Hacker News Reader

Comment by superchroma | Hacker News Reader

"All girls and women [...] should avoid being alone with men they don’t know"

I guess the default setting for my gender is 'predator'..

The author views are heavily tainted by her career: “I spent my entire professional life working on the issue of male violence against women—first in a rape crisis center, and later as a journalist and a media relations director for a legal campaign against sexual violence.” It’s easy to assume all men are predators when that’s the reality you face every day.

Then it's a bit weird that she dismisses "consent workshops". What's wrong with those? They explore patterns and scripts of social interaction that successfully remove the fiction of plausible deniability from outright predatory behavior, and enable others to recognize it and call it out easily. This is not something that should have obnoxious political connotations, it's just a straightforward improvement.

Yes we are, potentially, until we decide we are not. The brute force way we now know is suboptimal and rightly failing, and no matter what you think about OP, the femcel trend she's writing about is happening.

In response to that, a new generation of chivalrous Gentlemen will rise. Cheers to that!

I'm not sure if you're aware of this and trying to make a point, but quite a few self-described "chivalrous Gentlemen" have in fact been predators. The whole notion of polite, chivalrous, "Gentlemen's" behavior as inherently desirable is, shall we say, a bit discredited.

Codes of chivalry and "gentlemanly behavior" came about in the context of strictly class-oriented patriarchy. Those codes existed not to protect women but to reinforce male status within that hierarchy, with women being the currency of social transaction. And like the Bushido of the Samurai, most of the culture around it was a romanticized retcon of a brutal reality.

There's no historical evidence of a knight ever having rescued a damsel in distress, for instance. It was far more likely for a knight to kidnap women, rape them to "consummate marriage" and take legal possession of their property. And that was just a privilege afforded to noble women who had anything worth stealing.

That's a straw man. Speaking as a Muslim, Islam controls mixing between genders of people that are non-Mahrams (i.e. people who are able to get married to each other). The same applies to Judaism and Christianity. Interactions between the genders is controlled and under specific circumstances, based on necessity, and no such thing as "casual friendship" exists between the genders.

The reason of course, is that the natural desire of humans, as well as the influence of Satan, will cause things to end up badly, as we've seen time and time again. Wasn't there the "metoo" movement that we saw?

I have not seen any Muslim scholar declare men as defacto "predators".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com