TRIGGER WARNING: Graphic descriptions of sexual assault; rape apologetics.
Journalist Lara Logan recently appeared on 60 Minutes, giving the harrowing details of the brutal sexual and physical assault she sustained at the hands of a mob while covering the protests for (60 Minutes) in Cairo this past February.
When news of the assault first hit the internet, you may recall, it seemed to open the floodgates of misogyny and racism. Looking at one Yahoo News story on the attack, I found hundreds of vile comments – some blaming Logan for her victimization, or doubting it ever happened; others using the assault as an excuse to spout hateful filth about Arabs and Muslims in general. In the “manosphere” itself, the reaction was predictably appalling, with many MRAs not only mocking and belittling the victim but using the case to push their own retrograde agenda. (See my post here for more details.)
Even within this context, the reaction of blogger Ferdinand Bardamu of In Mala Fide stood out for its sheer nastiness; I wrote about it here. In his first post on the subject, Bardamu mocked the victim, declared that “she had it coming,” then suggested that she probably hadn’t been raped at all. Based on no evidence whatsoever, he speculated that she may have just “made the whole thing up to garner attention and sympathy from the weepy, chivalrous masses. “
Bardamu has now used the occasion of Logan’s new CBS interview as an excuse to mock the victim again — calling her, among other things, an “idiot,” a “moron,” a “strumpet” and a “fake-breasted tart” — and to repeat his contention that she wasn’t “really” raped at all. Indeed, he says, the interview has “vindicated” his skepticism about the rape. Why? Because in her interview of 60 Minutes, Logan had spoken about being penetrated by the hands of her attackers. Bardamu evidently finds this highly risable, and somehow manages to convince himself that Logan was merely groped:
But seriously, “they raped [you] with their hands”?
Look, I’m no scholar, but even with feminists’ constant re-defining of rape, I know for a fact that rape has to involve a penis. Specifically, an penis entering an orifice without invitation. If you didn’t get a dick forced into your mouth, vagina or asshole, you didn’t get raped.
Logan and CBS’ deliberate vagueness about the “sexual assault” back in February was no doubt calculated to make people imagine the worst possible scenario that could happen. A line of hairy, creepy men pulling a train on her. Triple penetration at all times, the hairy sleazy monkey-men shooting jizz in every hole in her body, donkey punching her every time she tried to resist. In reality, she probably got spit on a few times, had her butt slapped, and had her silicone tits felt up. That’s not rape, you strumpet, that’s Spring Break in Cancun!
It’s hard to even know where to start with something this appalling. First of all, as a few dissenters pointed out in the comments on Bardamu’s post, it is still rape – “real” rape – when you are penetrated with fingers, bottles, or any other foreign object. When Abner Louima was brutally sodomized with the handle a bathroom plunger by New York city cops, that was rape, real rape. And what Logan says happened to her was real rape too.
As for the rest, I think the only thing to do is to contrast Bardamu’s words with Logan’s account of what happened to her, taken from a transcript of the interview.
As Logan tells the story of the assault, she and her crew were caught in the midst of a mob. Men grabbed her, groped her, and literally tore the clothes from her body. As she describes it:
I feel them tearing at my clothing. I think my shirt, my sweater was torn off completely. My shirt was around my neck. I felt the moment that my bra tore. They tore the metal clips of my bra. They tore those open. … [T]hey literally just tore my pants to shreds. And then I felt my underwear go.
Some men began beating her with sticks and others, with their hands, penetrated her. In this and the following passages I’ve bolded the statements dealing specifically with the sexual aspect of the assault. Logan again:
I didn’t even know that they were beating me with flagpoles and sticks and things, because I couldn’t even feel that. Because I think of the sexual assault, was all I could feel, was their hands raping me over and over and over again. …
They were tearing my body in every direction at this point, tearing my muscles. And they were trying to tear off chunks of my scalp … not trying to pull out my hair, holding big wads of it, literally trying to tear my scalp off my skull. And I thought, … I am going to die here.
This assault lasted 25 minutes. Logan says:
[T]hat’s when I said, “Okay, it’s about staying alive now. I have to just surrender to the sexual assault. What more can they do now? They’re inside you everywhere.” So the only thing to fight for, left to fight for, was my life.
Ultimately, Logan was rescued and rushed to the hospital. Logan continues:
I stayed there for four days, which was hard. My muscles were so unbelievably sore, because they were literally stretched from the mob trying to tear my limbs off my body. My joints, every joint in my body was distended. And then they, the more intimate injuries, the injuries, the tearing inside. And the mark of their hands, their fingers all over my body, cuts and everything you could imagine. But no broken bones.
This horrific account bears very little resemblance, it hardly needs to be said, to Spring Break in Cancun.
Naturally, a number of the commenters on Bardamu’s site manage if anything to be even more vile than Bardamu himself.
McGlothin suggests that Logan probably enjoyed the experience:
It’s not impossible that she went all the way to orgasm when the testosterone filled raging men fingered and groped her. That would explain the vagueness of her description: she was way enjoying it so much that she could not remember precisely what happened except that they molested her manually.
Attila concurs:
This gynbot just wants attention, and is playing the “Arabs are animals” routine for brownie points. She probably got groped a little, in a way that she has never been groped before, and she may be reacting to the fact that she may have gotten a thrill out of it.
Commander Shepard throws some racism and “slut”-shaming into the mix:
She was raped by their hands? LOL. A pretty blond like Logan probably spent her youth getting gang banged by alphas. In this case the men were beneath her (dirty sand niggers) but even they didn’t penetrate. She’s probably more upset about her bruised ego than her bruised body.
Bardamu wrote his post, I should note, before the interview aired, and before anything beyond a few quotes from it had been published. But it is telling that he has not bothered to go back and watch or read the full account. Not that it would matter; he made up his mind on the case a long time ago, and I doubt that anything could change it. Like many in the “manosphere,” Bardamu and his fans see only what they want to see, and use their imagination – and their prejudices — to fill in the rest.
