My dog understands the word “No,” so how are you going to tell me teenage boys don’t know the difference between rape and consent?
Nailed it.
#safetytipsforladies: A hashtag about how tired women are of being told to do stupid, ineffective, unrealistic things to avoid being raped.
Ryan Gosling on the MPAA’s decision to give Blue Valentine an NC-17 rating over its inclusion of an oral sex scene. (x)
Steubenville football players drug, kidnap, and gang rape unconscious girl, call themselves “Rape Crew”, tweet about it, take pictures of it, and video tape it. They are essentially sentenced to 1-2 years. The media bends over backwards to portray them sympathetically.
Marissa Alexander fires a warning gunshot to defend herself against abusive husband. No one is hurt. She is sentenced to 20 years.
“Misogyny doesn’t exist anymore”
Just so we're clear
Cocaine possession: 3-5 years in prison
Crack possession: 15 years in prison
Pirating music: Civil lawsuit and/or up to five years in prison
What these little rapist shits got: One year in prison
The boys’ lawyers plan to argue that silence is consent.
The boys’ lawyers plan to argue that silence is consent.
The boys’ lawyers plan to argue that silence is consent.
THE BOY’S LAWYERS PLAN TO ARGUE THAT SILENCE IS CONSENT
Great. So all you have to do to get “consent” is drug someone into silence like these men did. This may be the most disgusting defense I have ever heard.
Seriously, that’s their defense. She couldn’t say “no,” on account of SHE WAS UNCONSCIOUS, so since she didn’t technically NOT consent she consented by default. They’re saying that everyone’s natural state is consenting to sex with anyone who wants it.
A THOUSAND RE-BLOGS! probably one of the best anti-rape campaigns I have ever seen
Exactly.. So true. Have some respect people! Don’t be that guy!
amazing campaign
My mom said if this post gets 500,000 notes nothing will happen.
But if this petition gets 500,000 signatures we can get federal laws preventing rapists from suing for custody/visitation of their victim’s children.
You guys accomplished Operation Fluffy Chicken
How about putting in an effort to Operation We’re Finally Taking Rape Seriously?guys this needs about 98,000 more signatures
To all those who don’t think the rape joke was a problem, or rape jokes are a problem.
I get it, you’re a decent guy. I can even believe it. You’ve never raped anybody. You would NEVER rape anybody. You’re upset that all these feminists are trying to accuse you of doing something or connect you to doing something that, as far as you’re concerned, you’ve never done and would never condone.
And they’ve told you about triggers, and PTSD, and how one in six women is a survivor, and you get it. You do. But you can’t let every time someone gets all upset get in the way of you having a good time, right?
So fine. If all those arguments aren’t going anything for you, let me tell you this. And I tell you this because I genuinely believe you mean it when you say you don’t want to hurt anybody, and you don’t see the harm, and that it’s important to you to do your best to be a decent and good person. And I genuinely believe you when you say you would never associate with a rapist and you think rape really is a very bad thing.
Because this is why I refuse to take rape jokes sitting down-
6% of college age men, slightly over 1 in 20, will admit to raping someone in anonymous surveys, as long as the word “rape” isn’t used in the description of the act.
6% of Penny Arcade’s target demographic will admit to actually being rapists when asked.
A lot of people accuse feminists of thinking that all men are rapists. That’s not true. But do you know who think all men are rapists?
Rapists do.
They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again.
Virtually all rapists genuinely believe that all men rape, and other men just keep it hushed up better. And more, these people who really are rapists are constantly reaffirmed in their belief about the rest of mankind being rapists like them by things like rape jokes, that dismiss and normalize the idea of rape.
If one in twenty guys is a real and true rapist, and you have any amount of social activity with other guys like yourself, really cool guy, then it is almost a statistical certainty that one time hanging out with friends and their friends, playing Halo with a bunch of guys online, in a WoW guild, or elsewhere, you were talking to a rapist. Not your fault. You can’t tell a rapist apart any better than anyone else can. It’s not like they announce themselves.
But, here’s the thing. It’s very likely that in some of these interactions with these guys, at some point or another someone told a rape joke. You, decent guy that you are, understood that they didn’t mean it, and it was just a joke. And so you laughed.
And, decent guy who would never condone rape, who would step in and stop rape if he saw it, who understands that rape is awful and wrong and bad, when you laughed?
That rapist who was in the group with you, that rapist thought that you were on his side. That rapist knew that you were a rapist like him. And he felt validated, and he felt he was among his comrades.
You. The rapist’s comrade.
And if that doesn’t make you feel sick to your stomach, if that doesn’t make you want to throw up, if that doesn’t disturb you or bother you or make you feel like maybe you should at least consider not participating in that kind of humor anymore…
Well, maybe you aren’t as opposed to rapists as you claim.
“
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Time-Machine (via a comment at shakesville.com) (now updated with proper source!) |
We need to talk about the Friendzone
How is this even a thing? I’m a dude. I get it. Girls can be scary. They look just like humans, but they make Weird Things happen in your pants-area. It must be magic. They are the Gargamels to your dick’s whatever-Smurf-your-dick-is.
(Sidenote: the makers of The Smurfs meant for each Smurf to represent a different kind of dick. There are 99 dick archetypes. Mine’s Vanity Smurf because it’s so god damned beautiful. Yours might be Baby Smurf because it’s so tiny or Fakir Smurf because it’s racist as hell.)
Actually, none of that is true. Girls are normal humans, and I’m pretty sure Smurfs aren’t dicks, though the hats are suspicious. The problem is that when you see a girl your body goes all Breaking Bad and starts manufacturing chemicals that Jack You Up. That’s scary. I know. I overdosed on PCP once.
Before I launch into this I need to say that if you’re a high school kid, and you’re getting “friend zoned,” I do not blame you for being an idiot. You’re going through a lot of bullshit right now, and your body is more like season 4 of Breaking Bad where for a grown man it’s more like season 1 or 2. But read this article and become wiser than your fellow dweebs. Stop fearing girls as capricious and devastating forces of nature and start seeing them as people who are EXACTLY LIKE YOU except with different pants-parts and, in many cases, different shirt-parts.
If you’re a grown man (read: 19 or older, and I’m cutting the 18 year olds a fucking break here) and you get “friendzoned,” then the following words are for you, Friendzone.
Stop it. How is this even happening? What are the events that are occurring? This is what I imagine:
You become attracted to a woman.
You are friendly to that woman in the hopes she will show you her vagina.
She mistakes your friendliness for friendliness and befriends you, neglecting to show you her vagina.
You act like a butthurt little asswipe, forever placing yourself firmly outside of the circle on the Venn diagram of dudes she will ever show her vagina to.
You complain about it on the internet, and 1000 other maladjusted bro-dudes go, “I know that feel,” and you are validated in your misogyny.
We’ll call that Scenario 1 because there is a second scenario I imagine where “friendzoning” may occur. We will refer to this as Scenario B. (Did that throw you off, Friendzone? Keep on your toes. I am the ninja master in your training regimen to stop being a douche bag.)
You become attracted to a woman.
You befriend her in a passive-aggressive, it’s-us-against-the-world kind of way.
She tolerates that because she’s too nice to tell you, “fuck off, you creep.”
She dates an actual interesting guy with an actual personality.
They break up, and she hurts.
You offer your shoulder to cry on.
She cries on your shoulder.
She dates another interesting guy.
You go, “What the fuck? You cried on my shoulder! Show me your vagina!”
She reacts something like, “I thought we were friends, you creepy-ass, fucking creep!”
You tell the internet you’ve been friendzoned.
The internet validates your misogyny.
So, what’s wrong? You’re a nice guy, right? Why aren’t theses Stupid Whores showing you their vaginas? Probably because you’re too nice. You should be a douche bag like that guy she dated who had interests besides pretending to be her friend while simultaneously trying to eye-laser her pants off. Well, good news: you ARE a douche bag!
Consider something for me. Imagine that I, an incredibly good-looking, nice, eligible man, was walking into a shop ahead of you. As I reach the door I stop to look behind me, and I see you there only a few paces away. So I wait and hold the door. Maybe you say something like, “Thanks, bro. That was really nice.”
To which I respond, “Yeah, it was. Now you know what you have to do, right?” And I take my dick out.
Would that be uncomfortable for you? Would it be unpleasant for you to live in a world where, if a man was nice to you, it meant he expected you to pleasure him sexually? Guess what! That’s uncomfortable for women, too. Isn’t that weird? It’s almost like they’re the same kind of person you are. WEIRD!
No, actually. It’s not weird. It turns out they are the same kind of person you are, and having unwanted dicks around is as horrifying to them as it is to you. So, stop. Stop it with your unwanted dick.
Here’s the hard truth, Friendzone. You’re not a nice guy. You are a gutless, pathetic, sad, horny little worm who’s too afraid of rejection to just tell a woman how you really feel. Your anger when she doesn’t psychically glean your unspoken desires and automatically reciprocate them is actually just you externalizing the disgust you feel for your own cowardice. You think pretending to be friends with a woman will get her to have sex with you because women are sex-objects to you. You can’t imagine a non-sexual friendship with a woman being rewarding in any way because you don’t think of them as whole, real people. It doesn’t occur to her to date you either because your pandering comes of as unchallenging and uninteresting or because your creepiness is obvious and unnerving.
How can you stop being such a douche bag? Well, I suggest forming a friendship with a woman. You’re going to need to find one who can put up with a lot of bullshit, because that’s all you’ve really got to offer at this early stage. A good indicator is if she’s been married a long time or has raised children. Invest time and energy in this relationship WITHOUT thinking about your constant loneliness-boner. Once you have internalized the knowledge that your new friend has thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, AND breasts, take a look around you. Look at the world. Look at all of the people with breasts. Those people are just like her, just like your friend. They, too, have thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams. Even the ones you want to fuck. Isn’t the world magical?
Here’s my last advice, Friendzone. People, men and women both, are complex, emotional creatures, and virtually all of them are horny. If you’re honest with yourself and honest with them you will form trusting, open connections with a large network of humans. Those people are called friends. You will be in many friend zones. You will be a better person. Someone will fuck you. Trust me.
In 2008, an 18-year-old woman in Washington State reported to police that she had been sexually assaulted. But they didn’t believe her. Lynnwood Police Chief Steve Jensen said that her story changed, her details were inconsistent and that people who knew the victim expressed doubts about her story.
So the police charged her with false reporting, and she pleaded guilty under a deal that included a fine of $500. The charge remains on her record.
Three years later, Marc O’Leary was arrested in Colorado for charges of sexual assault, kidnapping, burglary and felony menacing. He is being held on $5 million bail. When the police raided O’Leary’s home earlier this month, they found photos of his victims.
The 18-year-old woman from Washington was in those photographs.
Welcome to rape culture. Try to tell me again that it doesn’t exist.
just shut up.
First, a story.
So, my first semester of my freshman year of college, I took this Intro to Women’s Studies class. The class met for five hours a week, one two hour session and one three hour session, and the breakdown of students was what I eventually discovered to be the typical sampling in any Women’s Studies class with no pre-recs at my mid-sized, southern Ohio state school. There were a number of girls who would become, or were already part of, the feminist advocacy groups on campus; there were a number of girls who would prove themselves to be opposed to feminism in both concept and practice, one of whom I distinctly recall giving a presentation on the merits of the “Mrs. Degree,” while my professor’s eye twitched in muted horror; there were a handful of girls and at least one guy I’d come to know later through assorted campus queer groups; and there were, of course, the three to six dudebros, self-admittedly there to “meet chicks,” all but one or two of whom would drop the class after the first midterm. At eighteen, I was myself a feminist in name but not in practice—I believed in the idea behind feminism (which is, for the record, that people should be on equal footing regardless of gender, not that we should CRUSH ALL MEN BENEATH THE VICIOUS HEELS OF OUR DOC MARTENS GLORY HALLELUJAH), but I didn’t actually know anything about it. I could not identify the waves of feminism. Intersectionality and how the movement is crap at it were not things of which I was aware. Never had I ever encountered the writings of bell hooks. In a lucky break, you do not need to know about the waves of feminism, or know what intersectionality is, or have read bell hooks to read this essay! (But you should read bell hooks. Everyone should read bell hooks. bell hooks is FUCKING AWESOME.)
The first couple of weeks of this class were about what you’d expect. The professor was fun and engaging, but she was not exactly pulling out the eye-opening stops on our wide-eyed freshman asses. There were handouts. There were selections of the textbook for reading. There was a very depressing class about domestic violence, abuse, and rape that was the typical rattling off of terms and horrific statistics that everyone winced at, but that nobody really internalized. The dudebros snickered in the back corner, grouped together like they would be infested by cooties if they spread out, occasionally chiming in with helpful comments like, “Dude, the lady on the back of this book is smoking,” and getting turned down by each girl in the class, on whom they were hitting in what I can only assume was a pre-determined descending order of hotness. The queer kids, myself included, huddled in the other corner making pithy comments. The up-and-coming active feminists glared at the bros, who leered back, and the Mrs. Degree-friendly crowd mostly texted under their desks and made it very clear that they were only there for humanities credit. Again, it was a fairly typical southern Ohio state school class full of fairly typical southern Ohio state school freshmen. Nobody was super engaged, is what I am saying here. Nobody, myself included, was really eating it up with a spoon.
And then one day, my professor opened the class with, “So, who here has seen Beauty and the Beast?”
In the U.S., where ninety-six percent of the reported perpetrators of rape are white, eighty percent of the men in prison for rape are black.
“
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Joseph Weinberg & Michael Biernbaum, Conversations of Consent: Sexual Intimacy without Sexual Assault (via cocknbull) oops (via crackerhell) 96%…wow just wow. (via clairebearology) Not shocking being white men brought rape to the new world and still do it worldwide. (via bad-dominicana) but someone please tell me how jim crow is over. please. and why the hell we don’t talk about this as an aspect of rape culture. (via so-treu) |
Drug Rape Prevention: DrinkSavvy Color Changing Drinkware
The problem is that date rape drugs are odorless, colorless, and tasteless once they’re in your drink. We all know not to leave our drinks unattended, but the reality is it’s impossible to keep an eye on your drink all night. So what’s the solution? With the help of Dr. John MacDonald, a professor of chemistry at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and with the help of Contract Researching Organizations, DrinkSavvy is developing material that will immediately change color to warn you if a drug is slipped into your drink.
Great! But it doesn’t stop there. Together, DrinkSavvy will have the funding necessary to fully develop the material and drinkware directly from this material, such as, Plastic Straws and Stirrers, Plastic Party Cups, and Glassware.
That means discrete, 100% effortless, and continuous drink monitoring throughout the night, because the same drinkware that you are drinking with…is also the color changing material that makes invisible drugs visible.
While DrinkSavvy’s initial goal is to perfect our design to make our products available online and free to select rape crisis centers, DrinkSavvy’s ultimate goal is to use the success of this campaign to convince bars, clubs, and colleges to make DrinkSavvy the new safety standard and eventually make drug-facilitated sexual assault a crime of the past. So please, back DrinkSavvy to be a part of something that will change the world for the better. Back DrinkSavvy to be a part of something that has never been done before, and back DrinkSavvy to prevent someone you care about from possibly being the victim of drug-facilitated sexual assault. Thank you all so much in advance, and remember, when you’re out drinking, drink smart, drink safe, DrinkSavvy.
