SpaceInsomniac

Even if the bare minimum of allegations are true, she is absolutely right to pursue this. You don't get to group finger a girl who gets completely wasted at a party, and expect her to be cool with that when she finds out.

If that is the truth, then I wouldn't even spare them the lifetime sex offender label, as I've previously suggested. Why the hell wasn't this in the news reports? My guess is because it was illegally obtained, but it's hard to tell.

So the vast majority of sexual offenders DON'T turn into repeat sexual offenders, but DO commit other crimes. That right there should tell you how absolutely fucked you are when you have a criminal record following you around for the rest of your life, which would be about the only reason I would ever feel sorry for these two, or anyone else who commits a crime and then supposedly "pays their debt to society."

There was a janitor who was hired where I work, and he was there for all of a few days before his background check came back and his criminal record was revealed. If a person can't even find an honest job pushing a broom, how the hell do you expect them not to turn to criminal activity?

I'm not really doing that, as legally these guys clearly raped this girl, end of story. However, there was a thought that came to my mind when I first read the word "rape" in this story, and it was not something that involved fingers. If you have a thread asking why anyone should have sympathy for these people, it at least helps to explain specifically what happened.

None the less, their actions clearly fit the legal definition of rape.

You might be right if anyone actually had sex (only fingering was involved), or if the victim claimed to remember the event, or if there weren't male witnesses, or if the defendant didn't take pictures of the drunk naked girl.

Geez, am I the only one who reads about a case like this before commenting?

I think people are being seriously mislead with the use of the word rape in this story. A 16 and a 17 year old male fingered a 16 year old female while she was was heavily intoxicated, to the point where she doesn't remember the event. Other people did see it happen, though, which is why they were charged. Now I'm not defending that, it's still some awful shit to do to someone and they absolutely should serve time, but I don't believe it fits the punishment that the original poster seems to be hoping for.

I hope these two get hit in the face with a brick. As for the two rapists they'll get theirs. Sex offenders are the lowest form of scum in prison and the same is true for juvenile hall. Men that violate and hurt women deserve a special kind of torture.

And it certainly doesn't fit the punishment of being a registered sex offender for the rest of their lives, and having that show up on every background check for every job that they'll ever put in for. That sort of thing just makes it impossible to ever hope to turn your life around, no matter how much you might have changed and grown as a person.

I think arsonists get people thinking about fire safety, but that doesn't make what they do a good idea.

Then again, if Anita's videos either get developers to put more thought into writing female characters, or educate more people on the current direction of the feminist movement--as Dr. Sommers describes it, equity feminism vs. gender feminism--then it will have been worth it.

And with regard to what you were replying to, here's a great article that talks about the possible reluctance of mainly white male developers to write female or minority characters: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanCreighton/20130101/184227/White_as_a_Sheet.php

As for everything else you said, I agree with almost all of it as well.

I work for a company where about 70 percent of our customers are female. I see the word "she" awkwardly referring to our customers on nearly every piece of corporate created paperwork, and I'm telling you right now, that IS sexist. It angers me every time I see it. It's not about creating a product for a specific gender, and it's not about marketing. It's denying the existence of every customer who happens to have the opposite gender of your target audience, and doing so through simple word choice.

It's "Hi, I'm new in town, and I need to find a new Doctor. Oh, and he has to be close to where I live. I don't want to travel very far."

It's the same as a hardware store who would refer to their customers as "he." It's about making an assumption, and it is sexist.

Agreed, but I still found it sexist and unnecessary. There are several female COD players on You Tube alone who would kick my ass. Even if less than 1 percent of COD players were female, that's still a huge amount of customers that don't deserve to essentially be told that they don't exist due to a careless use of language.

I would have just as much of a problem with a Twilight event using the word "she" to describe their customers.

If this is true, it gives even more credibility to an argument that I made a while back that took a less feminist view regarding the lack of female protagonists, and attempted to understand the situation from a business perspective.

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion-30/actual-female-protagonist-statistics-1427886/?page=1#1

That thread didn't get very far, but I'd love to hear your opinion on the topic.

A side note: I watched a rather lengthy Call of Duty: Black Ops II video last year where Activision was unavailing the game and talking about various features that were new to the series, and I lost count of how many times the people talking about the game referred to their customers as "he". It was kind of ridiculous. It's one thing for an industry to focus on what sells, which seems to lead to female protagonists that are few and far between, but it's another for a company to casually disavow an entire gender as potential customers.