I thought these two needed a thread after seeing them getting exposed on Twitter last week for their comments about rape, their disgusting treatment of Rosemary McCabe after speaking out about her own rape.
Serious question. Did anyone actually listen to the "rape" podcast in question or are we just going off the current twitter debate that Rosemary has initiated?
I used to listen to the podcasts (don't anymore) and honestly didn't see anything wrong with it at the time. The podcast episode was about consent in general. The general vibe of their podcast has always been to debate taboo subjects and to get people talking. They discussed Rosemary's article in which SHE specifically said that she wasn't reporting her rapist because he was a nice guy and because she was dating him and only thought it was rape after the fact not at the time it happened, which of course is her own prerogative and feeling, who is anyone else to say it's not rape.
However I can't quote Rosemary here because she has also removed her article from the internet... which I find odd.
However, the debate on It Gals was from my point of view an interesting point of discussion about consent, saying yes, saying no, verbalising versus body language etc, they asked the question was it empowering for rape victims to read something like this or not, and questioned was a statement like this in fact rape, can you claim rape when you change your mind afterwards (which is kind of what the article read like) etc ... and all before the subject of consent became spoken about properly in the media. They used Rosemary as a point of view on this because she had publicly written on this exact subject and her whole article was about why she wasn't reporting her rapist. The it Gals for some reason have deleted their podcast too - perhaps they felt it was no longer appropriate as times have moved on or maybe they got too much stick. Who knows? I just think a lot of this conversation is based off twitter comments when nobody has actually either listened to the podcast or read the article.
Don't get me wrong, I stopped listening because I don't want to listen to half the stuff they babble on about. But I do think a lot of people are jumping on a bandwagon without actually knowing what they are talking about after reading one sentence on twitter. I also think Rosemary is one of the most hypocritical journalists i've read - she claims she is a feminist but I have seen her bash other celebrity women online and on TV. You can't have it both ways. She once on TV compared an Irish actress to a prostitute because of the way she was dressed! Great feminism.