essays I remember from the third wave of feminism covering victim blaming always addressed that, culturally, we didn't tell rapists not to rape, not really, and certainly not with the same vigor we used to police the behavior of young women. as a matter of fact, there was even a lot of media that tacitly approved of boundary pushing, disregarding consent, etc etc. this part of the talk has diminished as sexual assault got drummed out of comedy, cultural conversations around consent and men changed quite a bit, and on balance the changes may have left half of the victim blaming conversation standing a bit awkwardly by itself.
That's a really great point I hadn't considered. There was indeed an important and necessary effort to counter the blaze attitude had about sexual consent (for example, marital rape was legal everywhere in the US prior to the 1970s).
Yeah for years (decades? centuries?) the standard response to a rape victim seems to have been “well what were you wearing” so it’s hardly surprising that there was eventually a widespread cultural pushback. But agreed, that response is less—openly—acceptable now so hopefully safety doesn’t get conflated with blaming. (Although I guarantee safety tips have always been part of the conversation among women, so the idea that everybody just stopped talked about rape prevention lest they seem victim-blamey seems uh, farfetched.)
The amount of throat-clearing that even someone like Stock has to do to make an obvious commonsense point is what makes our culture so stultifying and exhausting.
I use the same analogy of bike lock and bike theft in my head whenever this topic comes up.
I can't really think of any other crime where the response is essentially "somebody should tell those rotten criminals to stop criming". Like, when mass shootings happen and there are renewed calls for more gun control, nobody is saying "that's just a distraction from the real issue which is that somebody needs to teach these (mostly) young (mostly) white (mostly) men that shooting up schools is *wrong*".
> even in forums dedicated specifically to grief, when someone posts about a COVID death, often the first thing people ask is whether the person was vaccinated.
In my opinion this urge comes from the fear/panic caused by imagining a horrible fate like dying of COVID (or being raped). I want to believe that this won't happen to me, so I start looking for differences in circumstances between myself and the victim. It doesn't even have to be something the victim chose. For example, when I read about the latest shooting victim in my city I may comfort myself by noting that it was not where I live. And I think that when a victim hears us asking these questions they can tell that part of the goal is to distance ourselves from them, to establish that they are the kind of person that this happens to, while we are not. So even if we do not say or imply that they "deserved" what happened, they may perceive a lack of empathy.
> And I think that when a victim hears us asking these questions they can tell that part of the goal is to distance ourselves from them, to establish that they are the kind of person that this happens to, while we are not.
This a really really great point. I'd have to mull this over.
This is a specific example of the general phenomenon called the "just-world fallacy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis), wherein bad things only happen to those who have somehow invited them upon themselves. In its extreme form, this can lead you to believe that people who die of cancer were insufficiently "brave" (precisely why medical practitioners are discouraging this kind of terminology in discussing cancer sufferers); the "law of attraction" quackery which logically implies that developing a terminal illness is a result of one's own negative attitude towards life*; or that horrible deepity "what's for you won't pass you by" which implies that poor people deserve to be poor, lonely people deserve to be lonely etc.
*Lest you think I'm exaggerating, I've met a woman who read "The Secret" and literally believed exactly this.
Yeah, I’ve read that when picking a jury for a rape trial, prosecutors look for more men, as many women will look to psychically distance themselves and be more open to excuses/exoneration while men (especially men with daughters) are likely to convict.
Having made a similar point as Stock back in 2019, only to go viral and be informed by thousands how wrong and awful I was, I fear that this excellent effort at analogy will still fail to make an obvious point clear. Of course there is no piece of advice that will end all rape. Of course the rapist, not the victim, is responsible for his conduct.
And yet, doing whatever one can to avoid the harm, even if that means the teaching the victim to defend herself if possible, promoting safe behaviors and taking the initiative to say "no" to anything she's not comfortable with, would reduce the incidence of rape. Isn't that the point, you ask? Not if it means placing any onus on the victim, no matter how small, easy or reasonable, as that would shift the burden off the rapist, no matter how slightly. And that is politically unacceptable. Better your bike be stolen than you be required to lock it up.
> And that is politically unacceptable. Better your bike be stolen than you be required to lock it up.
Given the way people talk about it, this implication does seem inescapable. And it's even more baffling that sexual assault is as far as I can tell the ONLY offense this logic apparently applies to.
I get this and I do find it a good analogy for advising women on how to avoid rape, *but* I‘ve also recently noticed how many people will point out how a tragedy was avoidable and then conclude that they will therefore have *no empathy whatsoever* with the victims (one recent example would be the case of the imploded submarine).
Maybe this attitude is what people are thinking about when they detect victim blaming in practical advice.
Sep 18, 2023·edited Sep 18, 2023Liked by Yassine Meskhout
I think there's an important distinction between being the victim of another agent's evil actions and being the victim of the whims of mother nature.
If you leave your bike unlocked in a busy area prone to theft, and your bike gets stolen, it's undeniable that your decisions contributed to your misfortune - but it's equally undeniable that the person ultimately responsible for your misfortune is the thief themselves. The thief is an agent who made the deliberate decision to cause you harm. There are many agents who contributed to your misfortune (including you), but the thief bears the ultimate responsibility.
In the case of the submersible, there is no other agent which caused the misfortune - there's just the well-understood laws of physics governing the deformation of metals under extremely high pressure, which OceanGate arrogantly chose to ignore. The only agent who can reasonably be assigned blame for the misfortune which befell the occupants of the submersible is the CEO of OceanGate itself (and as arrogant and foolhardy as he was, I can't help but give him a little credit - at least he had the courage of his own hubris to pilot the submersible himself).
Does that mean that no one deserves any sympathy when, through their own decisions, they fall victim of the laws of nature? No, of course not. A person who makes the one-off foolish decision to climb to the top of a hill during a thunderstorm and gets struck by lightning deserves our sympathy (who among us hasn't made a one-off impulsive decision which only failed to backfire on us horribly through blind luck?). But the submersible implosion wasn't the result of a one-off impulsive decision made on the spur of the moment. OceanGate spent well over a decade dismissing or rubbishing the warnings offered to them by experts in deep-sea diving, asserting that "safety is just waste", firing engineers who tried to raise alarm bells and ignoring the non-fatal incidents that occurred on previous Titanic dives. Compassion fatigue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion_fatigue) has to set in somewhere.
Granted that only one person on the submersible was an OceanGate employee. Failing to do your due diligence and research the credentials of the company whose hands you are placing your life in isn't quite as foolish and arrogant as ten years of cost-cutting design and ignoring safety warnings, but it strikes me as the same ballpark.
My understanding from a ten-minute read of twitter was that the submarine victims were rich tourists blowing money on stupid rich people things instead of helping to solve hunger and that's why they deserved it. (twitter's opinion, not mine)
My take is that it was both awesome _and_ stupid to dive to the Titanic. They knew the risks and the dice happened to roll poorly for them on that day. I do think it's sad and I certainly don't _blame_ them for taking the risk (or for "wasting" money for that matter). But at the same time, it was a tragedy which was _less_ tragic than another tragedy which occurred close to the same time where hundreds of Libyan migrants to Italy died when their boat capsized (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/syria-migrants-boat-sinking-titanic-submersive-missing-rcna90336).
So I can see why deliberate risk taking behaviors can affect the empathy felt by onlookers. And (sadly) that can happen even in cases of rape, but it _shouldn't_ happen because there is a categorical difference between knowingly deciding to risk your life versus deciding what clothes to wear or where to walk.
I think one problem that the “don’t blame the victim” discourse is trying to address, which does not exist with bike thieves, is that most rapists are someone the survivor knows and who is in the broader social scene. There are a number of crimes like this and many of them have a similar profile to rape - people just commit the crimes and victims/ survivors will often just deal without even warning their friends or trying to get anything evened out within their social scene, because nobody wants to hear about it. It’s not like a bike theft where you are unlikely to know who stole the bike.
Yes this is a good point. If someone's unlocked bike was stolen and we *know* who did it because they're riding it around the neighborhood, it does seem gauche to excoriate the victim for not locking it up. I'm not sure how much that changes my overall argument.
I would also add, on reflection, that crimes that induce PTSD are just a different kind of thing. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it why it’s important to have people believe you when you’re trying to work through that sort of thing.
Maybe some people get PTSD from having their bike stolen in some circumstances, but my sense is that there is a qualitative difference in impact on the victim’s psychology.
I don't deny that crimes that induce PTSD should be handled differently. Part of the issue here is that many collateral complaints get stuffed into the same "victim-blaming" envelope. "Giving advice to victims on how to reduce risk" is not the same thing as "not believing victims" and not the same thing as "giving advice inappropriately".
As a less broadly emotional example - a crime I have noticed that has similar dynamics is the theft of relatively small amounts of money (eg $300, $1k). I have seen multiple such thefts happen within my community and they just get eaten, minimally gossiped about, with zero consequences for the perpetrator. It’s really annoying, actually, because it ends up decreasing the ambient trust and screwing up whatever social structure was working with the good faith that enabled the money to be stolen
Whenever someone makes the argument that we need to teach criminals to stop doing crime, that Beach Boys song, Wouldn't it be Nice, starts going through my head. Sure, it would be great to live in a crime free utopia where you could leave an unlocked bike any old place and not worry about it. But we don't. And wishing won't make it so.
while your basic point here is solid I feel like sexual assault is a crime where there is a lot of room in the margins to work on reducing the level of sexual assault. as an oversimplified example, some young men are taught that girls don't really mean it when they say no, and some are taught that no means no . ozy brennan had a good post the other day digging into how we might better understand and deal with sexual assault. it is neither pie in the sky nor head in the sand: https://open.substack.com/pub/thingofthings/p/casr-on-rape?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=ngvj:
I have yet to run into anyone who was *taught* that no doesn't always mean no. Instead, I see a number of men who have, from their own observations of female flirting, drawn the conclusion that no doesn't always mean no.
The closest I've seen to "teaching" is something like this Bill Burr bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9GF-hPevZM but even that really just boils down to the completely banal point that people communicate with inflection and body language which provide context beyond the plain meaning of words.
I mean, sure. We should raise boys to understand that they are not entitled to sex, and we should raise girls to be able to say No (without being labeled a bitch) or Yes (without being labeled a slut). That's important. But it's also important that when some creeper follows you into an alley, he gets to meet the barrel of the 9mm. That's just common sense.
But I once left my bike unlocked and it didn't get stolen, plus I have a friend who knows a guy that got his locked bike stolen. And I'm sure some bike thieves are actually good people on hard times, its wrong to blame people for society's problems. And it is wrong to tell people its their fault for getting their bike stolen. And really moat people who own bikes are more privileged than the people who steal them, so they shouldn't complain. And actually it might be better to redistribute the wealth of bikes to the needy via bike theft. And the idea that most bike thefts are committed by POC means that complaining about bike thefts is contributing to a racist trope. And most bike thefts are non violent, should this even be a crime? Private property is nothing but a way for the rich to deny others the things they claim to own.
Some people, when venting about a calamity that allegedly happened to them, are not looking for a solution, but sympathy. So they’d rather hear things that soothe them rather than trying to avoid the situation next time. I feel like there’s some of this going on here.
It's fine to recognize that there's a time and place to providing advice. That's different from categorically denouncing all advice with the "victim-blaming" reprimand
Entirely understandable, and if a close friend of mine personally confided in me that she had been raped, I think it would be grossly insensitive to ask her if she'd had too much to drink etc. rather than trying to comfort her.
What's NOT grossly insensitive is when public health officials offer advice to young women who have never been raped on how to avoid being the victims of rape, and these public health officials are accused of "victim blaming", even though, at this point, no victim exists.
Here’s the flip side- the threat of rape is used to actively corral women and curtail their public freedom. This is writ large in Muslim countries- never go anywhere without a relative male- but even outside Saudi, you realise that women from these communities are being effectively controlled by the implicit threat of rape if they go out alone, go for an unaccompanied walk, talk to someone their family doesn’t approve of.
It happens to a lesser extent with women from western countries. You think we don’t know? You think we don’t take measures to protect ourselves?? Of course we fucking do: that’s why we get pissed off when some dipshit gives their “advice”- we already live in ducking fear, what less do you want is to do now?
Saying you’ll step up and make public spaces safer never seems to be a possibility does it? Maybe we should just let women carry guns and have done with it.
essays I remember from the third wave of feminism covering victim blaming always addressed that, culturally, we didn't tell rapists not to rape, not really, and certainly not with the same vigor we used to police the behavior of young women. as a matter of fact, there was even a lot of media that tacitly approved of boundary pushing, disregarding consent, etc etc. this part of the talk has diminished as sexual assault got drummed out of comedy, cultural conversations around consent and men changed quite a bit, and on balance the changes may have left half of the victim blaming conversation standing a bit awkwardly by itself.
That's a really great point I hadn't considered. There was indeed an important and necessary effort to counter the blaze attitude had about sexual consent (for example, marital rape was legal everywhere in the US prior to the 1970s).
Yeah for years (decades? centuries?) the standard response to a rape victim seems to have been “well what were you wearing” so it’s hardly surprising that there was eventually a widespread cultural pushback. But agreed, that response is less—openly—acceptable now so hopefully safety doesn’t get conflated with blaming. (Although I guarantee safety tips have always been part of the conversation among women, so the idea that everybody just stopped talked about rape prevention lest they seem victim-blamey seems uh, farfetched.)
The amount of throat-clearing that even someone like Stock has to do to make an obvious commonsense point is what makes our culture so stultifying and exhausting.
I use the same analogy of bike lock and bike theft in my head whenever this topic comes up.
I can't really think of any other crime where the response is essentially "somebody should tell those rotten criminals to stop criming". Like, when mass shootings happen and there are renewed calls for more gun control, nobody is saying "that's just a distraction from the real issue which is that somebody needs to teach these (mostly) young (mostly) white (mostly) men that shooting up schools is *wrong*".
I think there is another aspect to this. Consider the recent example is unvaccinated people dying of COVID: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/01/unvaccinated-covid-deaths-secret-grief/621269/
> even in forums dedicated specifically to grief, when someone posts about a COVID death, often the first thing people ask is whether the person was vaccinated.
In my opinion this urge comes from the fear/panic caused by imagining a horrible fate like dying of COVID (or being raped). I want to believe that this won't happen to me, so I start looking for differences in circumstances between myself and the victim. It doesn't even have to be something the victim chose. For example, when I read about the latest shooting victim in my city I may comfort myself by noting that it was not where I live. And I think that when a victim hears us asking these questions they can tell that part of the goal is to distance ourselves from them, to establish that they are the kind of person that this happens to, while we are not. So even if we do not say or imply that they "deserved" what happened, they may perceive a lack of empathy.
> And I think that when a victim hears us asking these questions they can tell that part of the goal is to distance ourselves from them, to establish that they are the kind of person that this happens to, while we are not.
This a really really great point. I'd have to mull this over.
This is a specific example of the general phenomenon called the "just-world fallacy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis), wherein bad things only happen to those who have somehow invited them upon themselves. In its extreme form, this can lead you to believe that people who die of cancer were insufficiently "brave" (precisely why medical practitioners are discouraging this kind of terminology in discussing cancer sufferers); the "law of attraction" quackery which logically implies that developing a terminal illness is a result of one's own negative attitude towards life*; or that horrible deepity "what's for you won't pass you by" which implies that poor people deserve to be poor, lonely people deserve to be lonely etc.
*Lest you think I'm exaggerating, I've met a woman who read "The Secret" and literally believed exactly this.
Yeah, I’ve read that when picking a jury for a rape trial, prosecutors look for more men, as many women will look to psychically distance themselves and be more open to excuses/exoneration while men (especially men with daughters) are likely to convict.
Having made a similar point as Stock back in 2019, only to go viral and be informed by thousands how wrong and awful I was, I fear that this excellent effort at analogy will still fail to make an obvious point clear. Of course there is no piece of advice that will end all rape. Of course the rapist, not the victim, is responsible for his conduct.
And yet, doing whatever one can to avoid the harm, even if that means the teaching the victim to defend herself if possible, promoting safe behaviors and taking the initiative to say "no" to anything she's not comfortable with, would reduce the incidence of rape. Isn't that the point, you ask? Not if it means placing any onus on the victim, no matter how small, easy or reasonable, as that would shift the burden off the rapist, no matter how slightly. And that is politically unacceptable. Better your bike be stolen than you be required to lock it up.
> And that is politically unacceptable. Better your bike be stolen than you be required to lock it up.
Given the way people talk about it, this implication does seem inescapable. And it's even more baffling that sexual assault is as far as I can tell the ONLY offense this logic apparently applies to.
„There was nothing sadistic about our inquiries.“
I get this and I do find it a good analogy for advising women on how to avoid rape, *but* I‘ve also recently noticed how many people will point out how a tragedy was avoidable and then conclude that they will therefore have *no empathy whatsoever* with the victims (one recent example would be the case of the imploded submarine).
Maybe this attitude is what people are thinking about when they detect victim blaming in practical advice.
I think there's an important distinction between being the victim of another agent's evil actions and being the victim of the whims of mother nature.
If you leave your bike unlocked in a busy area prone to theft, and your bike gets stolen, it's undeniable that your decisions contributed to your misfortune - but it's equally undeniable that the person ultimately responsible for your misfortune is the thief themselves. The thief is an agent who made the deliberate decision to cause you harm. There are many agents who contributed to your misfortune (including you), but the thief bears the ultimate responsibility.
In the case of the submersible, there is no other agent which caused the misfortune - there's just the well-understood laws of physics governing the deformation of metals under extremely high pressure, which OceanGate arrogantly chose to ignore. The only agent who can reasonably be assigned blame for the misfortune which befell the occupants of the submersible is the CEO of OceanGate itself (and as arrogant and foolhardy as he was, I can't help but give him a little credit - at least he had the courage of his own hubris to pilot the submersible himself).
Does that mean that no one deserves any sympathy when, through their own decisions, they fall victim of the laws of nature? No, of course not. A person who makes the one-off foolish decision to climb to the top of a hill during a thunderstorm and gets struck by lightning deserves our sympathy (who among us hasn't made a one-off impulsive decision which only failed to backfire on us horribly through blind luck?). But the submersible implosion wasn't the result of a one-off impulsive decision made on the spur of the moment. OceanGate spent well over a decade dismissing or rubbishing the warnings offered to them by experts in deep-sea diving, asserting that "safety is just waste", firing engineers who tried to raise alarm bells and ignoring the non-fatal incidents that occurred on previous Titanic dives. Compassion fatigue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion_fatigue) has to set in somewhere.
Granted that only one person on the submersible was an OceanGate employee. Failing to do your due diligence and research the credentials of the company whose hands you are placing your life in isn't quite as foolish and arrogant as ten years of cost-cutting design and ignoring safety warnings, but it strikes me as the same ballpark.
My understanding from a ten-minute read of twitter was that the submarine victims were rich tourists blowing money on stupid rich people things instead of helping to solve hunger and that's why they deserved it. (twitter's opinion, not mine)
Yeah, that’s what some people said, but for many others it ended with „it’s stupid to dive to the Titanic“.
My take is that it was both awesome _and_ stupid to dive to the Titanic. They knew the risks and the dice happened to roll poorly for them on that day. I do think it's sad and I certainly don't _blame_ them for taking the risk (or for "wasting" money for that matter). But at the same time, it was a tragedy which was _less_ tragic than another tragedy which occurred close to the same time where hundreds of Libyan migrants to Italy died when their boat capsized (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/syria-migrants-boat-sinking-titanic-submersive-missing-rcna90336).
So I can see why deliberate risk taking behaviors can affect the empathy felt by onlookers. And (sadly) that can happen even in cases of rape, but it _shouldn't_ happen because there is a categorical difference between knowingly deciding to risk your life versus deciding what clothes to wear or where to walk.
I think one problem that the “don’t blame the victim” discourse is trying to address, which does not exist with bike thieves, is that most rapists are someone the survivor knows and who is in the broader social scene. There are a number of crimes like this and many of them have a similar profile to rape - people just commit the crimes and victims/ survivors will often just deal without even warning their friends or trying to get anything evened out within their social scene, because nobody wants to hear about it. It’s not like a bike theft where you are unlikely to know who stole the bike.
Yes this is a good point. If someone's unlocked bike was stolen and we *know* who did it because they're riding it around the neighborhood, it does seem gauche to excoriate the victim for not locking it up. I'm not sure how much that changes my overall argument.
I would also add, on reflection, that crimes that induce PTSD are just a different kind of thing. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it why it’s important to have people believe you when you’re trying to work through that sort of thing.
Maybe some people get PTSD from having their bike stolen in some circumstances, but my sense is that there is a qualitative difference in impact on the victim’s psychology.
I don't deny that crimes that induce PTSD should be handled differently. Part of the issue here is that many collateral complaints get stuffed into the same "victim-blaming" envelope. "Giving advice to victims on how to reduce risk" is not the same thing as "not believing victims" and not the same thing as "giving advice inappropriately".
As a less broadly emotional example - a crime I have noticed that has similar dynamics is the theft of relatively small amounts of money (eg $300, $1k). I have seen multiple such thefts happen within my community and they just get eaten, minimally gossiped about, with zero consequences for the perpetrator. It’s really annoying, actually, because it ends up decreasing the ambient trust and screwing up whatever social structure was working with the good faith that enabled the money to be stolen
Whenever someone makes the argument that we need to teach criminals to stop doing crime, that Beach Boys song, Wouldn't it be Nice, starts going through my head. Sure, it would be great to live in a crime free utopia where you could leave an unlocked bike any old place and not worry about it. But we don't. And wishing won't make it so.
while your basic point here is solid I feel like sexual assault is a crime where there is a lot of room in the margins to work on reducing the level of sexual assault. as an oversimplified example, some young men are taught that girls don't really mean it when they say no, and some are taught that no means no . ozy brennan had a good post the other day digging into how we might better understand and deal with sexual assault. it is neither pie in the sky nor head in the sand: https://open.substack.com/pub/thingofthings/p/casr-on-rape?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=ngvj:
I have yet to run into anyone who was *taught* that no doesn't always mean no. Instead, I see a number of men who have, from their own observations of female flirting, drawn the conclusion that no doesn't always mean no.
The closest I've seen to "teaching" is something like this Bill Burr bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9GF-hPevZM but even that really just boils down to the completely banal point that people communicate with inflection and body language which provide context beyond the plain meaning of words.
I mean, sure. We should raise boys to understand that they are not entitled to sex, and we should raise girls to be able to say No (without being labeled a bitch) or Yes (without being labeled a slut). That's important. But it's also important that when some creeper follows you into an alley, he gets to meet the barrel of the 9mm. That's just common sense.
But I once left my bike unlocked and it didn't get stolen, plus I have a friend who knows a guy that got his locked bike stolen. And I'm sure some bike thieves are actually good people on hard times, its wrong to blame people for society's problems. And it is wrong to tell people its their fault for getting their bike stolen. And really moat people who own bikes are more privileged than the people who steal them, so they shouldn't complain. And actually it might be better to redistribute the wealth of bikes to the needy via bike theft. And the idea that most bike thefts are committed by POC means that complaining about bike thefts is contributing to a racist trope. And most bike thefts are non violent, should this even be a crime? Private property is nothing but a way for the rich to deny others the things they claim to own.
I'm sure I could go on... /s
See if you can get away with transposing these cliches onto the rape discourse :)
I can't tell if this is a parody or not
Some people, when venting about a calamity that allegedly happened to them, are not looking for a solution, but sympathy. So they’d rather hear things that soothe them rather than trying to avoid the situation next time. I feel like there’s some of this going on here.
It's fine to recognize that there's a time and place to providing advice. That's different from categorically denouncing all advice with the "victim-blaming" reprimand
Entirely understandable, and if a close friend of mine personally confided in me that she had been raped, I think it would be grossly insensitive to ask her if she'd had too much to drink etc. rather than trying to comfort her.
What's NOT grossly insensitive is when public health officials offer advice to young women who have never been raped on how to avoid being the victims of rape, and these public health officials are accused of "victim blaming", even though, at this point, no victim exists.
Here’s the flip side- the threat of rape is used to actively corral women and curtail their public freedom. This is writ large in Muslim countries- never go anywhere without a relative male- but even outside Saudi, you realise that women from these communities are being effectively controlled by the implicit threat of rape if they go out alone, go for an unaccompanied walk, talk to someone their family doesn’t approve of.
It happens to a lesser extent with women from western countries. You think we don’t know? You think we don’t take measures to protect ourselves?? Of course we fucking do: that’s why we get pissed off when some dipshit gives their “advice”- we already live in ducking fear, what less do you want is to do now?
Saying you’ll step up and make public spaces safer never seems to be a possibility does it? Maybe we should just let women carry guns and have done with it.
Was bill burr your inspiration for this text he said something similar