[DerpObvious]

> sexism

Wait, wait... how did you get sexism out of this particular issue?

I'm not saying the dude isn't sexist or an asshole, but all of the characters in the offending strip were male, there's not specific reprisal against one particular gender of critics, etc.

So there's lots of assholery going around, but how did you get /sexism/?

[drhayes9]

There is specific reprisal against one particular gender of critics. Outspoken women who critiqued the comic and PA's response were sent rape and death threats.

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Dickwolves

[parennoob]

To what degree exactly were they 'threats'? I have been hearing this phrase 'X received death and rape threats' a lot recently, but I have almost never heard of these being reported to the police, or arrests being made because of them (which you'd expect to be the case).

For example, randomcommenter123 saying something asinine like "you deserve to be trampled by a rampaging rhinoceros" does not constitute a death threat. On the other hand, someone who knows your address, or personal details about you is clearly dangerous and should be reported to law enforcement immediately. I would like the see the actual text of some of these threats before we assign them any actual importance.

[potatolicious]

Yeah, if you really wanted to know what rape threats read like, you could just Google it. Here's less than 5 mins of Googling for the term "rape threats":

Some examples (warning, some may find this content disturbing, turn back now):

"This is just the beginning. Over the next couple of weeks I receive a steady stream of violent abuse, including rape and death threats. At its peak I am getting about one threat a minute, with men discussing how they will rape me together, which parts of my body will be penetrated and exactly how they are going to kill me. They are still coming in now – the latest: a death-through gang-rape threat where I’m told to “KISS YOUR PUSSY GOODBYE AS WE BREAK IT IRREPARABLY”."[1]

"She wrote on her blog: "I just got one of those Twitter threats... 'Your house will be blown up at 10.47 tonight....'"[2]

"You better watch your back....Im gonna rape your ass at 8pm and put the video all over the internet," read one."[3]

"A BOMB HAS BEEN PLACED OUTSIDE YOUR HOME. IT WILL GO OFF AT EXACTLY 10:47PM ON A TIMER AND TRIGGER DESTROY EVERYTHING"[4]

"i will rape you tomorrow at 9pm .... shall we meet near your house??????< @MPSWForest and again….."[5]

Also, they are being reported to the police, the question of why no arrests have been made because of them should rightfully be directed at law enforcement:

"Professor Beard had tried to submit an abuse report to Twitter on her mobile phone but found the form refused to submit. She reported the incident to police, explaining to a follower: "Abuse is one thing (that's name and shame stuff), death threats are criminal and for the boys (& girls) in blue."[2]

Though it does appear sometimes they do get arrested[6].

Seriously man, if you were actually curious about how bad these threats are, this is trivially easy to discover. This is the internet. And this isn't limited to well-known authors or political figures too. Everytime something sufficiently controversial comes out of the mouth of a woman the violence and rape threats roll in, as if on cue.

[1] http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/08/internet-trolls-twitter-...

[2] http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/twitter-trolls-send-mar...

[3] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/29/labour-mp-...

[4] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57596875-93/twitter-updates...

[5] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10210324/Scotla...

[6] http://gawker.com/man-arrested-over-twitter-rape-threats-to-...

[DerpObvious]

I would guess, much like another respondent, that such behavior was directed at /both/ genders of critics, and not specific to women.

Do you have any evidence that this response, in particular, was directly solely or mainly at women and not critics at large?

[DanBC]

While I agree with you, men probably had threats of sexual and physical violence sent to them too.

[drhayes9]

Okay.

But men don't exist in a culture that tells them to fear being raped, or that their physical appearance is what matters most about them, or that they should be demure and not like sex.

In no way was I saying "men didn't receive threats". But don't act like threats of rape to men and women are received the same way. They're not.

[DanBC]

No, you're right. It's easy for me to say "A troll writes the same horrible nonsense to everyone", and I had forgotten about the impact upon the receiver of the message.

[sramsay]

What seems to me most outrageous is not the strip (which is obviously tasteless), but the response toward people who objected.

But you're absolutely right. We need a new word to describe open hostility toward victims of rape.

[x0x0]

starting at the dickwolves comic and jumping to open hostility towards victims of rape is a giant leap

[stonemetal]

The hostility towards victims of rape didn't stem from the comic, it came from the response to the response to the comic.

That is to say rape victims said some not nice things about the comic and so they made a tee shirt about it, and started carrying on. Kind of a Streisand effect.

[mtinkerhess]

The issue of rape disproportionately affects women, therefore the normalization of rape jokes is sexist.

[wutbrodo]

You'd be surprised actually. When studying the incidence of sexual violence in the last 12 months, the CDC's 2010 "National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey" study found that 5.3% of men and 6.5% of women were victims.

The CDC did a pretty terrible job of organizing and labeling their data, and the male numbers are skewed downwards because they don't have reliable statistics for the last 12 months for rape in which male victims were penetrated. It's true that the lifetime incidence of sexual violence is significantly higher for women, but talking about the average person today, rape is basically an equal-opportunity tragedy. Even leaving aside the problems with the study that bias male data downwards, making the claim that a type of crime is gendered should require a far greater disparity in the incidence per gender.

http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a...; pp 18-19

[DerpObvious]

If I had two white characters in a comic strip, with one being a stereotypical "loser" being arrested by the police (let's say in a comical manner, over a single joint) and the other one joking about it, is it racist because the issue of the war on drugs primarily affects minorities?

[mtinkerhess]

Good question! I think that's getting into blurry lines territory.

Rape victims often suffer for a long period of time from the experience; people busted for a joint usually get over it more quickly. A reader of the comic is more likely to be suffering PTSD from rape than from getting busted.

Societal attitudes toward rape materially impact the likelihood of the occurrence of rape by creating a culture of safety or of danger; attitudes about drugs generally don't affect whether an officer will make an arrest (until laws get changed). Media shapes societal attitudes; therefore media creators have an obligation to be socially responsible.

Although rape doesn't only affect women, I estimate that it does affect them more disproportionately than the war on drugs disproportionately affect minorities. Men going about their day-to-day business aren't concerned with the threat of rape or related issues; white pot smokers going about their day-to-day pot smoking should be concerned with encountering the police (depending on local law).

[DerpObvious]

> attitudes about drugs generally don't affect whether an officer will make an arrest (until laws get changed).

This is untrue: officers operating under the same set of laws within my state have disparate policies regarding arrest (and from the DAs, prosecution) based on the local social leanings.

> I estimate that it does affect them more disproportionately than the war on drugs disproportionately affect minorities.

According to the CDC study cited in another reply, you'd be wrong.

> Men going about their day-to-day business aren't concerned with the threat of rape or related issues;

This seems like it's cultural and about social attitudes, rather than about any actual danger level. (Based on the same CDC report.)

I'm not sure that I buy the argument that because one group of people is afraid of something that impacts a wider group of people, no one can make jokes about it.

Here's a few questions: would your opinion of whether the rape joke was "sexist" depend on if the male author had been the victim of rape and was making jokes about it as a therapeutic device (noting that all the rape jokes in the strip are about "dicks" and male slaves)? how is the joke existing different in this context? should he stop if people are still uncomfortable about it? why is this (not) okay if the author hasn't been raped, but has some sort of anxiety about it? where exactly does it become "sexist" again?

[wutbrodo]

> I estimate that it does affect them more disproportionately than the war on drugs disproportionately affect [sic] minorities.

I appreciate that you're willing to be so open-minded about this stuff (in contrast to a lot of the conversation around both these topics), but the numbers that you're guessing and basing your assumptions on are just wildly off the mark. Black Americans are estimated to make up 13% to 20% of drug offenders in the US, but 35% percent of drug arrests are of black offenders. At the peak of the disparity (early 90s), black drug offenders were being arrested at FIVE times the rate of white drug offenders. The current disparity is between 3.5 and 4 times as much. Note that this is talking specifically about elevated arrest rates of drug _offenders_, so the fact that the amount of drug usage between the two groups may differ is not relevant. By the way, the disparity only increases as you look at indictment and incarceration rates vs percentage of population or percentage of offenders.

[newobj]

... says the guy who makes video games where you kill people.