Comments on: Scottish Anti-Rape Campaign: Effective or Sensationalist? (NSFW?)

By: mike ley

mike ley — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 23:21:03 +0000

Watch out for a new movement that is now international…. check out http://www.slutwalktoronto.com for ways to start a slutwalk in your area…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 23:16:23 +0000

http://www.slutwalktoronto.com is another step in the right direction…. we must continue to inform and educate … and especially strive for systemic change in institutions like the police and the rest of the criminal justice system… and we muste take our message to the streets…. in big numbers and across as many cities as possible…..

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 03:33:31 +0000

A new documentary looking into sensationalism:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1SYsvV9bYc

#47 – Most Discussed (Today)) – Education
#76 – Most Viewed (Today)) – Education – Canada
#74 – Most Viewed (Today)) – Education
#92 – Most Viewed (Today)) – Education – Netherlands
#15 – Top Favorited (Today)) – Education
#28 – Top Rated (Today)) – Education

By: Liberal Media Bias at It Again … Oh, umm, wait « BackStage

Liberal Media Bias at It Again … Oh, umm, wait « BackStage — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:31:07 +0000

[...] Huh? Umm. Well. Here’s my sociology class. Teenage suicide, Don’t Do It! If you get hit or raped it’s obviously your fault — of course I’d use all the “She was Asking For [...]

By: Muse142

Muse142 — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 06:47:22 +0000

And, taking these ads at face value.. this only applies to White, thin, cis, able-bodied women?

By: spinach

spinach — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:34:27 +0000

that text is also a bit suspect. minus the “myth:”, every caption, along with its respective poster, serves as reinforcement of the very dangerous pattern of victim blame. that’s a lot of weight for a single word to hold up.

By: depresso

depresso — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:30:36 +0000

Late to the party, I know, but reading the discussion here, I’d say that the ads have done what they set out to do – create a discussion. I recall hearing someone from Rape Crisis Scotland talking about these ads months before they appeared; they’re an idea that was first used in LA, and they were found to be quite effective there. They caught people’s attention and got them thinking, even if it was only for a second or two. And it doesn’t really matter if they’re thinking that this image or that image is somehow inappropriate to them, or that the women are too pretty or too sexy or whatever – they’ve read the text (This Is Not An Invitation To Rape Me was very clear from a distance) and whether or not the viewer is aware of it, it’s filtering in, just the same as any other ad.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:06:41 +0000

Rape jokes? Sometimes I feel like I live on a different planet. I have seen women objectified, I have known women who where abused. I know women who have been sexually assaulted. Certainly, I do not live in paradise.

Perhaps my memory is failing me, but I don’t remember even once in my life hearing a rape joke.

Perhaps Ive just been “lucky” in that respect. But it seems to me that there are likely cultures where the incidence of actual rape is higher than the incidence of rape jokes in our culture.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:32:42 +0000

I think these ads are perpetuating another popular and problematic myth about rape – that you have to be attractive to be raped. I think its problematic to associate rape with sexiness as these images do. The image they give of a rape victim is very monolithic – all the women are very similar in age and physical appearnace. Also these ads feel like theyre trying to clear up a misunderstanding – the tone of the images feels wrong to me.

By: Caitlin

Caitlin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:35:08 +0000

Also, the fact that people can’t look at the second picture without seeing it as “titillation”, “almost pornographic” etc etc is the whole fucking POINT. A woman can’t walk down the fucking street without her body/dress automatically being evaluated based on how aroused nearby men might become as a result. Breasts are just a female body feature and it is totally inappropriate to sexualise them in every fucking situation. It’s almost like we live in a society where women are just objects to be used for sex by men and so rape doesn’t really matter much. Hmm.

By: Caitlin

Caitlin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:29:46 +0000

I was standing outside the Reading Room at Glasgow University when someone came by handing out the postcards of these (which did say “This is not an invitation to rape me”, btw). I thought they were really effective. And they were handing them out to men, women, young, old — whoever was around. It’s completely right to be targetting the whole of society, including potential rapists, rather than just the potential victims (the way normal anti-rape campaigns do). Particularly since they did it on a uni campus, where date rape is probably a common occurance.

All in all, awesome. Definitely a step up from the normal victim-blaming. (Restrict your movements, alcohol consumption and interaction with men, and then you will be a good Victorian woman- em, I mean, protected from sexual assault! Unless there’s a man around who unaccountably doesn’t follow these rules and decides to rape you anyway, that is. But you probably asked for it in some other way, like being born female. You disgust me.)

By: Caitlin

Caitlin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:21:10 +0000

That’s a nice world of denial you’re living in, but Western Europe and North America are still very very much places where rape happens and is dismissed, belittled, blamed on the victim or ignored ALL THE TIME. We absolutely are not “recovering”. How many rape jokes have you heard in your lifetime?

By: stropharia

stropharia — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:08:19 +0000

I also probably get paid more than similarly-situated women. You’re probably right that neither of us can be assumed to be representative, but our culture simply isn’t awash in the objectification of men the way it is with the objectification of women.

By: Bagelsan

Bagelsan — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:49:55 +0000

It’s interesting that you mention this about yourself because (not to try and make you feel bad or anything) I conversely have a really hard time thinking about good-looking guys that I see as objects. I’m much more likely not to check out a guy at all if I think there’s even a chance that he would notice or be made uncomfortable by it, even if I really really want to get a good look at him. I have trouble applying fantasies to real people, even people I don’t know at all, because I feel like it’s disrespectful. It’s doesn’t feel natural at all to objectify the people around me — in fact, lately I’ve been *practicing* trying to objectify guys more, and trying to check someone out (discreetly, of course) when I want to check them out, just to see what it’s like to take a purely sexual interest in a fellow human being.

I’m certainly not going to say that my experience is true for all women while yours is true for all men, but I wouldn’t be astonished to find that there was a general divide along gender between who “naturally” and automatically objectifies and who doesn’t.

By: Suzanne

Suzanne — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 13:33:14 +0000

If it’s true that the ads include text on the actual posters then I don’t have a problem with them, otherwise there’d just be random images! In regards to the “pornographic” comment, I don’t find the 2nd poster to be as objectifying and exploitive as the PETA ads where she appears to me to simply be a woman walking down the street going about daily life. The PETA version would probably have her doing “sexyface” and dressed in a skimpy bikini with “pweeze don’t rape me” painted on her body or something equally as vomit-inducing.

Also, there’s a poster on the website of a young married couple with “This is not an invitation to rape me” which I think is rather good as I believe that it’s not an issue that is given much attention, even in domestic violence campaigns.