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.
Ok, guess it’s the latter…
Sorry, guys. I guess the distinction between mental disorder and mental illness is not considered to be as stark as it used to be.
And I was knee-jerk generalizing and forgetting that there are plenty of PDs beyond psychopathic and narcissistic.
But hey, while we’re being up-to-date, let’s remember that “sociopath” is a defunct label.
You are mistaken about this. The DSM-5 recognizes “a distinct variant” of anti-social personality disorder which is “often termed psychopathy (or primary psychopathy)”. The manual itself doesn’t name the variant, most likely because they feel the name is unhelpful or misleading, but they clearly don’t think of psychopathy as a fiction of pop-psychology; they think it’s an in-apt name for a real thing.
The variant in question is marked by “low levels of anxiousness … and [of] withdrawal … and high levels of attention seeking ….” which lead to “social potency” and “stress immunity,” which do sound like the traits of “a charismatic villain.”
It would be irresponsible and pointless to speculate about whether James Deen is a psychopath, but psychopathy itself is still part of mainstream psychology.
Thank you for correcting me on that, Orion. I need to read DSM 5 more closely.
@WWTH
James Deen likely has ample opportunity to have sex, even if this was the only thing he did besides eating and going to the bathroom.
I’m sure there will be people who will say he’s a sex-addict (as if that would excuse the crime), but there’s no way someone in Deen’s position would “need to rape” because he’s not getting enough sex.
Please someone correct me if I’m wrong: Is sociopath a term used to describe people who can grasp codes of morality, but won’t see the need to respect them if they can get away with it?
RosaDeLava : I don’t think what you mean define a mental illness.
I don’t see a need to respect any codes of morality if I can get away with it ; it’s just that I know I can’t get away with it, and I do a lot of needless thing anyway.
Rosa,
The word “sociopath” does not appear in the current DSM; there are some professionals who still use it, but it is controversial and does not have a universally-accepted meaning. Back before the phrase “anti-social personality disorder” was thought up, it was a big part of mainstream psychology, but during that time its definition was revised several times.
If you were going to use it today, I think you’d basically have to treat it like psychopathy — treat is as one subtype of anti-social personality disorder. There are indeed some psychologists who like to draw a distinction between sociopaths and psychopaths. I don’t know exactly why psychopath made it in to the DSM and sociopath didn’t, but I suspect it’s because there’s no unanimity about what exactly makes a sociopath different.
Now, on to your question:
I don’t think “grasp[ing] codes of morality” is the right way to think about it. Unless they have some unrelated cognitive problem, people with ASPD can understand moral codes intellectually. It’s not hard for someone of normal intelligence to memorize basic principles like “theft, fraud, and murder are wrong.” What many (but not all) people with ASPD are unable to do is feel the emotion of guilt. Some are also unable to rejoice with those rejoice and mourn with those who mourn, and some are unable to accurately predict what other people will feel.
The ASPD umbrella doesn’t require the absence of guilt or empathy. Someone who habitually commits serious crimes in ways that are some combination of (deceitful, impulsive, reckless, aggressive, callous) can be diagnosed with ASPD even if they do feel bad about it sometimes. In the past, “psychopath” was limited to those people who do lack guilt. The DSM-5 doesn’t explicitly say that all psychopaths are remorseless, but they way they define psychopathy suggests that most of them are.
The following are some of the proposed distinctions between sociopaths and psychopaths:
1. Psychopaths are born; sociopaths are made
2. Sociopaths justify their crimes; psychopaths don’t think they need justification
3. Sociopaths may have panic or anxiety; psychopaths are fearless
@Ohlmann
I thought sociopathy wasn’t used to describe a mental illness anymore.
I ask because I’ve seen psycopathy and sociopathy being used interchangeably a number of times, I don’t know what to make of either anymore.
@Orion
Thanks, I think I get it a little bit better now. I’ve seen people and characters that behave in the ways you said psychopaths do being called sociopaths, so I felt confused by the term. But the way you described sociopathy makes it seem like it’s not a mental illness.
I’m sorry; you text was really long and I hope none thinks I want others to waste their time explaining to me things that I could look up on my own. But f you or anyone knows of any sites that get into the subject (and are honest), that would help me.
rosa,
Not sure if we crossposted or if I failed to clarify things with my first post. The tl;dr is that because the word “sociopath” is no longer used as a clinical diagnosis, there’s no central authority with the power to decide what it means. Every researcher or pop writer gets to define it as they wish. Some say it’s the same as psychopathy, some say it’s not, no one is wrong.
@Auntie Alias
re: Jian Ghomeshi:
Yeah, Ghomeshi was campaigning for abortion rights back in University; the band he was in, Moxy Früvous, used to do charity drives for the Morgentaler clinics, with Dr. Henry Morgentaler himself sometimes in attendance down at Lee’s Palace.
Given some of the stories of warnings about not being alone with Ghomeshi date back to his days at York University, it’s apparent that he’s been like this for a long time.
One of the most interesting parts about all this is that Ghomeshi had so normalized this in his own mind that when he was scared into thinking the Toronto Star was about to do an expose on him (they weren’t; they had been working on one that he knew about but didn’t have enough evidence yet, but were about to do something else at CBC that Ghomeshi assumed was about him) he went to his bosses to head off the accusations with tapes of his ‘consensual’ activities. Seeing that so spooked the directors of the CBC that they fired him then, trying to get enough distance before this blew up in their faces.
The CBC in general really didn’t come off looking well. Nor did the employee union leadership, who had helped in the coverups and who had deliberately not forwarded complaints from their members up the chain so they could claim that there were no formal complaints later, throwing some of their members to the wolves to try and pretend they had done nothing wrong.
The local CBC Metro Morning show did a series of segments about it that probably didn’t endear them to their bosses much.
I think Deen’s ‘jokes’ were a kind of sarcastic take on how ironic the scenarios he commonly partakes in for his pornography are- a sort of ‘this is how ridiculous the unrealistic nature of porn is’ take, if that makes sense. Still, if the allegations are true then he is a sickening human being, no matter what he’s said and done before. That he seemed like a nice, even feminist, guy makes it even more distressing.
I think that’s a common thing with rapists isn’t it? They seem nice and charming until they reveal their true selves.
I’m rather pleased too on how many people in the industry I’ve seen disowning him and not victim blaming Stoya and the other alleged victims. Kink.com (he works with them a lot) have declared they have severed all ties with him, and a lot of their forum members seem to be very supportive of the decision.
I believe someone mentioned less than savoury responses elsewhere, though?
Mostly ‘sociopath/psychopath’ are terms we’ve come to expect out of profilers working for the FBI (blame the crime-procedural dramas, crime doc shows on channels like ID formerly court tv in some cable television markets, and all that stuff we’ve generally had seep into how we view the machinations of the justice system) – there’s a show called “Most Evil” with a guy who ranks killers on a scale that he developed over years of interviews with killers about their motivations/childhood/life experiences/relationships. I’d get to a point where, if the original purpose was to figure out how to identify such people in a logical way because killers look like everyone else, things would get frustrating when the only thing produced are detailed records on the ones who killed. Can we identify troubling behaviors, sure, but without the means to intervene that get the individual connected to appropriate social services and/or effective programs things are likely to go badly – criminal charges become revolving doors all too often, but to simply let that happen until the person has finally become the violent and dangerous person the system has molded him/her into being is disgraceful.
The mentally ill are being warehoused in jails/prisons because decades ago politicians decided the mental hospitals had to go because they were too expensive, with promises made and unrealized for community based mental health services. Punished for being homeless, or drunk and disorderly, these people wind up in jails and prisons where the environment alone isn’t healthy – overmedication, lights on 24/7, solitary confinement, correctional facility ‘strike teams’ deployed to force someone into being strapped in a chair “until their attitude improves”, and once the person gets out there aren’t any reliable programs to get them the help they need while connecting them to housing and if possible, get them working. Homeless person goes to jail, gets a couple of weeks worth of meds at time of release, will wind up in jail again without the system doing anything to help them help themselves! It’s really hard to find a job with a criminal record, without a bed to sleep in and a place to shower things get even harder. Foster kids go through much of the same but with a different path which often leads to the adult criminal system, sadly.
All this to say that we can and should be doing so much better for our fellow citizens. And it starts with investing in our schools, getting people connected to supportive services when they need them, and making all communities safe, inclusive, compassionate. We don’t need to figure out more ways to keep the privatized correctional industry in business.
So here’s the thought I had earlier.
A lot of Deen’s allure and popularity, I think, was that he’s a porn actor who isn’t The Other. He’s a handsome, articulate, witty man who comes across as safe and normal, meaning that he makes the whole field of pornography accessible to people who would normally see it as dangerous and threatening. This turned out to be very lucrative; it also means that there’s a powerful incentive for the industry to preserve his image, and also a powerful push from the audience to prevent the truth coming out because they don’t want their dreams to be shattered.
It’s the same formula as Saville or Shermer or any number of priests: powerful man plus ignorance plus secrecy plus a constant supply of impressionable replaceable victims plus a wider community with a vested interest in not ruining the fiction, equals a trail of hurt people.
My only exposure to James Deen is via gifs on Tumblr*. In all those gifs, he was choking a woman, or slapping her ass, something like that. Never was he the one being choked or slapped. I was kind of suspicious of the ‘feminist porn star’ label people wanted to put on him.
*I gave up on video-based porn long ago, since the few things I found that appealed to me weren’t really worth the time invested in finding them.
Basically everything Cerberus said.
(Although the one time I remember NCSF conducted a poll of kinksters, the percentage of people reporting boundary violations was higher than the general population. I think it was likely that was due to a largely self-selected sample of people reporting, though.)
@nparkern — “Kink.com (he works with them a lot) have declared they have severed all ties with him, and a lot of their forum members seem to be very supportive of the decision.”
Yes, but they are coming across a bit like the CBC in the Ghomeshi incident to me. From the articles and stories trickling out, it seems Kink.com was happy to enable him before it became too public. This looks a lot like CYA behaviour now that this is going to escalate, even if they were happy to cover for him when he was bringing in good money.
Huh, lots of people have known Deen was a piece of shit for a long time, I know almost nothing about the porn world and I’ve heard plenty of terrible things about Deen. I also knew that because of his large fanbase, the profits he generates and the way that no one cares about the treatment of women in porn he will never be forced to change his behavior in any way or be punished for it.
I’m betting after this Twitter controversy blows over Deen’s popularity and behavior will remain unchanged. I’d love to be proven wrong but I don’t see that happening.
Quite possible lightcastle. In fact, very possible. I was struck (pleasantly) by the members of the public who are members of the website though- they almost all agreed that Deen should be kept as far away from the industry as possible right now.
Actually, there’s been publicly reported problems with Kink.com before. I can’t quite remember the details though, but it was on some news sites?
Question: who/what is “the bdsm community”? I know of local sex workers, I know there is a porn community, but I guess I didnt see it as a whole scene….?
re: “If you have a mental illness, you suffer. But with a personality disorder, you make everyone else suffer.”
That is not at all accurate! Please stop thinking that your assumptions about paychology are facts, there are real facts out there to be studied. Personality disorders are complex, nuanced, and still in debate. People with personality disorders are not, like, evil. They can be wonderful to others or they can isolate themselves from others and yes they can suffer, that is part of the diagnosis of disorders-qnd yes it is a disorder, meanig an illness. Some scientists think that at least some aspcts of some of these disorders are just pathologizing personality differences and the science is constently changing. This is exactly why there is an anti-abelism policy.
@Orion
“So it sucks that that’s even possible, and it also leaves me with doubts about whether the BDSM community can be fixed. In principle I see no reason why consenting to receive or inflict pain should be wrong. In reality, men known for their willingness to simulate rape or torture turn out, again and again, to be actual rapists or torturers. I hate this.”
Selection bias. When you see someone with presumed vanilla tastes (like Bill Cosby) assault people, you don’t think, “aha! More abuse from the vanilla community.” But when it’s a kinkster, it confirms some people’s anxieties about/disgust with BDSM, so that becomes the angle.
I think you misunderstand BDSM. It looks like “I’m brutalizing you,” but when done right, it’s “I’m going to extreme and theatrical lengths to get you off and make sure you’re having fun.” The problem is with abusive people trying to use BDSM to cover or rationalize their abusive BS. I think for most of us, it wouldn’t be fun to play with someone who’s not enjoying him/herself any more than it would be fun for an action movie star to get in a real gunfight.
Being kinky has led me to think really deeply about consent and cultural power assymetries, communicate with my partner, and be attentive to her needs and boundaries. It’s important to check-in with any kind of sex, but you have to be hyper-aware of it when the game is about pushing boundaries. I’m certainly not saying that kinksters are the only ones who develop these skills, but it’s going to be immediately clear to an experienced sub if he/she’s with a partner who doesn’t respect limits or care for his/her pleasure. I think it can take more time to see those things in vanilla sex and relationships.
Not saying that the BDSM community doesn’t need work (I’m really not immersed in it, so I don’t know, but I’ve heard some alarming anecdotes) but I think the problem is with men, not with BDSM as such. You’re letting guys off the hook for real violence by targeting a sexual subculture for theater.
@kale:
A lot of big cities have regular parties, coffee events, lunches, pub nights, club nights, specialist clubs and et cetera dedicated to kinksters. It’s a community which exists entirely separately from the pornography themed about it. Orion and I have been known to complain about the feminist issues inherent in said community.
@EJ thats interesting, thanks for the clarification. I hope those communities can become safer soon or that you can find better communities.
Re: sociopathy (teal deer warning)
I am not a mental health professional, and I cannot argue from that viewpoint. But here is how I reason that the use of the labels sociopathy and psychopathy is harmful, whether or not they fall under the category of ableism or not. My reasoning is based on the popularly understood meaning of the terms: An innate lack of empathy. Whether you are born with this condition or whether it is something you’ve learned is, to my understanding, how one differentiates between a psychopath and a sociopath. For the sake of convenience (read: laziness), I will mainly use the word sociopathy.
First, when you call someone a sociopath, you are indeed diagnosing them. You are making an assumption that they lack the capability to feel empathy. You are giving an opinion on their inherent capacity for empathy based on no actual psychological diagnosis. Why? If you decide that someone is a sociopath only based on something bad they did, you’re making what boils down to an online diagnosis based on speculation, whether you mean to or not and whether sociopathy is a mental illness or not.
Second, when you call someone a sociopath, you’re providing that person with a moral easy out: You’re essentially saying they are incapable of feeling empathy, instead of choosing not to feel it towards certain groups. This is simply not true in most cases. The vast number of hate crimes and crimes of entitlement committed by white, able-bodied cishet men is particularly prone to being explained away in this manner, despite it making no statistical sense that said group is overrepresented in the group “sociopaths” (don’t get me started on the privileged, entitled Dark Triad boogerheads). “It’s in their nature” is what murderers, abusers, rapists and bullies love to hear.
Third, when you call someone a sociopath, what you’re essentially doing is othering them. Singling evil-doers out as sociopaths is providing society with a scapegoat that allows it to ignore the inherent social problems that lead to crime and violence. It doesn’t address the actual problem, just a single person, and therefore it helps to keep the problem going even when the individual is put away. Labeling someone a sociopath before sentencing them serves the basic function of cleansing society’s conscience for its many ills without having to actually address them.
The problem with labeling someone a sociopath is really the same as with labeling someone “crazy”, so the comparison to ableism is valid, regardless of whether or not sociopathy can be considered a mental illness. The question of who is an actual sociopath is pure conjecture anyway. At best, it’s pointless. What is the use in speculating for the morally inconsistent position of someone being “inherently evil”, if we’re in the camp of “judging people for what they do, rather than for what they are?” If someone like, say, Deen commits awful acts that hurt people, what good could it do to give him the label sociopath when it has nothing at all to do with his actual crime of being an abusive rapist asshole? And if an actual, honest-to-god sociopath can manage to logically understand the rules of society and play fairly despite their lack of empathy, what is the goddamn point of labeling them in the first place?
I repeat my personal position once again: People who have actual, inherent difficulty with feeling empathy (such as those who have suffered an injury to the frontal lobe, which changes their entire personality) have my sympathies. They cannot be held responsible for their condition, only for their actions. People who possess full capacity for empathy (which is the vast majority) but decide to ignore it when it comes to certain groups (again, due to othering) are much more dangerous and much more common, and most importantly, have no justification. They are literally worse than sociopaths, since they can feel empathy, but choose not to.
From an ethical standpoint, the only sound position is understanding that we are all capable of indescribable atrocities given the motivation and the ability to get away with it. The myth of bad things being done only by inherently bad people is so attractive because it provides us with the romanticized idea of “the monster in our midst” while not making us think too hard on our own harmful beliefs that may, under the right circumstances, lead to bad deeds. Calling someone a sociopath is not only pointless, it’s giving yourself an easy out from having to watch your own morals, basically excusing yourself for potential “sociopathic” acts.
That is why I hope that the layman label of the sociopath could be laid to rest. It is lazy, it is based on vague, popularized definitions that have little to do with reality and it is perpetuating the myth of violent, dangerous individuals being inherently different from the rest of us, thus side-stepping the necessity to address dangerous social issues that lead to the creation of these alleged “sociopaths”. Issues such as privilege, social hierarchies, toxic masculinity, racism etc., all of which make othering and subsequent abusive acts all the easier.
TL;DR: Calling people socio- or psychopaths is pointless at best, excusing society from having to examine its harmful ideas and systemic problems that perpetuate the very crimes that are excused with the label socio- or psychopath in the first place at worst. But yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, my opinion, man.
@Pie
If you’re not in the mood to read my long-ass rant (I won’t blame you), here’s the gist of it: When you say “actual sociopaths” as if they’re something evil just for the sake of existing as sociopaths, you’re creating fictional monsters in your mind, not unlike Tolkien’s orcs, without considering the ethical implications of othering someone as “inherently evil.” You’re essentially saying that it is the inherent quality called “sociopathy” that makes the person bad, not their actions. Do you not realize how problematic that is?
Personally, I’d say that it is much more harmful to conflate bad behavior with mental illness than it is to include personality disorders in the mental illness spectrum. After all, nobody has denied that mentally ill people are capable of being assholes just as well as neurotypical people, they just have additional challenges along the way.
@SFHC & EJ:
Thanks! Can I say I’ve enjoyed your posts as well?
Sorry I haven’t been posting much these last months. Long story short, I hit burnout, I was diagnosed with serious depression and I have been regularly getting crippling anxiety attacks, all of which conspired to me having to quit my job and essentially completely removing me from acting as a useful member of society until I’m better. My medication in turn made me unable to form enough coherent thoughts to write meaningful posts. It’s getting better, though.
My personal life aside, I’ve been fearing that my oversensitivity to problematic ideas and my rather blunt demeanor in delivering my nuggets of “wisdom” has played a part in newcomers feeling hesitant to comment on WHTM, which is something I absolutely don’t want to do, so I took a short break for that reason as well.