There is also something to be said in regards to common, acceptable risk. That is, there is a chance that if I walk on the sidewalk that I will get clobbered by a wayward vehicle. However, that should not stop someone from walking on the sidewalk. When you begin to live your life according to fringe fears (as I like to call them, that is, a fear that is statistically unlikely to happen), you aren't really living at all. Going back to my example with the lost vehicle plowing into me. It is not my fault that I got hit by a car. The same logic can apply to other situations as well.
Also, we don't actually know the risks of any specific thing happening at any specific time and place.
Hillary Clinton supposedly won four coin tosses in a row in Iowa the other day, to break four tied caucuses. Some people will think that's unlikely; that there was only a 1 in 4 chance that it could happen like that. But in truth it was 50/50 in each instance, that Hillary would win, which tells us absolutely nothing in advance about the probable outcomes of those tied caucuses.
When a woman walks down a street at night, alone, wearing a short skirt, people think she has increased the likelihood of her being raped. But in fact, the only possible outcomes in this scenario are rape, or no rape. So the odds of her being raped remain 50/50 regardless of the night, the skirt, and her being alone. And that 50/50 option tells us absolutely nothing, in advance of the outcome, about the likelihood of her being raped as the outcome.
But that won't stop lots of people who WANT TO BELIEVE THAT SHE IS SOMEHOW RESPONSIBLE from imagining that the darkness, the skirt, and being alone were choices that she made that increased her likelihood of being raped, and so therefor the rape is partly her fault. (Because that's the conclusion they wanted to arrive at from the start.)
Whenever a woman has sexual intercourse without the self-righteous misogynistic Christian's permission, she must be punished for it (in their minds). So that even if the sexual intercourse has been forced on her, the force itself becomes the punishment for the non-sanctioned sex act. Hence: some blame has to be found, and placed on her, to justify the judgment of her 'sin' (having sex without their permission) and the punishment (having the sex forced on her).
I know this is bizarre, but this is what happens, I think, in the minds of the self-righteous misogynist Christian, who considers sex a sin in every permutation but their own, very narrow, conception of it. A concept in which the male decides when the female has sex. Always. I also think it's the result of having chosen to believe that God controls every event, and so even an event like rape must be determined to have been a righteous punishment from God, somehow. There can be no innocent victims in life when God is controlling everything that happens. Right? So somehow, the victims of rape must be found responsible for God's allowing the rapes to happen to them.
lain:
