Epiphenomenal

Laura Bates of Everyday Sexism gives us some more everyday sexism.

Meanwhile, this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival made headlines for featuring a high number of jokes about rape and domestic violence. Such “jokes” are also endemic online.“We must wake up to the way that social media enables and magnifies abuse and harassment of women,” Ms Dustin says. The popular social news website Reddit has entire categories dedicated to “raping women”, “hot rape stories”, and “choke a bitch”. And an article on the student website UniLad in January said: “Eighty-five per cent of rape cases go unreported. That seems to be fairly good odds.”

Yes but those are just tropes and tropes don’t matter and besides “tropes” is a big stuck-up fancy intellectual showoffy conceited arrogant word that only a bitch would use because bitches are so arrogant and bitchy, plus they all stole it from Anita Sarkeesian because nobody ever used it before she did. [Read more…]

Women end up exacerbating tensions

Via Katha Pollitt on Twitter – an Italian priest explains things to women.

Italian media reported that parish priest Piero Corsi fixed a text to the bulletin board of his church in the northern village of San Terenzo di Lerici, which said women should engage in “healthy self criticism” over the issue of femicide, or men murdering women.

Healthy self-criticism! Good thinking. It is a just world, so if a women is murdered, it has to be because she did something so bad that it deserves murder. [Read more…]

Since the rapists started harassing her

And then there’s the rape victim in India who killed herself yesterday. She was being harassed by the rapists. That’s right. First they rape her, then they make her life hell afterwards because.

The police also got in on the act, making her report to the police station late at night and tell them all about the rape.

…as no arrests were made, the accused not only harassed the victim and her family, but also started issuing open threats. Hounded, the girl shifted to her aunt’s house in nearby Samana town on November 29. “Since the rapists started harassing her at Samana too, she consumed some poisonous substance around 5pm on Wednesday [Read more…]

The news from India

Avicenna is on his way out to the protest, to provide medical coverage. He was already getting ready to go when the victim’s death was reported; now he expects riots. Be careful, Avi.

Meanwhile, experts were giving their views in the hours before the victim lost the fight.

“Had the girl simply surrendered (and not resisted) when surrounded by six men, she would not have lost her intestine. Why was she out with her boyfriend at 10 pm?” These comments made by an agricultural scientist at a seminar organised by the police provoked an outrage in Madhya Pradesh on Thursday, and demands for punitive action against her.

Dr Anita Shukla, a scientist at the Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia Krishi Vishwa Vidyalaya, had been invited to the seminar on “Women’s Empowerment” in her capacity as the president of Lion’s Club on Wednesday. Women, Shukla said in her speech, had misused the facilities and rights given to them.

Hmmyeah. She should have surrendered, and she shouldn’t have been out at 10 pm. She was doing everything wrong, wasn’t she. She shouldn’t have had a hole between her legs. She shouldn’t have left the house. She shouldn’t have grown up. She shouldn’t have been born. One mistake after another, she made.

Thanks, Dr Shukla. You’re a big help.

Tho thorry their thentimenth got hurt

NPR reports on the Delhi rape victim and rape culture in India (without calling it that).

The victim of a gang-rape in New Delhi fought for her life at a Singapore hospital Friday as officials in the Indian state of Punjab fired and suspended police officers accused of ignoring the rape of another woman, who then committed suicide.

Indian authorities have been accused of belittling rape victims and refusing to file cases against their attackers, further deterring victims — already under societal pressure to keep the assaults quiet — from reporting the crimes.

Because only sluts get raped and only lying sluts report rape. The sluts. [Read more…]

Bitter herbs

The Delhi rape victim is much worse.

The 23-year-old arrived in Singapore on Thursday after undergoing three operations in a Delhi hospital.

“Her vital signs are deteriorating with signs of severe organ failure,” hospital official Kelvin Loh said.

…

On arrival at the hospital in Singapore, doctors said that as well as a “prior cardiac arrest, she also had infection of her lungs and abdomen, as well as significant brain injury”.

And all for why? For because she and a male friend tried to take a bus home after going to the movies. Slut! Obviously she deserved to be raped to death.

 

Thugs

Now there’s another fake Twitter account using my name. I changed my profile picture two days ago to try to avoid the deception caused by the fake account (which had the pineapple as my picture). I used the amusing one that Hank Fox took of me squirming at a talk at Eschaton, which he gave me permission to publish. Nobody else has any right to use that photo. The harasser-bully who set up fake account using my name number 2 is using that photo. They’re bullies and thieves and thugs.

fake2

 Update: Ed says what he thinks of the thugs (he calls them assholes, which also fits), and what people should do about them.

Update 2: Latest “parody”

Bitter Benson‏@FakeOphiBenson

How can I exploit the Delhi rape death? It’s all about ME ME ME

Right, because tweeting about it and RTing other people’s angry sad tweets is exploiting it and making it all about me.

The thugs, meanwhile, of course are not exploiting anything, they’re just pursuing an honest…vendetta.

Ed launches an atheist cult

Ed has a post on Al’s ragey video. He doesn’t find it completely persuasive. Usually he likes to be Switzerland when others are fighting, but this time, no.

It seems that, according to Al, I have unwittingly launched an “atheist cult” of “radical extremists” who are “giving a bad name” to “real feminists.” PZ, Jen, Ophelia, Stephanie, Rebecca and others, Al says, “appear to have an incredibly unhealthy vendetta against men in general, and as it appears, the entire Caucasian race as well.” This is not a straw man, it’s an entire straw universe, a bizarro world remarkably similar to the one inhabited by the religious right, where any challenge to their privilege is terrible persecution from “feminazis” and other unsavory types. [Read more…]

The re-reading files

Has anybody here read The Brothers Karamazov lately? Or, many times and with great interest? Or anything along those lines? Read it in Russian perhaps? (Do I have any Russian readers? I’m not sure…but then I wouldn’t necessarily know, would I.)

Just wondering. I read it once, centuries ago, when I was in high school. It was my read all the long things phase, combined with a read all the Russian things phase. Clearly I didn’t like it much, or I would have read it more than once, as I have Anna Karenina. But I don’t remember it well.

I picked it up yesterday and took a stab – and found it immediately unreadable. It’s not just the translation: it’s clearly very wordy in a bad way; turgid, undisciplined, prolix, on and on ish.

And then there’s Father Stinking Zossima – oh take it away. Dostoevsky was a preachy Christian and a reactionary, so I probably shouldn’t expect to be able to like The Brothers K. I thought I would give it a shot in case there was good stuff I’d forgotten, but now I’m thinking no I won’t.

Anybody want to argue the other side?