Pierce Graham said:
But it's a simple fact: if you dress like a slut, you're more likely to get raped.
If it's a simple fact, then can you support it with any numbers?
As far as I'm aware:
1) The jury is out on whether clothing has any impact on the likelihood of being raped. Since stranger rape (not 'date rape', fuck you Charles Clarke) is relatively rare and dealing with victims raises ethical problems, it would be extremely difficult to perform any kind of balanced research on the subject. Sure, if you were willing to brave an ethics board, you might be able to produce a rough idea of how many of a sample of stranger rape victims were wearing 'slutty' clothes at the time, but that means nothing without other numbers.
2) The vast majority of rape cases are not stranger rape. In the majority of rape cases, the victim and the attacker have a previous sexual relationship, in most other rape cases the victim and the attacker have known each other for a significant period of time. Stranger rape is a tiny fraction of overall rape cases, and yet since it's the most likely to be reported that tiny fraction is already massively overeported relative to other forms of rape.
An enormous majority of people who are raped will be raped by people who already know them and have seen them in a range of clothes already. Again, there is no evidence that it is in any way statistically significant.
But all this is besides the point..
Pierce Graham said:
If I leave my doors unlocked, I'm more likely to get robbed. If I cross the street, I'm more likely to get hit by a car.
A female body (or male body, let's not be narrow minded) is not a car. It's not a piece of jewellery. It's not a handbag. It isn't a possession to be owned or stolen. It's amazing how common it is in rape discourse to see people comparing female bodies to commodities with logic along the lines of 'well, I lock my car to discourage thieves so you should wear an unflattering top to discourage rapists'.
No. That kind of discourse is not helpful, in fact it's worse than unhelpful in that it's actively promoting the kinds of attitudes which often make rape justifiable to those who do it. Rape is not a preventable theft which you can solve by metaphorically locking your car. The preventive logic of theft does not apply, and if you apply it (without any real evidence, I might add) then you send the message to society that an uncovered female body is fair game.
Yes, you lock your car. But you never have to go out wearing a burlap bag because if you don't random guys might assume you want to be stabbed in the stomach. And if that happened, I'd presume you wouldn't expect everyone around you to tut and tell you that you should have been wearing your bag. I'd hope in that situation you'd have the spine to assert your right not to have to wear the burlap bag, especially if there was no real evidence that those guys wouldn't have stabbed you anyway. This is exactly what these women are doing, and fucking power to them!