The Difference Is...

[woodwardiocom]

Three parallel situations:

• "You didn't have a bike lock? No wonder it got stolen, you doofus."
  
• "You walked through that part of town at midnight waving around an expensive cell phone? You idiot, no wonder you got mugged!"
  
• "You were dressed like that when you were sexually assaulted? You kinda asked for it."

My social circles regard the first two as appropriate replies, and the third as absolutely not. I agree with that, but on analysis, am having trouble articulating the relevant distinction.

Edit: Many thanks for the answers thus far. They've helped.

Comments

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

One difference is that the third applies only to women, and implies that men have no self-control.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Do the first two imply that bike-thieves and muggers have no self-control?

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

It doesn't take all men having no self-control. It only takes one bad one.

[nchanter.livejournal.com]

To me, those statements read all together equate a woman's body and/or sexuality as a commodity or property, which bicycles and cell phones are, and a woman is not.

-K

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

You have a point. My intended parallel was that all three involve crimes, and blaming the victim.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's a very good point.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Surely in both cases both truths apply. The person who stole the bike was a contemptible thief with no respect for the bike owner's rights, and merits condemnation for their wrongful actions (though not as intense condemnation as the rapist, as the harm is almost certainly less). And the woman who dressed sexually provocatively while going into certain types of environment was endangering herself and was imprudent, perhaps culpably so, in not better safeguarding her own person. Criminals have a moral obligation not to commit crimes, but potential victims have a moral obligation not to be careless of their own security.

After all, when your daughter is old enough to carry a wallet, I expect you're going to teach her not to take out her money and count or sort it in public, right?

[nchanter.livejournal.com]

Please list for me the places where it is OK for me to dress "sexually provocatively" and the places where it is not. And please define dressing sexually provocatively. Because some people have decided workout clothes count, and some men rape women wearing Burqas. Can you please define those lines for us?

Thanks!

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

Wow. Okay, unpacking this one.

My obligation to my own security is practical, not moral. Every day, I make choices about what matters to me, and if I decide not to safeguard, say, my phone, that's not an ethical failing. (I have made the choice to risk my pocket being picked in order to handle some more pressing problem. You probably do the same from time to time. If my wallet goes missing in a crowd while I am, say, hustling toddlers off the train, I don't acquire moral culpability. I also sometimes choose to go into bad parts of town. If bad shit happens to me while I'm jogging my usual route, it's not because I made some ethical error.)

There is no outfit that will render me safe from sexual assault. Worse, there is no outfit that a cop or an assailant cannot claim was somehow, in some way, provocative of that assault. Since no outfit will make me safe, or even make key people think I took reasonable precautions, I have reserved to myself the right to wear what I damn well want. Interpretation is in the mind of the beholder, and no matter what efforts I make in that direction, I cannot control it.

If someone is assaulted, it's not because they were culpable in failing to safeguard themselves, it's because there was an assailant.

I have a young daughter. It is a fight every day to get her to wear clothing that covers her underpants (in fairness to her, when I wear things with my favorite characters on them, I like them to show them off too). It makes me unspeakably angry that the social consensus is that she has to wear bottoms because if she doesn't, someone might molest her. If you find preschoolers irresistably appealing in that way, the problem is not that the preschoolers aren't wearing bike shorts.

[futurenurselady.livejournal.com]

I don't think any of the three statements make much sense. I think they're only acceptable because we live in an individualist society and not a collectivist one.

You can't control a criminal's actions. If a person wants to steak a bike badly enough, then the lock will be broken or picked and it won't matter how nice the bike is. If they want to steal a phone badly enough, they'll hold a weapon to that person's head and demand their phone and it won't matter what kind of phone it is. If they want to rape someone badly enough they'll do it, and it won't matter what that person is wearing, what the person's age is, or even whether they're male or female.

When I hear that a friend's been stolen from, whether it's their bike or their phone or their sexual actions, my first response is along the lines of "whoever that shithead was who did this, I hope they get what's coming to them."

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Seconding this. All three statements are victim-blaming, which shifts the emphasis away from where it belongs enables a culture of violation. I don't think any of them are okay.

That said, as other commenters have effectively pointed out, there are reasons why the third statement is different and potentially even more damaging to said victim than the first two (ETA: including the fact that, unlike other potential precautions against crime, women's clothing choices don't make any measurable difference to their risk of being raped, a point others have made on this thread but important enough that I want to underscore it). Victims of bike theft and mugging are not systematically discriminated against and blamed for their own violation as a feature of a wider sexist culture, but victims of sexual assault are. You are lucky that you exist in a circle that recognizes this discrepancy and comes down hard on expressions of rape culture! But make no mistake, that puts you in a minority.

[spoothbrush.livejournal.com]

I think that for me the first one may be an appropriate reply, but the 2nd and 3rd are both not -- and I think it has to do with the presence or absence of an owner. When someone is carrying a cell phone, they're clearly in possession and asserting ownership of it. Someone who's "dressed like that" is still in possession of their body.

But an unsecured item with no identifiable owner, especially in a public place... I mean, if I found $10 on the ground with no evidence of ownership, I wouldn't feel like it was inappropriate to make it my $10. (In a dropped wallet, there's identifying information that suggests ownership, and if I saw it fall out of someone's pocket, again there's identifying information.) With the unlocked bike, it may be highly unlikely that someone's just abandoned it, but it's not impossible. The cellphone that I'm using, though... clearly not abandoned property.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

I fall down on your breakdown of acceptable/not acceptable. I'm sorry your bike got stolen, god, that's shitty, and bike locks don't exactly prevent it, but yes, if you ask me, I will tell you to lock your bike. You have the cellphone you have, you don't buy a special cheaper one to use in bad parts of town when you are there at scary times, and you got mugged because you happened across a mugger, not because your cell was brandy new and pricey. Similarly, if you got raped, that happened because of the confluence of you and rapist, not because you failed to divine what magical outfit it was you could have worn that would have miraculously made you safe.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Yah, certainly, the second one seems a bit heartless, but I can imagine someone in our circle saying it, and not getting the wrath that the third would engender.

[aroraborealis.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I don't see the first two as appropriate replies.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

One of our babysitters recently went off to college, and her bike was stolen very early on, by the thief snipping the cable lock. One of her friends immediately said, "If you'd used a U-lock, it wouldn't have happened." That's most of what got me thinking about this. I mean, really? Is it acceptable to blame the victim like that? When they used a lock, just not a good enough one?

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I have never heard the second response to a mugging. There have been two street attacks on people I knew this year and the sympathy was pretty uniform, where I saw/heard opinions expressed. I don't think that the idea that being a victim of violence is your own damn fault is commonly expressed in my social circles.

I think you're getting good answers to your actual question elsewhere, so I'll just stick with the quibble.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

All three are quite judgmental.

The third is purified bullshit. Rape doesn't happen because women dress a certain way. Furthermore, not dressing that way ("using a bike lock") makes no difference in rape rates and that's a dangerous meme you should evict from your mind.

Given that, the first two are "really" about something you do, and the third is about something you _are_, to wit, female, and can't not do.

Finally--and importantly--rape is a hugely different crime than petty theft. Equating the two even for hypothetical reasons is a mistake. Try 1 and 2 with "that's why you got locked up and tortured" and see if your opinion of the advice changes.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

rape is a hugely different crime than petty theft.

That's a very fair point. In my head I was presuming the mugging involved violence, and thus there was more of a continuum there, but I didn't actually type that, so...

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Rape's a more serious crime. The harm to the victim is greater. That doesn't mean that we should simply shut down all logic in horror when trying to figure out how to avoid the crime.

The obvious fashion accessory that deters or stops rape, of course ... ?

A weapon.

[spinrabbit.livejournal.com]

They're all rude, of course.

Victim-blaming is more problematic the more harm the victim has suffered. If you said #2 to someone who had been seriously injured, that would not be at all ok, and if you said #1 to someone who really could not afford to replace their bike you'd be an asshole.

And the set of behaviors that are considered by large groups of people to be reasonable and obvious precautions for women to take against rape is huge, ever-mutating, includes mutually-exclusive things, and is tenuously, at best, connected to actual likelihood of rape.

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

I don't regard any of those as appropriate. I might say to the person who got their bike stolen, "Unfortunately, there are assholes around here who do that kind of thing, but a good bike lock will make it harder for them to do so." That's because it's true. It won't make it impossible, but it makes it harder. And even if they didn't use a bike lock, that doesn't make the theft of the bicycle their fault. The fault still lies with the thief. There are no clothes that make it harder to rape a woman, or less likely that she will get raped. Period.

As for the second person, I still won't blame them. There are many reasons why they might not have had a choice except to be using their phone there at that time. Even if they were just strolling around for hell of it and playing Angry Birds, they still don't deserve to get mugged. They didn't ask for it.

[minkrose]

A lot of important replies have already been covered.
Another difference with the third one that I don't think has been pointed out: victims of sexual assault usually *know* their attackers, which is rarely the case for the other two examples. While rape-by-stranger does happen, the fact that it often isn't an unknown attacker also ties into the fact that "what you were wearing" is totally irrelevant. Knowing that person, and possibly seeing them again regularly, are a huge difference, in my opinion.

I'll also agree that all three are judgmental and the first two are not something I've heard said by my friends to others, though I did know a 6'3" Indian man who got mugged when he was wearing a nice leather jacket and walking alone in Allston (I think?) ~10 years ago, and he did say that in retrospect, he knew it wasn't a good idea and he shouldn't have done it (yes, that is Rishi, if Kris is wondering). Relatedly, when my parents first moved to Boston, they lived in Brighton and had a freakin' Pontiac Firebird which someone stole and crashed into a bridge on Route 9. When they told their new co-workers this story, people said "Welcome to Boston." Though I think that's less victim-blamey and more "yeah, we can't solve that problem" (which is still a terrible response, because no one should have to accept that "that's just the way it is.") Anyway, when I've heard anything along those lines, it's been turned inward, but I think that's because the message is so prevalent, no one has to say it to you.

In the end, all three imply that crime is inevitable and there's nothing we can do about it because it is an unknown and mysterious force that cannot be controlled. I think that's a bullshit attitude. I think it's a bullshit attitude about gang violence, too. I don't have the answers for solving any of these, but I am trying to "act like I can do something about it" (from this blog post about race: http://livingformations.com/2013/09/16/for-whites-like-me-who-are-pissed-we-are-not-ignorant/ ). I find this to be all the more important living in the South End, where I now get (totally awesome) fliers from the NAACP while waiting for the bus. Belmont didn't want to/"have" to think about these problems and I don't miss that.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link; thought-provoking stuff.

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

I think most of the relevant answers I would have come up with have been covered, but in my opinion the first and third are more different than the second and third. The difference lies in the fact that a lock does offer some substantive protection. Of course, it offers just as much superstitious protection, but I'm comfortable with that. No regular, everyday clothing outfit, from long pants to long skirts to full face covering offers protection against assault, sexual or other. To make the first and third reasonably parallel, we'd have to be talking about tactical gear e.g. certain motorcycle-oriented kevlar-lined, or certain kinds of SWAT gear where you could be relatively certain that guns or knives would not get to you while you were trying to get away. But no one says: "what? You weren't wearing your slash proof shirt and pants with your bullet proof vest? No wonder!" No one is talking about clothing that would be *actually* protective. (Now of course, if we were, it would still be victim-blaming, but the ridiculousness would be clearer. There is no such thing as a rape-preventing bike lock. Neither the cable nor the U lock will do it. And to expect every woman to be "rape-proofed" begins to point to how insane the comparison is.)

On the subject of the second one--we talk about phones getting stolen in muggings when people had phones during muggings. In the 80s, we didn't talk about phones getting stolen, we talked about cash, and then people said "Why were you caring X$ in cash on you!?" But that was never the point. They would have gotten mugged if they had had little cash, but the story wouldn't have been as impressive. My mom got mugged once and they got $18 and her credit cards which she had cancelled before they got a chance to use them. It was the 80s, so she didn't have a phone, new or otherwise. She was in a chancy part of town, but it was the part of town where her dentist was. If it were today (aside from the fact that the dentist is dead and that building is now like million dollar condos, but I digress) she *would* have a phone stolen and the phone might be new, but (as ricevermicelli pointed out a few times here, that's not why she got mugged. It's just what the story is about afterwards.

[longstrider.livejournal.com]

I would say that the first is different from the other two. I view all locks (house, car, bike, wifi encryption, computer passwords, etc.) as deterrents against casual crimes of opportunity. It's your responsibility to protect your stuff. None of these will prevent transgression by a well-equipped, determined criminal, but will keep out the yahoo with poor impulse control and a poorly development moral compass.

Both the second and third are victim blaming and shift responsibility for substantially more serious (rape being MUCH more serious) crimes from the perpetrator to the victim. Mugging and rape are not impulse crimes. Others have gone into more detail above.