I remember it clearly, and it isn’t counter-factual. It should be absurd, but disappointingly, it isn’t.
The thing is, people say “oh, we are not blaming the victim. This is all just honest inquiry about how communities can prevent crime” but then we see stuff like this:
There is no excuse for this. The whole “what if it was a big mistake/what if he thought she wanted/what if she did want it” thing is obnoxious enough in your average college/alcohol/date rape scenario (only because it’s such a knee-jerk reaction), but in those situations there is some room for ambiguity.
In the case of an 11 year threatened, taken to an abandon shack, and raped by dozens of men there is no room for ambiguity. There is no situations where someone might think that is okay.
There can be NO honest reason for bringing this up. This is just making excuses for the rapists.
If you want to have a conversation, you need to call stuff like this out, because it undermines your cause. When we see people obviously grasping at straws to defend rapists using cheap excuses, we figure you guys are just doing the same thing but you are better at it. When someone calls an 11 year old rape victim a “gang ho,” you guys need to step out and say that’s not okay. When they talk about her “boyfriend,” you guys need to point out that an 11 year old and a 19 year old is not an inherently abusive relationship, not a “boyfriend-girlfriend” situation.
Then we’ll believe your heart is in the right place. Then we can start talking about how to restore our communities. But god, there are some nutballs out there. Kick them out of “your side.”
Look, if you want to discuss the rapists instead of the girl, then you’re going to have to take a dramamine and prepare yourself to discuss the rapists, which will include possible reasons how this could have happened, and what these guys could possibly have been thinking. Many of us here are men. We’ve never raped anything but our own penis. We’ve never participated in a gang rape. We can’t give you answers to how and why this happened because we don’t really know either. We’re going to guess. It’s kinda like wondering how soldiers in wartime can sometimes do such heinous things. Most of us don’t know, because we haven’t done it and have never been in any kind of similar situation.
[George Carlin]
We could also outlaw religion and most sex crimes would disappear in a couple generations. But we don’t have time for rational solutions.
[/GC]
Sure, I can see a difference. I whupped the shit out of that page in Highlights on the reg.
I believe that margin’s point was that, first, that fictional comment is far from the most extreme one about the girl’s conduct, and second, that there is still an element there in that comment that seems to focus the attention on what the girl did wrong.
It’s not the same as saying “this rape happened because the girl did X, Y and Z.” But it is saying that the girl contributed to the circumstances, because if there was something for the parents to spot, then there was something about her “road” that made her a better rape candidate. I think there’s no question that this is an accurate observation, in terms of playing percentages. The trouble with that, especially historically, is that pointing out how the victim’s choices contributed to the crime is the number one defense to rape, right up to and including the claim that “she chose to have sex with me.” And it’s not at all clear how much of her life a woman is expected to give up in order to inoculate herself against those kinds of criticisms if she ever does get assaulted. Which lots and lots of women do.
So I think in the fifteenth thread in the last two years, or whatever, where a terrible rape is being discussed and the predominant angle taken in the conversation is “man, this girl was living a bad life,” it’s not really that outlandish to take the “why didn’t her parents spot it” and lump it in with the “don’t leave your cash where the criminals can see it” arguments. Personally, I am completely willing to believe that 97% of the people who participate in the threads are completely supportive of the victim and don’t actually blame her, but it’s hard to tell who’s who when everybody chooses to focus on the same relatively minor details.
You have to admit that it’s a bit off-kilter when so many people who apparently all agree that the most important thing about the rape is the conduct of the rapist, and that the choices of the victim are a far less contributory and far less relevant issue than the choices of the rapist, all choose to talk about the latter every single time.
Even if there’s nothing to say about the rapist, which is what people keep saying, why’s everybody have so much to say about the victim, given that we all agree it’s not her fault and we don’t blame her?
Because it is controversial.
The conversation about the rapists is a short one, since pretty well everyone agrees that they are scum.
OTOH, the conversation about the girl is obviously a long one, since people have quite radically different views about the relative significance of her situation to the story; and then, on top of that, quite radically different notions about the motivations of the people who have different notions about relative significance, etc.
In short, threads where everyone agrees on a topic will be brief, and threads where there are radical disagreements will be lengthy. Particularly where one side is evidently pissed at the temerity of the other in disagreeing.
In this case, it is because the counter-measures that should have been taken to protect the girl seem so screamingly obvious. What kind of dolt lets their eleven year old “date” a nineteen year old?
It appears that there can be no discussion of the circumstances of any rape. Because, sooner or later, such a discussion will include something that is not on the Approved List of Things That Can Be Said About Rapes that some people apparently carry around in their heads.
Because apparently that List is two items long.
[ol][li]Rapes happen because men are evil, and [*]Rapes happen because we live in a rape culture.[/ol]Anything else is labeled “blaming the victim” and the resident loonies start screaming at you and ignoring everything you say. [/li]
I’d recommend that you read the thread. It is not the case that “all chose to talk about the (victim instead of the rapists) every single time”. Like I said, the first flurry of posts were mostly about the rapists - and how they deserved to be executed or put in prison for life or whatever. That’s fine with the resident loonies, because it agrees with List Item #1. But then it became “what the hell were that girl’s parents thinking?”, and that was not on the List. And here we are.
Regards,
Shodan
If the parents of the child in question were aware of their daughter’s “relationship” with a nineteen year old man, and took no steps to end it, then it doesn’t seem to me to be blaming the victim to observe that those parents didn’t do their parenting jobs well. Obviously any kind of “dating” between an eleven and a nineteen-year-old is abusive, no matter what the eleven year old or the nineteen year old thought about it. The parents of the nineteen year old undoubtedly were crappy as well, but in light of the fact that he’s now an adult, their culpability is more remote. The actual nineteen year old is obviously scum.
But none of that detracts from the fact that other factors may be discussed, and I’d start those other factors with the question of why (if true) the eleven year old’s parents permitted that conduct to occur.
Depends what you mean by permitted, i guess.
I’ve read a few stories on this case (admittedly, not dozens; just a few), and i haven’t yet seen any mention of the fact that the girl was actually and explicitly allowed by her parents to go riding with the 19-year-old.
The best of parents, in caring and comfortable and prosperous families, can lose track of what their kids are doing, and this is especially true if the kid makes an active decision to defy or deceive her parents in order to do something that they don’t want her to do. Of course some will argue that only badly-brought-up kids will do this in the first place, but that’s simply bullshit. Tweens and teens can be very willful and stubborn creatures, and even the most concerned and involved parents can be on the receiving end of this tendency.
Oh, so now it’s her fault for who she was *born *to? Maybe she just should’ve been a stillbirth, just so you could continue to float comfortably in your own warm, cozy, gurgling sac of rape-culture ignorMANce!
Seriously, have you people arranged the letters in the words you’re typing and moved your eyes across them consecutively from left to right?
I have completely lost the ability to detect sarcasm in this thread.
The factor that I’d like to see discussed is exactly why the 19 year old guy is the scum that he is. He was 11 years old once himself and likely on the path that made him the 19 year old scum. Where is, in fact, the discussion of how his parents were clearly lax and didn’t do their jobs well? Why is there no interest in why his parents permitted his conduct to occur? Why is the discussion so much more focused on the parents who let their daughter become a victim than the parents who let their son become a monster? If there are no monsters, they will have no victims, so it would seem that the focus should be on raising kids to not be predatory. And yet that’s swept under the rug (because it’s “more remote”? There are young boys being badly parented today who will be the rapists of tomorrow.) That’s why people get upset in these conversations.
Frankly, I think it’s insulting to men too that the issue is waived off in a “boys will be boys, we have to focus on teaching our daughters to protect themselves” manner. That may not be the intent, but that’s how it reads. As if boys were naturally evil and the idea of teaching them not to rape is a lost cause. I don’t believe that, and likely very few of you do either.
No. You don’t. You’re almost certainly making it up, and most people reading along can probably figure that out. That’s the reason why despite this ‘clear recollection’ you can’t find the thread it happened it, can’t find the posts you’re alleging actually exist, and can’t cite them so that everybody reading along would say “oh yeah, that person really was offering up an apologia for rape.”
Your angst over the potential that someone just might disagree with you also shows how secure you are in your claim to clearly remember this non-event; if you were not making it up and were actually certain in the accuracy of your memory, then only an idiot would disagree with such a clear “apologia” for rape as you could cite.
But you can’t cite it. Because it almost definitely never happened. It’s as real as the “rape culture” that we need to fear.
Caveat: I am half-willing to concede that you might have stumbled across a Blazing Saddles reference and gotten bent out of shape.
Margin and her more hysterical compatriots are living examples of Poe’s Law: it’s impossible to distinguish a parody of anti-rape zealotry (the Special Olympics of feminist activism) from the genuine delusional fanatic.
Because he is nineteen, not eleven. He is responsible for his actions.
No one ever said anything remotely resembling “boys will be boys”. No one waved the issue off.
Regards,
Shodan
Then why the fuck do you still read it the “way it reads” when you are pretty sure thats not the way people “intend” it to be “read”?
Or are you (and plenty of others) just looking for a reason to make stuff up to get bent out of shape about?
Look, we live in a country now where 25% of high school girls have STD’s, schools where one in eight girls are pregnant and others where girls are having contests to see who can get pregnant first, and elementary school children are engaging in oral sex in the classroom, on school busses, and undoubtedly when they’re on their own. Girls are called bitches and ho’s and treated in ways that could be called disrespectful only as understatement, and these are the messages of popular forms of entertainment. So now, to a very real degree, these boys are just being boys and girls are ho-ing up in dress and manner and allowing themselves to be treated badly like this girl did because that is what popular culture is teaching them to do. Then add to that that so many kids are growing up with only one parent and that that parent is often female and only fifteen or sixteen years older than the child is, and this is the kind of behavior you get.
You know…(get ready for it)…this shit wasn’t going on in the fifties. And until people begin to realize that moral relativism doesn’t work if you want to have a safe and healthy society, this kind of thing (and worse) is going to happen more and more, so we might as well get used to it.
Absolutely correct, which is why I said if true in mentioning it.
Cue 911 taped recording:
Their raping everybody up here in the 21st Century!
But seriously. Starving Artist points are valid IMO.
If any crime anywhere bear as brutal as rape/attempted rape often is, was visited upon men with anywhere near the degree of frequency that rape is visited upon women, you would never see accusations such as “anti-rape zealotry.” If there were such an epidemic of crimes on men, it would be the lead story in the news every single day.
There isn’t an over-focus on rape by feminists. There’s a fucking shameful denial of rape by a male dominated society.