We Hunted The Mammoth>Two influential blogs in the “manosphere” — there may be more, I don’t know — have now posted the names and contact information of Julian Assange’s accusers; I won’t link to the posts. Clearly the purpose of doing this is to encourage harassment of these women. Disgraceful.
EDIT: Some asshole keeps posting the contact info here so I am moderating comments for now.
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The rape charges against Julian Assange have inspired a massive flareup of pure bushittery on the net, amongst Men’s Rights troglodytes and liberal bloggers alike, vilifying the accusers and dismissing their charges as politically motivated revenge schemes. The gist of it all: the charges are false, and it wasn’t even real rape, and the women charging him are evil feminist harpies and might be working for the CIA.
And, as Kate Harding points out in a Salon piece that is the best thing anyone has written about any of this so far, all this speculation is based on … a whole lot of nothing. We don’t know the specifics of the accusations, and much of what little we do know of the case comes second-hand from tabloids and other unreliable sources. One thing is clear: the few new details released today indicate that he’s being charged with real rape all right, so let’s move on from all the indignant and uninformed talk about “sex by surprise.” (Feministe has the only really intelligent discussion of the “surprise” issue I’ve seen.)
Harding sums it up:
The fact is, we just don’t know anything right now. Assange may be a rapist, or he may not. His accuser may be a spy or a liar or the heir to Valerie Solanas, or she might be a sexual assault victim who now also gets to enjoy having her name dragged through the mud, or all of the above. The charges against Assange may be retaliation for Cablegate or (cough) they may not.
Public evidence, as The Times noted, is scarce. So, it’s heartening to see that in the absence of same, my fellow liberal bloggers are so eager to abandon any pretense of healthy skepticism and rush to discredit an alleged rape victim based on some tabloid articles and a feverish post by someone who is perhaps not the most trustworthy source. Well done, friends! What a fantastic show of research, critical thinking and, as always, respect for women.
So let me make a radical proposal: Until we actually know shit about what really happened, let’s suspend our judgment about Assange’s guilt or innocence. Liberals want to support Assange because, you know, he’s fighting the power and shit. (Even Naomi Wolf has joined the pro-Assange chorus.) But the fact is, sometimes politically admirable people do bad shit to women. Men’s Rightsers want to vilify the accusers because the primary accuser is a feminist. But the fact that someone is a feminist doesn’t mean that she can’t get raped.
The low point of the Men’s Rights discussion of the case so far is probably this blog post by ScareCrow, who took a few moments from posting comments here to write up the strangest attack on the accusers yet. ScareCrow first demands that everyone assume that Assange is “innocent until proven guilty,” conveniently forgetting that those of us not actually serving on juries are entitled to come to whatever conclusions we want on criminal cases, for whatever reasons we want. (Heck, we’re allowed to disagree with jury verdicts: I have no problem calling OJ a murderer, even though he wasn’t convicted as one.)
Still, in this case, given that we have no real evidence to weigh, there’s no good reason to assume either guilt or innocence at this point.
It’s what ScareCrow does next that’s telling: after indignantly telling us not to assume Assange’s guilt, he spits forth an extended series of vicious “speculations” about the accusers, based on … what they look like in a couple of photos he’s seen of them. Of one accuser, he writes:
This woman reminds me of those women – to whom – everything is a simple “chess game”. Move and counter-move – guile and deceit. This type is what I like to call the “quiet” and “not so brainy” type. Smart when she was young perhaps, but upon hitting puberty, blamed her supposed “lack of attraction” on the fact that she was “no so brainy”. This lead to a contempt of men. I can see that in her face. A certain bitter frustration that her encounters with men did not proceed according to the “tea parties” she used to imagine as a small child – is what I see written on her face.
And of the other:
Ah yes. The look on this woman’s face is painful for me. Why? Simple – she looks like many women I have met – who consider themselves to be excessively attractive. Since they believe they are so attractive, they use that “feature” to hurt men. This type of woman was basically the “parasite” I encountered many times in my youth – at clubs, in college, and various other places where young men and women are supposed to “hook-up”. When being approached by a man, such women would usually respond with extreme callousness and uncalled for hostility and rudeness. Looking at her face, all I see is malice and hatred of men.
Yep, that’s right: she’s a dirty man-hating liar because … she reminds ScareCrow of women who turned him down turned down other dudes (who definitely weren’t him) when he was in college. Absurd, to be sure, but not, in the end, all that different from liberal bloggers and Men’s Rightsers who, in the absence of evidence, have projected their own issues onto the case.
Go read the Harding piece.
More on the case from Jezebel and Amanda Marcotte.
EDIT: A new piece on Feministe critiquing Naomi Wolf’s idiotic blog post on the case.
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If you want to get downvoted on the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit, just post something about how you were actually raped in a discussion of “The Campus Rape Myth.” You’ll get a batch of instant downvotes, and a bunch of Men’s Rightsers questioning whether or not you’re telling the truth, and demanding that you answer all of their questions.
Contrast this to what happens when a guy posts something on that subreddit about being falsely accused of rape or child abduction. No scrutiny, no downvotes. It’s simply assumed to be true.
This is the internet, and it’s pretty hard to know who is and who isn’t telling the truth. But this is a pretty clear double standard, on the part of people who claim to hate double standards.
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| Paul Elam, in context. |
Yesterday, I posted a set of pretty awful comments from Paul Elam’s A Voice For Men blog, one of which included this lovely line:
I am so fucking tired of this shit, that I really wouldn’t mind shooting a bitch dead in the face.
While even the mildest critiques of MRA dogma tend to get downvoted into oblivion on Paul’s site — see this one, for example (you’ll need to click another link there to even see it) — the “shoot a bitch” comment got more upvotes than down. Which tells you something about Paul’s audience.
Paul has now taken the offending comment down, saying that he hadn’t noticed it before, because he was on vacation. I’ll take his word for this. His explanation for taking it down? “[T]he bottom line,” he writes, “is that I am vehemently against violence.”
Given that Paul has written several posts containing similarly over-the-top fantasies of violence against women, and another recent post mocking female rape victims, this explanation rather strains credulity.
His explanation for these previous posts? Again, back to his post today:
I have satirized violence several times, and it has of course been taken out of context and even drawn criticism from MRA’s and sympathizers. … If people don’t recognize satire or humor then let ’em stew.
So he’s making three claims about his previous posts containing fantasies of violence towards women: that they’re “satire,” that they’re “humor,” and that the violent quotes have been “taken out of context.”
So let’s deal with all of those claims in regard to Paul’s most notorious “satirical” post. I’ll start with humor.
Here is an example of humor, from comedian Emo Philips:
Always remember the last words of my grandfather, who said: “A truck!”
What’s funny about this — at least the first time you hear it — is that Philips has led us to believe one thing (that we’re going to hear some words of wisdom from his grandfather), but instead flips the script, challenging our expectations by delivering instead the last thing his grandfather shouted before being hit by a truck. (Sorry, explanations of humor are almost always completely unfunny.)
Here is an example of something that is not humor:
Let’s punch some bitches until blood spurts from their noses!
That second example might seem a bit strange. It’s not clever. There’s no twist, no challenging of our assumptions. There’s no incongruity. It’s really just a violent fantasy. Why would anyone claim that it’s “humor,” or satirical?
Well, that’s essentially what Paul Elam has been doing. That quote isn’t from him — I made it up as an example — but it’s essentially a condensed version of Paul’s allegedly “humorous” remarks about domestic violence:. Here’s Paul, in his own words, in a post I’ve criticized before:
In the name of equality and fairness, I am proclaiming October to be Bash a Violent Bitch Month.
I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women – to beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.
And then make them clean up the mess.
Ba-dump TSSH! Not even an instant rimshot makes that funny. There’s no clever twist; it’s just a fantasy about beating and humiliating women.
Is it unfair to quote this passage “out of context?” Here’s a bit more context: those words ran next to a photo of a woman with a black eye, with the caption: “Maybe she DID have it coming.” (See the picture at top right, which is a screenshot from Paul’s site.)
But I suspect that’s not the “context” Elam is talking about. He seems to be referring instead to this, from later in his post:
Now, am I serious about this?
No.
That seems clear. And in one sense this is true: he’s not literally calling for men to organize a “Bash a Violent Bitch Month.”
But let’s look at the comment I just quoted in context, shall we? (Emphasis added.)
Now, am I serious about this?
No. Not because it’s wrong. It’s not wrong. Every one should have the right to defend themselves. …
In that light, every one of those women at Jezebel and millions of others across the western world are as deserving of a righteous ass kicking as any human being can be. But it isn’t worth the time behind bars or the abuse of anger management training that men must endure if they are uppity enough to defend themselves from female attackers.
In other words, he’s not backing off from his advocacy of violence against “violent bitches” because he thinks that this violence is wrong; he’s backing off for purely pragmatic reasons — if you actually “bash a violent bitch” it may get you arrested.
Now, about the question of satire. Satire is defined as “the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.” When Jonathan Swift wrote his famous essay seemingly calling for the Irish to eat their own children, it was satire because he was being bitterly ironic: he didn’t really think anyone should be eating babies, and his essay was in fact intended to mock British authorities and callous attitudes towards the Irish.
By contrast, there’s no irony in Paul’s post: he actually believes that “violent bitches” deserve “a righteous ass kicking,” and he states this quite explicitly.
Since Paul wrote that post, he’s written others that reveal a pretty callous view towards female victims of violence. In one post, which I discuss here, he mocks and blames women for the crime of getting raped, suggesting that women who get drunk and make out with guys are “freaking begging” to be raped, “[d]amn near demanding it”:
[T]here are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.
You can find those quotes, in all their glorious context here.
And in a more recent piece, Paul announces that he doesn’t really care all that much about rape:
I lack any desire to react to rape, especially as currently defined, with the same vengeful repugnance that I would other crimes generally considered heinous.
The fact is that I care about a lot of things more than I care about rape.
He goes on to suggest a curious moral equivalency between women and rapists, saying that he views “the perceived struggles of women with all the concern I have for the struggles of real rapists in the criminal justice system.”
Now, again, there is context here: in the rest of the piece he argues, not very effectively, that rape has been defined in crazy ways by the “hegemonic [feminist] elite,” that “so often nothing more than accusation is needed in order to secure a conviction.” And so on and so forth. You can read the whole thing here. Still, none of this “context” alters the noxious attitudes he’s shown towards women time and time again.
Paul, you’re a terrible comedian, and an even worse satirist. But as a human being?
You’re pretty fucking awful at that too.
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In a discussion of my “Ladies! Stop assaulting us by dressing like slutty sluts” post, regular commenter DarkSideCat left a comment that really got to the heart of what is so troubling about the CoAlpha Brotherhood and others of their ilk. I thought everyone deserved to see it, so here it is. (I’ve edited it down slightly, broken it into paragraphs and put especially pertinent points in bold; you can see the original comment in context here.)
To set it up: In a previous comment Eoghan had referred casually to the “aggressive flashing of fertility and mating symbols by females.” DarkSideCat replied:
You mean their fucking bodies? Have you so objectified women that you can’t think of their very BODIES as anything other than ‘fertility and mating symbols’? You are thinking of women’s skin as some sort of sexual object for you, rather than their own flesh. … You are assuming that women’s bodies are sex objects or sex acts, they aren’t, they are people’s fucking bodies.
Men show their skin all of the damned time. They even routinely go topless in public places. Because a man taking off his shirt in the heat, or putting on a nice pair of jeans to try and look nice is a person doing stuff, whereas a woman going topless in [the] heat or putting on a pair of jeans to look nice is a filthy slut who deserves to be raped?
Women’s bodies and skin are no more public property than men’s, and, if you can’t manage to see someone in public and find them attractive without thinking they are evil and are asking for you to rape them, you are the problem, not them.
Shit like this is also pretty damned insulting to men. You know, I think more highly of men than this, perhaps that is the difference between me and CoAlpha. I think that men can (and some in fact do) behave like decent human beings, and see women as human beings as well. I do not see male sexuality as so innately out of control and violent that if they see someone sexy, they will feel a burning need to violently attack and rape them.
You want to know why rad fems see all men as rapists? Because they believe the same stereotypes about men as anti-feminists like CoAlpha. If you spend so much fucking time pushing the notion that men can’t help being assholes or rapists, you are going to get some people to believe it, but disagree about the solution.
The quotes here contain direct threats of rape and murder and say that people dressed in certain types of clothes are asking to be raped. Yet, somehow you can’t see how fucked up that is?
Amen.
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Men’s Rights Movement Claim: A high percentage — 40% or more — of rape accusations are false.
The Facts: This claim is dubious. The studies claiming these high numbers have been debunked. Better studies estimate the rate of false accusations as being in the single digits, generally in a range from 2-8%.
Here are some useful posts and papers on the subject. You’ll notice they don’t all agree with one another; It’s a complicated subject.
False Rape Allegations Are Rare (YesMeansYes)
Excerpt:
The reputable, methodologically sound reviews put the frequency of false reports in the single-digit percentages. There are people who, for propaganda reasons, keep saying that the incidence of false reports is much higher. They create these figures with biased reviews or intellectually dishonest mislabeling. … A new study … based on a review of every single rape allegation made to a US university police department — the study does not disclose which school — over a ten year period. The result: 5.9 percent false allegations.
Critique of Eugene Kanin’s Study Of False Rape Reports (Alas, a blog)
Excerpt:
Eugene Kanin famously found that 41%, or perhaps 50%, of rapes reported to police are false. Kanin’s study is both badly designed and unverifiable; more reliable studies have found that between 2% and 8% of rapes reported to police are false reports.
Here’s the Kanin study being discussed. (pdf).
False Allegations Of Rape Not Common – Or Are They? (Alas, a blog)
More on Kanin.
Report on False Reporting Of Non-Stranger Rapes (abyss2hope)
A discussion of a paper that notes:
In the research literature, estimates for the percentage of sexual assault reports that are false have varied widely, virtually across the entire possible spectrum. For example, a very comprehensive review article documented estimates from 1.5% to 90% (Rumney, 2006). However, very few of these estimates are based on research that could be considered credible. Most are reported without the kind of information that would be needed to evaluate their reliability and validity. A few are little more than published opinions, based either on personal experience or a non-systematic review (e.g. of police files, interviews with police investigators, or other information with unknown reliability and validity).
The paper reviews recent research and notes that the most credible studies find “the rate of false reporting for sexual assault is in the range of 2-8%.”
NOTE: the link to the study on abyss2hope is broken. This one works. (It’s a pdf.)
Why it’s so hard to quantify false rape charges, by Emily Bazelon and Rachael Larimore (Slate)
[I]sn’t the rate of false rape charges an empirical question, with a specific answer that isn’t vulnerable to ideological twisting? Yes and no. There has been a burst of research on this subject. Some of it is careful, but much of it is questionable. While most of the good studies converge at a rate of about 8 percent to 10 percent for false rape charges, the literature isn’t quite definitive enough to stamp out the far higher estimates.
Anti-feminist myths debunked (Pandagon)
Contains an interesting discussion of the Kanin study.
Claims about McDowell’s research into false rape allegations are not credible (Feminist Critics)
Discussion of another study that found a high percentage of false accusations.
Why Women Allegedly Lie About Rape (abyss2hope)
Also discusses McDowell’s Air Force study
The myth of women’s false accusations of domestic violence and rape and misuse of protection orders (Michael Flood)
Excerpt:
Myth: Women routinely make up allegations of domestic violence and rape, including to gain advantage in family law cases. And women use protection orders to remove men from their homes or deny contact with children.
Facts: The risk of domestic violence increases at the time of separation. Most allegations of domestic violence in the context of family law proceedings are made in good faith and with support and evidence for their claims. Rates of false accusations of rape are very low. Women living with domestic violence often do not take out protection orders and do so only as a last resort. Protection orders provide an effective means of reducing women’s vulnerability to violence.
Note: I think this paper lowballs the estimate of false rape accusations. See the YesMeansYes article above for what I think is a more reasonable take.
False Allegations, Recantations, and Unfounding in the Context of Sexual Assault, Oregon Attorney General’s Sexual Assault Task Force (pdf)
Explains why recantations cannot be taken as definitive proof that an allegation is false.
Because recantation is used so frequently by victims to halt criminal justice involvement, it should never be seen, in and of itself, as indicative of a false report.
Another kind of false allegation:
The myth of false accusations of child abuse (Michael Flood)
Excerpt:
Myth: Women routinely make false accusations of child abuse or domestic violence to gain advantage in family law proceedings and to arbitrarily deny their ex-partners’ access to the children.
Facts: Allegations of child abuse are rare. False allegations are rare; False allegations are made by fathers and mothers at equal rates; The child abuse often takes place in families where there is also domestic violence; Allegations of child abuse rarely result in the denial of parental contact.
(Note: Most data cited from Australia.)
An article in the British magazine New Statesman, by Joanna Bourke, Professor of History at Birkbeck and author of Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present (Virago, 2007). Excerpt:
[W]hat is the risk of an accused man being falsely accused of rape? Popular prejudices estimate that around half of rape victims are lying, but a major Home Office research project in 2000-2003 concluded that only three per cent of rape allegations were false. Indeed, contrary to the notion that men are at risk of being falsely accused, it is much more common for actual rapists to get away with their actions. Around four-fifths of rapes are never reported to the police. And only five per cent of rapes reported to the police ever end in a conviction. This is the lowest attrition rate of any country in Europe, except for Ireland.
None of this is to say that people aren’t falsely accused — of rape, and of other crimes — or falsely convicted. They are, and it’s a tragedy. Here are two groups that advocate for the the falsely accused and falsely convicted:
The National Center for Reason and Justice
NOTE: I have added text and links to this post since I originally posted it.
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| From Stop Prisoner Rape (now Just Detention) |
Rape in US prisons, jails and other detention facilities is a serious problem, and a disgrace to our country.
Men’s Rights Activists often complain, quite justifiably, about prison rape jokes. Typically, they attribute the double standard towards prison rape jokes as an indication that, as one MRA put it in a recent discussion, “nobody gives a shit about men.” As I’ve pointed out, this explanation doesn’t take us very far, given that women are also raped in prison, and that people make jokes about that too. (Indeed, there is an entire genre of “women in prison” exploitation films that sexualizes this abuse.)
More to the point, most MRAs don’t seem terribly interested in actually attempting to do much about prison rape beyond complaining about obnoxious rape jokes or making rhetorical points about the “disposability” of men. (See below for the few examples of MR blogs I could find that have addressed the issue as more than a bullet point in a laundry list of complaints; I’ve found much more serious discussion of prison rape on feminist blogs.) Anyone who is interested in doing something about it should consider getting in touch with Just Detention, a human rights advocacy group working to stop sexual abuse in detention facilities.
Some basic information about prison rape. I’ve bolded the crucial information.
Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2008-09, by Allen J. Beck, Ph.D., Paige M. Harrison
An estimated 4.4% of prison inmates and 3.1% of jail inmates reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another inmate or facility staff in the past 12 months or since admission to the facility, if less than 12 months. Nationwide, these percentages suggest that approximately 88,500 adults held in prisons and jails at the time of the survey had been sexually victimized.
Female inmates in prison (4.7%) or jail (3.1%) were more than twice as likely as male inmates in prison (1.9%) or jail (1.3%) to report experiencing inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization. … Most victims of staff sexual misconduct were males; most perpetrators were females.
Note: Men make up the overwhelming majority of rape victims in prison — 90 percent — largely because the overwhelming majority of inmates are male. While the number of men raped in prison is appalling, I would like to clear up one Men’s Rights Myth: that the number of men raped inside prison is greater than the number of women raped outside of prison. This is simply false; the numbers aren’t even close: again, while the estimate of the total number of people (male and female) currently being held in prison who have been raped there in the past year is 88,500, estimates of the total number of those raped per year (outside of prison) range from about 200,000 to more than a million (the real number is probably closer to the latter); estimates suggest that anywhere from 86% to 94% of rape victims are female, and that males may make up to 99% of the perpetrators. See here (doc format) for a look at various estimates, and here (pdf) for more details from a large scale survey. As is the case with rapes in general, the vast majority of prison rapes go unreported.
EDITED TO ADD: The information in the previous paragraph is outdated. The Department of Justice has revised upwards its estimate of the number of prisoners (male and female) who are sexually assaulted each year to 216,000. Which means that considerably more men are raped per year than previously thought. There is still no clean and direct way to directly compare rapes of men and women, in prison and out, because the various studies out there use different methodologies and different definitions of sexual assault. Stephanie Zvan drills into the numbers in great detail here; anyone seriously interested in this issue should read her post carefully.
Information from Just Detention:
Overview:
Sexual abuse behind bars is a widespread human rights crisis in prisons and jails across the US. Aaccording to the best available research, 20 percent of inmates in men’s prisons are sexually abused at some point during their incarceration. The rate for women’s facilities varies dramatically from one prison to another, with one in four inmates being victimized at the worst institutions.
In a 2007 survey of prisoners across the country, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) found that 4.5 percent (or 60,500) of the more than 1.3 million inmates held in federal and state prisons had been sexually abused in the previous year alone. A BJS survey in county jails was just as troubling; nearly 25,000 jail detainees reported having been sexually abused in the past six months.
Unfortunately, the data provided by the still represent only a fraction of the true number of detainees who are victimized, especially of those held in county jails. The number of admissions to local jails over the course of a year is approximately 17 times higher than the nation’s jail population … .
(Source pdf)
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer inmates are the chief target of sexual abuse in prison
Sexual abuse of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) inmates constitutes one of the most rampant and ignored human rights violations in the US today. In a 2007 academic study, funded by the California Department of Corrections and rehabilitation and conducted at six California men’s prisons, 67 percent of inmates who identified as LGBTQ reported having been sexually assaulted by another inmate during their incarceration, a rate that was 15 times higher than for the inmate population overall.
(Source pdf)
Sexual Abuse and STDs:
Sexual violence in detention spreads disease. Prisoner rape victims are highly vulnerable to contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. … In 2004, the HIV prevalence rate inside US prisons was more than four times higher than in society overall. Hepatitis C rates are 8 to 20 times higher in prisons than on the outside … The rates of infection for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis are likewise significantly higher among inmates than in the population at-large.
(Source pdf)
For more information from Just Detention, see here for fact sheets, and here for links to useful articles and studies.
Human Rights Watch Report: No Escape, Human Rights Watch, 2001.
Prison Rape: A Critical Review of the Literature, National Institute of Justice, 2004.
Cindy Struckman-Johnson and David Struckman-Johnson, Comparison of Sexual Coercion Experiences Reported by Men and Women in Prison, 21 Journal of Interpersonal Violence 1591 (2006)
Cathy Young: Assault Behind Bars
Interesting discussion of prison rape jokes on Reddit.
Some useful blog posts about prison rape, and prison rape jokes:
The Curvature: Prison rape and complacency
Feministe: Prison Rape: Assault shouldn’t be part of the sentence
Sex abuse rampant at youth prisons around the country
An old story: the cruel and unusual punishment of prison rape
Ms Magazine blog: Prison rape: Can it be stopped?
Equal Writes: Rape in prison is still rape
Alas, a blog: Ezra Klein on Prison Rape
Feminist Critics: Discussion of the Alas, a blog post linked above
Alas, a blog: More on prison rape
Alas, a blog: Blog post round-up: Prison rape (Extensive list of links)
Reason Hit and Run: Mocking prison rape for fun and profit
Men’s Rights blogs on prison rape:
Human Stupidity: Stop Prison Rape! Legalize Corporal Punishment (Whipping)
Female Offenders: Prison Rape Report
Toy Soldiers: Cost of Prison Rape
Menstuff: Prison Rape
Mens-rights.net: Prison Rape: the challenge of prevention and enforcement (Note that this cut-and-pasted post is illustrated by an animated gif of a pair of boots with the caption: “These boots were made for kicking feminists in the cunt.”)
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Looking back through older posts on the OneY subreddit on Reddit, a relatively new and very promising subreddit devoted to men’s issues, I ran across a surprisingly civil and illuminating discussion of prison rape jokes. “Scarletbanner” opened the discussion by asking why there is a double standard with regard to these jokes:
As someone [who’s] majoring in Criminal Justice, I hear comments when the topic of women being raped that it’s “fucked up shit”, yet when the subject turns to prison rape, it’s a massive joke… from derogatory comments regarding sexual preference to “don’t drop the soap”. Between 43,000-140,000+ are raped each year ffs, with men (especially homosexuals) as the largest targeted group…
The typical Men’s Rights take on this is that there’s a double standard “because nobody gives a shit about men,” as EddieVanHelsing put it in a comment there. This explanation doesn’t take us very far, given that women are also raped in prison, and that people make jokes about that too.
Others in the discussion offered more incisive takes on the issue. puffinmuffin pointed out that
the problem is NO ONE CARES about people in jail. No one gives a shit about prisoner’s rights. It really isn’t an issue about raping, it’s an issue about the fucked up system that no one cares enough to fix. Conditions in a lot of jails are downright abhorrent. Unsanitary environments, abuse, horrid bureaucracy … But no one cares. They think, “Oh, well, they’re criminals so they deserve whatever.”
Archythearchivist, a self-described “XX, card carrying, baby eatin’ feminist” suggested that the double standard
is perhaps more indicative of the way that masculinity is viewed. Male rape is funny (to some) because it subverts common narratives of male virility and roles. It’s a “joke” where the main idea is that the world is a certain way, and only certain less masculine men would be raped. … It bases itself on a world that supposedly does not exist, at least not for “real” men. … These jokes should be considered as tasteless and hateful as any other rape joke.
But perhaps the most thoughtful comment came from AlphaCygni, who noted that there had recently been a post on Reddit
from a guy who had been sexually abused in a juvenile detention facility. Apparently there was systematic abuse and rape of young boys within this facility. What struck me the most about the [discussion of this on Reddit] was the number of individuals asking the victim why he didn’t just bite the dicks of his attackers. It was a situation so far out of their mindset, they couldn’t imagine how a person can be made to feel so powerless and scared that their primary focus is on staying alive rather than avoiding emasculation. Rape as a real possibility is something that just never seriously occurs to most men and, since they never think about, they can’t place themselves in the victim’s shoes. …
All that being said, I do know some women who joke about rape. I know a rape victim who makes rape jokes. I know other rape victims who can’t stand them. I think if more people could experience what it’s like to be the object of unwanted, intense, sexual attraction by someone who is more powerful than you, there would be less rape jokes overall except by those who enjoy gallows humor. I think that if more men were allowed to openly share their rape experiences and men were to listen to these poor individuals and try to put themselves in their shoes instead of asking how they could allow such a thing to happen, or discounting their masculinity, prison rape jokes wouldn’t be seen widely as funny.
The whole comment is worth reading; this is only an excerpt.
Prison rape is a disgrace, and jokes about it don’t help. Because most of those in prison are male, it primarily affects men. But women in prison are more than twice as likely to be raped or abused by other inmates than men. And, as Scarletbanner alluded to in the comment that started off the discussion, gays (and transsexuals) face a much higher risk of rape in prison.
I’m preparing a “further reading” post on prison rape, but in the meantime if you’re looking for more information on the subject, I suggest you start with the fact sheets on the web site of Just Detention International, a human rights advocacy group working to stop sexual abuse in detention facilities worldwide; the pictures I used to illustrate this post come from a media campaign by the group.
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They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place. That’s not true. But people like to say it nevertheless. That’s not something anyone would say about stupidity, ever, because stupidity strikes the same places with such monotonous regularity.
And so it is that I can report with pleasure but not much surprise that stupidity — really massive stupidity, in fact — has once again hit the discussion thread on The Spearhead which provided us with our previous incredibly stupid Quote of the Day. This time, a fellow called TFH offers his unique take on rape statistics:
“1 in 4 women on college campuses have been raped”
….and none of those women are ever higher than a 6 in looks. Most are 4s or lower.
Coincidence? I think not.
We never, ever see women who would rate a 7 or higher making a big fuss about ‘rape’, claiming that rape is rampant, etc. EVEN THOUGH THEY WOULD BE THE ONES MORE AT RISK.
This fact reveals the rape industry to be a complete fabrication. A ploy to get attention.
Always ask yourself : Where are the women who are a 7+ in looks, who are sufficiently afraid of rape to bring it up as often as the uggos do?
I should note that in addition to the rest of the stupidity, he’s a little confused as to what the 1-in-4 statistic refers to. The study in question, by Mary Koss, found that 1-in-4 college-age women had been the victim of rape or attempted rape at some point in their lives. (1-in-8 had been raped.) For more on the study upon which this figure is based, take a look at this extremely useful piece on Alas, A Blog, which has a whole category on the site devoted to the study in question, and on the claims of various anti-feminists to have “rebutted” it. Daran of Feminist Critics, a regular commenter on this blog, has also written two very useful posts on the subject as well.
EDIT: Here is another excellent post from Daran taking down Heather MacDonald, one of Koss’ recent critics, as well as two comments here that shed even more light on MacDonald’s flawed arguments. Thanks, Daran!
>… suggest that false accusers should be raped. (Here’s the comment in context in the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit.)
