Can we please be the generation that stops putting up with the family child molester? The grown uncle who dates teenage girls, the husband who makes uncomfortable comments about young women’s clothing, or the cousin who raises red flags with their behavior towards children but no one wants to talk about all need to go. Children, especially young women, are expected to “keep the family together” by not making a fuss over incredibly traumatic behavior. Children don’t deserve to suffer trauma for adults’ feelings of togetherness. They’re more worthy of protection than predators. A healthy family is not built on the backs of abuse survivors expected to live their lives in silence without justice, support, or protection.
Because those are specifically what I’m talking about. The argument
isn’t about it catering to children, it’s about not catering to people
who consume that kind of content. Which there is thousands of, if you do
a quick search of any of the tags used to find shit of that like.
I’m saying that while I personally abhor such things on such a visceral
level to the point where even thinking about it in a fictional context is making me shake and want to throw up as I type this, that doesn’t give me the right to decide who to censor and who to not. Cause where do you then decide that censorship ends? Once you allow the one to be censored, it allows for the censorship of the personal as well which is exactly what happened before. And anyone naive enough to believe that it wouldn’t happen again is in for a very rude awakening. We’re already seeing it come into effect with Microsoft censoring what they deem to be “explicit content”, which includes a lot of things from explicit imagery, right down to swearing.
This is actually something that’s been hashed out in courts of law over and over and over until we have come up with the laws that we do have, which are very helpfully explained here and are well worth the time to read:
And it has already been decided that legally, fictional depictions of certain acts even between adults and minors, can only be judged on a case by case basis to determine whether something has artistic merit or if it can be deemed too obscene as to be harmful.
And people making reports to the FBI over this kind of thing, is going to obliterate fandom again, and all the safe spaces the generations even before mine worked so hard to build are going to go with it. Again.
Just because I’m anti-censorship and losing my fandom spaces, doesn’t mean I want those stories on there, it doesn’t even make me okay with them existing on a personal level because I am not.
But I am aware of the consequences of what will happen if we do allow for that kind of censorship, and it’s not as clean cut as a lot of people believe. In an ideal world, maybe it would be. But we’re not in that world.
Now if you’ll excuse me. I’m going to go throw up.
This is, to me, a pretty solid example of why sometimes learned history and empirical examples trump good intentions and feelings.
Because every part of me screams that of course banning luridly ephebophilic content on creative platforms is the right thing to do. (And pedophilic content too of course, but that’s actually pretty heavily policed already). Especially platforms that minors frequent, where minors regularly consume content labeled ‘not for minors’, and there’s no good way to keep them out of such content. And it’s not immediately obvious to me why this would be a difficult issue to selectively police. Arguments for why it’s a slippery slope tend to sound like apologist arguments to me, rather than legitimate difficulties.
But you know what? I’m wrong. How I feel about this is demonstrably, historically wrong. Countries around the world have struggled, really fucking struggled, to decide how underage sexual acts should be legally handled in media and absolutely none of them have come up with an easy solution. The most common one is “the legal system will handle it on a case by case basis, when it’s clear there’s something to be looked at”. And I mean … damn. When that’s the best legal scholars can do you know it’s bad. I don’t even want to imagine what law school courses on this subject are like.
And in fanfiction specifically, there are horror stories of how this kind of policy was abused. How well-intentioned efforts had awful far-reaching consequences and how malicious actors abused the policing systems. The effects of this in the past unmade creative fandom on the internet and forced it to basically start from scratch so far as platforms went.
I wish, I wish, that simple common sense policing policies for this stuff worked. And it feels to me like they should! That makes it really hard for me to let go of the idea that there should be some way to make it work. But all the world’s lawyers and all the world’s committees haven’t managed to do it, so I’ve just got to bite my tongue and admit I’m not that smart. I will not succeed where they failed. So for fandom, we’ve just got to let fandom be posted and hosted as is.
Thank you, you just summed up exactly how I feel about all of this. And I’m so incredibly bitter that I’m having to be the one to make the “slippery slope” argument cause it just feels wrong. But this isn’t about my feelings. It’s about protecting ourselves against those who would silence us entirely, and if you think this whole thing is “just” about fanfiction, you are absolutely dreaming.
And as I’ve said during kink discussions— this slippery slope ends with the burden being predominantly taken by young women and queer folx who are just trying to explore their world. No one’s talking about MLP fandom or actual loli fans. This doesn’t hurt people with social capital to burn, like straight men sexualizing young girls. This is all within an community most specifically used by marginalized people. LGBTQ writers and people with trauma in particular bear the brunt of these attacks.
just as A Thing: this doesn’t just include fandom.
Sex education is so shitty in the US because there is a strong, real fear that any frank discussion of sex or how to do it will entice children to be sexual before they are ready. The common idea is that sexual discussions should be between parents and children because only parents can appropriately gauge both what moral lessons they want to impart to their children and what information is appropriate for their own children to hear, even though parents don’t actually provide their kids with basic sexual instruction or do so in a patchy, gender-biased, and non-comprehensive way.
Anything non-cis and non-het is still thought of as inherently more sexual than anything heterosexual. This is the reasoning behind double standards regarding, for example, nonsexual public displays of affection between same-gender couples instead of different-gender couples. This is often linked to a “conversion” theory of queerness where impressionable children become queer from being exposed to it through interactions with other queer people and through the media. This is inexorably linked with pedophilia and the idea that queer people are all pedophiles who “make new ones” by molesting children. (This is further complicated by the fact that LGBTQ people, more often than straight people, are fine with and interested in relationships with 10+ year age gaps)
But of course you don’t mean sex education. But of course you don’t mean queer couples. But of course you’re fine with people who write stuff out of trauma, or are minors themselves, or are portraying it as a bad thing.
Fun fact: the law doesn’t give a shit about that. There is no “but only if it’s portrayed as bad” law. There’s no “but only if it’s a result of trauma” law. There’s no “it’s okay if you’re a minor yourself” law, as kids find out all the time. You can have your philosophical discussions about where to draw the line all you want, but you cannot then assume that the law has come to the same conclusion you have about it.
the wave of harassment allegations leads to amusing levels of tension in the discourse about whether men are “inherently” more aggressive or high libido
warm take on this discourse
“wider distribution” hypothesis applied to sexual harassing behavior – small number of “super-harassers” responsible for majority of harassment, mean level of sexual harassment is relatively low, women more average, therefore most super harassers are men
So I know this study is from 2002 but it’s kind of the seminal study on this sort of thing. Also all of this information was collected from men who had never been caught as rapists, so that’s fun. Also:
A majority of the undetected rapists in this sample were repeat offenders. Almost two-thirds of them raped more than once, and a majority also committed other acts of inter-personal violence, such as battery, child physical abuse, and child sexual abuse. These repeat rapists each committed an average of six rapes and/or attempted rapes and an average of 14 interpersonally violent acts. Within the universe of 3,698 violent acts that the 1,882 men in this sample were responsible for, the 76 repeat rapists by themselves accounted for 1,045 of that total. That is, representing only 4% of the sample, the repeat rapists accounted for 28% of the violence. Their level of violence was nearly ten times that of non-rapists, and nearly three and a half times that of single-act rapists.
The evidence that a relatively small proportion of men are responsible for a large number of rapes and other interpersonal crimes may provide at least a partial answer to an oft-noted paradox: namely, that while victimization surveys have established that a substantial proportion of women are sexually victimized, relatively small percentages of men report committing acts of sexual violence (e.g., Rubenzahl & Corcoran, 1998). In this sample of 1,882 men, 76 (4%) individuals were responsible for an estimated 439 rapes and attempted rapes.
So you know that thing where there’s someone in your DND group or intramural softball team or book club who you don’t leave alone with new members, or members of a particular gender, or who someone warned you about when you joined, or who a bunch of people have creepy stories about? That’s Spiders Harvey. This is a thing that happens.
Hey-o, another problem is that Spiders Harvey tends to isolate victims so they can’t talk to one another and realize they weren’t alone. With literal Harvey Weinstein this has started to break down, but this is true in your life as well.
Have you had a creepy interaction with someone in a group you’re part of? Talk to other people about it. Ask if it’s happened before. Report it to the group leader if you have one.
I had no idea that a dude in my social group who kept pressuring me into touching him and calling me a bitch when I wouldn’t had groped other women until I blew up about it and stories started coming out.
I had no idea that the dude who shot upskirts of me was doing it to other women in the group until I found his website where he had published the pictures and I saw two of my friends there as well.
There’s this intense pressure not to talk about this stuff, this feeling of “I don’t wanna rock the boat” or “I was stupid, I shouldn’t have let this happen to me” or “God, it’s not serious, relax, don’t be so uptight” but holy shit please talk about it.
As much as it fucking sucks please talk about this shit, tell your friends, tell people around you, and believe people when they tell you that something has happened to them.
If a creepy fucker in your friend group has groped someone and gotten away with it they’re probably going to do it again. And again. And again. Don’t let them. Tell someone what has happened, believe people when they report a problem, keep an eye out for sexually abusive behavior, and boot them the fuck out if it’s clear they’re a Spiders Harvey.
Everything is awful. Keep yourself safe.
Australian journalist Tracey Spicer called for reports of harassment in local media and received reports from 500 women naming 65 men, so that’s a solid 8:1 ratio even before you consider that probably half of those women were naming Don Burke in particular.
So you know that thing where there’s someone in your DND group or intramural softball team or book club who you don’t leave alone with new members, or members of a particular gender, or who someone warned you about when you joined, or who a bunch of people have creepy stories about? That’s Spiders Harvey. This is a thing that happens.
…no, I don’t?
Every time I hear about this kind of thing in the news, I wonder what hell groups other people are members of.
Places where I’ve specifically seen this be a problem are: newsrooms, hacker conferences, the philosophy wing of my college humanities building, D&D groups, a loose group of regulars at a coffee shop, kink groups, the local industrial and goth scene, a high school art group, comic shops, maker spaces, DC/2600 meetings, aaaaand roller derby (actually you know what, all women’s sports I’ve ever been close to that have men coaching have had this issue with some of the coaches in the league).
I think that’s it.
Do you want some theories? I have some theories!
A) Let’s be controversial right of the bat – this shit is more prevalent in geek spaces. Geeks are more used to feeling powerless and less aware of (or give lower priority to) social norms. This allows abusers to take advantage of people who are already unsure of their standing in the group or in their lives AND take advantage of the “I dunno, maybe this is normal, this doesn’t seem TOO weird” line of thought for somewhat off-kilter behavior.
ALSO MOTHERFUCKERS AND I HAVE A SERIOUS ISSUE WITH THIS – Geeks are unwilling to ostracize members of the group (at least overtly). That’s why some of this shit gets extremely toxic: if you speak up about someone hurting you you are being bad and mean and they just don’t understand social norms, why are you trying to exclude them? Gross. Gross gross gross. So sometimes what you’ll see is someone repeatedly just “not understanding social norms” until the people hurt by this leave the group for their safety, which allows the abuser to stay, and the surrounding folks who don’t want to ostracize anyone can safely say they didn’t push out the abuser over “drama” and the other people chose to leave and weren’t forced out.
There are comic shops and game shops that I don’t go to because “that’s just how he is” and “you have to be patient with him, he doesn’t socialize a lot” and “well we can’t just make him leave, he’s been around forever” are phrases that get thrown around too much.
B) This shit is extremely difficult to get rid of in casual groups that don’t have a formal hierarchy.
But we’re egalitarians, but it’s a meritocracy, but it’s not fair to have one leader.
I don’t care, write yourself some bylaws. The issue I’m currently having with 2600 meetups is rooted in this. No one is in charge, the meetings are open to the public, and we don’t have a posted harassment policy, so no one has the authority to say “hey, this abusive person is banned.” If you try to bring it up to the group as a whole (“hey, this person doesn’t listen when women specifically tell him not to touch them, let’s not have him around”) you get the “maybe he doesn’t know social boundaries” thing and a lot of wishy-washy dithering about how a ban would be enforced and nothing ends up happening. And then I have to be the asshole who says out loud in front of him and new attendees “hey, don’t be alone with this guy, and if you don’t want him touching you make that clear” and it’s building to a fight and I fucking hate it.
A long time ago I was on a board for a college group and we had to remove an elected member (it was a journalism group and we discovered that the norcal VP had plagiarized several of his articles, a clear violation of our ethics). Up to that point there had been no policy in place for how to remove someone but we had a hierarchy in place so that we could write a rule and vote on it and create a policy for how to remove someone and what they could be removed for. It was *such* a fucking relief.
Some makerspaces I know have a bit of a hierarchy, with keyholders having more say-so than regular visitors, but getting rid of (minor, like just groping not rape) abusers is damn near impossible in something like a D&D group or a book club where everyone casually gets together and no one wants to be the dick who says “you gotta go, you’re a problem and we want you out.” It’s *hard* to pull a Mean Girls in a casual context. It’s incredibly difficult and counter to all of our socialization to look a person in the face and say “we decided we don’t want to be around you anymore, don’t come back.” That’s hard to do when breaking up with a romantic partner, it feels even worse to do it to someone who is basically an acquaintance. There’s a level of intimacy there that makes it difficult to have that conversation in a group that otherwise isn’t very intimate.
C) Having a harassment policy or code of conduct in a group is vital to getting rid of people who do this shit.
So for a very very long time the DefCon code of conduct was “don’t be a dick.” That’s it. That was the whole code. Seems like you’d have a lot of leeway but it’s broad enough to be useless.
Because otherwise we should have used it to ban Cap’n Crunch decades ago. “Don’t be a dick” doesn’t include things like giving teen boys “energy massages.” Is a piggyback ride “being a dick?” What about asking someone to do pushups. What if the person asking you to do pushups is extremely famous in the scene and was foundational to creating the scene?
Cap’n Crunch was the very first thing I was warned about at my very first con when I was a wee little teen in 2005. He was known to be creepy around teen boys and young men even back then. Because I was a smoker I was assigned Draper Duty – if I saw John Draper talking to a teenager I was to go over and talk to the kid while smoking to chase Draper away. Draper hated cigarette smoke and it was the one surefire way to keep him from asking the boy in question back to his room for an “energy massage.” Boys who attended the cons were told to come ask me for a cigarette if Draper was bugging them.
That was in 2005. He finally got banned from DefCon this month. Proactively, before the con, of course, when there’s a ton of discourse about sexual harassment and how to respond to it.
DefCon says they couldn’t ban him before because they had rumors but no specific complaints against him. Their policy was nonspecific – it didn’t define “being a dick” well enough to include “rubbing your boner against teenagers while getting piggyback rides from them” as being a dick.
This was a policy that was so broad as to be useless (the current DefCon Code of Conduct isn’t much better).
So institute a code of conduct for your game nights. Put one together for your derby bouts. Buy hosting, put up a wiki, make sure the link to the code of conduct is easily findable and prominently linked on the homepage. And then enforce your code of conduct evenly. Woman who hugs people even if they say they’re not really into hugs gets the same warning as guy who “jokingly” blocked someone’s exit. Woman who feels like it’s okay to grab someone’s boobs gets the same ban as guy who feels like it’s okay to grab someone’s boobs.
D) Everything is awful and sometimes you can’t get away. (AKA why Shieldfoss’s statement can be read as victim blaming)
Every time I hear about this kind of thing in the news, I wonder what hell groups other people are members of.
Hi this has happened to me at…………literally every job I’ve had except my current job (which has different issues, like a boss who has threatened to fire me if I get pregnant).
At my last job I was sexually assaulted by a coworker (grabbing my ass in front of customers, holding me against a door demanding I kiss him) who “everyone knew about” and by my boss, the owner of the coffee shop, who two other employees then told me had approached them for sex (he got drunk after a breakup and as I was hugging him to comfort him he started forcing my head and hands onto his penis).
The moment I was signing my noncompete to work at my first real newspaper job my Editor In Chief introduced me to the paper’s film critic, who wouldn’t let me stand and instead held me in the chair and massaged my shoulders while greeting me (and I do feel that it’s pertinent to point out that I was 20 and this was a man in his 50s). For five minutes. While he looked down my shirt from behind. My boss obviously knew this kind of thing happened because *she watched it happen* but it was a reporter who told me not to stand next to the film critic at parties or staff meetings.
Now look. I am aware that this happens to me an unusual amount. From the informal polling of my friends I am aware that I have a higher-than-typical number of creepy, awful, assault-y interactions under my belt (if you’re interested in reading about revictimization this article itself isn’t great but links to several actually good studies – it’s all extremely sad and I don’t wanna talk about it). I’ve even been assaulted by women and queer folks and realize this isn’t an exclusively cis straight male issue (though yes, more straight men have done shit like this to me personally than other women or queer folks have).
What kind of groups am I hanging out with? Shooting sports groups and hackers and geeks and comic nerds and musicians and athletes and boring fucking office workers and coffee shop employees. I am hanging out with normal groups of normal people. That’s the really horrifying and upsetting thing about this avalanche of assault accusations, the dawning and ongoing realization that people who do awful things are normal and likeable and friendly and funny and they make things you like. Fun people who do things you like do awful things that would make you sick to your stomach.
It’s painful and awkward to tell a friend you’ve known for years not to come back to your monthly potluck because you heard that she touched someone inappropriately last month so instead whispers and rumors get started and suddenly a stair is missing. Everyone who’s been around knows to hop over it and you can have a good time, but new people have to be warned and there’s always the possibility that something awful is going to happen later.
What kind of groups am I hanging out with? Pretend that instead of spiders harvey or that random hacker it’s your brother you’re hearing the accusation about, or your mom, or your dad’s college roommate whose kids you were raised with and are best friends with, or your best friend, or your spouse. How easy is it to clean up the group when the problem is the person who founded the group, or is someone who has been coming for years but their accuser is a newbie? How easy is it to clean up your group when you like the person accused better than you like the accuser?
The film critic at my job who held me in a chair and stared down my shirt was someone who almost everyone thought was a perfectly nice guy. The employer who put my hands on his penis is a dad now and happily married and still owns a coffee shop where he’s adored by the people in that small town. The hacker who published photos of my ass and my underwear had provided security for conferences for over a decade and was trusted by the organizers of the conferences to help keep attendees safe – I was just some new chick stirring up trouble but he had helped them clean puke off their clothes and gone to their kid’s birthday parties.
This discussion came up a few weeks ago and I brought up the importance of making your own safe spaces and relentlessly policing them and this is *why* that is so important to me. I’ve never been assaulted in my punk band that is me and three other people, one of whom I’ve known for fifteen years. I’ve never been assaulted in the bi ladies art group that meets once a month and colors in the park. It’s goddamned amazing to know when I hang out with these little groups that I’m going to be safe and not scared at least for a little while.
But these aren’t the groups I get to be around all the time. The hacker scene has become a part of my job. Other jobs have been places where I’ve been assaulted. I thought derby would be safe but it wasn’t so I left. I thought D&D would be safe but it wasn’t so I left. I thought the comic shop would be safe but it wasn’t – you get the picture.
I’m sure @shieldfoss didn’t intend to blame victims of assault for making bad choices and choosing to be where assaulters are but that’s kind of how this “who are you associating with” attitude comes off because a) it’s hard to avoid rapists – statistically they’re more common than trans folks and folks with celiac disease and if you interact with enough people realistically you’re just going to be around a rapist at some point and b) sometimes it’s not a choice. Sometimes it’s your boss or your coworker or someone you have to network with in your field or a family member or the spouse of a family member who most people would honestly feel too awkward to challenge. I would *fucking love it* if you could say “Tom grabbed my ass and pulled up my shirt in front of customers, I’d like to make sure I’m not scheduled with him anymore” and not fear some kind of punitive change to your scheduling. It would be goddamned amazing if saying “James asked me to allow myself to get groped in front of witnesses because he didn’t believe me about my assailant” didn’t mean walking away from a group of friends you’d spent ten years building relationships because they think you’re just stirring shit.
There’s only so much you can retreat. There are only so many times you can back away. It’s tremendously upsetting to me that I’ve just accepted a certain amount of grabbing, catcalling, fondling, and attempted rape is what I have to put up with if I want to keep doing things that I enjoy doing (going to conferences, going to metal festivals, going to parties, going to monthly tech meetups) or keep doing things that I have to do (go to work, pump gas, buy groceries). It is exhausting and upsetting and I am so goddamned tired all the time.
(all of that by the way ties into the revictimization thing – you become resigned to it and get worse at asserting boundaries and accept that this is a part of life which is why some of you reading this may have noticed I’m something of a grind on this topic, gotta keep making the point that this is not normal, this is not something that you should accept, this is something to stand up and complain about even if that does mean you lose basically everyone you thought was a friend goddamnit)
I’m very happy for you if your friend group and all of your acquaintances doesn’t include at least one creepy person who just kind of gets overlooked. Keep up the good, work, exclude the creepy rapey people.
But please recognize that doing so is legitimately difficult for a lot of people.
When I was 10 I had a friend whose older brother was a child rapist. At 20 he’d been convicted of raping his step-sister and had spent time in prison for it. I didn’t know that at the time – I just went over to my friend’s house and we played in the pool and had sleepovers. Her parents never left us alone with him. They knew he was that missing stair, but he was their fucking son. They didn’t broadcast warnings or throw him out of the house, they just made sure he was never alone with his sisters or their friends ever again. And given my history I kind of wish I’d known about it so I could have made that choice myself but, fuck, I get not broadcasting that. I get trying to manage that secret and hiding that history.
That guy who put pics of my ass online? He gave one of the guys in the group his first car. He has worked with a dozen guys in the group and gotten at least five of them jobs. It’s fucking difficult to weigh “person who has been generous to me and helped me find work when I was in a tough spot” against “who is this girl again?” and I really do see why people go “well I don’t want him hurting people but I don’t want to hurt him either, we’ll just keep the problem from happening again.” In some ways it’s actually kind of admirable and I can respect that the people in that middle position are taking up the weight of trying to keep people safe and happy.
But, fuck, it doesn’t work and it sucks. It’s tacit approval, it’s saying “I’ll let you get away with it just this once” which just encourages them to get away with it again.
I’m going to say it again: everything is awful, keep yourself safe.
Please believe people who report abuse, please enforce your own boundaries, please recognize that some people have a difficult choice between “saying something about abuse” and “paying rent” and you can’t make that choice for them. And please, if at all possible, kick assault-y rapey people out of your groups, and support people who do the difficult work of saying “you aren’t welcome here anymore.”
Ugh. That became an awful lot of wordvomit. Not mad at anyone in this particular conversation, just so goddamned tired all the goddamned time.
That sounds terrible. It’s a completely different world to the one I live in where I know literally zero people who there are rumors about through my entire family, hobby groups and work environment.
I dunno, maybe I’m just a top tier introvert who people don’t tell things to but that
just
it doesn’t sound right either.
Maybe it’s a Scandinavia/America thing, where my boring bourgeoisie life just is not at any scale comparable to how things are in Average America but that sounds wrong too.
I definitely don’t blame anybody for ending up in these groups, you’re supposed to be able to just show up without ever worrying about hidden creeps, I just don’t understand how it happens because in my experience, groups don’t have hidden creeps.
I dunno, maybe I’m Good Groups Georg and my experience shouldn’t be counted.
I would fully believe that this is an America/other places issue, where Americans (unsurprisingly) assume everywhere else is like America.
I am not American: I don’t have a The Creepy One to point to in any of the groups I’ve ever been a part of, going back decades. There are socially inept ones who are ultimately harmless but have poor understanding of what is appropriate (but not in a touch-y, predator-y way), and I know people who have stopped going to groups because of that social ineptitude.
I’ve seen another post going around saying that, even if you’re a man and you don’t know about it, there is a The Creepy One, and the women just aren’t telling you about him, which strikes me as doubling down on this attitude.
Maybe it’s the type of groups that I move in (low number of women, but never uniformly men). In the queer spaces I’m adjacent to (but close enough to know the gossip), I know of people who are kept at arms length for various reasons, but not because of their being The Creepy One, more for being duplicitous.
I’m not sure how many Good Groups Georg you can have before it stops being a Georg and starts being the norm.
I don’t think that “geek spaces” is exactly it (and that the hacker cons are, by every account I’ve gotten of them going back for years, so rife with missing stairs I don’t get the impression that it could rightly be called a staircase) but spaces where people don’t think there’s an alternative. If this is the only [x] in driving distance, or the only acceptable social outlet around for [y] people, then leaving is that much harder (and expulsion that much more a nuclear option) Also, low status people are always prime targets, so social spaces for low status people are basically hunting fish in a barrel.
That’s also a prerequisite for bullying: the victim can’t leave, or is seriously discouraged from leaving, by forces outside the bully. In my own experience, bullying and sexual harassment are extremely close and somewhat overlapping categories.q
And, let’s be honest, the people who make a stink are usually either mentally unstable, making a power play, stupid/new and failing to understand that they’re trashing their own chances socially/professionally, or actually an outsider who doesn’t care.
“ALSO MOTHERFUCKERS AND I HAVE A SERIOUS ISSUE WITH THIS – Geeks are unwilling to ostracize members of the group (at least overtly). That’s why some of this shit gets extremely toxic: if you speak up about someone hurting you you are being bad and mean and they just don’t understand social norms, why are you trying to exclude them? Gross. Gross gross gross. So sometimes what you’ll see is someone repeatedly just “not understanding social norms” until the people hurt by this leave the group for their safety, which allows the abuser to stay, and the surrounding folks who don’t want to ostracize anyone can safely say they didn’t push out the abuser over “drama” and the other people chose to leave and weren’t forced out.”
This is absolutely a thing, and why I worry about some of the mental health/disability discourse on here. Yeah, it’s awful if your default instincts are “do these things that other people tend to find creepy and not know why.” But if that’s a pattern, sooner or later you might just have to go “people consistently don’t seem to like this. Maybe I should only do it around people I know very well who have told me it doesn’t bug them.”
so it turns out i’m going back on private insurance in october because pennsylvania medicaid isn’t going to cover any of my transition-related expenses—including hormones. a side effect of this is that (for at least a year) i’m going to have to terminate with my psychiatrist and therapist, an autism specialist with whom i’ve made the only significant progress in my six-year, eight-practitioner mental health campaign.
needless to say, neither of us is thrilled about this, but certain things need to take priority and there’s little we can do to prevent it. at first, she suggested i go back to my old clinic—even if it’s just to touch base every couple weeks—until i walked us through the following:
at best, this clinic will stick me with another intern who i don’t trust and who isn’t equipped to help me. at this point in my life, i am not a client who benefits greatly from talk therapy. my official diagnoses are far outside the anxiety and unipolar depression comfort zone of most practitioners. at best, especially to an intern, this makes me a liability.
imagine i walk in during a real low (to “touch base”). my lows are scary, both to me and to the people who witness them. the only thing a new, inexperienced therapist is going to see is the alphabet soup on my client profile—”oh shit, he got fucked as a kid and doesn’t eat”—and immediately gun for a 302. this has happened to me before, once with a therapist i actually trusted, who attempted to commit me knowing i was about to go on a trip that would ultimately save my life and radically change it for the better.
if i go to inpatient, i lose my job. because i am autistic and inpatient teams don’t know or care to know about autism, i am also unable to gain enough ‘privileges’ to talk to my partner. i am completely isolated from my support network, constantly overstimulated and exhausted, and, when i finally get out, without a livelihood.
i asked my psychiatrist at this point whether any of this seemed unreasonable or paranoid. “no,” she said, “unfortunately it really doesn’t.” we’re now going to try and negotiate a single-case contract with my hypothetical insurance provider, because neither of us is the slightest bit optimistic about any of my other options when it comes to continuity of care.
this is what multidiagnosis is like. this is what it’s like navigating healthcare with autism, with complex PTSD, with complex mood disorders, and god help you with a tentative cluster B diagnosis. success stories without major setbacks are the exception, not the rule, and the exceptions most often occur at the confluence of social privilege and alignment of a client’s problems with the practice du jour of the mental healthcare and pharmaceutical industries.
the idea of a widespread “anti-recovery” movement is tone deaf at best, almost always drenched in privilege, and uncritically marginalizing at worst.
Kids who sought out sexual/romantic interactions with adults…
because they were lonely and needed human interaction/attention
or had emotional needs not being met
because they thought it was the price of being treated with care
or because it was a way to understand/reenact/overwrite/escape previous trauma
because they thought it was normal
or because they had picked up the message that this was how to be daring and cool and sexy/mature
or because they didn’t really understand how it would affect them
because they felt like they deserved it
or because they thought there wasn’t a big difference and “age is just a number”
or because being sexual around adults was the only time people said nice things to them or seemed to like them or notice them
or for any other reason
… still did not deserve the abuse they suffered.
Kids who initiate flirtation with adults still don’t deserve abuse.
Adults who aren’t abusers will not take advantage of a kid’s crush or advances. It’s the adult’s responsibility to set clear boundaries and enforce them. It’s an adult’s responsibility to not become sexually or romantically involved with a child. Adults who do are abusers.
Children did not cause those adults to become abusers. Children cannot tempt nonabusers into becoming abusers. Children are never responsible for adults deciding to abuse.
Even if you feel like you made it really easy for them to abuse you, being vulnerable to abuse around a nonabuser doesn’t result in abuse. Your vulnerability wasn’t the cause of the abuse. Their choices were.
Yes, I’m copy-pasting a lot from previous versions of this post, because it’s exhausting to rewrite the same info over and other again.
However, let’s see if I can sum things up: my daughter Dessie has chronic kidney disease, currently at stage 4. Sometime, hopefully soon, she will need/get a donated kidney transplanted. That will take us over to Seattle for three to four months, basically moving us there for the duration.
Here is the information for possible kidney donors: Donors need to between 21-45, in reasonably good health, and O+ blood type. If this is something you’re interested, please contact the University of Washington’s living donor program at 206-598-3627, and mention you’re interested in donating to Dessie McAdams. I am not sure what constitutes “reasonably good health” in this case, though I think most people with chronic illnesses don’t qualify and anyone immmuno-compromised. Best to contact UW and ask.
We do have a possible living donor right now, and are waiting on the process, which may take months. I am hoping, however, that one way or the other Dessie will receive a new kidney in the next 12 months. Or so. Soon, I’m hoping. However, transplanted kidneys come with expiration dates averaging between 10-20 years, so her doctors want her to retain her native kidneys as long as possible.
I divorced my abusive ex about four years ago, taking on the marital debt to speed the divorce. I consolidated it, but just trying to staying alive as a family keeps piling up debt, pretty consistently putting us in the negative each month, because there’s more bills than money, and no way to be rid of bills without more money than we have. I’m trying. It kills me to keep asking for help. But I’ve learned if you don’t ask, people won’t help; staying silent assumes you’re fine.
We are living in a house owned by my ex in laws, and there’ve repeated threats to evict us. I’d love to move, but that’s impossible without money. I badly want to get us into a place where neither my ex nor his family have power over us.
In about early May 2017, my daughter revealed to me that her father molested her, while we were still married., when she was about three or four. I reported this to CPS and the police., but ultimately nothing came of it, because by that time no physical evidence remained.
Im trying to keep my family safe, and well. It’s a constant and continuing struggle. We currently have an old but good working car; in the past few months, though, w e’ve had tires blow out, and our car repossessed. Most recently it required a $754 fix; my mother was able and kind enough that help me that done, but I most pay her back somehow.
The house has issues; every time I think we’ve tackled the last plumbing issue, a new one comes up. The last one was the bathroom sink. Getting them fixed means dealing with my ex mother in law or ex father in law. They like to use such things as excuses to interfere in our lives. The last time I requested a plumbing fix, they sent in my ex’s half-brother, who did the job but also called CPS on me. The house’s poor electrical setup regularly kills our lightbulbs.
YouCaring has been fully absorbed by GoFundMe as of July 31st, so that’s no longer an alternative. Be aware that the GFM does not reflect the approximately 40k in debt I’m struggling with, nor other life complications which money would help with, partly not to muddy up the donation page, but also because GoFundMe is fairly public and encourages shares to Facebook — which is good for a donation platform, yes, but I don’t want my ex and his family to find out all our struggles.
I am looking into bankruptcy; that also requires money to file for. I am trying to modify our parenting plan so the kids either only see him in a formally supervised setting or not at all. Though I’m hunting for sliding fees and fee waivers, money is required for all of this. (Just filing for a parenting plan modification costs $260, if the court denies the fee waiver request.) Capitalism sucks pointy rocks.
Ifou prefer alternate donation methods, here are some:
PayPal.me/kerryren
Venmo @KerryRen
Cash app $KerryRen
C
CirclePay kerryren@yahoo.com
If you use these, please let me know if you want to be publicly thanked/acknowledged here (if you also shared your tumblr @), or as an offline donation on the GFM. Otherwise I’ll assume anonymity is preferred; you’ll still get thanked if I can find a way, but not necessarily publicly.
Do not donate if it will cause you personal hardship. Please. Don’t feel obliged to donate if you either can’t afford or even don’t want to. Rebloggjng and signal boosting, however, on whatever your available platforms are is greatly appreciated.
I do try to keep these posts updated as to my present financial status. As I receive SSDI (and my children receive social security funds through both their parents), money comes in on the third of each month and then whooshes out through the next three days. From there I try to keep us fed and alive any way I can — mostly with plasma money right now.
We don’t get food stamps. We don’t get energy assistance. We don’t get housing assistance. This is not from pride; I’ve applied and been told our household has too much income. (They don’t take the total outgo into account, much, usually). We get health insurance, which is a plus or things would be infinitely, painfully worse.
Anyway, this is long enough so I’ll end it for now.
This month’s hell begins. Please help.
Please. Help.
They’re killing me.
And in my continuing car woes, my right rear tire somehow got a big hole in it and needs replaced, because Cars Hate Me.
I hate this constant need, this constant series of setbacks and disasters. I just want to live. I just want my kids to live, safe and well. I hate asking for help all the damn time.
But I’m not going to stop hoping for a miracle. Things have to Get Better, Somehow.
We know about the little boys, but Catholic priests had other victims, too.
Several nuns are now coming forward to tell the Associated Press their own stories of abuse and assault, in what reporters Nicole Winfield and Rodney Muhumuza are calling “Vatican Meets #MeToo”:
An AP examination has found that cases have emerged in Europe, Africa, South America and Asia, demonstrating that the problem is global and pervasive, thanks to the universal tradition of sisters’ second-class status in the Catholic Church and their ingrained subservience to the men who run it.
Some nuns are now finding their voices, buoyed by the #MeToo movement and the growing recognition that adults can be victims of sexual abuse when there is an imbalance of power in a relationship. The sisters are going public in part because of years of inaction by church leaders, even after major studies on the problem in Africa were reported to the Vatican in the 1990s.
It’s that last bit that’s especially disturbing. The victims had nowhere to turn. If they reported the abuse, it was bound to reach the same people who covered up the child abuse scandals.
The AP says the Vatican doesn’t often hear about these incidents, which also means they have no plan for how to handle them.
… the Catholic Church has no clear measures in place to investigate and punish bishops who themselves abuse or allow abusers to remain in their ranks — a legal loophole that has recently been highlighted by the [Cardinal Theodore E.] McCarrick case.
Another problem? Some priests accused of assault just blame the women, as is common in patriarchal religions. She wanted it, the men say, suggesting that they were too helpless to stop the thing they were doing.
And if abuse and assault weren’t enough, the consequences of these incidents can lead to even more pushback against Catholic teachings.
And when these women become pregnant?
“Mainly she has an abortion. Even more than once. And he pays for that. A religious sister has no money. A priest, yes,” [clergy sexual abuse expert Karlijn Demasure] said.
It may be tempting to blame the Church’s own rules for making the entire situation worse. When celibacy is required and contraception and birth control are forbidden, what did you think would happen? But that’s a cop-out. There’s no excuse for abuse. And remember: the priests signed up for this life.
This is only the latest example of Catholic Church’s own leaders doing the unthinkable — all without any real consequences. So we’re back to the same questions that were asked when we learned about all the sexual assaults on children: Why would anyone remain in the Catholic Church after all these reports? Why would they give money to an organization that can’t protect its own leaders? How could they trust anyone who thinks this is the group they want to join?
May the exodus out of the Church be even swifter this time around.
ok ‘she wanted it’ normally is one thing, it’s basically saying ‘it was consensual, she’s lying’ and you have a he said she said situation. But in the catholic church consensual sex is ALSO forbidden for preists right? they take a vow of celibacy?
if they say ‘she wanted it’ doesn’t that mean that they’re at the very least admitting to breaking their vow of celibacy? shouldn’t that mean they get punished/ stop being a priest?
‘he says he did something that’s forbidden, she says he did something WAY WAY WORSE that’s also forbidden, therefore we shall…ignore it and brush it under the rug’?
That would certainly seem to be the case to me, yes.
So, I just wrote that big thing on ‘progressive’ white America’s modern view of the chattel slavery of African Americans, and I have deiced, on behalf of all white people, we need to stop lying to each other. Teachers, tour guides, even just random people, when they get asked “Was Master X nice to his slaves” or “But most slaves were treated well, right?” Need to uniformly answer “No.”
No owner ever treated a slave well. Not George Washington, Not Thomas Jefferson, not your potential ancestors, not the nice family you heard about on vacation last year. To own another human being is to not treat them well.
We have to stop lying to kids (and each other) and saying that there is a humane way to strip another human being of there right to self, to take a person and create a marketable commodity .
White Americans still benefit from the legacy of slavery, and Black American’s still suffer from it. We need to stop teaching it as an ancient quirk that left few scars because everyone was more or less happy.
It wasn’t symbiotic, it was parasitic, and we need to stop saying otherwise.
To own another human being is to not treat them well.
Aside (in relation to hearing about another conversation): To own another human being, means they cannot give enthusiastic consent to sex. There were no slave and master love stories. The inability to say no to the person who can beat you, kill you, starve you, sell off family members, sell you off away from all you’ve ever known, kill family members and or torture them – means there’s no consent to sex.
No slave master ever fell in love with a slave then treated them right by NOT freeing them and not freeing their family and not supporting abolition.
The fact that a person did not have the full autonomy and were forced to be at the whim of another person is abuse. Period. Slavery was ongoing abuse.
All of these bullshit ‘massa treated me well’ narratives are STOCKHOLM SYNDROME.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A GOOD SLAVE OWNER. THEY ARE ABUSERS. ALL. SLAVE. OWNERS. WERE. VIOLENT. ABUSERS
CW FOR SLAVERY
Want to know a good way to shut down Thomas Jefferson apologists?
Point out the fact that under Virginian standards in Jefferson’s time, the children he fathered on Sally Hemings were white.
Sally Hemings was one quarter black and three quarters white.* She had three white grandparents and one black grandparent in the maternal line.
Jefferson was white. So the children that Jefferson impregnated Sally with were one-eighth black and seven-eighths white. Virginian law during Jefferson’s time stated that a person who had one black great-grandparent was a white person. They were, in the racial parlance of the time, ‘octoroons’ and octoroons were considered white people (NB: THIS IS A VERY LOADED RACIST TERM, AND I’M USING IT HERE FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES, DO NOT USE THIS TERM TO DESCRIBE PEOPLE.) The children were slaves because they were born to an enslaved mother**, but they were legally white children, and Jefferson deliberately decided to keep them in slavery, which was allowed at the time.*** This is where the apologists get uncomfortable. They’re like “Don’t make this weird.” And you’re like WEIRDER THAN IT IS ALREADY?
Now, not only were they the half-siblings of Jefferson’s own children, and were raised in slavery, but Sally Hemings was the half-sibling of Jefferson’s wife. Sally Hemings and Martha shared a father. Sally was 25 years younger than Martha, and Martha and her husband inherited baby Sally as property after her father’s death. At the age of 14, Sally – used as a servant for the Jefferson’s teenage daughters – became Thomas’s concubine and got pregnant. SO THAT’S REALLY NICE. TOTALLY NOT CREEPY OR WEIRD.
Jefferson didn’t see a problem with enslaving and impregnating his wife’s sister IN HIS WIFE’S HOUSE – his wife’s teen sister that he had OWNED SINCE SHE WAS A TINY BABY – and keeping the resulting children as property. There’s no need to make it weird, guys! This is totally normal behavior.
The only reason that Sally, as a pregnant teen in France, did not run
away from Jefferson in a country where she was legally free was because
he apparently promised to free her children at the age of 21.
In their 20s, two of the children (Beverly, a boy, and Harriet, a girl) ran away to the North, where they were legally free.
They self-identified as white, entered white society, and married middle-class white people. They disappeared into history.
Jefferson did not pursue them or make any attempt to recover his property, which is seen to demonstrate his Compassion, and the fact that he totally Freed His Children. But not legally. And in such a way that they ran about in the North for a bit, sparking interested gossip and speculation, because they looked a hell of a lot like Jefferson. People try to handwave it – “Oh, he freed them by letting them escape… we don’t mean that he FREED them, like gave them official papers to keep them safe from slavecatchers or allow them to vote or anything… he just didn’t…. run them down with dogs.”
When
Beverly ran away, he was 24. Remember how Jefferson promised to free the kids at the age of 21? That must have been an awkward few years. “So can I have some voting rights and the ability to get married, like you promised my mother, please? Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness? Can I get a little of that?” “Oh no, don’t worry about it. Tell you what, if you ever decide to run away and are forced to establish yourself in an alien society from scratch without ever seeing your family again, I won’t run you down with dogs.” NOW THAT’S GOOD PARENTING
Jefferson legally freed the two surviving sons in his will – it was a dicey moment, because he died in Lots of Fucking Debt and huge chunks of Wayles-Jefferson-Hemings family got auctioned off randomly and weren’t seen again. But the other two boys were freed and just about managed to dodge the debt collectors. After his death, they remained in the South and married, only moving away when they feared slavecatchers would kidnap them. Imagine leaving your own children (who were also your wife’s nephews) in that situation. BUT THAT’S NOT WEIRD.
Jefferson didn’t want to deal with any political awkwardness that would happen if he officially freed any of the children when he was alive.
Because, you know.
That would have made it weird.
* This is known and recorded; her family tree is clear. It was valuable information that contributed to her ‘market value.’ Disgusting! But clearly recorded!
**This changed later, and varied by state; you can read plenty of accounts of “white slaves” with predominantly Caucasian features being bought and sold in the South. The ‘just one drop’ rule was widely adopted to make this easier for slavers – if one black ancestor could be proved or suggested, the person could be bought and sold as property. A young vulnerable white person with no family could be conveniently be ‘accused’ of having black ancestry, so that blue-eyed-blondes could be purchased and sold as sexual slaves – and used to produce more slaves! This was absolutely shocking for European visitors at the time, who wrote it all down and went “LOOK AT THE FUCKERY THE AMERICANS ARE DOING?! DO YOU BELIEVE THIS? THEY INVENTED A SPECIFIC KIND OF RACISM TO JUSTIFY SLAVERY AND NOW THEY’RE NOT EVEN STICKING TO THEIR OWN RULES??” So you know, this was just incredibly terrible and unethical the whole way down. Hopefully everyone gets that? Does using white people as an example clarify matters for everyone? It’s problematic, but it’s a technique that abolitionists used for hundreds of years, because it’s effective and usually REALLY freaks out apologists. Thus there was the now-forgotten plot device of the “tragic octoroon” used in abolitionist plays and literature – usually a pretty blonde girl with secret African ancestry, forced into sexual slavery until rescued by an abolitionist in an extremely heavy-handed plot twist – but it was extremely effective at freaking out the middle-class white people in the North. “That could be my daughter! We have to stop slavery!” And Europeans were just like “Jesus CHRIST what are Americans even DOING?!” as they frantically wrote letters back home.
*** The Virginian law statedpartus sequitur ventrem – the child of an enslaved mother is an enslaved child. Even if they aren’t technically ‘black.’ Because it made Jefferson’s life less awkward.
NB: SLAVERY IS WRONG and it was ALWAYS wrong to enslave people. The fact that the Hemings children were “legally white” – basically a meaningless term anyway – doesn’t mean they “deserved” to be elevated above other enslaved people and freed. It’s just a really good way to shut down the apologists, because they like to set up a fake fantasy system where slavery is totally justified and fair. This is not compatible with reality, particularly in the case of Presidential children.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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