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.
@sunnysombrera, you can add to that list “Patronizing nicknames for other commenters”
@Kat: All the cyberhugs. 🙁
I can’t imagine anyone risking rape for a story, but now that you mention it, are Nellie Bly-like undercover missions still legal?
I just re-read Kant’s the Metaphysics of Morals (for the record, I think Kant had some messed-up views on certain particular issues (masturbation is wrong because you’re sexueally molesting yourself, hey!) but I think his overall moral philosophy is pretty much right). Now, Kant’s moral philosophy makes right and wrong all about intentions, but there is so much that goes into having a truly good intention.
A person who acts with good intentions, according to Kant, is one who sees other people as equals and respects them, who regards their goals and purposes as reason-giving for zir as well (insofar as their goals and purposes aren’t straight-out immoral, that is), and never hides away from uncomfortable facts such as some people being poor, oppressed and so on, but faces the problems of the world with open eyes. If someone satisfies all these conditions and still, somehow, messes up, zie didn’t do anything wrong, according to Kant, because zie had a good intention.
In my experience, roughly 99 % of all people to whose behaviour others object and who responds with “but my intentions were gooood!” don’t live up to all this at all. They sort of mistake saying “my intentions were good” or perhaps thinking “my intentions were good” for actually having good intentions, but these are very different things.
It’s pretty clear that if you really do regard other people as equals and respect them and see their goals and purposes as reason-giving for yourself, then most of the time people will also feel well treated by you.
And you just know that by the time he’s done it’ll look like a botched autoerotic asphyxiation.
I think Sage’s “defense” also exposes the gaping lie that is “oh men can’t possibly know when they are committing rape or being harassing, it’s all so subtle and shocking to find out after the fact and so all these innocent men are caught unawares by evil feeemale’s accusations of rape.
Neither Blair, nor Jeff Sharlet ever accused Sage of rape and were in fact very forgiving of his rapey overly touchy and boundary violating ways, only noting how creepy they felt and unsettling and weird the whole thing was.
But Sage gets it. He jumps to the word rape and starts “woe is meing” over the false accusations. Because he is fully aware that his actions were rapey. Because he fully understood that he was pushing against a woman’s boundaries. Because he understood implicitly and fully without anyone even pointing out the connection, what his actions represented and meant.
And that’s the big huge revelation in his “defense”. That the rapey PUA guys who push on boundaries know full well that this violates consent. That they are fully aware of subtle social cues. That they directly look for opportunities where their victims have less power to harm their “image”.
That they, in essence, get all the things they play dumb about when feminists talk about rape culture and consent. All the things they throw autism spectrum people under the bus* about whenever they are called out publicly for their creeping. That they understand exactly what they are doing and what social niceties they are exploiting or can exploit to do so (including calling women whores or saying they are leading them on, or that they interpreted perfectly innocent predatory behavior as predatory even if they didn’t say that).
And it’s refreshing to see that. That these people know exactly what they are doing wrong and to see exactly all their favorite defense tactics (in the absence of anything more than someone noting what they did with little other commentary), because it really helps defeat the smokescreen that abusers like this always through up.
These guys know that they are being rapey. These guys know they are taking advantage of sexist structures to get away with it. And most importantly of all, they know that their behavior is wrong.
This really is the abusers lobby and they’re all trading skills with each other.
*This bullshit, oh I’m autistic, so clearly I could never have been aware of boundaries infuriates me because I work with autistic spectrum kids a lot for my job and they are the most aware and respectful of boundaries kids I’ve ever met, because they know it is hard for them and are aware of the social cost of messing up, so they tend to be hyper focused and hyper paranoid about respecting other people’s boundaries.
I said this before but I’ll repeat it: I think we were watching PUA “game” in action: violate a woman’s boundaries and see if you get away with it, then …
Ninja’d by Cerberus. Oh, well.
I think the bit about “sensing a trap” is part and parcel of how this little intersection of “white, atheist, libertarian, and MRA” interprets being wrong.
See to them, they know they aren’t typically excelling at toxic masculinity standards by the usual metrics of physical aptitude and sports, so instead they view intelligence and always being right as key aspects to their identity and resolving this worrying concern with not appeasing the dragon of toxic masculinity they are all willingly chained to.
So, manliness is expressed by always being smarter than everyone else and knowing all the things better than anyone, especially those designated as social inferiors (because they must be inferior intellectually, otherwise it would mean acknowledging an external system of privilege where one’s social position was due to oppressive systems rather than inherent superiority). So any woman, POC, queer individual, trans* identified individual, and/or poor person who expresses an opinion different from them must be wrong, because to acknowledge that they aren’t means that the fedora-bearer is incorrect about something and thus less manly and also maybe less deserving of his systemic support, and that notion is terrifying and counter to their self-image.
And it especially happens whenever they end up being chumps, either because they were scammed by a scam artist who took advantage of their reflexive sexism and racism or because they were revealed to be the man-children they were by people paying attention.
Suddenly then it becomes a tale of how intelligent they were to recognize this evil person and what they were going on about and how this totally was the reason that they didn’t invest even more money/do something even more heinous, because again to do so would mean they weren’t the smartest and most aware person in the room and that means a threat to their self-image.
And that self-image is critical, because as noted earlier, it is their personal entry into why they meet the standards of toxic masculinity and deserve its protection as men and not its ire as not-men. So to them, admitting a need to grow or a need to learn or recognizing and changing toxic behaviors, especially due to the commentary of an “inferior” is like voluntarily stating oneself to be a not-man and agreeing to be treated like a not-man by those others who buy into toxic masculinity. And as they know exactly how awful “not-men” are treated by their own and how many of their social support network they’ve built to only include those most invested in toxic masculinity, they and their brains will do anything to avoid facing any mental situation that involves admitting the slightest amount of fault, wrongdoing, or anything less than the pinnacle of intellectual prowess and awareness.
And that fucks over that group a lot, because closing oneself off from ever learning something and convincing yourself you know everything you’re ever going to need to for all time is the single-best way to make yourself ignorant and to mean you’re going to have less accurate and supported intellectual opinions the more years you continue in this state.
But then that is part and parcel of how toxic masculinity harms men too.
Went through picture folder on my old hard drive. Found baby pictures of my cat! Awwwwwww
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/07c53e4b-8cd3-4d0c-826f-5a573b96785d_zps3vjuc5xo.jpg
GrumpyOldMangina-
Yup. All I could think of reading that description in the GQ article was “sounds like kino and a bunch of other ‘we swear this is the secret incantation that makes the boss monster remove her panties due to 20 pts fake empathy damage’ type crap”.
I mean, it’s pretty well established with the unwanted touching and escalation and isolation which are pretty big staples of that “genre” and it explains inexplicable actions like the “poetry”, the constant attempts to infantalize her, and the “I heard about your Earth empathy concepts” level of “connecting” pretty handily.
And I think that’s why he’s busting out the “defending himself against an accusation of creepiness at the bar” standards here instead of rebutting that he did any of it, because that really is his main MO at bars and he’s used to gaslighting a single person or a small group of people about it instead of the entire nation.
So yeah, I think you were spot on on that.
And it’s disturbing/refreshing to see that the PUA types do fully understand that they are rapey creeps and what they are doing goes against consent and what that means.
Because it means that if we can fix our culture’s blindness/disregard for consent we can starve these rapists out of their little exploitations of social niceties and societal sexism.
@Cerberus: It just seemed to be that he was consciously seeing how much he could get away with, that maybe if he played things right he could get her all the way to bed — that he was thinking of sex right from the start, and none of the things he said were meant to help deal with “her friend’s problem”, it was all meant to attack what SG saw as an emotional weakness that he could exploit.
A few months ago Jeff Sharlet gave a speech here in Concord, and I had an opportunity to chat with him for ten minutes afterward. He is in person the sort of slightly chubby, balding, unprepossessing person who is easy to talk to and very easy to underestimate, and I can understand why people might tend to forget that they are in the presence of a very smart journalist — and start to behave the way they would if nobody who could record their nasty behavior were present. The MRAs underestimated him and got badly bitten — and I hate to say it, but their yelps of pain are music to my ears.
KITTY!
Whenever I see pictures of these guys, it’s no wonder they’re so bitter about women. They whine and moan that women only like bad boys, while dismissing all but relatively fit women (and some of certain body types who are fit) and declaring women ruined by 25 or some none sense.
Meanwhile, they’re all out of shape and possessing zero fashion sense or grooming sensibilities.
I mean, that dude can’t have any real friends. “Dude, if you want women to be more attracted to you, try cutting your hair in a way that makes you look less like a banging carrot top (before the steroids)
That should be balding, not banging.
The thought of “a banging carrot top” did make me giggle. 🙂
@Portantonio: You just don’t get it. Trying to make yourself attractive to women is totally beta behavior. Old Roosh V thinks that even wiping your butt is beta.
Gingerkittysqueeeeee! Wookit dat widdle pink nosey!
“Unfortunately for Jeff, I have an ability to detect manipulation, and I do not think with my dick.”
You didn’t rape someone because you have an ability to detect manipulation?
I assume you didn’t meant to say that but what you ACTUALLY SAID was…
I have nothing to add to creepfest-ughs, so here’s a picture of my cat in a box:
http://imgur.com/MTaFCll
@suffrajitsu GQ just says Braverman was wondering if her friend was innocent, with no details beyond that – I’m assuming it’s true because if she made it up and GQ didn’t report it, that’d be very shifty. Sage is the one adding the BDSM stuff and saying she definitely believes it’s fake. Considering it’s Sage, I assume he’s telling a porkie or two
I am still laughing at the ‘banging carrot top’! Carrot Top is unknown in the UK, but I am a big fan of Seinfeld.
Aww, sweet calico.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rape-culture-does-not-exist-tickets-15595107386
frances: Wat.