Remember that motivational video Eliezer linked to? One of the lines toward the end was “If she puts you in the friend zone, put her in the rape zone.” I can’t imagine Eliezer saying that himself, and I expect he was only noticing and making use of the go for it and ignore your own pain slogans—but I’m still shocked and angry that it’s possible to not notice something like that.
My apologies for that! You’re correct that I didn’t notice that on a different level than, say, the parts about killing your friends if they don’t believe in you or whatever else was in the Courage Wolf montage. I expect I made a ‘bleah’ face at that and some other screens which demonstrated concepts exceptionally less savory than ‘Courage’, but failed to mark it as something requiring a trigger warning. I think this was before I’d even heard of the concept of a “trigger warning”, which I first got to hear about after writing Ch. 7 of HPMOR.
Generally speaking, I’ve noticed that mentioning rape tends to mind-kill people on the Internet much more than mentioning murder. I hypothesize this is due to the fact that many more people are actually raped than murdered.
And that people who have been raped are much (infinitely?) more likely to go one to participate in discussions on rape than people who have been murdered are likely to participate in discussions on murder. Also, that rape is more likely to bring in gender politics.
And that people who have been raped are much (infinitely?) more likely to go one to participate in discussions on rape than people who have been murdered are likely to participate in discussions on murder.
What about people who have had friends or relatives murdered?
Presumably there’s as many such relatives as for the rape victims. (Unless lonely orphans are singled out by murderers? In order to inherit the family fortune, if I’ve learned anything about the real world from false made-up stories...)
Presumably there’s as many such relatives as for the rape victims.
This could be due to media filters, but I hear about people traumatized by the murder of their friends and family much more often than people traumatized by the rape of others.
...or people who survived attempted murder, for that matter. (Still probably many fewer of them in the average internet discussion than people who survived rape or attempted rape.)
I think there’s been a cultural shift—mentions of rape are taken a lot more seriously than they were maybe 20 years ago. (I’m sure of the shift, and less sure of the time scale.)
I believe part of it has been a feminist effort to get rape of women by men taken seriously which has started to get rape of men by men taken seriously. Rape by women is barely on the horizon so far.
PTSD being recognized as a real thing has made a major contribution—it meant that people could no longer say that rape is something which should just be gotten over. Another piece is an effort to make being raped not be a major status-lowering event, which made people more likely to talk about it.
As for comparison to murder, I’ve seen relatives of murdered people complain that murder jokes are still socially acceptable.
As far as I can tell, horrific events can be used as jokes when they aren’t vividly imagined, and whether something you haven’t experienced is vividly imagined is strongly affected by whether the people around you encourage you to imagine it or not.
[A]t the Parents of Murdered Children Conference, they have [a presentation
on] murder mystery dinners. And the way that they always do it is they say,
let’s just pretend that you were going to have a rape mystery dinner and you
were going to show up and the rule of the game was going to be that someone’s
been raped, and we’re all going to find the rapist. That wouldn’t go over.
Nobody would do it. Everybody would feel that that was deeply distasteful.
As far as I can tell, horrific events can be used as jokes when they aren’t vividly imagined, and whether something you haven’t experienced is vividly imagined is strongly affected by whether the people around you encourage you to imagine it or not.
I’m not sure about that. It seems like in places and times where horrific events are much more common, people take an almost gallows humor attitude towards the whole thing (at least the violence part). Things like PTSD seem to happen when people in cultures where horrific events are rare temporarily get exposed to them.
Oh, right. I interpreted it as saying that horrific events are only traumatic when you’re from a culture where they’re rare, not that repeated traumatic events somehow lower one’s levels of PTSD. That would be nonsense, obviously.
Right. One idea I had is that what causes PTSD is not so much the traumatic experience as being surrounded by people who can’t relate to it.
A more Hansonian version is that exhibiting PTSD is a strategy to gain attention and sympathy and that this strategy won’t work if everyone around has also suffered similar experiences.
Another possibility is that in cultures where traumatic events are common, people who can’t deal with them without suffering PTSD are likely to get killed off by the next one.
There are probably many reasons involved, but I’d point out that in our media we frequently glamorize protagonists who kill people, but generally not ones who rape people.
There may be some cultural variation in this; I recall reading an African folk tale wherein, early on, the protagonist rapes his own mother. Afterwards he proceeds to navigate various perils with feats of cunning and derring-do, and I spent the rest of the story asking “how am I supposed to root for this guy? He raped his own mother! For no apparent reason, even!”
Tell me about that… Last night I was watching Big Miracle and I was like “how am I supposed to root for the whales? It’d probably cost a lot to save them, and with that much money you could save people!” Until the youngest whale was shown to be ill, then I did. I guess that illustrates the Near vs Far distinction even though that wasn’t the point!
“how am I supposed to root for this guy? He raped his own mother! For no apparent reason, even!”
BTW (continuing along the rape vs murder thing), have you read (say) Crime and Punishment, and if so, were you able to root for the protagonist? (I was.)
This difference in commonality extends not only to victims but to perpetrators. A higher proportion of people who find rape funny will be rapists than those who find murder funny will be murderers; murder is much harder to get away with.
I hypothesize this is due to the fact that many more people are actually raped than murdered.
I think this has to do with the way we handle things related to sex, for example, if we were having this discussion 100 years ago, we might be talking about why portrayals of adultery are unacceptable in contexts where portrails of murder would be.
I agree with your conclusion, but that particular example doesn’t counterexemplify my point because I guess many more people were actually cuckolded than murdered!
Apology accepted. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I can see how you could have filed it under “generic hyperbolic obnoxious”.
At the time, I was just too tired of discussing gender issues to be more direct about that part of the video.
Looking at the discussion a year and a half later, I was somewhat amazed at the range of reactions to the video. Apropo of a recent facebook discussion about the found cat and lotteries, there might be a clue about why people use imprecise hyperbolic language so much—it’s more likely to lead to action. I’ve also noticed that it doesn’t necessarily feel accurate to describe strong emotions in outside view accurate language.
There ought to be something intelligent and abstract to say about filtering mechanism conflicts, but I can’t think of what it might be right now. E.g., a mention once came up of os-tans on HN, someone said “What’s an os-tan?”, I posted a link to a page of OS-tans, and then replies complained that the page was NSFW and needed a warning. I was like “What? All those os-tans are totally safe for work, I checked”. Turns out there was a big ol’ pornographic ad at the top of the page which my eyes had probably literally skipped over, as in just never saccaded there.
That Courage Wolf video probably has a pretty different impact depending on whether or not you automatically skip over and mostly don’t even notice all the bad parts.
And in another ten years a naked person walking down the street will be invisible.
My apologies for that! You’re correct that I didn’t notice that on a different level than, say, the parts about killing your friends if they don’t believe in you or whatever else was in the Courage Wolf montage. I expect I made a ‘bleah’ face at that and some other screens which demonstrated concepts exceptionally less savory than ‘Courage’, but failed to mark it as something requiring a trigger warning. I think this was before I’d even heard of the concept of a “trigger warning”, which I first got to hear about after writing Ch. 7 of HPMOR.
Generally speaking, I’ve noticed that mentioning rape tends to mind-kill people on the Internet much more than mentioning murder. I hypothesize this is due to the fact that many more people are actually raped than murdered.
And that people who have been raped are much (infinitely?) more likely to go one to participate in discussions on rape than people who have been murdered are likely to participate in discussions on murder. Also, that rape is more likely to bring in gender politics.
What about people who have had friends or relatives murdered?
The murder of children, I think, tends to be intrinsically serious in the way that fictional murder in general isn’t. This might be part of it.
Presumably there’s as many such relatives as for the rape victims. (Unless lonely orphans are singled out by murderers? In order to inherit the family fortune, if I’ve learned anything about the real world from false made-up stories...)
This could be due to media filters, but I hear about people traumatized by the murder of their friends and family much more often than people traumatized by the rape of others.
...or people who survived attempted murder, for that matter. (Still probably many fewer of them in the average internet discussion than people who survived rape or attempted rape.)
I think there’s been a cultural shift—mentions of rape are taken a lot more seriously than they were maybe 20 years ago. (I’m sure of the shift, and less sure of the time scale.)
I believe part of it has been a feminist effort to get rape of women by men taken seriously which has started to get rape of men by men taken seriously. Rape by women is barely on the horizon so far.
PTSD being recognized as a real thing has made a major contribution—it meant that people could no longer say that rape is something which should just be gotten over. Another piece is an effort to make being raped not be a major status-lowering event, which made people more likely to talk about it.
As for comparison to murder, I’ve seen relatives of murdered people complain that murder jokes are still socially acceptable.
As far as I can tell, horrific events can be used as jokes when they aren’t vividly imagined, and whether something you haven’t experienced is vividly imagined is strongly affected by whether the people around you encourage you to imagine it or not.
That’s the subject of the first couple minutes of This American Life episode 342.
(Transcript here.)
That’s definitely a place I’ve heard it.
I’m not sure about that. It seems like in places and times where horrific events are much more common, people take an almost gallows humor attitude towards the whole thing (at least the violence part). Things like PTSD seem to happen when people in cultures where horrific events are rare temporarily get exposed to them.
This … seems to fit the evidence, actually. Not sure why it was downvoted; is there some evidence nobody’s told me about?
From what I’ve read, repeated trauma is a good way of predicting PTSD, so lack of familiarity with trauma wouldn’t be a good explanation.
Oh, right. I interpreted it as saying that horrific events are only traumatic when you’re from a culture where they’re rare, not that repeated traumatic events somehow lower one’s levels of PTSD. That would be nonsense, obviously.
Right. One idea I had is that what causes PTSD is not so much the traumatic experience as being surrounded by people who can’t relate to it.
A more Hansonian version is that exhibiting PTSD is a strategy to gain attention and sympathy and that this strategy won’t work if everyone around has also suffered similar experiences.
Another possibility is that in cultures where traumatic events are common, people who can’t deal with them without suffering PTSD are likely to get killed off by the next one.
There are probably many reasons involved, but I’d point out that in our media we frequently glamorize protagonists who kill people, but generally not ones who rape people.
There may be some cultural variation in this; I recall reading an African folk tale wherein, early on, the protagonist rapes his own mother. Afterwards he proceeds to navigate various perils with feats of cunning and derring-do, and I spent the rest of the story asking “how am I supposed to root for this guy? He raped his own mother! For no apparent reason, even!”
Tell me about that… Last night I was watching Big Miracle and I was like “how am I supposed to root for the whales? It’d probably cost a lot to save them, and with that much money you could save people!” Until the youngest whale was shown to be ill, then I did. I guess that illustrates the Near vs Far distinction even though that wasn’t the point!
BTW (continuing along the rape vs murder thing), have you read (say) Crime and Punishment, and if so, were you able to root for the protagonist? (I was.)
No, I’ve never read it.
This difference in commonality extends not only to victims but to perpetrators. A higher proportion of people who find rape funny will be rapists than those who find murder funny will be murderers; murder is much harder to get away with.
I think this has to do with the way we handle things related to sex, for example, if we were having this discussion 100 years ago, we might be talking about why portrayals of adultery are unacceptable in contexts where portrails of murder would be.
I agree with your conclusion, but that particular example doesn’t counterexemplify my point because I guess many more people were actually cuckolded than murdered!
Apology accepted. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I can see how you could have filed it under “generic hyperbolic obnoxious”.
At the time, I was just too tired of discussing gender issues to be more direct about that part of the video.
Looking at the discussion a year and a half later, I was somewhat amazed at the range of reactions to the video. Apropo of a recent facebook discussion about the found cat and lotteries, there might be a clue about why people use imprecise hyperbolic language so much—it’s more likely to lead to action. I’ve also noticed that it doesn’t necessarily feel accurate to describe strong emotions in outside view accurate language.
There ought to be something intelligent and abstract to say about filtering mechanism conflicts, but I can’t think of what it might be right now. E.g., a mention once came up of os-tans on HN, someone said “What’s an os-tan?”, I posted a link to a page of OS-tans, and then replies complained that the page was NSFW and needed a warning. I was like “What? All those os-tans are totally safe for work, I checked”. Turns out there was a big ol’ pornographic ad at the top of the page which my eyes had probably literally skipped over, as in just never saccaded there.
That Courage Wolf video probably has a pretty different impact depending on whether or not you automatically skip over and mostly don’t even notice all the bad parts.
And in another ten years a naked person walking down the street will be invisible.
Sometimes I fail to include NSFW tags because I use an adblocker, so NSFW ads don’t appear for me.
Huh?! I wonder if this is another instance of Eliezer not realizing how atypical the bay area is.
Science fiction reference—I think it’s to Kurland’s The Unicorn Girl.
I don’t see how it is.