This is the second of 3 posts on an anonymous comment I received. Check out part 1 including a comment (on abyss2hope) from someone who tells me what “no means no” really means.
Here’s the next section of the anonymous comment:
I was surprise of how many false rape accusations have been made by several independent surveys reveal that 42% to approximately half of all accusations made are false. Most cases involve divorce battles involving the custody of children, some for revenge for withdraw of affection, monetary gains, an excuse for infidelity, or misidentification.
Yeah, right. Surprising. But it’s not so surprising that he isn’t as skeptical of this claim as he is of rape accusations.
It’s also interesting how he slips in misidentification since those are cases where a rape occurred and the only problem is identifying the rapist. I suspect those are stranger rapes and rape/murder cases such as this one where the confession to rape/murder is being disputed or this one where the DNA evidence cleared a man who is still a sex offender because of another conviction which hasn’t been overturned.
By bringing up the issue of custody, he seems to be including any reports of suspected child sexual abuse and calling any unproven claims of that type false rape allegations.
His intent is to convince people that it’s been proven that nearly half of all girls and women who report rapes were not raped or sexually assaulted but he can throw in everything but the kitchen sink to count as a valid false accusation.
I suspect that if there is a loophole in the law (marital rape excluded from rape law, for example) the person who reported the rape automatically becomes someone making a false allegation according to this commenter’s view of false allegations. That same problem may exist in crime statistics collected by different government agencies as well.
While he brings up false rape allegations, he doesn’t bring up the strategy of rapists and those accused of rape to make allegations against the alleged victim such as the rape trial of the father of a chess prodigy or the stranger rapist who claimed he was breaking into a woman’s home for more consensual sex.
By the logic used by many people like anonymous if these people are convicted of rape, they should also be convicted of making a false allegation when they make claims about the victim that are subsequently proven to be false.
According to the FBI, one of every 12 claims of rape filed in the United States are later deemed ‘unfounded,’ meaning the case was closed because the alleged victim recanted or because investigators found no evidence of a crime.
This is a blatant attempt to distort data that says one thing to mean another. Just because someone can’t prove a crime was committed, or classifies it that way, doesn’t mean it wasn’t committed. Just because someone doesn’t believe a victim doesn’t mean that victim was not a victim. Recanting a rape allegation is as problematic as confessions given by those accused of rape.
Howard County Police classified one out of every four rape allegations as unfounded in 1990-91.
Just because they did this doesn’t mean one out of every four rape allegations was false as this comment is implying. Or that this number reflects only cases where a girl or woman says she was raped.
The National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers says around 600 teachers a year are falsely accused – a trebling since the 1989 Children’s Act.
I looked up this claim and the subject of false allegations was not specific to allegations of rape. One of the problems that leads to unsubstantiated allegations and damage to reputations can be shoddy, incomplete investigations. If claims appear to be dismissed too easily by those in charge, more people will abandon the system of investigation and take their claims public. Rather than the solution being a gag order, the solution should be thorough investigations that document what happened so that the innocent party is protected whether that is a student or a teacher.
Citing a recent USA Today article, discussing the miracle of DNA and FBI studies of sexual assault suspects, DNA testing exonerated about 30% to 35% of the more than 4,000 sexual assault suspects on whom the FBI had conducted DNA testing over the past three years.
Since they had DNA, the problem was not false reports of rape. This mixing of identification of unknown rapists and rapist/murderers with women who accuse specific men of raping them is no accident but a deliberate strategy to inflate the number of women who lie about being raped.
Purdue sociologist Eugene J. Kanin, in over 40% of the cases reviewed, the complainants eventually admitted that no rape had occurred (Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1994).
There are serious flaws in this study, yet people who want to appear as if they have done full investigations always neglect to point out anything that doesn’t support their assertion. This number could as easily be caused by the way those charged with investigating rape treated alleged victims. If victims come in scared and traumatized and are treated like suspects who must be badgered and threatened, it wouldn’t be that hard to break many of those victims.
1985 the Air Force conducted a study of 556 rape accusations. Over 25% of the accusers admitted, either just before they took a lie detector test or after they had failed it, that no rape occurred.
This data is meaningless since one of the ways to get false confessions is to use props such as lie detector tests to induce a confession. Where’s the study of the matching alleged rapists and the results of their lie detector tests? Oh, wait. Alleged rapists have rights.
1996 Department of Justice Report, of the roughly 10,000 sexual assault cases analyzed with DNA evidence over the previous seven years, 2,000 excluded the primary suspect, and another 2,000 were inconclusive.
Again we get the mixing of unknown rapists with the assertion that no rape occurred.
Linda Fairstein, who heads the New York County District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit. Fairstein, the author of Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape, says, “there are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about 50% simply did not happen.”
But what data supports this assertion reportedly made in Penthouse magazine in the late 1980s? And what constitutes a report of rape? Does it include calls where someone says they think someone is being raped or sexually abused? If a call came in about a rape in progress and the police find nothing and nobody related to the call, is that considered a false allegation? If a cop refused to believe a report and labels it a false report without any investigation, how do we know the cop’s instincts were correct?
Craig Silverman, a former Colorado prosecutor known for his zealous prosecution of rapists during his 16-year career, says that false rape accusations occur with “scary frequency.” As a regular commentator on the Bryant trial for Denver’s ABC affiliate, Silverman noted that “any honest veteran sex assault investigator will tell you that rape is one of the most falsely reported crimes.” According to Silverman, a Denver sex-assault unit commander estimates that nearly 50% of all reported rape claims are false.
This is so generic we have no way of knowing what all of the scenarios are which are being called false. Just because he was zealous in the rape cases he prosecuted doesn’t mean he’s skilled at assessing the validity of all rape cases.
And how do we know honest veteran sex assault investigator always equals skilled at assessing cases between people who know each other and where there wasn’t great physical trauma? Sometimes veteran equals cynical and eager to be rid of the half of the cases which are assumed to be false. Get an ex-con victim with an attitude and a drug habit who says she was raped? False report. “Next!”
I’m sure coping with the workload is easier if you believe that the cases which were dumped are all false reports.
Through all of the proof given to show that nearly half of those who report rape are liars, this commenter shows that he only cares about beyond-a-reasonable-doubt proof when it comes to accused rapists. Accusations against alleged victims don’t need no stinking proof just the lack of a convicted rapist.
Where are the statistics on the number of convictions for making false rape accusations? What’s the ratio between convictions on sexual assault charges and convictions on false accusation of rape charges?
The possibility of a report on real criminal behavior being labeled nothing more than a false allegation seems beyond this commentor’s comprehension or it brings up issues he’d rather pretend don’t exist. Yet he can think of every possibility where innocent men are called rapists. Does that fit under the label of being objective? I don’t think so.
Part 3 gets into the issues of the rape trial.
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
Note: Comments are limited to feminists or those who can be respectful of feminists and their efforts to fight sexual exploitation. If you want to excuse or minimize the behavior of those who harm others, make the person exploited responsible for their own exploitation, call those who label their experiences rape liars, or tell us that we should be focusing on more important issues, please do so elsewhere.
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This is totally off the track, but it just occurred to me that all these wanker’s who complain about threads in which feminists talk solely of male on female rape always whine away that “men get raped too!”. But yet they don’t seem to make the correlation that they’re proposing that 100% of the people who lie about rape are women.
Come on guys, what about the men and boys that lie about rape?
The complaint isn’t just that feminists talk solely of male on female rape, but also that male rape survivors are excluded from services. I have known personally several male survivors in both real life and on the net. I’m sorry that you regard concern from them to be the “whining” of “wanker’s”.
Do you have any examples?
Daran, Q grrl is referring to the argument made in this anonymous comment where all false accusers are female. Are you trying to make the argument that false accusations can never involve a male alleged victim or a male accuser on someone else’s behalf?
The majority of drive-by commenters will make this double argument that males are victims too and that all discussion should be gender neutral, and yet when they talk of false accusations the liar is always female. Do you dispute this pattern?
Many years ago, an investigator with a military sex crimes unit did a study of false rape reports — that is, he studied all reports of rape that were later admitted by the alleged victim to be false, or for which the suspect had an incontrovertible alibi (not found not guilty because of factual issues or issues related to consent). He found that truly false allegations of rape had a number of commonalities, including all of the following:
1. Victim is injured, but only a bit, and in ways that aren’t “typical” of coerced sexual encounters — e.g., more likely to have scratches than injuries consistent with falling while trying to get away, abrasions to vaginal or labial tissue, or blunt force trauma or broken bones. Apparently, rapists tend not to be violent at all, or are very violent. So there are patterns of injury consistent with “non-violent” rapists (e.g., vaginal abrasions, but no blunt trauma) and patterns of injury consistent with “violent” rapists — e.g., vaginal abrasions and a lot of other injuries, depending on how much the victim struggled. But rapists who inflict intentional injuries tend to inflict a lot of damage — as in, serious knife or gunshot wounds, and not superficial scratches.
2. Victim knows of perpetrator, but does not know him well, and alleged perpetrator has reputation for criminal activity. There are rapes among acquaintances, most typical, and rapes of opportunity among slight acquaintances and true stranger rapes. But in most cases where the victim actually knows the rapist, the opportunity for contact is pretty routine — next door neighbor borrows phone, for instance. A predatory or stalking rape by a slightly known acquaintance doesn’t fit the most typical pattern for any of these (not that it couldn’t happen, it’s just unusual).
3. Rape provides victim with an explanation for something that is happening in her life that can’t otherwise be explained — unwanted pregnancy, accusations of unchastity, unexplained absences from marital home, evidence of other sexual activity etc.
When people say that there has been a false accusation of rape, what they are usually referring to is that they believe that the woman’s interpretation of consent is inaccurate. That’s not a false report, but a definitional problem with the crime itself that is open to subjective interpretation, just as self-defense is. When someone says “I was acting in self-defense,” and the jury finds that they acted unreasonably, we don’t accuse them of lying, we just assume that we disagree with their interpretation of events.
I’ve heard of complaints from and complaints by women who were either raped or somene had tried to rape them and they could call the police who would come out and say no crime happened. Take no report and if these women wanted blood and urine tests taken if they suspected they had been given a date rape drug or they wanted a rape kit done, they were on their own. And there are certain beliefs pervasive in law enforcement that certain classes of women can’t be raped.
And what about the women who want rape kits done and are sitting in jail because the DUI they’ve been arrested for is more important than getting a rape kit done? That happened to a woman in Austin, Texas and she’s not the only one.
Things have changed but there’s still a long way to go and things haven’t changed for every woman or girl.
I’m wondering the same thing.
Hmmm, what did they do here, interview rapists? The range of injury for assault to commit robbery can vary greatly from no physical injury, to some injury to great injury or death. That injury may or may not be based on what the victim is doing, i.e. fighting back which too often is blamed for many injuries in rape cases and too few injuries are attributed to the victim not fighting back enough. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Damn you if you don’t fit properly into the “did she or did she not” category.
Oh, and when I say “injury”, I’m borrowing the definition provided in that criteria, not my own.
One group of women who are raped where apparently there is almost always significant physical injuries are rapes of elderly women. An expert said that was because there was more anger involved, that these women were standing in for female authority figures, but I don’t know if that’s true. And the problem with coming up with criteria like this, is that when you have a case that doesn’t *fit* the pattern, almost invariably its credibility is challenged when it shouldn’t be.
I meant “extra violence” in addition to the coercion. There are rapists who try to injure their victims in addition to sexually assaulting them, and there are those who are satisfied with sexual assault and its collateral injuries, rather than inflicting additional injuries. I think it was obvious enough that’s what I meant.
The use of other prisoners, (often cellmates of the defendant while his was on remand/in prison for another offence), to ‘finger’ the accused is a common factor in false conviction for rape and other crimes. That would fall, I suppose, under the rubric of falsely accusing someone “on someone else’s behalf”, namely the police.
But I can’t recall a case of false accusation involving a male alleged victim. Nor can I recall one by a third-party on behalf of an alleged victim. Nor one in which a woman was falsely accused by the alleged victim*. “False accusation” as it is normally construed to mean a false complaint, appears to be a uniquely female on male crime.
Unless you know different?
I don’t dispute the pattern, but unless you can demonstrate that a male false complainant is more than a theoretical possibility, you don’t have a valid objection.
*Paula Gray was falsely accused (basically fitted up, along with four innocent men) by the police. A truly horrendous case.
Daran:
Anytime a real male rapist says that a real rape victim is lying and contributes to her being charged with making a false allegation, he is a false complaintant. And that’s not counting all those males who are guilty of sexual assault but call their victims liars. Their lies are designed to hide their criminal activity and to avoid conviction, but it still damages the reputation of his victims and it is still a lie.
There have definitely been cases where a male rapist has pointed the finger at another man he knows is innocent. That fits what I wrote: “when they talk of false accusations the liar is always female.” Just because the liar is not a complainant doesn’t nullify the fact that lies about sex crimes is not a female-only habit.
Abyss2hope:
I’ll respond to your reply in a mo, but it appears that I misinterpretted Q Grrl’s words. So let me have another go at replying to what I thought she said. :-)
“Lying about rape” in the lexicon of antifeminism means “falsely claiming to have been raped”. There is some ambiguity (not to mention dishonesty based on these ambiguities) about whether “false” means “not true” or “wrongful” and about whether the concept applies only to allegations made within a criminal justice context, and if so, if it is necessary for the false complaint to identify a perpetrator. (Generally the latter is assumed even though most of their purported “evidence” pertains to allegations which may not accuse anyone.)
So yeah, lots of dishonesty there. But the basic idea of “Person A falsely reporting to the police that they were raped” is, to the best of my knowledge, a uniquely female crime, while “Person A falsely reporting to the police that Person B raped them” is a uniquely female on male crime.
I originally understood Q Grrl’s complaint as objecting, not to the narrow antifeminist definition per se, but to its gendered treatment. Hence my response. I now understand both her and you to be arguing against that narrow definition.
I still find her characterisation of those who advocate for the admission of male rape victims to the discourse as “wankers” who “whine” to be offensive. “Respect” is not a one-way street.
I know of no jurisdiction which has a specific “false accusation” offence. False complainants are usually prosecuted, if at all, in the UK for perjury, “perverting the course of justice”, and “wasting police time”. I understand the corresponding offences exist in the US, but have different names except for the first.
The complainant in a “wasting police time” case is the police. I’m not sure who the complainant is in cases of perjury or “perverting”, but I’m pretty certain it’s not the allegedly falsely accused person.
As a matter of interest, how many cases do you know of where this has happened, and by what standard do you judge the alleged false accuser to be actually innocent?
Daran:
You know, Daran, as a man who was sexually abused when I was a child, I have quite a lot of sympathy for a position that is critical of the way in which men are often left out of the sexual-assault discourse, feminist or otherwise. When I was in my late teens and early 20s and just beginning to come to awareness of what had been done to me, no one, and I mean no one, was talking about the fact that boys were sexually abuse; people were just beginning to acknowledge publicly the degree to which it happened to girls; and the one or two pieces I was able to find in the library where I was going to school focused, at least in my memory, on the common (mis)perception that boys who were sexually abused by men were most likely to grow up to be homosexual. I was, my experience was, rendered almost entirely invisible and that hurt.
I would love, therefore, the opportunity to be part of a conversation among men about what it means to be a male survivor of rape and other forms of sexual assault that takes as its starting point not the fact that feminism does not include men in its discourse, which is where you inevitably start these discussions, but rather our experience of men of being sexually violated (and, yes, also of having our experiences dismissed, etc. and so on). Instead of trying to muscle your way into feminist discourse, or trying to force feminist discourse open in a way that is antithetical to feminism itself, why not do the work of developing a discourse about the male survivors you claim to care so much about that will remove the need for the adversarial stance you take because it will have the kind of integrity that will inherently command the respect not only of feminists, but of anyone who wants to talk about sexual abuse as a phenomenon?
That discourse does not now exist in our cultural imagination, or it does so only barely. Carving out a space for it would be valuable work indeed, far more valuable than coming here and derailing conversations that are started with the entirely valid intent of focusing on women because what is being talked about takes place, by your own admission in other posts, overwhelmingly in the realm of female experience.
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Thank you for posting that, Richard. I hope the conversation Abyss has opened for you yields good results.
Richard,
I don’t have time to reply right now, and in case, this isn’t the right place. Marcella’s new thread would be good, but I don’t qualify to post there as I’m not a survivor of sexual abuse. I have been the victim of female domestic violence, and I’ve also done voluntary work (as a non-survivor member) of an incest survivors group. If you are prepared to relax the rules for participation there to include people in either of those categories, please let me know.
My last post seems to have been eaten by the spam fairy.
Well, it wasn’t to me, which was why I posted what I did. Thank you for the clarification.
After reading Richard’s posts, I was going to suggest that a separate thread being started to address the issues he raised. I’m glad someone did this.
It will be interesting to see if the new thread is mobbed by hordes of women insisting that the men who describe their assaults are all a bunch of liars, or somehow responsible for their own situation, ad nauseum.
I remember what an obnxious twit “jaketik” was when he was here, and yet I don’t recall a single woman poster who said that he could not possibly have been a victim of a sexual attack, that he could have done more to prevent it, he was surely lying, yadda yadda yadda…
Me:
I retract the italicised portion. Christine Hamilton was, together with her husband, former politician Neil Hamilton, falsely accused of rape by Nadine Milroy-Sloan.
I remember jaketk too, and the moblike abuse he got for refusing to be silenced about his experiences. Looks like it doesn’t stop, even when he’s not here.
Dude, jaketik behaved like a total asshole. More than one poster pointed that out. It all comes back to the great “civility” debate, I guess. It was all right for him to derail thread after thread in which he impugned the integrity of women who survived/fought sexual abuse of women, because he was so “civilized” about it. However, when women (and even a couple of men) told him that he was behaving like an ass, it was “moblike abuse.”
Fuck that noise. Nobody said or implied that he was lying about being abused. Jake Squid has mentioned childhood abuse. So has Richard. I recall not one woman in this space who acused them of lying, or implied it. Whereas you and other men imply all the livelong day in this space that women are liars when we talk about our abuse. Spare me the goddamn violins.
curious, who said anything about an award ? I’m pointing out a disparity in treatment of rape and abuse survivors in this space that appears to be rooted in gender. Is that a huge problem for you ?
There was no mob, Daran, so cool your jets. Jaketk had a habit of derailing every, and I do mean each and every, thread we had about male on female rape into a discussion of the slim percentage of men who get raped by women. He was very much like you – unable to actually focus and talk about those men who *are* rapists.
no, and its worth saying thatl I obviously wasn’t there. “derailing” is something i’ve seen often enough and dislike, so i guess I just get suspicious when the argument is that women or feminists or leftists or members of the workingclass are automatically better behaved than men/regular people/rich people, though sometimes it is true.
I’m newish around here–I’ve seen lots of defense and advocacy for the idea that women regularly lie about rape in society at large, but I haven’t seen, or noticed men posters suggesting that posters who’ve identified as survivor are themselves lying. Has that happened? If so, hope/assume/deperately hope that the male poster in question was banned.
I dont like the first kind of arguement at all and i’m impressed with the intellegence that commentors here have taken it on; ive defintely learned some good arguments, but I think its different than the second thing.
sorry for being crappy; i think i’m stresed out for non-blog reasons. thats my only defense.
I’m pointing out a disparity in treatment of rape and abuse survivors in this space that appears to be rooted in gender.
And I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why that is. I just don’t understand why the gender of the victim or the abuser matters (wrt veracity, impact, etc.) when we talk about this. But when the topic is men’s abusive behaviour towards women and how best to address that, it is just not the time to whine about how men are abused to. If you want to bring your experience into the discussion in a constructive way, that’s one thing – but jaketk…
Yeah, jaketk was a monstrous thread-derailer and an asshole about it. (“Why do you minimize my experience? Why don’t you believe me?” When nobody minimized his experience nor challenged his veracity. People just found the way he used his experience not relevant and a distraction. Remember that? Good times…)
Jake Squid has mentioned childhood abuse. So has Richard. I recall not one woman in this space who acused them of lying, or implied it.
Nope. Not a once. And thinking about it… it wouldn’t matter to me if somebody did accuse me of lying.
I think that is worth addressing. I tend to think that it matters less to me than the average woman because of the dynamics of abuse and the fact that my sexuality and sexual attractiveness are not what is highlighted about me (or my gender) irl. Women, otoh, are defined by their sexuality and attractiveness to men – culturally speaking – and, generally, on the receiving end of abuse. Oh, damn, I can’t put it all together the way I’d like to right now. Maybe if it percolates for a while I’ll be able to organize my thoughts better.
Jake Squid:
Ah, but according to Daran, if a woman comments that men routinely derail threads to silence women and to draw attention away from the subject of male on female rapists, it’s actually the WOMEN’S COMPLAINT about derailment that’s really silencing and derailment. It’s sort of like how the average sexist male loves to complain about women’s “victim mentality” whenever women point out that there are power disparities in this society and they frequently involve men’s power over female’s. Victimhood doesn’t exist until the woman says out loud ” a man victimized me.” It’s all almost Orwellian in its beauty, I think.
Oh, and Daran, way to go. Complaining about my comments (from this thread) in a thread where you can play “gotcha !” should I dare to post my opinions on your attitude there. Sooooo very clever of you.
The fact that a previously resident asshole is not present to continue his assholishness does not in any way or fashion diminish the fact that he was an asshole in this space. If that bothers you, tough shit. Frankly, I’ve had MRA’s and others trash the shit out of me in their own spaces, where I did not even contribute nor desire membership– and yet I did not die of it. Amazing, that.
I know I said I wouldn’t comment further, but…
Did jaketk ever deny or disbelieve another person’s disclosure? If so, can anyone cite?
Ho hum, another thread that’s all about the men.
The sense of privilege is pretty staggering, don’t you think, radfem ? Check it out. Right next door, Daran is going on and on about “feminist apartheid” and how men simply must horn in on everything women do for women because “that’s where the money tends to end up.” Tends to. It just falls in our laps like free milk and cookies in fucking kindergarten. Truckloads of free milk and cookies, and how meeeeeeean of us not to give him any just because he holds out his hand. Sweet jeebus.
Well, I hope that’s not what Richard had in mind when he agreed to come back and oversee/mediate the thread Abyss set up, but I guess only time will tell. It’s Richard’s thread. I’m not taking bait from anti-feminists. He can deal with them just fine, I’m sure. :/
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Right next door, Daran is going on and on about “feminist apartheid” and how men simply must horn in on everything women do for women because “that’s where the money tends to end up.”
I don’t know. I find it very interesting. Perhaps it isn’t just men horning in on threads about abuse of women by men. Maybe it’s any time there is a discussion of sexual abuse that there are those (mainly, but not exclusively, men) who need to turn it away from anything that might be remotely helpful or victim centralized. Why else take a thread that is pointedly about male survivors of sexual abuse (and what might be different than women’s experience) to bash feminists and woman-centered threads about survivors of sexual abuse. I, personally, hope that thread can recover and avoid the phenomenon of instant derailment/distraction.
Pick a color, Mr. Squid. Any color.
That would be nice. I’ll leave you all to it.
Meanwhile, Daran just never stops digging that hole, does he ? An hour ago, it was all about him getting all het up because I wasn’t inviting jaketik back to this space before calling him poopy names. Now it’s all about Daran harvesting my comments here for use on his own space, without inviting my express approval first. The stench of disymmetry –or hypocrisy– hangs heavy in the air. Too bad it’s almost Winter or I could crack a window. :/
Staggering, indeed and we can still crack windows open down south until at least January.
Strangely, I have no interest in jumping into Richard’s thread and derailing it by saying, “What about the women?” and how many men make false accusations and I’ll give you this example and that one. What, women lie? Never!
I wonder what’s holding me back from just jumping into this thread and doing it. Oh, yeah, I don’t feel like it’s my birthright to do this, simply because I’m female. Or maybe I’ve just been reared in a society where women aren’t given the same entitlement to do this as men are.
Women’s space or feminist space is constantly being targeted by male anti-feminists to derail or plunder to get all the attention focused on them and their needs. The constant act of doing this lays waste to all the arguments about men as a class being oppressed by women as a class.
radfem:
Or maybe you have genuine respect for Richard or Jake, given that they don’t act like assholes in women’s space every fifteen minutes. It’s remarkable, the ability to tell one man from the other based on their behavior. Even if you’re not hauling their words back to your own boards to play bogus, hypocritical little games of Gotcha’ in the spirit of Daran…
Well, I have my moments but I’m really quite mean. Especially this week.
Ah, I saw the track back. Don’t take the bait, but calling you the thread derailer? LMFAO, the wonder of male entitlement, never ends, does it? Not only do men get to derail threads that are women-centered, but they then get to decide who the derailer is. Tee hee.
When people slam you at their own sites, you’ve arrived! When they slam you on your own, it just gets old, says me going back to deal with the latest whiny crowd of men who can’t understand why their blackface comments and porn comments aren’t getting approved.
radfem:
Oh, it was tempting. Then I remembered that I really ought to clean the catboxes and throw out that moldy fruit in the crisper.
Yep. It’s like the glory days of SYG all over again, isn’t it…
ms_xeno, racism is gone. Sexism, too. The White man is the most oppressed individual on the planet so it’s always what about him? I think I’ve had my fill of this for the day.
Yeah, regarding SYG. I have relegated the trolls who write in blackface and one who I guess heard me do a radio show a couple months and is howling about that.
I did get some nice interesting traffic this week on my site, thanks to the New York Times who posted a link to one of my articles on its site.
You and me both. >:
Bean, you make an excellent point. I too have gotten these types of calls on the local rape line from men who wanted to describe — in detail — how they were raped, but they were never classified as false accusations.
So the claim that men never lie about being raped is false.
Bean,
FWIW, from what I’ve heard, there are some women who make those kinds of obsessive calls, too. The impression I got of the women who used to call ’round my area was that they were less perverted, and more sort of schizophrenic. :(
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Uh, I meant it as an addition, not an attack or a contradiction.
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Daran’s post in response to this thread uses some interesting logic. According to him, the statement “men lie about rape” is either a false or an unproven claim. Not because men don’t lie about rape, but because that statement cannot be taken at face value.
He makes “men lie about rape” equivalent to “men have been convicted of lying to the police (using their real names) about being raped” and attacks the former statement as if it were the latter.
He goes so far as to decide that all men who call rape lines with the story that they’ve been raped are telling the truth. It’s all those women answering rape crisis lines who are at fault for not recognizing that male crank or obscene callers are really rape victims.
He doesn’t even consider the possibility that these male callers are intentionally exploiting those who answer rape crisis lines by posing as rape victims. He also doesn’t seem to view these men as harming real male rape victims.
Rarely do non-feminists give women this same benefit of the doubt. That speaks volumes about a deep seated bias against women.
Lifts head above parapet, and looks wearily from side to side
Does anyone remember the film “Rain Man“, and how the titular character, a profoundly autistic “savant”, was enraptured by the Abbott and Costello Skit “Who’s on First?” To him it’s a puzzle. He tries to figure out what it means, but he can’t solve the problem, because there is no solution. It doesn’t mean anything. But Raymond can’t see this, so he keeps on trying to figure it out.
I am an Aspie. Asperger’s syndrome is a neurological condition classified as an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). How these conditions relate to each other, indeed whether there is a true difference between Asperger’s, “traditional” (Kammer’s) Autism, “Savantism”, and other ASDs and whether it should even be considered a “disorder” are highly contested issues. For me, it creates difficulties in interpetting some neurotypical (meaning non-ASD) utterances.
It was me who derailed the thread, in comment #4, and I’m very sorry for that. I didn’t realise that Q Grrl’s comment #3 wasn’t intended to be parsed for meaning. It wasn’t even grammatical. It was the textual equivalent of a scream. If Q Grrl wants to scream at antifeminists, who am I to say she can’t?
But I did try to parse if for meaning, and the meaning I got out of it was the proposition ‘Those who say “women lie about rape” should also say “men lie about rape”‘. Since I disagree that antifeminists should be required to say “men lie about rape” I proceeded to argue against that proposition. Everything that has happened in this thread since then (apart from a second derailment initiated by what I guess was another scream, this time by ms_xeno) has been a series of arguments, counter-arguments, and counter-counter-arguments between Darain Man, and the rest of you, in support of our various position as to who exactly is on first. And we’re still arguing it.
It’s an interesting question, and if anyone else is interested, I suggest we continue the discussion here. But I think I should let the rest of you folk get back to discussing the real topic, which was Marcella’s original post.
You may now all commence (or resume) screaming at me.
Posted to Alas. Also crossposted to Creative Destruction and Daran’s Blog.
Edited to add: Thanks to curiousgyrl whose comments lead me to this insight.
Marcella, will you please delete the link I put on the word “aspie”. I searched for something which I thought said what I wanted to say about who I am. I now realise that I don’t agree with what he said about Neurotypicals (NTs). I find it prejudiced, and don’t want to be associated with those views.
Daran,
I think your problem actually has more to do with an inability on your part to parse nuance and context. QGrrl’s comment was not some sort of incoherent scream that couldn’t be parsed for meaning (an extremely insulting description by the way- indeed, there is a strong undertone of “I am the paragon of reason, incapable of understanding your irrationality” throughout that comment), it just couldn’t be parsed for meaning by you. Qgrrl’s comment was of the perfectly standard “Why don’t people I disagree with about X also say Z about Y, which would be consistent with what they say about X?” formulation. Such a statement is basically never intended to mean that people who the writer disagrees with about X should say Z about Y. It usually means that to be consistent, they should say Z about Y, which would also be wrong. It means that those people’s position is incoherent, wrong and probably dishonest.
Surely, you’ve encountered that rhetorical device before, but perhaps you are always baffled by it?
Reading back through this thread, I remain baffled by how you misread mx_xeno’s comment about jaketk in the manner you did, but it certainly wasn’t because of incoherence on her part. My only guess is that seeing a friend spoken ill of made you start misreading everything relating to him. ms_xeno brought him up as an example of how feminists don’t accuse even the most annoying and disruptive of their anti-feminist opponents of lying about having been raped. No one suggested that jaketk was a rape denialist, and no one suggested that jaketk was lying about being raped. ms_xeno brought him up as an example of someone against whom people here had sufficient ill will that, if they (we) were going to accuse any man of lying about having been raped (not because of anything about his story, but simply out of hostility and a desire to shut him up), jaketk would have been they guy. ms_xeon’s point was not that we should have done so, but that we didn’t, because we don’t do that.
This exchange, and particularly your reaction to it, has been baffling me for ages, and I do think you having Aspergers is part of the explanation, but not in the way you suggests.
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Hi Charles, It’s DaRain Man the (allegedly) human trackback here. I really do not want to continue discussing this on Alas, so I have replied to your comment here.
I saw you visited, and thanks for that, but I don’t know whether you saw that post, or realised it was in reply to you.
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Daran, I didn’t remove my more recent post once I read your email today because you aren’t the only one to make the points you made in the comments of this post and in your own blog. Creating the illusion that men are more honest than women is one of the key reasons for the assertion by Anonymous and others that 40-50% of women who report being raped are liars. You supported that illusion, whether intentionally or through misunderstanding.
Charles:
Yep.
Daran’s no fool. I think he knew that all along, but thanks for writing that, Charles. It’s appreciated. Frankly, my skills at theory could fit on the head of a pin with room left over for a case of Fresca. Yet I seldom if ever have trouble parsing Qgrrl’s posts. I have a nagging suspicion that Daran doesn’t, either. :/
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