I think I'd like to respond to these ideas, I don't want to try to continue a conversation that can't be responded to, so I'm trying to reply in general. If I fail I apologize.
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Originally Posted by 19Yzerman19
Right, because statistics and data have never been used to justify the perpetuation of negative attitudes about a group of people based on a shared immutable characteristic. That would never happen!
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I think this misses the point entirely. The negative attitudes aren't against a group of people. Nor are they presuming the entire group of people have this property as an inherent thing. That's what makes it different than bigotry.
As far as I know all the women posting in this thread are either married or have otherwise outright said they date, etc. So that demonstrates that it's not a negative attitude towards a group of people.
What it is is taking the
necessary precautions to improve chances of avoiding harm, and the negative response at that being necessary for half the population.
Not to mention it being backwards. Rather than teaching people not to be raped, we should be teaching people not to rape. (Or assault, or demean, or marginalize).
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Originally Posted by 19Yzerman19
Again, it wouldn't matter if 1 in 4 people had been the victim of assault at the hands of a black person, it would be equally wrong to take the position that any time you see a black guy walking toward you you need to take a defensive posture.
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I disagree. What would be wrong is to take the position that it's an inherent property of black people to assault people.
Otherwise not taking precautions when the risk is so incredibly high is foolishness. No one would swim at the beach that has a 25% chance of getting eaten by sharks.
And I think sharks is maybe a better comparison than one might first think. No one hates sharks for growing up a shark. No one blames sharks as a group for doing shark things.
If one reads what's been written, it's not blaming all men for being inherently bad (again I'm sure there's some of that somewhere, but we can all agree that it isn't valid). The posts talk more about society and societal attitudes and how some people as a result. I don't blame someone raised 150 years ago for being racist; it'd be shocking if they weren't. I don't blame someone that has bad attitudes towards women if that's the ocean they swam in since they were born.
That's why speaking out is important. Education. Media.
Eventually someone is responsible if they don't change their attitudes, but change takes time.
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Originally Posted by 19Yzerman19
Whether or not a person makes the choice that they're going to adopt an attitude like this out of necessity (which I think is a very sad way to live one's life) is a different issue.
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Personally I'm very careful about making such a judgement if one I'm not in the other person's shoes. I agree that having to take measures to protect one's self against a source of harm that's pervasive and even fostered by a significant part of society IS a sad way to live, but I blame the source of harm (which as I said is not the male gender itself), not the victims of that harm for protecting themselves.