Smackdown

Via Feministe:

Oh, here's a brilliant marketing strategy to promote awareness of violence against women: Design a website that allows you to manipulate a giant hand -- via your mouse or your very own hand via your webcam -- to beat up a woman.

Call it "Hit the bitch!'' Score points with every punch. Don't be a ''pussy!'' Be a ''gangsta!'' Hit her again! Look at her face bruising and bleeding! Yeah. Smack her again ...

Bet all the woman abusers just love to play.

I kid you not.

This Danish website, which pretends to be about getting young men to stop battering their girlfriends, uses abuse to get them in the tent. Bet that part at least works -- all too well.

As for stopping the violence, don't make me laugh. Or cry.

Putting up a few statistics after you've knocked her to the ground just doesn't cut it.

I don't speak Danish but the good people over at Sociological Images did get some translations via their readers, which I've emailed to Stargazing's Malene Arpe for confirmation.

In the meantime, here's what the commenters at SI say:

In a comment Jillian ads,

A Danish friend just told me what the woman is saying.  Two of the quotes are as follows:

“why would I f**k your best friend he’s just as ugly as you”

 “I’ll dance with anyone I want to dance with”

UPDATE: Reader Jacque provides a more complete translation:

In the beginning when the girl comes in she says:

“You don’t get to decide if I dance with people or not.”

Then the voiceover says “What are you doing? You cant even control your bitch. A couple of slaps will help…in the end the voiceover comes in again stating: “It’s not f**king gangstar to hit bitches, you lost the game when you lifted the hand the first time. There is no excuse. None!”

Then comes a womans voice: “In Denmark every third girl in college is in an abusive realtionship. If you are one of these seek help … etc…”

If that's not enough, here's a rather sick joke about a sick joke:

The game isn't that hard. Dayum, I knocked her around so well I scored 100% Gangsta first time out. Not quite as challenging as PacMac. But she mouths off so much, it makes it at least somewhat enjoyable.

Here's the organization that sponsored the website.

There's an email link. Use it.

Remember. Your kid can find this.

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Malene confirmed ''the gist'' of Sociological Images' translations. Most of them I can't really repeat. Suffice to say that what the woman says is very provocative, and even insulting. Some people might call it verbal abuse.

Not that any of that justifies the website. But that may justify, at least in the mind of the batterer, that it's fine to hit somebody when they comment on the size of your, um, manhood.

It doesn't.

And it doesn't make this website any more acceptable.

Comments

[Shawn Whitney]

Besides being grotesquely sexist and bizarrely conceived, the use of "gangsta" as the descriptor for woman abuse is, frankly, racist. As though spousal abuse is limited to black rappers and not, say, white hockey fans, or Asian mahjong players, or whatever.

[PaulR]

It's a misguided message from feminist advocates, which through dunderheaded application, ironically ends up affirming the very behaviours it was intended to change, while taking extra pains to offend a lot more in the process.

Careful, now. You don't want to be "blaming feminism", do you?

[mozo]

As far as I know the term "gangsta" is used pretty generically these days. Lots of pasty faced white boys, and Philipinos and Asians and South Asians are slouching around with droopy pants, half-turned ball caps and related accessories, talking about bros, hos and yos.

[The Stygian and his Shemitish Dogs]

"talking about bros, hos and yos......

.... and mozos?

[The Stygian and his Shemitish Dogs]

"I don't speak Danish"

I do, kind of.

I don't have a dictionary available, so here goes.

The poster says

"DO SOMETHING
Two women in every class from 9. to 3.G in Denmark live in a violent relationship. If you are violent, or you are a woman victim of violence, get help.

GET HELP
READ MORE ABOUT VIOLENCE BY THOSE NEAREST TO YOU

Contact the group "break the Silence"
Share with your friends on Facebook

[Jim M]

If there is a way to justify physical violence or deadly force, except when used for purely defensive reasons, then I have no idea what that justification would be. The following smackdown video shows a more common way that violent words and images have been used (or maybe just ended up working better than other methods) to get people into tents where violence was on display. Like the video game at the Danish website mentioned in this post, I believe this story is also supposed to work like a tent that people were/are supposed to move on from after learning more than that which was/is superficially obvious.
I'm not sure why people who know this story mostly conclude, or so it would seem, that the bigtop is the destination and not just a point of entry, but that is how I would describe what became of this smackdown video and the original story it is based on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8bLyxROLi0&fmt=18&annotation_id=annotation_415715&feature=iv