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Why is this more offensive than ranking people according to academic or athletic ability? Why is this considered offensive, but describing an individual woman's attractiveness is not? Why is putting multiple women onto a single list to compare them worse?
I find this somewhat baffling. There are numerous references to violence against women and sexual assault in the article as though the connection, which I cannot identify, were totally obvious. As fast as I can see, this list is totally innocent and their right to freedom of speech gives them the right to do this.
What’s different in this instance is the systemization of it. Sure, everybody knows men find women varying levels of attractive, but I think keeping a logbook of all the women you know and their rating would generally be considered ‘freak behavior’. (Think of Don Giovanni.)
There are many things that are not inherently bad, but signal some maladaption, and they often involve specifically codifying vague norms. If you found out a friend keeps a ranked spreadsheet of everybody he knows, and writes down his judgements of all their actions, that would be understandably off putting. Sure, it’s something we all do unconsciously, but the very act of making it explicit causes problems.
The connection to sexual violence likely comes from the ‘unrapable’ label. It’s clearly implying that the boys are contemplating the ‘rape-ability’ of their classmates. Even if it is an edgy joke, it’s absolutely unacceptable from a school’s (and likely parents’) perspective. The same spreadsheet ranking them from 1-10 would still warrant action by the school, but likely wouldn’t reach national news levels.
Like what? I agree that it's weird, but I don't see anything wrong with it.
Because it prevents you from having a normal social connection. That type of thing is best mediated through interpersonal contact, because that’s how we evolved to deal with it.
It’s one of the reasons people behave radically differently online than they would in person.
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Same reason why women can denigrate men based on their height but men can't judge a woman based on her weight, even though one is a mutable characteristic and the other is immutable.
For a woman, a lot of her social status and worth does stem from her appearance. To insult a woman's appearance, or to even rank her lower relative to her peers in terms of attractiveness, is to denigrate her very existence. Their looks determine who they get to date, who becomes friends with them, and how people treat them. A woman's academic or athletic ability relative to her peers is not as important since women aren't competing with each other on the basis of academics or athletics, especially when it comes to the dating market. Also, women are more neurotic and take these things more personally than a man would. A man that complains women call him ugly would be labeled a loser and an incel. A woman complaining is a victim that needs protection, and being a victim (only for women and minorities) gives you social brownie points nowadays.
Notice it's not really men pushing against this sort of ranking, it's mostly women. The only men that do are male feminists or men who have to criticize in lieu of reputation harm.
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Because all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
Australia recognizes no such right. Also, the people who made the list are generally recognized as subhumans [due to their age], so nobody's expecting them to have rights in the first place- the hysterics are because lists like that are hard evidence the brainwashing campaigns were ineffective.
Don't all countries with legal systems based on the English common law have freedom of speech?
In Australia we have 18C. Speech is free so long as you're not racist. Plus we have pretty aggressive anti-defamation laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_18C_of_the_Racial_Discrimination_Act_1975
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English law doesn't even recognize that concept; the US's notion of protecting it was a reaction to it being non-existent.
Later nations gesture vaguely at the concept, but if it's in their law, it's always explicitly prefaced with "unless we really don't want to".
That's not true. There was a debate in the US over even including the bill of rights because those rights were considered to already exist and it was worried that including it would imply rights not listed did not exist.
In Canada, our Charter of Rights explicitly lists "freedom of expression", but there was also a law passed earlier recognizing an already existing "freedom of speech" and there are court rulings stating that this already existed as a quasi-constitutional right emerging from English common law.
S. 1 of the CCRF is the explicit "everything after this section is functionally meaningless" part. It's difficult to miss, being at the top and all. And if that wasn't enough, there's S. 33 (which normally gets used for provincial vs. federal slapfights).
Well, given how they treat the rights that are listed...
What I'm saying is not true is your assertion that the US's notion of protecting freedom of speech was a reaction to it being non-existent.
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English law does recognize the concept, since it’s part of the ECHR which is British law. But the ECHR does caveat hate speech, dangerous speech and so on.
Yes, that's what "no right to free speech" means.
Sure, but that isn’t no understanding of free expression, it’s just a different one. For most of the history of the US states had various laws banning various kinds of speech, so did the federal government during the wars. Absolute free speech is a 20th century interpretation of the first amendment.
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