In PurplePillDebate — that surreal subreddit in which Red and Blue Pillers seek common ground — one alleged woman offers a rather original solution to the problem of acquaintance rape, telling women who are afraid of being raped by someone they know that they should only hang out with guys they think are hot. Because then if one of them decides to rape you, hey, at least he’ll be good-looking!
Here’s the, er, logic that led lauren_collins to this conclusion:
i haven’t read any rape stats and never met anyone who was raped as far as i know, but from what i understand, stranger rape is pretty rare. like a guy dragging you into an alley way. i’d imagine its especially rare in urban (city, not black) areas where there is a lot of foot traffic so stuff like that is harder to get away with. because the chances of someone walking by, seeing it, and intervening are much higher.
Today I Learned that stranger rapes only happen in dark alleyways, and also that women never have to walk through dark alleyways.
anyway, i’m assuming that most rapists are actually acquaintances / friends / relatives of the victim.
Well, ok, at least that bit is true.
so my question is why do you hang out with people you don’t wanna have sex with?
Oh dear. This isn’t going anywhere good.
like if you’re more likely to be raped by someone you socialize with rather than a stranger, doesn’t it make sense to only socialize with attractive men? so that if you are forced to have sex, it will at least be with someone you like.
Uh.
How does that even
this question is specifically for women who think all men are potential rapists.
Yeah, that doesn’t really help.
edit – imagine if you were forced to work construction because your education level prevented you from getting an office job, wouldn’t it make more sense to live in a city with warm weather? like ya, you’re doing work you don’t wanna do, but it could be worse. i don’t wanna work outdoors, but i’d rather work outdoors in san diego than anchorage. just like forced sex is bad, but its not as bad if the guy is good looking.
Yeah, that doesn’t really help either.
To their credit, most of the commenters in the PurplePillDebate thread are at least vaguely horrified by Lauren’s er, logic, though it is perhaps a little telling that the only person in the discussion who openly proclaims himself to be a Red Piller thinks that “this would be a sensible policy for women to follow. But of course ‘muh freedoms’.”
I honestly can’t tell if Lauren is a troll or not. She’s posted a bunch of rather boring and non-trolly comments in other threads, which suggests she’s either real, or a very dedicated troll.
Of course, she also posted this thing that totally really happened yeah sure:
one time my ex and i were smoking a joint in his backyard when his neighbor smelled it, came up and yelled at him for it, and later told his mom about what happened. his mom grounded him for a few weeks, he more or less got over it, but i was furious. his neighbor was an older guy, kind of fat, poorly groomed. and i thought basically “how dare this 3 raise his voice to an 8?”
Uh, really?
so i defecated in my hand and rubbed it all over the neighbor’s car windshield.
You did what now?
Ok, maybe Lauren is a troll. Or a monkey.
H/T — r/TheBluePill
I’ve heard enough depressing/rage-inducing news stories to seriously doubt that.
Exactly. My point exactly, though you said it better and more clearly. Some people want to work in construction, no one wants to be raped (though I think some of these red pill folks think women secretly want to be raped and will fall in love with the guy who does. Yuck.)
WTF is up with this idea that people only work construction because they’re too dumb to get an office job? I’ve known really smart construction workers and really stupid office drones. Hell, one of my favorite teachers left the educational field and went into construction because it paid more than teaching. And the idea that construction is an unskilled trade needs to be tied into a gunny sack with rocks and tossed in a lake.
This kind of ‘thinking’ seems to be related to the ‘he wasn’t even ugly, he didn’t need to rape’ kind of ‘thinking’. I read the latter the other day – really pissed me off, obviously.
Mostly because it equates ‘ugliness’ with being the kind of shithouse human being who would force someone.
Also because it is implying that rape is ‘simply’ sexual urges that get out of control.
And then because being attractive is subjective, and I have often said how attractive I think a particular person is to have someone else totally disagree.
One thing that REALLY stands out is that if you are the kind of person who could force someone you automatically become deeply unattractive.
Having regular features and good teeth (just a couple of markers of attractiveness) really count for shit when you are an abuser.
Not quite. Some of them may have fantasies about rape, but like I pointed out, fantasy-rape is not rape. In women, especially, it adheres more to the long disproved notion that rape is about sexual desire run amok (in men who have rape fantasies, whether as victim or rapist, it’s more likely to be obviously about power and control).* It has as much to do with reality as my daydreams about being able to control the lottery machines telekinetically.
*: I will confirm that this is anecdata from a relatively small sampling of reading and conversations with people who have such fantasies, and in no way a statement of the psychological science of such things, of which I am fully cognizant of my ignorance.
It’s certainly possible to be deeply attracted to someone – whether an acquaintance, a first date, a relationship, or a marriage – and still get raped by them. Just because a woman may have fantasized about someone, or briefly desired them, or even slept with them (once, twice, a thousand times – the number doesn’t matter), that doesn’t constitute ongoing consent. That’s the part that seems to elude RedPill types. They think once a women is interested, however obliquely, it means they have the green light for all eternity.
It’s not a logical thought process. I mean, coffee oreo ice cream is attractive to me, but I don’t want it 24/7. And I don’t want to be forced to eat it.
This gives it away. She(/he/they) are trying to do satire. Too bad it’s (almost) indistinguishable from the real thing.
dust bunny – I really wish the internet wasn’t awash with these piss poor satirists. The whole thing reminded me of Judgy Bitch’s style, and she is a complete a hole.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is strong in this one.
One irritating aspect of taking a stroll through internet fora or comments sections is the sheer number of people who have no idea what they are talking about, and, like “Lauren”, even admit they don’t have any information or expertise, yet, here they are proposing to everyone their wonderful solution!
“I have done absolutely 0 research on problem X, not even a minimal google search to see what kind of stats I might locate, but here I am with my brilliant brain to propose my ‘commonsense’ solution to problem X!”
Okay, I didn’t mean my whole comment to create a link to Dunning-Kruger, only the top line.
I can’t internet.
Just like Muphry’s Law, when someone complains about a typo, they will make a typo, here I complain about people not knowing stuff on the internet when I can’t even link right. {sigh}
Edit: now I get it and too late to edit.
Actually, if there are more people around, each individual is less likely to help. It’s called the bystander effect and there was a famous case of a woman raped and beaten to death in an alley and dozens of people were woken up by it but no one called the police or an ambulance because they all saw all the lights on and assumed someone else would call.
@Freemage
Yeah, I imagine it often runs roughly parallel to the sort of “passion boiling over” pseudo-rape-but-she-ends-up-liking-it stuff that happens in romance novels (at least, in the half-dozen that I’ve read).
Another potential angle (possible tmi warning): I have a partner that enjoys very rough and physically restrictive sex as it lets her subvert bad experiences from her past. As it now happens with her explicit consent and with partners she trusts highly, she’s able to feel in full control of a situation that at one time she had no control over.
Let’s see.
I don’t hang out only with people I’d want to have sex with because I interact with people for reasons that have nothing to do with sex. (Plus, happily married and monogamous. Already have a lifetime sexual partner and I’m not looking for more.)
“Lauren’s” argument is reminding me of those horrible high-school tropes where girls are told that they should be grateful the quarterback or other high-status student had wanted to have sex with them.
As for the OP, to me it basically reads like a juvenile fantasy where one imagines a world in which pesky things like consent aren’t required. If being friends with someone implies consent, then verbal confirmation and boundary negotiation aren’t necessary!
If it weren’t for the myriad ways that it’s completely ridiculous and not at all workable in the real world, it would be perfect!
My aunt’s husband was a construction worker. He’s not rich or anything but because he’s union he made a decent enough living to retire early. He isn’t an unintelligent or unskilled person either.
I work in an office and although I do have a college degree, I’m not union and don’t make much money. I don’t think I’ll be retiring early.
My mom has a theory, and I think I agree. People have become more classist in recent decades. They want to get away from blue collar work because it is perceived as low status. This makes anti union attitudes flourish because unions are associated in people’s minds with blue color trades. These attitudes are encouraged by corporate America and the mainstream media because they perpetuate the shifting of wealth into the hands of the very wealthiest. I know that was US centric. I have no idea if people have snobbish attitudes about trades elsewhere.
my sister was assaulted by a man she was attracted to and wanted to date. Somehow being choked, hit, & brutalized (she ended up with genital damage and infection) while intoxicated wasnt sexy to her. She would have gladly had consensual sex with him. He didnt WANT consensual sex. THAT is the difference with rape that most men and many women dont know about because even when you really are listening to a rape victim they might not mention “I was attracted to him” or “I needed medical care for my damaged genitals”. Even tho my sis is pretty open with this stuff and this account is anonymous I hesitate to post this but you know, people need to fucking learn
@ScarlettAthena–Thanks for that, it sort of made me laugh about an interaction I had with my boss’s boss the other day, who criticised my clothing (I dress about as ‘professionally’ as anyone else in our office, though differently from most of the women in that I don’t wear makeup, skirts or heels)–I sent him a bunch of articles and then later suggested in the nicest possible way ‘maybe you shouldn’t express an opinion about something like this without knowing that people have been blaming what women wear for how we’re treated for millennia’.
@kupo–The story of Kitty Genovese is much more complex than the pop-psych people have told us; it’s one of those stories, like ‘that woman who sued McDonalds when she spilled hot coffee on herself’, that repays further investigation.
@WeirwoodTreeHugger–One of the things I loved about England when I first moved here more than a decade ago was how seriously people took their jobs; the down side is that ‘people knew their place’ but the up side was that people were proud of who they were, where they came from and what they did. I don’t notice that so much any more; I don’t know now whether it’s because it’s less true or I’m more used to it.
A while back Tony Blair made some kind of pledge/aspiration to get half of the country’s young people into college–I remember talking to the partner of the sister of a friend (yes it’s complicated, but the dude is no friend of mine) who taught marketing at a college near London, who told me ‘I teach a fourth-rate programme in a fifth-rate college, and my students aren’t idiots–they’re well aware that they’re being ripped off.’ But the pressure to get out of ‘the trades’ and get a university education, no matter where and no matter how useful, was that strong.
@WWTH
From my experience, the attitude up in Canada (or at least here in BC) is very different. I have limited info to make a comparison, but I feel we don’t have the same sort of anti-union sentiment up here, and I tend to think more of teachers and healthcare when I hear “union” than of construction.
There’s a local technical/trade school that’s actually seen as one of the best schools you can have on your resume when job hunting. “Going into trades” is seen as a legitimate career path, and for at least as long as I’ve been in the job market, “unskilled labor” has had a lot of opportunities for starting above minimum wage – primarily in cities working for condo/residential developers, or going to work “at the patch” (oil fields).
Though I don’t know if any of that means we’re any less classist; at best I think it just shows that we don’t consider “blue collar” work to be lower class work.
@kupo:
Several years ago, I read an article that pretty thoroughly debunked the Kitty Genovese “bystander effect” narrative. I recall specific mention of several people calling the police. I don’t recall where I read it, though. I just remember being really interested because I had completely believed the established narrative on that case without actually reading anything about it.
Yes, the ‘everybody knows’ version of the Kitty Genovese story is significantly different from the actual events.
That said, in first aid training, we’re taught not to just say ‘somebody call 911’, instead you point to one particular person and say ‘YOU call 911’ because it helps cut through panic reactions as well.
The bystander effect seems to be real (there’ve been enough controlled psychological studies to back it up), but I also know it actually doesn’t apply to the Kitty Genovese story.
I’d say the lady has been brought up on bodice rippers and thinks that’s real life, but bodice ripper heroines never smear their own poop around. Indeed, for literary purposes, they never poop.
Back before mobile phones I was caught up in a bystander effect when I saw a man assaulted in the street. I was right there, so I was beside him trying to reassure him because he was bleeding heavily and obviously terrified. BUT when I said to someone to go and call and ambulance no one fucking would! I had to tell him I would be back, leg it 5 minutes to a cab office and then go back. No one there was panicked, apart from the victim. it was just that no one gave a shit.
So what do they mean by “attractive”? My idea of what’s attractive, or the manospehrian’s idea of what’s attractive?
Because if we’re going by my idea of what’s attractive (fat women), then this would punch a million holes into the “logic” of this poster. How “attractive” someone is has nothing to do with their tendencies to commit rape, especially since it’s something that isn’t mutually exclusive to a specific group of people.
Likewise, construction doesn’t really hire “idiots” like the poster suggests; if you can’t do math, you pretty much are screwed in a construction job. Likewise, there’s more to construction than digging ditches and laying concrete.
Of course, if that Savage and his Walrus pal are any kind of proof, people who work in construction, engineering, and anything else where you have to build stuff that works, then we can state that these people are actually very intelligent.
Thanks to everyone who corrected me on the Kitty Genovese case. I learned something new today. 🙂