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Barbara Amiel’s comments on Steubenville, Ohio, rape case ignite online backlash

After the public outrage following CNN's sympathizing-with-the-rapists coverage of the Steubenville, Ohio, rape trial, Barbara Amiel wrote a Maclean's article on society's "sexual landscape" that has many readers confused and angry, and some questioning why the magazine allowed it to be published in the first place.

Perhaps her most offending paragraph comes halfway through her piece about the "anything-goes sexual society" we apparently now live in, when she discusses the Steubenville rape case as though it were an overreaction, writing that all involved "behaved appallingly" and that the victim "couldn’t remember a thing except that she didn’t have sex as we once understood it."

"In a normal society, the girl’s mother would have locked her up for a week and all boys present would have been suspended from school and their beloved football team. Instead we had a trial and media circus: two boys out of the many were declared juvenile delinquents guilty of rape (by inserting a finger in her vagina) with custodial sentences of a year each, one getting an extra year for distributing her photo," she writes. "The boys go on a juvenile sex offender list. The girl could do with an alcohol abuse program while Steubenville clearly suffers from a shortage of parents in situ."

[ Related: Steubenville's troubling question: Is rape just a part of 'hook-up culture'? ]

Needless to say, readers were not amused.

"The article, an opinion piece by long-time MacLean's contributor Barbara Amiel, doesn’t so much make light of the Steubenville rape case as it callously uses it as a cheap ploy to attract the pageviews of angry readers," Straight.com's Tracis Lupick writes, highlighting the article's most outrageous excerpts — and including Amiel's email address for readers to reach her directly.

"This is an awful article, full of victim blaming. The Steubenville trial showed our society that we have created a group of people who are so entitled they feel like they can use someone else's body without their consent. Rape is rape is rape. It doesn't matter how many clothes they were wearing, it doesn't matter how drunk they are. If someone does not consent to sex but someone else put anything in them then they have been raped," reader Patricia Johnson-Castle commented.

Porkosity's tongue-in-cheek article about a Burlington, Ontario, bank robbery exposed these "boys will be boys" attitudes and misplaced sympathies that keep popping up in discussions of the Steubenville case.

"Why is no one asking the harder questions? Why did the bank put all of its money in one place, if it didn't want to get robbed? What was the bank doing there at that time of night? What was the bank wearing? And how much did the bank have to drink?" Corey Mintz writes. "Clearly, these young men made some poor choices. But it was late at night. They may well have had too much to drink themselves. Boys will be boys. And the bank was kind of asking for it."

[ Related: In Ohio rape case, social media attention proved a double-edged sword ]

A Change.org petition is asking that CNN apologize for sympathizing with the rapists. More than 284,000 people have signed it so far.

After the barrage of angry comments and threats to never look at another Maclean's magazine again, it's clear Amiel readers want an apology, too.