Well, we could do a poll targeted at Doper women, MaxtheVool. Ask them how willingly they’d report a rape where they were the victim and the accused was a well-liked member of the community.
I don’t have any skeletons in the closet or a reputation that could taint my credibility. But I would be very hesitant to put myself in such a situation.
I think social media makes this more of a minefield, not less. All it takes is a few key strokes to dig up dirt (made-up or real) to make someone look less than sympathetic.
I don’t have any idea why the Cosby thing blew up, other than people finally getting tired of keeping their mouths shut. I don’t think social media had anything to do with it, or the enlightenment of society. Perhaps women, in general, have become more comfortable speaking uncomfortable truths and shouting down those who’d rather not listen. I don’t know.
Eh, social media is definitely a factor here. “Mob justice” is very much in right now. Like, a few months ago some video of some guy littering out his car window made the rounds and several of my friends straight-faced advocated doxxing him based on the license plate in the video so he could be publicly named and shamed. Littering. I’m serious.
As a matter of pure, actual statistics I’ve seen, and anecdotally, women and minorities get the brunt of the shit on social media, but it definitely, definitely cuts the other way and social justice movements of various stripes are not at all shy about using and abusing social media mob justice to advance their agendas or (over)react to various things. Bill Cosby is a scumbag, and he honestly deserved it, but I think it’s a pretty clear example of the inscrutable whims of the internet outrage machine.
When someone gets butthurt because a poster doesn’t want to answer a stupid question about why they didn’t act a certain way, then yes, “DEMAND” is a good word to use.
Maybe if you stopped entering topics that you obviously know nothing about, you’d stop stepping in “shit” all the time.
You always portray yourself as well-intentioned guy just trying to learn, and yet you always come across as argumentative, as if you possess first-hand experience with the topic at hand that should be respected by virtue of you having a keyboard. If you’re seriously trying to learn, then your communication style leaves a whole lot to be desired.
I guess it depends on the social media you encounter. I don’t hang out on tumblr, which has a reputation (positive or negative, depending on your bent) for being reactive towards injustice. But more mainstream joints were not gushing with support for Cosby’s accusers. Hell, the SDMD is fairly liberal and it took a long-ass time for anti-Cosby sentiment to come around.
But I do agree that social media has been a positive force in other issues. Like LGBT stuff and school bullying.
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We certainly wouldn’t have had that attack going viral all over social media, because of course social media didn’t exist then (which is at least partly a response to WhyNot’s cynicism that suddenly the powers that be don’t care about protecting Bill Cosby… social media takes a lot of that power away).
My point is not “hey, society is totally cool about rape now”. My point is that the descriptions I read in that review (I have not read the book itself) seem quite outdated. As I’ve said repeatedly in this thread, maybe I’m wrong. But I definitely feel like prominent rape accusations in the past couple of years have NOT fit the old-school “rape culture” pattern that the book describes.
What happened to make the Bill Cosby thing blow up now? It’s partly the existence of social media, of course, but does a changing culture which is no longer willing to chuckle and look the other way have nothing to do with it?
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I think social media has definitely helped. It’s also hurt. And one of the hardest things about understanding what people are saying on “social media” is that we’re not all looking at the same things. We choose the people whose posts and tweets we see, we choose the message boards or subreddit’s we hang out on, we choose which links to click on based on our knowledge of their domains (I know I don’t click through the links my dad provides on most of his conservative rants, because honestly I don’t give a shit what townhall.com has to say about anything! In return, he refuses to read anything I like from huffingtonpost). So when we’re judging “social media response”, we’re judging mostly how our chosen peers are responding, and our response to them.
My Facebook yesterday was full of pictures and memes that were veering into anti-USA territory, with questions of why we should “never forget” 911, but black people should “get over” slavery; pictures of a Sept 11, 1973 bombing in Chile that killed many more people than the one at the WTC (which I’d never learned about); and reminders that more Iraqi civilians and US soldiers were killed in the US strikes after than at the WTC, and even more US soldiers have died of suicide than killed at war. My husband (a first responder at WTC) had a Facebook full of unironic messages of patriotism, support for first responders, memorials, and many, many, “never forget” messages. Two very different experiences, and that at the same website!
So…what was the social media reaction to the anniversary of 9/11? Was it critical or supportive? Depends on your social media experience. I suspect the same is true of social media reaction to big rape stories. Some people are calling for the rapist’s head, others are asking why the stupid bitch was hanging out in the hotel room. Which you see depends on who your Friends and followers are.
As I already said, I have not drawn a conclusion on this issue. I was posting in response to yourassertion that no evidence on the subject even existed. Abbey’s review of the research summarizes a lot of evidence about men’s alcohol consumption and sexual assault (with a specific focus on college students). I probably should have known better, but at the time I thought the response I’d get would be something like “Thanks for the link, that looks interesting.”
Where did this happen, in Opposite Land? I handed you a review article full of information on alcohol and sexual assault, then you cherry-picked a few bits of it and drew the facile conclusion that “men who prey on drunk women go to where alcohol is served and drink with their victims-to-be”. I’ve seen no indication that you read or comprehended any of the material in the article that didn’t support your pre-existing beliefs. Even when quoting Abbey just now you elided over what she said about the effects of alcohol on men.
You have not only wasted my time, you’ve been weirdly hostile about it. You’ve been even worse towards women who’ve dared to talk about their own experiences. I don’t know whether monstro is right about you always acting this way, but I agree with her description of your behavior here:
It’s far too late to edit this, but while DSeid has been weirdly hostile I should have said (as I did originally) that I have been wasting my time. As little as I think of DSeid’s behavior here, he hasn’t asked me for anything so the time-wasting has been entirely voluntary on my part.
But I think that’s kind of stacking the deck. Accusing a rich and powerful and well liked person of anything is hard enough, due to the influence of money in the legal system. Look at OJ. And accusing anyone of rape is always going to be hard because of how hard it has to be to prove that something not only occurred, but was nonconsensual. At the same time, the difference, to me, between 1980 and 2015, is that if someone goes public with a reasonably plausible rape accusation against some public figure, there will be sufficient interest in social media, and the scandal-hungry mainstream media, to make it basically impossible for the accusation to be buried. There will be MASSIVE scrutiny on the DA and prosecutors to take action.
Of course, there’s also a huge difference depending on what kind of prominent person it is. Suppose it’s a politician… then, in our partisan society, 30% of the population will want to believe the accuser no matter what the evidence, and 30% will never believe them short of indisputably clear video coverage.
My point being, I don’t think the most stereotypical “rape culture” narrative of how a rape accusation will go is accurate any more. Again, things are still far from perfect, but to describe the 2015 of Facebook and Nancy Grace as “Why is rape the only crime where the perpetrator is effectively erased and most or all of the focus is on the victim? And when a rapist is accused, why are they supported more than the person who got raped?” just rings lazy and complacent to me.