[Content note: rape culture, victim-blaming, slut-shaming, #steubenville]
Travesty of justice in Steubenville
Update with relevant links:
WTF CNN?
- Grieving for rapists
- describing Jane Doe as “allegedly” drunk h/t @JessicaValenti
Good stuff:
- @DanWetzel on Yahoo! Sports and the culture of arrogance in athletics
- miri at Brute Reason / Freethoughtblogs has a glorious rant on everything that’s wrong with the way the mainstream is discussing the Steubenville case and just about every other case of rape too – More About Justice and Less About Revenge: On Reading the Steubenville Coverage Too Early in the Goddamn Day
Categories: ethics & philosophy, gender & feminism, social justice
Pamela Denoon Lecture 2016: Nelly Thomas 
Feminist burnout: the toll of continually responding to the news cycle 
Quicklink of the Day #2: #DestroyTheJoint excludes voices of women with disabilities 
Friday Hoyden: Gillian Triggs 
Hoyden About Town 
Oh my god. That wasn’t intended to be satire, was it?
I think I may need to go throw up now. Shit, how people can even think like this makes me sick.
I just posted that link over at Feministe too, and for that post I found a few more relevant articles, so I’ll add them here in comments.
(read down to Crook’s conclusion about bystander laws to fully absorb the marvel that is Michael)
That’s just the beginning of his perverse smugness over not helping people “who put [themselves] into this situation”.
Coming a close second, this: CNN grieves for the rapists – then another female reporter for CNN topped her sadface for the convicted rapists by referring to Jane Doe as “allegedly” drunk.
I’ll leave you with one article, on Yahoo! Sports of all places, to balance the dross.
@danwetzel: In Steubenville, a culture of extreme arrogance collapses in two tearful rape convictions.
P.S. Also Miri’s glorious rant over at Brute Reason:
More About Justice and Less About Revenge: On Reading the Steubenville Coverage Too Early in the Goddamn Day
Ugh. That Michael Crook piece is indeed the worse thing I will read today, tomorrow, and for a good long while.
And was it just me, or did he also take pride in not performing life-saving CPR on a child?
Thank you for the link to Miri’s piece, it provided a much needed soothing balm to my brain.
The Yahoo! Sports article is a good one – it looks at the culture which surrounded the crime, the circumstances of it, and how the glorification of a sporting team meant there wasn’t much attention paid to what the players were doing off-field so long as they continued to win while they were on it. There’s a similar mindset here in Australia with regard to professional sportsmen (yes, gender specific noun is deliberate) particularly in the popular sports, such as the various codes of football, or cricket, tennis, motorsport and so on. Keep winning, and you’re bulletproof, appears to be the assumption – but look out for problems when you’re losing.
That first article (the one by Michael Crook) I gave up on about three paragraphs in when he basically said he didn’t believe rape ever happened – that it was just “buyer’s remorse”. At that point, there just wasn’t any point in continuing, because it was fairly clear he didn’t think a crime had occurred, and therefore the two young men being prosecuted for rape were being persecuted by definition. I’m in a bit of a psychologically delicate mood at the mo – I have more immediate things I can melt down about, and don’t need to go seeking them out on the internet.
Are we sure it’s not a Poe?
Yep.
I hesitate to gild the lily by touching your HTML Tigtog, but would you give permission for me to add a troll-link-love-denying “rel=”nofollow”” to the link?
I should have thought of that myself, although since he doesn’t have ads and the revenue that accrues from that, it’s purely symbolic; still, symbolic matters.
OK, the link is nofollow now.
Wow, that was terrible. Not even fractally wrong because it started out maximally wrong and had nowhere else to go from there…
I also liked the Yahoo Sports article, except:
There’s something about the “they were good boys” meme that disturbs me. I keep thinking of the time in the Harry Potter series where Harry worries that he’s just like Tom Riddle and Dumbledore says, “it is our choices that make us who we are.” The human race is not easily divided into “good boys” who do no wrong (or whose wrongs deserve to be forgiven) and “bad boys” who deserve to go to Hell.
Being a “good boy” doesn’t mean you can’t make choices that have horrific consequences. An obvious example: driving drunk (or recklessly) and colliding with something and killing yourself, your friend(s), or a car full of strangers.
Nor does it mean that you can’t unthinkingly go on making choices that end up leading you to participate in true evil. Is a German youth who joins the Hitler Jugend in 1936 and ends up participating in an Einsatzgruppe a “good boy” or a “bad boy”?
@5 (Megpie71)
You’ve got a stronger stomach than I have.
Michael Crook appears to be a professional troll, based on this link. Not sure it makes it better but suggests this is not his opinion, just the most offensive thing he could think of to write.
http://voices.yahoo.com/the-internets-most-hated-man-strange-story-of-474618.html
Why did he ever bother learning CPR? You can’t perform it on yourself – and it seems that’s the only person he cares about?
Not even fractally wrong because it started out maximally wrong and had nowhere else to go from there…
And somehow still managed to get worse and worse.
Thanks to Miri for her rant. As Kirst said, it was necessary soothing.
Ugh – there are no words low enough to describe my opinion of Mr Crook… Now I need to go read Miri’s rant to get the bad taste out of my mouth!
The compilation of twitter comments I saw this morning made me despair for humanity. Again. I can’t face looking at Michael Crook.
The Henry Rollins piece was good, if not revolutionary. His focus is on what we need to do to end the rape culture, which is the right approach, if a little vague. http://henryrollins.com/dispatch/detail/dispatch_03-17-12_los_angeles/ if you’re interested.
I liked the Henry Rollings piece, Ariane. I generally like most things he does, and it’s a pleasant change to have someone like that not disappoint.
Well, somebody’s gone suddenly shy:
Not just on Twitter, tigtog; as Chris Clarke just pointed out over on FTB, following the link to Crook’s blog entry at officialblog.michaelcrook.org results in a blank page of html.
Twitter today was filled with Nattering Nabobs of Negativism to whom the welcome (to me) sight of discussion of rape culture going mainstream was JUST SO BORING AND SHUT UP ABOUT IT ALREADY.
This was my personal worst thing.
Gutted. I think a lot of people my age have loved this woman forever. So sad.
Boys will be boys, eh? And we can never socialise them differently because well, it’s just impossible?
Wahabism in western dress.
Because that strategy of not doing anything is working out so well.
Via The Heresy Club, the disappearance of Crook’s Twitter and web presence is apparently owing to him being a really nasty piece of work, such that Anonymous d0xxed him. Trigger warning for details of statutory rape on the link.
What a horrible shitty person.
And now Fox, CNN, and MSNBC have let slip Jane Doe’s real name. (By not editing it out when playing that clip of one of the rapists’ so-called apology). With the predictable results.
AMM @ 12 – yes, the vast majority of the population are neither purely good nor bad. We all do good things and bad things. Some do appalling bad things as well as wonderfully good things too.