Comment by fabian2k
4 years ago
The "share an AirBnB to be able to afford the conference" part seems particularly damning to me. That seems entirely premeditated and predatory.
4 years ago
The "share an AirBnB to be able to afford the conference" part seems particularly damning to me. That seems entirely premeditated and predatory.
"seems" doesn't mean "is", we have law systems to deal with those kind of issues. Judges are for determining where the line between "shitty partner" vs "rapist" lies.
The author doesn't appear to want to make the claim that Mr. Pretty raped her. She suggests, strongly, that he's a shitty person. She wants other people to know this. Courts don't adjudicate such matters, unless they have further consequences.
"Insist[ing] on having intercourse regardless of me saying I didn’t want to" is rape.
4 replies →
I'm not a court, I'm a random person on the internet commenting here.
Me too.
In particular, if true, the part where he first encouraged her to invite other people and then when she expressed interest in that, accused her of trying to bring a “chaperone” sounds very much like premeditation. The initial invitation was designed to make her think it wasn’t just the two of them, but then he shamed her into acquiescing to that exact situation.
To me it sounds generous and possibly completely harmless.
My experience with conferences is in a different field, but a senior participant proposing to share an AirBnB with a junior participant like a student would be extremely weird.
If you want to support the student, you either organize another student for them to share accomodations, or connect them to one of the travel grants for that conference.
It creates a power imbalance, or increases the power imbalance that already existed between the two.
If you have a boss/employee relationship, or a mentor/mentee relationship, or a professor/student relationship, you need to tread extra carefully around consent. One party in those relationships holds incredible power over the other, and can coerce the weaker party into things they may not be comfortable doing.
Likewise, enabling someone to attend a conference they would not otherwise be able to financially afford creates a possibility of coercion . It's not always coercive, but it needs to be handled delicately and appropriately. In the author's situation, if she refused, there was a chance she was thrown out onto the streets of Berlin at who knows what hour, with no money/luggage, and maybe no ability to speak the local language.
I don't agree. The crime here seems to be rape and the use of power to extract sex from another. That's the problem. I don't see how sharing an AirBnB is by itself a problem. In light of everything else, it fits a pattern of manipulation, but it by itself isn't harmful.
5 replies →
Do you think that accomplished, intelligent rapists like to drag helpless women down dark alleys by their hair after punching them out, or do you think they would prefer a situation where a naive response might be "That sounds generous and possibly completely harmless"? I am going to assume that you are an innocent, not a troll, and ask you that you think like a rapist. What situations would benefit a serial rapist, both in terms of creating a power disadvantage for the victim, a physical opportunity, and a plausible alternative explanation for the public? Bingo.
Let's turn it around. You are a respected figure in a community. You are aware, and have read on HN threads like this, how there are terrible women who smear men with baseless, yet career-ending allegations of sexual advances or worse. In what situation are you comfortable with that risk to your career? There is only one such situation: where you are the predator, and you have groomed a naive victim.
As a professional, you have no business sharing accommodation, of any kind, with a person of the opposite gender (or the same gender if that is your sexual preference). Frankly unless you are very good friends, not anyone at all.
The generous thing would be to fund a private AirBnB for her.