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

[Kveta]

link to story here

I am still going after reading this, and wondered if anyone has more coherent thoughts on the matter than me?

I remember the tread.

I was hoping that the sods had been charged on the back of this. Why have they not been? So a footballer gets charged for making racist insults (fair enough) but these 'boys'' can put this crap in writing - for a much larger audience - and don't even get a slap on the wrist?

What? Just, what? WTAF?

Fresher girls are particularly vulnerable?
85% of rape cases go unreported, that's pretty good odds?

What is the fucking POINT in even trying to do anything about anything when popular publications think it is fine to say these things?

When do we get hate laws and incitement laws used against people who say these things?

Bloody hell

I have been following this. Comments thread on their Facebook page is massive, basically loads of supporters playing the "feminists with no sense of humour" card about anyone who doesn't like it. Now completely, utterly depressed by vast degree of woman-hating dressed up as humour I've borne witness to. Makes me sick.

to be fair, I don't think it's that widely read a publication. It can't be, can it?!

DH was absolutely shocked too when I read it to him - he asked why, in the UK, making a racist comment or threatening to blow up an airport as a joke is treated as a crime, but advocating rape isn't. Also, when the riots were ongoing last year, people who had used social networking to tell others how to join in the riots were charged with a crime - but telling undergrads how to rape and get away with it is not frowned upon by the authorities.

I'm pretty disgusted that these are people who got into university in this country too. It suggests that we need more rigorous screening of applicants.

Exactly Kveta if you said an equivalent comment about black people there would be an outcry and rightly so.

Who could we send this to to complain? Press Association?

"Far from being a harmless student blog, UniLad is a money-generating website, complete with merchandise. The site has nearly 70,000 "likes" on Facebook and more than 2,000 followers on Twitter and claims to have an average daily visit count of 8,000."

They get money from advertising. Boycott the advertisers and that will hit them where it hurts.

So who's going into see who their sponsors/advertisers are?

Their site is closed down and has this message:

We would like to make a public apology as it appears that some of the content previously published on this site has caused some distress.
The content in question was un-called for and should in no way have been published, and we can assure you it will never happen again. Any grief this may have caused you, we apologise for. We took things too far.
Any flippant comments that may have been said during discussions, I also apologise for, it will not happen again. We are certainly going to be cleaning up our act on unilad.com.
We do appreciate where you are coming from with your points, hence forth, an immediate change in material.
Thank you, and sorry once again.
UniLad.com will be re-launching in a few weeks.

Balls. They have an 'apology' page up (probably written by their lawyers) and the site is down pre relaunch.

They've put an apology up on their website and FB page... I recommend not reading the comments underneath unless you want to explode with rage

I heard that one of their advertisers pulled out, maybe? William Hill, possibly? Sorry, mind like sieve.

There's several things which I found ick about it, other than the obvious misogyny and rape jokes things

1. there's a woman writing for them calling herself feminist for doing so @LornaNaylor. Ok, she's quite young, and seems a bit naive, but it's sad to see that amount of naivity and lack of introspection

2. it's not only hateful about women, but as Petra Boynton rightly points out equally hateful about men and ridiculing their problems with their "advice" columns

3. Some of their "advice" (e.g. double condoms) is increasing risk of STD transmission rather than reducing it. Even if just meant as a joke, it's a potentially dangerous joke

Apparently they've closed the site to relaunch - I hope they come to their senses and keep the shop shut, as I can't see them rebranding to anything which they haven't been with their target audience in mind.

It's absolutely baffling that they allegedly didn't realise what they were doing. They were targeting people at uni, in higher education. They should have enough awareness to realise that rape isn't funny.

I was quite shocked? repulsed? dismayed? to see the comments on the FB page, which included lots from females saying things like 'it's not rape if you say surprise'. urgh. who actually thinks like that? what woman, in particular, thinks like that?!

I am a massive fan of a website in the UK which is often in poor taste (b3ta), but I have yet to see any rape jokes on the site, and suspect that they'd be ripped to shreds if they were posted. So why does a site that supposedly has such a wide readership not have more people expressing disgust at their grotesque attitude to women?

How do we find out who the advertisers are btw?

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.

StewieGriffinsMom - I think classing violence against women as a hatecrime similar to racist or disablist motivated attacks would cause more problems than it solves. It would send out the message that women are different, and in a minority, which is the opposite of what I want.

Not sure how declaring rape - which already is illegal - a hate crime changes anything anyway.

As for going at the advertisers - good idea, in general, but now that website has been closed down a little bit too late. I had a look yesterday, and the only advertiser I could see was a pay-day loan company. So not exactly anything I could start boycotting as I wouldn't have used such services in the first place.

I'm not sure it would need to be a hate crime even. Surely it's just inciting a crime, no matter who the crime is against? So, in the riot example, telling your friends where to nick a television from was considered a crime. Why can't telling people to rape because the chances are you won't get caught NOT be a criminal offence?

It would send out the message that women are an oppressed group, which they are.

Joking about rape is not a hate crime. It's obviously offensive but yu can't start policing everything people say and laws already exist to deal with what that magazine has done - y9u can't encourage someone to commit a crime, it's against the law!

although it looks like there has to be an intention that others would commit the crime.

Even so, it looks like someone has had their arse well and truly kicked which is how it should be.