Starving Artist says grope away – it’s not sexual assault in his opinion. Grab tits, grab ass, and it’s not sexual, and it’s not assault. Things sure were better back in the day, huh?
As far as the “misogynistic” charge, you might have noticed the word “mistrust” in the definition. I’ve seen no reason to doubt or mistrust Carla Ferrigno, Michelle Hurd, or the other accusers. But you mistrust them, and (I guess) you trust Cosby and his lawyer… why is that? Why is his refusal to talk about it, and his lawyer’s denials, more trustworthy than the accusations? Why do you assume they are lying? Automatically mistrusting the accusations of women against a prominent man is indeed misogynistic. It doesn’t mean you need to accept them automatically, but it does mean that you don’t assume they are lying.
You’ll notice that it’s your statements that I called misogynistic, not your person. I have no idea if you’re a misogynist – I hope you aren’t. But I think some of the things you’ve said qualify.
I’m deciding (based on nothing) that nobody thought it was rape (though, how would I know what a random woman was thinking twenty years ago…nevermind that) and what makes something rape is people thinking it’s rape, rather than, say, the fact of forcing someone to have non-consensual sex. So no rape!
25% of surveyed South African men in Kwa-Zulu Natal and Cape province admitted to raping someone. 40% of South African women will be raped in their lifetime. Only 1 in 9 rapes are reported.
No biggie, right? Just a different approach to sex, no harm no foul. The ladies probably don’t even mind it- hell, they probably like the attention. It’s just our uptight PC culture unfairly casting judgment.
Except, no. The sixties aren’t a mystery to us, any more than South Africa is. There are plenty of memoirs and books and histories written from a female perspective. And women didn’t like being raped back then any more than we like being raped now. “Not being able to do much about it” is not the same as being cool with it.
And then the authoress ruins it with this stupid photo caption:
Which gratuitous strawman deflects from issues like “innocent until proven guilty”, “due process of law”, and even “evidence”, and argues that anyone who is not automatically on the side of a rape complainant is a paranoid Men’s Rights activist or at any rate an idiot who thinks that the lunatic fringe of lesbian separatism is representative of feminism as a whole.
Nobody is supposed to come away from that caption thinking anyone actually thinks that. It’s an intentional exaggeration, and the target of the joke isn’t men or any subset of men, but rather, it’s just a humorous take on the author’s own point.
Please don’t take this as a personal attack but I really can’t let this go. You have said so many disturbing things in this thread that reflect a complete lack of empathy for victims of sexual assault and a complete failure to understand the psychology of a person who has been sexually assaulted, but this thing I quoted here is what gets me the most.
Why is this idea silly? Are you really so far removed from the reality of sexual assault victims that you fail to realize that sort of thing happens all the time? Are you surprised at all, with the attitudes you’ve read in this thread and others like it, that there aren’t women (and men) out there who actually take the rapist apologist nonsense to heart and blame themselves when this stuff happens? Society bends over backward to blame women for this stuff when it happens to them, and you think it’s silly when women actually buy into it?
I didn’t know what to call what had happened to me for years. It went firmly into the mental file marked Things I Don’t Think About Except When They Are Happening. A little bleeds through in nightmares, weak moments, but for the most part it was heavily compartmentalized. I remember reading accounts of sexual abuse or seeing them on TV and feeling bad for those people but what I was going through - that was something different, because <insert random excuse>. Buddy, you have no idea how much a mind can rationalize away a trauma, or for how long, or for how many times.
My mother married the guy who roofied her and got her pregnant with me, and it was decades before she could see it as rape. He drugged her and had sex with her while she was unconscious, so I’m not sure what to call that other than rape, but in her mind, it was just a thing that happened she had to deal with. I’m the one who had to explain to her that it was rape, and it still took her more years to come around.
That made it particularly hard, in subsequent marriages, for her to recognize what was happening to me even though her husband told her outright, ‘‘I’m going to have you locked away in an insane asylum and your daughter is going to replace you.’’ Years. It took her years after he said that for her to believe me. Why? Because she had no name for her own experiences, either. (I just learned that he told her that last month, and it blew my fucking mind, because he told me something almost exactly the same at exactly the same time, and my only reaction to learning this was ‘‘hallelujah, I’m not out of my goddamn mind. It really was as fucked up as I remember it.’’) Because after so many times of being told you’re wrong, you start to believe it. Hell, I’ll go one further. Long before anybody tells you you’re wrong, you believe you’re wrong. Being wrong is the path of least resistance. Accepting that someone actually abused or assaulted you - requires heroic effort. Actually telling someone else about it requires several magnitudes more effort.
If you don’t believe Cosby is a rapist, fine. I personally see no compelling reason to decide one way or the other. I just don’t understand why you have to drag the experience of actual victims through the mud to make your points.
I took some time to look up tone trolling because I hadn’t heard it before. I’m not trying to change the tone of the conversation. You can be a raging howler monkey about this if you want. It’s you personalizing here. If you want to treat this issue as RO and become overwrought and overly emotional about it, have at it.
My comment that you quoted and are responding to, was to Spice Weasel about her wanting other people to have a 'nuanced perspective" about this issue. I just suggested that if she wanted other people to have a nuanced perspective, it’s easier for people to get that if you aren’t calling them names. If you want to consider the name she’s calling them to be appropriate, that’s your call as well. But I don’t think it furthers understanding, and I was under the impression that’s what she was trying to gain.
I’ll admit though, that I don’t think the stakes of the conversation are very high. So far, the issue is about one comedian and some stories about his alleged inappropriate behavior over decades. If it translated to other societal issues, I might change my mind, but so far, I’m not convinced it does. So far, all I’ve seen is this one comedian getting accused, losing a lot of work and a few institutions refusing his donations, leaving a few institutions with a few less scholarships.
I’ve read this a number of times and can’t understand what I’m supposed to be personalizing. I’m not counting myself on the list of people being “punished.” I was thinking more of Starving Artist and kstarnes.
I’m not sure what you or The Second Stone have to do with my comment since it wasn’t addressed to you. I’m also not a guy, if that makes a difference. Since you’ve noted that you probably won’t remember it, probably not.
I’ve often wondered how it would be to not remember who people are and respond to them all just based on their comment. When I respond to people, I generally have some idea of their previous posts, what I know of them and the interactions I’ve had with them in the past. It’s not possible for me to un-know the history of the person I’m responding to.
Who is the “we” in the first sentence? How do you account for the “fact” that some people disagree?
Your use of the word “fact” may be technically correct but gives a misleading impression that there’s more settled ground than exists.
There is the “fact” that several people in this thread have disagreed that Bill Cosby is a rapist.
OK, but I seriously doubt it. I’ll think about it again if you point it out again, but since you’ve pointed out that you probably won’t remember, that seems unlikely.
It would be awesome if I could just create standard rules of conduct for my life and adhere to them in every instance, but the problem is I have conflicting values. On one hand, I value peace. On the other hand, I value justice. Those aren’t always mutually exclusive but they often are. I want everyone to feel respected and I think you can’t make real change without raising some hell. I wish for mutual understanding and I think sometimes people need pushback on their dangerous ideas. I also believe in lost causes, that some people are so far beyond understanding that the best thing you can do is make a social example of them for others to learn from. Social censure is a pretty damned effective means of discouraging bad behavior in a community. How to solve this conflict?
No really, I’m open to suggestions. I actually lose sleep at night over it. Arguably I’m losing sleep over it right now.
[QUOTE=Heffalump and Roo]
I’ll admit though, that I don’t think the stakes of the conversation are very high. So far, the issue is about one comedian and some stories about his alleged inappropriate behavior over decades.
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I don’t think that’s the real issue at all, though. I think the Cosby case has served as a focal point for some much larger issues about how we as a society understand and make judgments about rape and sexual assault. So from my view the stakes are quite high indeed.
First, I want to quote a small piece of the articles by kstarnes and Acsenray. Here’s a piece from Acsenray’s article:
SJW stands for Social Justice Warrior. When people are mocking other people, are they searching for understanding or self-righteousness? I don’t see it as promoting understanding. Social censure in small communities on the internet can often just solidify existing ideas. It doesn’t mean that the ideas are right. As you say, the solutions to complex problems are often in the gray areas, not in the black and white.
This is my problem with some of your writings here. Whenever someone (mostly Starving Artist) questions the statements of the accusers, you’ve claimed that he doesn’t understand rape psychology and that makes his writings misogynist. According to you, rape victims don’t know when they’ve been raped but can still claim to be raped. They can also act contradictorily.
In fact, in your first Pit thread that you just referenced recently, you noted that sexual assault victims can view events in the past and their relationship to them in direct contradiction to each other. When Dio saw a contradiction in two statements, that was explained away by saying that sexual assault victims can see the same event in opposing ways.
Yet, in this case, that’s all the evidence there is. There’s no physical evidence, just the stories of the accusers. The stories also don’t have to synchronize with external events since the stories are from so long ago. If people can’t apply reason to the stories to see if the statements make internal sense, how can they be determined to be trustworthy or not?
What are the larger issues that you think this case represents?
I would say that the Bill Cosby case isn’t about how society sees rape. These are 30-40 year old cases. On the whole, society focusing on 30-40 year old cases, unless something can be done about them, isn’t very productive. I think that society should be focusing on current cases with real solutions.
After I looked at them the other night, these statistics have been running through my head. 18% of women in the US will be raped in her lifetime. As a conservative estimate (from 2004), 4.5% of men have raped a woman. 97% of rapistswill never spend a day in jail. People can quibble about the numbers, but it’s a pretty big problem.
I’m not seeing how focusing on Bill Cosby is helping to solve that problem.
Due to legal statutes of limitations, the only justice left for Bill Cosby is public shaming. The public seems to be doing a pretty good job of that.
As for the people who excuse more than a dozen rapes with the myth of the myth of women always lying, the denizens of this thread seem to be putting a pretty good smack-down on that too.
As arm-chair internet warriors, we have left the Shagnasty’s and kstarnes holding their own limp dicks on a SFW and logical thread in the pit.
There’s a lot to say in response to your whole post but the bit just quoted invite a question. What are you doing to help solve the problem?
A related question: what are you trying to accomplish by typing the words comprising the post from which the above quote was taken? What is the effect you’re trying to be a cause of?
If public shaming serves as justice for rapists who can’t be convicted, should society extend that to other rapists?
First, I’ll just give a bit of the scope of the issue. If the statistic is correct and 4.5% of men are rapists (I don’t know the statistic for women), in 2004 numbers, according to this blogger:
There are a lot of rapists out there. If something were done about all of them, it would affect almost everyone in some way.
Below is a thought experiment that I posted in IMHO as an extension to the idea that the Bill Cosby case might be applied to the larger problem.
To make it more like the Bill Cosby case, I’ll add a few more stipulations. People could go to the story-telling registry anonymously. Bill Cosby has several Jane Does who are not identified by name. Any unwanted contact counts. Bill Cosby has a woman claiming an unwanted kiss. Accusers don’t have to remember the rape, just not have a better explanation for the circumstances. Some of the accusers don’t remember the rape. Registrants don’t have to give a date, just a time frame within a decade. Several of the Bill Cosby accusers have given time frames that span a decade. People could search on anyone’s name on the registry which would be kept as an ongoing project.
When the accusations got to a number that you can choose, the accused would be front page news.
If you think that’s a really bad idea with potentially disastrous consequences, so do I.
If you aren’t suggesting that the process be extended to other rapists, how does the public shaming of Bill Cosby relate to justice for other rapists?
I see that as mostly just message board dynamics. kstarnes is already banned.