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.
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Date: 2013-10-04 03:15 pm (UTC)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.