>A New Low in Victim-Blaming, Part 2: In Mala Fide on Lara Logan

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From In Mala Fide

The reaction of the “manosphere” to Lara Logan’s reported sexual assault in Cairo has been highly revealing, to put it mildly. And what it reveals about the assorted Men’s Rightsers, Men Going Their Own Way, pickup artists, and others who make up the manosphere is pretty ugly.

Take, for example, Ferdinand Bardamu’s posts on the subject. On Tuesday, Bardamu, whose antifeminist blog In Mala Fide is widely linked to in the manosphere, spat forth a snide, sarcastic rant that attacked Logan for having the temerity to even set foot in Egypt. He started out dismissive:

Apparently, a CBS lady reporter got raped while covering the revolution in Egypt. For some reason, we’re expected to feel sorry for her.

Then turned up the sarcasm:

Oh, what a symbol of courage Miss Logan is! What a beacon of determination and grit and…no, seriously. I can’t go on.

Fuck Lara Logan. Fuck her and the shit-for-brains idiot who thought it was a good idea to send a WOMAN to report from a war zone. …

Of course, Bardamu ignores the simple  fact that is is dangerous to send ANY reporter, male or female, into the midst of a revolution — indeed, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented more than 140 attacks on journalists in the Egyptian unrest so far; one journalist was shot and killed. Despite this fact, it is an undeniably good thing that some reporters (male and female both) are willing to risk their lives to cover wars and revolutions and other dramatic, dangerous, and important events. No one has suggested that the attacks on male journalists mean that men should not be covering these events. No one is mocking the male journalists who were attacked. (Well, almost no one. Bardamu refers in passing to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, also famously attacked while covering the events of Egypt, as a “twinkle-toed pansy [who] couldn’t handle the heat on the streets of Cairo.”)

For Bardamu, though, Logan’s story is one of a woman foolishly trying to make her way in a man’s world:

You send a chick into a situation like the one in Egypt, you might as well hang a sign around her neck that says “FREE FUCKTOY”. I don’t care how many disaster areas she’s reported from, how many awards she’s won, it was going to happen eventually. …

Sucks that Lara got raped, but she had it coming. [Emphasis in original]

To Bardamu, this case is evidence not only that women journalists should not be sent to cover the Egyptian revolution but that they should not be allowed to leave their home country at all:

[O]f COURSE Lara shouldn’t be sent on another foreign assignment again! She, nor any other women should be allowed to be a foreign correspondent for their own safety.

And then, after arguing that Logan “had it coming,”and that any western woman who has the temerity to leave her hotel room and step out into the streets of Cairo should expect herself to get raped sooner or later, Bardamu then suggests that Logan may be making it all up:

There’s a non-zero chance that she didn’t get raped at all, and that she made the whole thing up to garner attention and sympathy from the weepy, chivalrous masses. …

I have no evidence that she’s not telling the truth, only a tiny feeling in the pit of my stomach that’s been growing year by year, with every venal vixen who falsely accuses a man of rape because she wants fame, or she feels like a slut after sleeping with the guy, or she’s mad that he slept with her best friend the day after, or whatever else.

Naturally, in the comments, many of Bardamu’s fans agreed that women women who trespass into male spaces deserve whatever happens to them. According to “John”:

Women do not belong in men’s locker rooms, Mike Tysons apartment at 2:00 a.m., drunk in a bar bathroom with the Steelers quarterback, and they sure as hell don’t belong “reporting” in the middle of a revolution. Women should not go to Frat Parties dressed like sluts and get drunk with the expectation that “nothing will happen.” …

This woman, Laura Logan, is not just an idiot – she is an adulterous whore. She shares this unfortunate circumstance with tens of millions of others of her sex, and deserves no pity whatsoever.

For some, the case was not just another excuse for “slut shaming” but evidence that the very notion of equality between the sexes is wrong. As Brett Stevens put it:

American women are rape targets worldwide. They are known to be clueless, friendly, and most of all, sexually easy. If a woman chucks her sexual favors out the door at the drop out of a hat, why not just go the extra mile and apply pressure? … We take these girls from comfy suburbs and send them into war zones and riots and wonder why they get gang raped. Amazing cluelessness, arising from our insane idea of “equality.”

There were other comments even worse than these — e.g., this one — but I don’t have the heart to post them here.

But Bardamu’s retrograde notions were also challenged in the comments — mostly from those who saw his noxious post linked to on feminist sites and on Twitter, but also in a few cases from actual fans of his blog.

This reaction inspired Bardamu to post a second piece on the Logan story, one even more narcissistic and self-righteous than the first. After taking on some of his critics (most notably Molly of Progressive Blogic, whom he labeled a “premenstrual whiner”), and casually referring to Logan as “an unwilling cum dumpster,” Bardamu tried to pretend that it was him, and not the feminists, who had the best interests of women at heart.

Lara Logan had no business being in Cairo, or anywhere in that part of the world for that matter. All of you leftie feminist tossers screeching about “rape culture” have her blood on your hands. How many more have to suffer before your lies are discredited?

Sorry, but a guy who refers to any women, much less a woman who has been raped, as a “cum dumpster” pretty much forfeits any right to be taken seriously on the subject of what is best for women.

About a week ago, Bardamu reported that he’d taken a Psychopathy Test on OkCupid, and had scored an impressive 31 points, which put him in the ranks of the “True Psychopaths.”  His posts on Logan — full of narcissistic rage and utterly lacking in basic human empathy — seem to bear out this diagnoses all too well.

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