The point continues to be missed: why is it unsafe?
No one disputes that that situation is unsafe. People are saying that it’s unsafe because of rapists. Pointing out that you shouldn’t do unsafe things is asinine when the point being made is that people shouldn’t act in a fashion that makes them a danger to others.
Ignoring that the hazard is due to the choices of live humans with agency and entirely placing the agency on the victim is the crux of the problem.
Flip it around: you shouldn’t be inebriated in a situation where there are hundreds of people you can hurt.
The victim has no control over where the hazard goes. The rapist chooses where it’s dangerous for the victim to be. Big party? Dangerous if there’s a rapist there. Intimate gathering of friends? Dangerous if one of them is a rapist.
Rapists are not lightning. They don’t randomly strike in hazardous situations beyond anyone’s control where the best advice is “don’t stand under a big tree or you might get raped by lightning”.
They’re humans committing a crime against another person.
I like to analogize victim blaming to blaming someone who was hit on the head with hammers for not wearing a helmet. Like, yes, wearing a helmet would make you safer, but these conversations always get derailed into talking about helmets and not really asking why are people hitting others on the head with hammers?
You’re not wrong. It’s further than that though, because there are accidental head-hammerings (if we want to get all OSHA I suppose we’d say there are head hammerings from systemic negligence, but thats the same on an individual level), but you just don’t have an accidental rape.
The point continues to be missed: why is it unsafe?
No one disputes that that situation is unsafe. People are saying that it’s unsafe because of rapists. Pointing out that you shouldn’t do unsafe things is asinine when the point being made is that people shouldn’t act in a fashion that makes them a danger to others.
Ignoring that the hazard is due to the choices of live humans with agency and entirely placing the agency on the victim is the crux of the problem.
Flip it around: you shouldn’t be inebriated in a situation where there are hundreds of people you can hurt.
The victim has no control over where the hazard goes. The rapist chooses where it’s dangerous for the victim to be. Big party? Dangerous if there’s a rapist there. Intimate gathering of friends? Dangerous if one of them is a rapist.
Rapists are not lightning. They don’t randomly strike in hazardous situations beyond anyone’s control where the best advice is “don’t stand under a big tree or you might get raped by lightning”.
They’re humans committing a crime against another person.
I like to analogize victim blaming to blaming someone who was hit on the head with hammers for not wearing a helmet. Like, yes, wearing a helmet would make you safer, but these conversations always get derailed into talking about helmets and not really asking why are people hitting others on the head with hammers?
More like walking under a ladder with a bag of hammers on it. Not your fault but a known risk of the action.
You’re not wrong. It’s further than that though, because there are accidental head-hammerings (if we want to get all OSHA I suppose we’d say there are head hammerings from systemic negligence, but thats the same on an individual level), but you just don’t have an accidental rape.