On protections against bad behavior
How I think about reducing my risk of being hit as a pedestrian and being raped, and how that's simultaneously similar to and different from addressing threats of foreign hostility
Kathleen Stock has an excellent new piece out on her Substack.
It’s worth reading in its entirety, but I’d like to dive more deeply into one specific point she made:
A related area in which the liberal-humanist vision misleads feminists is in arguments about who, exactly, is expected to change their behaviours in female-hostile environments. Many feminists get understandably riled at the suggestion that women should modify their behaviour or dress in environments where violent males tend to be, in order to reduce risk to themselves. Telling women not to wear sexually revealing clothes or to walk in dark, lonely places late at night is interpreted by feminists as victim-blaming. And sometimes it’s exactly that. There’s a misogynist tendency to suggest that assaults on women are somehow their own fault. But it’s not always victim-blaming. Sometimes, I’m sorry to report, it’s just very good advice, given the kind of society we live in.
To this, it’s replied that it isn’t women’s moral responsibility to change these behaviours and so limit their own freedoms. It’s the responsibility of violent men to stop being violent. But this reply misses the point. There need be nothing moralised about advice to women to reduce their risk, and no blame of them need be implied either way. Interpreted a different way, the advice is simply prudent, aimed at reducing risk for women in the kind of world in which we actually live - the one where there are hulking great men that are stronger than you, revved up on testosterone, who don’t give a shit about your freedom to wear practically nothing on a night out, or your consent either for that matter.
I completely agree with Stock on this count. While it’s unfortunate that we live in a world where women have to worry about being raped/sexually assaulted, and we can campaign for specific policies that may decrease the rates of these heinous crimes, we’re never going to eliminate the risk of these outcomes. To make a comparison to a less emotionally charged situation, consider instead how you protect yourself as a pedestrian. Suppose you’re crossing a busy street, and a “walk” sign is giving you the right of way along a crosswalk. But it’s an area with few pedestrians, and many cars are accustomed to turning right1 on a red light without checking for pedestrians crossing. It’s unfortunate that drivers don’t always check crosswalks and are often distracted, but until we can count on fully autonomous vehicles not to hit pedestrians, we have to protect ourselves in these imperfect situations. Thus, it’d be reasonable to either wait for the line of cars turning right to clear or to discern that the driver about to turn right sees you and will wait for you to cross. It’s not fair that pedestrians have to spend more time waiting to cross because of the risk of distracted drivers, but I’d rather spend 30 seconds waiting than risk a broken leg or an even worse injury. (And we’re much likelier to get fully autonomous vehicles within the next few decades than we are to eliminate all rape and sexual assault!)
Similarly, it’s very unfortunate that some men still choose to rape and sexually assault women. But as long as such bad behavior exists, the most we can do in the short-term is reduce our risk of being exposed to it, and the most we can do in the long-term is try to develop policies and technological advances2 that reduce its prevalence but still don’t eliminate it. There is still, of course, a risk-benefit tradeoff to be made. Avoiding all night-time activities for fear of rape, for instance, is overkill. And some women will either have higher risk tolerances or obtain more positive utility from engaging in riskier activities than others, so reasonable people can choose different individual tradeoffs. But choosing certain actions in response to male misbehavior doesn’t condone that behavior. It’s just a way of surviving in the unjust world where we actually live, not an imaginary perfect world we have no realistic chance of achieving.
Speaking of the unjust world where we live, I’d like to transition to some broader ramifications of this general concept. I don’t want to make too many object-level comments here about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, because my knowledge of eastern European geopolitics is insufficient to add anything of substance to the discussions of how the war started, who’s at fault, and what the likely final outcome is. I instead want to discuss how protecting oneself in the face of others’ misbehavior can give us a general strategy for how to handle a foreign country that either threatens to or actually does behave badly.
Reducing one’s risk of being raped by a stranger/hit by a car and reducing the risk of one’s country being harmed by a foreign adversary are indeed different in many ways. But the most salient way in which they differ is that the former is a one-time encounter, whereas the latter is usually an iterated series of encounters. Going out with a friend in an unfamiliar neighborhood (instead of going alone) isn’t going to change your probability of being raped by a stranger the next time you go out, but arming up in response to a foreign adversary’s aggression could have all kinds of unpredictable higher-order effects. Investing in powerful weapons could make your adversary back off in an acute conflict, but they may very well come back in a year or two with weapons even more powerful than the ones you developed. Deploying crippling sanctions could put enough pressure on other elites residing in the same country to either oust the country’s leader or convince him/her to reverse course. But meanwhile, the sanctions could drive the adversary into the arms of an even more threatening rival and strengthen their relationship with each other. (Ok, maybe we’re getting a little too close to the object level questions here.)
Perhaps I’m just repeating some basic fundamentals of international relations that undergrads learn in their first IR class. But so many official responses are focused on punishing people deemed to be on Putin’s side rather than helping the Ukrainians defend themselves, let alone reach some sort of peaceful resolution. Maybe the real issue is that these organizations have internalized the “silence is violence” message we’ve been hearing so much over the last two years, and they can’t do anything meaningful to help the Ukrainians, so they flail about and try to signal their support in the only way they know how. Alternatively, maybe the businesses I highlighted in the links are just trying to avoid getting hit with fines, or they think that banning RT will bring them positive publicity and thus more customers. But what I do know is that the average person complaining about Putin won’t do anything more for the Ukrainian people than complaining about how awful rapists are will do for rape survivors. And I also suspect that the ultimate outcome of the war will require the Ukrainians to make sacrifices that might be unfair in the sense that they don’t deserve to have to give anything up for their own autonomy. But when you live in the real world with a neighbor who has a history of not respecting your right to self-determination, sometimes you have to find ways to make the most of your life amidst the unfairness.
I’m assuming you’re in a country where cars drive on the right side of the road.
I’m worried that some readers might assume that such technological advances would need to be either extremely advanced or dystopian, but they don’t have to be! Consider the evidence that shows that increased street lighting reduces crime.