Making Molehills Out of Mountains...

I’ve only been semi-following the PAX east/dickwolves controversy, so I’m not going to write a novel about what happened and who was in the wrong and why.

However, in reading through other people’s novels, I’ve come across some really insightful stuff that I think transcends this particular debate.

The first was this comment on Shakesville by Time Machine about rape culture, excerpted here:

If one in twenty guys is a real and true rapist, and you have any amount of social activity with other guys like yourself… then it is almost a statistical certainty that one time hanging out with friends and their friends, playing Halo with a bunch of guys online, in a WoW guild, or elsewhere, you were talking to a rapist. Not your fault. You can’t tell a rapist apart any better than anyone else can. It’s not like they announce themselves. But, here’s the thing. It’s very likely that in some of these interactions with these guys, at some point or another someone told a rape joke. You, decent guy that you are, understood that they didn’t mean it, and it was just a joke. And so you laughed. And, decent guy who would never condone rape, who would step in and stop rape if he saw it, who understands that rape is awful and wrong and bad, when you laughed? That rapist who was in the group with you, that rapist thought that you were on his side.

The second is a graph made by kirbybits in a post about the trolls she’s been dealing with:

The upper half is comments that made it into the blog discussion. The bottom half is troll comments that were deleted. It makes my heart ache to see some of the allowed comments - “I hope you see how ridiculous this is”, “over-sensitive, over-reactionary”, “harmless t-shirt”, etc. in the context of the vile garbage below. I wonder if those well-intentioned people would be so dismissive if they were receiving dozens or even hundreds of threatening and harassing comments and emails? It’s a reminder to privileged groups that just because you don’t see something, doesn’t mean it’s not there. It’s a lot easier to laugh off the idea of “rape culture” when it’s nastier manifestations are invisible to you.