Piers Morgan Is Saying Stupid Things About Male Rape

Which is funny, because I didn't know that we had anointed Piers Morgan as The Rape Decider—you know, the guy who decides who has or hasn't been raped.

Which is funny since I didn't know that we had anointed Piers Morgan as The Rape Decider—you know, the guy who decides who has or hasn't been raped. CNN/Youtube

It has been a banner year for Piers Morgan.

His show on CNN got canned. He had a delicious meltdown on Twitter following wide criticism that he bungled his interview with Janet Mock by asking her invasive and transphobic questions. A couple of weeks ago, he decided it’d be a good idea to tell Black people to stop using the word “nigga.” And most recently, he took to Twitter to rant about Shia LaBeouf, claiming that LaBeouf’s rape claims “demean real rape victims.”

Then, after presumably deciding that his Twitter rant wasn’t enough, he penned an article for the Daily Mail in which he argued that LaBeouf’s story is a “repulsive insult to every single person who has ever been genuinely raped.”

Which is funny, because I didn’t know that we had anointed Piers Morgan as The Rape Decider—you know, the guy who decides who has or hasn’t been raped.

Morgan writes:

So let’s be very clear here: Shia LaBeouf wants us to believe he just sat in silence, with a paper bag over his head, doing absolutely nothing to resist as he was supposedly brutally whipped and ‘raped’?

Then he wants us to believe that he allowed his ‘rapist’ to calmly walk off into the LA sunshine?

Oh, and he also wants us to believe that he continued to sit there in total silence, presumably with the paper bag still over his head, as his own girlfriend came in and asked him what the hell had just happened?

And he did all this because he didn’t want to break his ‘performance art’ experiment?

What a load of absolute baloney, and what a repulsive insult to every single person who has ever been genuinely raped.

Shia LaBeouf is one of the toughest actors in Hollywood. He recently cut his own face with a knife during filming of Fury to make his scars look more realistic.

If he’d wanted to stop this complete stranger supposedly ‘raping’ him, all he had to do was physically stop her himself or shout for help.

But he didn’t. He just let it all happen.

For those of you playing Rape Culture Bingo at home, you can go ahead and cross off the following squares:

1. But the victim didn’t report the rape to police;
2. He didn’t fight back (and he’s so tough! He cut his own face with a knife!);
3. He didn’t shout for help;
4. He’s just looking for attention;
5. He must have wanted it.

And then there’s the kicker: It seems that Morgan doesn’t think that men can be raped by women—not really. He’ll allow for the possibility, but does it really happen? He thinks not:

Men rape women, men rape men, women rape women.

It’s also perfectly possible for a woman to rape a man. Without spelling out the precise physical requirements for such an offense, it is specifically covered in American law.

It’s “perfectly possible.” Gee whiz. Thanks, Piers. Thanks for confirming that you believe that it’s perfectly possible that the 46 percent of male victims of rape who said that women were the perpetrators (according to a recent analysis of Bureau of Justice Statistics) were telling the truth.

Mighty noble of you.

Piers Morgan is the type of guy that thinks every thought that pops into his head is a gem, one which he will bestow upon the world. It’s typical of lots of straight white guys—they think that everything they have to say matters. Indeed, everything they have to say is the most important thing that was ever said. Certainly more important than anything those silly women and colored folks have to say. That’s why Piers attacked Janet Mock. That’s why Piers tried to debate John Legend and Ta-Nehisi Coates about the usage of the word “nigga.”

And that’s why he is not only calling Shia LaBeouf a liar, but he’s calling out the feminists who have spoken out for Shia LaBeouf:

(How a feminist defending a male victim of rape constitutes “man-hating” is something that only the addled mind of Piers Morgan could possibly discern.)

It’s not just that LaBeouf should apologize, evidently, but that those of us defending him should be ashamed of ourselves. And let’s face it, the only people I’ve seen defending LaBeouf are feminists, which is weird because you’d think this would be the perfect cause for men’s rights activists (MRAs) to latch themselves onto, in order to show they really care about men’s rights as opposed to just bashing women. But then again, MRAs are the worst, so no surprise there.

What boggles my mind is that Piers Morgan thought he had any business speaking on the matter in the first place. You know what, bro? Sometimes the world doesn’t need to hear every single thought that pops into your head, especially when those thoughts are tired-ass rape culture-promoting tropes that have been pulled directly from The Big Book of Tired-Ass Rape Culture Tropes and General Dickishness.

As blogger stavvers points out in a recent blog post:

You’ll see here that leaking shitcanoe Morgan is focusing on some tiresome and long-discredited tropes: that LaBeouf didn’t report to the police and that he didn’t follow the Good Survivor™ script that we must all follow in order to be believed. While a gratifyingly large number of decent people called him out, there was a worrisomely large proportion of men cheering him on.

It’s absolutely abominable that somebody can dictate to millions the reasons not to believe a survivor. I had thought Piers Morgan to be an unwanted fart in a small room before, but now I see that he is something far more dangerous: he is a man who wants rapists to be able to continue raping.

The whole response to LaBeouf has laid bare the faces of rape culture. Each undue focus on how LaBeouf acts weird and crazy so shouldn’t be believed makes life easier for rapists: People with mental health problems are more likely to be raped precisely because they are less likely to be believed. Each repetition of the myth that someone with a vagina cannot rape someone with a penis is a complete nonsense, and makes it easier for rapists to thrive. Each cry that LaBeouf did not report to the police is a slap in the face of the vast majority of survivors who also did not report.

Yep. What she said.

Ultimately, Piers Morgan should be foreclosed from saying anything ever again. Because every time he opens his mouth an angel drops dead.