so first of all, i wanna make crystal clear that i am absolutely for the premise of that movement. if you are a victim of rape, you should take legal action and not just be quiet and keep it a secret so the rapist gets away unpunished.
so having that out of the way, i think that this movement did harm to everyone of us. so i'll now try to make an argument for every group of people that were harmed by this movement and how. this is my opinion and how i see things. you're free to disagree and to tell me how bullshit what i said is in the comments, IF you have arguments that are constructive and informative and not just insults.
1. How "me too" harmed women
First of all i wanna point out the most ironic factor. The me too movement was "mostly" considered a movement for women to help the "phyiscally weaker gender" that is statisticaly raped slightly more often than men. men suffer from rape too and there are some cases where men spoke up in the me too movement but i think we can all agree that it was mostly a movement for women.
so i think by encouraging people to publicly and openly announce that you were raped and by publickly praising the courage that one needs to do that, you create a sort of "hero" role. i am not trying to take away from the fact that this takes courage and that this is a difficult thing for everyone to do. BUT: i think this glorifies the "corageous woman that comes out as a rape victim" which psychologically creates a very morbid way for people to gain attention and validation by publicly announcing that horrible thing that happened to them loud and proud as if everyone should have such a story and be public about it.
here's an idea of mine. maybe i'm alone in this. but i think, if you were raped, that is a horrible thing and you should definitely not be silent and let the rapist get away with what they did to you. go to the police and take legal action... but i think it is very inappropriate to be loud and proud and public like "oh look at me, i was raped. poor poor me"... that's just wrong in my eyes. it's a morbid way of getting attention and validation. and not a good way to cope with this situation that you suffered.
so how does this harm women? well look at all the women abusing the "me too" movement to throw shit at men (usually celebs) for their personal gain and without actually having suffered rape. i think it did a lot of damage to the female gender roll overall. and it did cause a sort of desensitization of the rape topic in the public. rape is a serious and horrible thing. and we souldn't normalize it by showing it in the media so much that people get the feeling that this is "normal" and "it just happens to everyone" as some bullshit studies proclaiming "rape culture", saying 1 in 5 girls is raped, which is just plainly false.
on top of that it makes women very careful and confused as to where is the exact point at which it becomes rape. consequently making them scared of the most beautiful thing in the world, which is having sex with a partner that you love. i'm sure there are hard to decide fringe cases but i feel like these days women come out with rape accusations after they had regrettable drunk sex with some guy (there's even lots of court cases where that was the case). making some things "rape" where previously not even close to be considered a sexual offense in any way.
all that combined does in my opinion harm women by reducing the publicly percieved severety and cruelty of actual violent rape and belittles those few that had to suffer through that.
2. How "me too" harmed men
i think it comes as a surprise to nobody that men don't typically want to rape a woman. typically men want to express their feelings towards a woman and get mutual physical and emotional validation through the act of sexual intercourse. even if it is not happening in the context of a commited relationship.
so i don't think i need to tell you how complicated female sexuality can be for men. men typically are more easy around sex. they don't consider so many long term plans and social contexts. they just live in the moment and just wanna have some mutual fun. their physical and emotiona arousal works more easily thanin women due to hormonal differences to women. for women way more emotional things play a role that men don't really know how to navigate and sometimes female signals are just confusing as heck to them. but since they are the "man", they gotta take the "dominant" part cause women won't just jump on their dick, if they sit around and do nothing right?
so considering what i said in point 1, men that don't wanna rape a woman will have to be even more carefull now. because the slightest mistake can lead to rape accusations, which can have a seriously bad impact on their entire life. cause even just the accusations will fuck you up, even if you win a court case showing that you didn't actually rape her.
This image goes to show the contradictory and confusing bullshit men THAT DON'T WANT TO RAPE A WOMAN BUT STILL WANT SEX have to put up with now. if "a woman getting naked with a man in private without him forcing her to" isn't permission, then what the fuck is "permission" supposed to look like?! do men have to make women sign a formally written contract of consent before engaging in any sexual action now? how is that supposed to be fun for everyone involved?!
this also goes back around to women and harms women. because since more "sexually assertive" men will have more success with women, it's typically those that would rape a woman are less carefull, getting more success, making it even more likely for women to suffer actual rape.
so what do you think? do you think i had a few coherent and true thoughts here or am i just full of shit?
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I agree with all of that.
Only thing I would add, is that it's far more common to run across a woman who says they lied about being raped, or would lie about it just to get back at someone they didn't like or get free money, than it is to come across a woman who was actually raped, and that court systems almost never verify anything, and just blindly believe the woman.
I think thats the biggest way it's harmed men. Second biggest way is the last part you mentioned, where consent basically doesn't exist anymore because nothing is considered permission.
Having to sign a contract for sex would be absurd.
i don't now if that's true. certainly ther's a number of women that abuse their superior credibility when it comes to this. i don't know if it's actually more than those who were actually raped.
Whether it is or isn't is up for speculation, but the women I've met would suggest false reporting is more common than actually having been raped, at least where I've been anyway.
Oh ok. I thought there were actually valid statistics for that
Valid and statistics don't belong in the same sentence imho, especially when in order to count false rape accusations, you first have to show that they are false.
The best that can be done is seeing how many assholish women admit to it, then comparing with confirmed cases, and looking at how many rape court cases actually have verifiable evidence. (every one i've seen on the news sentenced people by word of mouth alone from what I could find)
But I'm sure someone somewhere bothered to count them anyway, but if they have, I haven't seen it.
My reasoning for seeing statistics as pseudoscience in uncontrolled situations, is variables making predictability impossible.
I'm very much an "Ian Malcom" type about this sort of thing.
Valid statistics do absolutely belong in the same sentence. The problem is often that people misuse statistical numbers to make correlations that are actually not supported at all by the numbers they are quoting. That's what invalid statistics would be. If you interperet something into numbers that the humbers do not say. We see this misuse daily in media and politics. That's why is said "valid" statistics, cause we have ways to calculate the certainty with which correlations we make using numbers and statistics aren't actually wrong. Though people who do make such correlations and claims often forego the complex multivariate analysis of relevant factors that determine the phenomenon they are trying to explain.
And even in the generation of the complex multivariate analysis, there's lots of problems with accidental Errors and intentional skewing in favor of private or corporate interest.
I do not take valid statistics lightly. there's not many of those.
There's so many ways to lie with statistics. But they are also an incredibly sharp tool to find pieces of truth.
Saying statistics are bullshit like saying knifes are murder weapons. It's both true. If one choose to use them like that.
Statistics are bullshit outside of controlled settings.
A valid statistic has no variables, but is also useless in almost all real world situations, because the real world is almost entirely variables.
When you add in variables, the statistical information becomes useless, because the point of a statistic is prediction. And without variables, there is no reason to have a statistical analysis.
Lets say you have a study group of 1 million women. Out of those 1 million, 3,000 of them false claimed they were raped, but if you grab another 1 million women, that group might have only 1,000 doing that, or 10,000, or just 3. People are not the same, and each type of person is not going to be distributed in each area in the same amounts. Peoplevmight do the dame thing for different reasons, or dofferent things for the same reasons, or something (or nothing), for no reason at all.
The reason statistics are useless is because seeing examples of behavior from people inside the study, does not predict the behavior of people outside the study.
Humans do not make sense, we do not do things based on pure logic and reason, we do not add up, so we cannot be "added up"
Reality is chaos, it's unpredictability, it's fueled by nonsense and emotion and accidents and all sorts of other shit that can't be accurately accounted for until it happens.
Typo correction: people might do the same thing for different reasons*
TLDR: statistics are a non replicable and inconsistent way to run a study.
"A valid statistic has no variables" dude. i'm sorry but you have no idea about statistics. signigicance levels and covariance eliminating models are not a hoax. why do you think we "know" smoking kills? we don't know it from doctors or the medical industry. we know it from multivarate regression methods in statistics.
multivariate statistical analysis is one of the best tools to get closer to the truth. behind complex issues.
of course everone who just puts 2 graphs next to each other and says there's a correlation is a moron. and that's exactly what happens all the time. cause people who aren't educated don't know the difference between coinciding events and correlating events in statistics.
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