Category Archives: rape
“And what if they get killed?” A Voice for Men as an antifeminist Witchfinder General
So John the Other has responded to my post about A Voice for Men’s “bounty” on the makers of the SCUM video. It’s a fairly unhinged rant, even by his standards. Here’s the money quote:
It’s a bizarre bit of circular logic: if some deranged asshole literally kills one or more of the videomakers, this is proof that the Swedish justice system isn’t working, which therefore justifies the deranged asshole’s actions. So the existence of vigilante violence justifies vigilante violence that justifies vigilante violence.
Since when is making a video a capital crime?
After all this, John rather bizarrely claims that “[u]nlike David Futrelle, I do not and will not lend myself to the support of violence, or indeed, of murder.”
That’s because, according to his daft logic, shooting the videomakers would count as “self defense,” because evidently someone posting a video on YouTube that you don’t like is equivalent to someone coming at you with a knife.
While challenging AVfM’s “bounty” — without actually defending the video in any way — apparently means that I support murder. Go figure.
Vincent Price as the Witchfinder General
But dwelling too much on the specifics of this one case is to miss the larger point. A Voice for Men has essentially set itself up as a sort of antifeminist Witchfinder General. In the 1968 cult film of that name, you may remember, the corrupt Witchfinder tested whether the accused were witches by lowering them into water; those who floated were judged guilty, and burned at the stake. Those who sank were innocent, but dead.
Paul Elam and his sidekick John have a similar approach. They intend to do feminists harm, to “fuck their shit up,” regardless of what they’ve done or said. None of those who have been placed in the Register-Her “registry” as “bigots” deserve to be smeared or harassed (or put on the phony “registry” in the first place). But if you look at what they are ostensibly there for, well, you’ll discover that it matters not at all to Elam whether they sink or float. The point is to harass feminists; almost any excuse will do.
One of those on the “registry,” a radical feminist who posts online as Vliet Tiptree , has indeed said some fairly vile things about the male gender; she is the only one who might conceivably be described as a “bigot.” But others are there on trumped up “charges” based on highly tendentious readings of some of their writing; it’s clear that they’ve been targeted mainly because they have been publicly critical of the men’s rights movement.
Meanwhile, another of the alleged feminist bigots is not a feminist at all, but rather a traditional-minded “mom blogger” who aroused Elam’s fury by saying that she didn’t want male daycare volunteers taking her daughter to the bathroom, and for suggesting (incorrectly) that men make up 99% of abusers. (She has since apologized, but remains on the “registry.”)
And one recent candidate for inclusion, a feminist blogger whom Elam has pledged to “stalk,” seems to have made it on Elam’s naughty list simply because she has helped to highlight how pervasive harassment of women and feminists is online. Complain about harassment; get harassed. But Elam’s “critiques” of her are all suspiciously vague. It’s not clear if he has read even a single one of her blog posts. Nonetheless, he promises her that
by the time we are done you will wax nostalgic over the days when all you had to deal with was someone expressing a desire to fuck you up your shopworn ass.
In a post from some months back, Elam offered a similarly psychosexually charged justification for his campaign to “Fuck Their Shit Up.” Directly addressing the “feminazi scumbags reading this right now,” he declared:
I am not going to stop. You see, I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.
Let’s repeat that last bit for emphasis:
the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.
Does anyone still doubt that the aim of A Voice for Men and Register-Her.com in publishing personal information of their enemies is to intimidate – indeed, to terrorize?
Does anyone still doubt that their campaign is driven by hate?
Does anyone still doubt that they don’t give a shit if their actions cause someone to be physically assaulted or even killed?
Why “Fucking Their Shit Up” is fucked up.
Here’s a picture someone posted to Reddit about a day ago:
Found on Reddit.
The general consensus amongst Redditors who saw the post was that it was hilarious. At last count, the post had gotten 1,157 up votes and 318 down votes, giving it 830 net upvotes. That’s a shitload, even for Reddit; it’s gotten more net upvotes than all but one of the posts currently on the front page of the subreddit (r/vertical) it was posted in.
It’s also pretty fucking offensive — a rape joke, a murder-of-women joke, and a necrophilia joke all rolled into one. Sure, it’s a “joke,” but it wouldn’t be hard to make the argument that pictures like this one, which make violence against women into a joke, can actually serve to encourage such violence.
If you did believe this, what would be the appropriate reaction to such a picture? You could post critical remarks about it in the comments section for the post on Reddit. You could post about it in ShitRedditSays, a subreddit devoted to ferreting out misogyny and racism and other bigotries on Reddit. You could post about it on your blog.
Or you could declare the picture an “unambiguous call for murder” and the person responsible for it to be a ” depraved and murderous male supremacist.” You could offer a reward for information on that person’s real identity, and post that person’s personal information — including their phone number, their place of employment, their home address — online. And if someone points out that posting such information might lead to this person being physically harmed or even killed, you could say: I don’t give a shit.
But that would be wrong.
It would also be terribly time-consuming, because crap like this gets posted to Reddit all the fucking time.
The proper response to speech you don’t like, however vile you think it is, isn’t violence or harassment, but more speech.
If what someone says goes beyond the bounds of free speech, you have other options. If someone threatens you personally, in a posting on the internet or by letter or email or phone call, you have the right to (and you should) report them to the proper authorities. If someone threatens you physically, you have the right to defend yourself.
But a misogynistic picture on the internet is not a threat to you. Nor is a misandrist video. These things are challenges — and in many ways opportunities — for you to make your case against hate. Responding to shit you don’t like on the internet with harassment and threats — implicit or explicit — of violence? That is hate.
Men Who Hate Women and the Women They Try to Date: Another visit to the Annals of Online Dating
What is this fucking shit?
A lot of guys who try online dating (of the heterosexual kind) complain that they send out message after message to the ladies and get no responses. Now, I’m no dating expert, but I would like to offer these gentlemen a piece of advice that I feel could dramatically improve their chances. Here it is:
If the message you are sending the lass you fancy would get upvotes on The Spearhead, do not send it.
This seems like a fairly self-evident point, but it’s one that a lot of guys don’t seem to understand, at least judging from some of the awful online come-ons posted at the always fabulous A(n)nals of Online Dating. Take this fella:
[M]en have an obligation to rescue kittens from burning buildings, pay for your drinks, hold the door open for you, keep their hair neat, go to war and many other things. I’m just saying… Society worldwide really does put more obligations on men than women all around. There are few things women have to do… Shaving your legs is one of them.
I’m not sure how exactly this topic came up in conversation, but I’m pretty sure that Mr. Mammoth-Hunting Kitten-Rescuing Door-Holder-Opener and Lady Who Doesn’t Shave Her Legs are probably not a match made in Internet heaven.
This guy’s strategy is also somewhat problematic:
A so-cal Brooklyn transplant who believes in grammar, manners, music, and humor. I’m nice to my mother, always smile at dogs and babies, and am in the process of pleading that statutory rape charge down to a misdemeanor.
Yeah, it’s probably not a good idea to open with a joke about raping underage girls. Assuming it is a joke.
This message would be a bad idea regardless of gender:
RON PAUL REVOLUTION!! GIVE US BACK OUR CONSTITUTION!!!! lol sorry
Sorry indeed.
This next fellow is a bit of a Stealth Misogynist, in that he starts out with some actual compliments directed toward an actual women. Really creepy compliments, but complements nonetheless. Then we get a plot twist that’s about as shocking as the big reveal in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. Which is to say, so obvious that it could probably be spotted from space.
When I look at you I see very happy, fun loving, sexy, good girl. I love looking through your photos, I only wish there were more. Do you enjoy being obedient to the male figures in your life?
David K. Meller, is that you?
MRA: Who cares if #MenCallYouThings? It’s not like women have any real problems.
Fried rice. Frequently confused with "fried ice."
Oh, ladies, must you complain so much? I mean, who cares if every time you say something on the internet some random dude threatens to rape you? White and Nerdy, the dude behind the Omega Virgin Revolt blog, doesn’t care, and he wants you to know it:
#mencallmethings is just another example of how women (in first world countries) don’t have any actual problems. Between the government and manginas doing everything for women, no woman has any true problems. Any “problem” a woman has is because of one of these reasons:
1. A desire for the equivalent of fried ice. IOW she wants something that is physically impossible.
2. Failed attempts at defrauding, stealing from, or otherwise attempting to enslave men.
That’s it. When a woman has to go through 1% of what a typical non-alpha man has to go through then maybe she can talk about having actual problems. Until that happens women should keep their mouths shut.
Exactly. We need to stop talking about men raping women to focus on the much more important issue of women not having sex with White and Nerdy.
But I am wondering about one thing. Is it possible that the women in question were asking for fried rice instead of fried ice? Because fried rice is totally a thing, and if you call up the proper restaurant someone will literally bring it to your door.
Now I’m hungry.
NOTE: This post may contain 
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Showdown: #MenCallMeThings versus The Catalogue of Anti-Male Shaming Tactics
The most common “critique” of the #mencallmethings hashtag that blew up on Twitter last week was that the women posting examples of misogynistic shit they got called online were making a big deal out of nothing. As the always-charming Ferdinand Bardamu so memorably put it:
It’s funny, then, that when MRAs find themselves described with less-than-flattering language they have a strange tendency to act like they’ve suddenly been struck with a case of the vapors. Witness the reaction of MRAs when someone calls them the “c-word.” No, not “cunt” – “creep.” As one outraged Men’s Rights Redditor recently put it, in a comment with 30+ net upvotes:
Creep shaming is probably one of the most insidious and anti-equality things you can do. The ability to label men as “creepy” is just one privilege that women enjoy, and a constant source of fear of ostracizing that all men must fear in our society.
When MRAs feel themselves being oppressed by such clearly man-hating language, they often refer to something called the Catalogue of Anti-Male Shaming Tactics, which, well, catalogues their language grievances in detail. According to the author of the Catalogue,
Shaming tactics are emotional devices meant to play on a man’s insecurities and shut down debate. They are meant to elicit sympathy for women and to demonize men who ask hard questions. Most, if not all, shaming tactics are basically ad homimem attacks.
Such shaming tactics, the author of the Catalogue says, with no evident awareness of the irony, are often used by “histrionic … female detractors who refuse to argue their points with logic” and the male “gynocentrists” who ally with them.
Here are some of the awful “shaming” remarks that get directed at MRAs, according to the Catalogue of Shaming Tactics:
“Stop whining!”
“Suck it up like a man!”
“You need to get over your anger at women.”
“You’re afraid of a strong woman!”
“You are so immature!”
“You are just bitter because you can’t get laid.”
“Are you gay?”
“That’s a sexist stereotype!”
“You need therapy.”
“You make me feel afraid.”
“Weirdo!”
“Loser!”
“You are so materialistic.”
“No woman will marry you with that attitude.”
“You are insensitive to the plight of women.”
Did someone just use the word "creep?"
Is that last one even an insult? It’s a fairly accurate description of a lot of MRAs, who take a certain pride in being “insensitive to the plight of women.”
So now that we’ve seen the horrible abuse that MRAs have to put up with on a daily basis, let’s take a quick look at some of the things that women and feminists regularly get from their detractors, as posted to the #mencallmethings hashtag and sent to Sady Doyle, who originated the hashtag. (These are all taken from a great post she did in the aftermath of #mencallmethings’ big blowup.) I think you will find the comparison instructive. Let’s start with the more straightforward slurs. (TRIGGER WARNING for, well, just about everything in the quotes that follow.)
Slut, cunt, bitch, whore, ugly, dyke, lesbo, unfuckable, crazy, delusional, liar, hysterical, autistic bitch child, feminazi, ballbuster, humorless, heartless whore, man hater, misandrist, stupid little girl, shrieky hysterical moron, airhead, spoiled little princess, stupid bitch, stupid fucking cunt, stupid feminazi cunt, an ugly bitter little woman, cumm guzzling closet lesbian, a pseudo-intellectual Insane Oversensitive Humourless Female supremacist.
Now let’s move on to complete sentences:
“You’re an ugly fucking cunt.”
“That sort of smirk is why God invented anal sex.”
“you’re so ugly you look like you have downs syndrome, you’d be thankful to be raped.”
“hope you catch a sexually transmitted disease or vagina cancer, cuntwit.”
”Stick a dildo up your dry vagina.”
“the only time your mouth should be open is when i’m putting my d–k in it”
“Your just a gay cunt who deserves to be punished.”
“A firm backhand to her whore face would provide her with a much needed attitude adjustment.”
“Fuck you bitch….ya need to get beat like ur pops use to do to u.”
“I hope you never have children, your daughters would be such sluts and end up murdered in a gutter by someone like me.”
You’re “not worth the effort to murder.”
“[The] only tragedy is that a bullet didn’t rip through ur brainstem after u were used 4 ur 1 & only purpose in this world.”
“what a long winded bitch. You certainly do need to be gagged.”
“You’re an annoying bitch with no friends.I’d love to run you over with my truck.”
“you stupid bitch, I should fuck the crazy right out of you.”
”i surely hope that one day you get raped.”
“[You] can’t be a female scientist, that phrase is an oxymoron,”
“it’s painfully obvious you’re a woman, get off the internet.”
“I will fuck your ass to death you filthy fucking whore. Your only worth on this planet is as a warm hole.”
“Do you need to file a hurt feelings report?”
As I noted before, despite my general unpopularity in the MRA world, I tend to get fewer of these things than, for example, most feminist bloggers with a similar degree of internet notoriety. But I get them. Here, for example, is the latest comment I’ve gotten from the guy who calls himself Nugganu, a sort of follow-up to a previous comment I quoted earlier in which he imagined me raped by ten black men:
He certainly does have a vivid imagination.
But, yeah, somehow it’s a little hard for me to feel a ton of sympathy for MRAs who so regularly work themselves into a lather over “shaming language” like “creep” and “loser” and “you are insensitive to the plight of women.”
“Please Killl Yourselves”: MRAs respond to #mencallmethings
Well, that was … instructive. The Twitter hashtag extravaganza that is #mencallmethings is still going strong. But I think at this point it’s safe to say that it has basically served it’s purpose: to highlight the obnoxious, obscene, often threatening misogynist shit that women who express their opinions about almost anything on the internet get in their inboxes or in comments online on a regular basis. Women with feminist blogs who actually call out this kind of misogyny get this sort of abuse basically every day.
Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown, who started up this hashtag campaign, explained in an eloquent and angry blog post why she did it: to point out how absolutely routine this sort of shit is. When she started her blog, she really hadn’t anticipated the sheer volume of vicious shit she’d get:
I got targeted. With threats, with insults, with smear campaigns, with attempts to threaten my employment or credibility or just general ability to get through the day with a healthy attitude and a minimal amount of insult.
The intent of all this abuse is simple: to intimidate. When someone says to a woman online “I hope you get raped with a chainsaw,” the point is to get her to shut up. The person who posts this sort of violent shit, Doyle notes,
hopes that the next time you sit down to write, you’ll remember that yikesy chainsaw-rape thing and think, “you know? Maybe this isn’t such a great idea. Maybe I don’t need to say this. Maybe I’ll piss someone off, and maybe it will be more than I can handle, and you know, maybe my thoughts on this topic just ARE NOT IMPORTANT ENOUGH for me to risk the headache/fear/irritation/distress/panic attack I know I will get.”
And then, when you say that aloud, they call you a whiny little girl who can’t handle the Internet. Because, of COURSE multiple chainsaw-rape comments aren’t a big deal! They’re just words! Sticks and stones! …
To you, my friends, I say: Fuck that noise. All of this matters. A hostile work environment matters. Being afraid of your own in-box matters. Deleting your blog because that’s the only way for you to have a normal, non-hate-filled life matters. “Accepting” that continual, virulent, hateful misogynist abuse is a pre-condition for being a lady who talks about thing, or for challenging sexism in any way, no matter who you are: That matters. And if you think we’re fragile, well. LET US COUNT THE WAYS we have hacked it, under conditions your pampered manly self just cannot imagine. LET US DEMONSTRATE FOR YOU the shit we wade through, every day, in order to talk about whether or not we liked that one “Community” episode or Lady GaGa album.
Naturally, critics of the whole hashtag campaign have done their best to minimize and dismiss this sort of routine harassment in exactly the ways that Doyle predicted they would.
The charming Ferdinand Bardamu of In Mala Fide responded to #mencallmethings with a bunch of obnoxious comments that conveniently proved basically every point Sady Doyle was trying to make with the hashtag in the first place. He started off with this bit of rapier wit:
He followed this up with a clumsy fat joke:
He continued on in this vein for awhile, so proud of his insightful critiques that he made a blog post about it.
Encouraged by Bardamu’s example, blogger PMAFT (Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology) announced a #MenCallMeThings Trolling Contest. The highlight of his own contributions to this contest:
Over on Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit, c0mputar offered slightly more coherent, if equally misguided, response.
The reality is that most of the “misogyny” they face is just criticism to their feminist viewpoints. I see this a lot when I confront feminists arguments, present my arguments, and get called a misogynist, amongst other things characterized by misandry. It happens on both sides …
Really now? Here are some actual examples of comments posted on #mencallmethings (taken from a comment from Shaenon in the discussion here).
here’s some to start: ‘I’ll rape your mum, faggot fuck’ “I’ll come to your house and kill you”
#mencallmethings, impersonate me on FB, & make disgusting sexual comments, post my name & # when I helped organize Slutwalk
cunt, whore, ugly, disgusting, cold, feminazi, shut the fuck up bitch, manipulative, crazy, playing the victim, sociopath
Bitch, whore, being sensitive, little girl, dumb, subject of jokes involving physical and sexual assault.
Any variation on fat and/or ugly at this point just makes me yawn.
I’ve had so many emails and messages telling me I deserve a beating, I don’t even keep track any longer.
“13? Judging by the size of your titties, I’d of thought you were 18.”
(censored version) If you keep talking the way you do, you deserved to get raped.
My #mencallmethings moment – receiving an email consisting of 1600 lines plus of the same insult over and over. My crime? Being fat.
I’ve had so many guys tell me how good I must be in bed because I’m fat and therefor will do anyone
I usually get ‘sweetheart’ just before they dismiss my argument as being ‘stupid’. No counter argument.
Will not repeat the violence that’s been directed at me but this one made me laugh “Blubbering self-important herd animal.”
apparently I’m a lesbian… I was unaware until #mencallmethings.
I’M ON ANTI-DEPRESSANTS AND I CANT EVEN JERK OFF CORRECTLY NOW & ITS BECAUSE OF WOMEN SO FUCK ALL YOU INFERIOR COWS
“You should have your tongue ripped out.”
I get sent one rape threat a month on average.
I was once told “get back in the kitchen you ugly bitch” for posting on a Linux board (can’t remember which one now)
Have you ever wanted someone to tell you that your genetalia should be stapled shut with bugs inside, start a blog
How about being choked to death during a forced blowjob? Start a feminist blog.
Not worth the effort to murder: the most recent example of what I had to delete off the blog when #mencallmethings
C0mputar, in his Reddit post, went on to offer another argument that seems to be a favorite of those trying to trivialize the abuse catalogued by the contributors to #mencallmethings:
In the end, veterans of the internet know there is no protected demographic. Everyone gets shit on, but if you make a point of belonging with a group, you get shit on even more, and more so the smaller you are. You know who gets shit on more than feminists? MRAs.
Really? Some MRA types on Twitter tried to get a rival hashtag going: #womencallmethings. Needless to say, they didn’t have much to work with.
One Man Boobz non-fan — whom I banned for his repeated comments about anal rape — tried to post a sarcastic little comment here last night dismissing #mencallmethings on similar grounds. Here’s a screenshot from my wordpress account, with his identifying data erased:
Let’s just, for contrast, take a look at the previous comment he tried to post here:
Another day, another “hope you get raped” comment.
Ironically, though I’m pretty thoroughly disliked across the manosphere, I actually get a lot less of this sort of abuse than most reasonably well-known feminist bloggers who happen to be non-dudes. Oh, sure, I get called a “traitor” and a “mangina,” and once in a while someone points out that I’m, you know, fat, but when it comes to the really nasty shit, the abusive commenters and emailers seem to much prefer going after women. This may be because they are misogynistic assholes. That’s just a theory, though.
The False Rape Society: Fighting “false accusations” with rape jokes and misinformation
Question for Pierce Harlan, the guy behind the False Rape Society blog: Do you really think this is the best way to fight false rape allegations?
The real problem here isn’t that he’s recycled an old rape joke; it’s that he’s pretending that rapists are somehow a species apart from ordinary men. His big complaint is that the PSA in question “passes off a criminal deviant as a typical guy.”
Pierce, what do you think rapists look like? They’re not villains out of some silent-movie melodrama, twirling their whiskers and cackling with glee. They don’t have giant R’s tattooed on their foreheads. No, they look like “ordinary” guys. Exactly like them. Rape prevention — and crime prevention in general — would be a lot more effective if criminals could be easily identified at a glance. But the world doesn’t work that way. Most criminals look pretty ordinary, actually.
But the problem with Harlan’s stance here go beyond that. The fact is that most rapists aren’t sinister strangers hiding in an alleyway; the overwhelming majority – something like 70% — are people known to their victims. As someone who writes regularly about rape, Pierce is presumably aware of this, which means either that he’s being completely disingenuous, or that he’s simply pretending that date rape (and non-stranger rape in general) doesn’t exist.
The PSA in question is far from perfect. Aside from the terrible acting, the main problem with it is that it it’s victim-blaming. Its depiction of a rapist as an ordinary-looking guy – and a friend of the victim — is the one thing it gets right.
To get an idea of the sort of person who reads (and agrees with) The False Rape Society blog, here are a couple of comments on the, er, “controversy.”
Here’s a comment from YouTube, posted by someone who obviously got there from Harlan’s blog (it appeared after the video was linked at the FRS; before the recent batch of comments, the video hadn’t had a comment for three years).
So the message is that if a guy is being helpful at a party, he’s probably a rapist? This is not a fair psa. It did better than some though, by highlighting the fact that the female friend ditched her.
Apparently, in this guy’s mind, trying to remove the clothes of a woman almost completely incapacitated by alcohol is just a way of being “helpful.”
Meanwhile, on the FRS blog itself:
Anonymous said…
Wow- just like TV- apparently the only people on earth who ever do ANYTHING wrong are white males- preferably fat ones to give feminists a little extra to hate.
While we’re on the subject of false accusations, here’s a strange bit of paranoid word-salad on the subject that I ran across recently from a Reddit Men’s Rightser.
Is it really possible that anyone – including the author and the people upvoting the comment — could actually believe this nonsense? If so, what a strange, sad world they must live in.
EDITED TO ADD: Holly Pervocracy just wrote a great and highly relevant post on what she calls “Slavering Beast Theory.” As she explains:
In the Slavering Beast Theory, there are two kinds of men. Two species, nearly. … There are ordinary guys and there are Slavering Beasts. And they are very, very easy to tell apart. They act different, even look different, to the point where any adult should be able to distinguish them in any casual social setting. …
This dichotomy is how someone can simultaneously believe that women shouldn’t go out after dark because rape is such a big problem and believe that tons of rape accusations are false. It makes perfect sense if you believe there are Slavering Beasts out in the dark, but if an ordinary guy is accused of rape, there must be more to the story. It explains why people are angered by rape prevention tips aimed at men–those are insulting to ordinary guys, and Slavering Beasts won’t listen. And it justifies the belief that abuse victims had it coming: either they were abused by a Slavering Beast and should have known better, or they were abused by an ordinary guy and must have done something terrible to provoke him.
LA Times op-ed: “The faux-hos of Halloween and their SlutWalker counterparts … should be careful about where they flash their treasure.”
Men should also not dress as sexy cowboys.
Happy Halloween! The LA Times has decided to celebrate the unholiest of holidays with a convoluted op-ed from conservative ideologue Charlotte Allen using Halloween as an excuse to bash both sluts and slutwalks. Because, you know, if you dress like a slut – whether to protest rape or to go to a Halloween party – it’s like you’re begging to be raped. Bad feminists! Bad Halloween revelers dressed as sexy nurses!
Here are a few of the more coherent passages from the piece:
[T]he SlutWalk feminists are in denial of a reality that is perfectly obvious to both the women who favor “sexy” for Halloween parties and (although perhaps not consciously) the SlutWalkers themselves. The reality is that men’s sexual responses are highly susceptible to visual stimuli, and women, who are also sexual beings, like to generate those stimuli by displaying as much of their attractive selves as social mores or their own personal moral codes permit. … It’s no wonder that SlutWalks have quickly outstripped (as it were) Take Back the Night as anti-rape protest. Women get another chance besides Halloween to dress up like prostitutes!
Just watch out, ladies, because dressing sexy is like waving a red flag in front of a bull, with your wallet hanging out!
[T]he vast majority of rape victims are under age 30 — that is, when women are at their peak of desirability. …
[T]he fact that rapists tend to target young women rather than grandmotherly types suggests that in the real rape culture (in contrast to the imaginary rape culture of some feminist ideology), the faux-hos of Halloween and their SlutWalker counterparts marching in their underwear — like a man walking at night with a bulging wallet — should be careful about where they flash their treasure.
So thank you, Charlotte Allen, for once again showing just why the Slutwalks are necessary in the first place.
Jill at Feministe has an excellent response to Allen’s nonsense, which points out that while, yes, younger women are more likely to be victims of rape,
Younger people are also the most likely group to be the victims of aggravated, non-sexual assault. … In fact, younger people are victimized by violent crime more often than older folks as a general rule. A person between the ages of 12 and 24 is six times more likely to be the victim of a robbery than a person over the age of 50; about half of people who report being the victims of aggravated assault are under the age of 25. Men are much more likely than women to be the victims of violent crime. In every age group, black people are the most likely to be the victims of violent crime.
So yes, it is true that younger women are more likely to be targeted for sexual assault than older women. But it’s not because of The Sexy — unless hormones and hard-ons are what are causing criminals to choose their (mostly male) targets for robbery and assault also.
So, really, the only really safe costuming strategy for young people on Halloween, regardless of gender, is to dress up like an old white lady. Might I suggest Dame Judi Dench?
“Many feminists love rape” Another gem from Reddit
According to some MRAs, this guy doesn't care about rape
Ugh. No jokes this time, just an appalling little exchange on Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit. First, a Redditor called xbyiu offers some unsolicited, and pretty pig-ignorant, thoughts about SlutWalks. The basic thesis:
Personally, I think a lot of feminists just don’t care about rape victims. They’d much rather see women as a whole being a victim of the patriarchy and fight against that sort of abstract idea then deal with the reality of rape, which can be fought against with simple tips on how to protect yourself.
Hold on; it gets worse.
To this the r/mr regular EvilPundit replied (in a comment that, last I checked, had gotten three times more upvotes than downvotes):
I’d go even further, and say that many feminists love rape. For them, it’s a perfect way to demonise men in general.
If rape didn’t exist, feminism would invent it. In fact, feminism does invent a lot of rape, with its imaginary statistics such as “1 in 4″, and so on.
In other words, feminists don’t really want to prevent rape. But most rape is imaginary. So feminists are trying to not prevent something that doesn’t much happen anyway. Brilliant.
A note on the “1 in 4” thing: EvilPundit’s insinuation that it’s an “imaginary statistic” is a common MRA talking point. It’s not imaginary, but it’s not quite accurate either. The one-in-four number comes from a study conducted in the 80s by researcher Mary Koss: based on a detailed survey of college women, she found that roughly one in four of her respondent had been a victim of rape or attempted rape since the age of 14. This is often simplified – and distorted – into “one in four female college students are raped while in college.”
In fact, Koss’ survey found that one in eight college women answering her survey, not one in four, had been the victim of completed rape. Other studies have reported numbers not far off from this. The National Violence Against Women Survey, for example, found that roughly one in six of female respondents reported being the victim of rape in their lifetime.
The fact that some people have misrepresented Koss’ study doesn’t mean that her findings are “imaginary.”
I’m not even sure why I’m writing all this, given that as a feminist I presumably don’t care at all about rape.
Pic above taken from here.
EDITED TO ADD: EvilPundit’s comment has gotten some downvotes since I posted this, but it still has more upvotes than downvotes.
Quotations from Chairman Alcuin
Dude, you should totally read this shit!
Like Chairman Mao, the MRA blogger Alcuin is a massive douchebag with intellectual pretensions far outstripping his limited brainpower. Also like Mao, Alcuin is perhaps best appreciated in tiny doses. Most of his posts are rambling, pretentious messes; yet many of them contain wonderful little nuggets of anti-wisdom that I feel compelled to share with you all.
Mao had his Little Red Book. Here’s part one of Alcuin’s Little Red-Faced Book. Click on the titles for the full posts.
[A] woman only thinks of her next meal, and which man can provide the best one for her. … Allow them to run organizations and society, and they will destroy everything. … Women are too emotional and self-centered to build civilization.
All Feminists are Doctor’s Daughters:
Feminism, the domain of doctor’s daughters, is for snobs. Men with dirty fingernails are haughtily ignored and dismissed. … Ironic, ain’t it, that feminists can be both perpetual victims and upper-class snobs at the same time, with the same remark and arrogant flick of the hair, as she puts her nose in the air and walks past. … Uppity cunts.
Dare to Struggle, Dare to Backlash:
Because feminism has attacked humans so viciously, injecting its hate-filled venom so deeply into both men and women, the “reaction” will not be a mere rainstorm. Deep, psychotic imbalance such as the type wrought by feminism and by liberals in general will necessitate a fucking shitstorm the likes of which we’ve hardly seen.
Constant rape accusations are ridiculous, given the sexless marriage epidemic. How many bored, asexual women stuck in a sexless marriage would love to be taken?
Modern miseduated western women fear their femininity, fear their natural beauty, and run away from it. … The hags we currently see in western countries resemble a clear-cut, eroded mountain. A contemporary western woman reminds one of the landscape created by the orcs in The Lord of the Rings, ugly and unnatural, a place of evil and sadness.
More to come; Alcuin’s idiocy is a renewable resource.
