm clothing" and "never ski at all", there are also other options besides "party as hard as you can" and "never party at all".
Sure.
But rapists are people, not forces of nature. And the particular worrying about environmental risk that comes out as "Don't dress too sexy" increases the getting-away-with-it-even-when-caught risk much more than it decreases environmental risk.
Plus, it emboldens the let's tolerate the local rapist vibe that makes reporting a rapist you know so much more difficult. Rapists aren't just environment. They are people in a community that the community needs to address directly - hard as that is.