someone describing their own rape or assault, even if you personally believe it to be untrue, should never be a source of comedy. let’s just start there with the bar considering it’s on the ground
I’m going to get personal for a moment here because there’s something that’s been weighing on my mind with the pending criminalization of abortion, and that’s a lot of conservative folks saying that they would make ‘allowances’ for abortion in cases of rape and incest.
Here’s my problem with that: who determines if folks with uteruses are raped?
Is it enough if they report it to the police? Per RAINN, only about 1 in 3 sexual assaults are reported. Does their rapist have to be found guilty? Less than 3% of sexual assaults result in a felony conviction.
Let’s say we go with the first option, that a sexual assault victim merely needs to make a police report, like someone trying to get their car insurance to cover a hit and run accident. How soon after the assault do they need to report? Do they need to have a rape kit done? What if they wait to report until past the point when a rape kit is helpful? And what happens if, when they go to report, they get told that what happened to them wasn’t rape, or are strongly encouraged by the police not to file a report and “ruin” their attackers life?
I know this is a lot of hypotheticals, so I want to make it more real, and share my rape story.
Ten years ago, I was at a party. I was drinking, pretty heavily, and a friend of a friend who I had met a few times offered to walk me home. He told me, and everyone, that he was sober, so he’d look out for me. When we got back to my place, he asked to come in for a drink. I didn’t say no. He started kissing me. I didn’t say no. The evening gets a little blurry at this point, but at some point, we had sex.
Now, I’ve had one night stands before. I’ve had drunken sex before. When I woke up the next morning, something about that encounter felt very different. Maybe it was the fact that he was sober and I wasn’t. Maybe it was that he leveraged walking me home as an excuse to lead to sex. All I know is that I didn’t feel good about the encounter, but I was hesitant to call it rape.
I disclosed to our mutual friend a little later that week, desperate to gauge whether I was crazy, or if this was something I should report. She looked me dead in the eyes and said, “Sounds like you had a little too much fun.”
Over the years I go back and forth on blaming her, or wishing she’d reacted differently, or telling myself that she wasn’t trained to deal with this kind of thing, and I’ve never landed on a satisfactory conclusion. But the fact is, her saying what she did told me not to say anything. Whatever happened was my fault. So I kept my mouth shut, and kept my head down.
About three weeks later, I was invited to a different party. I asked who was invited. I asked, specifically, if the man in question would be there. I was told he would not be.
When I arrived, the first person I saw was him, and my heart dropped to my knees. Should I have left at that point? Probably. But it was the end of the semester, we were celebrating, and I didn’t want to miss spending time with my friends who were about to graduate. So I grabbed a different friend and told her not to let me leave with anyone. She promised she would.
I tried to have a good time but I was nervous, and out of sorts. To help myself get into a party mood, I drank, a lot, and I did a lot of drugs that night. By the time the party was almost over, my friend had already left, and I could barely stand, let alone walk.
You may have guessed what happened next. The man in question said he would get me home. The last thing I remember from that night was being pushed against the wall of my apartment building as he dug in my purse for my keys. I remember telling him no, and to leave me alone.
Then I woke up the next morning naked with his cum drying on the inside of my thigh.
I didn’t report what happened to me to the police. Why? Because I wasn’t a perfect victim. I was drunk, and high, and had had sex with this man before. No one would believe me. So I showered, and I scrubbed my apartment with bleach, and for almost 5 years I didn’t say a word about what happened to me until a friend disclosed a similar situation, and I held her hand, and I said, “Me too.”
Now, I was lucky, because my rape(s) didn’t result in a pregnancy. But they could have. I was on the pill back then but I was in the process of finishing up the semester and getting ready to move so I wasn’t taking it consistently. And I was so traumatized and full of self-blame that I wasn’t ready to report it to the police, let alone to admit to myself what had happened to me. So if I had gotten pregnant, and had needed an abortion that was criminalized except for rape, what then? Would me saying that it was rape (something I wasn’t mentally in a place to do) be enough? Or would the fact that my trauma didn’t allow me to go to the police be held against me?
I already know the answer to that, and anyone who’s paid even a smidgeon of attention to our criminal justice system also knows.
So I just want folks to keep that in mind, because as we get closer to the SCOTUS decision, and especially as we get closer to the election in the fall, you’re going to see a lot of conservatives trot out that talking point, that they’d allow abortion in the case of rape. Or even, in blue/purple states, tout it as a moderate position. And I think that a lot of folks on both ends of the spectrum are going to let that talking point go unquestioned and unchallenged.
But it’s just another way of stripping control of their own healthcare from folks with uteruses. When the folks who are stripping the right to an abortion away are the same ones who get to decide what is and isn’t rape, it’s just control in a different, more palatable package.
And there’s absolutely nothing moderate about that.
People will say that they’re all about respecting sa survivors until it comes to victims of incest. Will expand later.
Overall I’ve found that people, most likely subconsciously, don’t think that incest can be traumatic. When I told my therapist that I was sexually abused she was so supportive. She told me that it wasn’t my fault. That what happened doesn’t define me. That I can always tell her about this stuff without fear of judgment or rejection. That whatever happened, my trauma is valid. Then I told her that it was from someone in my family, and her tone switched immediately. All of a sudden it couldn’t have actually been that bad. What I was describing most be an overexaggeration. “It’s normal for families to show their love in different ways,” she said. “There most have been a miscommunication.” She didn’t listen to me anymore. I told her the worst of what happened in graphic detail, but none of that mattered. We were related. There’s no way that actually happened. And this is far from an isolated incident. I got blocked by one of my favorite cosplayers, one that was vocal about protecting minors and respecting triggers, for saying that incest survivors getting triggered by the twins, even if they are supposed to be satire or an act, is s valid reason to not watch ohshc. Both online and irl, people who vocally opposed to joking about sexual abuse would make incest jokes and even joke about my experiences explicitly. There’s a widespread belief in our society that incest is funny or not a real issue. And most activists not only refuse to acknowledge that this is an issue, but get upset when you try to educate them on it. This belief keeps getting spread, and it actively keeps us from being believed, from getting treatment, from getting justice. This belief keeps us silent and lets our abusers go free.
If you aren’t an incest survivor you are legally obligated to reblog this
@dyke-uncle this is an excellent addition thank you
Especially if your sibling was/is close in age during it all
People will try and tell you “oh yknow all kids play doctor! you’re taking it too seriously, you’re overreacting”
It’s already hard enough to talk about and then you’re constantly met with people trying to coerce you into a narrative that makes them more comfortable at your expense
Bad. Things. Happen.
People close to you, related to you by blood or law or close long term bond, can hurt you. It’s a horrifying reality to grapple with but downplaying what happened to us doesnt make that fact any easier for you to bear in the long run, and leads to our self harm and suicide.
WARNING:The screenshots and content in this document contain grooming, sexual exploitation of a minor, and sexual coercion of a minor. Please read at your own discretion.
@aellagirl’s recent post “The Rape Spectrum Survey Results” is great and provides a lot of food for thought, but it reminds me of one of my main issues with these discussions, which has to do with overlooking the factor of how much the object of the behavior in question did or did not want/like it, and how overlooking this leads to a lot of fuzzy thinking. (As far as I recall, I wasn’t audience to the original survey and certainly didn’t take it. Also, as a non-paying subscriber – sorry Aella, I still love your writing! – I can’t comment on it. But I’ve been meaning to expound at least upon the “did the victim in fact want/like it” issue here.)
[Long effortpost below. Content warning for the obvious, including some discussion in the second half on Donald Trump’s history of sexual violence.]
The array of mildy/somewhat/very rapey situations listed in the survey, and whether they qualify as rape or not, is thought-provoking in a relevant way, and there were a few (“Emerson and Frankie”, “26-year-old and 16-year-old”) to which I’m not entirely sure what my answer would be. Others are incredibly clear-cut to me even though they were contentious among the survey-takers (e.g. the Miller/Nico situation is a serious crime, but the crime is robbery, not rape! More controversially, I would suggest that the Carey/Aspen situation is not one of rape but of violent assault, where it so happens that the violence is part of a consensual sexual encounter). There are a couple of other “does this qualify as rape or not?” situations that I’ve considered myself that were not represented in the survey but don’t want to get into here. I’m sure someone with enough imagination could come up with a good hundred. (I remember John Nerst writing an Everything Studies article that linked to another article listing, as far as I remember, many dozens of such hypotheticals, but I’m not about to go on a search for this now.)
One of my main reactions was that I have somewhat of an issue with one of the main premises of the survey: the implicit assumption of significance to the term rape that is divorced from immorality/badness. Aella bent over backwards to make sure that the survey participants answered not according to whether each situation was bad, or how bad it was, but to whether the situation fell under the definition of the word rape. I understand why she went out of her way to do this, and there are certainly some scenarios in there where it’s clear to me that the obvious badness of the situation is quite separate from its rapiness or lack thereof (e.g. the Miller/Nico one which was clearly robbery and therefore very bad, but not rape). But I have trouble understanding the point of asking ourselves the question “Is this rape?” or “Do most people consider this rape?” without some sort of assumption that our definition of rape should capture some measure of badness of a questionable sexual situation. Of course we could instead be asking about whether something qualifies as rape according to a legal definition, but then we all have to do some pretty specialized law research, decide which state, country, and time period we are judging with respect to, and so on; this obviously wasn’t the object of the survey. Without referring to the law as it exists (somewhere and sometime), we are left with forming our own personal definitions of the term, and can it really be expected that most survey participants have developed these definitions to not at least be inspired by what they consider to be mildly bad versus severely bad?
But the real issue I wanted to discuss here, the one I mentioned in the opening of this post, is the fact that I consider the internal experience of the person acted/aggressed upon to be crucial to whether an act can be considered rape, which seems like it should be completely uncontroversial to me, and perhaps it is uncontroversial and assumed by nearly everyone in these discussions, but there still seems to be a lot of sloppy thinking with regard to it.
There are several scenarios laid out in the survey that I would not be able to answer, not because I consider them too gray and nuanced for me to feel confident in an answer (like a couple I listed several paragraphs above), but because of completely missing information about the victim(?)’s feeling about what is happening.
Teagan and Vic are at a party, making out. Teagan escalates. Vic seems nervous and tense, but doesn’t resist or say no. Teagan does not ask for verbal consent. They have sex.
Harper goes on a date with Kerry. Harper demonstrates being very interested in Kerry, with warm body language, compliments, and flirting. Harper gets progressively drunk, and at the end of the night is very intoxicated. They go to Kerry’s apartment and have sex. Kerry is sober the whole time.
Micah goes on a date with Kim, and seems uninterested, with cold body language and comments like “not being the kind of person to have sex on first dates”. By the end of the night, Micah is very intoxicated. They go to Kim’s apartment and have sex. Kim is sober the whole time.
To my mind, the applicability of “rape” to each of these situations rests primarily on whether Vic, Harper, and Micah are happy with what happened, in the case of the latter two, whether they would have consented had they been sober, or whether their sober selves beforehand and afterwards wanted something like that to happen. This isn’t specified at all in any of the above three. This fact about the making of the survey imposes an implicit background assumption that whether an action is rape or not entirely depends on what is perceivable from the point of view of the rapist(?). This way of looking at it strikes me somehow very… perpetrator-centered rather than victim-centered? And I don’t even know if I should see that as a good thing or a bad thing, but it strikes me as wrong.
Whereas meanwhile, the following scenario, which was split almost 50-50 among participants’ answers, is completely clear-cut to me:
Carroll has sex with Darby at the end of a date. Darby gives mild resistance, looking unenthusiastic and saying hedged “no"s, but secretly really wants and is enjoying it.
If someone really wants and enjoys sex they are having, then they are not being raped.
I claim that rapey/possibly-rape behavior should be thought of in a similar way to how we think of drunk driving. When someone drives intoxicated, it’s not a certainty that they’ll get in an accident and hurt someone, but by making the choice to drive in that condition, they’re running a significantly elevated risk of something like that happening. That’s exactly why it’s really bad to drive drunk! However, someone is not guilty of manslaughter just by virtue of having chosen to drive drunk, unless their drunk driving results in the death of someone else. Again, drunk driving is very bad, precisely because it might result in someone’s (most likely another person’s) injury or death. Choosing to drive under the influence means not at all holding one’s own or others’ well-being in high regard. For this reason, we treat it like a crime, even in instances where no bodily harm results from it. But it isn’t a crime on the level of actually, say, killing someone through drunk driving.
(Upsetting personal story time: I have a childhood friend, who I remember as an exceptionally kind and compassionate person, who accidentally killed someone and permanently injured someone else from behind the wheel under the influence of alcohol when he was 19. As far as I know, he’s still doing the prison sentence. I didn’t find out about any of this until he had just entered prison, and I remember one of my dad’s main reactions being anger that his prison sentence was 12 years when others make the exact same horrible choice that he did all over the place and, if they happen to get caught, receive far milder punishments – it was unlucky that my friend’s horrible choice actually had tragic consequences. And I do get where my dad is coming from. This gets into the whole issue of consequentialism-based punishment being meted out according to expected consequencesversusactual consequences of a bad choice, a topic for another post maybe. But I still kind of think that at the end of the day, my friend is guilty of a worse crime because of what the consequences turned out to be and that this should be reflected in how the law sanctions it, even while I continue to feel heartbroken for my friend who is far too good of a person to ”deserve“ his whole life to be half-ruined in this way.)
If you begin or continue to have sex with someone when they’re not displaying unambiguous consent, you are not necessarily raping them, you are running a very high risk of raping them and so are not holding their bodily autonomy in much regard. Precisely for this reason, this is really awful, irresponsible behavior and should always be treated as such (even if it turns out that no harm was actually done in the sense of the sexual partner wanting/liking it the whole time). Perhaps it should even be prosecuted as a (in the absence of the other person experiencing nonconsensual sex!) mild crime. But what would make it actually rape is if the other person in fact did not consent to beginning or continuing the sexual encounter.
When a sober person has sex with someone who is obviously drunk, they’re incurring a very high risk that the other person doesn’t really consent to what’s going on (even if that person is like Harper above and acted in a way that suggested wanting to have sex later). That is not okay behavior! Whether or not it deserves to be called rape, though, in my view depends mainly on whether the other person feels directly afterwards that this was an encounter that they wanted. (I’m oversimplifying here, I suppose, and probably their feelings even while intoxicated and having the experience bear some weight here as well, although we’re assuming for the sake of argument that they were rendered incapable of resisting or expressing a desire to stop at the time. It’s a thorny situation, and I don’t mean to imply that deciding the next morning that they’re okay with what happened is necessarily enough to qualify the night before as "not rape”.)
And the behavior of Carroll above is obviously unacceptably awful, even though he obviously lucked out here since Darby wanted and enjoyed it. I would go so far as to say that Darby (after a certain kind of wising up in the aftermath) should resent and distrust Carroll as a person who showed he clearly doesn’t care about her autonomy. No doubt this is why nearly half of survey participants chose to brand Carroll as a rapist here, even while to me it’s a no-brainer that he did not in fact commit rape. (Of course, while Darby’s behavior might seem odd, I imagine there are some people, particularly women, who behave this way, and that it was even to some extent a societal expectation of women many decades in the past. To my view this was incredibly damaging as it muddied society’s perception of rape for a long time and slowed our progress in addressing it as a serious problem.)
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This brings me to the fact that the view I just expressed extends to all types of sexual assault. Which brings me to Donald Trump and the very infamous the Access Hollywood tape. I thought of writing out my thoughts dissecting it at the time (the gist of which would be what I’m about to write below), then didn’t, and now I’m very, very late to this party. But here goes. (Spoiler: Trump’s words are quite disgusting no matter how you look at it, but evaluating them as evidence of sexual assault is much trickier than people are making it out to be.)
The common perception, at least among those of us who hate Trump, is that he directly admitted to sexual assault – he even said he “grab[bed] them by the p****”, for crying out loud! Which… it’s probably true that what he was describing was sexual assault, but only if the women involved didn’t want/like it. I see a lot of ways to interpret he words that leave room for different conclusions about whether or not he grabbed women sexually when they didn’t want it.
First of all, there’s ambiguity in the statement, “When you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything.” On the one hand, it could mean, “When you’re a star, other people are too intimidated to stop you from doing whatever you want to them.” Which absolutely would cements Trump as a psychopathic perpetrator of sexual violence. But it could also mean, “When you’re a star, women are so attracted to you that they’re willing for you to do anything; you don’t even have to ask because it’s a certainty that they want it.” (Or if he’s being a little more nuanced, he might be thinking more along the lines of “I don’t even have to ask because a lot of the time they want it, and I being a very stable genius have the judgment to know without asking when they do or don’t want it.”) I would say that the latter seems somewhat more likely to be what Trump meant, because the former would be a straightforward admittance to being a psychopathic monster – a thing which Trump is, mind you, but I doubt he’s self-aware enough to know it and that’s much less likely something he would actively brag about (unless I’m just really naive about what people in his circles are okay with others bragging about).
If in fact Trump meant “When you’re a star, women are so attracted to you that they’re willing for you to do anything; I don’t even have to ask because it’s a certainty that they want it / because I have a good enough sense of these things to know if they want it”, then that of course doesn’t rule out the possibility that what he’s describing is sexual assault. In fact, I find that possibility extremely high. It’s not like women typically want to be grabbed sexually by a near-stranger. Even estimating that 5% of women want to be grabbed in the you-know-where by a near-stranger with no asking beforehand, even if that near-stranger is a major charismatic celebrity, is probably being a little generous. And we can’t exactly assume that Trump was remotely correct in his judgment of these situations. <sarcasm> Trump of all people doesn’t seem like the type to overestimate his own attractiveness or abilities at anything or harbor delusions of grandeur, does he? </sarcasm>
Then again, it’s also possible that this was all empty bragging, that Trump just wanted Billy Bush to think that he was such a star that so many women wanted him to kiss them or grab them in an intimate manner that he didn’t even have to ask but that Trump never actually tried this. I actually find this plausible, if still rather unlikely, but again it’s predicated on the plausibility of Trump considering this a thing to boast about, which again suggests that he didn’t mean, “they let me because they’re too intimidated to resist”.
There was a lot of talk at the time about how dare he dismiss this as “locker room talk”, “normal” men’s locker room talk isn’t like that (one of the only times I’ve heard “typical” default male behavior defended in feminist discourse!), and indeed I was agreeing with them by pointing out that men may brag about how much they score but primarily on the basis that women want them and like it. And yet, it’s perfectly plausible that this is more or less the kind of bragging that Trump genuinely meant to be doing.
To summarize, the “testimony” on the “bus tape” suggests that Trump sexually assaulted a number of women, if he was in fact wrong in judging that they wanted it, and if he wasn’t in fact just spewing empty words for the purpose of boasting. (And if he didn’t mean “they let you do it” as in “they’re too intimidated to stop me from doing it” in the first place, which as I explained above, I doubt is what he meant.) I would say that still leaves a very high likelihood that his comments refer to actual sexual assaults. But others may disagree on the likelihood, and the fact that there’s room for judging such likelihood means that there’s room for many to instinctively interpret his comments as not being proof of sexual assault.
Now I say none of this to defend Trump, who is rather disgusting for saying those things in the first place even assuming the best possible interpretation and who is incredibly disgusting for a multitude of other reasons (including evidence elsewhere of sexual violence). I’m picking this apart to make a point in response to all those who express mystification at how so many people on the more Trumpy side of the political spectrum (even women!) can possibly dismiss the “bus tape” comments or say they’re basically okay or at least not an ironclad confession of sexual assault. It’s because sexual assault, in my mind (and so I’m sure in many people’s minds), requires that the potential victim doesn’t want or like it, and there’s room for interpretation by reasonable people as to whether Trump was claiming that the women whose genitals he grabbed didn’t want or like it. And part of the reason why so many people on my side of the Trumpism divide are so mystified about how anyone can choose to overlook the “bus tape” comments has a lot to do, I imagine, with fuzzy thinking around the idea of sexual violence by definition requiring the victim not being okay with it.
And what’s most frustrating to me about the whole thing is that it’s plainly obvious to me that Trump is in fact a repeat rapist and a repeat sexual assailant. Not because of his recorded comments (which, as I’ve argued, by themselves are very weak as evidence), but because of twenty or so women who have come forward with straightforward allegations of such behavior. And yet, there’s disproportionately very little talk about the actual allegations, and the conversation about Trump’s sexual misconduct has generally revolved around the Access Hollywood tape. I get that the tape gripped and chilled people a lot more, because that’s his actual voice we’re hearing, but it all still seems very unfortunate. People wonder why more of the country hasn’t completely turned against Trump with regard to whether or not he’s guilty of severe sexual misconduct, and there are many reasons for this, and maybe focusing on the actual allegations wouldn’t convince that many new people in practice, but I bet it might be more effective than harping on the tape all the time.
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.
(Edited for clarity: Tumblr won’t let me remove the damn tag (or doesn’t seem to be anyway), but I’m aware the phrasing is ambiguous, so to be clear: I am genuinely wondering if they are enjoying this, or are horrified and considering it to somehow still be the fault of trans women. Either way, my own stance is that this is horrific and child abuse, and also, I believe we should find a legal way to have terfs and other transphobes flung into Jupiter)
