Remember SlutWalk? From the Wikipedia page:
Participants protest against explaining or excusing rape by referring to any aspect of a woman’s appearance. The rallies began when Constable Michael Sanguinetti, a Toronto Police officer, suggested that to remain safe, “women should avoid dressing like sluts.”
It’s one of the peculiarities of the modern condition that advice of this sort is taken as an exercise in moral blame-assignment rather than simple, prudential wisdom. “X is a bad idea so don’t do it or Y might happen,” where, in this case, X = “Getting ruinously drunk in a sexually-charged environment surrounded by people you don’t know, then walking home alone through a bad part of town at 2 AM on a Saturday” but could just as well mean lots of other things, means just what it says and nothing more. And if Y happens, the fact that you’re not morally culpable for Y doesn’t mean X wasn’t, therefore, a bad idea.
Why, then, the leftist/feminist griping that this constitutes “blaming the victim”? Here’s a useful graphic of the typical SlutWalker demographic that gives us some insight into what’s going on in their heads:
Now, this is interesting. Even if modernity did not drown us in warnings about the prevalence and evils of rape, do they really think grown men need to be told not to rape? That rapists will actually respond to stern talking-tos from the authorities, or be swayed by appeals to women’s rights?
I said a moment ago that advice of the “don’t dress sluttily and walk alone through bad parts of town” sort is prudential. Let’s rephrase it a little: “Given that the world is a dangerous place containing rapists and other sorts of deranged criminals, it is imprudent to dress like a slut, walk alone through bad parts of town, etc.” I don’t think the lady above necessarily disagrees with the “it is imprudent” bit, given that it logically follows from the given. I think she disagrees with the “given” bit. That is, she objects on principle to the idea that the world in which we live is necessarily fallen, that we must accept that the world is a dangerous place inhabited by dangerous people. Since she refuses to take the predicate as a given, she refuses to accept the consequent which logically derives from it. Hence she experiences the consequent as unjust, as men telling her what to do because it’s easier than the work of making the world a safer, better, less fallen place. And hence she sincerely seems to think that rape would disappear if only Playboy (or whoever) would publish an article telling men how not to rape people.
So it doesn’t matter to her if there is a logical connection between certain behaviors and certain outcomes (though she probably denies that there is). If there is such a connection, it is itself unjust, and she refuses to accept simple truths about reality that are, to her mind, unjust.
That is the gnostic temptation in a nutshell: the refusal to accept the world as it is, on the grounds that its defects can be repaired through human action motivated by spontaneous insight into the true nature of reality. In saner times, we would’ve called this denial of reality what it is: psychotic.