Three women, so far, have come forward to accuse porn star James Deen of sexual assault. It seems exceedingly likely there will be more.
After porn actress Stoya tweeted on Saturday that Deen had forcibly raped her, other women in the porn industry made clear that they’d been warning fellow performers about Deen’s allegedly predatory actions for years.
Indeed, porn actress Sydney Leathers told the Daily Beast that another porn performer “told me when I first got into the business that I should avoid him — that he has boundary issues, basically that he tries to break women.”
In other words, Deen seems to be a perfect example what kink blogger Cliff Pervocracy once called a “missing stair” — that is, a dangerous person that women warn one another about, but whose power in the community shields him from public accusations.
As Cliff wrote in a now-famous post, some people are the equivalent of a missing stair,
[s]omething massively unsafe and uncomfortable and against code, but everyone in the house …. [is] used to it? “Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you, there’s a missing step on the unlit staircase with no railings. But it’s okay because we all just remember to jump over it.”
Cliff came up with this striking metaphor after posting publicly “about a rapist in a community I belonged to,” noting that even without giving a name or details of the rapist’s actions,
I immediately got several emails from other members of that community saying “oh, you must mean X.” Everyone knew who he was! … The reaction wasn’t “there’s a rapist among us!?!” but “oh hey, I bet you’re talking about our local rapist.” Several of them expressed regret that I hadn’t been warned about him beforehand, because they tried to discreetly tell new people about this guy. Others talked about how they tried to make sure there was someone keeping an eye on him at parties, because he was fine so long as someone remembered to assign him a Rape Babysitter.
Just as Bill Cosby’s status as a beloved father figure of the comedy world made it terrifyingly difficult for women to go public with their rape accusations against him, Deen’s status in the porn world, and his public reputation as an enlightened, even feminist, porn performer made it similarly terrifying for women to come forward with their accusations against him.
But it wasn’t just Deen’s power in the porn world that kept his alleged victims silent. There is also a strange but widespread belief that porn performers (and sex workers more generally) can’t really be raped.
Tori Lux, one of the three women who say they’ve been assaulted by Deen, explained that she hadn’t gone to the police or gone public earlier because
people (including the police) tend to operate from the assumption that sex workers have put themselves in harm’s way, and therefore can’t be assaulted – which is incorrect, as being involved in sex work does not equate being harmed. …
[S]ex workers are silenced and our negative experiences are swept under the rug in simply trying to protect ourselves from judgement of others, or worse, a variety of problems ranging from further physical attacks to professional problems such as slander and blacklisting. To put it simply, I was afraid.
Her fear is certainly understandable. The “porn performers can’t be raped” argument, despite its obvious absurdity, is one that actually makes it into rape trials. Indeed, only a couple of days before Stoya came forward with her accusations, the lawyer for the MMA fighter known as War Machine, who is currently on trial for sexual assault and attempted murder, suggested that his accuser’s history as a porn actress known for rough sex somehow means that she can’t be raped. As the Daily Beast writes,
War Machine’s attorney … said that even when she wasn’t acting as on-screen seductress Christy Mack, the accuser showed the “desire, the preference, to acceptability towards a particular form of sex activities that were outside of the norm.”
If Deen is prosecuted for his alleged sexual assaults, will we hear a similar argument from his lawyers?
For now, Deen is flatly denying all of the allegations leveled against him:
https://twitter.com/JamesDeen/status/671131915773022209
https://twitter.com/JamesDeen/status/671131998535090176?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
But a couple of years ago, Deen took the issue of consent a good deal less seriously than he says he does now. joking about it on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/JamesDeen/status/39057114148245504
He liked that joke so much that he used it again later:
https://twitter.com/JamesDeen/status/189541701751287812
Then again, maybe these Tweets weren’t meant as jokes at all. Maybe this is what Deen actually believes.
Oh god, I just read another article on this and she says he ignored her safeword. I can’t even breathe right now, that’s so terrifying. What an absolute piece of shit.
I’m glad that Kink are severing all ties with him.
Interesting that y’all consider sociopathy a mental illness and conflate it with being “crazy” or a “psycho”. So it is ableist to call someone a sociopath, but totes fine to consider actual sociopaths mentally ill?
One might ponder upon the origin and meaning of “neurotypical” and think about what it might mean in a broader sense.
-path mean “disease of” or something to that extent, and sociopathy have been used to mean what is now called psychopathy. So I guess it mostly depend on what one expect from that word.
@Pie:
People suffering from antisocial personality disorder and dissocial personality disorder (that is, the people commonly referred to as psychopaths and sociopaths) are mentally ill. That is what “having a disorder” means. It isn’t a moral judgement or a value judgement on the individual: most people with emotional or personality disorders will never commit crimes based on them, and will suffer considerable prejudice based on it.
The problem comes from associating certain types of behaviour with these disorders. If sane people say that a certain act is “psychopathic” then they are associating it with a group of people who are (falsely) blamed for such activities. This is ableism, and just like any other -ism which associates behaviour with groups based on inherent traits it’s unacceptable, just like using “Jew” to mean “fraudster” is unacceptable.
Statistically, mental illness is not a predictor of violent crime. Circumstances are a much stronger predictor. If you want to use a term as a shorthand for “person likely to commit rape”, try “person in a position of relative power over the victim, who suffers frustration from their perceived lack of power over the rest of the world, and whose circumstances afford them a relative expectation of secrecy from the victim”, or “PiaPoRPotVwSFftPLoPOtRotWaWCATaREoSftV” for short.
It can probably be shortened further. I’m not a poet.
Additionally, “psychopath” and “sociopath” aren’t in the DSM. They’re pop-psychology terms with increasingly little evidence-based support. There is such a thing as antisocial personality disorder but its sufferers are a long way from the charismatic villains of popular belief: they tend to be impulsive, angry, frustrated and of below-average intelligence.
Additionally additionally, it is commonly argued that one of the reasons why people habitually blame violent crimes on armchair-diagnosed mental illnesses rather than on circumstances is in order to reassure themselves that if they found themselves in those circumstances, they would not commit the same violent crimes. (This is known as Othering amongst philosophical peeps.) Like most self-reassurance, this is sadly unsupported by evidence: we would all like to believe that we ourselves and our friends and family aren’t capable of evil, but the research has shown otherwise.
Therefore, in conclusion: when you say that “it is ableist to call someone a sociopath, but totes fine to consider actual sociopaths mentally ill?” you must bear in mind that:
a) There is no such thing, medically, as a sociopath.
b) People with antisocial or dissocial personality disorders (the nearest thing in DSM) do not meet the popular image of a sociopath.
c) Violent crimes are not, on the whole, committed by people with said personality disorders.
d) To ignore a, b and c in order to blame violent crimes on people with said disorders is unacceptable. We use the word ableism for this.
Okay, calmer now.
I prefer James Dean
So, if a rape victim goes to the police and reports it, she’s a lying whore who is out to ruin the lives of innocent men. That’s the common MRA refrain.
Until a rape victim doesn’t officially report it. Then all of a sudden she’s a lying whore because she didn’t go to the police. Of course.
What I’m taking away from that reddit thread is that women just accept being raped and not ever do anything about it at all.
As weirwoodtreehugger says, this is a great example of rape being about power, not sex. Deen made a series of videos where non-professional fans had sex with him on camera. I think we can be fairly confident that for every fan willing to be recorded fucking him, there were many more who’d do the same off-camera. So basically the limiting factor on the amount of sex he could have was hours in the day. Sex at work. Sex in his free time. And he still (alledgedly) raped.
Anyone who doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion from that is willfully blind.
Erlend, she says he used physical force to hold her down, that’s what I was trying to convey.
Guys, while it’s certainly not okay to play armchair psychiatrist, it is also super not okay to call sociopathy a “mental illness.” It is a personality disorder. Please understand the difference and know that confusing these is very stigmatizing to those of us with MI.
If you have a mental illness, you suffer. But with a personality disorder, you make everyone else suffer.
@storyending
Wait, is this an argument for “all porn is rape”? If it is, then I’m not keen about it. At all.
Could you clarify?
Jo,
I guess the inevitable excuse people will make for him is sex addiction then.
God, it was just the other day, one of my family was talking about their time working for a regional newspaper.
The paper had a regular column asking standard interview questions to celebrities from the region, you know the kind of thing. Anyway, she came up with a list of people to interview, that included Jimmy Saville.
And the editors all said, “Oh no, we’re not putting him in the paper”. And she asked “Oh, why not? has he been interviewed already?” And they said “No, it’s because he’s a notorious kiddy fiddler”. To which she responded in surprise, “Oh, I hadn’t heard anything about that in the news”, and they’d said “Well, of course not, it’s all been covered up!”.
And even though everyone in the news room cited this as common knowledge, not a single person had ever thought to just break the story. I don’t know if that was because they were worried about a libel case, or some other kind of backlash, but that must have been around 1990.
I know Erika Moen of OhJoySexToy was considering doing a scene with James Deen, she’s since pulled all affiliation with him off her site – looks like she dodged a bullet.
Can we mention the fact that Deen works with members of the public who are not professional porn stars, too? Like, apparently anyone can apply to film a video with him. I hope this news reaches far and wide so that it’s not just members within the industry who are warned about his behaviour.
Also, the phrase “forcibly raped” jumped out of me in David’s article – don’t we just call that “rape”? I mean, adding the adjective implies there’s some other kind… which, by definition, there is not.
Anyway, I hope this all starts a big conversation around safeguarding and how to confront missing stairs. It’s not a minor problem to have that one skeevy “friend” making everyone unsafe, while everyone else is covering up for their horribleness. I think we’ve all met one.
Thanks for correcting me on that, LG.
Isn’t ‘violent rape’ the common term for rape involving physical force?
I thought that being a sociopath, or having a number of anti social traits is not considered a mental illness because of the lack of ways to treat them and certainly no way of curing them?
That the anti social personality is something you have developed, it is part of you, and not part of a condition that can be treated?
When the term ‘high functioning sociopath’ is used it is certainly not used in the context of describing a mental illness.
I know that it can get really confusing to someone who has little knowledge of mental health issues, but I do not see any difference in calling someone narcissistic or sociopathic (in terms of ‘diagnosis’) – you are describing character traits, not symptoms of an illness.
The type of behaviour that Deen, and men like him, has exhibited certainly fits with sociopathic and narcissistic behaviour.
Bernardo-
Sadly, there’s a good number of “missing stairs” in a number of BDSM communities and some communities are nothing but missing stairs (I know of at least one city where the parties are nothing but newbie women and a good number of predator men, because it’s an open secret that the predator percentage is too high), largely because “missing stairs” tend to flock to positions of power. They tend to lead classes or have a key skill or pop up in a lot of leadership roles and then trade that community power to basically have the community have their back when they abuse someone. They also tend to focus on newer people in the scene so that those they abuse are less likely to be believed if they try and tell people and can be assumed to “just be confused about how all this work” (and yeah, I’ve seen the creepy swarming by cis male domly doms circle like fish around the 18 year old “this is my first play party” types in so so many straight parties).
The BDSM community also tends to be pretty bad on policing this kind of thing. Largely because BDSM has a reputation for being better on consent, so a lot of kinksters don’t like thinking that they’ve tolerated and supported an abuser and so are more prone to disbelieve people who become brave enough to talk about abuse in the community. But also because there’s this sort of culture of silence where it is rude to talk out loud and try and warn community-wide about abusers or speak out about problematic actions by the community.
And the sad thing is even with that, kinksters are not wrong that on average they are still better than the overall culture on consent, it’s just the comparison points are awful.
Also, I think it’s telling that one of the women reported that she was assaulted on set in front of others in her industry who did nothing. These companies were willing to work with him and support his brand so long as it was just an open secret in the industry and he’s only facing consequences because it’s now public. And that’s not even a specific hit against the industry as there’s similar stories of a lot of abusers in a lot of media forms, but rather just telling of how much rape culture will tolerate an abuser and continue to reward them until it is no longer commercially viable to.
Additionally, it’s worth noting the high number of self-professed feminist men who’ve turned out to be abusers trading that reputation as a get-out-of-jail-free card of abusive behavior around women. Clearly to a not that small minority of abusers, the incredibly low bar of being considered a feminist man is just a tactic to disarm their chosen targets. Basically making some comments about consent or the importance of a woman’s right to own her reproductive health as a means of appearing safe to be alone with. It’s really creepy.
@LG.
As a person who probably has avoidant personality disorder (self-diagnosed), I’m not liking that generalisation very much at all.
I know someone who suffers as a result of her personality disorder. Yes, she hurts people, too, but it also hurts her. And her disorder is in the DSM and has been diagnosed by a mental health professional, so isn’t it a mental illness?
“I thought that being a sociopath, or having a number of anti social traits is not considered a mental illness because of the lack of ways to treat them and certainly no way of curing them?”
Alzheimer have no way to treat or cure it, and yet it’s a disease.
“That the anti social personality is something you have developed, it is part of you, and not part of a condition that can be treated?”
It’s pretty likely that some develop as antisocial, and other inherently are sociopath.
But more importantly, if someone say “I am narcissic”, most people don’t think of it as a disease. While if you say “I am sociopath”, most people will put you under the umbrela of “mad”, who despite having at least dozens of different category, will evoquate you being the big bad of a slasher movie.
It’s one of the reason that ableist slurs are frowned upon. Also, the fact that 99% of the time, it’s not true, and the guy don’t behave at all like a sociopath (or a psychopath, or a bipolar, or …).
L.G, people with personality disorders certainly do suffer. I’m also very uncomfortable with the generalisation here.
Am I on moderation, or did my apology and recant just not go through? If it’s the former, I get it, but if it’s the latter I need to make sure I try again…