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.
Seriously? I have to wonder why so many of these people seem to want people who commit the act of rape to be not accountable for their actions. They act like there is some kind of gotcha way to do this, and it is all okay.
On a side note (because what else is left to say about hole digging Theodore Beale), judges really should stop wearing those silly wigs. Or they should just go full blown and add a clown nose or something. I was trying to read the telegraph article linked, but the wig makes it really hard to take seriously.
Pretty sure that I always know where to find my vagina, dude. And no, being drunk is not like handing any asshole who happens to be around the keys.
HAAAAAAAAAAAA. Did you see the other gem from Vox about how anti-racists <a href="http://www.donotlink.com/bc11"want to promote child sexual abuse (or something, it’s awfully hard to tell from someone as incoherent as he is–oh, and trigger warning for child sexual abuse for that link).
Well, I can’t seem to make the HTML work. The link I meant to post was http://www.donotlink.com/bc11
Yes because being a rape survivor is exactly the same as being a car. Cars have to give consent too, and have personal agency.
Bloody hell, I assume his sci fi writing is as crap as his ability to use metaphors.
Not very long ago, I saw that “mythical attitude” expressed quite openly on the comment thread of a popular blog, and nobody challenged it.
(Actually the attitude was [paraphrasing]: “Sure I would; if I didn’t someone else would, and besides, she obviously doesn’t have much self-respect.”)
Wow. For a writer, he’s extremely bad at analogies.
“Hello, police? I’d like to report my car stolen.”
“All right, when did this happen?”
“Last night.”
“Where was the car last?”
“At a friends house, I can give you the address.”
“What were you doing over there?”
“Uh… I was at a party?”
“Was there alcohol involved?”
“Hang on, why is this relevent?”
“Just answer the question, miss.”
“Yes, I had a few drinks. I didn’t want to drive home so my friend let me sleep over. When I woke up my car was gone.”
“So you got drunk, and your car was stolen, hmm? What else did you expect?”
“What do you mean? I expect my car to still be there.”
“Maybe if you didn’t get so drunk you could have driven home. Where were your keys?”
“What?”
“I asked ‘Where were your keys?'”
“I.. um… In my pocket? They were stolen too.”
“And do you know who took those keys to steal your car?”
“No.”
“Well then, how do you even know it was stolen? Maybe you just misplaced your keys?”
“My car is gone.”
“Listen, I can’t go on ‘he said, she said.’ You were drunk, who knows what happened to your car. Unless you can prove it was stolen, don’t call the police again.”
…
“Car thefts statistics won’t improve until people like you stop getting so drunk.”
Can I speak to someone else?
And it was a real-enough attitude in Steubenville.
By the way, PZ Myers has a funny article about Theodore “VD” Beale over at Pharyngula. Did you know Teddy is a scientist? He is, he says so himself!
And for some reason, this is the post that makes me feel like I have to vomit, so I’m gonna go sit in a corner and play Civ4 for a while. Vox Day can go bathe in an ocean of legos. Broken ones.
(funny, my browser tried to close when I switched to this thread, so I’m gonna take that as a sign, make a tomato sandwich and contemplate going out for beer).
Sarah, yeah, I saw that just a few minutes after posting this. So I’ve updated the post. It’s a Vox Day Day here at WHTM!
Vox Day is Best Day!
*twweeeeebpbpbphbphb*
That judge is a real piece of shit too.
Oh for fuck’s sake. I saw that on the news earlier, and I nearly threw the TV through the TV.
Stop laughing. I would have made that work. I’m magic.
You didn’t report a crime because you were afraid of being thought racist? Bullshit. If a Pakistani commits a crime, then it is not racist to report that. What’s racist is suggesting that all Pakistanis are criminals. Unless you were planning to do that, then it would not have been racist. What, do you think we’re of the opinion that racial minorities are incapable of committing crimes? Really? Ridiculous.
The thing that really annoys me about the issue of being too drunk to consent is that MRAs like to ask, as if it’s some kind of gotcha, how they’re supposed to know if someone is too drunk to consent. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong here, but isn’t that pretty much exactly the point? I mean, sure, they might get lucky and she might’ve been entirely aware and happy with what was going on, or maybe she was too drunk but wanted it anyway (sort of a not-rape by not-regret, huh?) but they also might be taking advantage of someone in a debilitated state, and surely decent people are supposed to care about things like that?
Why don’t they identify? They’re flesh & blood, right? If someone left a deposit in their lower intestine while they were blotto, wouldn’t they send it to the lab?
Ok… so that was badly phrased… a thing that really annoys me about the MRA approach to the issue, etc.
I also hate that they’re offended that they’re expected to care that they might be raping someone.
And now I’m going to go get some sleep, because my wordbrain appears to be shutting down.
Speaking of stupid, Teddy Boy, you’re soaking in it. Why do men who rape get a free pass for being drunk and slutty, but women who GET raped, DON’T?
I guess that if a rape falls in a bottle forest and you didn’t hear screams, it never happened.
I personally consider running around raping drunk people to be extremely un-civil, but perhaps this is just because of my silly little ladybrain.
Or any people, in fact. Rape – not in fact a necessary component of a civilized society, and in fact some of us might consider it very uncivil indeed.
Yeah, Tedders, it’s ridiculous, all right. All the more so because the average woman, even if she can fully demonstrate that she was innocent of all wrongdoing, will STILL not be believed. I once heard it said that the only rape victims who get taken at their word are babies in diapers, and eighty-year-old nuns with a minimum of six bullet holes and/or stab wounds.
And what is “being raped with impunity”, anyway? If anything, rape is punitive. A woman who gets raped is being punished for being a woman, and for being someplace where someone thinks she shouldn’t be, doing something they think she shouldn’t do. Rape IS punishment. For being female.
It’s like he doesn’t know any women at all, and that in turn makes me wonder if he really IS married, or just making that shit up like all the rest of his shit.
So according to this guy, If women drink, then it’s okay to rape her? Women aren’t allowed to drink anymore, basically? And I assume – because clearly he has too much integrity to resort to double standards – that if a guy gets drunk, it’s okay for gay men to rape him? After all, if you didn’t want that, you shouldn’t have been drinking, right?
And seconding Athywren: If in doubt, err on the side of “no”. Better to wish you had made a move, than to wish you hadn’t.
Tell that to the slaves who died in the Middle Passage, asshole.
I think I have enough material to write the sci-fi story I had in mind about the MRAs, now, but the problem is that the behaviour is so over the top they don’t work as villains. It’s too much like a parody.
It’s hard working out how to write about them without them being caricatures – I don’t really want to tone it down, but it’s so obviously ‘mustache twirling villain’…
Well, I guess at least he’s honest about the fact that he thinks rape is an appropriate punishment for drinking (but only for women).