Datingish has an article on some sex tapes that are going around. Apparently Kendra Wilkinson is involved, and she's not entirely happy throughout the entire thing. At the end of an article that states she did not want to be filmed, and did not want to perform specific sex acts that happened anyway, is this line:

***Quick FYI, the tape was going to be sold by someone and Kendra made the decision to profit from the video, instead of being the victim***

Really?

Because if we accept the author's premise - that she was pushed around and made to commit sex acts she wasn't wholly comfortable with - it looks to me like she's the victim either way.

To make this clear, I'm going to take a more extreme example. Suppose that someone gets raped, and then her rapist offers her a cookie. Does this in any way make her not a victim? Suppose that "cookie" is STD testing, a ride home, and/or a sizeable amount of money. Again, does this make her not a victim? Or would we say that in order to not be a victim, she should have known what she was getting into from the start, and agreed to it?

Now the Kendra Wilkinson tape is, if I understand correctly, in the grey area between "fully consenting" and "clearly not consenting." So I'm not going to argue that it is legally rape (though it is at least uncomfortably toeing the borderline.) However, it's manifestly obvious that the girl thought she was getting into something different from what wound up happening. And if we agree that she would be a victim if it was released without her permission, can we really say that she categorically isn't a victim if she was in any way forced to release the tape?

A long time ago I wrote about the error in thinking behind this phrase:

"If you get raped, enjoy it."

The error in that is the idea that to enjoy or not enjoy is a choice entirely independent of circumstance. If a woman is violently assaulted, how can she enjoy it? In most cases, that's not agreeable. So too with the forced release of a sex tape - if it was forced, how can agreeing to the inevitable release make one not a victim?

Destroying hope for the intelligence of humanity, one post at a time.

[01:31] *: there was this girl, who had on a dress with a low cut back and she had the most Gorgeous tattoo of a branch of cherry blossoms

And then it got infected. She shrieked in agony as blisters erupted from her skin!

Sex & Dating Percents analogy- Here's the deal; if I left a bag Chocolate chips out not telling anyone that I was making cookies, 1 of 3 family members would take a hand full.

- made2sing4jesus

There are a number of problems with this analogy.

First, the emphasis appears to be on the decision to leave the bag out, but why focus on that? The decisions of the family members were not considered at all in this. Presumably they all like chocolate chip cookies and will generally eat them given the chance, hence the example. But in this situation, have they not already made the decision to partake? And do they not have the ability to get chocolate chip cookies under their own power, if they so wish? The only thing you are truly changing is the frequency with which they eat chocolate chip cookies - not whether or not they do so at all.

Second, absent severe diabetes, the decision to eat chocolate chip cookies is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Sure, you might put on a few calories, but it won't matter unless you have also made other really bad decisions (such as not exercising) or unless you repeatedly make the same bad decision (i.e. you repeatedly gorge yourself on cookies.)

Third, anyone who treats sex with the same gravity that they do chocolate chip cookies is either one hell of a chocolate fanatic, or treating a serious matter with levity. Either way, however, it's their choice to do so, and they get to deal with the consequences of such. You do not make that decision for them.

Yahoo shared a NASA artist’s concept image of the hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy:

"The doomed planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS)."

The article concludes, "The planet may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured."

Awww yeah:

Courtesy Wedinator.

According to the NY Times, judges are increasingly fighting punitive laws aimed at sexual deviants, which they say are inconsistent with legal principles.

“What has caused concern in courts across the nation is that we have a lot of relatively law-abiding individuals sitting in the basement downloading the wrong kind of dirty pictures facing not just prison sentences but incredibly long prison sentences,” said Douglas A. Berman, a professor at Moritz College of Law of Ohio State University, who studies sentencing issues.

In related news, Anon disagrees.

Suppose someone trashes your hallway, and you clean it up.

Should you be blamed for the trashed hallway? No.

But should you get credit for cleaning it up? Absolutely.

Supposing you don't clean it up, is it your fault? In a sense, no, because you didn't create the crappy situation. Still, if you don't clean it up, people might not want to hang out in the trashed hallway, and that's understandable. It's not a matter of moral culpability, just an aesthetic question of what they enjoy.

We don't generally blame people for being born with disabilities or into poor conditions. However, we can respect someone for rising above whatever they were born into.

What’s really annoying is when someone is miserable and complaining all the time and won’t do anything about it.

. . . If you know why you’re upset and see a way to solve that, and still don’t, then it’s your damn fault you’re depressed. - Everlastte

The thing is, depressed people are broken in precisely that way, where they refuse to do anything to fix their problems - that's why they can't get out of depression. Part of major depression is not wanting to do anything to better your lot in life. If they could take this advice, they wouldn't have major depression, now would they? They would have already gotten out.

To illustrate this general phenomenon further, take the example of self-mutilation. Does a cutter know - intellectually - that wounding his or her own body is not a healthy thing? Sure, in the abstract. But does this knowledge make them quit right away? No. Their urge to act in a self-destructive fashion is more powerful than anything else, and that's why the behavior continues. They rationalize this in various ways - the pain helps them feel alive; nothing really matters, and so on - but the important part to note is that the action continues.

For normal people, of course, the urge to act in a self-destructive fashion is less powerful than the urge to preserve themselves, so the behavior does not occur, or when it does, it does not continue. That is what makes them normal people.

And is it the fault of the depressed that they are depressed?

If you accept that depression is a mental illness, then it is never a depressed person's fault no matter how much of an asshole they are. On the other hand, treating it as a character flaw means you don't really accept that it's a medical condition. To me, the latter stance is about as nonsensical as insisting that the poor are necessarily less virtuous than the rich, or the physically weak are always less virtuous than the physically strong. I'm reasonably sure you wouldn't fault someone born with a deformity for not looking pretty. You wouldn't fault someone born with epilepsy for having seizures, and tell them to toughen up and act normal. You wouldn't tell them that it's their fault they're having seizures, would you? Why tell someone who has a condition that prevents them from helping themselves that this is their fault? Why tell them that they are lesser people for it? What does heaping abuse on them accomplish? The helpless ones remain every bit as powerless to help themselves as they were to start with.

Of course, it is absolutely frustrating for everyone else around the depressed. They are hell to live with or be around, and I have no interest in denying or sugarcoating it. But by blaming them for not getting their acts together you're basically blaming them for having abnormal brain chemistry, which is the root of their problem to begin with. It is not productive to yell at someone for this, in the very way that yelling "Why are you so tall?" or "Why were you born with more/less skin pigment than me?" is not productive. It is a biological feature. Don't like it? Don't hang out with them.

I have no reason to doubt that Everlastte did herself once have depression. But I doubt that mental disorders come as "one size fits all" and that just because a person overcomes theirs, so can all other people, in the same fashion. If illnesses were conquerable that way, then cancer would never be an issue (after all, Lance Armstrong overcame his cancer) obesity would vanish (after all, there are people who have wrestled with their obesity and won) and so forth. For all I know, it was an epic, heroic act of will that led Everlastte to claw her way out of the darkness, and she ought to get a medal for it. That still doesn't make every currently depressed person in the world her automatic moral inferior, nor does it make it acceptable for her to go around acting as if this were the case.