An informal poll about attitudes - REVISED

[unixronin]

Caution:  May be inflammatory.

Just for the sake of possibly-morbid curiosity:  I direct you to this article that perspicuity pointed out to me elsewhere.  Please go and read it.  Particularly the beginning.

Now, please answer only one poll.  First up, asking my readers of the feminine persuasion here:

[Poll #1472271]

For my chromosomally heterogeneous readers, I offer the following alternate poll with your own seven eight choices:

[Poll #1472272]

My personal feeling is that if you regard every male as a probable rapist lacking only the opportunity, I want some way to know in advance, because if the very first thought that goes through a woman's head is, "Is that man going to try to rape me?", I don't even want to start a conversation.  I find the whole attitude insulting, to say the least.  It's way too high a disadvantage to start out having to first of all convince someone that you're not planning to rape or murder them, and if I knew in advance that I was going to be up against that, I'd move on immediately to talk to someone saner.  I don't know how people who approach the world with that kind of level of fear every day can even function, but I do believe that it's not my responsibility to walk on eggshells everywhere I go, just to avoid triggering someone else's paranoia.

(Heh.  I just discovered I have to answer both polls to be able to see the results of my own poll.  Pretty obviously, so does everyone else.  Please note I am RESUBMITTING to add a "Just show me the results" entry to each poll.  If you already voted, this means your vote will be lost.  Feel free to vote again.  We apologize for the confusion.)

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. I hate NYC. The one time I was in NYC on foot, I could feel the crazy in the air. I don't go back to NYC if I can avoid it, and so far I've always been able to avoid it.

Potential threats, yes. But IMHO there's a difference between scanning for potential threats and assuming that everyone you meet is a threat until proven otherwise.

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet. (http://usmilitary.about.com/od/militaryhumor/a/gunrules.htm)

You could do worse.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Point. :)

I do observe, though, that it's not necessarily the most functional way to approach having or developing a social life.

[databeast.livejournal.com]

haha! bastard! You beat me to it!

Personally, I felt insulted by her insinuation that men don't consistently feel a paranoia that we may be called to action at any time by the actions of random nutbags; indeed, it is the constant paranoid whinnyings of harridan's like her that remind all well-meaning males that they may be AT ANY TIME! (oh noess!) be called upon to defend women from our fellows.

It's that fine line between 'readiness' and 'paranoia': one is enabling and fulfilling, allowing people to live without fear, the other is just fear given a programmatic output.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

How is that different? Isn't the first step of scanning for a potential threat to assume that everyone you meet is a threat until proven otherwise? Isn't it a process of elimination, not inclusion?

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

There are a great deal of different attitudes to this. What follows is mine. It works for me and has a good track record of working for me. Your mileage will probably vary.

Scanning for a potential threat is just like scanning for anything else. You first learn what traits tend to accompany what you’re looking for. You look for those traits. When you find things that hit those traits, you pay close attention to them and don’t allow them near you unless you’ve proven they’re not actually this thing you’re afraid of.

Consider, for instance, a soldier walking a patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan. They know suicide bombers exist. They also know the suicide bombers are typically young men from outside Iraq who are wearing unusually baggy clothing. If a young man with a Saudi accent wearing baggy clothes comes near to the soldier, the soldier will probably tell him to stand his ground and start disrobing. But if a young girl with a Sadr City accent approaches, the soldier will probably let her approach. After all, if he treats her like she's a threat, she might run off. If he treats her nicely, she might tell him where an ied is planted and thus save his life.

The same logic applies to scanning a crowd for threats. You need to know the clear warning signs, and you need to react quickly to them. You also need to be approachable by others, because 97% of people aren't sociopaths, and they're your best early warning system for when things are going wrong.

[databeast.livejournal.com]

hear hear on the 'other people are your best early warning system'.

I long ago realized that I just don't have the mental multitasking ability to process every last detail in my environment for meaning, but the people around me will pull a different subset of it, and pre-process it for me.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Actually, no, I don't see it that way. Unless threats outnumber non-threats, it is more efficient to identify the threats among the non-threat majority than to eliminate the non-threats. (And if threats even come close to matching the number of non-threats, you probably shouldn't go out at all — though there are exceptions to this rule. See below.)

Consider this reasoning for a moment:
1. I am very seldom attacked. Therefore the majority of people are not tangible threats.
2. Those people who are threats are therefore a minority that differs from the majority.
3. Since I cannot detect internal motivation, I have to go by behavior. But if the internal motivation of the actual threats is different from the majority, then their behavior may be as well. Therefore I may be able to identify them by their atypical behavior, which will stand out from the norm.
4. Not all atypical behaviors are harmful or threatening. Therefore when I detect someone behaving atypically, I must assess whether that behavior differs in a threatening way.

I probably cannot detect ALL threats this way, because some threats may not be identifiable by their actions. But if I have identified and avoided a number of visibly identifiable threats without encountering a non-identifiable threat, it is probably reasonable to infer that the number of non-identifiable threats is small compared to the number of identifiable threats, which is in turn small compared to the general population. Hence if I avoid the identifiable threats, I have in all probability avoided a large majority of all threats; and I cannot screen out the non-identifiable threats in the first place.

It doesn't always work, of course. Sometimes you DO run into an unidentifiable threat. The driver who left-turned into me across a divided expressway in 1999 was not in a turn lane, did not slow down, did not signal a turn, and in fact gave no visible indication whatsoever that she was about to turn until she turned. It being about twenty minutes after sundown, I could not see where she was looking. When the threat finally became apparent, I only had maybe a second and a half in which to react and evade, and that wasn't enough.

(I note, by the way, that this specific situation — a motorcyclist sharing the road with other traffic — is a case in which the population is inverted, and there are so many other drivers who are thoughtless, simply inattentive, or even actively malicious that the only prudent strategy is to consider ALL other vehicles on the road as potential threats. But in this case, it is not cost-effective to try to screen out the ones that are not threats; you simply avoid them all as though they were all threats, and continually form updated escape plans. A vehicle that turns out not to be a threat doesn't cost you anything.)

No strategy is perfect. But as long as the proportion of actual threats in the population is small, I find looking for the odd-ones-out that behave differently from the majority to be much more efficient — and much less mentally demanding — than screening every member of the majority to see that they really aren't threats. The greater the margin by which non-threats outnumber threats, the more efficient it is.

(This is why concealed carry has been found to be a more effective deterrent to crime than open carry, even when only a very small percentage of people carry. Criminals can easily identify the people who are carrying openly, and avoid them. But they can't easily identify the ones who carry concealed, and the more of those there are, the higher the risk of getting it wrong, even if the absolute number is still small. Criminals turn out to be very risk-averse. A National Institute of Justice study in the late 90s, surveyed about 2000 convicted felons in Federal prisons, of whom more than 90% stated that on one or more occasions, they had decided against committing a crime merely because they thought it was possible their intended victim might be armed.)

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

One thing to be said in the favor of our original Paranoid Woman -- talking to strangers *is* unusual behavior in our modern urban setting. If a stranger starts talking to me, my alert level goes up several notches.

[fruitylips.livejournal.com]

Is it? People talk to me pretty regularly when I'm out and about.

OTOH, I appear to exude a strong 'knows where he's going' vibe since a lot of those are people asking me for directions.

When someone finally stabs me, I suppose at least I'll know how to get to the hospital ;-)

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Further comment -- we tend to gloss over the difference between "all strangers are dangerous" and "all men are rapists" in this kind of discussion.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

The human brain does a pretty good job of sorting out things that are "different" -- which means that 90% of that process of elimination happens without any conscious thought, even if you are aware of your surroundings and operating in "condition yellow." It's somewhat like driving the freeway, where you don't pay attention to the traffic going the other way until something unusual happens over there.

[ariyanakylstram.livejournal.com]

Hey, as a motorcyclist we're taught to assume every car is out to hit us until proven otherwise. How is it that much different?

Really?

I don't see you getting your hackles up at being a driver who is probably watched carefully by that bicyclist over there, or that motorcyclist over in that lane, or that mother with a stroller who wants to make sure you won't run her and her baby over.

It's part of what we do.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Hey, Wife is always surprised when I recognize a neighbor driving a car when we are out walking. As far as she is concerned, cars are threats. Threats don't contain neighbors waving "Hi" . . .

(I don't tell her that I mainly look at faces to try to judge the threat level.)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Partly, I know that the risk ratio of drivers who are simply inattentive or unobservant is more like one in two or one in three than, say, one in a hundred or a thousand. And in that situation, specific malice is not required — a moment's inattention is all it takes. You know that as well as I do. From the other side, when I'm driving a car and I see a cyclist or motorcyclist, I know he or she has due cause for caution, and I allow extra room. If at all possible, I won't pass a cyclist until I have room to swing wide, for example.

This doesn't — IMHO — really transfer to the question of rape/assault/robbery, because you don't just accidentally rape someone because your attention wandered for a moment. (Potential South Park treatments aside. "BAD cock! ...Sorry about that.")

[ariyanakylstram.livejournal.com]

actually, given all the commentary there's been about how rape is usually not due to strangers, but acquaintances or even friends...

for the record, I *am* part of the statistic.

and the person responsible was one of my lovers at the time, who assumed everything was OK when it wasn't, and who, if he'd been paying better attention, probably would never have gone there.

so your attention argument rather falls flat with me.

that's why they call is "date rape".

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

actually, given all the commentary there's been about how rape is usually not due to strangers, but acquaintances or even friends...

Yuip, someone else poited that out. It's not just that she's crossed the line into paranoia, the people she's paranoid about aren't even the main threat.

for the record, I *am* part of the statistic.

and the person responsible was one of my lovers at the time, who assumed everything was OK when it wasn't, and who, if he'd been paying better attention, probably would never have gone there.

OK, that's not quite what I meant. I don't wish to sound insensitive or belittle it at all, but extending "caution among strangers on the street" to date rape by a current lover is just a totally different situation, to the point that I don't think you can take anything from one and meaningfully apply it to the other, beyond the concept that no means no and stop means stop. (And at that, frankly, there's the "no means no, except when it means 'yes but persuade me more first'" trap. And women wonder why men are sometimes confused.) I particularly shy away from anything involving the term "date rape" because as currently widely defined in practice, if a woman consents at the time but changes her mind later, it retroactively becomes date rape. That way lies madness.

Let me ask you this, if I might: Do you think it was his intent to rape you?


I would put it this way: I fully agree that it is possible to commit "date rape" through a misunderstanding of intent or a failure of communication, certainly. But outside of that, I do not think it is possible to commit rape, date or otherwise, by accident. Regardless of the motivation behind the act, it's a pretty difficult act to commit without direct intention to do so, especially if the other party is actively resisting. Just like a gun doesn't leap up off the table on its own and randomly shoot someone without someone's finger being on the trigger, a cock doesn't just spring out of some guy's pants and rape a passing woman because its owner wasn't paying attention for a moment. It requires intent and direct conscious action on the part of its owner.

This is what I meant about the infeasibility of rape-via-momentary-inattention. It just doesn't work that way. (Hell, many rapists don't succeed when actively trying and using violence to aid the attempt.)

[ariyanakylstram.livejournal.com]

I am not going to discuss this any further. It is completely out of line for you to dissect that experience.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I'm not trying to dissect anyone's experience. But I point out that you brought it up.

Now you say it's out of bounds to discuss your own point? Then perhaps you shouldn't have introduced it into the discussion.