broomfucking

But I think what's interesting is the one guy who pleaded gulty. How come? why was his attitude different to that of the others (his friends)? is that what meant that this episode has got all the legal and media whistles and bells?

Good on the victim for having the guts to prosecute. That would be such a hard thing to do.

-- mike hanle y (pennysong@japan.com), April 10, 2002.

hahahaha, I love this guy.....yo mike we should hook up and put out an EP......menthol mike/ reporting for duty / take skin / off your booty....

which female poster to this thread claimed to know all about male behaviour? i was talking about the media, not men (although some are men). oh and by the way, thank you for pointing out my gender bias in presuming the perpetrators are of male gender - if that is what you were trying to do. but umm compare instances of women getting raped by other women with instances of women getting raped by men. theres sorta a bit of a discrepancy going on there. what i meant was that if the victim was female, and the perpetrators were men, it wouldn't make headlines, i don't reckon, cos thats just a common everyday newstory for the media. and there's no sanctity of manhood involved - its just another woman gets penetrated without her consent - oh big deal women get penetrated every day is the assumption. you are right - its the penetration that makes it a big deal (for the media) - because gettin penetrated is associated with being a woman or a homo. thats what i meant about the emasculating factor. have i made sense?

normative masculine solidarity is LEARNT cultural behaviour, not inbuilt => ONE of its motors is subliminal terror, as policed by incidents like this (ok generally much less extreme than this, hence very rarely reported or explored)

i don't claim to know all about male behaviour, but i disagree with you, kiwi re violence and domination being inherent in many men. it implies the inverse being true of females, that we are innately maternal and nurturing, and your example of helen clark shows what a falsehood that assumption is. ps is helen clark spunky or is it just me?

Yeah, jeez, I just can't turn on the TV without seeing a story on prison rape, y'know?

Anyway, I agree that it's a big step that it was reported, and that prison rapes are underreported, etc., etc., etc. My beef was with your comment "a male being demasculinised is far more horrific to the media than just another woman gettin raped", which I think is mistaken, at least with regard to the US media, and which has a spin on it that I find troubling. I mean, I see where you're coming from, and certainly there's an element of fascination-with-emasculation that runs through media attention to cases like Abner Louima's (for instance). But I just don't buy your argument that if six people -- male or female -- held a woman down and sodomized her with a broom, the media wouldn't make a big deal of it because of some institutionalized misogyny/"sanctity of manhood" thing. If a bigger deal of this is being made because it's male-on-male, then (I think) it's because it's seen as singular or unusual, not because some trespass has been made on the "sanctity of manhood". That may be a factor, but as I pointed out, plenty of 17- and 18-year-old boys, many of them nonviolent drug offenders, are raped in prisons and jails, every day, day in, day out, and the media won't touch that story with a ten-foot pole; I even remember seeing a "stop prison rape" poster put up by (I think) Amnesty International that used a woman as its poster child, even though every source I've ever checked says that the number of male-on-male rapes in prisons almost definitely exceeds the number of male-on-female rapes in prisons. (American ones, anyway: I remember hearing that rape and forced prostitution was widespread among woman inmates of Turkish prisons, for one -- though, then again, T.E. Lawrence probably could tell us a thing or two about the other side of that coin...)

So they're in error to see it (the case we're discussing) as singular or unusual, because it isn't, neither in nor out of prison. But to try to use this case as an example of misogyny (to imply that they're making a big deal out of it because it's somehow OK in Western society's eyes when women get raped but not OK when it happens to men) seems like a reeeeeally big stretch. I'd far sooner buy it as an example of patriarchy (a word that I find tired at best, especially when used as a trope for the status quo), and the oppressive effects that conventional gender roles have on both sexes, than as an example of misogyny.

but thats not what i was trying to do. i've never even mentioned the word misogyny or even sexism or patriarchy in this thread. and i don't think it means its OK in western society when a woman gets raped. i think thats a rather simplistic reading of my argument.

Fair enough. Knowing that you feel strongly about the issue of rape, my instinct was to read sentences like "and there's no sanctity of manhood involved - its just another woman gets penetrated without her consent - oh big deal women get penetrated every day is the assumption" spun as a implicit commentary on institutionalized misogyny in the media (i.e. the media are willing to rally 'round the flag of sanctity of manhood, but couldn't care less if women get raped), which is what seemed to me like a stretch. But if you meant it matter-of-factly, then I apologize for misreading you.

for the record, i still don't think your example of prison rape is a good one because its easy to draw the conclusion that the reason why the media won't talk about it is because they assume people can't sympathise with criminals getting raped.

You definitely have a point. I'd personally argue, though, that there are many more factors contributing too, many of which have to do with our perception of what masculinity ought to be (and which aren't based in homophobia per se). I think society (men and women both) tends to take a dim view of men in general who need help or who are otherwise rendered powerless -- a man being raped on a regular basis certainly being an example of that, regardless of the institution of which it happens. There's sort of an implicit assumption that you ought to be strong/powerful enough to prevent it from happening; if you're not, well, that's what happens to people who aren't, right? The expectation of male strength/power is very deeply rooted in our society, and we tend to devalue men who don't endeavor to acquire as much of one or both as possible; certainly, it's an oft-recurring theme in literature and film, where the corollary of "only the strong survive" is often implicitly "...and the weak get what they deserve." Even films working on a high level will sometimes fall prey to painting that aspect of things in overly broad strokes; I've always read Ned Beatty's rape scene in Deliverance as an implicit "indictment" of the fact that he was fat and fairly effete, whereas the other surviving characters were strong. (What would the movie have been like if Burt Reynolds had been told to squeal like a pig, I wonder?)

and from he re:
"There were people in this community who thought we were wrong (for laying charges). Further afield from Taradale it was different, but here, there were blinkers on. "They don't want this in their secure little village of Taradale. 'Let's cover it up and as quickly as we can' was a lot of people's attitude."
[...]
During a break at one of the first appearances two weeks before Christmas, the students seemed oblivious of the victim's family seated a few metres from them. Facing a serious criminal charge, they openly laughed among themselves and with their mates and a parent while the judge was not in the courtroom.

Justice Gendall said in sentencing Castles that he could find no other case to compare and he accepted that the "conventional rape starting point of eight years (jail) does not need to be used for all types of penetration".

i'm not sure how much of a double standard is going on here though. i would be interested to find out how rugbyheads usually get sentenced when raping women, and the usual sentences for different kinds of penetration of women. (i have a suspicion that it might be below the standard rape sentence.) what i'm saying is that i really don't know if the message the courts are sending out is one of "its more excusable to rape men than women", or "anal rape is more excusable than some other kinds of rape" or "its more excusable to rape people if you are a rugbyhead with expensive lawyers and good grades". what do people think about this?