After a brief Rickrolling of his audience, John Oliver turned toward the darker corners of the Internet on Sunday, exploring the depth and danger posed by online threats against women.
“I’m talking about the kind of direct threats that can make people fear for their safety,” the host of “Last Week Tonight” said.
“And if you’re thinking, well come on, that doesn’t seem like that big a problem, well, congratulations on your white penis,” he said.
If you’re endowed with one of those, Oliver said, you likely have a very different experience on the Internet than women.
Oliver pointed to video game journalists Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian, both of whose harassers have posted the women’s addresses online and called in bomb and death threats.
The same kind of thing visited Slate writer Amanda Hess.
“Happy to say we live in the same state,” one man wrote to her on Twitter. “Im looking you up, and when i find you, im going to rape you and remove your head.” He added that he had done 12 years on manslaughter charges for killing a woman.
Oliver investigated the shortcomings in law enforcement that prevent cops and the legal system from properly protecting women from online threats (and offshoots like revenge porn).
Watch the clip, courtesy of HBO:
“And if you’re thinking, well come on, that doesn’t seem like that big a problem, well, congratulations on your white penis,” he said.
Thanks, John. You would have thought that my wife would have remembered to congratulate me on my white penis on Fathers’ Day, but no, I had to hear it from the host of a comedy news show instead.
Oh, that and John Oliver is national treasure.
CA just got on the revenge porn bandwagon, but it took the money angle to bring that case home. The guy was posting the photos, charging to see them, and then offering the women the opportunity to take them down for more money. More photos posted? More money to take them down. The big question, as I recall, was if any of that was actually illegal. I think it was the blackmail aspect of the scheme that finally won the day. Needless to say, the perp was totally mystified on why this was a problem - he was raking in the big bucks.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruled that because Anthony Elonis made death threats to his wife online (instead of leaving them under the windshield wiper on her car) it’s free speech instead of a criminal act.
I don’t want to even think about the decades it’s going to take to undo the damage done by the Roberts court.
Can’t really blame Roberts for this one. It was a 7-2 ruling, (well 7.5 to 1.5, Alito both concurred and dissented,) and the 2 were Allito and Thomas. I think Elonis is pretty loathesome, but the court got this one legally right. It’s probably a good reason to change the laws.