In the world of fantasy writer and all-around hateful shithead Vox Day, women who are raped when they’re too drunk to consent should just suck it up, because reporting their rapes would be akin to someone calling police when they can’t remember where they’ve parked their car.
In a blog post today, Vox approvingly quotes a retiring British judge under fire for telling a newspaper that “the rape conviction statistics will not improve until women stop getting so drunk.” (This is the same judge who recently gave a teacher convicted of possessing a massive library of child porn a suspended sentence, saying that she couldn’t “criticise you for being a teacher who’s attracted to children.”)
Vox offers his take:
Perhaps women would be slower to put themselves in positions where they can be raped with impunity if they understood that they will not be taken at their word simply because they cry rape. It’s ridiculous. Can you imagine any other purported crime being investigated, much less prosecuted, on similarly vague grounds?
He follows this with an imaginary conversation between a young woman and the police in which she reports that her car is stolen because she can’t remember where she parked it.
It’s not really quite as hilarious as Vox imagines it to be.
PRO TIP: One way you can tell that forgetting where you parked your car is not actually much like rape is that no one actually calls police when they forget where they parked their car, while people do indeed report rapes, despite knowing that they will be grilled and second-guessed and called a “slut” and possibly mocked on the internet by assholes like Vox Day.
In the comments, one fellow suggests that feminists should have their right to vote taken away from them:
Feminists love to conflate the difference between saying that a drunk woman’s testimony is insufficient to establish a conviction of rape in a he/she said situation and the mythical attitude “she’s drunk so she’s asking for it even if she’s passed out on the floor.” They don’t understand that this is primary evidence for the fact that feminists should never be allowed to vote, because they’re (deliberately) too stupid to grasp the fundamental principles of civil society, or that alcohol affects men’s inhibitions as well as women’s.
Vox and his readers do indeed live in a fantasy land.
UPDATE: It’s a Vox Day twofer today! On his other blog today, Vox quotes a Daily Mail story claiming that the horrifying sexual abuse of 1400 children in Rotherham, England went unchecked in part because (as a report on the disaster notes) some social workers felt “nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist.”
Ignoring the fact that this is the self-serving claim of people who knowingly allowed this abuse to persist, and ignoring all of the other factors that contributed to this horrendous failure, Vox concludes that
the material costs of anti-racism are CONSIDERABLY worse than the material costs of racism …
Anti-racists not only actively celebrate predatory relationships, they regularly demonstrate that they have no problem whatsoever with child abuse, whether it occurs within the same race or is interracial. Moreover, what they falsely decry as “racism” is quite often nothing more than the exercise of the Constitutional right of free association. …
If you think that you possess the higher moral ground because you are anti-racist, think again. You are observably enabling widespread crime, particularly rape and child abuse, and are quite literally doing material harm to your own nation.
Astounding. Appalling. And just plain ridiculous.
There seem to be two modes by which the university winds up dealing with rape instead of the police:
1 The student just doesn’t think about going to the police, and the university never calls the cops either and doesn’t suggest the student do it, and by the time the student thinks about it, it’s too late to do a rape kit, and so the student decides not to bother since there will be no physical evidence for a court of law.
2. The student purposefully goes through the university honor court, because there’s a better chance of being taken seriously there than at a court of law (among other things the burden of proof is less stringent, because the penalties are so weak), and sometimes just having it acknowledged that a wrong thing happened to you and everyone agrees that it was wrong is the best attainable outcome.
Obviously both of these things are problems, but I understand why survivors choose not to go the criminal route.
Schools and colleges are required by Title IX to provide an environment free from discrimination. Sexual harassment and sexual assault are both classified as forms of discrimination. Reports of these are treated as a civil matter and as such a lower standard of proof is used compared with criminal courts.
This is what sticks in the craw of manospherians. They whine about feminists lowering the standard of proof to ruin more men’s lives. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was Tefo’s unstated issue.
Also, the panda story was hilarious. Mispandary!
And how would YOU know? Have you conducted a scientific survey with a large sampling and a calculated margin of error? Explain how you arrived at this conclusion, and show your work, or GTFO.
Damn.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/27/feminist-video-game-critic-forced-to-leave-her-home-after-online-rape-and-death-threats/
Ferrets have been known to use deception as well. My baby (the PUF or Pick Up Ferret, if anyone remembers) has a love for pooping on the carpet. If I see him do the potty shuffle, I put him in the litterbox. He’ll do the dance, pretend to go and ask to be let out so he can… poop on the carpet. Total scammer, that one!
Besides the nasty rape apologia, the bit about alcohol lowering men’s inhibitions struck me. If alcohol or any other intoxicant makes you so uninhibited that you run the risk of raping someone, perhaps it’s you who shouldn’t be drinking.
@Nova: Absolutely. I think someone upthread linked to the Laci Green video about consent, and her take on it is that if you’re too drunk to drive, you’re too drunk to be having sex. I may not agree with that 100% but I like her articulating the idea that sex is an act of responsibility and you shouldn’t initiate it if you’re not in a state to do so responsibly.
Also should have added “… or initiate sex with somebody else if *they* are not in a state to participate responsibly”.
@Auntie Alias
Surely this incident will send a powerful message to the online community highlighting the terrible and terrifying levels of harassment women experience who dare to challenge the misogynistic attitudes that are clearly rife in the gaming industry alone?
Oh. Beancord says no.
http://blogs.canoe.ca/buttonmashers/general/death-threats-force-anita-sarkeesian-out-of-her-home/
@Policy of Madness
>Right, because the correct solution to men tying themselves up into knots over this is not to teach them how to not act like rapists, but instead to tell them to go act like rapists all they want, just somewhere else.
I think I remember that the bro-code has rules against telling your bro that they’re acting creepy and are about to do something illegal, if not outright criminal as in the case we’re discussing here, does it not?
Isn’t that standard racist procedure?
I was stuck on the deer story, and just now read this.
I think I’ll go hide now.
Oh boy, referring to a Daily Mail article to say that anti-racist sentiment is a problem? Yeeeeah, that’s a great and entirely unbiased source to refer to on subjects like that.
“women who are raped when they’re too drunk to consent”
How is that situation even possible?
So it’s rape if a woman is to drunk to say yes to have sex even if she wants sex?
Or does it mean a woman who was to drunk to say no?
(I am German and maybe I just have a problem with your language here?)
I think it means a woman who is too drunk to say anything.
@Saxi Fraga, “women who are raped when they’re too drunk to consent”
How can you not understand this concept, that someone can be too drunk to give meaningful consent, even if they can still articulate “yes” or “no”? Or that they can be drunk enough to be incoherent, unconscious or physically unable to resist a rapist. All of these scenarios are covered by the above scenario.
@Saxi Fraga I’ve heard this concern come up from other German speakers on Pharyngula. Is it because rape from your understanding in your native language has connotations of assault? Here in the U.S. there does not have to be violence involved for the crime of rape to be committed. Basically, if someone hasn’t consented to sex, that’s rape. (If they’ve consented but were coerced, that’s still rape.) Hope that clears things up.