The Rape Question

She led him on. He raped her. Who's to blame?

If you’re lucky enough to live in a high-functioning social circle, you may have never met anyone involved in a rape. And assuming you also didn’t read much about rape online, rape might seem something completely abstract to you.

With these assumptions, when you see or hear the word “rape”, you might think of:

(Case 1A)

A woman is being violently assaulted at night on a street by a stranger, then dragged into a dark alley and brutally raped.

However, if you ever heard any woman telling her actual rape story, it most likely wasn’t a violent assault by a stranger but date rape. Something along the lines of:

(Case 1B)

A woman and a man are having a date. Things are getting hot and fun for both of them.

Eventually, they end up in a bedroom. They get to first, second or third base.

But at some point, things get out of hand. She no longer feels safe and comfortable. She doesn’t want to go all in. But he does. She says “No”, loudly and clearly. He doesn’t listen. He penetrates her with his penis.

She doesn’t enjoy this at all. When she wakes up next day, she feels devastated. Used. Raped.

Now, in many date rape stories, the matter of consent is often ambiguous. A gray area. Some women just let sex happen to them when they don’t really want it or are just not sure, without explicit statement of non-consent. Some fake enthusiastic consent. Some retroactively retract consent on a whim, or based on overall negative impression about the encounter, and vice-versa - the rapist’s behavior during and after the act (be it gaslighting or romance and aftercare) leads to an overall positive impression and brushing off the fact of non-consent.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that this is none of the above. This is an unambiguous case where the woman has loudly and clearly said “No” and had a very negative impression both during and after the act.

People judging the participants of such rape are usually split in two camps:

Camp A: “She didn’t consent. This is clearly rape. Rape is always wrong.”

Camp B: “Well, yes, but… they were dating/she wore heels and a short skirt/she was provocative/she was drunk/they were making out/she followed him into the bedroom/she knew what she was walking into/she knew the risk - or at least she should’ve known it. If she didn’t go back to his/her place/hotel room with him, none of this would’ve happened.

Camp A: “This is bullshit. This is victim blaming. It doesn’t matter that she did any of those things. None of this absolves him of blame. Rape is always wrong regardless of what she did.”

<Camp A and Camp B start yelling at each other>

Camp A puts all blame on the rapist. Camp B partially absolves the rapist of blame and also put some blame on the victim.

Arguably, there’s also a very small and radical Camp C - religious fundamentalists, armchair evolutionary psychologists¹ and Louis Theroux documentary-grade online masculinity influencers like Roosh V - who might mutter something about rape being part of male or human nature and our evolutionary past, or say that the woman’s behavior leading up to the rape proves her consent.

According to the radical Camp C, the date rape is absolutely the woman’s fault.

Which camp is right? My answer is: neither of them.

Women Are Wonderful

First off, the usual judgements of the rape situation are biased with two common cognitive biases: the Virtuous Victim effect and the Women Are Wonderful effect.

Honestly I can’t think of a good thought experiment to isolate the Virtuous Victim effect, but the impact of the WAW effect can be easily shown by replacing the woman in the rape scenario with a man. Gay rape is pretty rare, so to make it more realistic we should also replace the rape with another, more common type of male violence:

(Case 2A)

A man is being violently assaulted at night on a street by a violent criminal, then dragged into a dark alley and brutally beaten up.

(Case 2B)

A man sees a violent criminal. For some reason, he walks up to him and starts shouting at him and insulting him. The violent criminal quickly becomes furious and violently beats him up.

Like with rape, the former case is pretty unambiguous. The man didn’t do anything wrong. The criminal attacked him out of the blue and he is the one to blame.

But in the latter case, I believe that there is a more even split between Camp A and Camp B. Camp A believes that all physical assault is wrong. Camp B considers the assault as an overblown, unjustified escalation in response to the man assaulting the criminal verbally.

Also, in this case there is a more sizable Camp C that believes that the man is the only one to blame here, and that the violent criminal’s physical assault is a justified response to the man’s verbal assault. This is acceptable in honor cultures, either in a non-codified way (a fight breaks out instantly), a semi-codified way (“let’s step outside and resolve it like real men”) or fully codified way (aristocratic dueling).

Note how the Virtuous Victim effect is still in play here, but this time, it is not backed up by the Women Are Wonderful effect.

Exercise 1: Replace the violent criminal in the thought experiment with a dog (a possibly violent pet with a human owner that’s responsible for its actions despite not being fully in control - consider different dogs, from standard ones to violent breeds like Pitbulls) or a wild animal. Think how people’s judgements would change, imagine how the split between Camps A/B/C would turn out.

Exercise 2: Assume that the man/victim and the violent criminal are members of your own ethnic group or some other ethnic group that you don’t like. Note whether and how your judgement changes with different combinations of this.

Amoral judgements

Rejecting both cognitive biases - the virtuous victim effect and the WAW effect - would only push our judgement away from Camp A and more towards Camp B and/or C. But this is not the main problem of The Rape Question.

The main problem of the rape question is that not all judgements are moral judgements, but people often mix and conflate them.

Each of us has an individual value system and uses it to judge others accordingly. Communities and societies form around a consensus between individual value systems of groups of individuals. Some philosophers and ethicists even discuss whether an universal value system exists, and what is it like - a.k.a. “natural law”.

Moral values are a significant part of each value system, but importantly, they are not the only ones. There are many things that people value that are not within the scope of morality - wealth, status, beauty, sex, physical fitness, work - providing goods and services, and many other things. Let’s call these amoral values. - they are values, but they have nothing to do with morality.

“There’s nothing wrong with being poor/ugly/fat, etc” - but still, people will judge you poorly for being such.

Some of these might look like objective dimensions, but even if an objective measure exists, we still make judgements based on the number (“Is a 200 lbs guy fat?”, “Is $500k net worth rich?”).

Both moral and amoral values are separate dimensions that are independent, though sometimes correlated (like sex appeal and physical fitness).

Subconsciously, we aggregate the “scores” from all values from our value system - a weighted average of some sorts - to form an overall judgement of a person.

A collective aggregation of individual overall judgements of a person is otherwise known as social status.

On one hand, comparing across separate value dimensions is a category error (“Is it worse to be fat or to be poor?”). On the other hand, all values somehow contribute to the overall judgement, so theoretically it’s possible to compare the impact of one value vs the impact of another value. But practically, this is very hard outside of identical twin thought experiments - in most real life cases, what we end up comparing is two very different people with very different value scores contributing to their overall judgements.

A great example of this are celebrity scandals. A celebrity is someone who managed to get popular due to some high amoral value - wealth, sport or artistic achievements, political power and such. Prior to the scandal, their perception of moral values is OK. Hence, their individual overall judgements are most often very positive → they are high status people.

The celebrity scandal starts when some new information about how the celebrity in question has actually been low moral value is revealed - they’ve been involved in fraud, theft, rape, drunk driving, speeding, cheating on their spouse, whatever - you name it, they’ve done it. Suddenly, their public perception / social status shifts - not only their average overall judgement is way lower, it’s also more varied across the population. Those who prioritize moral values have a very low overall judgement, those who don’t, have a higher overall judgement based on their still high amoral value. They also note that having that celebrity cancelled or put behind bars will no longer allow them to contribute to the society with their amoral values. A heated public debate ensues.

The Rape Question exists because we often get moral and amoral values confused.

One reason is that here in the modern West, we have a strange, three-layer value system:

• An outer layer (Superego) egalitarian system where no values exist and “all humans are equal”.

• A middle layer (Ego) value system that includes moral values only (“A bad man” vs “A good man”)

• An inner layer (Id) comprehensive value system that includes both moral and amoral values.

Based on the context, we switch between the layers. Surprisingly, this weird system is one of the reasons why the West dominates the modern world:

Another issue is that we don’t have a good vocabulary to separate moral and amoral judgements. We have “right” and “wrong”, which typically is used for moral values, and “good” and “bad”, which is used for both moral and amoral values. We also have insidious word structures like “a sin against <amoral value>” (“Writing with ChatGPT is a sin against creativity”).

A third reason is the way religious moral value systems are structured. All moral systems are built on the core principle that it’s wrong for people to hurt each other. More specifically, the non-hurting principle applies to in-group members - violent criminals and enemy soldiers can be hurt, killed or put behind bars. But the religious systems also incorporate second-order moral values that indirectly contribute to people hurting each other less by establishing a high-functioning community - regular prayers and participation in religious rituals where moral values are reiterated and discussed, monogamous marriage, work ethic, charity, respect for parents, elders and hierarchies and the belief in a supernatural omniscient and omnipresent entity watching your every step and eventually deciding whether you deserve an eternal afterlife.

All of this clouds the fact that both moral and amoral values are independent of each other.

How rich you are does not affect how hot you are.
How morally right (or wrong) you are doesn’t affect how rich or hot you are.
And vice versa².

The Young and the Reckless

One of the amoral values we have in our Western world is safety.

We believe that safe things, systems and behaviors are valuable, while the unsafe ones are not.

Based on that, we create laws, systems and institutions to make our world safe. Many of them are created to prevent people from inadvertently hurting other people: FAA prevents people from building and selling bad, unsafe airplanes, FDA prevents people from creating and selling bad, unsafe drugs and food and so on.

But some laws like drinking age, age of consent, seat belt and bike helmet mandates are created to prevent people from hurting themselves.

These are based on the idea that personal safety is a shared amoral value, in that case even more valuable than personal freedom.

If at some point the safety laws, systems and institutions are far beyond the position of safety in the value system of (at least a significant chunk of) the society, there’s an uproar against “safetyism”.

Notably, safety is not an universal value - it is just something that we prioritize here in our modern Western world. If you’ve ever seen the streets in India or anywhere else in the Third World, you know that they don’t have a safety culture.

And even in the Western world we have subcultures that don’t prioritize safety. One of them is street skateboarders, known for not wearing helmets despite the risk of severe head injuries.

Last year, skating superstar Nyjah Huston, was sliding down a huge handrail (like pro street skaters usually do) when his foot was caught in one of the poles supporting the rail. His body flipped upside down and he landed straight on his head - the worst case scenario, looking like certain death or at least paralysis from the neck down.

Miraculously, Nyjah (left below) only suffered a concussion and a fractured skull, and within a few weeks he was back skating in a top level competition. But his slam reignited the debate about helmets in street skateboarding. Other pro skaters (like Ricky Glaser in the video below) attempted rhetorical and philosophical acrobatics to justify how they’re still not going to wear helmets even in light of Nyjah’s slam. Andy Anderson (right below), known for his long hair and vintage freestyle tricks, remains the only pro street skater that wears a helmet at all times.

Anyway, sex is not like street skateboarding, but more like pretty much everything else - we value safe sex, and we don’t value reckless sex.

In The Rape Question debate, Camps B and C recognize that the date rape victim put herself at risk. But this is not “victim blaming”, because it doesn’t have to do anything with morality. It has to do with the amoral value of safety.

“There’s nothing wrong with being reckless” - but regardless of that, one can be proud when acting safely, and shamed when acting recklessly.

For a moment, let’s compare the date rape with a consensual casual sex scenario.

Assuming the modern liberal morality, there’s nothing (morally) wrong about a consensual sex act between two adults. But in terms of safety, both parties bear some risk of STDs (very low with condoms), but other than that, the woman about to have casual sex puts herself at much more risk: she risks that if she changes her mind and non-consents³, the man might push through and rape her.

The consensual casual sex scenario is more of a Schroedinger’s Cat situation: with every man a woman could consider having casual sex with, there is some kind of probability (between 0 and 100%) that they will turn out to be a rapist in the moment she tries to stop him. But for the man she had consensual sex with, she will never know (or at least, not until she tries to have sex with him again): she didn’t open the box and didn’t find out if the cat was dead or alive.

But the date rape victim opened the box and, unfortunately, found out that the cat was dead.

The safety value judgement of the date rape victim is more harsh than the casual sex having woman, because the casual sex having woman has put herself at unknown risk of rape - between 0 and 100% (probably on the lower end, as most men, I presume, are not rapists) - while the date rape victim put herself at risk of certain rape (the probability of things that have already happened in the past is 100%).

Now, I acknowledge that this might be hindsight bias. A significant part of the dating process is the woman checking if she can feel safe with the man (which includes subconscious assessment of the risk that he will rape her whenever he has a chance to), and the man trying to assure her that she can feel safe with him. The rape victim is extra shamed, because her rape risk assessment (low) turned out to be incorrect, as the actual risk was high (or 100%, with hindsight bias).

The casual sex safety judgement is like an inquiry about a safety procedure non-compliance that could’ve led to a plane crash, but didn’t, or judging street skaters for skating without helmets.
The date rape safety judgement is like a plane crash investigation, or judging Nyjah Huston for falling on his head and cracking his skull.

The proper way to get rid of the hindsight bias is to investigate the thought and decision process from before the act. While this is usually a part of airplane safety incident investigation, this is not realistic for real life judgements of date rape victims and skateboarding accident survivors.

Anyway, what I believe the correct value judgement of the date rape participants should be:

• The rapist did something terribly immoral (moral value score = low)

• The rape victim put herself at terrible risk (safety value score = low)

Both of these should be completely independent and unrelated to each other. ⁴

The final part is these two independent value judgements should affect your overall judgements of both date rape participants.

This - the weights subconsciously applied to value components to aggregate the overall judgement - depend on one’s individual value system, but I believe the consensus across the modern Western world is that a terrible moral offense is way more significant driver of negative overall judgement than putting oneself at terrible risk.

The correct way most people in the Western society should form their overall judgements of the date rate participants is:

• Rapist - very low (driven by moral failure)

• Victim - slightly low (driven by safety failure)

Like the value judgements, these should be completely independent of each other - what the rapist did should not affect the overall judgement of the victim (i.e. no Virtuous Victim effect) and vice versa.

In practice, this is often not the case - hence, Camps A/B/C.

The reason for this is, I believe, another cognitive bias where the rape situation is framed as a conflict between two actors, which prompts others to judge them using the conflict resolution heuristic; a 2-player zero-sum game:

• Camp A believes that the woman wins and the rapist loses.

• Camp C believes that the rapist wins and the woman loses.

• Camp B believes that it’s a draw, or the win/loss is split unevenly (i.e. 30/70%)

This reasoning is flawed, because the only judgements that really matter in this situation are the individual judgements of each date rape participants (independent from each other), which affect the course of (potential) social relationships between the judging individuals and the date rape participants, and the legal judgement of the date rapist⁵.

The zero sum reasoning would only apply if there was an actual zero-sum game played by both date rape participants:

• The rapist and victim both run for president and you have to vote one or the other.

• The rapist and victim are the two only people you are left with on a desert island or after a catastrophic event and you need to choose which one to date and marry (you’re bisexual).

• The rapist and victim are the only two coworkers seriously considered for a promotion to a management position (most realistic scenario I could think of).

In reality, there is almost never any zero-sum game between the date rape participants. Hence, they should both be judged individually and independently.

In this non-zero sum judgement game, the rapist takes a huge loss, and the victim loses just slightly. Both of them lose - but the rapist’s loss is way more significant.

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1. Not me. I call myself an armchair evolutionary psychologist, but I’m a good kind of armchair evolutionary psychologist. But there’s also a plenty of bad ones out there.

2. More specifically, the current states of values are independent. How rich you are NOW doesn’t affect how hot you are NOW. But being hot now can lead to being rich in the future, or might be a consequence of having been rich in the past.

3. I remember pickup artists discussing LMR (Last Minute Resistance) mitigation tactics, ranging from sensible (play it cool, step back, try again later, more gently and slowly) to unhinged (“be the prize”, act fussy and passive-aggressive to guilt or shame her into sex).

The fact that LMR became a part of the pickup artist vocabulary confirms that this is something that a significant chunk of women do, and men need to be prepared for it and act accordingly.

4. With “should”, I am assuming that this is a correct judgement for anyone with a value system that includes both the immorality of rape as one of their moral values, as well as the (sexual) safety as part of their amoral values.

5. Legal judgements are specific types of judgements - the legal system is usually built based on the secular core of moral value system (based on the “people should not hurt each other” principle), plus some select amoral values.

You can be punished by law for raping, stealing and, in some countries, not wearing a seat belt or a bike helmet, but you can’t be punished by law for not being a nice person, having reckless sex, or (unless you have a religious fundamentalist legal system) not going to church.