Too late to the debate, but I would suggest splitting this into multiple questions:
Is it true of human suffering in general that if you tell people “this was a horrible thing that happened to you”, they will subjectively suffer more than if you tell them “shut up, that was nothing”?
Assuming that the answer to the previous question is a clear yes, how should we organize our society to minimize human suffering?
Note that these two questions can be explored apart from sexuality. The question whether sexual abuse is different from abuse in general, could then be treated separately.
The reason I would like to have the debate about suffering in general first, is that many arguments made about sexual abuse actually are generalizable to all kinds of abuse—so it feels like motivated reasoning to only make those arguments with regards to sexual abuse.
I mean, the point of signaling that you suffer is to elicit compassion; and the signal is more credible if you actually suffer. If you were 100% sure you would never get any compassion, no matter what, there would be no need to signal suffering, so perhaps there would be less suffering. Maybe engineering our society to eradicate compassion would lead to less human suffering! …see, I just made the entire argument without mentioning sex at all. If it perhaps did not convince you in its general form, why does it sound more convincing if I make the same argument specifically about sexual abuse?
I suspect that it’s worth mentioning sexuality as a special case specifically because our society treats sexual abuse as a separate and somewhat magical magisterium; you’re correct to note that the dynamic matters much more broadly than just with sex in particular, but if there is a problem here in the way the OP theorizes, it seems to me that it’s especially virulent in the domain of sexual assault.
Another way to say this is that not singling out sexual assault in particular makes this almost a … bait and switch? Like, you’d in practice be doing something like trapping people in a way that feels a little disingenuous, by first getting them to admit to a general conclusion and then springing it on them that it applies in this highly-charged, poor-epistemic-hygiene domain as well, ha ha!!
Or something. It feels like burying the lede, or failing to put your thesis up front, even though the argument is more elegant the way you want to make it. Something something the pragmatics of people’s actual attitudes toward/behaviors around sex in particular.
If we first figure out how things work in general, and then check whether the conclusion also applies to sex, we can find out how much is the same and how much is different. Maybe it is different a lot! But if we start with sex, then the conclusion “sex is different” is kinda already assumed.
I suspect that the real answer will include a lot of “people are different” and “it depends”. If one victim is traumatized, it does not necessarily mean that all must be. If one victim says is was no big deal for them, it does not necessarily mean everyone else would also be okay except for having been programmed by the society to react strongly. -- I felt the need to react, because it seemed to me that this debate had a vibe of “one victim said it was actually no big deal, therefore everyone who complains is… oversensitive; hey I am not blaming them, of course, I am only blaming the society that made them so sensitive!”
Context probably matters a lot; whether it was “it happened in a special situation, but I am no longer in that special situation so now I am safe” or “it happened out of the blue, it could happen anytime again” (or “it happened in a special situation, and I am still in that special situation”). Did it happen once or repeatedly? Was everything else okay, or was this just one bad experience among many? Was the environment supportive to me or to the aggressor? The important things may actually be subjective, such as “I feel responsible for what happened to me” or “it was clearly someone else’s fault”; where sometimes two people could interpret the same situation differently.
And I think the topic is worth exploring in general. I mean, life sucks (the first Buddhist noble truth), and we experience all kinds of not-optimal-experiences, some of them smaller, some larger, of different kinds. For some of those experiences, the attitude of the society is “for fuck’s sake, grow up and stop whining”, for others, it is “this is a horrible thing that should have never happened to you”. What is the exact rule that separates the unwanted experiences into these two heaps? Is there already a research on this?
(As an interesting example of this more general case, some rationalists disagree with the society in general on the topic of death—is it something that wise people need to accept and preferably find some way to see as a good thing; or is it a definitely bad thing that is merely too difficult to fix, but once we become able to do something about it, we definitely should? In the meanwhile, is it an infohazard to tell people that death is bad?)
For some of those experiences, the attitude of the society is “for fuck’s sake, grow up and stop whining”, for others, it is “this is a horrible thing that should have never happened to you”.
Let’s not forget that, to a normally socialized man, the latter carries an implicit “and you alone are at fault for not having been strong enough to stop your assailant in their tracks. You should be ashamed forever and have no business being alive”. Therefore, it may be more damning than the former.
The reason why sexual harm is (correctly) considered a serious case of harm distinct from other harms might be evolutionary—in ancestral environment, being physically injured or hurt some other way might’ve been much less of a predictor of that person’s future than being raped (and possibly also a predictor of a much less seriously bad future).
Too late to the debate, but I would suggest splitting this into multiple questions:
Is it true of human suffering in general that if you tell people “this was a horrible thing that happened to you”, they will subjectively suffer more than if you tell them “shut up, that was nothing”?
Assuming that the answer to the previous question is a clear yes, how should we organize our society to minimize human suffering?
Note that these two questions can be explored apart from sexuality. The question whether sexual abuse is different from abuse in general, could then be treated separately.
The reason I would like to have the debate about suffering in general first, is that many arguments made about sexual abuse actually are generalizable to all kinds of abuse—so it feels like motivated reasoning to only make those arguments with regards to sexual abuse.
I mean, the point of signaling that you suffer is to elicit compassion; and the signal is more credible if you actually suffer. If you were 100% sure you would never get any compassion, no matter what, there would be no need to signal suffering, so perhaps there would be less suffering. Maybe engineering our society to eradicate compassion would lead to less human suffering! …see, I just made the entire argument without mentioning sex at all. If it perhaps did not convince you in its general form, why does it sound more convincing if I make the same argument specifically about sexual abuse?
I suspect that it’s worth mentioning sexuality as a special case specifically because our society treats sexual abuse as a separate and somewhat magical magisterium; you’re correct to note that the dynamic matters much more broadly than just with sex in particular, but if there is a problem here in the way the OP theorizes, it seems to me that it’s especially virulent in the domain of sexual assault.
Another way to say this is that not singling out sexual assault in particular makes this almost a … bait and switch? Like, you’d in practice be doing something like trapping people in a way that feels a little disingenuous, by first getting them to admit to a general conclusion and then springing it on them that it applies in this highly-charged, poor-epistemic-hygiene domain as well, ha ha!!
Or something. It feels like burying the lede, or failing to put your thesis up front, even though the argument is more elegant the way you want to make it. Something something the pragmatics of people’s actual attitudes toward/behaviors around sex in particular.
If we first figure out how things work in general, and then check whether the conclusion also applies to sex, we can find out how much is the same and how much is different. Maybe it is different a lot! But if we start with sex, then the conclusion “sex is different” is kinda already assumed.
I suspect that the real answer will include a lot of “people are different” and “it depends”. If one victim is traumatized, it does not necessarily mean that all must be. If one victim says is was no big deal for them, it does not necessarily mean everyone else would also be okay except for having been programmed by the society to react strongly. -- I felt the need to react, because it seemed to me that this debate had a vibe of “one victim said it was actually no big deal, therefore everyone who complains is… oversensitive; hey I am not blaming them, of course, I am only blaming the society that made them so sensitive!”
Context probably matters a lot; whether it was “it happened in a special situation, but I am no longer in that special situation so now I am safe” or “it happened out of the blue, it could happen anytime again” (or “it happened in a special situation, and I am still in that special situation”). Did it happen once or repeatedly? Was everything else okay, or was this just one bad experience among many? Was the environment supportive to me or to the aggressor? The important things may actually be subjective, such as “I feel responsible for what happened to me” or “it was clearly someone else’s fault”; where sometimes two people could interpret the same situation differently.
And I think the topic is worth exploring in general. I mean, life sucks (the first Buddhist noble truth), and we experience all kinds of not-optimal-experiences, some of them smaller, some larger, of different kinds. For some of those experiences, the attitude of the society is “for fuck’s sake, grow up and stop whining”, for others, it is “this is a horrible thing that should have never happened to you”. What is the exact rule that separates the unwanted experiences into these two heaps? Is there already a research on this?
(As an interesting example of this more general case, some rationalists disagree with the society in general on the topic of death—is it something that wise people need to accept and preferably find some way to see as a good thing; or is it a definitely bad thing that is merely too difficult to fix, but once we become able to do something about it, we definitely should? In the meanwhile, is it an infohazard to tell people that death is bad?)
Let’s not forget that, to a normally socialized man, the latter carries an implicit “and you alone are at fault for not having been strong enough to stop your assailant in their tracks. You should be ashamed forever and have no business being alive”. Therefore, it may be more damning than the former.
The reason why sexual harm is (correctly) considered a serious case of harm distinct from other harms might be evolutionary—in ancestral environment, being physically injured or hurt some other way might’ve been much less of a predictor of that person’s future than being raped (and possibly also a predictor of a much less seriously bad future).