Holy fuck. A couple of people sent me the Stokke story, and I passed on it, but this, this is something. The Yahweh angle is brilliant.
Uhh, just to be clear, "Damn" referenced the connection between Stokke's dad and those evil OC fucks, and how generally weird that is. It wasn't meant as a commentary about her physical appearance or anything like that.
I knew that he was a defense attorney etc but not that he was the defense attorney in that *particular* case. Wow. And yuck.
4: What can I say? The beady eyes, the five o'clock shadow, the Hussein-like features: Al Stokke's attractive. (Oh, wait. That might be the columnist.)
Ah, Google Image Search gives us 2 pictures of his daughter, Mr. Magoo, the sun, a hurricane, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al Gore, the Golden State Warrior Girls, and a bunch of wooden furniture. All very revelant, and that's just page 1 of 11. Sometimes less is more, Google Image Search.
Still.
Anyway, I wrote what I had to say about the connection over at SG, and I think it was pretty smart so you should go read it. Bonus: the header image has titties.
Also, y'know, Galley Slaves could have made the point without posting yet *another* picture of the girl.
Reading the comments at that With Leather place, I have to wonder, what's wrong with those people?
Yes, Stokke is hot. She's just barely out of her teens, she's fit, and she happens to have a hobby that requires tight clothes and weird, eye-catching poses. That puts her in the rare, coveted position of... about 834,192 women in this country. I take awed reactions in stride when they're aimed at A-list celebrities in "candid" shots, but when people are acting like a high school student at a high school sporting event is something incredibly rare and exciting, what the hell? Seriously, does every one of those people competing to offer the most original variation on "I'd hit it" live in a state that doesn't have strip clubs?
Ah yes, why do men with access to strippers and prostitutes not just leave the nice women alone?
B, you're surprisingly openminded about this...
But agreed, she's an attractive young woman of the sort one could find all over the damned place so there's no need to pick on her in particular. I demand a more equitable distribution of leering! On the other hand, well, her dad.
I'm surprisingly openminded, period. Considering that men are such dunces.
B's motto: free your ass and your mind will follow.
I'm going to disagree with B here and state that strippers and prostitutes are more appropriate targets for leering than random high-school girls.
Mostly I get laid because I won't back down. It's like a big game of straight chicken.
17: My point was that the entitlement to leer at women is itself suspect, and that leering at whores and leering at virgins are the same thing in the end.
16 -- No, that appears to be the slogan of Provokator magazine.
Feel free to follow 19 by accusing me of wanting to suppress men's natural sexuality, by the way.
The latter sentence of 18 wouldn't be the worst mouseover text in the world.
Wow, B, if you were a man, that'd be creepy. I call double standard. This means I'll be victimized by C&BT, right?
12: I plead guilty to sloppy writing. I thought the comment was finished enough without either run-on rambling or uncomfortable sharing; evidently not.
I do agree with 19. I was just trying to note that there's something wrong with guys like, for example, the one posting under "MMP" in the With Leather thread, not that he's the worst, of course. I take for granted comments like that when aimed at models or actresses or whatever - I shouldn't, but on the other hand, I doubt I'm alone. But seeing it aimed at a high school girl jumped out at me. On sober reflection, "deranged" is probably the only really appropriate description, but I assumed "desperate" was appropriate as well.
I assume 24 refers to 18. Hey, look, if you can't beat 'em, beat 'em. I'll stop when you guys do. After all, a lady should always defer to her betters.
Now, Labs, I only do that stuff to you because you pay me to.
Btw, if you haven't seen this, well, you really need to.
This song is fun too, though mostly sans the surreal imagery. Their name is apparently Russian for "Moomintroll".
well, probably the whores in much of America are out of high school. Thus there is a slight distinction on that ground.
There may also be a distinction in that their occupations has perhaps inured them to assholes and the attentions thereof.
Here's a question: has there been any recent lawyery thinking (in the American context or more generally) about how people can find some legal recourse when unauthorized pictures of them turn up on the Internets? I notice the photo that started it all was actually posted on that sports site in what the photographer claimed was a violation of copyright, for instance. What are people in the legal profession saying and thinking about the prospect of giving that kind of objection some teeth?
Honestly, parsing which class of women deserves to be harassed and which doesn't is pretty obnoxious.
DS, *I* would think that anti-harassment law would be a way to start. The problem with copyright is that the questions there have already been pretty well answered (e.g., paparazzi shots).
36: well, probably the whores in much of America are out of high school.
North America does a fairly brisk trade in underaged prostitutes, actually. And their being inured to bad treatment is surely not much of an excuse.
OTOH, I did read B's commentary over at SG and have to admit I found the point about one culture vs. the other kind of unconvincing, inasmuch as it seems to be arguing that claiming "it's not rape if she's unconscious" is a similar class of behaviour to saying "I'd hit it" on a message board. The latter may be obnoxious (mostly just boring, really) but the former is truly vicious, and plainly can and has been carried out by more than just the sort of people who engage in the message board-related obnoxiousness.
I bet that anti-harassment laws end up being a great way to kill all but the corporate blogs/magazines/etc.
B, you couldn't find it in your heart to insert a bracketed substitue euphemism for "make sticky"?
41: I fail to see how they would affect the ones that don't harass people.
39: Of course, anti-harassment laws would seem an obvious starting point, wouldn't they? So why aren't they used in cases like this, or what are the bars to applying them?
43: Think all the way back to B's contretemps with De/n/i/gan and see if you can gin something up.
45: I can see how we'd all be fucked, but there are a lot of blogs out there.
36: C'mon. Asserting the "right" to comment on a stranger's hotness is just a milder version of asserting the "right" to sleep with a girl if she's passed out. In both cases, the onus is on the girl to actually articulate her objections because hey, you can't blame men for wanting women.
Is 47 a response to 37? If so, no, asserting the "right" to comment on something or someone is nowhere near equivalent to physically forcing them to have sex with you. I think that's reaching to put it mildly.
I didn't say equivalent, I said milder version of. And the entire point of the "she's unconscious" thing is that the guy *isn't* "forcing" her to do anything--she's simply not resisting. So hey, fair game.
Well, this is going to be a promising thread. Commenting about someone's picture is not "harassment." Free speech and all that. It's rude and should sometimes be discouraged, but you're going down the "pass a law" route, which is madness.
I'd say that a whole bunch of people ganging up to comment on a picture is harassment. But any one of those individual comments is just a possibly-rude comment.
We should take the analogy ban seriously.
Maybe we should also start taking the commenter bans seriously.
Should we take you seriously?
you're going down the "pass a law" route
I am?
Free speech, as we all know, is limited: you can't libel someone, you can't shout fire in a crowded theater, etc. Plus there's the whole "your rights stop where my nose begins." Whether or not you think that laws against harassing speech are constitutional or even a good idea, it's a bit much to deny that public statements about the hotness of strangers isn't a form of harassment.
shout fire in a crowded theater
Dude.
"Milder version of" rings false, too; it ain't no ballpark, it ain't in the same league, it ain't even the same sport. What makes the "unconsciousness is consent" defense so pernicious is surely its pretense that rape is not the use of force against a person is so palpably false. Speech is not the use of force against a person.
When I agreed that the harassment laws may apply, I had in mind a scenario in which people publishing images of others without their consent -- esp in ways they know perfectly well may irrevocably affect their quality of life -- could be effectively charged or sued. That's a different proposition from classing conversation about people's looks as harassment (which seems untenable and undesirable), much less trying to argue that either is on a continuum with rape.
I don't see why this is such a controversial assertion, seriously. If I walk down the street and some guy wolf whistles, it's a li'l annoying unless I'm in a particularly spectacular mood and decide to play along; if I'm startled or the guy leers or something, it's a threat. If I walk down the street and a *group* of men make comments about my ass, it's definitely threatening. What's that feeling of threat about, if not a recognition that said guy(s) are asserting *their* right to behave thusly, and my complete inability to stop them? And isn't the fear of rape basically the same fear?
58: You could tell said guy(s) to fuck off, which is basically a milder version of shooting them in the head.
59: One could, yes. But one seldom does. I'll give you one guess as to why.
it's a bit much to deny that public statements about the hotness of strangers isn't a form of harassment.
Wait, say what?!
B later rephrased that to indicate that "public statements about the hotness of strangers" means "public and intimidating statements by a group of people, within earshot of the strangers whose hotness they are talking about".
Okay, isn't sometimes or potentially. In any case, the point is that whether or not it's harassment depends on the person being discussed, and given that there's no way of knowing ahead of time what they think, y'oughta (like with fucking the unconscious) presume that when they find out, they're not gonna be real happy about it.
63: No, I didn't. And my point is that the internet is within everyone's earshot.
Anyway, I'm going to stop arguing about this because I'm too busy having a nervous breakdown. Go ahead, talk about how hot random strangers are to your heart's content. I don't give a fuck.
And my point is that the internet is within everyone's earshot.
That is a good point. That's why people shouldn't do it on the internet.
I had in mind a scenario in which people publishing images of others without their consent -- esp in ways they know perfectly well may irrevocably affect their quality of life -- could be effectively charged or sued.
The frustrating factor here is that some blogs clearly are powerful enough that posting something about a stranger may irrevocably affect the stranger's quality of life (e.g. Deadspin, Suzy Kolber), whereas some blogs are small and therefore the posting of pictures there would not affect the person's quality of life. The smaller blogs shouldn't do it either, of course.
Don't have a breakdown, B!
I agree that passing a law is almost never going to solve this kind of problem. But talking about it, naming it, and calling it out is important. Internet harassment is newer territory and we haven't fully established the norms yet.
JM (?) has told some pretty unpleasant stories about street harassment in France. Street harassment in the US takes a somewhat different shape. I'd argue that is partially because of differences in what society is willing to tolerate.
I am not looking forward to a world in which I have to scout the sidelines of my niece's soccer game because if some dude snaps a picture of her and posts it on the web along with comments about her, the society around me is going to shrug its shoulders and say, "Well, it's a fact of life. Not much you can do about that."
58: The distinguishing element of rape is surely that it is an extremely personal and humiliating form of physical assault, not merely that the victim cannot stop the other person from behaving in a way they don't like. If inability to stop behaviour we don't like in public spaces constitutes something on the same continuum as being fucked while unconscious and helpless, then most people in the course of any given day can make that claim. I don't think that's what you're aiming for.
a bunch of wooden furniture
that's some pretty good wooden furniture that the Stokke company make btw. I can particularly recommend the TrippTrapp highchair.
Leering, like eating ortolans ought to be a private pleasure. To quietly and reflectively leer is one of the sublime aspects of early middle age; it's the boasting about it that's crude and boorish.
I think, btw, that BPhD is broadly right that it's the same sort of thing, in the sense that a cat is the same sort of thing as a lion. A lot of the reason why I hate boorish leerers is that I can't help thinking I've just got a little bit of an insight into what they'd do if they weren't scared of getting caught.
The wikipedia ortolan article contains a use of the subjunctive dying out even faster than "were" in conditionals: If, as is supposed, the ortolan be the miliaria of Varro, the practice of artificially fattening birds of this species is very ancient.
.
inability to stop behaviour we don't like in public spaces
No. Specific, personal, and targeted assertions of sexualized power and dominance are what I'm talking about. Not whether or not I think you dress funny.
What distinguishes assertions of "sexualized power and dominance" from the thousand other kinds of power and dominance assertions that occur between human beings? Aside from the fact that it's, you know, sex? Public space can be bruising for everyone in it.
I highly recommend Ellen Willis' essay "Freedom, Power, and Speech" in "Don't Think, Smile". (Actually, the whole damn book is a classic). But that essay really takes apart Catharine MacKinnon's arguments for equating speech and physical actions. What's good about the esasy is that it acknowledges that *of course* speech is a form of action...but the decision to give that form of action special status and protection is still a crucial victory for freedom. It's a basically authoritarian move to compromise that.
P.S. but to the extent the "specific, personal, and targeted" in 72 was an attempt to distinguish a line beyond which speech becomes a direct physical threat...clearly it's also true that such a line does exist, in sexual and other situations.
What distinguishes assertions of "sexualized power and dominance" from the thousand other kinds of power and dominance assertions that occur between human beings?
The fact that such assertions are used systematically to the detriment of half the population? That's a lot of people, don't you think?
Of course I don't mean you, specifically. You're a peach.
I can see what dsquared is driving at; also, Marcus basically gets at the aspect that was bothering me. So, clear as mud.
