Taking victim-blaming to new lows: The Spearhead on Lara Logan

Lara Logan, shortly before the attack

There has been an astounding amount of vile shit posted on the internet about the reported sexual assault and beating of CBS reporter Lara Logan in Cairo's Tahir Square. I spent a depressing hour or so the other night looking through hundreds of comments on the Yahoo news message boards; it was a virtual festival of misogyny, racism, victim-blaming and simple nastiness. A sample (each quote is from a different comment):

don't put some nice white pu55y near crazy @#$% arabs. it's like goddamn king kong

Kinda' like sending a woman reporter into a locker room? Don't ask me to feel any kind of remorse for her. Equal rights demands equal responsibility

it started as a revolution and turned in a black spring break! mwaa ha ha

She loved every minute of it.

I could multiply examples ad infinitum; the last I checked there were more than 1500 comments on the one Yahoo news story I looked at, and most were of this sort. The only slightly encouraging sign? Most of these vile comments have more downvotes from readers than upvotes.

You expect this kind of behavior from the Yahoo message board crowd, which has never been very big on civility, or even basic human decency. Typical anonymous internet assholery.

Leave it to the readers of The Spearhead, though, to take commentary on this sad case to an even lower low. Yesterday, Spearhead head honcho W.F. Price published his own, predictably victim-blaming, take on the subject -- essentially blaming feminists for encouraging women to report the news in the same dangerous places that male reporters go. (When Anderson Cooper was attacked, you didn't hear anyone suggesting that men shouldn't be covering the events in Cairo.)

I think that's a supremely tasteless way to use this tragedy to push an antifeminist agenda. But the comments to his article, roughly 270 of them at last count, are far worse -- rarely bothering with even a pro-forma expression of basic human sympathy, some blaming and even mocking the victim, and most using the case to crudely push an assortment of their own misogynist agendas.  Here are some of the worst; I present them without comment, as they pretty much speak for themselves. I have edited some for space reasons; you can follow the links to read them in their entirety.

Alucin explained about how rape allegedly benefits its victims:

When I studied in university a woman claimed to have been gang-raped. After telling the story, she acquired a certain authority. She was at the top of the feminist hierarchy .... Her word was gold because of her rape.

It was never even verified if she had in fact been raped.

It’s a harsh thing to say, but the woman at university gained immensely from the rape, or her rape story-telling, with this increased stature. She probably wouldn’t have gotten into that very small degree program without the rape story to tell to the admissions committee.

At school, no one, especially a man, could ever challenge her about any subject, however remotely related to rape. ...

Rape against men or women is a tragedy, but I also find it sickening how “survivors” or their “friends and supporters” often use their status for personal gain. ... It’s the same thing when feminists politicize breast cancer. 

Opus added:

I agree with Alcuin: In my experience women wear RAPE like a badge of honour or military medal (as I presume Ms Logan will now do). I, of course, never believe word of it, and I notice most guys these days are equally sceptical. There may be an increasing Rape epidemic but no one I know is a Rapist. Funny.

Confused declared that he didn't give a shit:

No group on earth is more privileged that American/western women.
I won’t waste my time any more worrying about their safety, or lack thereof, due to their choices.

intp took it a step further:

Don’t believe her. Don’t care. I hope the Arab guys didn’t catch anything from her.

That is what the non-stop lie called feminism has done to me. Vive la nihilism.

Rebel offered this highly original take on rape:

I don’t see the point here..

According to feminist orthodoxy, humpteen gazillion women are raped every day. This one is the humpteen gazillionth plus one for that day.

Women are raped if you have sex with them, women are raped if you don’t have sex with them, women are raped even if there are no men around. ...

Every time two animals are copulating, a woman feels raped. There are more rapes on earth than there are hydrogen molecules in the universe.

To women of today, rape seems to be the highest achievement, the Royal Road to Success.

I’m laughing so much I might get a hernia, my belly is aching from the laughter.

Papa Smurf suggested the reported rape was a great career move, and ended his comment with a smiley:

she’ll be a CBS news anchor in no time. great way to get promoted.

I dont know if she genuinely didnt want what just happend or maybe feminism has affectivly blinded her and rendered her stupid. Blonde western women in the arab world are like all you can eat restraunts to fat people. Just help yourselves ;)

Troll King posted a long rambling diatribe against "western women" in the Middle East, of which these remarks are only a small portion:

*yawn*

Typical feminist/western woman(as if there is a difference) acts like her typical bitchy self in a place that won’t tolerate it. ....

The fact is that women, western cunts, think they can go into a culture and act how they want and treat the poorest of the poor not just like “help” or a but like a slave that should be lashed for simply flirting. I bet these rapists look who do this probably thought she would act towards them the same way white women act towards brown and black men on western tv. Like he was a stud....

But, umm, like yeah dude. That is so hurrible I might go and cry a river.

The Contrarian Expatriate took victim-blaming to a new low:

Sounds like she got what she set herself up for. You can yell, “I am woman, hear me roar!” all you want in the Anglosphere, but step into the 3rd world behaving that way and they will pound you (no pun intended) back into your place.

Again, as is generally the case with the comments from The Spearhead that I quote here on my blog, these are not weird outliers in the discussion there. Unlike the comments from Yahoo I quoted above, all of the comments I quoted from The Spearhead got multiple upvotes from readers there, in most cases several dozen; none had more than a handful of downvotes. Alucin's comment about the benefits of rape -- a comment surprisingly similar in spirit to an infamous quote on false rape accusations from Catherine Comins, an assistant dean at Vassar, that still raises hackles from antifeminists two decades after it was uttered to a Time magazine writer --  got more than 80 upvotes. There is more than a little irony here.

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