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.
I think we need this:
https://www.thedodo.com/cats-recreate-photo-kittenhood-1009118646.html
One thing that we should all remember is that these guys are like the Taliban, rape is not a crime for them. They don’t hate actions, only people. They hate you because you’re a woman or you’re not a woman hater; they won’t hate you if you’re a loser who lives off of his girlfriend, beats his grandchild and then shirks all responsibility.
@wordsp1nner
And now, all the anger inside me has melted into a puddle of d’awww. Awesome link.
The most disturbing part to me is that he thinks a woman would actually hire herself out to be raped. Like, rape really isn’t as bothersome as all us hysterical ladies make it out to be in order to ruin good men’s lives.
But… wait, I thought that under the despotic matriarchy that controls the western world, women just had to claim they were raped, without any proof given or asked for, in order to send a man to prison for fifty years. If this is true, then why would Blair have to get paid to get raped at the conference? They could have just paid her to say “yes I was totally raped at the AVFM conference”, and everyone would have believed her, because that’s totally how false rape accusations go! /sarcasm
To call this gibberish is an insult to typical gibberish. I now understand everything in the world a little less after reading this because many of my brain cells did not survive the encounter.
Hi blockquote monster! Guess I forgot your Valentine’s day present.
These guys seriously think any woman would actively try to get raped as a journalistic “gotcha”?
That’s even daffier than the one about helping a guy recover from false-rape trauma by writing a shitty poem.
Or the one about how Sage Fucking Gerard should be allowed to go stickering women’s campus washrooms with Menz Rightz crapaganda, and how no one should feel the least bit threatened or creeped out by that, oh noooooo.
And on a more serious note, I hope Blair, Jeff Sharlet and GQ are properly lawyered up. Because that right there is libel, Mr. Gerard.
Forget the libel, they should be going after him for the sexual harassment and assault, especially since he’s admitted it.
The reverse “logic” of these creepy fuckers is baffling. Plus, the underlying assumption that as a women she had one purpose being there…
It’s almost definitely not libel. You really can’t prove that kind of speculation about intentions well enough to establish that someone is deliberately lying. All he would have to do as a legal defense was argue that he believes what he’s saying, which I think he could do. Sharlet and Braverson probably count as “public figures.”
‘I think that ‘Sage Gerard’ is probably the least socially aware person ever.’
I wanted to highlight this sentence because it’s the kind of thing I used to believe, but after years of reading and observing I realise it’s not actually the case. I’m sure he’s totally socially aware, when it comes to interacting with other men. I think Deborah Tannen talks about studies/experiments demonstrating that men are as capable of reading and acting on subtle social signals, and understanding indirect language (like ‘is there any ketchup?’ or ‘it’s chilly in here’), as women are…but where women are concerned they don’t choose to. And they don’t choose to because they don’t have to. There’s no social penalty for them when they ignore these kinds of communications from women, because we all cut them slack–well, he’s just not socially aware, it’s not his fault. It’s like the men who try to justify their physical violence toward women under their control by saying ‘they just get so angry, it’s not their fault they can’t control their tempers’–and yet seem perfectly capable of controlling their tempers at work.
Uh, Sage, methinks you’re tipping your hand.
Sharlet describes Sage as behaving inappropriately touchy-feely. Sage interprets this as similar to a rape accusation.
What the fucking fuck?
—
What get’s me about Sage is a bunch of small things. For instance, this bit: ‘“I apologize for dragging you away,” he says. “I wasn’t going to feel okay until I talked to you.”‘
It’s creep to foist emotional needs onto strangers you just met. That’s the creepiness. Dude, the hugging isn’t the problem, the poem isn’t the problem, bringing her to more private space isn’t the problem: the fact that all of this was clearly about your emotional needs and what you wanted; despite the fact that it was ostensibly about her and her friend; was creepy as fuck.
Manurespherians are not “incapable of self-control and [ ] ready to rape at a moment’s notice”, asserts Gerard, despite not seeming to question the assumption that a) Blair *could* have lured one or more of them into raping her, because that’s a temptation to MRAs; b) he mostly avoided raping her by figuring that he would get caught; c) unconsensual contact is totally not a red-flag behaviour that needs to be addressed.
Y’know, I hope his online activities are sufficient to get him kicked off campus permanently, but then he’d just be creeping around elsewhere. The sooner they can introduce mandatory consent classes to universities the better.
And while they’re at it, they can introduce Discourse on The Otter as a major subject, too.
http://discourseontheotter.tumblr.com/
http://36.media.tumblr.com/59f5b42ad9d36cc4e3299779a7786a12/tumblr_n6lk8v8axR1rjiopto1_1280.png
@guest,
I dunno. You’re absolutely right about the general case; abusers don’t have worse social skills than the rest of us, just worse ethics. Stepping back from abusers to look at sexists generally, it’s true that sexist men on the whole have the same social skills as egalitarian men, just less desire to use them for women’s benefit.
But Paul Elam’s friends aren’t your run-of-the-mill sexists or even your run of the mill abusers. They’re people who for run reason or another haven’t found a place in any of the many, many mainstream institutions that tolerates sexism. There are indeed savvy, genteel woman-haters in this world, but they don’t hang out on AVFM.
I recommend listening to Gerard’s tape of his interview with Sharlet. It’s weird as hell. Gerard has talking points and sticks to them, but the oddness goes even beyond that. He doesn’t seem to notice or care when Sharley has heard enough and is trying to start a new topic. He replies to several questions with complete non-sequiturs. Even when Sharlet actually concedes a point to Gerard, Gerard doesn’t immediately notice and keeps arguing it anyway. It’s a really uncomfortable tape that reminds me of “The Office” more than anything. It’s both a little distasteful how full of himself Sage is, and a little sad how much he just doesn’t get it.
Being the kiljoy that I am, can I ask for the use of the invented word ‘rapey’ to be throttled back on as I feel it starts to detract from the real word and the real crime.
@tenya
Big ol trigger warning on this for rape, victim blaming, unconsensual “BDSM” aka violence and mild torture, general awfulness.
I agree, the one line mention of it in Sharlet’s article was enough to get my hackles up and this has not helped. I have the screaming heebie jeebies. Before I was ever raped, I knew how women were treated if they reported. After I was raped and my rapist ran to the cops because he was afraid I would kill him, the cops told me – a 15 year old girl – that I was just that kind of girl, and that I didn’t seem to realise what I had done to this ‘boy,’ who was 22. It was no worse than I had expected. After I was raped by someone else, I did not and will not report because a) I had slept with him before and b) I was in his bed at the time. I would wager I am one of millions of women who know that while what happened to them was indisputably rape, they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting taken seriously or treated with any kind of dignity or empathy if they report. Any and all anecdotes about false reports ring my alarm bells, but especially ones where it’s like “she was just drunk and regretted it” or in this case “the bruises were given consensually, she likes being beaten.”
Another thing is that when I was young (15-17) and experimenting with BDSM, I found myself being beaten way past my tolerance from the off by super serious Doms who acted surprised and hurt when I managed to gasp out a safeword, or in some cases when I was unable to get out the safeword and just screamed and struggled until they took the hint. I’m sure they would describe that as consensual. One boyfriend hit me with a studded paddle, making the first blow as hard as he could manage which was very much not what I had asked, and as I was unrestrained I jumped out of his reach and safeworded, but he chased me round the fucking bed with the thing saying “you’re not getting away that easy” and I was giggling in panic, and he would definitely describe that as consensual. Another boyfriend was biting me lightly at my behest, and he suddenly chomped down on my nipple and through the skin. I shrieked but couldn’t move til he let go for fear of wrenching it off, it bled a lot and oh my god it hurt, all he could say was “I got carried away.” Again…would he view that as non-consensual? Unlikely.
I’ve also been ‘casually’ raped several times – like on two occasions with two different guys we were having consensual sex as we had before, it was fun, they were pretty decent guys to be with. Then they asked for anal, I said no, they disregarded it and acted surprised when I started screaming bloody murder. Then they sort of apologised and went back to what they were doing before – one of these guys totally ignored me when I asked for a minute to be curled up whimpering, and pulled me back into position instead. Or there was one guy who again, was fine, but he kept trying to put things up there while hoping I was distracted by whatever else was going on, to the point where I had to shout “LEAVE MY ASS ALONE!” at him and he got very sheepish but finally let up. I’m not traumatised by it as much as I am very annoyed, but you know, I told my mum about it in one of our many…uh like a masterpost but out loud, you know, long discussions about all the issues and all the dark things…and she agreed that similar things had happened to her many times. They’re still rape as hell, but you can sort of grimly see why the guys would be shocked to find we had gone to the police over it, and you can hear their protests and their poor-me narrative to their friends, and they weren’t overtly creepy or misogynistic so you can also see their friends believing it.
Anyway this terrible ramble has been a whole bunch of things that I really hope Blair, and anyone else who thinks they know someone falsely accused, takes into consideration.
“when you want to describe my stay in a prison hospital”
What’s Gerard’s ‘stay in a prison hospital’ all about?
Hey, you laugh, but calibrating bear traps to go off on hug-triggers is actually pretty difficult. Right up there with calibrating spear-traps to activate on bee proximity and setting up a temple to crumble to dust upon detection of the abstract concept of melancholia.
Kat, I am so sorry to read your experiences, and I hope you are now thriving, and on to better things.
Jedi-hugs if you want them.
Yes, thanks AltoFronto, I’m doing very well, and the big pile of wanktossers is securely in the past. I only consort with cool people and animals now. Much better for the psyche and the body parts, apart from when my cat gets lost in my duvet at night and claws her way out, but hey.
That creepy creepy picture. I literally had nightmares about being at the AVFM Conference, being non-consensually hugged by loads of men who looked like Sage Gerard. I woke up drenched in sweat and only got 5 hours sleep.
You owe me a good night’s sleep, David!
The unconsensual hug happened to me just two days ago, and I can so well understand Blair. People who believe they are entitled to hug you (or worse), and won´t understand your no as anything but a yes… THAT is super duper creepy =(