For every animal you don't eat, I'm going to eat three.

Every year in Australia we have 'Dry July', some charity drive where you get people to sponsor you to stay sober throughout July. Every year the people that take this up are my heavier drinking female friends, who are feeling the social pressure to be well-behaved and socially acceptable. (This seems to be age related as well - around 25/26, a lot of the women I know feel obligated to 'grow up'.) This takes out some of my absolute favourite people to drink with, and every time I rail against it I get 'but it's for chaaaarity'.

If I was running it (stop laughing and compose yourselves), I'd have Wet July, where you guilt alcoholics into adding up however much they spend on alcohol in July, and then donating that same amount to charity. It's beautiful. It highlights the fact you have disposable income which could go to worthy causes, and makes drinking morally acceptable. Where's my Nobel Prize, fuckers?

FOCUS: What is the most misguided cause you have come across? Also, what is the most egregious, sanctimonious example of slacktivism you've ever seen?

 

There are basically three ways to get change effected these days:

1. Hire lobbyists.
2. Have some cause go viral such that you can't turn on any of the major news networks without hearing about that shit.
3. Do it yourself.

#3 is generally hard, #2 is a crapshoot unless it's a missing white woman. I go for #1. I have no idea why slacktivists don't just pool a bunch of money and hire the slimiest lobbyists they can. All these causes that are being out-lobbied by special interests whine whine whine about it but never fight back with any effective strategy...LIKE HIRING THEIR OWN LOBBYISTS. This is the reason your entire life will be dictated by corn farmers, plumbers, fundies, and record companies.

 

I stole the name for this from TFLN, but this is a charity drive I'm actually running. From my Facebook:

It's almost time: No Sober October! Get your friends, family, boss, and total strangers to sponsor you for the Herculean effort of getting drunk or high every day in October, and especially belted each Friday AND Saturday night. Donations to be made to the two best charities as ranked by GiveWell. For every night you stay sober, you have to refund one sponsor and match their donation yourself. I'm offering $20 to anyone who's in to start. Game on.

Most of the comments I've received are positive and I have 2 pledges so far, although there are a couple of women bitching at me for promoting an unhealthy lifestyle. Coincidentally, both of them are doing Dry July.

The cause which is seriously enraging me at the moment though is the 'ban the burqa' movement here. 'According to the latest WestPoll, 65% of Australians support banning the burqa in public'. For a start, there are probably about 10 people in all of Australia this would actually affect, and I guarantee most of the people rallying to this cause have never actually seen, met, or talked to a Muslim. If we ban wearing the burqa in public, we are basically sentencing those women to house arrest. What a brilliant plan to help them integrate with their community! What a clever way to nurture their independence! Shockingly, the genius behind this bit of legislation is a Reverend, who wants to ban all immigration for Muslims, and remove hate speech laws regarding homosexuals. 'My silly rituals and costumes are better than your silly rituals and costumes! Ban them!'. Fuck me.

 

France and Switzerland are in on the act too. Those fancy hats and pointy buildings will be the death of us!

FOCUS: I know there's pretty widespread agreement on this here, but I basically cannot stand any kind of Facebook status "activism". "Change your profile picture to a cartoon character to protest against child abuse!" I'm sure all the child abusers reading your Facebook profile will gasp and change their nefarious ways.

The thing that really gets me is that it's basically disguised narcissism. They're taking impulses that would usually be considered stupid and childish (i.e. the impulse to change your profile pic every two days) and attempting to validate them with the language of social justice. "Sure, I changed my profile pic again, but it was for a cause." Look at me, I'm so conscious!

I wonder what Kant would have to say about the morality of people who only do good things because it rationalizes their own self-image. But this isn't even an example of actually doing a good thing for a stupid reason. It's pretending to do something useful without actually doing it. There are layers and layers of stupid here.

But for some reason, I still don't have the heart to call out people who do this. They really think they're doing something important...

 

I prefer "Extra Dry July". Just drink a lot of TED's instead.

 

The Toronto SlutWalk. Its champions created the straw-man out of the Toronto police chief's suggestion (that women maybe shouldn't be dressed provocatively in order to avoid harassment) to mean that women deserve to be raped for dressing like sluts.

People have likened the police chief's suggestion to warning people against leaving their car doors unlocked, and I think that is a decent enough metaphor. No one deserves to have their car ransacked just because their car doors are unlocked, but locking your doors is a good preventative first step that can't hurt.

Yes, we should tell boys and men to not rape (in any case, the vast, vast majority of men don't have the inclination to rape even without any sort of instruction) but violent rapists typically aren't the kind of people that can be bargained or reasoned with. It seems that feminists aren't that kind of people either.

And dressing like sluts, marching in a parade, and generally acting like histrionic, sanctimonious attention-whores helps women against rape how?

 

Ruh roh.

Scootah's going to get you.

 

Read this, then shut the fuck up on subjects you clearly know nothing about.

 

This is bullshit. Feminists, like the Terminator, violent rapists and Labradoodle puppies, can not be reasoned with.

(BTW, there are legitimate arguments for and against SlutWalk. They are all way more nuanced than Bryan's.)

 

I read it. How does "[making] a unified statement about sexual assault and victims’ rights and to demand respect for all" even move the needle on incidents of sexual assaults though? No one thinks females should "equate enjoying sex with attracting sexual assault" or that females "being in charge of [their] sexual lives should not mean that we are opening ourselves to an expectation of violence." But because some girls don't want to be judged, or some people think this could result in victim-blaming, we're not supposed to recognize cause and effect warn our friends, daughters, sisters, and the general female public on being cognizant of the potential influence of dress on some deranged men? I would warn someone not to wear a gaudy watch in sketchy neighborhoods too in order not to attract undesirable attention.

Some literature on "slut-shaming."

EDIT: Oh and also "we are here to call foul on our Police Force and demand change. We want Toronto Police Services to take serious steps to regain our trust." If I'm not mistaken, as long as the police force is enforcing the laws of its land, it's doing its job, which doesn't include bending over and handing over a pound of flesh to any particular indignant interest group.

 

Hiya kids,

You may not recall that I was involved in the slutwalks, and I have pretty strong opinions on the validity of these causes. And mod powers. So here's the thing. Shut the fuck up about it. Really. Or I'll just fuck with your posts, your ability to post, your rep, and anything else NettDaddy will give me access too until you wish you'd shut the fuck up about it. Or I'll just fucking ban you, because really, I have zero fucking patience with this shit.

The slutwalks weren't a thing to stop rape. They weren't a thing to educate rapists. Although there is pretty strong evidence that anti-rape programs like potential offender group education programs do typically precede a decrease in sexual assaults... The slutwalks were about supporting victims and helping them to know that they weren't at fault. No matter what they were wearing, how they were behaving, or how fucking stupid assholes with badges are, victims of sexual assault weren't at fucking fault. Because one of, if not the hardest part of being raped, is coping with the sense of being at fault after the fact. And the slutwalks did an awesome job of that.

When I was in highschool, I volunteered in a shelter for assaulted women and among other memorable events, took the butter knife away from a woman who was trying to slit her wrists, because she felt like she was at fault for having been raped. I have spoken to sexual abuse victims who were raped as pre-teens who felt like they were at fault because of how they dressed. I've spoken to women who felt like they didn't have the right to file a police complaint because they had an orgasm during their rape. I've spoken to a kid in Juvie hall who was in there for rape, who insisted that he hadn't raped that girl because she loved cock and had fucked 3 guys before him. I've been at sex toy expos where religious groups picketed and claimed that by encouraging women's sexuality, the men attending the events were encouraging their rapes. At the slutwalk I marched in, a woman spoke about how hard it was to have police take her fucking report after she was raped by a woman, at a swingers party, while wearing a slutty outfit. Her fucking friends and family didn't take her seriously. Because clearly, she was bang up for it.

It is a real fucking issue. It does need attention. And it's a topic that we will not be being fuckheads about.

Kthnxbai.

 

But Scootah, implying rape is caused by a woman's clothes is the same as telling people to lock their doors! Actually, now that I think about it, the only way this argument makes sense is if you want to force women to wear chastity belts. Which actually wouldn't be a huge surprise from a lot of the people that talk this shit. There are a couple of people on this board that actively scare me with their views on women.

Since this thread has tanked anyway, I might as well throw something else controversial out there. I don't know if this applies in the US / Canada, but here in Aus, 'Men's Activists' are terrible, bitter people that got fucked by their ex-wives in the divorce and have turned self pity into a cause. Fortunately, they have mostly collected themselves into one organization populated exclusively by total fuckwits, the Men's Confraternity. From their webpage:

That's right folks, white men are the 'aborigines of the world' - unlike, you know, actual goddamn Aborigines. Look, I am a white male. I've spent more years than I care to count in extremely PC environments where men are always considered 'potential rapists' and women are supposedly nurturing saints, and I do think that the Family Court in Aus is incredibly biased and fucks over fathers as a matter of institutionalized sexism. However: if you have an adept primary school student's grasp of history, or an ounce of critical reasoning ability, the idea that we are going to fix the world's ills by concentrating more power in the hands of white males is somewhere between deluded and abhorrent. I'm pretty far from the modern day definition of a feminist, but every time this fuckwit writes in to our national paper I think about becoming one. Some gems from the convener of the Confraternity:

This was in response to a series of gang rapes and sexual assaults committed by members of our footy and rugby league teams

Yep, reporting your gang rape makes you part of the 'sex abuse' industry. Fucking hell.

On the upside, Mike Ward himself died recently, but he has a stack of equally embittered underlings carrying on his good work.

 

I have one friend who's vegan and isn't intolerable. She is fine with buying second hand leather products as long as they're old and really doesn't give a shit what people do with their own diet and fashion choices as long as she doesn't have to do things she considers unethical. Every other vegan I know is intolerable. They really make me want to eat more meat just to fuck with them. I'm a firm believer in humane use of animals - but domesticated animals are food and labour for smarter beings - get over it hippies! And eat a fucking cheeseburger before you faint.

Men's Rights Activists in the US and Canada are incredibly annoying also. I understand that guys get fucked in family courts all the time, and every time I hear someone mention Schroedinger's rapist, I want to fucking beat them to death with a shovel. But surely there's a middle ground between 'all men are rapists' and 'all women are whores' and surely some gender activists could potentially occupy that fucking space.

 

Hooray! We're back to the days where disagreeing with a mod is a bannable offense. I feel all nostalgic for the TMMB.

Focus (sort of): I like that there seem to be a lot of people, at least on facebook, that are starting to realize the uselessness of slacktivism. I'm seeing more and more sarcastic replies to "Change your profile pic to fight..." statuses (statii? statum? statuses sounds wrong). I also see more and more facetious statuses about changing your profile pic to help victims of koala bear attacks or whatever. I hope it's an actual trend but it may just be that I'm pretty picky about whose friend request I will accept.

 

If this was the TMMB, I'd have banned you, and the last three people to leave you positive rep. I'm just saying.

For those asking. Shrodinger's Rapist started from a feminist blog post giving guys advice on how to approach strange women without being maced.

The premise is that like Shrodinger couldn't know if his cat was alive or dead until he opened the box, the woman in question can't know if you're a rapist until you rape her. Here's some of my favorite quotes from the original post...

The ongoing references to that post are if anything, more demonizing of men, more paranoid, and more full of the presumption that not only is everyone on earth with a penis a potential rapist, but that every one on earth with a rapist wants to rape the woman making reference to the concept.

It's remarkable how few of those women ever discuss or show any consideration of female rapists, or men who have been raped. Or any understanding of statistics. (like 73% of rape victims know their rapist, strangers in the street are only 1/4 as likely to rape you as your uncle or family doctor, and while 1 in 6 women in the US reports having been sexually assaulted, a huge majority of those are as children, and pedophiles typically have more than 100 victims prior to being caught, and rapists who prey on adults typically have more than 10 reporting victims which combined with unreported rape statistics (that are used to get the 1 in 6 figure) implies that individual rapists will have somewhere north of 45 and 200 victims. Which makes the assumption that one in 60 guys in her gym will be a rapist horribly, horribly misguided and misanthropic.

 

It's really fucking enraging to be called a potential rapist, especially when you are, if anything, too passive when it comes to making a move. I went to a left-wing university, and I heard it at least once a semester. I started responding to it publicly in lectures by standing up and saying "by that logic all women are potential baby murderers". (Nb: I'm pro-choice, but anti-stupid rhetoric). I got kicked out of class a lot.

Also, thanks for posting a clarification of the stats. I read that article yesterday when I google searched Scrodinger's rapist, and the maths felt horribly wrong. 1 in 60 men is a rapist? Get the fuck out. In a federal prison maybe. I just wasn't sure where she was pulling her figures from, and it's always dicey to contest figures in this argument without being labelled a 'rape apologist'. Fuck, that term pisses me off just thinking about it.

 

Don't you know that 1 in 4 college women are victims of sexual assault? It's common knowledge that fraternities are but excuses to gang rape and silence women all in the name of male bonding. Rape is so ubiquitous and insidious that it brainwashes 48.8% of rape victims into thinking they weren't raped, that's how ubiquitous and insidious rape is. Liberal academics get to define what rape is, as they know what's rape better than the unwashed masses. Anyone who challenges these facts must be rape apologists who want all women to serve as chained-up sex slaves.

 

... This is my fault. I brought up the irrationality of focusing on the 15% of rapes that are committed by strangers instead of the 85% that are committed by friends and family. In a context where I should have known it would turn stupid. This thread is done.