Today in Rape Culture: More #Steubenville Awfullness on Twitter

Not actually the victims in Steubenville

The Public Shaming blog and Twitchy.com have been doing the world a service by documenting some of the worst rape apologist nonsense that sprouted up on Twitter in the wake of the Steubenville rape verdict. I thought I would add some more screenshots to the growing pile.

TRIGGER WARNING for some really horrible rape-apologizing bullshit.

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Atheist author Michael Crook had many opinions on the matter, some already cited by Public Shaming. Here are some more:

For more of Crook’s awful thoughts on the case, see this terrible post on his blog. Let me put another TRIGGER WARNING on top of the TRIGGER WARNING I posted above; Crook is really a piece of work, and his post is one of the worst things I’ve read since I started this blog.

Someone calling himself Reality Talks had even more opinions on the subject:

Bill Peace III thinks the whole thing is hilarious — except for the part about the rapists being punished:

A fellow named Tyler figures that the victim “got [what] she deserved.”

A teenager calling himself Space Cowboy shows how the attitudes that define and perpetuate rape culture are absorbed at a pretty young age:

Amazingly, after being called out on his bullshit on Twitter, Space Cowboy seemed to realize that he had been wrong to blame the girl, and deleted his victim-blaming tweets. Assuming he wasn’t being sarcastic when he tweeted that “the girl is an angle, [sic]  the boys are to blame entirely,” it’s a heartening development, and evidence that rape culture can be unlearned as well as learned. If he was being sarcastic, his deletion of the offending tweets at least suggests that he now realizes that blaming rape victims is not socially acceptable in all social circles.

The misnamed Truthwatcher, meanwhile, blames everyone but the boys, with his Tweets basically serving as a sort of Rape Culture FAQ.

These are just a few snapshots from the Twitter stream. There’s a lot more nastiness out there.

But these comments are really nothing compared to the crass tweets, and pictures, and videos posted by or otherwise passed around by the rapists and their accomplices and their enablers. Or the threats, some of them made in the wake of the verdict, against the victim from anonymous internetters — and, more to the point, by other students at her school. I can only hope there will be more indictments, not only of the students who participated in the victim’s ordeal but of the adults who knew and did nothing or even worked to cover it up. The whole thing just sickens me.