The theft of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities’ personal photos has prompted a now-predictable online discussion about victim-blaming, with self-appointed moralists condemning Lawrence for taking nude or sexually-explicit pictures in the first place and her defenders objecting to any discussion of taking reasonable precautions against becoming a victim. It’s a repeat of the societal conversations we have around rape, and while I get it, it wears me down.
The Huffington Post posted a tweet from Farhad Manjoo, “I’ve never heard anyone respond to financial hacking by saying, Just don’t use online banking. That’s what you get for using credit cards.”
But the truth is that we blame victims—of crime, of misfortune—all the time, blaming them for risky behavior, for bad one-off decisions, even as we ignore how many risks we take ourselves, or how many of our own stupid decisions turn out well when they might just as easily have been deadly.
And here’s a test case: If you hear that someone not wearing a helmet was killed in a bike accident, or not wearing his seat belt was killed in a car crash, or texting while walking was hit by a car, if you learn that someone wearing expensive jewelry, talking on the phone, and walking alone late at night was mugged, and some part of you doesn’t think “he was asking for it,” then you’re a better person than most of your countrymen. What else is the Darwin Awards if not a celebration of the stupid getting what they deserve and eliminating their genes from our collective pool? And yet, I’ve done every single one of those things above once or twice and never thought of myself as particularly deserving of death or violent attack.
This phenomenon is on clear display every time a tragedy happens involving children, when there is an inevitable outpouring of online condemnation towards the parents, only some of whom committed real acts of negligence or recklessness. Perhaps heaping blame is a kind of subconscious forking of the evil eye, which assures us that because “I would never do ___, I need never worry about that kind of tragedy befalling me.” And perhaps I notice it because I’m all too conscious of the many times that—exhausted, unthinking, distracted—I’ve been lucky and possible disaster has been averted.
When 3-day-old Howard Nicholson Jr. was killed by the family dog in 2012 while he was sitting in his baby carrier on the floor of his home, I recall people said of the parents, “What were they thinking leaving a baby on the floor with a dog? With that kind of negligence, they deserved to lose their child.” I don’t know what the parents were thinking, but I know that the day we brought our 3-day-old son home from the hospital—following a protracted labor and a difficult delivery—we were almost drunk with exhaustion. We’re lucky we weren’t in a car accident.
The phenomenon is all the more potent when it involves female sexuality in any form because our attitudes are so toxic and contradictory, so filled with terror at the idea of women as autonomous beings with sexual independence. It becomes nearly impossible not to be forced by the absurdities of internet rhetoric into one camp or another, so that any discussion of legitimate safety precautions ends up warping into victim-blaming and slut-shaming, whereby we put the onus on girls not boys, women not men, to prevent rape. I have no problem with the feminist slogan that the best way to stop rape is to stop rapists from raping. But somehow some way we have to get beyond the false dichotomy of the current discussion. No, you aren’t asking for it, but yes, there are some things we can all do to lessen our chances of becoming victims.
So in my daily life and in my own home, this is how I’d like to raise my boys:
1) “There but for the grace of God go I” (or its humanist analog). Put empathy over rush to judgment, not just to be a better person, but because it’ll make you happier in your own life. Even if you were to do everything right in your life, take every possible precaution, you might still fall victim to crime or misfortune, accident or attack, violence or rape. But remember that you’re not going to do everything right, always, because no one can, and that doesn’t mean you deserve the bad things life may hand you, nor does anyone else.
2) At the same time, the world is, and always will be, full of dangers and dangerous people, so try to keep your eyes open to the risks you face and take reasonable precautions. Do wear your helmet and seat belt. Don’t walk and text. Don’t walk home late at night with a wad of cash and your ears stuffed with earbuds. Don’t get so inebriated you lose control of yourself. And yeah, (with a few notable exceptions), there’s absolutely nothing wrong or immoral with sexting, but since there’s always the chance that your intimate self could end up online, make sure you’ve considered the possible outcomes first.
The Huffington Post posted a tweet from Farhad Manjoo, “I’ve never heard anyone respond to financial hacking by saying, Just don’t use online banking. That’s what you get for using credit cards.”
But the truth is that we blame victims—of crime, of misfortune—all the time, blaming them for risky behavior, for bad one-off decisions, even as we ignore how many risks we take ourselves, or how many of our own stupid decisions turn out well when they might just as easily have been deadly.
And here’s a test case: If you hear that someone not wearing a helmet was killed in a bike accident, or not wearing his seat belt was killed in a car crash, or texting while walking was hit by a car, if you learn that someone wearing expensive jewelry, talking on the phone, and walking alone late at night was mugged, and some part of you doesn’t think “he was asking for it,” then you’re a better person than most of your countrymen. What else is the Darwin Awards if not a celebration of the stupid getting what they deserve and eliminating their genes from our collective pool? And yet, I’ve done every single one of those things above once or twice and never thought of myself as particularly deserving of death or violent attack.
This phenomenon is on clear display every time a tragedy happens involving children, when there is an inevitable outpouring of online condemnation towards the parents, only some of whom committed real acts of negligence or recklessness. Perhaps heaping blame is a kind of subconscious forking of the evil eye, which assures us that because “I would never do ___, I need never worry about that kind of tragedy befalling me.” And perhaps I notice it because I’m all too conscious of the many times that—exhausted, unthinking, distracted—I’ve been lucky and possible disaster has been averted.
When 3-day-old Howard Nicholson Jr. was killed by the family dog in 2012 while he was sitting in his baby carrier on the floor of his home, I recall people said of the parents, “What were they thinking leaving a baby on the floor with a dog? With that kind of negligence, they deserved to lose their child.” I don’t know what the parents were thinking, but I know that the day we brought our 3-day-old son home from the hospital—following a protracted labor and a difficult delivery—we were almost drunk with exhaustion. We’re lucky we weren’t in a car accident.
The phenomenon is all the more potent when it involves female sexuality in any form because our attitudes are so toxic and contradictory, so filled with terror at the idea of women as autonomous beings with sexual independence. It becomes nearly impossible not to be forced by the absurdities of internet rhetoric into one camp or another, so that any discussion of legitimate safety precautions ends up warping into victim-blaming and slut-shaming, whereby we put the onus on girls not boys, women not men, to prevent rape. I have no problem with the feminist slogan that the best way to stop rape is to stop rapists from raping. But somehow some way we have to get beyond the false dichotomy of the current discussion. No, you aren’t asking for it, but yes, there are some things we can all do to lessen our chances of becoming victims.
So in my daily life and in my own home, this is how I’d like to raise my boys:
1) “There but for the grace of God go I” (or its humanist analog). Put empathy over rush to judgment, not just to be a better person, but because it’ll make you happier in your own life. Even if you were to do everything right in your life, take every possible precaution, you might still fall victim to crime or misfortune, accident or attack, violence or rape. But remember that you’re not going to do everything right, always, because no one can, and that doesn’t mean you deserve the bad things life may hand you, nor does anyone else.
2) At the same time, the world is, and always will be, full of dangers and dangerous people, so try to keep your eyes open to the risks you face and take reasonable precautions. Do wear your helmet and seat belt. Don’t walk and text. Don’t walk home late at night with a wad of cash and your ears stuffed with earbuds. Don’t get so inebriated you lose control of yourself. And yeah, (with a few notable exceptions), there’s absolutely nothing wrong or immoral with sexting, but since there’s always the chance that your intimate self could end up online, make sure you’ve considered the possible outcomes first.
Comments
Post a Comment