Victim Blaming. 2012: the year when it became okay to blame victims of sexual assault

No, it isn't OK to run around pantyless & short skirts and think you are not making yourself target. What you wear and how you wear it tells a lot about a persons personality and behavior. You wear a neon sign saying fk-me, you are liable to get screwed. We can still blame the prep, but that doesn't mean you were not also at fault or acted irresponsible in the matter.

This is a symptom of a morally sick society. It’s a society that absolutely refuses to force men to be responsible for their own sexual behavior or its consequences. Men certainly have a choice in the abortion and birth control debate too. Each and every one of them. And that choice is located precisely at their pants zipper. But after they decide at that time and location, their part of any “choice” is done. Any choosing beyond that point is up to her. His choice ends there. But his responsibility for the consequence of his choice should not. If a man gets a woman pregnant, regardless how he does it, he should be held financially responsible by law:

If a pregnancy results, then he must now help raise that child (and yes, he or his immediate family should be forced to financially support the child);

He or his family must pay for a safe, legal abortion if the woman he impregnated wants it (NO it doesn’t matter if he is against abortion. He should have thought of that before he unzipped the zipper. Remember he’s made his choice already. Now it’s up to her);

If he gave the woman an STD, he or his family must be held financially responsible for treatment for both of them, particularly if the STD is HIV, which is deadly;

If he raped the woman, then he or his family must pay for any psychological counseling for his victim if she requires it, and she most certainly will.

Again, men have a choice – it’s located at their pants zipper. That is the location and the scope of their choice in the matter and it’s time society started both teaching and enforcing this principle. Males should be taught from early puberty that their “choice” in the matter of abortion and contraception begins and ends right there. But their responsibility for any consequences of their choice absolutely does not end there. There is no moral or legal reason that it should. Except of course that men mostly make our laws and they make them such that it is convenient for them to pawn financial responsibility and social blame for the consequences and costs of their own behavior and lack of self-control onto the women of our society.

The just-world hypothesis (or just-world fallacy) is the cognitive bias that human actions eventually yield morally fair and fitting consequences, so that, ultimately, noble actions are duly rewarded and evil actions are duly punished. In other words, the just-world hypothesis is the tendency to attribute consequences to, or expect consequences as the result of, an unspecified power that restores moral balance; the fallacy is that this implies (often unintentionally) the existence of such a power in terms of some cosmic force of justice, desert, stability, or order in the universe.

Actor–observer asymmetry (also actor–observer bias) explains the errors that one makes when forming attributions about behavior (Jones & Nisbett, 1971). When a person judges their own behavior, and they are the actor, they are more likely to attribute their actions to the particular situation than to a generalization about their personality. Yet when a person is attributing the behavior of another person, thus acting as the observer; they are more likely to attribute this behavior to the person’s overall disposition than as a result of situational factors. This frequent error shows the bias that people hold in their evaluations of behavior (Miller & Norman, 1975). People are more likely to see their own behavior as affected by the situation they are in, or the sequence of occurrences that have happened to them throughout their day. But, they see other people’s actions as solely a product of their overall personality, and they do not afford them the chance to explain their behavior as exclusively a result of a situational effect.