UPDATE: I wrote this post before seeing the “Update” to Jill’s, in which she reported the comments the AutoAdmit trolls made about her on their own board: “I want to brutally rape that Jill slut,” “I’m 98% sure that she should be raped (even if only in Internet Land),” “So seriously, I think we should start another war with this cunt. She clearly deserves anything XOXO might inflict on her.” Of course that just proves the point of my post, but I wouldn’t call these guys “funny.” No, funny’s not the word. Insane, maybe? Or maybe just normal privileged men chatting about doing what normal privileged men have always done to keep the underclass in line.

*****

What’s it called when the thing that you’re doing disproves exactly what you’re saying?

Over at Feministe I’ve been following the Duke case thread, which has been infested by trolls from AutoAdmit (the home for misogynist racist law students on the web). By the way, I strongly recommend that post as an excellent statement on the case.

Anyway, one of the twit-trolls said a funny thing:

Friendly Intruder Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 5:32 pm

“they’re not rich, but you have to realize that being a white man from a middle class suburb IS privileged in American society. maybe you don’t realize that.”

Jesus. Are we still on about “white males”? Still?

Our generation has moved past sexism to a large degree. Fighting a fight that was pretty much won by the late 90s seems like a waste of effort.

Yeah, I know. I don’t get it. I dated a rather extreme feminist for quite awhile and I tried like hell to understand her position. But she went to Yale, so it was difficult for me to feel her discriminated pain.

Notice the nascent MRAism there? He’s jealous of the girlfriend’s success. Guarantee you in 15 years he’ll be a divorced member of Fathers for Justice or something and railing about how the fembots have turned this country into a matriarchy.

But what’s funny is the “our generation has moved past sexism” bit. Do you hear that? Sexism is over! It’s just so last-decade. Friendly Intruder’s generation is beyond it. Which Friendly Intruder has amply demonstrated by his comments throughout the thread:

Friendly Intruder Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 3:56 pm

Interesting post.

What is your take on the below?

Actually, FBI statistics show that about 9 percent of rape reports are “unfounded” — dismissed without charges being filed. The feminist party line is that most of these are valid complaints, nixed because the authorities lack sufficient proof or distrust acquaintance rape claims. But dismissals because of insufficient evidence usually occur further down the pipeline and are not in the “unfounded” category. Generally, a complaint is unfounded when the accuser recants or when her story is not just unsupported but contradicted by evidence.

Measuring false allegations is all the more difficult since policies on unfounded complaints differ between jurisdictions. A Washington Post investigation in Virginia and Maryland found that nearly one in four rape reports in 1990-91 was unfounded. When contacted by the newspaper, many “victims” admitted they lied. More shocking figures come from a study by now-retired Purdue University sociologist Eugene Kanin published in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 1994. After reviewing the police records of an Indiana town, Kanin found that of 109 reports of rape filed in 1978-87, 45 — or 41 percent — turned out to be false, as the women themselves admitted after the investigation.

Those statistics are bogus, cooked up by rape-apologist MRAs like Glenn Sacks. The only way Friendly Intruder could have gotten them was by looking for “proof” that women lie about rape, and then accepting uncritically the propaganda from anti-feminists. But you could have guessed that from his reference to the “feminist party line.” (One of the other commenters in the thread replied with one of the best nutshell explanations I’ve seen of the rape statistics, which I’m reproducing below* in a footnote.)

But Friendly Intruder won’t let it go:

Friendly Intruder Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 4:03 pm

I mean, if this is true: “After reviewing the police records of an Indiana town, Kanin found that of 109 reports of rape filed in 1978-87, 45 — or 41 percent — turned out to be false, as the women themselves admitted after the investigation” (see previous post above)…

Then this statement: “yeah, it could be, but there’s about a 98% chance that she’s telling the truth”

seems way, way off.

In fact, there would then be a 59% chance she’s telling the truth.

The Kanin he refers to is the uber-guru of MRAs, a crackpot researcher who tried to prove that women were faking rape accusations at an alarming rate. He also “found” that feminism exposed women to the threat of rape because it made them act like sluts. I shit you not.

Now, why would a post-sexist kind of guy like Friendly Intruder go looking for this crap? He also has firm opinions on the moral depravity of women who strip for a living:

Friendly Intruder Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 4:54 pm

“Being a stripper does not mean you have weak character or reduced moral fibre.”

Uh… yes it does. How many strippers do you know?

When one of the other commenters retorts that she knows a lot more strippers than he does, he says, “Heh. Unlikely.”

God almighty, how small can a guy’s penis be? He must have one of those little button things.

But he’s not the only representative of his allegedly post-sexist generation. Check out this chump:

Bilbo Baggins Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 3:40 pm

Link to anything verifying anything you’ve said? I realize that it is often painstaking and mind wrenching to develop a well thought out position and support it, seeing as women often fear TEH LOGIC, but you should really give it a shot.

Bilbo Baggins Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 4:11 pm

I understand some of you want justice, and by justice I mean ripping down the WHITE PATRIARCHY that has oppressed women for so long. That the facts don’t support any of the allegations is, of course, a lamentable development for some of you. BUT DON’T WORRY, if you believe it hard enough dreams can come true. Maybe they’ll find a semen covered glove in one of the LAX player’s glove compartments. Just make sure he doesn’t try it on.

Bilbo Baggins Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 4:33 pm

Liz:

I assume your circumstances are dissimilar. Are you a stripper with a less than rigorous application process to be slept with? Are you prone ot manufacturing lies that are demonstrably false? If so, I retract my point.

Yep, that generation has moved past sexism big time. Feminism is passé. The fight’s been won!

But the best guy on the thread (I mean best in terms of disproving what he says by what he’s saying) is some twit calling himself Realist. I don’t know if he’s of the same post-sexist generation as the others, but he’s funny:

Realist Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 2:52 pm

“What evidence would that be? I haven’t seen any definitive evidence that she was not raped. Changing a story, as other commenters have pointed out, does not mean that she’s lying. She was intoxicated, scared, and in the media spotlight. Again, this is not proof that she wasn’t raped.”

Really? What planet are you living on? For starters, she had the seamen of multiple males not present at the party (I believe DNA tests showed them to be African American males) Aside from changing her story, then saying she “wasn’t sure she was raped at all”, she accused men that had airtight alibis, and she told the other stripper she was going to make the story up. All of this is widely reported. Also, she previously filed a false gang-rape report 10 years prior, apparently this is a common thing for her:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,193495,00.html

“She filed a rape charge, she didn’t indict these three men. No one has proven that she filed a false charge. What, exactly, would they be suing her for?”

Falsely accusing them of a felony? Wasting 13 months and over $1,000,000 in attorney fees? I hope they get filthy rich off the city of Durham, the lying stripper, the State of North Carolina and the University that turned its back on them

I understand you have good intentions Jill, but its radicalized feminists like yourself who cause much of the animosity in modern society between the genders. You do much more harm than good, whether you realize it or not. You couldn’t be more biased in your viewpoint of this situation, which is clearcut to 90% of the public. Your clinging to nothing. The mass media who have combed over the full prosecution case gave up on it months ago. Its a total fabrication by a coked out lying striper. The real victims in the case are the 3 MEN (you happy now?), their families, the Duke Lacrosse coach and program and the University as a whole, women who actually are victims of sexual assualt and rape, and race relations of all of us.

No racism or sexism there! It’s all the fault of radicalized feminists. Ninety percent of the public understands that if a woman has lots of African-American seamen inside her, then not only must she be rather large, but she is automatically a lying coked-up whore.

Note also the reference to FoxNews as if it’s a reliable source, and the penetrating legal argument that we know exactly what happened because the media has “combed over the full prosecution case.”

Here’s his coup de grace:

Realist Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

Whats so amusing about this whole thing, is that you man-hating feminists, and thats what you are, man-hating don’t realize the irony of the Duke fiasco:

The victims of race and gender bias were those that are supposedly immune from it: white males

You wonder why so many men hate so many women these days? Women like you are why. Don’t beleive me? Go on men’s forums around the net, see what’s being said. In your pursuit of global domination by playing the oh so convenient victim card you’ve managed to turn an entire generation of men away from you. Have fun dying old and lonely.

I wonder if I could talk Jill into giving me his email address so I can propose marriage? I sure don’t want to die old and lonely.

Actually, FBI statistics show that about 9 percent of rape reports are “unfounded” — dismissed without charges being filed. The feminist party line is that most of these are valid complaints, nixed because the authorities lack sufficient proof or distrust acquaintance rape claims. But dismissals because of insufficient evidence usually occur further down the pipeline and are not in the “unfounded” category. Generally, a complaint is unfounded when the accuser recants or when her story is not just unsupported but contradicted by evidence.

Actually, my job just gave me occasion to pull the unfounded statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, and that’s a crock. First of all, the FBI’s current unfounded statistic for the crime of rape is 5.7%, which is nowhere near 9% (reporting year 2005). To put that in perspective, according to the FBI, the number of unfounded rapes is higher than the number of unfounded murders, but lower than the number of unfounded car thefts. For various reasons, I think this number is more solidly grounded than the 2% number — but it reflects something other than the “false reporting” that you seem to think it means.

“Unfounded” is not the same as “false report.” “Unfounded” reflects that the police could not satisfy that the elements of the crime as reflected in the local statute had been met. If there is a marital rape exemption, and you report that your husband has raped you, it is an unfounded rape. If you’re blacked-out drunk and you had sex and you’re in a state where that’s legal, it is an unfounded rape. If you yell “rape” when your purse is being stolen, it is an unfounded rape. If you are mentally ill and you report that Jesus raped you, it is an unfounded rape.

To an anti-feminist, “false report” means “a consensual sexual encounter that the crazy woman later reports as a rape.” That particular scenario has to sandwich somewhere into the 5.7% of rapes that are unfounded, along with false reports against fictional people, reports of rape by people whose local laws are bullshit, calls that are originally coded as rape but later unfounded (like the purse-snatching above), rape investigations that are terminated because the victim stops cooperating with police, and reports of rape that are simply improperly coded as unfounded.

If I had to make a guess, I’d say that the particular scenario that anti-feminists use as the default has probably happened, at some point. But assuming that all rapes are vindictive false reports is like assuming that all murders were committed by the suspect’s evil twin: it’s a vanishingly tiny minority of cases in which that is the case.

Sometimes, because I’m a solutions-driven, technocratic-minded person, I can come off in ways that make more theory-minded people upset with me — and I’m afraid there are people who think I’m a troll. I’m glad you’re not one of them.

Seamen. My dad was a seaman. Uncle Bob was a seaman. Together, they were seamen.

*dies laughing*

I’m so sad that it turned out like this – I didn’t want them to be guilty, but every rape case that ends like this makes the next victim loathe to step forward – she asked for it, she once went to a nude resort.

The Daily Show had the best take I’ve seen – the only on I saw on TV – where showed a clip from Fox news, going after the woman. How nice of them. (Fox, I mean.)

And, god, who watches Nancy Grace? She’s like a female Geraldo on the annoyance scale – we have come a long way, baby! If not for feminism, she wouldn’t have that job.

So if we do away with feminism, we do away with Nancy Grace, Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schlafly(??), and Michelle Malkin! (In the public sphere.)

I’ll forfeit my reproductive rights and career choices to be rid of them.

Not!

Like the song says (I woke up with this for no discernible reason – I last heard it Tuesday morning) Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you’re chewing on life’s gristle
Don’t grumble, give a whistle
And this’ll help things turn out for the best…

And…always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the light side of life…

If life seems jolly rotten
There’s something you’ve forgotten
And that’s to laugh and smile and dance and sing.
When you’re feeling in the dumps
Don’t be silly chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle – that’s the thing.

And…always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the light side of life…

For life is quite absurd
And death’s the final word
You must always face the curtain with a bow.
Forget about your sin – give the audience a grin
Enjoy it – it’s your last chance anyhow.

So always look on the bright side of death
Just before you draw your terminal breath

Life’s a piece of shit
When you look at it
Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true.
You’ll see it’s all a show
Keep ‘em laughing as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you.

And always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the right side of life…
(Come on guys, cheer up!)
Always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the bright side of life…
(Worse things happen at sea, you know.)
Always look on the bright side of life…
(I mean – what have you got to lose?)
(You know, you come from nothing – you’re going back to nothing.
What have you lost? Nothing!)
Always look on the right side of life…

‘Ninety percent of the public understands that if a woman has lots of African-American seamen inside her, then not only must she be rather large…’

damn you socks you manhater (and proper punctuater because thats what you are) that was going to be my joke and you stole it because you are an african american lying nautically inclined cokehead whorejunkie doctor.

old and lonely looks a picnic compared to having to whup ‘realist’s’ improperly-punctuated fox-watching non-sexist non-racist ass

The Duke case is just a sad, sad, sad chapter for the legal system. I found it interesting how all the crazy right wingers suddenly became worried about a fair trial. Do you think they would be saying the same things if the accused were black males? I think not.

I have never been a fan of publishing the name of the defendants and keeping the alleged victim’s name hidden. It always strikes me as being against the presumption of innocence.