Rape culture exists in North America

"Joking about sexual assault is making it seem less serious than it is. That is trivializing sexual assault. That is rape culture. Saying he regrets it is not enough. Of course he regrets it, it severely hurt him in the polls. Saying he wasn't proud of it is not enough, either. As long as he keeps trivializing sexual assault by using the "locker room talk" excuse, he is still promoting rape culture." Saying that he regrets it and that he is not proud of it is a clear indication that he would not do such again. He doesn't support it. "The remainder of my argument still stands: Those voting for Trump are working to put a leader and role model in office who promotes rape culture. Therefore, by simply supporting Trump, they are furthering rape culture in America. I'll repeat the analogy I used in the last round: "To put it a different way, everyone who voted for Hitler furthered the anti-Semitic cause, even if they themselves were not anti-Semitic. Similarly, over 40% of Americans polled are contributing to the promotion of rape culture, even though many may not personally agree with the idea."" 1. Godwin's law. 2. This argument only works if Trump has been proven to still be supporting rape culture. This is not the case. He has shown that he is not proud of the actions that once may have supported rape culture. Thus he would not repeat them. Hence he does not support it. -------------------- "The definition of rape culture includes trivializing (e.g. joking) about sexual assault. Therefore, the belief that joking about sexual assault acceptable is a belief grounded in rape culture. Trump supporters who believe this, then, are continuing to foster rape culture." Your basis was that these people are going to vote for Trump and that since Trump supports rape culture, so do these people, in effect. However, it still has not been shown that he supports rape culture. He has declared that he was not proud of what he did. --------------------------------------------------- "In the previous round, I cited statistics that showed 47% of American voters admitted that American men, as a whole, make jokes about sexual assault, which as I showed above, promotes rape culture." Your language is very interesting here. You use the term "admit". To admit something is to confess something to be the truth. By using this language, you are therefore stating that you believe that the majority of American men makes jokes about sexual assault and that the majority of men support rape culture. This is unproven and sexist. "Agreed. 47% of U.S. voters represents approximately 29% of all Americans. However, it is reasonable to extrapolate that the beliefs of voting Americans are roughly representative of the country as a whole. The only way you can say that only 29% of Americans don't believe American men make jokes about sexual assault is if you can prove 100% of non-voters don't believe it, which is absurdly unlikely." You - at first - said it was 47% of Americans, which at face value would hugely support your case. I pointed out how it wasn't 47% of Americans. "My argument here is that over 40% of Americans believe that American men promote rape culture. You are right, in that this is not proof. They could all be wrong, or biased. However, Occam's Razor says that most likely, the majority of them are simply reporting what they see and experience in their everyday lives. Or, in other words, a significant minority of Americans see men promoting rape culture in the U.S." If someone voices their opinion, we cannot accurately say that they hold their opinion because of what has happened in reality. Let's take some white supremacists. They say that white people are superior and good but they say that black people are inferior and are all horrible rapists. What your logic determines is that these white supremacists are basing their views on reality and therefore should be taken seriously. Now switch "white supremacists" with "misandrists", "white people" with "women", and "black people" with "men". Moreover, we do not know what amount of this 29% actually supported Trump. Some could have been misandrists voicing their sexist views, as I said before. Also, for all we know, 99% of this percentage could have been misandrists. My point here is that we don't know the reasons behind these people's poll votes. We do not know if the majority was supporting Trump or if the majority were supporting sexist views. It is very uncertain what these people's motivations are and therefore we cannot be certain if these people support Trump or not. We cannot be certain how many of these people, if any, support rape culture. "that is not even considering the unreported population of women who promote rape culture." If it's unreported, we don't know the statistics and therefore it cannot be a part of this debate. ----------------------------------------- "I completely disagree and argue the exact opposite. There is absolutely no way of knowing the emotion of a writer on the internet." I highly doubt that someone telling someone to go die and get raped at the same time is in the best of moods. Moreover, you have yet to prove that all or the majority of these people hold legitimate intention to rape. "Someone writing a rape threat could be angry, or depressed, or excited, or horny, or sleepy." The victims caused a spiral of outrage with what they did. Most likely anger. Emotions would be extreme. But this line supports me a bit by stating "depressed" and "sleepy". They're not in their right frame of minds and therefore would not say these things normally and therefore would not support rape culture. But even so, legitimate intent is unknown. "Heck, some of those rape threats could have been written by bots that have no emotion whatsoever." Thus the population of people contributing to rape culture goes down. This oddly supports my original point. "I can write "I AM SO ANGRY AT YOU!", and you have no idea whether I'm telling the truth, especially if that's all I write." It's not a good comparison to death and rape threats. Not many people say that they're so angry, as they'd try to have an effect on their victim. This does not. "When communicating over the internet, all we have are the words that are written, and so the words themselves are all that matter." And the original intent is all but unknown. "I want to address what Con calls "legitimate intention". Writing "I will do X" states intention to do X. [24] On the internet, because we only have written words to go by, any reasonably feasible statement of intention cannot be dismissed as non-legitimate. If I write "After writing this, I will turn into a zebra", you can be pretty sure that's not legitimate. However, if I write "After writing this, I will go eat a sandwich", there is no evidence to be able to say that it is not my legitimate intention to do so. So it is with rape threats." Eating a sandwich is a normal thing to do in America. Raping someone is not. It is very easy to communicate via the internet and very easy to hurt people with what you say. These threats have not been proven to have legitimate intent. The fact that it has only come to threats suggests that legitimate intent to rape is very low among the people who threatened it. "When someone on the internet says "I will find you and rape you" there is no way to tell if the person writing it is serious or not. This can be especially troubling for someone whose name is known, or whose place of employment is known, or someone who goes to public events. Each of the three people I mentioned in Round 2 are well known in their communities, so finding them is not a difficult task. In other words, they have no proof that the threat is not "legitimate"." The fact that it has only come to threats suggests that legitimate intent to rape is very low among the people who threatened it. "Furthermore, even if one argues that "non-legitimate" rape threats are not serious, it is still rape culture. This is because saying they are not serious is trivializing rape, which is rape culture." No no, they are using rape as a threat BECAUSE it is so serious BECAUSE it is so extreme. If rape was trivialised and made a non-issue, as is what rape culture does, then they're threats wouldn't mean anything. By threatening to rape, they demonstrating that it is extreme and wrong. If it wasn't, then the threat wouldn't nearly have the same effect. CONCLUSION Pro tries to demonstrate that Trump still supports rape culture and therefore those voting for him would also do so. However, it has not been properly shown that he supports rape culture. He apologised for it and said that he wasn't proud of it, thus he regretted it and thus he doesn't support rape culture anymore. He states that over 25% of Americans defend what Trump said, thus supporting rape culture. However, the unfortunate nature of the poll meant that we could not be certain on the motivation behind these polls and therefore the majority could may have well been misandrists. We don't know for certain and therefore it isn't a strong component for his argument. He also points out that rape threats are an example of rape culture. But he fails to take into account the fact that it is uncertain how many of these people held legitimate intention to rape (due to the nature of the internet it is also likely that the majority did not). He combats this by saying that the mere use of rape threats to express extreme feelings trivialises rape, though he doesn't take into account the fact the trivialisation of rape would render those threats useless. It is the fact that rape is extreme that those threats are so extreme. If rape was a non-issue, the threats would have very little effect. It's been my first time debating properly in a while and it was certainly an interesting topic, though I'm surprised that rape jokes didn't crop up. Thanks to Pro for challenging me.