“Don’t you want to be a brother?” “We all had to do it, so you do, too.”
I guess maybe you could say this was the first and only year that rape was a precondition for brotherhood, but the past tense implies otherwise to me.
Many UVA students and alums have an insufferable habit of insisting there is no UVA campus, but only grounds. See also, “We don’t have sophomores here. Perhaps you mean second-years?” They’re idiots who like to think they’re special. Fortunately, some of them come out of there uninfected.
It’s absolutely irrelevant. The student didn’t write the article. If I’d written the article, I would have written “campus” too. The quotation marks aren’t intended to imply direct transcription.
Ignoring the cliche right out of the victim-blamers top-ten list, I’d not have heard someone screaming for help 10 feet from me at a frat party, let alone someone upstairs.
You’d not have heard Satan conducting lots of supernatural sacrifices either. Weird you think “men” are perfectly understandable.
At most, you can infer from those remarks that the “ritual” had been performed for four years. In any event, those words are presumably as quoted by “Jackie”, who probably was not entirely focused on remembering what those around her were saying at the time (assuming, of course, that this actually happened.)
Re the example I don’t think I can characterize the fairly obnoxious but typical hazing assholery described below as even remotely equivalent to a pre-meditated forced gang rape and violent beating of a female stranger. One is highly obnoxious the other is psychopathic.
The bottom line issue here re believability is whether you were able to get about one half to one third of all the pledges that year to be part of pre-meditated assault and rape gang where they are beating and raping a woman for hours on end. Maybe you would defy the odds and be able to get two psychopaths to team up on craziness like this, but seven?
This writer went out hunting a story and she indeed found someone willing to tell her a story. A story that the teller apparently insisted not be corroborated in any meaningful way by talking to the participants in the assault. At some point the explanatory gymnastics and excuses the writer offers as to why this is OK fail and you are left with the high probability that all the allowances you made to get the story has yielded a pile of largely made up nonsense.
In context, it seemed obvious to me that “We all had to do it” was referring to what had just happened, not something in a previous year:
[QUOTE=A Rape on Campus]
As the last man sank onto her, Jackie was startled to recognize him: He attended her tiny anthropology discussion group. He looked like he was going to cry or puke as he told the crowd he couldn’t get it up. “Pussy!” the other men jeered. “What, she’s not hot enough for you?” Then they egged him on: “Don’t you want to be a brother?” “We all had to do it, so you do, too.”
[/quote]
At this point the other pledges had already raped Jackie and were speaking to the last pledge.
Heck, the article even says that this was a noisy party:
[QUOTE=A Rape on Campus]
Jackie was sober but giddy with discovery as she looked around the room crammed with rowdy strangers guzzling beer and dancing to loud music. […] “Want to go upstairs, where it’s quieter?” Drew shouted into her ear, and Jackie’s heart quickened.
[/quote]
I can see where there’s room to question whether things really happened exactly as described in the article, but it seems like a lot of the questioning going on here is based on misreading the article.
As one of the few or possibly only person on this board that has cleaned up broken tempered glass dozens and dozens of times (broken car windows requiring cleaning the broken glass out of the door)
Despite the small “rounded” pieces every time I would clean up a door full of glass I would always end up with several small cuts on my hands despite the calluses on them. This is due from from sharp corners on the “rounded” pieces and small flat slivers that are as sharp as a scalpel and have a bad tendency to stick in the wound they make. Then have to be removed carefully often by tweezers. In fact in the older days before seatbelts became common when someone’s face broke the windshield the hospital would rub cotton balls across their face till it snagged then use tweezers to remove the glass sliver.
I cringe thinking about rolling around having sex on broken glass. It would shred the skin on your back.
Group dynamics can be really “strange”. You don’t have to google very far before you find a whole bunch of sports teams, clubs, groups or similar behaving in exactly this way. The bolded part to me, is probably the MOST believable part of the story and isn’t a stretch in the slightest
It’s all bending over backwards to explain how men are the devil. Why is this okay when substituting women/black/Jew name your prejudice would be anathema?
Nobody is doing anything of the sort, of course. Are you sure you’re in the right thread?
Nice try.
I don’t know if this happened. There are certainly some questions and things that don’t quite add up as reported. However, whenever any publicized crime comes into a little bit of question these threads just turn into the Plot holes in Reality thread really fast.
People don’t act perfectly rationally. Not every situation fits into a neat box. Sometimes group mentality and fear lead people to do terrible or strange things they otherwise wouldn’t.
I’m not saying it happened, I don’t exactly have access to any evidence, but focusing on stuff like “nobody at UVA would say off-campus” or the stuff about not screaming is really not much different from
In reading the web responses on this issues it’s distressing to see normally intelligent progressive people contort themselves into knots trying to explain how this incredibly and increasingly improbable scenario might have happened, and beyond this to accommodate the narrative by making excuses for astoundingly incompetent investigative journalism because of “the big picture”. This desperate, grasping magical thinking in service of what is likely to be a hoax is as bad in it’s own way as any of the Republican “Truther” lies and nonsense we watched play out in the recent past.
Let me rephrase it for you: When words are put in quotes that clearly nobody actually spoke, every other quote in the story is called into question. Especially when the central person in the story is anonymous, as are many of the other persons quoted. That’s not a stylistic thing, it’s a journalism standard. Better?
As the idiot in question, maybe you could explain to me which statements in quotes are intended to be read as quotes and which ones weren’t? If the evil rapey frat boys never actually said “Hold its legs still” or “I had a great time last night,” maybe the story should have made that clear.
Oh, BTW, are citizens of Alaska and Louisiana pretentious idiots for not calling their counties “counties”? It’s sort of the same thing.
Not “women” but single black women moms do abuse and neglect their children more than men, yes? It does happen, does it not? Oh my goodness. Clearly, I’m not saying anything, but women do abuse children more than men and turn them into abusers but I’m clearly not saying that.
But it won’t be remembered the next time there’s a thread about… er… unjustified things Republicans believe vs unjustified things Democrats believe.
I don’t know how much fiction made its way into the article.
It seems clear that key pieces were fabricated. But it’s certainly possible that when those embellishments are stripped away that a terrible crime still lies at its core. It’s also possible that the crime itself was fabricated. I simply don’t know.
Which is why I don’t take a position on that question.
Bricker, if I ever accuse you of depraved atrocities, I promise you I will detail what you did, who you did it to, and how I know for a fact you did it, or I will keep my counsel. I hold Rolling Stone to the same standard.
Oh, and Jragon, about your (significantly unattributed) “quote” about WWII? Germany’s actions were well-documented by witnesses, cameras, and trials at which the accused were offered a chance to defend themselves and explain their actions. Those are pretty significant differences. But ignore Godwin’s Law any time you feel like it, okay?