From time to time, something will happen on the Internet or in real life that I know I should write about for Man Boobz, but it’s so infuriating or depressing that I can’t bring myself to write about it. The recent bullshit on Reddit involving a young woman whose story of a sexual assault was met with angry disbelief until she provided video proof that her injuries were real is a perfect case in point.
Briefly, what happened is this:
A young woman posted about a sexual assault she’d endured a day or so earlier – a man had tried to rape her, pushing her to the ground and scraping her face on the pavement. In a separate topic she posted a picture of her injuries, most notably a giant scrape on her cheek. You can see it at right; click on the picture to see it full size.
Then another Redditor noticed that some time back, the same woman had posted a picture of herself in zombie makeup. This, he said, made him skeptical that her injuries were real — it was probably just a good makeup job.
That was all it took to send Reddit into a full internet lynch mob frenzy: obviously this woman was a liar and an attention whore and, even worse, possibly a feminist anti-rape activist! Redditors suddenly became both medical and makeup experts, and declared that the giant scrape on her face was obviously phony. (Not to me; I tried arguing with several of them to no avail.) It got ugly, very ugly, very quickly.
The woman at the heart of the storm asked if she needed to post an actual video of her cleaning the wound on her face to show that it was real; a redditor demanded that she do just that.
So she did. (Here it is.) Long story short: the scrape is real. The woman also posted a picture of the business card given to her by the police detective she’s spoken to when reporting the incident. It’s now pretty clear that there is no reason to doubt that her story is true. Even the Redditor who originally challenged her story realized that she was almost certainly telling the truth.
Here’s her post offering proof to back up her story.
At this point the lynch mob lost its steam; some people even apologized to her.
But the evidence of the ugliness remains in a host of different threads and different subforums on Reddit. I honestly don’t have the energy or the patience to sift through all of the ugliness; luckily, Jezebel has given a decent account of the whole spectacle; you can go there to get some more of the details.
You might also want to look in to the main thread where most of the ugliness occurred — though at this point many of the vile accusatory comments that got upvoted when everyone seemed to assume she was lying have been retroactively voted down. (The screenshot I posted above gives a better idea of what it looked like at the time; here’s another screenshot with some of the choicer comments.)
Naturally, Men’s Rightsers contributed to the ugliness – though most of the worst comments appeared outside of the Men’s Rights subreddit, and a surprising number of r/mr regulars refused to jump on the original “she’s a liar” bandwagon.
While many Men’s Rightsters are now apologetic, others still think she may be lying.
Here’s a good discussion of the whole thing in ShitRedditSays, and a followup.
Well, now I feel even more depressed about the world.
The fact that this poor woman was pressured into providing proof for these assholes online is sickening. I hope she has friends and family that have been on her side without demanding evidence.
“And Societal Contract…in the past I would have said you were being silly, but the more I read the things MRAs say, and hear about situations like this one, or whenever I go on ANY website and women posters are constantly called whores, sluts, bitches, told tits or GTFO, get me a sammich etc, the more I wonder just how much your average joe hates women…”
The more they come out of the closet online, the more we can vet which ones to keep on our side of the Mississippi and which ones to “send their own way” across to the other side.
good god can you people have a discussion without freaking out and foaming at the mouth? the woman put a story of her sexual assault on reddit for the world to read. she put this out for public consumption. granted, some people have been overly strong in their rhetoric and won’t accept the woman’s claims no matter what.
but it was once claimed that “1 in 4” women were raped – either during the course of the college career or during their lifetime. then it became “1 in 4” are sexually assaulted. the definition and the actions that define the term were shifted to encompass a wider plethora of behaviors, but the outrage on the part of feminists stayed the same.
i’m asking what is the basis of “sexual assault” and “near rape” charges – the lingo David uses. I read through the reddit and subreddits the day after the original post was put up, and i read through David’s post today. there’s a lot of content, so maybe i missed where the woman explained what was said leading up to the incident, why she considered it sexual assault, and why David calls it “nearly rape”.
separately, i would ask why her encounter was any worse or deserving of any more attention than any other sort of attack that happens to men and women all the time. i’ve been assaulted multiple times. nobody, including the cops after i sustained $4,000 worth of tooth and lip damage, really gave two shits about my assault (which was unprovoked).
ah, is this where the troll and sockpuppet known as Societal Contract came from?
Obviously you did not read it because it clearly states what exactly happened G.L. Piggy or worse, you decided her own testimony to the incident is ignorable because of your preconceived notions of what she went through.
GL, the solution to “the cops don’t give a fuck about my assault” is not “therefore no one should give a fuck about any assaults,” but “let’s give a fuck about every assault.”
Also, you’re an asshole.
@Piggy: I’m going to assume you’re writing in good faith and will try to avoid doing anything that you would consider ‘foaming at the mouth’.
-A woman says that she was assaulted sexually, and posts a picture of the wound.
-First the wound is questioned, based on the bizarre accusation that she is a special effects expert and therefore probably a liar.
-She, showing remarkable restraint (the questions were miles out of line), goes to the trouble of proving that her wounds are not makeup.
-Next, you come along and say that even if the wounds are real, the nature of the assault is not necessarily sexual. You mention that you got beat up one time, and that there was no sexual motivation. You ask for additional details of the assault.
The reason that your questions make people angry is that this woman has already answered WAY MORE THAN THE REASONABLE NUMBER OF QUESTIONS. When you got beat up on the street, did you have to prove to your friends that your wounds weren’t makeup? My guess is no.
Perhaps you feel like you are asking reasonable questions about an issue that is entirely academic. It starts looking like conspiracy-theory stuff, though. Where is Obama’s birth certificate? Oh, it’s right there, well… where is the long form one? Oh, you have that one, too? Well, how do I know that this proves Obama was born in the US? I don’t trust birth certificates anyway — these documents prove nothing!
After a while, it stops looking like you care whether Obama was born in the US (or whether a woman was sexually assaulted), and begins to look as if you are trying to bend reality to match a particular ideology.
Instead, let’s just agree that, in this case, the fact that internet morons accused a woman of faking assault based on her Halloween costume is among the most disgusting things we’ve ever heard. Okay?
Piggy, you get that ‘nearly raped’ doesn’t mean that the physical assault she suffered was so close to rape in nature that it was ‘nearly’ a rape, right? We’re not grading injuries on a how much like rape this is scale. This woman is not claiming that a bad facial injury is practically rape, she’s saying that in her actual experience of these real events, a man tried to rape her. Hence ‘nearly raped’ means ‘was almost raped’, which could be anything from ‘cornered by a rapist’ to ‘threatened with rape’ to ‘physically attacked’.
You want to ask, ‘why she considered it rape’? Your questions are strange and repulsive.
Piggy: That would go under ‘none of your fucking business.’ Unless she chooses to share it. And even if she did, you’d invent another reason to disbelieve her, and another hurdle for her to jump.
And now that I’ve dug through the many links to this incident, I’ve come across the woman’s recounting of the story.
Yeah, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to doubt her.
But I’ll say that this doesn’t make those guys on Reddit assholes; they’ve heard all too many false accusations and overblown rhetoric coming from feminists.
In a regular assault, the victims hardly ever have a good reason (or a political reason) to lie since assault isn’t really condemned that strongly. But such is not the case with sexual assault and rape. Those accusations carry a lot of weight and should therefore be vetted more stringently.
So I stand corrected on the facts of the case, but I think that it is improper to say that these Redditors are assholes for asking questions about an incident that this woman chose to report in a public online forum.
Kathleen B:
It is everyone’s fucking business if they choose it to be so. If they address a topic that a woman put out there for everyone to read then there is no good reason that they can’t ask these questions. Now, it gets really tricky if and when someone won’t accept all of the evidence and continues to state that this woman was lying even while her story holds up under scrutiny.
This isn’t a court of law; it is the internet. This woman chose to post on the internet so kind of has to abide by Internet – tits or GTFO – rules. She didn’t have to post there, after all.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (trigger warning), until more men are actually SEXUALLY assualted (as opposed to “just” assualted), there is always going to be this cognitive dissonance.
Those are not internet rules, those are asshole rules. And unless she chooses to post further, it’s no one’s fucking business.
GL, go sit in the corner with DKM. You two are made for each other.
“it is improper to say that these Redditors are assholes for asking questions about an incident that this woman chose to report in a public online forum.”
Not assholes for being skeptical, assholes for being narrow minded. The attitude of most certainly was not called for.
“tits or GTFO”
Those are not the internet’s rules, those are the rules of sad little boys who may never see a tit otherwise.
And honestly, I would have told the slavering commentariat to go fuck themselves sideways after the first demand – she has no obligation to feed MRAs or to post anything she doesn’t want to.
Lee:
“When you got beat up on the street, did you have to prove to your friends that your wounds weren’t makeup? My guess is no.”
I don’t want to hijack the thread with my own incident, but a guy threw a bottle at my face and knocked out three of my teeth. The guy was in a truck with his buddies even as the cops showed up to the scene. They gave me a case number without arresting the dude. I called the police station about 6 times and was given the run-around on the case before I eventually stopped pursuing it.
When I came home from the emergency room, my girlfriend jumps on my ass telling me that I shouldn’t have been out late and that this is what I get (I was a bystander at a friend’s birthday party and got hit by the bottle).
I’m just saying that there is a little bit of a double standard here. Women get an outpouring of support and care when anything bad happens to them. And then when their injuries are questioned – are they lying or did they have a hand in causing the assault – their questioners are shouted down and called assholes. There needs to be more level-headed rhetoric from both sides.
She didn’t have to post there, after all.
which is, of course, one of the points of the harassment. It makes the forum a toxic place for women, and forces them to leave.
Also the point of the “tits or GTFO” rules.
But I’ll say that this doesn’t make those guys on Reddit assholes; they’ve heard all too many false accusations and overblown rhetoric coming from feminists.
Sure it does, and not just because those “all too many” episodes result from anecdata or unsupported claims.
Also, when they are simply unable to treat a fellow human being with kindness, just because the attack she endured does not fit their rigid ideological worldview. Also, she’s a woman, so EVERYBODY GET HER!
They’re assholes.
The poor girl probably had no idea that there were so many women-haters running loose on the internet. We just don’t experience that in day to day life to that extent. She could not imagine that there are so many hateful men out here who would not only be skeptical, but actually taunt, degrade, verbally and psychologically abuse her.
Its just not something that a normal, healthy person who is mostly in day 2 day contact with other normal, healthy persons experience…… until they come in contact with the online “Manosphere”.
That’s why I said, until these Manospherian assholes start getting sexually assaulted on the regular, there’s going to be this cognitive dissonance.
GL Piggy, the assholes at the Reddit jumped to conclusions and assumed the woman was lying, just because they want to believe that most rape accusations are false. You mentioned “too many false accusations and overblown rhetoric coming from feminists”. Have you ever stopped to wonder why so many commenters falsely accused her of lying? Their only evidence to call her a liar was that she did zombie makeup once. Why do so many MRA’s rush to decide all alleged rapists are innocent, and all accusers are liars?
I am sorry about the attack you went through. It is terrible that the cops brushed off the assault, and that your girlfriend blamed you for that happening. It sounds a lot like how many people treat rape victims, too. The girl from the OP was not given an outpouring of sympathy and support. She was branded a liar and blamed for what happened. It’s sad that so much violence is dismissed by other people that can’t be bothered to care about the suffering of others.
hellkell says:
“Those are not the internet’s rules, those are the rules of sad little boys who may never see a tit otherwise.”
A little originality would be nice.
Communication and interaction on the internet would naturally be a little bit different than real-world interaction. “Tits or GTFO” is an admittedly crude way of saying “I don’t know you from Adam (or Eve) so whatever you’re saying carries very little weight. Show me or don’t even bring it up because it is about as meaningful as reading the same thing happening to a character in a novel.”
I hardly need to tell anyone that IRL, someone telling about their sexual assault or rape would be done where face-to-face interaction allows for the listener to gauge body language and the overall level of truth-telling. We do this in every sort of interaction whether we realize it or not. But we obviously don’t have that luxury when we’re talking about the internet.
So my point lies in the differences between online discourse and real-world discourse. It seems that real-world outrage carries over into the internet where it may not be properly applied.
So, G.L. Piggy, are you implying that because people were assholes to you when you got hurt, it’s okay that people are assholes to this woman when she’s hurt?
i should also point out that this type of “Tits or GTFO” mentality occurs in all parts of the internet. if a guy at a PUA blog says that he bagged a 10 or if he boasts about something of consequence, he’ll be met with that rebuttal. “Prove it or you’re lying”. And they don’t relent until you do prove it.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (trigger warning), until more men are actually SEXUALLY assualted (as opposed to “just” assualted), there is always going to be this cognitive dissonance.”
Uh, what? A lot of men are sexually assaulted. I really don’t think that has anything to do with the kind of just world fallacy that’s going on here. Are you saying that people who haven’t been sexually assaulted are automatically unsympathetic to victims? Because there’s a lot of men and women out there who haven’t been, and yet still manage to be decent human beings who wouldn’t dream of saying any of the shit that Piggy or DKM here is saying.