Rewritten for Facebook and perhaps general publication

[madscience]

I've gotten into some serious Internet drama recently over a simple idea: that the way many people think about victims of sexual assault is inconsistent with the way they think about victims of anything else

Comments

[glowing_fish]

I think it is a fair point.

The difference is, HIV is amoral. Its a virus. It isn't even living. It doesn't have a choice. It has no moral culpability in what it does.

But I think that the moral argument and the factual argument can be separated. Because you aren't morally responsible to protect yourself from crime, doesn't mean that there are not things you can do, that FACTUALLY make you safer.

So some of the confusion seems to be that people are talking about two different things.

[madscience]

"HIV is amoral."

True, but it isn't known to go out and infect people on its own. Someone has to infect you directly. That person is morally culpable.

I think you're exactly right - people are responding to a factual argument as if it were a moral judgment. But it seems to me that it's not just a matter of people confusing the two; some people seem totally incapable of separating them, no matter how carefully you explain it.

[drbunsen]

"That person is morally culpable."

If and when they are aware that they are HIV+. There would be I assume very few instances of rape where the perp can claim unawareness.

[madscience]

Even if they're unaware, they're still guilty of negligence.

[tinag]

Reminds me of how people often get as riled up over rape as murder, wanting to give the same sentences for each. Probably both happen for the same reason: rape's just too emotional, too stigmatised for people to think rationally.

[madscience]

Rape used to be a capital crime. I think it still is in a few jurisdictions, but only under extreme circumstances. It's also a capital crime under the UCMJ, though nobody's been executed for it (separate from other crimes) since 1961.

The cynic in me says that the main reason rape is no longer a capital crime is that a woman's sexual purity is no longer considered a man's exclusive property.

[vaguelyweird]

however, our current culture is, at best, conflicted over rape. there are a lot of mixed signals (what is rape? when someone claims rape, are they lying? elements of manliness, etc.), and the clearest tends to be that the victim of rape must have been irresponsible. it is the imbalance toward which people generally are reacting

[madscience]

I don't think our culture as a whole dismisses emotion. I used to dismiss it explicitly. I don't know exactly where I got the idea that emotion is weakness, but I always associated it with my Lutheran education. After rejecting Christianity, I embraced emotion as a powerful tool for navigating life. But when I shared this "insight", I discovered that a lot of people already knew and took it for granted.

What few people do, I think, is use emotion to inform reason. They don't pick apart their emotions to expose their foundations. In terms of what I wrote here, people feel (C) or (D) in their gut and they accept it at face value instead of critically examining it. Emotion and logic together can bring you to summits of understanding that neither alone could ever reach.

[vaguelyweird]

i definitely agree that understanding ones emotions is a crucial aspect of .. being sane lol.

i don't think the majority of educated/activist people are entirely dismissing the victim's role in victimization. and i don't think it's necessarily from the emotional reactions.

but there is this attitude of 'man as animal' which leads towards towards camps of 'sex is evolutionarily imperative (men must prove their worth)' and 'men are brainless beasts (never to be trusted)'. these myths are interesting because they put the /intellectual/ responsibility squarely with the woman. that is what i mean by cultural mixed signals.