So I heard about this on a podcast I listen to and that
everyone should listen to Citizen Radio.
Then Friday morning I was skimming Jezebel to pause from data tables, and Jezebel’s
Katie
JM Baker has a post about it too. The Guardian’s Tim Adams’ piece reads: “Beeban
Kidron: ‘We need to talk about teenagers and the internet’ The boy addicted to
porn; the girl who endured sexual assault to get her Blackberry back…In Beeban
Kidron’s sobering documentary British teenagers open up about how they use and
feel about their smartphones and the internet.”
The paragraph about the woman who was raped read: “In
one, a girl who does not reveal her identity, talks with heartbreaking candour
about how she would do anything for her BlackBerry; when a gang of boys takes
it from her she recounts how she allowed herself to be sexually assaulted in
order to have it back.”
Previously it read: the girl who “let herself be gang-raped”
to obtain her BlackBerry. Because as you know women are to blame for their own
rapes. And the Guardian thought, let’s
fix this by reclassifying the rape as a sexual assault. Take a minute. Also
know while I was reading this some bro on the internet was blaming women for
not killing their abusers because that works out for the best. Is it possible
to hate everyone? I might be retreating to a hermitage.
So one doesn’t allow or get raped because that implies
consent of some kind. Rape is unwanted sexual intercourse (including vaginal, anal,
oral, etc). This language blames the victim instead of the rapists. This is a
problem.
For fun, Baker mentions that Adams asked the filmmaker is
she, “sees an inbuilt gender imbalance in some of the tone of social media.
Does the medium itself work to encourage misogyny, in her view?” Yes, yes it
does. And people who use victim blaming language aren’t helping the internet culture.
So Internet and the Guardian:
So Internet and the Guardian:
