She Wasn’t Asking For It

And cue the 200-post thread over at Dr. B’s in
3..2..1..

I want only to talk about the meta-discussion (clearly the woman, who I had not heard of before this, was a victim). A lot of the commentary there was about whether women’s risky behaviour is unduly highlighted while men’s risky behaviour is unduly muted. Maybe that’s true. But it’s not universal (consider the focus on when politicians say things that can be misinterpreted; a lot of it is on said politician making such a mistake, not on those who are misinterpreting it. And most of the politicians I can think of who’ve done this are distinctly male).

Suppose a tragic crime occurs which is not connected with you at all (you just read it in the paper, or saw it on tv). What is there to talk about? Maybe nothing, in which case it probably just “goes away” — there’s an awful lot of tragedy in the world. Maybe it’s worthwhile to try to get in the heads of the perpetrator — try to figure out why someone would go into the tower and start sniping, or whether there was some twisted justification.

The reason I think rape and mugging cases tend not to draw that sort of discussion is we — at least I — tend to think we know why rapes or muggings would occur. So there’s like 2 minutes of discussion possible about the perpetrator (barring something unusual about the person, such as being a well known sports star). Getting into the mind of the victim is a more interesting line of thought, and I think it’s inevitable to wonder “what would or could *I* have done in that situation to get away?”

Not everything is due to men identifying with rapists, or whatever the claim is.

The problem is the rapists and murderers. Keep your eyes on the ball, people.

To get meta for a bit, I’m not really sure what can meaningfully be said about the rapists and murderers. Pretty much everyone thinks rape and murder is bad, and I don’t think anyone is arguing that stranger rapes and rape/murders are not investigated and prosecuted or that there’s some other kind of obvious public policy failure that permits those crimes to occur. It’s therefore not very surprising that discussions of crimes like these drift into discussions of the victim, even though people reasonably find those discussions to be inappropriate and/or offensive, because there’s just not that much to say on the other side of the equation.

To make this a bit more concrete, one commenter at Pandagon writes: “The point is that whenever a rape case is brought up, focus is brought to what the woman did or did not do, NOT what the guy did OR how society perpetuates rape.”

As to “what the guy did,” I’m not sure anything can meaningfully be said about that.

As to “how society perpetuates rape,” I’m equally at a loss: I don’t think stranger rapes are any less disfavored in society than bank robbery, and yet people still commit bank robbery. I don’t know how I would comment on the proposition that “society perpetuates bank robbery.” This is not to say that you couldn’t have a more particularized discussion about aspects of misogynistic violence and its social background — Catharine MacKinnon, for one, has a lot to say about that — but it seems unlikely that a particular case of stranger-rape/murder would provide an useful or interesting angle on that subject.

A bigger question is why you’re continuing to give this case any more publicity than it deserves? (which is to say “Huh?).

Some of what Malkin says deserves rebittal and comment, but this isn’t one of them. Everyone’s preaching to the choir without any effect.

Why not rebut this? Because her fans will nod in agreement, her oponents will agree with the commenter and Malkin’s profile becomes further injected into colloquoys she shouldn’t have any chance of being invited into.

This is a standard crime story. It’s horrible, hideous, and only illustrates that there are, indeed, bad people in the world. And with every piblished crime story there are those who wish to make it stand for something greater.

In the end a couple of kids did what kids sometimes do: they acted impulsively in search of a good time and then found themselves in trouble beyond anything they had ever imagined. That doesn’t mean they deserved their fate, but only that their ill-considered actions put them in harm’s way in a manner they had either never thought about or thought wouldn’t apply to them. Thisis worth about one sentence in a tabloid.

Let Malkin turn this into whatever she wishes. It ain’t and won;t be that, and for reasoned and seasoned pundits to be astonished at Malkin’s perfidy leaves me wondering why they continue to give Malkin all this attention.

The problem is not that women sometimes get drunk or go dancing or get into cars with strangers because someone threatening is following them down a dark city street. The problem is the rapists and murderers.

Suppose your underaged daughter (or son) had gone off clubbing in New York, gotten drunk, gone for a rides with a stranger, etc, and nothing terrible had happened. Would you have reprimanded your kid the next day? Would you considered they’d done something wrong and dumb? Of course you would. Would that make them responsible of they’d been a victim of a crime — would it mean they’d have had it coming? Obviously not.

From the Pandagon post: “The guy who killed Moore threw her body in the trash like it was a Kleenex. He did that because he lives in a society that endorses treating women like less than human beings but simply masturbation toys and/or baby incubators for male use.”

This is bullshit with a captial ‘B’. The guy who killed Moore wasn’t only a rapist and murderer–he had a long criminal record. Did he commit his earlier robberies because ‘he lives in a society that endorses treating passersby like ATM machines’? No — he committed all of his crimes because he just didn’t give a damn what society endorsed or condemned.

I think I agree with Slocum and alkali. Forcible stranger rape is in the “very disfavored” category. (And IMO, mixing up “date rape” and forcible rape confuses the issue–concealed carry is actually pretty effective against forcible rape by strangers.) I suppose that it is less disfavored than it used to be, but I’m inclined to think that going back to the “anyone who can get a mob together can hang a rapist” days would not be an improvement.

Since sexual predators have such a high recidivism rate, we should probably hand out Life Without Parole more often.

> I think I agree with Slocum and alkali.
> Forcible stranger rape is in the “very
> disfavored” category.

Really? At one time I was a candidate to join the very low end of the patriarchy, so I got to hear how such people (and other candidates) think when the start to speak their real minds. And while excessive amounts of rape (meaning “my wife” or “my daughter”) is disfavored, I got the impression that a bit of random rape held in reserve to ‘keep the bitches in their place’ was not an unwanted thing.

Not Really

I’ve also seen expressions of the attitude “not really” describes. Loose women were regarded as fair game because they “give it away”. It was a combination of misogyny, puritanism, and envy of the guys who got some for free. Often with a racial slant too.

I don’t think that this is a rare attitude of individual psychos at all. A lot of the guys were backsliding members of conservative churches for whom sexual orthodoxy (men not gay, women not promiscuous) was a last vestige of decency. “I’m no angel, but there are some things I’d never do”.

Daniel: going to clubs to get drunk is okay? Let’s take a moment to note that two people with, at most, 4 years of driving experience, were attempting to retrieve their car, one so sick she passed out, the other seemingly unable to find her bearings well enough to identify the street she was on. This happens thousands of times every night in Manhattan. Regardless of what happened subsequent to that moment, these two were very familiar with high risk behavior, since they were eager to endanger themselves and the hundreds of pedentrians and drivers they would pass before they made it home.

Has anyone on this thread actually watched what young people look like coming out of clubs at 4AM here? I see it almost nightly. Are y’all arguing that we need to create more ways to enable and protect idiots like this to continue this behavior? The the last thing the actress who got murdered last year said was “what are you going to do, shoot me?” We need a safe space for a person like this to what, actualize themselves into a full bore DUI expert?

“people should be allowed go out and get drunk without getting raped” /= “people should be allowed drive drunk”
are you reading this thread or just looking for a random place to vent?

Um, I was addressing Daniel’s point that the behavior of these two was entirely above reproach. Because she ended up dead, that excuses the fact that she was about to pour herself drunk into the car at 4AM?

So if she was carrying a concealed weapon, dispatched Mr. No Good to Anyone, then found her way back to the pound, and armed herself with her second deadly weapon of the night, this story would have had a happy ending? You’ve got some fucked up standard, babe.

Ray, the issue isn’t whether she should have been allowed to drive drunk, the issue is whether the fact that she was trying to drive at all showed bad judgment.

I think the thing that is so frustrating about this debate is that many seem to recognize no distinction between saying that someone has shown bad judgment and saying that that person deserves whatever terrible thing happens to him or her. I think Slocum makes the argument pretty well: you can say that someone has done something “wrong and dumb” without saying that they deserve whatever they get.

It’s pretty self-evident that the two victims in this case showed terrible judgment. This is not simply because, as Daniel says, they went out clubbing and got drunk. They attempted to drive home when they were so drunk that they were unable to stand. When they weren’t allowed to get their car, Ms. Moore left the lot and begun wandering aimlessly around an area of New York that she didn’t know at all but that she would most definitely have been able to see was completely deserted (as 12th avenue is pretty much all of the time, let alone very late at night)–at 5 AM. This is stupid, high-risk behavior, and it is so completely independent of one’s gender. The idea that to say that somehow makes one a bad feminist and an apologist for rape is offensive.

Let’s consider some of the implications of that position. If I’d been at the tow lot with Jennifer Moore and I’d told her that she ought to stay there, that it was a bad idea to go wandering around the neighborhood, would I have been apologizing for criminality? What if I were the bartender at the club and I’d told them that they’d had enough to drink? What if I were their parents and told them to drink responsibly, because it could be dangerous to be wandering around New York in the middle of the night blind drunk?

Let’s put it another way–let’s say that they’d succeeded in getting their car, driven home, and died in an accident along the way because they were driving drunk. After all, if the parking attendant had just given them their car, this could very easily have happened. Would criticizing their behavior have been out of bounds then? The fact that they were the victims of a crime doesn’t excuse their behavior, any more than their behavior excuses the crime.

I feel really silly arguing about this, because I agree with a lot of the substance of this post’s argument. There are strong misogynistic currents in our culture that need to be fought, and the “she was asking for it” response to rape is an all-too-common manifestation of those currents. But I just don’t think it does much for that cause when people make extreme, unconvincing arguments for the sake of consistency, which I think is what’s going on here.

bro. bartleby

You’ve been trolling persistently for a long time now. You (and your various aliases) are banned permanently from commenting on Crooked Timber threads. Any comments that we find will be removed immediately. We also reserve the right to use any future ridiculous comments on Cafe Press coffee mugs, t shirts and other Crooked Timber memorabilia (any action on your part to comment in spite of our banning policy shall constitute your acceptance of these terms).

Henry, you make this place suck. I’m outy. Fark off!

Because she ended up dead, that excuses the fact that she was about to pour herself drunk into the car at 4AM?

Of course, all this ignores that it’s neither illegal nor particularly immoral to be a drunk passenger, as it was her friend’s car. You know, the young woman who wasn’t murdered. Perhaps we can turn more of our moral outrage on her, since I’m sure that otherwise she’ll be singing and dancing with gleeful unconcern. Or telling a vengeful deity, “You missed!”

Even though I thought this statement was clear: Regardless of what happened subsequent to that moment, these two were very familiar with high risk behavior (meaning what happened later = bad and inexcusable, and unrelated to their present decisions, but that their present decisions were indicative of criminal intent), I better get in line, or I’ll get my progressive card revoked (Henry seems testy): rape and murder by a stranger is a very bad thing. I wish it happened to no one. And being a guns and land type, it wouldn’t really bother me if these guys got popped. Hell, if the cops just deposited him a dumpster as well, I wouldn’t have thought twice about the morality of it.

To go back to Belle’s comment: The problem is not that women sometimes get drunk.

Um, no, that actually is a problem unto itself, particularly when they get drunk enough to pass out while trying to get in a car and drive.

It’s a different problem, but, aside from the one really bad instance we saw last week, versus the far larger number of nasty things that don’t get written up that arise from the exact same circumstance, it would seem to make discussing what we consider normal or reasonable behavior worthwhile. Cause I don’t want to give blank checks to drunk 18 year olds.

And, interestingly, if we addressed that problem, fewer rapes would happen as well. An ancillary benefit at best, but we’re talking about reducing rape right? If reducing alcohol consumption across the board (men and women) by 10% resulted in a 10% drop in reported rape, would anyone here support it?

Daniel, I’m pretty sure New York is dangerous at night for men too, though I don’t have any figures.

I’m a bit confused about the relevance of the (obvious and correct) point several commenters have made about the crime rate in New York being a socially caused fact rather than a law of nature. I don’t see why this should impact whether someone’s behavior exhibits poor judgment. Isn’t prudence about reacting to the circumstances that actually exist in reality rather than those that would exist in Utopia?

Ray, I reiterate. The fact that New York is dangerous at night for women (if it is a fact) is not a physical fact, and not something that should be regarded as acceptable. There is no very great social problem with respect to the judgement of young women, but a very big social problem with respect to the levels of sex crime in New York.

Indeed. Or in New Jersey, which is apparently where the crime actually took place, after she got into a cab with the rapist (a “low-level drug dealer and pimp”) and his girlfriend and went to the motel where they were staying.

But the level of sex crime in urban America is a much stickier subject that I suspect most people don’t want to get into – is the problem that people think that “No” means “Give her another drink and ask her again?”, or that there are too many low-level drug dealers and pimps running the streets who should be in jail, and would be, if it wasn’t for that pesky 4th amendment?

Far easier to use a photogenic victim to push whatever your pet agenda is (stopping young women from partying? why on earth for?)

Daniel (in #16) “And the fact that going for rides with strangers and getting into taxis are dangerous for young unaccompanied women is neither an unalterable fact about the world, nor something that we should accept.”
Response (#19) “Daniel: going to clubs to get drunk is okay?”

The unintended implication of #19 is to make what happened to this woman into a punishment for wrongdoing. It’s that implication that fuels the rationalizations of those who tell themselves their victims were asking for trouble. That leads to people saying things like: All those who did wrong and weren’t punished escaped their fate.

This mindset makes us powerless to do anything except take actions that warrant a better fate. And that would be great if rape worked that way, but it doesn’t. Ministers rape too, but we aren’t telling girls and women that they asked for it by going to church alone.

“no one is likely to tote their pistol around from room to room in their own goddamn house while they talk with a friend”

Hey Belle, are you thinking what I’m thinking?

I don’t see why this should impact whether someone’s behavior exhibits poor judgment

The matter at issue is not whether someone’s behaviour exhibited poor judgement, but whether it makes sense to have an assessment of their judgement as a major part of our reaction to the case, as opposed to an assessment of the social factors which make some places dangerous for sex crimes.

In unrelated news, I am aware for certain of plenty of men, including police officers, who regard rape (although not under that description) as acceptable behaviour for a man who has been prick-teased, and the thing about attitudes like that is that there are a lot of borderline cases about who have a structural tendency to believe that they have been teased.

Oh, hell. I am sooooo tired of this. DO they ever publicise rape cases where it isn’t easy to take cheap shots at the victim??

dsquared has summed up the issue for me well.

The matter at issue is not whether someone’s behaviour exhibited poor judgement, but whether it makes sense to have an assessment of their judgement as a major part of our reaction to the case, as opposed to an assessment of the social factors which make some places dangerous for sex crimes.

Yes, and I think the question seems to be what constitutes “major”. Minor is OK? Where is the balance that makes you happy? I agree that some people get to the poor judgment issue too fast to be trusted….

cala: you can start here.

Spend 3 bucks and read Joan Didion

Cala has it exactly right. It’s like that scene near the beginning of Brave New World where the kids who’ve listened to the tape in their sleep who say “The Nile is the longest river” who automatically repeat it whenever prompted. You mention that a woman was out late and got raped, and automatically someone will recite a little speech about how they’re not blaming the victim, but she shouldn’t blah, blah, blah. It’s like watching a computer program run. I wish Windows offered that kind of reliability.

Acutally, a man was shot, along with two companions, while arguing with a bouncer a few weeks back. Many of you probably didn’t hear about it because it didn’t involve a white woman. The link posted was to a site written by a bouncer at a club; I did some searching for a quote he gave elsewhere, to the effect of “don’t fight with bouncers”.

So we have two examples, in the same neighborhood of two murders, one male, one female, to which much of the local reaction was ‘what did you think would happen’?

Is that not the exact evidence you were looking for?

In the very local coverage (blogs), it was intially reported only that they found her body. I was seeing ‘what was she doing wandering drunk on 12th avenue at that time’ before there was any mention of sexual violence. No one was asking what her outfit looked like.

If anybody is doubting that in the US (I can’t speak for the UK) the kinds of acquaintance-rape cases of which d^2 speaks are aggressively investigated and prosecuted nowadays, allow me to reassure you. Indeed, they represent the great majority of my sexual assault cases

Respectfully, Steve, you see the ones that get prosecuted. This isn’t a sample that is going to give you a representative picture. If you count the cars people are buying at a Ford dealership, you will reach the conclusion that people are buying a lot of Fords.

The anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday has written quite a bit on “rape-free” societies where rape rarely or never occurs, versus “rape-prone” ones where rape is frequent. (For reference, she talks about this on her website at the University of Pennsylvania as well as in her book, “A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape On Trial.”

In a nutshell, Sanday concluded that rape is far more likely to occur in societies where women are considered second-class citizens and inferior to men (true in the past for the US though much, much less true now), “real men” are supposed to be tough and aggressive, and interpersonal violence (male-on-male as well as male-on-female) is common. Rape is part and parcel of a larger pattern of violence; the American cowboy mentality bites us in the ass here.

The psychologist Neil Malamuth has also done extensive studies of rape, and he concludes that rapists, as opposed to men who don’t rape, are marked by narcissism and an acceptance of violence to get one’s way. A normal, nonviolent man would see a woman, and regardless of whether he thought she was a “tease” or out late at night dead drunk or etc., would not rape her. A rapist, on the other hand, would think he was entitled to “what was his” because she was a tease or out late at night drunk or etc.

As a point of comparison, I’ve heard rape rates are far lower in Scandinavia, also a modern Western culture but where the values are quite different.

I don’t doubt that most Americans, male and female alike, think rape is abhorrent. I also don’t doubt that our culture glorifies violence, toughness and the I’ve-got-mine mentality and that spills over to our interpersonal relations, often with tragic results.

I apologize for addressing Daniel as “David”- the godawful heat wave we’re suffering through must have warped my brain!

99: The reason Belle drew this to everyone’s attention was not that Michelle Malkin was an idiot, but that as Zuzu discovered on her weblog (where her initial point was that the case was being blown up out of proportion) there are lots of idiots.

it’s much more within my power to improve the judgement of potential victims than to change the social factors that make some places dangerous for sex crimes

Mmm, yeah, good luck with that. Potential victims are women, and of course women are so stupid that no amount of explination on our parts seems to get through to the little imbeciles. You’d think, from the way they act, that they spend most of their lives worrying about their physical safety, and they resent big brave smart guys like us condescending to them and acting like they’re simpleminded two year olds, telling them all things that they already know. Listen up, girls, wear your burquas and get those sex change operations, and you probably won’t be raped, and if you are it’s because you did something to bring it on yourself. This girl shouldn’t have been walking, and she shouldn’t have taken a cab so she sould stop walking,a nd she shouldn’t have been in New York, and she shouldn’t have been born female. It’s that simple.

And jet, thanks for that awesome analogy. Clearly, if someone is wandering around drunk at 4 am and wanders into the street, thus increasing the possibility that someone will hit her, endangering both the oncoming drivers and passengers and herself, that’s exactly the same as wandering around at 4 am forcing someone to rape and murder her! In the first case, her actions are potentially forcing someone to accidentally hit her, in the second she’s forcing someone, most unwillingly, to rape and murder and dismember her and stuff her into a trash can. Exactly the same. I see now why it’s true that the victim bears responsibility, why won’t you women just stop forcing us to violate and massacre you? Just stop!

Look on the bright side people. If Malkin gets raped, killed, and dismembered, we can find some reason to put some blame on her.

So no one’s going to criticize the NYC government, for towing her car in the first place? Instead of just writing a hefty ticket?

It’s hard to believe that her car was impeding the flow of traffic late on a weekend night. The practice of towing cars for minor infractions is often just a corrupt way of channeling money to certain towing companies.

In the best case, towing a car means the driver has to spend hours retrieving it. In the worst case, I’m sure that many people get stranded in the scary neighborhood around the impound lot, just as these two were.

i stopped reading early on, so forgive me if the point i make has already been made (as it should have been).

a) this is not the point: ” the society we live in encourages rape”. it probably isn’t even true, except possibly indirectly, and then the argument is difficult to make.

b) this is the point: “when a woman is raped, abused or killed, societal sympathies only vest in her if she can be shown to have adhered to a victorian moral code. this rule does not apply to men.”

c)this is also worth making as a point: “vesting societal sympathy in the vicitm is a crucial step towards developing a general interests in ways to reduce the incidence of male on female crime.”

having skimmed the rest, kudos to dsquared.right on both counts in 45, and both funny and right in 60.

lurker: well, as Rumsfeld tells us about Iraqi WMD or something: “as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Daniel, yes, ha ha. There is a serious point lurking, which is that this kind of story is one of the few things to appear in a newspaper which allow a practical response in people’s everyday lives, rather than a quick bloviation, however satisfying. The victim was not stupid or blameworthy to be a woman; it was however stupid and blameworthy to be very drunk late at night in a dangerous part of town. Of course she didn’t deserve what happened to her but her actions made it more likely that it would happen.

To take a parallel example, quite free, so far as I know, from sexual politics: if anyone rides a bicycle on the lanes where I live they are quite likely to be knocked down and killed by a car. Of course this is the driver’s fault if it happens, and they shouldn’t drive like that. That won’t stop me from urging people not to ride bicycles on dangerous roads. I may also campaign to make the roads safe. That’s less within my power to affect and so in some senses less urgent.

71: Most of the large clubs are located in districts that have “night regulation” parking. Often this is because they are tight up against businesses that sometimes require nighttiime delivery; mostly they are high traffic commerical areas during the day, and sweeping/cleaning happens at night (or the trucks arrive early enough to cause conflict with early morning departees — in the club world, this can be 6-10AM). Oftentimes encroaching residential units lead to massive complaints (screaming, rowdy drunks on the street late). The night regulation parking serves to push crowds off the block more quickly (cabs move more quickly, and no one has a car nearby).

A popular club, Tramps, used to have signs the size of the front door discouraging parking. And, without fail, leaving at show at 11, one would see literally a line of NYC trucks taking away every car on the block.

But none of these clubs is more than a block from easily accessible, if not cheap parking (but considering that drinks in these clubs start at $7 for water and cover is north of $20 meaning that it’s relatively affordable), typically becase of the puacity of on street parking.

NYC already heavily subsidizes out of state drivers with our on street parking availability. Tows and tickets are important sources of revenue. But to keep in the spirit of the tenor here: so you are saying writing tickets will prevent rape? That’s a policy we can all get behind.

Oh, and if that car wasn’t towed, do you think the city should have strict liability for enabling a felon (drunk driving, since as many people point out, the driver, not the victim, was the falling down and passing out drunk one)?

Andrew: I genuinely apologise for that one, but when you come up with a joke like that you’ve got to use it.

The point I was trying to make is that, for example, when we have a thread on unemployment on CT (even one based on an individual experience of poverty, like one we had a couple of years ago), nobody posts “the thing to do is wear a nice business suit and use your network of contacts and make sure you do some positive action every day”, even though that’s actually good advice for someone looking for a job. Everyone recognises that it’s a social problem that needs a social/political solution and that’s what we’re talking about. And this is generally how things go. But when something like this comes up, everything’s different and self-defence tips are now on topic. I don’t understand why that’s the case, although I am pretty sure it has something to do with teh sexisms.

Marcella,
you sure have a lousy opinion of men if you believe we either have to lock up the women or lock up the men to reduce the incidence of rape.

You misunderstand completely. There’s absolutely no doubt that there are men out there who are rapists. Just as there’s absolutely no doubt that the personal actions of women can increase or decrease their risk of becoming a rape victim.
These are immutable facts of the human condition. No moral judgement here, it’s just the way things are.

Noting that a woman’s behavior increased her risk of rape is not “blaming the victim”. It’s just acknowledging reality. And it seems that those that complain that this is unjust, do not acknowledge that any socially imposed solution, imperfect as any other human endeavor, would involve the loss of freedom to some class of people.

Of course the perfect solution would involve identifying rapists prenatally, and then placing them straight into detention upon birth. Of course, justice imposes on us the restriction that we must wait for a rape to occur first, especially since we can never know with certainty who will be a rapist. Unless of course, we consider the opinion of some whereby “all men are rapists”. This would make the solution quite clear, wouldn’t it?

From the opposite view, “all women are rape victims” and so should be “protected”. That means never allowing to leave home or always remain in the company of a male relative if they do. We have actual societies that subscribe to this formula if any would wish to study the effect of such policies. We must assume that this is an acceptable solution since all cultures are equally valid.

Personally, I think none of these solutions are just. If you agree, then you must also acknowledge that justice demands that rape can never be eliminated! And trying to do so would restrict freedoms for some innocent folks to an intolerable degree.

The imperfect system we have trys to convict and incarcerate actual rapists, which unfortuantely means that a rape must have occured.

I submit that this is the best we can do. We should do a better job of keeping these rapists in jail, but many here don’t like that solution either, based on the various social justice concerns. Another possiblity is encouraging more woman to arm thmeselves. Alas, this isn’t a popular opinion here either.

So unfortunately in the case of rape, some burden does fall on women. We as a society ask them to consider that actions have real consequences; because responsible behavior on their part will go a long why to preserve a more just society.

You can, of course, generalize this principle to everyone, since we’re all potential victims of violent crime.

Also, to those upthread who don’t feel like reading firsthand material, the lot clerk refused to release the car because they were evidently drunk, a cabbie who brought them encouraged them to wait, so there were two people (trying to do other jobs at the time) who tried to intervene.

99,

Sure, some of the reasons you gave for towing a car are valid (when a car is actually blocking something), but others aren’t.

Anyway, thinking about it some more, my point is that the best policy response is to make it easier for young people to go out clubbing. Why were they driving into the City in the first place? Probably because there’s no mass transit, there’s no local clubs, the local clubs enforce the drinking age more strictly, and so on.

PS, thanks for the link. It seems the Daily News has better coverage of this story than the NY Times.

This all reminds me of our former naive belief that being an astronaut was not a dangerous job. The first launches went so well (as far as we knew) that we forgot just what exactly was involved.

Put yourself in the predator’s shoes for a minute- where would you go to hunt? Check, check, and double-check.

But frankly, I’m more scared of Wall Street than I am of the sexual predators of Manhattan. Wall Street depends on putting hundreds of millions of Americans into wage slavery, or worse, creating the environment in which social ills incubate.

It is no wonder to me that among respondents many odd opinions will be found. It is their way, probably mistaken, of saying they think they have bigger problems than the rape of a stranger.

Anyway, thinking about it some more, my point is that the best policy response is to make it easier for young people to go out clubbing. Why were they driving into the City in the first place? Probably because there’s no mass transit, there’s no local clubs, the local clubs enforce the drinking age more strictly, and so on.

Ragout, there is tons of mass transit in the New York metropolitan area. The subway and city buses run all night. Granted, the commuter trains don’t, but one could get a cab to Grand Central or Penn Station and wait for the first train in a well-lit area patroled by police officers. Or use a cell phone to call a car service. Or get a hotel room. I’m not surprised many teens and college students don’t think of these things, but it’s not as if the options aren’t there.

It may be easier for some kids to go clubbing in New York because their local clubs enforce the drinking age, but I don’t see an easy solution. Should a club increase its liability by admitting underage locals? Seems like a big risk for them. Besides, the point of our ridiculously high drinking age is to cut down on drunk driving. In the long run, I think there would be more deaths and injuries if the cops winked at underage drinking in local clubs than we have among the smaller number of kids who come into the city. But I admit I have no statistics, so that’s just speculation.

I very much enjoy going clubbing and staying out until well past 4 in the morning in NYC. I do this maybe once every month or two. I think it’s been good for me.

Pointing out that their behavior that night is nothing a young person should emulate is not blaming them for the events at the end of the evening.

in that case, may I point out, non-judgementally, that you’re coming over as one hell of a sexist dickhead here.

Daniel: whoa! That’s some fancy ad hom. Did you get that from Judith Butler? Since we are doing College Freshman (oops, First Year) Spot the Oppressor here, may I ask how you legitimate this observation? After all, you are on the Wrong Team. Or is it you have Overcome Your Inherent Failings, and want to Enlighten Me?

You must of been one of those hug-dispensing, grope-scoring SNAGs. Sweet talkin’ the ladies about how down you were trying to fight the patriarchy, even though you it is was impossible in theory, but were still a Pro-feminist Guy. Maybe played a folk song before trying to get in their pants.

It took awhile, but we got there — I got tired of all these posts, but I knew someone would finally deliver. We can construct a corollary to Godwin’s Law. Call it Dworkin’s Law. Except under Godwin’s Law, declaring someone you disagree a Nazi is seen as a rhetorical failure. I doubt the shining lights of logic at work here feel the same way about accusing strangers or rape.