UniLad magazine advocating rape - have there been threads on this already?

Viz the "can't grasp it until it happens to them/ touches them personally" thing, I think that links in with the various reports around at the moment showing that men who become fathers of girls, suddenly develop a realisation that women aren't equal after all and it dawns on them that one day, some fucker will treat their loved daughter the way they've treated women in the past and they get all interested in equality.

Having mothers, sisters, female cousins, friends and colleagues isn't enough, apparently, to enable many men to empathise with women as fellow humans. They actually have to help reproduce one, before the penny drops.

Hey no worries differentid I probably should have put out things more carefully in the first place. It's an emotive topic.

I kept seeing references to UniLad and its writer Alex Partridge yesterday morning on Twitter starting to appear. I got curious and investigated the matter and what i read got me so angry that i couldn't just stay silent. I spoke to my editor about the issue and he decided to write a story about it on our site as we felt that the issue was too important to disappear in the million of trending topics that Twitter has daily. The Huffington Post UK seemed to have picked up the story pretty quickly too. This is the story which we then published yesterday afternoon www.theweek.co.uk/uk-news/44930/twitter-fury-over-surprise-rape-article-gets-unilad-suspended

A few hours later Jezebel.com also picked it up jezebel.com/5881333/lad-mag-suggests-guys-get-rapey-because-odds-are-in-their-favor

I know this is not the first time this level of stupidity and misogyny arises where people think joking about rape is funny but i just hope that highlighting the outrage that it causes might make them realise how wrong they really are.

Oh & I totally agree that it is a 'it won't happen to me' mentality. They do think they are invincible, and think perhaps if they become 'one of the lads' it can't happen to them.

SardineQueen

Thanks for explaining...maybe I read it wrong, but your later explanation makes it clearer for me. I completely understand what you were trying to say.

Sorry for being abrupt :)

Because they are young and confident, which is as it should be.

And then life happens and they come around to a different way of thinking! Which is also the way it should be, I guess.

It takes a special sort of young person to have insight past their feelings of invulnerability and confidence and to look outside their direct experience and immediate thoughts of getting off with people and going out and all that stuff that consumes your brain when you are young - I certainly didn't very much anyway

I was talking to my 14 year old yesterday, and she said that I was sexist ,because in her eyes I am obviously anoyed when i hear/read of boys/men behaving badly.(I write annoyed, because i dont think i rant).I say probably i am, I dont dislike men, but i think i'm more protective of women, and feel the need to empower my daughters,so they can deal with situations. It clearly isnt working-society is far too powerful.
She actually said that she wont have any problems and looked at me as if i was a mad shit stirrer.

Why do girls, in every generation, always think that this misogyny is going away, and that somehow its all going to be full of reliable blokes.

differentid that isn't what I meant, apologies if I didn't explain myself very well.

I think that for some young women, thinking these jokes are funny is part of that "I'm invincible" feeling that you have when you are young. The idea in society and in the press is that rape is something that is done by a stranger in an alley and is fairly rare. So for young women who have not been exposed to it firsthand either themselves or family etc the likelihood of it happening to them seems similar to the likelihood of anything else really bad happening - it won't because the are invincible. It just seems impossible. Also, the idea is that rape is something that is done by a stranger in an alley means that if your nice normal friend in class is making a joke about saying "surprise" then obviously it's just a joke because obviously he isn't a rapist.

For some/many women I think that life experience has to happen before they understand that nice normal men can and do rape and there's very little that is done about it. And then they become feminists

I did put "some" in my post as I was trying to think about why some younger women might support these comments and jokes and that is what I thought. I don't believe that people can't understand about rape unless it has happened to them or someone close to them - but for some that is what it takes. And of course for some they go through life believing the myths and that only stranger rape is real rape and anything else is mixed signals etc. and never open their eyes.

I really wonder about these MRA sites masquarading as a "normal university lads" site or Pistonheads for car afficionados or that other site (name evades me) which tried to do an MN site invasion the other day.

They appear to be normal people but in fact they are hard core MRA, misogynist places where people (yes, women as well as men) outdo each other in offensiveness. But these sites all appear to be originated and run by men, with a few uneducated female stragglers trying to get in on the act.

My question, is the a female dominated site that prides itself on this kind of idiotic, offensive, political correctness smashing, delighting in abuse type crap?

The Netmums site gets a bashing in some zones of MN for frivolousness and poor grammar and spelling but Netmums seems to be a gang if harmless mums gossiping in the same as MN, (maybe differnet topics, I don't know, never really been) but a world away from this unilads claptrap.

I am a few parenting sites and an expat forum and I have never, ever come across any attitudes like this.

But it seems there are LOADS of sites run by men along these lines.

The opposite dynamic seems to exist on MN; someone uses a word like "mentally handicapped" or "coloured" or similar and people are queuing up to upbraid the OP. You get the very occasional stirrer like Donnie who delights in agreeing with weird, out of date terms, but on the whole, people here vy to be holier than thou, often going OTT on an OP who just got it a bit wrong, sometimes in ignorance not from malice.

Does anyone know of a female dominated / run site where there is the kind of vicious, fuck you, extremist masquarading as normal attitude of unilads?

different You're getting the wrong end of the stick SQ doesn't say that noone who hasn't experienced rape first hand can comprehend the effects, but that not having experienced rape might contribute to not comprehending the effects in those who don't.

Anyway - not that it really is an excuse - I think both lad mag likers and writers are probably still quite young, immature and naive, and are actually not realising what they are talking about. That's a sad state of affairs, and clearly needs to be addressed.

Helpful?

SardineQueen

I disagree with your post

Some women who haven't been raped, whose friends haven't been raped, whose family members haven't been raped think like that I guess. I think until it enters your world as a thing that happens, and you realise how much it happens, it's easy to see it as so rare and outrageous that of course anyone who talks about doing it is joking

I don't know anyone who has been raped (well, not that they have mentioned anyway) & I don't think like any of those people who have posted on UniLad (on FB). You don't have to experience rape first hand or see it's effects first hand to know how awful & life changing it is. Don't tar people like me with people like that, thank you!

Many many people are fully able to comprehend the effects of rape & don't spout hatred like that! I resent that implication, to be honest.

Some good points Victor and Basil (sounds like you're both smoking cigars and drinking port! :o )

Trotting out rape myths, making excuses for rape, even some jokes that trivialise rape are abhorrent, but the statements on this site (and some of the comments in support of these,) actually advocate/recommend/incite/etc. men to rape.

Yep, what's the difference in saying, "Alright lads, get out and smash up JJB Sport, hey you'll get away with it like the others did," and "Alright lads, get out and rape women, hey you'll get away with it like the others did," eh?

Can we report any of these young men to the police? The ones who are advocating rape?

After all, rape is really common, while rioting isn't, and those young men who advocated a riot that didn't happen, got sent to prison.

Given that these young men have made their comments on a public site with no controls (you don't even have to 'like' UniLad to comment or view) anyone could contact the relevant universities (somewhere like corporate communications would be a good start) and the NUS and push for disciplinary procedures.

One or two universities have already started investigating. I certainly hope that others follow suit.

This comment in the article: "If the girl you've taken for a drink... won't 'spread for your head', think about this mathematical statistic: 85% of rape cases go unreported. "That seems to be fairly good odds." and the later statement, "Uni Lad does not condone rape without saying 'surprise'." surely constitute incitement to commit crime and there are laws against that I believe.

What happens if a man is arrested for rape and says, "I was encouraged to do it by what I read on UniLad," would the victim then have a case for civil action against UniLad?

Someone linked to a (warning - nasty comments endorsing violence against women and rape) screenshot of comments from Facebook. I'm not Facebook savvy, but since they made their comments quite public, is there anything that can be done about it?

A few have asked why there are young women who appear to endorse the article and the comments from men advocating rape and violence against women. My guess is a combo of internalised oppression and an extreme and scary example of what Andrea Dworkin described in Right Wing Women. They think they'll gain status/favour/kudos/approval/cookies from men if they pat their heads and stroke their egos (probably feeling compelled to pat and stroke other things as well, but I digress,) and "prove" their loyalty to men by dissing other women.

It's not noble. In fact it's down right shitty. But, women aren't immune to 24/7 messages saying that women are inferior to men, their only value is in their appeal to/service of men, are objects for the sexual pleasure of men, etc. Some women think there's more to gain not by challenging the unfairness of that, but "playing along" and getting ahead by being the "best" at all those things. Keeping up that paradox of loving the self-loathing screws up your head though.

That Facebook page, while vile, provides a bit of a glow. Look at all the feminists and feminist supporters on there, giving their misogynist peers shit with correct spelling and punctuation (although they do have an annoying tendency to use 'cunt' as an insult).

Look at all the misogynists unable to string any kind of coherent sentence together, punctuate or spell, and proffering no defence more eloquent than 'free speech' or 'fuck off'. And then deleting their (screen-capped) posts once they work out that yes, the world is watching them now and no, it doesn't approve and you're not funny and employers aren't going to like this and oh look, your universities are starting to get disciplinary proceedings underway.

Who's laughing now, fuckfaces? (a load of oiks getting their arses handed to them on the internet isn't the end of patriarchy, of course, but I am only human and it's very nice to see some comeuppances).

And if anyone, ANYONE, ever tries to tell me that rapists are the boogeyman and I'm a manhater than these guys have just provided me with every resource I'll ever need.

fuzzy, I think you've spotted a gap in the market...

In some ways it's good that this is out there.

Lots of women don't realise how much contempt some supposedly normal men hold them in. It's good that they have their eyes open.

God, I wish there was a "Name and Shame Mysoginist (sp?) Bastards" database in the public interest, kind of like there is for wanted criminals. The guys from this site could be on the list, and people everywhere could check before hiring/dating/befriending them.

So much for the theory that rapists are not "ordinary" men.

Having said that my DH used to play rugby and this sort of thing horrifies him.

Some of his friends would probably find it funny though.

I find it staggering that men find this not only funny but just Ok.

What's the point of any 'Men, don't rape' campaigns if the audience is men like these?

I never really came across blokes like this at school or uni. I think if they thought things like this they kept them to themselves.

Having said that I mingled in the indie / rock / hard dance type circles and I suspect that blokes who are into alternative scenes are a bit better with this stuff than more mainstream types IYSWIM. I also never had any trouble with the blokes on my course - spoddy science types at university specialising in science - so there weren't any bog-standard blokes around anywhere really Certainly none of them played rugby!

It's disgusting. Men like this were a problem when I was at uni. I wondered how much things had changed but according to friends who are still students, these young men exist on every campus across the country, unsurprisingly. I was reading on Twitter that someone has written to the university one of the writers attends and they have responded to her saying they will be 'taking appropriate action' and 'do not condone' the material on the site.

Reading the comments on the Facebook group made me despair. An unending stream of hatred. Saw several men mocking people who may have been upset by the site because of their own experiences, as well as the standard women defending the guys and claiming that any woman expressing dislike of UniLad must be an 'uptight lesbian'.

The sole woman contributor was saying on Twitter that most of the men who write for the site have girlfriends. I wonder how they treat them?

I once had a student of mine (in his 20s) say about surprise sex.

He got incredibly offended when I pointed out how unfunny and offensive it was.