| o_O.Q said: 1) "I think the distinction between prison rape and non-prison rape is that prison rape is not indicative of culture at large." this coming from someone entertaining the idea that the culture of modern western countries normalises rape is pretty rich don't you think? 2) "I think one would be remiss to make conclusions about society by discussing conditions in prison. " and who did so? my argument is that men are the victims of rape more so than women, which i suppose you agree on, therefore, rape is a greater threat to men than to women |
1) First of all, I believe my only real comment on rape culture in this thread was to say that the idea is meaningless and subjective. You seem to be making an assumption about me here, which is not supported by the comments made in this thread.
But I'll treat that as a question and answer it for you, with a resounding, "kinda".
I don't believe that rape, with a hard "r" is normalized. I think at times it may be swept under the rug to avoid inconvenient truths, but there is a reason authors say that rape (hard "r") is the one crime which makes a character permanently evil. You cannot write a sympathetic rapist, or at least so says conventional wisdom.
But "rape" goes far beyond the "man grabs a woman in an alley and rapes her with a knife to her neck". It also means "man buys woman shots until she gets drunk enough to stop saying no", or "man has sex with woman who says no but doesnt act the way he thinks she would if she truly meant it". I think these definitions are where a lot of the issue here comes in. Is it normalized to try to liquor a girl up to get in her pants? 100%. Is it normalized to display sexual dominance when a woman has a moment of doubt? 100%.
2) Again, I don't think you can say that men are more at risk of rape, when in general the risk of rape for is very low except for one extremely high risk population. You can't really use an outlier to make conclusions about the whole group. Especially when the data shows that if you look within even these groups, women are still more at risk than men.
To make a comparison, if you took a neighborhood with 9 people making $10k and 1 person making $1million, you would have 90% of your population under the poverty line, but because of your outlier, your average earnings are about $100,000. Would it be accurate to say that the average person here is upper-middle class? No, an average person in this neighborhood is below the poverty line. Basically, using strict averages becomes significantly less effective when you have a data source with a massive outlier such as this. Generally, in case like this, utilizing a median would be more effective. To quote a website discussing when to use mean vs median:
"Whenever a graph falls on a normal distribution, using the mean is a good choice. But if your data has extreme scores (such as the difference between a millionaire and someone making 30,000 a year), you will need to look at median, because you’ll find a much more representative number for your sample."
In your general NCVS population, it is generally considered that about 10% of victims are male. This makes a prevalence of about 0.2 in 1000 by my math. This means that in prison populations, sexual victimization is about 500 times more prevalent than in the general population. Because of this, you get incredibly skewed data because of an outlier high risk population.
