TRIGGER WARNING: Graphic descriptions of sexual assault; rape apologetics.
Journalist Lara Logan recently appeared on 60 Minutes, giving the harrowing details of the brutal sexual and physical assault she sustained at the hands of a mob while covering the protests for (60 Minutes) in Cairo this past February.
When news of the assault first hit the internet, you may recall, it seemed to open the floodgates of misogyny and racism. Looking at one Yahoo News story on the attack, I found hundreds of vile comments – some blaming Logan for her victimization, or doubting it ever happened; others using the assault as an excuse to spout hateful filth about Arabs and Muslims in general. In the “manosphere” itself, the reaction was predictably appalling, with many MRAs not only mocking and belittling the victim but using the case to push their own retrograde agenda. (See my post here for more details.)
Even within this context, the reaction of blogger Ferdinand Bardamu of In Mala Fide stood out for its sheer nastiness; I wrote about it here. In his first post on the subject, Bardamu mocked the victim, declared that “she had it coming,” then suggested that she probably hadn’t been raped at all. Based on no evidence whatsoever, he speculated that she may have just “made the whole thing up to garner attention and sympathy from the weepy, chivalrous masses. “
Bardamu has now used the occasion of Logan’s new CBS interview as an excuse to mock the victim again — calling her, among other things, an “idiot,” a “moron,” a “strumpet” and a “fake-breasted tart” — and to repeat his contention that she wasn’t “really” raped at all. Indeed, he says, the interview has “vindicated” his skepticism about the rape. Why? Because in her interview of 60 Minutes, Logan had spoken about being penetrated by the hands of her attackers. Bardamu evidently finds this highly risable, and somehow manages to convince himself that Logan was merely groped:
But seriously, “they raped [you] with their hands”?
Look, I’m no scholar, but even with feminists’ constant re-defining of rape, I know for a fact that rape has to involve a penis. Specifically, an penis entering an orifice without invitation. If you didn’t get a dick forced into your mouth, vagina or asshole, you didn’t get raped.
Logan and CBS’ deliberate vagueness about the “sexual assault” back in February was no doubt calculated to make people imagine the worst possible scenario that could happen. A line of hairy, creepy men pulling a train on her. Triple penetration at all times, the hairy sleazy monkey-men shooting jizz in every hole in her body, donkey punching her every time she tried to resist. In reality, she probably got spit on a few times, had her butt slapped, and had her silicone tits felt up. That’s not rape, you strumpet, that’s Spring Break in Cancun!
It’s hard to even know where to start with something this appalling. First of all, as a few dissenters pointed out in the comments on Bardamu’s post, it is still rape – “real” rape – when you are penetrated with fingers, bottles, or any other foreign object. When Abner Louima was brutally sodomized with the handle a bathroom plunger by New York city cops, that was rape, real rape. And what Logan says happened to her was real rape too.
As for the rest, I think the only thing to do is to contrast Bardamu’s words with Logan’s account of what happened to her, taken from a transcript of the interview.
As Logan tells the story of the assault, she and her crew were caught in the midst of a mob. Men grabbed her, groped her, and literally tore the clothes from her body. As she describes it:
I feel them tearing at my clothing. I think my shirt, my sweater was torn off completely. My shirt was around my neck. I felt the moment that my bra tore. They tore the metal clips of my bra. They tore those open. … [T]hey literally just tore my pants to shreds. And then I felt my underwear go.
Some men began beating her with sticks and others, with their hands, penetrated her. In this and the following passages I’ve bolded the statements dealing specifically with the sexual aspect of the assault. Logan again:
I didn’t even know that they were beating me with flagpoles and sticks and things, because I couldn’t even feel that. Because I think of the sexual assault, was all I could feel, was their hands raping me over and over and over again. …
They were tearing my body in every direction at this point, tearing my muscles. And they were trying to tear off chunks of my scalp … not trying to pull out my hair, holding big wads of it, literally trying to tear my scalp off my skull. And I thought, … I am going to die here.
This assault lasted 25 minutes. Logan says:
[T]hat’s when I said, “Okay, it’s about staying alive now. I have to just surrender to the sexual assault. What more can they do now? They’re inside you everywhere.” So the only thing to fight for, left to fight for, was my life.
Ultimately, Logan was rescued and rushed to the hospital. Logan continues:
I stayed there for four days, which was hard. My muscles were so unbelievably sore, because they were literally stretched from the mob trying to tear my limbs off my body. My joints, every joint in my body was distended. And then they, the more intimate injuries, the injuries, the tearing inside. And the mark of their hands, their fingers all over my body, cuts and everything you could imagine. But no broken bones.
This horrific account bears very little resemblance, it hardly needs to be said, to Spring Break in Cancun.
Naturally, a number of the commenters on Bardamu’s site manage if anything to be even more vile than Bardamu himself.
McGlothin suggests that Logan probably enjoyed the experience:
It’s not impossible that she went all the way to orgasm when the testosterone filled raging men fingered and groped her. That would explain the vagueness of her description: she was way enjoying it so much that she could not remember precisely what happened except that they molested her manually.
Attila concurs:
This gynbot just wants attention, and is playing the “Arabs are animals” routine for brownie points. She probably got groped a little, in a way that she has never been groped before, and she may be reacting to the fact that she may have gotten a thrill out of it.
Commander Shepard throws some racism and “slut”-shaming into the mix:
She was raped by their hands? LOL. A pretty blond like Logan probably spent her youth getting gang banged by alphas. In this case the men were beneath her (dirty sand niggers) but even they didn’t penetrate. She’s probably more upset about her bruised ego than her bruised body.
Bardamu wrote his post, I should note, before the interview aired, and before anything beyond a few quotes from it had been published. But it is telling that he has not bothered to go back and watch or read the full account. Not that it would matter; he made up his mind on the case a long time ago, and I doubt that anything could change it. Like many in the “manosphere,” Bardamu and his fans see only what they want to see, and use their imagination – and their prejudices — to fill in the rest.
I don’t condone what this guy wrote. It’s clearly wrong and I have sympathy for Lara Logan.
At the same time, I can understand his blind anger and pain that leads him to make such unfounded declarations. We live in a world in which any man below the alpha level is spit upon by entitled women who consider us to be second-class citizens, little more than indentured servants that provide them with money and status- and I don’t say that lightly. Fix our broken sexual system, and you will not have men lashing out at women like this- which, while wrong, is a natural and understandable response to such treatment.
Again, not to excuse what he wrote. But this is a textbook example of how the MRA philosophy can benefit women too.
NO, Lieutenant, there is nothing natural about lumping all women together, giving them some narrow expectations that include another gender/genitalia group dominating them to their injury, and then also making these ridiculous “alpha” distinctions for both, and then getting angry at life or all women when some woman you deem hot doesn’t like you. It’s bigoted crazy nonsense. This blog mocks you and your ilk well.
also… you see where his unfounded declarations come from on a topic like rape? Misogynists are full of unfounded declarations and laying exploitative claim on unfortunate status quo circumstances for both male and female.
I don’t condone what this guy wrote. Now here’s where I condone what he wrote. Not to excuse what he wrote, though.
Thank goodness we don’t live in some backwards shithole like Saudi Arabia where women are blamed for their own rapes and their accounts disbelieved, amirite?
Any of those white western Christian men on those sites would do the same thing if given the chance. They obviously don’t see a problem with it. Remember Woodstock ’99? Seattle Mardi Gras 2001?
Did you read my post? I just said I UNDERSTAND his anger, not that I agree with it. It’s like how I can understand and sympathize with Malcolm X’s philosophy without thinking he was right.
” But this is a textbook example of how the MRA philosophy can benefit women too.”
Please explain.
Totally. There’s no excuse for Bardamu’s post, but he wouldn’t have said it if women weren’t such bitches, amirite? Brofive!
Rape is women’s fault for not putting out enough, in other words. Suck my left one.
Bee- Well, yeah, that’s a harsh way of putting it, I guess. But I’d prefer to frame it as a societal issue, I bitches and alphas are made by our culture and not necessarily natural. Isn’t that what you deluded feminists do? “Oh, we need to UNDERSTAND this woman’s anger.” Well, you’re got the methods right, just not the subject.
@MRAL:
Your reasons for “understanding his anger” are abysmal, making your understanding almost as terrible. Consider this hypothetical: if you are wrong and society isn’t how you claim, even extending sympathy to Bardamu and the other two is an immoral act.
So the question is, are you right? Or are you wrong? Do you have any evidence WHATSOEVER that Logan was one of those “entitled women” that spit upon poor men like yourself? If not, then at best you are thoughtless or heartless, and at worst you are a despicable person. So which is it?
kirby, does it matter? I’m not discussing her assault or condemning Logan, I’m discussing these mens’ reactions to it. And while wrong, they are understandable because of the treatment they have suffered from women as a whole.
I may be sounding quite harsh, but when you dedicate two sentences denouncing a statement, then spend a paragraph sympathizing with it… There are not many words to be said, or could be said in polite company.
Just thought I’d highlight this. Anytime MRAL claims he isn’t condemning “women as a whole”, point him here.
You’re back, MRAL? I thought you were off nursing your wounded IQ.
Bardamu doesn’t sound angry in his post.. he sounds especially happy that this “uppity” American woman was put in her place by a rape mob. And he calls her a liar, implies that she has breast implants (wtf does that have to do with anything?), and gets some racist digs in at Arabs for good measure. It’s like a Mala Fide hat trick.
Bee | May 3, 2011 at 12:42 pm
Totally. There’s no excuse for Bardamu’s post, but he wouldn’t have said it if women weren’t such bitches, amirite? Brofive!
Men’s Rights Activist Lieutenant | May 3, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Bee- Well, yeah, that’s a harsh way of putting it, I guess.Bee- Well, yeah, that’s a harsh way of putting it, I guess.
LOLLERSKATES! Well done, Bee.
Would you react the same to Malcolm X’s declarations of the “white devil”? Would you call him a disgusting racist pile of shit? Or would you perhaps be more nuanced- understand that while his worldview was clearly flawed, he had been made that way by a racist society, and his was a legitimate view that needed to be heard, if only as a wake up call?
@MRAL
I really don’t now how to make this clear to you. I actually agree with you that, if it were the case that Bardamu had been abused systematically by women, his reaction would be understandable, perhaps pitiable. But his are views that represent a movement, not an isolated case (the other two quotes in the OP support this), a movement based on a reaction to something that doesn’t exist.
And here’s the thing that gets me seething at times; yours is not a reaction of “oh, his reaction is understandable because of his beliefs.” Your reaction is “oh, his reaction is understandable because of what the world is currently like.” Instead of actually expressing sympathy to a woman who underwent a tragic and horrifying experience, you use it as a spring board to proclaim how she, in a sense (and I’m interpolating here), deserved it because of the way she undoubtably treated other men.
Honestly, I have absolutely no patience for this way of thinking.
Again, MARL, Malcolm X DID live in a racist society, and there is plenty of evidence supporting it. We DO NOT live in a society of Alphas shitting on Betas and Omegas, and we DO NOT live in a society where women, as a whole, abuse men and their wallets and therefore deserve to be raped by a mob.
MRAL: Listen. I have a feeling that for reasons that are partly your fault and partly not exactly under your control, you’ve had worse luck with your desired sexual partners than maybe most of us have, and I can sympathize. However, it’s odd that you’ve made the leap from there (some girls didn’t want to date me) to an overarching view of society that we all must now subscribe to.
I’m not sure if it makes any difference at all, but keep in mind that being turned down by desired sexual partners–even very maliciously–is a pretty much universal experience. That means so-called alpha men have experienced it, so-called alpha women have, so-called beta women, etc. Everyone. It’s just that some people have better coping skills or whatnot.
I’m not sure why I’m trying to convince someone that his imaginary worldview that he’s chosen to believe in to help him through his self-pity is incorrect. It’s sisyphean at best.
This is an open question to everyone, especially MRAL, because I may not be in the best frame of mind at the moment to answer.
There are two possibilities at play here: one is the view espoused by MRAL, where there is a societal hierarchy and systematic abuse from those at the top aimed at those at the bottom. This hierarchy is built up on attractiveness and charisma of its members, and in general women hold the reins over men.
The other is, what I most sincerely believe to be the actual state of affairs, a complex system of interpersonal relationships, where how good one looks plays only a minor role in how often one can get laid. There is no systematic abuse, save for significant residual sexism from the early days of the US and other countries where woman, along with minorities, considered to be second class to white males.
The question is, what evidence should we use to determine which system we live in, or at least whether a particular system is true or false? In other words, can we agree on a method by which we could determine whether the MRA or Feminist world view is closer to reality? Is MRAL even interested in this? Or is he just going to continue to assert the former and discount anything supporting the latter?
Bee-it is because you are a kind hearted person who sees that it may just be because of some kind of heart break *cue MRAL’s “no bitch ever told me no!” reaction* or otherwise cruel rejection. Or you hope it is that because the alternative is that this guy is a complete asshole and was born that way.
MRAL-there is no society that gives anyone just cause to be so heartless to someone who has been attacked viciously by a mob.
I think I might ONLY concede that the “alpha alphas”, for lack of a better word, are more influential than alpha and beta women. Those men at the very top of the pyramid- status-wise, looks-wise, and charisma-wise- are the best of the best, and thus even the alpha bitches can’t leave them for someone better, because there is no one. Thus, the alpha alphas do have power over the bitches, but all other men- even lower alphas, to a certain degree- are subject to rampant entitlement.
Just when I start to feel a modicum of pity for these guys, shit like this snaps me out of it pretty quick.
Male-supremacist ideology and bigotry are pretty much ubiquitous through-out the MRM blogs. And is part of the reason I am highly skeptical that the “Men’s Rights Movement” in it’s current form will ever effect positive change for men (in areas where they get a raw deal) or gain a main stream following.
I was feeling a little frustrated on the MRAs behalf that the MRM pretty much get’s no press coverage, other than the guy who made a fool of himself on the Colbert Report. But on second thought, I think a bulk of the movement really isn’t worthy of anything other than ridicule.
And really vile rhetoric such as this aside, they do deliver the lulz in spades.
@kirbywarp
I think we do live in a hierarchical society, but that the hierarchy is based mainly on money, race and gender rather than physical appearance, with the rich, the white, and the male at the top.