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Lock Your Doors: Wear Conservative Clothing

I've heard this argument before - that women who wear revealing clothing are "asking" to be raped or assaulted. That doesn't necessarily mean that the women deserve it, or that they're glad it happened to the women. Instead, they argue that dressing too sexy is like leaving your doors unlocked - you don't deserve to be robbed, but it doesn't mean you weren't being stupid.

The Daily Mail confirms that people do indeed think this.
If the woman was wearing sexy or revealing clothing, 6pc said she was totally responsible and 20pc said she was partially responsible.

If the woman behaved in a flirtatious manner, 6pc said she was totally responsible and 28pc said she was partially responsible.
Men, incidentally, blame women slightly higher than other women do. I'm not sure if this is surprising or not, as (in my experience) women are often more judgmental than men about other women.
In each of these scenarios a slightly greater proportion of men than women held these views - except when it came to being drunk, when it was equal.
Something about this idea of calling women partially responsible bothers me. If a woman is partially responsible for being raped, does this make the rapist less responsible? I would hope no one's actually suggesting that.

So, should women "lock their doors" so as to not be "asking" for it?

Several studies contradict this conclusion and suggest that women who dress sexy are actually less likely to be raped:
The men were then asked to evaluate which of the two women he would prefer to approach to do something she did not want to do. The men picked the submissive woman. These researchers also evaluated the differences in non-verbal cues between dominant and submissive women. They found that the submissive women generally gestured with less expansive movements and wore more body concealing clothing than dominant women.
Submissive women are more likely to be raped, and submissive women are less likely to wear revealing clothing. Who knew...

Robbery is about easy money, so that's why we don't walk around with a wad of cash on the street. That's why we lock our doors.

Rape, on the other hand, isn't about lust - it's about power, dominance and violence. "Locking your doors" doesn't make you any less likely to be a victim.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A very important and painful topic to discuss, more so because my male brain can understand why poor mentally diseased people commit all types of crimes except understand the crime of rape. Until I stumbled on your blog.

It literary made me google up (oh my dear google !!) "psychology of rape".

and here is what I found on http://www.forensicmed.co.uk/psychology.htm

"The myths that continue to persist about can often screen the truth. Most rapists show no sign of psychopathology; most rapes occur indoor and most victims know their attackers; most rapes are planned and are about humiliation, domination and degradation; and violence is an effective tool against an individual."

It further goes on:
"Theories of rape are roughly broken into four camps.
1> The disease model (the rapist suffers from a mental illness and not responsible for their crimes); 2> the biological model (a result of an over developed evolutionary drive to procreate);
3> the psychological model (the suffering of abuse or trauma during childhood leads to differing values being learnt or learn the behaviour from society) and
4> the feminist model (men are encouraged to assert their dominance over women and rape is one of these methods).

The disease and the psychological model are easy to understand because there's nothing to be understood. A diseased and traumatized mind and body have been known to commit more hideous crimes .

But what is more disturbing is the biological and feminist model. And I am truly helpless in understanding these again. Because here we are talking about rape and not a mere eve-teasing. What is the biological need of the urge to rape ? Thats ridiculous explanation or rape.

And the more ridiculous is rape being associated to women dressing provocatively.
And I would still want to associate rape with a diseased mind. I mean what will you understand of a person who doesnt have enough brains to understand that he's not invited everywhere ?

~Ranjan

Anonymous said...

If you believe in evolution and evolutionary biology, the explanation for rape is very simple--it's a successful reproductive strategy and therefore there is an enormous instinctual drive for men to do it.

This is simple common sense that would be obvious to everybody if "psychology" wasn't clouding and confusing the issue: men want to have sex (a lot) and are often able to force women to have sex with them. That's really almost the end of the story. Occam's razor says rape has nothing to do with power or dominance or any of that nonsense.

Since humans are social creatures, there are also some instinctual motivations for men to not rape women, to better get along in society and presumably with the mother-to-be of their offspring, but it's obvious that these instincts are often outweighed.