We have a legal system in place for a reason. And if she claims rape and files a police report then it's not up to HR or you and me to go play detective

This theory falls apart with us being a society, however. We need to evaluate, think and talk about it because that's how we can grow as a society.

It's neither easy nor quick though, I expect this discussion to continue for the foreseeable future.

It (was) fairly okay in San Francisco. There was even a hubbub about how nudist men were taking over a shiny new parklet a few years back. The city passed an ordinance, but I don't think any of them were too worried about getting raped.

(Note: You moved the goalpost from "safe from rape" to "is it okay".)

I noticed that too. Maybe the correct point to make is this: how is wandering the streets (almost) naked, or with the most provocative choice of clothing one could make, not considered in itself sexual harassment?

> Mariah asked him to come to her room to move some luggage; when he got there, she was allegedly wearing a see-through negligee that was open

Thank you for stating this idea so perfectly.

Firstly, I want to thank you for publicly sharing your opinion and bringing nuance to a complicated and difficult topic.

But secondly, how did we get to the point where we must first give out group identity credentials in order to be taken seriously in a discussion? Shouldn't the actual meat of what a person says hold greater weight than the group(s) that a person identifies with?

I've been noticing this trend a lot lately -- articles in, say, The Atlantic of the type of 'hold on, is this what feminism should be?' -- but always prefaced by the author first identifying as a woman, perhaps to insulate from criticism.

Please note that this is no way intended as a criticism of you. I find myself doing the exact same thing (prefacing comments with snippets of my bio) -- it just feels weird that 'progressivism' seems to have led to this, which doesn't feel much like 'progress' at all.

I am not really aware of what you are describing.

HN is less "social" than most forums. There are no avatars and the profile is completely free form and can be left completely blank. It is a very large forum, so I cannot assume that everyone recognizes me. It also is overwhelmingly male, so it is common for people to assume that anyone speaking here is male.

I often qualify my remarks here on certain subjects for those reasons. Long experience as a participant tells me that if I don't, someone will make a fool of themselves by accusing me of being a rapey bastard, as obviously only a rapist man would ever say X (or something along those lines). And that is a huge, pointless derail that I hate seeing.

As far as I can tell you're both on the same side that you share the experience that if one isn't (perceived) a member of the protected group they are at risk for being subject of virtue-shaming or ad-hominem attack for debating progressive ideals.

I would like to think that years of study and introspective contemplation have helped me craft an evenhanded and well thought out position on certain subjects.

My observation is that most people, regardless of which "side" they are on, somewhat ham-handedly speak to only the concerns of their side. This very often comes across as dismissive of the concerns of the other side, even when that isn't intended.

So, if someone wants to speak to difficult subjects, I think good advice is to consider how things impact all parties, not just their own side, and work at considering details like context and how that makes your message look. If you barge into a discussion of rape and all you say is (or sounds like) "what about da menz!", well, yeah, that will go badly.

Like take the charge of victim blaming -- on the one hand, we can all probably agree that victims deserve sympathy and a platform to air their grievances as well as our thoughtful consideration.

Yet it seems that of we as a society offer unconditional trust to anyone who claims to have been a victim, this will eventually encourage all sorts of mischief. Not every person who 'seems' like a victim is in fact one, and not everyone who has been victimized can or will lay public claim to that status.

In the limit, this confusion about who is allowed to say what about whom can actually lead to the behavior you referenced above -- if men have internalized the idea that men are only allowed to comment or judge men, but not other groups, then the only possible response is for men to speak about their own group interests.

Sigh. This is perhaps a can of worms I shouldn't open. But here goes:

I was sexually abused as a child. So, in my youth, I very much had the mental model that men are predators and women are prey. It took me a long, long time to sort that out. I think that mental model is shared by quite a lot of people, often without realizing it.

So, if you have internalized this idea that all sex involves a victim and that the woman is probably the victim, well, that explains a lot of the dynamics of discussion that we see, where people implicitly assume that if anything goes wrong in a heterosexual encounter, clearly the man is the perp and the woman is the victim.

I think a lot of people cannot imagine women as having any kind of real power. And therein lies a real huge problem in these discussions, because if you suggest anything women can do differently, you are bad, evil and wrong. Or if you suggest women aren't all paragons of virtue and many would equally take advantage if given the opportunity, this just doesn't sit well with a lot of people.

Someone here mentioned intersectionality, a term I only know from an incredibly toxic environment full of SJWs who claim to want a better world, but mostly crapped all over me rather than being helpful with my problems and also very much are fine with the Lord of the Flies pecking order that is at the root of a lot of social problems. They don't really want to be rid of it. They just want to be at the top doing the shitting, rather than at the bottom getting shat upon.

So if that is your approach, well, duh, the well off white males currently in power aren't going to go along with your plans to make them the acceptable social toilet that everyone gets to crap all over. And when they resist becoming the new victim of our crappy social order, they get accused of all kinds of evil for clinging to the privilege they currently have.

The problems we currently have cannot be resolved by seeking revenge at the societal level. This is an incredibly hard thing to discuss, for a long list of reasons. But the angry, vengeful approach that so many women take helps entrench the problem. It doesn't resolve it.

I don't want revenge. I want constructive change that overall reduces how much people get victimized.

I have been speaking about subjects like rape and women's issues and female empowerment for a long time. It's just a hard, hard subject to have a good discussion on.

I think this one is going incredibly well -- or was. Perhaps this comment will be a thing I very much regret. But it is a thing we eventually need to discuss in the world, and Hacker News has turned out to be the least worst place for me to try to make constructive points on such subjects.

(crosses fingers, hits reply)

Unless you are talking about homosexuality. Then you will see a lot of women trying to lecture you. Damn bastard you.

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

What I'm worried about though is the risk of going past 'we should listen to person from group X when they talk about group X's experience', to the the much stronger claim that 'for all persons P outside of group X, P have nothing valid to say about group X'.

That would be to confuse ends for means, and to discard the attempt to find universal truths and merely settle for truths that are relative to a person's group identities.

In other words, this is thought of as a feature, not a bug.

We can still argue based on merit but I find it interesting to hear the perspective specifically from a woman.

I am a man fyi

I'm glad she said she's a woman first up, it made me much more interested in what she had to say in response.

I would take what males said seriously. But a group of males discussing rape etc isn't quite... Anyway - is this hard to understand? Women have a 'different' point of view on the subject, and on a mostly-male site like this, it's useful to know. I'm puzzled by your confusion. Maybe you are female; then it would be easier to understand what you say. I wish you had said up front :-) It just helps understand where people are coming from, their perspective. A man writing about what feminism should be has a different effect to a woman doing it, and naturally/rightly so.

If you didn't realize that you didn't have consent, sucks to be you, but you should still suffer the consequences.

But I am not really speaking to "What do we do after the fact?" I am speaking more to "How does culture change so you see fewer rapes to begin with? How does culture change so fewer rich, powerful men are oblivious to the fact that their wealth and power can be a form of pressure for a woman they are pursuing?"

I was raped at the age of 12. I have not been raped as an adult. I don't want to be raped ever again. I am not interested in fostering a culture that does a better job of throwing all the rapists in jail. I am interested in fostering a culture where people do a better job of negotiating consent so we don't have women feeling violated while the man who had sex with them is completely convinced she wanted it and she consented by failing to say no strongly enough.

Can you elaborate on that dynamic? Is it as simple as "women are drawn to men with money and power" which is what men think, or is there something more to it? How is it pressure?

And BTW you are unusually honest about sexual dynamics in a way that most women are not IMHO. Thanks for that. Nobody is going to stop in the moment and sign written consent forms, and a woman who happened to have a drink or two will dump a guy who says "oh, I can't because you had a drink and people say that make you unable to consent." It's just not that clear cut in practice.

Not the other poster, I assume they are taking about inherent power dynamics in the workplace. So not two random people at a bar, but let's say an employee and a boss, or a boss's friend. In hopes of maintaining the status quo with their boss, the employee might comply.

(I know HN is full of rebellious individuals who'd never acquiesce, but for a more commonplace example, think of happy hour functions where the boss buys everyone another round and there's the pressure to finish that shot.)

I don't know how to elaborate. I have been trying to come up with a clear explanation.

The best thing I can come up with is that somewhere I saw some video that said that white males are the only people in the US who seem to not know that when a cop stops you, you roll down your window and place your hands on the steering wheel at the 10 and 2 positions. Some white males will act like the cop is their friend and cops never see that from women and people of color.

If you have so much power that no one wants to offend you, you may not realize you are surrounded by yes men. You may have gotten to where you are in your career by being very aggressive and not readily accepting no for an answer. You may not recognize that doing the same thing in romance is actually harassment. To you, it may be a normal form of negotiating.

Pissing off a powerful man in your social circle can be very problematic. Most people don't want to do so, regardless of gender.

And I think that's a poor explanation, but it is the best I can come up with right this minute.

So, does it solve the problem if it became a rule that men in more powerful positions (but with no direct business relationship) should wait for a woman to pursue them? Or should people only ever date at the same power level? If the answer to the first is yes, wouldn't it help quite a bit if it became the norm for women to do the first move, or at least to so around half the times? There are cultures where this it the norm, but I can't comment on whether their dating life is 'healthier' or whether there is less sexual assault there. I reckon it would be an interesting, albeit very difficult to control for, social study.

How we get there, I don't know. But I doubt there is some easy answer here. If powerful men cannot ask, how do they weed out women who are pursuing them solely for their money?

Being rich and powerful does not make them invulnerable. It does not mean they have no Achilles heel.

I'm a fairly traditionally feminine woman who does not like initiating. I have figured out how to navigate traditional gender dynamics comfortably. If you are asking, then I have the power here. You have to meet my expectations to get a yes.

My perspective is very underrepresented and hard to talk about. It is fairly socially unacceptable for me to try to talk about certain things. This has left me with few opportunities to practice communicating effectively on those topics, which just about guarantees that I won't say it very well. Given that it isn't acceptable to say to begin with, saying it poorly tends to lead to drama.

I am not an expert in US law, but doesn't intent to commit a crime matters ?

Which is why there is a difference between murdering someone and taking actions that ultimately lead to someone death ?

In France (civil system, I know), we for example have "murder" and "violence that lead to death without intent to cause it" (and "involuntary homicide", etc)

Law is complicated stuff.

My understanding is the standard is in place to avoid giving all first time offenders a free pass and to also actively encourage people to look up laws pertinent to their lives. If it weren't in place, then willful ignorance would be in your best interest. Since it is in place, it is in your best interest to go find out what is and is not legal when, for example, starting a business.