Quote of the day: Rape culture in Reddit

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inb4 MRA claim it’s the fault of all those false rape accusations.

Quoth Breakfast_Champions:

If anyone ever doubted rape culture exists, this whole incident is the proof. Talking about an experience of being raped leads to being critisized in the harshest terms and accused of being a faker. Posting proof of the rape leads to walls of text with upvotes about how the real issue in all this is false rape accusations. And then there are massively upvoted posts after the fact about how she basically deserved that response for even bringing it up.

That is rape culture. Where rape jokes are considered funny, actually being raped is your own private shame, and any attempt to talk about rape with either lead to harsh criticism, or a shift of the discussion towards false rape accusations. Reddit shows a window into a fundamentally rape-friendly society.

I won’t go into the details of this story as Manboobz and Jezebel have already analyzed it and provided the appropriate link. I’ll just say that this is par for the course for the larger Reddit community. It’s only funny because how much redditors think they’re some enlightened class, somehow above sexism.

 

Once again comparing false rape accusations to actual rape.

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Redditors insist that being accused of rape is just as bas or worse as being raped

I had a discussion on this issue again on reddit. I thought I’d repost my comments here. Unfortunately the person I was talking to deleted their comments, but I’ve quoted a part of it. Basically that person claimed that they had both been raped and been falsely accused of rape and both scarred them deeply. They were using their personal experiences to argue that false rape accusations can be just as bad as being raped. So I wrote…

Were you convicted? Same thing can happen for being convicted of murder, or any other serious crime.

Not to mention that this is not necessarily what happens to all who are accused of rape. Much of the time, the rape victim is not believed at all, their tale trivialized, or they are victim-blamed.

Yes, it sucks to be considered guilty for something you didn’t do. If there’s enough evidence to convict you, it can totally ruin a life and nobody deserves that. But accusing someone of rape is nothing compared to being raped.

Simply being falsely accused does not always lead to anything bad happening. Being raped always leaves permanent scars.

The basic point is that the results of fale accusation and rapes always vary. Some victims might take it better than others. But rape, on average, has far far worse results and occurs with far higher frequency.

Finally, within the current system there is a kind of zero sum effect between false rape accusations and actual rapes. We’re still at a point in time where many kind of rapes are not considered “rape-rape” (as some clueless media personas have called it) and there’s still a huge amount of rapes that don’t see justice because the victim was afraid to come out for fear of being accused and victim blamed. By making the culture more focused on false-rape accusations (i.e. more skeptic towards accusations of rape), is just going to make victim blaming even worse and thus more women are unlikely to even come out.

There is no perfect solution within the sociopolitical system we live in (which is why, and others, are rather radical about the change we need to have). But until then, I find it absurd to compare something that happens to something like 0.5% (or was it 0.05%? fairly small anyway as it only affects around 2%-8% of rape accusations) of males and has on average very little consequences, to something that happens to 15%-25% (statistic vary, but it’s a fucking lot) of females, causes horrible psychological damage, and is so permeating that it affects the lives of all females, without it ever happening to them, simply due to the fear that it might.

They replied to that comment with parts I quoted when I responded.

sad but true that an accusation is basically the same as a conviction in the eyes of everyone around you when it comes to rape

That’s just not true. I guess it depends on who you hang out with but this attitude is definitelly not generic.

I’d say that the SOCIAL consequences of a false accusation are at least as bad if not worse as those of being raped, and the potential exists for someone’s life to be destroyed just as fully if not moreso (thanks to the lack of support/resources) as someone who was raped.

Again, that’s just not true and I haven’t seen any study showing that this is anywhere near common.

OTOH, there’s never a loss for cases of rape accusations (true of false) where the accused didn’t have any problems from it.

Yes, the potential is there, but having a potential for a false rape (or murder, or theft) accusation to turn out horrid is not a guarantee. But every rape turns out on a scale of horrid.

Everything I know about feminism I learned on reddit

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MRAs are hilarious. We just write down things that they say.

a user in /r/ShitRedditSays (/r/SRS for short) has created a sort of Hall of Fame of quotes from men’s rights “activists” on reddit who presume to define feminism and feminists. In their own words:

How do magnets work? What makes the sky blue? What are the Olay seven signs of ageing? These are just a few of the questions science has yet to answer. But by far the biggest mystery of all is feminism. What is it? Who subscribes to it? And what does it portend? Until comparatively recently science had no answers to these difficult questions. But now, thanks to the combined collective wisdom of reddit, its Byzantine intricacies have been unravelled. In this thread, I will present the sum of reddit’s expansive knowledge on feminism. And as you might expect, most of the quotes below are indeed from the people who talk about feminism more than any other group on earth: mens rights advocates!

The results are hilarious, and not at all surprising for anyone who has spent a minuscule amount of time arguing from a feminist perspective on reddit. And don’t think that the quotes themselves are hard to find or anything. According to the OP, it took a couple of hours to create this huge-ass compilation of redditry, just by doing a fairly simple search for the “feminism” keyword. This is because it’s MRA that like to talk about the term itself, while actual feminists discuss the actual sociopolitical issues.

Some choice quotes to give you an idea:

  • Misandrist feminists want gender based apartheid, and the male population culled to lest than 10%
  • They sure do love their homosexuals, those feminists…
  • Feminism will not fight for men because its very purpose is to fight AGAINST men. How much more evidence do the men here need that feminism hates you?
  • Feminism IS the system
  • Feminism has ALWAYS been about promoting the needs of women above those of men.
  • feminism taken to it’s logical conclusion: Oppression everywhere you look. Paranoia and suspicion about every word you hear. The patriarchy is out to get you. Women are oppressed by evil men with impunity. Big Father is watching you. Big Father will rape you. Your only function as a woman in this “patriarchy” is to be raped and killed. Women have been so brainwashed by the patriarchy that they can never be free. The only solution – the final solution – is to remove the male from the planet and cut out the cancer before it kills you. Do you want to be free? You’re not free. You’ll never be free. The only path to freedom is to destroy the male that keeps you down. 77 cents on the dollar. 1 in 4. Rape, rape and more rape. Everything, everywhere is rape. Rape is around every corner. Sexism spews from the mouths of everyone around you. Look what men have done to you. Look how they hold you back. There’s not enough female electrical engineers because the patriarchy holds them back. You could rule the world. You DESERVE to rule the world. If women ruled the world there would be no war, there would be no sickness, there would be no pollution, there would be no discrimination, the would be no hate. If women ruled the world all the problems would be solved – forever! Doesn’t the world deserve better than what MEN can give it? Don’t you see how men everywhere are nothing more than a disgusting cancer rotting our world from the inside out? Don’t you see it makes sense that men and masculinity should be destroyed? Don’t you??!!

And that’s just the tip of the penis iceberg. Take a gander yourself and laugh your heart out.

/inb4 MRAs tell me how they find nothing funny or questionable about these quotes.

 

The strange phenomenon of gamers finding violence against women in video games funny

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Gamers sure love to see women being beaten.

This is something that always leaves me scratching my head, I continuously see videos of various games where women are beated up, upvoted and promoted in gaming fora such as reddit’s gaming subreddit. Those videos usually contain nothing more than a short sequence of a video game character beating up women, such as this, and this or this, and yet, the reddit and youtube communities seem to think this is hilarious, as seen by the amount of “likes” and upvotes.

Not only that, but if you see the related videos in Youtube, you’ll find a large collection of videos simply about that. Beating up random women in video games.And this is not only in Deus Ex, oh no. A cursory search will easily turn up videos of beating digital females in Grand Theft Auto, Saint’s Row and the like. It’s like a special kind of humour for misogynists.

For some strange reason, it’s also primarily directed against prostitutes as well, which raises all sorts of secondary questions beside the love of female abuse.

What do you think about this phenomenon?

History according to the MRAs

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Women have always been privileged in human history, dontchaknow?

Once again, I have to point out the absurd perspective of MRAs, just because of how unbelievable it is

Read the posts, women are not the victims of sexism and never were. It’s all a propaganda lie. Women are and always have been the most pampered members of this and nearly every society on earth.

oh, that’s not all

Name any society in any period of history where the average man had a better life than the average woman. Quit looking at just the top tier.

All societies serve women above men. Blessed be the womb of reproduction. Might makes right, numbers make might, and women make numbers.

And the funny thing is, that this is not an uncommon sentiment among MRAs. I’ve seen the same thing repeated multiple times.

Obviously these people are pointing out to the ideas of chivalry and how the women were treated as the “protected gender” in history, without really looking one inch deeper than that. They don’t care to understand that women were protected because they were considered far weaker than men, which was also the reason why they were not allowed independence. In most of history, women were literally either slaves (to their family or husband) or outcasts if they didn’t choose this path of life.

And because  women were treated as objects, as slaves, as inferior, as commodities and so on, they were protected as an object, a slave or a commodity. Protected because they weren’t considered to have enough agency or strength to protect themselves. And that protection only came as long as they accepted this marginalization, for a woman that wasn’t in her place, became the target of violence; from her father, her brothers, her husband or just strangers. And if violence wasn’t enough, she was ostracised at best, or raped/killed at worst.

Remember, slaves were protected as well, because they were a valuable commodity. But this protection only existed inasmuch as it didn’t harm the slaveholder. Were the slaves to think and act for themselves, they would be put in their place quickly and decisively by their owner or society at large. Their protection existed only as long as they were not allowed to protect themselves.

This idea that oppressed people can somehow have a “better life” than their oppressors, is a very common sentiment within reactionary ideologies, especially those who have a purely materialistic or crassly individualistic basis. So for some MRAs, women had “better life” because they were protected from external harm and didn’t have to work for their wealth. Discounting the in-family violence, the fact that they didn’t own the wealth (i.e. if they lost their husband, they were kicked to the curb) and the almost complete absence of freedom. This is similar to the argument that slaves were better than their non-slave brethren (that some slave owners actually used), because they were protected and fed, discounting again the complete loss of freedom. This is in turn very similar to capitalist rhetoric, that workers of today are better off than free farmers and artisans of the past, just because they have more luxuries available, completely discounting the freedom they miss comparatively.

There’s a reason why so many “men’s rights” are also right-libertarians and have quite a bit of intersection with “white rights” people.

In the end, almost everyone in the world can intuitively understand now at what price such protection and “better life” was provided for women and slaves. Everyone but MRAs, for whom personal freedom was apparently not important at all, compared to ephemeral wealth and shallow protection.

Name any society in any period of history where the average man had a better life than the average woman. Quit looking at just the top tier.

All societies serve women above men. Blessed be the womb of reproduction. Might makes right, numbers make might, and women make numbers.

APOC VS Food Not Bombs

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Is Food not Bombs unwittingly harming the POC communities it helps? Some seem to take it a step further than that.

A meal being served by Food Not Bombs

This article just came to my attention, and it’s just…wow ((Note: I realize that this is just one APOC who does not necessarily repressent the feelings of the whole movement. I just needed a title)).

I am not very familiar with the “race” tension in the US (I use “scare quotes” because I can’t really consider skin colour a race) but some of the things the author says don’t make sense to me. White privilege does not equal white supremacy. Someone may be ignorant on how their privilege display and use is harming poc, but that’s a far cry from claiming that they are part of a movement aiming to dominate people of colour. This is without pointing out that FNB does not operate just in black neighborhoods as far as I understand.

The next thing that perplexes me is that the author asks FNB people to give away the food to the communities that need it and go away. But this presumes that there are people in those communities who are up for running a kitchen, or distributing it, or whatever. But if those existed, wouldn’t they have set up their own FNB (or something similar) in the first place, therefore making the existence of a second FNB org moot? And if nobody is there to actually do this, then what? Not do it at all? Not try and help people in your communities with your own time and effort?

The author seems to be unwittingly supporting a kind of class division, in the way that they say: “I flip a finger to all you white college kids and middle-class punks hiding in drop-out culture, get your fucking privilege out of my face.” But aren’t people of all classes supposed to co-operate? Shouldn’t it be expected by better-off anarchists to use their privilege for good rather than evil? Of course it is privilege that these people have the time, money and energy, to setup FNB chapters, but I don’t see how it’s a privilege that reinforces oppression. Rather, I would think that it’s the kind of privilege use, that battles itself, by letting people know that they can  do the same thing, regardless of their skin colour or wealth.

I could be simply ignorant here. There could be specific circumstances in POC neighborhoods that primarily white FNB chapters inflame somehow, but the author does not deem it necessary to go into detail. The best I understand is that FNB dumpster diving might be affecting those who dumpster dive themselves outside of FNB. But that would be a class privilege rather than white privilege and something that I would expect the people actually affected to oppose. Is there any such opposition from people that cannot dumpster dive anymore when FNB comes around?

Unfortunately, the author does something I’ve seen many other times within radical circles, which is, use privilege as an excuse and a cudgel in order to promote something which has nothing to do with it. In this case, the author seems to just want white people out of black neighborhoods, regardless. The argument seems to be basically: FNB is white supremacist because privilege.

But I would expect a bit more explanation than that. I can imagine a few scenarios, such as FNB disturbing the dynamics of poc dumpster divers, or trying to take some kind of white charity role, or being a gentrification front. But without at least some clarification, it’s impossible to know what exactly, and how to avoid doing it in the future, while continuing to be of help to the rest of your community. But simply wishing that white people stop trying to provide mutual aid because they’re white, with no further explanation or nuance whatsoever, seems simply wrong.

Anyway, as I said, this is coming from my own, non US-centric perspective. If any POC are willing to perhaps educate a clueless European like me, or at least provide me with some places I can educate myself, I’d appreciate it.

EDIT: I just noticed that this is an old post, there’s been follow-ups here and here

Scumfuck gamers

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Ha ha. Rape is funney!

In this video, at 14:24, the player passes a random peasant woman in a village. Some guy in the audience shouts “Rape her!” The Audience laughs…

It’s shit like this why the gaming community deserves the reputation it has much of the time. It’s shit like this which drives women away from gaming.

This is what rape culture looks like. Fuck this shit.

Criticizing authors based on the characters

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I just read this post and while it makes some compelling points I’m not sure I agree with the author completely. Is it accurate to do a reverse psychology on an storyteller based on the flaws of the protagonists they’re making?

While I can understand the various story fails that Buffy and Firefly has, I can also understand that a story cannot have perfect characters. If Whendon was just designing flawless women all the time, it would just not make very compelling stories and people would rightly call him out for it. And if you’re going to have a flawed but empowered female character, she’s allowed to be flawed in her empowerment.

In the Firefly case for example, the author criticizes Inara for failing at her own empowerment at times, but doesn’t this make for a compelling story? Sure, Mal “saves” her (and it’s arguable that Inara didn’t need his help), but in the end she has to save him in turn from his own stupidity.

So yeah, Mal is very flawed, and Inara as well (albeit less so imho), but I’m not sure I’d characterize Whendon from the personality of such characters and particularly Inara’s story, especially when there’s others like Zoe who are nothing like Inara and don’t need any such help (and in fact end up saving Mal and her own husband more than once).

I’m also concerned about the “key points” for “Nice Guys” that the author is making. I used to be a Nice Guy and I never thought, for example, that “Men Are Evil, Male Sexuality is Evil“. Not even close. In face, I do not believe I held any of those Key Points as true in my Nice Guy phase. Rather, I was just very shy, inexperienced and awkward with females and my shyness was preventing me from making clear that I wanted a sexual relation, thus ending up bypassing it.

Perhaps I wasn’t the kind of Nice Guy the author is talking about as my phase only lasted until my early twenties, but given how little the Nice Guy Key Points describe my former self, I’m not keen on accepting them at face value.

Introducing the Confederation of Anarchist Reddits

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/r/Anarchism attempts to confederate all the Anarchist communities of reddit. Lets see how this experiment works.

Exciting A Black flag and the 8 tendencies of anarchism in the form of bi-coloured stars, surrounding the all-black "Anarchism without Adjectives" star. Below it "reddit" is written.news everyone!

We implemented a new initiative yesterday at /r/Anarchism, meant to promote solidarity between the various disconnected anarchism subreddits: The Confederation of Anarchist Reddits.

The idea is very simple: Using Reddit’s built-in functionality to combine multiple subreddits on the same page, we create an aggregated page including all the known Anarchist subreddits. This means that someone can simply visit that page and get an overview of news from all subreddits, even if not subscribed to each individual one. Then we put a nice link on the header of each reddit (although that’s optional) which is meant to grab people’s attention and get them to visit the aggregated page.

In the end, we’ve settled to the following look:

And clicking on the link, takes you to this page.

As you can see if you visit it, you see the latest posts coming up in all the subreddits as well as a list of the subreddits in the confederation on the sidebar. Now people can simply open new browser tabs for each article of interest and vote on everything discussed in all the anarchist reddits.

Now you might ask, what’s the point? Doesn’t every individual user have the capacity to fine tune their subscriptions to any subreddits they want? Well, yes they do, but the confederation is there to serve a slightly different purpose. The benefits I see coming from it are the following

  • It allows new people to discover the anarchist community of reddit at one-stop and also provides them with a launching pad into reddit they can bookmark and visit. It also saves someone from subscribing to a dozen low-traffic reddits they’re only marginally interested in, and cluttering up their subscription list.
  • Because of the above benefit, people who wouldn’t otherwise subscribe to a dozen different anarchist subreddits, can now still be exposed to them via the aggregated page and ideas/news which they might otherwise miss, might grab their attention. Hopefully, this will lead to a sort of “cross-pollination” of ideas between the various subreddits.
  • Because of the common link and the implicit sending of traffic towards the smaller subreddits, I hope that solidarity will be improved in between the various fragmented communities. In the end, we’re all part of the same movement and significantly outnumbered so it pays to remind and reinforce our common ideological bonds.
  • It allows each subreddit to tailor its moderation policies to suits its own style. You see we have various perspectives on how a reddit needs to deal with anything from Trolls to Fascist Agitators to MRAs. In fact, the difference of opinion on the moderation policies were the primary reason for /r/Anarchism’s Great ShitStorm of 2010. So /r/anarchism has now settled in a somewhat active moderation against oppressive speech. However, many other people don’t feel the same way and a few have gone ahead an opened reddits which follow their own perspective. From janitorial moderation of /r/anarchist, to no moderation of /r/blackflag.
    Unfortunately, because /r/anarchism is the largest and most visible subreddit of them all ((To the point that we’re the 9th link in google for the search term “anarchism”)) many people argue for their own preferred style of (non-)moderation in /r/anarchism still and refuse to simply move to another anarchist reddit because /r/anarchism is the most big and active one. And that makes sense, as it’s almost as a voluntary ostracism to remove yourself like so.
    The confederation aims to bring the best of both worlds. Now each subreddit can choose the moderation style they prefer best and at the same time get the benefit of the larger community which uses the confederation aggregation as their starting point in reddit’s anarchist community. This means that even if what someone thinks is a perfectly legitimate post about “National Anarchism” was removed from /r/anarchism outright, they can still visit /r/blackflag and post it there. They will probably still get downvoted into oblivion now that the larger anarchist community can see such the post of course, but at least they will have less a reason to troll and complain that those nasty “authoritarians” of /r/anarchism censor them.
  • In the same vein, people who are not interested in reddits which do not moderate, retain the capacity to personally customize the aggregation so as to remove loosely moderated reddits altogether. So if /r/anarchist starts getting flooded by Men’s Rights, eventually many anarchists will simply remove the reddit from view and in a way, “organically” ostracize it from their collective attention.
  • It will allow smaller subreddits to gain some instant traction since their new posts will appear automatically at the view people who are using the confederation. So if Bob creates a niche subreddit about guerrilla gardening for example,  they can still take advantage of the larger anarchist community, even if their post introducing people to it is downvoted into oblivion. Even if they don’t advertise at all and merely start posting interesting articles.
  • It naturally presents a core point in action, to outsiders to anarchism: that is the principle of federation between anarchist communities, thus showing how we value both communities of a common mind, and expression of individuality between communities.

These are just the initial benefits I can see coming from it. I’m excited to see how it will morph and develop in the future. I’ve already informed the community and most other subreddits I initially added and reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, even from critics of /r/anarchism’s moderation.

What do you think of it?