He is empathizing with the other side
Victoria Derbyshire talked to Carl Benjamin this morning about his “jokes” about rape.
“It’s comments like this that would have prevented me telling people what happened to me”@VicDerbyshire reads to UKIP's Carl Benjamin the reaction of two rape survivors to his rape comment about Labour’s @jessphillips.
He says other survivors have thanked him for his comments. pic.twitter.com/y2oE27kHlg
— Victoria Derbyshire (@VictoriaLIVE) May 16, 2019
“There are two sides to every question,” he says, “and I am empathizing with the other side.”
So there are two sides to rape and he’s empathizing with the rapist?
Probably not; he probably means he’s “empathizing” with the side that finds rape jokes funny and “empowering.” He claims that he gets survivors of rape telling him they appreciate his jokes.
But. Even if you take that claim at face value, is that what he was doing when he made that “joke” about and at Jess Phillips? No, it was not. It was a very ordinary very familiar woman-hating dude joke aimed at a woman he wanted to bully.
“I don’t believe that these are real”@VicDerbyshire reads comments from UKIP candidate Carl Benjamin’s social media pages to him, from after he made rape remarks about Labour’s @jessphillips. pic.twitter.com/slrmnINuos
— Victoria Derbyshire (@VictoriaLIVE) May 16, 2019
He wants comedy to come back to the UK, because the BBC is doing everything it can to kill it off.
“So there is a link, you say, between language and acts of violence?”
UKIP’s Carl Benjamin says he has had kippers and milkshakes thrown over him because the media is “radicalising people by lying about me”
He has previously made rape comments about Labour’s @jessphillips pic.twitter.com/F4S8fa5UxI
— Victoria Derbyshire (@VictoriaLIVE) May 16, 2019
He says Derbyshire is inciting violence against him (milkshakes and kippers, apparently), but he hasn’t incited violence against anyone, because he was telling jokes.
And to sum up…
I feel sick watching Carl Benjamin chuckling along to people joining in with the language he has given them about putting a bag on my head and raping me.
— Jess Phillips (@jessphillips) May 16, 2019
One of these days, someone is going to say that “listening to the other side” or “hearing the other side” within earshot of me, and it will be the last straw. I will hope I am carrying kippers at the time (unlikely; kippers are not common in Nebraska, though I am sure I could get them).
I hear it all the time. My friend who is a liberal theatre producer and wanted to produce a play blaming a woman for being sexually molested because “women need to take responsibility for their own actions”. Another, former friend who insisted that abortion should be restricted so people can’t use it to “manage their sluthood”. Everyone I know who says “there are always two sides to every story”. That is not true. Sometimes there are many more than two. Sometimes there are two, but one has all the evidence (climate change? evolution? vaccines?). And those who don’t want to ruin a young man’s life just because he raped someone – he’s so promising.
I think we should all send kippers and milkshakes to Carl Benjamin. We don’t need to dump them over him, just keep sending them day after day, showing him how many people really do not like rape “jokes”. Or, in this case, rape threats.
I have the solution:
Accept that throwing kippers and milkshakes at someone is a joke!
They discussed that, in considerable detail.
I often like dark humor, and I think people are often oversensitive to things not meant seriously, but I listen to Benjamin and can’t even figure out what the humor is supposed to be. The “not enough beer” line was pretty much the only thing I’ve been able to identify as a joke (a bad one). The rest of it is just vile spewing.
It’s not humor and we need to stop acting as that’s even a credible thing to ponder. It’s naked, smirking sadism. See it for what it is.
Eh? Did I treat the claim with anything other than contempt anywhere? If so show me on the doll where so that I can fix it immediately.
I’m sure I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong, but I think Josh’s reference for critiqueing Benjamin’s comments from the perspective of “humour” was in reference to Skeletor’s #4, not anything you’ve written, Ophelia. That’s how I took it, anyway.
Oh so it is. Derp.
*throws doll out the window*