I find it hard to read about the Stanford rape case for more than a few minutes at a time. The whole thing is so grotesque and awful that I literally start twitching in anger and frustration and have to stop reading.
It took several tries for me to make it all the way through a three-and-a-half minute video from Buzzfeed in which a young woman read excerpts from the deeply unsettling letter the victim read to her attacker in court, and it left my stomach in knots.
Last night, a reader pointed me to what he said were some particularly egregious comments about the case he’d run across on Roosh V’s forum from a fellow who calls himself, perhaps appropriately, the Lizard of Oz. I finally forced myself to read them this morning, and found myself twitching again.
The Lizard is as angry about the case as I am. But he’s not angry at “poor wide-eyed fearful [Brock] Turner,” for violating an unconscious woman, or at the judge for giving Turner only a six month sentence (of which he will likely only serve half).
No, he’s angry at what he describes as “a society full of psychotic princesses and their despicable white-knight enablers which treats its young men as worthless roadkill.” And he’s angry at the woman who was violated for speaking up on her own behalf with what he sees as a suspicious eloquence.
Yes, that’s right. He’s mad at her in part because her letter is too well-written for his taste, complaining that the “emotionally dishonest” document “is a self-consciously literary text written in the hysterical tones of contemporary serious female fiction.” In another comment, he denounces her letter as “literary attention whoring from the first word to the last.”
His comments are worth looking at in some detail, if only as a sort of case study in the ways in which misogyny and rape culture can not only destroy a person’s basic human empathy but also their ability to see the facts right in front of them.
As The Lizard sees it, the only crime here is that a “drunk and confused teenage boy” had his “life …. destroyed” just because he failed to notice that his sex partner had passed out.
The idea that this is a “light sentence” is a tragically misplaced one. In reality, the guy’s life is ruined forever. He will be registered as a sex offender for the remainder of his life. He is an eternal pariah and outcast. All because this slut decided that a few moments of drunkenness were enough to destroy a man’s life for good.
The Lizard has somehow convinced himself, through a rather tortured reading of the victim’s letter, that she “liked” being violated by Turner.
This slut went to the party because she wanted to get drunk and cheat on her boyfriend. She obviously wanted this athlete guy to f**k her as she admits in this key passage from the “victim letter” which you need to parse correctly through its lawyerly wording.
Here’s the passage in question, in which she admits no such thing. (I’m putting quotes from her in blue to distinguish them clearly from his.)
And you’re right, maybe I was still fluttering my eyes and wasn’t completely limp yet, fine. His guilt did not depend on him knowing the exact second that I became unconscious, that is never what this was about. I was slurring, too drunk to consent way before I was on the ground. I should have never been touched in the first place
The meaning of the passage is pretty transparent. She’s not saying she consented. She’s saying that she was clearly, obviously, unquestionably “too drunk to consent.”
The Lizard has a somewhat different take.
In other words she’s admitting she was by no means unconscious when he started “fingering” her which she herself said she “liked”. This kid is now supposed to be a “rapist” because in his own drunkenness he could not figure out the exact moment when the equally drunk girl passed out? Really?
Yes, really. It doesn’t matter what “exact moment” she passed out, you stupid sack of garbage. If you stick your fingers into someone who is passed out, that is rape. If you stick your fingers into someone so drunk they’re on the verge of passing out, that is also rape.
The Lizard puts the word “liked” in quotes, as if it is a direct quote from the victim. It’s not. If you search her statement for the words “like” and “liked,” you won’t find her saying anywhere that she “liked” what Turner did to her.
Here are some of the things you will find. (I will put the words “like” and “liked” in italics.)
A paragraph in which she describes taking a shower in a hospital after several hours of being poked and prodded and examined for evidence of rape.
After a few hours of this, they let me shower. I stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, I don’t want my body anymore. I was terrified of it, I didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.
A paragraph in which she describes how she learned what happened to her that night in the time between her last memory of the party she was at and when she came to hours later on a hospital gurney.
This was how I learned what happened to me, sitting at my desk reading the news at work. I learned what happened to me the same time everyone else in the world learned what happened to me. That’s when the pine needles in my hair made sense, they didn’t fall from a tree. He had taken off my underwear, his fingers had been inside of me. I don’t even know this person. I still don’t know this person. When I read about me like this, I said, this can’t be me, this can’t be me. I could not digest or accept any of this information.
A paragraph in which she addresses Turner for trying to excuse his actions by claiming he was too drunk to know what he was doing. An excerpt:
Sipping fireball is not your crime. Peeling off and discarding my underwear like a candy wrapper to insert your finger into my body, is where you went wrong. Why am I still explaining this.
A paragraph in which she discusses one way in which the sexual assault has affected her:
I can’t sleep alone at night without having a light on, like a five year old, because I have nightmares of being touched where I cannot wake up, I did this thing where I waited until the sun came up and I felt safe enough to sleep. For three months, I went to bed at six o’clock in the morning.
So where does the idea she “liked it” come from? Not from her, but from Turner. In her letter, she recalls reading a news account of the evening’s events:
In the next paragraph, I read something that I will never forgive; I read that according to him, I liked it. I liked it. Again, I do not have words for these feelings.
Speaking of the word “like,” The Lizard’s comment received fifty “likes” from Roosh V forum users. Here they all are:
MiscBrah, Horus, n/a, BallsDeep, GlobalMan, KidA, Samseau, Captainstabbin, spokepoker, Genghis Khan, RoastBeefCurtains4Me, Burt Gummer, Tokyo Joe, bigrich, gajf77, Comte De St. Germain, Mr. Scumbag, getdownonit, Renton1875, H1N1, Benoit, Chevalier De Seingalt, J. Spice, DJ-Matt, debeguiled, Neo2, Grodin, PUA_Rachacha, VincentVinturi, arafat scarf, Professor Fox, godzilla, Roadrunner, UroboricForms, B TAHKE, MMX2010, yfc4, Grizzles, Ocelot, TooFineAPoint, Polo, DeltaSmelt, Dismal Operator, Gmac, Geomann180, mpr, tradman, Avarence, dies irae, Matrixdude
In a followup comment, The Lizard begs a fellow forum member who actually sees the incident as”obviously a real case of rape” to have some empathy — for Turner.
Please try to think about this in actual human terms and understand what happened here. The idea that a young kid’s life should be ruined forever because of this incident is disgraceful.
It’s not long before The Lizard sets forth a conspiracy theory to explain just why the victim’s letter went viral. Weirdly, it involves Donald Trump.
I can tell you why it went viral:
1. They need this to make up for the loss they took on lyin’ Jackie [last name redacted –DF] in the UVa case — a loss they’re still smarting from.
2. It’s needed as payback for TRUMP — pretty much the fact that he still dares to exist.
Unbelievable. The Lizard concludes:
There is serious evil afoot here. But it’s not in the actions of one drunk confused kid — the evil is in our society and the hysterical extremes it has reached in pandering to female lies.
In a series of followup comments, The Lizard informs us that white men can’t rape:
“Rape” victims are few and far between, and real rapes, violent drag into the bushes rapes, are vanishingly rare on college campuses, and not committed by young white male college students.
That women apparently love — no, LOVE — having sex behind dumpsters:
What I know for sure is that women go to parties and get drunk because they want to f**k; and women, especially when they are drunk and horny, LOVE the idea and the excitement of having sex in public locations to an extent that most prudish men and white-knights can never understand.
That he’s pretty sure the victim didn’t write her letter, because reasons:
I did not believe when I saw it, and I believe less now, that it was written in full by “Emily Doe”. It bears all the marks of a far more experienced, ideological, and nastier hand.
I cannot prove, but strongly suspect, that this document was written in part or in full by Michele Dauber, the Stanford Law professor who has been primarily responsible for coordinating the propaganda campaign in this case.
Several commenters on Roosh’s forum, to their credit, take issue with The Lizard’s arguments, such as they are.
And then there is the odious piece of human garbage who calls himself GlobalMan — who may be a man we have met many times before, since“GlobalMan” was for years the internet moniker used by the extremely odd and terrible person better known as Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c).
Here is his take on the situation:
Wow. If [Turner’s] account is indeed accurate and true, not only is this the furthest thing from rape there could ever be, but it is also quite scary that men have to now worry about roving pairs of violent white knights intruding on any public lustful escapades with a willing and enthusiastic lover because they’ve been trained to view all males with natural virility as a threat to public safety.
What you have is in fact actually a sweet and beautiful scene, two young drunk kids slipping and falling and going at it right where they fell. Not too long ago in history someone would have walked by these kids and smirked, passing by with a smile at the thought of young lust. Now such a scene is cause to use violence to restrain the male and send him off to the gulag for societal castration.
A disgusting and sad outcome if there ever was one.
A “sweet and beautiful scene.” That comment got more than a dozen “likes” from the Roosh V Forum crowd.
I’m twitching again.
Hey Skip,
Men like you cutting women completely from their lives sounds like a win-win situation to me.
Ok-great-thanks.
“Equally as drunk” yet managed to take a semi-conscious woman behind a dumpster, remove items of her clothing, then leg it after being caught. If he were that drunk it just could not have happened.
This twerp will have people defending him for the rest of his life, which is a lot more than you can say for men in jail serving excessive sentences for drug-related and other non-violent crimes.
I really don’t like talking about this, but here is my story. It is not as much of a ‘thing’ in the UK, but there are cults and Christian sects on the ‘fringe’ of society which are very similar to the WASP families you describe.
I had a very strict father who was older than my mum, and used physical discipline on both of us. Mum used that term ‘it was different back then’ to excuse herself from ever leaving him. He was the sole breadwinner and she was not allowed to have a job, she was a stay at home mum with me (only child) and he was a tyrant, always demanding his dinner on the table the right time and her to make him tea etc, he did no housework or anything to help.
They were member of the Brethren church, a Patriarchist cult which gives men ‘headship’ over women, as they believe men represent Christ. I had a close male cousin, who used to be my best friend until we became teenagers then they turned him against me, because he wasn’t allowed to be alone with a single woman. It got even worse when my father died, my mum and me weren’t allowed any male visitors not even family members.
There were two very suspicious men who attended this church, one was convicted in 1995 of child abuse and went to prison. He had been abusing his brother’s little girl who was born out of wedlock so officially she didn’t even exist. The other one was the son of the pastor, who “groomed” girls, and treated it like he was being just friendly and matey and it was just a joke. He tried this on me when I was about 15 but I was frightened by his advances and told one of the older ladies in the church who told me to keep my mouth shut because he had a family and a good job, and she didn’t want slander to effect his livelihood. It was not until November last year, at least twenty years later that he assaulted the wrong kid and ended up in court, he is on the sex offenders register now, and has a suspended sentence and £6000 fine – they were very lenient.
I gave up religion because of this, I still believe in God, but not their sex obsessed Patriachist God. If there really is a God, s/he should hate religion.
“Keeping up appearances” always means silencing the victims. The entire objective is to make sure people outside the family only see a perfect, happy, Christian if appropriate, home; if anyone sees anything other than that, it means the patriarch and matriarch have failed in their primary duty of producing good members of the next generation.
Perpetrators usually do their thing low-key. The abuse happens behind closed doors, and only rarely where outsiders can see it. Perpetrators aren’t disrupting that happy-perfect-home image. Speaking out, however, and demanding that something be done about the abuse means putting it into the public sphere. The family can’t or won’t control the perpetrators; if it were otherwise, the abuse wouldn’t continue. Speaking out requires the intervention of outside forces, either the state or the community at large. It’s impossible to avoid a public demonstration of the family’s fucked-up-ness at that point. It’s the victim’s demands to be treated as a human being that bring in that attention, not the crime itself, which happened under a veil.
Families with this value system always silence victims. Maintaining the image of a perfect family is their highest value, and it’s victims, not perpetrators, who threaten that image.
What? Concern of people? Love? You shallow liberal degenerate! This is nothing more than weakness and slavishness! The illusion of human uniqueness and, consequently, individual worth. Mankind’s worth is measured by strength and it is through blood and tradition that this strength is maintained. Not through twittering feminine values of concern for the weak. Feminization is at hand, mankind will lose all dignity, individuality, and strength, reduced to cucked imbecile female drones for our Jewish masters.
/extreme sarcasm, yes, I know, Poe’s Law and all that.
I didn’t read any of the post or most of the comments here, I just wanted to say love, kittens, hugs and kisses for the victim and everyone else here who has been raped, assaulted, etc.
I love that pic you made PI.
@ryeash
Echoing scildfreja, thanks for the novel!
I didn’t know this was a Midwestern pattern, and I suppose that’s because many Midwesterners maintain a profound silence about this abuse.
Here’s what I already knew:
Of the people who have told me about the abuse they’ve survived, possibly the worst abuse happened to two people from different states in the Midwest — and the abuse was in one case, at the hands of his family, and in the other case, at the hands of her husband.
Jane Smiley’s family tragedy, based on Lear and titled One Thousand Acres (which I have not read but have read about) is set in the Midwest.
Sinclair Lewis was from the Midwest and wrote many books about American materialism and conformity (Babbitt, Main Street, etc.). Feminism and the bohemian life were also featured in his books, which was the draw for me. I now understand that his books probably can also be understood to reflect specifically Midwestern values.
And then there’s Bob Dylan, who once upon a time was a Jewish kid living in the Midwest:
With God On Our Side
Bob Dylan
Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I’s taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that the land that I live in
Has God on its side
Thanks again, ryeash. I’m going to give this subject a lot of thought.
*******
Internet hugs (if you want them) to everyone who’s lived through or is currently going through a hard time.
@Nikki the Bluth Wannabe
Yes, that is indeed the area I live. I am very familiar with the culture that grew Brock Turner and his supporters. My kids go to a high school that is one of the few in the area competitive with Oakwood, but it has a hugely different culture with regards to sports, wealth, privilege, race, and consent.
A huge part of the problem is the “othering” that happens both ways around here. Folks who live in Oakwood other anyone different, and many around here other Oakwood for their racial and material privilege. It’s easy to see how a “golden boy” growing up in Oakwood would not be capable of seeing people unlike him as deserving of the same respect he himself receives and comes to expect.
There are good things to be known for around here, we did make it big in the news for the ongoing consent policy for Antioch College! More than 20 years ago- each sexual encounter requires consent and each new level of sexual activity requires consent. We were soundly mocked then, but not now.
People around here seem to be ashamed that such a systemic rape apologist system could be in place. I hope this is addressed in the training both where the father worked and where the son went to school. I’ll be watching and attending the training at the father’s workplace, and my teacher friend will be keeping tabs on the school’s program.
Gah, internet problems in my area off and on for the last couple days. Sorry for the late response.
@Cupcakes 4 Hitler
Never feel pressured to talk about anything that happened to you. I do it so that others can hopefully feel comfortable doing so if they need to (plus it helps me to talk about it here, because I have a lot of trouble getting close enough to people IRL to share), but I completely understand those who don’t want to.
Thank you for sharing, though. I didn’t mean to make it sound like a strictly midwest US thing, and I don’t want anyone getting that impression. I’ve met people from all over the world who have had the same experiences or at least know someone who has. It’s just common as dirt here.
These aren’t rich families playing Dynasty Wars, either. This is what’s left of the frustrated middle class who will likely never reach the upper rungs of society like they always dreamed, so they play pretend. It shouldn’t surprise anyone how rampant racism is in these communities. It’s all the immigrants and minorities wanting jobs and equality that are holding the middle class back, according to them. It’s everyone’s fault but their own for voting in people who serve only the interests of those who are currently rich. They live their lives putting up the appearance of money and status and preparing for the day when their bank account matches their braggadocio.
@Kat
Tom Waits wrote a song where he specifically mentions missing my city. It used to be a beautiful place with a thriving downtown area, but the industries moved out or exported jobs, and now we’re just another decaying crime hub. Forbes also likes to mention us–in lists of the US’s most dangerous cities. We’ve always had an art scene, though, and no shortage of local musicians, visual artists, writers. I feel like we have the right mix of beauty and tragedy to draw endless inspiration, so it’s no wonder that a lot of artists have come from the midwest.
@Her Grace Phryne
I’ve heard almost that exact quote so many times. Not just towards me, but towards friends. It makes me unbelievably angry. I always retort “Oh, so you’ve lived with them and know what they’re like huh?” People still say this about my mother, but my stepfather was like your mother–he didn’t pretend around children, because no one believes what children say around here. My friends refused to come over to my house, because they were terrified of him. Yet they still didn’t believe me when I told them just how bad things were, because we were all raised to think that kids are a drain on their parents, and anything they say about how their parents are raising them is being ungrateful for their sacrifices. I was fed stories about kids who had their parents sent to jail by lying about abuse and was told it was common and no one should believe children because they’re selfish and evil.
Not only the families but the community keeps children in these cycles of abuse. When a whole community is silencing abuse, it’s impossible to make any headway against it. It goes up to the justice system in my city. I wrote a letter to help have a judge removed, because he refused me an Order of Protection after the incident with my stepfather. His reason: it might help my mother in the divorce. With pictures of what my stepfather did to my face sitting in front of him, he laughed at me and called me a liar and a pawn for my greedy mother who just wanted all of my stepdad’s money (even though his money was actually hers, because he didn’t work).
It’s seriously like MRA Wonderland here.
ETA ^^sweet Jesus, you’d think one time I could avoid a wall-o-text
Hugs to everyone who grew up in a patriarchal household in which appearance was all that mattered and silence was a virtue. My mother was a teacher too, and we went to church. That’s all I’ll say. Other people here have described it better than I could.
If you got out, congratulations on getting out. If you haven’t managed to get out, please know that you have all my support, and if you need to talk to someone then I’d be honoured to help however I can.
“Not only the families but the community keeps children in these cycles of abuse. When a whole community is silencing abuse, it’s impossible to make any headway against it.”
Yep. I had someone my junior year of high school, my former “best friend”, follow me through the halls of school screaming that I was a lesbian. (In the mid-90s, that was a horrible thing to say.) Despite the fact that the halls were crowded and teachers saw us, nobody said anything, and when my dad talked to the principal, they said nothing could be done because I didn’t have any proof. Like… what proof could I have?
And that “best friend”, do you know the terrible crime I committed that led to this? I told her to stop lying about me to a boy that she knew I liked. But I stood up to her bullshit, and therefore it was time to make me anathema.
It’s slightly better where we live now, but I will be SO glad when we move to NYC in a couple of years. The culture may not be perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than around here.
Also, thank you, ryeash, for describing it so well. I honestly didn’t realize it was a culture thing, and it’s… well, it sucks that other people had to go through it, but at least we’re not alone.
@Her Grace Phryne
It became easier to see how prevalent the problem was and all the little patterns and indicators after I was away from it all for a few years. Always easier to see clearly from the outside.
Agreed! It’s nice to know that there are people who understand what we experienced, but I hate the thought that they all paid for that knowledge with miserable, abusive childhoods where they were constantly invalidated and gaslighted (gaslit? subjected to gaslighting).
Echoing EJ’s hugs and offer of support.
Thanks. I’ll be out of here in a while, but in the meantime, at least I don’t have to speak to my mother, who was the worst of it. Looking forward to NYC.
Brock Turner released from jail after serving three months in Stanford sexual assault case