What is "Rape Culture"?

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Bowser, Nov 8, 2015.

  1. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Charlie Chaplin had a bit about that, too; if you did the drop and spill gag, it always had to be a rich person whose clothes took the damage.

    And Looney Tunes, too. I mean, they really went after hunters and machismo. To the other, I never did get a good read on their treatment of Foghorn Leghorn.
     
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  3. Secular Sanity Registered Senior Member

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    Well, I don't think it's funny. Watch this lady. She's smirking. She's proud of it.

     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Every third time you post that, I'm going to repeat that I made no such claim. And you no longer have the excuse of misreading - you've been corrected several times now.

    You asked four or five times, and were answered each time.

    Postings from a rape culture. So there is at least one.
    Like most women in your culture, you mean.
    Why would an even greater chance of assault somewhere else mean the fear of the present chance was "unfounded"?

    Besides, you are confused about the stats: the people you know and trust have more opportunity, not greater likelihood per chance. It's like the car crash stats - you are most likely to crash on a familiar road near your home, but those are not the most dangerous roads you drive.

    Nope. Read the thread - there's a fair number of people oblivious to the very concept. Look at them: they are counting rapes, and arguing about what frequency of them constitutes a rape culture; they are watching videos of street harassment and seeing "simple greetings"; they talk about being "cautious, like most people" as if it were normal, expected in any life.
     
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  7. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Among the many cringing moments of this thread is that one in which our neighbor complained about moving goalposts because nobody would meet her straw man.

    But I would take the occasion to remind that Bowser, Milkweed, Tali, and Secular Sanity are all pushing fallacies. That is, the first two are pushing an MRA line about all men, the one is pushing her own arbitrary standard, and the other is pushing the McElroy Lie. In the end, all they demonstrate is the paucity of their own fallacies.

    But also remember that this one, Tali, pretends an utter lack of basic comprehension; at some point, people are welcome to accept it's not a pretense.
     
  8. Secular Sanity Registered Senior Member

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    I don't know about that, if you're referring to me, but I did like her conclusion.

    "Those who use the big lie of “rape culture” to promote their politics have more in common with rapists than they know; both use the pain and fear of women to their own advantage."
     
  9. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Here, again:
    http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-big-lie-of-a-rape-culture/

    She pretty much runs a gamut of weirdly oblivious illogicality, quite similar to yours:
    Like this:
    And so forth.

    It's all nonsense, of course, but how does it happen? What is the brain glitch that has somebody typing, right in front of their face, the assertion that "cultural factors" and "the conscious decisions of a small percentage of the community" are somehow in conflict or exclude each other? Doesn't the very act of typing that force the poster to read it, and register its meaning?

    Or this:
    So the people observing that the US is in the grip of a rape culture have in reality some other political agenda which they serve thereby, and are somehow using the fear and pain of women who are not so afflicted, by their observation of reality taking advantage of something that does not in fact exist to further an agenda not visible.

    One must admire the pretzel - tied in one sentence with a single bow. https://www.google.com/imgres?imgur...B6_eQy9fJAhVEz2MKHVNDC0gQxiAIAg&iact=c&ictx=1
     
    Last edited: Dec 13, 2015
  10. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    That would be the one:

    The idea that America is a rape culture is a particularly vicious big lie, because it brands all men as rapists or rape facilitators.

    (McElroy↱)

    Every time we see the phrase, "a rape culture", it behooves us to check the context.

    The transformation is as straightforward as we see in the early parts of this thread; they argue against fallacies intended to obscure the real issues.

    If I refer to "Beltway culture", would you tell me that, "America isn't a Beltway culture", or that "we don't live in a Beltway culture"? Or would you know I was referring to a cultural phenomenon identified with Washington, D.C., and the business of governing the nation?

    How about Hollywood culture?

    Corporate culture?

    Nobody ever protests the idea of Hollywood culture by saying, "America isn't a Hollywood culture", or, "we don't live in a Hollywood culture".

    The McElroy Lie is intended to frame rape culture according to impossible boundaries; it is an example of the person telling you something doesn't exist also defining what that something is, and the argumentative form aims to hold other people accountable for one's own words.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    McElroy, Wendy. "The Big Lie of a 'Rape Culture'". The Future of Freedom Foundation. 7 April 2014. FFF.org. 12 December 2015. http://bit.ly/1QlMGBZ
     
  11. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    Secular Sanity:

    Once again, others have got in ahead of me with the correct reply to this. iceaura, in particular, just keeps nitting the nail on the head time after time in this thread. (Thanks, iceaura.)

    You are cautious when you're out in public precisely because you have a fear that is not unfounded. Yes, you are more likely to raped by somebody you know and trust, but that doesn't mean your chance of being raped by a stranger is negligible. You have far more interactions with people you know and trust than you do with random strangers.

    I think that violence against men is no more acceptable than violence against women. How about you?

    If, in your opinion, your society finds violence against men acceptable - even funny at times - then would you agree that it also finds violence against women to be acceptable - even funny at times? Or do you think there's a double standard at work in your society in which your society condones or tolerates violence against men yet has a taboo about violence against women?

    If you feel that there is no "rape culture" in your society, how do you account for the rape jokes, the advertisements condoning rape, the victim blaming that goes on when a woman is raped, etc. (see the list of examples I posted earlier in the thread)?
     
  12. tali89 Registered Senior Member

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    I'd prefer that every time I post it you repeat that you made no such claim, because you'll provide me with three times the entertainment. After all, you stated here that: "Nobody but you (tali89) is trying to make the frequency of rape the determining factor in whether or not a rape culture exists." Now you're accusing Secular of having engaged in the same behavior. You've probably felt that way about her for a while (after all, it was Secular who initially posted those statistics, I merely commented on them), but you didn't want to alienate a fence sitter. Now that Secular has reviewed the evidence and come to a conclusion contrary to your own, you have no problem tarring her with the same brush you used on me.

    Nope. I asked once. You specified that you were referring to my society, and claimed that you had made this clear in your initial statement. I disagreed, and cited your initial claim word for word, which gave no indication that you were referring to my culture in particular. It seems you are struggling with the definition of 'initial'. I'd recommend you take your own advice, and invest in a good dictionary.

    Gibberish. I'll simply write this off as two more of your claims that you refuse to elaborate and support. I'd ask some of your fellow lefties to back you up, but so far they've done you more harm than good by effectively arguing against your assertions. I guess when you try to juggle too many baseless assertions all at once, they are eventually going to come crashing down.
     
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  13. tali89 Registered Senior Member

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    Emphasis mine. Numerous liberals got in ahead of the left-wing king to issue the 'correct' reply. Iceaura 'just keeps nitting (sic) the nail on the head'. If you ever needed evidence of a left-wing hive-mind, there it is.

    Being cautious implies that a fear is not unfounded? There's a non sequitur if I've ever seen one.
     
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    No: Secular was and is obsessed with counting rapes, all the fogbound are, but your attempt to make that kind of quantification the end all and be all was just you.
    I wasn't, in that post. I was referring to your rape culture among any others at hand. When you for some reason (confused or dishonest) then demanded a particular "society" be identified for the rape culture to inhabit, I then specified yours. Each time you repeated the demand, I provided "yours". It's still "yours". That's because it simplifies the reference, and gets rid of your silly muddle, and makes all your posts evidence.

    For example, in your culture you have never heard a rape joke, but men harassing women on the street are simply saying hello - you posted a half dozen examples of behavior from that video that looked normal and innocuous to you.
    Secular has yet to review the evidence (such as your posting) in this matter.

    Which is kind of interesting. None of the various denialist folks seem to have any idea what is revealed in each other's posting. It's not a matter of being unaware of one's own blind spots, the common human condition.
     
  15. tali89 Registered Senior Member

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    Ah, so you think Secular was attempting to determine the actual frequency of rape simply as an intellectual exercise, and not because she thought it had relevance to establishing whether a rape culture existed. That's the sort of mental gymnastics I've come to expect from you when you're caught out in a blatant contradiction.

    So you're now admitting that you didn't initially specify my culture, despite previously claiming you did. The more you keep talking, the more you contradict yourself.

    I requested clarity, something which is frequently lacking in your assertions. It's also important to establish where exactly you think most women are continually harassed by men, so that we have a reference point from which you can collect the data to substantiate that claim. Unfortunately my having pinned you down somewhat on this issue hasn't resulted in you actually putting forward any sort of statistical or sociological evidence to support your claim that most women in my culture are continually harassed by men, although that's hardly surprising.

    So you are now conceding that I have never heard a rape joke? It's good that you are distancing yourself from that hamburger analogy, it made you look rather silly.

    And you have yet to address those examples and justify why they are not normal and innocuous, despite my repeated requests. Instead you demonstrate a fantastic case of double-think by misrepresenting me as believing that the entirety of the video was men simply issuing simple greetings, and then acknowledge that I was actually only referring to certain instances from the video.

    Secular has been quite active in this thread, to the point I think it's reasonable to assume she has reviewed what everyone has posted. At this point you're just stomping your feet because someone came to a conclusion different from you own. I remember when I committed the cardinal sin of disagreeing with you, and you revealed your misogyny by taking cheap shots at my mental health.
     
  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The reverse, of course. Why do you ask? Are you confusing your attempts to make rape frequency the determining factor, thereby preventing the consideration of all the other evidence here and the topic itself, with Secular's muddled obsession?
    I did. You did not understand the post, because you by either nature or design you were not capable of comprehending it. You were and are too stupid, or at least presenting yourself to be.
    So in response to your demand for repetitive clarification about "society", a word you introduced out of confusion or dishonesty, I obliged. Four or five times. So that's done, now. And of course with an example of the society and rape culture at issue - yours - established, we have plenty of evidence such as you request. Your posting, prominent among it.
    Piling up. More missives from Tali's society and its rape culture.

    Except that she doesn't seem to be acquainted with the evidence for a rape culture presented therein, such as is contained in your posting. So more review would be indicated, eh?
     
  17. tali89 Registered Senior Member

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    So you're claiming that Secular was attempting to determine the actual frequency of rape because she thought it had relevance to establishing whether a rape culture existed? Given that you originally claimed that I was the only one guilty of doing that, you've just been caught out in yet another contradiction.

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    So you're running away from backing up another of your claims, instead resorting to accusing those who disagree with you as being mentally ill, confused, stupid, and/or dishonest. Why am I not surprised?

    Or she may have reviewed what little evidence has been posted that supposedly supports the existence of a rape culture, and arrived at a conclusion contrary to your own. Given that your argumentation in this thread essentially boils down to 'You live in a rape culture because you live in a rape culture', it's not surprising she didn't find your line of logic particularly persuasive. Your propensity to deem any data on the prevalence of rape and sexual assault as 'irrelevant' also hints at your underlying prejudices.

    By the way, I'll just post the list of claims you've made that you have yet to support, so it remains fresh in the audience's memory. We wouldn't want all of your baseless speculation to fade into obscurity, would we now?

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    The claims you have yet to support with substantial evidence and cogent logic are as follows:

     
  18. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    tali89 has been temporarily banned as a result of trolling in this and other threads.

    Here is a short extract from our site posting guidelines, on the subject of trolling:

    Trolls tend to follow certain patterns of behaviour that may include:
    • Posting of similar responses and topics repeatedly.
    • Avoiding giving answers to direct questions put to them.
    • Never attempting to justify their position.
    • Demanding evidence from others while offering none in return.
    • Vanishing when their bluff is called, only to reappear in a different thread arguing the same point.
    • Deliberately derailing discussions onto tangential matters in order to try to control the flow of discussion.
    tali89 has ticked all the boxes here, and also fits our general definition of a troll.

    tali89's behaviour here and in other threads is a net negative for sciforums. He is adding nothing useful to the forum as things stand. Things need to change, or tali89 needs to leave for good. He now has a 14 day break to think about how (and whether) he wishes to interact with other forum members in future.
     
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  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    I don't regard replying to banned posters as clean, ethically, but there is an issue in 594 with "evidence" not particular to Tali's various accusatory convolutions: apparently rape culture, at least the one established here, depends on inculcated blind spots. For human beings to accept it and live comfortably with it, they have to be blinded to its betrayals in some way. At least, they all seem to be (the denial crowd). The human nature of morality - in particular its foundation in rejection of betrayal - conflicts with rape culture. So rape culture is not inevitable , and establishing a culture without structural rape threat seems not - in theory anyway - to require formal ethical sophistication and abstract education.

    That's good news, in a sense. Because awareness of one's culture is a gradual and extended matter of education, upbringing, and personal maturity - it is possible to erode, undermine, by many small steps transform, a lack of cultural awareness. And apparently that can bring a culture's structural rape threat into conflict with the basic human morality of its members.

    So one does not have to persuade people that rape threats are wrong, in general. One has only to persuade people that they exist.
     
  20. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

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    I probably shouldn't re-enter this thread, but what is a "structural rape threat"?
     
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    A threat of rape incorporated into the structure of a culture.
     
  22. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Typically, one class has political power and abuses it to deny power to the other classes. In the USA, for example, especially before nationhood, people of northern European origin had the power to rape Native Americans (not to mention killing them and taking their land) as well as Afro-Americans (not to mention enslaving them, separating families and denying them literacy).

    Even today, male Americans have considerable power over females, although this has been steadily changing since World War II, when women simply had to be allowed to hold important jobs because the men were off killing the people in other countries.

    Rapists are generally prosecuted today, although it is not always easy to get a conviction.
     
  23. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Priorities

    Because it's what women are for, right?

    I mean I don't honestly know. I can't, once again, that's, in my mind, reading over the manual numerous times and all this stuff, I mean I don't know. I've heard numerous times you don't ask out victims, you don't ask out DV victims at any time, you don't do a lot of stuff. But when a normal citizen in a neighborhood comes up to you and talks to you and says they wanna meet you and everything else, I didn't think I was using my position for anything other than to, you know, that's what I said last, last interview, I know tons of people in this exact same way... I have a lot of witnesses to my character that definitely, if they knew what was going on here, 'cause I can't tell them, they know something's going on, they would be here meeting with the Chief or whatever, in a heartbeat, 'cause I'm not, this is not me. I mean I don't go around...and maybe I'm saying too much, well, I don't know, but...


    Because when a normal citizen in a neighborhood wants to talk to you about policing, the first thing is to check if she's a woman, and the second is to find out if she's available.

    Former Seattle Police Officer Mark Henry retired amid an investigation that would inevitably have seen him fired. Ansel Herz↱ of The Stranger offers the silver lining: "The sequence of events leading up to Officer Henry's departure, after 28 years on the police force, represent an example of the department's often-criticized accountability system actually working quite well."

    And this is good news. It's about time. In fact, it's well past time.

    But here's another downside: If you think your job affords you time to hit on the ladies, because, you know, how else are you going to meet women, then go work someplace where that is part of the job.

    That is to say, if you want to offer me your hot dog on a stick, you better be working at Hot Dog on a Stick; sure, it's inappropriate, but I'll let you down easy because I get that such behavior might be symptomatic of the fact that you're stuck working at fucking Hot Dog on a Stick. But I'm also a guy; if you say that to me, well, I do come from a generation in which chatting up another man like that would be a mortal risk.

    Because, really, in this case, if you're a police officer?

    Herz reports:

    Questions about his conduct first arose in March, when the woman, a former Tacoma police officer whose first initial is K., first complained to the SPD's Office of Professional Accountability about the lack of patrols in her area. (March happens to be the same month that O'Toole fired another officer↱ for sending propositional texts to three women he encountered on the job.)

    Because, you know, if a woman complains about crime and the lack of policing in an area, what she really wants is a date.

    The records also show that Officer Walt Hayden, representing the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG), sat in on Officer Henry's interview with the OPA and tried to cast aspersions on the woman who made the complaint:

    She had sour grapes over a number of people who made sure she didn't get on this police department. She went to Tacoma. She was at least from what I know, fired from there for being dishonest. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but just the mere fact that, you know, Officer Henry cut off—he heard some of these stories—and he had no further contact with her after he had this lunch date with her, and I'm assuming that's why she filed this complaint, because she's vindictive.

    In fact, K. hadn't mentioned Officer Henry at all in her initial complaint about the lack of patrols in Magnolia.

    Apparently seeing the writing on the wall, Officer Henry was allowed to retire in August; Chief O'Toole, conveying to him the OPA finding, asserted that had he not retired he would have been fired.

    Still, though, SPD's willingness to scandalize sexual harassment victims is not encouraging. Sometimes it's not about relying on stereotypes of the vindictive woman; sometimes it really is about professional conduct.

    † † †​

    Anecdotally: A friend recently conveyed what really should seem among the strangest of stories; unfortunately, there really isn't anything new about it.

    Imagine please that you need to take your father to the hospital. Imagine it is a life-threatening need.

    So the hospital manages to stabilize him and keeps him overnight.

    When you return to the hospital the next day, instead of discussing test results and other medical information, the doctor is more interested in your contact information and whether or not you might want to go out on a date.

    And, you know, all things considered, whether or not your father dies is probably more important than whether or not they put too much mustard on your hot dog on a stick.

    Just sayin'.

    For some of us, work is work and not a place to be hitting on anyone. Others, however, would like to reserve some portion of their professional lives to chasing tail, and see no problem with this; after all, how's he supposed to meet women?

    Even in that case, though, one wonders at the notion that it's all the same.

    There was a night in which my mother encouraged me to flirt with a waiter, and what a handsome young man he was; the sort to evoke shivering lust at the thought of that gorgeousness fucking me into sublimity all night long. And it was hard enough to decide to hit on a guy while he's working. And, you know, while I was annoyed at the time about the sudden slapstick routine my mother went through as we left the restaurant to physically block me from approaching him, hindsight tells me to not be so annoyed at her neurotic "it's okay to be gay, but not too gay" routine because it really would have been inappropriate despite what seemed his obvious interest. Not only might I be reading him wrong, honestly, he just doesn't need that kind of bullshit at work.

    The complication, of course, is that I'm a guy. My kinship with women's sexual experiences only goes so far; we might chuckle about a guy's particular quirky move that he thinks makes choking on his penis feel that much sexier, or share the number of creative ways we've been called a bitch (as a compliment, apparently) mid-coitus, but in the end it really does seem as if it's still different. Nonetheless, this is all an issue for understanding what any episode means; I doubt either he or I could tell a woman accurately what it's like to endure that sort of sexual harassment on a regular basis.

    Still, though, a bit of flirting is often customary in the serving and consuming of drinks; even as such, there is a difference between flirting and proposition, right? After all, the number of times we might encounter a defense of sexual belligerence and harassment as some manner of innocuous flirting―because, you know, how's he supposed to meet women―suggests room for both custom and cautious consideration. It is sometimes hard to delineate the boundaries, and the question of propriety remains to be settled, but effectively at this time, yes, a bit of flirting is often customary in the serving and consuming of alcohol.

    How about in hospital medicine? You know, like saving your father's life?

    Maybe in crime prevention?

    Something about priorities goes here.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Herz, Ansel. "Seattle Police Chief Fires Officer for Hitting on Female Crime Victims". Slog. 13 March 2015. TheStranger.com. 16 December 2015. http://bit.ly/19l38Ql

    "Seattle Police Officer Resigns Rather Than Face Firing Over Romantic Texts". Slog. 15 December 2015. TheStranger.com. 16 December 2015. http://bit.ly/1IURLPm
     

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