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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27720 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.

Something's not adding up here.

Suppose we have a rape victim who says this. Then, regarding the time she was raped, she would prefer it if she had died instead.

But she can replicate the effect of having died back then by simply committing suicide now. But she doesn't - she chooses to keep living instead. So it seems that her revealed preference is that she actually doesn't want to have died back then, because she rejects the necessary consequences of that choice.

I certainly believe there are fates worse than death. But I also think that in the majority of cases where people say "rape is worse than death", it's just hyperbolic social signalling rather than a genuinely held conviction.

Suppose we have a rape victim who says this. Then, regarding the time she was raped, she would prefer it if she had died instead. But she can replicate the effect of having died back then by simply committing suicide now. But she doesn't - she chooses to keep living instead. So it seems that her revealed preference is that she actually doesn't want to have died back then, because she rejects the necessary consequences of that choice.

You're missing something. There are three separate states being talked about here.

(1) the anguish of mentally-anticipating the pain of being raped.

(2) the in-the-moment physical experience of being raped.

(3) the mental anguish experienced in the wake of being raped, through recollections, PTSD, etc.

Each of these three is a separate experience, all tied to the concept of "being raped." A rape victim who says they wish the had died instead of being raped may well be saying that, now knowing what (2) and (3) are like, she would have preferred to never go through them and die instead without having had those experiences. But, having gone through them, dying now would not retroactively alleviate the anguish that has been already experienced.

But she can replicate the effect of having died back then by simply committing suicide now.

Regardless of whether your conclusion is right, it doesn't follow from this argument. Even to someone for whom rape is worse than death, rape+death can be (and likely is) still worse than rape-without-death.

hyperbolic social signalling

I want to believe this, but I didn't even expect the "bear" answer to be popular in the context of signalling, so I'm clearly not modeling people correctly ... if there are people who would answer "bear" as some weird rhetorical point, couldn't there be people who would decide "bear" in real life too? I'm imagining a woman hiking alone in a canyon (unprepared for any sort of combat), when a male hiker catching up to her shouts that the park rangers got a report of a bear further down the trail ... but I'm trying to imagine the woman then breaking into a run away from the man and toward the bear, and I just can't seem to do it, not without adding a bunch of assumptions that weren't in the viral question.

I think it's pretty difficult to construct a realistic hypothetical on which to test intuitions. Yours doesn't really work because the woman is choosing between an actual man and a report of a bear (by the man), which is a very different comparison.

That's a very good point ... but doesn't that flaw make my man-vs-potential-bear scenario as favorable as possible toward not choosing "man"? If we imagine instead that our hiker first saw the bear herself and turned around, and then encountered a man in between her and the trailhead, it feels even wilder to imagine her turning around a second time and taking her chances with the actual-bear after all.

that flaw make my man-vs-potential-bear scenario as favorable as possible toward not choosing "man"

Yes, that was my concern, I can definitely imagine a woman coming to the conclusion that a man making that claim was trying to trick her and steering clear. But I think your updated hypothetical is better, and I agree that very few if any would run towards the bear. A sight of an actual bear would act on someone at an instinctual level in a way that the word "bear" in a Twitter poll would not.

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