Hey, I'm totally late to this one, just saw this, waking a dead thread, blah blah my bad.
I hear this analogy quite a lot, "lassie walking alone" versus "you wouldn't leave your door unlocked" and it bothers me because it seems to me, people are equating "being in possession of a vagina" with "being in possession of valuables and not taking good enough care of them".
What I
don't hear, interestingly enough, is a comparison between like for like - a lassie getting assaulted while walking 'alone and walking in a dangerous or deserted area' and a guy getting jumped on his way to the 24 hr garage for a pack of fags, say.
Circumstantial evidence and anecdotes-ahoy alert, but: when I lived in halls in Maryhill (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth) it was quite frequent to hear that some poor bloke had been jumped on his way up the road the night before. And everyone's attitude was, 'what a wee shame, guy is going about minding his own business and
this happens'. It certainly wasn't "well, pfft, he was practically asking for it, wandering about at night ON HIS OWN".
Which suggests that in a lot of people's minds it's perfectly acceptable for
half the population to be taking 'risky' behaviour - but not the other half, so if they do it and anything bad happens, it's (to a greater or lesser extent) their own fault. And that's a double standard. Bad things can happen to
anyone on their way home from a club/ to the shops/ whatever.
I dunno, maybe people in general are less comfortable with the idea of sexual violence than, you know,
common or garden violence
, and so want to make out it was somehow less bad because, 'well, if she hadn't been there it wouldn't have happened to her, like?'
