Question for Pierce Harlan, the guy behind the False Rape Society blog: Do you really think this is the best way to fight false rape allegations?
The real problem here isn’t that he’s recycled an old rape joke; it’s that he’s pretending that rapists are somehow a species apart from ordinary men. His big complaint is that the PSA in question “passes off a criminal deviant as a typical guy.”
Pierce, what do you think rapists look like? They’re not villains out of some silent-movie melodrama, twirling their whiskers and cackling with glee. They don’t have giant R’s tattooed on their foreheads. No, they look like “ordinary” guys. Exactly like them. Rape prevention — and crime prevention in general — would be a lot more effective if criminals could be easily identified at a glance. But the world doesn’t work that way. Most criminals look pretty ordinary, actually.
But the problem with Harlan’s stance here go beyond that. The fact is that most rapists aren’t sinister strangers hiding in an alleyway; the overwhelming majority – something like 70% — are people known to their victims. As someone who writes regularly about rape, Pierce is presumably aware of this, which means either that he’s being completely disingenuous, or that he’s simply pretending that date rape (and non-stranger rape in general) doesn’t exist.
The PSA in question is far from perfect. Aside from the terrible acting, the main problem with it is that it it’s victim-blaming. Its depiction of a rapist as an ordinary-looking guy – and a friend of the victim — is the one thing it gets right.
To get an idea of the sort of person who reads (and agrees with) The False Rape Society blog, here are a couple of comments on the, er, “controversy.”
Here’s a comment from YouTube, posted by someone who obviously got there from Harlan’s blog (it appeared after the video was linked at the FRS; before the recent batch of comments, the video hadn’t had a comment for three years).
So the message is that if a guy is being helpful at a party, he’s probably a rapist? This is not a fair psa. It did better than some though, by highlighting the fact that the female friend ditched her.
Apparently, in this guy’s mind, trying to remove the clothes of a woman almost completely incapacitated by alcohol is just a way of being “helpful.”
Meanwhile, on the FRS blog itself:
Anonymous said…
Wow- just like TV- apparently the only people on earth who ever do ANYTHING wrong are white males- preferably fat ones to give feminists a little extra to hate.
While we’re on the subject of false accusations, here’s a strange bit of paranoid word-salad on the subject that I ran across recently from a Reddit Men’s Rightser.
Is it really possible that anyone – including the author and the people upvoting the comment — could actually believe this nonsense? If so, what a strange, sad world they must live in.
EDITED TO ADD: Holly Pervocracy just wrote a great and highly relevant post on what she calls “Slavering Beast Theory.” As she explains:
In the Slavering Beast Theory, there are two kinds of men. Two species, nearly. … There are ordinary guys and there are Slavering Beasts. And they are very, very easy to tell apart. They act different, even look different, to the point where any adult should be able to distinguish them in any casual social setting. …
This dichotomy is how someone can simultaneously believe that women shouldn’t go out after dark because rape is such a big problem and believe that tons of rape accusations are false. It makes perfect sense if you believe there are Slavering Beasts out in the dark, but if an ordinary guy is accused of rape, there must be more to the story. It explains why people are angered by rape prevention tips aimed at men–those are insulting to ordinary guys, and Slavering Beasts won’t listen. And it justifies the belief that abuse victims had it coming: either they were abused by a Slavering Beast and should have known better, or they were abused by an ordinary guy and must have done something terrible to provoke him.
Well, since we’re on the Disc already, maybe you can get your own Luggage.
This might also help simplify the issue of what to do if various men disagree as to what you should wear, since the Luggage could just eat dissenters until a consensus is reached.
Heh, I see Cassandra and I were on the same wavelength. Guess I should have refreshed the page before posting. :-p
I’d imagine walking around accompanied by an indestructible homicidal magic suitcase would probably help to prevent the issue even coming up to begin with.
So…you’re admitting that you see the purpose of science not as the search for truth but as the creation of propaganda. You have nothing against propaganda as such, you just want more propaganda for your side.
At least you’re honest.
VoiP – “I’ll accept facts when they tell me what I want to hear!”
(He then went on to prove that black is white and was killed at the next zebra crossing.)
Now, let’s be fair. NWO frequently mentions Europe and Russia, which, in the NWO-verse, are even more feminist than the U.S. Russia is the most feminist country on Earth, because feminism was invented there before the CIA smuggled it into the U.S. via the notorious government agitprop Ms. Magazine. The male life expectancy in Russia is low because it’s so feminist that men just keel over dead from the toxic man-hate. (No, it’s not because it’s an impoverished country still struggling to recover from the damage wreaked by the Soviet regime. It’s women! Women, dammit!)
Scandinavia is almost as bad. Men are imprisoned there for farting. NWO was horrified when Julian Assange was extradited to Sweden on rape charges, and remains convinced that Assange is being hideously tortured by feminists in the feared Swedish feminist prisons. Mentioning that Assange is in fact out on bail has done nothing to soothe his fears.
He hasn’t said much about other countries (although we’ve recently learned that Judaism is a nationality), and he’s not one of the MRAs who praises Third World countries for having properly submissive women. He seems firm in his belief that women are evil hell-beasts the world over. So, um, points for consistency?
Holly:
Now we need a Python reference to complete the trifecta.
Hershele Ostropoler: Hmmmm… perhaps a ‘turned into a newt’ reference? It would go well with the overarching ‘feminists are evil witches’ theme the MRM has going on.
You know, one of the most frustrating things about this myth that false accusers are rare beasts is that it is plays off of a truth-that most women do not falsely accuse, and that false accusers are commonly compulsive liars. The problem is that the mythos of the false accuser beast monster presumes that one can tell by a whole collection of things (esp. bigoted things like race and class) which women are and are not false accusers at a glance, and that people are either human or monster (that it is impossible for people to choose to do good things and also choose to do bad things). Whereas one cannot tell a false accuser at a glance, and, if anything, the groups of women who are least likely to be presumed beastly are often the most likely to be in a position to falsely accuse with impunity. Society should stop making excuses for the women who falsely accuse, often serially, and stop reinforcing their bad behavior by protection and support.
So is “beast” replace “zero-sum game” in NWO’s vocabulary?
NWO, in addition to the general ridiculousness of the “false accusation is like rape for men!” game, it completely ignores the fact that there are men who’ve been literally raped.
…but maybe you consider them false accusers until proven otherwise?
Well, he also doesn’t give a shit that people were, and is some places still are, literally slaves.
Yeah, NWOslave, I’d rather be falsely accused of rape (as unlikely as that is) than actually be raped.
Well, it’s not like he has any actual moral objections to slavery. He wants a rape-slave of his own, after all.
@Spearhafoc
“Yeah, NWOslave, I’d rather be falsely accused of rape (as unlikely as that is) than actually be raped.”
You can have both. First ya get falsely accused and tossed into the funhouse, Then ya get gangbanged by the GB portion of the LGBTQ you so lovingly support.
Why would prison rape happen, NWOslave? Everybody is dressed the same. Surely there wouldn’t be enough slutty sartorial choices to drive men to rape.
There’s no problem NWO can’t solve with more hatred!
It is the duct tape and WD-40 of his little world.
NWO: Is there any redeemable part of your personality that you just keep hidden, or are you really this much of an asshole?
The whole meaning of the term “compulsive liar” is that the person does not fully choose to lie or not lie. Serial rapists are not compulsive rapists, they rape by choice, as they bit about choice in my statement should have indicated clearly was my position.
Over on this side of reality, we don’t live in a society that makes excuses for false accusers and it is not a common crime, so the “flip” societal argument in nonsensical. Still, I think that when one removes the actual issues of social stigmas and pressures, most of this holds true (well, not that women who falsely make rape accusations do so habitually, I have no idea about that statistically). People who falsely accuse others of rape are humans who made a bad ethical choice to falsely accuse someone, not compulsive inhuman monsters. People who might be treated with least suspicion based on bigoted factors can generally get away with the crime more easily.
I think he is that much of an asshole. Even Meller likes animals, and that seems to be his only redeeming quality.
Oh, look, NWO is being disgusting. Again. I’m shocked.
Aww except for porcupines, hellkell!
@Holly Pervocracy
“NWO, in addition to the general ridiculousness of the “false accusation is like rape for men!” game, it completely ignores the fact that there are men who’ve been literally raped.”
False accusations aren’t like rape. Rape is about forcible sex. False accusations are about lies, manipulation, revenge, excuses, ect.
The men who are raped, are raped by the GB gang whom you support unconditionally. Even if 5% of the reported rapes are men, by men, plus the massive silent number of rapes by the GB in prisons. The likelyhood of a GB being a rapist proportionally is easily 10X greater, making them a very violent society within society.
And how much sympathy can one expect from a “good feminist” like you as far as false accusations are concerned?
Your own words from your own blog… “I’d rather live in a world where a hundred false accusers are told* “I believe you, I care about you, and I’ll stand up for you,” than where one rape survivor is told “gosh, this story has two sides and I really need to consider him innocent until proven guilty.”
So if you believe, care and stand up for a false accuser, the falsely accused is guilty. Sure sounds like a master/slave society to me. Believe the master, the master never lies, stand up for the master, care about the master. The slave is always guilty.
You guys, I’m starting to think NWOslave might not be a very good person.
Women can rape men too, NWOslave.
Just because a man rapes another man doesn’t actually mean either of them are gay. Rapists in prison rape other men because all they have access to are other men, not because they’re actually attracted to men.
Prison rapes happen for exactly the same reason as male on female rape (or female on male, female on female, etc). It’s about power. It’s about thinking that your right to have an orgasm trumps somebody else’s right to bodily autonomy.