I wonder which one of these two scenarios is a better analogy to a website that is broadcast to literally every single person on the planet with access to the internet.

You know, a great ethical philosopher once said:



I wonder what that great philosopher would think of the way you use your rabbit fur purse.

This reply is apparently seriously fucking intense.

That wasn't their original point, the dickwolf was not the focus or the punch line of the joke. There wasn't even a dickwolf drawn in the comic.


One of the strange things for me of the whole deal, was why it was the dickwolf that set it off and not the Fruitfucker. That one has been around much longer and is an overt rapist. Were none of these triggers ever set off by the Fruitfucker?

[q="Golux13"]I think it's because the Fruitfucker is not actually about rape - it's about a machine that fucks fruit. I suppose you could call it non-consensual, since it's, you know, fruit. But unless the FF actually talks about raping fruit - as opposed to just fucking it - I can see the difference. The dickwolves strip was straight up talking about rape.

While we are unlikely to ever agree ... I am going to try one more time:

Look at my original reply to Mark. Note and compare the parts I put into bold.



Now look at what you JUST THE F WROTE




Brian you just said "Hey rape victims, if you don't that comic was funny and you have the nerve to not keep your humorless whining to yourself: YOU are the problem. ."


The whole reality of culture, ideas, language and reactions on a large scale is that most people react in some consistent and predicable ways.

The reality of cross cultural misunderstandings arises out of how sometimes one large group sees/reacts to something in ONE way while another group sees/reacts in a DIFFERENT way.

The ONLY WAY to ever overcome cross cultural misunderstandings is to DISCUSS the realities of what everybody is seeing and reacting to.

Trying to intimidate, shout down, drown out, mock or otherwise silence the "Others" expressing their reality is counter productive to actually understanding each other.


So for the purposes of UNDERSTANDING I am going to continue:

I don't imagine what it says. There were literally hundreds if not thousands of people who reacted to that T-Shirt in exactly that way. As is evidenced by the thousands and thousands of words written about it in articles and the comments to those articles.

Therefore that is exactly what it DOES SAY... to A LOT of women, especially Rape Survivors. That was their first and strongest reaction. And FYI a lot of men also think that is what it essentially said. Many who agreed with the women. But also including the ones who took it to be encouragement and then went on to up the harassment levels.

Your "Understanding" of the message that shirt sent is no more "explicit" than the one you are calling "imagined". That is the point were cross cultural misunderstandings can happen. What seems obvious to one group is totally different than what seems obvious to another group.

Now you can argue that one interpretation wasn't the intent of the creators. (Something nobody can know but them) You can even say with assurance that it is not YOUR PERSONAL INTENT by buying and wearing one if you did so. ORIGINALLY that is ... if you now wore it to a convention I would say you are intentionally being callous and inflammatory, since you know that it has the potential to hurt/inflame emotions for a lot of people.

However what you cannot do is say that it shouldn't have "hit others (women, especially rape survivors) in the gut" when it did/does. You also cannot say that it doesn't ENCOURAGE the jack-asses who DID think telling the rape survivors to shut the F up was acceptable. Because we have almost a year of internet evidence as the obvious proof that it did exactly that.

You can be excused for cultural ignorance UNTIL it is pointed out to you that something is harmful/offensive.

At the point that you KNOW something is potentially harmful/offensive what you do next carries with it some level of accountability.

One might say that the "humor" has such value to so many that it is worth any pain it causes to others. Others might disagree, especially if they are the ones feeling the pain.

But that would be a value judgment and/or a discussion one might want to engage in.

HOWEVER ... Saying F You, we will continue on exactly the way we always have, with perhaps some extra mocking now that we know about it, and not care if we hurt people is a choice with a different spin than just deciding that the benefits outweigh the costs.

It is a choice people get to make in a free society. But it isn't one that is particularly nice and certainly it isn't admirable nor honorable.

Brian you just said "Hey rape victims, if you don't that comic was funny and you have the nerve to not keep your humorless whining to yourself: YOU are the problem. ."