Boing Boing » misogyny

Nasty Dead Island promo statue "belongs in museum"

Rob Beschizza — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 13:24:17 +0000

The publishers of Dead Island: Riptide produced this remarkable promotional item, a mangled female torso, to maximize its appeal to gaming's all-important squirrel-skinning minsogynst demographic. John Teti hopes that it ends up in a museum, not the memory hole.

The exhibit would start, of course, with the sculpture itself, because the longer you look at Double-D Decomposition, the more it has to offer. In this “grotesque take on an iconic Roman marble torso sculpture”—an actual thing said by an actual human being who works for Deep Silver—the limbs aren’t just gone. No, their gory absence suggests a struggle. This anonymous woman’s limbs and head were ripped from her, presumably amid spurts of blood and a few prerecorded voiceover-booth moans rendered in sparkling 7.1-channel surround sound. Flesh Husk (In Swimsuit) is all about the details. Note the spinal column that juts out of the neck. The way your eye is drawn to an insouciant bit of bone on the arm. These are important cues in the visual vocabulary of Modern Game Studio artworks. They symbolize worship of the deities Dark and Gritty.

Violentacrez exposé should be taken on its own merits

Rob Beschizza — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 17:12:20 +0000

Freddie deBoer doesn't like Gawker's publication of an exposé on infamous internet creep Violentacrez: "I'll take honest depravity over depravity masked as righteousness."

It's not sympathy for ViolentAcrez that moves me, but rather contempt for the deep hypocrisy of Gawker, along with its always-hilarious sanctimony of convenience. I would argue that, in fact, Gawker's writers and audience partake in essentially the same thing that many Redditors who frequent the uglier sub-Reddits do: being titillated, in various ways, by content that they simultaneously disclaim and enjoy.

Without casting aspersions on deBoer's motives here, I can't help but notice that this looks a lot like the oldest steering trick in the book: if you don't like something that someone has written (or the journalist who wrote it), try and associate it with the publisher.

If the publisher has a good reputation, the aim is to to force the institution to take collective responsibility for the individual's beliefs—for example, to cast a contributor's opinion as that of the publisher itself.

If the publisher has a questionable reputation, however -- let's say, Gawker -- the intent is to cast the contributor's work as untrustworthy by association, regardless of its qualities.

In both cases, it encourages the reader to think not of the story's facts, but the moral and intellectual abstractions surrounding its publication: the politics, the motives, the journalistic legitimacy. The publisher, the writer and the story all become props in the play of ideas.

DeBoer's opinions about Gawker are interesting, but in picking Violentacrez as his horse--casting a explicit equivalency between what he did and what Gawker does--I think he's made a terrible mistake.

Consider two simple truths of this story:

1. Michael Brutsch acted in public, made only lazy attempts to pseudonymize himself as Violentacrez, and openly revealed his identity to others who knew him. Even if we accept the crazy proposition that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy in all this, its was used often to conceal his own invasion of other people's.

2. Brutch's public activities -- he maintained a hugely popular 'jailbait' forum which sexualized children; boasted of sexually exploiting his own step-daughter; and participated in a 'creepshots' forum that preyed on unsuspecting girls -- are definitively matters of public interest. Moreover, it's all taking place at one of the world's best and biggest web forums: Brutch was a key player in exploiting Reddit's strong free-speech policies and its weak management to create a safe place for misogynists, racists and pedophiles to gather and acculturate.

There's nothing criminal here--like deBoer, I'd guess that most of us following the story are free speech maximalists. The world won't be a safer or less misogynistic place for the downfall of Violentacrez. But it's absolutely creditable to write about it, and about him, no matter where you're doing it.

If you want to argue over institutional legitimacy, publishing Chen's exposé surely improves Gawker's reputation ... even if you think that it's got a long way to go.

Much of deBoer's post is given to dressing down New York lefties and writer Bhaskar Sunkara over a tweet that deBour misunderstood. But he's shooting straight when he makes this point:

ViolentAcrez is a deplorable guy. But he is honest in his ugly behavior ... it is a culture of open depravity. Gawker, and the larger scene of elite New York media it exemplifies, are something more devious, something more dangerous.

I just don't buy it. Who can, hand on heart, prefer the "honest depravity" of a prolific victimizer of the weak over the "hypocritical" journalism that exposes him? It's an entirely too abstract--and too privileged--viewpoint.

Douche.0: Daniel Tosh digs rape jokes, proposes a female audience member be raped

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 22:42:06 +0000

The un-bylined author of the Cookies for Breakfast tumblog publishes the story of two female friends attending a standup performance by Daniel Tosh, host of the notably unfunny Comedy Central show Tosh.0, in which the comedian made some stupid rape jokes. Not that there are any other kind of rape jokes.

“Actually, rape jokes are never funny!,” the woman in the published account says she replied from the audience.

Snip from her version of what followed:

I did it because, even though being “disruptive” is against my nature, I felt that sitting there and saying nothing, or leaving quietly, would have been against my values as a person and as a woman. I don’t sit there while someone tells me how I should feel about something as profound and damaging as rape.
After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…” and I, completely stunned and finding it hard to process what was happening but knowing i needed to get out of there, immediately nudged my friend, who was also completely stunned, and we high-tailed it out of there. It was humiliating, of course, especially as the audience guffawed in response to Tosh, their eyes following us as we made our way out of there. I didn’t hear the rest of what he said about me.

Now, proposing that an audience member sitting right in front of you in a crowd of mostly men "get raped by, like, 5 guys right now" is in my opinion a whole lot heavier than letting a few random rape jokes drop in your lame standup act. Not that rape jokes are lulzy. But, Christ, what an asshole.

By way of this non-apology, Tosh appears to confirm the woman's story:

all the out of context misquotes aside, i'd like to sincerely apologize j.mp/PJ8bNs
— daniel tosh (@danieltosh) July 10, 2012

the point i was making before i was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them. #deadbabies
— daniel tosh (@danieltosh) July 10, 2012

More coverage around the web: The Atlantic, Jezebel, Videogum, ThinkProgress, Feminists for Choice.

The video above, and many others like it, and the dude's entire body of work show that this kind of stuff is hardly out of character for Mr. Tosh.

Jamie Frevele says:

I would like to know why the internet has only suddenly discovered that Daniel Tosh is a fucking pig.
— Jamie Frevele (@jamielikesthis) July 10, 2012

Never liked the guy.

The real reason I can't stand Tosh.0 is that it and Daniel Tosh have degraded Peter Tosh's google rank.
— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) July 5, 2012

Guys. Real shocker in@danieltosh rape joke brouhaha? Was at a @DaneCook show. Tosh is so lame, he managed to make Dane Cook look classy.
— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) July 10, 2012

Nicki Minaj, discussing sexism in the music industry while applying eyeliner (video)

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 21:01:40 +0000

[Video Link] "Had I accepted the pickle juice, I would be drinking the pickle juice right now."—Nicki Minaj. (via Maggie Koerth-Baker, via Upworthy)

Amateur game invites player to beat up woman

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 14:36:12 +0000

When Anita Sarkeesian kickstarted a research project into female videogame tropes, you might have expected some nasty remarks from game culture's contingent of adolescent boys.

But Sarkeesian's been subjected to much more: attempts to hack her website, comics depicting her being raped, and even a video game where the player pounds her face into a bloodied pulp.

The game's creator, Ben Spurr, explains: he just wanted to make her listen.