Last year, I wrote about a repellant little “community” on Reddit: the PhilosophyofRape subreddit, devoted to promoting what it called the corrective rape of “filthy, unmitigated, sluts … [t]hat badly need to be punished. Badly.”
Reddit being what it is, the subreddit remains up to this day. And now the folks behind it have taken their repugnant “philosophy” to the web. Earlier this week, one of the subreddit’s numerous moderators, a veritable cauldron of bigotries who calls himself European88, announced the grand opening of a new Philosophy of Rape website. He urged his fellow “philosophers” to “[s]ubscribe and submit your rape tips … !”
Like the subreddit before it, the site declares war on “harpies,” “hussies,” “[d]ecrepid filth, dressed like hookers and reaking like vodka” and “Belligerent. Entitled. Selfie taking, Tindr-whoring, Teenage-walking-herpes-sores.”
The “philosophers” also take aim at “vain, vile, venemous, femenist, filth,” particularly
[t]he kind who get conferences to talk about mens suicide rates shut down. The type of hussies who have lobbied effectively to remove due process from proceedings against men on college campuses.
In a post titled “Why is Rape Necessary,” the site sets forth its case for “correction.” (I’ve bolded the worst bits.)
1) Rape did serve important, healthy, and natural biological purposes historically in limiting the extent to which female bad behavior can go.
2. Women in many ways are like children, and most can not self-regulate very well, so in the absence of something like parents or a natural limiting force like rape, they just run amok and destroy their selves and everything they touch.
3. Because rape is so completely arm-barred back by the state, and feminism has grown to be this infestation that caused even the social consequences for female behavior to dissappear, we find ourselves in a precarious situation. Unbridled female sluttishness, entitlement, narcissism, vileness and destruction gone viral.
4. Such women need to be Corrected. Humbled. Brought back down to a healthy place and realistic mindset. For their own good as well as that of those around them. That particular corrective action is quite clear, the one that used to naturally limit the behavior: rape.
5. We are here to provide encouragement and advice how to do that and do it safely. Regression analysis to find out which variables make it less likely to get into legal trouble. Very few women report the rapes, what can you do to make it even less likely? Example: remind the victim that “no one will believe them”. When they orgasm (which is actually very common during rape, Google it) speak up and let them know that you are aware of it and that it will come out during trial if they reported it.
Yes, that’s right. After complaining that the feminist “infestation” has enabled “unbridled” female awfulness by drastically reducing the “natural limiting force [of] rape,” the rape “philosophers” acknowledge that most men who rape women face zero consequences for their action. Indeed, in another post, one “philosopher” declares that
We want to teach men that although it may be easier than ever for an innocent man to be convicted of rape when a consensual partner has buyers remorse, it’s also easier than ever for a guilty man to get away Scott free – so long as it’s done the way we advocate: actual rape-rape, as in dark-alley, ski mask, stranger rape.
Emphasis mine. Some of the rape “tips” offered on the site are wholly unoriginal:
Tell the harlot that you come from a rich family and that she will never successfully convict you of raping her in court. Tell her that, if she tries to sue you, you will counter-sue for a huge amount of money that will bankrupt her.
Pretty sure that one’s been used before.
Tell the harlot that, if she tells the police about the rape, you will kill her entire family. If she has children, tell her that you will rape her children before killing them.
That one too.
Other tips are little more than sadistic fantasies:
Put sugar into the harlot’s vagina to give her a yeast infection. This will be a mark of shame on her that she will be unable to forget, and she will have to relive the rape every time she seeks treatment for it. …
After raping the harlot, steal her clothes and write “WHORE” on her chest with a red marker. She will be forced to walk around naked with “WHORE” written on her chest, and it will be extremely humiliating for her.
Whether these rape “philosophers” are actually living out their repellant philosophy, I couldn’t tell you. They insist that they’re quite sincere.
Indeed, in a posting on slutHATE, one rape “philosopher” assured skeptics that
The Philosophy of Rape is as serious as a heart attack. We are a movement of angry, fed-up men – much like you – who have decided to take matters into our own hands. The simple fact of the matter is, simply sitting around and complaining about sluts on the Internet isn’t going to change anything. We need real-world action to correct the slut problem. That’s why The Philosophy of Rape was created. Sluts need real-world punishment, and we want to train an army of holy warriors to dish out that punishment. Your chances of getting caught are already slim, and we will teach you how to make 100% sure that you don’t get caught.
In another comment, he reported that while
I can’t openly admit to how many harlots I’ve corrected, but let’s just say that I do indeed practice what I preach.
He offered this lovely bit of advice to anyone thinking of following in his (alleged) footsteps:
It definitely helps if you build up to the act. Keep edging closer and closer to rape until you’re finally ready to do the deed. For example, send a harlot an anonymous message telling her you’re gonna rape her, then write “HARLOT” on her car, then finally rape her when the moment is right. Build up your courage by first committing smaller acts.
He urged others to take up his peculiar fight for, er, justice:
We are going to build an army of holy warriors to correct harlots and feminazi whores around the world. All it takes is a few Elliot Rodger types to get the ball rolling. What do you have to lose? Enlist in our rape army today, and we will teach you how to correct a new harlot a week and get away with it.
Apparently unafraid of legal consequences, the person posting all this gave what he said was his real name, claiming to be “Brother” Dean Saxton, a campus “activist” of sorts who several years ago caused a stir after holding a one-man protest at the University of Arizona, holding a sign reading “You Deserve Rape.”
In another thread, “Brother Dean” explained why he felt this slogan was so effective in angering feminists: .
NOTHING pisses off feminazis more than reminding them that they are filthy harlots who desperately need to be – and, deep down, WANT TO BE – raped.
He went on to explain why the kind of rape he advocates is the most public-spirited of all the different varieties of rape:
N*ggers rape because they are feral animals who cannot control their primitive biological urges. We rape because we are holy warriors on a mission to correct harlots and purge society of unmitigated female entitlement. The Philosophy of Rape is, ultimately, about fixing society. The only way to correct harlots and feminazis is by raping them.
If “Brother Dean” is European88, he’s kept himself busy since his college protest as a moderator of 157 of Reddit’s most loathsome subreddits, including /r/CoonTown, /r/WhiteRights, /r/nazi, /r/GasTheKikes, /r/Chimpout, /r/StormfrontForums and the lovely /r/N*ggerSafari.
Some of the slutHATE regulars dismissed “Brother Dean” as “disinfo” and “just another frustrated virgin in his basement spreading shit.” frenchy91, for his part, noted that
while i really don’t give a shit who you could rape as long as it’s not my girlfriend, nor familly member, i think you op should get raped by a group of n*ggers, just to know how it feels, then you could objectively speak about who diserve it or not. for now, you just sound like a desperate mysogincel
This is apparently what passes for a “moderate” position on slutHATE. Others there found Brother Dean’s message inspirational. A commenter calling himself mvp wrote that
i definitely support this movement
its time to fight back
“Fuck it,” wrote another. “I’ll rape a bitch for you.”
It would be easy enough to dismiss all of this as nothing more than the ridiculous fantasies of “frustrated virgin[s]” or the work of trolls. I really hope that’s all it is.
But we should remember that slutHATE is essentially a reincarnation of PUAhate, an online forum that was frequented by a young man named, yes, Elliot Rodger, who posted similarly hateful and similarly implausible-sounding comments there before setting out one evening a little over a year ago, intending to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut” in a popular sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
H/T — MoonMetropolis
You’re also going ultimately back to “society and it’s mechanisms.” Who/what do you think is going to be teaching all these girls from toddlerhood how to snap-kick a rapist in the throat? You want society to condition girls to fight, and then the girls go on to condition rapists not to rape. I would, indeed, make society responsible for controlling rapists. Your method also does this, but you’re insisting that girls and women need to be stuck in there as middlemen for some reason, and that society needs to act on rapists indirectly instead of directly.
But apparently the “some of them” that you admit would “give a shit” aren’t worth it to you? You’d rather let them become rapists and make it a girl’s responsibility to fend them off?
This is a combination of assfax and factually incorrect assertions. I know the studies you’re talking about. I’ve read them. The factually incorrect portion is your proportions. It’s not 25%/75%, it’s more like 40%/60%. That is not an insignificant difference.
More important is your assfax. There is nothing at all in either of the studies about why some men rape only once and some rape multiple times. The motivations of the once-only rapists are not touched upon anywhere, and you’re pulling this “oh, they had remorse when they saw the effects of the rape” out of your ass.
It’s far more likely that they, and the serial rapists, just don’t think of what they did as rape. You only get self-reporting if you don’t identify non-consensual sex as rape. Rapists tend to agree that rape is terrible! They just don’t classify what they did as rape. So your story about the poor weeping remorse-filled rapist has no support except your imagination, and there is good reason to think it’s bullshit.
I’m not even going to go into your assessment of law enforcement, because your women-drop-kicking-rapists model seems to pretend that law enforcement isn’t going to get involved when a woman beats the shit out of a man. All of the problems you list about law enforcement complicate your very prescription. You think that would-be rapists aren’t going to call the cops when they get their asses kicked? You think that all the problems of sexist and abusive cops aren’t going to be problems for the woman who tries to explain that she committed this violence because the dude tried to rape her?
How can you even type this shit out and not see what you’re saying?
And then, for some reason, they don’t wind up in jail for murder despite law enforcement being too corrupt and/or ineffective to prosecute rape successfully. Because, y’know, a cop who doesn’t believe a women who says she was rape is totally going to believe a woman who says she killed a guy because he tried to rape her. That makes complete sense.
Fuck RAINN. The instant RAINN put that up, it was criticized, and RAINN’s response was full of whining and rape culture. Fuck RAINN.
Yep, and that’s why men are never raped. Oh, wait.
You need to think this through more. A hell of a lot more.
Not to mention the implication that if you were a strong woman, you wouldn’t go get yourself raped. Plenty of people -whatever their gender – surely never imagined that they’d “let” themselves get raped. Until it happened. As somebody else already said, rapists are manipulative. They don’t always use force. Which is why consent education is so much more important than defense training. It needs to be clear that it’s okay to say no, It needs to be clear that yes means yes and the lack of a yes isn’t the signal to try another tactic until you wear the other person down.
I recall certain politics insist you shouldn’t give money to the poor, you should simply allow rich dudes to get really, really rich, and then eventually they’ll end up sharing a bit of that wealth with the rest of society!
They don’t actually think it’s going to happen: they just need a myth to justify taking from the poor and giving to the rich.
It works the same way with rapists: I don’t think someone really thinks training women is actually going to fix the problem.
I think they either want the solution to be delayed as much as possible, or else they are too fixed on the individual woman to conceive women acting as a group.
Plus, women being trained to physically repel rapists would be super-double victim blamed if betrayed by someone they trusted, or were threatened.
OK, say “fuck RAINN” if you want. We’re just going to have to agree to disagree on that.
More important is your argument on the statistics. Thank you for correcting the numbers; that isn’t insignificant. I was also going entirely on conjecture where motives were concerned and also admitted it, in case you didn’t notice.
You’re right that legal corruption still matters even in the case of self-defense-based solutions, but that doesn’t benefit your argument any more than it benefits mine. In both cases, we need to change the way the police force operates and what laws are being enforced, as well as deal with corruption. The difference is that I also propose a model where self-defense is more acceptable and the police are less important, and I also proposed legal changes in favour of self-defense which go all the way back to Andrea Dworkin.
Also, I said you should go ahead and educate would-be rapists on consent if you are so inclined. I even agreed that it would probably *reduce* rapes, though I *wouldn’t stop at such solutions* and said that a latticework of multiple solutions would probably be best.
You seem to think that I believe that women and girls deserve to be victimised. If you’re really convinced of that, my attempts at dialogue with you are pointless. If you’re open to any alternative reasoning, I’m saying that the efficacy and benevolence of law enforcement *isn’t trustworthy* enough for self-defense to be unnecessary, and that when it comes to would-be rapists, I trust fear as a motivator more than empathy. I’m saying I sure as fuck don’t want a culture of helplessness. And, of course, I already admitted that I’m not philosophically opposed to the use of force as a tool against patriarchy and other forms of injustice. Maybe you’re a pacifist. I’m not. We’ll just have to agree to disagree.
I wasn’t strawmanning. At the most I was exaggerating what you said, but training women in self defense at the start of childhood and throughout their lives sounds like a fighting machine. I mean, you don’t have to spend your whole life in the army to become a KILLING machine, let alone learn self defense.
@Allison
Except that the patronizing part was the “well, give guns to people because the protection isn’t working but disabled people will just have to be protected.” Not the people pointing out that you were throwing disabled people under the bus, but nice of you to try to sic me on the people who actually give a $&#% about me.
Oh, and self-defense being accepted is a wonderful thing. It just isn’t a substitute for cultural change.
A clarification: I said aggression and self-worth, specifically. In the same sense that we don’t raise boys to be killing machines, but they are frequently raised with aggression and self-worth as values. I still think teaching young women how to protect themselves physically is a good idea, but it’s meaningless unless girls are brought up with enough aggression and self-worth to be willing to put themselves before someone who would do them harm.
Andiexist: anytime!
Y’know, if I were FBI, something like the site described in the OP seems like an excellent way to get info to pass on to local PDs.
What in the motherfuck gave you that impression?
For real, I’m asking you to point out what I said that gave you that impression.
I completely understand what you’re saying. I don’t agree with it because it’s bullshit, not because I have an inadequate grasp on it.
You haven’t addressed most of what I said up there, but forget about that for a moment, because you’ve just brought in even more problems by reducing the role of law enforcement.
In turning women into chaotic-neutral death machines who execute men who attempt to commit rape, you’re ignoring that most rapes committed by men on women are perpetrated by men who know the victim and utilize alcohol or drugs to incapacitate the victim. Since the police are “less important” in your model, what recourse is there for a woman who is roofied and can’t engage her death-machine mode?
Since the police are “less important,” what recourse is there for children who are raped, and aren’t physically capable of being death machines yet?
Since the police are “less important,” what recourse is there for men who are raped?
Some men are raped by women. Are men allowed to be death machines as well? Or are women just able to get away with this because of their superior ninja training? Law enforcement being “less important,” and all.
P.S. What did you think you were going to accomplish by name-dropping Dworkin? Dworkin isn’t here to talk about her ideas. You are. We’re talking about your ideas, not hers, and if yours are informed by hers, that doesn’t absolve you from having to defend them.
Fuck you for putting words into my mouth, more than just this once. I’m engaging with your ideas on their own terms. I’m explaining why they’re bullshit on their own terms. Your ideas collapse on their own, for practical reasons and because they are self-contradictory, without any resort to any alternative model. You can label me a pacifist if you like, but that is, again, you pulling shit out of your ass.
@Allison
I… guess that amused you? Okay.
I used to walk home from my dojo pondering what I would do if someone tried to rape me. Well past clutching my keys between my fingers but still fully believing that “stranger danger” rape by someone literally jumping out of the bushes at me was likely.
Then I got home to my emotionally/mentally abusive boyfriend who guilt tripped me into initiating sex. That couldn’t possibly be rape.
I think absolutely the onus is on rapists to not rape. But I think knowledge of consent issues is also good for everyone. I’m sure my boyfriend didn’t know that he was violating my boundaries. I didn’t even know! Because although it made me feel nauseous, I thought it was just something wrong with me.
Outstanding.
@Alison
So when I was raped I should have just had a gun handy (illegal in my country but whatevs) or should have fought back. I’m trained in kickboxing which I didn’t use at all during the rape so maybe I wanted it?
You’re out of line here. Just stop, please.
This is getting heated enough that I considered getting out, but before I do, I’m going to talk about where this is coming from. It’s personal to my family, so I don’t want to identify anyone, but I come from a family where the credible threat of force *worked*. We had an abusive, violent man in it who ceased his violence, overnight, because he was threatened with force by the woman he was abusing, and she meant it. She didn’t have to be, as you put it, a “ninja” or a “death machine;” just angry enough to escalate to a price he wasn’t willing to pay. For my family, that shit delivered–not just in the short term, but for a lifetime. This has coloured my views, though it’s probably also true that it means said views work better *for* aggressive people like my family, *on* aggressive people like my family.
So, yeah. I apologise if I sounded like I was saying that consent education shouldn’t be a thing, or cleansing of law enforcement corruption shouldn’t be a thing, or correcting our culture’s tendency to look at rape as a joke shouldn’t be a thing. They all should be, and I didn’t mean to sound like I was arguing against them. And I’m sorry about putting words in your mouth, PoM.
But I still believe in the importance of the right to self-defense, and of expanding self-defense laws to include domestic violence as a justification. The threat of force stopped abuse in my family, and so I believe in its power and its value. Maybe it really did only work because we’re aggressive people, but we’re not the only ones.
Semi-parenthetical, but I don’t believe anyone needs to be taught to have boundaries. Children seem to naturally develop them as they grow. Even my cat sets clear boundaries (I’m trying to be better about respecting them).
Children have to be taught that their boundaries are not important and they don’t have any right to bodily autonomy. If we’d stop teaching that lesson, and stop letting others teach our children that lesson, a lot of things would improve I think.
Jesus this isn’t that hard. Of course we should all take steps to be safe. Lock your door, lock your car, take your purse, etc. but if someone breaks into my house, car, or nabs my purse, I hold zero responsibility for it. Zilch. It’s a slippery slope requiring women to be “rape proof”. It’s a sad world when if I walk to my car by myself in the dark, it’s my fucking fault if something happens to me because I made a “reckless” choice. Wake up! Women don’t “get raped”. People rape them. Focus on rapist, not raped.
Yeah, the problem comes when you put self-defense with potentially deadly force on the highest pedestal, and make it the first option rather than the last resort. The problem comes when you generalize what worked in a single situation to every situation, and make the claim that it would probably work great for everyone.
In doing so, you erase women who are not able to, or for whatever reason are not willing to, commit deadly violence in response to a threat of rape.
You’re also basically upending the whole idea of law. Law is something enforced by the state. This is specifically for the following reasons:
– some people are not able or not willing to defend themselves, for any of an array of reasons, and those people nevertheless equally deserve to be protected from harm
– some people are over-able to defend themselves, and will sometimes use this power unjustly
Furthermore, the key identifying feature of a state is sovereignty, which is tied up with the concept of the state having the ultimate authority within its territory. Authority is, in turn, tied up with the concept of the use of force. A state must have the ability to use force, which trumps the ability of any other actor to use force, within its territory, or frankly it just doesn’t qualify as a state.
Self-defense is always allowed by civilized society, but the right to self-defense is, morally and usually legally, limited to preserving your own safety. You’re not allowed to retaliate against force used against you with greater force than that necessary to preserve your safety.
I realize that “stand your ground” laws are a thing, but they are an irrational and logically contradictory thing. The result of stand-your-ground laws is to have the law function in such a way that the law becomes suspended. Completely aside from the racist and sexist way they are enforced, they are also just indefensible on a purely rational basis. (I went over how this works in an hour long video that is actually a video game Let’s Play, so I’m not going over it again here. But if you’re interested in why I say this, and you have an hour to kill, you can watch it for the entire chain of reasoning.)
By saying that private citizens are not only empowered to use deadly force against rapists, but almost required to do this, as this is the first line of defense against rape, you are suspending the state’s sovereign power to control who gets to be executed for crimes and putting that power into the hands of individuals. That has serious implications for the state.
Now, you see, I’m stepping outside of your stupid, stupid idea and showing you why it doesn’t work for reasons divorced from its internal rationale. Its internal rationale, and how that rationale collapses itself, is sufficient to demonstrate why it doesn’t work, but there are additional reasons why it doesn’t work, such as the ones I just gave.
Footage of the proposed rape-prevention program.
@PoM
Oh wowsers. You’re very right. I don’t always play the whole tape and realize that my ex was able to get his way at my expense in part because he was continuing the job my mother did.
The way society treats children is bizarre. They are supposed to sit still and be quiet and do as they’re told. They have no autonomy and parents/teachers make sure they know it. Then after 16-18 years they’re supposed to bloom into confident independent thinkers and become Real People. Just like magic.
Though perhaps I’m just bitter because I tried to do everything right and be quiet and do as I was told and all I learned was that my voice didn’t matter and I couldn’t trust my own judgment.
The ‘every law-abiding citizen carrying a concealed weapon’ approach wouldn’t even work from a deterrent angle.
Guns are largely irrelevant when if comes to personal safety. Assailants generally don’t or wait until they’re in their victim’s field of vision or announce when they’re about to make their move. People can’t just pull a gun on someone who is bothering them without being obviously threatening, or someone who seems like they might be following them.
Pssst. PoM. *PoMMMMMmmmmm.* I subbed to youuuuu.
http://byt.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/tumblr_inline_mnvtsl2aI11qz4rgp.gif
And by focusing on a personal experience you’ve overlooked something more important. No one instituted such changes 30 years ago.
It must be a miracle that violent crime of all kinds has declined in all Western industrial nations in the last three decades, then. There are various theories about this – ranging from removing lead from petrol through to the emphasis in primary education on self-care/ stranger danger/ sex education/ self-esteem to non-violent child-raising in the home to no-fault divorce.
It will probably take sociologists decades to sort out the various strands in our societies that have resulted in the very steep decline in violent crime. All that we, and governments, need to take away from this is that we Do Not Need an escalation in violence to deal with violence — because we achieved this reduction when all violence was declining.
Given that, and the obvious fact that we’ve seriously reduced violent crime without any specific focus on violence at all, it’s worth taking specific measures targeting particular behaviours — that will benefit everyone even if its impact on statistics is not immediately detectable. (Most such changes take at least 2 decades to show up as reliable results.)
I strongly believe that children should not be required to hug or kiss relatives if they don’t want to. If a child is old enough to be verbal, we should ask their permission for a hug or kiss. Bodily autonomy isn’t just about sex.
Whoops. Do Not Need an escalation in violence to deal with sexual violence — because we achieved this reduction when all violence was declining.
PoM: I’d agree with a fair bit of that, particularly the part about the state needing to be able to use force. I still intimately understand why someone’s political fantasies (mine, admittedly) would run to the violent side, and I’d still argue that the privileging of men’s use of force while stigmatizing women’s use of force is a critical component of patriarchy both historically and today, and that gendered disparities in power and privilege cannot be fixed without fixing inequalities concerning the use of force. When I’m more lucid, I consider it one critical component of a comprehensive solution; when I’m less so, I wanna see more articles where some would-be rapist/abuser/etc. got his shit ruined by a woman he thought he could push around.
I’ll share another thing that informed my views on self-defense law, especially with regard to how it discriminates against women’s use of force in particular (less so about issues like “is SYG even a good idea in the first place,” which isn’t really what I’m arguing about and the Zimmerman/Martin case suggests not anyway): http://lawreview.law.miami.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Real-Men-Advance-Real-Women-Retreat.pdf