vivelamemoires
Vive La Memoires
I created this Tumblr as a mean of compiling the research I've been doing on the Steubenville rape case, and how social media played a large role.
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How Digital Spaces Were Used
Twitter: a very reactionary space but not a ton of communication between users. Mostly used to share opinions, support the victim, blame the victim, support the rapists, decry the rapists, and generally tweet things about rape culture. News organizations used this a lot, it’s how I found about half of the articles I used gather comments. Many news organizations live-tweeted the trial.
The rapists also used this space to communicate with each other, to post and share photos of their crime.
Tumblr: This was the main space of data archiving, I found a lot of tweets that had been removed from Twitter on Tumblr. This was also mostly a space of support for Jane Doe. People used it to spread images of tweets-since-removed around the internet and to gather support for organizations that were trying to bring light to this issue.
I used to it to archive my findings across various spaces and found it extremely useful.
Comments: People using this space mostly used it to demonize the rapists, blame the victim, and then argue with each other about who was right. They were fairly shrouded from the rest of the web, unless the website used facebook for its comments and a user like the article or a comment, it felt more like a forum where people forget that there’s a larger digital world out there.
The most interaction across digital spaces was between Twitter and Tumblr and between Twitter and the news articles which people then commented on. Tumblr sers used Tumblr to archive screencaps of vile tweets and to spread awareness. Tweets were used as source materials in various articles.
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A court in Steubenville, Ohio, was today told how a 16-year-old girl learned from a series of graphic text messages that she had been stripped naked, humiliated and allegedly sexually assaulted by two footballers after she passed out from drink.Hours of text and email conversations were read out during an explosive second day of testimony at the trial of footballers Trent Mays, 17, and Ma'lik Richmond, 16.
This is from the Daily Mail, so take that as you will. The language of the article does contain eau de rape culture, but the images and captions of text messages and tweets are good.
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Another timeline of the Steubenville rape case. Via www.theintelligencer.net
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Comments on the Text Messages that Led to Convictions
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The assaults took place on the night of August 11 2012 and continued into the morning of August 12 2012, the same day that Trent Mays retweeted these gems.
THE D: For those of you unaware "the d" is internet slang for dick. The twitter handle @YesSheWantsTheD assumes that the female in whatever scenario the twitter follower finds himself in, does indeed want the D.
The language of the tweet implies a male-centric fantasy world where a teacher would not give a male student a D because he did poorly on a paper, or give him a D for Dumbass, but would only give him a D because she was in the beginning of some student/teacher porno.
THE P: At first, I thought "the P" meant the penis, but then I realized it stood for "the pussy". Likely operated by the same people behind THE D, it promotes behavioral policing for girls.
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Popular news outlets were prime examples of victim blaming while covering the story.
In the process of covering the trial, many news outlets, including Fox, live streamed the trial, and inadvertently (but still inexcusably) released the name of the underaged victim.
While the release of the victim's name could potentially be forgiven as an accidental 'slip', there is no excuse for the way the CNN, ABC, NBC and USA TODAY covered the story.
USA TODAY: stressing that the victim was drunk lends itself to the idea that those who do not do everything to safeguard themselves against rape, are not actual victims of rape. It implies that drinking is an invitation for sex.
NBC: this suggests that the prospect of their football careers are more important than the prospect that if they go free, they may rape again. It propagates the notion that celebrities are above the law.
ABC: This is just flat out telling the public that rapists can be sympathetic and rape can be excused.
CNN: Again, like NBC, CNN is implying that the future of the boys is more important than what they did to their victim. They are implying that rapists are the victims of their own crime.
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Beyond the absolutely ludicrous fact that a person charged with rape was allowed to go on a vacation, the rhetorical significance of this tweet is this:
No where in this abstract is it mentioned that Ma'lik Richmond is the suspected rapist. It is implied, however, the abstract leads with "Steubenville High School Football star Ma'lik Richmond", diluting title as a suspected rapist.
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This is a reaction to the verdict of the Steubenville rape trial.
There are many things wrong with this tweet. Truthwatcher is under the impression that either alcohol is consent, or that girls who aren't "innocent" (whatever that means; in this context, girls with a low tolerance for alcohol) don't deserve justice, or perhaps that they can't be raped.
(This reminds me of a joke I heard when I was in high school: if someone has sex with a prostitute without paying, is it rape or shoplifting?)
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A tweet from BigJournalism that focuses not on the rapists that the town sheltered, but on the organization responsible for bringing their crimes to light.
This tweet could have read:
Guilty verdict in Steubenville rape case
Defendants in Steubenville rape case found guilty
Justice for Steubenville rape victim
Idiots who posted footage of themselves raping an unconscious girl to the internet found guilty
Instead of focusing on how Steubenville's rape culture is brainwashing half its population with terror and the other half with the belief that they have the right to women's bodies.
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This is actually why we have the juvenile justice system. Because the frontal lobe (the decision making center) is not fully developed until 25 years old, but the legal system believes that 18 is mature enough. This does not absolve those who commit crime of crime, it is merely supposed to prevent juveniles from going to jail for life.
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Kenni B Shane ;-B : Defamation of the victim's character.
The myth that "whores can't be raped" comes from the old idea that women are property and the most valued part of them is their virginity. Virgins are supposed to act in a very specific way, and when women deviate from that role and start acting like "non-virgins" they become less valuable in the eyes of those who still (however subconsciously) view them as objects.
VON DYKE and REALITY TALKS: Von Dyke makes two very good points, it is very easy to find people who want to have consensual sex, and forced sex is rape. These two points imply that because sex is so easy to come by, rape therefore should never happen—if rape was about sex, which it isn't, it's about power.
Reality Talks is incorrect about what rape is. He seems to think that rape is forced sex, but that the word "force" denotes using physical force, therefore, if the victim isn't resisting, she is complying. He is, of course, wrong, and his use of the pejorative "whore" smacks of the same nonsense that Kenni Shane ;-B's did.
JIMMY MOMENEE: here he's propagating the myth of false rape reports, which various news outlets saw fit to discuss the possibility that Jane Doe might be lying. While false rape reports do occur, they represent 2% of all rape reports. This myth supports the idea that rape doesn't occur all that often, and that women are shallow, fickle creatures incapable of taking responsibilities for their own actions.
EMILY IGHNAT et al. : I'm focusing on Emily because she's in half of these tweets. She starts off by saying that she's not going to stop tweeting until people understand that Jane Doe is a whore (again, implying that whores either can't be or simply aren't raped) and even goes so far as to give her first name (which I've redacted). She tells people that the rapists are not low-lifes, Jane Doe is. She claims that the video of Michael Nodianos laughing about how Jane Doe was "more raped than Marselus Wallace in Pulp Fiction" is "hilarious." And Kratoz, though he takes a more calm approach, urges people to pray because "God's gonna get her worse than anyone can."
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This is in line with the above post featuring Emily Ighnat. I wasn't able to find any others, but I did find reports of the twitter tag #DieJaneDoe trending as people used it to threaten Jane Doe into silence.
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Anyone can view these files so long as they have the link. There are some repeats.
These are all the images I've collected from Twitter, Tumblr, and from various news articles and their comment about the Steubenville rape case and trial.
The reason that I decided to share these folders is because in some instances, I used the app Paparazzi! to screenshot entire web pages, and these images were too big to post to Tumblr and retain their legibility.
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This is a post I reblogged from tumblr user hollyjollytweetmas and there are some tweets that you will see posted on another part of this tumblr.
DUANE COTTON (1): convinced that an unconscious girl was asking for "the D" and that the boys who penetrated her while she was severely intoxicated (also known as unable to give consent) are being wrongfully accused of rape (also known as having sex with someone without their consent).
REALITY TALKS: You'll see them again on this blog. I'm not sure if he's saying that this is not the first time she has had a penis in her vagina, or if this was the first time she's been raped. Either way, he's implying that only virgins can be raped (because you can't steal the oh-so-precious-lady-flower-diamond if it isn't there), and/or that a person can only be raped once. Either way it suggests that women are objects, non-virgin women are damaged goods who have lost all worth and value and are therefore not worthy of protection and are undeserving of justice.
CAM (1): This person is equating rape to sex, which, in my opinion, makes this one of the scarier tweets in this batch. Sex can just be sex, but rape is never sex, rape is about power. This implies that Cam equates sex with power, that he doesn't see a distinction and he doesn't understand that others might see a distinction.
TURNT UP CHUBB and KIERAN JOSEPH and DIABLO DANIELZ: these tweets are essentially saying the same thing as DUANE COTTON (1).
CAM (2): Not only admitting that she was asleep an unable to give consent, but now he's being kind of racist about it. The stereotype that black men have larger penises is based in the myth that black people all have strange and enlarged genitalia (see the case of Sarah Baartman). This was not ever meant as some kind of compliment, this was a means of comparing persons of color to animals.
DUANE COTTON (2): Yes. You read that correctly. Duane Cotton is accusing an unconscious girl of raping two boys. This promotes the absolutely idiotic idea that, once stirred from its slumber by the wild calls of the slut, the penis takes over the body it is attached to and wreaks havoc, the kind that never would have happened if those darn sluts could just restrict their own rights to bodily autonomy.
KENNI SHANE ;-B: covered in another post.
RYAN TOOTHMAN: implies that the town of Steubenville is full of conniving women, all scheming to seduce men and accuse them of rape. I imagine he thinks there's a competition with a prize at the end for who can get the most convictions.
Even though their are people on Tumblr that are already covering the disgusting tweets that people have sent out when it comes to the Steubenville case...
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