But you won’t read about it in the newspapers. Incredibly disturbing and infuriating. via.
Thanks to Russell for the link.
UPDATE: In the comments, Afaeyre Maede points us to this BBC article about the event.
UPDATE 2: Apparently a handful of racist nutjobs, in the original post’s comments and elsewhere, are under the impression that Islam causes gang-rape and street harassment. Because, you know, nice Western Christian boys never rape anyone.
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This is disgusting and appalling.
I know Evil Fizz doesn’t agree with the recent study showing a link between access to internet pornography and reduced rape rates. But this gives us a good idea of what happens when the exact opposite is true.
I do think humans are capable of controlling their sexual urges, but in order to control themselves they have to be able to get some sort of release. That is part of controlling ourselves, knowing when it is time to take care of that tension, otherwise it controls you.
Just found this one on BBC News.
Cairo Street Crowds Target Women
The comment thread there gets real bad, real fast. One poster is an open troll, suggesting the eradication of the muslim world via nuclear war, another shows up with saying the solution is gun violence, the next simply blames Islam without suggesting genocide, and one more comes from jihadwatch. And on and on…
I love the poster who insists that something like that would never happen in the US. It did, at least twice–once in NYC and once in Seattle. (Both cities in a nation that has plenty of access to porn, BTW.)
And I love how people are attributing the reasons for this to sexual frustration, repression, a breakdown of values, etc. Rape is a crime of entitlement. You feel entitled to take what you want and disregard the humanity and the human rights and dignity of the woman you rape.
How about this–the guys who did it felt entitled to do it because the women were just, well, women, and apparently lower than dogshit. IOW, let’s blame misogyny.
There’s a novel concept!
Shinobi, you do statistics in some professional capacity, right? What was there of merit to the porn-prevents-rape study? Because I’m thinking, I grew up about as sexually repressed as it was possible for a girl to be and yet, somehow, I managed never to rape anybody.
I’m gonna brain the first person who goes off on the “well, women can’t really rape guys” tangent, by the way, because my point is, it never even occurred to me to rape anybody, nor would it have even if woman-rapes-man were more feasible, because women aren’t raised to feel entitled to men’s bodies.
Right. This is the reasoning behind, “Rape is not about sex.” The idea that rape has anything to do with the availability of consensual sex, either in terms of repression or hedonism, is bullshit. It’s been around for centuries, and was a justification for prostitution since the oldest profession existed.
What I noticed in the link was the repeated shock that these groups of men were making no distinctions between women based on how women were dressed. They attacked veiled women, women in “traditional” clothes, women in modern “western” clothes. Which goes right to the heart of why what a woman is wearing when she is attacked doesn’t MATTER. Because, as piny already said, this isn’t about sex, and as sheelzebub already said, it’s a crime of entitlement. This is a sexualized response to feelings of obsessive entitlement. It’s not about showing skin.
Shinobi, I hear what you’re saying, but I think that intense sexual repression and sexual subjugation come from the same place. Violent or borderline violent porn is just a different incarnation of the same belief which secludes women from the public sphere because it sees them as sexually tempting or deviant.
Based on my admittedly limited experience in Egypt (10 days, about half of them spent in Cairo) and the stories of the friend I visited in Cairo, who lived there for 5 months, the socially-enforced female modesty and general sexual repression don’t cause sexual violence, but they do reflect the same ideals that sexual predators carry out. Get into any taxi cab in Cairo and (if you’re male and speak Arabic) you’ll be inundated with a verbal barrage of some of the crudest sexual comments you’ll ever hear. Men feel entitled to comment and joke about women’s bodies, and what they would or wouldn’t do to those bodies. Men also feel entitled to demand that women cover up their bodies in order to not tempt the same men who will make comments about them and disrespect them, no matter what they’re wearing.
It’s not so different from those “civilized” Western men, who also feel entitled to women’s bodies, whether that means having actual physical access to them, or viewing them in porn. And those same Western men will joke about things like “Slut-o-ween” and make disparaging comments about women who dress “suggestively.”
The over-arching theme? Women are the sex class, and men are entitled to their bodies, even if they have to use force to access those bodies. How that theme plays out may look different between here and Cairo, but the underlying values are pretty much identical.
Ugh. That comment thread is a toilet. I do love the logic, though, of “Islam causes rape, and the only way to stop rape is to destroy Islam.” Riiight… because rape never happens in majority-Christian countries, or majority-Buddhist countries, or majority-Jewish countries, or anywhere else.
I hate to move off topic here, but the old saw that prostitution is the oldest profession caters to misogyny (and makes no sense). I’m fairly certain that hunting and gathering came first. :) Perhaps fishing in some places too. In some cultures prostitution never arose because women took leadership positions and sexual expression was not rigidly controlled or shamed.
Of course, rape is not about sex. It is much easier to masturbate than to attack another human being to get “satisfaction.”
Hmm, I feel like taking a shower after reading the blog and the comments.
I used to wander around downtown Cairo all the time. Of course i am a grown woman not a girl but this is just really really weird and sounds like some sort of mob thing.
In fact it also reminds me of the sectarian mob violence that happened in Alexandria several months before i left Egypt (spring of this year). Christian gangs targeted random Muslims and Muslim gangs targeted random Christians. In this case male gangs were targeting random women.
It is very hard to understand from the perspective of someone who has lived there. Yes there is misogyny and yes people are crude about it and yes there is street harrassment (but not more than in other countries like Greece and Italy – maybe it’s a mediterranean thing?) but I actually have not heard of this type of thing happening in quite this way before. It’s very disturbing and tragic and infuriating and it also makes you want to cry. I have so many young female friends who live there. They’ve got to be afraid of going anywhere now.
I’ve never heard the “old saw” repeated in any context but an ironic one; it’s usually a counter to the idea that there’s some new, apocalyptic moral degeneracy upon us, of which prostitution and related industries are a part.
The logic is actually even worse than that. Never mind the fact that the assumption is patently, logically, and absurdly false – let’s even grant it for the next few seconds. “Islam causes men to rape…so let’s kill everyone from Morocco to Indonesia with nukes.” So, does “Robert” have some kind of Y-Chromosome targetting anti-muslim bomb planned, or is he actually too stupid to realize this involves killing all the women he imagines he’s rescuing.
And the thought of what he imagines after ‘rescuing’ the women there is making me retch.
Ilyka, I do do statistics professionally. I haven’t finished reading the study yet (day job). It is, on the surface at least highly correlative, so obviously it is difficult to prove direct causality between the internet (presumably porn) and reductions in rape. As far as I can tell this study is valid only as it pertains to Violent rapes, not aquaintance or date rape, as those are highly under reported. Also the reduction is fairly small, though statistically significant. So porn clearly doesn’t prevent rape. (conversely nor would lack of access CAUSE it) But it might be one of the contributing factors to a reduction in rape crimes.
I think the idea behind the study is that for some individuals for whom pornography is a substitute for their desire to rape, but it would not be universally true for every rapist.
I also think the findings may have been slightly overstated, becausee as soon as things are published in the media they go from “there might be tenuous link between obesity and death” To “All fat people are gonna die tomorrow.”
As far as Violent porn goes, I don’t you can universally state the reason a man or woman may want to watch violent pornography. But I support an adults right to watch whatever videos are produced by consenting adults. Even if I personally find it distasteful and demeaning.
But I support an adults right to watch whatever videos are produced by consenting adults. Even if I personally find it distasteful and demeaning.
Darn good thing that no one here has advocated censorship.
I just…I can’t…I just can’t believe that something like this has happened. I’m mortified!
I’m really at a loss to explain something like this. Wow.
“Therefore, members of a group are likely to commit acts they would never commit alone. Being in a group allows individuals to defer blame, responsibility, accountability, and/or judgement upon the group.”
I think that’s the meat of it, really.
What’s to explain? It’s robust, old fashioned control of uppity women.
I have an interesting study on the shelf about medieval prostitution. One of the hazards for city dwelling medieval women in Europe were bands of young men acting as self appointed morality squads roamed the streets of towns/cities looking for women out in public for ‘immoral purposes’. This tended to be a woman out alone. Didn’t matter if she was a working prostitute, since a good girl should be cloistered.
The descriptions of what these squads did to women they targeted parallel eerily to what the BBC article reports for the modern events.
The medieval ‘youths’ professed to act against the breakdown of society caused by women flaunting themselves, (guess where they got that message?) when pretty much all they were doing was engaging in gang affirming rape. (she was out, ergo she was asking for it)
It sounds to me like the situation in Egypt is the same psychology and nothing has changed at all in hundreds of years when it comes to the rights of women.
Oh, I once did a paper on medieval (European) prostitution.
Besides that, the apologia by Thomas Aquinas:
“*Prostitution in towns is like the sewer in a palace; take away the sewers and the palace becomes an impure and stinking place.”
At the same time, of course; whenever the actual prostitutes attempted to, like, organize, create guilds, and so forth, it’d get stomped down.
Per sexual repression vs. learned misogyny: it can’t be both? Personally I’ve always thought they go together like chocolate and peanut butter (if decidedly -not- delicious).
never mind “raunch culture;” what I want to look at again, now, is Wilhelm Reich. “Mass Psychology of Fascism,” anyone?
I dunno … that sort of assumes that these guys actually felt like they needed a rationalization to manhandle some women, or that this mob actually had some conscious objective here (e.g. intimidating “uppity women”). The creepy thing is that people in a mob don’t need justification; they can simply indulge their basest impulses and do whatever terrible things they may have wanted to do without being held responsible for it.
Well, tell that to Levy, who’s apparently hella peeved that we didn’t take the time to do a rigorous statistical analysis on the porn/rape study* and instead just arbitrarily elected to disbelieve it because feminists ‘n’ facts don’t mix, or something. I love it when guys get right up on the edge of calling hysteria and then lose their nerve at the last minute and merely imply it instead. It makes them look so manly.
You know, I never did a rigorous statistical analysis on Limbaugh’s old claim that the United States has more acres of forest now than it did in Columbus’ day, either. Because I don’t like to waste my time doing rigorous analysis of obvious idiocy.
Sorry. I’m threadjacking. Just tired of being told what to discuss and how on this shit.
*Even though Lesley shot down the methodology quite thoroughly. But Lesley, where’s the math? Where are the numbers? Not that it would count if you had them, because Alon’s only interested in hearing from the explicitly sex-positive. And not that there’s anything arbitrary about that, because it’s important to adjust for the feminist man-hating quotient when discussing these issues, especially when you’re privileged to be able to dismiss them as abstract nonsense.
i think that only works up to a point, though. and after the mob disperses, the individuals still have to find a way to rationalize their actions to themselves.
In other news: good god, that Atlas Shrugs person is annoying. i guess i hadn’t had the pleasure before. Superwoman? wtf?
Without bothering with the Levy business, I’ll just add quickly that my own understanding of “sexual repression” is more (I hope) complex than “lack of consensual sex=more rape.”
It’s more: -authoritarianism- uses sexual repression as a key tool. Rape is one expression of power misused; there are others.
I didn’t mean to argue that repression, authoritarianism, and hierarchies don’t dovetail really neatly–just that it’s inaccurate to say, “He rapes because he can’t get laid.” It would be fair to say that a culture that conflates male sexuality with rapine and male selfhood with power-over women will probably end up tying rape, repression, and sexuality together. That’s different–and in that scenario, misogyny is still the fucking problem. The porn-or-rape argument (and its earlier incarnations, e.g. marriage or rape, prostitution or rape, the cloister or rape, etc.) is based on the idea that rape is a negative means towards gratifying the same need porn satisfies, without any interrogation of why we believe in that need. When you ignore all of that, you’re making a backhanded apology both for rape and for misogyny in general.
And, of course, you’re casting the rapist in the role of iconoclast and rebel, which makes about as much sense as seeing the Klan as revolutionaries.
Ilyka, I actually really liked Lesley’s takedown. I didn’t link to it in my first post mostly on account of my having written it a few hours before she wrote her comment. Between her comment and my second post, I think we’ve shown fairly conclusively why the study has no merit.
None of that justifies saying that the study is wrong because it conflicts with an unsubstantiated theory or because you don’t like its social consequences.
Alon, are you saying that the only acceptable grounds for objecting to a study is methodology?
This is such a sad state of affairs. It seems that the Egyptians need to take care of this “mob” problem. The best form of control is self control. If only these people in the mob could be taught self-control.
I think he’s simply saying that if you’re going to criticize the claimed results of a study, you ought to have sound reasons other than those results not fitting into your ideology.
Well, if masturbating to porn alleviates misogyny, the world should be a very different place than it is currently. I’d say that’s sound, even lacking regression analysis.
/threadjack
if masturbating to porn alleviates misogyny
Ha!
My main problem with the “Oh, it’s obviously wrong” criticism is that it brings fresh memories of Michelle Malkin saying in response to the Lancet study something like “I know it’s wrong. Math people, can you help?”.
The study never said porn alleviates misogyny. It said it alleviates rape. Even if porn increases misogyny, it doesn’t mean it can’t reduce rape. A good analogy of that is that education makes your richer and more liberal, but wealth is strongly positively correlated with conservatism.
Yes, but that’s because even a strong positive correlation does not equal causation. It would make it a good predictor (e.g., if someone is wealthy, there’s a good chance they are conservative), but the reasons for their conservatism may be caused by another factor that is related to the wealth. For example, inherited wealth.
A good example of that would be sunspots and recessionary economic cycles. There is a strong positive correlation between them, but how many of us believe that sunspots directly cause the recessions? And why don’t we believe it? Because it seems idiotic on its face, despite the strong positive correlation. It seems far more likely to us that there is some other factor related to the sunspots that cause the recession (droughts and/or human excitability). If we could alleviate the droughts or the human excitability through technology, we might do away with the recessions, even though the sunspots would continue.
BTW, I’m not suggesting we should try to alleviate the human excitability through technology. Government programs to try to reduce emotions sound to me like a hideously bad idea. I’m just theorizing about the actual direct causes of the recessions.
Ah yes, but the Slate article did.
The article quoted in the link was quite creepy.
What???? Which ones were more deserving of being sexually assaulted?
Is it really that hard to pick between these two targets of blame?
I know no one on this site thinks this dude has a clue or anything, and Regina mentioned it above, but I just had to repeat it as it was so disgusting.
Well, I’m an Egyptian young woman and I’m shocked for this is the first time something horrible like this happens. Islam and Christianity are against this … I can’t help but say those who did this are below animals, I guess they make animals appear more human … What could be the reason for this??? I’ll tell you … Harassments started in the streets of Egypt since the introduction of satellite channels with all its porn movies and obscene video clips … Egyptians never been this way … in the past women used to walk wearing mini-skirts and noone even tried to touch them … I wish that we return to Allah the only God again … and we’ll never be lost … May Allah help those poor women … they’ll never be the same ones they used to be before.
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