Category: rape

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>The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys

>

I’m walkin’ here!

Pierce Harlan of the False Rape Society has broken past the limits of mere logic, arguing that the fact that a small number of guys at a couple of events have put on women’s clothing to raise money for women’s causes means that rape culture doesn’t exist. That seems to be the main message of a post of his today with the baffling title “Boys in bras, boys in heels, boys in pink — all to raise money for women’s causes: Is this the ‘rape culture’ we hear so much about?”

Harlan, posting as “Archivist,” complains about several recent campus events, in which college guys have literally put on heels (to raise money and awareness about sexual assault) and bras (to raise money for breast cancer research). Harlan isn’t thrilled about the causes themselves: he has sneeringly derided sexual assault awareness as “a supposedly good cause” and, while acknowledging that breast cancer research is theoretically a good thing, he’s evidently tired of hearing about it.

But he seems even more hot and bothered about the cross-dressing by guys he calls “chivalrous clowns,” describing the bra-wearing as “creepy” and deriding the guys “prancing around in high heels.” Apparently, as Harlan sees it, these fellows are just doing it to impress the chicks:

young men will do pretty much anything to help, to curry favor with, and to be admired by young women.

It is heinous to suggest that attitudes of sexual aggression and dominance over women are normalized, rationalized, and excused by the alleged beneficiaries of “patriarchy” in our culture. In point of fact, the foolish young buffoons in heels and bras are far more representative of young masculinity in our culture than is the young rapist. 

There’s not a lot of logic in this, er, argument, but in an earlier posting Harlan elaborates on the distaste he feels towards the “Walk A Mile In Her Shoes” event, which was held at the University of Montana (clearly a hotbed of radical feminism). 

It would be downright shocking if this or similar events ever prevented a single sexual assault from occurring because: (1) prancing around in high heels and similar useless stunts has nothing to do with preventing sexual assault; and (2) the vast majority of young men who strutted their stuff and who participate in such events are highly unlikely to ever rape a woman.  …

If we want to curb sexual assault, we need to teach our young people the truth, but the truth doesn’t jibe with the current rape meta-narrative that holds only one gender responsible for stopping it. …

Young people generally do not understand that women experience much greater after-the-fact regret than men do. Sometimes feelings of regret are translated into feelings of “being used,” and sometimes feelings of “being used” are misinterpreted or purposefully misconstrued as “rape.”

Asking the police, a judge, or a jury to sort out what happened in an alcohol-fueled tryst based on a “he said/she said” account puts an impossible burden on our law enforcement and judicial apparatuses. …

There is no “rape culture”; there is no “rape continuum.”  Rape is committed by social deviants, not the nice boy next door. It is almost a certainty that none of the charming young buffoons who strutted around in women’s heels yesterday will ever rape a woman. …

The sad, politically incorrect fact of the matter is that young women have far more power to stop rape than innocent young men by not putting themselves in situations where rape is more likely to occur. 

There’s a lot of bullshit condensed into these short paragraphs. There’s victim-blaming, of course: do we regularly attack murder victims for “putting themselves in situations where murder is likely to occur?” There’s his weird complaint that actually investigating and prosecuting date rape puts an “impossible burden” on police and the judicial system: should we simply stop enforcing laws against all crimes that are hard to investigate or prosecute? And there’s his unwillingness to accept the simple fact that rapists all too often do look exactly like the “nice boy next door.” As for his complaint that these events target the wrong people, see here for an argument as to why it makes sense to raise awareness specifically amongst those men who are NOT likely to rape women. 

In the past a few MRAs have asked me why I put the False Rape Society blog in my “boob roll” — and formerly in my “enemies list.” This is why. Spreading blatant misinformation and blaming victims: these are not exactly good ways to actually reduce the number of men falsely accused of rape.

And here’s another thought for the MRAs reading this, Harlan included: if you are truly as concerned about testicular or prostate cancer — or any other male malady — as you so often and so loudly claim to be, take a few moments away from your constant complaining about feminism and/or women, and actually hold a fund raiser yourselves. In a comment on his latest post, Harlan writes: “My problem is this: how about an event to raise funds for male suicide, etc. once in a while?” You know how events like these happen? PEOPLE ORGANIZE THEM. There is nothing stopping MRAs from organizing such an event on their own. How about it, guys? 

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>Earthquakes and Ideologues

>

A scene in Haiti, after its earthquake.

Sometimes The Spearhead, probably the internet’s leading angry-man site, seems like a giant interactive game of “pin the blame on the feminists.” When uprisings broke out in Tunisia and then Egypt , you may recall, W. F. Price — head honcho at The Spearhead — suggested that the unrest in both countries was a male reaction to the excesses of feminism and female power.

Now he’s returned with an even stranger article, comparing  the current disaster in Japan with the very different outcome of last year’s earthquake in Haiti– and blaming women in general and feminists in particular for the far more lethal outcome in Haiti.

You might think that the staggering death toll in Haiti — estimates range from 92,000 to more than 300,000 —  might have something  to do with the fact that it’s the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with a weak and corrupt government and almost nothing in the way of intrastructure.  And that Japan’s relative resiliance in the face of an even more powerful earthquake might have something to do with the fact that it’s a wealthy nation — the world’s third most powerful economy, with a GDP per capita about 30 times greater than Haiti’s — with a great deal of experience in handling earthquakes.

But Price has a rather different, and highly peculiar, explanation: Haiti suffered more because it’s a  “matriachal” country, unlike properly “patriarchal” Japan. Comparing  “matriarchal Haiti’s and patriarchal Japan’s respective responses to natural disaster,” Price writes that

in Haiti the women are still living in open encampments well over a year after the quake, [while] Japanese women are already sheltered, which is necessary, because it is still cold in northern Japan this time of year. …

Price goes on to argue that Japan is doing better by its men as well. While in Haiti in the aftermath of the quake, the UN and some relief organizations targeted aid towards women — who tend to literally get pushed aside in the mad scramble for food supplies otherwise — Price argues that

Japanese men … have it far better than their Haitian counterparts as well. There are no foreign troops pointing guns at them and denying them food, they are taken care of and respected if old, and given jobs and a place in society if young. Perhaps most importantly, They are given the opportunity to do what men often do best — they are allowed to take care of their families and communities.

Let’s set aside for a moment that it is a tad early to be declaring, er, “mission accomplished” in the Japan crisis, especially with the specter of a nuclear reactor meltdown looming. Price is a man with an agenda, and he moves fairly quickly to his grand conclusion: The two disasters, he argues,

give us an opportunity to ask ourselves what kind of a society we want to live in. Do we want, as the feminists would have it, to be helpless, disease infested, homeless and starving if we face hardship, or do we want to have the ability to come together and pull ourselves up from the rubble? For the sane people of the world, the choice is clear.

Yes, that’s right. Feminism is the party of helplessness, disease, homelessness and starvation. Anyone who’s just made the argument he made really shouldn’t be offering any opinions on the sanity of others.

Before we get into a critique of Price’s argument, such as it is, let’s pause for a moment to ask how his novel thesis was received by the Spearhead regulars. While a few commenters did take him to task for ignoring economics, others took his absurd argument and ran with it. (This is The Spearhead, after all.) Alucin declared,

Feminism is a crime against humanity. What happened in Haiti regarding food distribution will be repeated again and again as long as feminism prevails. Fighting feminism is something good people do on behalf of humanity. The men and women of Japan will get their lives back together again far more quickly than the matriarchal people of Haiti.

The future is patriarchal. It’s just a matter of which form it will take and when the West will re-masculate.

Epoetker took it a step further, adding a bit of racism to the misogynistic mix:

Haiti is a land of men who look like men but think like women. Japan is a land of men who look like women but think like men.

Rebel, meanwhile, found a grim humor in it all:

The Haitian case is proof positive that feminism is exactly like AIDS.
No matter how many die, feminism will be the last thing to die.
It was planned that way.

Whichever way you look at it, the answer is always the same: feminism is a religion of death.
Feminists are death worshippers.

That leaves very little hope for the future.
Life is so short and we worry too much. And it’s so futile.
One day we will all be Haitians. LOL!!

A note: These aren’t a couple of weird comments I’ve “cherry picked” to give a distorted picture of the discussion. In fact, these comments got anywhere from 20 to nearly 70 upvotes from Spearhead readers, and almost no downvotes. There were many other comments, also heavily upvoted, agreeing with these general premises. If you don’t believe me, go take a look yourself.

Numerous other commenters, I should also note, offered frankly racist interpretations of “the tale of two earthquakes,” blaming the greater scope of the disaster in Haiti on what one commenter called its “largely negro, largely indolent society.” While some objected to the racism, many clearly racist comments got numerous upvotes from the Spearhead crowd.  (The comment I just quoted got 60 upvotes and 20 downvotes.)

Getting back to Price’s argument, let’s try to unpack the various layers of bullshit here. First of all, Haiti is no matriarchy. Yes, women often head up households there. But they don’t run the country, by any measure.

Life in Haiti is no picnic for men, but women have it even worse; as one human rights group noted in a recent report, “Haitian women experience additional barriers to the full enjoyment of their basic rights due to predominant social beliefs that they are inferior to men and a historical pattern of discrimination and violence against them based on their sex. Discrimination against women is a structural feature in Haitian society and culture that has subsisted throughout its history, both in times of peace and unrest.”

Rape is a constant threat, and, as a recent article in the Los Angeles Times notes, it “wasn’t even considered a serious criminal offense in Haiti until five years ago. … Before 2005, rape was considered an offense against honor, or “crime of passion,” meaning it was a minor infraction in which the perpetrator would go free if he agreed to marry his victim.”

The earthquake only made the situation worse for women. Rapes are especially widespread in the camps that sprung up in the wake of last year’s earthquake. Instead of “tak[ing] care of their families and communities,” as Price would put it, many Haitian men have instead preyed on women and girls, sexually assaultng them and stealing their food and other supplies. This is not, to put it mildly, a country suffering from an excess of feminism or female authority.

No, Haiti is in dire straits mostly because of its extreme poverty. Anyone looking at the history of natural disasters can plainly see that they tend to cause far more chaos and misery and death in poor countries than they do in rich ones: In highly patriarchal, and poverty-stricken Pakistan, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake killed an estimated 75,000, though the quake there was an order of magnitude weaker than Japan’s.

I’m not sure why I feel the need to remind readers of these basic points; the absurdity of Price’s arguments should be immediately obvious to anyone not blinded by misogyny. Sometimes I wonder if Price even believes all of the shit he shovels. Stupidity would be easier to forgive than that level of cynicism.

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>Check out my post on “Misogyny in the Men’s Rights Movement” on the Good Men Project

>

My contribution to the Good Men Project debate over the Men’s Rights Movement — talking about misogyny in the movement — is up now.

Batman on an elephant says check it out.

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>Ruthless Lady-People: Short-haired, smelly, muffin-eating lady-people

>

Women not only eat muffins — they decapitate them!

Over on an angry-man site that would be called The Pearhead if you removed an “S” from its name, a fellow named Alcuin has a few complaints about the ladies. Let’s listen in, shall we?

Western women are ruthless. They will destroy a family with a lifestyle divorce, and ruin her husband without thinking of their lives. …

Ah yes, the old lifestyle divorce. There’s little that Western women enjoy more than a nice divorce. Well, aside from accusing men of rape, and playing slutty dressup, and going to work:

They will accuse a man of rape when he did no such thing so they can get revenge for hurt feelings or to cover their own infidelity. They will dress like whores, then accuse men of being perverts and of sexual harassment. They will take all the cushy jobs and complain when men refuse to take the shit jobs, but act like “boys” instead.

But Alucin is just getting started. It gets worse:

They will cut their hair short, get fat, avoid shaving (their legs? their face?), smell, and then complain that men go for Asian women or none. They will take advantage of manginas for years, and give nothing in return for such dog-like loyalty. They will take jobs away from men, and become lazy, useless muffin-eaters.

That’s right. You heard him. Women will actually CUT THEIR HAIR SHORT just to torment the men of the world with its shortness! Yet they will REFUSE to shave the hair off their legs! Which are FAT and STINKY! Also MUFFINS! They EAT MUFFINS! I’m not sure if this is supposed to be some sort of lesbian innuendo, or whether Alucin is referring to actual literal ingestion of delicious blueberry muffins, but I don’t care. Either way, MEN ARE CLEARLY BEING OPPRESSED!

Why does writing this blog always make me so hungry? First, it gives me a craving for cupcakes, and now for muffins, the cupcakes’ more demure cousin, the Cathy to its Patty. .

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>Taking victim-blaming to new lows: The Spearhead on Lara Logan

>

Lara Logan, shortly before the attack

There has been an astounding amount of vile shit posted on the internet about the reported sexual assault and beating of CBS reporter Lara Logan in Cairo’s Tahir Square. I spent a depressing hour or so the other night looking through hundreds of comments on the Yahoo news message boards; it was a virtual festival of misogyny, racism, victim-blaming and simple nastiness. A sample (each quote is from a different comment):

don’t put some nice white pu55y near crazy @#$% arabs. it’s like goddamn king kong

Kinda’ like sending a woman reporter into a locker room? Don’t ask me to feel any kind of remorse for her. Equal rights demands equal responsibility

it started as a revolution and turned in a black spring break! mwaa ha ha

She loved every minute of it.

I could multiply examples ad infinitum; the last I checked there were more than 1500 comments on the one Yahoo news story I looked at, and most were of this sort. The only slightly encouraging sign? Most of these vile comments have more downvotes from readers than upvotes.

You expect this kind of behavior from the Yahoo message board crowd, which has never been very big on civility, or even basic human decency. Typical anonymous internet assholery.

Leave it to the readers of The Spearhead, though, to take commentary on this sad case to an even lower low. Yesterday, Spearhead head honcho W.F. Price published his own, predictably victim-blaming, take on the subject — essentially blaming feminists for encouraging women to report the news in the same dangerous places that male reporters go. (When Anderson Cooper was attacked, you didn’t hear anyone suggesting that men shouldn’t be covering the events in Cairo.)

I think that’s a supremely tasteless way to use this tragedy to push an antifeminist agenda. But the comments to his article, roughly 270 of them at last count, are far worse — rarely bothering with even a pro-forma expression of basic human sympathy, some blaming and even mocking the victim, and most using the case to crudely push an assortment of their own misogynist agendas.  Here are some of the worst; I present them without comment, as they pretty much speak for themselves. I have edited some for space reasons; you can follow the links to read them in their entirety.

Alucin explained about how rape allegedly benefits its victims:

When I studied in university a woman claimed to have been gang-raped. After telling the story, she acquired a certain authority. She was at the top of the feminist hierarchy …. Her word was gold because of her rape.

It was never even verified if she had in fact been raped.

It’s a harsh thing to say, but the woman at university gained immensely from the rape, or her rape story-telling, with this increased stature. She probably wouldn’t have gotten into that very small degree program without the rape story to tell to the admissions committee.

At school, no one, especially a man, could ever challenge her about any subject, however remotely related to rape. …

Rape against men or women is a tragedy, but I also find it sickening how “survivors” or their “friends and supporters” often use their status for personal gain. … It’s the same thing when feminists politicize breast cancer. 

Opus added:

I agree with Alcuin: In my experience women wear RAPE like a badge of honour or military medal (as I presume Ms Logan will now do). I, of course, never believe word of it, and I notice most guys these days are equally sceptical. There may be an increasing Rape epidemic but no one I know is a Rapist. Funny.

Confused declared that he didn’t give a shit:

No group on earth is more privileged that American/western women.
I won’t waste my time any more worrying about their safety, or lack thereof, due to their choices.

intp took it a step further:

Don’t believe her. Don’t care. I hope the Arab guys didn’t catch anything from her.

That is what the non-stop lie called feminism has done to me. Vive la nihilism.

Rebel offered this highly original take on rape:

I don’t see the point here..

According to feminist orthodoxy, humpteen gazillion women are raped every day. This one is the humpteen gazillionth plus one for that day.

Women are raped if you have sex with them, women are raped if you don’t have sex with them, women are raped even if there are no men around. …

Every time two animals are copulating, a woman feels raped. There are more rapes on earth than there are hydrogen molecules in the universe.

To women of today, rape seems to be the highest achievement, the Royal Road to Success.

I’m laughing so much I might get a hernia, my belly is aching from the laughter.

Papa Smurf suggested the reported rape was a great career move, and ended his comment with a smiley:

she’ll be a CBS news anchor in no time. great way to get promoted.

I dont know if she genuinely didnt want what just happend or maybe feminism has affectivly blinded her and rendered her stupid. Blonde western women in the arab world are like all you can eat restraunts to fat people. Just help yourselves 😉

Troll King posted a long rambling diatribe against “western women” in the Middle East, of which these remarks are only a small portion:

*yawn*

Typical feminist/western woman(as if there is a difference) acts like her typical bitchy self in a place that won’t tolerate it. ….

The fact is that women, western cunts, think they can go into a culture and act how they want and treat the poorest of the poor not just like “help” or a but like a slave that should be lashed for simply flirting. I bet these rapists look who do this probably thought she would act towards them the same way white women act towards brown and black men on western tv. Like he was a stud….

But, umm, like yeah dude. That is so hurrible I might go and cry a river.

The Contrarian Expatriate took victim-blaming to a new low:

Sounds like she got what she set herself up for. You can yell, “I am woman, hear me roar!” all you want in the Anglosphere, but step into the 3rd world behaving that way and they will pound you (no pun intended) back into your place.

Again, as is generally the case with the comments from The Spearhead that I quote here on my blog, these are not weird outliers in the discussion there. Unlike the comments from Yahoo I quoted above, all of the comments I quoted from The Spearhead got multiple upvotes from readers there, in most cases several dozen; none had more than a handful of downvotes. Alucin’s comment about the benefits of rape — a comment surprisingly similar in spirit to an infamous quote on false rape accusations from Catherine Comins, an assistant dean at Vassar, that still raises hackles from antifeminists two decades after it was uttered to a Time magazine writer —  got more than 80 upvotes. There is more than a little irony here.

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>The Republicans take aim at pregnant rape victims.

>

He’s not crying for pregnant rape victims.

Let’s take a brief break from the man boobz on the internet to look at the man (and some women) boobz in Congress, specifically the Republicans (and a handful of Democrats) who are trying to push through a truly odious bill, The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, designed to make it harder for women who have been raped to get abortions. Here’s how the SF Chronicle sums it up:

Current law allows federal funds (usually for Medicaid) to be spent on abortions only for women who have been raped or are the victims of incest. We think those restrictions are bad enough, but the new class of House Republicans want more. The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act would outlaw the use of federal funds for abortion except in the case of “forcible rape.” The incest exemption would only apply to minors.

“Forcible rape” doesn’t have a legal definition, but in general the idea is to exclude pregnancies that result from date rape, statutory rape or rapes that happen when women are physically incapacitated.

So if you’re drugged and raped, and you get pregnant, too bad. If your father rapes you, and you get pregnant, too bad. Those rapes apparently don’t count.

As Amanda Marcotte puts it, the bill’s sponsors apparently

believe the misogynist stereotype that all women, especially those who claim to be ill or victims of crimes, are lying whores until proven otherwise.  Or just lying whores, regardless of the evidence they produce.  And so, to make sure those lying whores don’t get their hands on those delicious, orgasm-inducing uterine scrapings, the bill has language in it that, in essence, assumes that 70% of rape victims weren’t really raped.  The exception is only for “forcible rape”, which is vaguely defined, but in practice tends to mean that anything short of getting your ass beat down means you weren’t “really” raped.  Even if you’re a 13-year-old who was impregnated by a 30-year-old.  Also, if you happen to get pregnant by your abusive, rape-y father on your 18th birthday, you will get no funding to make sure you don’t give birth to your own brother.

In Salon, Sady Doyle puts the Republican push for the bill in a larger context, noting that the bill’s reference to “forcible rape”

brings us back to an ancient, long-outdated standard of rape law: “Utmost resistance.” By this standard, a rape verdict depended not on whether the victim consented, but on whether outsiders thought she resisted as hard as humanly possible. Survivors rarely measured up.

Meanwhile, Time magazine’s Amy Sullivan tried to figure out if there really were a lot of “false rape claims” being by made by wily money-hungry young pregnant women in an attempt to bilk the government out of money.  The answer, of course, is no.

Eligibility rules … differ by state, but many states are like Tennessee, which requires a doctor to certify that “there is credible evidence to believe that the pregnancy is the result of rape” and to attach “documentation from a law enforcement agency indicating the patient has made a credible report as the victim of incest or rape” before Medicaid will consider issuing payment for an abortion procedure. …

So that scourge of false rape reports–or even, let’s say, “non-forcible” rapes? It doesn’t exist. I couldn’t find numbers more recent than 2001, but these shocked me. In that year, the total number of abortions covered by Medicaid was 56. That’s all abortions for cases in which the mother’s life was in danger, the pregnancy was a result of incest, or in the case of rape. Another 25 were covered by state Medicaid programs. Even assuming that every single one of those abortions was to end a pregnancy caused by rape, that’s 81 abortions paid for in part with taxpayer dollars. Nationwide. That’s roughly $32,000 total for first trimester procedures.

So, yeah, this is not exactly what is busting the budget. Indeed, I imagine there are many rape victims who choose to pay out of pocket for an abortion, even if they can’t really afford it, rather than going through the humiliation of trying to prove they’ve been raped to the satisfaction of government bureaucrats.

UPDATE: The Republicans have removed the “forcible rape” language from the bill. But there is still plenty about the bill to hate. 

If you’re American, and want to do something about this bill, here’s one practical suggestion: There are a number of Democrats who have signed on to co-sponsor the bill. I suggest you contact them and let them know how you feel. You can find info on how to contact them on Pandagon.

Or you can contact your representative by clicking on the banner below:


 
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>The Giffords shooting: Misogyny has consequences

>

Reason #1538 it’s not such a good idea to spend time online nursing your resentments towards the opposite sex because no one from that sex seems to want to have sex with you: Because that kind of, sort of, makes you a little bit like Jared Loughner.

The Wall Street Journal managed to track down what are apparently some comments Loughner made on a gaming site; they’re full of his usual conspiratorial nonsense (his lunatic theories on grammar and currency) but they’re also, as the Journal notes, “peppered with displays of misogyny.” One posting

titled “Why Rape,” … said women in college enjoyed being raped. “There are Rape victims that are under the influence of a substance. The drinking is leading them to rape. The loneliness will bring you to depression. Being alone for a very long time will inevitably lead you to rape.”

This is the dark side of the “incel” mindset. (That is, those who turn their “involuntarily celibate” state into an identity.)

Another time, the Journal reports, Loughner

started a thread titled “Talk, Talk, Talking about Rejection.” He solicited stories of rejection by the opposite sex. The next day he wrote, “Its funny…when..they say lets go on a date about 3 times..and they dont….go…” Three days later, he wrote, “Its funny when your 60 wondering……what happen at 21.”

There is other evidence that Loughner nursed anger towards and hatred of women and authority figures: he apparently scrawled the phrases “die bitch” and “die cops” on a letter he’d gotten from congresswoman Giffords.

As Amanda Marcotte points out, there are a lot of people out there who’ve responded with anger at the very notion “that misogyny might play a role in the choice of a young man to shoot a powerful woman in the head … .”

But the fact is that misogyny has consequences, and one of its most common and most predictable consequences is violence towards women. Misogyny plays a role, as Marcotte notes, even when the perpetrator of this violence is “crazy.”

What I’m seeing here is that Loughner, mental illness or no, completely absorbed society’s teachings about male entitlement and female sinfulness, that men have a right to have needs filled at women’s expense, and that women give up their rights to bodily autonomy if they do things deemed unladylike, like have sex or drink alcohol.

And just as those who spew hateful political rhetoric — filled with talk of guns and targets and “second amendment solutions” to political “problems” — shouldn’t be surprised when someone takes that rhetoric seriously, so those who spew misogyny online shouldn’t be surprised when someone acts on that misogyny and attacks a woman. As Marcotte puts it,

just because someone has a mental illness rarely means that he’s completely unaware of the world around him.  Loughner’s ability with a gun or his thoughts on rape didn’t spring fully formed from his brain, but are the product of an individual interacting with a specific environment.

Those who contribute to that toxic environment — whether they’re Sarah Palin talking about “reloading” or some random woman-hater talking gleefully online about bashing “bitches” — share in the responsibility when someone pulls a gun and shoots down a female politician he’s convinced himself is a “bitch.” 

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>Quiz: Jezebel … or Andrea Dworkin?

>Here’s one easy way to tell if someone is from another planet. Specifically, Planet I’m-So-Crazed-by-My-Hatred-of-Feminism-That-My-Brain-Has-Imploded. They post comments on Reddit containing this sentence:

Hmm. I’m not what you’d call a big fan of Andrea Dworkin, but I have read her work, and unless my memory is faulty, I don’t recall her writing much about Ryan Gosling, lip stain, or baby giraffes.

So here’s a little quiz to see if you can tell the difference between Jezebel and Andrea Dworkin. Some of the quotes below come from recent Jezebel articles; some come from Dworkin. I also threw in a quote from Ryan Gosling as well, just for the hell of it. So who said what? (Answers below.)

a) Intercourse in reality is a use and an abuse simultaneously, experienced and described as such, the act parlayed into the illuminated heights of religious duty and the dark recesses of morbid and dirty brutality.
b) I freely admit that I watch some shitty, shitty television, and if it weren’t for my sense of shame, I’d probably watch a lot more of it. I can’t get enough of The Bachelor, which combines the most terrible aspects of dating, the weirdest aspects of arranged marriages, and sociopaths.
c) The sexual colonialization of women’s bodies is a material reality: men control the sexual and reproductive uses of women’s bodies. In this system of male power, rape is the paradigmatic sexual act.
d) Women’s bodies are possessed by men. Women are forced into involuntary childbearing because men, not women, control women’s reproductive functions. Women are an enslaved population–the crop we harvest is children, the fields we work are houses.
e) Pie is just fine as a partner for the weak coffee of church basements, for Thanksgiving, for dessert at a roadside cafe in Harmony, Minneosta, but for high falutin’ snacking, you cannot beat the elegant convenience of the cupcake.
f) If I eat a huge meal and I can get the girl to rub my belly, I think that’s about as romantic as I can think of.

ANSWER KEY: What, are you a fucking idiot? Oh, ok, the last one is the Ryan Gosling quote. I really, really, really hope you can figure out the rest on your own.

Categories
idiocy misandry MRA rape reddit Uncategorized

>Rapists are apparently being oppressed by the term “rapist.”

>

Well, here’s a new one. Apparently rapists are being oppressed by the evil misandrist term … rapist. Or so says a poster calling himself ReluctantNihilist in the upstart MENSRIGHTSMOVEMENT subreddit on Reddit, a tiny little discussion forum (with 12 subscribers) for those who think the regular Men’s Rights subreddit has become a hotbed of radical feminism. Here’s his argument:

The prefix “-ist” means “one who believes in”. …  It is a belief system. A misandrist demonstrates a pattern of behaviors that exemplify misandry.

Does a person who commits a rape necessarily believe and engage in a pattern of behavior of rape?

No.

There are a couple of problems with this analysis, starting with the fact that “ist” is, uh, not actually a prefix but a suffix. And that it can simply mean “one that performs a specified action.” Believing may not have anything to do with it: a “typist,” for example, types; he or she doesn’t believe in an ideology of typing. Nor does an “ist” have to do something repeatedly: an “arsonist” is someone who burns shit up, whether that’s once or a hundred times. Our ReluctantlNihilist is evidently not much of a linguist. But let’s set aside these little qualms and continue with his post:

The proper term for someone who commits a rape, or even several, is a raper. “-er” means “one who takes part in”. Determination of whether that person would qualify as a rapist is another matter.

The use of the word “rapist” rather than “raper” is misandrist doublespeak, because even though women rape, too, we know that the term “rapist” is only applied to males. 

Uh, I think the term is used for female rapists also. There just aren’t that many of them.

This misandrist doublespeak is subtle but effective. Calling someone a rapist insinuates they have committed multiple rapes and, if set free, they’ll do it again and again. This only fuels rape hysteria.

The more accurate and less emotionally-charged term is:

Raper.

Actually, it’s a fair bet that someone who rapes once will rape again; one study of “undetected rapists” — that is, rapists who hadn’t been caught, which is to say the overwhelming majority of rapists — found that they admitted to having assaulted, on average, roughly 6 victims each.

But let’s set this aside and ask the big question: why exactly should we give a fuck about hurting the feelings of people who rape other people? If “ist” is good enough for Stalinists, philanthropists, proctologists, and, yes, even nihilists, it’s certainly good enough for rapists.

ReluctantNihilist, I am demoting you to a ReluctantNihiler.

Categories
douchebaggery men who should not ever be with women ever MRA rape reddit Uncategorized

>MRAs on Julian Assange: No consent, no problem!

>

Apparently some Men’s Right Activists have no trouble believing the rape accusations against Julian Assange. They just have trouble giving a shit about rape.

Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit, the regular crowd was discussing an article about Assange. One of the allegations against Assange is that he raped one of his accusers in her sleep, without wearing a condom. (EDITED TO ADD: According to her account, she had told him explicitly the night before that she would not have sex with him without a condom, and had in fact refused unprotected sex with him when he’d tried it that evening.) As the article recounts the (alleged) incident:

She says they had consensual sex but she woke up the next morning to find him having intercourse with her to which she had not consented.

When she asked him if he was wearing anything, he had allegedly said: “I am wearing you.”

This response got high-fives from some of the Men’s Rights redditors. One quoted Assange’s (alleged) remark, then added “Nailed it.” Eight upvotes for that comment, no downvotes. Another quoted the same remark, and added “LIKE A BOSS.” That got upvotes as well.

So apparently, to some MRAs at least, raping a woman in her sleep is A-OK, just so long as you’ve got a witty one-liner at the ready when she wakes up.