Rape culture and feeding the trolls.

For the most part trolls aren't worth bothering with, for the most part, I mean, you need to decide how much your time is worth and some yahoo on the internet may indeed not be worth that, but not always.

I'll back up a bit, what do I mean when I say troll? I mean someone, usually on the internet, saying or doing something outrageous just to get attention. Politically Libertertarians have been a classic source of trolling, and the time honored tradition of 13 year old kids who discovered swearing recently are pretty much willing to talk about Hitler an spew racial slurs in basically any format.

I got into an argument today with someone when my friend Karl posted a rightfully disgusted reaction to a lovely fella named Roosh V. this guy is a "pick up artist" and male supremacist and currently banned from Australia if I remember rightly, anyway he is in the public consciousness at the moment because he announced a series of meetups with similarly like minded individuals in which they would discuss ways to legalize rape on private property, why you ask? Well it's to make sure that the only way women enter their homes is to have sex, see, Roosh believes that the only reason a man would have a woman in his private residence is for sexual purposes, and the idea that women might not want to have sex with a man in his house is extremely upsetting to him, so he wants to change the laws about that so if she changes her mind he can still rape her without consequence.

No Karl, being a decent human being, was appalled by this and posted such on Facebook, then that guy showed up, you know the one, he's the guy who is always getting into the most pedantic arguments in class, reads a lot, probably wears a trenchcoat, has a huge vocabulary which he uses to cover up the fact that he can't make a rational argument based on evidence to save his life, probably uses the word "Fallacy" more than he needs to.
Anyway, he showed up in the comment thread and bestowed on us his wisdom, which more or less was "Don't feed the trolls", his argument being that vociferous arguments against Roosh and his ilk somehow drive men to the Men's Rights movement. First off we have tone policing, and if that is what someone starts with we can more or less ignore them right off the bat, but I wanna talk about feeding the trolls.

It is true that for a lot of things, it is better to ignore someone who is obviously trolling rather than fight them on everything, life is short and you won't convince them anyway. Rape culture stuff is one of the major exceptions though.

The thing about rape and consent is that for too many people it is still unclear, I don't know how many times a woman who has been raped has been asked "why did you go to his place if you didn't want to have sex?" But I bet it's a lot, and a lot of times that is enough to convince a jury of a man's innocence.

Our culture is already not terribly interested in protecting the interests of the women who live in it, and while shit like Roosh's latest brainstorm are, shall we say, unlikely to become law, if he is allowed to bring it up without dissenting voices then it goes unremarked, but not without influence, maybe a man who isn't prone to self reflection hops on board with the idea because he didn't see anyone he knows arguing against it, maybe a kid sees the post and begins internalizing even more hateful ideas.

Maybe a victim of sexual assault in a similar situation sees no one arguing and decides not to report it.

I can't say that speaking up all he time is the best plan, and for some it isn't even a safe one, but wherever possible this shit must be fought against, it cannot be allowed to gain any more legitimacy than it already has, it doesn't deserve to be debated on it's own merits, it should not be treated with respect, the only way our culture changes is if people show they want it to do so.