Some people and institutions do take misogyny seriously. Dalhousie University apparently does.
Dalhousie University in Halifax has launched an investigation into disturbing, sexually explicit Facebook posts attributed to male students in the faculty of dentistry, CBC News has learned.
The men were part of a Facebook group called the Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen. The group was removed from Facebook late last week.
I wonder by whom. Facebook doesn’t remove groups like that, and no one else could, so I guess the members removed it.
The university is working on what to do about it. Exams have been postponed until next month.
CBC News obtained screenshots of the group’s posts, which are sexually explicit and appear to involve discussions of female classmates.
In one post, members were polled and asked, “Who would you hate f–k?” They were given two names to vote on.
Yeah that hate fuck idea is nice. Jian Ghomeshi told a colleague he wanted to hate fuck her at a meeting, which tells you something.
Another post shows a woman wearing a bikini. The caption says, “Bang until stress is relieved or unconscious (girl).”
You know…I know of several Facebook groups that are way worse than that. That’s mild in comparison. It shouldn’t be, but it is.
Their conversations also include jokes about using chloroform on women.
The words: “Does this rag smell like chloroform to you??” were superimposed on one photo.
In response to another photo of a bikini-clad woman, two members wrote: “Can you tell me what this chloroform smells like?” and “Does this mask smell like nitrous oxide to you?”
Haha – geddit? Gas her unconscious so that you can fuck her – with or without hate – whether she’s willing or not.
One thing the internet has certainly given us is a much deeper knowledge of how many men really hate women, and how taken for granted it is. Not one of my favorite things about the technology.
H/t Ibis.
I loathe lad culture.
Do any of them actually know what chloroform is?
Doesn’t excuse anything, but the joke is lifted from Family Guy, in which the family hires a Mexican housekeeper who refuses to be fired (“No, no, I stay.”). The dad asks her, “Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?” She replies “No, no,” and passes out. He takes her somewhere and leaves her.
Like Family Guy generally, disturbing, but not originally a rape joke. These boys took it to the next level of awful.
A Masked Avenger,
I would bet that the joke is much older than Family Guy (which I generally dislike greatly). And even it it did come from there? Doesn’t make it any less awful. Drugging women so that you can violate their consent (she didn’t want to leave, lets drug her!) is still a terrible sentiment.
@2: They’re dentistry students. I don’t know if chloroform is used as a dental anesthetic, but they are likely to be taught basic anesthesia.
I don’t know if chloroform is used as a dental anesthetic, but they are likely to be taught basic anesthesia.
Chloroform is not used for anaesthesia and hasn’t been for a very long time; it leaves the patient with a skull-splitting headache. It’s mostly used for euthanizing small specimens (birds, bugs, mice, etc) and it’s tracked and controlled.
Nitrous oxide doesn’t cause either memory loss or long-term unconsciousness unless very carefully administered with oxygen. As soon as you stop breathing it, you’ll come right out of it and adrenaline clears it quite well.
In other words, it’s not only not funny and misogynistic, it’s stupid.
Yazikus,
I’ll agree staying where you are not wanted should result in a call to the police, not drugging.
Re:
If it were only that it gives us this deeper knowledge, I might figure this for potentially a good thing, if a painful thing. The net does seem to have a few attributes that expose this stuff more than it might otherwise be. The fact that records have such permanence, possibly also something about people’s relationship to the technologies themselves leading them to put things onto disk which previously just would have been said out of sight, behind closed doors, off the record. We had rape jokes before the internet, but it was generally a lot harder proving what people said (versus what they now type, conveniently generally timestamped, filed, made searchable by the busy search spiders, and so on). What this alone might do to our culture, I dunno, but at least it’s there, on disk now. I suspect a lot of the recent developments in our cultures are driven by this, and some of that might be a good thing. The net really does mash a lot of people together, for better and for worse, I think. And it’s unsurprising that this stuff shows up this way, as a result. We always knew these people were out there, knew there were currents of this stuff generally in our societies. Now, it’s just easier for the various angry cranks to find a platform on which to air their issues, easier for the rest of us to see this.
The possibly not-so-good: I don’t think it’s the whole of the story that the net just exposes it more. I suspect it also aggravates it. Hate groups and anonymous trolls making threats had their pre-digital predecessors, too, but the relative ease of communications probably makes it easier for the deeply toxic among them to find each other, egg each other on. It may be normalizing it, making it seem to others who possibly wouldn’t have been so inclined–or not quite so extreme about it, anyway–that this is just what people think, this is just how they talk. Or, more precisely, since I think a lot of this stuff is actually a pretty natural offshoot of ancient inequities in our culture, and a lot of it already was normalized, I might better write: it may be normalizing far more extreme expressions of this attitude than might have been otherwise.
I’ve heard that on a list of “nerdy pickup lines”, called out as the one that goes too far. There are much better, and funnier:
“If I were a particle and you were a quantum potential, would you let me penetrate your classically forbidden regions?”
“I wish I was your derivative, so I could lie tangent to your curves.”
“Why don’t we go back to my place, and I can show you the exponential growth of my natural log?”
Matthew Prorok
You should read the post and the linked articles.
The mere fact that these boys posted their hateful and demeaning attitudes on an Internet site, for all to see, with no apparent shame or fear of consequences, says a lot about how far, and how sick, the “lad culture” there has gone.
Raging Bee: I think that aspect of it is part of ‘internet culture’. There’s a tendency by folks to assume that the only people they are speaking to at any given time are the folks who are part of their group. This is especially true of things like Facebook. It’s not so much, “Hey, I’ll flaunt this for the world to see,” as it is, “Hey, a bunch of other people like this same type of [unstated: douchebaggy] behavior, so I can relax and not filter myself.” Note in the article how they panic when they realize that other people are actually looking at what they say.
As for the possible Family Guy reference, that just means they re-purposed a racist joke to a misogynist one. The original running gag with the maid in FG is that she’s lazy and uses her lack of English to pretend she doesn’t understand any instructions she doesn’t like–you know, just like all the other Mexicans. Thus, Peter is ‘justified’ in using coercive tactics to get her out of his house.