Physical Desires vs. Human Dignity and Unfulfilled Dreams...
in Philosophy ·
Edward Green said:It feels like all this talk about a survivor's "honor" boils down to one thing: if a woman doesn't have the right to sex, she's a slut. If she's forced, she isn't quite a slut anymore, but people still won't view her as an honorable woman.
Disgusting, slimy, backwards mindset. 🤮
I feel sick for these women. On top of the assault itself, they have to deal with a society that judges them—a society that honestly thinks they'd be better off dead than having "lost their dignity."
Big Dick's quote, which you posted, perfectly sketches out society's double standards, and the pastor's statement is, in my view, a perfect mirror of those very same standards. While I suspect his remarks perhaps played a role in the moment—offering what the girl's loved ones perhaps wanted to hear and what might have perhaps comforted them—I believe his words were incomplete, socially dangerous, and irresponsible. Therefore, I only partially agree with the following:
casualowl1 said:Some people spend their entire lives trying and still fail. That’s on you.
If someone kidnapped you, forced you into sex work, and sold you as a slave—forcing you into drugs, abortions, or even those horrific hymen surgeries—would you really say you haven't lost your dignity and honor? Just because it was someone else pulling the strings?
Maybe you wouldn't "lose" it, but it would be violently stripped away from you. It's exactly what that guy was attempting to do to her.
His statement implies that you have to fight back.
Your take implies that it's better to just give in the moment someone looks at you wrong. At least you stay alive that way. That's a pathetic way to live.
Also, the statement strongly emphasizes that dignity and honor depend entirely on a person's own actions. And she chose to fight for herself. She fought for her dignity, her honor, her human rights, and ultimately, her life.
He's saying we should fight against assault.
You're implying we shouldn't resist because if we fail, we might lose our lives.
There is immense honor in dying while fighting for your ideals, for freedom, and for your basic human dignity. But what do you actually know about honor and respect? You seem to think they're just handed to you by God and don't need to be earned or fought for.
And the saddest part is that you're ignoring the fact that the man who said this knew her personally and understood her values, whereas you don't have a clue.
It implies it, but instead of—or alongside—that pathetic rhetoric, the statement should have more strongly implied that the girl lost the battle. She lost because of the twisted, reckless actions of another person, and since she has already lost it, the responsibility for any further struggle should fall upon our societal institutions. It would have been enough for him to say that such an injustice must be sanctioned and that the case warrants serious reflection. Instead, by making that statement, he simply placed the incident within that exact framework Big Dick described, which Alex quoted, merely reproducing it without any meaningful intervention. The girl experienced an attempted rape; therefore, the pastor concludes that it was right for her to fight to the death (likely) to defend against that loss of honor, and now life goes on (for everyone else). Rather than stating that her fundamental human rights—her right to life itself and the ability to live it freely—were brutally stripped away from her.
The case was framed through sacrifice, perhaps even falsifying the motivation that drove her until the final moment, rather than emphasizing the tragedy of the pathology that led to her becoming a victim in the first place. I am not suggesting he should have crammed all of that into a funeral sermon, but I do think the emphasis should have been on those elements, rather than on this false, distorted image of a noble struggle for survival by some socially maladjusted kid from the neighborhood.