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Originally Posted by Hamlet53
Wow! I have to inject myself into this once more. If you are suggestion that when a woman dresses in a sexy manner that it is a valid point of view that she is inviting rape, that her attire should play as a defense for a man who rapes her sorry but no way. Wrong today, wrong in Heinlein's time, just wrong.
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No, my argument was not that simple. Indeed, my whole point thus far has been that things aren't that simple. It's not just a matter of "dressing sexy". It's a matter of where you are, who you are with, and how you act when you do so.
And the norms differ between cultures. Every culture has standards of what is considered acceptable behavior, and controls intended to promote it and prevent unacceptable behavior. In our culture, in relations between the sexes, the controls are
internal. A man is expected to know how to behave and be capable of controlling himself in the presence of an attractive woman. He's expected to know the steps in the mating dance and follow the established protocols when interacting with an attractive woman he like to have sex with.
Now consider the culture in the more conservative Islamic states in the Middle East. The controls there are
external. The specified dress for women is the burkha, a head to toe covering, complete with veil. They assume a man
can't control himself, and must be given no provocation, which is why that mode of dress for women is prescribed. Of course, if your culture assumes you can't control yourself, you'll never learn how to. Guess what happens if you take a guy from that sort of culture and drop him into our society? There have been some ugly incidents between male exchange students from those areas and women in our society dressed appropriately for our culture but inappropriately for theirs, up to and including full scale rape, because the guy
couldn't control himself.
Clothing is a social marker. How we dress and where we do so communicates to other around us who we believe ourselves to be and what we believe ourselves to be doing. Mode of dress is one of the ways we size up people we don't know when we encounter them for the first time.
A woman who dresses in a sexy fashion is almost certainly aware she is doing so, and is doing so deliberately. She's broadcasting a message. She should reasonably expect anywhere from admiring glances to outright propositions from surrounding men, depending upon exactly how sexily she is dressed and where she is when she dresses that way.
But acknowledgement from men may not be the motivation. And so it might be for the sexily dressed girl - not broadcasting "I'm hot!" to passing guys, but instead broadcasting "I'm hotter than
you!" to other girls. After you get past survival basics like "I'm alive, I'm healthy, and I have a roof over my head, food on my table, clothes on my back, and expectations things will continue that way.", the next level of concern tends to be status in the community and how you are doing relative to your peers. "I'm hotter than you!" is a "how I'm doing" statement.
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I guess I return to my original assessment in large of Heinlein that he had real problems with his views on women and sexual roles in society.
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They were fairly common at the time, and in some respects are far more common now. SIaSL is considered among other things to be a major influence in popularizing the notion of polyamory. That's alive and
very well in the circles I travel in, and I'd estimate about half the folks I consider friends are in some variety of poly relationship. (I was, many years back, but have been more conventional since. I don't object to it, but it didn't happen to work for me.)
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Dennis