Has the #MeToo movement become a witch-hunt to a significant degree?

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ChunkMonk said:
One of the big red flags in my friendship was when when my buddy said his friends were telling him to beat me down and rob me so I would start buying him stuff. Now it may soind stupid, but I was only 19.

Come on… It’s like you want me to think women need to be controlled. I hear this stuff all the time and it’a mind-boggling how a 10 year old me apparently had more common sense than a grown woman…
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You’re missing the rest - the rest being the part about how conservative Christian women are educated about men. In a society which poo-pooed any idea of feminism or modern culture, the dominant ideology was that men naturally had raging sexual desires, and it was on the woman to control those desires with her modesty and purity. (Not by forcefully saying no, mind, but merely by being modest and chaste enough to prevent it.) Oh, and if a guy had too strong sexual desires, it wasn’t a red flag about him, it meant you weren’t being a good enough Christian woman.

If you were in a culture/subculture where your friends were routinely expected to try to steal from you, and it was your responsibility to stop them by hiding all your possessions (but it was expected that all of your friends would try), that wouldn’t sound so stupid. Oh and leaders publicly declare that people who get beaten up and robbed are just getting the natural consequences of flaunting their wealth, because that’s what modern people do, and if they’d just stop flaunting it they wouldn’t get robbed.

I have to get going fairly soon so I’ll address more later.
 
DarkLight said:
There were warning signs, but I didn’t see them because I thought the idea that I should be on the looking for things like that was feminist nonsense.
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Wait… Wait… Wait. You were taught that men are not in control of their sexuality and that they are all trying to get into your pants and that even being alone with them qualifies as consent… But you also thought that looking for warning signs was feminist nonsense?

How… Why… What? I can’t be the only one seeing this disconnect:

“I was taught that this forest is full of lions and they are all dying to eat me, so I didn’t look for warning signs because I thought that was all tree-hugger nonsense.”

I’m trying not to laugh because it is horrible what the guy did (whatever it was) but this reasoning is so foreign to me. Like, I can’t even begin to imagine the mental gymnastics required to hold these concepts together in one head.
 
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DarkLight said:
how conservative Christian women are educated about men.
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I’m not missing it. I’m straight up saying you are misrepresenting it.
DarkLight said:
(Not by forcefully saying no, mind, but merely by being modest and chaste enough to prevent it.) Oh, and if a guy had too strong sexual desires, it wasn’t a red flag about him, it meant you weren’t being a good enough Christian woman.
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Since this is oh so prevalent, can you point me to some mainstream Christians saying anything like this… Ever?
DarkLight said:
If you were in a culture/subculture where your friends were routinely expected to try to steal from you, and it was your responsibility to stop them by hiding all your possessions
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Umm if I lived in that culture, then wouldn’t it be like super dumb for me to not hide my possessions? That’s what you’re saying. “I grew up thinking every man was trying to rape me, so I decided to be alone with men!”

Like… What?
 
ChunkMonk said:
I’m trying not to laugh because it is horrible what the guy did (whatever it was) but this reasoning is so foreign to me. Like, I can’t even begin to imagine the mental gymnastics required to hold these concepts together in one head.
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I think what she means is she was taught that if something bad happened to a woman, she must have done something to encourage it. So, she interacted with men thinking “as long as I don’t intentionally get him excited, I’ll be safe.”
 
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Oh I know. It seemed to operate on some idea that female modesty and chastity was some sort of magic shield and good women who trusted in Jesus would be protected. It wasn’t all thought out in words like that, but merely absorbed from the various lessons I’d gotten in the conservative Christian culture I’d grown up in. I don’t think they’d thought it out either, it was just all some vague mess of “women taking responsibility” and “male sex hormones” and a few other things.

It had been made very clear to me since before puberty that it was my responsibility to prevent guys from lusting after me. I remember one modesty lecture where it was explained that empire waist tops were all immodest, because having a ribbon or drawstring under the bustline would inevitably draw male attention to the bust. So would a line of decorative buttons running up a dress.

It was not uncommon for stories of women being harassed or assaulted to be commented on with things like “well you’ve seen what women wear these days, maybe if they didn’t all go around in miniskirts and bras they wouldn’t get that treatment” - even in cases where there was zero information of what the woman wore, it was clear that she must have done something to attract the man’s attention.

At the same time, the subtext was very much that if you did live by the prescribed rules, you would be completely safe. I remember one of my first reactions was to examine my outfit - I had worn a top that had only sheer fabric over my shoulders. My first thought was that that outfit was what had caused the whole mess.
 
DarkLight said:
I remember one of my first reactions was to examine my outfit - I had worn a top that had only sheer fabric over my shoulders. My first thought was that that outfit was what had caused the whole mess.
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😧 No words.
 
DarkLight said:
It wasn’t all thought out in words like that, but merely absorbed from the various lessons I’d gotten in the conservative Christian culture I’d grown up in.
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This seems to be the money quote. No one ever actually said any of this to you.

I’m honestly still a little confused. You said you believed all this, but then you say you were alone with a man wearing clothes that were revealing (according to the standards you were allegedly taught)… So you believed that being alone with a man constituted consent, that wearing revealing clothes constituted consent, but you went and did just those things… But weren’t consenting?

I’m confused. Why did you go do all these things you allegedly believed were communicating desire for sexual attention if you didn’t want sexual attention? I agree that being alone and wearing those clothes doesn’t constitute consent, but you are claiming you actually were taught (and believed) that they did… Did you think you were communicating consent but praying would magically make him not see it as consent?

Something smells fishy here.
 
starshiptrooper said:
Since the last draft happened well within living memory and registration for selective service is mandatory, I fail to see your point.
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No man alive in the contemporary US is ever going to be drafted by the US military.

Also, the draft ended a couple years before I was born, and 20 years before at least several of the posters on this thread were born. Nixon was president, a filet o fish cost 48 cents, Bad Bad Leroy Brown was in the top 40, OPEC shenanigans caused gas shortages across the nation–for practical purposes, 1973 was a long, long, long time ago.
 
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TheAmazingGrace said:
I think what she means is she was taught that if something bad happened to a woman, she must have done something to encourage it.
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I’m going to risk the fallout and say she never believed any of that. My evidence is that her actions in the story don’t match with that belief.

Also, since that exact accusation was made against me (that I was basically saying every woman who is victimized is to blame for some reason) in this thread, when I said nothing of the sort… Well, that screams that this alleged “lesson” she was taught was never actually taught but it provides a convenient explanation for whatever it is that happened at the time amd it fits in with her current world view, so she is now convinced of it.
 
ChunkMonk said:
Well, that screams that this alleged “lesson” she was taught was never actually taught but it provides a convenient explanation for whatever it is that happened at the time amd it fits in with her current world view, so she is now convinced of it.
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So, are you saying she’s a liar?
 
I’m saying she has been thoroughly hoodwinked by a feminist ideology. She’s telling the truth as she sees it, but it doesn’t pass the smell test. There is something else going on here.
 
DarkLight said:
You’re missing the rest - the rest being the part about how conservative Christian women are educated about men. In a society which poo-pooed any idea of feminism or modern culture, the dominant ideology was that men naturally had raging sexual desires, and it was on the woman to control those desires with her modesty and purity. (Not by forcefully saying no, mind, but merely by being modest and chaste enough to prevent it.) Oh, and if a guy had too strong sexual desires, it wasn’t a red flag about him, it meant you weren’t being a good enough Christian woman.
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That’s not the Christian culture I grew up in, you are creating a convenient strawman.
 
You have to understand the entire idea of “consent” simply wasn’t present in the same way. No one would have put it that way. Rather, it was put in an overall sense of how good girls behave. And of course we did want to date and marry and all that, and arranged marriages weren’t a thing, so you have to be around a guy sometime! (Being alone with a man actually wasn’t forbidden - it was just that if he tried anything it must have been because you provoked it.)

Retroactive immodesty was also a thing. I didn’t believe that the top I was wearing was immodest, at the time I was wearing it. But then when something happened, the lesson I’d learned was that I must have done something somehow. So I latched on to that top.

There are many lessons you can teach without explicitly saying things. If you tell a girl that of course rape is wrong, but it’s her responsibility to prevent men from lusting after her. And every single time an actual story of a woman being harassed or assaulted that doesn’t fit a very narrow ideology, is criticized and it’s explained what the woman did to cause the man to behave like that. (I do remember being told that modest women did not get catcalled or harassed on the street.) And if she dresses and acts a certain way she’ll command respect from even non-Christian men.

We talk here all the time about parents who tell children that their faith is important, but then brush off religious obligations for any reason that comes up. We know that in that case the children are likely to learn that faith isn’t really that important. Actions speak louder than words. You don’t have to put something explicitly to teach it.
Theo520 said:
That’s not the Christian culture I grew up in, you are creating a convenient strawman.
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There’s a difference between something you haven’t personally experienced and a strawman. It is certainly what I experienced - I believe @Xantippe has referenced similar things, there are many other women who’ve said similar. Also consider as a man the lessons you learned were likely not the same. The boys were always shooed out of the room any time the subject of modesty came up.

My point is, the whole idea of uncontrolled male sexuality isn’t something feminists are suddenly coming up with to demonize men.
 
DarkLight said:
There’s a difference between something you haven’t personally experienced and a strawman. It is certainly what I experienced - I believe @Xantippe has referenced similar things, there are many other women who’ve said similar. Also consider as a man the lessons you learned were likely not the same. The boys were always shooed out of the room any time the subject of modesty came up.

My point is, the whole idea of uncontrolled male sexuality isn’t something feminists are suddenly coming up with to demonize men.
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With all those subtle cues you picked up, you seem to be omitting the lesson that any premarital sex was a sin for both man and women.

Your line of reasoning smells more like an excuse than an objective summary of what was taught.
 
Theo520 said:
Nope, she was generalizing to the broader Christian culture.
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Personally, I have seen it a bit in Catholic culture. Jason Evert likes to talk about how dressing modestly automatically commands respect, which is true…for men who are already respectful. Modesty as a virtue is all-too often confused with modesty as a deterrent, which can lead devout girls into thinking that being “pure” is enough to keep them safe from harm.
 
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I guess without knowing the specifics I can’t possibly understand how a person came to these conclusions. I guess maybe I was a weird kid but I questioned everything I was taught, even the things that made sense… So to come up with something so ridiculous without even being explicitly taught it, but just by implication… I don’t know. That is a totally foreign concept to me.

Anyway this is part of what I hate about these types of feminist conversations. Everything is instantly hyper-personalized and I don’t feel comfortable interrogating you to get every little detail, but without the details it’s just a “trust me or be labelled a jerk, no compassion, denial culture” situation. There’s really nothing else to say. This entire debate is just two camps talking past each other in different languages.

Personally, considering the fact that it’s women who want a solution, I would just make the prudential suggestion that they learn to speak men’s language rather than stamp their feet at men not learning women’s language.
 
TheAmazingGrace said:
Jason Evert likes to talk about how dressing modestly automatically commands respect, which is true…for men who are already respectful.
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Did you see a part of his talk where he compared a woman dressing immodestly to a man purposefully leading a girl on :confused: I think he’s great in chastity talks in general but that part was sooo off.
 
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