An open letter

I think part of the problem is that culture is an overloaded word with multiple occasionally slightly overlapping definitions which means that if you are uniformed about the context it can be slightly hard to grasp which definition is being used:

The phrase "rape culture" uses the last definition of the word culture but I bet a lot of people elide that definition mentally with the third definition which would make statements like 'It's basically accusing everyone who is a part of society as being an accessory to rape' make sense. There is a rape culture in the broader melting pot that is modern American culture, just as there are youth cultures and drug cultures. You are not necessarily a part of it, just as you are probably not a part of a modern youth culture if you are over thirty, but it is a very pervasive culture and enmeshed in the broader culture in lots of subtle ways.

Secondly, it is possible to be a minor enabler of the normalization of sexual violence (that then, lowers the bar for potential rapists) without being a willing accessory to every rape that happens. All you have to do is be born into our current society and continue acting within some of it's current norms around sexual behaviour without investigating and challenging them. Just as people who lived during the era of widespread slavery would largely have been minor enablers of the 'slave culture' without actually owning any slaves and without bearing any direct individual responsibility for the institution that it was. I don't think we believe that all people who lived during the time of widespread slavery were evil, so we should not think the same of people today who live within and alongside the normalisation of sexual violence. However, the people we tend to regard as heroic from the time of widespread slavery are those who recognized that something wasn't right, challenged it, ultimately fought against it and won victories.

Just in case this is a little too abstract I thought I'd put down some of the things that for me help identify the rape culture

• Young men and women being taught that sex is something that women are the gatekeepers of and that men have to fight to get at.
• The routine objectification, inappropriate sexualisation, reduction and dehumanisation of women based on their choice of clothes or physical attributes.
• The idolisation of men with a large number of sexual partners compared to the demonisation of women with same.
• The strong stigma attached to virginity and single-dom in general in young men. This is present for women too to some extent but tends to come later in life and is less aggressive.

Misogyny is a different, though often related problem that is about the hatred of women rather than the more subtle problem of normalisation of sexual violence (usually toward women).Societal normalisation of sexual violence can come from people who love women as much as from those that hate them.

Secondly, the term rape culture doesn't exclude the far less common but also culturally problematic homosexual rapes. One of the huge problems around reducing rape is the reluctance of people who have been raped to report it out of both a rational fear of not being believed and out of a feeling of shame, that comes from our culture, and is often magnified in a homosexual rape.

I don't think all of those areas would be covered adequately covered by the term misogyny.


EDIT:

'Youth culture' isn't the culture of people who are into youths, that would be a different culture entirely.

And just as we accept that a youth culture is about the norms, beliefs and behaviours around young people, a rape culture is about the norms, beliefs and behaviours around rape and other sexual violence. It's not some unprecedented usage even if it is deliberately emotive.

Rape and sexual violence is the product of the norms, beliefs and behaviors of our society and culture in regards to women. Misogyny is not simply outright hatred, it is also (and I'd say mostly) the more subtle contempt. The typical misogynist has no problem with women, provided they behave in a way the misogynist deems appropriate.

Some time ago on Australian TV show The Project after a story about a gay couple adopting, host Charlie Pickering made a comment about how funny it was that one of the men would be referred to as the mother, a joke that the rest of the panel ignored before going to the ad break. Based on everything I've seen of the guy I don't think he is a misogynist but a joke like that can can only exist in a misogynistic society, a society where women are seen as less than men.

The term "rape culture" doesn't adequately cover things like parents who allow their daughter to play with trucks because it's cute that she's a tomboy but forbid their son to play with dolls for fear he'll grow up to be a pussy. It doesn't cover things like grown men referring to themselves as being "scared like a little girl" because little girls are viewed as being lesser than little boys.

Why do you think the think the victim of male on male rape is commonly referred to as the "bitch"?

What does it even mean to "love women"? Much like I've never met anyone who asked why white people don't get pride parades and wasn't also a racist, I've never met a man who said he loved women who wasn't actually referring to what he himself got from women.

HeavenlyInsanity gosh it's like the term "rape culture" wasn't meant to encompass every gender-related problem society has. Shocking!

You're not so good at parsing language, are you? He was clearly using the phrase "love women" as a sort of antonym for "misogynist". He might have put it more elegantly by saying "OK with women", or possibly "not a misogynist". He was trying to turn a phrase, and it didn't quite work out. But it's pretty fucking clear what he was getting at.

It doesn't cover nuclear proliferation! It doesn't cover terrorism paranoia in a post 9-11 world! It doesn't cover airplane food and how bad it is! It doesn't cover when you see a homeless guy on the sidewalk ahead of you and you think about crossing the street just so you won't have to interact with him but that makes you feel guilty so you walk on but you avert your eyes when you get close! It doesn't cover drug addiction rates among minorities! It doesn't cover America's poor history when dealing with its native population! It doesn't cover how maybe they should make the whole plane out of the black box! It doesn't cover the potential of a robotic revolution! It doesn't cover the fact that wrestling is fake, but the athleticism is real! It doesn't cover the realization that we will one day die! It doesn't cover the idea that maybe it's okay to let pandas go extinct! It doesn't cover recycling! It doesn't cover the fact that Panera isn't great, but I like their black bean soup! It doesn't cover Disney and their interest in copyright law! It doesn't cover the JFK assassination! It doesn't cover gun violence in schools! It doesn't cover America's messed up emissions laws which result in our driving less fuel efficient vehicles! It doesn't cover Quebec independence! It doesn't cover norovirus breakouts on cruise ships! It doesn't cover satellites falling from the sky! It doesn't cover awareness ribbon magnets on cars! It doesn't cover the cancelation of all of my favorite shows! It doesn't cover World of Darkness Gypsy! It doesn't cover the situation wherein you put in your money and then the vending machine dispenses two bags of chips instead of one! It doesn't cover a culture where the normalization of violence toward women is increasingly acceptable!

Oh, wait. No. It does do that last thing. Which is why the term exists. Cos it describes that one specific thing, and not a bunch of other random shit.

As Jeff said, I wasn't dismissing misogyny as a problem, merely saying that it wasn't a replacement term for rape culture as they are two different though, often related, issues.

I'm not sure it is a phrase you would go around shouting in the streets (unless you were a drunken Italian), but I merely meant that it is possible to unthinkingly pass on the norms that encourage sexualised violence even to people that you love; for example a father unthinkingly passing on problematic social roles and beliefs to a daughter that he still loves. I'd argue what you are describing is probably more correctly categorised as sexism, the belief in the primacy of one sex over the other rather than misogyny the meaning of which is more generally concerned with the hatred and dislike of women. A male-centred person who is only sexist may like women but just believe that they have some imagined attributes that make them suited to more subordinate roles (I guess you might compare their feelings toward women to the Owner & Pet relationship, you love your pets but usually don't regard them as equals). Meanwhile, a misogynist would have no time for women at all and regards them with contempt; they are seen as enemies to be thwarted, dominated and used.

Of course as with rape culture these terms often overlap, intertwine and get redefined through repeated use in new contexts. However they still (at least currently) all have subtly different meanings and its easy to end up in arguments where you really don't disagree simply through confusion as to what meaning each person sees in a given word or phrase.

I was never suggesting that misogyny was a replacement term for rape culture.

Sorry, I knew what you meant, and that question wasn't directed at you or anyone in particular. The phrase is just a pet peeve of mine that rubs me the wrong way as I've known too many men who use it in the way you describe, as owner and pet. Or possibly owner and object.

This I must disagree with. A misogynist will have time for women when he wishes to use them, see them as enemies when they cross him, and the rest of the time they will be irrelevant.

I think you mean World of Darkness Romani, mister Casual Racism.

(once you get 4 dots in Pickpocket and 3 in Fortunetelling, the game just becomes broken anyway)

I mean World of Darkness: Black Guy, where your Blood Purity determines how good you are at dancing and slamming back grape sodas.

Some of us are drunken Italians, you know...

I know there are worse things to get pissy about as a feminist, but this is without a doubt one of the fastest ways to make me fucking hate you, guys I don't know.

Yup, one day someone will lionize us for our struggles about semantics on the D&D forum.

Maybe if you weren't a feminist you'd smile more!

>:C

Ah, there's the old "LOL it's only the internet" canard.

If nothing we say here matters, why do you bother with your weak attempts to troll it? Oh, right. Because it does matter because this is the grounds for intellectual exchange where ideas are formed and opinions are shaped, and you're a misogynist twit trying to minimize what scares you in hopes that you don't have to grow the fuck up and live in a world where you don't get the prize by default by virtue of a Y chromosome.

I really don't know how you slide under the ban radar, you've never been anything but a mediocre troll at best, and at worst you're blatantly sexist, homophobic, and transphobic.

IT WAS STILL FUNNY

I'm bisexual, have lots of trans people in my life including 2 in my family, and am okay with the coming matriarchy...

Ultimately I think we disagree about what a forum is for. I think a forum should be washroom graffiti with much better archiving. I don't really care about the identities of anyone posting on this forum, in the exact same way that I don't worry about the guy who writes "I drink jock cum" and his phone number on the wall next to the urinal. I only care about someone carving 666 swastikas into the stall divider insofar as it is boring to look at. Like... if every single stall looked like that, and Heil Hitler was written in blood on the mirrors, then maybe I might not go to that washroom anymore, but I'm not going to lose sleep or get my blood pressure up about it. So, in the same way, when people try to argue that stuff that happens in the forum has some kind of meaningful social resonance and that forum posts are implicated in awful things that deviant people who are nowhere near the forum do, I care that that attitude encourages a po faced identity politics contest where we compete to post the most dogmatic take on stuff that offends us.

And I feel this way because I don't think forums can bear the bear burden that you want them to... This is just all talk. We're all wearing masks, this is all ephemeral, everyone forgets about everything written here the second they have something more interesting to do. What forums can do is allow uninhibited rhetorical play and preserve it for as long as someone pays the bills.

Ah, the old "I'm in a race with myself to care less than you" gambit.

And yet your posts in the threads that shall not be named still showed blatant transphobia and some real homophobic issues. You might as well go with "But I have a black friend!"

Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to have an actual conversation and learn something. If you see no purpose in being here, kindly get the fuck out.

You might, but many of us don't. If all you want to do is let off drive by one-liners that no one cares about go back to reddit.

EDIT: what Zeke said.

I think I can now field a reasonable number of names for my banned-posters themed Blood Bowl team without having to dip into people from other forums.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Lum is just trying to farm for likes by banning the posters that everyone hates. I see through your transparent attempts to beat Angie's like count and I'M WATCHING YOU MISTER.

You're disagreeing with what Dan said by... er... repeating it?

Good Men Project turns out to be full of rapists

What is this I don't even

Oh man, the blackout drunk thing was painful. If you know, you have this crazy tendency to try to rape people when you get black out drunk, maybe, now just maybe, you should avoid getting anywhere near black out drunk.

"the cost of doing business." I . . .

That is totally the part where I finally went "WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK" in my head. Like, all the other stuff was ugh, but that in particular was ?!?!?!?!?.

Okay, I know I'm the messenger folks, but why do JoshV, OZ 4.0, and Sjofn get all the likes when I posted the godawful...oh, right.

There you go, big guy.

BUT I DID IT FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES

This is relevant. (Former GMP blogger on why he left.)

I always just assume people can't say no to giving Bunny in a Santa Hat likes, no matter the post content.

You'd be right.

On the GMP, here are some articles I read last night:
https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.c...-predators-and-the-social-license-to-operate/
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archiv...ball-with-feministe-and-the-good-men-project/

And since this has also become an issue about Predator Theory (the research showing that most "acquaintance rapes" are committed by a small minority of men who are very well aware of what they're doing and use strategies that they know minimizes the risk of being accused of rape; thus getting women drunk, "miscommunication", and establishing the "she wanted it" defence), as referenced in the articles above, here's the classic post from the Yes Means Yes! blog about it:
http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-predators/

Jesus fuck. I've been unsettled about the GMP literally from the moment I first heard the name, but this is really unbelievably beyond the pale. How could anyone, anywhere, think publishing those articles was a good idea?

I like how all that is going on but their opinion about the editor-in-chief is that he's in no way less of a feminist.

Cognitive dissonance and rationalization is a hell of a drug.

I have never followed the Good Men Project, but I've been linked to articles by them from time to time and I always thought it was a strange site. The shit that has been blowing up over the past couple of weeks, though. Man.