Destructive Criticism Vs. Constructive Criticism: A Comment

A comment left in response to this buffoon:

Admitting bad judgment on your part if you are a rape victim (or victim of some other crime) is also not “blaming the victim”

Well yes but it's completely irrelevent to the issue at hand: which is rape.

We can tell this because... well let's set up two hyperthetical situations where a rape occurs, both of which involve exactly identical conditions and actions on the part of the man and woman, but one has none of this "bad judgement" radiation emitted by the woman, and the other one does.

Okay so one woman is raped, but there's no "bad judgements" involved (let's ignore your rather curiously open ended and generic conception of "bad judgement", which seems to consist of... well... never giving any guy the benefit of the doubt ever and assuming that they're all rapists a priori) on the other hand another woman is raped, same circumstances, same sort of rape, same reaction to the rape as the first time, but there's this "bad" judgement stuff involved...

so?

That's the problem, you and many other bloggers like you have spent exorbinant amounts of time and billion upon billions of pages of text talking about "resposibility" and "bad judgement" and all that jass... the thing is I've yet to see any of you actually provide a point, a woman shows bad judgement this one time; and? A woman slips up and makes a erroneous assumption or makes a mistaken action; yes? What is the point of this exactly?

You see there's two sorts of criticism: one is destructive criticism, whihc is designed to tear down an arguement or person, and then there's constructive criticism, which is designed to help the target improve in some way.

This criticism you and many many others have whipped out again and again, with nearly the same arguements each time mark you, doesn't constitute constructive criticism, because it is useless for preventing rape, on account of it assuming that there is always things that are really accurate "tells" that the man you're with is likely to have sex with you against your will and basically consists of nothing more than conflating asocial paranoia with sanity.

And if we actually apply it in a real post-rape situation, the destructive nature of it becomes even clearer.

Scenario 2: I have just been raped, and I immediately start trying to figure out what tells were presented which I overlook in an attempt to figure out how to avoid such a situation in the future.

What's wrong with this scenario?

Well for one thing, the rapist's tells are unique to him, because everyone is a unique nad precious snowflake. Second off, I've probably gone out with any number of guys who, presented with the exact same situation that this rapist was, didn't rape me yet at the same time, gave off what, in hindsight, would look like a tell when it came from teh rapist - and which would be overlooked the next time I went on a date if I like the guy (and if I like someone I assume they're not a rapists, beacuse I don't like rapists).

This is called sample bias, and when the datum size equals 1, it's pretty much all biased and there's very little actual trustable data to be analysed because your analysis is running off of nothing less than unsubstantiated assumptions. What actually occurs in these silly little peices (which are produced after all news catching rapes) is that people start pointing out things that they think might be common to rapists, or more often, things that were exploited by specific rapists to rape a woman (which have ranged from "getting into a taxi", to "going out in public without wearing something to cover the temptatious female ankle", all the way to the crazy-ville of "being a lesbian") and which are completely useless if you're not being attacked by that singular specific rapist, or if random guess work and social training isn't correct in what it perceives to be "rapist-like" behavior.

And then there's the sheer uselessness of all this destructive criticism for cases of close aquaintance rape that is committed by people you not only know, but in fact have been going out with, or may have even married (which isn't exactly rare you know) because if you're having that sort of relationship with someone, you like them, you not only want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but you trust them enough to enter into a serious relationship with him.

And in fact, what the sort of presumption of him being a rapist would do is poison your relationship, and you would be doing while having no way of knowing if the tells you're seeing are even accurate warnings of him being a rapist.

Which gets to the ultimate problem with these essays: Ever bit of advice they give out is being ignored by millions of women across teh globe as I type, some woman out there is, right now, ending the evening, fucked off her face with a guy she barely knows who is taking her back to her residence, and will proceed to put herself in every situation that might potentially lead to her getting raped.

And in the morning, she will still not have been raped because merely eliminating instances that a rapist might use to rape you, or failing to, is no garuntee that you will/will not be raped.
Because if a rapists really wants to have you, they can distract you for a split second, slip a roofie in your drink, then take you off to the toilets when you're too drugged to stop him, and you'll spend most of the rest of the evening in casualty getting the rips in your asshole sewn up.
Because there are never enough precautions that could ever possibly garuntee that you won't get raped, and so someone will always be able to another variation of this essay explicating how, in that instance where through a wide variety of rather mundane reasons that largely involved you leaving the house that morning, you were in some way responsible for a man slipping drugs into your drink and violently raping you in the toilets.

And unfortunately there are a grand total of two sane ways to react to that information:

1) grab the shotgun, run to the hills, build a logcabin and live off the land avoiding contact with any other human being for the rest of your life surrounded by cats.

2) Accept fate, and focus on actually enjoying yourself considering that at any moment the next person you meet might be a closet ted bundy who'll rape and murder you (and not neccesarily in that order).

So take your pick of reactions, because I don't care because I don't personally feel a pressing need to pat myself on the back while also performing cunninglingus on myself because I have had the good fortune not to have been raped at some point in my life.

And because I don't engage in that sort of self-centred waffling, I don't have people say things like, I dunno.. GIVING DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM TO RAPE VICTIMS IS JUST PLAIN WRONG YOU ASSHOLE.

because you're right, it's not blaming the victim exactly, but is still wrong in a whole special morally repugnant way all its own.