The Houston Press publishes the 10 Hottest Women on the Texas Sex Offenders List and everyone goes completely bananas. I’ll save you the click: the title contains a crucial misrepresentation.
There’s no point in defending their stupid article, but is there any point in attacking it? They obviously did it for clicks; poor judgment + what did you expect?
Houston Press is the city’s free weekly paper. Has anyone ever read any city’s free paper? They all contain roach eggs and you’ll have to get a dose of Cipro.
the public has a right to know
Offense over news stories is nearly always self-aggrandizing. The Houston Press did it for clicks, and got 500+ comments. The Huffington Post published their outrage– twice– getting themselves 1500 comments on each article.
From there it was picked up by other outraged journalists and bloggers, with the obvious consequences. Consequences= clicks.
I can’t fault them for that. That’s the business.
What is troubling is the pretense. Is HuffPo offended? Change.org, powerful promoter of social change, has called for the Houston Press to apologize.
But it’s still there. No one asked for it to be removed.
It does not occur to them to get it removed. They are so part of the world of appearances that taking it down doesn’t feel like a successful outcome because it occurs outside the public sphere. They see a public article, they want to be outraged publicly, and to get a public apology. If it’s not public, it’s worthless even if it actually is better for society.
On a lark I googled “hottest sex offenders” and surprise, it took me right to my home page, Coed Magazine. They had already published the 18 Sexiest Sex Offenders (indeed) in 2008:
We here at COED do not condone sexual misconduct by any means, unless said means consist of hot, willing and able teachers getting down with young studs. Just kidding…?
So far no comment from HuffPo.
There was also the “25 hottest sex offenders any boy wishes to become a rape victim of” written by some guy that did not draw the ire of Change.org. For over a year.
Then back to Coed, The 42 Sexiest Female Sex Offenders, also magnanimously given a pass by the brand management team at Huffington Post.
And etc. Everyone nowadays wants a public apology. Any such apology would be laughably disingenuous– and no one would seriously believe it. So why ask for one?
If they were truly promoting social change or progressive ideals or protecting children, they would have quietly asked for the articles to be removed so that no attention was drawn to them. Instead, they used it as a way of identifying themselves as progressive; defining themselves publicly in reaction to what they don’t like. That’s also why Change.org asked not for an apology specifically, but for readers to sign their petition asking for an apology.
If anyone was truly offended by Houston Press, they would have also been offended by the Coed articles, or the 9 quadrillion hot for teacher porn sites. Arguing that Houston Press’s stupid top ten list is bad for society but ignoring Coed and porn is astonishingly myopic. The only reason to do it is that the soapbox is higher. No one gets points for being outraged at Coed.
The people and the organizations who are deeply offended probably think of themselves as outside the establishment, looking in, trying to change the way things are to the way they should be.
They may seriously believe in their cause, but pursuing a fake apology from a high visibility source because it is a public win reveals them to be an entrenched part of the establishment. That’s change you shouldn’t believe in.
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I had a similar argument with a housemate a couple months ago about the youtube video in which the Christian girl is pumped that Japan was devastated by earthquake + tsunami*. After an appropriately negative response from the sane part of the world, she claimed that she was just trolling, removed her account, and disappeared into the ether. My housemate was pissed and wanted an apology — not just for the offensiveness of her video, but for the act of trolling as well. He wanted it to be a public show of remorse for the potential harm she did — he claimed that whether or not she was serious, just posting them may have reinforced others’ similar conceptions of the world. I argued that withdrawing from youtube, removing her account and the videos, was the better thing to do.
But what does an apology really mean? Words are an easily fabricated vessel for thoughts and feelings. Actions are significantly more reliable because there’s a longer commitment involved — words take seconds, actions can take forever. For tamtampamela, as she was known, to show remorse, she has to never post a similarly offensive youtube video ever again. Unless God decides he’d like one less naive-teen-cum-pretentious-adult in the world, that’s going to be a while.
*If you didn’t see the video, here it is, reposted by someone who would like to make sure the incident lasts forever. God bless the shit-disturbers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP-sSeqPywI
As a tangent to your point — I wonder how many orders of offensive these lists would be if it dealt with (a) male sex offenders and (b) a tag line “the 10 men that any woman would want to be the rape victim of” (I really did not like typing that). At a certain point, these articles will have to go for the jugular to continue the shock and all for readership. I mean, look at how deep the gashes go when the internet decides to troll.
Second, the thing that puts a question in my mind is the effect of putting these articles to paper. While I don’t think that the next iteration of this list is going in the New Yorker, I could see Vice Magazine putting this on the news stand (those still exist right). I guess my question is, how far will “established” media sources go?– will it be to the level of the youtube video that you mentioned.
You can’t apply the same standard to men and women! That’s sexist!
When it comes to rape, I’m with JohnJ ; it’s different.
On the flip side (let’s say that a local paper found another excuse to print the pictures of male sex offenders), it is interesting that the argument would be shifted entirely to offenders’ right to privacy v. communities’ “right to know”. It also probably wouldn’t make the Huffington Post.
Do you that HuffPo didn’t ask for removal exclusively to keep web traffic up, or do you think they also wish to avoid being called the voice of censorship?
I believe JohnJ was being sarcastic.
I was trying to be funny, but ya, I do think it’s different. I know I’m a horrible person no matter what, but I do think that being raped by a man is worse than being raped by a woman.
It’s not that one is bad and the other is good. One is bad and the other is worse.
I know, I know. I’m a horrible, evil person. Whatever.
I think rape is rape, pretty much. It’s just more likely to happen to adult women than to adult men, and far more likely to be perpetrated by males than by females.
Most men don’t really fear that women will rape them, so it’s easier to joke.
It is valid to assume that rape from a man is worse, because men are larger and more threatening so it may be perceived as more traumatizing. However if we are talking about a small child being raped by a female adult, I would argue that is no worse than a man raping anyone (be it a child or an adult) because small children are at the mercy of adults whether they are male or female adults.
Part of the reason rape is bad is because it is violent and threatening, ignore the sex aspect for a moment; the physical size of your attacker compared to yourself is definitely a factor in how traumatizing it is. How able you are to fight back and resist will affect how traumatized you are. It would be worse to be attacked by someone you are so much weaker against that you could hardly do anything to deter them. That will create a pervasive feeling of victimization.
Possibly the people at HuffPo also knew that asking someone to take down an Internet posting is pointless; once enough people see something (as would be inevitable if HuffPo linked to it), it’s effectively on the Internet forever.
And of course I agree with you that men and women are not similarly situated when it comes to rape; men are far more likely to rape women than vice versa. Furthermore, straight men are stereotyped as being perpetually up for sex with any woman who offers, which unfortunately makes it easier to joke about those occasions when women do victimize men sexually.
Although I suspect, given the ages of some of the male victims, that some of these crimes may have been simply statutory rape, which I’m not convinced should be as broadly defined as it currently is in the U.S.
Fair enough, I knew he was being sarcastic, I was playing along. And my totally vague comments were referring to how men and women are differently situated to rape, rather than any other differences.
As for the page being unable to die, I agree, and I’m sure that the HuffPo people know that, but the point is the gesture, isn’t it? Especially because on the site, they preempt the link to their explanation/apology with a bit of a fuck you.
Ah, you were clearly too subtle for the likes of me. :)
Rape of Men vs Women aside, there is a huge difference between between Statutory Rape(Victim consents, but they are not of age to consent) and Violent Rape(Victim doesn’t consent)
I don’t have hard numbers but I would be willing to bet that women are far more likely to be in the statutory rape category.
I also suspect that in the cases of the women whose victims were 16 years old. But IIRC, men are charged with statutory rape quite a lot as well.
You have to question the sanity of any 25+ year old woman who has sex with a 16 year old boy. It may not be quite as horrible as violent nonconsensual sex, but it’s still really sickening.
Do you remember 16 year old boys? Ew, like, acne and playstation and always talking about mom and cracking voices.
I suspect a higher than chance number of women who have sex with 16 year old boys are in a lithium & depakote deficit.
I demand an apology for this link-bait title and article. You just did it for clicks. And there aren’t even any pictures!
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That’s why we love TLP: infinite levels of irony.
He helps us eat our cake and have it too.
Let’s give HuffPo the benefit of the doubt and say that the outrage is at least as much about forum and professional regulation as it is about the actual supposedly offensive content of the article. The people in the best position to impugn a lack of journalistic integrity are other journalists. The Houston Press might be a shitty free newspaper, but it’s still a newspaper; the people at HuffPo have some distant investment in its standards remaining relatively high. They also have an investment of being public about their outrage: not all newspapers have descended to this level of buffoonery, or at least ours haven’t. No one gives a shit what gets published at Coed Magazine because you wouldn’t expect any better. You (rightly) aren’t allowed to say the same things on stage at a political debate that you’d say at a comedy club, either.
Interestingly enough, Fox did almost this exact same thing with the “banning” of the American flag at the Butterfield elementary school in Orangefield, MA. Of course, they had to do it by omitting the detail that the kid was drawing when he was supposed to be working, so displaying the flag would have been rewarding him for bad behavior. But the message is clear: Fox is patriotic because they’re against banning the flag! (Because if anything says patriotism, lying about a kid getting in trouble does.) Let’s all be outraged together!
I thought I was the only one who had that homepage.