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This Is Not Fucking Harmless

caseymalone:

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I love Kickstarter. I think that’s clear to people who know me by now? I love it. There’s a dude named Brad Muir and he works at Double Fine and I love the games they make, so much. But before Kickstarter, every time a Double Fine game came out I was a little worried it would be their last, and I’d have to worry that if people didn’t buy it, who knows what would happen to that studio. Then they found KIckstarter and now they make games and people like me can front load the development cost for them and it is the absolute best arrangement for creative people who want a tool in the exhausting struggle of art + commerce.  A friend of mine is taking a month off her job to write a children’s book because of this platform. It’s GREAT. I love it. 

The outcome of this is that I spend a lot of time just browsing Kickstarter looking for something cool to either back or crow about online. I don’t really back much - I don’t have a ton of capitol to toss around, and I’m sure the fact that I have a lot of ideas and no money factors into my love of a platform that gives money to people with ideas - but I like to check it out. So tonight, I found THIS fucking thing. 

This is a nightmare. 

Watching the video, reading the description, it sounds fairly innocent but a little eye-roll inducing. It’s another book where some nerd, desperate to be liked by women (this is not an insult, we are ALL desperate to be liked by someone we want to have sex with) thinks he’s figured out some cheat code or check-list like routine they can run in a bar to make women sleep with them, as if women aren’t people but a series of subroutines or an obstacle course that they can optimize to get their dick wet as fast as possible. And he’s written that advice down! And he’s selling it! To you! You could learn his cheat codes. This is nothing new for the internet. In fact, a large swath of this book was published already on Reddit. What’s new is that he’s crowdfunding it. 

And sure, you might think this is sad or dumb or that this guy is just another lonely dude talking to other lonely dudes who’ll head out into the night with their fedoras to failure, right? Not a big deal? Oops, turns out we’re wrong, because here are some excerpts from what he’s already put on Reddit - 

”5) Get CLOSE to her, damn it!

To quote Rob Judge, “Personal space is for pussies.” I already told you that the most successful seducers are those who can’t keep their hands off of women. Well you’re not gonna be able to do that if you aren’t in close! ”

“All the greatest seducers in history could not keep their hands off of women. They aggressively escalated physically with every woman they were flirting with. They began touching them immediately, kept great body language and eye contact, and were shameless in their physicality. Even when a girl rejects your advances, she KNOWS that you desire her. That’s hot. It arouses her physically and psychologically.”

 

“Decide that you’re going to sit in a position where you can rub her leg and back. Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don’t ask for permission. Be dominant. Force her to rebuff your advances.”

“Sex

Pull out your cock and put her hand on it. Remember, she is letting you do this because you have established yourself as a LEADER. Don’t ask for permission, GRAB HER HAND, and put it right on your dick.”

 - Source

SO. Now I am no longer rolling my eyes.

This guy is no longer just being weird and creepy on the internet. Now he’s writing a book about how to sexually assault women, and he is using something I believe in (Kickstarter) to ask YOU for money to do it. I am offended as someone who believes in the platform, and more importantly I am offended as someone who believes women shouldn’t be treated this way, and that people who say otherwise CERTAINLY should not profit off saying they should. 

This isn’t harmless. People come to these boards because they are scared of being humiliated, and they are saying to the world, “Tell me what to do, because I don’t know what to do.” And this guy has chosen to tell them, “You should be a rapist.” 

There’s largely nothing we can do about people saying this shit on a place like Reddit - Reddit’s a mess for another time - but let’s get it off of Kickstarter. The project is funded in 10 hours - and unfortunately a lot of those are sleeping hours - but PLEASE report it to Kickstarter, please tweet @Kickstarter asking them to take it down, and PLEASE do not let something cool be used for the UGLIEST thing imaginable.

The Kickstarter - Report Button is on the bottom of the page

Please Tweet at @Kickstarter 

Casey

Signal boost.

“Yes, false rape accusations happen. Run the protocol anyway. I’ve heard that perhaps the military has the highest number of ‘em. True or not, RUN THE PROTOCOL ANYWAY. Because in 15 years of investigating rape accusations, I can count those that panned out as false on one hand. Meanwhile, the one time I almost skipped the protocol, the one time I almost didn’t believe a petty officer, because I was naive as an investigator and a young woman, because her commanding officer described her as “a party girl, always late, always out drinking, don’t bother with this one”, she turned out to be the victim of one of the most brutal assaults I’ve ever investigated. She shouldn’t have still been -alive-, let alone up and making the accusation. So let me repeat: five false accounts in fifteen years. And one time I almost failed a woman ‘cause of the bullshit way it’s normal to talk about us. Take your shipmates’ word, and then run the protocol. Every. Single. Time.”

 - JAG lawyer, speaking to my husband’s plant during Sexual Assault Prevention Month. (via circusbones)

(via fattyforever)

“If owning a gun and knowing how to use it worked, the military would be the safest place for a woman. It’s not.

If women covering up their bodies worked, Afghanistan would have a lower rate of sexual assault than Polynesia. It doesn’t.

If not drinking alcohol worked, children would not be raped. They are.

If your advice to a woman to avoid rape is to be the most modestly dressed, soberest and first to go home, you may as well add “so the rapist will choose someone else”.

If your response to hearing a woman has been raped is “she didn’t have to go to that bar/nightclub/party” you are saying that you want bars, nightclubs and parties to have no women in them. Unless you want the women to show up, but wear kaftans and drink orange juice. Good luck selling either of those options to your friends.

Or you could just be honest and say that you don’t want less rape, you want (even) less prosecution of rapists.”

A Short Post on Rape Prevention (via brute-reason)

Exactly.

Be honest: You don’t give a shit about rape victims.

You don’t fucking care.

You make excuses for the rapists all the damn time.

This is about policing women’s bodies and telling them to just ‘shut up and stop complaining about your rape because you deserved it’

(via sourcedumal)

(via lucybarker)

“

What kind of world do we live in when young men are so proud of violating unconscious girls that they pass proof around to their friends? It’s the same kind of world in which being labeled a slut comes with such torturous social repercussions that suicide is preferable to enduring them. As a woman named Sara Erdmann so aptly tweeted to me, “I will never understand why it is more shameful to be raped than to be a rapist.”

And yet it is: so much so that young men seem to think there’s nothing wrong with—and maybe something hilarious about—sharing pictures of themselves raping young women. And why not? Their friends will defend them, as they did in Steubenville, tweeting that the young woman was “asking for it” and that the boys were being unfairly targeted.

Women and girls are the ones expected to carry the shame of the sexual crimes perpetrated against them. And that shame is a tremendous load to bear, because once you’re labeled a slut, empathy and compassion go out the window. The word is more than a slur—it’s a designation.

”

“In Rape Tragedies, the Shame Is Ours,” my latest at The Nation (via jessicavalenti)

On Rehtaeh Parsons, Jane Doe, and rape.

On Sunday, Rehtaeh Parsons’ family took her off life support.

Rehtaeh Parsons hanged herself in her bathroom four days before that, because Rehtaeah Parsons was gang-raped by four boys a year ago.

They took pictures.

It took weeks for the police to even talk to them.

The atrocity they committed was dismissed — lack of evidence, they couldn’t prove who’d taken the picture.

The people in Rehtaeh’s school called her a slut. They passed her phone number around. They asked her if she’d have sex with them. They bullied, shunned, and browbeat her to death.

Her mother has a memorial page for her on Facebook and I can’t stop looking at the pictures and pictures of her as a child. Rehtaeh with a little dog. Rehtaeh’s school portrait. Rehtaeh and her family. Rehtaeh and her friends. Selfies she took. Pages and pages and pages of them, and I can’t stop looking, and I can’t shake it.

I didn’t know her. I don’t know her. But I know girls like her. I know boys like the ones that did this to her. We all do. 

People were so horrified at Steubenville like it was some isolated incident, like it was on a different level than all the other rapes that happen every day, every hour, every minute. Like Steubenville was the limit of human atrocity, an outlier, something everyone shook their heads at and wondered “How?” and thought “That could never happen to my daughter.” Not me. Not here.

It happens here. It happens wherever you are, right now. It happens every two minutes in the US. One out of five. One out of four. One out of six. One out of three. One billion, worldwide, every year.

Steubenville is not an isolated incident. What happened to Jane Doe and Rehtaeh Parsons is not an isolated incident. It doesn’t happen just to pretty white girls with long hair; it doesn’t just happen to the people we are most comfortable feeling compassion for. 

I’m sorry, Rehtaeh. I’m sorry that so many people failed you. I’m sorry that we are all complicit in a culture that shames and silences and browbeats victims literally to death. We created this. We built it.

I want to tear it apart with my teeth.

“

But are we really that surprised that these two young men didn’t think their actions were wrong?

Videos of men running up to women they don’t know just to grab their ass or stomach and run away are played for laughs on shows like Tosh.0. (The show is run by a comedian who garnered tremendous support after he “joked” about a woman in his audience being gang raped.) A “funny” montage of women’s breasts shown at the Oscars included rape scenes. We have handfuls of qualifiers—date, legitimate, forcible, gray—that we throw in front of “rape” because we want to know if an assault was a “real” rape or one of those non-rapes Republican politicians keep talking about.

And it’s not just rape that’s the joke—it’s women. Our very existence is presented to young men as fodder for sex and laughs, our humiliation and pain as goalposts for their masculinity. While mainstream culture fools itself into thinking that Americans take rape seriously, most women know better. We get the joke. We’re just tired of being the punchline.

”

What’s So Funny About Steubenville, my latest at The Nation (via jessicavalenti)

This week in horrifying misogyny…

[TRIGGER WARNING: Rape, domestic violence, assault]

A 13-year-old girl is raped by two 18-year-old football players, is then bullied mercilessly for being a “ho” and a “snitch.” 

SendGrid developer evangelist Adria Richards tweets a picture of a PlayHaven developer calling him out on making sexist jokes; PlayHaven fires the developer; SendGrid is subject to a huge DDOS attack and Richards is attacked with rape and death threats; SendGrid fires Adria Richards. Their response (why they fired her) is total bullshit — I could write an entire goddamn book on why public shaming of sexism is crucial in dismantling sexist culture, particularly in fields where outright misogyny is basically standard.

Marissa Alexander, after being repeatedly beaten by her husband, fires a warning shot into the ceiling during an episode of abuse. No one is hurt. She’s facing 20 years in prison, despite the “Stand Your Ground” law.