Leo

Well-known member
call me cynical but most of the media just want to sell papers/get clicks, and playing up this angle sells papers and attracts eyeballs. i doubt it's any sort of moral stance, it's just what sells.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Absolutely, but shouldn't there be some stricter regulations around it? The obvious argument is how the hell to enforce such regulations.....and on that, who knows.

@ Leo's post, but I do also feel strongly that indoor shoelessness should be enforced.
 

Martin D

Well-known member
Absolutely, but shouldn't there be some stricter regulations around it? The obvious argument is how the hell to enforce such regulations.....and on that, who knows.

@ Leo's post, but I do also feel strongly that indoor shoelessness should be enforced.

Detector after the welcome mat, shoes detected, release the 30ft spike! :)
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
A spike seems excessive. But if it means cutting off their feet in the interim period while they learn some basic household decency, so be it.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Mr Tea, you said this case was 'utterly indicative' of whats fucked about our society. But this case and verdict were highly irregular. AFAIK there isn't a trend of privileged women gaining impunity from assaulting men (or other crimes) because their career is deemed more important. But switch the gender around and I think you could probably find many examples of this happening (and a lot more sexual assault and harrassment cases too). As baboon was saying these anomalous cases getting blanket coverage aren't indicative of anything really if you just take them at face value. And it just feeds the misogynist trolls and commonly-held sexist myths embedded in public attitudes.

Clearly the public reaction to a case like this is far more important to you than the case itself, which is telling.

In a way yes its more valuable to look at public reactions and attitudes, how the media portrays women (whether they are the victims or the perps of the crime) and general trends of violence, rather than picking on an anomalous example and declaring the decline of civilisation or whatever- you'll almost always find sexism hidden in plain view when women are being judged by the court, by the media or by the public - regardless of whether she is guilty or not.

I just find it bizarre that your first reaction to a woman literally getting away with attempted murder - which story is obviously more about the privileges of wealth, class and education than it is about gender, but never mind - is try to bend it into your narrative of universal female victimhood. Well actually I don't, because it's entirely in keeping with the stuff you've been coming out with for ages, but it is nuts.

To be honest my first reaction was that it was quite an unusual case - a woman assaulting a man and getting away with it through privilege (though it can't be said that she had privilege over him, being a cambridge-educated white male himself). Then I thought, I bet the sexist media and the MRAs will have a field day with this and, lo and behold, I was right.

Then the reporting; photos taken from her facebook splashed everywhere (visible nipples: bonus!), she met the guy on tinder (so probably a slag then...), she's described as the 'Slasher Surgeon', info about her being abused in previous relationships and her 'troubled life' tucked away at the end of the article and more or less overlooked (or mocked in the comments). No surprises here then.

Then of course the usual palpable hatred of women in the comments boxes and on twitter.

So no, I don't think my reaction was bizarre or nutty at all actually.



edit, btw she apparently admitted a charge of unlawful wounding, so not 'literally attempted murder' then.
 
Last edited:

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Well whatever the (manifold) problems there are in our media culture, that's a separate issue from the miscarriage of the case itself.

I don't know if the media is necessarily harsher on women than on men in cases like this. I think it's more complicated than that. On one hand, much of the media effectively tried Amanda "Foxy Knoxy" Knox in absentia and decided she was guilty of Meredith Kercher's murder because she 'looked the sort' and because there was (allegedly) sex involved, and everyone loves a femme fatale. OTOH, I remember the media being overwhelmingly defensive of Louise Woodward, who of course turned out to be guilty as sin, because she was kind of baby-faced and innocent-looking. So it can certainly go both ways.

worth noting that both 'femme fatale' and 'baby-faced and innocent' are both sexist stereotypes that are not generally advantageous for women: they're two sides of the same coin.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
worth noting that both 'femme fatale' and 'baby-faced and innocent' are both sexist stereotypes that are not generally advantageous for women.

Louise Woodward killed a baby and got off with less than ten months on remand as time served. There is no fucking way you can twist that into a woman being disadvantaged by stereotypes.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Louise Woodward killed a baby and got off with less than ten months on remand as time served. There is no fucking way you can twist that into a woman being disadvantaged by stereotypes.

I didn't try to. Read what I wrote again and have a think about it.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Benny, we're only ever going to go round and round in circles in discussions about anything to do with gender because you hold this dogmatic position that every conceivable form of gender inequality benefits men at the expense of women. You stick to it with a religious conviction but it's demonstrably falsified by a wide range of statistics, from school achievement to suicide rates, that having conversations with you about it is like trying to discuss geology with a Flat Earther. It also prevents you from seeing that it's your insistence that anyone who doesn't share your orthodoxy must be an "MRA" and a misogynist, or a least a misogyny-apologist - a heretic, an infidel - is exactly the thing that's driving the anti-feminist backlash and this big resurgence in actual misogyny. We're not going to resolve this so I think we should probably just block each other.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I think you might be getting a bit carried away Mr Tea. Read back over the conversation - I've been perfectly civil and haven't even said anything particularly controversial, or anything about you personally. I tried to stick to the point and back it up with a bit of evidence. All you've done is froth at the mouth, ignore or misread the majority of what I wrote, and accuse me personally of being some sort of lunatic.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
It's not just this thread though, it's a persistent position you've taken loads of times before. I'm sure you're a great guy and have only good intentions, and god knows the world could do with more of that right now, but I see your arguments as coming from a very dogmatic kind of feminism that's heavily based in academia and the more fringe areas of activism and that's pretty far removed from most people's lived experiences, and in some respects is flatly contradicted by real-world facts, and which I think may be having negative effects on both women and men. (And that's without even going into the potentially much worse effects on transgender people, which subvert47 has repeatedly tried to discuss with you, to no great success.) So I'm sorry if that last post seemed unnecessarily personal, but at the same time, in an online space with a political centre of gravity that's pretty far to the left, it's specifically a lot of things that you've said about sex and gender that I think are unhelpful or harmful.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
It also prevents you from seeing that it's your insistence that anyone who doesn't share your orthodoxy must be an "MRA" and a misogynist, or a least a misogyny-apologist - a heretic, an infidel - is exactly the thing that's driving the anti-feminist backlash and this big resurgence in actual misogyny.


But that's a gobsmackingly outrageous claim. Lucky for you there are next to no women on this forum.
 
Top