Piers Morgan is no stranger to controversy lately, where in his TV show’s dying days, he sought to turn Janet Mock’s life into infotainment, doing immense splash damage to trans folks in the process. It’s no wonder people are taking it upon themselves to shame him in innumerable ways.

Like with this very probably faked tweet, apparently taken as a photograph of a computer monitor with visible pixellation, posted by some rapper obviously looking to make a name for himself by inventing a “beef” as the kids say with a public figure:

Hahahahaha @piersmorgan just tweeted this accidentally then deleted it within seconds but we caught it hahahahahha pic.twitter.com/p5x3pnPCTY

— Elro (@ElroRaps) March 1, 2014

The image is ostensibly of Morgan’s Twitter stream, complete with his avatar and Twitter page background, tweeting a link to www.pornhub.com/asian .

Below the fold, I talk about pornography. Might not be safe for work.

My immediate reaction was to tweet that there are plenty of reasons to chastise Morgan for moral failings without resorting to shame him for consuming porn, like, for instance, mistaking Twitter for a web browser. However, the closer you look at this picture and the replies to it, the more obvious it is that it was faked and that Morgan wasn’t, in fact, off to have a wank and misplaced his cursor.

First, the “verified user” tick mark which Twitter uses to identify real celebrities, to distinguish them from the myriad faked accounts, didn’t show up on the tweet. Individual tweets don’t get the verified tick mark in a stream, but this tweet was formatted like it was in the blown-up individual tweet “details” view, where it SHOULD get that tick mark.

Second, Elro replies to someone questioning this fact by saying “that’s how it showed up on my tablet”, but there’s a very visible cursor on that screen, and it’s unlikely (though certainly not impossible) that his tablet, most of which have touch screens, has a mouse attached. And beyond that, there’s a lot of very visible dirt on that screen. If it’s really a tablet, that spot must never get touched — or else Elro often has shit all over his hands. Either clean your screen or wash your hands once in a while, Elro.

Third, and very importantly, pornhub.com/asian doesn’t exist. I’m not ashamed to admit that I tried going there to see what would happen, and I got an error page (file not found), and a bunch of generic (more on THAT later!) porn video thumbnails.

Fourth, I was able to do this with some facility:

OMG @piersmorgan just tweeted this then deleted it! I hate to have to defend the bigot, but… pic.twitter.com/vn8jLRzoy1

— Jason Thibeault (@lousycanuck) March 1, 2014

That’s a picture of another faked tweet, taken with my phone camera of my monitor, this one saying “This isn’t a real tweet either! It’s from lemmetweetthatforyou.com .”

So, it’s pretty incontrovertible that this is very likely fake. I’m sure some confluence of events might have actually resulted in this being real, but there’s too much that’s questionable around the edges.

But something else merits discussion here: the use of sex as a shaming mechanism. Elro thought it was shame-worthy to fake that Morgan was apparently trying to get some porn starring southeast-Asian folks. There’s absolutely nothing shameful about watching or enjoying porn. Nor, in fact, about having erotic fantasies about certain races; nor in having erotic fantasies of any sort whatsoever, in their myriad possibilities.

I also don’t buy into the whole “porn is inherently violent against women” line, when I know so many feminist sex workers. I would argue very strongly, in fact, that all sex work should be legalized, so it can be unionized and regulated and made safe for the workers and the consumers alike.

In my estimation, the only dividing line between acceptable sex, and unacceptable immoral sex, is informed consent. Even in bondage and domination, the key is informed, ongoing consent, by parties legally capable of such — that is undeniably the line between sex and rape.

Imagine for a moment that the tweet had been real, though. Getting a peek into someone else’s fantasies doesn’t give you any actual insight about what they are like as people. Your knowing that a person fantasizes about, say, Asians, or bondage, or even something as undeniably immoral as pedophilia or rape, does not actually say anything about them as people. You can fantasize even about extraordinarily problematic things, like a lack of consent or sex with people who cannot consent, as long as you do not act on it. You are only engaging in immoral or illegal activities when you actually act on such impulses. I am reminded of a short story written by Stephanie Zvan wherein a doctor with pedophilic tendencies is allowed to indulge those tendencies through the use of virtual reality, keeping her as a productive member of society. The problem is not the fetishes themselves, it’s whether or not they’re acted upon.

There’s another complicated, nuanced problem here: the fetishization of Asians in general. Given the recent uprising on Twitter of Suey Park with the #notyourasiansidekick hashtag, where stereotypes are often played out in public in how people treat visibly-Asian folks — meaning, generally, people with the distinctly Oriental epicanthic fold — it’s entirely understandable if Asian folks might find it very troubling that Western Caucasians might find them attractive to the point of fetishizing them. If an Asian took offence at this, I wouldn’t have a problem with their saying so.

But then, many of the people going to a porn site and clicking on the Asian category might actually be looking for people who look like themselves. And a large number of Asians are going to be disappointed that the only demographic actually being served by that tag are people of Southeast-Asian descent. You’ll rarely find Polynesian or Indian folks categorized as such. Heavens forefend if you’re a Mauritian, whose lineage is distinctly Chinese-descent with a good deal of South African influence due to proximity; good luck finding someone in porn who looks like you.

To me, something really troubling is that this is another instance of the default being designed to be straight white male, even if that’s not necessarily who’s consuming the content. If you go to most porn sites, you’ll find they show by default heterosexual white couples, with every other video hidden under some potentially-damaging category label. Some sites are taking steps to categorize straight and gay videos such that you actually see all videos by default, regardless of category; some sites evidently think trans folks are fetishized and potentially disgusting to a large enough population that they’re not listed on that firehose by default. What’s worse is they’re often hidden under a category label that’s a slur, like “tranny”.

And if you click on the “gay” category, you’re going to largely only see male-on-male porn. The lesbian video demographic is, while consumed by lesbians, culturally accepted as another niche of straight porn to the point where half the actors in lesbian porn are apparently not interested at all in the act — they’re doing it purely mechanically, for the money. Not that there’s anything wrong with that either, but it sort of short-changes lesbians who are interested in seeing women who are actually into it, if you catch my meaning.

The fetishization of non-white, non-straight, non-male-interest sex is irritating to me. Especially since the “default” is probably a smaller demographic of porn-watcher than you’d expect. It actually grates at me when people consider certain “labels” as overrides of the default — even the assumption that you’re a theist unless you expressly list “atheist” on your profile is problematic, but it’s readily apparently when you go to any skeptic’s profile and the labels they list don’t include “white”, “male”, “hetero”, “cis”, “middle-class”. (My own included.)

The porn industry is, in my estimation, leaving so much money on the table by catering to the straight white male first. It makes me want to start up an intersectional porn site, honestly. One where forgotten demographics are the default. Perhaps where a random set of tags is considered the “front page” for every visit (e.g.: gay black bondage, religious straight white foot fetish, trans bisexual asian, etc) until you expressly drill down (heh, drill) to specific tags you’d like to see. And if there’s a set of tags that has no entries, well, Rule 34 should come into play then, right? Maybe cash bounties for uploading porn that fits all the tags of that otherwise random set. I think such a site could make all sorts of money.

That’s a lot of words I just wrote, and a lot of ideas and ground covered. Wow. It’s kind of funny to me that all of these issues were raised directly from a single fake tweet by a jerk trying to tar Piers Morgan as someone who enjoys pornography and, specifically, Asians.

The post Fake tweet, legit topics of discussion. appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Google is ubiquitous. Everyone everywhere uses Google at some point. And right now, at least in the US and probably Canada, the Google Doodle — the logo Google uses on its main search page and on the top left of every search result page — is sticking it to Russia over the anti-gay human rights violations happening there presently.

A rainbow of silhouetted athletes form the logo, and beneath the search box, this quote:

“The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practicing sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” –Olympic Charter

This is not just subversive, it’s downright defiant. The message is clear: the discrimination that Putin and his government have entrenched in his country, the discrimination that anti-gay right-wingers are cheering in America, is a betrayal of everything the Olympics was intended to stand for. Humanity’s colors are at its most vibrant when it is not suppressed by bigotry and intolerance of difference, especially over something so fundamentally human as who you happen to love.

Google has not always entirely lived up to its mission statement of “Don’t Be Evil”. But on this issue, at least, the pendulum is obviously swinging far in the morally righteous direction. Thanks, Google, for siding with the angels this time.

The post Google demonstrates how to use your platform and reach judiciously and subversively appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

The first video by Hambone Productions of Skepticon is up, of David Fitzgerald’s comedic analysis of the Bible’s naughtier bits.

Trigger warning: the Bible is very, very rapey.

I mostly enjoyed this talk, though there were a few bits that were problematic.

Many of the jokes are visual or are punctuated with visual aids, with people in the audience who are vision-impaired (Rebecca Watson made a point of narrating her slides for the benefit of these folks), and so they’re not going to get these jokes in this video either. Apologies to my readers. Also, I haven’t rewatched this, so I can’t remember exactly what was said, but I have a recollection of wincing a few times at some problematic language, too. “Bitch”, most likely.

The post Skepticon 6 video: Sex and Violence in the Bible appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Once upon a time, I was young and foolish, and thinking I was so enlightened about sexuality I suggested at a lunch table with friends that Freud was onto something when he said “the only unnatural sexuality is none at all”. Little did I know a friend at that table with me — about whom I think the world, and would never want to hurt — identified as asexual.

I was mortified to learn this a few years later. Such a casual throwaway comment, made thinking I was flip and clever and progressive, that hurt a dear friend.

I’m happy to see this exists. Maybe I can assuage my guilty conscience a bit by helping promote it. Though I am not asexual myself, I know a few people who do identify as such, and in all our talk about gender and sexuality around these parts, it’s only fitting that we avoid erasing an entire class of people.

From their 101 page:

What is an asexual person?

An asexual person is someone who does not experience sexual attraction. Most individuals find there are certain people they are not sexually attracted to. For asexuals, this includes everybody!

Is asexual another word for celibate?

Unlike celibacy, which is a lifestyle choice, asexuality is a sexual orientation – just like homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality. Celibacy is a conscious decision not to have sex, regardless of sexual desire. Many asexuals do not consider themselves celibate, as they are giving up no more in abstaining from sex than a gay person is by abstaining from sex with someone of a different gender or a straight person is by abstaining from sex with the same gender. Furthermore, some asexual people do choose to have sex, and therefore are certainly not celibate.

It’s not about simply being celibate — asexual folks can choose to engage in sexual activities with people or with themselves, without necessarily having a sex drive of their own. They can be in romantic relationships. They can climax. They can do everything you can do. They can have an undirected sex drive. They can simply have no sex drive and if left to their own devices, would not seek it out. Or perhaps they even have boundaries that they define with their partners in advance. Or perhaps they have no desire to enter a romantic relationship at all. It’s every bit as varied as every other orientation.

We’d all do well to remember that when trying to be inclusive.

The post Asexual awareness week appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

This is a brutally clever re-cutting of a Christian anti-porn propaganda movie, showing all sorts of examples of people being so addicted to porn that they’ve ruined lives, and suggesting the only way to kick the habit is — like with everything else — to get right with Jesus. Funny that that always seems to be the panacea. And funny the sources they picked to back up their assertions — like Ted Fucking Bundy himself. That’s right, trust the serial killer and sociopath, bordering on criminal supervillain, to tell the truth when a lie could do so much more damage.

To be perfectly clear, there is a (slightly controversial) subtype of hypersexual disorder for pornography, but “porn addiction” is not presently recognized by the DSM. If anything, it’s a compulsive disorder much like gambling.

And for those who aren’t prone to life-ruining compulsive disorders, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying some pornography, even kinky stuff, as long as it involves fully-consenting adults. There’s nothing inherently wrong about exploring one’s own, nor one another’s, sexuality as long as consent is kept paramount. The fact that the god-botherers would rather nobody ever have sex except for procreative purposes, and even then to keep it as vanilla as possible, is shameful — they’re telling humans, in all their rainbow of sexual proclivities, that they’re broken, and the only way to fix themselves is to abstain from everything and seek forgiveness. Trying to convince us we’re broken, and that only they have the cure.

That’s the real shame here. Not that they’re playing people with a real condition as object lessons to the rest of the human race to make more Christians. They’re making something generally natural a sin. It’s sad, really.

The post Chrstian propaganda: Every Young Man's Battle appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

A funny thing happened yesterday. I started seeing hits from Reddit. A *lot* of hits. Fully a fifth of my traffic came from a particular thread on Reddit — despite my being in a slow blogging period, posting my one post I managed very late in the day, and despite the long tail on my bigger posts already waning.

(In other words, by “a lot” of hits, I mean ~400. About what I’ll get from posting a video of a turtle doing something cute.)

So I clicked through to see what I was linked from, Turns out, it was r/MensRights, and they were opining that I’m a terrible human being, a beta mangina, and a sop for the Gynocracy because of this post.

I’m going to try to emulate replies by nesting blockquotes, let’s see how this looks.

Much of the substance of their “critique” on my post is that I’m suffering from some form of Stockholm Syndrome — four original freethinkers suggested the same thing, so you know it must be true.

GRAMMARNOTGRAMMERFFS 1 point 3 hours ago
Stockholm syndrome pretty much. Sympathizing with your oppressors.

Well said, GRAMMARNOTGRAMMERFFS. Well said. Assuming oppression is begging the question, mind you, but keep up teh good grammers.

Speaking of…

PierceHarlan 0 points 23 hours ago
I couldn’t get wade it — he would do well to take a writing class and learn to compose his thoughts better.

I looked up “get wade it” to see if it was some idiom I did not comprehend; some colloquialism outside my ken. Not as far as I can tell. Not that other redditors noticed:

CremasterGuy 2 points 13 hours ago
He writes like an idiot.

There was some interesting scientific critique of my post:

SarahC -4 points 19 hours ago
He’s so beta, he’s radioactive!

Hah! That’s pretty funny. Let me try: You’re so gamma, you’re green… with envy.

Well, that didn’t work out so well. What do the other redditors think of this joke?

GRAMMARNOTGRAMMERFFS 1 point 3 hours ago
I liked the joke but shut the fuck up

That’s it, I’m sending this guy a card this Christmas. I like the cut of his jib!

giegerwasright 23 points 1 day ago
Remember that guy who Cheney shot in the face who then apologized to Cheney for the inconvenience?
Gooood little lap dog.

Thagros 1 point 18 hours ago
You reminded me to watch this bit and forget about the twat who wrote the article.

Heh, yeah, Lewis Black. He’s pretty funny. I like him a lot. Say, have you watched this routine? Just wondering.

Jesus_marley 30 points 1 day ago
Holy fuck. “freeze peach”? Really? Has it reached the point of mocking the institution of questioning assertions? If I had even a miniscule level of respect for anyone associated with FfTB, it has now evaporated into the ether. These folks are so detached from reality that Neil Gaiman would mine their dreams for writing material.

Freeze Peach is actually a mockery of the fact that you buffoons don’t really know what “free speech” is, and think yours is being abrogated by someone plugging their ears.

Wait — ooh! FfTB. I recognize that meme! You must be John Greg, or Richard Sanderson! …No, no, that would be silly of me to make assumptions from insufficient evidence, just based on hearing a meme I recognize as denigrating to me specifically.

deeptimeswimmer 19 points 1 day ago
Holy shit; ‘freeze peach’ is an SRS term. Well we know his redditing history now, don’t we?

…

Pecanpig 2 points 1 day ago
No :/

See? Someone there gets that you can’t assume the use of a meme associated with a board on Reddit means I read that board, given that this meme may not even have originated there, and that I may not have encountered it there first. At least someone there gets —

deeptimeswimmer 0 points 23 hours ago
Elaborate, please…

… Regular braintrusts, these gents are.

antithing 1 point 19 hours ago
As if he earns his daily bread from srs. Even then he should have his own mind which should work.

That’s two votes for SRS, which as I understand it, means “Shit Reddit Says”, a reddit where people point to ridiculous bullshit other redditors say and laugh at it. Since I don’t generally reddit, save for the occasional upvote of my own post when I notice someone else has posted it (though I’m seriously tempted to downvote my post on r/MR because HELLOOOO BULLSHIT), I don’t actually know much about Shit Reddit Says except that they generally don’t like the misogynist creeps inhabiting the rest of the mostly-odious social media network. And as a result, they tend to point at and mock them quite frequently.

OH HEY, THAT’S WHAT I’M DOING HERE. I must be ALL the SRS redditors!!!

Wawoowoo 19 points 1 day ago
Ahh, the “the only moral abortion is my abortion” defense. I know I’m telling the truth, but I also know that everyone else is lying. Forget that his number isn’t really 94%, but more like a number between 0% and 94%. He also doesn’t seem to recognize that mailing 1 letter to the FCC or 1 million would be the exact same thing. Why would multiple accusations from the same source increase their credibility?

So rather than multiple people making multiple claims and substantiations here, what we actually have in Shermer’s case is one single person sockpuppeting across a dozen accounts, including those of known entities in the community, making false rape claims more believable by substantiating them via either hacking those folks’ accounts or possessing them through astral projection or some shit.

But despite the introduction of nonsense into the equation, the 6% is still sacrosanct! So it’s not 6% false rape claims, but between 6 and 100% false rape claims? You don’t want to give that ground and say that it’s actually between 0% and 100%, to better fit the evidence by your interpretation (e.g., that some cases might have been tried incorrectly)? That’s being REALLY flexible with the truth. And with my own claims. 6% is a big number, even if it wasn’t being inflated by people motivated to cook the books.

Speaking of EEB…

spankytheham 4 points 19 hours ago
Who is this EEB in the story? Is it an actual short for some person I am not aware of? Or another anonymous random source like PZ’s rape victim?
PS: Apparently this thread was mentioned in the comments. Omg! We so horrible!

junoguten 1 point 18 hours ago
HOLY SHIT! That’s the guy who they’re slandering! I’m fucking shocked he’s still defending them..

spankytheham 2 points 10 hours ago
No I mean what is his real name? Is he an actual person? I couldn’t find a name.

junoguten 1 point 10 hours ago
Oh.. I have no idea. Do you think they’re inventing false people and stories to scare their cult members back in rank?

spankytheham 2 points 9 hours ago
No idea really, it’s just I saw the name EEB the victim in the story and tried to find out who it actually is, but there was no name no nothing. I could have missed it so I’m asking.
I just remember a few weeks ago of the sap fake story of the baby boy with a pink ribbon getting harassed in a store.

junoguten 1 point 9 hours ago
Yeah maybe they’ve learnt since then to keep their false stories anonymous 🙂

Wow. Maybe it’s a conspiracy, and it’s ALLLL the same person, including that fake story about the boy with a pink ribbon which was not faked but removed while law enforcement investigates?

Or perhaps EEB is a longtime commenter, and you have no idea who or what you’re talking about?

…NAH! Hopefully junoguten can recover from that fumble…

junoguten 1 point 18 hours ago
First time I read that, I read “almost beaten to death by white knights”.. guess I’m actually too jumpy?
IT guy? Why is he a feminist if it doens’t mean he can have an easy, know-nothing degree?

No, actually, I wasn’t beaten at all. So yes, you’re too jumpy.

As for why I’m a feminist, maybe because they don’t actually give degrees in being a decent human being who can read statistics and has a functioning sense of empathy for people who’re actually getting shat upon? Same reason I actually empathize with the disadvantages of being a man, despite recognizing they come from the same power structures that screw women over time and again and to a greater degree. And I post quite frequently on that topic.

But no, I’m nothing but a beta mangina to you folks, who just wants to justify a system that apparently oppresses me — despite the fact that I am not oppressed or harassed or harangued or diminished or mistreated by society or thought less of for my sex in any respect, except perhaps by you folks who perpetrate the only real sorts of misandry I’ve ever seen.

Like this:

Drewbus 1 point 10 hours ago
This is one of those guys who is just trying to get laid. Trying the angle of, “I’m one of you”.

Because nothing says respect for men like suggesting the only thing they care about is having sex.

railroadwino 3 points 16 hours ago
I’m surprised this sorry dickhead didn’t convict himself based on her word.

What’s wrong with dicks that you have to use it as a gendered slur? Not that the idea that “maybe we should take rape claims seriously enough to actually investigate them once in a damn while” means anything beyond that, but yes, I’m certain that at some point, I totally DID say “all men are rapists every time they had sex”, surely — because I’m a feminist, and you know, feminists are all that one quote by that feminist who was writing a straw feminist in her book.

But it’s not all misandry.

johnmarkley 12 points 1 day ago

In my case, a single person claimed rape, and made statements of fact that were demonstrably false. This is decidedly not sufficient evidence to send anyone to jail.

…said the handsome white guy.

Aww. That’s sweet of you to say, if you ignore the implication that ugly black men are thrown in jail for rape without any evidence at all. As though I was anything but a gangly and generally hated 16-year-old at the time. (And it’s not as though the people who wanted to beat me up might have been looking for any tenuous reason to punch up a NERRRRRRD, am I right?)

But then it’s right back to the misandry:

Nomenimion 6 points 23 hours ago
Quite the contrary: that’s more than enough to send his pretty ass to jail. And won’t the other inmates love him!

Right, right, because prison rape is FUNNY when it’s happening to a feminist, but it’s SUPER SERIOUS when it’s happening to a bro. Only you MRA-types actually don’t seem to give a shit about prison rape of men at all. Protip: the A in your name stands for “activist”, not “asshole”.

Hey, by the way, you’re welcome for my giving you buffoons a wider audience. May you roll in all the internet wealth that your copious hits — granted to you by me as a boon, you see — will definitely bring. You can use your internet bucks to purchase more media for your library of video-recorded conquests. I’m sure the wealth this post brings you will help fund a commensurate number of gigabytes of storage to your needs.

MAN, but these guys are good at making stuff up on the internet. I’m beginning to suspect the existence of a movement of antifeminists is actually real, with all the multiply-repeated ridiculousness on display here!

The post r/MensRights reminds me why I don't Reddit appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

If I had known the story of my false rape allegation would be held up by so many dudebros as the reason why you can’t take rape allegations seriously, I almost certainly would have thought again about posting the story I told primarily for catharsis’ sake back in 2009, before the shit started hitting the fan in the secular community when people dared suggest maybe we should try not to chase out women so much.

Another comment today has hit my first-post moderation wall, as so many others have since the allegations had been made against Shermer, on that old post. My linking it in the Web of Trust post probably didn’t help matters, but neither did having a shitload of people who hate FtB latching onto it and deciding this meant that we at FtB, monolith that we are, are lying hypocrites and/or rapists and/or something something evil something something blog hits something take over the world.

This comment seems more reasonable than most of them, at first glance. It’s decidedly not, though.

Trigger warnings due to frank discussion of rape and rape-apologetics.

Author : Rohn

I have no doubt based on your story you were a victim of a false rape accusation. But a dilemma is raised.

Is it fair for us to believe that your ex-girlfriend who accused you years ago of rape, is a bat-shit crazy liar without hearing her side of the story? Isn’t this “the bitch be lyin’?”

Have I missed something?

You seem trustworthy but many would say Dr. Shermer does too. Only a minority of rape allegations are false, as you yourself say.

Hypothetically – If your ex-girlfriend approached Dr. Myers today with her allegation of being raped by you, what do you think ethically he should do: Ignore the allegation, liase with you about it, publish it on his blog, or go the the police?

I suspect raising this question will get me insta-banned, if not I’d be interested in your answer.

I absolutely love the preemptive defense of Freeze Peach at the end, but I have to say that seeing this nonsense used as a club to attack PZ Myers and the unnamed source of the allegations against Michael Shermer is emotionally draining — in no small part because it’s being used to ultimately undercut victims of sexual assault.

Let’s go through this Fisking-style.

I have no doubt based on your story you were a victim of a false rape accusation. But a dilemma is raised.

I provided no evidence for my story other than my word — I could have made up every single fact about it, up to and including the existence of a girlfriend when I was 16, and yet you believed me without reservation. Why is that?

And a “dilemma” is a problem with exactly two solutions, neither of them being acceptable. You do not raise a dilemma in this comment; you raise, at most generous, a conundrum.

Is it fair for us to believe that your ex-girlfriend who accused you years ago of rape, is a bat-shit crazy liar without hearing her side of the story? Isn’t this “the bitch be lyin’?”

Have I missed something?

Quite a few things, actually. Aside from the fact that lying about things causes an erosion of trust overall, and aside from the fact that trust is necessary for believing a case without corroborating evidence, I’m going to say this as absolutely plainly as I can: Even people who lie frequently should be able to report rape and it should be taken as seriously. There should not be a “you cried dickwolf” defense. This is morally reprehensible, and intellectually lazy, and it allows real rapists who target known liars to get away with their crimes.

Another thing that you missed is that I don’t mean “throw men in jail because a woman claims rape”. Nobody means that, to my knowledge. What “taken seriously” means is, trust but verify.

In my story, a group of her schoolmates who believed her came to my house ostensibly to beat the shit out of me. They trusted, but didn’t verify. They were trying to enact vigilante justice. In Shermer’s case, I don’t know of a single person advocating either that he get put in jail without evidence, nor that a mob of vigilantes take him aside and beat him to a pulp.

So, yes. She was a compulsive liar, which I should have recognized sooner with all my attempts at covering for her and providing apologetics for her that what she said wasn’t REALLY a lie. I was in love, and I didn’t want to think ill of her, so I mentally justified all the lies as mere misinterpretations and misspeakings. But people saw her do this and recognized that this was the case, prior to her rape claims, and despite the small circle of her friends who took her at her word, many people saw this as just another lie. This, I recognize, is ALSO a problem.

I never saw a court of law over this. Most claims of rape never do. I did see some repercussions though, psychologically — since then I have had a great deal of difficulty with being overly cautious even with enthusiastic partners, to their consternation when I move too slowly in bed for their tastes. As a result of the deeply in-grained fear that perhaps the rape allegation against me was predicated on my misreading signals, I have historically chosen to be as cautious as humanly possible in such matters. I know, intellectually, that I didn’t rape her, and I know, intellectually, why she made the accusations that she did, but the psychological damage is still there, and I’m still overly cautious decades later. This is something I need to work out between myself and my partners, though — and I’ve managed to some reasonable degree, given that my dance card is presently full. But she was not taken as seriously as she should have been, except for the small group that took her way too seriously without verifying.

I resent the hell out of the fact that my ex-girlfriend’s lying is being used as an example of why you shouldn’t trust-but-verify when people claim they’ve been raped. It’s an example of exactly why you should be measured and careful in treating such a situation without doing undue damage to the alleged victim, at the same time as not doing undue damage to the accused in case they turn out to be one of the rare cases of false accusation. NOBODY treated this situation correctly, in my estimation — not the people who dismissed it as a lie out of hand, and not the people who took her at face value. And if anyone took her seriously and fact-checked before taking action, I didn’t see it (probably because they were being as cautious as they should have).

You seem trustworthy but many would say Dr. Shermer does too. Only a minority of rape allegations are false, as you yourself say.

I’ve talked at great length about how trust is built up. Shermer’s trust is built up through his celebrity status, mostly, with regard to the people making this sort of apologetic. For the people who claim to be victims, perhaps they trusted him as well, and got burned as a result, and they are trying to let everyone know he’s less trustworthy than he seems by virtue of his celebrity.

In my case, a single person claimed rape, and made statements of fact that were demonstrably false. This is decidedly not sufficient evidence to send anyone to jail. However, I have absolutely zero problem with people taking her story into account when determining whether or not I am trustworthy to be around. If people misjudge me based on that story, it might hurt my feelings, but not enough to overcome my empathy for the position that that person is actually in when deciding whether or not they need to defend themselves.

This is the Schrodinger’s Rapist argument all over again. And my stance has not changed. I, as a male imbued with all the privileges of not having to worry about any social encounter ending with rape because rape of men is exceedingly comparatively rare outside of prison, empathize fully with someone who feels they need to cross the street or wait for the next elevator or walk faster to get away from me even though I have no intention of mistreating them. My feelings are not hurt by this — not really. In fact, it makes me angry at a society where such rapes happen and the rapists are almost never brought to justice.

A very small minority of reported rapes are false in the sense of being invented from whole cloth. However, depending on your definition of “false”, meaning everything up to and including claims of rape that cannot be proven in a court of law (and running through the gamut of excuses including “woman was inebriated and therefore untrustworthy” through “nobody’s been specifically accused” through “police didn’t want to bother”), the numbers vary greatly. The most commonly accepted number is about 6% being reported but being totally untrue.

That means 94% of rape allegations are probably true. And this with under-reporting being a huge problem. If all instances of rape were reported, despite monumental societal pressure against reporting since the person reporting rape is often the only person whose life gets turned upside-down, then I suspect the number of false rape cases would decrease precipitously.

By comparison, most theft is reported, and the victims aren’t unduly put through any legal wringers. False theft reporting happens about 2% of the time. I suspect if you took false rape claims and compared to a combination of both unreported rapes and reported legitimate rapes, you’d get about the same percentage.

So, when someone reports that they’ve been raped, chances are, they were. Calling them a liar is actually the extraordinary claim.

Hypothetically – If your ex-girlfriend approached Dr. Myers today with her allegation of being raped by you, what do you think ethically he should do: Ignore the allegation, liase with you about it, publish it on his blog, or go the the police?

Since you’re not being confronted with a person who is personally known to you, whom you trust to not make radically contrafactual statements in a climate where their lives would be turned upside-down by making such a claim, in my case you find me trustworthy because I’m the only one telling the story. In Shermer’s case, multiple unnamed people have either claimed being assaulted themselves, or established corroboration of patterns of behaviour described in those claims. You can distrust them, and by extension the people who brought those claims forward, if you want. You can (correctly) suggest that this isn’t enough by which to put Shermer in jail.

But the goal of the alleged victim is to make the pattern of behaviour better known, so in the future, others might more correctly judge how to deal with this person. Ethically, I see no problem with a multiply-substantiated account by credible sources that this person may not be trustworthy in those sorts of social situations, that this person might be a horndog on the prowl. However, it’s up to individuals whether or not this is a turn-off. There could very well be people fully interested in taking him to bed despite these issues. Philosopher groupies, as it were. The issue is one of INFORMED ENTHUSIASTIC ONGOING CONSENT. This is primary in any discussion of sex — nobody here is against sex if there’s consent. Sex is great, when all parties involved are into it. Have as much sex with willing partners as you want. But consent must be INFORMED.

This is merely more information with which people can make an informed choice to consent.

Ethically, if the goal is to prevent people from being raped, and if a statute of limitations has passed and the evidence available is grossly unlikely to land Shermer in jail even if all these accounts were absolutely true, then the correct ethical choice is to make these accusations known to the audience that might use that information to better protect themselves. Since we are an internet-based community primarily, I see no problem with using the internet to get this information to the people that might be most in need of it.

If my ex-girlfriend were to — almost twenty years after the fact — approach someone in a position of power to make the allegations widely known in our community, and the person in a position of power were to believe her uncritically without independently verifying the facts of the case that are verifiable, or to compare notes against other patterns of behaviour that have been observed and reported on for years within our community — then I would suggest that that might be ethically questionable. However, even then, the people receiving that information would be able to gauge how credible the accounts are and modify their behaviour around the accused, either with being around Shermer, or with being around me. As I said before, the worst that can happen if people shy away from intimate situations with me is that my feelings get hurt. I empathize enough with people trying to avoid rape that if they gauge me as a potential attacker, they should do what they need to to feel safe (short of preemptive assault), my feelings be damned.

If, ultimately, Michael Shermer learns that he needs to be a lot more careful about consent — even if he ends up with hang-ups about it, like I did — that’s not a horrible result. Especially not where we have multiple witnesses to multiple events suggesting he’s taking the issue of consent a lot less seriously than he should.

Now, does that answer your question to your satisfaction, first-time commenter who airdropped into a post from four years ago to talk about Michael Shermer?

Somehow, I doubt it.

The post On people believing the extraordinary claims about rape appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Jackie Paper left a great comment on my post about the Brian Dalton episode I’m informally titling Mr. Deity and the Victim-Blaming and Dismissiveness of Serious Allegations. It’s something I haven’t been able to wrap my head around either.

I’m having trouble understanding why certain people seem drawn to the “She just regrets screwing him” narrative.

If she merely didn’t think the sex was worth shaving her legs over or she found out afterward that he bit his toenails..or whatever caused this “regret”, why would she want to tell anyone she was raped? Exactly how bad in bed is this guy supposed to be? How batshit, cackling, evil is this woman supposed to be to want vengeance years later because she got some dull nookie? Is this something they think women do? Do they think every now and then one of us get’s a lackluster lay, so we write a note in our journals reminding us to frame the dude for rape years later? ? Is she supposed to regret it because sex is shameful and nasty and makes her a slut? That isn’t regret. That’s shame and I don’t see why a person would draw attention to the thing they are so irrationally ashamed of. Are they saying that out of shame she came forward anonymously so that people who don’t know who she is won’t think she had icky, dirty sex on purpose? Really, what sort of motivation is there supposed to be for her to lie about being raped?

In order to think that scenario is more plausible than one in which the woman is being honest, you have to believe some very nasty things about women to begin with. Which I think is the case with these people.

I cannot say I have ever seen anyone go nuclear on someone with false rape charges over a consensual but lousy lay. Ever. And I HAVE heard people banter about certain guys being self-centered or unfulfilling.

That’s not to say this doesn’t happen, but I’d have to see some hard numbers before I believe the narrative that this is a valid rationale for dismissing ANY rape claims out of hand. The idea violates Occam’s Razor. It necessitates a will toward vengeance, and a lack of the self-preservation that keeps so many rape victims from speaking up. It necessitates a willingness to have your personal life become very, very public, as the victim is most often the one whose life gets turned upside-down and ultimately put on trial. It requires your overdeveloped sense of vengeance to overcome your fear of getting in trouble. And for that vengeance to be triggered by sex being unsatisfying, well, that’s an extraordinary claim indeed.

If you want to see some research on REAL situations that might lead to false rape reports, visit Stephanie’s blog where she rips apart some rape myths with hard figures. One very salient point is that false reports almost always involve strangers:

Kelly’s paper provides some interesting detail on a sample of reports that were accurately coded as false. Unlike the stereotype, most of the false reports did not involve direct accusations of a particular person. They were stranger-rape scenarios.
Also, in both the stranger-rape and acquaintance-rape scenarios, the false accuser was generally a victim of some sort. Some had been otherwise abused by those people they accused, including prior sexual abuse. Some were reporting rape to avoid abuse they would have otherwise received, as is suspected to the case for Tawana Brawley.

There are real false-rape allegations, and they don’t look a thing like the chaff that rape apologists throw up to confuse the matter.

The post On dealing with regret after sex appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Here’s another of the myriad ways that patriarchy and rape culture hurts men. I know this is going to be counterintuitive to some of you mouth-breathers, but if your first reaction to this story is “that guy has all the luck” or “but he’s a rapper who raps a lot about sex” or anything other than “holy shit that’s rape”, then you’re part of the problem.

A rapper by the name of Danny Brown is on tour, and stopped in Minneapolis at the Triple Rock Social Club recently, and during his concert a female fan pulled down his pants and started sucking on his penis.

He backed up quickly, later tweeted jokingly with people who congratulated him on Twitter (saying things like “never missed a bar”), and generally tried to play it off like he’s perfectly fine and it was just a blowjob. Fans are talking about how he was given oral sex. Hell, the MEDIA is calling it oral sex. But his close friend and fellow rapper, Kitty Pryde, is framing things very differently.

Not only is Pryde unafraid to call what happened a real sexual assault, she rightly points out that in our society, it’s not like he had much choice in his reaction to the assault, given that at least part of the system of self-aggrandizement in the rap world involves being hypersexual and/or hypermasculine. She laments that when she’d had a similar event happen to her, with two fans ripping her pants off, the others on stage with her were rightly defensive. They rushed to her aid, helped stop the assault. Brown was not so lucky — getting, instead, put into a Catch-22 position then getting congratulated on his good fortune at having been violated.

If he had figured out a way to gently push the girl off him immediately without looking like he was smacking her in the face, he’s faced with attacks on his masculinity by every douchebro in the building. Yo dude, you don’t want your dick sucked, bro? Are you gay? Haha you’re gay you don’t want girls to suck your dick haha gay dude bro man swag! And that’s a rapper’s literal nightmare.

Why would a “surprise blowjob” be a rapper’s nightmare? Well, it’s rather simple actually. The nightmare lies in the nexus of: a) the rape culture that enshrines some ability for outsiders to know better than you what you do and do not consent to; and b) the rigid gender roles that expect that men are only concerned with getting their dicks wet at every opportunity.

Danny Brown, using the part of rap culture that draws so heavily on patriarchal notions like rigid male gender roles and male sexual appetites, was in effect “playing the game” of the patriarchy, so to speak. As a result, he was in possibly one of the worst positions anyone could have been in, and I don’t envy him for a minute. It’s horrible and damning that the patriarchal notions that won him fans backfired on him so spectacularly — especially insofar as the perpetrator was apparently a fan herself.

If he did anything to stop this overzealous fan, short of backing up — the most passive way to stop someone from assaulting you that I can think of short of closing your eyes and praying — then he would have incurred the derision of his peers, his douchier fans, MRAs who decry the concepts of patriarchy and rape culture, and just about anyone who’s got a suspiciously personal stake in insisting that “surprise sex”, without any sort of pre-existing relationship where consent can be implied, is fine-just-fine. Brown didn’t even have the option to push his assaulter away, even if he hadn’t suffered a surprising and otherwise mentally vapor-locking event. Imagine if he’d pushed her away with anything more than a gentle hand — he’d probably be looking at assault charges, especially where he’s a black man where people are already predisposed to stereotyping him as hypersexual and violent even without the rapper angle.

I lay the blame for Brown’s assault squarely at the feet of the assaulter, who while she didn’t hurt him physically, certainly violated his bodily integrity. Rape is rape whether it’s violent or doesn’t leave a mark.

However, I lay the blame for all the pain experienced by Brown in dealing with the consequences of his assaulter’s actions, squarely at the feet of the power dynamics of privilege at play. That same power dynamic disadvantages women who are raped by men, and practically ensures that the comparatively few men who are raped by women, like Brown, will probably never see real justice. They’re forced to play it off like it’s no big deal. They’re forced to accept that they don’t get to choose what happens to their dick, by whom, and when. They get to taste in one small way what it’s like to be a woman in a rape culture, and some of these male rape victims even internalize the fucked up narrative that you should be thankful that someone is willing to suck your dick — that you should take it as a compliment, or as something to be cheered on, and never, ever get to say “that was fucked up”, on penalty of having a swarm of self-appointed gender police attack you for stepping out of line.

Let this be a lesson to you assholes who think the concept of patriarchy was invented to shame and hurt men for being men: try being less manly, in any way, even in moments of extreme vulnerability, and see what happens to you. When society fucks you over for it, recognize that that’s the same damned patriarchy we feminists have been talking about all along.

Maya and Alexandra have more analysis at Feministing.

The post Memo to blowjob-forcing fan: it's a RAP concert, not a RAPE concert. appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

If you were watching the SkepTech hash tag on Twitter during the conference last weekend, you probably would have seen the usual suspects making the usual whine-plaints about harassment policies, and how they’re ruining all the fun at conferences. Then you would have seen some of those same whiners lose their shit over the fact that there was a whole panel about sex (HEAVENS FOREFEND), populated by feminists (FETCH MY FAINTING COUCH).

An example tweet from a pro-harassment tweeter (I mean, seriously, what else can you make of this?), believes they’ve caught us feminists, and the founders of SkepTech who supported harassment policies, out on some sort of hypocrisy:

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/iamcuriousblue/status/322614556880949249″]

@iamcuriousblue #SkepTech policy:”Sexual language & imagery not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks.” In practice: [link to Youtube video]

The panel in question was fantastic. It was thoughtful, thorough, answered questions from the audience with aplomb, and every panelist was very obviously pro-sex. And yet, the whole panel was also very, very anti-harassment.

I strongly recommend you watch it all. And while you’re watching, have a pen and paper handy to write down all the instances of sexual language used.

And then, once you’re done, scratch out any that doesn’t involve actively mistreating someone else, present or otherwise, or otherwise treating someone as a sexual object with or without their consent, because that’s how everyone else seems to understand the term (pdf).

Once you’re done this tally and come up with the great big goose-egg that I got, then try to argue that the pro-harassment crowd is losing their shit repeatedly over anything but a phantasm. Perhaps they should keep their fears grounded in reality, and engage us on our actual arguments, our actual words, the actual effects of real harassment policies, et cetera. You know, obtain real and valid data and examine it critically.

Like skeptics do.

The post Spot the Sexual Language appeared first on Lousy Canuck.