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.
@MRAL:
And would you care to give any particular evidence you would use to tell the difference between the two scenarios I’ve listed? Also, if I’ve got your system wrong, correct that as well.
If not… You are a man convinced that you are right, and no amount of debate will change that. The discussion is over.
I don’t agree that rejection is a universal experience. Plus there’s a big difference between an alpha getting rejected twice in his life by a dominant bitch, and an omega getting rejected constantly, every day, by every woman he meets. And it certainly isn’t a phenomenon for women, unless you’re an omega or a low beta trying to date WAY WAY WAY out of your league (and even then you’ll probably be able to get a one-night stand out of it). I honestly think that most women (betas and alphas) have literally NO concept of what it even means to be rejected. They have no compassion, no understanding.
@Johnny Pez:
Sure, I kinda agree with you on that. I’m more interested in how to distinguish between what is and what isn’t, whatever the case may be. Then we could focus on that evidence, and whether or not it exists. But I’m sure I’ve got both scenarios wrong in some way or another.
Triple penetration at all times? That sick clown sounds like he was spanking one out when he wrote that.
MRAL’s position is very interesting. Did I say interesting? I mean boring. Very boring and trite. Sounds to me like he’s making the typical MRA claim that “women wouldn’t be raped so often if they didn’t turn good men down”, which is essentially the same thing as saying “women don’t have a right to say no to sex”. Come on. Can’t you think of anything better than that? It’s getting old. Real old.
What if we lived in a society where men didn’t have a right to refuse if women asked them for sex? What if we reversed the genders on that? See, it’s just as ludicrous when gender-flipped. It doesn’t pass the gender-flipping litmus test.
but all other men- even lower alphas, to a certain degree- are subject to rampant entitlement.
Wha? Can someone else make sense of this word salad?
MRAL: Maybe, MAYBE, you’d get a little more respect for your ridiculous ideas here if you’d stop using “bitch” and “woman” interchangeably.
Wait? So there are “alpha alphas” now? I see, the beauty of this system is that since it’s imaginary, you can just continue to make up more categories.
“an omega getting rejected constantly, every day, by every woman he meets.”
So are the women supposed to go out with someone they aren’t interested in in order to make omegas feel better about themselves?
Perhaps at a certain point, one must look within and say, “hm, maybe it’s me, and not everyone else.”
@mediumdave:
Heh, looks like MRAL finally admitted that men are subject to entitlements, which in context refers to the same enjoyed by “alpha-alphas” (urk, did you seriously just make up that term, MRAL)?
@MRAL:
Am I to understand, then, that you are uninterested in actually finding out whether your world view is right or wrong? Are you interested in finding out the truth, or are you happy in your delusion? This is the last time I’m asking.
Huh, so MRAL is saying that any woman who is not the peak of physical perfection has no idea what it is like to be rejected therefore lacks in compassion and understanding?
I call troll.
kirby- what do you want me to say? How can we “prove” our worldviews on an internet forum? The evidence is right there in front of you, it’s the fucking world. Why do you think men approach bitches 90% of the time (ie, unless the men are alpha alphas)? Why do women do 90% of the rejecting? Why are omega men emotionally scarred from all these rejections? Yes, there are SOME omega women, but FUCK THEM.
You want to know what I hate most about worthless omega fat chicks? Why they get no sympathy from me? It’s because it’s so easy for them, for women, and they’ve still managed to somehow fail the simplest of tests- not fucking eating yourself to death. My face is fucked up from birth because I have a deformed eye. I had no choice, I am ugly and an omega no matter what, even if otherwise I looked like Taylor Lautner. But I still keep myself in relatively good shape, because I simply like to be healthy, and I don’t even have the incentive of getting laid like everyone else, because it’s not going to happen anyway. Thus, I have NO compassion for weak, disgusting, pathetic, worthless, fucking fat FUCKS who have been given every natural opportunity in the world, who could be normal and hot, who COULD be betas or alphas, but who are too fucking weak to stop stuffing their fucking fat fucking mouth with goddamn fucking cake and fat calories. FUCK them. Yes, I hate fat women. I hate them. Is that politically incorrect? Well fuck you too.
Johnny, of course, since when do women have the right to turn anyone down? Except when that makes them sluts. It is very obvious to anyone with a lack of sanity.
Men approach women because of a long held social tradition of men taking the initiative in “wooing” the lady. Feminists have suggested women ask out men. This is about the same reason why women do most of the rejecting. (Of course, in the past it was the parents, usually the father, who did the acceptance or rejection, but happily things have changed). Men are scarred precisely because of what Bee said, people have different coping mechanisms. The MRA forums are a biased selection of badly coping males who have decided to label themselves betas or omegas, thus “omega men [being] emotionally scarred.”
The rest? Ok, you hate fat women, and interestingly for non-mysoginist reasons. So why do you generalize this to hating women?
I don’t hate alpha and beta women, I just think they’ve been conditioned- most of them, anyway- to feel entitled to take whatever they want from non-alphas. This could be changed with a new sexual hierarchy.
Has anyone ever seen the movie The Stoned Age? The villain in the film, if there can be said to be a villain, is this horny douche named Tack.
Tack basically spends the whole movie acting like a total creeper, and trying way too hard with women. At the end he’s finally confronted by one of the main characters who says, “Tack, you used to be cool, why do you gotta be a dick?”
Tack says that all he wants is some chicks, but none of them will talk to him because he’s a “craterface.”
The main guy says, “well hey Tack, don’t worry, someday your face will clear up. And hey, why don’t you find some other chicks with zits?”
Then Tack utters one of the movie’s most important lines, which seems to sum up the whole MRA movement:
“I don’t want chicks with zits! I want FINE chicks!”
I’m gonna keep pressing, please anybody tell me to stop when it gets annoying. MRAL, did my explanation not make sense? Do you object for some reason? Or do you accept it but it doesn’t matter?
It becomes clear why MRAL is so mad at women-he assumes they will reject him because of a physical flaw. He has no proof of this (except perhaps the fact that high school girls are not always the kindest in their saying no.)
Also, your hatred of women who are overweight is not only uncalled for, it is based on major assumptions that are not true. You have no idea why a woman is overweight when you see her. You may not like her physical form but subjecting her to the abuse you may have suffered does nothing to encourage her to lose weight. All it does is make her feel bad just as you have when someone subjects you to the same abuse over your physical appearance that you most likely could correct with cosmetic surgery.
I don’t buy that shit. 95% of fat fucks are fat because they’re weak. If you’re one of the 5% with a problem, well, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to tiptoe around fat fucks because of a miniscule percentage that can’t help it.
By the way I’m not in high school, this is how the real world works. Anyway my physical appearance, whatever. I’m not just basing this on me, it’s from observing other men and women, so I’m not biased.
“Yes, there are SOME omega women, but FUCK THEM.
Thus, I have NO compassion for weak, disgusting, pathetic, worthless, fucking fat FUCKS who have been given every natural opportunity in the world, who could be normal and hot, who COULD be betas or alphas, but who are too fucking weak to stop stuffing their fucking fat fucking mouth with goddamn fucking cake and fat calories. FUCK them. Yes, I hate fat women. I hate them.”
Oh.
Oh, wow.
Oh, dear.
I deduce several problems here, mostly based on your interpretation of the world, which is true TO YOU. This has no bearing on others’ interpretations of the same situation.
1) That because your undesirable trait was unchosen, therefore every trait you deduce to be a) undesirable and b) unchosen in another person makes that person unworthy of love, respect or personhood in your eyes.
To this I say you must be very, very young. And definitely NOT a woman, or you would know several truths that you currently consider personal are in fact, universal. ONE is that everyone has a trait or two they consider so incredibly bad, so undesirable, that no one could ever love them. Something they would do ANYTHING to change about themselves.
But then they discover *other people* also have traits they consider negative. Often, the part of them that others consider their most interesting feature. Flaws: People have them! EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE. The older you get, the more you can accept your own flaws and those in others.
2) You don’t know much about obesity, causes of. “Sitting on your ass eating cheesecake for ten years” will indeed make you fat. You know what else will contribute to that process? Genetics. Commuting by car an hour a day, sitting at a desk for 8, and sleeping for 8, with maaaybe 20 or 30 minutes of exercise per day. Living in a “food desert” where fresh foods are expensive or unavailable, while cheap, fattening, processed foods are the only ones sold at the corner store. Working two jobs to feed three children and having no time or money for anything beyond the dollar menu. Eating food that has been enriched at every level with HFCS and sodium.
And, in the case of women, having a body that anticipates pregnancy and birth. As was pointed out earlier, large-chested women “break” the BMI tables. Large chests often come with large butts and large hips. This is NOT a chosen trait, and has been actively selected for in our species evolutionary history. This body type will not go away simply because it doesn’t conform to current beauty standards. Every woman I’ve ever known has gained weight as she aged. Western women, Russian women, Central Asian women. It happens. Bodies change with age. This is not a chosen trait either.
3) Selfish entitlement. You don’t have what you want (“The bitches”) but when you can’t have that thing, you decide to hate the specific Her you can’t have, all the Hers that she resembles, and even all the Hers that are nothing like the original Her, just for good measure. The answer to this isn’t a “social and sexual restructuring” that will give you what you want. It is a personal restructuring of your blanket hatred for that which you cannot have.
@MRAL
“I’m not just basing this on me, it’s from observing other men and women, so I’m not biased.”
That is exactly wrong. Bias doesn’t mean your experience, bias means forcing evidence you are given to fit a predetermined model, rather than adjusting the model to the evidence. Your model is the greek alphabet thing, and you interpret all social situations as being governed by it. That is bias.
Try assuming a feminist model for a bit (you don’t need to actually believe it) and see how well the data fits the model. You may be surprised.
Yeah you are MRAL. You have been rejected because of your physical appearance and so if a guy is like you-flawed in some way-her turning him down is because of her being the same way you assume women are with you.
Also, you assume someone who is fat is weak-people gain weight for thousands of reasons and it is not automatically because they are weak. It is not even because they are just lazy fucks.
You say women lack compassion but you are the one who lacks the ability to be compassionate towards anyone else.
So again-troll.
I’m merely displaying how the Greek system has worked with me and others around me. It’s failed. The MRAs have plans to restructure the system. The feminists don’t, all they want to do is push me farther down, so fuck them. This position is reasonable.
“so fuck them. This position is reasonable”
What I love about you, MRAL, is your astounding ability to engage in pitch-perfect irony with no intent what-so-ever. It is truly awe-inspiring.
On that note, have you ever heard of “sex-positive feminism”? I think you might like it.
@MRAL:
Hmm.. Soo, feminists, the ones who are trying to convince you that the Greek system is nonexistant want the system to stay in place, while the MRAs, who came up with the system in the first place, want it to change? Right… Totally reasonable.
And kes, if a woman is working for 8 hours and sleeping for 8, what the fuck is she doing the other 8? If she can’t fit an hour of intense exercise in there, then fuck her.
MRAL, you are angry that the women you classify as omegas do not want to be with a person you classify as an omega (yourself), but you also say that you do not want to be with omegas. Why is it acceptable for you as an omega in your hierarchy to reject other omegas, but not acceptable for them to reject you?
I disagree with the veracity of your hierarchy concept, but it even fails at internal consistency.