MasterBlasterApparently men have to be tracked for safety reasons.
Anything but force men to take accountability for their actions and to change our culture.
So your take-away from this article about a surveillance tool that seeks patterns of behavior and movement amongst hundreds of random people in a public space is “those privileged men will do anything to remain unaccountable” for… minding their business on in the tube, mall, or sidewalk? This is waaaayyy bigger than that level of bigotry, and in fact pandering to that very bigotry is exactly the tool used to get 51% of the population on board with implementing it without considering the very real consequences for them.
starman2112I think their point is that this technology will continue the trend of not making men take accountability for their actions. Expanding surveillance and preemptively arresting guys for being awkward does nothing to put guys like Brock Allen Turner (aka Brock Turner) (aka Allen Turner) in jail for raping people.
Definitely better ways to phrase it though. A lot of people think that “forcing men to take accountability for their actions” means “forcing all men to take accountability for all other men’s actions,” but that’s not really what they said
What pragmatically can anyone do?
Am I suppose to stalk my female friends 24/7 like a vigilante to prevent them from being assaulted? Maybe put a webcam in their bedroom and watch every sexual encounter they have to make sure they aren’t assaulted?
It’s a more complicated situation than any one person can have an answer to. That said, I think a large part of the problem is that we live in a society that normalizes sexual assault to an extent. Everyone knows that rape is bad, just like everyone knows that robbing banks is bad. The difference is that most bank robbers don’t delude themselves into thinking that they’re somehow innocent of any wrongdoing. They might offer personal circumstances as some sort of justification for having robbed a bank, but by and large when someone robs a bank, they know they’ve robbed a bank.
Contrast that with sexual assault, where by and large people who commit sexual assault rationalize their crimes to the point where they believe themselves to be fully innocent. Most people believe themselves to be “good people.” Since I’m a good person and good people don’t rape, that means the sex I had wasn’t rape.
She was into it when we started. She never said no. Did you see what she was wearing? She was asleep, it was a victimless crime. I just couldn’t control myself. He’s 14, but he wasn’t complaining. He’s bigger and stronger than me, if he doesn’t want it he can stop me any time.
All bank robbers know that they are bank robbers, but most rapists don’t know that they are rapists. And you’re right to ask what anyone can do, because that’s a very hard question to answer. My friends don’t tell me when they have sex, and they certainly don’t tell me about the circumstances of the sex they have. If they’re doing sexual assaults, there’s literally no way for me to know.
That’s why I think it has to be an enormous cultural shift. We have to instill in the minds of everyone that if a person can’t and/or doesn’t enthusiastically agree to sexual contact, then sexual contact is sexual assault. We also have to instill in everyone’s minds that there is no such thing as a “good” or “bad” person, there’s just people. Everyone is capable of doing good or bad things.
Yeah, but it’s worse than that. Some people don’t even know they were raped. Some people, think you not raping them is worse than raping them. For some being enthusiastic consent happens at the moment of the act, but then is revoked retroactively due to guilt and shame.
Rape and SA don’t really have very clear cut and obvious cases, esp from the victim or the perpetuator’s POV. It’s easy to judge it from an external POV, naturally. But it’s VERY gray. I have had so many sexual encounters that were so messy, including encounters where there was no sex, and the other party accused me SA for not raping them, because in their twisted mentality, my lack of overbearing sexual desire was somehow insulting and painful for them. Literally, I had a woman over, she was falling over drunk, so I put her to sleep on my couch, and the next morning she sent me a flurry of texts about how I had SA her and violated her by not sleeping with her and she was going to post my info all over the internet and make sure I was punished for being a good person because how DARE I not take advantage of her what is wrong with me, I must be gay, etc.
I didn’t have sex with her because she barely conscious and it would be rape. And yet, her mind, I was still an evil-doing bad guy because it hurt her feelings for me to not rape her while she was semi-conscious. I can’t say for certain, but I suspect his woman was clearly a previous victim of sexual abuse. I’ve also had similar encounters with women in the case of physical abuse, where the encounter was “be a man and hit me to prove to me you care.”
Peoples mentalities around sex are not cut and dry. They are incredibly messy and fraught.
I’ve also had so many other encounters where people lectured me on safe sex, consent, etc. but then when we were in the sexual act, they demanded I sleep with them without a condom, and then retroactively decided that doing so was wrong/bad. Or, that I was a pussy for wanting to use a condom. Some of those encounters also result in physical/sexual assault on myself by the woman.
I mean really, there is no ‘solution’ unless you’re going to have some neutral third party observing all sexual relations between people. People themselves are not capable of this.