I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

I just checked out the rest of the t-shirts on that website. Some of my favorites are the “Abuse me� t-shirt and the “I slept my way to the top“ one. Are there really any women out there with so little self-respect so as to buy those?

Maybe you should hold a competition for counter-pictures, like the one that Trish Wilson held on her blog last year.

Unfortunately, the sentiment on the t-shirt seems to be true, if this case is to be used as any precendent:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-6006266,00.html

Via Feministe, a man rapes a sleeping woman, and as a sentence only has to write her an apology letter.

Unfortunately, the sentiment on the t-shirt seems to be true, if this case is to be used as any precedent:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-6006266,00.html

Via Feministe, a man rapes a sleeping woman, and as a sentence only has to write her an apology letter.

Carlie, that is OUTRAGEOUS. Please tell me that's a satire piece... a misprint... SOMETHING!

So now "geeky" is an excuse for being a rapist? He was too "geeky" to realize he didn't have the girl's consent to FORCE HIS PENIS INTO HER VAGINA?

I really want to talk to this judge.

So now "geeky" is an excuse for being a rapist?

Yes. Don't you know that? Secret screenings of Serenity open with a clip of Joss Whedon saying, "Remember, guys, if a woman says no, or doesn't say anything, she means yes." If you only read every tenth letter of the latest D&D handbook, you get the Fathers' Manifesto. Linux code is interlaced with a subliminal message, "Women are the property of men."

I am really fucking angry.

The man is a millionaire. He is middle-aged. He is fucking 33 years old. And the judge just thinks he didn't fucking know what rape was because he "wasn't used to Western ways"?!!!?

Fuck that! Is that going to be an excuse now? "In my country, we rape women all the time. You wouldn't want to appear racist by not allowing me to practice my culture here, would you?" Is that honestly going to be used by the rapists as a valid defense?

This guy deserves nothing sort of a firing squad and that judge should be up there with him. That poor girl has been raped twice now.

The culture I come from demands that I and a few friends beat the crap out of rapists. And I am very geeky--I read science fiction and fantasy all the time, and sometimes I page through the dictionary enjoying the words. So that means I can we fly over to England and kick his ass, right? After all, we don't know any better, do we, EJ? We were confused--we didn't realize that hitting his head repeatedly with a lead pipe was frowned upon there.

You know, I'm really so much more angry at the judge than the rapist.

I mean... the judge should fucking no better than to pull this kind of crap. It's not like this guy is some poor, confused Indian kid who didn't know any better. This man is more priviledged than any of us ever have and ever will be and the judge knows it. And this decision is now a legal precedent. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Was this judge bribed? It's impossible for me to not think that he was. Either that or he just truly hates women.

EG, I'm with you. We're breaking out the weasels. Since culture and religion are now unassailable and we can use those two shields to do anything we want to anyone we want, we might as well use that power for good and justice. The fanged weasels of death will ride once more.

They're not that unassailable... it's possible to attack them in various ways. The trick is to look like another oppressed group rather than an imperialist culture. So a good attack on non-Western misogyny would be based on encouraging women's groups to be more vocal about misogyny in their own cultures, and providing them with the necessary platform. It's ultimately a PR war.

My guess is that the judge neither was bribed or is abnormally sexist. If he were that sexist, he'd say the woman invited rape, not that ethnicity was a mitigating factor. What's likely is that he either displays the pathologically British oversensitivity to claims of cultural customs. While it has its advantages when it comes to public perception of immigration, it also serves to produce ghettos and perpetuate intra-cultural oppression.

It actually sounds more like British imperialist racism than oversensitivity to me. You know, the whole "oh, those savages just don't know any better" sort of thing.

But all of that is undercut by the use of the word "geeky," which somehow implies that...what? He's poorly socialized and somehow that excuses his behavior? At any rate, it assigns the rapist a definite identity in British culture.

The trick is to look like another oppressed group

Let's see.

As a woman, I can...

...be denied important medication.
...be forced to carry a baby to term, even if my life is in danger doing so.
...be assured of fewer job opportunities and lower pay than a male.
...be raped while sleeping and have no legal recourse.
...be murdered in multiple countries for not covering every inch of my body.

Someone explain to me how I can appear to be MORE oppressed?

(I know what you were saying Alon, but I'm just really pissy right now.)

I'm pretty certain that under the old Imperialist system, this wouldn't have been tolerated. The Imperialist model held non-Westerners to be children to be harshly disciplined into adulthood. In particular, any attack on "our people" - which includes this case's victim, who is Swedish - would be considered inexcusable in any racist system I know of.

There's always been the minor ideology of noble-and-innocent-savage-corrupted-and-overwhelmed-by-our-decadent-civilization ways that this would slot neatly into, especially since this guy has money.

No matter how you wring it, this judge is out of touch with reality. This isn't the romantic middle ages for fuck's sake. 2006. Age of information. A millionaire middle-aged man, regardless of culture, has plenty of opportunity to realize along the way that women=human beings. He just chose not to.

Oh, of course he is. The best argument for democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average judge, apparently. After all, it's accepted that ignorance of the law is never a valid defense; the judge may have just violated centuries of precedent.