quote:Originally posted by Evil Brain Rejecter: 'I've got an idea lads! You hold him down, I'll go get a banana...'
That's the weird thing isn't it, how everyone joins in
In Matt Dawson's autobiography he tells the story of his first British Lions tour and the initiation of new players. Can't remember full details but it was to do with bare arse being whacked as hard as possible with a plank or something. As I recall it, Dawson told them to fuck off after he'd seen the other new guy getting the treatment.
This was being done by the elite of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland to each other.
"What an honour to meet you! One of my all time heroes. Great game the other week. Thought your drop goal was genius. Reckon you can do that against the All Blacks?"
"Dunno. Now bend over while I smack your arse with this lump of 4x2."
posted
The nature of current sexual politics is that, for the majority of people (myself included), this mentally falls under 'laddish japes' rather than sexual assault, whatever the law says. I can't see this changing until/unless the very nature of male sexuality and competitiveness transforms into something more, er, girlish.
That said I don't think it is as serious as the same crime being committed on a girl, because then we're talking about sexual boundaries being crossed. Unless you meant a group of girls assaulting another girl, in which case I don't think I would see it as much different to this.
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posted
holy crap, are you sure about that Raz? I mean, the 16 year old boy was crying, the dude who did it was like 30 or something wasn't he? That's not laddish japes. Surely same sex assaults are the same as different gender assaults. Violating someone is wrong full stop. Doesn't matter what the context is. Doing something to someone against their will is never "japes" or fun.
quote:Originally posted by Uber Trick: Violating someone is wrong full stop.
Of course! But it seems to be a human trait to desire a sliding scale of wrongness ie: hitting a woman is much worst than hitting a man raping a woman is much worst than killing a man raping a child is much worse than raping an adult ETC.
[Chris Morris touched on this quite excellently in his 2001 BrassEye special; his cheeky Cockney ex-convicted paedophile satirising public love of Kray-style 'they only done their own sawt' murderers]
On the sliding scale of wrongness the intention behind this action (straight male bonding stretched to a point, no pun intended) is not as bad as the sexual humiliation of a woman by a group of men.
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That said I don't think it is as serious as the same crime being committed on a girl, because then we're talking about sexual boundaries being crossed.
I think those boundaries were very seriously crossed.
In my opinion sexual assault shouldn’t be given grades determined by what sex the attacker and the victim is. If it had been a girl involved, I fail to see why that would be any more serious than the current situation. A lot of coverage is given to females who has been attacked, and it seems to me that when a man is attacked in the exactly the same way, people almost seem not to care.
This event has probably ruined this boys dreams of getting into professional football and will stay with him for the rest of his life, I fail to see the humour in that.
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quote:Originally posted by miffysocks: In my opinion sexual assault shouldn’t be given grades determined by what sex the attacker and the victim is. If it had been a girl involved, I fail to see why that would be any more serious than the current situation.
In an ideal world yes, but it's pretty clear from his posts that Raz's is talking about how things are really perecived in the less-than-ideal world we live in.
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quote:Originally posted by Raz: Of course! But it seems to be a human trait to desire a sliding scale of wrongness
Yes it is a trait but I don't think that it's a good trait and it is one that I feel should be challenged.
That sliding scale of wrongness thing is so true. I've been trying to get this across on a cycling forum I frequent. They have these five page long rants about 4x4s and their filthy, fuel-guzzling ways but won't comprehend that, like, all cars guzzle fuel. A few extra gallons guzzled by a 4x4 is really not going to use up the supplies that much quicker on the scale of things. Either all cars are bad and should be removed from the roads forthwith, or all cars are OK and sod the consequences.
And that's not to mention fuel-guzzling central heating which they've all got but never mention.
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Yes Bamba I agree that is what Raz is doing but just because a belief is widely held doesn't mean it's right and shouldn't be challenged. We should be aiming for the "ideal" that miffy posted.
quote:Originally posted by Uber Trick: just because a belief is widely held doesn't mean it's right and shouldn't be challenged.
Hardest job in the world, that is, challenging widely held beliefs.
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Astromariner
Going the right way for a smacked bottom
posted
Generally speaking though, isn't a sliding scale of wrongness a useful thing to have? Otherwise, how would you work out things like prison sentences.
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fuck yeah, we should be aiming for that ideal. bullshit like this should not be written off as a stretched-to-its-limits version male bonding. straight male bonding? its vile gang machismo with the humiliation of a weaker individual at its core. so is gang rape- the only difference here is that the victim is male and the humiliation is covertly sexual instead of actively and overtly so.
quote:Originally posted by Uber Trick: On my sliding scale of wrongness sexual assault is worse than petrol guzzling.
Yes, I suspect it would be on most people's All-encompassing Sliding Scale, but I'm talking about more precise sliding scale terms. It's like the school run thing, where people driving to work rant about these bastards in their cars taking children to school and blocking up the roads, as opposed to saying, "God, what a bastard I am driving myself to work and blocking up the roads." On their own sliding scale they see themselves as somehow far less of a contributor to the overall congestion and wonder why the government aren't doing something about the other people.
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quote:Originally posted by dang65: Hardest job in the world, that is, challenging widely held beliefs.
I know *sigh*
Astro: Yes... I think... I am not against the sliding scale of wrongness altogether more the application of it with regards to its ok to assault a boy if you're a boy but not a girl if you're a boy (or whatever)... perhaps against it's gender usage, thinking more along the lines of it is wrong to violate a person full stop rather than it being categorised into gender.
(ramble ramble... sorry initial knee jerk post reaction. Retreats again.)
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There is no distinction on any "sliding scale" of wrongness here. (Why a sliding scale anyway and not just a scale? Isn't a scale what we use when determining prison sentences? Maybe someone can explain "sliding" to me in this context.)
This seems to be a case of group sexual assault. It is as horrific to me as a bunch of men doing it to a woman -- with the added sick twist that many people won't regard it as a genuinely serious violation, and will even, as has been grossly demonstrated on this thread, treat it as a joke.
That the people committing a sexual violation have the same genitals as the victim is fucking irrelevant.
And to respond to this case (and to the response to this case) by saying "well, whatever the issues in theory, in practice people will write it off as a lesser offence" is equivalent to saying, of a manslaughter victim, "well, yeah one human life is worth as much as another, but he was a Paki so some people won't be as outraged as they would if he was white." Yes, it might be true -- but you don't have to accept that trend. I didn't find it difficult to reject and challenge it on this thread: in fact, I wouldn't find it possible to respond any other way.
quote:Originally posted by kovacs: (Why a sliding scale anyway and not just a scale? Isn't a scale what we use when determining prison sentences? Maybe someone can explain "sliding" to me in this context.)
A sliding scale implies a seamless transition from one evil to the next, like a ramp, a regular old scale has steps/increments in it, as in weights, even though you can get pretty small increments, you still have to have some defining unit of measure.
Since prison sentences are probably defined by units of punishment: days, months, years perhaps, it would not be a sliding scale. Morality itself has no such limits.
Oh, and the important thing is sliding scales are also like line graphs – with an x and y axis (i.e. evils and associated moral heinousness). Regular scales could have those I guess, but don’t always?
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Thanks Rooster, if that was an accurate explanation of "sliding scale" then I now understand it.
So, here was the first use of "sliding scale" on this thread:
quote:Originally posted by Raz: it seems to be a human trait to desire a sliding scale of wrongness ie: hitting a woman is much worst than hitting a man raping a woman is much worst than killing a man raping a child is much worse than raping an adult ETC.
On the sliding scale of wrongness the intention behind this action (straight male bonding stretched to a point, no pun intended) is not as bad as the sexual humiliation of a woman by a group of men.
It seems that "scale" would actually have done here. But I don't know how seriously I can take a post that declares raping a woman is much worst than killing a man.
posted
kovacs, i understand your befuddlement. there is a degree of 'shrug... s'way it is, innit' about this thread that makes me really sad. i think one of the few things more awful than being a woman who is raped would be being a man who is raped. who would you talk to? would you be guaranteed the righteous indignation, the need for revenge, the support, jesus, the helplines? how would the police treat you if you decided to report it? in soho, pretty well, i trust. but in rural lincolnshire? you might as well be a drunk 17 year old girl in a short skirt in 1972. but everyone cares about female rape victims- sometimes very aggressively. male rape victims.. not so much.
raping a woman can be as bad as raping a man can be as bad as killing a person. being held down and having a banana stuck up your arse can be as bad as rape. and may well have been.
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Thanks Disco... I wouldn't say I feel befuddlement so much as -- as you also suggest -- a kind of sad sickness at the double-standards this case reveals.
posted
My opinion? The assault was a sexual assault, where sex is taken as a manifestation of power, and assault demonstrates the unequal distribution of that power. Sexuality is created from birth onwards, in and through several bodily locations and functions - the breast and orality, the anus and anality, and the genitals. Sexuality is about far more than male/female adult penetrative sex. (So, Raz, I disagree strongly with what you said.) The victim "answered back" so the assailant exerted his superiority (strength, social position, age) in a way that would guarantee the victim's acquiesence through humiliation - with a public, homoerotic sexual assault involving inappropriate forced entry of an inanimate object into a taboo orifice. I was sickened by the report, and more angry that you can imagine.
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quote:Originally posted by kovacs: It is as horrific to me as a bunch of men doing it to a woman -- with the added sick twist that many people won't regard it as a genuinely serious violation, and will even, as has been grossly demonstrated on this thread, treat it as a joke.
There were a couple of joke responses right at the start of the thread, by people who haven't posted anything else on it since. Raz then made genuine comments about the perception of the seriousness of this assault and admitted that he himself doesn't see this particular event as being as serious as a similar assault on a girl by a group of men. This is a fact - people, society and the law, view different crimes as being of different severity and earning different punishment. However right or wrong this may or may not be, it is a fact.
I don't know if Evil Brain Rejector was making a joke or a point in saying, "I've got an idea lads! You hold him down, I'll go get a banana..." I took it as a point about the ludicrousness (word?) of initiating such an assault in the first place. How many people do you know that would go, "Excellent! Make it an extra big one, mate!" as opposed to, "Er, you're going to do what?" But somehow these assaults do get initiated, by groups of people - even the most adored and respected groups of people like the British Lions, as referred to in my post.
I'm not sure that anyone's said that this (sliding) scale situation is good, or that it's funny, but it is effectively in use, both officially and casually, and that appears to make it acceptable. Hence the apparent conflicts between someone getting six months for killing a child whilst drunk driving versus someone else getting ten years for fraud, or whatever. There's a billion examples of such drastic sliding of the scale.
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quote:Originally posted by dang65: There were a couple of joke responses right at the start of the thread, by people who haven't posted anything else on it since.
That only tells me that they didn't want to make any more joke comments after I'd said I was sickened by it -- hardly surprising.
quote: Raz then made genuine comments about the perception of the seriousness of this assault and admitted that he himself doesn't see this particular event as being as serious as a similar assault on a girl by a group of men.
And people disagreed with him. Are you just summarising the thread? Because you're not really saying anything that a quick skim wouldn't reveal.
quote: I'm not sure that anyone's said that this (sliding) scale situation is good, or that it's funny, but it is effectively in use, both officially and casually, and that appears to make it acceptable. Hence the apparent conflicts between someone getting six months for killing a child whilst drunk driving versus someone else getting ten years for fraud, or whatever. There's a billion examples of such drastic sliding of the scale.
Well, I wasn't talking about legality. I was talking about the fact that male sexual assault is seen on this thread, at the top, as something to joke about. That this hypocrisy may be enshrined in current British law -- I don't know if it is anyway; I thought male rape and sexual assault would carry the same penalty as female, if they came to court -- doesn't in any way justify having a laugh about it on a discussion board. Even if the law was totally inconsistent in its treatment of male sexual assault compared to female, that wouldn't in my mind make it acceptable to treat it as a joking matter.
I'm not actually condemning anyone here, just disagreeing strongly.
quote:Originally posted by kovacs: That only tells me that they didn't want to make any more joke comments after I'd said I was sickened by it -- hardly surprising.
To be honest, theres only so much funny you can get out of one news article.
quote:Originally posted by kovacs: Are you just summarising the thread? Because you're not really saying anything that a quick skim wouldn't reveal.
I was merely trying to demonstrate that, save for a couple of throwaway jokes at the start, the overwhelming contributions to this thread have not made light of the situation. It's actually quite difficult to pick out the points which seem to have sickened you, and your insistence on highlighting those couple of jokes has consistently distracted from a potentially interesting discussion about the way we all, including the law of the land, seem to give different weighting to different crimes.
Which is worse then, making a couple of daft jokes or tiresomely moaning about those jokes instead of getting on with a decent debate?
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So which are you more angry at? The sexual assault or the *gasp* thought anyone could find something so eye-openingly absurd, amusing in any way?
Thanks for pandering to my comment though, I can't resist the opportunity to get a rise out of someone when they are all kitted up in their Moral Police costume, shining their buttons with self righteous pride.
For the record? I know exactly why it was in bad taste to find it amusing. All in all though, I'm not going to backtrack and deny I ever did. Looking at the article, it's a bit flippant don't you think? In particular;
quote:They demanded action and Oxford manager Graham Rix — who served time in prison after being found guilty of having sex with a 15-year-old girl in 1999 — fired Alsop on Monday.
That was supremo journalism. I understand that you were sickened. It's a plausible response. But then the police have been known to crack jokes at a murder scene, to stop themselves feeling too overly depressed on arrival of a butchered corpse.
The attempt at trying to make it look like I condone sexual abuse was good though. I'm not going to feel bad for finding it amusing or assisting in any knee-jerk reactions so that the poster promptly kicks themselves in their own face.
[ 25.10.2004, 06:40: Message edited by: New Way Of Decay ]
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