In his must-read GQ story on A Voice for Men’s conference last summer, Jeff Sharlet detailed an unsettling encounter between his friend Blair and AVFM’s “collegiate activism director” Sage Gerard, who, Blair told Sharlet, crudely propositioned her and gave her “the most unconsensual hug I have ever known.” (I wrote about it here.)
Now Gerard has offered a rebuttal of sorts to Sharlet’s article and, well, it’s nearly as creepy as the incident itself. Gerard admits that he was indeed flirting with her and that, yes, “[m]y talking to her included a reassuring knee pat and a hug.”
He also claims that Blair was literally hired by GQ in order to flirt with men at the conference and lure one or more of them into raping her.
Gerard starts off by declaring, with no evidence whatsoever, that Blair was a “plant hired specifically to flirt with men and get GQ a story.”
Then his accusations get even uglier:
Blair’s job was to get raped.
Jeff [Sharlet] wanted that to happen, not MHRAs [Men’s Human Rights Activists]. Blair would play Seven Minutes in Heaven if it got Jeff a rape story. She was there to confirm a presumption that MHRAs, MGTOWs or other red-pill folk are incapable of self-control and are ready to rape at a moment’s notice.
Happily for Gerard, he writes, he was able to see through this subterfuge in time, I guess, to keep from raping her.
Unfortunately for Jeff, I have an ability to detect manipulation, and I do not think with my dick. He calibrated his bear trap to clamp shut on a hug-trigger, which meant he could try to make me look like a pervert even with totally appropriate physical contact. Since he was obviously desperate to catch prey, his trap misfired and merely ripped my jeans without biting me to a standstill. Having narrowly evaded pseudo-journalistic “capture,” I can easily show you that Blair was, indeed, a trap.
He then proceeds to “show us” absolutely nothing that backs up this accusation. After briefly describing his conversation with Blair, which (aside from the “reassuring knee pat” and unconsensual hug) dealt with a friend of Blair’s who claims he’s been falsely accused of rape, he wrote.
I never intend to sleep with strangers, but Jeff framed this interaction as me using Blair’s pain as an excuse to eat her out.
I have no idea where that last bit came from either.
He follows this with a bunch of rape jokes I won’t bother to quote.
I’m not quite sure how Gerard expects that writing this creepy-as-hell post will somehow make him seem like less of a creep.
Dipshit MRA:
Uh, that’s an assumption MRAs and other misogynists make about men, not one their opponents make. And it’s kind of begging the question to frame not raping women as an exercise in self control. If you don’t feel entitled to do something in the first place, you won’t need any kind of control mechanism to prevent yourself from doing it. Like, I might have trouble stopping myself from eating an entire bag of jelly beans I bought for myself, but I’m not about to help myself to even one of the jellybeans a stranger sitting next to me on the bus is eating.
When I was working at the hospital, I happened to be introduced to a woman who had a ‘hugging ministry’. I was involuntarily hugged by this woman once. Despite knowing that she actual had good, if woefully misguided, intentions, and it being over a decade in the past, she still strikes me as a good example of good intentions leading you to questionable behavior.
Sage Gerard is an example of bad intentions leading you to repellent behavior. Legos, assemble!
Oh, this is all so silly. Of course it’s fine to touch the leg of someone you just meant and scoop them up for a hug! She was sad, he totally meant to be comforting and supportive. Intent is magic and telegraphs itself to all and sundry in a ten mile radius, especially strangers who might be otherwise ill at ease.
It’s like if you’re at a party and a get talking to a man who’s really excited about something good that just happened. Maybe he got a raise, maybe his kid just brought home a great report card, maybe he achieved a personal record in his last 5K. Whatever the case, he’s happy, so the most logical thing to do is to dump a cooler full of half-melted ice on his head. It’s what football teammates sometimes do to their coach after a big win, right? And all men everywhere love sports, it is a science fact. So why wouldn’t he want to get doused in ice-cold water, just like a professional sports coach after a big win? You’re just expressing your own joy at his exuberance. He was definitely okay with it since he just pulled the last beer out of the cooler. Why would he even be standing by the drinks, being a man who loves sports, if he wasn’t okay with getting cold and wet? How could he not see how innocent and positive your actions were?
Oh, wait, that’s all crappy behavior. You shouldn’t do any of that. Not the compassionate stranger grabbing, and not the celebratory ice baths. Because people don’t have mind-reading skills, but do have different preferences and boundaries and that crazy thing called bodily autonomy. Huh.
If you see “flirting” (it doesn’t sound like she was, but anyway) and think “devious plot to get raped”, you must spend a heck of a lot of time thinking about rape. These guys love to accuse feminists of “seeing rape everywhere”, but it really doesn’t take much for them to pull out the R-word themselves.
Incidentally, back in high school I had a story idea about a 1970s revenge film style teenage female vigilante that would ‘lure’ adult sexual predators, then kill them in self-defense. The whole idea was that even if she did ‘lead them on’, the impetus was on them not to rape so she could keep killing criminals legally. I never wrote it, but there actually are women whose ‘job is to get raped’…or at least, to pretend that they’ll almost get raped. They’re undercover cops, who often pose as ‘decoys’ for online and real-life sexual predators. Somehow, I don’t think ‘she was there to get raped’ would be a very effective excuse if Sage Gerard ever found himself in a situation like with that lady in the park in The Warriors.
Not sure how he expects to prove that MRAs aren’t rapists by detailing how he convinced himself not to rape her despite how much he wanted to.
Robert: My dad’s Hospice nurses were all kinds of touchy-feely. My family, as a rule, is not. I know they meant well and were trying to be kind, but… Luckily, they stopped when asked to or when they recognized our discomfort.
Larry Fine, how could you!
@alaisvex: I read it that way too. I’m not as convinced as you, though, that that wasn’t what he intended.
@lkeke35: I think the answer to that is obvious.
Remember that the PUA “game” is basically to violate a women’s boundaries and, if you get away with that, keep going. I think we saw PUA “game” in action.
I’m fully agreeing on the weirdness of this whole “oh, she was totally there to get raped to prove that we’re ready to rape anything like those feminists keep accusing us of! Good thing we saw their trap and didn’t rape her even a little!” charade. Weeeeiirrd.
Also, am I the only who wants to know a little more about the false rape accusation scenario of the friend of Blair’s? Because I’d really like to reach out and inject some skepticism into that scenario – the idea that there is actually any woman willing to pretend to be into BDSM in order to get some bruises and sex to facilitate a rape accusation sounds Gone Girl levels of outlandish villainy. Having only that to go on, I’m much more inclined to believe her friend is trying to say “nope, that whole thing was consensual”
“well, what about those bruises?”
“She’s super into BDSM, she asked for them.”
One of the neighbors came over with food when my mother passed away and she hugged me without asking. I am not a hugger. I had to do the thing where you pat the person on the back and then pull your arms away THREE TIMES before she got the hint, at which point I circled around and hid behind my brother.
GrumpyOldMangina | February 28, 2015 at 9:29 pm
It’s like Schroedinger’s PUA. An asshole who decides if they were flirting with you or if they actually just thought you were “easy” based on your reactions to their unwanted advances.
I want to comment on how heinously stupid and offensive and CREEPY all this dude’s writing is (because oh dear gods in heaven this is tripe of a rare and disgusting breed) but that would require me to actually scroll up and be in the same vicinity as that incredibly creepy picture of said dude. Christ on a cracker, why would a person ever let such an unsettling image of their face escape into the wilds of the internet?
Ghostbird, my mother had a line for that: “He cannot know what he looks like.”
suffrajitsu: There was a 2005 flick along those lines. Hard Candy, starring Ellen Page and Patrick Wilson. It’s about a teenage girl who preys upon pedophiles.
@Robert
But….but that’s not a *friendly* face. Thats not even an approximation of a friendly face. That’s a goddamn ‘HEEEEEERE’S JOHNNY!’-as-the-axe-comes-through-the-door face.
@suffrajitsu,
I definitely think that he was thinking that he was lucky that he didn’t rape her because he realized that it was a trap. I just don’t think that he meant for that to come out in writing. But then again, maybe I’m being too optimistic in assuming that he feels the need to pretend that he doesn’t think that rape is justifiable if the woman gives him anything that he can interpret as encouragement.
Also, I have to ask again: how was she supposed to trick them into raping her? By encouraging to ask her for sex and then denying consent? But for that ploy to work, they’d have to keep going after she said, “No.” And that would be their fault and no one else’s.
@tenya,
I’m hoping Blair’s false rape accusation story was made up for that very reason. The “rough sex” defense is way too common for me to accept it at face value, and the news had given us more than one example in the last few moths of men using BDSM as an excuse for sexually assaulting women.
@tenya: I vaguely remember wondering if Braverman had made up, exaggerated, or simplified that story to get a conversation started at the conference for journalistic purposes. I’d have to reread the article to remember how it was described, but I don’t want to ruin my weekend.
John Steinbeck’s East of Eden had a soap opera-worthy backstory for the Cathy Ames character, where the Devil incarnate (not an exaggeration, the book’s based on Genesis) femme fatale convinced two boys to tie her up and then framed them for rape when she was a little girl. I really liked Of Mice and Men and I have friends who love East of Eden, but I just couldn’t take the cartoonishly misogynist evil-woman-manipulating-poor-men overtones seriously. I wasn’t even offended by it, it was so over the top. (While Cathy is pure evil, we’re supposed to feel sympathize with a teacher who killed himself because 16-year-old Cathy rejected him and interpret an entire encampment of railroad workers who gang raped a pregnant woman so brutally she died–the railroad workers later help her grieving husband raise the baby, and it’s supposed to be a comment on how men are capable of both great evil and great good, but I couldn’t help but interpret it as ‘women are evil manipulative monsters who will destroy innocent men, but men raping women to death doesn’t really mean they’re bad.’)
I really love the guy in the comments that complains about his friend being in jail for killing his son and the wife got victim’s compensation, that harpy.
Him and his mate sound like real attractive guys.
Reblogged this on respectsexwork.
The whole bear trap analogy was creepy, hilarious, and telling all into one.
Yeah, right. “I knew it was a bear trap all along! So I smartly stuck my leg inside the jaws and waved it all around and tapped my toe lightly on the center spring mechanism and then stuck my face right down into the sharp teeth. Because that’s what clever people do when faced with a bear trap.”
I do like how he rationalizes his scumbag actions by patting himself on the back vigorously for not being an even bigger scumbag. MRAs are forever demanding cookies for alllllllmost achieving the minimum baseline of decent behavior.
Tenya,
Where are you getting those details on Blair’s “Bryan”story? I only see a one-line mention in Sharlet’s GQ article?
Oh, I see, it’s in the Sage piece. Damn, I really hope she did make that up.