When I came back in, I said to my SO “I will never ever stop thinking of Tyson as a raping fuckhead”. He did not disagree.

Thank you for being open-minded enough to reconsider. That kind of thoughtfulness is the sort of thing that makes me reconsider my planned move to NoDudesonia.

I apologize for not responding right away. Considering your own in depth response, I didn’t want to blow you off with something relatively insignificant. Unfortunately, that’s probably what this is going to be.

Anyway, you’re right and I agree. In retrospect, I didn’t separate Tyson from the movie. Since I defended the latter, I suppose I felt obligated to defend the former, but that doesn’t adequately separate fiction from reality. Moreover, I didn’t adequately consider the grounds for when someone loses their spotlight (to say the least) privileges.

While I’m fully aware of the things mentioned in your response, the reminder did make me consider if Tyson should have ever been contacted for work in the first place, I’ll move my chips over to “no.”

And thanks for noticing my name; I strive for subtlety.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by elenielstorm: I’ll start packing my spaceship. http://bit.ly/6WqzoL...

@Dude: Allow me to submit to you a fairly basic concept. In one box, we have what I will call the “human community.” This is the portion of the human race that you should hire, work with, be friendly to, enable in most general respects, unless they were rude to you at a party or something, in which case fuck ‘em. But they don’t have any strikes against them on the major level, this “human community.” They haven’t completely violated the sanctity and entire concept of the “human community” through actions such as… I don’t know. Murder, maybe. OR RAPE. This also happens to be the portion of the human race that includes many a professional athlete and ex-professional athlete, all of whom (MOST of whom?) could be hired to portray a “pinnacle of male self-parody,” convincingly.

However, once a person makes the choice to RAPE SOMEONE, they take a step out of the “human community” box. Because they willfully, in full consciousness, violated the body and mind and life of another human being; they purposefully took what is one of the most vital human experiences – sex – and transformed it into a weapon of physical and psychological torture. They treated another human being as a thing; they caused pain, for pleasure. That pain will last a lifetime. I mean, how many rape victims do you actually know? Well: you probably know a lot of them, actually, because it’s a common crime. But how many rape victims do you know that you know? The damage really never, ever, ever goes away. You don’t get to be the same person after the rape as you were before. All you get to do is to figure out how to hold it together despite the pain that your rapist caused you, and how to live as the person you are now. Once a person has crossed that line and become a rapist, once you’re willing to say that the humanity of another person means JACK SHIT to you, that you’re willing to cause that damage just because you feel like it, you don’t get to cross back over that line. You don’t belong to us any more. And you definitely shouldn’t be treated as a hero, joke-celebrity figure, actual-celebrity figure, or anything other than a rapist. You shouldn’t be rewarded for what you’ve done.

And, I mean, I know this sounds like a harsh line! So, I’ll cut you a deal: maybe we don’t need to do it with the majority of rapists, the ones who never get sent to court and put on trial before a jury of their peers. Maybe we don’t need to do it with rapists who aren’t convicted, even though getting a rape conviction is really, really fucking tough for any number of fair and monstrously unfair reasons. But if it’s proven, in court, beyond a reasonable doubt, that someone is a rapist, “rapist” is what they should be known and treated as from that moment forward.

Therefore it not acceptable to make a movie with that person, that person who has exited the “human community” box and entered the “rapist” box, particularly not if that person is making a cameo appearance AS HIMSELF and the point seems to be that he’s a bit scary at first but fun to party with and basically, in the words of one of the characters in the movie, a “sweet guy.” It’s grossly insensitive, it trivializes rape, it treats rape as fundamentally less important than a gimmicky cameo in a movie. It contributes to a culture where rape is not dealt with, not reported, not adequately understood, not taken seriously: in other words, a culture where rape is tacitly permitted.

This is where the concepts get REAL basic, Dude: RAPE IS BAD. WE NEED TO ACT LIKE RAPE IS BAD, BECAUSE RAPE IS BAD. RAPE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN A MOVIE. I know it might not seem that way, when you’re chuckling it up at “The Hangover!” But trust me: REALIZING THAT RAPE IS BAD, AND ACTING LIKE RAPE IS BAD, IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANY MOVIE, EVER, IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. You might not realize this, because you live in a thing called “rape culture,” and that is the culture that convinces you that it’s not actually unusual or gross to see Mike Tyson fawned over in a movie or at an award ceremony, that hiring him in the first place (let alone making his cameo one of the movie’s major selling points) is not an actual, inexcusable, deeply alarming trivialization of an actual rape that actually happened to an actual woman (because Mike Tyson wanted it to happen – Mike Tyson wanted that woman raped, he wanted her to suffer in that way, and then he raped her), or that the many jokes trivializing sexual assault in the movie and the actual choice to cast a rapist in the movie, without once mentioning his rape or treating it as a legitimately scary thing, are two separate and unconnected phenomena. Both of which you seem pretty damn eager to excuse. It’s THIS – the treatment of rape as NO BIG DEAL, in the grand scheme of a derivative dick-joke summer comedy – that the post is about.

You want to know the sad thing? I will bet you one million dollars that you posted this because you were offended by the joke in the second paragraph. (I mean, calling yourself “Dude” was a subtle tip-off.) Not realizing that reasoning like yours, and actions like these, are the reason I ever got upset enough to make that joke in the first place.

Also, “novelty” can be an adjective, according to the American Heritage Dictionary. But if you want to split hairs over that, I’ll give you the novelty points.

Also, is novelty an adjective now?