This week in Australia

A quick, potentially-triggering overview of Cunt: The Movie – Last year, a gang of boys sexually-assaulted mentally-handicapped girl, urinated on her, set her on fire and throw her clothing in a river, along with a bunch of other shit, including harassing a homeless man and building chlorine bombs. We know this because they videotaped the entire thing, made DVDs of it and sold it at high school complete with end credits that mentioned their names. Obviously they ended up being caught. Repentant? Not fucking likely.

Punishment has recently been handed out. Punishment consists of… an eighteen month supervision order and participation in a rehabilitation program on “positive sexuality”. Bit too fucking late for that now, isn’t it? It’s assuming that these boys are somehow aberrant and should be treated like special cases. No. The chances of a dozen boys all of whom share the precise combination of genes that turn them into rapists who get off on degradation and violence all ending up in the same peer group are, let’s face it, fairly remote. Boys spend their entire lives, even before their hormones are working properly, being told – implicitly and explicitly – that gender politics revolves around dominance, fear and harassment. This is the extreme end of a continuum that begins with having your behaviour excused on the grounds that boys will be boys, becomes normalised out-and-out misogyny during adolescence and grows steadily worse because… it’s normalised. I’m sure we can all provide our own examples here. The first one that springs to my mind is when, during high school, a male classmate of mine mimed raping a female classmate who wasn’t in the room, because she was ugly and that was her punishment. There were no women in the room, because we had single-sex tutorial groups. Teacher doesn’t question it, students don’t question it, because it’s simply what’s expected. The site I used to run imploded for the same reason; Women were leaving the community or just not participating because the dominant culture was inherently sexist, I tried to make a point of toning things down in the area that I had influence over, and three months later I’d been forced to close up shop entirely because “Please stop telling jokes about rape” and “You are not the centre of the universe” are interpreted as human rights violations. I mean, for fuck’s sake, if you want to work on “positive sexuality”, you have to start before it gets to the point where boys think treating women like shit is acceptable in the first place. You’d think that’d be fairly fucking obvious, wouldn’t you? Doesn’t work the other way around, does it? Might want to actually tackling how rape culture works if you want to stop this, yes? Tackle cause rather than symptoms, perhaps? Mmm? Fuckbuggerbastardshitfuckjesusfuckchristbastard.

Also, man goes apeshit after passing woman suggests he may have a small penis, because it’s horrible and unfair when strangers make sexually-suggestive comments about you out of nowhere. Not that women would understand, because we are living in a climate of state-sponsored misandry. The nature of this war is a road safety campaign implying that speeding is a shitty way of proving how masculine you are. There’s now an entire site dedicated to it, including choice comments from online discussions. Some of it’s potentially-interesting; the rest is just a bunch of whining courtesy of people who can’t tell the difference between mocking idiotic drivers who put people in danger by speeding, and randomly harassing passing women because you feel entitled to do so.