Nornagest comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong

58 [deleted] 25 November 2012 11:33PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (1254)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Nornagest 28 November 2012 02:51:19AM *  1 point [-]

I think that some of the motivation for discussing whether short skirts increase stranger rape risk is not-true-rejection behavior to avoid discussing acquaintance rape - a far more frequent kind of rape that requires very different responses.

I'm not certain how different the responses actually are in this particular context. We might expect effective risk-minimization behavior to look different overall, but if there's anything to the theory that victims' social presentation styles are a risk factor for rape in general, I'd expect them to be a risk factor for acquaintance rapes unless we have some particularly good reason to think that rapists of strangers have unique psychology in this respect.

Indeed, the only empirical data I remember being linked in this thread found its strongest links for date and spousal rape, though the association looks to be on the weak side either way.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 28 November 2012 07:42:25AM 2 points [-]

The study looked as though it was pretty hypothetical.

There's one I can't find at the moment which was based on interviewing rapists, and it concluded that rapists select for vulnerability (a drunk woman at a bar who's by herself) rather than by clothing.