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 think insisting on women being different from men is missing the point big time. (And fails to acknowledge that this magazine is hateful of men and women alike, and mocking anyone who is not hetero)

With regards to DV - that gets milder punishments no matter whether the perpetrator is male or female (and yes I'm aware, that the vast majority of reported cases is male perpetrator female victim). So whilst DV is a problem that needs addressing, I think that's less to do with women being marginalised than you claim.

Being divisive and insisting on women being a seperate group which needs special treatment isn't helpful.

The characteristics that are protected by the Equality Act 2010 are:

age (in employment, further and higher education only)
disability
gender identity and gender reassignment
marriage or civil partnership (in employment only)
pregnancy and maternity
race
religion or belief
sex
sexual orientation.

I think going any further than that would achieve the opposite of equality

Certainly not declaring women a minority worthy of special protection. That reinforces damaging stereotypes.

Best way of achieving equality in my mind is breaking down boundaries of traditional gender roles, legislation which enables a couple to choose who takes parental leave, rather than forcing the mother to have the career break or lose any entitlement is the first step.

Rape is a crime, and it doesn't matter whether the rapist is a man or a woman. Or whether the victim is a man or a woman. Problems in persecuting rape properly need to be addressed, but putting special emphasis on the sex of the victim just reinforces the idea that women are victims, IYSWIM.

By looking at only the misogynist aspect of the rape jokes in that magazine, the flipside of saying that a man needs to be sexually aggressive in order to conform and be accepted is ignored. That message however is as damaging as the misogyny.

free universal quality childcare

Do this people not have mums, sisters, grans, aunts? How would they feel if someone attacked them? Laugh it off?

I despair.

Can you imagine if it was your son writing for that?

wahwah or daugher

Sadly true.

Would throttle either.

That's fucking disgusting.

I went to Glasgow uni which has two unions, one for fey indie people and one for people who play rugby. The first edition one year of the latter's union magazine had a game where you scored points depending on who you slept with.

It contained the immortal line "no means yes and yes means harder".

Didn't even get their wrists slapped.

Yes, quick, must hide any suggestion of the oppression of women. Move along now. Nothing to see here. Anyone would think we were feminists or something.

shit yellow, really? I was a member of the GUU only because QMU had typos in their prospectus that year for a while. which year was that?

2004-2005 I think, Kveta.

Although, strictly, since you were a member of the GUU, I don't think I should be talking to you.

I'm only surprised that they were arrogant enough to put this in print. This is the kind of talk that goes on all the time around lots of groups of men when they don't think/care that women are listening.

"Rape is a crime, and it doesn't matter whether the rapist is a man or a woman" In this country it does. A penis is required for rape - a woman can only be convicted if she forces a man to penetrate another, unconsenting, woman.

oh good, I'd just left by then! was a GUU member 1st and 3rd year, and a QMU member 2nd, 4th and 5th :o not really fussed by either, but wanted daft friday tickets in 3rd year :o

ahem

back to the UniLad thing.

my wee brother 'liked' a FB page about rape being surprise sex, and swiftly unliked it when I reminded him that his sister was a rape survivor. I suspect a lot of teens and early 20s get swept along by their peers, and just don't think what they are doing. However, that's no excuse for all the fuckwits who read that magazine and have commented on their FB feed. They are just vile morons.

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.

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 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!

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.