Breaking: Someone Does Something Funny and Outraged Feminists Say "That's Not Funny!!!"

Apparently there's a mime in France (I can hear browsers clicking on to Hot Air as I write this) with some kind of a YouTube following.

I looked this guy Galliard's bits. Eh, they're okay. Here, he takes the stage in a Mister Universe tournament, despite not having any muscle mass, and despite, also, not having any permission to go on stage.

Eh, kind of cute.

Even better is "Urban Touchdown," which is pretty darn funny.

Well, he had another idea. He realized that if he had a friend videotape him from the right angle, he could, for example, stand ten feet away from a woman bending over to tie her shoe, and yet the angle would make it look like he was standing right behind her.

And then: He could mime having sex with her.

Yes, pretty much, this guy re-discovered the Benny Hill Trick-Perspective Shot.

But he went a bit further with it than ol' Benny did (Moderate Content Warning -- he goes to town in his "air sex").

Well, while most of us would see this as a rude, but harmless, prank, the Agents of Outrage of course have to prove they're Concerned and also Clever by making connections no sane human being ever would, and claim that, by pulling a silly prank, he was somehow encouraging (wait for it...) "rape culture."

Um, no he's not. Like those paid to detect Dog Whistles that don't exist, there are a certain number of professional gender-based grievance mongers who are paid to claim that pretty much anything involving a man and a woman is, in some way, perpetuating our "rape culture."

The Daisy Chain of bent logic goes something like this:

1. If you make any kind of sexual joke at a woman's expense, you are in some way subjecting her to unwanted sexual attention and unwanted sexual aggression.

2. By promoting a culture in which unwanted sexual aggression is established as a permissible norm, you are normalizing unwanted sexual aggression.

3. Some people will take a culture permitting unwanted sexual aggression to also permit actual sexual assault.

4. Those who laugh at this video, then, are encouraging -- and also laughing at -- actual rape, and are therefore akin to rapists themselves.

But this reasoning is ludicrous. Because using the same sort of connect-the-dots logic, I can prove that anyone who speeds on the highways promotes the death of children. Like so:

1. If you speed, you help perpetuate a highway environment in which speeding is seen as permissible.

2. For every 5 mph above the posted limits a population drives, a certain number of additional highway fatalities can be expected.

3. A significant fraction of those additional highway fatalities will be children.

4. Therefore anyone who speeds on the highways is blessing the needless deaths of children and should be stigmatized to nearly the extent a child-murderer would be stigmatized.

Do you let your kids watch Rugrats? Well how dare you -- you support The murder of police officers. Here, let me show you.

1. Rugrats encourages a social norm of undermining and resisting authority.

2. Police officers represent the authority of the state.

3. By letting your children watch Rugrats, you make the show more profitable, and they make more shows.

4. By making more shows, they increase the number of children exposed to anti-authoritarian messaging.

5. People will often act in comportment with the lessons they've learned as children.

6. Some people, when challenge by police, will react with the anti-authoritarian impulses they learned as children.

8. Among those reacting according to the anti-authoritarian impulses they learned as children, there must be -- as a statistical inevitability -- some number of persons willing to use violence as the vehicle of their resistance.

9. Some number of these persons will shoot and murder police officers. The law of large numbers makes this statistically inevitable.

10. Therefore, watching Rugrats encourages the shooting of policemen in the street.

Now, in each of these chains of logic, there is a certain amount of truth-- yes, one does support, sort of, in a very trivial way, the "increased marginal number of children's deaths" when one chooses to speed.

But no one thinks about this, because the links are so attenuated and weak.

And certainly no one would make the case that your routine 10 mph over the limit speeder is somehow a malefactor on par with child murderer.

But feminists deploy this weak Daisy Chain every day of the week to link some alleged social ill to rape, and then casually denigrate the perpetrator of such thoughtcrimes as near-rapists.

And no one ever says: "That makes no sense, and it's unfair and foul. Now stop that and behave properly."

And that's because if you object to the silly-string and duct tape that holds this nasty syllogism together, well, then, you are also guilty of encouraging rape, by denying the logic of the "rape culture" analysis.

Thanks to the Phantom Tipster.

posted by Ace at 05:45 PM

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