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.
MRA Lieutenant, eh? So what does one have to do to be promoted to MRA Major? What’s the hangup, Lieutenant? Don’t you care about your woman-hating career? Haven’t personally beat down a fat chick yet? What?
MRAL is obsessed with fat people. I wonder how my marriage must seem to him, since I have a BMI of 23, in the normal range, while my husband’s is 36, which is considered morbidly obese. I didn’t know I could judge the value of a person by an arbitrary ratio of weight to height. I bet he’s also very picky that a woman has to be under the age of 25, have no children from a previous relationship, be economically stable, have clear skin, straight teeth, and a meek personality. Then he’ll say it’s an injustice that such women dare to be picky about men.
MRAL, let me repeat this once more “Someone refusing to pity fuck you is not oppression.” You are bitterly jealous of people who are more attractive than you because they are more attractive than you, and you are bitter towards people you find less attractive than you, because how dare women exist as something other than a potential fucktoy for you. Other people’s bodies and lives are not all about you and their refusual to fuck you. So what if fat women chose to be fat? It is their bodies, they can be fat if they like. They have no obligation to be the sort of body shape you find attractive. None whatsoever. You are not oppressed, you are just a bitter misogynist who can’t get a pity fuck (in large part because you fucking hate women so much).
Look, people have a right over their own bodies. At all times. That includes a right to refuse the sexual advances of others-yes, both men and women have the absolute right to refuse to have sex with anyone they do not want to have sex with (though men’s right to this is less often questioned).
I know for a fact that rape has to involve a penis. Specifically, an penis entering an orifice without invitation.
Someone please tell that to the “CHILD SUPPORT IS RAPE!” crowd. I don’t care if you qualify it with “financial”.
And Bardamu reveals far more about himself with his “
bestworst case scenario”. That was really creepy.plymouth, my body weight stays between a size 4 (in most brands) and a size 8. My body just doesn’t naturally gain weight really well. I’d have to eat like that all day every day in order to get to an unacceptable (by mra standards) weight.
Absinthe Dextrous: In the Spearhead a week ago, they had an article saying that school teachers making little boys still and behave in class is rape, too. They’re classifying anything they don’t like as rape, because they want to trivialize the reality and brutality of actual rape. I also think it’s sick how Bardamu describes Logan’s assault as “spring break in Cancun”, as if sexual assault and rape are okay if you’re drinking and partying.
Oh right. I was gonna make fun of that too, before getting sucked into making fun of MRAL.
If you didn’t get a dick forced into your mouth, vagina or asshole, you didn’t get raped.
I don’t care what MRAs say; it is possible for a woman to rape a boy or a man. Why do MRAs hate men so much?
I’m always AFK for the good stuff.
First, I don’t want to irritate all the non-MRAL people present, so I’ll just ask: How many Brave New World jokes am I allowed to make per thread?
Second, please, for the love of God, stop letting MRAL frame the debate by using his terminology! If you must refer to people in a hierarchical manner, either make up your own terms (“a traditionally attractive person”) or put in a qualifier (“what you would consider an alpha,” “an alpha, whatever the hell that means”).
You think you’re being ironic, but you’re not. The MRAs hate any man who isn’t an MRA, and they hate plenty of men who are MRAs for various doctrinal reasons, and of course they also hate themselves.
Katz, you may make 215,465,461 per thread but only on opposing Wednesdays in a month of Sundays.
I think this is in the dictionary beside “cognitive dissonance.”
But I thought your genius-level IQ made you the only person qualified to talk about anything!
Dude, that’s the opposite of what you want. You might get money someday, but your personality will always be abhorrent.
A devastating repartee!
You mean “peace until the inevitable revolution.”
Anyone want to place bets on how long before he’s back?
I cannot believe that there are people out there that can watch this lady talk about what happened to her and say she enjoyed it or had it coming. It’s just heartbreaking. I think the only part that really made me feel a bit better were those women and men who stood up to the mob.
On to a more lighter topic. I’m a new reader. I hope to come by from time to time as much as life allows. Hope you will have me. 🙂
“Dude, that’s the opposite of what you want. You might get money someday, but your personality will always be abhorrent.”
LOL
There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell I’d give up cheesecake just for the chance to look attractive to a clueless loser MRA.
/because the writings from MRAs in the original post are an abomination and I can’t even process them
this is horrifying. i sometimes start to believe that all the talk of there being men who don’t believe women are people is simply rhetoric, and then i see something like this. i feel sick. i sincerely hope ms logan never has the misfortune of seeing this vile commentary or anything like it.
oh MRAL, I get it now. You see folks walking around smiling and doing their lives and think they have never been rejected or hurt. It may seem like that. Heartache can seem like it holds you down and makes you ugly and desparate. It can seem as if those folks knew what pain it is to be rejected they couldnt possibly hold their heads up and continue in life.
But MRAL: All of us, ALL OF US, have been hurt, rejected and felt alone and betrayed.
Some how we get up, dust our selves off, smile and keep on. Just because some one isnt wallowing in self pity doest mean they havent experienced these things. It is up to the individual to get up and keep going. And put on a good face a look to love again. Dont wallow, grow! Its like how you think fat works. (only you are wrong about that). You choose to be mean spirited and sad. or you can get up, be brave and face life to see what it brings you next.
I would like to take this opportunity to personally apologize to all of womenkind for MRAL and all like him–not because I feel responsible, but because I know it will really piss him off. It’s all in a day’s work of Disgracing the Penis.
Disgracing the Penis could go on a t-shirt. Just saying.
I wish someone who was more artistically inclined would draw a picture of a giant, anthropomorphic penis doing facepalm or something else that would suggest disgrace.
OT: For some reason my professor has assigned a lot of books where the main characters spend a LOT of time jerking off (written in graphic detail). 🙁
Which is what came to mind when I read “penis doing facepalm.” :/
For some reason the caption beside the photo is cut off for me, want an image cap?
Bardamu is a bit of a fool. Since Logan’s assault occurred in Egypt and was (allegedly? not sure of how to properly use that word) perpetrated by Egyptian men, it actually doesn’t have anything to do with what MRAs think American/western women have done to western men.
Him: “She was totally asking for it for being hot. On another note, why won’t hot women fuck men less attractive than themselves whenever those men want it?” MRAL adds: “I would never fuck a fat chick. Why won’t hot women sleep with me?”
Seconding the complaint that the image at the top of the post is cut off. And it’s still cut off when the only thing I’m viewing is the image (i.e. after I click on it).
No, that’s the whole image. I was basically just trying to show that this picture did run on In Mala Fide; you can go there to actually read the text.
as if sexual assault and rape are okay if you’re drinking and partying.
Also disturbing is that people like this don’t see the difference between someone wanting their date’s hands all over them and some stranger giving them an unwanted grope. It’s the strange thinking that if a woman has sex with one man, she has to have sex with any man. I can understand that being rejected is painful, but really, why would they want to have sex with someone who clearly does not want to have sex with them? That doesn’t sound like a good time.
And as far as “rape”, I guess it’s like anything that they go on about – only men can be raped. I think that goes far beyond just trivializing rape and into complete narcissism. It is all about them.