Metametameta coverage – reactions to the Steubenville verdict, reactions to reactions to the Steubenville verdict, [continue the series].
Too much sympathy in court being shown for these disgusting little rapists. It is not a tragedy when a rapist is found guilty.#Steubenville
— Radical Feminist (@RadicalFeminist) March 17, 2013
Is there? I looked for coverage and haven’t found it yet but did find commentary on the tears and sobs of the rapists themselves. The anchor (a woman) in the studio asked the commentator (a man) outside the courthouse about how gut-wrenching it all was, and he said the boys “didn’t realize that what they did was so serious.”
They didn’t?
Well why the fuck not?
Did they think it’s just ok and normal and no biggy to shove your fingers up a nonconsenting girl?
If so, why would they think that? Why would anyone ever think that?
Why would anyone ever think it’s ok to shove your fingers up a nonconsenting girl while other people watched and took pictures and video?
I would really like to know.
I wonder how much of it, if any, has to do with being called a girl by their coach during football practice. I wonder if their coach did that; I wonder if it’s universal among football coaches; I wonder if anybody even talks about it, in schools, where it counts. I wonder if all or most football players learn contempt for women, even loathing of them, in the very act of playing and training for football.
Anyway. I would really like to know how teenage boys can fail to realize that sexual assault is serious.
Apparently they didn’t realise that their reputations could be affected – yet they actually celebrated the fact that they had thought they’d ruined hers.
As you say, they must have realised what they were doing was vicious and wrong. What they didn’t realise is that there would be consequences for them. I guess that’s what is meant by the term “rape culture”.
I wonder how much of it, if any, has to do with being called a girl by their coach during football practice.
When I was a kid, I remember my parents used to say, about people like that, “well, they were badly brought up.”
It seems to me like the offenders’ parents are being very small and very quiet regarding their raising and releasing abusive criminals into the world. Maybe the football coach is a piece of the problem but amidst all the yelling, I’m not hearing the parents saying anything about their role in all this.
The victim’s mother said:
And I don’t agree. Human compassion is taught by teachers, coaches, and parents. It’s not god-given, because – if it was – we’d be left with the horrible realization that god left compassion out of those kids, and that’s why they acted that way.
In the way of being a good parent, and a good moral example, one of the attackers’ father’s said:
Fortunately, the rest of us put our trust in the district attorney, and the jury not god.
I guess it would be too hard for one of the boy’s fathers to say, “I guess I didn’t do a very good job instilling any values in the kid. Maybe if I’d spent more time talking to him and being an example to him, he wouldn’t have felt like he could do something like that to another thinking, feeling human being. I am deeply ashamed of my child and I hope other parents can learn from this.”
Yeah, well, since we’re trading in fantasies.
I used to work as a classroom assistant at a primary school in Spain. The headmistress often used to say that the most important thing to teach the children wasn’t Maths or Spanish language or English, but how to be people.
Well Steubenville failed miserably at that, didn’t they?
Marcus, I have a horrible suspicion that the fathers DID instil their own values into the kids.
OK, as a cis previously het guy, I’ll try to dredge up an insight into their warped brains for you.
To guys like this, everybody is dehumanized – not just women. Cruelty is a game used for social sorting, which I expect even those raised as women here can remember from primary education as well. As football players, these two were very successful at the game, so they must have been accustomed to abusing people every day.
Anyhow, as everyone outside of their own asshole is an object in the game, and as women have been sold to them as objects by culture and commercial influences compounding the issue, it’s natural enough to mix this business of cruelty with pleasure. It’s the business of cruelty that defines them, which makes mixing this up with sex utterly unsurprising.
To me the most unusual thing about this case is the involvement of social media, but everything else is disgustingly obvious.
@sheila – I’m afraid so, too.
There’s another element here which the movie Natural Born Killers demonstrated – the culture of voyeurism and exhibitionism, since amped by reality TV – is producing some very strange behavior. That’s especially in evidence on Youtube. People are using media to show off, and think everyone is entitled to a full view of any creepy body part or demented feeling they choose to dangle or express in front of us.
@#5 whenever I think about this sort of thing I can’t help remembering the part in 1984 when O’Brien asks Winston, “How do you show you have power over someone? You make them suffer.”
This is good news…
DeWine was on CNN this morning; while he didn;t use the words “rape culture” he was clearly talking about it…
Weird reading about this and the disgusting comments from the people associated with these scumbags and at the same time having arguments about how “rape culture” is all a lie made up by feminists.
Human beings have empathy, pretty much from the time they notice the world isn’t just them.
But they also have shitty assholishness.
I see it in my kids every day: They will spontaneously be nice, comforting, supportive. They will make you little gifts and they will try to comfort you and cheer you up whenever you’re hurting.
Under one condition: This doesn’t conflict with their desires.
If they need to hurt other children in order to get the toy, they’ll do so.
It’s then the job of the adults to tell them that this is not OK, that hurting other people is bad and that no, they don’t exist for your gratification but are people in their own right.
But apparently not in Steubenville where those kids got taught that the sun shines out of their ass and everybody else, especially girl and women were there for their pleasure. And where a community still treates them like the poor victims.
No, they are not “poor boys” who “couldn’t have known”. They were not raised by wolves (wolves are a lot less nasty). But this case spells RAPE CULTURE in capital letters. There is a big fat responsibility in that community, in the houses of their parents, in society at large.
Yes, parents, you failed. You suck. You didn’t teach those boys about respect and consent and bodily autonomy.
Boys will be boys, my shit.
Whoever says that should be hit over the head with a shoe.
Yeah I know… I said I was gonna get away from this, but…
Ophelia…
Then you missed CNN’s “coverage”:
ALL THE TRIGGER WARNINGS! apply….
The Raw Story: CNN grieves that guilty verdict ruined ‘promising’ lives of Steubenville rapists
And it was Candy Crowley. Candy. Fucking. Crowley. The woman who performed so incredibly at the second presidential debate, who helped Obama trap Romney in a lie, who I myself said should win a Pulitzer for her moderating of that debate.
I am so angry at this.
FUCK THEIR GODDAMN PROMISING LIVES!!!! THEY’RE FUCKING RAPISTS YOU IDIOTS!!!!!!!!
Also…
The Raw Story: The top 5 rape apologist reactions to the Steubenville rape verdict
BREAKING: Jane Doe #Steubenville Now Receiving Threats Via Social Media *Contact Info To Report*
Giliell – “If they need to hurt other children in order to get the toy, they’ll do so.”
I don’t think this is true, at least not inherently. I think they have to learn it by example.
When my son was a toddler, he was playing with a toy in a doctor’s waiting room when a girl about his own age tried to take it off him. Naturally he hung on to it and wouldn’t let go, whereupon she hit him. I don’t think she hit him very hard, as he didn’t seem particularly hurt, but he DID seem totally bewildered, and it didn’t seem to occur to him to hit her back.
We never smacked either of our children, and I got the impression we were in a minority among parents for that. My suspicion is that the girl in question had been smacked herself when she didn’t do what an adult wanted, and she was just following the example she had been set.
Ruth
As long as we don’t raise children in vats and then study them in 100% controlled groups, we’ll never know.
But children are much more physical than adults. They lack the tools to deal with their anger and frustration otherwise.
Who was the first child to hit the other? I don’t know.
If you look at any primate species, the young will often engage in ‘rough and tumble’ as a way of finding their place in the world, so it’s no surprise that the young of our species does the same (although, of course, in line with the rest of the primates some young are more boisterous than others.
What we, as parents or teachers, etc. have to do is teach them where the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour lies, not only in terms of the rough stuff but also with regards to social behaviour in general.
As a parent, grandparent, and particularly as an erstwhile foster carer, I can say with some confidence that there is a fine line between over-protecting or over-pacifying a child and leaving it vulnerable as it grows up, and not protecting or pacifying it enough; I saw examples of both in the children we fostered over the years, and once those habits are learned, it’s very hard to correct the imbalence, especially once they’ve hit their teens.
I’m not making excuses or shedding tears for those boys; no matter what their upbringing – and I suspect they fell into the under-protected, under-pacified group – they still had to know that what they were doing was wrong, there’s no way that they couldn’t, but I do fear an increase in this sort of sexual crime unless something is done about the objectification of females in everyday life and the unrestricted access that our children have to the kind of pornography that would have made my teenage head explode, yet is viewed as perfectly normal by the young of today.
When combined with instant media (396,000 text messages and 308,000 photos in connection with the investigation. Wow, Just…wow) and the usual peer pressure, I truly fear that things will get worse before they get better,
And that’s sad. I almost feel as if my own generation, and the one that followed, have failed the current one big time.