RawStory has a piece up highlighting The top 5 rape apologist reactions to the Steubenville rape verdict. It’s well worth reading. As the author of the piece, Emily Mullen, notes:
The Steubenville guilty verdict spawned nearly as much rape apology as the original news of the case did, highlighting the point — made by feminists like Zerlina Maxwell and Jaclyn Friedman — that America has a long way to go before it gets past blaming victims and sympathizing with rapists.
I haven’t yet run across any reactions in the Manosphere to the verdicts, but I’m sure we’ll see some in the next few days. If you run across anything especially awful, in the Manosphere or outside of it, please let me know.
Men’s Rights Redditors, currently silent about the verdicts, were up in arms the other day because Reuters was identifying the accused — now the convicted — rapists, while not identifying the victim. Or, as MRAs prefer to put it, the “alleged victim.” Now, as RawStory points out, she is getting death threats.
EDITED TO ADD: More victim blaming online, as catalogued on the Public Shaming blog: First post, second post with more.
Below, Several examples borrowed from Public Shaming. TRIGGER WARNING for rape apology.
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Saving a baby and not getting genitals (cuz that’d be ally wrong in this case) — http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/15/susanna-rohm_n_2884350.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003
This has been your random light hearted contribution to an otherwise depressing topic.
*really wrong
Thanks a lot autocorrect
Autocorrect ruins everything, but it can’t ruin how wonderful that story is, Argenti. 🙂
Argenti, thanks for that link! Those two boys are good people.
@falconer, yes you will sleep again. My 9yr old slept through by 8months, my 3yr old slept through by 14weeks. But they will have unsettled periods when they grow and teeth. A good routine helps establish a good sleep pattern, I think (worked for ours YMMV). I really recommend a humidifier and eucalyptus oil for the inevitable teething colds. Also do you wrap/swaddle them?
#parenting derail
Ugh, yes. Thank you for articulating yet another issue I have with this bullshit. May every douche wanting cookies for not being a rapist be cursed to only have stale, hard, no-good cookies.
And I can’t help but wonder, if those nice guys are just SO NICE where the fuck were they when this shit went down? You know some of them had to be at the parties. So either they thought it was ok or that she somehow “deserved it” or just didn’t give enough of a shit to even bother calling the fucking cops. Gee, what nice guys.
I have a bit of a problem with this… granted, I don’t know anything about any particular American sports subculture. But overall, western society does NOT tell people that women are completely worthless and it’s okay to piss on them and rape them.
When people get angry at feminists for talking about “rape culture” because our society supposedly abhors rape, they’re over-simplifying, since there are all these cultural memes that facilitate rape and all this victim-blaming going on when someone does get raped. BUT at the same time – it IS true that people are explicitly told that rape is bad. It’s NOT like you can actually grow up without ever hearing anyone saying that rape is bad and something you shouldn’t do. In fact, the vast majority of men never rape anyone, even when they happen to be alone with a passed-out drunk girl for instance, because they know it’s wrong to do so. You can’t say about rapists that they didn’t know any better since they grew up in a rape culture – the 95 % or so of men who never rape anyone grew up in the very same culture, and somehow they still managed to take away the message that rape is, in fact, WRONG.
Viscaria: I should have amended that to say that in 25 years, the conversation has not changed. It always starts out with “she lied, his life is ruined.” It’s depressing.
@BigMomma: Boy howdy do we swaddle them. My mom said they were the most-swaddled babies she’d ever seen.
It didn’t occur to me for two weeks to unswaddle them in order to photograph them for my family. Nope, I’d just snap away and get photos of bundles with knit caps on top.
I think some routine would be best for us, too, seeing as we can’t drop our schedules entirely for the babies. This morning, for instance, I got up and fed them at 7:30 in hopes they wouldn’t wake up immediately after I left Beloved alone with them to go to work, as has been their pattern for a week or so.
I’m real slow on the uptake.
I should add to the above, that of course, I also hold ALL of bystanders in contempt for this, but I think it’s fair to be a bit more afraid, as a young woman bystander to a crime like this (I know if it were me I’d be afraid that if I said something I’d be next). Not that that excuses any of them from calling the authorities the moment things got hinky. Doing the right thing doesn’t always have to involve physical force or jumping into danger. I can totally understand people not wanting to insert themselves in between the victim and attackers (having been someone who once upon a time tried to break up a fight and got some of my hair ripped out for it, believe me, I can totally understand). But that is why you call the authorities, or a parent or SOMETHING. So yeah, I’m pretty pissed at all the kids who were there and didn’t do anything. Just that, if those poor “nice guys” who aren’t getting any pity fucks didn’t bother to call the cops, well, they don’t strike me as terribly nice.
@cassandrasays:
“No. A rapist is a person who has raped someone. Referring to someone by a term that describes what they did in a very clear way is not the same thing as buying into the slavering beast myth. In fact, you’ve got things exactly backwards – refusing the label these boys as rapists supports the slavering beast myth, because part of what upholds that myth”
Ok, I stand corrected. What you wrote is exactly what I meant to convey. The regulars here are a sharp bunch, and you continually educate me. I think I may have some leftover internalized misogyny to deal with. In all seriousness, it has been the pages and pages of comments over the last several months of lurking, and sometimes commenting, that has educated me, and how you take trolls to task is as entertaining as it is brilliant, patient, and impressive. Thank you!
@Dvärghundspossen Ok, maybe I was ranting a little.
I agree that 95% of men (or whatever the figure is, the vast majority anyway) would never think of raping, even if they thought they could get away with it .
I agree that western culture doesn’t stand up and explicitly say “Women – feel free to rape and piss on them”. And if asked directly,”Is rape wrong?” we all repeat faithfully “Yes, rape is dreadful”.
But every time our society lets some “golden boy” off, every time the media is full of victim blaming and sympathy for the offender, and Twitter says “she deserved it” and “it wasn’t really rape”, we as a society are “showing” rather “telling” them that actually it’s just fine to do that. If you’re a footballer (UK) or a varsity player (USA) or similarly privilleged enough in some other way, and in the 5% predisposed to rape.
Do we really think that there aren’t a dozen other girls (and probably boys too) in Steubenville who have been similarly assaulted by “Big Red” players over the years? One of the articles quoted a young women who lived in Steubenville saying that the Big Red parites had a reputation as being risky. Lovely euphemism.
And is Big Red really just freakily unlucky by being full of rapists and rape supporters? Or is it typical of a lot of over-achieving and beloved macho sports team, unless the people involved have made a real effort to ensure otherwise? Penn State? Notre Dame? How many more?
Sorry, Dvärghundspossen, I’m not ranting at you, I’m shaking my fist at the gods for allowing this to happen and trying to understand the causes. Because if I can understand the causes, maybe I can help to change things for the future. *crawls under a rock to hide from the likely lightening strike*
Titianblue: I agree with you about everything. I just wanted to make clear that “rape culture”=/=”rapists have no individual responsibility for what they do, we should merely blame society”.
Naïf;: Three years seems about right.
Really…? Break into someone’s home in Ohio with the intent to steal something and you can spend as much as ten years in prison.
But you think three years is “about right” for breaking into someone’s body.
Stop shitposting.
Physician heal thyself. If you were in a bar, or a restaurant, or a museum, and people whom you disliked insisted on being seated near you, or following you from piece to piece: while sharing inane, erroneous, and often offensive, opinions about what they meant, you wouldn’t be having a good time.
You might even (if you had the gumption) tell them to bugger off. But here, because Dave is tolerant, and you don’t have to face people in the flesh, you insist on doing it, and pretend the (quite reasonable) offense you engender is somehow reflected of the people whom you are treating ill, rather than a reflection of your rude, juvenile, and somewhat pathetic attention seeking.
It’s even more pathetic in that you complain people don’t respond to you, but when they do (as I have, more than once) you melt away and pretend it never happened.
So you are, as well as a childish lackwit, a moral coward, and intellectual hypocrite, posting challenges you refuse to answer, while abusing people who engage you on your terms (i.e. being rude).
You are, so far as I can tell, a miserable excuse for a human being.
QFT
I saved a pan of milk from burning once ….
Naïf: I have to go to work, but if you’ve not answered people in the other thread about PIV, well as I said you are a moral, and intellectual coward but I’ll be willing to (again) point out that you have once again decided to show us that you aren’t always full of shit; sometimes you share it with us.
ostara, I am having mixed feelings about the bystanders as well. I don’t expect people to do something physically but didn’t anyone think to even say something?
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m only a few years older than these kids and when someone is that drunk usually a friend of theirs takes them to the bathroom to be sick if they need to and then puts them on a sofa to sleep it off. We do this for everyone, not just our friends, but for people we don’t know well either.
And I can see that physically intervening would be scary and many people would be reluctant to do so. But I HAVE intervened when I thought a girl was far, far too drunk.
It was this new years, at a house party, she was a friend of a friend who I’d never met before and she was plastered, completely gone. On two occasions, guys, people I know pretty well were very clearly making a move and she was both not happy and too drunk to do anything about it (you can hardly push someone off you if you can barely stand). So I intervened and got the girl away from the guy.
The first time I just let her move away and gave the guy a dirty look. The second time I nearly blew a fuse and I told the guy (a different one) that she was far too drunk and that he he was to leave her alone. Then I put her on the sofa with her coat over her and got her some water.
So yeah, nothing terrible was happening but I still intervened and made it clear to guys that their behavior was not acceptable.
To be fair though, I am 20, I don’t know for certain if I’d have the same thing at 16, but I should very much hope I would have done something if a similar event to the steubenville case happened in front of me.
I turn into Mama Bear as well when I see other girls and women being treated like this, I want to tear the guys limb from limb. If any guy tries and hurts my friends then I will end up in jail for a very, very long time. NO-ONE hurts or abuses my friends or any other woman in front of me.
Good for you, historophilia! I’m not going to say that young women must stand up for each other like that, but I’m hella proud when they do.
Sorry to keep posting this crap, but it’s so unbelievable. From the Onion Article comments:
“They were drunk, too. Therefor, they couldn’t consent to sex anymore than she could. Therefor, they were raped as much as she was.
If you have a problem with this line of thought, perhaps you should rethink the laws which state “drunk=not consenting.” If we would accept that drunk people CAN and DO make adult decisions that they need to be held accountable for, in other words, that drunk people CAN consent (which is what I certainly believe), then it would be appropriate to punish those boys. Otherwise, the law must be applied fairly to everyone.
In other words, if you’re drunk, but conscious, and you say “yes,” that needs to be considered legal consent. Otherwise, these boys were no more rapists than they were raped.”
Sorry I’m too dumb for quotes. Here is the link again.
http://gawker.com/5991175/this-two+year+old-onion-story-perfectly-predicted-cnns-shocking-steubenville-rape-trial-coverage?post=58391970
Yeah, that’s my thing as well. It’s possible someone did, and they were ignored, or threatened, but I mean, yeah, looking out for other people is generally just good practice. When I was at the height of my partying days, we’d mostly just try to put people to bed too, take care of them if they were far too gone, try to find them a ride home, etc. It was just something you did, even if it was just because you wanted to be able to go back to the party and not have to worry about that person puking on the dance floor or pool table or just because you didn’t want to have to worry about someone calling the cops and breaking up the party. I remember one time when I got really, really violently ill, I vaguely registered at one point that there was a girl from another college who none of us knew very well (friend of a friend of a friend) who was propped up next to me with her own waste basket and a sleeve of saltines, being taken care of, just like me, even though none of us knew her very well. And this was at a frat house, at a themed party so I mean, it’s not like we weren’t in close proximity to lots of young, supposedly virile guys or dressed provocatively. Heck, some of those guys were the ones who dug out the crackers or found us garbage cans to double as puke baskets. Which pretty much disproves the whole “any guy would do the same in that situation” bullshit.
Roosh — you summon the blockquote monster…
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And FTR, I put the line closer to can’t stand // vomiting (if nothing else that’s going to be some incredibly shitty sex) — and getting a partner impaired with the intent to incapacitate is a crime in its own right, at least in some states.
…and I see you weren’t agreeing with the bull about “remotely drunk” versus “unconscious” as a black and white matter, whoops. But yeah, getting some one drunk so they’ll “consent” is, at best, a dick move, and straight up illegal in some places.
Don’t be that guy, it really is that bloody simple.
(FYI, your rep kinda precedes you, and isn’t good, you’re going to need a solid show of being here in good faith…after Diogenes and Jaro I’m feeling forgiving or something)
Re rape culture, did anyone read that horrible horrible article on The Good Men Project called “nice guys rape too” or something similarly oxymoronic? It was written by a woman who told of her friend who had raped a blacked-out woman. The author claimed that the man couldn’t possibly be blameworthy for the rape in question, since a) the woman he raped was a total slut who ASKED FOR IT, and b) we live in a rape culture, so how could he possibly know that it’s bad to rape people?
Yeah, she really did use both a and b.
The only part of that that surprises me? It wasn’t written by Hugo. Fucking. Schwyzer.
@Dvärghundspossen
I read about that article and couldn’t handle reading it.