What’s the difference between a lad mag and a rapist? Aside from one being a magazine and the other a person, albeit an reprehensible one, apparently not very much.
In a study soon to be published in the British Journal of Psychology, researchers at Middlesex University and the University of Surrey showed people quotes about women from British lad mags (FHM, Loaded, Nuts and Zoo) and from convicted rapists. Most survey respondents – men and women both – could not tell the difference between the quotes from the magazines and the quotes from the rapists. And most of the male respondents identified more with the quotes from the rapists than from the lad mags.
Here are some of the quotes the survey respondents were asked to react to. (You can find more at Jezebel.) Can you tell which of these are from rapists or lad mags?
Mascara running down the cheeks means they’ve just been crying, and it was probably your fault . . . but you can cheer up the miserable beauty with a bit of the old in and out.
You’ll find most girls will be reluctant about going to bed with somebody or crawling in the back seat of a car . . . But you can usually seduce them, and they’ll do it willingly.
Some girls walk around in short-shorts . . . showing their body off . . . It just starts a man thinking that if he gets something like that, what can he do with it?
I think girls are like plasticine, if you warm them up you can do anything you want with them.
In case you’re wondering, the correct answers are: Lad mag, Rapist, Rapist, Lad Mag.
Creepy, eh?
Lead researcher Miranda Horvath of Middlesex University explains why she feels this is so troubling:
Rapists try to justify their actions, suggesting that women lead men on, or want sex even when they say no, and there is clearly something wrong when people feel the sort of language used in a lads’ mag could have come from a convicted rapist.
I would say so.
And so, you might wonder, how did the regulars on the Men’s Rights subreddit react this this research? Take a look.
The comment with the most upvotes offered some nice juicy denial:
The comment with the second-highest number of upvotes completely missed the point:
And then there was this hot mess:
In case anyone is wondering, that quote from French is actually a quote from a character in one of her novels. And it’s pretty easy to distinguish it from things posted on Jezebel, because none of the writers on Jezebel ever say anything even remotely like that.
The Men’s Rights subreddit, responding to evidence of rape culture by going “la la la I can’t hear you” since March 2008.
Several years ago in an intense LJ discussion on rape and rape culture, a clueless WOMAN (I have the misfortune to know her offline) barged into the discussion (on a journal she’d not been a regular, which is fine in theory, but in practice, can sometimes not work out well) and began posting right and left lecturing rape survivors on what to do and how to do it.
She was repeatedly requested (esp. by those of us who knew her habits from other social justice discussions) to stop posting, to listen and learn, to not lecture the survivors.
After multiple posts, one survivor posted that she was currently being triggered JUST by seeing this woman’s pseud.
The woman posted to apologize.
The post went to the survivor’s email (LJ lets you set that up), and she saw it.
Since that time, I’ve not seen anybody behave as badly in a rape culture, or similar social justice conversation, as she did.
Until now.
In fact, he’s on the verge of surpassing her in his ability to make it all about him despite the negative impact he’s having on rape survivors.
Posting a reaction to a new study which backs up the 1 in 5 stat ,
“That almost one in five women have been raped in their lifetime is very striking and, I think, will be surprising to a lot of people,” said Linda C. Degutis, director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducted the survey.
“I don’t think we’ve really known that it was this prevalent in the population,” she said.
Here is a link to the GOogle search for “rape” and “prevalent.”
LOTS of sites use the words together.
http://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1&nord=1#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&nord=1&site=webhp&source=hp&q=%22rape%22%20%22prevalent%22&pbx=1&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&fp=23bc058ba87a7947&ion=1&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=23bc058ba87a7947&ion=1&biw=1280&bih=939
So, now, LJ will you fucking shut up about the term?
And, btw, go hang out with Lian Li–clearly your soulmate.
The 2010 stat is halfway between 1 in 5 and 1 in 6 — more accurately, 1 in 5.46 — so if you want to go with whole numbers, if you had a group of 11 average USian women, 2 would have been raped; and 5 of them would have experienced other sexual violence, 1 of whom would have been coerced into penetrative sex, which is treated separately of rape in the statistics (these 5 perhaps overlapping with/including the victims of rape).
It’s worth noting the survey also breaks the stats down very finely (albeit to the extent where some statistics no longer retain relevance and precision owing to the diminished sample size, for certain communities/identified ethnic groups) and the survey also asked the identity of perpetrators of sexual violence — which is not to tar all men, however violence by males dominated many of the statistics. Read the report (I linked to the CDC’s website when I cited stats for the lifetime prevalence of the rape of US women).
LJ4: Rape is a much more dangerous and much more frequent crime than the crime of making a false accusation of rape. The crime of rape deserves much more attention and much more of an effort in prevention than the crime of a false accusation of rape. That I believe the crime of false accusation of rape deserves more attention than it currently gets in no way makes me a rape apologist. “
You keep saying rape isn’t prevalent. That the culture doesn’t ignore rape, nor denigrate the victims.
10 women testified about being raped, zero convictions
You’ve still not (so far as I’ve seen) said how you would describe it (prevalent, or not) if one in six men were going to be killed/have someone try to kill them.
But you are still up in arms that because 1 in 500 men might be falsely accused of rape (though your methodology in defining that term seems a but suspect).
You are making two very different things equal. You are dismissing the more common; while paying lip service to it being horrible, and sad, while rending your garments and demanding others do the same for the less common.
I understand that being falsely accused sucks, but it doesn’t make it a huge social problem, and certainly not one as severe as rape.
Ithiliana: It is possible that someone could fail to explain something clearly multiple times. However, there are several things that I have said clearly and people still are getting it wrong. In that case, the problem is on them.
No. The fact that someone continues to say the same thing does not make it correct. Even if it is correct it doesn’t make it comprehensible. English (this isn’t true of all languages/cultures) says the person with the message has the responsibility to be clear, and understood. It is not the recipients duty to figure out what was meant, and then divine a proper understanding (even in languages/cultures where there is this is the case, the areas in which the recipient is supposed to figure out what is meant are 1: narrow and 2: the speaker is required to figure out ways to make it clear [and there are sub-cultures in English-speaking cultures which do this too, the military for one]. Those tend to be caste-related interactions).
The more complex your subject matter, the more you need to look at ways to make it plain, not just repeat the same ideas in slightly different wordings.
lj4adotcomdan | December 14, 2011 at 1:59 pm
hellkell: If I say “Rape is much more serious and much more harmful than false accusations of rape” and then someone later says “You said that false accusations are much more serious than rape”, I think it is clear the latter person is the one at fault.
And yes, that happened right here on this thread.
Yes, it did; because the connotative content of your entire work seems to invalidate the specific content of that sentence. See above.
@Pecunium: Very good points–watching the hot mess of rape apology on another thread with (I think) Ullere?, insisting that if he didn’t say those exact words, it doesn’t count, and if we don’t show him where he said those exact words, blah blah blah which is very similar to what LJ4 did (albeit U’s approach is a lot more aggressive in tone), I keep thinking how little they lack connotative or associative thinking, or realizing that meaning is not conveyed solely by the dictionary meaning of individual words in a vacuum, and there can be subtext as well as text–some of the feminist linguists have done work on the tendency, more prevalent among men than women but not universal, to insist that meaning is solely limited to words, and that tone, context, non-verbal elements (in f/f communication systems) does not count.
And lack of awareness of connotative content is really shown by some of these dudes.
ithiliana: Thanks. I’ve been doing this sort of thing a while, and the, “that’s not exactly what I said” defense is pretty common, and often slips past the heated arguments it’s inside, which leaves it as something apparently valid.
Since I read for content and note context, I get accused of ‘misquoting’ pretty often; because people (e.g. Brandon) dislike having the meaning of the words they use shown to the world; and they argue the specific words are talismanic.
If someone doesn’t say, “I hate ‘x’ group”, then all the combined words that add up to such hate have to be ignored. There is a word for that sort of argument.
Bullshit.
And…
Ullere has made that is his MO. Say things which have meaning, and then deny the meaning, while standing behind the words. He’s a piece of work that one.
@Pecuncium
Actually, for every 500 women that get raped, 1 man will get falsely accused. This doesn’t even mean that 1 out of every 500 men gets falsely accused; but if 1 out of 6 women get raped, then 500×6 = 1 out of 3000 men will get falsely accused of rape.
Just to clarify, because I was the one that did the math myself. (So correct me if I’m wrong).
But yeah, if 1 out of 4/5/6 (whatever statistic you want to use) women get raped, but only 1 out of 3000 men will ever be falsely accused of rape, that makes false accusations a non-issue.
Stephanie, I’ll jump on you slightly to say that something that affects 1 in 3000 men is not a non-issue, but it is a minor one, even if it rises to be a serious problem for those men concerned; if we wanted to have a round of Oppression Olympics it would seriously lose out. But what is horribly objectionable is the privileged and entitled demand that problems which affect 1 in 5.5 women directly, and 1 in 1 women indirectly should be diminished and dismissed in order to address the other issue. People are capable of addressing multiple issues appropriately and it need not be a zero-sum game that to address false rape accusations with due seriousness it is simultaneously necessary to deny the prevalence of rape and rape culture.
@Xanthe
I agree with you to an extent–I should have said that false rape accusations are *virtually* a non-issue (in comparison with the reality of 1 in 6 women getting raped). So yeah, they are an issue, but not a big one.
At the same time, I don’t think false rape accusations should be given any more attention than false accusations of other crimes. False accusations suck, for any crime. But giving too much attention to false rape accusations really just perpetuates rape culture and the myth that women lie about rape (and that justifies the attitudes of the courts and police when questioning–and disbelieving–rape victims).
Stephanie: Thank you for the correction, I misread the stat, in the heat of various moments.
Are the consequences of being falsely accused of rape worse than the consequences of being falsely accused of a different violent crime?
Not that false accusations are all right either way, not that erroneous accusations don’t suck either way. But if merely being accused is almost as bad as wrongful conviction, surely that’s not peculiar to untrue rape accusations, the way having one’s own life and choices examined, and word and integrity doubted, is to making a rape accusation.
Hershele: If it’s just gossip, the false accusation of any sexual offense is going to be worse. If an official complaint is made, false accusations of rape are less worrisome, because of how the burden shifts to the accuser; should the accusation make it to trial.
The worst crime to be falsely accused of is probably murder.
Hersele:
Potentially. If the accusation leads to you being put on trial and you are wrongly convicted, once you get out of jail you may very well be required to register as a sex offender.
Plus, if it hits media sources, more time will be spent calling the falsely accused the “accused rapist” and even if not convicted in a court of law, people will still think “well what if”. And I think that is more likely to be the case with rape cases than with other cases. I could very well be wrong on that point though. But the first point still stands.
The potential punishment for a false accusation of murder is worse than that of one for false accusations of rape (as pecunium rightly pointed out) so it is not true in all cases that rape is the worst thing that one could be falsely accused of if you want to look at worst possible punishment. But there are many other violent crimes I would rather be falsely accused of than a sexual assault.
lj4adotcomdan, I don’t think life is going to be great for anybody who just got out of jail, even if they weren’t there for a sexual assault crime. The percentage of ex-felons who can get jobs is not high.
pecunium:
That I disagree with the use of that one word DOESN’T mean that I am saying that some rapes are ignored (they are) and that culture doesn’t denigrate victims (it does).
If one out of every 6 people would die from murder, and lets say 1 out of 6 die from accidents and the other 4 die from natural causes, I would say that prevalent would not be the appropriate word their either. I would say that rampant might be a more correct use to describe both the murder scenario and the rape statistic. To me, it would be a correct use of the word to say that rape is rampant. (And yes, some sources list prevalent as an adjective to rampant, but they also use exuberant as an adjective to rampant as well and exuberant doesn’t fit)
Up in arms? No. The first time that I brought up false accusations in this discussion was to simply say that I didn’t believe we lived in a rape society OR a “false rape society”. I have changed my mind and now agree we live in a rape culture. I still do not believe we live in a “false rape society” as people in the MRA would have us believe.
I am sorry but you are 100% wrong. Other people are trying to represent my arguments as if I am doing such. But there is no way that any statement that I have made should be taken as such.
Again, not dismissing. I do not think prevalent is the right word. But I have repeatedly said that by saying that I was not dismissing how horrible the occurrence of rape is AND I have repeatedly said that it is a much bigger problem in our society than false accusations of rape.
Never said it was a huge social problem. In fact I have agreed, several times, that it is not. And I have also said, many many many times, that it is not as severe as rape. Shall I say it 12 more times in order for you to believe that it is the case?
What would it take for you to believe, without any doubt, that I believe rape is a major problem in our society that is a much bigger problem than false accusations of rape and that I do not believe that false accusations of rape comes anywhere close to the problem of rape? I mean, did you see my post on the thread discussing the disgusting fraternity where I explained why the statistics in the fox news article were flawed and why 25% was not a realistic number for false accusations?
And even when people are being clear, there are still people who either hear what they want to hear or just refuse to believe anything different. I believe that is the case with ithiliana.
My refusing to use one word to describe the enormous problem that is rape has caused a lot of people to assume things about me that I do not believe and then present those falsehoods as fact. Much of what is being considered to be my beliefs is a giant straw man based on assumptions made that are plainly not true.
In short. Rape is a huge problem. It is a much bigger problem than false accusations of rape… and there is no equivalency. We live in a rape culture. We do not live in a “false rape society”.
molly ren:
Yes, you are absolutely correct. Most people getting out of jail for a felony are not going to have a walk in the park.
I am just saying that, with potentially the exception of murder, that a conviction of rape based on a false accusation would be worse because the person falsely accused would have to register as a sex offender for the rest of their lives.
LJ4: Here, in a nutshell, is why I have problems with what you think you are saying.
To which you replied My refusing to use one word to describe the enormous problem that is rape has caused a lot of people to assume things about me that I do not believe and then present those falsehoods as fact. Much of what is being considered to be my beliefs is a giant straw man based on assumptions made that are plainly not true.
I didn’t say it was your misunderstanding of the word prevalent (and the issue of, is there a prevalent rape culture, vs. is rape prevalent is another problem, because you keep conflating those two things), I said it was the entirety of your writing, as in the way you take my comment, “You’ve still not (so far as I’ve seen) said how you would describe it (prevalent, or not) if one in six men were going to be killed/have someone try to kill them., and ignored that to be killed is an active verb, and the dependent clause makes it plain that I am talking about murder, which you tried to make it a case of how the various people die.
That’s gibberish. My example was one in six men being murdered. Not that one in six of the people who die are murdered. 18 out of a hundred men will die from someone else killing them.
That would be a murder culture. And murder would be prevalent. Murder would be the prevalent means of death.
But you don’t even seem to be willing to deal with that, you have to introduce oddities, and change the entire nature of my argument; which you then dismiss, because in your new example the numbers aren’t predominant enough to rise to your level of prevalent.
Then you change the question of a socially based (i.e. gossip) false accusation to on of someone falsely convicted.
You keep raising the stakes for one (false rape accusations, which I made an error in the math about, it’s one in 3,000 men who will ever face one at all; not who will be falsely charged, but rather falsely investigated), while dismissing rape with stock phrases about how it’s bad, but look! men will be falsely accused of rape and we need to bend our efforts to dealing with it.
It’s not a big problem. It’s not rampant. It’s miniscule. Yes, for those accused it’s shitty as all fuck, but it’s not something men need to worry about, day in day out. It’s not something which they are attacked for when it happens.
The Duke Boys… doing just fine, and they are about as bad as a false rape accusation can get. Even with people who have pulpits still trying to pillory them they are not suffering any backlash.
But women who are raped… blamed for it. Told it’s their fault. Abused by the defense at the trials. Women who aren’t raped are told how they are doing things (walking without an escort, stopping by the local for a drink on the way home, wearing the wrong clothes) which means they will be raped: and it will be their fault.
These two things are so unequal that they don’t merit being equated in any way and you keep doing just that.
That’s why I say I don’t believe you think rape is that big a deal, and that you are really all about the false rape accusations.
@Pecunium
“The worst crime to be falsely accused of is probably murder.”
I’m a hit and run so don’t bother to try and debate this with me. Perhaps another member would like to take the Devil’s Advocate role and have an honest debate without being an echo chamber.
In order to be accused of murder, there has to actually be a dead body. You must then link the dead body to the perpetrator (Actus Reus). For murder you then need to prove that the perpetrator had a guilty mind (Mens Rea) i.e. intended to kill the victim. Rape is more like attempted murder in the fact that it doesn’t have to have actually happened in order to be accused of it.
Remember that Rape is one of the only crimes in which either the accused or the accuser has be believed. One or the other must have the onus put on them. If you put the onus on the accuser you’re re-victimizing the victim. If you put the onus on the accused, you’re violating the constitution.
My personal favourite is “attempted rape”. Attempting (mens rea) without proving an actual crime took place (actus reus) to do something that may or may not have happened. Really, if he stopped was there actually going to be a rape? If he was stopped then who stopped him and what were his intentions?
Well that was pointless
pecunium: I had to change the nature of your argument because your argument as presented was not an accurate analogy to the 1 in 6 rape problem. It is 1 in 6 women will be raped in her lifetime. In order for your murder analogy to be accurate you would have to have 1 in 6 men being killed as their cause of death. (Sorry for neglecting to mention why i changed that earlier).
To ME, when discussing false accusations of rape, it covers the broad spectrum. There is harm that can be done by the gossip. There is harm that can be done by bringing it to the police. And there is harm that can be done by the actual conviction.
“These two things are so unequal that they don’t merit being equated in any way and you keep doing just that.”
Never have I equated the two. NOT ONCE. So you are either a liar or an idiot. You choose. I am done with you being disingenuous.
dan:
Do false rape charges stick better than false charges of other crimes?
What is the mechanism by which this would be the case? Are rapes and rape accusations more likely to be covered in the media than murders and accusations of that (if the crime doesn’t involve a child or famous person)? I don’t think that’s the case in New York, is it elsewhere? How would we even know?
Is a false accusation of sexual assault easier or more straightforward to levy than of another violent crime?
I suppose it’s possible, though I have no reason to suspect that it’s true, that rape is most likely to be the accusation made when no crime has taken place at all; that is, while a false/erroneous murder accusation is one merely implicating the wrong person for an actual crime, a false/erroneous rape accusation can happen when there’s no crime in the first place. But again, that’s all speculation, I have no idea what the data is.
“My personal favourite is “attempted rape”. Attempting (mens rea) without proving an actual crime took place (actus reus) to do something that may or may not have happened. Really, if he stopped was there actually going to be a rape? If he was stopped then who stopped him and what were his intentions?”
I know you’re a hit and run, so let me just applaud and say – Yeah, totally. Attempted rape is the stupidest charge ever amirite, peeps? Right? Oh, wait, no. I am seriously not right. What the fuck?
Dan, you’re an idiot for saying you’d rather be falsely accused of murder. There’s a man here in TX–Michael Morton–that was just released from jail after being falsely accused and convicted of murdering his wife. He lost 25 years of his life.
You’d rather do that?