Penny Arcade Dickwolves brouhaha - My Take
By sealog444 1 Comments
Just to get this out of the way, im writing this mostly for myself, as after reading most of what this conflict is about late last night I can't seem to stop thinking of it. This is all my personal opinion and I'm not writing this to persuade anyone, this is just me. Some of this is based on the primary parties and some of this is based on Arthur Geis's response to it on IGN.
I believe in free speech, and I believe people have right to use that free speech in anyway they see fit. There are tons of people I can't stand, like glenn beck or michael savage, but they can say what they want and they should be allowed to. I dont listen becuase I find it ignorant or distasteful, and thats it. This brings me to Penny Arcade, they as artists have to right to publish what they are comfortable with in their corner of the internet. To people who do not like that humor or subject matter, dont listen/watch/read/whatever. I feel the root of this problem came from the anti-rape protesters wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They largely enjoyed the content that PA produced, but onced PA crossed this certain line, this content was no longer acceptable, and the PA should change their content to suit individual needs, and once they did that things could return to normal. PA obviously rebeled against this notion, as they felt their work was not offensive, and they should not have to kowtow to this grassroots censorship movement. This conflict, as things on the internet are wont to do, spiraled out from them into my other branches. Here is my take on what I precieve to be orginal root of the problem, either the anti-rape group is going to have work past this difference in sensibilities, or stop coming to PA. People say shit all the time that makes me mad, and i solve it by doing one of the two things above. An example of this very thing is that Anthony from gamespy/rebelfm made a statement to the effect that all cops and by extension all the people in columbus, OH are racist becuase the homeless man with a golden voice was from columbus and he has been arrested a bunch. Being a resident of columbus, I know that is not the case, and it makes me mad when people just assume that becuase we are in the midwest everyone wears camo and hates black people. Im sure anthony has never been to columbus and he has no basis for this other than a sterotype. I hate being called a racist, even by proxy, but i dealt with it and moved on kept listening to the debriefings. yes i realise this story is not rape, and rape is a whole order of magnitude worse that that, but this is also the internet and i am not going to spend all my time focusing on a incident that was essentially an off hand remark by one person. In that context the Dickwolves is not so different from my story.
My second thought is this, if you are mental compromised to such a degree that you cannot see the word rape in a comic strip that is nominally not about rape without a flashback, you should be much more selective about what internet circles you travel in. The PA site have been around awhile, and people havent noticed, there is crude humor on PA, I mean this guys put a robot named the fruitfucker in a game. It is in no way reasonable to expect the PA staff to tailor their creative nature to suit what appear to be some of the most unstable individuals in our society. This sounds callous and perhaps it is, you can't expect life to come to you, you have to go to it. As for trigger warnings that have been mentioned by stanton, if I go to CNN.com right now (and I did) you will not see trigger warnings on any of their news articles, so why should penny arcade be held to such arbitary standard.
My final note is about the word rape and rape culture. Arthur's article talks about how gamers cant take the word rape back, because its not theirs and it only belongs to victims. My response: Bullshit. Rape wasnt theirs to begin with, so they cant just march in and lop pieces off my vocabulary becuase they say so. racial slurs can be "someones" word becuase almost all slurs are words that have no other meaning in our language other than to direct hate at a certain group. Rape is a thing in our language, and people cant tell me not to use it. I can walk down the street and say the words Iraq, beating, kill, blood, car accident and no one is going to stop me and say I cant say that becuase its offensive. People boating accidents dont go around saying I cant say boat. That said, the maximum amount of respect should be afforded to victims and all people in general, and just becuase you can say something doesnt me you have to. When I am around people I will respect their wishes on anything like that, but I am not going to censor myself when typing on the internet in case someone wanders by and reads my writing or comments. I shouldnt have to respect the individual sensibilites of 300 million people.
As for rape culture, saying rape in a comic strip or selling merch with dickwolves on it is promoting rape culture is ridiculous. Real rape culture is pushed by hardcore porn and bars with girls gone wild nights and college frat houses where they get women to drink so much they cant say no. That is real rape culture, and to act like kids saying rape in Halo or a comic strip is silly.
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