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The occasions under which rape threats are appropriate are: Not ever. The contexts under which it is appropriate to mock or make light of rape threats are: None.
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What the fuck is going on here, though? Who is Sarah Kendzior? Why and how were people mocking rape threats against her? I’m not interested in justifying jokes about rape, but I feel like there’s a ton of missing context here to explain what the fuck she’s talking about.
All I know about her is her work on Central Asia. She is an anthropologist by training and evidently now writes for Aljazeera. But, I think the point is that nobody should be threatened with rape and nobody should make light of any such threats.
Her CV is online here.
https://wustl.academia.edu/SarahKendzior/CurriculumVitae
I gather this was the Jacobin blog post in question:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/bro-bash/
It’s mainly focused on criticizing Aaron Bady for being a bit of a ponce. The reference to Sarah Kendzior’s Twitter reply has been removed, so I don’t know if she was truly being mocked.
I will say that Kendzior loses me when she complains that it didn’t deserve to be dug up because it was merely a reply, and not a tweet. It’s not a secret either way.
I didn’t see anything in that link on it. So it looks like it has indeed been removed.
The bigger issue is the terrible need and desire to regulate thought and speech of others.
In a free country, it’s a horrible idea.
And this is the big difference between the socialist European nations who outlaw speech and the United States that doesn’t. They tolerate Nazis, and communists alike.
Want liberty? Probably not valuable is you want to beat people up for unpopular speech.
Fuck off and die, but not before getting to experience a little of any of the pain you’re disregarding because it would inconvenience you to deal with.
Thank you.
kill yourself you piece of shit
You go to church with that mouth? Your mother must be very proud.
Thought policing is exactly what’s happening when someone gets rape threats for daring to be a woman and voice an opinion.
Yes, exactly – it takes a very Brownshirt-ish approach to thought policing, which is of course the great irony of JenBob’s idiotic comment. (Not that he’ll get it.)
FREEEEEEEEEEZE PEEAAAACHHHHHH
What are you trying to say?
We have, here, for those who cannot read, an online argument among people who – wait for it – write stuff. One of them would like the others to not link to her Twitter feed.
Oh, crap, why am I speaking in tongues to this thing?
Threats aren’t protected speech, nor should they be. They’re threats.
Threats are no laughing matter. Rape threats are particularly vile, because they’re a weapon to keep women from being full participants in our society’s debates and discussions.
You DON’T have a legal right to threaten people with violence, sexual or otherwise.
You DO have a Constitutional right to belittle such threats and their impact.
But the rest of us have the Constitutional right to say that not only are such threats beyond the pale, but speech that condones or belittles such threats is also beyond the pale – not as a matter of law, but as a matter of being a freakin’ human being.
So get over your “people condemning bad things are regulating the speech of people advocating bad things” rap. It’s a bunch of crap, honestly.
or stop being a weak subhuman whose brain can’t process words without get fucked up by emotions?
That’s right. We lock up Nazis and Communists under the Completely Fictious Act of 2014.
I know that is not true because Congress only names post offices these days.
And only names them after Ronald Reagan.
The Amber a’lee piece “bro bash” is just one of the most vomit inducing pieces of circular self aggrandizement I’ve ever read but since its so jargon laden and so self referential its impossible to figure out what the original offense was like.
Yes. Jacobin is a bit of a mixed bag but this piece is a profoundly incompetent and pointless exercise.
The commitment to being breezy and entertaining clearly gets in the way of much of an argument actually coming together.
It reminded me of Megan McArdle. The sort of BS that you may be able to get away with live, to friends who have been drinking, is revealed as poop on the page. My best guess is that whoever printed it has heard the cocktail party version. This would explain the redaction and then walk back from Jacobin. I remember a story about Kay Graham, a reporter was told by an editor, you can write what you want about Graham, but be very careful what you say about her friends.
Frost is essentially saying that using the term bro, which she calls “a cryptic sports metaphor,” in political criticism voids the validity of the argument. We don’t know what was in Kenzidor’s tweets, but since the main point of the essay is someone used “Broconomist” in a tweet about Piketty, so that means feminists are saying girls can’t do math, which Frost would never say, so she’s more better than everyone. I leave to your imagination how well taking the same attitude to rape threats would work. McMegan must be seething.
Yeah, I didn’t see the piece until after the link got removed, but I mostly couldn’t figure out what in holy hell the piece was trying to say (that young leftist feminists are bad for calling things that they don’t like bro-ish? and somehow this relates to them not liking math?). Which is ironic because one of the things the piece was complaining about is how inaccessible modern feminist discourse is.
I’ve liked most of the other things I’ve read on Jacobin, and in fact linked to them to give some of my more mainstream-liberal friends who don’t interact with anything further left than that very often interesting further-left things to chew on. So I am really disappointed about what happened in this case.
What? The Frost post is basically clear, though a bit meandering. Aaron Bady described using numbers as “dudebro” behavior. Frost points out the obvious fact that saying there’s anything intrinsically masculine about using numbers as facts is gender-essentialist bullshit. She acknowledges that there are right-wingers who use numbers deceptively, but that doesn’t mean that the left should abandon quantitative analysis.
I have no idea what Aaron Bady has or hasn’t claimed, but the Frost piece seemed to think this was a major trend among young leftist feminists. Which I think is a strawman. I’ve seen a decent number of leftists regardless of gender or feminism complaining about Vox, but I have not seen this trend of leftist feminists who hate numbers. For years, I have seen the occasional individual feminist claim that science is masculinist discourse, but nothing like a trend.
I’ve actually only ever seen those claims attributed to feminists in screeds about how postmodernism is destroying civilization (A House Built on Sand, Higher Superstition, etc). Usually it’s a combination of nut-picking and egregiously dishonest selective quotation. I’ve never encountered an actual feminist who was anti-science or anti-math for reasons of gender politics.
I have, on Twisty Faster’s blog… but they are vanishingly rare. IMO they’re more common among Second Wavers than later-generation feminists. Most younger feminists are very keen on seeing more women get into STEM.
there’s no jargon. maybe you’re some sort of illiterate retard?
It sounds like she was criticizing Kendzior for referring to people who threatened her with rape as “bros.”
“Not All Bros”?
The argument is that “bro” is too innocuous a term to refer to rape threateners. It isn’t a very good argument, but I don’t think it’s at all fair to accuse Frost of “mocking” the rape threats.
I don’t think Kendzior is claiming that it didn’t deserve to be dug up or that it was supposed to be a secret. Just that it would have been hard to dig up and the Jacobin author must have put a lot of effort into finding a tweet that used ‘bro’ in a non-approved way.
But Aaron Bady is a ponce. I almost always check out his Sunday Reading on TNI, but he approaches DeBoner levels of unbearable smugness.
As far as I can tell, “ponce” is a derogatory term for an effeminate man. Whatever Aaron Brady’s (and Freddie DeBoer’s) character flaws are, I can see some pretty good reasons to avoid bringing this sort of masculinity-policing nonsense into our accounts of their failings.
Insofar as I could make heads or tails of Frost’s piece, her commitment to bringing policing the boundaries of masculinity as a promising tool for the left is one of the six or seven worst ideas she crammed into that mess of a column.
+1
Hrm I misread the urban dictionary definitions then. Suffice it to say that I don’t like Bady, but I don’t like calling men effeminate.
I think Ponce once had the connotation of pimp but it certainly has overtones of effeminate–“Poncey” means a swishy or effeminate man and I think it can be used as a kind of intensifier for nouns.
I get “ponce” and “prat” confused.
Easy to do, when you’ve been drinking from the Fountain of Dyslexia.
This isn’t the vermouth I’m used to.
a swishy or effeminate man
That’s the meaning I picked up from watching “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” when I was 11.
cf. The Ponce Brigade
Who is Sarah Kendzior?
From the link: “Writer, researcher, critic. Columnist for Al Jazeera English and the Chronicle of Higher Education.” If that’s not enough information, there’s a CV elsewhere on the page. I’m not sure why you’re confused here, or why the specific details of her biography matter.
Just that I don’t understand what she’s mad at Jacobin for. It sounds like they were in fact not mocking rape threats, at least from their description of the removed sentence.
By calling attention to it, they incited more rape threats. There were ways to make Frost’s point without singling Kendzior out with a link.
Sure, that’s fair enough. But she said Frost was mocking her rape threats, and was not at all clear about what happened.
Agreed, but I’m inclined to cut her a little slack under the circumstances. Throwing her to the wolves in a drive-by in an article on a completely unrelated topic isn’t “mockery,” but it’s a kind of trivialization, an underestimation of the nature and seriousness of Kendzior’s situation. And if the initial response from the Jacobin editors was along the lines of “Don’t be so sensitive,” that’s also not mockery, but it doesn’t help.
It would be nice to have more details, but I can sympathize with her thinking there are already too many details in too wide a circulation.
Actually given the type of stress such threats generate I am willing to cut Kendzior a lot of slack right now. I think in such a situation a publication like Jacobin has an obligation to be more sensitive than normal.
This is totally fair. As I said, I wasn’t trying to minimize anything, I just felt like Kendzior’s article gave me very little idea of what had actually happened, so it was hard to know how to respond to it.
Well this is just the way twitter functions. Before twitter, Kendzior would probably just have contacted the editors and a retraction and apology would have followed(which did happen in this situation)
But instead, on twitter, the situation gets blown out of proportion; Kendzior’s initial response gets amplified by bystanders weighing in on her feed, some on the other side(connected to Jacobin) become defensive, a whole lot of bystanders become involved and what was once a situation easily reconcilable escalates into people taking extreme positions and talking past eachother.
The editors were right to remove the link and apologise. Ordinarily that would be that.
I think Ronan has captured this mess pretty well, but I would add into the stew Otto’s point about Kendzior’s mental state.
I am quite sure that, if I were trying to deal with rape threats online, finding my situation pointed out in a completely stupid way by someone else would throw me into a fit of anger.
Do you have some reason to doubt her description of it as mockery? given that she’s stepped so far outside her own parameters to write a rebuke like this? Really?
The available evidence does not suggest that it was mockery. I tend to trust actual, specific quotes of what Frost said over Kendzior’s vague and misleading description.
Frost’s comments were, nonetheless, uncalled for and obnoxious. But they weren’t mocking rape threats. It was a stupid and unnecessary argument about semantics. “Made light of rape threats” seems like the better description
Glad you’ve straightened that out for all of us and Kendzior. Good to know.
Sarah Kendzior doesn’t know what she’s talking about either, I gather.
Ugh, that was a terrible way to phrase it over there. I’m sorry. As for this, I can understand why someone emotionally invested in the situation might interpret the Frost article as mockery, but I think that, given that we can read the Frost article ourselves, we’re totally free to come to our own independent judgment on that.
I appreciate the apology, but
That’s… kind of not good either. I’m not “emotionally invested” in it, in that I’m not involved at all. Nor am I a rape survivor. However, my analytical take on it is that it’s of a piece with minimization of rape threats, which are not that far-placed from mockery of rape threats.
Urgh, yeah, obviously that sounds patronizing, but I’m not sure how else to make clear that I disagree with Kendzior’s description without blaming her for it.
Here’s what Frost actually said:
She’s not making fun of rape threats. She’s saying that we shouldn’t call people making rape threats “bros,” because it makes them sound cute and non-threatening. That’s a debatable point, and one that makes it seem like how we describe people making rape threats is more important than the rape threats themselves. But I don’t see how one could possibly see it as mocking rape threats. If anything, she’s arguing that Kendzior isn’t taking rape threats seriously enough. Which is a dick move in and of itself, but I just don’t see how that’s a mockery of rape threats.
You need to stop digging now.
And Frost is wrong in what you’ve quoted, anyway, so you’re now doubling down the condescending know-it-all schtick. Consider stopping that, right now.
When I objected to the piece, two Jacobin editors admitted that they had not edited or carefully read the piece in question, and removed the link. Then another editor, Megan Erickson, said I was being “childish” for noting that they had mocked me for my rape threats. She and others spent the day mocking and harassing me.
Why you’re struggling with this I can’t understand. Rather unlike Frost’s horrible Jacobin piece, Kendzior’s writing is clear and straightfoward.
Yes. “Spend the day mocking and harrassing me” is pretty straightforward. If you read Amber A’lee whatever’s twitter feed you get the sense of someone who simply can’t keep her mouth shut and feels the need to weigh in and pursue every topic that comes her way. I can well imagine that when the Jacobin editors decided to push back that they engaged in some pretty serious harrassing behavior via social media.
I dont think thats a particularly accurate description of Amber A Lee’s twitter feed, and you can look at all the jacobin editors twitter feeds to see if they spent the day mocking Kendizor (they didnt – it all doesnt seem amber a lee said anything whatsoever)
Which isnt to say anything about rape threats
That was my impression of her twitter feed. I did not do any research on the supposed social media battle between Kendzior and the other editors.
Megan Erickson’s twitter feed shows her reacting pretty defensively to criticisms of the article. I don’t see her specifically mocking Kendzior, but it’s possible I missed it.
It’s also possible one or all of these people deleted any questionable tweets at some point. That happens a lot when people tweet offensive things.
Erickson tweeted to Kendzior: “The piece is not ‘mocking your rape threats.’ This is dishonest, childish bullshit.”
Erickson’s not saying that objecting to mockery is childish. She’s saying that making up mockery that never actually took place is childish.
After reading Kenzior’s piece I felt infuriated – ready to metaphorically burn down Jacobin’s office. But after reading what Frost and Erickson actually wrote, it does seem Kenzior’s characterization of what they said is unfair.
I don’t see any fair way that Frost’s piece can be read as mocking Renzior or mocking victims of rape threats. Erickson’s tweet – intemperate and unhelpful as it was – was objecting to mischaracterization, not defending mocking victims of rape threats.
I think its complicated and not going to be answered by some textbook approach to the concept of “mocking.” A person could feel mocked, as in trivalized and taken up wrongly, by a stranger taking a single twitter post out of context and using it absurdly to bolster a bullshit argument about the use of the word “bro.” They could feel further abused by being called “childish” as though their concerns about their privacy and their real world situation as a person receiving rape threats were of no import compared to the right of some stupid, badly edited, fake marxist humorist to vomit her way through a pop culture piece about the word “bro.”
With all due respect, just a few hours ago you wrote “‘Spend the day mocking and harrassing me’ is pretty straightforward.” Now you’re saying that it’s not straightforward.
I think you were right the first time. Kendzior’s writing is perfectly (admirably) clear, and her claims about what happened aren’t accurate, if read in a straightforward fashion.
That said, I don’t think Kendzior is being intentionally misleading. I agree with you that she could easily have felt misused and abused by the original link, and then felt rightly insulted by Erickson’s tweets.
But even though Kendzior’s position is understandable and sympathetic, it’s still unfair to accuse people of doing something that they didn’t do. Frost and Erickson didn’t mock Kendzior for receiving rape threats. I don’t understand how you can consider that distinction irrelevant.
But you’re apparently willing to give Frost a pass for accusing Kendzior of something she didn’t do.
I’m sorry if I appear that way. I don’t think Kendzior should accuse Frost of anything Frost didn’t do, or vice-versa.
If Frost accused Kendzior of something, I missed it. (But I easily could have missed something – there are dozens of tweets, and god knows I didn’t read all of them.) But obviously, your principle is correct – for Frost to accuse Kendzior of something Kendzior didn’t do would be wrong.
I don’t understand why you think you can assert that Kendzior’s statement that she felt “mocked and harassed” on social media by the third editor and her friends is false or misrepresented. You aren’t privy to all the tweets or communications that Kendzior got or to what she was seeing when, you don’t have any way of evaluating what the impact was of hostile tweets/social media attacks on her within a single afternoon. You just don’t know and can’t know.
As for me–I don’thave a problem with Kedzior’s use of “mocking and harrassing.” Other people (you?) do but that,I would argue, is because you are using a very limited concept of the terms, not one to which I subscribe. I’m not being contradictory at all. I am satisfied with Kedzior’s use of language.
From Frost’s blogpost at Jacobin:
In the original version, the second sentence linked to Kendzior’s tweet-reply where she talked about the rape threats she had received. I haven’t sought that out, and I’m willing to suppose that she used the word “bro,” but not that she used it in order to “mitigate her censure” of rape threats. Especially rape threats directed at her. The word “mockery” is a bad fit, but it’s as close as I would expect from someone in Kendzior’s situation. Willful trivialization; utter lack of empathy; exploiting her situation to make a cheap point in a largely pointless article. Choose your own.
@Hogan:
I’ll pick all three, for $500, Alec.
Just curious – what could you possibly learn about her that would make the rape threats OK? And if, as is devoutly to be hoped, the answer is “nothing” what’s the point of the question in the context of this post?
The rape threats are not okay. I just don’t understand what she was mad at Jacobin about.
I sympathize with the confusion.
The link provided by the lede discusses something that w/o context is akin to coming in on a conversation mid-way. This is not about “questioning her” bona fides. Wanting to know the whole context is “reality community” stuff.
Trying to get exactly what is going on is not about being okay with rape threats. Sort of missing the point, isn’t it?
People then explain on this thread. I’m not talking about after that. I’m talking about the original question, which to me is valid — I too was confused on what specifically happened.
“I know rape is serious, but she’s not complaining about it right” is well beyond “reality community” stuff.
I don’t know what you are quoting here. Guessing it is some sort of paraphrase.
Noted already that my comment was specifically tied to the first think MK said, which was basically “have no idea what is going on here” and asking for info which is reality based stuff.
MK then tries to get at just what was said. The analysis might be off. But, seems to me an attempt to reason it out, not that throwaway line you provided. Again, “reality community” stuff that lead to some emotional responses that might be ‘from the good guys’ but a bit “gut” stuff too.
Perhaps ‘mock’ isn’t the best word for what Jacobin did. Rob’s ‘make light of’ is more apt, I think. In a piece complaining about the use of ‘bro’ as insult, the author included as an example of unfair uses of ‘bro’ a tweet in which Kendzior referred to her threatener as a ‘bro.’ Kendzior’s experience is thus treated as fodder for a discussion of the legitimate uses of the word ‘bro,’ which makes light of the threats she received.
It’s clear Kendzior was reluctant to talk about the experience and did not provide much details about what happened. Who can blame her? I figured out the above by following the twitter storm around the Jacobin article. The initial response of the editors of Jacobin seemed pretty good (apologizing for not editing the piece better and removing the link), but then a third editor stepped in an said the piece hadn’t been mocking Kendzior and she was being childish for claiming it was. Again, I don’t think ‘mocking’ is the best description of what happened, but the original author focusing on proper uses of ‘bro’ and the editor focusing on proper uses of ‘mocking’ make clear they are more concerned about semantics than about rape threats.
Kendzior’s description of what happened seems so vague as to be practically misleading, though:
Its not misleading–she didn’t include links because her principal objection was being dragged into Jacobin’s attempt at relevance, trivialized, and then stalked and harassed on twitter and other social media by the Jacobin editors themselves. She’s in the difficult position of wishing to comment on something which is happening to her without drawing more attention to it and without creating even more of a firestorm of hate, threats, and harassment.
Wait, now that the context’s been explained by me and others, you’re still harping about how vague Kendzior’s writing it? I’m not sure I understand the point you’re trying to make, but it seems to resemble the semantic-police-point of Frost and Erickson: Kendzior did not use precisely the language you all wished she had and, therefore, should be blamed or shamed or mocked (being called ‘childish,’ at the least, is clearly mocking) or criticized for it. All of which detracts from the rape threats she received and make her the focus rather than threats and the rape culture that perpetuates them.
That last sentence, by the way, was one of the main points of her article, in case you missed it.
You’re normally a good commenter and I’m really having trouble understand what you’re fixating on here, so if I’ve misunderstood what you’re trying to say, please help me out.
Ditto.
Yeah, I’m probably harping on it too much. I guess my objection is that I don’t like being told to get outraged on behalf of something by someone who’s not willing to explain to me clearly what it is I’m supposed to be outraged at. This is perhaps as much a criticism of Rob’s original post as of Kendzior.
But I should probably lay off. I get twisted up about bad or unclear writing, and apparently not as twisted up about rape threats, which is probably a character flaw.
Rape threats are awful and shouldn’t be treated lightly – certainly not as a thrown off adjunct to some stupid article about people using the word “bro”.
I had the same reaction initially – how am I supposed to know if someone said something out of line or not if I can’t see what they said? – but if two different Jacobin editors decided she was right to complain about something that Jacobin readers/commenters/community members were saying, then it’s a pretty safe bet that the third one was out of line for taking several whacks at her for complaining.
I did not find her piece to be either badly written or unclear. It was, I think, deliberately cautious – even vague if you like – because she hated writing about it.
So, a tad more sympathy in one’s reading – rather than a critique of her style – seems in order.
Thinking more about what led me to this pass, I think the key issue is a failure of empathy. I viewed the story entirely in terms of *me* – I was upset because it didn’t give *me* a good understanding of what actually happened.
Whereas, I mean, from her perspective, the whole thing is super shitty, and it ultimately doesn’t matter at all in the larger scheme of things whether or not her article clearly explained to *me* what was going on.
Well said.
That’s nice, Manny. Well done.
You’ve rather taken it on the chin, here, today.
For what it’s worth: yesterday morning I awoke in an utterly bad mood. I kept latching onto anything to be angry about. I eventually locked myself in my son’s empty room and went back to sleep. Much better than venturing online. :-)
You’ve buried the lead: did you sell your son to the circus?
Peace out,
brodude.That’s one of those super hard lessons to learn, and some of us (by which I mean me) seem to end up needing to re-learn it a lot. Well phrased.
@Big Bear:
Let me count the ways I love thee.
Harping on it at all is probably too much. Two things to consider:
#1. You’ve left a hostile, critical trail of comments in every single post at LGM of late that involve the problems women face, and you don’t seem able to maintain an awareness of having done so – each time the cumulative legacy comes up, you seem freshly surprised. Unselfaware toxicity is something to maybe scrutinize in oneself.
#2. Imagine a man writing in somewhat vague and allusive terms about his rape and ensuing harassment. Would you feel the same kind of need to zealously pursue skepticism until everything’s just as perfectly clarified as you might wish?
I have to agree with this.
#1 – Yeah, whenever I start posting and a bunch of people I normally agree with say I’m being an asshole, that’s definitely a good time to take a look in the mirror and see if I’m the one being an asshole (Answer: Yes)
That said, are we talking about more than the last two threads? I posted one really awful comment in the last thread (ugh, still embarrassed at how awful that one was), and then a bunch of somewhat less horrifyingly bone-headed things in this thread, but I’ve not been doing it in other threads too, have I?
#2 – I think so? I mean, it’s totally hard to say, but I like to think that it was just general assholishness, and it just happened that in this case it caused me to walk into being a mansplaining asshole. But, I mean, maybe it’s more systemic.
#1: Yeah, you have. I’m not gonna dig through archives right now, but I remember me writing comments about it, and agreeing with comments by Aimai and others. Maybe it’s time for a post-it note with the equivalent of “Is this trip really necessary?” :) Like, I don’t for a moment think you’re about to strip off your mask and run free to join the Jen-Bob brigade or anything like that; it’s just that there’s a real slump here with incidents that fall into a pattern. Fortunately, it’s something we can work on.
#2: Fair enough! It’s not like I’m writing here from a position of unassailable perfection (to put it mildly). But it’s the kind of question that’s good to ask ourselves every so often.
I took issue with your recent comment that the possibility of trigger warnings for college course content is “genuinely disturbing.” These two essays by academics make what I would consider a good case that a professor can reasonably accommodate these issues while still demanding academic rigor on the student’s part. Nobody is seriously suggesting that a student triggered by graphic descriptions of Holocaust atrocities should be able to get Ph.D.s in Holocaust Studies without reading the relevant material.
Ah, trigger warnings. I’ll just say that my concern is only with making them *mandatory* (which implies some sort of punishment for not including them), and that I pretty much think that this is just a hyped-up media frenzy, rather than a real thing that is actually going to happen on college campuses.
Also, there’s something like a quantum weirdness to ax-grinding. The harder you work at it, the duller it gets.
What strikes me is that that is such a weird thing to decide you need a specific example of, and even weirder that that specific example should be someone on twitter talking about a personal experience, and not like an article in Jezebel or The Guardian or something. It’s both fairly reckless and insensitive, given how women are often treated online, and sort of amateurish writing in how much it seems like an undergrad paper suffering from citation-compensation.
I know it’s not the important part of this or anything, but I’m feeling catty so can we talk more about how shitty the Jacobin article is over all? It’s ~2000 words whose central thesis is ‘everyone is using this fairly recent slang incorrectly except me; please follow the ultra-specific definition and narrow usage rules I have personally authored from now on.’ Is Jacobin making some miss-step in trying to appeal to its perceived target demo by reading more like the assembled-the-night-before weekly newsletter of a campus Marxist association?
Yup.that is the best thumbnail sketch of this kerfuffle yet.
Where would you like your prize Internets delivered?
I couldn’t find that, either.
I don’t know much about Salon. But, I would have thought that the people associated with Jacobin would have acted better. It is sad to hear they did not.
I agree that the author is a bit unclear on what happened. That is sad because I would absolutely write to Jacobin magazine and its editors and complain on her behalf but I can’t figure out what happened, when, and where. However I have no doubt that it happened. Rape and death threats are so common at this point that its more remarkable if you can engage in a public, internet, discussion without receiving them.
The internet needs to learn to calm down. Because people have anonymity, bottom of the barrel discourse is the norm. And it’s so much worse for wonen, because they don’t get insults which can be shaken off, they get rape threats.
Phrasing it as “the internet” seems a little silly. It’s not a disembodied bunch of people that need to stop making rape threats and generally being badly. It’s a bunch of specific who know who they are, in the main.
The framing is considered. I think anonymity leads inexorably to crappy discourse. Nobody makes a rape threat in a live in person political discussion.
I bet there are women reading this who have received in-person rape threats for being visibly political.
And I disagree that anonymity is the problem. People make rape threats that are non-anonymous all the time and in my experience on line spaces’ level of discourse if determined by how self-selecting they are and how heavy-handed the moderation and self-policing are. All the good spaces I visit online are either heavily moderated or heavily self-policing.
I like Jacobin, and they even have a few good feminist authors – their articles on sex work are usually worth a read – but they definitely appear to have what we in grad school used to call “Boy Marxist” culture at times. It’s not at all unthinkable or even surprising that the editors would have some contempt for people elsewhere on the left “whining” about oppression that isn’t framed in a political-economic way.
Hey, good to see you around here again!
Perfection.
It’s disappointing when people on the left perpetuate misogyny, but not really surprising. Hating women and trying to silence us is the one constant in this world.
I like the way a friend put it in an argument about sexism in the roleplaying game world: It’s startling and then revolting to realize that there are many of your peers who find it easier to imagine dragons and interstellar empires than that you’re just as worthwhile a person as they are.
Yes, but most science fiction (Ursula K. LeGuin is one of the exceptions) and even more so fantasy has traditionally been very bad at imagining changed social or even political relations as opposed to technological ones. I mean most science fiction in the 1960s still had the USSR surviving almost completely unchanged from the early Brezhnev era centuries into the future. So imagining more equal gender relations than exist in our own world has been rather uncommon in the genres. Although there are some stunning examples of more unequal societies like Gor.
What was the percentage stated in Sturgeon’s Law? 90 or 95, I can’t remember. I haven’t read super widely in sci fi, but I wonder whether the stuff that imagined for wildly such things as no more USSR and gender equality just didn’t sell as well or even get published? I bet there’s some old school sci fi lovers around who know much better than I.
“This has been another edition of Things People Should Know Without Being Told.”
Some people don’t get it even if they’re told.
There are a ton of hurtful idiots and morons out there, living out their hateful sexual fantasies with their Pez-dispenser sized dicks, and balls like two Tic Tac’s in a leather nickel-bag.
Ignoring that you shouldn’t fight assholes on their own terms (in this case, by attacking their sexuality instead of their ideas), I’ve never gotten describing their genitalia by comparing it to really tiny things. If you want to give them a (worse) complex, why not describe it in terms of large objects, while still dismissing it as tiny?
See if you can’t convince them that a flaccid 8 inches is an unimpressive average. Porn stars have the tiniest dicks, y’see, to keep the viewer from feeling inadequate.
If this also applies to jokes about prison rape, there’s going to need to be some more comment policing around here.
Are you implying that the moderators regularly allow prison rape jokes to stand in comments, and if so, could you please link to some offending comments?
I’ve certainly seen lots of Prison Rape jokes at other sites, such as Balloon Juice, but I’ve never seen an unrebutted prison rape joke or allusion here by a regular and you can see that if people make them once they don’t make them twice after the pushback. I just don’t think you can hold the site owners or the blog in general responsible for the fact that people will say stupid things once before they learn. While rape and death threats aimed at particular people are not understood as jokes and generally can’t be shut down once they get started.
I taught at a Maximum Security Prison in Upstate NY, back in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
And there is nothing, NOTHING funny about prison rape!
One guy I was teaching went in for murder for 20 years, and, a short while after getting into the prison, as he was about to be raped by two other prisoners, he pulled out an old sock he had filled with canned vegetables and fruits, and killed his two assailants. He had been told that that would be a good deterrent.
For THAT, he was given life, without parole.
I still cry when I remember him telling me his story.
Geez that’s horrible. And to think that there are people out there who think he got what he deserved, they got what they deserved and then he got what he deserved because…something, something, tough on crime. Your story and one’s like the OP (and countless others from every corner of the internet) are a sad illustration of how common the idea is in our society that some people deserve to be raped.
Yes, the guy, basically, a kid in his early 20’s (about my age back then) deserved to be punished for his crime – if I remember right, he was a new immigrant from Ireland, and got a job with some Irish gang, and had to “prove” himself – but a jail term is one thing, being raped in the prison is another one.
It sickens me to think that that still goes on.
But it does.
To make light of it, just shows a complete lack of empathy.
Even murderer’s are human beings, and deserve decent treatment while they’re paying their debt to society.
People who make rape jokes, are sick.
Yeah, but people who make sizest jokes about genitalia are just peachy.
As a small dick and balls man I’m ashamed by the hurtful reminder of my insignificance. Please refrain from such insensitivity henceforth.
WHAT!!!
No more dick jokes?
Net Neutering!
For real though, you probably should steer away from ‘tiny dick’ jokes (and their frequent traveling companion, virginity jokes) in these contexts, as they perpetuate the idea that misogyny is a product of males who are undesirable or unsuccessful sexually, which is both a) demonstrably untrue and b) actually pretty much in line with the MRA/MGTOW world view.
Point taken. Never again.
If I feel the urge to use a joke with collateral damage, I just change it to calling the person “Louie Gohmert.” There’s nothing worse to call a person than that and as collateral damage it insults only the most deeply-dipped dipshit in congress.
I know I’m late to this, but I also wanted to add that various trans- and inter-sexed people I’ve encountered have voiced how such jokes negatively affect them. So even putting aside that it directly reinforces a “be a real man, which means a large penis” narrative which is obviously problematic even if intended ironically, it directly hurts at least some transpeople, thus is totally worth avoiding.
I still cry when I remember him telling me his story.
Which you believed without question?
No.
I checked his story out with one of the CO’s – and the kid wasn’t lying.
Not EVERYONE in a prison says they’re innocent, and not all of them are liars.
Which you asked, why?
Because he was a criminal, and you can’t trust criminals, so obviously he must have been lying about it.
In case you were wondering, that was sarcasm.
Though I have known quite a few people who would use that “reasoning” seriously. And James Shearer is, in general, a reactionary idiot so he may be one of them.
pete,
Because I was interested in the cans in a sock that he used.
It sounded unusual, and I wanted to check that out.
Is that unusual, to want to check out someone’s story?
I wasn’t being an asshole, I was just curious.
Sorry if that offends you.
I think Pete was responding to James, not you, C u n d (love your nym)
One of the few bits of fatherly advice I ever got from my father was gleaned from the part of his time in the Marines when he was stationed at the Brooklyn Naval Base: carry a sock in one pocket and a bar of soap in other—then you won’t get in trouble if you’re frisked by the MPs, but you can convert them into a serviceable (and, if necessary, lethal) cosh almost instantly when likely to be needed (supposing your Situational Awareness / Spidey Sense is working, of course).
The other bit: when knife fighting, try to slice your opponent’s forehead, to blind him with his own blood.
Anna in PDX.
D’OH!!!!!!!!!!
Do you work hard at being a piece of shit or does it come naturally to you?
Given what I know about U.S. prisons, and I’m not an expert on the subject by any means, I have no trouble at all believing that story.
Fuck off. c u n d regularly contributes thoughtful comments to this blog
What the fuck do you do?
Damn. That’s bullshit. I’m sorry that happened and I’m sorry you had to live with it. The SO is getting really into Orange is the New Black and I too used to be involved in prisons (upstate New York-Auburn if you know where that is) and I just can’t watch it because of the associations.
Yes, there are occasional prison rape jokes made by regular commenters here, but they always seem to criticized by other regular commenters. The self-policing of the regular commenters is very good here.
Little to be done about the trolls and drive-bys though.
Well, I am happy to say I have missed those ‘jokes.’
I’ve missed them myself. I’d have lit into the makers of such jokes if I’d seen them in time, because prison rape isn’t funny. In addition to, you know, harming the victims directly, it also contributes to the general attitude that rape can ever be justified, as well as that prison inmates are subhuman refuse.
Once you start going down the road that anyone “deserves” rape, things get bad very, very quickly.
Yes. It’s like making the same argument for torture.
But what about those people? You know, those people . I’m just asking questions.
I actually had a [female] student once who said, in a discussion of prison rape, “Good, they deserve it.”
I was so appalled I could only stammer and stare at her.
Hey, rob a bank and you deserve to be raped!
Me too, though ‘butt-hurt’ makes an occasional and completely unnecessary appearance.
I don’t use that phrase myself, but I’ve heard enough people sincerely think it had to do with being spanked that I don’t think it’s necessarily a rape joke or homophobic comment.
Yeah, I never associated that with rape or anything literal, actually. Is that really where it comes from?
I actually stopped commenting on Wonkette when they got out of hand. Well, those and the constant fat-shaming and the casual classism.
LGM has always been a much better space with a lot of self-policing. Well, used to be. I haven’t posted in almost a year. Oh, hey, I’m posting again!
Oh, christ, am I tired of fat-shaming and classism in liberal spaces. The Twitter feed mocking the recent teabagger “march” on D.C. was full of that shit. But you try to speak up against it and you get a tidal flood of whining about “P.C.” from people who ought to damn well know better by now.
But, but fat acceptance encourages unhealthy lifestyles!
Read: I’m not allowed to make jokes about the blahs anymore, don’t take away my fatties too!
Further read: I have an extremely limited repertoire of jokes and poor improvisational skills!
See also, making fun of hillbillies, rednecks, white trash, etc.
It seemed, at Wonkette, like Rebecca tried to rein the commenters in on some things, which I deeply appreciated, but then allowed them to be shitty about other things without caring (and has been kind of shitty about some things herself – I remember her doing a lot of gratuitous mocking of trans activism, for instance, when I was last reading Wonkette regularly).
Ugh. Given the appallingly high murder rate of trans* women I find that especially unforgivable.
In fairness, trans anti-violence activism wasn’t what she was mocking – she was mocking things like asking people what pronouns they prefer, and anything else that smacked too much to her of gender studies. But…pronouns are an important thing for a lot of trans people. Big issues go hand in hand with smaller issues. I also got irritated that some of the writers, can’t remember if it was her or others, started frequently using the phrase “hate crime” or “hate criming” sarcastically mock what they considered overblown reactions to minor/obscure social justice fails.
Basically it seemed like Rebecca was very concerned that they not be dismissed as Internet Social Justice Warriors and had a tendency to mock anything that she felt smacked of that. This was a while ago so I’m not sure if things have changed at all.
Plus, using appropriate pronouns is like the least effort possible that one can expend. Given that it is important to lots of people, its ratio of “make things less shitty for people” to “how hard will this be for me” for bystanders is off the charts.
Indeed!
And conversely, not addressing people as they prefer to be addressed ranges from contemptuous to pretty damn hostile, cf “Democrat party”, or refusing to use “Chelsea Manning” or, to go back further, saying that Malcolm X’s “real name” was Malcolm Little.
I remember Cole once made a rape joke, and I chastised him for it. I’ve only posted like a couple of times since then on Balloon Juice. I don’t think he’s a bad guy, but he refused to take responsibility for it.
Not exactly a prison rape joke, but a “gay vampire jesus raping the pope” joke in the comments to the previous post.1152701″>
Very well. Take it up with Barry Freed directly and post under that comment. I am really certain he will respond thoughtfully and not do it again. I’m not going to argue that there should be a carve out for absurdity and hypotheticality involving gay vampire jesus but I do think that as a joke its pretty joke-like and not meant to be taken as any kind of actual threat or approval of rape as such. However, I’m sure Barry Freed will take your point and will self correct.
I left a comment for Barry. He’s usually a great commenter and I agree with you that he’ll respond thoughtfully.
Thanks guys, and apologies again. It wasn’t my intention to make a “rape joke” qua joke which is something I never do but it came off terribly.
Thanks, Barry.
Yeah, this is probably the tamest commenting community I have ever found on the internet. I have never seen someone get away with a joke like that here. Absolutely no clue what Ahistoricality is talking about.
I won’t talk about “here,” but it’s quite true that prison rape is blithely a matter of joking, including from some who should know better, and it isn’t just fine since two guys are involved.
I’m simply rather tired of men, especially, but also women, sometimes, deciding how rape culture most assuredly isn’t while making light of instances where misogynistic tools use threats of rape to try and intimidate as if they have every right to do so.
Yes, rape has been and remains one of the most effective ways that power-over is enforced in our culture. Yes, rape threats are never appropriate. But, sometimes I wish there was something a bit more forceful than “appropriate” to address the matter.
I dunno, maybe something like “you will now die, motherfucker!”
Counter a rape threat with a death threat? I like the way you think.
I presume with your nickname that you approve of escalation.
That would lead me to think that you’ve never experienced being used totally against your will by one or more individuals who believe that they’ve every right to “put you in your place.”
I don’t find it “escalation.” I find it congenially retributive after the individuals burnt themselves into my mind and heart for thirty years.
It’s just another WAHT ABOUT TEH MENZ boohoo.
Exactly.
What about the menz? If you don’t wanna be lumped with those who fervently support rape culture and rape jokes and rape excusing. Then stop asking dumbass questions about “how does she expect me to evaluate this?”
That’s simply old dried bullshit that needs no response whatsoever except, perhaps, severe ridicule.
Yep, the occasional male gets raped, more often in prison that among “the reality community.” But, most often, prolly always, in fact, males aren’t living their lives constantly being aware of the possibility being present, most especially when one’s in the place that should be safest. The home.
I’ve no doubt that Sarah Kendzior knows 1) rape threats when she reads them and 2) mockery, or “making light of” her concerns about such threats. Don’t we all who have received them?
QFT.
What would be an apt response? I’m against murder and the death penalty, but I am not deeply offended by someone on a blog thread venting some rage against rapists and rape threateners.
Shit comparison is shit. I hadn’t noticed that we live in a culture in which murder is supposedly condemned but in many cases considered justifiable.
Oh, wait. I meant, murder of straight white dudes. Versus, you know, domestic violence (“nagging bitches”), gay- and trans-bashing (“gay panic,” “trap”), and modern-day lynchings (Trayvon Martin, Jordan Russell Davis, etc.).
“I hadn’t noticed that we live in a culture in which murder is supposedly condemned but in many cases considered justifiable.”
This is really bizarre: you gave yourself quite a few conutere-examples to your own statement.
And I add:
1) the death penalty, which is legal in quite a few states, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future;
2) war;
3) the glorification of killing in popular culture (and “high” culture too, since the time culture existed).
Did you miss the “straight white dudes” in my comment?
And did you miss the 3 additional counter-examples I gave?
I dunno, reading the Jacobin post, the allegation that the Jacobin writer was making light of her rape threats is a bit distorted. If anything, the one offhand comment was that calling people who threaten rape “bros” was trivializing. Whether it’s fair or warranted to tell other people how to respond to Internet stalking is another conversation and I totally get why Kendzior was pissed. This is just a little bit more complicated than Kendzior suggests.
Oh, don’t be silly, how will people learn if strangers on the Internet with unclear motives don’t tell them? After all, it got the Jacobin writer to admit that she’s “sympathetic to the reasoning behind” telling women STEM is only for boys, even though she totally doesn’t believe it.
That was never quite her argument, though; she’s saying that there’s an idea out there among some feminists that quantitative, data-based work is part of a masculinist discourse that should be resisted. Granted, it is a bit of a straw-woman.
I know it isn’t her argument–the paragraph just before said,
so clearly all the sympathy she expresses for the reasoning (sympathy she expands upon in the following paragraphs) doesn’t cause her to change her mind about the appropriateness of women in STEM–that’s why her “not unsympathetic” seems so much weightier than it ought to.
And her argument at the end is, in part, that “bro” is populist, and anti-science is populist, so anti-bro anti-science populism is incoherent, and though it’s not a surprising POV for Jacobin to take, I don’t agree with it.
So far as the focus stays on feminists whose thinking she disagrees with, she’s essentially saying that anti-bro feminists are incoherent, because they oppose bro’s and the kind of bro’s she thinks they oppose can’t exist because their worldview would be inconsistent. That’s convoluted but it’s the best I’m going to do in a comment box on a Sunday morning.
I don’t think she quite realizes that she’s doing as much work collapsing things into the word “bro” as the people she’s criticizing.
I found the article so incoherent and badly written that I really couldn’t say what she thinks she was doing. She’s way out of her league as a humorist or as a theoretician or both. I gave it a good try and I’m not saying this to be mean. Whatever point she thinks she is trying to make it just can’t be worth struggling with the article. Bro isn’t an important enough term to care about or to police.
Well, I’m damn well not about to argue with that.
Not all bro?
This.
Yes. And it’s not at all helpful to make vague, general statements about A’Lee “mocking my rape threats,” while not linking to the article in question to give us any context.
I don’t think the Kendzior is under any duty to be “helpful.” She is a very private person, apparently, and she just didn’t want to be dragged into Jacobin’s attempts to be trendy and relevant. She’s more in the position of a crime victim whose picture gets published by the press as a side example of something or other just to increase page clicks. She pushed back requesting that her situation be treated seriously, not used capriciously in a way that put her in danger of further online abuse.
Thank you, Aimai.
Jesus, what is going on, here? A woman received rape threats. She let on, obliquely, to someone on Twitter. Some writer digs this up to flavor her own article and the victim was upset. Now, we are criticizing her for being upset, or not expressing her alarm in just-so terms?
As for me, I was initially confused because her post was unspecific and provided no links, so I couldn’t judge what exactly the problem was. After that, I got hung up on how it seemed like her description of Frost’s post as “mocking” her rape threats was a bit misleading. But probably his was not worth getting hung up on.
The Aristocrats
This.
Even if that’s the intent, like I said above, it’s reckless, insensitive, and downright stupid to link to a specific person’s twitter conversation about their actual experience as your example of that. “This person complaining about being threatened with rape is trivializing rape” is near the apex of self-refuting arguments.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I suspect that Kendzior’s reacting to being used this way as being mocked had a great deal to do with the Jacobin author’s effort to be clever/funny/whatever the fuck she was after.
And, yes, she was being used, her horrible experience of being threatened was being used by this dipshit clown to enhance her own article.
Christ. This thread is actually making me angrier than I was to begin with.
Right, Ampersand’s post upthread (or downthread, I’m getting lost) makes the same awful point all over again. Kedzior simply doesn’t have a right to object to being used in the Jacobin article, apparently, and god forbid that she use a word (mocked) in a way that eleventy billion strangers don’t agree with.
The thing that this is most reminding me of is the Rebecca Watson incident. Kedzior’s piece was a very mild rebuke, more like Watson saying “guys, don’t do that” about being accosted in elevators by strange men. And yet the amount of handwrining over whether or not she can call it “mocking” her or the rape threats is just out of proportion. Even if Kedzior is “wrong” in some existential sense and she should have chosen some other word for mocking–would “belittling” or “infantilizing” or “attacking” have been ok for being called “childish?” how wrong is it? Does it invalidate the entire discussion?
Both of these, Aimai.
This is one of the absolute best places on the web, but there is still obnoxious shit from not-even-hard-core-trolls.
see, I thought this post was going to be about the recently appointed indian minister, who said “rape happens accidentally”. I expect he may find himself “accidentally” hung from a lamp post.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/06/08/minister-in-indias-new-modi-government-says-rapes-happen-accidentally/
Ugh.
Given that Mr. Modi also wants us to believe pogroms happen accidentally, who can be surprised.
Serious question: has anything good come from Jacobin? It only comes to my attention for this pissy nitpicky crap. Also, you know, [BONERS].
My friend’s written an article in it, so there’s that. But it is more likely to be terrible than it is to be good.
I’ve read a number of good articles at Jacobin. I think Corey Robin has posted one or two there. Nice antidote to much of the centrist/liberal stuff one reads.
I’m a fan of Robin’s despite his obnoxious firebagger tendencies.
I read their stuff whenever a link crosses my social media (which is pretty often these days) and I usually find them to be quite good. Though I’ve never run into Freddie de[BONERS]’s byline there, which might account for why I have a higher opinion of it.
Yeah, I’ve seen a number of good articles over there, including a few feminist ones, usually connected to labor. I’m pretty sure one of the best ones I’ve seen critiquing Sheryl Sandberg was originally posted to Jacobin.
I subscribe and I like Jacobin a lot. My main complaint is that sometimes the writing style is too academic.
I link my wonky mainstream-liberal friends who are curious about further-left ideas but don’t know where to find smart further-left discourse to Jacobin pretty often. It can be very hit or miss, but there’s some very good stuff there as well as some incoherent messes.
I like it a lot. It has a number of good articles raising points that aren’t brought up elsewhere. Like others have said, Corey Robin’s stuff is great, and so was the article critiquing Sandberg from a feminist perspective.
That said, while Kedzior might not have been the clearest here, the article that used her tweet was both pointless and uncalled for. But I wouldn’t say that the article’s mindset was peculiar to Jacobin, or its ideology, or any ideology. There’s a cross-ideological internet culture of overreacting to women who complain about rape threats (while accusing THEM of hysterical overreaction). I would like for the left to be better than that. It often isn’t.
I like to think I’m pretty good at shifting my viewpoint and understanding where others are coming from, but I can’t understand the whole rape threat thing.
When you rape someone you physically and emotionally injure them, sure, but you also make yourself into a monster. As a society we glorify violence and many killers are venerated as heroes (Soldiers, cops, what have you.) Nobody venerates rapists. They are universally reviled. You can’t rape heroically. So when you threaten to rape someone you are really saying “I’m going to hurt you, and also identify myself as a heinous piece of garbage.”
I like to go through my life not thinking of myself as a heinous piece of garbage. Don’t these guys?
I hate to say this but rapists are not only not “universally reviled” they are often seen as quite heroic and manly. They did what they did, as they and society sees it, because “she was asking for it” or he was provoked or any number of reasons that society finds perfectly acceptable, at least in terms of some kinds of women and some kinds of rapists. At any rate rape happens, for the rapist, along a cline of behavior so that many rapists are quite comfortable with “their” rapes and their victims while leaving room to excoriate someone else as much, much, worse. Look at the popular fiction surrounding the notion that pedophiles fare worse in prison than other criminals because that crime is so horrifying that even hardened criminals (among whom are rapists) are horrified and take it upon themselves to exert rough prison justice? Its a revenge fantasy that people, even former prisoners, will repeat because it makes it possible to excuse their own crimes.
Rape is sometimes unrecognized, but where are rapists venerated for their rapes in our society? Sure some disgusting people might be willing to forgive certain rapists athletes or disbelieve that they committed rape, but that’s exploiting ignorance about rape and it isn’t venerating a rapist in their mind.
Rape threats are never in the so-called gray area. They are generally threats of violent stranger rape. Where are violent stranger rapists seen as heroic or manly?
Rape is used very casually in modern boy language “I totally raped that game” etc.. I also think you are confusing different things. Men, even men you may know socially, routinely issue rape threats along with threats that the woman “isn’t even pretty enough to rape” in online fora and these posts are often up voted by their comperes. Obviously people don’t do what they think is socially disapproved so if they are doing it routinely and semi publicly they don’t think its a bad thing at all. Its a threat of violence that is used instrumentally to banish women from the public sphere and a great many people think nothing of it.
Still, rape isn’t heroic or manly here – it’s merely trivial. In some ways I think that’s quite a bit worse; stranger rape itself is very clearly taboo, but all sorts of other forms of coercion and violence have been relegated to an area not worthy of serious consideration – we’re just supposed to “lighten up about it”. Because terrorizing someone with threats of rape is totally ok if no one is actually going to do it.
This. Holy shit, this. Nail, hit, head.
Thanks, anthrofred, this is precisely the point I was going to make.
Nobdy, the ways rapists become heroes involve denying that what they’ve done is rape. They call it “giving her what she was really asking for” and lots of other things, and they mock suggestions that this might be rape. They go onto reservations and “get some dark meat”, and might even agree that it would be rape if done to any woman they care about, but feel that it’s okay because the victim is Native American. And so forth and so on.
They think of “rape” as applying one when either or both of these is true:
#1. It happens to someone who deserves to have their body respected (which many bodies don’t, for them).
#2. Someone who doesn’t deserve sex with the target has it anyway. Here, of course, “rape” can extend very broadly indeed, including sex with the most enthusiastic consent and not actually having sex at all, just looking with insufficient deference.
“I totally raped that game”: when my little brother was VERY young, he made a haunted house tape for Halloween and instead of “help help” he recorded “rape!” He had absolutely no idea what it meant, and though I don’t know where he picked it up from, it doesn’t mean he was picking up on a coherent cultural belief about rape and sex. The boys you’re talking about are probably older but some number of them presumably stop using the word that way when it’s pointed out to them, just like you never hear people say “no homo” anymore.
I think there’s a fair number of people who learned that rape was funny after they already knew what it was, though, given the proliferation of rape jokes in comedy. The fact that it’s “edgy” and taboo is what gives it a charge, but most rape humor trivializes rather than calls attention to or disarms the threat.
Yes. That’s how it gets propagated. Jokes that people learn before they’re old enough to analyze them properly are jokes they’re most loath to give up.
Now that I think of it, in the 1970s I think teachers and people on TV would tell you if you were being mugged you should yell “rape” because you were more likely to attract attention. But even if I’m remembering it accurately, possibly it was not true.
Actually women were specifically told to shout “fire” because everyone knew that no one would come and help you if you shouted either “help” or “rape.”
They’re still being told that, at least in my neighborhood.
I totally raped that game is trivialization of rape, and part of rape culture, but is not a rape threat.
“She’s not pretty enough to rape” is what I would term a pseudo rape threat because there is an inherent threat, but even the speaker may not know it’s there. I also have not seen it EVER outside of people commenting on it, but that may easily be a function of where I spent my time on the Internets rather than its actual ubiquity.
I will, however, dispute two things. First that people perceive the Internet as semi-public. They don’t, and they often indulge in their darkest sickest fantasies online for that reason. They have an inflated sense of anonymity.
Second, while someone might not think saying “you’re too ugly to rape” is beyond the pale that doesn’t mean that they support actual rape. Now they may make rape threats without connecting them to actual rape, that happens, but that’s because they’re oblivious and lacking in introspection, not because they venerate rapists.
You are a very nice kid and its not worth arguing with you about this. But you don’t really know what you are talking about. For instance “semi public” means exactly that–that internet spaces and pseudonymity are semi-public and that action in those spaces, especially twitter and Facebook–are places where people interact (sometimes pseudonymously and sometimes under their real names) with people that they think of themselves as “knowing.” All rape threats are not anonymous. All threat of rape is not anonymous even on internet web sites–in fact there have been several well publicized cases of women being stalked IRL and on the internet simultaneously with crowd sourced rape and death threats. Please stop lecturing me on an area you simply aren’t well informed about.
And you seem to be totally misunderstanding and conflating things. I never said that there aren’t rape threats out there. In fact the entire conceit of my original post was that rape threats do exist and I don’t understand why they’re made. Then I said that nobody venerates rapists for raping, and now we’re in a weird argument about the thoughts of the very people whose mindset I originally said I didn’t understand. We’ve gone completely full circle, and while I will agree that outside of Western society that may not be true, it’s all just swirling around the fundamental point which, I guess if I have to distill it, is that people making rape threats are either A) Somehow supportive of even violent stranger rape, which is an outlier position even among those who would make rape threats/jokes or B) Completely non-introspective. They fail to see the implications of what they are saying.
I would wager that for something like 90% of the people who make such threats that if you sat them down and asked honestly “Do you actually think X deserves to be raped.” They would say “no, I am just angry and lashing out.” But they are lashing out in such a way that implicates them as evil, and that’s what I don’t understand. Which is all I was really saying.
I wouldn’t wager that 90 percent of people issuing rape threats would say “I’m just angry and lashing out.”
We are arguing because you are positing as a baseline that “Nobdy doesn’t get it” is somehow a realistic approximation of what other people don’t get. That’s just not true. It is not true that Rape is universally despised or excoriated, even what you are calling “stranger rape.” It is not true that rape threats online are just hyperbolic or are understood as just hyperbolic even by the people issuing them.
It may be true that a lot of rape threats are issued by people who don’t intend to bestir themselves to personally go out and physically attack a particular woman but that isn’t the issue here. You have no access to what they are thinking and no access to knowing what their real life behavior has been or will be in the future. In addition, as has been pointed out to you, not all of those threats are disconnected from stalking or from behavior which the women attacked may see as potentially quite harmful IRL. Women have been stalked, photographed, followed, and threatened online and IRL with threats coming both from far away and close up using the same medium (the internet) and with people who may not know each other crowdsourcing the threats and the surveillance.
You are writing that from a place that is incredibly, and I think dogmatically, more unwilling to take any but the male point of view than anything I have personally encountered. Even the pages of gender-awful books like “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” aren’t this bad. There are very few people who would defend rape, much less valorize it.
I mean, I see what you’re saying, but aren’t you exaggerating?
There are a lot of people in the world–billions. And there are a lot of cultures–many more than the modern US. Rape is a tool of warfare and valorized among many places and cultures. I’m sorry if that strikes you as weird but its true. This has nothing to do with being dogmatic or some kind of humorless feminist. Its just a statement of fact.
Also, though I may be misunderstanding your point about Men are From Mars/Women are from Venus, I am certainly not arguing that all rape apologists are male. Far from it. I would never assume or argue that. Plenty of apologists for (for example) the Priest scandal are women and when rape is used as a political tool or a weapon of war then tribal considerations override any kind of empathy as between women as a class and you will often find women siding with the rapists over the women who belong to the enemy.
It is unlikely that people threatening this writer are from non-western cultures, because they are unlikely to have read her or have any idea who she is.
She writes for Al-Jazeera and Rape was a component part several recent wars in Europe also we have commmenters right here on this blog who are writing and reading from Africa. The idea that the internet is bounded or that rape apologists don’t read stuff online in the US is just absurd. I urge you to do a little reading over at We Hunt the Mammoth and refresh your memory about Roosh V at Return of the Kings who routinely posts from abroad and is living abroad right now.
Al Jazeera English is intended for a Western audience. It’s like Egyptian Time Magazine but in reverse. That being said she might have non-western readers, but given that she has stated fear for her family I would imagine that many if not most of the threats are domestic.
Here is your original observation:
I responded that this is not in fact universally true and that Rapists are not, in fact, “universally reviled.” Even if you take “in our society” seriously as referring only to the US this simply isn’t true. Not only do we live in a multicultural society in which there isn’t a single, univocal, American standard but to the extent that we have a shared history many venerated White Americans (such as Thomas Jefferson or other founding fathers) were known to be rapists or to permit the rape of their slave woment as a tool of slavery and capitalist growth. And many important sports figures have, until recently, been respected despite being known as rapists.
Her area of academic specialty is Uzbekistan. I am pretty sure I first heard of her when I was living in Kyrgyzstan.
I wasn’t suggesting that the dogma in question was feminist, and I wonder why you found it necessary to say that I must be so ignorant as to think the existence of other cultures “weird.”
Your argument seems to be, here, that there are lots of cultures around the world that valorize rape–you’re not naming them–therefore it’s appropriate in a discussion of young US men and women to say (inaccurately) that in the world they live in, condemnation of rape is quite rare. I don’t know why you believe that.
I think part of Aimai’s argument is that in many cultures – including our own – some people are exceptional, are rapeable. Prisoners, for one. Enemy women in wartime for another. The prohibition on rape is not categorical – it only covers specific circumstances and people.
In the U.S. people still struggle with the concept that a husband can rape his wife. Sex workers are another category of women who “can’t” be raped.
Exactly.
I am particularly fond of the ‘no marital rape’ monsters who cloak their misogyny in religion.
Actually – didn’t the incelinsane guy trot that out?
There is still no law against spousal rape in Ghana. Although there is some agitation by gender equality activists for one.
Yes!
I was thinking more of cases where it’s recognized as forcible assault and consent is irrelevant, but you’re brought in another (important) distinction entirely, those cases where consent is automatic and perpetual.
There’s a thread between the two, of course. Aimai’s appropriately disturbing passive voice phrasing below – bad girls have sex happen to them – nails it.
In the US it is OK to rape enemy women in wartime?
Not officially, but it has happened and gone unpunished.
Technically no but practically–were the assaults on the prisoners in Abu Ghraib not sexual assault? Supposedly one of the reasons the Iraqis were bombing and attacking the prison itself was that female Iraqi prisoners had smuggled out information that they were being raped by the prison guards. Rape of male and female prisoners in the US is quite common and until the case of Jo Ann Little went completely unremarked and unpunished.
erm, conceived of as automatic and perpetual, I mean.
Nobdy’s comment was about all people, in all places. Although the conversation started by being about specific threats to one specific woman (and we can presume but we are probably wrong to assume that they were all from the US since she FUCKING WRITES FOR AL JAZEERA) his comment was broadly phrased and implicated all men threatening rape on the internet and implied a universal rejection of rapists and rape. That simply does not exist. Not only is rape not universally seen as a negative act or unmanly or any of the other adjectives nobdy used but it is not seen as wrong when applied to specific types of women (or men).
You are right (BS) to call me on my use of the word feminist. I read your comment too fast. I did not understand (and still don’t) your weird assertion that I’m taking a male gaze point of view. I’m not. I’m just stating the facts about rape and rape culture. It is used to keep women in line, rapists may or may not be seen as legitimately policing the boundaries of safe places for women/safe types of women but they often are or can be. And women are often forced to ally themselves with the rapists from their group over and against the imagined rapists from the other group or to defenestrate women (such as prostitutes, gypsies, non virgins) in order to stay safe themselves.
“Universally” is generally understood to apply only within the culture being discussed. Nobody would have any interest, in this thread, in discussing universal human nature or history-transcending cultural constants.
Certainly taking “male gaze” to be a fact about the world, and every possible male-female conflict in it, is what I meant by “dogma,” and I resent that your last paragraph suggests that I’m being anti-woman or even anti-feminist by failing to understand that men are always in charge.
I have no idea where you are getting this totally faked up outrage. I have never said or implied that “men are always in charge” and, in fact, have specifically included both male rape of other males and female complicity in my discussion.
I’m sorry, Bianca, but ‘universally’ is very much the opposite of ‘culturally specific.’
And,
?
Why not?
Because if you’re talking about a specific rape threat case that took place in a specific country, the same country you’re in while you’re talking, it would be unreasonable for a second person to start saying “but Taliban.” What in the world could the implication be?
“Universally” is fairly often used in a culturally-specific way, logical or not, to mean “everyone in this society” or “everyone whose opinion matters in this society.” (With or without the implied assumption that “only this society matters.”)
You really, really, really need to read more feminist blogs on the subject of rape.
Ever hear of Steubenville? Just for starters?
First of all the Steubenville rapists were not “venerated” they were just called non-rapists. And they were called non-rapists because people who liked them for other reasons couldn’t hold both their high opinion of the perpetrators and that the perpetrators in their heads simultaneously.
That’s the whole thing. To call someone a rapist is to call them horrible, so our society resists putting that label on people they otherwise like.
That is veneration. If they weren’t in the venerated group, they would not have gotten the sympathy at all.
In certain corners, though, they absolutely were venerated, or at least turned into some sort of tragic “real victims”. Traces of this even trickled in to the media coverage – the long, sad shots of boys in court, boys who had “lost so much”.
Yes–the public that venerated them were reluctant to call them rapists not because they thought the boys hadn’t sexually abused the girl but because they thought she deserved it,she was asking for it, and that nothing is wrong with sexually abusing or urinating on a girl who is helpless or drunk or drugged. Its some kind of weird logic chopping to buy into the notion that they werent’ called “rapists” because the word rapist is so despised. They weren’t called “rapists” because their supporters don’t think thatbad girls can be raped. Bad girls have sex happen to them. Bad girls consent to be treated like garbage and good boys just do whatever boys do.
And, let’s be practical: one can
1) know that rape is a crime, and a generally despised one, so that one knows to avoid that ascription to people one likes
and, in fact, still
2) approve of it in one’s own head.
You disgusting monster.
This might be extreme. He’s being remarkably ignorant, but it might come from a good place.
Once, long (long, long) ago, I said that ‘no one thinks wife beating is okay.’ Of course, I meant that ‘no one I have encountered thinks wife beating is ok.’ Which, probably, should have been further corrected to be “no one I have encountered and who was honest with me…’
I think some of us all too familiar with the cesspools of MRAs and PUAs, etc., can easily come to believe that no one could honestly be ignorant of them. But, that is not true, and *that* is why things like #yesallwomen area social good.
I read it like that intially as well, but I think it’s a play on words from Tristan (ie “Nobody venerates rapists” , says ‘nobody’)
Yeah I thought that was pretty obvious
Alas, it wasn’t. (For me, probably because I [internally] pronounce “Nobdy” as it’s spelled.)
Well in that case I apologize to Nobdy
And, I apologize to you.
Jeesh, what a day. :-)
Joking aside, I’m not going to belabour this because other people are getting into it above, but ‘there’s no such thing as heroic/justified rape’ is in the same category as most ‘nobody supports X’ statements: it’s obviously not strictly true, or it would never come up. We make statements like that as a way of othering (certain types of) criminal persons and behaviours, and as with most types of othering it has a dual purpose of both dehumanizing the other AND serving as a sort of no-true-scotsman for ‘normal’ people. I/my best friend/my favourite sports team could not have raped that girl because I/he/they am not a rapist. What I mean is you’re sort of talking past/arguing semantics with people when you distinguish ‘being called non-rapists’ and ‘being venerated as rapists’ above.
I want to emphasize I’m not trying to condemn you here. It can be a tough one to wrap your head around, after all my core argument here could be accurately (if not adequately) phrased as “you shouldn’t dehumanize rapists”, to which a lot of good, reasonable people’s knee jerk reaction would be “why the fuck not?”, and quite understandably so. The problem is that when people start talking about ‘the rapist’, ‘the criminal’, or even ‘the pedophile’ as if they were an alien species rather than as persons who chose to perform a vile act, it leads to a place where people find themselves re-assessing the act because of the person, and not vice-versa. You can find even quite recent court decisions where it’s possible to see this in action. You’d be utterly shocked to learn how young a girl can get and still be characterized, by a judge handing down a sentence to her abuser, as ‘leading him on’. A particularly unsettling one I read as a student had a judge justify a lenient sentence because (I don’t usually do this, which should tell you how bad it is, but trigger warning for the rest of this sentence, which I’m going to take the added precaution of distinguishing in a quote box for those who’d like to skip it):
This got longer than I meant it to and kind of tangential, so to bring it back around: the reason ‘no one venerates a rapist’ is because the concept of a rapist has been heavily folklorized in a way that’s inextricable from how rape apologetics are structured. No one explicitly venerates rapists as rapists, but idea of (some) rape as necessary, laudable, even heroic is still with us. Consider the implications of the rape-apologist phrase ‘she was asking for it’. This doesn’t just shift responsibility on to the victim (‘she should have been more careful’ covers that base already), it also implies an element of desert, that is punishment for a transgression, typically of moral and gendered character (the cliche short skirt). No one wants to explicitly link this sentiment to a statement of ‘I’m with the rapist on this one’, so the perpetrator is erased from the statement in a ‘don’t want to know how the sausages get made’ fashion, but the implications are that the rapist is at worst performing a necessary evil, the details of the rape may be unpleasant, but the fact of the rape’s occurrence is, itself, essentially an act of justice.
Put another way, society has been very successful in vilifying the word rapist. When it comes to actual people fitting the definition of ‘one who commits at least one rape’ the popular sentiment tends to be much more mixed.
That came out as a rambly load because my brain is hot free-associating garbage today, just read this:
People are capable of excusing, justifying, even applauding rape and rapists, they simply avoid using those specific words when they do so. Rape denial and rape veneration may not be the exact same thing, but they’re complementary.
I thought that distinction was Nobdy’s point: no one venerates rapists for raping, but they may well venerate people who rape by denying that what they did was “real” rape. In fact that’s probably how, cognitively speaking, rape can remain considered one of the worst possible crimes AND not be at all one of the least common. Think of Whoopi Goldberg on Roman Polanski, distinguishing between “rape” and “_rape_ rape.”
Yeah, it’s possible there’s a lot of speaking at cross purposes here
Thank you, this is an excellent post and basically what I was trying to get at in my argument with Nobdy.
The thing is and Nobdy isn’t at fault with this but it is damned irritating–I get really tired of nice guys explaining to me how shocked and appalled and unimaginable it is that (lots of) guys do some horrible thing to women. How its “just a way of speaking” or its a “misunderstanding” or its in some other culture or state or time.
Its right up there with white people (I assume) explaining to black people that “no one know uses the n word” or “its terrible what those southerners did to you black people before the civil rights act.” Racism is still ongoing. Not using a word doesn’t mean that racism isn’t happening even right in a conversation that I, myself, might be having with a black person. Racism isn’t something that happens far away among distant people who are utterly not me. I mean–its true I’m not a racist and I never use mean, racist terms and blah blah blah–but so what? This is a real world problem that real world people are having right now and maybe they are trying to tell me about their experiences and get me to understand more than a merely negative or horrified stance can do.
At a certain point “I’m shocked and innocent” isn’t as useful an organizing principle as “I’m empathetic, willing to listen, and looking for solutions.”
Pretty strong case here, sounds about right.
well bonus points for getting me reading her website – it looks fascinating, thanks Prof F
Me too. Seems like a good writer based on reading her last half-dozen posts.
From that Jacobin piece:
After a link to Hugo Schwyzer. What is binary fallacy. What are strawman.
Oh, wait. I cannot. even.
Brocialist – because we ought to love them for their ‘politics’ while pretending their misogyny is not political.
I think there is a tendency among some Marxists to be overly concerned with economic and class issues to the exclusion of things like gender. But, in real terms even the most radical attempts to create greater gender equality have had great difficulties overcoming “traditions” of inequality. In many ways it may be the most difficult sector society to equalize. One way to deal with the problem is just to ignore continuing inequalities after a while and even to allow a steady regression.
Well said, Otto.
Oh no, it’s . . . THE STRAWMAN!
Schwyzer? Cthulu wept.
Does anyone know what the other one was besides Jacobin?
Salon; Elias Isquith is a regular there, and he tweeted something dismissive about it, then deleted the tweet.
I wonder if Twitter functions as a kind of id for some people, with the ego and superego chiming in only after the damage is done.*
*Or, the cat’s out of the bag.
Hell’s bells, the whole fucking Internet functions as a kind of id for some people.
Yeah.
Oh. I saw the reference to Salon but I wouldn’t call it a “leftist publication”, certainly not in the same sense Jacobin is. It’s more of a pop-culture thing with a liberal bent like Huffington Post or Gawker, right?
Good to know there’s only one publication I have to lose respect for here.
Zackly.
So, tough day here at LGM. I am going to ‘officially’ sign off in hopes that I will not return and that I can get to sleep at some point.
And to all a good night.
After this topic, the nicest thing I can wish anyone is deep, dreamless sleep.
If I wake up feeling refreshed tomorrow I’m going to be really pissed off you didn’t wish everyone a huge bag of cash instead
I’ve been following this Sarah Kendzior brouhaha for awhile. My conclusion is that if indeed Kendzior has getting rape threats, perhaps some of her rhetoric is understandable as the emotional reaction of a person under stress. The facts, however, don’t support her characterization of the Amber A’lee Frost article in Jacobin. Kendzior claims that the article linked to her tweets in order to “viciously mock my potential rape.” That’s just not true. It’s actually a stretch to conclude that Frost’s article mocked Kendzior at all, and Frost certainly didn’t “viciously” mock her. At worst, Frost carelessly referenced Kenzior’s tweet to make a rather trivial argument about overuse of the word “bro.” If Frost was mocking anything, it was the word “bro,” not rape threats.
More fundamentally, though, Kendzior is guilty herself of the same thing that she accuses Frost of doing. Kendzior claims that mentioning rape threats provokes more rape threats, and that therefore Frost is endangering her life by linking to the place where Kenzior mentioned receiving rape threats. If that’s the case, then Kendzior shouldn’t have tweeted about the threats to begin with, and her first line of self-defense upon noticing Frost’s article should have been to delete her own tweet and then privately contact Jacobin and ask them to remove the link. Instead, she provoked a twitterstorm in which dozens, if not hundreds of people have tweeted some version of “Sarah Kendzior received rape threats” within the last 24 hours. Kendzior’s own twitter feed alone contains dozens of recent tweets to that effect.
If Kendzior thinks mentioning rape threats publicly attracts more threats, why is she herself mentioning them now in virtually every tweet she posts? She and her supporters have certainly drawn more attention to the threats than could have possibly been generated by a single hyperlink buried near the bottom of a tedious article in Jacobin. Speaking personally, I’m certain that I would have never even heard of or read the Jacobin article if not for the twitterstorm around it that Kendzior herself stirred up.
I also have to question Kendzior’s claim that linking to her tweet was somehow off-limits because her tweet was a “reply” to someone else. As a journalist, she certainly should know that anything you post publicly on the internet is public. If you don’t want it public, send a private message or an email.
Finally, if mentioning rape threats is itself an incitement to more rape threats, then a number of feminist organizations are going to have to rethink their organizing strategy. Websites like the Geek Feminism Blog make it their business to systematically collect and publish allegations of online and offline harassment of women, including rape threats. If publishing this information simply incites more threats, then feminists themselves are making the situation worse, not better. But that makes no sense to me, and I see plenty of feminists arguing that the best way to end harassment is to talk about it publicly and expose the harassers.
Of course, Kendzior is certainly entitled to choose when and whether to publicly discuss threats that she receives. She is under no obligation to discuss them publicly. However, what she has actually done is the following: (1) publicly tweeted about the threats; (2) complained when someone else (another woman, and in fact a feminist) linked to Kendzior’s own tweet; and then (3) incited a Twitter flash mob to obsessively talk about the link to her own tweet and the threats that she supposedly does not want anyone discussing. Even allowing for the fact that Kendzior may be under personal stress, this approach to dealing with her problem seems self-defeating at best.
Christ, what an asshole.
Fucking Zeus. For this I woke up?
I for one love to wake up to sniffy condescension, so I can’t even begin to imagine why you’re complaining. If, that is, indeed you did wake up.
Sniff! SNIFF! SNIFF!
Sheldon! You’ve got some mansplaining to do!
I can’t manage to absorb Sheldon’s post as anything but a series of high-pitched farts, but this may be my issue.
Can you link to where Kendizor publicized and trivialized someone else’s response to receiving rape threats, thus directly inciting further threats? Much appreciated.
Fucking context; how does it work?
Bitch was asking for it, amirite?
I mean, it’s not like words (let alone broad categories of speech) can do different work or have different meanings in different contexts.
Mighty white of you. Especially given that as of a few hours ago, the scope of the rape threats had apparently expanded to include her daughter.
Even allowing for the fact that Kendzior may be under personal stress…
Have Kendzior’s fallopian tubes become entangled around the frontal lobes of her cerebrum and begun spraying gallons upon gallons of logic-destroying estrogen all over her already frail and feeble woman-brain? Expert womanonomist Sheldon Rampton certainly thinks so, but allows that she should not be criticized too harshly for her feminine failings.
Expert womanonomist Sheldon Rampton certainly thinks so, but allows that she should not be criticized too harshly for her feminine failings.
A gentleman AND a scholar!
A source cited (with attribution which I have forgotten) in the Wikipedia article on Rampton (where I also learned that he coined the word “Wikimedia”) says that he (and a co-author) come from “the far side of liberal”. So there, scoffers!
So he IS a brocialist
OK, I hate to get on the “wrong side” in this debate, but this particular attack is very unfair. Rampton was not accusing Kendzior of being clouded by emotion. Rampton was trying to anticipate or counter the argument (which has appeared earlier on this thread, made by those who appear sympathetic to Kendzior) that we should cut Kendzior some slack because of the nature of what she has gone through.
Setting aside the implication that we shouldn’t cut the recipient of a deluge of rape threats some slack in how she responds to a publication simultaneously trivializing and exacerbating her experience, and also setting aside your apparent need to defend some pretty outrageous douchebaggery, there’s no way that Rampton’s comment about personal stress isn’t plausibly a gendered dig at her. That may not be your first read of the comment, but it’s by no means an unreasonable one.
OK, I disagree, but maybe that’s just because I’m a douchebag (and I mean that kind of sincerely). But then, what would you say about the people earlier on this thread, who made comments about personal stress while (apparently) supporting Kendzior? Is that sexist of them?
cs = isaiah, if anyone cares.
I mean, if you genuinely don’t understand how context can change the meaning of a given statement or idea, I’m not sure what to tell you.
I think I understand the concept of context just fine, and in fact the point I was making was that Rampton’s comment should be taken in context, the appropriate context being the previous comments on this thread. In that context I think it is pretty clear that Rampton raises the idea of “emotional state” because he is attempting to address other people’s arguments, and not to belittle Kendzior.
And I am starting to realize that I am not contributing anything useful to the discussion by belaboring this point. I don’t agree with most of what Rampton says. He seems to belive that just because Kendzior would prefer that the topic stay quiet, she is under an obligation to never discuss it, no matter how bad it gets, which is definitely wrong.
Although in this case, Rampton isn’t saying the same thing as the more sympathetic commenters.
Other commenters have said something along the lines of “Maybe demanding arbitrarily precise usage of certain words from victims of violent rape threats isn’t useful here.” Rampton countered with “Just because she’s hysterical doesn’t change the fact that she’s talking in ways I don’t approve of.” Not comparable.
+1
It’s entirely reasonable to be distraught over getting rape threats. It is not on to be dismissive or mocking of that distress with gendered terms.
to Isopod: an honest question – are you saying “personal stress” or “under stress” is a genedered term?
Rampton was not accusing Kendzior of being clouded by emotion.
He was, actually, and then wjts self-righteously mocked the idea that the idea is even possible. Both are clutching at the wrong phrase; look at the one immediately before: “…if indeed Kendzior has getting rape threats”. Rampton is using rhetoric similar to what lawyers use against rape victims.
I guess it’s nice that young college republicans read LGM, but…who has time? He’s not even worth refuting. Like any lawyer, he is not even bound to personally agree with the case he makes. He doesn’t seek Truth – he wants to win, and that’s it.
I find it unfortunate that there is a developing Twitterific – um, micro-meme, I guess – of The Left using rhetorical rape or misogyny to enforce ideological conformity…or something. I think it is misguided, to put it mildly.
As a late 50s white American male person, I am really shocked at how young men talk about women now. Really. Laugh if you want, but I really am. Privileged middle class (usually white) boys did not objectify women the same way their counterparts do now. I think younger people in 2014 underestimate the enormous cultural backlash this country went through in the 80s. I am not at all saying something ridiculous like ‘there was no violent misogyny in the 60s-70s’. I am saying what I’m saying: this is a much more rhetorically violent, vulgar, cowering, fearful, atomized, country than it was then. Among teenaged boys – and teenaged boys at heart – there is a casual misogyny common now that just wasn’t before. It is really remarkable. Nobody (guys) I knew or knew of at my nice small midwestern Liberal Arts College ‘joked’ about raping women, or prison rape. They/we weren’t restraining ourselves – it didn’t occur to us. Again, I’m not saying that there was no rape nor that nobody talked about it. I’m saying that it matters what is taboo and what isn’t. Rape talk among ‘the guys’ isn’t taboo now, and neither is torture. That is a big change. Non-leftist ‘heighten the contradiction’ types may think it’s a good change, but I’m not sure.
The subject here seems to be partially about how we gauge the weight of rhetoric. The casual flood of rape/death threats that just about all even-slightly-prominent-women-online get is frigging eye-popping to me. How anybody can be casual about it boggles. This stuff is a problem especially for women who have to deal with it, but it’s also a problem because some people’s casual reaction to it stinks of something very rotten in our culture.
My point is that this cultural degeneration is a result of politics. We (complacent anti-war left liberals) used to (very foolishly) laugh at Reagan as a reactionary clown who would never get anywhere, and were much too surprised at his political rise. Well, now the whole country resembles Orange County in some key ways. Again, laugh if you want (and despise ‘boomer-splaining’ if you must), but reading about it is not the same as living it. When stuff like this happens in other countries, we call it – or used to call it – ‘clamp down’.
The Left needs serious criticism – it needs very astringent crit in the US, esp liberals – but i think it is a bit careening to make ideological judgements based on this incident. What Amber F did with that link was bad and stupid and it’s quite understandable that SK was very upset about it. But Jacobin is good stuff most of the time – and so is Colbert, btw.
To paraphrase: the Right *doesn’t* have a rape/misogyny problem, because in the authoritarian system they preserve/implement, putatively benign versions of misogyny are a feature, not a bug.
I’m younger than you–I’ll be turning 29 soonish–and I agree about the increased casualness in rape threats. It’s not so much that rape is rhetorically used to enforce conformity (though that’s there, and it’s a cross-ideological thing), as that rape threats just aren’t given that much rhetorical weight in the minds of many young men. For the right, this fits neatly into their ideology; on the left, we can hopefully point out how it violates our principles when it happens.
I agree about the increased casualness in rape threats.
That and other just reeking misogyny. It really blows my mind.
Again, some will want to say that it’s better to be open about rape and torture, because then at least we deal with them. But I think that misses the point. What is and isn’t taboo matters. That rape and torture are no longer flatly taboo and have ‘gray areas’ is not progressive, to put it mildly.
Now you have American politicians running for high office talking about ‘legitimate rape’ and mincing words about ‘forceable rape’, and a high Indian official feeling free to say that rape is not always intentional (or whatever it was). This is going backwards.
I’m sure that women your age could tell you a lot about the shit they heard from men back then. Quite a few guys save their worst misogyny for women and don’t show it to other men.
Also, have you considered that because the Second Wave of feminism hadn’t yet happened or was in its infancy, men in general might not have felt quite as threatened by women?
I’m sure that women your age could tell you a lot about the shit they heard from men back then. Quite a few guys save their worst misogyny for women and don’t show it to other men.
Um, is that an argument? You are also making several ridiculous assumptions – particularly that I don’t know any women my age or that I haven’t talked to them about any of this kind of thing.
I would say it has very much to do with men feeling more threatened now than then, but that is not to say men actually *are* more threatened (at least by women) now than then. And I’m talking about a time well after second wave feminism began in the US – the mid to late 1970s. I could tell you that we young men on campus were *very* aware of feminism in mid/late 70s, but since you know so much about it, why don’t you tell me?
Besides, I am not talking about an absence of misogyny. I am talking about conventional wisdom, which tends to be revealing precisely because no one needs to say it out loud. If you were a guy hanging with your bros – students or working class people alike – and you made a casual joke about rape, I am quite sure that the other guys would edge away from you and be thinking ‘woah, that guy is a weirdo’.
Are you actually serious? I come from a country (ireland)that forceably (through family pressure and religious institutions) locked up single mothers and took their children from them (in the news at the moment is a story about a mass grave of babies remains found in the grounds of one former convent) This mindset and set of cultural norms was not specific to ireland.
Youre taking one specific example (that rhetoric around rape has changed), and are attempting to build a larger more general argument that (1) is entirely subjective and (2) probably nonsense
..which is to say, what is your argument ? That young men use the word rape more flippantly than their fathers and grandfathers ? what does that prove ?
Am I ‘actually serious’ about what? What general argument am I trying to make? I know what it is, but I’d like to hear it from you. And whatever is *your* point re: unwed mothers in Ireland?
I think I’ve made my argument and I don’t feel like reiterating it, particularly if you can’t be bothered to be clearer about what your objection is.
Your ‘argument’, as much as there is one, is a succesion of non sequiturs and generalisations looking for a point:
“As a late 50s white American male person, I am really shocked at how young men talk about women now. Really. Laugh if you want, but I really am. Privileged middle class (usually white) boys did not objectify women the same way their counterparts do now.”
Really, where’s your evidence for this ? Define objectify ? There’s nothing here bar a generalised claim based on a vague feeling you have.
“I think younger people in 2014 underestimate the enormous cultural backlash this country went through in the 80s.”
What does this even mean ? Who are these ‘younger people’ ? What was this specific cultural backlash in the 80s ?
“I am not at all saying something ridiculous like ‘there was no violent misogyny in the 60s-70s’. I am saying what I’m saying: this is a much more rhetorically violent, vulgar, cowering, fearful, atomized, country than it was then.”
You are saying what you’re saying ? Sure the country might be more ‘vulgar’ today (definitions of vulgarity change, as do language norms) is it institutionally more sexist ? How is it more ‘cowering’,more atomised ?
“Among teenaged boys – and teenaged boys at heart – there is a casual misogyny common now that just wasn’t before.”
Again, this is memory bias on your part. Are the structures of discrimination greater now ? Are the social norms against women more stifling ? I can grant you that the rhetoric of young men now is more ‘violent and vulgar’, but still dont see how this feeds into your larger narrative.
“It is really remarkable. Nobody (guys) I knew or knew of at my nice small midwestern Liberal Arts College ‘joked’ about raping women, or prison rape. They/we weren’t restraining ourselves – it didn’t occur to us.”
How can I possibly refute a claim that ‘no one you knew’ 40 years ago would make a rape joke. Even if it’s true, so what ? What does that say except the group you hung around with were very enlightened (at least in this respect)What does it say besides that very specific point?
“The subject here seems to be partially about how we gauge the weight of rhetoric. The casual flood of rape/death threats that just about all even-slightly-prominent-women-online get is frigging eye-popping to me. How anybody can be casual about it boggles. This stuff is a problem especially for women who have to deal with it, but it’s also a problem because some people’s casual reaction to it stinks of something very rotten in our culture.”
You dont think women got abuse in the 60s and 70s ? Especially women going against societal expectations ?Moving into careers and areas of life they were excluded from ?
“My point is that this cultural degeneration is a result of politics. We (complacent anti-war left liberals) used to (very foolishly) laugh at Reagan as a reactionary clown who would never get anywhere, and were much too surprised at his political rise. Well, now the whole country resembles Orange County in some key ways. Again, laugh if you want (and despise ‘boomer-splaining’ if you must), but reading about it is not the same as living it. When stuff like this happens in other countries, we call it – or used to call it – ‘clamp down’.”
Ah okay,it’s all about Reagan. Jesus Christ.
Hmm. How am I supposed to respond?
I can’t *prove* much of anything, and neither can you. I was making a point about conventional wisdom. I think that what most people in a society take for granted, what is left unsaid because it doesn’t need to be said, is revealing about that culture. Do you need proof for that? Don’t have any, sorry. I didn’t think that was a controversial observation.
(I hope you noticed that I was not extrapolating my experience to the whole country. I was saying that a large change of conventional wisdom among a privileged group means something.)
No matter what I say you can tell me I haven’t proven anything. I will stipulate that I can’t prove anything. So..?
The general culture or spirit in the US changed markedly starting in the 80s. It changed in the UK around the same time – did you happen to notice that? Do you think that that austerity (like the current one) might affect the culture in any way? I do.
I know for a fact that, despite rape and torture existing, it was taboo to suggest in public that either was ever equivocal, that sometimes rape wasn’t *so* bad, or that official torture was sometimes really just enhanced interrogation and therefore ok. There were state laws that prevented women from filing rape charges against their husbands, so there is that! But you still wouldn’t find equivocators about rape as it was defined conventionally (non-spousal). Rape was something to at least pretend to be ashamed of. I would also note that torture was always not only de jure but de facto illegal in the US before recently. You had to lie about it.
I can’t prove that politics is much more ‘in the driver’s seat’ culturally than Americans like to admit, but I believe it. BTW, maybe the source of our misunderstanding is country-specific. Perhaps people in Ireland are more realistic about this sort of thing, but Americans, really deep-down believe that what government does doesn’t impact on American culture all that much. ‘I’m all the way over here in OHIO so what are those bastards in DC gonna do?’ And by Americans, I mean *real* Americans – white people with mortgages and dread who believe they are successful because they are uniquely virtuous. People who have so much Liberty and Freedom (and an Innocence which never seems to stay lost) that we eventually notice government only in an absent minded (and irritated) way. Notwithstanding all the explicit culture war crap, Reaganism couldn’t have succeeded without this attitude – it IS this attitude. Voila the American conceits that we have no politics and no classes. It’s ridiculous.
I thought the idea that politics affects culture in a very direct, quite instrumental way was also not wildly controversial.
Look, I’m sorry for being so agitated and ungenerous in my reading. Nostalgia just grinds my gears !I know it’s unreasonable to expect you to ‘prove’ your argument to the level I demanded above (at least in the context of a blog comments secion)
It just read very defintive to me, and being from the demographic you’re speaking about, it read like a caricaure (if the argument had been somthing along the lines of ‘God, I dont remember young men doing X in the 70s ..’ or something along those lines I probably wouldnt have become so annoyed)
But I do know what you were getting at and would probably agree, in part and with SERIOUS qualifications : )
Wanna know the difference between the old Telegraph system and the Internet?
The number of on/offs per second.
The actual situation was that Kendzior tweeted out that she had received rape threats from someone she referred to as a “bro.” Frost linked to the tweet, saying that she thought that the word bro had an inherently unserious quality that made it inappropriate to use in that context. In other words, Frost was saying precisely that rape threats are serious, too serious to use the word bro. Anyone is free to disagree, but that is literally the opposite of “mocking” rape threats.
Kendzior complained about the link, so it was removed swiftly. But Kendzior has continued to insist that Frost was “mocking her rape threat.” That just isn’t true. There’s no reasonable reading of that piece as mocking her. And there’s no indication Dr. Farley has even bothered to investigate that fact.
1) Why is it ok to police the language someone uses to characterize the rape threats they’ve received?
2) Why would anyone think it a good idea to follow that up by policing the language used to criticize the original bit of language-policing?
I don’t know; those are questions for Frost and for Kilpatrick– two women, by the way, who have received an avalanche of misogynist attacks over this. (In the name of feminism, you understand.) People are free to debate that actual question. What is utterly clear is that neither of your questions addresses the central fact: that Frost was doing literally the opposite of mocking rape threats. She was saying that rape threats are very, very serious business.
I don’t doubt that both Frost and Kilpatrick have received misogynistic attacks; I would have been shocked if they hadn’t (which is depressing in and of itself). That doesn’t change the fact that a certain sector of the left is circling the wagons and attacking a women who spoke out against a way that her rape threats were being simultaneously trivialized and exacerbated by a writer in a leftist publication.
One can’t claim the moral high ground on condemning rape threats by exploiting an actual recipient of those threats to make an abstract point.
And this wouldn’t be an issue if the relevant parties had simply apologized and let it go, rather than taking to Twitter where they and their friends did mock and harass Kendzior.
Why would they apologize when someone is deliberately and openly misrepresenting the truth? Frost did not mock Kendzior’s rape threats. That’s literally the opposite of what she was doing. Kendzior, and the mob she whipped up, is not telling the truth. And you have the dynamics of this completely backwards: it’s Frost, and Kilpatrick, and now Elizabeth Stoker who are being mocked and harassed. And they did not mock and harass Kendzior. That’s simply not true. What you’re saying is not an accurate reflection of what happened.
And, again, there’s no indication whatsoever that Farley knows any of this. He just doesn’t like Marxists, so he attacks them without educating himself.
I have no clue what Farley does or doesn’t know, but I’ve been following the whole affair on Twitter, and you’re grossly mischaracterizing it. I don’t know whether it’s cognitive dissonance or bad faith, but watching the self-proclaimed left completely lose its shit in response to a single piece of criticism from a legitimately aggrieved party, whether or not that criticism was phrased accurately, is goddamn depressing.
That is totally, totally untrue. Kilpatrick has received hundreds of tweets. Frost has been the center of relentless attacks. Elizabeth Stoker, despite being a woman, has been repeatedly called a misogynist. That’s all happening. Those are facts.
Here’s Christopher Carbone, to pick one example, accusing Kilpatrick of not caring that Jacobin “endangered Kendzior’s life.”
https://twitter.com/christocarbone/status/475321456122167296
And here he is mocking Kilpatrick because he has so much journalism experience– because mansplaining and looking down your nose at a woman editor is so, so feminist, you guys:
https://twitter.com/christocarbone/status/475333690953072640
You’re blatantly, intentionally misrepresenting this controversy.
I have never denied that Frost, Kilpatrick, Stoker, or any of the other women involved in this have been subjected to virulent misogyny. In fact, I explicitly stated that I would have been shocked if they hadn’t.
You’re misrepresenting me and the actions of everyone involved originally. But the icing on the cake is getting to hear Freddie [BONERS] deBoer himself use some other random dude to lecture me on how unfeminist it is for men to mansplain feminism to women. You’re a fucking self-parody.
I think FDB has this part of it right(although it’s Erikson not Kilpatrick)
Well, I agree. Frost wasn’t mocking rape threats in that article (I haven’t followed what, if anything, she did on social media). Frost was concern-trolling a recipient of rape threats about how she (the recipient) described the threats. This is still inappropriate, even if it’s not ‘mocking.’ I’m really not sure why we’re so hung up on the term ‘mocking’? Is it just that we think Frost would be a worse person if she mocked Kedzior rather than concern-trolling her, and therefore it’s unfair to say she’s mocking? I can sympathize with that opinion–but it’s even more unfair to get super-nitpicky about Kedzior’s language in complaining about Frost.
Except that Frost has now been the target of literally hundreds of incredible inappropriate, crude, and vicious insults because of how Kendzior misrepresented her views. Including from many, many men. Yet somehow, Robert Farley’s Bat signal doesn’t go off to defend her. Because this all isn’t actually about defending women from threats; it’s about attacking a publication and its writers because you don’t like their politics.
In that case, I’d be more inclined to blame the people “defending” Kendzior by harassing Frost than Kendzior herself for some infelicitous phrasing. Unless Kendzior did something worse and more deliberate than just use the term ‘mock.’
Do you happen to have a link to people harassing Frost?
First, read the piece Farley linked to above, and tell me if that’s a fair representation of what Frost said. Then, search for her @replies on Twitter. Enjoy.
Because this all isn’t actually about defending women from threats; it’s about attacking a publication and its writers because you don’t like their politics.
This is a good example of why it’s impossible to take you seriously.
Unsupported? Unprovable? Incoherent and off topic? Must be BONERS.
Yes. You truly are a self-parody.
Perhaps he will defend her. Or, he could just say exactly what he says above: rape threats are never, never ok against anyone. Period.
Because this all isn’t actually about defending women from threats; it’s about attacking a publication and its writers because you don’t like their politics.
Oh, fer Chrissakes Freddie.
Which you’re proving, I suppose, by deciding to attack one woman who disagreed with your allies and pretend she’s responsible for everything that happens to your allies, and to defend another woman who, when I did a separate search, accuses “academic feminists” of insincerely saying that “bros” are well-poisoners. Because why would anyone assume that when someone says their enemies do a bad thing, they’re claiming their own innocence?
Yes, Freddie is projecting. So sad.
It’s actually very simple:
1) What Rob said above in the original post.
2) It’s also never appropriate to make misogynistic attacks against women even if those women have made (or you think they’ve made) misogynistic attacks against a women.
3) If something you’ve written causes someone else to receive rape threats or an increase in rape threats, it’s incumbent on you to try to mitigate that consequence, cf, what Frost’s editors did by removing the link. It’s not always possible or reasonable to mitigate it (e.g., publicizing a writer might inadvertently expose them to a noxious community).
4) Someone who’s in the midst of being threatened with rape is having a rough day and you should cut them considerable slack.
5) Not everyone is motivated one way or another by tribalism. While some groups largely are (cf Republicans, at the moment), many are not. If this is your go to move, you’re likely to be making a jackass out of yourself at best. Greenwald, in this respect, is not to be emulated.
5 is, by far, the least important point.
I’m a little doubtful about (4), because it seems to advise not publicizing people from potentially despised groups. It’s another version of “CEO’s have to be above any possible scandal,” and it risks implying that all representatives of any potentially controversial group should have always and only a vice-free, white, whitebread, male public face. To protect the women and the the other weak groups, of course.
It also seems to assume that the people who might make the threats don’t notice that the people they threaten don’t get linked. They might instead assume that their threats were persuasive, or even that the non-linkers always agreed with them.
I mean (3).
I think 3 involves a lot of judgement, so it is tricky.
But Frost’s article was a fairly clear cut example: She linked to something not very prominent or pushed at such, to make an extremely tangential point for which there were loads of alternatives, such that someone reported a significant rise in online abuse.
But if I link to Waston’s account of the elevator incident, it seems unlikely that my linking is going to change the landscape with respect to that. If I publish an article on a major site that would reopen the floodgates, then, yes, I should consult with Watson and consider how I might mitigate things.
There’s a “is it in the public interest” like consideration here. If I’m causing harm, even unintentionally, I need to weigh whether the purposes of my actions justify the harm.
Yes, and my response was more to your parenthetical than to the point itself. People use Twitter for everything from “everybody (really everybody) come to my reading Thursday” to “it was great seeing you (Bijan) in the bar on Thursday,” and journalists go on and use it instead of publication or blogs, so what any given person thinks of their own tweets isn’t always clear. But no one, I think, would do a search, find strangers’ tweets that were evidence for some point they want to make, and publish those tweets with the names of the tweeters as examples of behavior they dislike. That would be as . . . odd . . . as if I complained about how often my neighbors washed their cars, and added their names, street addresses, phone numbers, and photographs. But for some reason it’s less odd if I complain about Time and People magazine reporters and publish links to their pieces, which have comment sections. (Then again, if I’m starting an organized “flood the comments sections” thing, that’s yet another thing again.)
I didn’t see how the RW incident started, but it seemed she was doing something more obviously like publishing, and she wanted lots of people to see (which isn’t to say she foresaw just how many).
I suppose there’s an argument that it’s in the nature of the tool that some people are going to use the tool in a certain way, and they’re going to come into conflict with people who use it a different way, and that’s how it is. The tool in this case happens to be a big lazy tool for doing one very simple thing very easily and letting everybody do whatever they want, and you can’t really predict what people will do with it. It seems to be worse than Usenet that way. (I wrote a blog post about this in January, linking to a LGM post, but I won’t self-promote.)
Please self promote! Just the mention started me reading your blog :)
I don’t think I addressed enough your point that there’s a paternalistic danger. I agree that that is a real concern. I guess I would generally just ask or give a heads up. If I ran a popular blog such that linking to someone might crash their server due to increased traffic, I’d send them a heads up. If they said, “nooooo!” then I wouldn’t do a direct link.
If I had no reasonable idea that it would trigger the avalanche, then I’d only act upon complaint.
I *think* that threads the “inconsiderate/paternalistic” divide.
Of course, there’s my personal solution of not having any significant effect on the world :)
Thanks for the interest, this is the time of year when my readership (to the extent the tools work) tends to drop off. Here’s the link.
I’ll have to think more about not affecting the world. I’m not exactly sure how that could work.
Sorry, I was just jokingly referring to the fact that I don’t write a blog or in other venues that get picked up in a way that could flood someone with crap. If I paste a link to my Facebook page, essentially no one sees it, so I mostly just have to deal with these sorts of issue on a one to one or abstract basis.
Well, I agree. Frost wasn’t mocking rape threats in that article (I haven’t followed what, if anything, she did on social media). Frost was concern-trolling a recipient of rape threats about how she (the recipient) described the threats. This is still inappropriate, even if it’s not ‘mocking.’
I think this has it right. I think the problem here is that Frost was making a point (as best I understand it, “using quantitative data and the debates about Piketty aren’t inherently exclusionary or masculinist, and plenty of women use quant analysis”) that was accurate but, as applied to feminism in general circa 2014, something of a strawman. Rather than just say that Aaron Bady made a dumb joke, though, she had to search for other examples so it could be a broader point about a trend that would seem to be non-existent, and found a tweet that she could drag in to make a point that was both not very persuasive and peripheral to her general argument. She wasn’t making light of rape threats per se, but it also isn’t a very good idea to use someone’s tweet about actual rape threats to make a not-very-coherent point about the use of the word “bro.”
That said, Jacobin did the right thing — removed the hyperlink and apologized — so good on them for that.
This. All of it.
And the fact of the mater is, AFAICT, that DeBore is carrying on to vilify SK because he wants to defend people with whose politics he agrees.
Sort of just like what he accuses Farley of. Odd, that.
SK’s point was that linking to her fairly obscure tweet conversation in a magazine article is a.) mocking her (do you prefer ‘ridicule’?), which it is – (that’s what people usually do with links like that on the internets), and b.) dangerous to her (SK), since highlighting threats makes them increase. Frost – and every other woman in the world – does not deserve threats like this. But explain to me how Frost’s link was not gratuitous – and gratuitously personal, not to mention ridiculously inapposite. I follow SK and I’m positive she doesn’t trivialize rape or the threats thereof.
It was a very cheap shot in every sense, and the editors were right to take it down. It was not only not crucial to Frost’s point, it didn’t even really support it. It was ‘ ha ha, she said ‘bro”.
As far as ‘self-described communists raping their way to revolution’ goes…well, who the hell knows? There are tons of loonies out there. If SK were to have a turn against leftism even partially because of that, then that would be unfortunate. But I’d be curious to see how men would deal mentally, emotionally, with a constant gush of violent and sexually violent threats against you and your children. I know it would make me *way* crazier than that. And most of you, too.
Oh, OK, so you have nothing to contribute to the conversation that went on for 200+ posts before you showed up?
I would think that’s something best conveyed by silence.
You make it sounds like the point of the article was to defend the seriousness of rape threats. It wasn’t. It was to give an ideological critique of “the reduction of feminist critique to the Fear of The Bro and His Insidious Patriarchal Methodologies” (which to me does sound mocking).
That’s what pissed Kendzior off especially, she said, that her single tweet discussing the harassment she gets got linked as an aside in a longer piece about something else. It wasn’t like Jacobin was out to critique her in particular.
I mean, the real problem is not really anything Jacobin or Kendzior did or said. The real problem is that there are people who send rape threats to seemingly any woman who is visible online. It’s too bad that people and are focusing on attacking either Kendzior or Jacobin over this, frankly, but fish gonna swim, etc. It just sucks that the controversy is this, rather than the actual problem.
Eh, I just read the Jacobin post again. I find it a tiny bit annoying even without the link that was removed, because I have some sympathy myself for parts of the argument, and I don’t agree with how Frost handles it. BUT. At the beginning of the argument, she mentions feminism. Then she talks about Aaron Bady, who is a feminist, and she says his beliefs about academic expertise and mathematical economics (a big topic at Jacobin) and so on are caused by his feminism (IOW only feminists don’t like economics, which the Jacobin regulars mostly seem to like quite a bit). Then she talks about Catherine Liu and her book circa-2000 anti-intellectualism, which I already wanted to read. She ties Liu back to the bros. Here, now, she accuses people who are against bros of being against “expertise.” Then she reminds us again that she’s talking about feminists. End of story. So she makes a huge argument, and oh by the way, feminism (at least the kind she dislikes, and Aaron Bady is the one you have to read if you want to understand it) is the root cause of all these bad things.
Add that she names exactly one female feminist other than herself, and that is a bit annoying, I’d say.
You are correct. Frost was absolutely not mocking rape threats. The exact quote is, “And I just don’t think the diminutive label of “bro” should be to describe more insidious sexism, let alone violent aggression like rape threats. Let’s not mitigate our censure with cutesy fraternal nicknames.” Calling rape threats “Violent aggression” is not belittling or mocking rape threats. There is no reasonable way to interpret those words as mocking or belittling.
Relevant discussion by Matt Bruenig of an earlier willful misreading by Kendzior.
Oh, what a pile of tone-trolling shite. Especially when Frost also has it out for feminists who are too “elitist” to connect with the “common woman.”
I used to respect many of the people commenting on this thread. Here’s the summary: Kendzior is lying, and she’s not being particularly subtle about it. She lied about Frost “viciously mocking” her, she lied about Megan Erickson “mocking” her, she told some really filthy, egregious and obvious lies about Elizabeth Stoker, she lied about Elias Isquith, among others. Not one of these people “mocked” or in any way diminished the seriousness of rape threats in any way, shape, or form. And if the”real issue” was that publicizing rape threats led to more rape threats, why has Kendzior been tweeting nonstop about those very rape threats for four days now? Now her allies are charging Jacobin and Salon writers with sending her rape threats themselves. She was on the thread when these charges were made, and simply thanked the libelous accusers for their support. This is top notch professional trollery, and most of you rose to the bait like a trout, attacking innocent people with less than zero evidence. You got played, and you will probable get played again, by the same people in the same way, and will never catch on. What a pathetic display. Feminist heroes, all.
Well put.
yep
I enjoy what you guys are usually up too. Such clever work and reporting!
Keep up the great works guys I’ve you guys to my
personal blogroll.