UPDATE: Unilad also encourages disabilism and disabled hate crime.
Estelle Hart writes at the Huffington Post:
"And if the girl you've taken for a drink happens to belong to the '25%' group and won't 'spread for your head', think about this mathematical statistic: 85% of rape cases go unreported."
Guess where that line's from? I'll give you 3 options:
The dialogue from a low rent horror film?
The words of a convinced sex offender?
A lifestyle website run by university students?
If only it was one of the first two. Unfortunately the words come from an article on the 'UniLads' website and were recently removed after a deluge of tweets expressing disgust at the trivialisation of this most serious of crimes. UniLads has quickly become infamous and as more people read their site more and more comments like this are surfacing.
The creators of the website would like us to think that this is a one off, an oversight but it's actually part of a pattern from a site that views women solely as sex objects and slaves commonly referring to women as sluts and wenches and advising their readers how to get what they want from them.
This article wasn't a one off, it was the latest in a long line of grotesque misogyny dressed up as fun.
But there's nothing funny about the fact that we live in a society where women are blamed for the violence committed against them.
The rape conviction rate in the UK is, at 6%, one of the lowest in Europe and that's with less than 20% of rapes ever reported to the police.
A website referring to women as wenches and slags isn't simply the harmless "banter" the writers want us to believe. Just this week the head of the CPS in London has said that jurors preconceptions about women has a negative impact on rape conviction rates.
Society fails to take rape seriously enough and we regularly see statistics suggesting that women who flirt, dress provocatively or drink are to blame if they are assaulted.
Even those who are trying to help often buy into this blame culture, telling women to change their behaviour to avoid rape, but not reminding men that no means no...
Stavvers adds:
You appeared on my radar last week when you posted an article advocating rape. I suspect the author of the piece thought he was being ever so funny by suggesting that the number of unreported rapes could play to a man’s advantage.
Obviously you probably experienced quite a degree of backlash to this, because you quietly took it down. It’s still screencapped though, Unilad. People know what you did.
Then there’s this T-shirt, which manages to simultaneously advocate rape while implying that the wearer of the T-shirt suffers from premature ejaculation. Again, you quietly took it down, but forgot to remove it from your Facebook page. So we know what you did.
Your attitude to being called out on your behaviour is appalling. Tweeter @sazza_jay pointed out that what you were doing is wrong, and received misogynistic and homophobic abuse. Following your characteristic pattern, you then quietly took down the tweet, but we all saw it. It’s screencapped, Unilad. These days, nothing just disappears.
Your reaction to the controversy suggests that deep down you have some semblance of a clue that what you are doing is wrong, and here’s why: what you are doing is reinforcing a culture which facilitates rape.
Your professed “banter” is dangerous: you are repeating rape myths which are often subscribed to by rapists. On university campuses, the area your laughable attempt at a “magazine” attempts to cater to, as many as one in four women will be raped...
Unilad (staffed by these people)has given two-half hearted apologies, on Twitpic and Facebook.
As Alana Tortuga suggests, why not hit Unilad where it hurts by complaining to their advertisers William Hill,Model Muscle or Pay Day Wad.
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