I think the big problem with Dickwolves is that they are now associated with rape. It doesn't matter how it became so or whether it is fair, but they are. For this fact, Dickwolves will hit a nerve with many people.
Removing the shirt from the store was no doubt a hard decision. However, I support it for one single reason: Wheaton's Rule ("Don't be a dick."). Yes, people should have the right to wear their Dickwolves shirts. And Penny Arcade has the right to sell Dickwolve shirts. But wearing the shirt at PAX has to be considered as being dick on at least the smallest level. And, I believe selling them is the same, at this point in time.
You can say you are wearing the shirt in defiance of censorship, and again you have the right to do so. But you can not at the same time tell someone they can't be offended by what it has come to represent.
The only way to remedy the issue is to remove the Dickwolves = rapists connotation. Even if you don't believe they do, it is there. (I firmly believe the Dickwolves as a brand have been victimized here). But until then, there will always be a negative stigma attached to them, whether you like it or not.
Wearing the shirt in protest of censorship, while a noble endeavor, WILL hurt people belonging to your very own community. Out of respect of their feelings, I ask that you understand their views, and please not wear the shirt at PAX until the Dickwolve name can be cleansed.
This is my humble plea for more Dickwolve comics, preferably of them doing good things. Because Dickwolves are funny.
My problem is not that these few people were offended. They can be offended by whatever they want. What they can't do, however, is force everyone else to conform to their views on what is and isn't offensive. That's what I find personally offensive about this whole thing. For me, it is about freedom of speech.
Oh, that's cool. So the psychological problems people experience as a result of rape, and that can be triggered by a word or phrase or anything else just as small and harmless, screw 'em, eh? They're, what, probably just faking those psychological problems. Y'know, for the attention. I mean, the idea that something you say or do could possibly have a negative impact on someone else is just beyond far-fetched, beyond fantasy. And you being offended by the shirt being removed is totally comparable to suffering from PTSD that can be triggered by words or actions or something like that. Totally the same thing. The fact that you can't buy a Dickwolves shirt rules your life. You can't watch TV at certain times of day because of it. There are only a few places you can go on the internet without having tormenting flashbacks of trying to buy the shirt and getting a 404 error. You can't leave the house because you're terrified someone will follow you home and remove the Dickwolves shirt you've already brought from your drawers. And you can't speak to your family, because they were there when you got that 404 and seeing them brings it all back...
As has been pointed out before, this has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Censorship is the government actively denying your right to a voice. This is a private company making a business decision to protect their brand. If you can't see the difference, than damn, you got problems.
Let me not mince words here- the original comic and the response comic to which this controversy draw were, and aren't the issue. If they seem to be, or were made to appear as such, those individuals who attempted to draw those conclusions were being disingenuous at best, and outright manipulative at worst.
Let us step back a second and consider these two comics, first of all.
You initially had the framework of the joke- a man is in a terrible position (a slave who is raped to sleep by dickwolves, nightly) and the humor comes from the structure of an MMO. Player characters will often leave "the sixth slave" because they freed slaves 1 though 5.
People were upset (and most likely incorrectly so!) at the phrase "raped to sleep by dickwolves"...consider the response comic, which ended with this line
"Go, and rape no more".
All is well and good, there is no endorsement of rape as anything but a framework for the joke. Additionally, rapists are heartily denounced as "the worst".
But then consider the implications of making a t-shirt, in the graphical style of sports jerseys, that features the word "dickwolves".
What do we know about dickwolves up to this point?
Back to the first comic- a dickwolf is someone that "rapes you to sleep at night"
given the iconography of this shirt logo, you would be daft to not draw the aforementioned parallels to the logos of popular sports teams
Why would one wear the shirt of the St Louis Rams? Unless you are living under a rock, the implication is that you support this team, these "Rams".
Now then, if one is wearing a shirt that says "Dickwolves", with a stylized wolf, it is assumed that the wearer supports these "Dickwolves"
Back to what we know about dickwolves....dickwolves rape people. That is what dickwolves do. Not fruit, not some abstraction, but people. The only time a dickwolf has been featured on this site, it is referred to as something that "rapes you to sleep."
Thusly, the shirt is (whether it intended to be or not) an icon that brands the wearer of supporting those creatures that rape prisoners to sleep.
And people are having a problem understanding why this could be extremely offensive, and well within the boundaries of necessary censorship?
I would hope that there would be no one at PAX wearing a shirt that says "I rape people to sleep"....and yet the dickwolves shirt, by its very nature says that very thing, or at least says that you support something that rapes people to sleep.
Sorry guys, making a "dickwolves" shirt was and is a bad idea. Own up to it, as our Glorious Overlords have and get over it.
Sometimes your words can hurt people, whether you mean to or not, and the point of this con (and their comics and products, I suppose, given the censorship on the "Internet Fuckwad" shirt) is for everyone to have a good time, not to incite people or leave anyone with long-term hurt feelings.
Seriously? Mincing your cats tail is the same thing as making a joke about rape? ..
.
Sigh. In all honesty, I suspect foxie299 is referencing the online harassment experienced by Kirbybits/Scott Kurtz here. That said, he did a pretty poor job of it.
I know I'm echoing what some have already said, but I feel like voicing my own opinion in the vastness of the forums. It will make me feel good, if just to vent:
The part that bugs me the most about this whole thing is really that they caved to people complaining.
"Don't be a dick" has to swing both ways, complaining to such an extent that they pull the shirt falls into a certain behavior type that might describe as contrary to what PAX is "about".
I know that Gabe has a Christian faith (at least, from what we know of the comics), so I know that all of the Jesus tees are done as gags, and not as heresy, but it's easy to imagine some Christian gamers getting up in arms by shirts like "Jesus is My Guild Leader" and "Jesus is F'ing Metal". These shirts could be viewed as an afront to their faith and their belief in the Mesiah, better get rid of them or some people at PAX might be uncomfortable.
"A Rhombus Is The Kind of Rectangle a Bitch Would Draw"... if I wanted to, I could read some strong sexist implications into this otherwise hilarious shirt, better get rid of that one too.
For that matter, I saw some pretty violent games being demo'd at PAX last year (Red Dead, Mafia II, etc)... they might make certain people feel uncomfortable, make sure to only have "E" rated games this year please.
I'm reminded of a Stephen Colbert bit where he talks about the fact that once you give up something, it's gone forever. In his example it was civil liberties, once you give one up, it's gone. In this instance, it's integrity. By letting the "vocal minority" win, you've given power to those who would complain about every little thing that might offend. You've told them that it's ok to complain, because if you do it enough, you'll get your way.
Scott Kurtz got pretty lewd in his panel last year, I saw some people cringe at his off-the-wall humour maybe he shouldn't be invited this year?
I'm not saying it's going to get to that point, but they've still set a dangerous precedent with this DickWolves thing.
Seriously? Mincing your cats tail is the same thing as making a joke about rape? ..
.
Sigh. In all honesty, I suspect foxie299 is referencing the online harassment experienced by Kirbybits/Scott Kurtz here. That said, he did a pretty poor job of it.
I appreciate the thought, I really do, but I'm afraid I wasn't really referencing anything in particular. I was just trying to make the point that someone who hasn't been raped has no idea what it is like to be on the other side. Assuming they do is like assuming you know how it feels to have your tail minced, when you've never had a tail in your damned life. Telling people they're over-reacting is like telling the cat it's over-reacting when you mince its tail--how the fark would you know how much it hurts to have your tail minced? Shut up and listen to the damned cat! I had a cat crawling down my shoulder at the time. Maybe I was distracted.
Seriously? Mincing your cats tail is the same thing as making a joke about rape?
Sigh. In all honesty, I suspect foxie299 is referencing the online harassment experienced by Kirbybits/Scott Kurtz here. That said, he did a pretty poor job of it.
I appreciate the thought, I really do, but I'm afraid I wasn't really referencing anything in particular.
Thought I would apologize in private, but it's probably worth posting here that graphic descriptions of animal torture (or rape) are a poor rhetorical strategy.
Thought I would apologize in private, but it's probably worth posting here that graphic descriptions of animal torture (or rape) are a poor rhetorical strategy.
Also, not very funny.
Absolutely right. I erred, and I apologise for it. I'm still learning the art of thinking properly before posting, it appears...
This mess has actually made me decide to sit out PAX East this year.
Some background: I'm not an avid video game player; I actually found PA via Warmachine and Tycho/Gabe's comics regarding that game. I dig a lot of PA's humor (although I'm sure some video game references go over my head) and was looking forward to throwing down some dice at PAX East.
That said, the last thing I want to deal with when gaming is a large number of people I don't know getting into heated arguements over "rape culture"/"dick wolves" all weekend. That doesn't sound like fun to me, and while I respect Mike's decision to pull the shirt, I feel like the drama level surrounding the whole event has been raised because of it. With that in mind, I think I'll wait till 2012 when (hopefully) this has blown over.
This is the worst! Don't sit out due to this. It should not be a focal point of the show. From what I know of the general climate of these things, it will not be hostile, or dramatic. And though I might disagree with someone, at PAX the number one priority is 420 have fun erryday, and a rational PAXeteer would never seek out such a debate in that context. It's just not what the show is about, it's about fun with like-minded people. We have differences as every large group of people does, but for those three glorious days, we are just a bunch of dudes and ladies that like games.
Hopefully this situation won't discourage you from attending, it would be a shame.
Y'know, this right here is what I wish Mike had said in his post about pulling the shirt. Come to PAX; we want you there, even if you're feeling some trepidation about it now. We want you to come to PAX and enjoy it. We want you to feel comfortable and welcome and have a great time.
Arch, I really liked the detail you went in to, looking at the two strips and the Dickwolves logo, but I want to add a little bit to your explanation.
Okay, let's look again at the original comic. You're quite correct - the humour in the comic comes from the fact that it's making fun of the quest structure in MMOs - or really RPGs more generally. They are pointing out something in these games that is funny. But what is the joke, exactly?
Well, we've got a "Hero". The hero has a quest - save some slaves from tortured imprisonment. That sounds heroic, right? This is suposed to be the driving story convention of games like this - you are a hero, and you go around completing heroic quests, righting wrongs, doing good, and so on. As the person who plays a game, you are supposed to be playing the role of a "Hero". But the comic points out that the very mechanic that underlies this simulation of heroism is structurally amoral - as a video game must quantify your success in a quest in order to assess wether or not you have completed your obective, goodness and heroism themselves become driven by numbers. The game does not care about the value of the lives of characters that you save - if it tells you that you need to save five slaves, then you just need to collect that quantity of thing and you're done. They have no individual value - even if you save four, you still fail the quest as if you had saved none. And if there are more, the game doesn't care - success is sucess and failure is failure. Pure, black-and-white, and easily coded into a program.
So, look, you're playing a game where you're nominally supposed to be playing as a "Hero" - but the imaginary world that you're playing in is not one where you can find real goodness or heroism in your actions, as the software arbiter determining "good" and "complete" only cares about numbers and quantifyable acheivements. And as the person playing the game, you must recognize on some level that these 5 slave NPCs that you're "saving" are regarded by the game as on par with the six crisp basilisk urethra's you had to collect the day before. You are just grinding - you are just working your way through mechanical challenges. You cannot regard the slaves as any more valuable than other commodities.
The thing about the joke is that it is supposed to be unsettling - it is funny because it takes you outside of your comfort area and shows you something about yourself that you didn't see before, because in the joke it is presented in a new light, or from a new point of view. Why are we playing games built around heroism in which heroism is so spectacularly deflated into a meaningless grind? It's absurd - and the absurdity is funny.
Now, it's true that things are exagerated to bring out this grain of truth in the joke - the tortures of the slave are made particularly vile (raped to sleep by dickwolves, roused by blows). But when we laugh, we laugh at ourselves - that isn't actually IN a video game, but couldn't it be? Is it any different from the other violent and disturbing things that occur in our video games all the time? And if it was, would it even shock us out of our stupor? I mean, after all, we know we're playing a game, and we know it's not real. But more than that, we know that our characters themselves inhabit lifeless and absurd worlds in which rescuing 5 slaves means success and goodness, 4 or less failure, and any more than 5 are meaningless and unrecognized by the game world. The whole way in which our Hero's world WORKS does not make any moral sense, so why not raped by dickwolves? Isn't that where we're heading by making our virtual worlds so empty of real value?
The tension and discomfort in this comic is what drives the humour. It is absurd and shocking - but it is presented to us in a way that shows us that we as people are used to being complicit in just such absurdities. We know that we should be shocked, and yet we are used to working in such a way that we wouldn't be.
So look, if you actually sit back and analyze how this comic works, you see that its whole point is to make us uncomfortable with the torture and rape of the slave, while at the same time showing us that we're inconsistent - in the MMO world, they're just collectable objects that we wouldn't think twice about. We are supposed to be playing heroes in these games, but they are games stripped of all moral significance - and we're so used to it that we don't even think about it.
If you look at their response comic, the humour again comes from acheiving (or showing us our own) uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. I won't bother to beat how this joke works to death as I did with the one above.
And finally, the shirt. If you got the first comic, then what's going on with this shirt? The joke is, again, similarly premised on the recognition of cognitive dissonance. If you're hero in an MMO is just neutral and amoral, doing his neutral and amoral quests in a world stripped of meaning beyond collecting quantities of things, aren't the dickwolves the same? If there is no heroism and no good, there is also no evil.
Moreover, positioning the shirt as a sports team booster is genious, really. There's a comment on the inherent violence of sport, and how that is generally accepted in its context as allowable, whereas in the supermarket you won't be looked on so kindly for body-checking a competing shopper out of the way to get to the last box of Oreos. It's also a comment on how ridiculous and potentially offensive many "acceptable" names of sports teams actually are. Chicago Blackhawks? Wow, that's racially offensive. Pittsburgh Pirates? Do YOU support buccaneers that pillage and (incidentally) rape? Why aren't the people who protested the dickwolves shirt protesting the Pirates? By the logic they've employed (wearing a dickwolves shirt = being in favour of dickwolves and their dickwolfery) people who wear Pirates shirts must be in favour of all the shit pirates get up to. That's just ridiculous.
Yet the joke works because IT FEELS LIKE THERE SHOULD BE SOMETHING WRONG with the dickwolves shirt. I mean, they rape people, right? Well, sure - if you mean imaginally vitrual people who inhabit a world in which their rapes are rendered meaningless by OUR VERY CONSTRUCTION OF THEIR WORLD. Well, but a sports team based on such characters is clearly intolerable, right? Nope - as with the Pirates we tolerate team mascots who we could never accept if they were "real" and doing the things they would do if they were around. So it feels like there should be something wrong with the shirt - but if we look around at what we're already doing it's hard to point out exactly what's wrong with it. We are caught in cognitive dissonance where we are able to see products of our culture as absurd - as both right and wrong, both innofensive and offensive, as good and bad (or at least as neutral and bad) at the same time. And this is the space where a lot of humour and comedy live, because it is a space in which we are off-balance.
But, in spite of all this, people got offended. People get offended for all kinds of reasons - maybe they didn't get the joke. Maybe they are incapable of getting the joke. Maybe they have a good psychological reason for not getting the joke. Maybe they don't and they just had a knee-jerk reaction and never went back to check and see if the ACTUAL COMIC or the T-shrit had anything to do with "supporting or enabling rape culture". As far as I'm concerned, the shirt raises awareness that lots of things we are already doing could be viewed as a tacit acceptance of rape and rapists in our culture. (After all, as I said above, if the idea that the person who wears dickwolves shirt = think wolves raping people is great holds any water, then we must accept that the person who wears Pittsburgh Pirates shirt = thinks pirates killing, raping, and stealing from people is great as well - which is not a comfortable conclusion). This shirt pushed people into an uncomfortable space, from which they might look again and reexamine their culture and the things they do from a different point of view - and from there, maybe, have some thoughts. What about singing or listing to rap lyrics that feature exploitation or commodification of women? Is that just entertainment?
I'm really dissapointed, because the dickwolves shirt was a clever way of starting up people's minds - maybe MAKING THEM THINK - maybe making them start converstaions of exactly the kind that people who are against the tacit acceptance of rape or violence in our culture should want. If they ever want that conversation to happen, I hope that they realize that they some people are going to have to put themselves in uncomfortable spaces in order to think through all the implications. And if they are not wiling to let humour play a role in this - when humour is uniquely suited to pushing people to recognize what is absurd in their lives and should have greater scrutiny - then I think they're setting back their cause.
I just want PAX to be a big family get together, like Thanksgiving. Where we all pretend we don't know our uncle drinks too much, and we don't discuss politics because because Dad and Grandpa will fight. Because it's family time and it's important that we all get along dammit.
We're geeks and gamers, and generally good, fun people, and regardless of our views or feelings about a stupid shirt and comic, we should be able to be civil to each other and have a good time.
The Dickwolves comic got its humor not from the dickwolves themselves, but by turning the conventions of MMOs on their heads and make "heroic" acts look callous by comparison. You laughed at the twisted video game logic, not the dickwolves doing their thing. So in essence, the dickwolves drove the joke home, they weren't the joke themselves. Read that way, the comic didn't support the dickwolves.
But the shirt removes that MMO context, and places the joke entirely on the dickwolves. In that case, it does support the dickwolves.
So I can see the difference. At any rate, I'm sure this point has been made dozens of times by now.
I can certainly understand why some folks find the shirt inappropriate, but maybe there's a way to please everybody. Or at least logically please everybody so people don't have as much of a valid reason to complain.
I propose a re-designed dickwolves shirt be introduced along side a 3(?) part comic series illuminating the ordinarily idyllic and not-raping lifestyle of dickwolves.
I was going to respond to the previous Dickwolves thread in Awesome Posts but I might as well do it here. From the perspective of someone who is incredibly biased but has an opinion regardless. I'll make two disclaimers right now:
I thought the original comic was funny.
The t-shirt is not so much in bad taste as is Mike and Jerry's reaction to the controversy.
My girlfriend (edit: a former PA forums member!) was raped twice (six months apart, once by a stranger who followed her home, once by a psychotic ex). Two years later, she still has issues. Trouble sleeping. Flashbacks. She's made a lot of progress since then - a metric fucktonne of progress, even - but she's not out of the woods yet.
She dislikes rape jokes. Really, really dislikes rape jokes. And you can't really blame her for it. Trivializing or making a comedy out of a horrific, traumatizing experience hurts those very people. Take it from me. It's disturbing seeing this sort of effect firsthand.
Yet from time to time she'll also remark offhandedly in casual conversation "That's retarded."
You could argue that she's a hypocrite.
And this is why we as a society need to find a collective place to draw the line in the sand. It's impossible for us to crack down on all kinds of casual commentary - every joke, every wisecrack - fearing someone's hurt feelings, or accidentally triggering a person's PTSD. It just can't be done. Free speech is important, yes; I would argue that language itself is even more so. Turning a blind eye to the fact that "retarded" means something entirely different today than it did even fifty years ago is just silly. Language is dynamic and malleable, and to struggle against its evolution is to ignore what makes us human.
And yet, I'm not going to say to my girlfriend when I get home, "Aww yeah, I raped that final," because it will hurt her.
As a society, I don't think we should be focusing our energy on treading on eggshells around everyone. But I do think we should focus on being compassionate.
And this is why we as a society need to find a collective place to draw the line in the sand.
First off, sorry to hear about your girlfriend's past. That's a terrible thing to have happen to anyone and hope continues to get better.
I totally understand the situation you're in, and yes, I agree that you probably shouldn't be using the expression "I raped [x]", even in the colloquial sense, around her. That's just common sense and common courtesy.
To the same point (to a much lesser extent), I have some very relgious coworkers who get very offended when I take the Lord's name in vain. Around them, I censor myself.
That said, I don't censor myself re: Jesus on the internet. Not out of disrespect for my coworkers, but because I know the social norms of the forums I frequent.
Would I feel like a jerk if my co-workers found some of my forum posts and got offended? Hell no... the language wasn't directed at them and I had a reasonable expectation that they would never see it.
I feel that's an apt analogy for what happened here. PA posted a funny comic about WoW. Kirbybitz, etc got very offended and PA's response was "This is our sense of humor". Having read Kirbybits' blog posts, its very clear she's a "True Believer". Her rant on PA opens with, to paraphrase: "This is human error. Heck, I've accidentally offended people before. But in those cases you apologize profusely and you go educate yourself on The Truth (TM)". I'm not sure there's awhole lot the PA crew could have done to placate her and that's basically that.
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To my original post and to all who have encouraged me to attend PAX regardless: Someone made an analogy that PAX should be like Thanksgiving dinner. To use the same analogy, PAX is starting to feel like dinner at a new girlfriend's where Dad and Granddad are already having an arguement about politics. Sometimes, despite the best of intentions, you just want to wait in the car to ride out some of that BS.
This is not a free speech issue. Nobody, especially not the government, is arguing that Penny Arcade doesn't or shouldn't have the right to make the comic or the shirt.
But just because somebody has the right to do a thing, doesn't mean they should.
Just to clarify, I meant just because somebody has the right to do a thing, doesn't mean they should do that thing.
Agent Cooper on
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
edited February 2011
Reading indepth deconstructions of the hypothetical endorsement or condemnation of imaginary creatures raping people in the context of a joke which somehow may or may not endorse real rape or "rape culture" makes me feel like I've fallen into crazytown.
And this is why we as a society need to find a collective place to draw the line in the sand.
First off, sorry to hear about your girlfriend's past. That's a terrible thing to have happen to anyone and hope continues to get better.
I totally understand the situation you're in, and yes, I agree that you probably shouldn't be using the expression "I raped [x]", even in the colloquial sense, around her. That's just common sense and common courtesy.
To the same point (to a much lesser extent), I have some very relgious coworkers who get very offended when I take the Lord's name in vain. Around them, I censor myself.
That said, I don't censor myself re: Jesus on the internet. Not out of disrespect for my coworkers, but because I know the social norms of the forums I frequent.
Would I feel like a jerk if my co-workers found some of my forum posts and got offended? Hell no... the language wasn't directed at them and I had a reasonable expectation that they would never see it.
I feel that's an apt analogy for what happened here. PA posted a funny comic about WoW. Kirbybitz, etc got very offended and PA's response was "This is our sense of humor". Having read Kirbybits' blog posts, its very clear she's a "True Believer". Her rant on PA opens with, to paraphrase: "This is human error. Heck, I've accidentally offended people before. But in those cases you apologize profusely and you go educate yourself on The Truth (TM)". I'm not sure there's awhole lot the PA crew could have done to placate her and that's basically that.
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To my original post and to all who have encouraged me to attend PAX regardless: Someone made an analogy that PAX should be like Thanksgiving dinner. To use the same analogy, PAX is starting to feel like dinner at a new girlfriend's where Dad and Granddad are already having an arguement about politics. Sometimes, despite the best of intentions, you just want to wait in the car to ride out some of that BS.
I appreciate it, thank you. Without being all self-congratulatory here, I think being in a stable, committed long term relationship with someone who's halfway decent (I'd like to think :P) is what helps her progress and move past it.
People are going to moderate themselves differently in different relationships. I would never, ever, use the word rape as described beforehand in front of my girlfriend, and I don't use it at all, actually, because it's just not cool for other rape victims and it's not part of my vernacular. If she was upset however that she was around someone else who was a stranger to me who made a crass joke about rape, I would share her feelings but I wouldn't hunt them down and slap them on the wrist. It's just not worth it. The hardest judgement calls come from the actions of your friends. My stand-up, honourable friends from high school will cheerfully describe how the Packers are gonna rape the Steelers next week. If they said that in front of my girlfriend, she has enough poise and tolerance to not bitch them out or get upset in front of them, but she'll probably be a little hurt. And in that essence I'm responsible, in a way, for the words my friends use.
I finally broke down and showed all of this hoopla to my feminist, non-gamer, PhD-wielding wife, who gave PA a shot once upon a time, and didn't enjoy it, as it was "too crude" and she didn't get the game references.
She laughed at the comics, looked at the other stuff around the interwebs, and said, "what a bunch of fucking hypocrites. How the hell is this the thing that set people off? Morons."
...I love my wife dearly.
Mozu on
"...Taking an enemy on the battlefield is like a hawk taking a bird. Even though it enters into the midst of a thousand of them, it gives no attention to any bird other than the one that is has first marked." -Yamamoto Tsunetomo
I don't generally make serious posts on PA, nor do I make serious conversation with people in real life. Most any issue I communicate to others is dripping with sarcasm, hyperbole, and forms of humor with veiled pointed criticisms.
I hate censorship, even the kind people claim isn't censorship when someone "voluntarily" obliges. I'm disappointed that all this shit is happening. I like the comic, still do. I think it works on a few levels, which have already been said. I find the point of the comic, about the ridiculousness of MMO quests funny. I find humor in the idea that being "raped to sleep" could be a thing. That joke doesn't work with any other Bad Thing(TM) like murder, or arson, or theft - it works with rape. I find the imagery of wolves with dick limbs hilarious.
At the same time. I understand their position. When Facebook started getting big, all I did was post inappropriate and embarrassing things on my friend's walls. The same kind of crass dialog we have in real life. And it was returned, and things were good. One day a friend started deleting what I would write on his wall. I called him out on it, and he explained that he now had family on there, and coworkers, and had to keep it clean. I thought, "what a fucking sellout."
I completely understand it now, because I begrudgingly accepted family members and co-workers as friends on Facebook. And I've caught myself censoring some other friends who were used to writing some vile, but hilarious stuff. Hell, I even went back and deleted some of the more inappropriate stuff I wrote myself.
I didn't like doing it. I still don't like the fact that I did. But as I was reaching a larger audience, and growing out of the comfortable clique I was a part of, the compartmentalization I could afford before started to crumble.
You are killing independent George.
So I understand Gabe and Tycho's thoughts. Child's Play and PAX are doing what they wanted - becoming bigger than themselves, and they need these to be accepted by a wider audience than those who view the comics, or read the news posts.
As I said, I understand their position. I know they hate doing this too. And just as I understand it, I equally disagree with it. But that's the point, I can understand why something happens, and still disagree.
With that said, here's my take on the shirt, which is different from the views I have on the comic. The shirt was fine.
It was fine in the same way that when I was a kid, I bought a Freddy Krueger glove, with plastic finger blades. Was I fostering a culture of children murdering, and possibly pedophilia? No, because it's an icon that people get attached to, that doesn't necessarily literally equate to all the bad things a character does. It's the same for all movie monsters - people like the Aliens and the Predators more than the victims. I think Pyramid Head is completely awesome. If I had the time and skill I would have built a costume for Halloween and gone as him. Do I support the rape of four-legged animated mannequins? Do I march for the right to tear someone's skin clean off their body?
I guarantee none of the people that bought the shirts, or find something to like in the idea of a wolf with dick limbs, would say rape is okay. You can still like a fictional character, and dislike the bad things they do. That's what makes truly great villains so fun.
Like most long posts I do I probably lost my train of thought somewhere in the middle and went on a tangent.
TL: DR I understand the official Penny Arcade response to remove the shirts. I disagree with it, but I've done something similar (by no means equal in scale though), and I hated doing that too, but I understand why I and others have to do it sometimes. Also, enjoying a product, whether it's a toy, shirt, or poster of a fictional character that does terrible things does not make a statement to the world that you support those bad things.
So I understand Gabe and Tycho's thoughts. Child's Play and PAX are doing what they wanted - becoming bigger than themselves, and they need these to be accepted by a wider audience than those who view the comics, or read the news posts.
I think this does a good job of summarizing my own thoughts on the Dickwolves debacle. Gabe & Tycho have worked hard to build a brand greater than the Penny Arcade comic. I'm disappointed that they've been unable to manage PR related to the comic/t-shirt for the greater good of PAX.
TL;DR edited from the internets
I feel really uncomfortable with this decision. To me it is like they've given up the war. Like this is the very first step towards PA becoming bland and part of mainstream culture. Part of my loyalty towards Penny Arcade has always been the fact that they were willing to stand up and take the hate, no more who they offended, as long as they got there point across. I don't know if that is true anymore. When someone next complains about the murder, violence or even the occasional reference towards pedophilia, are they going to acquiesce to even more unreasonable demands?
Five years ago, PA would have laughed in the faces of these hypocritical, over-sensitive imbeciles. Now I fear that our shining lights are dulling.
(After all, as I said above, if the idea that the person who wears dickwolves shirt = think wolves raping people is great holds any water, then we must accept that the person who wears Pittsburgh Pirates shirt = thinks pirates killing, raping, and stealing from people is great as well - which is not a comfortable conclusion)
You know, the moment Johnny Depp or Kermit the Frog plays a dickwolf in a light-hearted comedy romp, I'll start to consider your point.
Or maybe when we have a 'talk like a dickwolf' day.
No, we don't know how dickwolves talk. All we know about them is that they:
a) Rape people to sleep; and
b) their every limb is an erect, rape-ready penis.
There is no cultural context for them outside those two known facts. That's the point. That's why people got upset about a shirt supporting a team of them. I think your assertion that they should dig the humour in someone mocking their real-life trauma, and they're setting their cause back by not doing so, is beyond ignorant, solipsistic and selfish. It's skirting the boardlines sociopathy.
What's especially damning is that Mike isn't just not telling his "angry fans" to back the fuck off and to stop making physical threats at people, he's making jokes about the whole thing and laughing about it.
PA will go out of their way to make an extra strip and a whole T-shirt to mock people who were uncomfortable about their joke. I guess when their fans threaten physical violence and attack others though, that's no biggie.
See that stuff? That's not ok. It's horrifying, disgusting, and abhorrent. It's something that shouldn't be happening. It's something that could so easily be curtailed by a single message on this site of "Hey guys knock it off." And it's something that's not going to be curtailed in the slightest, and that's what so terrifying.
Do you believe the people posting that aren't 4channers trolling the ever living fuck out of the situation, and that any intervention on behalf of anyone would stop it?
Like it's absolutely, 100% inappropriate on the part of the posters, but this is way out of the hands of anyone now.
Do you believe the people posting that aren't 4channers trolling the ever living fuck out of the situation, and that any intervention on behalf of anyone would stop it?
Like it's absolutely, 100% inappropriate on the part of the posters, but this is way out of the hands of anyone now.
Again, a simple blurb on the front page saying "Cut this shit out" alone would help.
ProfCirno, that's some reprehensible shit happening on Kirbybits' blog, but I think you are going pretty far out of your way to place the onus on Penny-Arcade. The internet is full of opportunists who jump at the chance to fan the flames, and in that regard Kirbybits is feeling the brunt of it. It's shitty, and I sympathize, but it's only the fault of people making those posts.
Please be mindful of the accusations you are tossing around when you add to the discussion.
I call bullshit on the idea that simply using the word "rape" in a joke in any way diminishes the gravity of actual rape. What exactly is supposed to be going on in our brains? "I heard the word rape and shortly after I laughed at something. Rape must be funny!"
No. People are not Pavlov's fucking dog.
You might as well argue that this comic will endanger people by making them less cautious around real wolves because it placed fictional wolves (of a kind) in a humorous context.
Now I can completely get that this was a joke that would offend some people. I think feeling uncomfortable when someone tells a joke with the word "rape" in it is a reasonable reaction. Even sending Mike and Jerry an e-mail letting them know how you feel and asking them to not use it again is reasonable, if you feel strongly enough. But if you're going to argue that any jokes with the word "rape" in them cause people to take real rape less seriously, you'd better be able to cite some cognitive studies to back that up. Until then, it's an illogical and unproven assertion and my call of bullshit stands.
But if you're going to argue that any jokes with the word "rape" in them cause people to take real rape less seriously, you'd better be able to cite some cognitive studies to back that up. Until then, it's an illogical and unproven assertion and my call of bullshit stands.
This isn't a TL;DR issue. It takes understanding, patience, an open mind and listening to other people without talking. If you're not capable of that, then, well, call BS all you like. Empty cans and all that.
TimeCruiserMikePast Organizer of the West Coast Train TripSan Fernando ValleyRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
aw nuts . . . i was going to buy a Dickwolves t-shirt as soon as i got my tax return.(well, right after i bought my PAXTrain tickets) I am so very disappointed. A little warning would have been nice. I just hope this doesn't become a thing. I don't want to see shirts disappearing from the store just because some humorless ass hats are offended by them. Nothing offends me more than censorship of any kind.(unless it's ironic censorship, done specifically for a joke.)
But if you're going to argue that any jokes with the word "rape" in them cause people to take real rape less seriously, you'd better be able to cite some cognitive studies to back that up. Until then, it's an illogical and unproven assertion and my call of bullshit stands.
This isn't a TL;DR issue. It takes understanding, patience, an open mind and listening to other people without talking. If you're not capable of that, then, well, call BS all you like. Empty cans and all that.
Nothing in those contradicts anything I said, and anyway something being written in a blog doesn't make it true.
By the way I do not for one second dispute the existence of rape culture. I simply argued that there was no evidential or rational basis for asserting that using the word "rape" in a joke - not as the punchline, just in the joke - could in any way diminish a person's negative response to the real thing.
Now I can completely get that this was a joke that would offend some people. I think feeling uncomfortable when someone tells a joke with the word "rape" in it is a reasonable reaction. Even sending Mike and Jerry an e-mail letting them know how you feel and asking them to not use it again is reasonable, if you feel strongly enough. But if you're going to argue that any jokes with the word "rape" in them cause people to take real rape less seriously, you'd better be able to cite some cognitive studies to back that up.
Okay, then!
Accession Number Peer Reviewed Journal: 1998-04309-004. Title The enjoyment of sexist humor, rape attitudes, and relationship aggression in college students. Publication Date May 1998 Year of Publication 1998 Author Ryan, Kathryn M; Kanjorski, Jeanne. Source Sex Roles. Vol.38(9-10), May 1998, pp. 743-756. Abstract Tested Freud's (1905/1960) theory that sexist humor may be associated with hostility toward women and extended previous research showing a link between hostile humor and aggression. 72 male and 227 female college students (approximately 92% White, 5% African American, and 3% other minorities) rated 10 sexist jokes on their perceived funniness. Results showed that the enjoyment of sexist humor was positively correlated with rape-related attitudes and beliefs, the self-reported likelihood of forcing sex, and psychological, physical, and sexual aggression in men. For women, the enjoyment of sexist humor was only positively correlated with Adversarial Sexual Beliefs and Acceptance of Interpersonal Violence. Women also found the jokes to be less enjoyable, less acceptable, and more offensive than the men, but they were not significantly less likely to tell the jokes.
Accession Number Peer Reviewed Journal: 2010-22675-010. Title Exposure to sexist humor and rape proclivity: The moderator effect of aversiveness ratings. [References]. Publication Date Dec 2010 Year of Publication 2010 Author Romero-Sanchez, Monica; Duran, Mercedes; Carretero-Dios, Hugo; Megias, Jesus L; Moya, Miguel. Source Journal of Interpersonal Violence. Vol.25(12), Dec 2010, pp. 2339-2350. Abstract The aim of this study is to explore the effect of exposure to sexist humor about women on men's self-reported rape proclivity. Earlier studies have shown that exposure to this type of humor increases rape proclivity and that funniness responses to jokes are a key element to consider. However, the role of aversiveness responses has not been studied. In a between-group design, 109 male university students are randomly exposed to sexist or nonsexist jokes. Participants are asked to rate the jokes according to their degree of funniness and aversiveness. Participants' levels of hostile and benevolent sexism were also measured. Results about the relationship between sexist attitudes and sexist humor and the relationship between sexist attitudes and rape proclivity are consistent with those of earlier studies. However, exposure to sexist humor affects rape proclivity only when aversiveness shown to this type of humor is low. The results are discussed in the light of the prejudiced norm theory.
Unfortunately there is no comparable stream of research (that I can find) that accounts for the possibility of male victims; it's strictly with a female victim view. But there is an actual stream, here; I could have added more but it would have simply been more of the same.
tl;dr version: Exposure to sexist jokes, even as mild as disparaging women's intelligence, not only increased the behaviors that signify a greater risk of rape, but they admitted it outright to the researchers. The scale used is quite blunt and asks questions along the lines of whether the participant believes that certain people "deserve" to be raped. And, of course, the jokes presented to the subject pools were not all as mild as disparaging women's intelligence. Present the subjects with jokes (that, yes, were presented as humor and not any sort of persuasive argument) that dismisses consideration for women's bodily integrity and hostility toward women increased.
But if you're going to argue that any jokes with the word "rape" in them cause people to take real rape less seriously, you'd better be able to cite some cognitive studies to back that up. Until then, it's an illogical and unproven assertion and my call of bullshit stands.
This isn't a TL;DR issue. It takes understanding, patience, an open mind and listening to other people without talking. If you're not capable of that, then, well, call BS all you like. Empty cans and all that.
Nothing in those contradicts anything I said, and anyway something being written in a blog doesn't make it true.
By the way I do not for one second dispute the existence of rape culture. I simply argued that there was no evidential or rational basis for asserting that using the word "rape" in a joke - not as the punchline, just in the joke - could in any way diminish a person's negative response to the real thing.
Using rape in an off-hand way, as part of a joke, contributes to rape culture. Rape culture leads people to not take rape seriously and to blame the victim, among other things. Thus people's response to the 'real thing' isn't, "OMG that's a terrible thing to happen to someone!", but instead is, "well, the way she was dressed she was asking for it", or, "if she didn't want sex with him, she shouldn't have gone home with him", or, "she's just ashamed of having sex with him and is calling rape to save her face". (Gendered pronouns used to keep the examples simple and direct.)
You presumably have studies and suchlike--providing evidential or a rational basis--backing your claim that it doesn't..?
Posts
Removing the shirt from the store was no doubt a hard decision. However, I support it for one single reason: Wheaton's Rule ("Don't be a dick."). Yes, people should have the right to wear their Dickwolves shirts. And Penny Arcade has the right to sell Dickwolve shirts. But wearing the shirt at PAX has to be considered as being dick on at least the smallest level. And, I believe selling them is the same, at this point in time.
You can say you are wearing the shirt in defiance of censorship, and again you have the right to do so. But you can not at the same time tell someone they can't be offended by what it has come to represent.
The only way to remedy the issue is to remove the Dickwolves = rapists connotation. Even if you don't believe they do, it is there. (I firmly believe the Dickwolves as a brand have been victimized here). But until then, there will always be a negative stigma attached to them, whether you like it or not.
Wearing the shirt in protest of censorship, while a noble endeavor, WILL hurt people belonging to your very own community. Out of respect of their feelings, I ask that you understand their views, and please not wear the shirt at PAX until the Dickwolve name can be cleansed.
This is my humble plea for more Dickwolve comics, preferably of them doing good things. Because Dickwolves are funny.
Oh, that's cool. So the psychological problems people experience as a result of rape, and that can be triggered by a word or phrase or anything else just as small and harmless, screw 'em, eh? They're, what, probably just faking those psychological problems. Y'know, for the attention. I mean, the idea that something you say or do could possibly have a negative impact on someone else is just beyond far-fetched, beyond fantasy. And you being offended by the shirt being removed is totally comparable to suffering from PTSD that can be triggered by words or actions or something like that. Totally the same thing. The fact that you can't buy a Dickwolves shirt rules your life. You can't watch TV at certain times of day because of it. There are only a few places you can go on the internet without having tormenting flashbacks of trying to buy the shirt and getting a 404 error. You can't leave the house because you're terrified someone will follow you home and remove the Dickwolves shirt you've already brought from your drawers. And you can't speak to your family, because they were there when you got that 404 and seeing them brings it all back...
As has been pointed out before, this has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Censorship is the government actively denying your right to a voice. This is a private company making a business decision to protect their brand. If you can't see the difference, than damn, you got problems.
Let me not mince words here- the original comic and the response comic to which this controversy draw were, and aren't the issue. If they seem to be, or were made to appear as such, those individuals who attempted to draw those conclusions were being disingenuous at best, and outright manipulative at worst.
Let us step back a second and consider these two comics, first of all.
You initially had the framework of the joke- a man is in a terrible position (a slave who is raped to sleep by dickwolves, nightly) and the humor comes from the structure of an MMO. Player characters will often leave "the sixth slave" because they freed slaves 1 though 5.
People were upset (and most likely incorrectly so!) at the phrase "raped to sleep by dickwolves"...consider the response comic, which ended with this line
"Go, and rape no more".
All is well and good, there is no endorsement of rape as anything but a framework for the joke. Additionally, rapists are heartily denounced as "the worst".
But then consider the implications of making a t-shirt, in the graphical style of sports jerseys, that features the word "dickwolves".
What do we know about dickwolves up to this point?
Back to the first comic- a dickwolf is someone that "rapes you to sleep at night"
given the iconography of this shirt logo, you would be daft to not draw the aforementioned parallels to the logos of popular sports teams
Why would one wear the shirt of the St Louis Rams? Unless you are living under a rock, the implication is that you support this team, these "Rams".
Now then, if one is wearing a shirt that says "Dickwolves", with a stylized wolf, it is assumed that the wearer supports these "Dickwolves"
Back to what we know about dickwolves....dickwolves rape people. That is what dickwolves do. Not fruit, not some abstraction, but people. The only time a dickwolf has been featured on this site, it is referred to as something that "rapes you to sleep."
Thusly, the shirt is (whether it intended to be or not) an icon that brands the wearer of supporting those creatures that rape prisoners to sleep.
And people are having a problem understanding why this could be extremely offensive, and well within the boundaries of necessary censorship?
I would hope that there would be no one at PAX wearing a shirt that says "I rape people to sleep"....and yet the dickwolves shirt, by its very nature says that very thing, or at least says that you support something that rapes people to sleep.
Sorry guys, making a "dickwolves" shirt was and is a bad idea. Own up to it, as our Glorious Overlords have and get over it.
Sometimes your words can hurt people, whether you mean to or not, and the point of this con (and their comics and products, I suppose, given the censorship on the "Internet Fuckwad" shirt) is for everyone to have a good time, not to incite people or leave anyone with long-term hurt feelings.
The part that bugs me the most about this whole thing is really that they caved to people complaining.
"Don't be a dick" has to swing both ways, complaining to such an extent that they pull the shirt falls into a certain behavior type that might describe as contrary to what PAX is "about".
I know that Gabe has a Christian faith (at least, from what we know of the comics), so I know that all of the Jesus tees are done as gags, and not as heresy, but it's easy to imagine some Christian gamers getting up in arms by shirts like "Jesus is My Guild Leader" and "Jesus is F'ing Metal". These shirts could be viewed as an afront to their faith and their belief in the Mesiah, better get rid of them or some people at PAX might be uncomfortable.
"A Rhombus Is The Kind of Rectangle a Bitch Would Draw"... if I wanted to, I could read some strong sexist implications into this otherwise hilarious shirt, better get rid of that one too.
For that matter, I saw some pretty violent games being demo'd at PAX last year (Red Dead, Mafia II, etc)... they might make certain people feel uncomfortable, make sure to only have "E" rated games this year please.
I'm reminded of a Stephen Colbert bit where he talks about the fact that once you give up something, it's gone forever. In his example it was civil liberties, once you give one up, it's gone. In this instance, it's integrity. By letting the "vocal minority" win, you've given power to those who would complain about every little thing that might offend. You've told them that it's ok to complain, because if you do it enough, you'll get your way.
Scott Kurtz got pretty lewd in his panel last year, I saw some people cringe at his off-the-wall humour maybe he shouldn't be invited this year?
I'm not saying it's going to get to that point, but they've still set a dangerous precedent with this DickWolves thing.
PAX East Unboxing Parody
I appreciate the thought, I really do, but I'm afraid I wasn't really referencing anything in particular. I was just trying to make the point that someone who hasn't been raped has no idea what it is like to be on the other side. Assuming they do is like assuming you know how it feels to have your tail minced, when you've never had a tail in your damned life. Telling people they're over-reacting is like telling the cat it's over-reacting when you mince its tail--how the fark would you know how much it hurts to have your tail minced? Shut up and listen to the damned cat! I had a cat crawling down my shoulder at the time. Maybe I was distracted.
You shouldn't stay away from PAX because of this. It'll be a minor problem at worst.
This is also an important issue- and I agree with this assessment completely.
A thousand times, yes.
Also, not very funny.
Absolutely right. I erred, and I apologise for it. I'm still learning the art of thinking properly before posting, it appears...
Okay, let's look again at the original comic. You're quite correct - the humour in the comic comes from the fact that it's making fun of the quest structure in MMOs - or really RPGs more generally. They are pointing out something in these games that is funny. But what is the joke, exactly?
Well, we've got a "Hero". The hero has a quest - save some slaves from tortured imprisonment. That sounds heroic, right? This is suposed to be the driving story convention of games like this - you are a hero, and you go around completing heroic quests, righting wrongs, doing good, and so on. As the person who plays a game, you are supposed to be playing the role of a "Hero". But the comic points out that the very mechanic that underlies this simulation of heroism is structurally amoral - as a video game must quantify your success in a quest in order to assess wether or not you have completed your obective, goodness and heroism themselves become driven by numbers. The game does not care about the value of the lives of characters that you save - if it tells you that you need to save five slaves, then you just need to collect that quantity of thing and you're done. They have no individual value - even if you save four, you still fail the quest as if you had saved none. And if there are more, the game doesn't care - success is sucess and failure is failure. Pure, black-and-white, and easily coded into a program.
So, look, you're playing a game where you're nominally supposed to be playing as a "Hero" - but the imaginary world that you're playing in is not one where you can find real goodness or heroism in your actions, as the software arbiter determining "good" and "complete" only cares about numbers and quantifyable acheivements. And as the person playing the game, you must recognize on some level that these 5 slave NPCs that you're "saving" are regarded by the game as on par with the six crisp basilisk urethra's you had to collect the day before. You are just grinding - you are just working your way through mechanical challenges. You cannot regard the slaves as any more valuable than other commodities.
The thing about the joke is that it is supposed to be unsettling - it is funny because it takes you outside of your comfort area and shows you something about yourself that you didn't see before, because in the joke it is presented in a new light, or from a new point of view. Why are we playing games built around heroism in which heroism is so spectacularly deflated into a meaningless grind? It's absurd - and the absurdity is funny.
Now, it's true that things are exagerated to bring out this grain of truth in the joke - the tortures of the slave are made particularly vile (raped to sleep by dickwolves, roused by blows). But when we laugh, we laugh at ourselves - that isn't actually IN a video game, but couldn't it be? Is it any different from the other violent and disturbing things that occur in our video games all the time? And if it was, would it even shock us out of our stupor? I mean, after all, we know we're playing a game, and we know it's not real. But more than that, we know that our characters themselves inhabit lifeless and absurd worlds in which rescuing 5 slaves means success and goodness, 4 or less failure, and any more than 5 are meaningless and unrecognized by the game world. The whole way in which our Hero's world WORKS does not make any moral sense, so why not raped by dickwolves? Isn't that where we're heading by making our virtual worlds so empty of real value?
The tension and discomfort in this comic is what drives the humour. It is absurd and shocking - but it is presented to us in a way that shows us that we as people are used to being complicit in just such absurdities. We know that we should be shocked, and yet we are used to working in such a way that we wouldn't be.
So look, if you actually sit back and analyze how this comic works, you see that its whole point is to make us uncomfortable with the torture and rape of the slave, while at the same time showing us that we're inconsistent - in the MMO world, they're just collectable objects that we wouldn't think twice about. We are supposed to be playing heroes in these games, but they are games stripped of all moral significance - and we're so used to it that we don't even think about it.
If you look at their response comic, the humour again comes from acheiving (or showing us our own) uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. I won't bother to beat how this joke works to death as I did with the one above.
And finally, the shirt. If you got the first comic, then what's going on with this shirt? The joke is, again, similarly premised on the recognition of cognitive dissonance. If you're hero in an MMO is just neutral and amoral, doing his neutral and amoral quests in a world stripped of meaning beyond collecting quantities of things, aren't the dickwolves the same? If there is no heroism and no good, there is also no evil.
Moreover, positioning the shirt as a sports team booster is genious, really. There's a comment on the inherent violence of sport, and how that is generally accepted in its context as allowable, whereas in the supermarket you won't be looked on so kindly for body-checking a competing shopper out of the way to get to the last box of Oreos. It's also a comment on how ridiculous and potentially offensive many "acceptable" names of sports teams actually are. Chicago Blackhawks? Wow, that's racially offensive. Pittsburgh Pirates? Do YOU support buccaneers that pillage and (incidentally) rape? Why aren't the people who protested the dickwolves shirt protesting the Pirates? By the logic they've employed (wearing a dickwolves shirt = being in favour of dickwolves and their dickwolfery) people who wear Pirates shirts must be in favour of all the shit pirates get up to. That's just ridiculous.
Yet the joke works because IT FEELS LIKE THERE SHOULD BE SOMETHING WRONG with the dickwolves shirt. I mean, they rape people, right? Well, sure - if you mean imaginally vitrual people who inhabit a world in which their rapes are rendered meaningless by OUR VERY CONSTRUCTION OF THEIR WORLD. Well, but a sports team based on such characters is clearly intolerable, right? Nope - as with the Pirates we tolerate team mascots who we could never accept if they were "real" and doing the things they would do if they were around. So it feels like there should be something wrong with the shirt - but if we look around at what we're already doing it's hard to point out exactly what's wrong with it. We are caught in cognitive dissonance where we are able to see products of our culture as absurd - as both right and wrong, both innofensive and offensive, as good and bad (or at least as neutral and bad) at the same time. And this is the space where a lot of humour and comedy live, because it is a space in which we are off-balance.
But, in spite of all this, people got offended. People get offended for all kinds of reasons - maybe they didn't get the joke. Maybe they are incapable of getting the joke. Maybe they have a good psychological reason for not getting the joke. Maybe they don't and they just had a knee-jerk reaction and never went back to check and see if the ACTUAL COMIC or the T-shrit had anything to do with "supporting or enabling rape culture". As far as I'm concerned, the shirt raises awareness that lots of things we are already doing could be viewed as a tacit acceptance of rape and rapists in our culture. (After all, as I said above, if the idea that the person who wears dickwolves shirt = think wolves raping people is great holds any water, then we must accept that the person who wears Pittsburgh Pirates shirt = thinks pirates killing, raping, and stealing from people is great as well - which is not a comfortable conclusion). This shirt pushed people into an uncomfortable space, from which they might look again and reexamine their culture and the things they do from a different point of view - and from there, maybe, have some thoughts. What about singing or listing to rap lyrics that feature exploitation or commodification of women? Is that just entertainment?
I'm really dissapointed, because the dickwolves shirt was a clever way of starting up people's minds - maybe MAKING THEM THINK - maybe making them start converstaions of exactly the kind that people who are against the tacit acceptance of rape or violence in our culture should want. If they ever want that conversation to happen, I hope that they realize that they some people are going to have to put themselves in uncomfortable spaces in order to think through all the implications. And if they are not wiling to let humour play a role in this - when humour is uniquely suited to pushing people to recognize what is absurd in their lives and should have greater scrutiny - then I think they're setting back their cause.
We're geeks and gamers, and generally good, fun people, and regardless of our views or feelings about a stupid shirt and comic, we should be able to be civil to each other and have a good time.
The Dickwolves comic got its humor not from the dickwolves themselves, but by turning the conventions of MMOs on their heads and make "heroic" acts look callous by comparison. You laughed at the twisted video game logic, not the dickwolves doing their thing. So in essence, the dickwolves drove the joke home, they weren't the joke themselves. Read that way, the comic didn't support the dickwolves.
But the shirt removes that MMO context, and places the joke entirely on the dickwolves. In that case, it does support the dickwolves.
So I can see the difference. At any rate, I'm sure this point has been made dozens of times by now.
I propose a re-designed dickwolves shirt be introduced along side a 3(?) part comic series illuminating the ordinarily idyllic and not-raping lifestyle of dickwolves.
My girlfriend (edit: a former PA forums member!) was raped twice (six months apart, once by a stranger who followed her home, once by a psychotic ex). Two years later, she still has issues. Trouble sleeping. Flashbacks. She's made a lot of progress since then - a metric fucktonne of progress, even - but she's not out of the woods yet.
She dislikes rape jokes. Really, really dislikes rape jokes. And you can't really blame her for it. Trivializing or making a comedy out of a horrific, traumatizing experience hurts those very people. Take it from me. It's disturbing seeing this sort of effect firsthand.
Yet from time to time she'll also remark offhandedly in casual conversation "That's retarded."
You could argue that she's a hypocrite.
And this is why we as a society need to find a collective place to draw the line in the sand. It's impossible for us to crack down on all kinds of casual commentary - every joke, every wisecrack - fearing someone's hurt feelings, or accidentally triggering a person's PTSD. It just can't be done. Free speech is important, yes; I would argue that language itself is even more so. Turning a blind eye to the fact that "retarded" means something entirely different today than it did even fifty years ago is just silly. Language is dynamic and malleable, and to struggle against its evolution is to ignore what makes us human.
And yet, I'm not going to say to my girlfriend when I get home, "Aww yeah, I raped that final," because it will hurt her.
As a society, I don't think we should be focusing our energy on treading on eggshells around everyone. But I do think we should focus on being compassionate.
First off, sorry to hear about your girlfriend's past. That's a terrible thing to have happen to anyone and hope continues to get better.
I totally understand the situation you're in, and yes, I agree that you probably shouldn't be using the expression "I raped [x]", even in the colloquial sense, around her. That's just common sense and common courtesy.
To the same point (to a much lesser extent), I have some very relgious coworkers who get very offended when I take the Lord's name in vain. Around them, I censor myself.
That said, I don't censor myself re: Jesus on the internet. Not out of disrespect for my coworkers, but because I know the social norms of the forums I frequent.
Would I feel like a jerk if my co-workers found some of my forum posts and got offended? Hell no... the language wasn't directed at them and I had a reasonable expectation that they would never see it.
I feel that's an apt analogy for what happened here. PA posted a funny comic about WoW. Kirbybitz, etc got very offended and PA's response was "This is our sense of humor". Having read Kirbybits' blog posts, its very clear she's a "True Believer". Her rant on PA opens with, to paraphrase: "This is human error. Heck, I've accidentally offended people before. But in those cases you apologize profusely and you go educate yourself on The Truth (TM)". I'm not sure there's awhole lot the PA crew could have done to placate her and that's basically that.
************
To my original post and to all who have encouraged me to attend PAX regardless: Someone made an analogy that PAX should be like Thanksgiving dinner. To use the same analogy, PAX is starting to feel like dinner at a new girlfriend's where Dad and Granddad are already having an arguement about politics. Sometimes, despite the best of intentions, you just want to wait in the car to ride out some of that BS.
But just because somebody has the right to do a thing, doesn't mean they should.
I appreciate it, thank you. Without being all self-congratulatory here, I think being in a stable, committed long term relationship with someone who's halfway decent (I'd like to think :P) is what helps her progress and move past it.
People are going to moderate themselves differently in different relationships. I would never, ever, use the word rape as described beforehand in front of my girlfriend, and I don't use it at all, actually, because it's just not cool for other rape victims and it's not part of my vernacular. If she was upset however that she was around someone else who was a stranger to me who made a crass joke about rape, I would share her feelings but I wouldn't hunt them down and slap them on the wrist. It's just not worth it. The hardest judgement calls come from the actions of your friends. My stand-up, honourable friends from high school will cheerfully describe how the Packers are gonna rape the Steelers next week. If they said that in front of my girlfriend, she has enough poise and tolerance to not bitch them out or get upset in front of them, but she'll probably be a little hurt. And in that essence I'm responsible, in a way, for the words my friends use.
It's all about moderation
She laughed at the comics, looked at the other stuff around the interwebs, and said, "what a bunch of fucking hypocrites. How the hell is this the thing that set people off? Morons."
...I love my wife dearly.
I hate censorship, even the kind people claim isn't censorship when someone "voluntarily" obliges. I'm disappointed that all this shit is happening. I like the comic, still do. I think it works on a few levels, which have already been said. I find the point of the comic, about the ridiculousness of MMO quests funny. I find humor in the idea that being "raped to sleep" could be a thing. That joke doesn't work with any other Bad Thing(TM) like murder, or arson, or theft - it works with rape. I find the imagery of wolves with dick limbs hilarious.
At the same time. I understand their position. When Facebook started getting big, all I did was post inappropriate and embarrassing things on my friend's walls. The same kind of crass dialog we have in real life. And it was returned, and things were good. One day a friend started deleting what I would write on his wall. I called him out on it, and he explained that he now had family on there, and coworkers, and had to keep it clean. I thought, "what a fucking sellout."
I completely understand it now, because I begrudgingly accepted family members and co-workers as friends on Facebook. And I've caught myself censoring some other friends who were used to writing some vile, but hilarious stuff. Hell, I even went back and deleted some of the more inappropriate stuff I wrote myself.
I didn't like doing it. I still don't like the fact that I did. But as I was reaching a larger audience, and growing out of the comfortable clique I was a part of, the compartmentalization I could afford before started to crumble.
You are killing independent George.
So I understand Gabe and Tycho's thoughts. Child's Play and PAX are doing what they wanted - becoming bigger than themselves, and they need these to be accepted by a wider audience than those who view the comics, or read the news posts.
As I said, I understand their position. I know they hate doing this too. And just as I understand it, I equally disagree with it. But that's the point, I can understand why something happens, and still disagree.
With that said, here's my take on the shirt, which is different from the views I have on the comic. The shirt was fine.
It was fine in the same way that when I was a kid, I bought a Freddy Krueger glove, with plastic finger blades. Was I fostering a culture of children murdering, and possibly pedophilia? No, because it's an icon that people get attached to, that doesn't necessarily literally equate to all the bad things a character does. It's the same for all movie monsters - people like the Aliens and the Predators more than the victims. I think Pyramid Head is completely awesome. If I had the time and skill I would have built a costume for Halloween and gone as him. Do I support the rape of four-legged animated mannequins? Do I march for the right to tear someone's skin clean off their body?
I guarantee none of the people that bought the shirts, or find something to like in the idea of a wolf with dick limbs, would say rape is okay. You can still like a fictional character, and dislike the bad things they do. That's what makes truly great villains so fun.
Like most long posts I do I probably lost my train of thought somewhere in the middle and went on a tangent.
TL: DR I understand the official Penny Arcade response to remove the shirts. I disagree with it, but I've done something similar (by no means equal in scale though), and I hated doing that too, but I understand why I and others have to do it sometimes. Also, enjoying a product, whether it's a toy, shirt, or poster of a fictional character that does terrible things does not make a statement to the world that you support those bad things.
TL;DR edited from the internets
Five years ago, PA would have laughed in the faces of these hypocritical, over-sensitive imbeciles. Now I fear that our shining lights are dulling.
You know, the moment Johnny Depp or Kermit the Frog plays a dickwolf in a light-hearted comedy romp, I'll start to consider your point.
Or maybe when we have a 'talk like a dickwolf' day.
No, we don't know how dickwolves talk. All we know about them is that they:
a) Rape people to sleep; and
b) their every limb is an erect, rape-ready penis.
There is no cultural context for them outside those two known facts. That's the point. That's why people got upset about a shirt supporting a team of them. I think your assertion that they should dig the humour in someone mocking their real-life trauma, and they're setting their cause back by not doing so, is beyond ignorant, solipsistic and selfish. It's skirting the boardlines sociopathy.
Ever wonder what happens when a lady says rape isn't funny?
http://twitpic.com/3vcz4d
http://twitpic.com/3vczpu
PA will go out of their way to make an extra strip and a whole T-shirt to mock people who were uncomfortable about their joke. I guess when their fans threaten physical violence and attack others though, that's no biggie.
See that stuff? That's not ok. It's horrifying, disgusting, and abhorrent. It's something that shouldn't be happening. It's something that could so easily be curtailed by a single message on this site of "Hey guys knock it off." And it's something that's not going to be curtailed in the slightest, and that's what so terrifying.
Like it's absolutely, 100% inappropriate on the part of the posters, but this is way out of the hands of anyone now.
Again, a simple blurb on the front page saying "Cut this shit out" alone would help.
Please be mindful of the accusations you are tossing around when you add to the discussion.
EDIT: Too slow on the draw!
No. People are not Pavlov's fucking dog.
You might as well argue that this comic will endanger people by making them less cautious around real wolves because it placed fictional wolves (of a kind) in a humorous context.
Now I can completely get that this was a joke that would offend some people. I think feeling uncomfortable when someone tells a joke with the word "rape" in it is a reasonable reaction. Even sending Mike and Jerry an e-mail letting them know how you feel and asking them to not use it again is reasonable, if you feel strongly enough. But if you're going to argue that any jokes with the word "rape" in them cause people to take real rape less seriously, you'd better be able to cite some cognitive studies to back that up. Until then, it's an illogical and unproven assertion and my call of bullshit stands.
Start here, here or here.
This isn't a TL;DR issue. It takes understanding, patience, an open mind and listening to other people without talking. If you're not capable of that, then, well, call BS all you like. Empty cans and all that.
{Fondly remembers the PAXTrain}
Nothing in those contradicts anything I said, and anyway something being written in a blog doesn't make it true.
By the way I do not for one second dispute the existence of rape culture. I simply argued that there was no evidential or rational basis for asserting that using the word "rape" in a joke - not as the punchline, just in the joke - could in any way diminish a person's negative response to the real thing.
Okay, then!
Accession Number Peer Reviewed Journal: 1998-04309-004.
Title The enjoyment of sexist humor, rape attitudes, and relationship aggression in college students.
Publication Date May 1998
Year of Publication 1998
Author Ryan, Kathryn M; Kanjorski, Jeanne.
Source Sex Roles. Vol.38(9-10), May 1998, pp. 743-756.
Abstract Tested Freud's (1905/1960) theory that sexist humor may be associated with hostility toward women and extended previous research showing a link between hostile humor and aggression. 72 male and 227 female college students (approximately 92% White, 5% African American, and 3% other minorities) rated 10 sexist jokes on their perceived funniness. Results showed that the enjoyment of sexist humor was positively correlated with rape-related attitudes and beliefs, the self-reported likelihood of forcing sex, and psychological, physical, and sexual aggression in men. For women, the enjoyment of sexist humor was only positively correlated with Adversarial Sexual Beliefs and Acceptance of Interpersonal Violence. Women also found the jokes to be less enjoyable, less acceptable, and more offensive than the men, but they were not significantly less likely to tell the jokes.
Accession Number Peer Reviewed Journal: 2010-22675-010.
Title Exposure to sexist humor and rape proclivity: The moderator effect of aversiveness ratings. [References].
Publication Date Dec 2010
Year of Publication 2010
Author Romero-Sanchez, Monica; Duran, Mercedes; Carretero-Dios, Hugo; Megias, Jesus L; Moya, Miguel.
Source Journal of Interpersonal Violence. Vol.25(12), Dec 2010, pp. 2339-2350.
Abstract The aim of this study is to explore the effect of exposure to sexist humor about women on men's self-reported rape proclivity. Earlier studies have shown that exposure to this type of humor increases rape proclivity and that funniness responses to jokes are a key element to consider. However, the role of aversiveness responses has not been studied. In a between-group design, 109 male university students are randomly exposed to sexist or nonsexist jokes. Participants are asked to rate the jokes according to their degree of funniness and aversiveness. Participants' levels of hostile and benevolent sexism were also measured. Results about the relationship between sexist attitudes and sexist humor and the relationship between sexist attitudes and rape proclivity are consistent with those of earlier studies. However, exposure to sexist humor affects rape proclivity only when aversiveness shown to this type of humor is low. The results are discussed in the light of the prejudiced norm theory.
Unfortunately there is no comparable stream of research (that I can find) that accounts for the possibility of male victims; it's strictly with a female victim view. But there is an actual stream, here; I could have added more but it would have simply been more of the same.
tl;dr version: Exposure to sexist jokes, even as mild as disparaging women's intelligence, not only increased the behaviors that signify a greater risk of rape, but they admitted it outright to the researchers. The scale used is quite blunt and asks questions along the lines of whether the participant believes that certain people "deserve" to be raped. And, of course, the jokes presented to the subject pools were not all as mild as disparaging women's intelligence. Present the subjects with jokes (that, yes, were presented as humor and not any sort of persuasive argument) that dismisses consideration for women's bodily integrity and hostility toward women increased.
Using rape in an off-hand way, as part of a joke, contributes to rape culture. Rape culture leads people to not take rape seriously and to blame the victim, among other things. Thus people's response to the 'real thing' isn't, "OMG that's a terrible thing to happen to someone!", but instead is, "well, the way she was dressed she was asking for it", or, "if she didn't want sex with him, she shouldn't have gone home with him", or, "she's just ashamed of having sex with him and is calling rape to save her face". (Gendered pronouns used to keep the examples simple and direct.)
You presumably have studies and suchlike--providing evidential or a rational basis--backing your claim that it doesn't..?