Shakesville again

Melissa McEwan has a post about a satirical website called "Republicans for Rape" that's responding to some bit of legislative inanity that I can't be bothered to find out about because, really, anything coming out of Congress is going to be bad for me and you and anyone else who doesn't have money, so I have no patience for the details.

Anyway, basically her complaint is that these jokes aren't funny and just trigger rape survivors and are very painful for them. I tend to think that satire works best when its intended audience is horrified, but it's a complicated issue, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it, so I won't take a position on that. But:

Republicans are just trying to protect their corporate sponsors, and if victims of rape are a casualty, so be it. The "Republicans for Rape" creators just hate Republicans, and if victims of rape are a casualty of hitting back at Republicans, so be it. What they share in common is that neither one of gives a fuck about rape survivors.

And you can't claim to be anti-rape if you don't give a fuck about rape survivors. It's really just. that. simple.

This, of course, comes from the woman who has posted about the Polanski case about nine million times in the past few weeks, whose group blog has posted about it more often, and who recently defended a post entitled "taking her side" equating being anti-Polanski with being pro-his victim. Which, judging from all of her public statements, the victim herself would disagree with. She has said that every time the case makes the news she feels victimized all over again. For McEwan this is irrelevant because, in her words, "justice doesn't operate on the principle of what's best for the victim; it operates on the principle of what's best for the community."

I realize, again, that this is a complicated issue, but I wish that McEwan would ever acknowledge that fact. In the world of her and her co-bloggers and her loyal readers (the comment sections there are creepy in their total agreement on everything), the world is entirely black and white, good and evil, and with the occasional recognized lapse (for which they will immediately apologize and "blub" and promise to learn from, because they are so self-righteously progressive in all things), they are 100% positive that they are on the good side.

For people who have bought into, for example, the lie that Hilary Clinton is a feminist force for good in the world and that any criticism of her can only be founded in misogyny, this is kind of a laugh riot. Of course, with that starting point, pretty much anything is gonna be a laugh riot. Or, as they would say in their twee internet talk, LOLsob.

OK, enough about Shakesville. I promise to leave them alone for a while.

(NOTE: It is solely in the interests of brevity that I ignored the Republicans vs. Democrats tribal/sport team aspects of the post, but, needless to say, oh my god how stupid can people continue to be?)