#courteousmingler

Last night, tumblr used clownyprincess was approached via DM by Carmen/courteousmingler. The conversation opened with Carmen asking clownyprincess to “walk [her] through” how to commit suicide and went downhill from there. Carmen has since made several postsabout this, and posted some decontextualized screencaps from their conversation. 

Carmen’s version of what happened between her and clownyprincess seems to be that clownyprincess was “sent after” her by catandkitty (untrue; catandkitty and clownyprincess are barely acquainted, and clownyprincess was wholly acting on her own during this exchange) in order to gaslight her by calling her motives into question. This is not what gaslighting is. When someone has lied consistently - and provably - as Carmen does when she says that no one ever called catandkitty or myself rapists, and that she never “invalidated” catandkitty’s abuse, and that catandkitty and myself ONLY brought up our abuse in “the chronological middle” of a discussion where asexual rape survivors were sharing their stories, and that catandkitty tagged posts about her abuse with “aces” and “asexual” specifically to create an association between all asexuals and her own sexual abuse, and that she never discusses the sexual abuse of people who have not given her permission to do so… it is not gaslighting to not trust them when they claim to have intimate knowledge of other peoples’ motivations, as Carmen does when she says that catandkitty “wants asexuals to be raped”, or that I have a “passionate love” of rape. When someone says they support rape survivors, but spends the majority of their online time calling rape and CSA survivors “rape worshipers”, “pedophile worshipers”, “pro rape”, saying that their “love” of rape is “masturbatory”, etc, it is not gaslighting to question the degree to which they actually support all rape survivors.  These are questions that I hope would occur to anyone who observed someone acting in way so contradictory to their stated intentions. 

It IS gaslighting to consistently lie to someone, over and over again, and then berate them for not believing you automatically. Which is not to say that courteousmingler gaslights people - I don’t think you can call any singular, one-off interaction with a person gaslighting; gaslighting by necessity takes place over a series of interactions, that is how it works - but having been in an abusive relationship that included gaslighting, it’s noticeable to me that Carmen frames people simply trusting their own immediate perceptions over what she tells them to believe as “gaslighting”. 

After talking to clownyprincess about her interaction with Carmen, we decided that it would make sense for me to post the screencaps of their conversation, as well as a statement from clownyprincess, here. The caps are below the cut. I received them from clownyprincess via e-mail last night, and am only posting them this evening because I had a lot to do today and couldn’t post them earlier.

PLEASE note that this chat contains heavy trigger warnings for suicidal ideation, discussions of rape and abuse, and honestly, serious emotional manipulation. I am not kidding. I find these screencaps deeply upsetting, even triggering. Take care.

There’s a lot I could say about this interaction and I may say it later. The way Carmen lies (claiming that catandkitty tagged posts about her own abuse with “aces”, for example, which is provably untrue) and then repeates the lie over and over and then demands that clownyprincess tell her where she’s lied and then immediately changes the subject - the way she opens with a request that clownyprincess go over suicide with her in explicit detail - the way she starts out questioning and becomes increasingly aggressive and verbally abusive (going from “it’s been really scary lately” and “I’m having a bad day” to “RAPE WORSHIPER! RAPE WORSHIPER! RAPE WORSHIPER!” in very short order) - the CONSTANT, constant, attempts to define catandkitty’s thoughts and intentions, followed by a complete meltdown when clownyprincess said that she felt she understood Carmen’s thoughts and intentions - the accusation that catandkitty and clownyprincess want to rape asexual people. All of that is here. What’s also immediately obvious is that Carmen has a specific sort of arguing style - I observed it from her in the DM interaction we had on my old blog; other people have commented on this as well. She messages you repeatedly, VERY quickly, often shifting the subject slightly from one message to the next, so that it’s hard to get your bearings, and you end up responding belatedly to some point she made earlier. When you do this, she berates you harshly for lying or changing the subject. Recently, she has claimed that this is a symptom of autism, and that therefor if any other disabled people find it hard to follow her particular chat style, they are being ableist, because her disability, I guess, trumps theirs. 

However, I want to close this out with a statement from clownyprincess, that she sent me along with these screencaps. I’ll preface this by saying that clownyprincess and I have been mutuals for many, many years now; our internet friendship dates back to livejournal days, and during that time, I have seen her get triggered and angry, but I have never seen her be dishonest about her feelings and motivations. If there is one person I trust on this hellsite to be a straight shooter, it is clownyprincess. She and I have very different styles of engagement in this sort of thing, but I understand where her anger here comes from, and I have a lot of respect for her relentless honesty in confronting online harassment and abuse. 

Anyway, here is what she had to say:

first of all, I am well aware that I lost my self-control whilst DMing with carmen yesterday and that nothing productive could come of it. I have worked hard to gain a great deal of self-control I didn’t have over the last few years and having it stripped away like that left me shaken. the entire interaction has left me feeling hollow and ill.

carmen knew exactly which buttons to push in order to trigger me and elicit an hysterical reaction, because later she can use those against the person she attacked. the aftermath of knowing a manipulative liar managed to suck me into the vortex of her awfulness is stark and ugly. fuck you, carmen, you’re a fucking black hole.

I have watched carmen harass an innocent woman, using the most violent and vile language about her, for months. carmen writing this post is what led to our confrontation (http://courteousmingler.tumblr.com/post/160416266640/catandkitty-wants-asexuals-to-be-raped-this-is-a)

carmen maliciously and savagely attempts to rewrite history, casting catandkitty in an incredibly ugly role of a rape advocate and apologist and which I knew could also be extremely triggering for her target. the following in particular horrified me: “catandkitty ran a campaign trying to associate asexuals who say “no” to sex, to violent abusers who withhold sex. because associating these two groups with each other can make the rape of asexuals more socially acceptable.”

it is such a heinous, depraved thing to say, especially as it is absolutely untrue. seeing such a malicious lie said about someone who is themselves a rape survivor infuriated and disgusted me. it was so blatantly evil. I sent carmen an ask saying simply “you are an evil fucking monster”.  though some may say I started it, I stress again that what prompted my reaction was an evil fucking lie.

she then responded by DMing me with a request to help her commit suicide, as seen in the screencaps. this was deliberate, I have no doubt. it is such a vile, violent thing to say to someone and she knew exactly what she was doing, evidenced in her own words “I know”. she attempted to manipulate me by trying to get sympathy and when that didn’t work, she doubled down on the same awful, repeated statement about catandkitty. frankly, the whole thing was triggering for me.

having someone deluge me with endless messages all basically just repeating themselves and all with the same disgusting, UNTRUE message about a traumatised woman who was only speaking the truth drove me right over the edge. so many people have explained so many times in so many ways, the only possible reason that occurs to me that carmen maintains her insistence that catandkitty’s motives were what she claims is pure vindictiveness. having someone repeat the same HORRIBLE lie like that, over and over, someone intentionally using the most distressing and awful language possible, knowing full well the impact it would have, was awful. I couldn’t believe she could lie like that, like she doesn’t give a fuck about the actual impacts this is having on a real person. I yelled at her because I wanted her to know that no matter how many times she told the same lie, I would not believe her.

the messages were flying back and forth constantly and by the time I was able to reply to one thing she’d said, another couple of her messages had come through, disrupting the continuity of the messages. her efforts to trigger me reached their peak when she told me that I was trying to make rape easier so I could rape someone. with the sexual violence I’ve experienced in my past, I just went numb. I realised I was arguing with someone who has no soul and no heart. I played cool and blocked her. good riddance to a toxic hellhole.

I’m not proud I lost my shit with carmen, but that’s because it’s what she wanted. from the second she sent her first message she knew what angles to play. asking me to help her commit suicide was a seriously abusive and violent thing to do and I am still shaken by it. she wanted to distress me as much as possible, knowing she could then manipulate the conversation to further blind her sycophants and cast herself as persecuted.

I will call an abuser an abuser. carmen has lied and lied and lied about catandkitty and has obsessively stalked catandkitty for seven months now, which is a type of abuse. carmen uses catandkitty’s abuse history against her in order to further traumatise her. that is abuse. and when someone is screaming the same stomach-churning lie calling a rape victim a “rape worshipper”, you bet I will double down and tell that abusive person they are a liar, that I know they’re lying, that they’re not fooling me for one second. and there is no damn good reason for these vile lies, except that that piece of shit enjoys it. if someone is gonna stand their ground and maintain the same obvious lie, expressing it in the most violent language they can find, I will definitely draw my own conclusions
about their agenda.

oh and catandkitty did NOT send me.  another blatant lie, carmen. I acted on my own accord.

I’ve spoken to some people about Carmen’s recent actions and, although being a target of her has been incredibly draining and terrible for my health (both mental and physical!), I wanted to say some things about the way she’s escalated her language and the claims that she’s making lately.

It has not escaped my notice that since I abandoned my more public blog and stopped writing things explicitly for wider distribution about abuse and sexual violence, I have not been a major target of Carmen’s, but that since I did these things, she has ramped up her harassment of people who associate with me (catandkitty and clownyprincess, among others) significantly. I do not think this is a coincidence. 

It has also not escaped my notice that regarding catandkitty, Carmen has basically constructed a new version of events to justify her continued harassment, which she outlineshere:

she entered a discussion between ace survivors about how they were raped by partners who guilted them into sex, and catandkitty entered the conversation to remind everyone present that withholding sex is abusive.

like.

that is *not* the context in which you say that.

the only reason someone would say that to a group of rape-by-coercion survivors is if they were attempting to defend the rapes being discussed.

and guess what?

making posts about torturously abusive partners who abuse by denying sex, and then tagging it “ace” when the post didn’t mention aces at all?

shows that you’re trying to associate violent abusers and rapists who deny sex to abuse, with asexuals who are sex repulsed.

it is an attempt to paint asexuals being sex repulsed as an act of abuse, which works as an AMAZING justification for pressuring asexuals into sex (you’re abusing me if you don’t consent!).

IE, it’s a defense of rape.

like. all you people can do is call me a liar, call me disgusting.

but you can never prove i’m wrong. lmao

Well, okay, allow me to prove that you’re wrong.

First of all, I’ve already addressed the idea that catandkitty (and myself, at my old blog missvoltairine) “entered into” the “chronological middle” of a discussion that was specifically about asexual peoples’ experiences of sexual violence. It’s not true. The conversation that sparked our responses took place over several days and across multiple threads. The crux of the discussion was not “is it okay to rape an asexual person”, but rather, “when and how is it okay to talk about issues of sexual compatibility in relationships?”. Multiple people took a stance that expressing any kind of dissatisfaction with your sex life with your partner was, essentially, rape by coercion, and multiple other people, including myself and catandkitty, spoke up in response to THAT specific idea by pointing out that a rapist could just as easily manipulate someone being unable to express sexual dissatisfaction in a relationship as they could manipulate someone with the idea that they were somehow “owed” sex. We both illustrated this point with personal anecdotes from our own separate abuse histories. 

So the claim that catandkitty was responding, specifically and directly, to several other rape survivors talking about their own abuse, in order to “defend” the sexual violence they had experienced, is a lie. Catandkitty and myself were both responding to a set of ideas that we were seeing repeated in a number of different places. We both made original posts on the subject, instead of reblogging a specific discussion chain, for this reason. Neither of us commented on anyone else’s sexual abuse. Both of us very clearly only discussed our OWN abuse, and the tactics our abusers used.

Catandkitty’s own post on the subject is what Carmen references constantly, now claiming that it was tagged “aces” and “asexual” in an attempt to frame asexual people as inherently sexually abusive. This is an outright lie - the initial post, foundhere, is tagged with some additional commentary:

#please take explicit notice that this expressly includes sex-repulsed people #the term human need does not in any way harm you #it also doesn’t assume you want any particular activity! #you’re all about as smart as rocks it’s incredible

Catandkitty later reblogged her own initial post to add clarifying details about where she was coming from, specifically - this is where she talks about her own abuse, and the phrase “withholding sex” first comes up (which was initially what a lot of people took issue with, and has now been reframed, as in Carmen’s post above, as “saying no to sex” - this may seem like an academic distinction but “withholding sex” is a phrase used in advocacy circles - it’s in Why Does He Do That?, I learned about it doing anti-rape advocacy work - to describe a specific phenomenon of abusers repeatedly shutting down and shaming any expression of sexual desire or agency in their victim, and then leveraging that later when coercing them into sex they don’t actually want; “saying no to sex” has very different connotations and was not coined in the same way/with the same intentions, and as such it evokes a very different dynamic). You’ll notice that this post is ALSO not tagged with “aces” or “asexual”! It is tagged with the usernames of two people - one of whom accused catandkitty of being a rapist directly, and another of whom was a minor whose blog became the epicenter of a series of people making claims along the lines of “any ultimatum in a relationship is abusive”. (The latter blog, certifiedacehet, has since been deleted and that content was purged, but I have linked to asexualnataliaromanova’s claims about catandkitty before, I believe they’re still up.) It is also tagged “ace tumblr” and “ace discourse”, which, I mean, you could argue implicated all asexuals, but you’d be very obviously wrong. These are tags that are consistently used for discourse, and it’s clear that that is why catandkitty used them.

So the statement that catandkitty tagged a post about her rapist with “ace” and “asexual” is also a lie. This just literally never happened.

I’m disturbed by this dishonesty on a few levels. Ultimately, I think the false claim that catandkitty speaking about her abuse was and is incompatible with the idea that asexual people have also experienced rape imposes a hierarchy of sexual violence where in order for one survivors’ experience to be believed and respected, it is understood that another survivors’ experience must be denigrated, weaponized, and (explicitly or implicitly) positioned as false. This is cruel, dishonest, and dangerous. A non-asexual person talking about their experience of rape is NOT an attack on the idea that sexual violence against asexual people is unacceptable. It never was. Not from me, and not from catandkitty. However, this framing also is pretty notable in how it is completely exclusive of the possibility that an asexual person could ever be abusive! The very idea that an asexual person could be abusive to a partner is consistently positioned as an attack on all asexuals - even when no one in the original conversation went there in any capacity at all. 

I find this difficult because one of my abusers was asexual. This is not a detail I wish to elaborate on, and I want to be very clear that I’m not bringing it up as proof that asexuals are inherently abusive. Abusers can be anyone! They can be members of literally any group. The idea that a specific identity precludes everyone within that identity from being abusive serves abusers and silences their victims. Taking the abuse history of someone like catandkitty and claiming that she’s wrong for discussing it at all because of how it reflects on asexuals - when her abuser was not asexual and she never said he was! - is an incredibly shitty way of perpetuating this idea. No survivor should be pressured to stay silent about their experiences for the sake of “the cause”. Not only is this terrible for survivors, it is terrible for movements, as it enables abuse and its destructive effects within specific groups. 

To spread that idea through blatant lies… is so damaging, to ALL survivors, that I can’t not say anything about it.

fillerblogisfiller:

@courteousmingler​

As an asexual person who has been raped specifically because of my asexuality, I need to have words with you. A lot of words. I’m on the inclusionist side of the discourse and I agree with a lot of points you’ve made. But I still have a serious problem.

The short of it: Stop using me as a rhetorical device in your discourse arguments.

The long of it. (Long post incoming. Trigger warnings for rape, sexual assault, and aphobia.)

I have to put this on a side blog because I know if I talk about my experience, I’m opening myself up to people who either won’t believe me, or will say that it didn’t happen for the reason that it did happen.

(But to anyone who’s about to protest: The person who raped me was a cis girl. I, at the time, assumed I was a cis girl. I not know I’m nonbinary. Misogyny wasn’t involved. We were discussing crushes and I brought up the fact that I didn’t have them. She was attempting to make me feel attraction to her.)

I am allowed to use my personal experience as an example of aphobia. I am allowed to define my personal experience, and to tell people about it, if I feel that telling it will increase awareness. I am allowed to use it as an example of what can happen when we don’t give minors the vocabulary to define themself. I am very hesitant to use the words corrective rape to describe my experience, but it was caused by my asexuality.

You, Carmen, are a survivor of abuse. You are allowed to talk about your personal experiences. You are allowed to use them however you want.

You, however, are not asexual. And as such, I do not feel that you are allowed to use our pain and our experiences for your rhetoric.

It, to be frank, is creepy. You know how straight people love to watch movies where queers suffer and die? That is how you come across, but specifically for aces. You use our abuse for your own gains.

I know you are autistic and this is likely a special interest of yours. But guess what? I am also autistic. I, also, have special interests. And it would be incredibly creepy if one of my special interests were the pain and suffering of people who experience transmisogyny, as that is not something I experience. It would be creepy if I kept bringing up transmisogyny in arguments. It would be incredibly inappropriate.

I did not give you PERMISSION to use my experience that way. You do not have my consent. You cannot.

The way you use examples of rape caused by asexuality is inappropriate. You bring it up randomly. You bring it up constantly. You bring it up in arguments that have NOTHING to do with that. And you never tag it! Ever!! You just post about it and make text wall upon text wall!

And yes, I am aware that the text walls are an autistic thing. I’m doing it myself. I, however, TAGGED IT. AND WARNED PEOPLE ABOUT IT. Because I don’t throw my assault in people’s faces!

You use it as a bullet point in debates! You use it as a finishing move in your arguments! Because you think if you bring up rape, instant win condition!! 

Did you watch the episode of Steven Universe called Rocknaldo? Did you know that it showed an example of how you can be a bad ally? When you make it about yourself? That’s you. I don’t think you actually care ace survivors. I think you just want us to exist so you can win your next argument. 

That is not appropriate.

You need to stop. You need. To. Stop. Because you are using my assault in ways that I did not give you permission to. And that is, in itself, violating.

The creator of this blog reached out to me about sharing this post. I posted a little while ago about how courteousmingler treats asexual rape victims like a voiceless monolith and I think this is a good statement on the negative impact that her approach has on the very people she claims to be standing up for. 

I hope this is redundant of me to say but please don’t reblog this to argue with the OP about how they define/interpret their experience of sexual violence. It’s okay for us as survivors to talk about this sort of thing but I don’t think this post is the place to hash out a debate about aphobia or whatever. Please be appropriate; this blog started because courteousmingler has a habit of turning other peoples’ abuse into Discourse in really destructive and cruel ways, don’t do that to this person. 

Courteousmingler has made a number of claims recently regarding her recent campaign against catandkitty and missvoltairine, and I want to talk about them, because the way she’s attempting to change tracks here is pretty alarming. 

Let’s start with this post, where courteousmingler makes a number of bold claims that are notably inconsistent with how she’s previously presented this whole conflict:

i told missvoltairine that denying the existence of ace oppression so that corrective rape against aces never stops is rape apologism.

she’s since started spreading rumors that i called her friend a rapist.

this objectively never occurred.

this is a slander campaign created by a rape apologist because i called her a rape apologist, when “all she did” was deny ace oppression so that corrective rape could not be combated by society.

First of all, the statement that courteousmingler calling someone a rapist “objectively never occurred (note the shift into a more specific denial - “I never called anyone a rapist” versus “no circulating posts call these people rapists”, which was her previous claim) is questionable. Here is my post about the screencap where courteousmingler can be seen calling catandkitty an “abuser posing as a victim” in direct response to catandkitty clarifying that she is not a rapist and is in fact a rape survivor. This in combination with statements like this one:

reminder that if you say things to your partner that makes them guilty for not wanting to have sex with you, like speaking verbatim about how much you “need” sex and saying shit like “withholding sex can be a form of abuse”, you are abusing them.

Here, she directly references things that catandkitty and missvoltairine said, recontextualizes those statements so that it seems like they weren’t about their abuse specifically but that those are things they have told partners of theirs, and says, “you are abusing [your partner]”. It’s pretty clear that the “you” here refers to catandkitty and missvoltairine. Then in response to an ask by bisexualrevolution she says this:

you know what makes someone a rapist? if they call their powerful desires a “need”, as if they can’t survive without it, and then use that to guilt their partner into having sex with them. emotionally manipulating a person into sex is rape. “sex is a human need!” is a phrase i’ve only ever used to justify rape.

This statement is a direct reference to catandkitty saying that “sex/physical intimacy is a human need”. You’ll note that courteousmingler extrapolates from the statement “sex … is a human need” that emotional manipulation MUST be occurring in a relationship, on the part of the person who said those words. 

These are only things courteousmingler has said herself directly - I touched in a previous post on how multiple people who courteousmingler vocally supported, reblogged from, and lent validity to - people who agreed with courteousmingler in her subsequent assessments of the situation - not only undermined catandkitty and missvoltairine’s personal accounts of their abuse, but sometimes outright said that they were lying in order to cover up the fact that they were the real abusers. I don’t mean to bring this up to imply that courteousmingler is responsible for the statements of people who are only connected to her through a series of likes and reblogs, but to illustrate that the above statements that she made took place in a context where other people were also calling catandkitty and missvoltairine abusers and rapists.

The assertion that missvoltairine said that rape never happens to asexuals or that it shouldn’t be addressed when someone who is asexual is raped seems to come up more in courteousmingler’s recent posts than it has in previous posts, which mostly focused on the assertion that catandkitty and missvoltairine said that withholding sex on it’s own was abusive and that was what made them rape apologists. Since I and others have pointed out that neither of those women ever said that, courteousmingler has quietly backed off this claim (at least for now) and fallen back on the narrative that missvoltairine specifically has “dedicated” herself to “making sure the cause of systemic rape is never stopped”. These statements pretty overtly position missvoltairine, a rape and abuse survivor, as directly responsible for the rapes of other people, if not a rapist herself. I’m not saying the distinction is meaningless, but it seems pretty academic at this point, just as the distinction between “calling someone a rapist” and “saying that the things someone has said about their abuse would only be said by a rapist, and that they would make someone a rapist in a specific context, and saying that they are only posing as a rape victim but are actually an abuser, in the larger context of other people calling them a rapist more directly” seems academic.

It’s also a pretty big digression from what the actual initial argument was about. I couldn’t find any evidence in the initial posts that sparked this whole debacle of missvoltairine or catandkitty saying anything about rape being used as a tool of punishment or “corrective therapy” against asexual people. Catandkitty did say that asexual people would need to have mature conversations about sex at some point, but “you will need to talk about sex” and “you deserve to be raped” are pretty radically different statements and sentiments. It’s true that other people have responded to this subject, but those discussions seem relatively unconnected to what was addressed in the argument between missvoltairine and catandkitty and courteousmingler et al. I find it troubling that courteousmingler seems to be insisting on holding some people accountable for things other people said - it’s disorienting for the people trying to hold a consistent conversation, and it feels pretty disingenuous. Creating confusion about who said what seems to serve a pretty clear purpose, especially when courteousmingler’s initial complaint against catandkitty and missvoltairine was proven to be a fabrication. 

If there’s one thing that I feel is really dangerous in this discussion, it’s the way the representations of specific survivors involved have shifted and been twisted almost beyond recognition. Shifting the narrative from “these people are rape apologists because they said it’s abusive to not want to have sex” to “these people are rape apologists because they want asexual people to be raped” when the first statement is disproven is pretty blatant, especially because the second statement is harder to address concretely given that neither of the people being accused have said much on the subject of asexual people being raped - they both pretty much stuck to personal accounts of their own abuse throughout this whole thing. Courteousmingler has talked a lot about how it’s not necessarily an act of violence to accuse a rape survivor of being a rape apologist, and I agree with the basic premise of that - rape survivors CAN and sometimes do engage in rape apologism - but I disagree that this means calling any rape survivor who disagrees with you about whether it’s possible for some asexuals to be considered straight and whether straight, cisgender asexuals belong in spaces reserved for LGBT people exclusively a rape apologist is okay. I think this is deliberately inflammatory and pretty much guaranteed to spark an emotional response, especially when directed at survivors, which makes it easier for the discussion to go off the rails completely. If I was a more cynical person I might think that this is deliberate and serves an agenda of vilifying rape and CSA survivors very well. 

 So I want to address courteousmingler’s claims that catandkitty and missvoltairine started talking about their abuse at an inappropriate time, specifically in her words that “what i don’t support is pretending that saying “no” to sex is ever capable of being abuse on its own. i especially do not support using your trauma story as a means of spreading this sentiment, in the chronological middle of a conversation about asexuals being pressured into sex aka raped.“

I’ve already addressed the fact that neither catandkitty or missvoltairine ever said that saying no to sex was inherently abusive on its own, and that the links courteousmingler provides as “evidence” that they did actually tell an entirely different story if you care to read them. This isn’t just a matter of interpretation. In the above linked post, courteousmingler links to a post where catandkitty corrects someone who states that she said saying no to sex is abusive on its own. The person asserting that catandkitty said this - without citations of his own - is acepilotlombardi. It’s strange that courteousmingler would use acepilotlombardi’s (debunked) accusation as evidence of catandkitty saying these things in her own words, given that acepilotlombardi had this to say about missvoltairine’s account of her own abuse:

Saying you can withhold sex from a person is like saying you can withhold pets from a dog. Look, if animal rights groups suddenly started saying that if you are ever not petting your dog, you’re abusing them, that would be absurd. This is basically the same situation.

Seems to contradict courteousmingler’s assertions that “no one” on the “inclusionist” side of this debacle has tried to shut down victims speaking about their own experiences, but that’s neither here nor there.

But let’s talk about the oft-repeated idea that catandkitty and missvoltairine entered into a simple discussion about rape and started talking about their abuse in ways that would imply that they thought rape was fine if the targets were asexual. Because that’s such a vast misrepresentation of what really happened as to basically be a lie.

The conversation in question was not, in fact, a single thread of conversation. It was a series of discussions that spanned several different threads and included multiple people on either “side” of “the discourse”. I spent a long time trying to figure out the chronology of the discussion, but tumblr’s format makes it nearly impossible, which already casts doubts on courteousmingler’s claim that catandkitty and missvoltairine’s accounts of their abuse came into play in the “chronological middle” of the discussion. 

To kick things off, let’s have a look at this thread. It begins with lgbtkhaleesi saying: 

it’s also shitty to deny your partner sex and shame them for even trying to communicate their feelings to you about it

This is obviously a complete statement - it’s shitty to do both of these things in tandem, because it creates a dynamic where one person can’t talk about something that is bothering them in the relationship. Not having sex with your partner is one thing; not having sex with your partner and making them feel ashamed and shutting down any attempts at having an honest discussion about the fact that you’re not having sex is another. The first is not abusive, the second is. However, throughout the resulting thread, people take the first part of this statement and repeat it over and over again without the added context of the second part of the statement. Then there’s this:

Why would you ever tell your sex repulsed partner that “it sucks you can’t have sex and that it hurts your self esteem”? Like what do you think would happen? It’s either

1. They still don’t have sex with you but now they feel guilty and insecure over something they can’t help.

or

2. They are guilted into having sex with you, which is rape by coercion.

This is a big part of what many people, including catandkitty and missvoltairine, took issue with - the idea that if a partner is shutting down discussions of sex in a way that makes you feel bad about yourself, simply attempting to address that verbally makes you a rapist because you’re “guilting” someone into having sex with you. 

This theme was repeated not just in that thread, but elsewhere as well:

People were so hostile to the idea of a couple simply talking about having sexual needs that were incompatible that at some point some presented nonmonogamy as a natural solution to feeling sexually unsatisfied in your relationship:

Nonmonogamy is a relationship style that requires a LOT of communication and honesty - if you’re entering into a nonmonogamous relationship because you feel like you CAN’T communicate about sex with your partner, there’s something wrong; this isn’t a healthy basis for a nonmonogamous relationship, and saying that it “is a consensual option that doesn’t involve manipulating people” is pretty loaded.

I think it’s clear by now that at least parts of this discussion had taken a turn away from “it’s not cool to coerce your partner into sex” and into characterizing any kind of attempt at communication, specifically from a non-asexual person towards an asexual person, as rape or advocating rape. It was this trend that catandkitty and missvoltairine objected to. Catandkitty in particular, who is the one who’s been most villified for her participation in this discussion, never actually engaged in any of these discussion threads. Her commentary was confined solely to original posts on her own blog, where she reflects on what is being said in posts like this one:

sex and/or physical intimacy IS human need and you WILL need to be able to have a healthy conversation about it at some point in your adult life. telling people that expressing that need is inherently abusive is intensely harmful and i wish ace tumblr would stop it

This post has been spun as evidence that catandkitty is a rape apologist so many times that I couldn’t possibly link to them all, but you can see some of it in the notes on the post. But the fact is, catandkitty did not say this in response to any one specific person; it’s not a reblog, it’s an original post on her personal blog, a place where she has in the past posted other personal reflections on trends in tumblr discourse, that is an individual reaction to multiple people saying things like the statements I discussed above. It is NOT a response to a statement as simple as “don’t rape asexual people”, and frankly, would make no sense as such. 

This discussion was an ugly one in which multiple rape and abuse survivors, including but not limited to catandkitty and missvoltairine, were told that their abuse wasn’t that bad or was irrelevant, were told to stop talking about their abuse, and were called rape apologists and, yes, even rapists. Here’s asexualnataliaromanova calling catandkitty an “abuser posing as a victim” and saying that it sounds like she raped her abusive ex:

First of all, you called them your abusive ex. Forgive me if the rest of us victims out here who went through shit (me included) aren’t too keen to assume you’re not the abuser when you can still swallow to call them your ex first instead of your rapist. That was red flag number 1.

Number 2, withholding sex is still a lovely way of saying that they didn’t consent. THEY AREN’T WITHHOLDING BC YOU DO NOT OWN OR HAVE A RIGHT TO THEIR BODY. Them having sex with you is not a right you have. Being in a relationship does not give you that right (see marital rape). The only thing that gives you that right is their informed, ENTHUSIASTIC consent. If they weren’t feeling it, tell me, you’d rather rape them than them continue to “Withhold sex”?

Here’s queergengar implying that missvoltairine’s abuser did not consent to sex with her:

How the fuck do you “withhold consensual sex” wtf?? If you don’t want to do it, it’s not consensual jfc. If you change your mind halfway through or right before or whenever and decide you don’t want to do the do anymore, /that means it’s no longer consensual!/

Here’s courteousmingler herself doing what she does best - asking leading questions that are loaded with innuendo and implication, so that she can effectively call an abuse survivor a rapist and then deny it because she never said it outright later:

anyone curious as to why catandkitty is so deeply obsessed with believing sex is a human need, after being told by multiple survivors that the rhetoric is used to get rapists off the hook?

like. why is clinging to rhetoric that silences rape victims something so deeply, deeply important to her? because she considers not having sex with her to be one of her abusers’ offences?

By now it should be clear that presenting this conflict as a simple case of innocent asexuals saying “please don’t rape us” and big mean rape apologists coming out of the woodwork to harass them about it is completely disingenuous and false. I really hope people take the time to read this post - I know it’s a lot, and there’s a lot of further evidence that I refrained from posting because I didn’t want to make this longer. But this is important, because a big part of courteousmingler and her friends - including wetwareproblem and vaspider, etc - smear campaign against these survivors relies on their radically dishonest reinterpretation of what actually happened. 

@courteousmingler is a csa and rape survivor and I want to make it clear before I start this that this is in no way meant to cast doubt on her account of her own abuse.

Over the course of the past several weeks, courteousmingler has made several posts calling out “REGs” and “acephobes” for what she sees as pedophilia apologism. She bases her accusations of pedophilia apologism on the idea that a blanket condemnation of all pedophiles is an inefficient means of combatting child sexual abuse. She outlines her stance on this in this post. From her questionable assertion that ostracizing all pedophiles is an ineffective way of preventing child sexual abuse, she seems to extrapolate that anyone who expresses anger or discomfort with pedophiles is opposed to using “the most effective” methods of combatting child abuse. She says as much in this post:

REG’s strongly oppose any and all effective methods of combating pedophilia. asks yourselves why, everyone!

courteousmingler has denied that this kind of framing of the issue of pedophilia and csa is implying that “REGs” stand to gain from covering up pedophilia and child sexual abuse. She has denied that it is implying that “REGs” are child abusers. But I don’t think it’s a stretch at all. In fact, I think it’s dishonest to pretend that there’s nothing clearly implied here about the motivation of the people she terms “REGs” - a group of people which includes many CSA  survivors. 

When a handful of people who were uncomfortable with her framing of this issue and with posts like this one where she seems to defend the idea that pedophilia is a mental illness (something she has, for the record, gone on to state that she’s “leaning towards” not believing), accused her of pedophilia apologism, she turned the accusation around on them and said that THEY were pedophile apologists.

Worth noting is the fact that @antillles and @cherrypielesbian are survivors themselves. 

People should not have to disclose their survivor status in order to be considered “entitled” to being angry at pedophiles. Please note that that link contains graphic discussions of CSA and its impact on victims.) It is one thing to tell someone who has made it clear that they are not a survivor to back out of discussions among survivors regarding specific types of abuse and how to deal with them, but it is another to make the blanket assumption, as courteousmingler does, that anyone who disagrees with you can’t be a survivor, or a survivor of a specific kind of abuse. Framing discussions of CSA this way creates an environment where people are compelled to disclose their survivor status in order to even say that they are angry at pedophiles, and that’s destructive, especially from someone who responds to someone telling them “I was gangraped” with “i literally never asked to be sent messages about gang rape”.

Recently, @courteousmingler accused another survivor, catandkitty, of deleting posts that proved that she was a rape apologist. The posts catandkitty allegedly deleted are mentioned in this post by courteousmingler. It’s worth noting that originally, the post by courteousmingler contained a number of “links” that were not links at all - she simply wrote “(x)” after statements and said that the x was a link, when in reality it was not. I want to be very clear here - I am not saying that it was a dead link, leading to a “page not found” error; I am saying that there was no link at all, the x was a plain text character with no link attached. This was visibly obvious, as the formatting of courteousmingler’s blog causes text with links attached to show up as bold white text; the text of the (x) was not bold or white, because it was not a link. She would do this, and then repeatedly make references to how she had “proven” through linked sources that catandkitty and missvoltairine were lying. I wish I had taken a screencap of the original version of the post - she’s since edited it to remove a number of links, claiming that those links were deleted, but I want to talk for a minute about the links that remain that she claims are “proof” and what they actually say. 

I think that courteousmingler does this a lot - she writes a LOT of text, and then inserts links, and counts on the idea that most people will have their hands full just making it through what she’s written, and therefor won’t actually check out the links she’s included. She also has blocked the people she’s linked to in this case, which makes it impossible for them to directly clarify what they actually said and meant on the post where they are being openly misinterpreted. It’s worth noting that this is actually a tactic very commonly used among the alt-right; it’s known as “linkbombing” and it’s a propaganda technique. 

For a direct example of this, here’s a point where courteousmingler writes:

anyway, here’s catandkitty saying that denying someone sex is an abuse tactic by itself. (x)

now, in that post, notice she didn’t say “saying no to sex isn’t abusive by itself, but making your partner feel unworthy of sex and ashamed of wanting sex is abusive.”

she believes the quote above is true! she definitely believes shaming your partner and making them feel unworthy of sex is abuse.

but in the post i linked, she clearly states that “withholding” sex is an abuse tactic all by itself- without rape or manipulation or shame being necessary to make it abusive.

That would be pretty damning - IF the post linked actually said anything like that. In actual reality, the post in question reveals catandkitty directly taking issue with someone claiming that she said that “withholding sex in any situation is abuse”, actively disagreeing with them and clarifying that she did not say that at all. Here’s what catandkitty actually says in that post, in direct response to someone accusing her of saying that withholding sex is abusive on its own:

MY OWN RAPIST used withholding sex as an abuse tactic in MY OWN PERSONAL ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP IT’S LINKED RIGHT HERE YOU ABSOLUTE DEMON

this makes it pretty clear that she was specifically talking about withholding sex in the context of a pattern of abusive behavior, specifically her own abuser’s.

Since a number of people have pointed out that a lot of the links courteousmingler used as “evidence” of rape apologism like this did not say what she claimed they said, she has gone back into the post and reformatted it, removing links and then claiming that she removed them because catandkitty deleted the posts in order to “bury evidence”. 

Except catandkitty hasn’t deleted anything! For example, here is a post that courteousmingler claims that she deleted - it’s still there and hasn’t even been edited. What IS revealed in that not-deleted link is @asexualnataliaromanova stating in very clear terms that she believes, based on the language catandkitty used, that catandkitty’s rapist was in fact a victim being raped by her - she refers to catandkitty saying that her rapist “controlled when and how” they had sex as “victim blaming someone who couldn’t give enthusiastic consent”. This directly contradicts courteousmingler’s claim that no one called catandkitty a rapist, which is probably why she’s claiming the post was deleted. 

Claiming that catandkitty deleted this post and others creates confusion about who said what and muddies the waters so that it’s harder to call courteousmingler out for lying directly. But she’s still lying.

Inthis recent ask,@clara-the-slytherin-graduate asked @courteousmingler why she is engaging in behavior that is retraumatizing to rape victims. The behavior she is specifically referring to is this post, where courteousmingler describes another survivor’s rapist being tortured in graphic ways (specifically the line “your rapists need to be hung from meat hooks and skinned alive”). The survivor in question, @missvoltairine,went on to say that she found this language inappropriate and triggering due to reasons relating to her own trauma. In a post made AFTER missvoltairine’s response, courteousmingler goes on to describe how missvoltairine and @catandkitty “could have slit their abusers throats”, continuing her use of graphic, violent language to emphasize her hatred of other peoples’ abusers, at the expense of the people those abusers actually abused. 

courteousmingler goes on in her response to this ask to ignore the fact that anyone who has followed this debacle would know exactly what language clara-the-slytherin-graduate is referring to, in order to accuse clara-the-slytherin-graduate of having a problem with her “calling out rape apologism”, which is a) arguably not even what she’s doing, and b) definitely not what was being addressed in the ask. This is what we in the industry call a “lie”: claiming that someone is saying one thing, when they are explicitly saying something else. 

The idea that your desire to communicate your hatred of another person’s rapist should not come at the expense of the person that rapist directly abused is a simple matter of ethics, and apparently it’s completely beyond courteousmingler’s comprehension. We’ll see more evidence of how she feels like retraumatizing other survivors is right, fair, and necessary in future posts - I’ll be starting with her most recent fuckery and working my way back on this blog.