Monday, November 19, 2012

Skepchicks, and the twelve year old slut meme. . .

Okey dokey. Having established beyond reasonable doubt my own position on censorship and freedom of speech, I will now use my own freedom of expression to inform certain people of what slimeballs they are.

            Two stories came to my attention recently. The first was an article by Soraya Chemaly in the Huffington Post concerning a delightful new Facebook page dedicated to a “12-Year Old Slut”.  The slut in question appears to be a young girl wearing an “I love cock” t-shirt. Visitors are invited to comment on this, and other similarly themed photos, submitted by members of the public. Visitors do not provide their own photos of course, but other people’s which they’ve stumbled across and found appropriately slutty. Needless to say, consent of the owners is not required (that would be so twentieth century).    

            Leaving aside for a moment the question of who would allow their daughter to wear such a shirt, one has to wonder what the appeal of such a page is. Who out there finds the sexualization of children funny? Well, the 200 000 people who “Like” the page apparently do. 

            Needless to say, there have been calls to take the page down, to which site-owners Dom & James provided the following eloquent response: 


“"You put something on Facebook, you no longer own it. Sometimes it pays to read the fine print. In short, shut your fucking mouth and accept you're the one that put up that slutty photo, regret and forget, you fucking moron."

            If you find yourself momentarily dazzled by the sophistication of this rebuttal, allow me to translate: it is the God-given right (so these master rhetoricians argue) of every drooling boor to take what he wants and do with it as he will. Dom and James feel themselves entitled to desecrate any photograph they please, and who are the owners to interfere?

            The other story was a piece in Slate by Rebecca Watson, a very smart and funny lady who runs the Skepchicks skeptical network.

            Apparently the mainly-male skeptics community is no freer of boors and lunkheads as anywhere else. Certain members of it have never forgiven Watson for rebuffing their advances: according to her article, her blog and Youtube page have been flooded with rape threats.

            Now really: is this civilized behaviour?

            Now, many claim that Watson is exaggerating, if not out and out lying (she cuts and pastes some of the threats – there’s no exaggeration there). If the comments on the article are anything to go by, there can be no doubt that she has become astoundingly unpopular for not wanting to be hit on at Skeptics gatherings.  

            There’s a story within this story that caught my eye as well: one of the commenters claimed that his children were threatened when he criticized an online conspiracy theory. I had to wonder: who out there thinks their theories are so important as to justify threatening children?

            The point to all this, is what people feel they can get away with on the web, and how they justify themselves. Here we’ve got a woman threatened with rape, and a man whose children are threatened, for no other reason than they annoyed someone by speaking their minds. Tell me: who’s freedom of speech is being threatened here? 

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