By David Futrelle
It’s a rarity in this year of terrible, but tonight has been a night of actual good news! Dems are winning elections, and Reddit has banned the toxic cesspool known as the Incels subreddit! Celebrate while you can in this open thread!
No trolls. Fuck trolls.
This is the first time a wall of news notifications hasn't been a nightmare in god knows how long pic.twitter.com/NpTaW5QK6e
— Ashley Feinberg (ashleyfeinberg.bsky.social) (@ashleyfeinberg) November 8, 2017
Dems have won all three of the marquee off-year races — NJGov, VAGov, NYC Mayor — for the first time since 1989.
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) November 8, 2017
Democrats decimated Republicans across the country tonight, at every level and in every branch of state government.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) November 8, 2017
Thanks, Trump!
And this is the icing on the cake:
Trans woman Danica Roem (D) just defeated anti-LGBTQ candidate Bob Marshall (R) in Virginia, becoming the first trans state legislator in America.
— Laura Bassett (@LEBassett) November 8, 2017
The man who wrote the anti-trans bathroom bill just lost the election to a trans woman. Let that sink in. https://t.co/KFEZXSYvMy
— Laura Bassett (@LEBassett) November 8, 2017
Oh, and there’s this:
Jeff Sessions' DOJ Drops Prosecution Of Woman Who Laughed At Jeff Sessions https://t.co/slOPOhmLYN pic.twitter.com/ekRsU1RJAq
— Curt and Frank 🏳️🌈 (@curtandfrank) November 7, 2017
Let’s all celebrate by laughing at Jeff Sessions!
Meanwhile, on Reddit:
Reddit has banned the Incels subreddit. About fucking time; it was a cesspool of misogyny and violent hate. pic.twitter.com/8RieXtxZLN
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) November 8, 2017
HEALTH NOTE: Though cheered by tonight’s news, I’m still dealing with a shitstorm of health issues. I will return to regular posting as soon as I can, but I’m not sure when that will be. Thanks again for your patience and your support!
Croquembouche –
You’re absolutely right, of course. And while it’s not something I’ve heard from other survivors, it is absolutely something I have done if I’m among trusted friends who have some understanding of this shit.
I really, truly do know better about this stuff, and on a normal day, I’d be making the arguments y’all are. It’s weird. Looking at what I wrote yesterday is like waking up to discover that my evil mirror twin did some shit I didn’t approve. Except I remember doing it, it’s not quite that kind of disconnect.
I’m not trying to make excuses, I’m just wondering if anyone else has had experiences like this. Like I said earlier, my trauma is acting up and I was in the middle of an extended, several day triggered state. I know that this state causes me to hate myself and make excuses for my abusers, but I’ve never before noticed myself making rape apologist arguments or excuses for anyone else’s. I’m equal parts intrigued and frightened by the implications of that.
Buttercup Q. :
“I’m taking the allegations against Takei seriously, but at the same time there are aspects of it that don’t sit right with me. For one thing, the timing stinks to high heaven. One day after Moore, reported on by three pro-Trump outlets? There’s been a very suspicious pattern of the right wing wresting away control of the news cycle. Every time a story airs about Trump-Russia or other sordid GOP doings, it seems like there’s an immediate terrorist attack, or mass shooting, or some form of whataboutism that muddies the waters.”
There could be some ill intention in the reporting and publicizing of it, sure. But seriously, do watch the Howard Stern thing because ol’ Georgie straight-up admits to groping someone without their consent because he thought it would “persuade” them when they were afraid to have sex with him. Much like the Trump audio on Stern, he seems to be describing the same incident (or at least the same pattern) as his accuser.
So, trolls may be capitalizing on it (I mean, they definitely are), but Takei’s a sexual abuser by his own admission.
Yes, I didn’t do that. I had 2 sons – desperately wanted daughters, but hey ho. I actually grew to prefer having sons because the shit has got worse for girls since I had them – the amount of sexual abuse teen girls are enduring from their male peers is horrifying.
It is not easy being the lesbian and feminist mother of sons (parenting is hard anyway), but one thing I learnt early on – THEY DON’T JUST AUTOMATICALLY BECOME MACHO SHITHEADS. My sons are lovely, and the only difficult period was when they first went to school and encountered a lot of boys who ARE being indoctrinated into toxic masculinity. My older son came out with a load of bollocks for a while, but I nipped it in the bud. A few years later he was actively rejecting machismo wonderfully illustrated by prancing around and singing:
Macho macho man
Don’t want to be a macho man.
Macho macho man
Don’t want to be what I’m not.
@Ellesar
I’d have paid to see that 🙂
One son, five daughters here (a good and sufficient reason to support feminism on it’s own, right?). The starting school bit was the trickiest time for us as well, though it was our eldest and second youngest girls who were the biggest problems. Took some loss of sleep to reading and thinking, and a LOT of talking things over with them.
@Scild
“Parents do that sort of thing unconsciously. It takes incredible social awareness to notice yourself doing it if you aren’t used to it, and parents are already overloaded with tasks. We encourage the gender roles we were encouraged with, without even thinking about it. This is not a small problem.”
Yeah and that’s only if you lock your kids in a box and forbid your kids from interacting with the world at large. Sorry to say, but us parents have much less influence on our kids than we wish we did. My girls are constantly drooling over the handsome and kind-yet-abusive male protagonists of all their shows. It drives me up the wall, but there’s little I can do in a world where *EVERYTHING’S* problematic than try to keep a dialog open with them.
(Cowardly Lion voice) Awwwww….shucks folks, I’m speechless!
Interesting bit in the Daily Fail (which is almost a contradiction in terms) about that sex rehab place Wankstain and Spacey have gone to:
From a “newspaper” that makes it’s living from sex and bullshit, that’s a fair old condemnation.
I’ll admit that I could be wrong here, but it feels like people who commit sexual assault are mentally acting like people who are racist. In other words, rape is where you drag someone into an alley and violate them by force, and they would NEVER do something like that, not at all! (Nevermind that some of them probably would if it came to it.) Therefore, anything less than that isn’t sexual assault at all, just…well aggressively getting what you want but that’s okay because s/he will surely want it in the end. I liken it to the mindset of racism because for far too many people racism means white robes and burning crosses on black people’s lawns, and anything less than that is just a minor and possibly amusing character defect. Sexual Assault/Racism is something only monsters do, and I’m not a monster, so therefore what I did couldn’t be rape/racism.
From the article Shadowplay linked:
Yeah, no comment.
Schnookums wrote:
Yeah, the “No racism without Klansmen” concept.
So, they treat “sex addicts” by reinforcing the idea that sexual assault or harassment is something that happens when a man is horny and he gets so tempted by a boner pleasing person that he can’t stop himself from violating them. Why, I see no possible way that can fail.
This “treatment”..it’s to make them better rapists yes? Cause I can’t see how it’s supposed to do any damn thing else.
Exactly, and we’re talking other patients here, apparently. So a woman who comes there to get help and is already vulnerable gets her looks policed for the benefit of some abusers… Oh, and she gets to pay tens of thousands of dollars for that, too. Seems like a very serious and trustworthy program. Not.
Wonder if the male patients get told “no banana hammocks.”
@msexceptiontotherule
Ah, my bad, sorry. I’m bad at reading tone and maybe yours wasn’t so clear but nonetheless I shoulda got the hint from the next paragraph.
@Schnookums
Nope, you pretty much nailed it. Same thing as abusers who don’t outright beat the shit out of their victims, or interestingly enough pro-lifers who have abortions because they’re the “exceptions” who do need one. Strawman evil is essential to the mindset of shitty people who still want to feel good about themselves.
@Shadowplay
The same paragraph says “Men are banned from wearing tight swimming trunks.”
I understand the criticism but most sex addicts are compulsive masturbators. And I agree with the rehab in that I don’t think bikinis or banana hammocks are a good idea in a place where people go to detox from porn.
ETA: wording
@mrex
Not even remotely equivalent.
@kupo
“Not even remotely equivalent.”
Banning tight pants in women isn’t the equivalent of banning tight pants in men?
I don’t know what to say kupo, but it’s a rehab, not a college campus or a public high school. If you’re upset on the ban on “sexy clothes” in the rehab, are you also upset that security guards monitor their 15 minutes a day of computer use, and chocolate and coffee are banned as “addictive”? Are you upset that they’re not allowed to smoke and drink and gamble and fuck in rehab, even though feminists fought against the bias that women are too “innocent” to indulge? I could go on…
Maybe you just don’t know about much about rebooting from sex addiction, but they usually spend the first month or so abstaining from EVERYTHING sexually stimulating, including having sex with their partner, cuddling/petting with a partner, going to the beaches and pools, and so on. Then after their reboot they work on adding healthy sexuality back into their lives.
Again, most men in sex rehab are NOT violent offenders, and I don’t even think that “sex addiction” is the problem with Weinstein et al. It’s just the new “get out of jail for free” card, since having a “drinking problem” and going into rehab for that no longer gets them out of trouble.
@Schnookums
All bigotries are interchangeable, all bigots are identical. In the end, bigotry exists to excuse acts and systems of violence. You’re not a bad person, if those peope actually are lesser than you. Therefore, any violation of their dignity or personhood is acceptable, cos they have neither dignity or personhood to begin with. The violence (or drive to violence) precedes the specific trappings of the hatred. Some such violence is done without those ‘justifications’, but bigotry is convenient and effective, so it’s rather often used
Especially effective is the ability for mitigation, as you pointed out. That people can say that there are worse people than them. Say they’re a 4 on the bigotry scale, well, they’re not as bad as those 10s. Then, a 10 becomes the prototype of hatred, and, since a 4 is not a 10, the 4 isn’t hateful at all. 4 drops to 0, 10 drops simlarly to 6, and now literal fuckin nazis are dapper pranksters, bragging about sexual assault is just locker room talk, ‘economic anxiety’ comes right from the last days of Weimar Germany, and there’s very fine people on both sides
Sorry, didn’t mean it to turn into an essay 😛
@mrex
Other people’s bodies are not porn
No. How often are men blamed for being raped when they wear tight pants? How often are they told not to flirt, not to drink, not to wear something too revealing, but also not to wear something too frumpy? How often are they warned not to go home with a woman? Not to go to a party alone with lots of women there? Not to run alone? Not to walk down the street alone?
I never fucking said this. You inferred it. I said that a ban on women wearing skimpy clothes is not equivalent to a ban on men wearing them. That’s all I said. I did not say it upsets me. I didn’t say they should or should not do so. But your defense of the practice was that they do the same for men. It’s not the same.
“That’s all I said. I did not say it upsets me. I didn’t say they should or should not do so. But your defense of the practice was that they do the same for men. It’s not the same.”
All right, see where you’re coming from. Gotcha.
Kupo, my defense of the practice is that in a sex rehab, where they’re trying to reboot from a behavioral addiction to sex, it is not appropiate to dress “sexy”. I wasn’t trying to make an equivalent between men dressing sexy and women doing so. (I agree, it is not equivalent. 🙂 ) The part you were responding to was only answering Shadowplay’s question as to whether bananna hammocks were also banned, not trying to justify the ban on sexy clothes. 🙂
@mrex
Ah, I did not see the question posed. Still do not appreciate the condescending tone towards me wrt the straw argument you made up for me, but whatever.
One of the big problems with trying to ban sexy attire IMO is that sexiness is so subjective and a lot of times people are turned on by attire that isn’t skimpy or tight. For example, I find men in sweaters sexier than men without shirts or men in tight muscle tee shirts. The sexy librarian trope is a classic turn on for woman attracted and as we know from hearing all the manospherians whine about short haired women, lots of people find long flowing hair sexy on women. I remember reading a male blogger write that he finds long flowing dresses sexy because they provide easy access for a quickie. You really can’t control for what people are going to find attractive.
I should say that I’m skeptical in general of the way that inpatient addiction and eating disorder treatment centers control every aspect of patients lives. It’s infantalizing and it doesn’t really prepare patients for life outside where their behavior is not policed. It seems to lead to an endless cycle of relapsing and checking into yet another center.
I know it’s the conventional wisdom that to focus on getting better, patients need to be free of any possible distraction and physically prevented from engaging in the behavior they’re being treated for. But the success rate for both addiction treatment and ED treatment in this country is abysmally low so perhaps there is a better way? I don’t know what though. So maybe I should just shut up.
1. I think the high failure rate is built-in. Only the why is kinda up in the air. It’s either intentional in order to make more money, or it’s incompetence.
2. You’re only cured when you can be around the problem substance and not feel compelled to drink/smoke/etc.
3. Addiction is a mental illness, it’s an attempt to cope (mainly through escapism). Rape and other inappropriate behaviour towards women are not, are never a case of addiction and no rehab treatment is ever going to make a difference.
4. Sex addiction is bullshit, it does not exist. It’s an excuse. Nymphomania, or more accurately, hypersexuality, is a different animal altogether.