Trouble! Internet mashup king Pogo reveals himself to be a misogynistic douchenozzle [UPDATED with links to archived versions of his posts]

@WatermelonSugar: If I only let myself like art from people who were perfect, I’d spend my days sitting in an empty room, in the dark.

Embrace that art, enjoy it, despite all the douchewaffles.

And anyway, I’m in no position to tell you to eschew any kind of art because the people behind it can be jerks. I watch Doctor Who.

Kirbywarp&Falconer–

Thanks for the feedback. I much appreciate it.

I think part of why I am having feels about this is that if some of these guys made chicken sandwiches and not paintings, I wouldn’t buy their chicken sandwiches.

But they do make paintings, and so do I*. As an someone who does art, I find myself drawn to their work–not their shit life choices, true, but products of them–for inspiration and teaching. I get inspired by their use of form and color and the view of the world they reproduce in paint, which to an extent is a reproduction of their world view, which can be flawed and pretty shite.

The catch-22 I find myself in is something like…I can say, “god, so-and-so obviously had some really terrible ideas about women,” but at the same time look to those works as something I can learn from and admire in a separate sort of way.

I think I may just be over-thinking it, but it still can feel a little uneasy. Obviously, I’m not looking to these artists to inform my views on women, but they do inform my views on and creation of art, to some extent.

Does that make any sort of sense?

[*I am self-taught, not an art school kid, so I learn from seeing and doing and not direct instruction.]

… drawing on a deeper and truer part of their “soul.”

OR we make sure that the truth about what consent is (I.e Yes Means Yes) is put out loud and clear in sex ed classes and general society so that if a rapist tries to claim he didn’t know that clothes=/=consent the courts can go “BULLSHIT. You were taught from day one what consent looks like. No way you can be serious that you didn’t know.” (Besides, I always thought that ignorance of the law is not an excuse? Or am I mixing things up?).

MISANDRY!!one!

Courts are a place of fact, logic, and reason. Juries, however, are made up of ordinary people with ordinary flaws and prejudices, and therefore jury selection is a place where a talented lawyer with money to spend on investigative services can almost always tip the balance away from the prosecution to the defendant. Here in the US we have the best system of justice that money can buy.
The problem with acquaintance rape cases is that — no matter how you tweak the DEFINITION of rape — absent obvious injuries or other hard evidence (such as testimony that the victim was clearly incapacitated or drugged), it tends to be an issue of the accuser’s word against the accused, and it is difficult to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that (let’s assume it is a woman) she did not consent, and very difficult to convince a jury that (let’s assume it is a man) he knew she didn’t consent, particularly when the lawyer has done a good job of selecting a jury biased toward the defendant’s side. Most of the time when men are actually convicted it involves a woman who gains the jury’s sympathy and an unsympathetic (i.e., poor or non-white) defendant.
Actually, as we all know, our system is very good at convicting the poor, friendless, and non-white, and very bad at convicting white men with money. Rape cases follow this pattern. I think a lot of the reason police and prosecutors don’t want to deal with these cases is that they don’t feel they can afford to invest resources on cases in which there is very little chance of obtaining a conviction. A fundamental difference between robbery and rape in the legal system is that the law assumes that virtually nobody consents to having their property taken away from them. One potential solution to the rape problem would be to create a similar legal presumption — that the law should presume that a woman does not consent to sex with anyone except her husband, which would throw the burden of proof that she did consent on the defendant. But I’m not sure that all that many women would support that change. So it’s a puzzle, and I do not have any solution. All I can say for sure is that tweaking the definition (despite all the howls of feigned pain from the men) won’t solve the problem.

@genedaniell3:

Courts are a place of fact, logic, and reason.

Eh, if you’re going to recognize that juries are flawed human beings, then you should also recognize that judges and lawyers are the same. Whenever I delve into stories about defenders or prosecutors in a courtroom, it always seems to be similar to a behind-the-scenes look at congress; a stressful, monotonous day-to-day with people making tons of shortcuts to get by and maintaining a certain detached mindset.

And those are the good ones. The bad ones actively try to game the system.

It’s also believed that women jurors are more likely to acquit in such cases. The theory being that men are too chivalrous in the jury room (“I’d certainly never take advantage of a woman like that”) whereas it’s ok for a woman to go “Well, what did she expect going back to his place dressed like that?”

I’ve heard that before, though the story I heard was more that women on the jury tended to try to come up with excuses as to why such a horrible thing could not possibly happen to them, and thus were more likely to nitpick exactly what the victim had done wrong. Because the idea that the victim had done nothing wrong and still was raped would imply that maybe they could be raped to, and people really didn’t want to think that.

Basically the woman had to be of higher social standing than the man.

I can believe that. That would make it easier to play into the story of the grungy man sullying the pure woman. And like it or not, people in general tend to think in terms of stories and narratives rather than facts.

By the way, Kirbywarp, your point is well taken. The system is not all that great at its best.

Oh indeed, ignorance of the (criminal) law is no defence; but ignorance of the facts is often at the heart of consent defences.

The belief only has to be reasonable; it doesn’t have to be correct.

But…The idea that clothes and sexual history equals consent isn’t reasonable at all!

This is why I believe the more education on consent the better – eventually it will punch a hole in these kinds of “i didnt know” excuses. Won’t it?

Re: the Yes Means Yes discussion–

Would it even be worth pointing out to the MRA-type commenters in the article in question that it would also work in favor of male rape victims? One of the prevailing misconceptions surrounding men as rape victims is “men always want sex, duh.” So removing the idea of I-assumed-that-person-actually-meant-yes-even-though-all-evidence-suggests-otherwise-because-things would greatly benefit male victims, too.

Wait, nevermind. I always forget that these guys don’t actually give a shit about male rape victims at all, just discrediting female rape victims and making the judicial process even more hostile than it already is.

@ sunnysombrera

Theoretically, in England, previous sexual history is not admissible, but there are exceptions. See this link for more details:

http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/rape_and_sexual_offences/yjcea_1999/

As to the clothes thing, I would agree with you, but ultimately juries are considered to be the final arbiter of what is ‘reasonable’, so, as you say, it’s going to be more about changing attitudes than the actual law.

The vast majority of men who are raped are raped by other men, so why would the MRAs care about it? No chance to score against women there.