yunabomb said:
Good points about the victim issue in the case of rape vs. murder.
Of course, there are also the victims of attempted murder and violent assault who might have much the same reaction to violent media as our rape victim. As well as the family of the victim.
Stripes said:
The one issue with this otherwise fine video is the complaint that whilst theres plenty of advice for women on how not to get raped theres little telling men not to. Its kinda like saying theres plenty self defence advise but nothing telling people not to kill each other, we dont really need to be told and if you were to tell men specifically not to rape, as if they were children or didnt know right from wrong, then it feels like your treating men as if they would rape without being told not to. Ive seen people make the same complaint and it feels a bit like characterizing all men for the actions of few.
That, and there are organizations like Men Can Stop Rape, whose sole purpose is to tell men not to rape, because that totally works.
Amaror said:
I don't know if i understood you right there but did you say rape is something
"Women just can't physically do", which is just wrong, of course they can force someone to sex as much as a men can do it.
Your next point however, that for the most part only women fear being raped and that it happens a lot more to women is true though.
It depends, in many jurisdictions rape isn't something a woman can do without an instrument (because rape requires one to penetrate), and a woman forcing a man into sexual activity through force, the threat of force, or while unconscious, intoxicated, or otherwise unable to consent isn't counted as rape (it isn't by the FBI/CDC statistics, for example; with the CDC using "made to penetrate" to cover that case).
Scrustle said:
There's also the possibility of the accusation of rape being used to selfish ends. It is rare, and does not excuse real rape in any way, but it does happen. Some people consent and then afterwards claim they were raped so they can sue someone or use it for some other selfish malicious goal.
Less rare than some would like to admit, but more rare than still others like to claim. The "other malicious goal"s seem to range pretty broadly from case to case from things like an abusive girlfriend/wife threatening the accusation if her partner/victim dares try to leave, to leverage in custody disputes, to even something as ridiculous as trying to dodge a cab fare.
cursedseishi said:
As for the rape issue, I agree almost wholeheartedly. I do say almost because I saw Tentacle Bento mentioned. I bring this up because there is some rather interesting concepts to this in its relation to rape.
Rape, as an act between two humans is quite obviously a horrible thing, and is why something like "Rapelay" was quickly shelved and forgotten.
Yet rape, as a tentacle and human, is probably one of the things Japan is most known for. There simply is no analogue in real life (besides the obvious), and as far as I'm aware of in general is completely accepted. I could turn Safety off on my google images and search "tentacle rape", but I'd rather not. I don't need to see how many results I get of it, because I know there will be a lot.
Which brings me to Tentacle Bento. I saw it, laughed a little at the idea and went on. Never had an interest in backing it, but I could see a little of the humor behind the basis of the game. Yet it apparently got kicked by kickstarter for one reason or another.
Again not having really looked too deeply into the game, from what I saw there was no real evidence that the game was saying the schoolgirls grabbed were raped. Where they? Maybe! I don't know. You just capture them, and they join your side.
So what is with that?
Also, the project apparently went to some other similar site and is succeeding from what I read on the main kickstarter page. Which obviously means that whatever site they are on definitely doesn't mind.
1. Kickstarter cancelled them as a response to an organized campaign to do so, mostly started and focused around certain feminist blogs. One of (if not the only) case where Kickstarter cancelled a project for reasons other than obvious fraud (like the one that copy-pasted the Banner Saga page)..
2. The game was/is totally not explicit, using innuendo and genre-savviness to imply the tentacle rape bit. As far as overt text goes, you could be just as well eating them.
3. They went to their own companies main website and set up their own system with which to be funded, via PayPal and a merchant account. The same people in 1 tried to get PayPal to freeze their account, but PayPal has not yet done so, to my knowledge.
GundamSentinel said:
Also, it happens very often that men are falsely accused (about 20% of all rape accusations) of rape by women who have no idea what kind of harm they are doing with such accusations, especially because of the air of 'ultimate evil' that surrounds it. This has done very little to promote contacting the police for actual rape victims, but instead often fuels the 'woman was behaving slutty' argument. Without a doubt a bad thing, but something to think about.
That 20% number is wildly in contention. The only really honest answer one can have for the incidence of false rape accusation is "more than never, less than always, and there seem to be enough examples of it kicking around that it
should throw reasonable doubt on a case supported by only the accusation, but often doesn't." There are studies, yes, but various studies have returned wildly different results. Studies that use approaches that are approved of by academic feminism (which are not coincidentally ones that minimize the rate and will tend towards false negatives rather than false positives) tend to give numbers in the 2-8% range, while other studies cluster around ~20% and ~40% (ones that use the metric of "if and only if the accuser says it's a false accusation, it is" tend to land in these ranges), while still others that use a very liberal measure of what counts as a false accusation get numbers as high as 90%. It's literally all over the place.[footnote]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#Rumney[/footnote]
It doesn't help that they don't even necessarily use the same definition of a false accusation, either. In some cases, being merely that the person accused did not commit the crime is sufficient. In others, it takes an accusation used to intentionally harm another who did not commit the crime, regardless of whether the crime occurred. In others, it is a false accusation if, and only if, the
accuser believes it to be so. In still others, it requires that it be clearly provable that nothing happened to the victim at all, and nothing short of that is sufficient.
daltonlaffs said:
You know that whole "violent games make you violent" thing that we all deny because it's demonstrably bullshit? Why do we deny that, again? "Because it's escapism." "Because it lets us put off steam and actually makes us less violent."
I know none of you want to hear this, but there's absolutely no difference between that justification and the idea that playing (or making) a rape fantasy game is wrong. Look at Japan over the last few years, let's see what effect these kinds of things actually have. You see, Japan has a genre of entertainment called "lolita", and I wouldn't recommend Googling that if you aren't familiar with it. It branches off into (drawn) child pornography very quickly. However, Japan actually has an extremely low rate of sexual child abuse compared to most first-world countries. How does that work? They're getting their fix from a victimless source. Ever since that one controversial rape game got banned in Japan and threatened to criminalize that entire subgenre, rates of real sexual abuse (in general) have been on the rise in Japan. Gee, I wonder what the correlation is?
Whether or not you or I like the idea of rape is irrelevant, as irrelevant as the fact that some religious extremists think all forms of violent media should be banned. It's victimless, and if anything, it's preventing the horrible acts it depicts by giving people that are considering them a harmless alternative to the real thing.
And yes, I do think drawn child pornography should be legal everywhere by extension. The witch hunt we have going against pedophiles is just making them more dangerous -- give them something to satisfy their strange desires that DOESN'T involve kidnapping and child rape in real life.
You are arguing directly against a firmly entrenched piece of feminist theory right here. That being that the very argument used commonly regarding violence in media is exactly the opposite of correct if, and only if, the topic at hand is rape. They call it "rape culture". No one is ever willing to explain what makes rape "special" that would render it not only an exception, but an outright inversion of precisely the argument used to protect other violence in the media.