Defense against status attacks is in no way illegitimate, status is one of the most valuable commodities humans have, and often considered literally worth dying for, as proven by countless suicides in defense of status ( seppuku, Romans falling onto their sword etc). Just because current society brands recognized status moves as illegitimate doesn’t mean denying the status component of social problems makes it go away, or that they can still be usefully analysed without.
Yes, describing a legitimate behavior in status terms factually constitutes a very serious attack on people who depend on the viability of that behavior if it is accompanied with the usual delegitimazation. And discussion here so far possibly hasn’t taken that into account sufficiently and so inadvertently damaged many legitimate causes that depend on the power of offense. But that doesn’t change any facts.
Rape looks in large parts like a status problem to me (I in no way mean to make light of rape, as said status is extremely important, even worth dying for). One of the things that make rape so horrible is that it’s pretty much the largest status degradation possible (and since status can be worth dying for the status component alone can move rape into roughly the same moral class as murder).
My suspicion is that most of the difficulties rape victims you describe can in large part be attributed to rape victims having lower status in the relevant eyes just for being rape victims, and pretend status blindness preventing anyone form recognizing this and compensating for it consciously. And one cause for the prevalence of rape seems to be the completely unfair way womens status is lowered just by being sexual while the opposite is true for men.
I suspect that if women had a higher status in general rape would also be less frequent, but since differences in rape incidence between countries seem to be dominated by the rate of underreporting and the wideness of the legal definition of rape there seems to be no way to check this by comparing the rate with womens apparent status in each country.
Defense against status attacks is in no way illegitimate, status is one of the most valuable commodities humans have, and often considered literally worth dying for, as proven by countless suicides in defense of status ( seppuku, Romans falling onto their sword etc). Just because current society brands recognized status moves as illegitimate doesn’t mean denying the status component of social problems makes it go away, or that they can still be usefully analysed without.
Yes, describing a legitimate behavior in status terms factually constitutes a very serious attack on people who depend on the viability of that behavior if it is accompanied with the usual delegitimazation. And discussion here so far possibly hasn’t taken that into account sufficiently and so inadvertently damaged many legitimate causes that depend on the power of offense. But that doesn’t change any facts.
Rape looks in large parts like a status problem to me (I in no way mean to make light of rape, as said status is extremely important, even worth dying for). One of the things that make rape so horrible is that it’s pretty much the largest status degradation possible (and since status can be worth dying for the status component alone can move rape into roughly the same moral class as murder).
My suspicion is that most of the difficulties rape victims you describe can in large part be attributed to rape victims having lower status in the relevant eyes just for being rape victims, and pretend status blindness preventing anyone form recognizing this and compensating for it consciously. And one cause for the prevalence of rape seems to be the completely unfair way womens status is lowered just by being sexual while the opposite is true for men.
I suspect that if women had a higher status in general rape would also be less frequent, but since differences in rape incidence between countries seem to be dominated by the rate of underreporting and the wideness of the legal definition of rape there seems to be no way to check this by comparing the rate with womens apparent status in each country.