It’s perhaps not altogether surprising that a writer at Return of Kings, a site run by someone who has openly admitted to raping a woman too drunk to consent, has come out in defense of Jian Ghomeshi, the Canadian radio personality recently fired from CBC in the wake of serious accusations of violent sexual assault from an ever-growing list of women.
For most of those who have been following the scandal, the fact that numerous women have come forward with strikingly similar stories of abuse at the hands of Ghomeshi only increases the credibility of the case against him.
Over on Return of Kings, however, writer Blair Naso dismisses this as “a common pattern with celebrities in unconfirmed sex scandals.” And then he sets forth one of the creepiest defenses against rape allegations I’ve ever heard:
One woman claims something and then several other groupies hop on the media whore train. People claim Bill Cosby raped 13 women, but do they have any idea how hard it is to rape just one? Thirteen is a large rape notch count. Even if it was all consensual, how would Cosby hide that much adultery from his wife? He isn’t a sex symbol like some politicians are.
Emphasis mine. Yes, that’s right, he actually wrote “thirteen is a large rape notch count.”
Mr. Nasi, you want to know how Cosby might have managed to get his “rape notch count” so high, even though he’s “not a sex symbol?” Well, you could always fucking read what the women making these accusations have said. (Hint: he allegedly drugged them first.) Generally speaking, it is probably a good idea to actually read the allegations against someone before dismissing them as nonsense.
If Ghomeshi, or Cosby, or any celebrity accused of rape were facing accusations from “only” one woman, the Return of Kings boys would no doubt dismiss her as some crazy, lying slut. But when the accusations seem to be corroborated by other similar stories from other women who have also been victimized, well, gosh, raping that many women would be “too hard” of a task for one man to pull off.
What the fuck.
Most of the commenters at ROK, meanwhile, think that even if Ghomeshi is being railroaded he is still getting what he deserves — for being a “white knight” who previously gave lip service to the ideals of feminism.
No matter what side they’re taking in this controversy, in other words, the ROKers are doing it for the worst reasons possible.
It’s the art of sarcastic understatement, Kevin. There’s also the point that moderators can’t actually ban people, which would be zero tolerance as far as I’m concerned.
Do these “apologists” understand that they’re actually and really bad people? Not just avatars in a shitty game? But real-and-true evil?
How these people sleep at night is beyond me.
They know they are the baddies. They like being the baddies.
Most excellent essay about social whispers and speaking up, or choosing not to (via Pharyngula and Scalzi): http://www.nothinginwinnipeg.com/2014/10/do-you-know-about-jian/
They think being the baddies makes them hot and sexy. As though anything could.
They also don’t think women exist except to serve and be punished by them.
TW for…well, Jian.
I have big feelings about this one because I was a Toronto-area Moxy Fruvous fan. And I started out having a huge crush on Jian. As I saw more shows, I started to realize that he was smug and narcissistic and in love with the sound of his own voice. By the time he became the CBC’s golden boy, I felt a pang of nausea every time I saw his name.
I read his “exculpatory” Facebook post and knew that he was guilty of horrible things. Why? Because he claimed that he showed proof to the CBC that his BDSM encounters were consensual. Unless that proof was an unedited video of full negotiation and scene, including consent to be taped, said proof would mean nothing. And all said theoretical video would prove would be that *one* scene was consensual. I knew that Jian’s idea of “consent” was not what a responsible Dominant would view as consent. And you know what an irresponsible Dom is called? A batterer and/or rapist. Fuck.
At first I thought that he honestly believed that he had consent. Why would he be so indignant and play the persecution card otherwise? But having read more and more and more about his actions (I’ve been a little obsessed) I think he realized that was the only card he could play. I think he did text/e-mail BDSM roleplay with women so he could have his so-called proof if there was a complaint against him. He was setting these women up so they couldn’t come forward. Nobody would believe them. A lot of people didn’t believe when there were “only” 4 complainants. Only when an actress/Air Force Captain put her name to an accusation did the tide turn.
And to think I have a picture of myself with his arm around me. I wish I could go back in time and punch him in the face. I admired him. I respected him. And even then the whisper network had been going for over a decade. How many women had he assaulted and raped even then?
Thanks for letting me word vomit here. I needed to get that out.
When I see ROK, I think “South Korea.” (I’m a bit obsessed with 20th-century geopolitical and military history, and the shape of the world that we’re living in today as a consequence of it.)
So…I read the original article to try and determine why a man who writes for a website that frequently likes to tout men’s vastly superior physical strength thinks that it would be so goddamn hard to rape a woman, and I didn’t find any further explanation in that article. In other manosphere articles, I’ve seen explanations for why it’s hard, that being that you’d have to beat a woman really badly to force her and stop her resistance, and even leaving out that this ignores other forms of coercion and other methods for disabling people (e.g. drugging), this still proves that this author doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about because all of the accusations report that Jian used brutal, sustained violence and force against his victims. And I’m just realizing again that literally nothing will ever be rape for these guys, and anything that they’ll actually admit to being rape (because I swear to God, as much as these motherfuckers love Ted Bundy, one day they’ll start claiming that he “bad-boy Alpha’d” his way into his victims’ pants) is okay because women really want that shit anyway. Because women always have to be wrong and men always have to be right.
If you read project unbreakable you see that the rapists and abusers say the same thing over and over. No one will believe you and I will destroy you if you tell.
Then they have each others back when someone does tell.
I was a huge Moxy Fruvous fan too. I went to concerts when I could. I got to see a relatively unknown opening act (Jann Arden) once. I feel retroactively bad for ever having liked him, even though I know that’s pointless.
But back to Jann Arden, she posted this great link on her twitter feed:
http://kiranopal.com/on-the-jian-ghomeshi-saga-and-the-conquest-of-feminism/
Dawn Incognito – and as commenters on Pharyngula pointed out, even if those videos were of consensual encounters, not only do the not prove he’s not a rapist, but he showed them without the other people’s consent, and the very act of showing homemade porn to his manager was a sackable offence anyway.
I think part of the piece linked above by Unimaginative is worth quoting:
It seems to me that men who commit acquaintance rape count on a number of advantages.
First, they assume that most of their victims will be too ashamed to report them or unwilling to go through the ordeal involved in reporting them. Also they often choose victims that they can injure in other ways for the crime of reporting them — anything from damaging their careers to ruining their reputations (this would be the particular thing a rapist could do if his victim was a fellow student). Secondly, they set up the situation so that they can have a plausible claim of consent and their victim will have a difficult time proving otherwise, or even have it look like the victim’s poor judgment or desire for revenge played a major role. These things are obvious enough.
The main thing, however — and I’ll admit I can’t prove it — is that I believe these guys have an unshakable faith in their personal charm and their ability to talk their way out of a situation, to shift the blame onto the victim, to — if nothing more — create enough doubt so that if the victim does report the crime, and anyone who matters believes her, they can still wriggle out of the trap. They count on the benefit of the doubt. That is why it takes at least three, often four women coming forward as accusers before the rapist starts to find himself in real trouble. Given that these rapists don’t look like what we think rapists should look like, it’s devilishly hard to pin their crimes on them before they have harmed a large number of victims.
The problem is that it is very hard to prove any one individual case. If I understand correctly, the consensus seems to be that most acquaintance rapes are committed by a relatively small number of men, so what you need is a way to demonstrate the pattern. I have been trying to think of how this could be done. Obviously the sort of grapevine approach described in the article I quoted has some value, but not nearly enough. One thought that occurred to me, in regard to a college campus, is that women who feel they have been sexually abused, but do not feel that they could make out a convincing case for immediate disciplinary action against the perp, could file a written report with a campus feminist group. The group would keep these reports and — if the idea that most of these assaults are committed by relatively few men is correct — the identify of those men and their method of operation would soon become clear. If you had three or four women identifying one perp, they might be willing to go together to the authorities, and I can believe that college authorities might very well welcome this — they would no longer have to decide on action on the basis of one student’s word against another’s. It might actually be a useful deterrent.
Of course this method would be harder to apply in the greater world, but it might work against a guy like Ghomeshi — I would think it would be easier for several women to go public together rather than one by one, as happens these days. I am not claiming that this is a great idea — just that I have been trying to think of some sort of way to counter the advantage that a clever and articulate rapist has, since it is clear that the way things have been handled up to this point is a dismal failure.
@Puddleglum
I discovered Sarah Slean and Danny Michel opening for Moxy Fruvous. Still love them both so I guess that’s something.
@GrumpyOldMan
I read a comment (from Amanda Palmer’s FB page originally, I think) that says York University RAs knew about him:
1988 and there was already a pattern. Did anyone take it to York? Who knows? And that was before he got any celebrity or power. It would have become harder and harder to come forward.
3 women so far have gone to police, though. We’ll see how far it progresses.
@kittehserf
The fact that he thought showing his homemade BDSM videos to his employer was justified! The sheer hubris. Nevermind that according to Canadian law, you cannot consent to assault causing bodily harm. And these videos were to show that consensual bruising was possible.
I didn’t even think of the sticky ethical wicket of showing sex videos without the other person’s consent. (Though I doubt he had consent to videotape.) This just gets grosser and grosser.
@thebewilderness
I thought this year’s winner of the Hugo Scwyzer award was Charles Clymer?
GrumpyOldMan,
An anonymous reporting system for rape and sexual assault was already tried by Occidental College (created and run by feminists). It ended up being spammed heavily by Men’s Rightsters from Reddit and 4Chan.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/12/20/3093761/mens-rights-occidental/
These kinds of cases are so weird. There was a case in Sweden a couple of years ago where a policeman, Göran Lindberg, was eventually convicted to jail for several cases of rape as well as buying sexual services (under Swedish law, it’s not illegal to sell sexual services but it’s illegal to buy). The thing is, he had made a career out of making campaigns against sexual harassment of female police officers, lecturing about gender equality and so on.
His name came up when other police officers were investigating some sex buyer case. A number of sex workers came forward and claimed he’d raped them (and this was all in BDSM-settings too, just like with the Jian case). The prosecution found enough evidence for conviction of rape in a few of the cases, and found it established that he’d at least paid for sex in the other cases. Eventually he got six years in jail.
But it really makes you wonder what goes on in the head of someone who alternates between lecturing about gender equality and raping women…
@GrumpyOldMan
Here’s the thing: I don’t think that young rapists, rapists who are about to commit their first rape, are necessarily thinking that far ahead. They just do it, and learn after the fact that rape culture is going to support them and protect them. Prior to the act, they certainly absorb some of the cultural memes you cite, but I don’t think that, as a rule, they are consciously planning to exploit them.
That’s what’s so horrible about rape culture: rapists don’t actually have to plan to exploit it. It’s designed so that they don’t have to do any planning.
ROK writers will always blame the women, regardless of the situation, no matter how far out their arguments are.
I read the Whole article and noted that at no point does the author bother to explain why 13 completely different women would falsely accuse the same man of rape? what was their motive for making such a secious accusation is they weren’t telling the truth? And of course, none of the commenters questions anything the author says either, no matter how obviously biased he is. They’re just happy as usual to have another outles for their oh-so-justified rage against women.
Yes Means Yes has a writeup about this case:
https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2014/10/30/ghomeshi-the-developing-story-and-predator-theory-observations/
It’s worth a read.
I’m thinking it could be one of two things: Either he feels guilty and this is his way of alleviating that guilt feeling (between horrible episodes), or else he’s blatantly using that as a strategy to lure vulnerable women. Because what could be more attractive than a guy who seemingly understands the issue so well?
It could also be a combination of the above, which is even weirder.
There’s a third possibility: he doesn’t actually believe that he raped anyone, and he thinks his behavior is perfectly in sync with his rhetoric.
QFGDT.
And this is why I so often feel the impulse to beat my head against a wall…I have to plan every move I make so carefully, so that no one can accuse me of “asking for it”. And even if I do everything “right”, and something still happens, guess who’ll get blamed…
It’s a definite possibility. Yesterday I read this, in which a 13-year-old Jian got naked with a girl and then didn’t know what to do next, and he wishes in hindsight that he’d had porn to help him. That was a massive WTF for me. Because porn, of course, makes it look like anything goes, and that the more horrid you are to women, the better they’ll like it (i.e., the “alpha male” fallacy so beloved of PUAs). Neither of which is true, and both of which would have made for one fucked-up 13-year-old would-be Casanova. Most of us would shrug off an episode like that as being proof that we were too young for that anyway. But the fact that his mind went THERE, of all places…ugh.
And of course, there’s the bit about him showing porn to his CBC higher-ups to prove he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Which is also pretty damning.