Dickwolves

If you don't immediately get the significance of that title, you can get caught up here and here, and finally here (scroll down to the last post). Got all that? Good.

My first reaction to this controversy was pretty much in line with that second link above. Everyone gets offended by things, and everyone has the right to voice his or her offense. I've done it myself, and I'm sure I'll do it again. It sucks when someone you like offends you, and it's even worse when you go to that person hoping to make them see your side of things and they make a t-shirt mocking you for being offended in the first place.

That doesn't mean you weren't wrong to be offended in the first place; it just sucks. Life is complicated.

I have to admit, though, reading that last post made me finally see the other side of the issue in a way I had previously failed to. I hadn't thought about what it would be like to be a woman (or maybe a man) whose life has been directly affected by rape, walking through a crowd of hundreds of sweaty adolescents (or adults for whom aging provided no escape from that desperate situation), trying to avoid making eye contact with the ones wearing that t-shirt--the one the people you thought were your friends made to mock you for being hurt by something they said, oh and also for having been hurt by sexual abuse.

That, purely and simply, is bullying, and Penny Arcade was enabling it. I don't believe for a second that that was their intent, but they're in a unique position to both make the t-shirt and provide the forum for victims to be mocked and vilified. Again, life is complicated.

The point of this post is not for me to get on my high horse and point out my own moral superiority. If anything, it's to come to grips with my own wrongness. While I support freedom of speech even when I find that speech abhorrent, I also believe in holding people responsible for what they say. I'll still defend the two comics I linked to above. It's unreasonable and harmful to demand that nobody ever talk or even joke about potentially offensive subjects.

But in retrospect, it's pretty easy to see that the t-shirt took things too far. Like Sarah Palin's gun sights ad, it encouraged solidarity between the sane (those who disagreed with Gabrielle Giffords's politics or found the world "dickwolves" funny) and the insane (those who actually wanted to kill Giffords or those who would actually commit rape). The sane always lose with that arrangement. We should avoid it.