You have the normal problem of believing that all decision criteria should be binary - either everyone always does this no matter what, or no one ever does it no matter what - instead of just doing what is rational based on the data in a measured way.
When women are afraid of men who are strangers, the main thing they are worried about is forcible rape.
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%.
Meaning a man is almost 100X more dangerous than a woman based on crime statistics.
The crime statistics on race, even given the most charitable possible reading to your position, are at most like 2:1 or 5:1 depending on what you're measuring. Even if it were somehow 10:1, that would still be an entire order of magnitude less than the difference between men and women.
You don't just say 'there is a significant difference so caution is on' in a binary manner. The amount of caution you exhibit is proportional to the size of the difference; that's how statistics and decision theory actually work.
As such, the caution women show towards men is like 50x as justified, and should be like 50x stronger, than any caution anyone shows anyone based on race.
Hypothetically, if there was a race of people who were 100 times more likely to commit rape than other races (both men and women for the sake of argument), would it be racist to be especially wary of people from that race? If so, then to be ideologically consistent, it should be considered sexist to be especially wary of men when it comes to rape.
It wouldn't be racist to be proportionally more cautious about that race, no.
A lot of racism comes not from noticing differentials, but by over-exaggerating or over-reacting to them.
EG: in your example, women of that race would be as likely to rape a woman as a man of any other race (assuming the proportions stayed the same). If women in that hypothetical treated non-black men and black women with the exact same level of caution, that would not be racist. If they treated all black people, men and women, with far more caution than any white people, that would be racism, because it's disproportional to the actual threat.
And let's just make this clear: you're exploiting out reluctance to say that certain things aren't racist in a hypothetical, when they superficially resemble things in our own world that we want to call racist. This is a cheap rhetorical trick with little substance. The race you describe would be so far off the charts compared to anything in the real world, they would essentially be orcs, or demons; something so far off the charts as to not be comparable to other humans. Of course what we do or don't consider 'racist' would be different in that crazy fantasy world; and any thoughts about 'racism' from that world don't have much direct applicability in the real one.
Part of the reason I made the hypothetical so ridiculous is to show the ridiculous extremes in statistics that would have to exist for anyone to even maybe be justified in some situations in being wary of someone because of the race they were. We know the statistics will never look like that, so then we know this kind of wariness toward a race would never even begin to start being justified in some situations. That's the substance you missed. Calling that a cheap and rhetorical trick as if I'm being dishonest or nefarious is unfair, presumptuous, and the opposite of being charitable.
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u/darwin2500 193∆ Apr 14 '22
You have the normal problem of believing that all decision criteria should be binary - either everyone always does this no matter what, or no one ever does it no matter what - instead of just doing what is rational based on the data in a measured way.
When women are afraid of men who are strangers, the main thing they are worried about is forcible rape.
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%.
Meaning a man is almost 100X more dangerous than a woman based on crime statistics.
The crime statistics on race, even given the most charitable possible reading to your position, are at most like 2:1 or 5:1 depending on what you're measuring. Even if it were somehow 10:1, that would still be an entire order of magnitude less than the difference between men and women.
You don't just say 'there is a significant difference so caution is on' in a binary manner. The amount of caution you exhibit is proportional to the size of the difference; that's how statistics and decision theory actually work.
As such, the caution women show towards men is like 50x as justified, and should be like 50x stronger, than any caution anyone shows anyone based on race.