Schrodinger's Rapist

Phaedra Starling is indeed a very cool name but, if I may say so, her grasp of statisitcs is a little weak. If she extended that same species of heavy-handed, tendentious reasoning to gays or jews or latinos, she'd be justly pilloried for it. But I guess when it's applied to an entire gender, that makes it OK.

I don't mean to condone unwanted advances by anyone, but there's a flaw in the reasoning here big enough to drive a truck through; e.g., that every boorish men is in fact a potential rapist until proven otherwise. In fact, that notion is not inherent in the Schrödinger model at all. What it does say is that the liklihood of any given male being a rapist is not knowable (although it may turn out to be the case) until it's too late. Fair enough, and point taken.

One could take this a step further and assert, if you choose, that a woman might be wise to reagrd any male as a potential rapist until proven safe, but there's no link whatever between that man's lack of social skill and his potential for rapacity behavior, either within the Schrödinger proposition or in reality in general.

The problem is equating creepy behavior with rape, and while you might suggest that one is tantamount to the other, both being forms of unwanted attention, that's an entirely different discussion.

As a happily married man who occiasionally chats "with" (as opposed to "up") strangers of either gender, I find the a priori assumption that a remark about the weather makes me statistically more likely to be a rapist than the rest of the Y-chromosome-carrying population rather offensive. Not to mention logically absurd.

Show me a statistical correlation between unwanted upchattery and rape and then I'll be impressed. But I'll go out on a limb here and guess that a woman being hit on by some doofus-- while she is doubtlessly undergoing an unpleasant experience-- is statistically less likely to be raped by him than by someone she's on a date with, a family member, or even the stereotypical trenchcoated stranger in a dark alley.

PS: I make funny faces at babies, too, but as far as I know that doesn't autmatically earn me a NAMBLA membership card.

PPS: Having said all that, I still think the Schrödingerâs Rapist notion is both valid and valuable, if used correctly.

Indeed; it's an excellent thing for us Y-chromosome-hampered folks to read, understand, internalize. Thanks for pointing to it here.

There are far too many comments to that post to get through, so I don't know whether this has already been said, but the one quibble I have with it is this:

It's clear why the perceived risk of someone's approach is inversely related to how well you know the person approaching. It's clear why the approach of a stranger is perceived as riskier than the approach of someone you know.

Only, many, many rapes and other physical assaults — I want to say "most", but I don't have the figures to hand — are committed by people known to the victim. Deeming someone "safe(r)" because you know him isn't really defensive.

The question, of course, is what to do about that. One can't live one's life in constant fear of everyone. Bodyguards (and large dogs) help. But, really, it's a nasty problem with no solution.

We just have to move our society to a place where attacks on and intimidation of women are entirely unacceptable. As we stand, we pay lip service to that, but we're actually disturbingly tolerant.

Rick, you said: "there's a flaw in the reasoning here big enough to drive a truck through; e.g., that every boorish men is in fact a potential rapist until proven otherwise."

I don't get that impression from the post at all. It seems to me that what the author is saying is that for a woman, she has to *assume* that every man is a potential rapist, for safety purposes. As a woman, I don't care if a man is black, white, Jewish or Latino,* if he's crossing the street towards me late at night with no one around, or refuses to take no for an answer outside a bar, I get my cell phone ready in my pocket to dial for help and start walking faster. I'm not going to apologize to you that I think I'm more likely to be victimized by your gender than by my own. Statistics DO bear that out.

The author isn't saying women should hate all men. In fact, I think her post is intended to help the "good guys" out by explaining why sometimes they get shut down through no fault of their own. It's not because women are bitches, necessarily - it could very well be because you're making them feel unsafe. They don't know you, so they have the right to treat you cautiously. Especially since, as Barry so appropriately, points out, even the men we trust aren't always trustworthy.

*If he's gay, fine - but you think in that situation I'm trusting my gaydar? Ha!

Rick, I think the post is describing a risk assessment, rather than a statistical analysis. Given what's at stake, it's perfectly understandable to behave as described, because the decision making process is not about whether or not the person fits the statistics for being a rapist. The decision making process is determining what risk of assault (sexual or otherwise) the person poses. The high consequences of a false negative require a higher degree of certainty when making the risk assessment. You have to earn the benefit of the doubt in those circumstances. Hopefully she'd rather be safe than not offend you.

Creepy behavior is not being equated with rape, but with increased risk to someone. If the person being creepy doesn't recognize some boundaries, it's safer to assume they would have trouble drawing lines somewhere else. And even if your supposition about creepy behavior decreasing the risk of rape is accurate (which would surprise me), that behavior would make me think a restraining order could be on the horizon.

It's interesting that'd we'd read the post so differently, Jess, although I may have been responding to some of the Comments as much as the original. Re-reading it, I still see a conflation of the entirely valid Schrödinger model (in this case, "women may be justly wary of men because there's no way of knowing which of them may be rapists) and the notion of a correlation between (unwanted) chatting-up and likelihood rape...or even the less socially skilled (I believe the technical term is "assholes") who persist beyond courtesy.Seems to me they're two separate issues.

Rick, perhaps David's astute explanation will be clearer to you than mine.

I'd just add that it really doesn't matter whether certain behaviors actually correlate with being a rapist or not, because a woman (or a man, for that matter) is perfectly within her (his) rights to decline to engage in conversation with random strangers in public spaces. Bluntly, if I don't want to chat politely with some creepy guy on the bus, I don't have to. Period. And I can make the choice on any subjective basis I choose. It's irrelevant whether you agree with my subjective assessment or not, since I'm not infringing on your rights - or the rights of the creepy guy. Your argument seems to be that maybe the creepy guy is actually an awesome dude I'd totally love to get to know, because creepiness doesn't correlate with being a rapist. Sure, that's totally possible. If so, my loss. But since I can't know that in advance, and the downside is so severe, I may well decide it's not worth the risk to find out.