Allecto has a post up that has gotten me to thinking. I used to watch To Catch A Predator with Davetavius, and we often speculated about the general male population and what percentage of them might be the kinds of guys we saw on the show. We came up with a 25-10-5 percent scheme, in which we surmised that 25% of men, if they were presented with the opportunity and were reasonably sure they wouldn’t get caught, would have sex with an adolescent girl, that 10% of men were one life crisis away from getting on the internet to seek out an adolescent girl to have sex with, and that 5% of men are currently on the internet seeking such. Real scientists, I know. We then went to Central Park and watched men walk by, trying to decide if they were 25, 10, or 5 percenters (not capital F, capital P Five Percenters). I admit that the whole thing was more about our own warped idea of humor than anything else, but I’ve started giving it more serious thought recently.

I’m generally not afraid of dudes, but I’m a 30-year-old woman at this point and I have yet to be mugged (I’m sure I’m up soon). That might be because I try to avoid getting into situations in which men can harm me, meaning I don’t hang out alone with dudes I don’t know very well. But I can think of about a zillion examples of times when dudes’ behavior has frightened me, whether harm came of it or not, and I’m generally more likely to feel threatened by men’s weird behavior than women’s.

I can already predict that there will be men who take offense to my bringing this subject up, but I’m going to have to ask them to calm down and think about what I’m saying, which is not that all men are dangerous, just that men are statistically more likely to be than women, especially toward women. I’m not arguing for any specific course of action, or for anything really, but rather exploring the idea of how we can know just how many men are dangerous, how we can figure out how to avoid the danger that some men pose, and what kinds of precautions are necessary and/or reasonable to take.

I know I often say that women shouldn’t have to alter our behavior to avoid being hurt by men, but I’m aware enough of how things work to know that, for now at least, that’s wishful thinking. Until the whole world listens to me and we raise an entire generation of people who treat each other like human beings, thus creating ourselves a little Nine Deuce-topia, I’d like to come up with a risk assessment and minimization plan.

What percentage of men are dangerous? Could it really be as high as 25%? More? How do we formulate such a statistic? We’d first have to figure out what “dangerous” means. I’d say it ought to include sexual predators of all stripes (and that includes men who coerce sex), domestic abusers, and men who are generally violent and abusive. How do we figure out, then, how many men have one or more of these tendencies? The only way I can think of to even attempt to get at such a figure would be through crime statistics, which would give us a very low figure that wouldn’t take into account all of the unpunished abuses that occur. We could use whatever logarithm government agencies use to figure out how many more crimes take place than are reported, but I still think that’d leave us with a lowball because a lot of abusive behavior exists in the “gray area” that the law can’t (or — more accurately — won’t) deal with (verbal abuse, sexual assaults that don’t leave evidence, etc.). Of course, not all men who pose a risk will abuse in all circumstances, so I guess we’d also have to figure out what kinds of men are dangerous in what kinds of situations.

I’ve gotten a lot of grief lately from people who think my rape law suggestions make the assumption that all men are rapists, but I’ve never made such a claim. I know not all men are rapists because I happen to know at least 5 that I hang out with regularly that have never raped anyone. I DON’T HATE MEN. I think most men are assholes (fuck, I think most women are assholes), but I don’t hate all of them. I honestly don’t really hate anybody (except maybe Diablo Cody and Chris Martin). This isn’t a discussion of whether men are evil, it’s a discussion of mathematical probabilities.  Just based on my own life experiences, I’d say that at least 1/4 of dudes (out of the probably thousands I’ve met) have had the potential to be threatening and/or aggressive enough to be considered abusive. Not good odds.

Could a quarter or more of men pose a potential risk to vulnerable women and children? If so, is it really all that unreasonable to avoid strange men or to avoid leaving children alone with men? Everyone has probably heard about airlines instituting policies in which single men will not be seated next to unaccompanied minors on planes. Is that unfair? I suppose if I were a dude who wasn’t dangerous it might bother me, might make me feel like I was being looked askance at. It might make me feel like I was being accused of something I didn’t do. It might feel like I was… a black guy or something. But is that really more important than women and childrens’ safety?

Like I said, I’m just sort of wondering aloud how we’d ever be able to calculate what kind of risk exists and figure out how to protect ourselves. Does someone with a more scientific education than I’ve got have any ideas?

It seems, as I look around at my comments, that there are more than a few radical feminists in Atlanta, where I’m spending the summer. It’s always been my dream to have a feminists-only kegger. I don’t know that such a thing is really a possibility, but maybe something similar is. Pisaquari, are you in?

From the Cry Me A River Department, I’ve just heard that a Georgia Tech football player, Jerrard Tarrant (could we get a few more r’s in there, buddy?), has been accused of rape and that people who give a shit about college football think it isn’t fair. Somebody call the wahmbulance.

You might ask how I, a sports-hating media-avoider, heard about a case such as this.  I mean, among what I assume are the thousands of cases of athletes who have been accused of rape, how did I hear about this one? I was driving down Ponce de Leon here in Atlanta, minding my own business, when I ran headfirst into the most egregious example of misogyny I’ve seen since, like, at least two days ago. I turned on some FM radio station in an attempt to avoid listening to Sean Hannity or whatever super-obscure band’s CD that Davetavius had left in the CD player, and I came across a talk radio show in which two people, a man and a woman, were discussing the case.

They weren’t discussing the details of what had happened, the problem of college and professional athletes’ extreme egotism and disregard for the law, or the difficulty a rape victim faces when her attacker happens to be (somewhat/a little/locally) famous. They were talking about how shitty the whole thing must be for poor Mr. Tarrant. That’s right.

They spent probably a half an hour discussing the different aspects of how unfair the whole thing was to Tarrant and not one second discussing the fate of the accuser. First they talked about how unfortunate it was that Tarrant, some kind of big deal or other as far as football goes, would be suspended for an entire season. It would suck for him because it’s coming right in the middle of his rise to college football stardom, and it would suck for Georgia Tech because it’d put their team at a disadvantage this season. They also pointed out that it would make Georgia Tech look bad in comparison to Georgia, because I guess Georgia’s had their fair share of scandals involving Natural Ice-saturated ‘roid monkey players tearing up bars, kicking people’s asses, raping people, and stealing shit, and there’s some sort of rivalry going on between the two schools over that and whatever other bullshit makes people who didn’t go to college give a fuck about one school or another. I know people in the South are a little fruity about their college football, but is the most important thing here really whether or not a team has to make do without one of its players for a season? Guess so.

These two radio dildoes then began to wonder aloud what it must feel like to be Mr. Tarrant. The poor guy has to go to class with a bunch of people who know he’s been accused of rape. Aw, that really sucks, man. (Wait, why the fuck hasn’t he been suspended from classes at the school?) The radio hosts didn’t wonder what it might be like for the victim, who has, you know, been raped and all, and who has to go to school on a campus where people are more concerned with football stats than women’s human rights. If these two local radio “personalities” are any indication, I’d be a little more likely to worry about the victim suffering harassment and dirty looks than Tarrant. They were also worried about his future, because once these charges are dismissed (and they will be dismissed, you know), people will always remember him as the guy who got falsely accused of rape. John Bender was right, the world is an imperfect place.

They stopped just short of suggesting that men accused of rape deserve the same anonymity the courts pretend to guarantee for victims, although it was implied in a fairly heavy-handed fashion. I’m serious.

I personally don’t give a fuck, flying or not, about whether this woman’s story is true. What I do care about is the fact that these assholes on this radio program, one of whom was female (I just learned what “kapo” means - think I can call her one?), are operating under the assumption that the accusation is false. As in, a conviction would surprise these two like Milli Vanilli putting out another album or Eric Nies making a comeback would surprise me (I really want all three to happen).

As much as I try to avoid hearing or talking about anything having to do with the sensational crime case du jour, I have had to suffer through ignorant discussions of the Duke rape case. I’ve also been forced to hear a bunch of MRA bullshit about the Kobe Bryant case. Two cases in which rape charges failed to stick, one a bit of an embarrassment, the other a fucking travesty (I bet you have to think for a second about which of them I’m referring to with which noun). TWO. And sports talk radio knobs everywhere go on to assume that any woman accusing any athlete of rape is full of shit.

Well, guess what, assholes? Kobe Bryant did it. He’s gotten away with rape on several occasions in other countries by paying off or intimidating victims and their families, and he managed to do so here as well by hiring legal assassins to make the victim out to be a slut.

That’s how it works. People who have money and status get away with rape, and our culture’s tendency toward idolatry makes certain that athletes have plenty of both. The coaches, fans, and sporting media, all of whom are personally and/or financially invested in the success of “their” teams, all do their part to make sure that the general population (and the jury pool) know where their sympathies ought to lie, and the net result is that athletes get away with rape even more often than rapists who don’t wear protective undergarments do. Don’t believe me? Read this.

There’s no other way to say it: we as a culture care more about sports than a woman’s right to not be raped. Remember that shit. Write it down. Whether Georgia Tech wins a game or two this year matters more than whether or not you get raped.

I don’t want to get down on the South. I mean, I just saw a guy ride by on a motorcycle with a lot of chrome flames on it and its own sound system blaring a song I’d only expect to hear at around 3 AM at a gay dance club. It’s funny here. I kinda like it. But I don’t know whether the reaction to this case would be quite as counter-intuitive, counter-ethical, counter-logical, or counter-sane in another part of the country.  I know that sports obsession has allowed rapists to go unpunished nationwide, but I think the emphasis on college sports in this region might just work in Tarrant’s favor with the judges, prosecutors, and juries he may face to an even greater extent than it might elsewhere.

And people wonder why I don’t have a lot of good things to say about sports (that’s sports with a lower-case “s,” because I have plenty of good things to say about “Sports” by Huey Lewis and the News). Not only are team sports a training tool for creating jingoistic assholes who are incapable of independent thought, not only are they a huge waste of time, money, energy, skill, talent, and nachos, but they’re also yet another cultural institution that protects men who abuse women and who abuse the (totally flawed) legal system.

Every time I write about rape people freak out. I can honestly say that, as much time as I’ve spent thinking about rape and how to stop it, I never realized that rape was such a controversial subject (at least in the way I’ve come to discover). I never knew there were so many rape apologists (MRAs, regular dudes, even women) that would come over here and give me a bunch of shit for making the outrageous suggestion that we ought not to keep allowing rapes to go unpunished. I intended to show that our legal system doesn’t protect women from rape, but plenty of people missed that point, detoured by talk of castration and jettisoning the presumption of innocence. I see now that I should’ve written something much simpler and more obvious if I expected these 4Chan types to understand me.

Fine, then. Some people need a Fox News-style Outrage!(TM) in order to get a point, and I’ll deliver. In the lovely state of Kansas, where they still have analog gas pump readouts that only go up to $25, a 14-year-old girl has been raped. She was hanging out with three of her friends when two of them left the room and the third, a 13-year-old boy, raped her. She tried to deal with the situation on her own, but decided after about a month to tell a school counselor about it. The counselor told the cops, and guess what happened? The GIRL has been charged with “rape” and “criminal sodomy.” The age of consent in Kansas is 16 (yikes), but the state also has a law similar to that in California under which sex with someone under 14 is taken to be a more serious crime.

I don’t think I’d argue with the idea that someone who has sex with a child under 14 ought to face a stiffer penalty than an 18-year-old having consensual sex with a 16-year-old, but what the fuck? That isn’t what’s going on here. A 14-year-old girl goes to see her school counselor for help after having been raped, and SHE gets in trouble? There’s been no mention made of the boy having been charged with anything. I am assuming that the boy was charged and then denied that he raped the girl, claiming that the sex was consensual, which is to be expected, but is this prosecutor out of his fucking mind? The kid can mount a defense and can claim whatever he wants, but the idea that the prosecutor would charge a rape victim with a crime as a response to that defense is pretty fucking weird.

I know some of the Tom Leykis types will argue that maybe she did consent and only decided to call it rape once she felt some regret over the whole thing, but whatever. We have no way of ever knowing that, which I suppose means that the prosecutor can do little toward convicting the boy (remember that thing about the presumption of innocence working in favor of rapists and against victims?). But what is the value in charging the girl? The boy, according to all I’ve read about the story, has made no claim to having been forced or coerced into anything. While it may be true that the idea of consent by either of these two at such a young age is a bit of a joke, that doesn’t seem to have dampened the prosecutor’s enthusiasm for charging this girl with a crime that implies she took advantage of someone too young to consent, even though she’s only a few months older than he is. He has effectively chosen to ignore a forcible rape and to prosecute the victim for taking advantage of her rapist. Oh, the beauty of the American legal system.

What does this story say to the people who’ve heard about it (which includes every girl in the area it took place in, I’m sure)? First, it says that we have no idea how to deal with the issue of consent. When someone is under 16 in Kansas, they are unable to consent to sex, and so exist in a perpetual state of non-consent. All it takes for a rape to have been assumed to have occurred is the admission that intercourse took place. But that only applies if one of the participants was over 16. If they were both under 16, it’s all good. Unless, of course, one of them was under 14, in which case it’s not cool. Unless they’re both under 14. But if you step over the state line into Missouri, the age of consent goes up to 17. Apparently the kids in Kansas mature faster than those in Missouri. Good to know. The kids in California are immature as fuck, though, because they can’t consent until they’re 18. Schizophrenic, I know. But that’s not all. Once a person has reached whatever age of consent their state representatives have laid down, they go from a perpetual state of non-consent to a perpetual state of consent, meaning that once they pass 16, 17, or 18, they have to prove that they did not consent to a sex act in order for the person who forced them to submit to the act to be punished for doing so. Makes almost as much sense as Bush lyrics.

The second thing this case tells the girls of Kansas is that, if they ever get raped, they’d better think twice about reporting it to anyone, even if they need help dealing with the emotional effects of the attack. Rape victims everywhere already know that, if they report having been attacked, they’ll be called whores, be exposed to ridicule and slander, and be treated mercilessly in court, just in the hopes that their case will be one of the few cases that will be prosecuted or end in conviction. But now they’ve got the added fear of being charged with a crime if the prosecutor doesn’t like that they’ve reported having been assaulted. What the fuck is this, Afghanistan?

No wonder 60% of rapes go unreported. Even among those that are reported, only half of reported rapes lead to arrests, and of those, only 80% will be prosecuted. Of those that are prosecuted, only about half will result in conviction, with only 69% of those convicts getting any jail time. That means 16% of reported rapes end in jail time (and most sentences are pretty paltry), and that only 6% of rapists will ever see any jail time at all if we include unreported rapes. 15 in 16 rapists go free. What was the highest estimate for false rape claims? Like 7%? Suck on that, MRAs.

The third thing this law tells us is that our legal system is fucked. Not only do we have no way to determine consent and no method for convicting rapists, but we have no way to control prosecutorial bias. Here we have Ted Nugent prosecuting a case in which he’s decided, on his own, that the girl is lying and that she has victimized the boy. He’s clearly using his prosecutorial discretion and technicalities in the law to pursue some kind of agenda. (I wonder what kind of record he has when it comes to prosecuting rapes.) Rape victims are forced to reply on police, prosecutors, judges, and juries to take their claims seriously, to pursue their attackers, to prosecute them when they catch them, and to remove them from society in order to mitigate further damage. It’s too bad the people victims have to rely on aren’t very reliable when it comes to treating rape victims with dignity and respect, or even believing their stories.

The proverbial deck is proverbially stacked against rape victims. Victims are met with potential disbelief and disrespect at every stage of the process. The foundational concept of the presumption of innocence, coupled with prosecutorial, judicial, and juridical indifference to rape victims’ claims, has dumped us in a legal shitheap from which there doesn’t seem to be an escape. You may not agree that we should assume that defendants are guilty until they can prove otherwise, but you can’t claim that our current system protects women (or anyone, really) from rape. Deuce’s Law might be the only alternative. I’m just saying.

Date My Mom might be the most fucked up thing I’ve ever seen in my life. For those of you who have yet to see this preview of the end of the universe, it works like this: a dude (no women, because it’s humiliating for men to compete for women or something) is looking for love and MTV has chosen three potential matches. The dude won’t get to see them or meet them, but rather will go on dates with their moms and make a choice on that basis. That could be interesting, but not to worry, MTV wouldn’t allow that. They’ve found a way to debauch everyone on the show and their mothers.

In the first episode I watched, it was a gay dude who was wookin’ pa nub. Now, I’m not here to pretend there’s no such thing as a promiscuous gay dude with a lisp, but this guy was unbelievable. He was essentially a caricature of himself, a 12-year-old’s idea of what being a gay man is all about. Obviously, MTV purposely chose a guy that would fulfill everyone’s stupid expectations of gay men. But it wasn’t just him. The three contestants were such cliches that I thought they were all brilliant actors playing out roles from a script written by a lame homophobic early-90s stand-up comedian. (MTV cultural info bite #1: The gays all talk funny and have weird posture.)

The first contestant was a rather fat and pale blond guy who was clearly completely out of his mind and had an unhealthy interest in Great Britain (or at least shirts with the Union Jack on them). His mother was absolutely batshit nuts, and apparently extremely intoxicated throughout the taping of the show. She and the dude went on their date at a wrecking yard where they sledgehammered cars and discussed her son. She told the dude that her son had had so many boyfriends she had lost count, that he liked to party, and that she and her son used to sing a song about centipedes when he was small, which she demonstrated and which was completely insane. It was one of the most surreal moments I’ve ever seen on television.

Next, the dude went out with an Asian woman whose son called her a “hot bitch” when she left for the date. He did so because she had agreed to tell the dude that her son had a “monstrous penis.” (Good lookin’ out, mom!) Their date was at a fucking karate studio. I swear to god, MTV sent the dude and the Asian mom on a date to learn martial arts. And the mom wore mandarin-collared clothing throughout the episode, which I suspect she might have done at the network’s insistence. (MTV cultural info bite #2 - Asians love karate and Chinese-style clothing, no matter what their actual ethnicity or how long their families have lived in the US. Me Chinese, me play joke, me go peepee in your Coke.) I’m pretty sure she was on at least 40 milligrams of Valium and possibly some box wine, because she told the dude that her son’s ass was “pure perfection” and that his penis was gigantic. Ugh. (MTV cultural info bite #3: The gays like big penises, so if you’re Asian and want to get with a gay, you’d better let him know that the old Asian stereotype doesn’t apply to you.)

The last mom was the least insane of the three and would have avoided giving creepy descriptions of her son’s physical attributes, but the dude sort of forced her into it. He asked her how many times a week her son went to the gym, and she said none. They actually showed the dude wince when she said that (MTV cultural info bite #4: The gays are superficial!). This dude was starting to sound too… not gay. I almost thought MTV had lost their place at the avant garde of stupid stereotype reinforcement until the mom came out with the info that her son was involved in musical theater. Even the dude who was choosing between the three moms had something to say about how cliche that concept was.

Once the dates were all over, the dude met the three moms at the beach and told them who he had and had not chosen. First, he told the crazy centipede mom he wasn’t going to be dating her son because he didn’t want to date a guy who was too promiscuous (huh?). Her son got out of the back of a limo wearing yet another British-themed outfit and the dude winced again. Apparently he doesn’t like ‘em chubby (MTV cultural info bite #5: Being fat isn’t ever cool, but it’s especially uncool if you’re gay.) Then he told the musical theater guy’s mom that he wouldn’t be dating her son. When that guy got out of the limo the dude behaved a little more civilly, saying he thought he might have blown it because the musical theater guy was hot (ssss!). Then he told the Asian mom, who was naturally wearing a qipao for the occasion, that he’d chosen her son, and that the information she’d shared with him about her son’s penis was what had sealed the deal. No, I’m serious. I swear. So the penis dude gets out of the limo and the guy is pumped because he’s picked the hottest one (of course). He was so impressed, in fact, that he told the cameras, “I know I can’t make babies with him, but I’m going to die trying.” Ah, love.

Once MTV had gotten through insulting gay men and their mothers everywhere, they moved on to heterosexual women and their mothers. The dude this time was a lifeguard and the three women whose moms he would be dating were really something. The first one was a rather portly young woman who spent almost every second of her screen time bragging about how many strings of beads she’d earned by showing people her ample bosoms and bragging about how ample those bosoms were. Her mother was her bosoms’ biggest fan, it seems, because she talked about them almost as much. She and the lifeguard did a CPR lesson and the mother reported to the dude that her daughter was a party animal extraordinaire with a bead collection nonpareil and a “voluptuous” bod.

The next contestant really made me want to kick someone’s ass. Her mother made a point of mentioning the fact that the girl had an abnormally high IQ and was an academic genius, but the girl asked that her mother not mention that to the date. Instead, she wanted her mom to tell the guy about the time she made out with two other women at a party. Do I need to comment on what that means? Mom blew it. She told the guy about the make-out sesh, but she slipped up and told him that her daughter was smart and liked to read. Bummer.

The last woman was the hottest (as was her mom), and she was the brattiest, least interesting, and most superficial of the contestants, so I knew she would win from the start. I really can’t remember anything about her or her mother except that they looked like they liked day spas.

At the beach, the dude told the first mom he wouldn’t be dating her daughter, and when the daughter got out of the limo he winced (remember, MTV viewers, fat people are only good for laughing at, they aren’t human beings). She took it all in stride, though, and seemed to really believe that it was his loss, which I think I agree with (besides, there’s a world of bead necklaces out there, afterall). Then he told the mother of the smarty-pants he wouldn’t be dating her daughter because all that reading sounded a little too dorky. (MTV cultural info bite #6 - Being smart is lame. Get naked and make out with your friends if you want attention.) Finally, he told the pilates mom that he had chosen her daughter, and the meeting took place. He was visibly thrilled that he had chosen the hottest one, and they shared a big hug in which he lifted her off the ground, at which point her skirt came up and exposed her entire enthonged ass. No pixelation anywhere. A beautiful ending to a beautiful love story.

Cut to “Dance Dance” by Fall Out Boy.

So, what have I learned from watching 3 hours of MTV? I’ve learned that love, happiness, and success increase in direct proportion to how many chicks I make out with in public. I’ve learned that being smart sucks and that I should pretend to be as stupid as I can lest I freak dudes out and end up a lonely spinster. I’ve learned that if I ever get fat, I might as well kill myself. I’ve learned that the best way to find love is to have sex with as many strangers as possible and then choose the one who is most easily manipulated with sexual favors. I’ve learned that love = sex+power and that there’s no room for trust, intimacy, or even morality in romantic relationships. It’s all about fucking and getting fucked. And anyone who has a problem with any of that is a reactionary asshole, you hear?

That includes parents. I learned from watching MTV that today’s parent doesn’t try to direct her child’s behavior, but rather tries to emulate it, because the most important thing for a parent to be is cool. Parental guidance is fucking lame, dude.

I’ve also learned a lot about homosexuality. For instance, women who are gay are gay for men’s visual enjoyment, but gay men actually are gay and don’t care about any women except their hot bitch mothers, who they’re inappropriately attached to, even as adults. You know, because gay men are mama’s boys. I discovered that the Andrew Dice Clay-esque stereotypes of gay men that I’ve thought were untrue for so long are actually pretty spot on (how naively PC of me!). It turns out that they really are all missing tendons in their wrists, they really do only care about asses and wieners, and they really are all into musical theater and Britney Spears.

Oh, wait. I didn’t learn any of that. I just learned that the producers of Date My Mom, The X-Effect, and A Shot at Love are the worst people in the world and that they don’t mind if they turn an entire generation of American youth into sex-crazed, disease-ridden, materialistic, unreflective, asshole robots who are terrified of books and people who don’t adhere to stereotypes. All the better to market Skechers and text-messaging scams to.

Sorry for the unexcused absence, everyone. I’m out of town. I’ve just been in Portland, where something in the tap water had me considering becoming a Suicide Girl and listening to Wilco, and now I’m in San Diego, where something in the tap water is making me think I should listen to Sublime and 311 and get a tattoo on my lower back. Good thing I’m going back to Atlanta on Monday, where the tap water just makes me want to drink microbrews with stupid names and pretend to like bluegrass (I can resist the tattoo for a few more days). That shouldn’t be too bad, at least until I go back to New York, where the tap water just makes me think I’m better than everyone else.

Back to MTV.

After Tila Tequila I watched a show called The X-Effect. The premise on this show is that two people who used to date and are now with other people hang out at a posh resort for a weekend to see if they still have unresolved feelings for each other. Or to see if MTV can manipulate them into getting naked. How this works out is that MTV brings both couples to the resort, tells the two exes that they are going to be spending the weekend together at the place, sends their significant others (SOs) away in a car, then turns the car around and brings the SOs back to another room at the same resort, where they will be sequestered for the duration of the weekend and from which they will be able to spy on their mates in various ways.

For example, the SOs will be given the option of sending the exes a bottle of champagne in a bucket with a hidden microphone that will allow them to hear the conversation that takes place over the bottle. Or the two SOs will be given the option to spy on their mates from their room, but are forced to choose between hearing the audio or seeing the video, not both. Their room is also outfitted with a lamp that lights up whenever their mates touch, which the lamp knows because the exes are wearing bracelets that detect such things, bracelets they’ve been told are really VIP wristbands that will allow them to charge everything to their room (dumbasses). The SOs will also often be offered the chance to choose the activities their mates will participate in, with one innocuous choice and one “sexy” one, say bocce ball or a couple’s spa day, respectively. The deal is, though, that the SOs won’t get to watch them if they play bocce ball, but will if they go for the couple’s massage or almost-nude photo shoot.

The exes are set up for two days in obscenely opulent surroundings, given every accoutrement they need to create the most romantic (at least in the mind of someone who is into Beyonce) environment possible, and pumped full of booze and bad ideas, then put into compromising positions in which they think they have privacy. In each episode, just to give one example, the couple is told on their second day that the hotel is having some kind of problem and that their previous room, the one with the separate beds, will no longer be available. The couple will, however, be offered the honeymoon suite (har har har), which has just one big, fancy bed and some couches (to be used in the unlikely event that the exes should choose not to behave like amoral assholes).The SOs are given constant updates on the exes via a computer screen with a diagram of the honeymoon suite that indicates the location of their mates.

The SOs are locked up in a room that they can’t leave, lest they interrupt their mates’ activities, and are also pumped full of booze and bad ideas. They are constantly sitting together, drunk, watching their mates succumb to one degree or another to ridiculously manufactured temptations, and are forced to decide whether to push their mates even further (by sending them champagne or choosing a couple’s bathing suit photo shoot or massage lessons as their mates’ activities) so that they can spy on them or to trust them and not spy on them (which none of them do, whether because human nature won’t allow it or because it would make for a boring show).

And  — surprise, surprise — the SOs often get pissed off and end up getting naked with each other out of spite and drunkenness.

When it’s all over, the SOs confront the exes. It’s usually at this point that the SOs tell their mates’ exes that they saw them or heard them behaving inappropriately but that it’s all good because “while you were with my girlfriend/boyfriend, I was with yours all weekend.” Mmmhmm! Then the couples meet and the borderline (or not-so-borderline) cheater makes the call whether to get back with their ex or stay with their current mate. You know, because the one who has been caught on video having acted a fool all weekend should be the one deciding the fate of the relationship, rather than allowing the person who has been betrayed to decide whether they want to stay with someone who has cheated on them and humiliated them on national television.

So basically, the goal of the show is to completely destroy as many relationships as possible by placing them under absurdly heavy strains that could never exist in real life.

In the first episode I watched the two exes didn’t get too crazy. I mean, the dude wrote his ex a poem about how he hoped they’d get back together one day and tried to manipulate her into sleeping in the same bed with him in the honeymoon suite by getting in it and giving her the couch, but nothing happened. Not so with the SOs, though. The dude, seeing that his girlfriend was resisting her ex’s advances, still decided to step up and… comfort the woman who had just heard her boyfriend recite a corny poem to his ex-girlfriend. She ended up getting into some lingerie and giving the SO dude a massage, which, of course, MTV showed us. At the confrontation, her poem-recitin’ boyfriend said he wanted to stay with her, but she told him to do one (good for her, but too bad she had to get used publicly by the other dude in the process). The other girl decided to stay with her current boyfriend, and he accepted, but he’d clearly cheated on her. The end result? Both women ended up looking like fools and the SO dude looks like a pimp (Gs up, hos down and shit). Shocking, I know.

The next episode was pretty heinous. I’m willing to bet thousands of dollars that the two exes were from New Jersey. The dude was losing his hair (despite an exceedingly low brow), had an obvious steroid problem, and was really into ribbed shirts. The woman was that special shade of orange that only Jersey tanning salons seem able to create, had hair that looked like it’d been bleached weekly with 90 volume peroxide for 7 or 8 years, and wore clothes that would make Christina Aguilera say, “She looks so trashy.” They should never have broken up. It’s all good, though, because they ended up having sex in a bathtub, which their SOs got to watch. After doing a couple’s bathing suit photo shoot, that is, which might have been the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. The dude basically grabbed the woman from behind by the hips like he was about to mount her, then bit her on the ass. Freeze frame!

The SOs spent the whole time being drunk and pissed off, but it all worked out at the confrontation. The dudes met on a pier, where I was really hoping one would throw the other into the water. (Close, but no cigar.) The SO told the ex that he’d seen him making out with his girlfriend on camera, but that it was cool because he’d spent the weekend making out with the ex’s girlfriend in a hot tub and, “you know, sleeping with her, everything.” The best part was that the ex, even after being told he’d been busted cheating on his new girlfriend, got all possessive and pissed when he heard that she’d been doing the same after seeing him do so.

When the couples met back up, the exes chose to dump their new mates and get back together. The SOs didn’t give a fuck, though, because they liked each other better than they had liked the other two. No sour grapes at all. True fucking love.

What an asshole party, right?

MTV is teaching us about love. I often wonder whether pop culture trends create, reflect, or reinforce social trends. I don’t hang out with enough gym enthusiasts to say for certain, but I think MTV’s version of love might mean that, if they haven’t already, human beings are losing the plot. If the kids being raised on MTV today pick up what the channel’s producers are laying down with regard to intimate relationships, we’re all going to die. People  are going to end up hosing around so much that they all get AIDS, and those who don’t are going to kill each other in jealous rages or kill themselves once they realize they’ve wasted their youth having sex with creatine and Botox abusers.

But even if that doesn’t happen, how responsible is it to put people in the positions MTV puts people in on these shows? I know that people sign up for these things knowing that there’s likely some drama in store, but it often seems like a pretty bad bargain for the participants. I wonder if, when these people sign up for the show, they’re aware of the fact that the producers consider the destruction of their relationships to be the ideal outcome for the episode. It seems clear that most of them just sign up just for the chance to be on television, but I doubt that all four participants in a given show expect that they’ll be trading in their relationships and dignity on that opportunity.

MTV does the same thing in this show that they do on A Shot at Love: they sequester the participants, don’t allow them to get enough sleep, keep them drunk, and play on their emotional vulnerabilities in order to create the most explosive outcomes possible, whatever personal hardships that may entail for the participants. Has anyone gone home from one of these shows and offed her/himself? Has anyone gone home and assaulted or nearly killed his/her partner? Has anyone gone home and found her/himself unable to deal with the emotional consequences of what happened on the show and the fact that it was broadcast nationwide?

Does MTV pay psychologists’ bills for the show participants who need professional help to deal with the aftermath? Of course not. They make the participants sign releases absolving MTV of any responsibility for what occurs after they get done orchestrating catastrophes in people’s lives for profit. MTV doesn’t give a fuck about the people they manipulate and use to make money, nor do they give a fuck about the impact of their product on their audience. I love the free market.

This shit is just so fucking mean-spirited. I don’t get excited by seeing people suffer. I admit that I like to watch Party Heat and Cops sometimes, but the situations drunken rednecks on those shows find themselves in are all of their own making. MTV — and the other networks responsible for reality TV — on the other hand, are intentionally manipulating circumstances to create emotionally abusive situations, situations that often exceed what the average person would be able to process and handle with any sort of equanimity. In the process, they’re feeding the public’s desire for ever more sensationalistic bullshit and simultaneously creating new standards of depravity and recklessness among the most impressionable of audiences: adolescents.

I’m not going to argue that the people who participate in these shows are innocent bystanders and that MTV is solely to blame for their suffering, but it is wildly irresponsible of MTV to willfully destroy intimate relationships and then present the depraved behavior they’ve managed to push people into to the teenage public as a matter of course, or even as some kind of ideal. Complete disregard for the feelings of others, extreme selfishness, and totally unreflective promiscuity don’t seem to be out of keeping with MTV’s version of “love.” I don’t know whether that’s any shittier than the unrealistic and shallow (and gender role-reinforcing) picture of love of fairy tales, but I do know that it sucks.

That we’re supposed to rejoice at the reunion of lovers after they’ve been dry humping people outside the relationship for a weekend is pretty fucking insulting. But not only that, it’s boring.  You always know what’s going to happen on an MTV show: the “hottest” (female) and least ethical (male) one wins, whatever the prize happens to be (no matter how ambiguous the value of the prize - can one really be said to have “won” when one gets the opportunity to continue a relationship with someone who has been making out with someone else all weekend?).

And that leads me to… Date My Mom.

To be continued…

]]> http://rageagainstthemanchine.com/2008/06/25/mtv-sex-drugs-and-almost-no-rock-and-roll-for-kids-part-2/feed/ Nine Deuce http://rageagainstthemanchine.com/2008/06/19/mtv-sex-drugs-and-almost-no-rock-and-roll-for-kids-part-1/ http://rageagainstthemanchine.com/2008/06/19/mtv-sex-drugs-and-almost-no-rock-and-roll-for-kids-part-1/#comments Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:18:53 +0000 Nine Deuce http://rageagainstthemanchine.wordpress.com/?p=226

I’m staying in Atlanta for the summer. It’s often hot as fuck out, so I’m stuck inside once in awhile, where I have cable for the first time in about 3 years. I haven’t taken much advantage of it since I’ve been reading, writing blog posts, and doing a lot of schoolwork, but last night I did.

Let me start by saying that I know making fun of MTV is pretty easy. It’s obvious that MTV isn’t cool, that it ruins a lot of the coolest things about youth culture, and that it exists to the detriment of young people’s development. Although I agree with everything he said, I get terribly embarrassed whenever I hear recordings of Jello Biafra bloviating about how much MTV sucks. Listening to someone making fun of MTV is like reading old punk lyrics. It’s just so obvious, you know? But I have to.

Anyway, I don’t ever watch it, but last night I did and it was unfuckingbelievable. I watched three hours of it with another advanced scholar of 80s and 90s pop culture (Davetavius), and we were completely astonished at how insane things have become on that network, even in comparison with the asinine drivel we remember having seen on it as teenagers. Seriously, it blew my mind. I had to write about it.

As I sit here and listen to the greatest hits of Huey Lewis and the News (a fuckin’ hipster, I am), I am reminded of a simpler time. A time when parents didn’t want their kids to be promiscuous drunks, when hardly anyone got naked in front of strangers for no reason, when MTV just played questionable music videos instead of outright misogynistic borderline porn, when it was the men who were wearing attire that nearly exposed their genitalia and humping inanimate objects (Aerosmith, The Cult, etc.) in order to shock the audience rather than women doing so to avoid shocking the audience by not doing it. MTV was tame back then. As it is now, there isn’t a minute that goes by on MTV that doesn’t contain at least two of the following:

1. People having sex. And I don’t mean the implication that people are humping, I mean video of people actually doing it, or video of people talking about having actually done it.
2. Horrifically embarrassing stereotypes. These usually involve some woman or member of a minority group caricaturing himself/herself for the amusement of the audience.
3. Emotional abuse. Nearly every program on MTV revolves around one member of a couple/love triangle/love octagon or a contestant for someone’s love being betrayed, humiliated, or emotionally abused.
4. Alcohol abuse. The producers of MTV’s shows all know that booze = drama. Who will fall on the floor screaming, get naked in public, get in a fight, or fuck a stranger on camera when they aren’t drunk?
5. Tons of T&A. Since most MTV shows are short on substance, they need footage that will kill time but also keep people watching. What works better for that than footage of the seemingly endless parade of women willing to hang out with hardly anything on? Footage of these women’s faces is purely optional as long as there are boobs in the shot.
6. Total debasement of the parent-child relationship. Parents on MTV are their kids’ drinking buddies, slaves, cheerleaders, enablers, and bank accounts, not authority figures. They’re there to bankroll the party, not to bum it out with their concerns for their children’s well-being.

Now that the parameters have been laid down, I’ll get to the shows. In the course of my MTV viewing experiment, I sat through an episode of A Shot at Love 2 with Tila Tequila, two episodes of The X-Effect, and two episodes of Date My Mom. I’ve also seen a few episodes of this season’s Real World recently. I don’t know which of these shows wins the Most Fucked Up Show on TV Award (previously held by The Swan), but all four are clearly produced by the devil (and I’m not just saying that because I had to sit through clips of Death Cab for Cutie on either side of the commercial breaks).

I’ll start with Tila Tequila’s show. The story, for those of you lucky enough to have escaped hearing about it, is that Tila Tequila, who is famous for being the filthiest animal on MySpace, is looking for a life partner. Tila Tequila is, quite simply, a sexbot. She was designed and built by strip club patrons who like ‘em ambiguously beige-tan, petite, and dramatically reconfigured by plastic surgery, she was programmed by Joe Rogan and Doug Stanhope to be their freewheelin’, free lovin’, chick lickin’ dream girl, then she got her own show. Either that or she did all that shit to herself knowing what appeals to the average dude and the average brainwashed young “chick” in order to get her own show. In any case, she’s ridden uber-commercialized, hyper-sexualized vacuity from a simple page on a social networking site to her own show on MTV, from where she gets to project her warped idea of femininity, morality, sexuality, and “love” to the preteens of the nation.

Like I said earlier, Tila, the story goes, is looking for true love. No one older than 13 really believes that’s what’s going on, but that’s the producers’ and Ms. Tequila’s story and they’re sticking to it. OK, fine, but doesn’t The Bachelorette already exist? What sets this show apart from Rock of Love (other than Ms. Tequila having hair and boobs) or I Love New York (besides the fact that I Love New York had Chance, the funniest dude on TV since Murdoch from The A-Team)?

The twist is… get ready… Tila Tequila is bisexual! She likes to do it with men and women. So half of the contestants trying to win the heart of this evil robot, trying to make the most of their Shot at Love, are men, and the other half are women. The men are the same kinds of men you see on any show with a similar premise: vain ‘roid monkeys with egos to put Billy Zabka to shame who are there simply because they, just knowing that they deserve to be famous, are looking for some small-screen exposure to get them started in the business. The women are weird, though. Most of them are similar to the women on shows like The Bachelor, although they manage to project even less self-respect and class than those women do, but at least one or two of them are actual lesbians. They usually get kicked off first, though. Who wants real lesbians ruining the Maxim-esque fantasy?

That’s right, I said it. Most of the women on Shot at Love aren’t lesbians. They’re women who make out with other women to make men want to pork them. They’re women who want to get famous and are willing to make out with a chick on screen if it’ll get them closer to that goal. I know that almost everyone on reality TV is there because they want to get famous (sorry if I’m ruining the magic for anyone), but this is easily the most egregious example of it I’ve ever seen. I suppose pretending to be gay isn’t any worse than pretending to care about someone so you can be on TV, but the combination of the two is a bit much.

But that’s not all. On most of these reality TV love match shows, the producers hesitate to bluntly insinuate that the contestants are having sex with the prize, but not so in this case. (Which is funny, considering the fact that most of these shows are intended for adult audiences, while Tila Tequila is on a network with a very young audience.) The only way they could make it more obvious that Ms. Tequila is having sex with every single contestant would be if they had a ticker at the bottom of the screen that showed the number of them she’d bedded tick up every time she closed a door on a camera. Now, I don’t know if she and the contestants are actually all getting busy, but that’s most definitely what we’re meant to believe, and I honestly don’t doubt it. Everyone on the show is drunk constantly, they’re all the kinds of people who believe life revolves around fucking, and hardly anyone is ever fully clothed. MTV producers, in all of their reality programs, seem hell-bent on getting as many people to fuck as many different people as possible, and this show is no exception. That means the contestants are constantly ensconced in opulent surroundings, they’re pumped full of booze, they’re always expected to be dressed up in “sexy” (if your idea of sexy is a stripper’s outfit) clothes, and they’re routinely asked to participate in overtly sexualized activities (bathing suit photo shoots, massage lessons, etc.).

Tila makes her decisions on who to keep and who to bounce on one criterion: how in love with her she thinks the contestants are. Fuckin’ A. Narcissism deluxe. You see, the contestants on these shows are in a weird position. They get almost no sleep, they eat poorly, they’re drunk all the time, and they have absolutely no privacy. It’s no surprise that they end up a little emotionally vulnerable, which makes it easy for Ms. Tequila to use her sexuality (consciously or not) to manipulate them into thinking they’re in love. If she fails, they get the boot. The weird part is that these women who are pretending to be gay actually seem to develop feelings for Tila Tequila. I don’t know whether they’re actually in love with her or if their feelings are really just intense admiration for someone who has earned a black belt in sexual manipulation, but they seem pretty stricken, so it’s really kind of gross to watch them get emotionally abused on national television.

What bothers me about this show isn’t that people are being hosey, that people are engaging in thoughtless casual sex, and that people are buying into the idea that Tila Tequila is after true love. What bothers me is how manipulative the entire premise of the show is and how sanctimonious the message seems to be. Basically, MTV is telling us that if we don’t think fucking 30 strangers is the best way to find love, we’re closed-minded homophobes, real reactionaries. You know, because the fact that people are pretending to be gay or bisexual and giving the (young, impressionable) public disgusting, caricatured, one-dimensional representations of the members of those communities is no big deal. Because believing that there should be something to love other than liking to fuck someone is totally passe. Because the path to liberation for women is lined with random wieners and public same-sex make-out sessions. Because the way to determine whether someone is a worthy human being is to see whether you can use your sexuality to manipulate them into thinking they love you.

Yeah, that’s what we want to tell our impressionable young women and men. And we wonder where the Suicide Girls and sex-positivism come from.

To be continued…

I can’t believe I missed this before, but here’s a little something from Twisty Faster on rape culture:

A significant portion of the patriarchy-blamer’s ideological day is spent pondering the subject of rape. Rape is, as we have seen, the founding principle of patriarchy and the model from which patriarchy’s most popular form of propaganda, porn, takes its inspiration. Rape isn’t just a subset of unrelated incidents perpetrated by a fringe contingent of sickos. It is, as Susan Brownmilller asserted, “a conscious process by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”

If you are a man, and you don’t rape women, well, goody for you, but if you email me with some inane vituperation about how your personal noble restraint invalidates Brownmiller’s statement, you will only embarrass yourself. No matter what kind of man you are, you benefit in a thousand different ways from the violent sexualization of women’s subordination. Actual rapists have got the initial shock and awe covered, but they’re only the infantry; it’s up to the rest of you to finish the job.

You do this by demonizing feminists, by renting women for lap dances, by letting rapists off the hook in court, by buying cheap crap Victoria’s Secret thongs for your woman, by congratulating your girlfriend on her boob job, by ignoring mass rapes in Rwanda, by passing along the URL to Paris Hilton’s fuck video, by ogling that girl at the bus stop, by letting your mom do your laundry, by “giving away” a bride, by voting control of women’s uteruses over to godbag politicians, by pressuring your girlfriend to take it up the ass because all your friends are doin’ it, by having an opinion on the size of human labia, by arguing that stripping is “empowering,” by claiming you’re “hardwired” to be turned on by women who emulate the ludicrous fashion practices of strippers and centerfolds, by your inability to conceive of sex without dominance, and by refusing, despite 30 years of intelligent, educated women telling you otherwise, to concede that you don’t really, truly view women as human beings in anything approaching the same light in which you view yourself.

But women, you might be inclined to argue, having heard somewhere that some men have started doing housework, have it so much better now. You think so? Then how is it that an American woman is raped every couple of minutes, and that 78% of these rapists are husbands, boyfriends, or dates? Less than 16% of these rapes are reported. Less than half of those are prosecuted. The average amount of time these few convicted dickwads spend in the clink: 11 months.

I’m sorry, everyone. I know that this blog is really descending into unexplored depths of self-referentialism (coining words is my new hobby), but I’ve had more free time than I’m used to lately, which has allowed me to have a look around at what people who read this blog and are too craven to comment here post about it elsewhere (hence this post). I know, I know, that’s ill-advised, but I can’t help it. Then, somehow, my recent post on rape laws ended up on Stumbleupon and 4Chan (gee, thanks for the info, Playermatt) and my post on MRAs was discovered by some cabal of MRAs who’ve linked to it and passed both it and the rape law post around to their buddies. The results have been… interesting.

I always hoped that this blog would reach a wide audience, that people who had yet to consider the things I write about would end up being exposed to them and thinking about them. That’s why I try to avoid jargon and try to write things out in simple language. That’s why I cuss a lot and make stupid jokes. I’m hoping doing so will engage the random thoughtful people who happen upon my page and get them to thinking about what I have to say.

But I forgot that, when we’re talking the general public, there is about one thoughtful person per 1000 unreflective jagoffs. There are an awful lot of people who will never, ever consider the fact that the way things are might not be the best we can do. There are also a lot of people who have convinced themselves that their sorrows in life are all the fault of some group of people whose existence and success they see as a threat to their own.

When I started this blog, I planned to patiently respond to every comment I got, to make an attempt to be as much like Jesus as possible without growing a beard. I thought that if I was calm and tolerant enough, I might plant some seeds of reason into the heads of commenters, that I might bring some people closer to, if not into complete agreement with, my point of view. And, I thought, if I couldn’t do that, at least I could use the commenters who displayed a complete lack of reason as entertainment for my other readers (BUTTKICKER 69, we love you).

That all worked pretty well for awhile, that is until a few of my posts ended up on Stumbleupon and started getting serious numbers of hits from the general public. Once that happened, I started getting a lot of comments from women who thought I was “just as bad as men” because they thought I was trying to tell them what to do (wrong). I got a lot of comments from pro-porn dudes who thought I was being unfair in my assessment that men who use porn are allowing their selfishness and sense of entitlement to override their humanity (also wrong). I got a lot of comments from people who thought my connecting Bratz with feminism didn’t make any sense (uber wrong). Most of these comments, although they were pretty stupid, were at least civil. I think they were civil because those posts, though they were pretty harsh in their criticisms of the beauty, porn, and girls’ toy industries, didn’t really propose any significant reductions in anyone’s privileges.

Not so with Deuce’s Law and my post on MRAs. I know that those two posts are inflammatory. I intended them to be. Women tolerate limits on our freedom, threats to our safety and security, and violations of our human rights as a matter of course. One of the determining factors in women’s inability to reach equality is the law, and so I decided, in these two posts, to point out the ways in which law serves men’s interests better than, and even to the detriment of, women’s interests and rights.

The point of the Deuce’s Law post was to illustrate by foil the injustices that women suffer under our current legal system, to point out that the presumption of a default state of consent is just as unfair as the presumption of guilt. I never made the claim that Deuce’s Law would be feasible or even the most desirable alternative (I pointed out in the introduction that cultural attitude changes that would eliminate rape would be ideal, which is my entire goal in writing this blog). It was SATIRE, though I do think that the logic of the entirety of the law is intellectually undeniable if taken as a counterpoint to the current system of laws. (I don’t know that I’d ever really advocate doing away with the presumption of innocence, but I would most certainly advocate the punishments I outlined in the post, especially for repeat offenders.) The point of both posts was to make people aware that the system we now operate under has faults, that it does not serve all citizens equally (as those who created and defend it would have us believe). It is taken for granted that our legal system is the most perfect incarnation of a system of laws that can be hoped for, and that to me seems a little silly. (But not as silly as the idea that our legal system privileges women over men, as the MRAs seem to think.)

Here’s where the point of this post comes in. I have had literally hundreds of people tell me, after reading Deuce’s Law, that I am crazy, stupid, uneducated, retarded, silly, foolish, horrible, a cunt, a bitch, a flaming cunt, a dyke, an ugly cunt, etc. People have told me they hope I get raped, they hope I die, they hope I get breast cancer, and they hope women lost the right to vote. I’ve been accused of intellectual dishonesty, hypocrisy, sexism, and a little bit o’ fascism.

Instead of thinking about what I’ve said, people have reacted instinctively to what they perceive as a threat to what they consider the natural, correct order of things. There is a reason that our central beliefs are called fundamental, foundational. The belief that our socio-political system is just, right, perfect, and natural is so deeply ingrained in the average psyche that my raising questions about it is met with extreme anger. The idea that someone could question the reasoning behind male supremacy and institutionalized sexism begets disbelief, fear, and rage in those who are unwilling or unable to look beyond their own assumptions. There are untold numbers of men AND WOMEN out there that will NEVER consider the idea that justice might better be served by something other than a patriarchal social structure, that our lives might be more fulfilling if they weren’t dominated by the quest for more stuff, more empty sex, more power, and more attention for climbing a ladder to nowhere that someone else designed.

I wouldn’t much care if these people just dismissed me as a lunatic and went on their merry way. What bothers me is the vitriol, the absolutely blistering hatred that comes through in their responses. The women usually just tell me I’m crazy, but some of the men really let loose. I’ve noticed that the uptick in comments with the word “cunt” in them has coincided with my MRA post being linked to from a few MRA sites and 4Chan.

MRAs make a lot of arguments about the law being unfair to men, about women victimizing men, about the fact that women supposedly commit the same kinds of wrongs they do. They claim that all they’re after is justice. Bullshit. I am here to say, right fucking now, that these guys have shown, through their comments on this blog, that the basis of their beliefs is an extreme hatred of women.

None of the MRAs or 4Chan geeks save one or two has wanted to discuss the law, none of them has wanted to talk about solutions, they’ve just come here to talk shit. Their arguments are nonexistent, their points are unrelated to the issues at hand, and their comments are absolutely saturated with insults and blanket attacks on feminism, feminists, me, etc. They make ludicrous claims about the prevalence of false rape claims, about the criminal activities of women, and about the levels of discrimination they face, and then accuse me of intellectual dishonesty or faulty logic (or of being a cunt).

Saith reader Aaron Boyden: