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[Watser?]

Hehe, not yet

[Sock Puppet]

I'll do my best!

[Gonzo]

does this go here?

[Ensign Steve]

Saw this in Facebook and the first comment was "they're both stupid." ... Yeah, that's it.

[Gonzo]

or maybe Mr/s. Evans?

[Watser?]

Not sure if this goes here either, but I suppose this is the most logical thread for it:

4.8% of American men claim they have been forced to rape someone else. That's more than three times the number who have actually been raped. What it means is that, if you're a guy, you should be more afraid of being forced to rape someone than of being raped yourself because it's a helluva lot more likely to happen.

A term has been invented to describe this behavior: "enforced rape" -- this is how it's described in an emerging literature on sexual violence against men, primarily in the field of international human rights law. (In my opinion it's a lousy term because it makes it sound like "regular" rape -- rape of women -- isn't enforced. I prefer "rape by proxy," because the person being forced to penetrate [or perform fellatio] is the victim of the rapist orchestrating the event.) Sivakumaran uses the term in his article "Sexual Violence Against Men in Armed Conflict":

Sivakumaran details a number of instances of this abuse during wartime or in prisoner-of-war camps. He makes the argument that forced rape, like rape, is about power. It's played out in the arena of sex, but sex is not the ultimate goal:

Unfortunately, the new, improved definition of rape just issued by the FBI does not include rape by proxy: "Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim." Under this definition, a man forced to perform fellatio would be considered a rape victim, but not a man forced to masturbate, penetrate or perform oral sex on another woman or man. Instead, the male proxy would defined as the rapist, while the guy doing the coercing would only be an accomplice to rape. Clearly, we need to rethink this.

It's damnably hard to find statistics about male rape, and even harder to find stats on rape by proxy. Instead, there's a stream of documented and anecdotal evidence that can be sorted into different categories:

1. Rape as heterosexual initiation: stories of young men who are coerced by their older peers into raping women or joining in gang rapes.

2. Rape as child sexual abuse: young boys who are coerced into having sex with their siblings or other children to satisfy the desires of older abusers.

3. Rape as homophobic hate crime: attacks by men who claim to be heterosexual on men who are suspected of being homosexual, commonly involving coerced fellatio and/or anal penetration.

4. Rape as torture: common in wartime or incarceration facilities where rape by proxy is used as a punishment for perceived infractions.

Daily Kos: Rape by Proxy: What the New CDC Study Tells Us about Male on Male Sexual Violence

[BrotherMan]

This girl's got it all figured out.

Riley on Marketing - YouTube

[LadyShea]

I want Riley to come live with me.

[lisarea]

I think I once said I thought Reddit had improved recently. I'd like to take that back.

Reddit Makes Me Hate Atheists - Skepchick

[LadyShea]

Look you guys, it needed to be said! Obviously someone had to make it clear that this 15-year old girl has various orifices that these grown men could stick their penises into.

WTF is wrong with these guys?

[BrotherMan]

I don't know where you got the idea that reddit had somehow improved. It's still populated by greasy college freshmans. Sure many of them are liberal-ish and a lot more of them seem to be atheist-ic, but there's also that semi-privileged superiority population that adores RONPAUL2012. So, basically, it's a microcosm of the internet (the good and the bad).

[seebs]

Originally Posted by lisarea

I think I once said I thought Reddit had improved recently. I'd like to take that back.

Reddit Makes Me Hate Atheists - Skepchick

Good writing, although I question the implicit assumption that r/atheism is populated exclusively by atheists.

[lisarea]

Yeah, it's really weird how various internets communities develop strange personality traits, and I don't entirely understand how it happens most of the time.

I think with Reddit, the smugness is inherent. Initially, it was perceived for some reason as being the grown up version of Digg, so there'd be a lot of backpatting about that. The current version of Reddit, though, makes the Digg they so despised look like the Algonquin round table. But the sense of smug superiority persists. People get really really attached to the idea of being 'redditors,' and the huge user base combined with their karma system tends to float the lowest common denominator* to the top, which of course ends up feeding on itself. Any medium that puts much weight in freshness of content ends up basically becoming a one-liner factory, and one-liners don't lend themselves to anything that challenges the status quo too significantly.

* That is such a sloppy term for that, so I'm in the market for a better one if anyone has any suggestions.

[seebs]

In general, assholes tend to drive out decent people in communities, because the decent people tend to also be a little thinner-skinned, and the assholes tend to dogpile them.

FF's done an amazing job of subverting this, and I'm not entirely sure how.

[LadyShea]

We are generally thick skinned yet non-assholes.

[Demimonde]

I gave reddit a go starting a couple months back, but gave it up a few weeks ago. It was just making me ragey.

I think demographics is key to how these communities find tone. Reddit seems populated by mostly young privileged white middle class men. The "humor" that comes from that mindset is shared. Contrast that with Twitter which has a much larger share of minorities, women, and lower income groups and you have a very different tone. Yes, there are misogynistic tweets, but Twitter has turned policing such nastiness into sport. Chris Brown trolling is one of the most massive memes on Twitter. So it sends a strong message in the community that that kinda crap will not be tolerated.

But yeah, I was about to post that reddit is the kid's table and Twitter the grown up table, but lisa has alerted me that there was something more infantile prior to reddit. The mind boggles. I will be at the table with the best wine.

[lisarea]

I don't think it's thin skinnedness, at least not entirely. In fact, the skin on an asshole is notoriously prone to tearing.

Some people are driven out of internet communities because of bullying; but I expect more of them drift away simply because the community doesn't provide the value they came for. Reddit was originally an aggregation site--basically a discrete message board where people could discuss content from other sites. At some point, though, probably because of the focus on freshness and the karma system, it became largely self-referential and more social than issue-based. People who were not interested in it as a sort of popularity platform are naturally going to drift away from it for that reason.

And even for people who stick to specific subreddits, the general trends still affect it enough to negate any convenience benefits they get from the platform itself. So rather than using Reddit as a place to aggregate stories on a specific topic, people might just go back to the sources of the original content or to Facebook or one of the other easily accessible solutions available to them.

[BrotherMan]

Not everything about reddit or /r/atheism is evil and misogynist. At the time of that linking, the top few comments were pretty much in agreement with Ms Watson's article. They were quick to point out that it's not just an /r/atheism problem, but a problem for reddit as a whole (and, also, the internet).

[LadyShea]

Reddit's format makes my head hurt.

WTF this guy?

notice i am not saying it is wrong as in, like, morally wrong, to make an off-color joke around a 15yo girl. i concede it is not wrong, it doesn't make you a bad person, but it is not appropriate (barring the louis ck exception, of course). maybe you can even make the case that the harm in this instance is negligible, and i might even concede that point. the op's point, tho, i feel is still on target - in the aggregate, treating this girl this way because she is pretty and posted her face and a bunch of guys, who would normally not say anything irl, are allowed to be "ironic" and "clever" b/c they're on the web...well, see relevant xkcd on that one.

Who is he conceding to? Why? Do they force people to be extreme moral relativists to the point nobody can say something is wrong?

[lisarea]

I can't fault the guy for that. I tend to avoid absolutes, too, and I don't think it's because of extreme moral relativism, but just in the interest of accuracy. And people on the internet, rightly, do jump all over absolute statements to point out exceptions, so he could just be predicting that. Notably too, he's posting on a board that has a whole lot of rape jokes.

Anyways, I don't think the core issue is with the atheism subreddit, either. I think that was on the front page at some point, so the commenters were likely from the general userbase.

I do think the problem is largely Reddit based, though, just because of the nature of the site. It's huge, low barrier to entry, general interest, and has had a pretty privileged slant for quite a while. And because of the focus on churn and popularity, it lends itself to a lot of back-patting and approval seeking. Which is why I point out the fragile nature of asshole skin. Things like that, which might get more pushback in real life, are actually pretty pandering on Reddit. They're not being assholes in any transgressive way. They're being assholes for approval.

Especially in low-content churn posts like that one. What is there to even say or talk about on that, especially in light of all the other, near-identical posts? So if something like that shows up on the front page, it's going to attract predictably shitty one-liner type comments like that, simply because that type of thing really is the status quo on Reddit as a whole, and because there's not much to comment about. The larger the audience, the deeper you have to dig to find commonalities. And with the size and nature of Reddit's audience, that commonality often ends up being racist or sexist or classist.

It's certainly not her fault. She didn't do anything that boys weren't already doing and getting positive feedback for. She just did it while being a young girl, and Reddit has a pretty big hate-on for that.

[Demimonde]

Ha! This has been quickmemed.



I rather like that. Easy to spread the objection in easy bite-sized brain morsels. Perfect for redditors.

[seebs]

I dunno, there's a lot of multi-syllable words there, will the guys be able to comprehend them?

[Demimonde]

I dunno. I don't think that discussions on this topic suggest that those perpetuating the lolrape are stupid. I think most discussions, particularly in skeptical communities, are so difficult because it isn't an intellectual issue so much as an empathic one.

Privilege is empirically invisible to those not effected. It is difficult to grasp on an intellectual level IMO. It has to be understood in a social/emotional context, which is a difficult leap for some folks. I have known some brilliant people who are sexist/racist/intolerant/etc. I think of it as the Bobby Fischer effect.

So within communities of people who pride themselves on a rational/empirical/intellectual level I think the conversation becomes much more difficult. And all the more important.

[livius drusus]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Who is he conceding to? Why? Do they force people to be extreme moral relativists to the point nobody can say something is wrong?

Originally Posted by lisarea

I can't fault the guy for that. I tend to avoid absolutes, too, and I don't think it's because of extreme moral relativism, but just in the interest of accuracy. And people on the internet, rightly, do jump all over absolute statements to point out exceptions, so he could just be predicting that. Notably too, he's posting on a board that has a whole lot of rape jokes.

I think he understated the issue in the first place in order to conceded its not-wrongness. Maybe he was avoiding absolutes, but I think he was also just trying to prevent getting hit with the "you have no sense of humor" stick.

Brutal rape imagery is something more than "off-color," and I say this as a fan of dead baby jokes. When you're working that blue, the target of the humor becomes a key factor in assessing the rightness or wrongness of it. Yes of course it's all bound by personal opinion even if not explicitly designated. If someone says "it's wrong to lol about blood being nature's lubricant when you ass-fuck a 15 year old girl to a 15-year-old girl," I read an implied "imo" qualification. To assume that it's a huge absolutist statement in order to refute it is just playing a rhetorical game, not genuinely engaging the substance of the argument.

[Demimonde]

Guy seems like a internet humor junkie. Note his ref to "the louis ck exception" though I am not sure how that applies. I don't read him as minimizing what those comments were, I think he was trying to say off color is fine, but this is way past that line. At least he referenced relevant xkcd:



Which makes me think he "gets it" even if he wasn't very clear.

ETA: I looked up the rest of his comments and now I see the point he was trying to make, even if I disagree with it.

that this happens in the atheist subreddit, a group that prides itself on operating by reason and logic, makes it all the worse. the logical, reasonable conclusion is: beyond a very small amount of this behavior, the environment quickly turns uncomfortable for that person. why don't we behave according to this conclusion? what is the message here, that girls and women, particularly pretty ones, should accept that they just have to deal with a wave of this kind of stuff, it's just their burden to bear?

what is the louis ck exception? glad you asked. it's perfectly fine to say whatever you want, no matter how offensive, no matter who's around, if it is so disproportionately funny to all other factors that everything else gets swept away like the japanese coast by a tsunami. this is an example of a fail. it's a little clever, maybe even original (at least i didn't borrow the crack from somewhere else, event though i suspect a quick google search would readily turn it up). it's in a bit of bad taste, it's a little funny...nowhere near a louis ck exception, though, and therefore i shouldn'ta said it.

I hereby suggest an exception for the "louis ck exception" which I shall call the "Dave Chappelle exception." Offensive humor can be entertaining up to the point that it becomes "socially irresponsible", then you "check your intentions, man."