Fuck off, Bob Jones, and everyone else: stop reading the Herald
[Trigger warning for rape and rape apologism]
I wanted to write some satire, but I just don’t have the spoons. I don’t have the sheer mental energy to snark Bob fucking Jones, someone who is only considered relevant because of modern capitalism’s irrational belief that having money means your opinion is worth listening to.
I just can’t deal with a major newspaper printing an article which so perfectly encapsulated rape culture that, were it written by anyone else, would have been assumed to be taking the piss.
Bob Jones has hurt people with this column. Bob Jones has re-victimised people who have survived rape. Bob Jones has basically taken a giant shit on everyone who has been attacked, no matter where or when or how it happened.
Bob Jones has, in a few hundred words, probably obstructed the course of justice, because there’s got to be at least one survivor out there who saw it and was convinced they could never tell anyone because they’d just be told it was their fault.
And the New Zealand Herald has enabled this. It has happily published an attack on all rape victims, and all women, in order to generate pageviews.
Even when the circumstances of someone’s rape are absolutely “legitimate” – it was a stranger, it was during the day, you were wearing a refrigerator box with eyeholes cut into the front – survivors know that whoever they tell, the odds are very, very good that the response won’t be “that’s so fucking terrible, how can I help?”, it will be “But why did you … why didn’t you … what were you …?”
Bob Jones wants you to believe that he’s just being the voice of reason, the rational one, the dude who just tells it like it is. But Bob Jones is actually the voice that tells rape survivors – even survivors of the perfect, legitimate rape – to sit down and shut up and never tell anyone because you won’t be believed and you must have done something to cause it.
And he does it, and the Herald publishes it, for pageviews.
Do you think it’s more evil if he really believes what he’s saying, or not?
~
Highly-recommended reading on Bob “strangely desperate to deny that certain things count as rape” Jones’ antics:
Tallulah Spankhead at The Lady Garden
Nat Dudley (Dropbox link)
Thomas Lumley at StatsChat
Ideologically Impure 
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