Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for sharing that. Your blog post definitely shed much more light onto the context of your comments, so I also appreciate your giving me the chance to keep my foot out of my mouth. ;-) First, your perspective raises the question for me, "Am I too focused on protecting my (future) teenage daughters, at the expense of not diligently analyzing their current environment?" Your approach here (of emphasizing mutua…
Re the logical progression: I imagine I could say a lot more about it. I spent time in therapy. I spent a lot of time reading, journaling, contemplating sexual morality and the like. So there is certainly a rich background that informed my thought process. But I laid out my logic as best I could concerning what I actually thought in concluding that emphasizing consent was the single strongest and most civilized measu…
And neither was that the message I intended to give them. It's an educational issue. I live on a farm and we kill a large portion of what we eat ourselves. Given a collapse of the supply-chain ecosystem that keeps grocery stores stocked with food, my family won't be scratching their heads wondering where the food went. I don't expect the global collapse of a food supply chain. I would guess it's statistically less likely to affect any one individual than rape is. But the tools for dealing with a worst-case scenario are best learned in advance. And so I intend to educate my children about self-defense in much the same way.
"I do not believe that overemphasizing a need to be prepared to physically assault another person is a means to teach women to not behave as prey in relation to men."
Isn't it similar to how you emphasized a need for mutual consent to your children? Moreover, isn't physical defense merely one more tool to pull out when others have crossed a boundary? I understand your argument that it isn't likely to be used, but it seems like you're drawing a distinction between the value of having boundaries and not letting people cross them, and the value of being able to reestablish those boundaries once crossed. Why do so strongly prefer the former to the latter?
This seems especially odd considering your own position of being physically capable of defense. Doesn't it seem like a good idea to have other women be as capable of defending themselves as you are?
"..., I will suggest you are putting your children at grave risk to view protecting their sexuality as an issue for their teen years."
That's the question I mentioned in my last post that your experience has raised for me. I intend to very carefully reconsider how I'm protecting my children in their current environment. Thanks for pointing me in that direction.