Rape and the "Civilized" World

[lightgigantic]

What we have is a predominance - in fact a totality - of advocates of precaution "whenever the woman anticipates she might be raped" as an attribute of "any responsible adult", who refuse to put any limits whatsoever on the costs of their own recommended "strategy".

No even the costs to society in general, or innocent bystanders, or regular people, let alone women.

If you wish to begin now, by answering that nagging little question you've been asked so many times or in any other relevant manner, you can put to rest the suspicion that in fact -

Right now there's no reason to believe any different.

already answered it now - perhaps a dozen times.

If you want to suggest otherwise, go back to the scenario and explain precisely what precautions the victim is implementing at the beginning and end of their account.

like many other advocates of women taking precautions - you do in fact expect women to risk death (in the many extreme cases even accept death) to avoid some situation in which they "anticipate they might be raped" with some large degree of probability - you do expect some women (the better or more saintly or more responsible class of women) to suffer death rather than rape.

justify these asinine conclusions of yours with references from this site, and there is a slight chance we might take you seriously

:shrug:

 

[dillion]

around 12 years ago, tiassa was in here raping the forum for her papers.

It was annoying at times.

Focus less on the physical definition of the word and more on the environment that it takes place.

 

[iceaura]

already answered it now - perhaps a dozen times.

If you want to suggest otherwise,

I don't "suggest", I directly observe - you have never answered that question, or even attempted an answer. Your claims otherwise have been dealt with before, and stupidity or misunderstanding is no longer a possibility with you. Dishonesty remains, as there - and here:

like many other advocates of women taking precautions - you do in fact expect women to risk death (in the many extreme cases even accept death) to avoid some situation in which they "anticipate they might be raped" with some large degree of probability - you do expect some women (the better or more saintly or more responsible class of women) to suffer death rather than rape.

justify these asinine conclusions of yours

In the original post you carefully broke apart, no conclusion was drawn, and the justification for the suspicion was provided.

Editing like that is clearly deliberate, to suggest the post said something it did not say, and appear to justify your response. You are a liar.

To repeat the point: Your innuendo here:

I'm not sure what makes you think there is a predominance of preventative strategies out there that advocate one must prevent an incident even at the cost of surviving.

is, apart from the dishonesty of pretending other people are talking about any "predominance of preventative strategies", also false in suggesting that the phenomenon

- of people who advocate that women take responsibility for their personal risk of being raped also expecting some women (the most honored, higher class, respectable) to risk (or even suffer) death in the course of their precautionary behavior

- is rare. It's very common, world wide, as you know very well. And you have put no limits whatsoever on the precautions you - you personally - expect women to take whenever they "anticipate {they} might be raped", to be considered by you and your kind "responsible adults". So until you have separated yourself from this very common - even, yes, predominant - sociological and psychiatric category of precaution advocates, we have no reason to assume you are separate from it.

 

[wynn]

No, I mean "did you read the post"? Can you show me where I said any of this nonsense that you are spewing, and attributing to me.

Are you Fraggle Rocker?

Is it well-known that the screen names "parmalee" and "Fraggle Rocker" refer to the same person?
??

I was quoting Fraggle, and noted so clearly.

But let's examine your previous response a little more closely:


I'm honestly not sure what this has to do with anything that I said, nor what it has to do with anything much period. But I'll consider it:

Well, yeah sure--who wouldn't want to live in a world where actions have exactly the consequences they desire? I mean that's kind of a no-brainer, right?

Now to the second part:

So in such a world, for example, drinking alcohol would not have adverse effects on a person's mental, moral and physical abilities.

Well, yeah that would be nice, wouldn't it? But it's not the reality. For most people, moderate consumption of alcohol has few or no deleterious effects; likewise, there are some for whom any amount of alcohol produces undesirable effects (as I said, just the taste of it can give me a migraine). Whereas excessive consumption of alcohol does tend to have deleterious effects for most nearly everyone. And so?

Personally, I wouldn't mind a world without alcohol, save for isopropyl, denatured, and grain alcohol (for making tinctures and such). But again, that's not the reality.

But more importantly: what exactly does this have to do with anything, and how is it a response to anything that I said?

Hypothesis:

Your desire for a world that would function according to your wishes is strong
and it is this desire that makes realistic practical solutions for dealing with reality
appear unappealing to you.

 

[wynn]

- is rare. It's very common, world wide, as you know very well. And you have put no limits whatsoever on the precautions you - you personally - expect women to take whenever they "anticipate {they} might be raped", to be considered by you and your kind "responsible adults". So until you have separated yourself from this very common - even, yes, predominant - sociological and psychiatric category of precaution advocates, we have no reason to assume you are separate from it.

So this is all about reputation, then?

Damn, I owe one of these idiots an apology.

That was a bad one. I do most sincerely apologize. No kidding - I wouldn't want that kind of stuff, or anything resembling any part of that post, attributed to me.

btw: you disagree with it, reject its author's presumptions, then?

At first, I thought that the first thing to say in this thread would be -

Does anyone here believe that this topic can openly and in detail be discussed in a forum like this?

At first, I was skeptical, but then I gave it a try anyway.

By now, I am convinced that the answer is No. There is a taboo on the topic of violence in general, so not much openness can be expected in regards to taboos, at least not in public settings. Instead, there is a rule of political correctness enforced.
And taboos are there for good reasons. For many people, fighting with monsters turns them into monsters, so they prefer to either stay away from the monsters altogether, or they deny their existence.


And yes, this post will likely be taken precisely the way I have not intended it ... such is the nature of taboos.

 

[parmalee]

Are you Fraggle Rocker?

Is it well-known that the screen names "parmalee" and "Fraggle Rocker" refer to the same person?
??

I was quoting Fraggle, and noted so clearly.

I suggest you take a look at post 308 again--you were responding to ME. Whether or not you intended to, I do not know.

Hypothesis:

Your desire for a world that would function according to your wishes is strong
and it is this desire that makes realistic practical solutions for dealing with reality
appear unappealing to you.

Hypothesis:

Your desire to think (or appear clever) is strong. You fail miserably on both counts.

 

[parmalee]

This is how post #308 appears at present:

Originally Posted by parmalee
It's when you frame it thusly:
Drinking can set you up to be a victim of sexual assault. Will this risk combine with any others to result in a scenario I wish to avoid. Am I comfortable making this decision?
that it becomes problematic, i.e., you need to think through the implications of what you are saying specifically here, with regards to where responsibility lay, etc.

It looks like you want to live in a world where actions would have exactly the consequences that you desire they would have.
So in such a world, for example, drinking alcohol would not have adverse effects on a person's mental, moral and physical abilities.

I expect an apology will be forthcoming.

 

[Balerion]

Are you Fraggle Rocker?

Is it well-known that the screen names "parmalee" and "Fraggle Rocker" refer to the same person?
??

I was quoting Fraggle, and noted so clearly.

You won't even attribute quotations correctly.

Once you get on that wagon, it's hard to get off, eh ...

 

[wynn]

Ah, irony:

/.../

You're snowballing. I won't try to put much effort into stopping that snowball.


One of the basic rules in combat is to get to know your enemy.
Sometimes, by getting to know those whom one considers to be one's enemies, one learns that they are not one's enemies to begin with; and that one's actual enemies are those whom one had considered one's allies all along.

 

[wynn]

This is how post #308 appears at present:

I expect an apology will be forthcoming.

What's wrong with it??

 

[wynn]

Hypothesis:

Your desire to think (or appear clever) is strong. You fail miserably on both counts.

Hypothesis:

You are not God.

 

[Tiassa]

Definitions, Applications, and Assignation

So this is all about reputation, then?

In a way. A weird, tortuous way.

Some people mete out, in their own minds, the human respect they think people deserve according to whether or not another person satisfies them. While a natural psychological process that occurs in any reasonably developed psyche, it does have practical effects in the world.

To wit, traditional societal attitudes in many industrialized, first-world cultures, frequently assign men and women different values as human beings; inherently, as men have generally run these societies for many generations, the masculine value is higher than the feminine.

One manifestation is in the misogyny derided as the Guardians of Female Chastity. This misogyny is a patchwork of cultural heritage in which only certain women conforming to certain expectations satisfy the tendency to mete out human respect. Thus, the drunk or provocatively dressed woman. Thus LG's thing about the commuting, working woman at the train station. Thus, de Beauvoir noted that when women try to act like humans they are accused of trying to be like men.

That alcohol, for instance, might contribute to circumstances in which a rapist perceives opportunity for access is a functional reality. But the attempt to mete out moral respect to rape victims accordingly is indicative of the underlying misogyny that assigns women a lesser human status. Juries have acquitted rapists before because they blamed her for the clothes she was wearing, or how much alcohol she had consumed. Nobody is going to acquit the car thief simply because the owner didn't use a club-lock. And, indeed, the 2010 Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Colorado, when he was a prosecutor, once declined to file rape charges—when he had a confession in hand—because he decided the woman deserved it.

The problem with prevention theory, as I have said for years, is that it remains unbounded. There is no outer boundary. This isn't just watching where you step in order to not trip. This isn't just locking your front door and turning on the porch-light. The open-ended prevention theory reaches into aspects like what a woman wears, whether or not she drinks alcohol, where she goes, how she travels. It is nothing more than an obligation to deny herself full participation in our human society. And the advocates cannot seem to muster a coherent description of their prevention theory's dimensions.

The functional result is that human respect toward rape victims is meted out according to this amorphous prevention theory. And here we arrive at your answer:

"So this is all about reputation, then?"​

It depends on how you define reputation. To attend a person's self-perception is an inappropriate application in the rape prevention question. But how one defines other people is exactly the point. If by reputation we mean the esteem we grant other people, yes, that is a key factor.

But it's not all about reputation in that context. It's about the societal myths and attitudes that form the criteria for how some people—far too many, as such—assign reputation and human value.

As long as a society continues to look down on women in such a manner, it will continue to empower rape.

The members of all communities, including nations and whole civilisations, are infused with the prevailing ideologies of those communities. These, in turn, create attitudes of mind which include certain capacities and equally positively exclude others.

The ideologies may be so ancient, so deep-seated or so subtle that they are not identified as such by the people at large. In this case they are often discerned only through a method of challenging them, asking questions about them or by comparing them with other communities.

Such challenge, description, or questioning, often the questioning of assumptions, is what frequently enables a culture or a number of people from that culture to think in ways that have been closed to most of their fellows.

—Emir Ali Khan​

____________________

Notes:

Ali Khan, Emir. "Sufi Activity." From Sufi Thought and Action. Ed. Idries Shah. London: Octagon, 1990.

 

[Balerion]

What's wrong with it??

By itself, nothing. It's that when parmalee attempted to respond, you claimed you had been responding to Fraggle Rocker, which isn't true.

Hypothesis:

You are not God.

Can you clue me in on something? This, or a form of it, is a common defense you employ. How on earth is it relevant here?

 

[wynn]

By itself, nothing. It's that when parmalee attempted to respond, you claimed you had been responding to Fraggle Rocker, which isn't true.

I have checked my posts and the quote tags in them, and they are attributed correctly.

I don't know what Parmalee is accusing me of.

Can you clue me in on something? This, or a form of it, is a common defense you employ. How on earth is it relevant here?

Are you God? If not, why do you expect me to heed your words as if they would be God's?

 

[parmalee]

What's wrong with it??

Seriously?! How about reading posts 324 and 326 again.

Or, to quote someone insignificant: Once you get on that wagon...

 

[parmalee]

Hypothesis:

You are not God.

Hypothesis:

You are an embarrassment.

 

[Balerion]

I have checked my posts and the quote tags in them, and they are attributed correctly.

I don't know what Parmalee is accusing me of.

Yes you do. I just told you what he's accusing you of.

Follow the timeline here.

In post #314, you ask a question of parmalee.

In post #315, parmalee responds.

In post #324, you say you were talking to Fraggle Rocker, not parmalee.

Are you God? If not, why do you expect me to heed your words as if they would be God's?

Wow, so in your mind, only God can point out your character flaws? Holy shit what an ego on you!

 

[Tiassa]

Attention given

Wynn is the definition of a poseur.

This is all about getting attention. Fine. Attention given. And what happens? Nothing unexpected.

I suggest people take the note and just move on.

Oh, and since it is, apparently, so important that we give Wynn all this attention that it is somehow necessary to do so—

—very well, attention given. We need not give any more.

 

[wynn]

In a way. A weird, tortuous way.

Some people mete out, in their own minds, the human respect they think people deserve according to whether or not another person satisfies them. While a natural psychological process that occurs in any reasonably developed psyche, it does have practical effects in the world.

Everyone does that. Each person according to their system of beliefs and values.

To wit, traditional societal attitudes in many industrialized, first-world cultures, frequently assign men and women different values as human beings; inherently, as men have generally run these societies for many generations, the masculine value is higher than the feminine.

One manifestation is in the misogyny derided as the Guardians of Female Chastity. This misogyny is a patchwork of cultural heritage in which only certain women conforming to certain expectations satisfy the tendency to mete out human respect. Thus, the drunk or provocatively dressed woman. Thus LG's thing about the commuting, working woman at the train station. Thus, de Beauvoir noted that when women try to act like humans they are accused of trying to be like men.

I don't come from that position, and I am quite sure neither do LG or Bill.

How you come to the point of interpreting precautionary measures as misogyny is still not exactly clear. Other than by positing that you actually hold the same beliefs as those misogynists you so criticize.

The problem with prevention theory, as I have said for years, is that it remains unbounded. There is no outer boundary. This isn't just watching where you step in order to not trip. This isn't just locking your front door and turning on the porch-light. The open-ended prevention theory reaches into aspects like what a woman wears, whether or not she drinks alcohol, where she goes, how she travels. It is nothing more than an obligation to deny herself full participation in our human society.

"Full participation in human society"?

By that standard, you are "denying yourself full participation in human society" by
- not being female,
- not being a vegetarian,
- not being a homeless person,
- not being a billionaire,
- not tattooing your whole body,
- not being in a wheelchair,
- not being a tennis pro,
etc. etc.

"Full participation in human society" would mean to do whatever it is that people do, to be whatever people are. And it is impossible that one person could or would do all the things that other people do, or be all the things that other people are.

IOW, it appears that what you mean by "full participation in human society" is about a limited set of givens, qualities, activities and actions that you consider normative or representative.
Obviously, not everyone agrees that your set is the normative or representative one; just like you don't agree that some other people's sets are.

The functional result is that human respect toward rape victims is meted out according to this amorphous prevention theory.

And here we arrive at your answer:

"So this is all about reputation, then?"​

It depends on how you define reputation. To attend a person's self-perception is an inappropriate application in the rape prevention question. But how one defines other people is exactly the point. If by reputation we mean the esteem we grant other people, yes, that is a key factor.

As long as a society continues to look down on women in such a manner,

You might want to consider the misogyny implied in liberalism and feminism, for example.

it will continue to empower rape.

There may be many factors that lead to or contribute to rape.

But it's not all about reputation in that context. It's about the societal myths and attitudes that form the criteria for how some people—far too many, as such—assign reputation and human value.

The members of all communities, including nations and whole civilisations, are infused with the prevailing ideologies of those communities. These, in turn, create attitudes of mind which include certain capacities and equally positively exclude others.

The ideologies may be so ancient, so deep-seated or so subtle that they are not identified as such by the people at large. In this case they are often discerned only through a method of challenging them, asking questions about them or by comparing them with other communities.

Such challenge, description, or questioning, often the questioning of assumptions, is what frequently enables a culture or a number of people from that culture to think in ways that have been closed to most of their fellows.

—Emir Ali Khan​

Have you noticed how lowly you esteem me and some other posters here?

 

[wynn]

This is all about getting attention. Fine. Attention given. And what happens? Nothing unexpected.

—very well, attention given. We need not give any more.

It looks like this is in fact about you expecting me to unquestioningly agree with you or someone you favor.

Hypothesis:

You are an embarrassment.

Hypothesis:

You are still not God.