Mary’s Monday Metazoan: The keys to a successful date are garish butt decorations » « Deconstructing metaphors

“no survivor privilege, just survivors”

Jen Gunter rips up George Will on his rape column. (By the way, Gunter talks frankly about her own rape: might cause extreme discomfort for some.)

I have a dream: that the editors at the Washington Post will wake up, realize that Will is a tedious, stupid asshole and will fire him, and replace him with someone like Jen Gunter. With a 10% increase in salary.

It’ll never happen.

Mary’s Monday Metazoan: The keys to a successful date are garish butt decorations » « Deconstructing metaphors

Comments

  1. busterggi says

    “Will is a tedious, stupid asshole ”

    Which still makes him better than most other Repubes.

  3. says

    I found myself nodding in agreement when reading this paragraph:

    There is no woman who I have ever met personally or as an OB/GYN who thinks that surviving a rape confers some sort of privilege. I am genuinely curious if you interviewed a few young women hoping to earn their college rape badge or is that just a conclusion you reached looking at the issue of sexual assault through the myopic lens of misogyny?

  4. violetknight says

    He’s received plenty of good takedowns, but the sad part is that few, if any, have anywhere near as big a bullhorn.

  5. redwood says

    The likelihood of George Will feeling empathy with or sympathy for a rape victim is right down there with the likelihood of the government curtailing gun possession.

  6. says

    I honestly don’t want to give the original article any hits, or even force myself to read the drivel. Can someone tell me what in the blazing hells “survivor priviledge” is even supposed to *be*?!

  7. says

    PZ sez:

    By the way, Gunter talks frankly about her own rape: might cause extreme discomfort for some.

    Most definitely. It shook me up a little bit, and I was expecting it.

    I commented on her blog, thanking her for sharing her story and speaking up against the lies George Will was spreading. A great many of the comments were supportive, but of course there are those few…ugh.

  8. says

    Leaders in the mormon church sometimes go even further. By both actions and words they indicate that the rapist is/was the victim. See http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1295212

    Excerpt below:

    […] It took almost two months before the bishop began action. He interviewed the boy first, decided nothing was wrong, that I had tempted him into doing it. I was not going to be interviewed until I asked him myself. I did, and I showed him everything. He agreed that I had been raped and he needed to have a disciplinary counsel with the rapist.

    Three weeks later, there was a counsel. He received no punishment because he “had such a great testimony of the gospel” even though he apparently did admit to raping me and everybody knows he did. The mother of the household asked him to leave her house because she didn’t feel comfortable having him with her kids. He now lives with the bishop and will live with my young women’s leader, who also knows about what happened.

    He’s seen as much, if not more, of a victim as I am. […]

    I’m not really sure where to go from here. I’m going to be a senior in high school next year and will have to apply to colleges. The only college I’m “””””allowed”””” to go to is BYU, but I really don’t want to go to school inhabited by the members and run by the church that excuses and cares for my rapist. In addition, my parents are paying for the mission they strongly desire me to go on. If I decided I didn’t want to go to BYU or go on a mission, I’m afraid I’d be disowned.

    As you can imagine, recovering from sexual trauma is not easy. The fact that the church I was a part of my entire life goes beyond not caring and goes into caring for the rapist does not make it any easier. […]

  10. says

    Wielding the threat of sectarian slaughter, Sunni Islamist militants claimed on Sunday that they had massacred hundreds of captive Shiite members of Iraq’s security forces, posting grisly pictures of a mass execution in Tikrit as evidence and warning of more killing to come.

    The possible mass killing came as militants cemented control of the city of Tal Afar, west of Mosul, after two days of fierce clashes with Iraqi troops, residents and senior security officials said. […]

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/world/middleeast/iraq.html

  11. says

    My apologies for comments #9 and #10. I posted them in the wrong thread. I’m headed back to the Lounge to hide in a corner and have some grog.

  12. twas brillig (stevem) says

    what in the blazing hells “survivor priviledge” is even supposed to *be*?!

    It’s a response to George Will’s declaration that women cry “rape”, just to receive all the “privileges” the universities are forced (by Progressives) to yield to the victims. She is just trying to clarify George, that the women who cry “rape”, are “survivors” and there is no such thing as a “survivor privilege”. That George is just brainfarting all over the paper that reproduces his brainfarts. for more info look for the previous thread here about, “time for George Will to retire”

  13. says

    twas billig:

    That George is just brainfarting all over the paper that reproduces his brainfarts.

    It was far worse than a brainfart.
    I had a brainfart a few moments ago when reading a comic book. I came across a new character, a being from another world, and I instantly used a male pronoun to describe the being, despite no gender related clues being present in the comic. I corrected my thoughts immediately, but still, the brainfart happened.
    OTOH, George Will did not make one relatively harmless mistake. He spread lies and misinformation (that are easily refuted by a few google searches) that will hurt women and men. Worse still, there are plenty of malicious people (MRAs for instance) and gullible people who will swallow that shit up and regurgitate it. He has a platform that reaches many people, and his “celebrity” will give his words a [false] air of authority.

  14. Seven of Mine, formerly piegasm says

    Tashiliciously Shriked @ 6

    I honestly don’t want to give the original article any hits, or even force myself to read the drivel. Can someone tell me what in the blazing hells “survivor priviledge” is even supposed to *be*?!

    Will doesn’t trouble himself to define it or describe what any of the benefits are. He just asserts that victim-hood is a coveted status and that women are falling all over themselves to be able to claim it.

  16. colnago80 says

    Let’s not forget that Will dumped his first wife to trade her in for a younger model. An all around class guy. Not.

  17. smhll says

    It seems that Will is disturbingly nostalgic for an era where there was more shame, more stigma and more silence.

  18. mikeyb says

    Will proves that looking intelligent and appearing to sound intelligent are far more important these days in the media punditocracy, than actually being and saying something intelligent, with few exceptions such as Paul Krugman once in a while when he’s permitted on a show here and there. I can’t recall Will every saying anything remotely insightful including his trite cliches about baseball. Mostly he just hides his smug bigotry, ignorance and blatant corporatism in grammatically correct sentences.

  19. says

    What a Maroon @15:
    Thanks for those links.
    The first (to Alyssa Rosenberg’s column) introduced me to ‘cultural cognition’:

    Daniel Kahan, the Elizabeth K. Dollar Professor of Law at Yale Law School, who has written extensively on the phenomenon of “motivated reasoning,”that the way we weigh evidence is influenced by strong goals, needs and worldviews, studied the cultural norms that affected views of acquaintance and date rape cases. He found that attachment to traditional gender roles played a significant role in driving skepticism that survivors actually meant it when they said no to sex.

    In particular, women who are highly invested in traditional gender norms tend to lean towards defendants’ accounts because of the idea that “saying ‘no’ but meaning ‘yes’ is conceived of by those who subscribe to gender norms as a strategy some women use to evade the stigma these norms visit on women who engage in casual sex,” Kahan wrote. “Women who have earned high group status by conspicuously conforming to these norms are the ones most threatened by the prospect that women who use this strategy will escape censure.”

    When discussing sexual assault, this kind of “cultural cognition,” or assessment of the facts in accordance with the ideas that make up your worldview, makes a certain sort of tragic sense.

    Distasteful as Will’s conclusions are, I suppose that, of two terrible options, it might be better to believe that young women have what Fox News recently termed “hateful little minds” than to believe that young men are raping young women in large numbers and that colleges are acting in such a way to keep sexual predators free. That former scenario is ugly. The latter is monstrous.

  21. knowknot says

    @3 Lynna, OM
    requoting:
     

    There is no woman who I have ever met personally or as an OB/GYN who thinks that surviving a rape confers some sort of privilege. I am genuinely curious if you interviewed a few young women hoping to earn their college rape badge or is that just a conclusion you reached looking at the issue of sexual assault through the myopic lens of misogyny?

    because that. because seriously that.
     
    and also this, for the sake of clarity:
     

    There is no woman who I have ever met personally or as an OB/GYN who thinks that surviving a rape confers some sort of privilege. I am genuinely curious if you interviewed a few young women hoping to earn their college rape badge or is that just a conclusion you reached looking at the issue of sexual assault through the myopic lens of misogyny?

  22. knowknot says

    @19 (as quoted by) Tony:
     
    The quoted writer states that “assessment of the facts in accordance with the ideas that make up your worldview” makes a “certain sort of tragic sense” when considering sexual assault, because

    ..(d)istasteful as Will’s conclusions are, I suppose that, of two terrible options, it might be better to believe that young women have what Fox News recently termed “hateful little minds” than to believe that young men are raping young women in large numbers and that colleges are acting in such a way to keep sexual predators free. That former scenario is ugly. The latter is monstrous.

    First, I have to admit that I’m having trouble conceiving of acultural cognition, or conceiving of my view of the world and its facts in the absence of my worldview. Or maybe I’m just not good at it. Or I’m missing something. Or “cultural cognition” means “how people cogitate anyway” plus “decieving themselves and anyone else available because wanna.”
     
    And even if I did get the concept, my experience (which I admit is often lacking) would still lead me to believe that this is either overly forgiving (as in, WAY overly forgiving) or twisted away from reality in an attempt to make the cold-bloodedness of these views comprehensible to those possessing an actual awareness of the existence of other humans and one or two mirror neurons.
     
    Meaning: I honestly think the evasiveness of this maneuver is ENTIRELY unecessary to Will and his kind, because either the swell and beneficent nature of creation or the largesse of the ruling class would never allow the latter “monstrosity” (to occur to the undeserving), and because they are already certain of either the former or its softer, gentler more ennobling version:
    Women just freaking talk and talk and talk and talk and it’s mostly crap anyway and boys will be boys and everything would fall apart and be all wimpy if they weren’t and then women wouldn’t have anything to talk about and they wouldn’t like it anyway and also that way lieth madness.

  23. Pteryxx says

    When I grow up and put on my superhero cape, I want to be Dr. Jen Gunter.

    —

    Via Tony! over the weekend:

    Colleges silence and fire faculty who speak out about rape

    Oftentimes, the so-called “political” or “trouble-making” behavior they engage in is simply doing what Title IX laws require them to in order to keep their students safe. Every professor I spoke to described a remarkably similar pattern of behavior on the administration’s part: when faculty object to the desultory, ineffective sexual assault and rape policies offered up by universities, they’re ignored; when they persist in their criticism, they’re labeled “hysterical” or “troublemakers” who are acting out of a “personal agenda,” and they’re put under increasing pressure to keep quiet. In some cases that pressure is insidious. In others, it’s bafflingly blatant: for instance, I spoke to two women who were denied tenure after helping students report sexual harassment (which, again, is their legal responsibility under Title IX).

    […]

    “They’re in now denial, and they’ve gone after faculty in an attempt to discredit them,” says Caroline Heldman. “It’s not just that they’re not making real changes: it’s that they’re spending all their time, energy and effort going after the faculty and survivors who brought it up. It’s beyond inactivity. They’re actively dedicating time and resources to shooting messengers.”

  24. says

    knowknot @22:
    re: cultural cognition-
    My understanding of the phrase is that individuals will attempt to force reality to fit their worldview. George Will’s conservative worldview doesn’t mesh with the reality of Rape Culture. Attempting to accommodate the two results in denying the extent of the problem (wow, that’s an understatement). His worldview needs to stay intact. Doing so means rejecting the evidence. The world can’t be that unfair. People can’t really act so abominably. So it has to be that women are lying. And of course, that’s confirmed by the Republican echo chamber and Rape Culture.
    I don’t see Dr. Gunter as forgiving George Will, so much as trying to understand how the hell he can arrive at his conclusions.

  25. knowknot says

    – I’m often obtuse as a duck in a milkshake, but doesn’t all that come down to confirmation / disconfirmation bias? As in, women are “like that” because entitlement / feminism / Obamacare / ladyparts / etc. The boys aren’t really “like that” because ladypartsinladyclothesfault / myfrat / God / tedcruz / etc.
    Seems simple. Seems like what I’ve seen: everything denied or affirmed piecmeal, because everything’s a conspiracy anyway.
    – I’m probably just being cranky, but I don’t get the sense or the value of the added terminology. And I don’t see any logic, tragic or otherwise, and even the waft of pathos in the struggle against cognitive dissonance is too romatic for heads with this crap in them.