Do you wish that Rihanna and Chris Brown would put aside their differences and resume their abusive relationship already? No? Then you'll hate WPGC's newest concert promotion!

WPGC 99.5, a D.C. hip-hop and R&B station, is currently airing a concert promotion that uses the theme of "bringing Chris and Rihanna back together" in order to get people to listen to the radio.

In truth, the concert is offering up tickets to see Chris Brown in D.C. and Rihanna in London, so WPGC is only bringing Chris Brown and Rihanna within 3600 miles miles of each other, but look! They creepily Photoshopped a picture of them together, so it's almost like the real thing. "95.5 is brining Rihanna and Chris Brown together again... sort of!!" the promotion announces. "win tickets to see Chris Brown in DC and qualify to see Rihanna in concert in London! Everytime you win Chris Brown tickets you qualify!"

And just in case you didn't get that it was a joke about how Chris Brown beat up Rihanna and wouldn't it be great if that was still happening: "Bringing Chris and Rihanna back together—-within legal restraining order limitations of course—-From 955 PGC!!"

I understand that the only thing that might make someone excited to win Chris Brown tickets anymore is the possibility of also winning Rihanna tickets. And hey, I would love to win a couple of free tickets to see Rihanna in London! But this promotion is so offensive, I'm not sure I could really muster the strength to pick up the phone to be the 9th caller here. Who is the target audience for this? People who truly want to watch Chris Brown in concert, travel a few thousand miles to watch Rihanna in concert, and in the meantime think about how awesome it would be if those lovebirds could make it work? Or people who think domestic violence is so totally hilarious, this strange virtual double-billing is worth the joke? Who knows: Maybe Chris Brown's team just wanted people to know that he was back on tour again, since it's not like he can make much news on his own without invoking the shining stardom of the girlfriend he beat up nine times.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/feed/

Thanks!

Thomas looks at a study of 1882 college students who were asked four questions to determine if they had ever raped (or attempted to rape) anyone:

1) Have you ever attempted unsuccessfully to have intercourse with an adult by force or threat of force?

2) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone who did not want you to because they were too intoxicated to resist?

3) Have you ever had intercourse with someone by force or threat of force?

4) Have you ever had oral intercourse with someone by force or threat of force?

Questions like these are bound to lead to underreporting—what guy is going to admit to forcing a girl to give him head? As it turns out, a lot of guys will admit to this, 120 to be exact: That's six percent of the survey's respondents who copped to either rape or attempted rape. Importantly, Thomas notes, the survey does not actually ask these guys if they've ever exactly "raped" anyone:

If a survey asks men, for example, if they ever “had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances,” some of them will say yes, as long as the questions don’t use the “R” word.

And they didn't just admit to raping—they admitted to raping repeatedly (as long as it's not really "rape," of course!) According to the study, a small percentage of men are responsible for committing a large portion of sexual assaults—that's a whole lot of "accidents," "misreadings," and "gray areas":

Of the 120 rapists in the sample, 44 reported only one assault. The remaining 76 were repeat offenders. These 76 men, 63% of the rapists, committed 439 rapes or attempted rapes, an average of 5.8 each (median of 3, so there were some super-repeat offenders in this group). Just 4% of the men surveyed committed over 400 attempted or completed rapes.

What does this mean about our "accidental" rapists?

a) The vast majority of acquaintance rapes are committed by the same people;

b) These people don't see themselves as "rapists";

c) They are, however, able recognize that they regularly threat, force, and intoxicate women in order to have sex with them.

Oops! There's no "accident" here—these guys just deny, evade punishment, and repeat.

So, what do we do to stop these guys? Well, here's a start: Let's call them rapists. It's not just rapists who fail to recognize these behaviors—threatening, forcing, incapacitating—as "real" rape. We all have to stop making excuses for calling a rapist a rapist—and doubting, minimizing, or lashing out against the people who do use that word. Women need to know that they can call their experiences "rape" and report them as crimes. They need to know that they can call their rapists "rapists," even if the rapist is also someone's "friend," "acquaintance," "co-worker," "fraternity brother," or "respected member of our community." As Thomas says:

The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn’t get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He’s telling you how he sees it. The guy who says, “bros before hos”, is asking you to make a pact.

The Pact. The social structure that allows the predators to hide in plain sight, to sit at the bar at the same table with everyone, take a target home, rape her, and stay in the same social circle because she can’t or won’t tell anyone, or because nobody does anything if she does. The pact to make excuses, to look for mitigation, to patch things over—to believe that what happens to our friends—what our friends do to our friends—is not (using Whoopi Goldberg’s pathetic apologetics) “rape-rape.”

. . . The rapists can’t be your friends, and if you are loyal to them even when faced with the evidence of what they do, you are complicit.

That last point is an important one. People who excuse rapists usually see that equation from the other end: "He's my friend, so he can't be a rapist." We need to reverse that equation—"He's a rapist, so he can't be my friend." Perhaps them we could begin addressing why the dictionary definition of rape is overlooked—threatening, forcing, and incapacitating for sex—in our to avoid applying the word—"rapist"—to anyone we know.

"What do the 'N' word, the 'W' word and the 'F' word have in common?" asks Tim Bloedow of NoApologies.ca, a Web site dedicated to "punching a hole in political correctness." According to Bloedow, refusing to use these racial, sexist, and homophobic slurs (the 'F' word isn't fuck here) displays a "complete disregard for using God's name in vain."

Bloedow explains why refusing to invoke the "N" word, the "W" word, and the "F" word is insulting to the almighty. (Note: I won't use those words here, because I'm an atheist, but be warned: Bloedow is a man of God, so he gleefully invokes the three slurs throughout the video):

"The Third Commandment says don't take the name of a larger God in vain," he says. "As Christians, we see the Lord's name taken in vain everywhere—on the TV, in movies, in the news, in just about every area of life, as we walk down the street, among our colleagues. Constantly God's name—'God,' 'Jesus Christ,' are used as cuss words and nobody seems to blink an eye. Yet I've been very frustrated in the last couple of weeks as I've observed the self-censorship in our media over other areas of sensibility."

To recap: White dude in a sweater and a mustache who records himself announcing racial slurs over the Internet? The work of God. Saying "Oh my God, that Tim Bloedow dude appears to be a huge racist"? Sacrilege.