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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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This being said, it does seem wise to counsel young men to not get themselves involved in ethically or morally ambiguous or murky sexual situations.

There are essentially two points being made here.

a) Moran says

If she’s an upset, needy person and you [expletive] her and then the rumor starts going around school, she might need to, for the defense of her reputation, say, “He raped me.”

The word "need" there shows a mindset that I normally see from Far Eastern shame cultures, where it's considered socially acceptable to commit crimes to cover dishonour as long as it winds up with you getting away with it. Here the girl doesn't want the true reputation of being a girl who gets drunk and sleeps with strangers, so she does something far worse - slander at the very least, quite likely perjury - but this is something she "need[s] to" do because it leads to her looking better in the eyes of society. No. This is evil behaviour and shouldn't be excused.

b) The point of the analogy to wearing revealing clothing is that there's a difference between positional and absolute goods: if you get everyone an absolute good, everyone is better off, but if you get everyone a positional good, that's wasted effort because only relative quantities of it matter. Wear less-revealing clothes as a society and the (rare) marauding rapists consider more skin covered to still be "asking for it". Give everyone a year-12 education and the bar simply rises to "do you have a tertiary education".

Londondare is (AIUI) saying that "avoid situations where you might draw the Eye of Sauron" is a positional good; the Eye of Sauron can and will target a finite number of men, so avoiding its gaze merely causes someone else to bear it instead, and telling everyone to avoid its gaze won't achieve anything (the Eye will merely lower the bar for what's objectionable).

Of course, then you get into the question of "is it better if there are more or less drunk hookups". I'm leaning toward "more" if only because romance is good and necessary and drunk hookups probably help somewhat with starting relationships (assuming neither party's cheating), but there's legitimate room for disagreement on that.

Here the girl doesn't want the true reputation of being a girl who gets drunk and sleeps with strangers, so she does something far worse - slander at the very least, quite likely perjury - but this is something she "need[s] to" do because it leads to her looking better in the eyes of society. No. This is evil behaviour and shouldn't be excused.

I mean, consent is murky when you are drunk.

Were they both equally drunk? If they weren't, did she deliberately get drunk in order to sleep with someone at the party? Was the guy mostly sober and deliberately targeting drunk women? What are the facts around this? It is possible that the guy is an asshole; it might even be that he is deliberately predatory and at best in a rather dark grey area.

He is at best...a little careless, and at worst a predator and genuine rapist. Guy's not a Boy Scout, but he's also not necessarily an evil rapist. Using the law to call this guy a "rapist" seems...disproportionate, there are a lot of legal ways to be a predator/asshole/piece of shit.

However, talking about "the defense of her reputation"...seems to imply an interesting culture, being charitable. Basically someone in a shitty situation who will face genuine victimization for getting a reputation as a "slut" and as such winds up getting a guy who's maybe half innocent tarred and feathered to save her own hide. Maybe if you're in high school and moving isn't exactly a live option, or if your family's going to honor kill you or something, that could be pardonable. Other than that I agree with you, more or less.

TL;DR doing this to go after assholes/rapists is a grey area and disproportionate unless he's actually a rapist, not just an asshole engaging in legal assholery. Doing it to defend your reputation is a shitbag move if you're a Westerner.