Idiots All Around

Should feminists be embracing the word ‘slut’?

Wherein we discover that self-professed “feminists” are pissed off at a Toronto policeman who told women that to avoid sexual assault, they should avoid dressing like sluts. These particualr feminists are using their artifical rage about this to help gin up more artificial rage (and very likely, funds).

Now, before the knee-jerkists start screeching, those guilty of rape need to be fired. Out of a gun. Into the sun. Anyone who, lets face it, tortures those weaker than them for no better reason than they get off on it are a detriment to society and the gene pool. But this does not mean that potential victims of rape should rely on nothing more than the fact that rape is both wrong and illegal to protect themselves from it.

If you are a pedestrian at a pedestrian crosswalk and the “walk” sign is lit… yes, you have the right to walk across the road unimpeded. But if there is a Mack truck bearing down on the intersection at 60 miles per hour with no brakes and a drunk driver talking on a cell phone… your right to walk across the road should take a back seat to seeing the wisdom of Backing The Hell Up. If you are a blond blue-eyed white guy, you have every right to walk down the streets of Compton or Watts wearing a “The Confederacy Had The Right Idea” tee-shirt while waving around handfulls of $100 bills without being accosted. If you are the blackest black man ever, you have the right to have a “Jefferson Davis was a pansy”-themed picnic in the park, even if the Klan happens to be holding a rally there. You have the *right.* But the universe doesn’t give a damn about your “rights.” Thugs don’t give a damn about your rights. Drunk idiots don’t give a damn about your rights. Often enough the cops or the government as a whole don’t give a damn about your rights. Get yourself mugged on the streets with a hundred witnesses, and you’ll find that often enough, *they* don’t give enough of a damn about your rights to help you (but sometimes, they do).

So… yeah. It is *not* “blaming the victim” to tell women tht “dressing like sluts” is a potentially unwise thing to do. It is just good advice. Just as it’s good advice to advise women to refrain from attending frat parties and drinking themselves into a stupor (again, their right to do so) or to walk city streets at night unarmed (once again, their right to do so) or to go to Certain Foreign Countries.

But it seems that these days if you suggest that someone refrain from doing something, you must be an evil anti-womanist (or whatever group happens to be professionally offended at the time). But that is not even remotely the case. As I’ve mentioned, politically I am a “small-l” libertarian. This means that, generally speaking, you can do whatever the hell you like, so long as you don’t harm others or demand that I pay for it… or pay for the consequences. This means that if you want to smoke tobacco or do meth or roll around naked on broken glass or taunt Crips, you should have the legal right to do so. But this is a wholly separate thing from me saying that any of these are *good* or *wise* things to do, and I’d counsel against doing any of them. With rights come responsibilities. And these responsibilities include making reasonable attempts at avoiding doing really dumb things.