I have been writing this post for a few days because I cannot stop thinking about the particular way that Depp v. Heard has been playing out in fandom not just over the course of this trial in Virginia but over the course of the past few years. One of my friends commented recently about the way in which fandom can train people to see things which are not there by taking fragments of media out of context and scrutinising them for small ‘tells’ which hint to the ‘real’ story often in support of a shipping narrative similar to the way that fragments of this trial are decontextualised and recontextualised, pored over in minute detail, and tea leaves read to support the idea that Amber Heard is lying, that Amber Heard is an abuser.
Much of what is circulating on social media about this case are outright lies at worst — the idea that Amber Heard quoted The Talented Mr. Ripley on the stand, which Snopes had to debunk — and pernicious victim-blaming nonsense and abuse myths at best.Milani Cosmetics’ decision to wade into the trial by suggesting Heard claimed she had used their specific concealer before it was released (she didn’t, the palette was used as an example of colour correcting concealer palettes) and insinuate that she must therefore be lying about having been abused falls into the latter category. The idea that if someone misremembers what brand of concealer they used over half a decade ago they are lying about being abused is appalling, it’s laughable. And it’s everywhere. This should be disturbing to anyone watching this case who truly cares about victim advocacy regardless of where you fall on the question of who abused who because the mainstreaming of abuse myths hurts all victims. There is no such thing as using an abuse myth to defend a victim or expose an abuser; if Heard is an abuser the logic underpinning that conclusion cannot be abuser logic without causing incredible social harm to victim advocacy.
And I have seen in fandom the way that people engage in wilful misreadings of all sorts of things to support an idea which is contrary to all reality. The prime example of this for me is Loki. Last summer I became unhealthily obsessed with the way that Loki fans who were opposed to his relationship with Sylvie concocted all sorts of wilful misreadings not just of the show itself but of interviews from the cast, writers, director, and even the composer — which would then go viral, racking up thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of likes.
There was a post on here and on twitter which took out-of-context quotes from several people involved with the show to frame them as contradictory and made some joke about people in a group project not agreeing on what it was about. This post got tens of thousands of likes and shares but if you read the quotes in their full context it was plain that all of the people speaking were in fact in total agreement on what the show was about. There was a cohesive behind-the-scenes agenda but it didn’t matter. Natalie Holt, the composer, mentioned in several subsequent interviews that her words had been taken out of context and twisted to imply something she emphatically was not saying. Other quotes were taken out of context and had bad faith readings applied to try to frame Kate Herron and Sophia Di Martino, both bisexual women who have expressed support and allyship with the trans community, as transphobic in order to justify online abuse and harassment of them. The same people doing this were simultaneously perpetuating harmful transmisogynistic rhetoric about ‘autogynephilia’ in order to frame the relationship as problematic and twisting Julia Serano’s academic work on the topic to support this even after she had expressly disagreed with this and called it out.
The primary driver of all of this is of course misogyny but if anyone pointed that out the deflection was to gesture towards Sophia Di Martino/Sylvie and Kate Herron being white women, particularly in contexts where the people doing this were challenged on why they didn’t hold Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson to the same standard. The exact same deflection is used to dispel any notion that misogyny might be a factor in the virulence of people’s anti-Heard sentiment: that defending her is “white feminism” and that she is exploiting “white woman’s tears”. This really illustrates the way that people in fandom have — in the words of one of my friends who I was speaking to about this the other day — learned a particular vocabulary but not an analytical toolkit.
“White feminism” and associated terms like “white woman’s tears” were coined to describe the unique tools which white women have at their disposal to (a) oppress racialised people and especially Black people, and (b) recruit others — particularly white men — to do the same. These terms do not apply to dynamics between white women and white men because white women cannot be racist towards white men. Depending on whether the white men in question belong to other marginalised classes white women can be ableist, transphobic, homophobic, or enact other forms of oppression against them but they cannot specifically be racist, so gesturing to their race in order to deflect from questions about double standards applied to a white woman versus a white man is a total non-starter and yet it happens all the time in these discussions. In fact the reason it happens is because (Depp’s struggles with addiction notwithstanding) the white men in question don’t have any other known marginalisations along which the white women might be oppressing them. So we have to make something up.
What’s really disturbing in the case of Depp v. Heard is that gesturing to “white woman’s tears” implies that white women are in fact the oppressors of white men and that they are more likeable and sympathetic figures to the general public. This posits either that misogyny is not real or that it does not apply to white women and is not a factor in the way that the general public assesses alleged abuse, which is not just untrue but actually dangerous. At a certain point the truth of what happened between Depp and Heard becomes immaterial when people are talking about the way the pro-Depp side is presenting and mainstreaming arguments which are extraordinarily harmful to victims of abuse. In fact, the victim-blaming rhetoric which is being pushed under the guise of “advocacy for male victims” is an uncanny echo of the transphobic rhetoric which was perpetuated in Loki fandom under the guise of “calling out transphobia”. What is happening here is that people are removing terms from their original political context where they were used to criticise oppressive power structures in order to support and uphold the paradigms they were coined to critique.
The disconnection of these terms and ideas from the power analysis they’re a product of also means that even when people are able to recognise that particular arguments are harmful they’re not able to see them in their full context as Depp and his team wielding systemic power and privilege to oppress and marginalise not just Heard but anyone identified as sharing a class with her. There are all sorts of posts and threads about the fact that it’s important not to allow Heard’s ‘diagnosis’ of borderline personality disorder to add to stigma that people diagnosed with BPD face with no recognition of the fact that this stigma is the exact reason Depp’s team wanted her characterised as having BPD at all. The argument from them is that she is a bad person and she is an abuser because she allegedly has BPD: they are stigmatising people diagnosed with this disorder in order to character assassinate her. Yet none of the people writing these threads about the importance of not letting this colour your perception of people with BPD have stopped to question why his team even considers whether she has it or not of any relevance and how this relates to the way he could be trying to exercise power and privilege in order to silence her. It’s insane to me that I even have to point this out.
What is absolutely fucked about all of this to me too is the proliferation of “amber heard supporters dni” in people’s bios. A lot of ink has been spilled in fandom on the overwhelmingly performative, virtue-signalling nature of a lot of dni criteria and this is what sticks in my throat when I think about this. People who put this in their bios are largely following the crowd and have done no actual research into the case beyond whatever distortions of the truth that have been leaked by his legal team cross their dashboards and timelines, if that. There is no curiosity about her allegations or her evidence or any desire to understand why people might support her when seemingly the entire internet has decided she is a monster, and what it comes down to is that people are virtue signalling by showing that as a matter of principle they do not stand by a woman who has made allegations of serious physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. What is considered virtuous in fandom is close-minded reactionary hatred of a woman who accused a powerful man of domestic violence. It is considered virtuous not to investigate her allegations. It is considered virtuous to declare that you hate her because everyone else does.
This hatred is so completely outsized in response to her perceived crime it absolutely dwarfs any outpouring of vitriol around someone like Harvey Weinstein because it’s not actually coming from any moral outrage about abuse itself. What is fuelling this outrage against Amber Heard is misogyny and victim-blaming, and that’s the fatal irony of all of this. Even though people are mired in cognitive dissonance about “who abused who” many of them show that underneath it all, even if they can’t admit it to themselves, they really do know she is a victim and that he is an abuser or else they would not apply victim-blaming tropes to her nor abuse apologist talking points to him. It’s the fact that we all know, really, instinctively, who is abuser and who is victim, that Depp supporters have to protect themselves so fiercely from this uncomfortable truth by making not just Heard herself but anyone who speaks in her defence or to the facts of the case personae non grata and acceptable targets for harassment and bullying themselves. It’s because we all know, really, in our hearts, that the power differential favours him that it’s necessary for him and his supporters to indulge in pernicious victim-blaming abuse myths to paint her as the villain. It’s because we know this that his supporters have to accuse everyone who questions his obvious DARVO tactics of “not thinking men can be abused”.
Actually, men can be and are abused, including in some cases by women, but abuse is about power and control. This is why the majority of male victims of abuse are marginalised in some way or otherwise vulnerable (young actors getting started in their careers, for example). It is also unbelievable historical revisionism to pretend that #MeToo has only ever been about female victims of abuse. It’s important for a number of reasons to recognise that abuse is a function of power and control and a tool for enforcing power and control but in particular it’s necessary to acknowledge this because otherwise the only explanation left for why there is such a gender disparity statistically between who perpetrates abuse and who is a victim of abuse is the TERF explanation that men are innately more violent, which is not true.
But to believe that Depp is Heard’s victim despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary is to completely eschew this power analysis of their relationship. It is to believe that there is power parity between a twenty-two year-old just getting started in her career and an A-list global celebrity with multi-million dollar mansions all over the world and his own private island. It is to ignore the reality that throughout their relationship she was surrounded by his staff and his security, that even the nurses who saw her after his beatings were on his payroll. To believe that he is her victim even after it was ruled in the UK to a civil standard that he abused her is to posit the MRA belief that women are always immediately believed when they allege abuse and that this imbues them with massive social power to ruin men’s lives “for no reason”. The fact that people seriously argue that the UK legal system favours women is absolutely astonishing. But not only is it not true that women are not believed in general, it is also not true that Amber Heard was believed! The rewriting of history around this is fucking breathtaking. She was getting called a lying gold-digger from the start. The only person who has ever been hurt by these allegations is her.
But at this point the need for it to be true that Depp is Heard’s victim is compounded not just by a desire to keep loving Johnny Depp but also by years of participation in a movement against Heard which, if she is a victim, is morally indefensible. These are people who cannot accept the guilt and shame of having participated in a harassment campaign which is fundamentally victim-blaming and misogynistic in nature and targeted not just against her but other victims speaking out in her defence. They cannot accept this truth so they choose to look away. The furthest you will get one of these people if they do listen to facts about the case is “well they’re both bad”, which itself is a victim-blaming cop out and dangerous rhetoric which prevents victims from recognising that they are being abused and seeking or receiving help.
The other day, I saw some old tweets between Depp supporters talking about how disturbed they were by the behaviour of other Depp supporters in the wake of his replacement by Mads Mikkelson in Fantastic Beasts 3. This was fascinating to me because in this conversation these two people confidently proclaimed that Depp himself, being a kind and gentle soul, would never condone the harassment of Mikkelson or Mikkelson’s fans. But this is ridiculous and totally disconnected from reality since it’s a documented fact that Johnny Depp’s legal team has been purchasing bots in order to provoke harassment of people speaking out in defence of Amber Heard — many of whom are abuse victims themselves — and it would not remotely surprise me if they had also directed this abuse at Mikkelson and his fans.
You can see this bot activity for yourself in any one of the hashtags his supporters are pushing. This “sweet and gentle man” is haunted by his misogynistic rants in texts to friends in which he describes lurid fantasies about burning Amber and desecrating her corpse, the texts in which he called the mother of his children a ‘cunt’, the property damage he committed in the past. The cognitive dissonance it requires to describe this man as ‘gentle’ irrespective of whether you believe he is a victim must be immense. But it’s also required in order to keep believing that Johnny Depp is who people want him to be, and part of shoring up his image as a gentle man means demonising a woman who was twenty-two and just starting out in her career as an actress when she met him and trying to convince yourself she somehow had the balance of power in their relationship.
If you look at any of the hashtags his supporters are pushing you will also see something even more disturbing, which is the way that supporters of Johnny Depp are also extending the abuse apologist logic and absurd conspiracy theories they spin in defence of him to other abusers. It’s worth pointing out that Marilyn Manson, a close friend of Johnny Depp’s, is now suing Evan Rachel Wood for defamation and many of Depp’s supporters are raking her over the coals in the exact same way as Amber Heard and I’m left wondering what is the limit of what people will believe? In five years will I see “evan rachel wood supporters dni” in people’s profiles?
What is amazing to me too is that there are people discussing the ‘fandomisation’ of this trial — the fancams, the memes, etc. — who are speaking about how disrespectful it all is toJohnny Depp as if it’s not precisely the response he and his legal team want. The more people make fancams of him being ‘savage’ on the stand (an odd choice of words given the furore over his racist Dior Sauvage ad campaign, not to mention the fact that he is the subject of horrific abuse allegations) and TikTok videos drawing attention to the disparity in crowd size between his and Heard’s fans the more people are encouraged to respond to this case emotionally rather than logically. People are manipulated into thinking supporting Depp is the popular stance and shown that they will be socially ostracised if they criticise him; people are encouraged to lean into nostalgia around his movies and remember how good he used to make them feel (and feel anger at Heard for “taking Jack Sparrow away”, never mind the fact that Depp had already left the franchise before Heard’s Washington Post op-ed was published); people are guided down a path well-worn with misogynistic tropes about lying, gold-digging, perfidious women out to ruin good men’s lives.
The repeated assertion that “she shit in his bed” (proven false, but nobody cares) and associated scatological puns on her name are intended to associate her with disgust. The posting over and over of his severed finger without censorship or content warnings is intended to shock and upset people in order to make the associated accusation that “she cut off his finger” (also proven false but again, nobody cares) stick in people’s minds. These things are fed by his team to the media in order to discredit and undermine her so that nobody is listening when she describes the horrific abuse she suffered at his hands during the fight in which he lost his finger or if they are they don’t believe her. The fancams of Johnny Depp “being savage” and the videos making fun of her sobbing so hard she can’t breathe and reenacting her allegations to mock her for them are two sides of the same coin both of which benefit him and his narrative. He is being lionised and she is being demonised, exactly as he wants. And it is exactly as he wants. This is a man who texted one of his friends that he would give her “total global humiliation”. The man stated in black and white exactly what he wanted so I’m not sure why anyone would think he would be appalled by any of this.
On a final note, I wonder how many people have actually read the op-ed that she is currently being sued over? I think people should and bear in mind that this is the speech Depp and his team is trying to silence. It barely even alludes to him and the bulk of it is about the need to expand protection for victims of abuse in general. Remember that.
Sunday is Kids’ Day at ECCC, the family friendly Seattle comic convention.
That’s right, comics fans! Teach your kids early that women are fodder to be raped and assaulted for the entertainment of male readers! I mean, that’s what comics are about, right?
Hey, at least ECCC is being honest about how they view us.
Oh wait, they issued a statement. That this was a mistake and they certainly don’t mean to tell women we’re not part of the community they want and we’re not safe at their convention–
“We are aware that some Fans are uncomfortable with the art depicted on the ECCC Sunday Badge. The art on the Badge is from the Image Comics’ series The Discipline. Within the context of the comic, it is understood that these images do not depict non-consensual acts or sexual assault. Without that context, such as on the face of a Sunday Badge, that is not clear.”
Oh. It’s AMBIGUOUS as to whether it’s sexual assault. I see. That makes it okay.
I mean, it’s like showing a consensual rape-play scene, right? It’s supposed to look like rape, it’s supposed to look non-consensual, but I mean, the participants know it’s fine and sure, if you have that context, you do too.
EXCEPT THERE’S NO FUCKING CONTEXT ON THE BADGE, AND EVEN IF THERE WERE, HOW THE FUCK WOULD THAT BE OKAY ON A KIDS’ DAY BADGE?
Or, on a badge at all.
Presumably you wouldn’t show a super-graphic scene of a torso being torn open on your badge, even if the context of the image was actually that it was surgery saving a life. So why a terrified woman having her blouse pulled open by a claw any different?
But hey, like I said, at least they’re being honest about the culture they’re proud of.
I can’t believe this circus has gotten to the point that I feel the need to say something, but I’m gonna say it: I believe Amber Heard.
I believe the case that proved 12 out of 14 cases of Johnny’s abuse of Amber to the civil standard. I believe the ex-girlfriend who has adamantly denied accusations of Amber abusing her. I believe the makeup artist who covered her bruises. I believe the hotel staff that had to clean up the messes of his violent rampages. I believe Ellen Barkin, a former partner of Johnny, who has also testified about his volatility. I believe Amber’s sister, who witnessed some of the violence. I believe her good friend, who was brought to tears while describing the fear she had for Amber’s wellbeing. And I believe Amber herself, when she says she feared for her life at times in their relationship.
I so wanted to dismiss this case as celebrity drama and move on, but the cesspit of social media has not allowed me to do so. Everywhere I go, I see reaction videos and memes. It’s being consumed like a fandom war—to the point that people genuinely thought it was acceptable to use a description of sexual assault as a tiktok sound. I don’t care if they thought it was a lie; the content was horrifying and triggering and not amusing at all. And it was rape culture at its finest (“Amber honey, that sounds like fun. Why are you complaining?”).
YouTube recommends videos of this case like it’s the next influencer cancel-war, and the comments are full of the most vile, misogynistic sentiments I’ve ever seen. “Hystrionic Personality Disorder” is being treated like a legitimate diagnosis (but only for women, of course), rather than the 21st century version of hysteria—aka a diagnosis specifically designed to discount the authentic distress of women. (Ever read Yellow Wallpaper?)
I do believe that men can be, and are, victims of domestic abuse. They deserve unequivocal support. But beyond the ravings of fangirls, the proof is simply not on Johnny’s side. To be fair, I actually believe Johnny about many things—I believe the multiple times he told witnesses (and was recorded admitting) that he cut his own finger. I believe his texts admitting that he wanted to drown then burn Amber and then rape her corpse. I believe that Amber hurled horrible insults at him and struck him, as abuse victims often do when provoked by their abusers. I believe the many, many vile things he’s said about/called women.
And yeah, it’s a real disappointment. I understand the nostalgia surrounding Johnny Depp. In many ways, he defined the media of my generation. But when I say I don’t give a shit, I really mean it. I believe he abused his wife. And I stand with Amber.
I have been writing this post for a few days because I cannot stop thinking about the particular way that Depp v. Heard has been playing out in fandom not just over the course of this trial in Virginia but over the course of the past few years. One of my friends commented recently about the way in which fandom can train people to see things which are not there by taking fragments of media out of context and scrutinising them for small ‘tells’ which hint to the ‘real’ story often in support of a shipping narrative similar to the way that fragments of this trial are decontextualised and recontextualised, pored over in minute detail, and tea leaves read to support the idea that Amber Heard is lying, that Amber Heard is an abuser.
Much of what is circulating on social media about this case are outright lies at worst — the idea that Amber Heard quoted The Talented Mr. Ripley on the stand, which Snopes had to debunk — and pernicious victim-blaming nonsense and abuse myths at best.Milani Cosmetics’ decision to wade into the trial by suggesting Heard claimed she had used their specific concealer before it was released (she didn’t, the palette was used as an example of colour correcting concealer palettes) and insinuate that she must therefore be lying about having been abused falls into the latter category. The idea that if someone misremembers what brand of concealer they used over half a decade ago they are lying about being abused is appalling, it’s laughable. And it’s everywhere. This should be disturbing to anyone watching this case who truly cares about victim advocacy regardless of where you fall on the question of who abused who because the mainstreaming of abuse myths hurts all victims. There is no such thing as using an abuse myth to defend a victim or expose an abuser; if Heard is an abuser the logic underpinning that conclusion cannot be abuser logic without causing incredible social harm to victim advocacy.
And I have seen in fandom the way that people engage in wilful misreadings of all sorts of things to support an idea which is contrary to all reality. The prime example of this for me is Loki. Last summer I became unhealthily obsessed with the way that Loki fans who were opposed to his relationship with Sylvie concocted all sorts of wilful misreadings not just of the show itself but of interviews from the cast, writers, director, and even the composer — which would then go viral, racking up thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of likes.
There was a post on here and on twitter which took out-of-context quotes from several people involved with the show to frame them as contradictory and made some joke about people in a group project not agreeing on what it was about. This post got tens of thousands of likes and shares but if you read the quotes in their full context it was plain that all of the people speaking were in fact in total agreement on what the show was about. There was a cohesive behind-the-scenes agenda but it didn’t matter. Natalie Holt, the composer, mentioned in several subsequent interviews that her words had been taken out of context and twisted to imply something she emphatically was not saying. Other quotes were taken out of context and had bad faith readings applied to try to frame Kate Herron and Sophia Di Martino, both bisexual women who have expressed support and allyship with the trans community, as transphobic in order to justify online abuse and harassment of them. The same people doing this were simultaneously perpetuating harmful transmisogynistic rhetoric about ‘autogynephilia’ in order to frame the relationship as problematic and twisting Julia Serano’s academic work on the topic to support this even after she had expressly disagreed with this and called it out.
The primary driver of all of this is of course misogyny but if anyone pointed that out the deflection was to gesture towards Sophia Di Martino/Sylvie and Kate Herron being white women, particularly in contexts where the people doing this were challenged on why they didn’t hold Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson to the same standard. The exact same deflection is used to dispel any notion that misogyny might be a factor in the virulence of people’s anti-Heard sentiment: that defending her is “white feminism” and that she is exploiting “white woman’s tears”. This really illustrates the way that people in fandom have — in the words of one of my friends who I was speaking to about this the other day — learned a particular vocabulary but not an analytical toolkit.
“White feminism” and associated terms like “white woman’s tears” were coined to describe the unique tools which white women have at their disposal to (a) oppress racialised people and especially Black people, and (b) recruit others — particularly white men — to do the same. These terms do not apply to dynamics between white women and white men because white women cannot be racist towards white men. Depending on whether the white men in question belong to other marginalised classes white women can be ableist, transphobic, homophobic, or enact other forms of oppression against them but they cannot specifically be racist, so gesturing to their race in order to deflect from questions about double standards applied to a white woman versus a white man is a total non-starter and yet it happens all the time in these discussions. In fact the reason it happens is because (Depp’s struggles with addiction notwithstanding) the white men in question don’t have any other known marginalisations along which the white women might be oppressing them. So we have to make something up.
What’s really disturbing in the case of Depp v. Heard is that gesturing to “white woman’s tears” implies that white women are in fact the oppressors of white men and that they are more likeable and sympathetic figures to the general public. This posits either that misogyny is not real or that it does not apply to white women and is not a factor in the way that the general public assesses alleged abuse, which is not just untrue but actually dangerous. At a certain point the truth of what happened between Depp and Heard becomes immaterial when people are talking about the way the pro-Depp side is presenting and mainstreaming arguments which are extraordinarily harmful to victims of abuse. In fact, the victim-blaming rhetoric which is being pushed under the guise of “advocacy for male victims” is an uncanny echo of the transphobic rhetoric which was perpetuated in Loki fandom under the guise of “calling out transphobia”. What is happening here is that people are removing terms from their original political context where they were used to criticise oppressive power structures in order to support and uphold the paradigms they were coined to critique.
The disconnection of these terms and ideas from the power analysis they’re a product of also means that even when people are able to recognise that particular arguments are harmful they’re not able to see them in their full context as Depp and his team wielding systemic power and privilege to oppress and marginalise not just Heard but anyone identified as sharing a class with her. There are all sorts of posts and threads about the fact that it’s important not to allow Heard’s ‘diagnosis’ of borderline personality disorder to add to stigma that people diagnosed with BPD face with no recognition of the fact that this stigma is the exact reason Depp’s team wanted her characterised as having BPD at all. The argument from them is that she is a bad person and she is an abuser because she allegedly has BPD: they are stigmatising people diagnosed with this disorder in order to character assassinate her. Yet none of the people writing these threads about the importance of not letting this colour your perception of people with BPD have stopped to question why his team even considers whether she has it or not of any relevance and how this relates to the way he could be trying to exercise power and privilege in order to silence her. It’s insane to me that I even have to point this out.
What is absolutely fucked about all of this to me too is the proliferation of “amber heard supporters dni” in people’s bios. A lot of ink has been spilled in fandom on the overwhelmingly performative, virtue-signalling nature of a lot of dni criteria and this is what sticks in my throat when I think about this. People who put this in their bios are largely following the crowd and have done no actual research into the case beyond whatever distortions of the truth that have been leaked by his legal team cross their dashboards and timelines, if that. There is no curiosity about her allegations or her evidence or any desire to understand why people might support her when seemingly the entire internet has decided she is a monster, and what it comes down to is that people are virtue signalling by showing that as a matter of principle they do not stand by a woman who has made allegations of serious physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. What is considered virtuous in fandom is close-minded reactionary hatred of a woman who accused a powerful man of domestic violence. It is considered virtuous not to investigate her allegations. It is considered virtuous to declare that you hate her because everyone else does.
This hatred is so completely outsized in response to her perceived crime it absolutely dwarfs any outpouring of vitriol around someone like Harvey Weinstein because it’s not actually coming from any moral outrage about abuse itself. What is fuelling this outrage against Amber Heard is misogyny and victim-blaming, and that’s the fatal irony of all of this. Even though people are mired in cognitive dissonance about “who abused who” many of them show that underneath it all, even if they can’t admit it to themselves, they really do know she is a victim and that he is an abuser or else they would not apply victim-blaming tropes to her nor abuse apologist talking points to him. It’s the fact that we all know, really, instinctively, who is abuser and who is victim, that Depp supporters have to protect themselves so fiercely from this uncomfortable truth by making not just Heard herself but anyone who speaks in her defence or to the facts of the case personae non grata and acceptable targets for harassment and bullying themselves. It’s because we all know, really, in our hearts, that the power differential favours him that it’s necessary for him and his supporters to indulge in pernicious victim-blaming abuse myths to paint her as the villain. It’s because we know this that his supporters have to accuse everyone who questions his obvious DARVO tactics of “not thinking men can be abused”.
Actually, men can be and are abused, including in some cases by women, but abuse is about power and control. This is why the majority of male victims of abuse are marginalised in some way or otherwise vulnerable (young actors getting started in their careers, for example). It is also unbelievable historical revisionism to pretend that #MeToo has only ever been about female victims of abuse. It’s important for a number of reasons to recognise that abuse is a function of power and control and a tool for enforcing power and control but in particular it’s necessary to acknowledge this because otherwise the only explanation left for why there is such a gender disparity statistically between who perpetrates abuse and who is a victim of abuse is the TERF explanation that men are innately more violent, which is not true.
But to believe that Depp is Heard’s victim despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary is to completely eschew this power analysis of their relationship. It is to believe that there is power parity between a twenty-two year-old just getting started in her career and an A-list global celebrity with multi-million dollar mansions all over the world and his own private island. It is to ignore the reality that throughout their relationship she was surrounded by his staff and his security, that even the nurses who saw her after his beatings were on his payroll. To believe that he is her victim even after it was ruled in the UK to a civil standard that he abused her is to posit the MRA belief that women are always immediately believed when they allege abuse and that this imbues them with massive social power to ruin men’s lives “for no reason”. The fact that people seriously argue that the UK legal system favours women is absolutely astonishing. But not only is it not true that women are not believed in general, it is also not true that Amber Heard was believed! The rewriting of history around this is fucking breathtaking. She was getting called a lying gold-digger from the start. The only person who has ever been hurt by these allegations is her.
But at this point the need for it to be true that Depp is Heard’s victim is compounded not just by a desire to keep loving Johnny Depp but also by years of participation in a movement against Heard which, if she is a victim, is morally indefensible. These are people who cannot accept the guilt and shame of having participated in a harassment campaign which is fundamentally victim-blaming and misogynistic in nature and targeted not just against her but other victims speaking out in her defence. They cannot accept this truth so they choose to look away. The furthest you will get one of these people if they do listen to facts about the case is “well they’re both bad”, which itself is a victim-blaming cop out and dangerous rhetoric which prevents victims from recognising that they are being abused and seeking or receiving help.
The other day, I saw some old tweets between Depp supporters talking about how disturbed they were by the behaviour of other Depp supporters in the wake of his replacement by Mads Mikkelson in Fantastic Beasts 3. This was fascinating to me because in this conversation these two people confidently proclaimed that Depp himself, being a kind and gentle soul, would never condone the harassment of Mikkelson or Mikkelson’s fans. But this is ridiculous and totally disconnected from reality since it’s a documented fact that Johnny Depp’s legal team has been purchasing bots in order to provoke harassment of people speaking out in defence of Amber Heard — many of whom are abuse victims themselves — and it would not remotely surprise me if they had also directed this abuse at Mikkelson and his fans.
You can see this bot activity for yourself in any one of the hashtags his supporters are pushing. This “sweet and gentle man” is haunted by his misogynistic rants in texts to friends in which he describes lurid fantasies about burning Amber and desecrating her corpse, the texts in which he called the mother of his children a ‘cunt’, the property damage he committed in the past. The cognitive dissonance it requires to describe this man as ‘gentle’ irrespective of whether you believe he is a victim must be immense. But it’s also required in order to keep believing that Johnny Depp is who people want him to be, and part of shoring up his image as a gentle man means demonising a woman who was twenty-two and just starting out in her career as an actress when she met him and trying to convince yourself she somehow had the balance of power in their relationship.
If you look at any of the hashtags his supporters are pushing you will also see something even more disturbing, which is the way that supporters of Johnny Depp are also extending the abuse apologist logic and absurd conspiracy theories they spin in defence of him to other abusers. It’s worth pointing out that Marilyn Manson, a close friend of Johnny Depp’s, is now suing Evan Rachel Wood for defamation and many of Depp’s supporters are raking her over the coals in the exact same way as Amber Heard and I’m left wondering what is the limit of what people will believe? In five years will I see “evan rachel wood supporters dni” in people’s profiles?
What is amazing to me too is that there are people discussing the ‘fandomisation’ of this trial — the fancams, the memes, etc. — who are speaking about how disrespectful it all is toJohnny Depp as if it’s not precisely the response he and his legal team want. The more people make fancams of him being ‘savage’ on the stand (an odd choice of words given the furore over his racist Dior Sauvage ad campaign, not to mention the fact that he is the subject of horrific abuse allegations) and TikTok videos drawing attention to the disparity in crowd size between his and Heard’s fans the more people are encouraged to respond to this case emotionally rather than logically. People are manipulated into thinking supporting Depp is the popular stance and shown that they will be socially ostracised if they criticise him; people are encouraged to lean into nostalgia around his movies and remember how good he used to make them feel (and feel anger at Heard for “taking Jack Sparrow away”, never mind the fact that Depp had already left the franchise before Heard’s Washington Post op-ed was published); people are guided down a path well-worn with misogynistic tropes about lying, gold-digging, perfidious women out to ruin good men’s lives.
The repeated assertion that “she shit in his bed” (proven false, but nobody cares) and associated scatological puns on her name are intended to associate her with disgust. The posting over and over of his severed finger without censorship or content warnings is intended to shock and upset people in order to make the associated accusation that “she cut off his finger” (also proven false but again, nobody cares) stick in people’s minds. These things are fed by his team to the media in order to discredit and undermine her so that nobody is listening when she describes the horrific abuse she suffered at his hands during the fight in which he lost his finger or if they are they don’t believe her. The fancams of Johnny Depp “being savage” and the videos making fun of her sobbing so hard she can’t breathe and reenacting her allegations to mock her for them are two sides of the same coin both of which benefit him and his narrative. He is being lionised and she is being demonised, exactly as he wants. And it is exactly as he wants. This is a man who texted one of his friends that he would give her “total global humiliation”. The man stated in black and white exactly what he wanted so I’m not sure why anyone would think he would be appalled by any of this.
On a final note, I wonder how many people have actually read the op-ed that she is currently being sued over? I think people should and bear in mind that this is the speech Depp and his team is trying to silence. It barely even alludes to him and the bulk of it is about the need to expand protection for victims of abuse in general. Remember that.
*sigh* I can’t believe yall are gonna make me say this depressing shit again, but the majority of rapists and child molesters already don’t go to prison. Only a small fraction of sexual assaults ever get reported, only a small fraction of those ever lead to arrest, and an even smaller factor of them ever get convicted and face prison time.
You repeatedly ask prison abolitionists “but what about the rapists?” Well I’m asking you, what about them? What does prison do to prevent sexual assault when most of our politicians and police are the ones committing the assaults? When prisoners themselves are sexually assaulted, often times by the guards?
Stop falling for the propaganda that prisons keep dangerous people away from you. They don’t. The dangerous people get to walk around every day with guns and badges.
I have been writing this post for a few days because I cannot stop thinking about the particular way that Depp v. Heard has been playing out in fandom not just over the course of this trial in Virginia but over the course of the past few years. One of my friends commented recently about the way in which fandom can train people to see things which are not there by taking fragments of media out of context and scrutinising them for small ‘tells’ which hint to the ‘real’ story often in support of a shipping narrative similar to the way that fragments of this trial are decontextualised and recontextualised, pored over in minute detail, and tea leaves read to support the idea that Amber Heard is lying, that Amber Heard is an abuser.
Much of what is circulating on social media about this case are outright lies at worst — the idea that Amber Heard quoted The Talented Mr. Ripley on the stand, which Snopes had to debunk — and pernicious victim-blaming nonsense and abuse myths at best.Milani Cosmetics’ decision to wade into the trial by suggesting Heard claimed she had used their specific concealer before it was released (she didn’t, the palette was used as an example of colour correcting concealer palettes) and insinuate that she must therefore be lying about having been abused falls into the latter category. The idea that if someone misremembers what brand of concealer they used over half a decade ago they are lying about being abused is appalling, it’s laughable. And it’s everywhere. This should be disturbing to anyone watching this case who truly cares about victim advocacy regardless of where you fall on the question of who abused who because the mainstreaming of abuse myths hurts all victims. There is no such thing as using an abuse myth to defend a victim or expose an abuser; if Heard is an abuser the logic underpinning that conclusion cannot be abuser logic without causing incredible social harm to victim advocacy.
And I have seen in fandom the way that people engage in wilful misreadings of all sorts of things to support an idea which is contrary to all reality. The prime example of this for me is Loki. Last summer I became unhealthily obsessed with the way that Loki fans who were opposed to his relationship with Sylvie concocted all sorts of wilful misreadings not just of the show itself but of interviews from the cast, writers, director, and even the composer — which would then go viral, racking up thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of likes.
There was a post on here and on twitter which took out-of-context quotes from several people involved with the show to frame them as contradictory and made some joke about people in a group project not agreeing on what it was about. This post got tens of thousands of likes and shares but if you read the quotes in their full context it was plain that all of the people speaking were in fact in total agreement on what the show was about. There was a cohesive behind-the-scenes agenda but it didn’t matter. Natalie Holt, the composer, mentioned in several subsequent interviews that her words had been taken out of context and twisted to imply something she emphatically was not saying. Other quotes were taken out of context and had bad faith readings applied to try to frame Kate Herron and Sophia Di Martino, both bisexual women who have expressed support and allyship with the trans community, as transphobic in order to justify online abuse and harassment of them. The same people doing this were simultaneously perpetuating harmful transmisogynistic rhetoric about ‘autogynephilia’ in order to frame the relationship as problematic and twisting Julia Serano’s academic work on the topic to support this even after she had expressly disagreed with this and called it out.
The primary driver of all of this is of course misogyny but if anyone pointed that out the deflection was to gesture towards Sophia Di Martino/Sylvie and Kate Herron being white women, particularly in contexts where the people doing this were challenged on why they didn’t hold Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson to the same standard. The exact same deflection is used to dispel any notion that misogyny might be a factor in the virulence of people’s anti-Heard sentiment: that defending her is “white feminism” and that she is exploiting “white woman’s tears”. This really illustrates the way that people in fandom have — in the words of one of my friends who I was speaking to about this the other day — learned a particular vocabulary but not an analytical toolkit.
“White feminism” and associated terms like “white woman’s tears” were coined to describe the unique tools which white women have at their disposal to (a) oppress racialised people and especially Black people, and (b) recruit others — particularly white men — to do the same. These terms do not apply to dynamics between white women and white men because white women cannot be racist towards white men. Depending on whether the white men in question belong to other marginalised classes white women can be ableist, transphobic, homophobic, or enact other forms of oppression against them but they cannot specifically be racist, so gesturing to their race in order to deflect from questions about double standards applied to a white woman versus a white man is a total non-starter and yet it happens all the time in these discussions. In fact the reason it happens is because (Depp’s struggles with addiction notwithstanding) the white men in question don’t have any other known marginalisations along which the white women might be oppressing them. So we have to make something up.
What’s really disturbing in the case of Depp v. Heard is that gesturing to “white woman’s tears” implies that white women are in fact the oppressors of white men and that they are more likeable and sympathetic figures to the general public. This posits either that misogyny is not real or that it does not apply to white women and is not a factor in the way that the general public assesses alleged abuse, which is not just untrue but actually dangerous. At a certain point the truth of what happened between Depp and Heard becomes immaterial when people are talking about the way the pro-Depp side is presenting and mainstreaming arguments which are extraordinarily harmful to victims of abuse. In fact, the victim-blaming rhetoric which is being pushed under the guise of “advocacy for male victims” is an uncanny echo of the transphobic rhetoric which was perpetuated in Loki fandom under the guise of “calling out transphobia”. What is happening here is that people are removing terms from their original political context where they were used to criticise oppressive power structures in order to support and uphold the paradigms they were coined to critique.
The disconnection of these terms and ideas from the power analysis they’re a product of also means that even when people are able to recognise that particular arguments are harmful they’re not able to see them in their full context as Depp and his team wielding systemic power and privilege to oppress and marginalise not just Heard but anyone identified as sharing a class with her. There are all sorts of posts and threads about the fact that it’s important not to allow Heard’s ‘diagnosis’ of borderline personality disorder to add to stigma that people diagnosed with BPD face with no recognition of the fact that this stigma is the exact reason Depp’s team wanted her characterised as having BPD at all. The argument from them is that she is a bad person and she is an abuser because she allegedly has BPD: they are stigmatising people diagnosed with this disorder in order to character assassinate her. Yet none of the people writing these threads about the importance of not letting this colour your perception of people with BPD have stopped to question why his team even considers whether she has it or not of any relevance and how this relates to the way he could be trying to exercise power and privilege in order to silence her. It’s insane to me that I even have to point this out.
What is absolutely fucked about all of this to me too is the proliferation of “amber heard supporters dni” in people’s bios. A lot of ink has been spilled in fandom on the overwhelmingly performative, virtue-signalling nature of a lot of dni criteria and this is what sticks in my throat when I think about this. People who put this in their bios are largely following the crowd and have done no actual research into the case beyond whatever distortions of the truth that have been leaked by his legal team cross their dashboards and timelines, if that. There is no curiosity about her allegations or her evidence or any desire to understand why people might support her when seemingly the entire internet has decided she is a monster, and what it comes down to is that people are virtue signalling by showing that as a matter of principle they do not stand by a woman who has made allegations of serious physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. What is considered virtuous in fandom is close-minded reactionary hatred of a woman who accused a powerful man of domestic violence. It is considered virtuous not to investigate her allegations. It is considered virtuous to declare that you hate her because everyone else does.
This hatred is so completely outsized in response to her perceived crime it absolutely dwarfs any outpouring of vitriol around someone like Harvey Weinstein because it’s not actually coming from any moral outrage about abuse itself. What is fuelling this outrage against Amber Heard is misogyny and victim-blaming, and that’s the fatal irony of all of this. Even though people are mired in cognitive dissonance about “who abused who” many of them show that underneath it all, even if they can’t admit it to themselves, they really do know she is a victim and that he is an abuser or else they would not apply victim-blaming tropes to her nor abuse apologist talking points to him. It’s the fact that we all know, really, instinctively, who is abuser and who is victim, that Depp supporters have to protect themselves so fiercely from this uncomfortable truth by making not just Heard herself but anyone who speaks in her defence or to the facts of the case personae non grata and acceptable targets for harassment and bullying themselves. It’s because we all know, really, in our hearts, that the power differential favours him that it’s necessary for him and his supporters to indulge in pernicious victim-blaming abuse myths to paint her as the villain. It’s because we know this that his supporters have to accuse everyone who questions his obvious DARVO tactics of “not thinking men can be abused”.
Actually, men can be and are abused, including in some cases by women, but abuse is about power and control. This is why the majority of male victims of abuse are marginalised in some way or otherwise vulnerable (young actors getting started in their careers, for example). It is also unbelievable historical revisionism to pretend that #MeToo has only ever been about female victims of abuse. It’s important for a number of reasons to recognise that abuse is a function of power and control and a tool for enforcing power and control but in particular it’s necessary to acknowledge this because otherwise the only explanation left for why there is such a gender disparity statistically between who perpetrates abuse and who is a victim of abuse is the TERF explanation that men are innately more violent, which is not true.
But to believe that Depp is Heard’s victim despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary is to completely eschew this power analysis of their relationship. It is to believe that there is power parity between a twenty-two year-old just getting started in her career and an A-list global celebrity with multi-million dollar mansions all over the world and his own private island. It is to ignore the reality that throughout their relationship she was surrounded by his staff and his security, that even the nurses who saw her after his beatings were on his payroll. To believe that he is her victim even after it was ruled in the UK to a civil standard that he abused her is to posit the MRA belief that women are always immediately believed when they allege abuse and that this imbues them with massive social power to ruin men’s lives “for no reason”. The fact that people seriously argue that the UK legal system favours women is absolutely astonishing. But not only is it not true that women are not believed in general, it is also not true that Amber Heard was believed! The rewriting of history around this is fucking breathtaking. She was getting called a lying gold-digger from the start. The only person who has ever been hurt by these allegations is her.
But at this point the need for it to be true that Depp is Heard’s victim is compounded not just by a desire to keep loving Johnny Depp but also by years of participation in a movement against Heard which, if she is a victim, is morally indefensible. These are people who cannot accept the guilt and shame of having participated in a harassment campaign which is fundamentally victim-blaming and misogynistic in nature and targeted not just against her but other victims speaking out in her defence. They cannot accept this truth so they choose to look away. The furthest you will get one of these people if they do listen to facts about the case is “well they’re both bad”, which itself is a victim-blaming cop out and dangerous rhetoric which prevents victims from recognising that they are being abused and seeking or receiving help.
The other day, I saw some old tweets between Depp supporters talking about how disturbed they were by the behaviour of other Depp supporters in the wake of his replacement by Mads Mikkelson in Fantastic Beasts 3. This was fascinating to me because in this conversation these two people confidently proclaimed that Depp himself, being a kind and gentle soul, would never condone the harassment of Mikkelson or Mikkelson’s fans. But this is ridiculous and totally disconnected from reality since it’s a documented fact that Johnny Depp’s legal team has been purchasing bots in order to provoke harassment of people speaking out in defence of Amber Heard — many of whom are abuse victims themselves — and it would not remotely surprise me if they had also directed this abuse at Mikkelson and his fans.
You can see this bot activity for yourself in any one of the hashtags his supporters are pushing. This “sweet and gentle man” is haunted by his misogynistic rants in texts to friends in which he describes lurid fantasies about burning Amber and desecrating her corpse, the texts in which he called the mother of his children a ‘cunt’, the property damage he committed in the past. The cognitive dissonance it requires to describe this man as ‘gentle’ irrespective of whether you believe he is a victim must be immense. But it’s also required in order to keep believing that Johnny Depp is who people want him to be, and part of shoring up his image as a gentle man means demonising a woman who was twenty-two and just starting out in her career as an actress when she met him and trying to convince yourself she somehow had the balance of power in their relationship.
If you look at any of the hashtags his supporters are pushing you will also see something even more disturbing, which is the way that supporters of Johnny Depp are also extending the abuse apologist logic and absurd conspiracy theories they spin in defence of him to other abusers. It’s worth pointing out that Marilyn Manson, a close friend of Johnny Depp’s, is now suing Evan Rachel Wood for defamation and many of Depp’s supporters are raking her over the coals in the exact same way as Amber Heard and I’m left wondering what is the limit of what people will believe? In five years will I see “evan rachel wood supporters dni” in people’s profiles?
What is amazing to me too is that there are people discussing the ‘fandomisation’ of this trial — the fancams, the memes, etc. — who are speaking about how disrespectful it all is toJohnny Depp as if it’s not precisely the response he and his legal team want. The more people make fancams of him being ‘savage’ on the stand (an odd choice of words given the furore over his racist Dior Sauvage ad campaign, not to mention the fact that he is the subject of horrific abuse allegations) and TikTok videos drawing attention to the disparity in crowd size between his and Heard’s fans the more people are encouraged to respond to this case emotionally rather than logically. People are manipulated into thinking supporting Depp is the popular stance and shown that they will be socially ostracised if they criticise him; people are encouraged to lean into nostalgia around his movies and remember how good he used to make them feel (and feel anger at Heard for “taking Jack Sparrow away”, never mind the fact that Depp had already left the franchise before Heard’s Washington Post op-ed was published); people are guided down a path well-worn with misogynistic tropes about lying, gold-digging, perfidious women out to ruin good men’s lives.
The repeated assertion that “she shit in his bed” (proven false, but nobody cares) and associated scatological puns on her name are intended to associate her with disgust. The posting over and over of his severed finger without censorship or content warnings is intended to shock and upset people in order to make the associated accusation that “she cut off his finger” (also proven false but again, nobody cares) stick in people’s minds. These things are fed by his team to the media in order to discredit and undermine her so that nobody is listening when she describes the horrific abuse she suffered at his hands during the fight in which he lost his finger or if they are they don’t believe her. The fancams of Johnny Depp “being savage” and the videos making fun of her sobbing so hard she can’t breathe and reenacting her allegations to mock her for them are two sides of the same coin both of which benefit him and his narrative. He is being lionised and she is being demonised, exactly as he wants. And it is exactly as he wants. This is a man who texted one of his friends that he would give her “total global humiliation”. The man stated in black and white exactly what he wanted so I’m not sure why anyone would think he would be appalled by any of this.
On a final note, I wonder how many people have actually read the op-ed that she is currently being sued over? I think people should and bear in mind that this is the speech Depp and his team is trying to silence. It barely even alludes to him and the bulk of it is about the need to expand protection for victims of abuse in general. Remember that.
This isn’t writing related and I honestly don’t know if I’ll get any negative engagement for reblogging this, but this post just feels very important
this thread is the absolute holy grail of repeated self owns
This thread is making me wet
“I voted for a guy who wants to take rights away from people I love and got backlash for it :(”
“I voted for a Vice President who caused an AIDS outbreak as governor of Indiana while also supporting conversion therapy and other anti-LGBT legislation and now my gay son won’t talk to me :-(”
hey uhhh anyone notice the nazi dogwhistle of (((group)))??? that’s a white supremacist way to say “the jews”. if anyone sees this thread and actually feels a little bit of sympathy, i would redirect your attention to that. these people, whether they admit it or not, have thrown in their lot with nazis. never forget that.
I think a lot of this explains why so many Trump supporters can’t turn their back on him, even if they know deep down he’s a disaster.
They’ve given up so much for this guy and alienated so many people to turn around now and admit they were wrong.
you actually hit the nail right on the head as to why cult members won’t leave their cult even when they hear about the terrible things that happens behind the scenes of the leaders. and seeing as how cult- like tumpers behave, it only makes sense that they react the way they do. because they’re part of a literal cult. except this kind centers around poitical ideologies rather than a fringe religion.
oh look it’s Jack Posobiec, the creep who fabricated a rape victim’s essay in the Game of Thrones fandom as angrygotfan, and then harassed a group of women online for ages before outing himself as a white supremacist to the entire world. Least surprising reveal ever tbh.
The HP series: makes a joke out of putting a man in drag, calls a male character’s handwriting feminine for a ‘subtle’ joke on rereads, mocks a male character for having to wear his mom’s clothes due to poverty, makes a point of calling an invasive reporter’s hands mannish, treats a female rapist sympathetically - going so far as to imply her evil son might not have been so evil if only his rapist mom would have stuck around, portrays the girls’ dorms as needing a defense against rape but not the boys,
Snaters, apparently: The obvious sign she was a terf was that she thought a man might feel extreme remorse, when him joining a cult partially leads to the murder of his first friend.
Unpopular opinion: I am realizing that the Harry Potter fandom villains the fact that Voldemort’s father, Mr. Tom Riddle, has abandoned the mother.
But he had no obligation to stay since he was drugged and raped to have a son who is Voldemort.
He is the victim of this whole situation, not Marope Gaunt, let’s stop minimizing male suffering, It not only applies to this situation but also to Severus Snape, that character who was sexually assaulted by James Potter and whose suffering is also minimized.
I’ve thankfully seen people point out Merope is a rapist many times before in fan spaces, though a lot of fanfics seem to have not caught on that Tom Riddle Sr had no obligation to stay with Merope or Jr. Which sucks, but might not necessarily be a lack of recognition that he was a victim … because I’ve seen a lot of people demonize cis women/other pregnancy-capable folks, for not wanting children conceived by rape.
But you’re not wrong that people minimize rape/sexual assault against men - which probably plays a part in the way some people seem to view Tom Sr.
I don’t care if you think that’s an extreme feminist perspective. It is true.
That’s why when women star is a shitty Ghost Busters movie they get verbally harassed. That’s why the one woman of color in the cast got her phone hacked and her nudes leaked. All because of a movie franchise that was never that good to begin with. Where was this hate for Paul Rudd when he starred in his shitty Ghost Busters remake? Oh, I forgot, he’s a funny white guy.
That’s why a woman will never win an election as president in the United States. Why people will grill a woman running for candidacy so much harder more than a vile, hate generating, “grab them by the pussy”, bad at his job business man.
That’s why literally any garbage fandom will harass the female actresses in their content. Remember when Brie Larson was the hated woman of the month, because …she didn’t smile enough? She looked smug? How dare she be a woman lead in a dull marvel movie as if any of the marvel movies are above average. My YouTube recommended feed was just thumbnails mocking this woman for weeks. A woman who did absolutely nothing.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, the world globally stanned fucking Joe Exotic despite his horrific animal abuse and literal attempt to kill a woman, yet the main thing people took away from Tiger King was that Carole Baskin was a monster. No one called into question how blatantly the documentary was slanted in favor of Joe, to the point of lying to Carole in order to record her off handed remarks of her husband. The fact that critical thinking and visual communication skills are so poor in this media hungry society that they can’t see how the one person trying to protect these animals isn’t the main villain.
That’s why I live in a culture where I have to hear from dudebros constantly say that its okay that the Brown’s chose a new Quarterback that has TWENTY THREE SEXUAL ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS against him, including forced oral sex. And why the only thing people say is “why are they all suddenly coming out now” and more shit not believing these women.
This is why the courts can’t deny that Amber was abused because there is simply too much evidence, but will say that she isn’t allowed to speak out about it. This is why we will still woobie the man saying he wants to drown her, burn her, and r*pe her corpse because he starred in the silly pirate movie. This is why this poor woman was dragged through the mud on the internet for clicks. Why people meme’d her r*pe accusation saying how whet they are for JD. Why we allowed this man to continue her abuse by going to a state that would ensure this trial could be livestreamed.
People don’t like women unless they’re dead. Then they get their sympathy, if they’re lucky. If they’re white. If they’re pure. God forbid you aren’t perfect. God forbid you do have mental illness. The public will never like you unless you are dead.
I think the Bridgerton fandom needs a little bit more nuance and reading comprehension when dissecting the books and digesting certain actions taken by the characters.
For example, Daphne and Phillip both raped someone in their books. Daphne raped Simon and Phillip raped Marina. This isn’t open for debate because that’s exactly what happened. But here is where the crux lies: When Julia Quinn wrote those scenes, she did not intend them to be rape scenes, and therefore she did not write Daphne nor Phillip to as rapists.
As readers it’s our job to criticize the scene and Julie Quinn for writing it, but understand you can’t use that scene to influence the whole character and what they are like. The issue lies with Julia Quinn and what she perceives as consent, and this actually comes up in every single Bridgerton book (with men acting as if they are owed sex), it’s just that Books 1 and 5 have the most egregious example of it.
What’s more is Julia even brings up rape multiple times in her other books, where the men would say “I would never rape a woman”, and you can tell from the context of those scenes Julia views rape as forcefully or violently sexually violating a woman. When the truth is, rape doesn’t need to be forceful nor violent. You can also tell that she doesn’t believe a husband or wife can rape one another, which is actually where Daphne and Phillip’s scenes come into play. Daphne was married to Simon, Phillip was married to Marina, and neither Simon no Marina said the word “no”, so to Julia that means both scenes were consensual.
As readers we need to concede that these scenes were rape, but I also think it’s entirely disingenuous to take it a step further and described Daphne and Phillip as rapists. These characters aren’t real, they’re fiction in novels written by a very real woman who is misunderstanding the very essence of consent and who can and should be educated about it. When I see people flippantly call Daphne and Phillip rapists it’s almost always related to the fact they dislike these characters for other reasons and rapist is an easy and powerful word to use to completely disregard their characters.
This is why I think it’s so important for the show adaption to understand these scenes and completely remove them from the show. They failed miserably with Daphne but given the backlash they received from including that scene, I feel as though it will not be done with Phillip.
PSA y'all this motherfucker sending unsolicited (completely unconsensual) r*pe threats!!!!! Block and report!!!!!!! These “men” are the scum of the earth and i hope they die slowly and painfully after having their dicks bitten off by a pack of rabid hyenas
I’m,,, disgusted by the mere existence of this bitch
REBLOG TO WARN YOUR MUTUALS AND FOLLOWERS STAY SAFE OUT THERE Y'ALL
Love it when people act like proving “rape or incest” exceptions for abortion are even possible, lmao
Quick, prove you were raped so you can access an abortion! How? I don’t know! Maybe you’ll have to get a rape test done at the hospital and prove you have sufficient bruising? Maybe it’ll require filing charges? Maybe it’ll require a full ass criminal trial which is gonna take longer than 9 months, lol.
Prove you were a victim of incest! How? I don’t know, because if you’re a victim of incest you might very well be a young child who doesn’t have the emotional strength and knowledge to even describe the abuse that’s happening to you, let alone advocate for your rights. And even if you are an adult, I dare you to go in front of a judge and detail the sexual abuse from you brother/father/uncle and come out of that untraumatised, all to get permission to have access to abortion. Make sure you get the courage up in just a few weeks!
What about threats to life of the mother exceptions? Quick! What’s the line you draw there? If a mother has extremely high blood pressure and diabetes and is at risk of death early enough in the pregnancy, is that enough for a termination? What about if the mother has an ectopic pregnancy? Or do we have to wait until the mother is suffering from sepsis and shock, blood poisoning maybe? Do mental health issues ever factor in?
It is literally impossible to place such restrictions on abortion that actually work, that are feasible and acceptable to those that would otherwise ban abortions outright.
Abortion on demand is the only answer.
Like, we don’t believe women who are raped when nothing is on the line. Why would we believe women when they’re trying to access a restricted medical procedure?!
If you’ve been around here for a bit, you probably know I’m a survivor of sexual assault, rape/coersion and all that jazz.
I feel like I’ve done a LOT of work in building up trust, trying to like, be in charge of my sexual experiences, learning to trust my body again and feel safe in it, etc. etc.
So. the best way I know how to say this is that I was recently assaulted by my fiancee. We both have a history of sexual trauma, for me that mostly looks like having issues with receiving sexual things/problems with boundaries and saying no, embarrassment and worry about sex and my body. For him that looks like shame and embarrassment about sexual feelings, not initiating, having trouble being assertive and communicating. Also, he knows that I have problems with dissociation, which I’ve worked on in therapy, and he also knows that I used to dissociate during sex. Like, it was a regular thing with the partner right before him.
We’ve spent years building up trust, and communicating with each other and have done kink stuff and have always checked in with each other– if something wasn’t clear, or one of us got quiet, we’d stop and check in, and then usually have the go to continue, or take a break, or stop if we needed to.
In this instance, this did not happen. I started dissociating hardcore bc my body went into ‘freeze’ mode because it got signals that I was not safe, and AFTERWARDS he said it was weird, and he didn’t like that I wasn’t responsive– but I was Not Okay. And he did not stop or check in or ask or anything, which is VERY UNUSUAL. Also, he was apparently nervous and having issues with staying hard – that’s normal! It is fine! nonconcordance is a thing and there are other options available! – so his answer to that was to just be super rough in an attempt to like, help him? Feel things better?
From what it sounds like, he could have been dissociating a little, too? His mental state was definitely not good. But he didn’t stop or say, hey can we do something different, NOTHING. There were visual and auditory clues BEFORE I dissociated completely– during oral I almost threw up (that happens occasionally because I have a little bit of a gag reflex, and we always pause), I was obviously not enjoying it, AND I was trying to pull away to make it less intense, which he would not let me do, and afterward, I said “Hey, that was a bit too much, like too rough”
Which he apparently did not hear or notice. Apparently he was also unaware of me pulling away or having any issue. So, after that, it does travel into rape territory.
I was super upset about not stopping it or doing more to stop it, and was blaming myself. Then when I explained it to my best friend, he asked if I was dissociating during, because it sounded that way, and, lo and behold, I was. (He’s only recently learned about dissociation and a lot of my trauma stuff, so he asks about it fairly often to check in with me/understand it better).
I only told two people about it after it happened (this happened on the 16th, like 2 and a half weeks ago). I suppressed it for a while because I had a lot of stuff to do for the end of September, but this last week I’ve actually had time to start processing things, and it is not great. The one friend asked about pressing charges, or if I needed to see a doctor, but I didn’t have to go to the hospital or anything and I wasn’t bleeding as far as I could tell, and I didn’t really want to (I figured it would be more harm than it was worth, esp ‘proving’ the assault), and I wanted to like, move past it.
Which was difficult because I was sore for over a week. My voice was messed up and my skin was like raw.
A lot of past stuff has come up, and I don’t know. I don’t trust him any more. I feel sick and scared when he hugs me.
We’ve only talked about it once. In which I said. “If I can’t trust you to not assault me because you’re having an issue and you’re stuck in your own head, I can’t trust you.”
We had sex once somewhere near the end of September, the 25th or something, and it was okay. I was trying to like, have things go back to normal. After that I think things started to sink in and I’ve withdrawn a lot. I sleep in a different bed and I don’t like changing in front of him (which is something I would do in front of friends).
I’m super upset and really want like, safe physical contact, but I don’t even know where I could get that from that it would feel safe and not be read as some kind of romantic thing. My best friend would, but he’s a guy and I think that would freak me out right now.
If anyone has any advice, at all, on how to talk to my fiancee about this, or things I could do to feel safer, or you’ve been through something similar, or ANYTHING, please help. I am at a loss, and I think this might be the end of the relationship.
Also, feel free to PM me or reply to this or reblog with a reply. Whatever.
sadly cw for domestic violence and rape i have to mention the trial..
seeking derangements posted a screencap of the them amber heard article as a joke
the joke being the bi discourse is at it again…
a queer friend sent it to me thinking i would also think it was funny.
the first paragraph of the article being made fun of here recounts heard’s testimony that at one point depp raped her because he was jealous of her interactions with another woman. this was not the only account of abuse related to her sexuality that has come up in this trial and previous ones, notably imo their divorce itself, which was the last time her sexuality was really public discussion. and we should understand the workings of divorce itself as a tool of abuse in any kind of case like this (if we understand that actions in divorce are abusive tools for men against women [and i can think of some times when it’s women against women lol shout-out to the uk for convincing feminists banning divorce was their idea ]) what then must we understand of their heterosexual marriage to begin with… digressing!)
this is an extreme but not particularly uncommon example, and it’s not like bi erasure or whatever other thing, it’s more like— it’s very obviously manufactured. the joke about amber heard being raped for being a queer woman and then crying bi oppression seems like one kind of thing. but the other thing is you endlessly sharing and circulating “annoying bisexual” tiktoks that were literally designed in a lab to create this reaction, and then generating from them that reaction (mad about a bisexual woman you invented in your head, bisexuals have taken over the culture, etc.) do you genuinely think, using your entire brain, that this is an accident of timing?
& now it is accompanied by people posting 100 astroturfed tiktoks while being like “i have cool bisexual woman friends who aren’t annoying” and/or sharing those directly with your bisexual woman friends being like not YOU and it’s like why ? what validation for your grievances are you genuinely asking us to perform for you while the queer podcasters joke about the lie of bisexual woman getting raped and then having all their money taken from them while also a same exact version of the money piece AT LEAST is probably happening to many of us in that moment. why ? why are you mad about tiktoks. you really do need to figure out how to free yourself from Brands this pride
Please spread this shit like wildfire. People go on and sit through the whole experience and they’re uncomfortable because they just want to please their partner and they don’t tell them that they want to stop because they are not ready. It’s okay not to be ready.
notice here that consent is revoked without ever saying no and consent goes so far beyond yes/no!!!!!!
this is my favorite comic on tumblr because the person initiating is the one stops it because the other person is uncomfortable and that’s just a fantastic message to spread.
i went to like the 3000th page of this tumblr because i remembered this comic and wanted to reblog it. i know im not active on my blog anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but this is important. a couple of years ago, i was sexually assaulted by somebody who was a good friend of mine at the time. my now ex-girlfriend pushed me way past my sexual comfort zone and boundaries without asking consent, in a place i couldnt cause a commotion or even protest too loud (movie theatre). im a cis male and it took me years to realize that the things that were done to me absolutely count as assault. theyve left me with a shitload of mental issues that have affected me for years and im only recently realizing are not normal, and are rooted in these events. this comic is helping.
Please spread this shit like wildfire. People go on and sit through the whole experience and they’re uncomfortable because they just want to please their partner and they don’t tell them that they want to stop because they are not ready. It’s okay not to be ready.
notice here that consent is revoked without ever saying no and consent goes so far beyond yes/no!!!!!!
this is my favorite comic on tumblr because the person initiating is the one stops it because the other person is uncomfortable and that’s just a fantastic message to spread.
i went to like the 3000th page of this tumblr because i remembered this comic and wanted to reblog it. i know im not active on my blog anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but this is important. a couple of years ago, i was sexually assaulted by somebody who was a good friend of mine at the time. my now ex-girlfriend pushed me way past my sexual comfort zone and boundaries without asking consent, in a place i couldnt cause a commotion or even protest too loud (movie theatre). im a cis male and it took me years to realize that the things that were done to me absolutely count as assault. theyve left me with a shitload of mental issues that have affected me for years and im only recently realizing are not normal, and are rooted in these events. this comic is helping.
