Occidental College in Los Angeles, California is not the first school to institute a system designed to facilitate the anonymous reporting of sexual assault and rape. Nor will the LA college be the last. However, it is presently at the centre of public attention and outrage, outrage because the online anonymous sexual assault reporting tool has been used exactly and precisely as it was designed to be used. The problem is that it was used by the wrong people.
Writing for the Huffington Post, Tyler Kingkade reported that “internet trolls” filed at least 400 false rape reports through the Occidental College anonymous online form. Kingkade wrote that members of a [scare-quotes] men’s rights website and the online-mobious-strip-of-tomfoolery, 4chan, weighed in, quickly suggesting the form be bombed with false reports. And why not, that is why the system is anonymous. That is the purpose.
Rape and sexual assaults are serious crimes. That seems like an obvious and redundant point to make, but it has become relevant in the widespread pious posturing of shock and outrage that just-anyone would abuse an instituted system for enacting aggression through an anonymous proxy. Just imagine!
Of course, the fatal design flaw in the Occidental College anonymous assault reporting tool is that just-anyone can use it. Clearly, only members of a protected caste should be able to access an online tool accusing those outside their caste of violent or sexual crimes from behind a screen of anonymity. The college’s administration are, of course, working on a solution to that flaw.
One possible solution – I thought it up while writing this – would be for the school’s victims’ center to supply cards printed with hash-generated keys. The numbers could be encoded as QR codes, saving accusers from the difficult task of correctly hand typing a generated key value. Victims could have easy access to a bin full of printed cards, located next to the bin of condoms and the table full of literature. Of course, this would all be located in a victim-only area, preventing the wrong people from using any of the supplied digital keys. Then, of course, scanning a card with a QR code would take any “victim” directly to the online accusation form right from her smart phone, and the wrong people (men’s rights activists and other “trolls”) would be effectively locked out of the anonymous accusation tool.
As everybody knows, men’s human rights activists are exclusively male, white, cis-gendered, middle-aged and angry. They’re easy to spot.
However, when the “men’s rights” website (actually Reddit, thus the scare-quotes) mentioned by Kingkade reported that the form was being flooded with false reports – I posted a comment on the site, including the headline, which read as follows:
“‘Men’s rights activists’ conspire to cripple college rape reporting system with false reports”
GOOD! Go forward, brothers, and fuck their shit up.
Rape is a crime. If somebody has a report to file of being the victim of this crime – file that report with a POLICE ORGANIZATION, not with some jumped up kangaroo court or administrative star chamber. And when operating in an environment where the star-chamber rules – FTSU with the same fraudulent reports they’ve tuned their system to process against you.
However, contrary to the possible perception that the Men’s Rights subreddit is populated exclusively by rape-enabling-neckbeard-MHRA-types (like me) a majority of the individuals reading my comment condemned and down-voted it.
In addition, several follow-on commenters showed a clear understanding which I continue to lack, that false reports of sexual assault are bad, as distinct from non-false reports of the same. The difference being which demographic files those reports, either the female victims of sexual crime, or male sexual criminals.
In response to my Reddit comment:
“This came off so silly and juvenile I thought it was one of the troll comments the mods talked about, but you seem to be some kind of widely-known MRA. In favour of making false reports. Appalling.”
Of course, this comment and the concomitant condemning down-votes created considerable confusion in my mind. The term “false reports” is likely the culprit. My definition was clearly in error. A false report of rape is not one in which the crime being reported did not actually happen. A false report is one made by a non-victim. This obviously requires further clarification of the term “victim.” Not somebody subjected to an actual incidence of sexual violence, but rather a member of the protected victim demographic – those whose reports of victimization should be correctly made from anonymity, enabled by a system such as that in place at Occidental College in California.
Another response said:
“Fuck their shit up” has to be done with some sophistication, so you don’t look like an asshole with nothing but hate on the agenda. This wasn’t the time to do that….
It certainly would be awful to look like an asshole with nothing but hate on the agenda. But that’s not all the commenter supplied.
When we talk about rape, we are talking about a felony. Unless we’re talking about regretted sex, or drunk sex, or refused sex, or no sex, or imaginary sex, or bad-idea sex, all of which are variously defined as criminal offences or sometimes not criminal offences, depending on legal jurisdictions. Victims, we must understand, are not fully realized, self-possessed adults in the same way that men are. Thus, for victims, consent to sex, enthusiastic participation in sex, and even non-sex do not actually constitute acts of volition. Victimization, including criminal victimization, occurs whenever a member of a victim-demographic feels like it.
The Reddit user correctly and roundly condemning my false-reporting endorsement also correctly pointed out that:
All complaints of rape should be handled by law enforcement. No student should agree to be subject to such a process and should hire legal counsel immediately.” [emphasis mine]
Indeed, if we’re going to work towards a more perfect society realizing the doctrine that all animals are equal, it’s important to remain focused on what should be, rather than what is.
But this is very good news indeed for the proponents of rape culture–that’s the cultivated public narrative that rape and sexual assault, are not the lowest-incidenced crimes tracked by law enforcement according to the FBI’s Bureau of Justice Statistics; rather, rape is a dominant feature of our culture. However, to understand how, in the relative absence of rape as defined by law enforcement – rape (of victims) is a foundational feature of the culture, a redefinition of the term is necessary. Thankfully, thousands of individual activist victims have been working on this for years.
You know, like this.
Although the above image is likely a photoshoped fake, it correctly characterizes the meaning of “rape” in the context of feminst-defined “rape-culture.”
The New Rape[TM] isn’t a violent crime, it’s a feeling. A rape occurs not when a victim is victimized, but when a self-selecting victim has an emotion. In fact, in Toronto, while attending a presentation by Drs Paul Nathanson and Catherine Young, I was instructed by a crowd of victims that regret after enthusiastic consensual sex /is/ rape. The post-facto change of opinion from “let’s screw” to “damn, that was a bad idea” is in the mainstream gender ideologue narrative, definitionally rape, and of course, Rape-Culture[TM].
However, as a very bad man, and one prone to use redundant adjectives, my continued re-education by pious bloggers continues. I’m thankful that the other very bad folks, including feminine patriarchal collaborators at AVfM, will continue to afford me space as a token on the site.
And I thank you all for your continued, and very kind attention.
