Very cool, if true

Depends on whether you're willing to take sociology as being ever plausibly scientific...

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channelpenguin.livejournal.com

hmm, tricky one that. mostly not :-). but straight biological or sociobiological explanations can fail to cover the complexity of people in a a social context.

Suppose the ideal aim would be to find out what is the best thing to actually DO to improve matters. Which means actual *experiments*. Which I can't see managing to be both useful AND ethical.

hmmmmm

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Well, you can look at social changes over time in different countries, and compare that to a variety of factors to see which ones had the highest effect. That wouldn't require actual experimentation.

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0olong.livejournal.com

Science generally becomes extremely difficult to do well and ethically as soon as you're dealing with things that directly impact on people's lives. This is one of the major problems with economics, and it's a big reason why medicine sometimes struggles with its scientific credentials as well. Add to that the complexity of the causes and effects...

Social science is hard.

But as andrew says, there are things you can figure out without actual experiments, even if they're not ever going to exactly be scientific.

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khbrown.livejournal.com

And that depends on your understanding of what science is and then what social science is.

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Well in some cases it is and of course it can be. Most modern sociology isn' though what with being weighed down with relativism and constructionism.

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I think both of those things are useful - but can be taken too far.

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Depends what you mean by useful. It worries me when people suggest we should use them as a basis for making actual policy and the like. What with the methods they use to do research precluding generalisation and prediction...

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Well, I think that remembering that cultural values are relative, and there is no absolute "better/worse" is vitally important to any study of different societies.

Similarly, if you follow a hardline essentialist viewpoint then you miss out on all the ways that people can be changed by their culture and experiences.

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I don't think cultural values are all that relative tbh...

Depends what you mean by cultural values (and relative I suppose) - I don't hold that there are that many (if any) differences in cognitive functioning and as a consequence of this the basic social rules that govern societies and cultures. Superficially they appear to look like chalk and cheese but if you look at the similarities then in esscence the same principles and psychology underly every society on the planet.

Of course there is no absolute better/worse... Such a thing doesn't exist outside of axiomatic domains.

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See, that reads to me as "There aren't that many difference in the way that air works all over the world, therefore a cyclone and an air rifle may superficially look like chalk and cheese, but if you look at the similarities then in essence the same principles hold."

To which the answer is "Yes, if you reduce everything to base components then it's all quarks, but that doesn't actually help much."

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Thats an interesting reducto ad absurdum...

But it doesn't really make for a logical comparison/analogy. Unless you hold that human cultures are as diverse as, at one end, a naturally occurring phenomenon involving high wind speed and at the other a manufactured product designed to propell pellets and the like.

The thing is many, many of the things that people hold on to as "actual real differences" TM aren't actually all that different. All cultures grew out of basic tribal societies and theire response to their enviroments

Relativism is also potentially very dangerous indeed. I mean just look at poor old Winston Smith...

(Relativism has it's intellectual roots in mind/body duality and the tabula rasa.)

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They aren't _that_ diverse. But they can be extremely diverse - comparing New York city, feudal Japan and tribal New Guinea, attempting to use social mores from any one of them in one of the others would get you into incredible trouble very quickly.

Yes, of course there are lots of similarities, on a person-by-person basis, but complexity means that the larger structures have gross differences between them.

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Why on Earth would you compare feudal japan with (presumably modern) New York City? You wouldn't use the mores from feudal Japan in modern day New York but then again there are things you could do in a Craigmillar boozer that you couldn't get away with in the main bar of the Balmoral hotel. It's a fairly innocous point really.

I'd be willing to bet that there aren't all that many striking differences between tribal societies globally. That you'd find more striking similarities between desert dwelling peoples (I believe this is the case) mountain dwelling peoples and fisher folk across arbitary cultural boundries.

I reckon you would find that people who are in similar social positions, relative levels of poverty, jobs etc probably find it easier to get along with people in similar jobs/social positions/levels of poverty/etc regardless of "culture" then they do with those above/below them in their own culture. Although history definatly shows us it's likely this was not always the case - but that's perhaps due to less travelling taking place and less mixing as a result.

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coffee-lifeform.livejournal.com

Didn't someone recently (I thought it was you,

andrewducker?), do a poll on their lj asking if people had been sexually assaulted? If so, what were the results?

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Naaah, I did one on who _knew someone_ who had been sexually assaulted. I wouldn't ask who had been, because I know many people who would not feel comfortable admitting it in a public forum, and would also feel uncomfortable hiding it when asked.

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coffee-lifeform.livejournal.com

Riiiiiight, yeah. What were the numbers on that one? How many people did know someone?

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The vast majority.

And the ones that thought they didn't - were wrong...

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girl-onthego.livejournal.com

I would venture to say that most of the women I know have been sexually assaulted at one time or another in their life.

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darn it, I really want to comment here but I feel it's TMI for a public forum.. I'll go away and think about it, and then come back :)

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coffee-lifeform.livejournal.com

I know the feeling. I had a pretty epic comment written when I decided it was far TMI and let it go. I'd be interested to hear what you had to say, though.

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God, I still can't decide what to write. I'm happy to share, but think I'll get flamed/called a naive idiot for daring to post something so "personal". Hmm, I'll drop you a private message..

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If anyone calls you an idiot for sharing a person experience I'll ban them.

Seriously - I don't want this to be that kind of place - it's my "home", not some random internet forum.

If you're not comfortable sharing in public then I understand - but I won't tolerate people being unpleasant to you over something sensitive like this.

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aha no, that is my point - there's no-one specific who would do that, it's the idea that everyone I know is sitting there thinking "omg tmi, I can't believe she just said that"

Even though I'm really quite comfortable discussing it. Actually, what has now happened is that i've over-thought it and I'm getting a headache. :D

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Oh dear - I hope it got better :->

In general, I'd rather people overshared than undershared. If people were less ashamed then we'd all know more about how the world _really_ is.

But I don't want to push any particular person beyond their comfort boundaries.

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Well, exactly. My point basically boiled down to wanting to say at some point in these discussions "I've been raped and I think XYZ" but I have an overwhelming feeling that I shouldn't be discussing it unless it's in the context of sharing my story of being a victim - but that's never how I dealt with having been sexually assaulted.

I, honest to god, in this sodding day and age and with the social liberal bubble I'm in, honestly still feel like this is something I should be ashamed of - which is frankly ridiculous. I'm not ashamed, I've dealt with it myself, but I still feel like I shouldn't be talking about it.

I know this comes down a lot to the reactions of the majority of people I told (years ago now), to the point that I just don't mention it any more when it would be a relevant thing to say in a discussion (You know, not just coming out with it as a non sequitur..) The reactions being, generally, a mixture of shock, or pity, or, my personal favourite "oh so that's why you're gay". The subject was always quickly changed, when it was a discussion about rape to start with. Very rarely were there any hugs and only once a "me too, isn't it crap?" I hasten to add that when I have told people in the past few years the reactions have been much better, but then again, I know a lot of more thoughtful people now.

And one of the other things that gets me here is that I don't know that I know anyone who's been sexually assaulted; it feels like it's just me then. Which can't be right, right? Or is it just that not one of us feel we can talk about it?

I understand the sensitivity and privacy of this, of course I do, and the assumption that "not everyone wants to talk about it in public". However, this made me think that if I did want to talk about it, then I was in the wrong, and certainly no-one really wants to listen.

Crikey. Does that even make sense? I'm terrible at explaining my thoughts, do appreciate that before you decide I've caused some mortal offence to everyone. I feel much better for writing a long-winded comment now, sorry for off-loading a bit. I wish I could do write stuff better..

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I don't have time to do a proper response to this right now (dashing off from work in 10 and have shedloads to do before I'll be near the internet later), but I just wanted to say thank you for sharing at all.

And *hugs*.

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slammerkinbabe.livejournal.com

I missed that poll, but here is a story:

Awhile back, when RAINN was having its annual fundraiser, I decided I would do this: I would donate one dollar for every person I knew who had been sexually assaulted. Then I would double that number (donating $2 per person) because I figured that for everyone who had been sexually assaulted and confided in me or gone public about it, there was at least one more person I knew who had been sexually assaulted without my knowing about it.

The end result was that I literally did not have enough money.

Granted I was poor at the time. But after it got well over $100, I had to stop and look at what I could actually afford to donate (something around $50, I think).

I was working on a rape crisis hotline at the time, but I only counted four of the regular callers. I counted all of the rest of the callers, past and present, as one. Every single other person of the 50+ that I counted before I *stopped* counting was someone I knew.

This is why I am what most people would call an unreasonable radical on the subject of sexual violence. I speak out about this really loudly and really often and in a way that causes many, many people to think I need to just lighten up. But I just don't think the weight of educating/raising awareness about sexual violence ought to fall on the shoulders of people who have *been* sexually assaulted. So I keep on being "unreasonable".

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khbrown.livejournal.com

I find these quotes particularly interesting:

Professor Rachel Jewkes of the MRC, who carried out the research, said: "We have a very, very high prevalence of rape in South Africa. I think it is down to ideas about masculinity based on gender hierarchy and the sexual entitlement of men. It's rooted in an African ideal of manhood."

and

"We hear men saying, 'If Jacob Zuma can have many wives, I can have many girlfriends.' The hyper-masculine rhetoric of the Zuma campaign is going to set back our work in challenging the old model of masculinity."

I'm wondering if an African ideal of manhood equates to a black African ideal and, if so, how far the figures on rape varied by ethnicity and if there are any comparable statistics from the apartheid era: was the prevalence of black on black rape just as high only it wasn't such an issue under apartheid (i.e. let 'them' do what they want to one another, as long as they don't do it to 'us') or is a post-apartheid phenonenon that's especially difficult to engage with because of the race aspect.

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girl-onthego.livejournal.com

Haven't read the report yet but given the number of women I know who have been raped or sexually assaulted, if it was fewer than 25% there would be an awful lot of men out there doing an awful lot of raping and sexual assaulting.

I'm not someone who puts herself at risk intentionally, a lot of the time, but I can rattle off a half-dozen times when I've been in a vulnerable (read: drunk) situation around men who I probably would have had a hard time fighting off. One of the most frightening times was when I walked home with a guy who started trying to get me to invite him in, then followed me halfway around the block when I said I had to go home and he had to go the other way, because I was getting a scary vibe. I have very little faith that if I wasn't nearly six feet tall he mightn't have pushed his luck farther.

I always feel protective of women who are smaller than me.

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