Rather than leave her in a ditch somewhere


How bad can it get? Well, I probably can’t even imagine, but I can see part of the way to how bad it can get. It can get as bad as Why don’t we have a Dumb Fucking Whore Registry? The author of that calls herself Judgybitch.

So two of the boys involved in the Steubenville “rape” case were found guilty and will now face imprisonment and a lifetime membership on the Registered List of Sex Offenders. That is a tragedy for the boys, for justice and for the victims of actual rape.  As we go through this case, ask yourself who benefits from this verdict, and why.

Most of the facts in this case seem relatively incontrovertible:  a young woman, who was not part of the regular social group, went to a football party, in a town mad for football, got trashed out of her mind, voluntarily accompanied two of the biggest football stars to another party, passed out and then got treated like a whore.

In a moment of mind-numbing stupidity, the boys opted to film their “assault” on the girl, which involved fingering her while she was passed out.  Rather than leave her in a ditch somewhere, they carried her around to different locations, none of which had any adult supervision.

What the fuck, Steubenville?  Where are all the goddamn grown-ups?

The law in Ohio states that ANY penetration, however slight, constitutes rape.  Let’s start there.  Comparing a stupid, drunk, helmet-chasing whore who gets fingered while passed out to an actual rape victim is completely and utterly absurd.

That’s the beginning. It gets less polite as it goes on.

The most telling thing about this whole case is that multiple people saw the little tramp passed out and carried about by a couple of douchey guys, and make no mistake, those boys behaved shamefully.  Part of having the adulation and admiration that comes along with being a small town football star is not to abuse that power when the little gold-digging status whores come a-calling, and those boys failed.

Punishment > Crime

That girl had no friends at the party, not one person had enough respect for her to step in, she was not part of the social tribe and there is no way in hell she did not know that.  She went to that party to nab herself a football player, and lo and behold, the football players didn’t really like such an obvious grasp at their glory.

Find yourself another wagon to hitch to, little star.

Hm. I can remember being in places where I wasn’t “part of the social tribe” when I was a teenager (and after, for that matter). Don’t we all? It happens. It’s not clear to me why not being part of the social tribe deserves such ferocious and humiliating punishment.

But the blogger assures us that the punishment wasn’t ferocious at all, and the girl will be fine.

Her life is not ruined in the slightest.  LittleTramp is free to go about her life, getting as drunk as she likes, chasing after any high-status males she likes, and securing criminal convictions against men who treat her like the whore she is.

I don’t think that last freedom is factually accurate, unless what the blogger means by “treat her like the whore she is” is sexually assault her while she’s passed out, and even then only if there’s enough evidence to convince a judge or jury.

You know what we need?  We need a Drunk Whore Registry. If sex offenders are registered for the protection of all women, then why not register drunk whores for the protection of all men?  It’s true that men could protect themselves by not acting like dicks, but combine small-town celebrity with lots of alcohol and no adult supervision, and you WILL get men acting like assholes and women acting like sluts.

When we only punish one side on that equation, we have a serious cultural problem.  Men are held to account for their irresponsible decisions made while young and stupid and drunk, but women are not? Most crimes acknowledge explicitly that mitigating circumstances create different categories of crime with correspondingly progressive punishments.  Why is rape different?

The punishment these boys face, which will be in effect for THE REST OF THEIR LIVES is way out of proportion to the “crime”.  The definition of rape in Ohio is so broadly defined that the act of being a dickhead is now as serious as the act of fucking a woman forcibly and against her will. And if you don’t think there is a material difference between getting fingered and getting fucked, you are probably a feminist.

That’s some of how bad it can get.

Comments

  1. Pteryxx says

    …at the moment, my snark fails me. I just hope the girl from near Steubenville never has to read that.

  2. says

    I’m… not surprised. She written posts about how she’s pro-choice because if a woman is evil enough to get an abortion, she shouldn’t be allowed to have children.

    I don’t know what happened to her to make her hate her own gender so fucking much, but this is par for the course for JudgyBitch, unfortunately…

  3. Anthony K says

    The definition of rape in Ohio is so broadly defined that the act of being a dickhead is now as serious as the act of fucking a woman forcibly and against her will. And if you don’t think there is a material difference between getting fingered and getting fucked, you are probably a feminist.

    I was just brushing up on the Canadian Criminal Code. Did you know that whether you steal a chocolate bar, someone’s pet dog, oysters or oyster brood from a marked oyster bed (it’s specifically noted, for some reason), or their car, it all counts as theft?

  4. Anthony K says

    Amy Davidson at The New Yorker wrote some great things about this issue:

    There was a good deal of anger in response to the CNN report, which, again, it fully deserved. A Gawker piece by Mallory Ortberg, for example, made the sensible point that “Their dreams and hopes were not crushed by an impersonal, inexorable legal system; Mays and Richmond raped a girl and have been sentenced accordingly.”
    But one can go further. Where is the challenge to the idea that their lives really are “over”? There is something deeply harmful in all of the adults reinforcing the idea that the lives of teen-age boys are destroyed when a girl says what they have done. There is also something incomplete about just replying that they deserved the consequences (as much as they do). For one thing, it can mean asking a sixteen-year-old to be the one to judge the weight of her own trauma. It isn’t trivializing the seriousness of the sentence to say that teen-agers always think, when one door is closed, that everything is over, and that it’s the job of grownups to explain that it isn’t. A different life is not a worthless one. (Absent parents, not incidentally, are a theme of this story.)
    There are more important and complicated questions beyond that, both practical and ethical. Telling those teen-agers that there shouldn’t have been consequences might mean another victim, in another town, years in the future. It also affects what sort of men the boys become, and one has to think that Richmond and Mays, too, have an interest in that. Does it destroy a teen-ager’s life to take him off the path of being an adult rapist? Perhaps it is too abstractly (even annoyingly) philosophical to ask what the “better” life is—one in which you have a remote shot at being in the NFL, or one in which you might be a person who treats others decently? Still, the question is worth asking.

  5. embertine says

    I don’t really know what to say. This is so extreme that I can’t even really be disgusted, just terribly sad for this woman and whatever happened to her to make her hate her own gender so much.

  6. Anthony K says

    I don’t know what happened to her to make her hate her own gender so fucking much, but this is par for the course for JudgyBitch, unfortunately…

    $50 she’s just another fuckhead who thinks it’s edgy to sound like ranty Uncle “Bomb Japan Again”.

  7. says

    If sex offenders are registered for the protection of all women, then why not register drunk whores for the protection of all men?

    And they say feminists hate men….

  8. says

    :: turns green ::

    Hateful. Vile. Does Judgybitch not realize that anyone can be victimized, that rape is a brutal and traumatic crime? Where is the empathy for the victim!?

  9. thefemalearchetype says

    The argument that this girl was friendless at this party and was not part of the social tribe and knew it does not really hold up in broader teenage interactions. I remember from high school that there were plenty of cliques that would not stand up for their members in the face of social pressure. I’ve known women in college who were left by their supposed friends in the care of dangerous people for fear of the stigma of being uncool. I understand that these are anecdotal but most discussions about teenagers and morality center on how easily they often submit to the will of the group. Does this author think that such behavior doesn’t apply to rape and sexual assault as well?

  10. says

    This is beyond the pale.

    Just out of curiosity, is there any evidence that the writer actually is a woman and not a MRA behind an internet mask? It really sounds far more like one of their insane rants.

  11. DaveL says

    LittleTramp is free to go about her life, getting as drunk as she likes, chasing after any high-status males she likes, and securing criminal convictions against men who treat her like the whore she is.

    I’m trying and failing to imagine what it’s like to live in a culture where:

    1) Members of my gender who are sex workers are considered subhuman objects outside the protection of the law; and

    2) Any member of my gender can arbitrarily be made into an ‘honorary sex worker’ by dint of wearing the wrong thing, or flirting, or drinking immoderately, or being at a party where they don’t know anybody, or..

  12. Goodbye Enemy Janine says

    Judgybitch’s name is Janet Bloomfield. This is not doxxing. The information is in the header for essays she writes for A Voice For Men.

    And, yes, Judgybitch is one of blogs on the reading list of Renee Hendricks.

    And the Slymies keep saying they are the ones who are the real feminists.

  13. says

    So I take it Judgybitch would have said the exact same thing if one of the football players had passed out and this girl had anally assaulted him with a dildo. You know, treated him like the whore he is.

  14. Pteryxx says

    AnthonyK at #8: Ugh. I’m working my way through that New Yorker article and my brain stopped at the discussion of rape culture and “niceness”.

    Worse, one could take away the impression that a nice girl doesn’t press charges, rather than that nice boys do not, as was the case in Steubenville, take a girl who has drunk too much and bring her from party to party, assaulting her in a car on the way, until they end up in a basement where they strip and assault her again…

    Argh. That sums it up too neatly, right there. ‘Nice girls don’t press charges’. ARGH.

  15. thefemalearchetype says

    Pteryxx, I think I would add to that that nice girls don’t say no in the first place because they understand their obligations to the team, the dinner date, the nice guy. ugh…I think I just gave myself the creeps by typing that sentence.

  16. says

    I can’t hunt for it just now, but yesterday I watched an Onion video send-up of the “What about the poor boyz whose lives are now ruined?!?” meme. (FWIW: I thought it skated uncomfortably close to the edge of acceptable irony).

  17. says

    Judgeybitch – and of course she’s not “reclaiming” the word, she’s just reinforcing that indeed, women are bitches and it’s totally okay to call them that, whenever, wherever, for whatever reason.

    Ugh ugh ugh. My lunch is totally ruined.

    Note: being treated “like a whore” should involve being paid a respectable, pre-negotiated sum of money for a consensual sexual encounter, not being assaulted and humiliated.

  18. says

    I can’t hunt for it just now, but yesterday I watched an Onion video send-up of the “What about the poor boyz whose lives are now ruined?!?” meme. (FWIW: I thought it skated uncomfortably close to the edge of acceptable irony).

    The thing is, that one isn’t even topical. It was produced two years ago, and not in response to any particular news event involving rape that I can recall.

  19. sawells says

    I think what we have here is an extreme case of Just World Fallacy combined with It Can’t Happen To Me.

    For this writer, it must be the case that everyone deserves what happens to them, and that nothing bad is going to happen to her, because she’s one of the good ones. Hence the frantic othering of the victim.

    Despicable.

  20. rnilsson says

    It can get as bad as Why don’t we have a Dumb Fucking Whore Registry? The author of that calls herself Judgybitch.

    Do sports associations not keep any kind of record of the athletes? Well, there’s your registry, dear Judgybitch. Please send my consultancy fee directly to FtB.

  21. Pteryxx says

    …This needs further messaging.

    http://createourownlight.tumblr.com/post/45684185068/steubenvilles-jane-doe-asked-people-to-do-something

    The Steubenville rape victim, when offered money for her legal expenses or counselling, asked that people donated to a shelter for abused women and children in her county, Madden House, instead.

    Her attorney spoke in a local news article on why the family wanted this, and said they hope very much that “the attention … can help other people that have been victimized by this type of crime,” Fitzsimmons said, “and give them some strength and some assurance that people are there to help them when that happens.”

    […]

    The best way to show you support Jane Doe is to make a donation, however small and leave a Paypal note when you do saying “In the name of Jane Doe, Steubenville.” They are telling her how many people donate in her name so it’s a direct way of letting her know.

  22. says

    @Gretchen #18 –

    So I take it Judgybitch would have said the exact same thing if one of the football players had passed out and this girl had anally assaulted him with a dildo. You know, treated him like the whore he is.

    You don’t understand, men are ALWAYS the victim when a woman is involved! ALWAYS

  23. says

    On top of all the other things desperately wrong with the press coverage and internet reactions, I notice that nobody ever questions whether or not the girl deliberately drank enough to pass out. Because apparently nobody ever presses alcohol on a girl or young woman with rapey intentions, and certainly nobody ever spikes her drinks.

    Which universe is this again?

  24. fastlane says

    It’s true that men could protect themselves by not acting like dicks.

    I think the author at judgybitch really just needs to read that sentence again, and again, then about a million more times. Maybe it will start to make sense….

  25. NitricAcid says

    And don’t forget, sheila, all teenage girls know exactly what their limit is, and can tell the strength of an alcoholic beverage by the mouthfeel. It’s not like there’s any kind of delay between the ingestion of alcohol and the onset of inebriation.

  26. Bjarte Foshaug says

    I think I have an idea for a fail-proof psychopath test. There’s absolytely no way a non-psychopath could read that and not have some physiological reaction. It’s wooly-bumblebee-esque in it’s level of malevolence and schadenfreude.

  27. says

    Well, just when I think no one can sink to a level lower than our favorite feMRA, Wooly Bully Bumblebee, we find someone. That is without a doubt the most despicable way I have seen this rape portrayed.

  28. theoreticalgrrrl says

    “I don’t know what happened to her to make her hate her own gender so fucking much”

    If you live in a world where women are blamed for being raped and sexually molested, it can mess with your mind a tad. Maybe distancing herself from the victim is her way of surviving psychologically.
    Victims being publicly dragged through the mud is a warning to any woman or girl who even thinks of pressing charges. It’s terrorism, plain and simple. This could be you if you don’t behave. And the rules for what is acceptable female behavior changes arbitrarily.
    For me personally, I have a bunch of stress-related disorders like chronic panic attacks and bouts of agoraphobia. I’ve never been sexually abused, just being female and seeing that you don’t even have the most basic, fundamental right to bodily integrity and privacy can have a damaging effect on you psychologically. But it’s a total mystery why girl’s self-confidence seems to plummet around adolescence, the time when you develop secondary sexual characteristics. And why women are twice as likely than men to suffer from depression and panic disorder. http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200307/more-women-suffer-depression. There couldn’t possibly be a connection with a pro-rape society and being seen as subhuman. It must be estrogen and our weak female brains.

  29. Claire Ramsey says

    I agree – there’s no evidence that they are narcissistic or sociopathic. They are teenage boys who have probably been getting away with some level of shit since their athleticism was discovered and promoted. They are immature idiots with worse than usual social skills, and little sense about putting limits on themselves.

    They could be rehabilitated, as long as the horrible prison system takes the care needed to actually do it, and do it right. As I understand it they are not going to adult prison, so their stints in the big house may not be as dangerous as they might have been.

    And the boys themselves have to grow up enough to face what they did and to learn some empathy and compassion for others. This is stuff that can be learned. But someone has to teach it to them in a way they can engage with. Perhaps with sports metaphors. . . Sigh.

  30. theoreticalgrrrl says

    Has anyone heard of this experiment done by Iowa teacher Jane Elliott in the ’60’s? After Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, her third graders came to school confused and upset and unable to understand why anyone would want to kill him.

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/synopsis.html

    “Elliott decided to teach her class a daring lesson in the meaning of discrimination. She wanted to show her pupils what discrimination feels like, and what it can do to people.

    “Elliott divided her class by eye color — those with blue eyes and those with brown. On the first day, the blue-eyed children were told they were smarter, nicer, neater, and better than those with brown eyes. Throughout the day, Elliott praised them and allowed them privileges such as a taking a longer recess and being first in the lunch line. In contrast, the brown-eyed children had to wear collars around their necks and their behavior and performance were criticized and ridiculed by Elliott. On the second day, the roles were reversed and the blue-eyed children were made to feel inferior while the brown eyes were designated the dominant group.

    “What happened over the course of the unique two-day exercise astonished both students and teacher. On both days, children who were designated as inferior took on the look and behavior of genuinely inferior students, performing poorly on tests and other work. In contrast, the ‘superior’ students — students who had been sweet and tolerant before the exercise — became mean-spirited and seemed to like discriminating against the ‘inferior’ group.

    “‘I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes,’ says Elliott. She says she realized then that she had ‘created a microcosm of society in a third-grade classroom.'”

    Now imagine a lifetime of being told girls are inferior, hearing adults use ‘girl’ as an insult and shaming tactic, seeing adults excuse abusive and bullying behavior with “boys will be boys.” Just for starters.

    The boys who raped this girl were confident their coach would ‘take care of things.’ They were completely comfortable bragging about their crime and posting and sharing a video document of their crime online. And now they hear mainstream media and adults empathizing with them and saying how unfair it is that they now have to register as sex offenders.

  31. leni says

    I left JB a reply asking if she’s flies into apoplectic fits of rage when a car owner “ruins” the lives of the thieves that drugged him and stole his care by going to the police and reporting a crime in the usual way.

    (Her creepy car analogy! Not mine! I just ran with it.)

    I most definitely did not say it that nicely. In fact, I think I might have overplayed my hand with the sheer number of “fucks” I put in those two short paragraphs. Woops.

    @ theoreticalgrrrl

    o.0 Mini Stanford prison experiment.

    I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. At least at how easy it is to do.

  32. theoreticalgrrrl says

    @leni

    After the experiment was over, the kids really bonded with each other. They learned a lesson in empathy that stayed with them.

  33. says

    And don’t forget, sheila, all teenage girls know exactly what their limit is, and can tell the strength of an alcoholic beverage by the mouthfeel.

    Whereas teenage boys have no control or resistance whatsoever. One drink and they can no longer be held responsible for their actions. In fact, they can’t even be held responsible if sober, because reasons.

    The boys who raped this girl were confident their coach would ‘take care of things.’ They were completely comfortable bragging about their crime and posting and sharing a video document of their crime online. And now they hear mainstream media and adults empathizing with them and saying how unfair it is that they now have to register as sex offenders.

    This. What strikes me most about the case is not that they were willing to do it, nor even that they didn’t feel there was anything wrong with it. It’s the fact that they clearly expected everyone else to be totally OK with the behavior, to the point where it didn’t even occur to them to be the least bit suspect about it. They didn’t even realize that it was something they’d have to hide.
    And, of course, to some degree they were right. Large portions of the media and wider society backs them all the way. People are bending over backwards trying to argue that they did nothing wrong, or if they did, that it wasn’t all that serious. There was one comment somewhere that stuck with me (paraphrasing): “Anyone would have done the same.”
    Fuck no, they wouldn’t. But it’s very telling that someone could seriously think that anyone would. It tells us something about our culture. You know what it is. Rhymes with “ape vulture”.

    We will probably never completely get rid of people who want to rape, but we certainly ought to be able to get to a point where they at least have to hide it; where they will be afraid of getting caught; where they know that if they’re found out, they’ll go to jail; and where victims will know that if they come forward, they’ll be supported, listened to and taken seriously.

  34. Tracey says

    Judgybitch also lies about the facts of the case. The girl had been dating the football player and broke up with him. According to the information revealed by Anonymous, that’s when the football player hatched up the plan to drug her and humiliate her, and got his friends and some of the girls to help out.

  35. theoreticalgrrrl says

    But we have laws against rape, that means no ape vulture:

    “The victim of a brutal sexual assault in East Grand Forks last May said she was “shattered” when a Crookston judge sentenced one of her attackers to less than a year in jail. The “presumptive” minimum sentence for the first-degree criminal sexual conduct to which Jose Soto Jr. pleaded guilty is 12 years in prison, under Minnesota guidelines; the maximum is 30 years. But state District Judge Jeffrey Remick sentenced Soto, 37, to 364 days in jail and 30 years of supervised probation. With credit for time served, including good time, since his arrest on the charge May 19, Soto walked out of the jail in Crookston March 4 within about an hour of his sentencing hearing. His victim stormed out of the courtroom before the hearing was over. “I didn’t want to be disrespectful,” she said Friday. “But I was livid and upset and I had to get out of there. I wanted to say to the judge, ‘What the hell were you thinking?’”
    Stephen J. Lee – Grand Forks Herald 03/17/2013

  36. Lena says

    Judgybitch has really low social skills.
    I live in germany and (you can’t believe it) my Ex-boyfriend told me once that ”drugging a girl to sleep with her” isn’t considered as real rape by society. However he views this shit as nasty and immoral (yuhuu at least some hope) Now reading this article I remember his words and now my mood really goes down. I think we as a society should teach our children what constitutes rape. A lot of teenagers would rather blame the ”dumb girl” for drinking to much that fucking hate the bastard who raped her. That is so sick. At least the majority of people I know don’t think in that sexist way. And also there was a conversation with a girl on the internet. She was just like judgybitch. She blamed the prostitutes for having sex with the men, if the men got HIV from having unprotected sex and then slept with their wives who also got HIV as a result.. But it was their own fault, too. I tried to explain that men have to take responsibilities for their CONSENSUAL actions. But NO OF COURSE, it is always the womans fault she replied. I think people like judgybitch try to blame always women. (sorry for my bad english)

  37. says

    I’ve only just come across all this in the past week or so but although I should be shocked, I’m not. This is what comes of allowing the filth of the world to have freedom of speech.
    I don’t know much about this Bloomfield individual, but such a character is not as unlikely as one may expect. Its the typical show-off, desperate to get the men to approve of her. It reminds me of those boys at schools who were vicious bullies, but the head mistress sided with them over the girls they kicked around on a daily basis, insisting they wound them up and often found fault with the more sensitive boys – describing them as pathetic. This type of female (if you can put her in that category) is the kind I have felt a strong detestation towards for a long time and for many reasons.
    Oh.. If anyone believes for a minute that this woman is concerned about father’s rights, then they are bigger fools than she for thinking any decent man respects her.
    From what I’ve seen, this foul being is no different to the rest of the perverts around. I know of a woman who was molested – by a female nurse. Without going into it, (because there is absolutely no way of it ever being reported, esp since she had already been raped etc) she remembered the ordeal as being the most traumatic over every other she had endured by men. And it had nothing to do with sexuality. If anything it didn’t occur to her whether the nurse was gay but that another woman merely felt powerful by violating her during her most vulnerable moment.
    Anyone – male or female, capable of blaming the victim, is actually telling us they would commit the same vile act.
    I wasn’t gang raped but I had been in a situation where I was held down by more than one. I can’t go into that either, except to point out that where I was from, taking pills and drinking, wasn’t to make ourselves easy prey but to escape the pain.. Boys and men could do what they wanted to us and we were the ones labelled “sluts” because next to every misogynist, was a group of Janet Bloomfields! They put us there as far as I’m concerned. I was told “don’t get yourself in this mess again, madame” and “boys will be boys” also by a female nurse, the next time I visited the dr.
    To taunt a victim of sexual abuse is predatory behaviour. Do not leave your children alone with the likes of Bloomfield, they have their own agenda. If I had My way, seeing as they hate female rape victims so much, they would be treated with the same contempt as rapists and thrown into a man’s prison. And NO, I don’t care if that attitude makes me as bad as them because you cannot imagine the degree of pain they cause which is worse than the actual perpetrator inflicts.

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