I once had a guy (my dad) tell my sisters and me that whenever a girl “gets raped” it is because she either was putting herself in a bad situation or because she made bad decisions in choosing a boyfriend. This was literally about a month after my sister’s boyfriend raped her.
When I was fifteen, a friend of a friend forced me to suck him off and then forced his fingers into me in a park. When my friend came to find me, he whispered “I would have fucked you, but I don’t have a condom on me, and only sluts with STIs don’t shave their pussies” in my ear.
I once had a guy who sexually harassed me in junior high tell me, at our twenty year high school reunion, that I was the one who sexually harassed him. Um, no. What he did left me physically ill for years.
I once had a guy tell me I was overreacting when I got pissed for him telling another girl to cover up because she was “asking for it” and that I should just suck it up when I am harassed in public because “that’s just how it is”
I once had a guy tell me that in the short story we were reading in class, the 15 year old who was kidnapped and raped by 2 grown men was actually partially at fault because of the way she dressed. People keep telling me that we should date. I’m too afraid to tell them this story to show why I won’t, because they’ll know that I still sometimes talk to him and think I’m weak for forgiving him.
So many girls/women I know blame themselves when men are violent or abusive towards them. “He hit me, but I deserved it because of the way I…” or “yes he hit me but it was my own fault because I…” Here’s the thing, though. Women are never hit without a reason being given, but that reason is NEVER a good one. Yes, maybe you did something that, in a spiraling chain of events eventually ended up with him hitting you. But hitting is never an appropriate response to ANYTHING, no matter what you do. So while you may feel responsible and take the blame for it because an action of yours precipitated the abuse, you are not at fault for how he reacted. (Note: I am aware that men are the victims of domestic violence as well. However, I’m speaking from my experience as a woman)
wow okay so depp’s psychologist or whatever said that “bpd is a common factor in women who physically abuse their partners” and none of y'all are blinking an eye at that…… LMFAO
i hope every depp supporter gets their teeth knocked out
wait so lemme get this straight… this bitch was hired BY DEPP to evaluate amber. after TWELVE HOURS she came to the conclusion that amber has borderline personality disorder. and then of course goes on to say that in her professional experience or whatever, women with bpd are basically known to be abusers.
are y'all seeing this shit???
on top of that she also diagnosed her with histrionic personality disorder. so this psychologist (HIRED BY DEPP WHO HAS HAD DINNER AT HIS HOUSE) talks with amber for TWELVE HOURS across TWO DAYS, diagnoses her with bpd (making her an “abuser”) and hpd (making her “attention-seeking”) and no one thinks this is a little weird. a little odd. a little bit of a setup?
but amber’s psychologist who worked with her all the way back in 2019 is a sham apparently. amber is faking ptsd as a bisexual victim of abuse from MULTIPLE different people in her life but this clown hired by her abuser can diagnose her with bpd and hpd in less than a day. i fucking hate y'all.
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.
“An abuser tries to keep everybody—his partner, his therapist, his friends and relatives—focused on how he feels, so that they won’t focus on how he thinks, perhaps because on some level he is aware that if you grasp the true nature of his problem, you will begin to escape his domination.”
— Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
It really is so insulting the way people act like survivors should be able to sever all emotional connection and empathy from their partner the second they behave abusively, because it’s not how human emotions/attachment works and it’s not how traumatic bonding works.
Instead of the “if a man ever did that to me I wouldn’t put up with that” ask yourself “what if someone I trusted completely, who was struggling with something serious in their life, who I lived with, harmed me and then apologized profusely and cried and promised they’d never do it again?” If you can picture immediately walking away from— not a hypothetical person— someone you trust right now if that situation happened, then you’re in the minority.
And also- when, after abuse, survivors DO walk away from friendships and relationships the first time there’s even the hint of harm, then people shame us for “black-and-white thinking” or “self-sabotage” and imply we’re damaged, but then if we don’t do that and get abused again then it’s our fault cause we should know better
Folks really need to have more empathy for how emotionally complex abuse is. It’s not the same kind of trauma as a stranger assaulting you on the street. It’s someone who will cry after they hurt you and it will take months or years to realize that wasn’t about actual remorse but was so you felt selfish if you ever complained about their treatment of you and so you would comfort them and swallow your own pain.
It is not survivors’ fault for being compassionate or not compassionate enough or too forgiving or not forgiving enough— it’s abusers’ fault for abusing. There is no “you should have___” because I guarantee somewhere a survivor tried that exact thing and it didn’t save them. There is no way to win in a dynamic where someone has control over you.
It doesn’t matter what you think you would do, because when you’re in it, it doesn’t feel like “I’m being abused” it feels like “I’m the only one who can help this extremely troubled but ultimately well-meaning person who wants to be better” and the latter feeling is much harder to just walk away from than you’d ever imagine
I wish I could have went into more detail for you all.
Thank you to the followers who have stuck with me through the years all 1,600 plus of you, I’ve lost some but the ones who have stayed I appreciate you.
On top of him doing all of this to me he also called me a “savage” due to my Native ancestory. And gaslighted me pretty badly.
I’ve already addressed the fact that neither catandkitty or missvoltairine ever said that saying no to sex was inherently abusive on its own, and that the links courteousmingler provides as “evidence” that they did actually tell an entirely different story if you care to read them. This isn’t just a matter of interpretation. In the above linked post, courteousmingler links to a post where catandkitty corrects someone who states that she said saying no to sex is abusive on its own. The person asserting that catandkitty said this - without citations of his own - is acepilotlombardi. It’s strange that courteousmingler would use acepilotlombardi’s (debunked) accusation as evidence of catandkitty saying these things in her own words, given that acepilotlombardi had this to say about missvoltairine’s account of her own abuse:
Saying you can withhold sex from a person is like saying you can withhold pets from a dog. Look, if animal rights groups suddenly started saying that if you are ever not petting your dog, you’re abusing them, that would be absurd. This is basically the same situation.
Seems to contradict courteousmingler’s assertions that “no one” on the “inclusionist” side of this debacle has tried to shut down victims speaking about their own experiences, but that’s neither here nor there.
But let’s talk about the oft-repeated idea that catandkitty and missvoltairine entered into a simple discussion about rape and started talking about their abuse in ways that would imply that they thought rape was fine if the targets were asexual. Because that’s such a vast misrepresentation of what really happened as to basically be a lie.
The conversation in question was not, in fact, a single thread of conversation. It was a series of discussions that spanned several different threads and included multiple people on either “side” of “the discourse”. I spent a long time trying to figure out the chronology of the discussion, but tumblr’s format makes it nearly impossible, which already casts doubts on courteousmingler’s claim that catandkitty and missvoltairine’s accounts of their abuse came into play in the “chronological middle” of the discussion.
To kick things off, let’s have a look at this thread. It begins with lgbtkhaleesi saying:
it’s also shitty to deny your partner sex and shame them for even trying to communicate their feelings to you about it
This is obviously a complete statement - it’s shitty to do both of these things in tandem, because it creates a dynamic where one person can’t talk about something that is bothering them in the relationship. Not having sex with your partner is one thing; not having sex with your partner and making them feel ashamed and shutting down any attempts at having an honest discussion about the fact that you’re not having sex is another. The first is not abusive, the second is. However, throughout the resulting thread, people take the first part of this statement and repeat it over and over again without the added context of the second part of the statement. Then there’s this:
Why would you ever tell your sex repulsed partner that “it sucks you can’t have sex and that it hurts your self esteem”? Like what do you think would happen? It’s either
1. They still don’t have sex with you but now they feel guilty and insecure over something they can’t help.
or
2. They are guilted into having sex with you, which is rape by coercion.
This is a big part of what many people, including catandkitty and missvoltairine, took issue with - the idea that if a partner is shutting down discussions of sex in a way that makes you feel bad about yourself, simply attempting to address that verbally makes you a rapist because you’re “guilting” someone into having sex with you.
This theme was repeated not just in that thread, but elsewhere as well:
People were so hostile to the idea of a couple simply talking about having sexual needs that were incompatible that at some point some presented nonmonogamy as a natural solution to feeling sexually unsatisfied in your relationship:
Nonmonogamy is a relationship style that requires a LOT of communication and honesty - if you’re entering into a nonmonogamous relationship because you feel like you CAN’T communicate about sex with your partner, there’s something wrong; this isn’t a healthy basis for a nonmonogamous relationship, and saying that it “is a consensual option that doesn’t involve manipulating people” is pretty loaded.
I think it’s clear by now that at least parts of this discussion had taken a turn away from “it’s not cool to coerce your partner into sex” and into characterizing any kind of attempt at communication, specifically from a non-asexual person towards an asexual person, as rape or advocating rape. It was this trend that catandkitty and missvoltairine objected to. Catandkitty in particular, who is the one who’s been most villified for her participation in this discussion, never actually engaged in any of these discussion threads. Her commentary was confined solely to original posts on her own blog, where she reflects on what is being said in posts like this one:
sex and/or physical intimacy IS human need and you WILL need to be able to have a healthy conversation about it at some point in your adult life. telling people that expressing that need is inherently abusive is intensely harmful and i wish ace tumblr would stop it
This post has been spun as evidence that catandkitty is a rape apologist so many times that I couldn’t possibly link to them all, but you can see some of it in the notes on the post. But the fact is, catandkitty did not say this in response to any one specific person; it’s not a reblog, it’s an original post on her personal blog, a place where she has in the past posted other personal reflections on trends in tumblr discourse, that is an individual reaction to multiple people saying things like the statements I discussed above. It is NOT a response to a statement as simple as “don’t rape asexual people”, and frankly, would make no sense as such.
First of all, you called them your abusive ex. Forgive me if the rest of us victims out here who went through shit (me included) aren’t too keen to assume you’re not the abuser when you can still swallow to call them your ex first instead of your rapist. That was red flag number 1.
Number 2, withholding sex is still a lovely way of saying that they didn’t consent. THEY AREN’T WITHHOLDING BC YOU DO NOT OWN OR HAVE A RIGHT TO THEIR BODY. Them having sex with you is not a right you have. Being in a relationship does not give you that right (see marital rape). The only thing that gives you that right is their informed, ENTHUSIASTIC consent. If they weren’t feeling it, tell me, you’d rather rape them than them continue to “Withhold sex”?
How the fuck do you “withhold consensual sex” wtf?? If you don’t want to do it, it’s not consensual jfc. If you change your mind halfway through or right before or whenever and decide you don’t want to do the do anymore, /that means it’s no longer consensual!/
anyone curious as to why catandkitty is so deeply obsessed with believing sex is a human need, after being told by multiple survivors that the rhetoric is used to get rapists off the hook?
like. why is clinging to rhetoric that silences rape victims something so deeply, deeply important to her? because she considers not having sex with her to be one of her abusers’ offences?
By now it should be clear that presenting this conflict as a simple case of innocent asexuals saying “please don’t rape us” and big mean rape apologists coming out of the woodwork to harass them about it is completely disingenuous and false. I really hope people take the time to read this post - I know it’s a lot, and there’s a lot of further evidence that I refrained from posting because I didn’t want to make this longer. But this is important, because a big part of courteousmingler and her friends - including wetwareproblem and vaspider, etc - smear campaign against these survivors relies on their radically dishonest reinterpretation of what actually happened.
@courteousmingler is a csa and rape survivor and I want to make it clear before I start this that this is in no way meant to cast doubt on her account of her own abuse.
Over the course of the past several weeks, courteousmingler has made several posts calling out “REGs” and “acephobes” for what she sees as pedophilia apologism. She bases her accusations of pedophilia apologism on the idea that a blanket condemnation of all pedophiles is an inefficient means of combatting child sexual abuse. She outlines her stance on this in this post. From her questionable assertion that ostracizing all pedophiles is an ineffective way of preventing child sexual abuse, she seems to extrapolate that anyone who expresses anger or discomfort with pedophiles is opposed to using “the most effective” methods of combatting child abuse. She says as much in this post:
REG’s strongly oppose any and all effective methods of combating pedophilia. asks yourselves why, everyone!
courteousmingler has denied that this kind of framing of the issue of pedophilia and csa is implying that “REGs” stand to gain from covering up pedophilia and child sexual abuse. She has denied that it is implying that “REGs” are child abusers. But I don’t think it’s a stretch at all. In fact, I think it’s dishonest to pretend that there’s nothing clearly implied here about the motivation of the people she terms “REGs” - a group of people which includes many CSA survivors.
Worth noting is the fact that @antillles and @cherrypielesbian are survivors themselves.
People should not have to disclose their survivor status in order to be considered “entitled” to being angry at pedophiles. Please note that that link contains graphic discussions of CSA and its impact on victims.) It is one thing to tell someone who has made it clear that they are not a survivor to back out of discussions among survivors regarding specific types of abuse and how to deal with them, but it is another to make the blanket assumption, as courteousmingler does, that anyone who disagrees with you can’t be a survivor, or a survivor of a specific kind of abuse. Framing discussions of CSA this way creates an environment where people are compelled to disclose their survivor status in order to even say that they are angry at pedophiles, and that’s destructive, especially from someone who responds to someone telling them “I was gangraped” with “i literally never asked to be sent messages about gang rape”.
Thanks to catandkitty for this screencap. Courteousmingler has repeatedly denied that she called any rape victims abusive or rapists themselves - and asked for sources of her doing that. This screencap clearly shows her calling an abuse survivor an “abuser posing as a victim”, and openly mocking the idea that she could even be a victim at all. Courteousmingler has since backtracked on this, claiming that she did not mean that catandkitty’s claims of being an abuse victim were false but that she was talking specifically about her position on asexuality in general - that her “rhetoric” is abusive and “posing as a victim” meant she was acting like she was being victimized by asexuals. However, this screenshot clearly shows that catandkitty was talking about being accused of lying about her abuse, and courteousmingler came in and defended those accusations, mocking the idea that catandkitty was a victim and calling her an abuser. Instead of admitting that she was wrong here, courteousmingler has taken the approach of insisting that she has been misrepresented and that it was never her intent to deny or downplay another survivor’s trauma at all, in fact, that she point-blank has never done such a thing ever, and anyone who claims this is a liar.
Recently, @courteousmingler accused another survivor, catandkitty, of deleting posts that proved that she was a rape apologist. The posts catandkitty allegedly deleted are mentioned in this post by courteousmingler. It’s worth noting that originally, the post by courteousmingler contained a number of “links” that were not links at all - she simply wrote “(x)” after statements and said that the x was a link, when in reality it was not. I want to be very clear here - I am not saying that it was a dead link, leading to a “page not found” error; I am saying that there was no link at all, the x was a plain text character with no link attached. This was visibly obvious, as the formatting of courteousmingler’s blog causes text with links attached to show up as bold white text; the text of the (x) was not bold or white, because it was not a link. She would do this, and then repeatedly make references to how she had “proven” through linked sources that catandkitty and missvoltairine were lying. I wish I had taken a screencap of the original version of the post - she’s since edited it to remove a number of links, claiming that those links were deleted, but I want to talk for a minute about the links that remain that she claims are “proof” and what they actually say.
I think that courteousmingler does this a lot - she writes a LOT of text, and then inserts links, and counts on the idea that most people will have their hands full just making it through what she’s written, and therefor won’t actually check out the links she’s included. She also has blocked the people she’s linked to in this case, which makes it impossible for them to directly clarify what they actually said and meant on the post where they are being openly misinterpreted. It’s worth noting that this is actually a tactic very commonly used among the alt-right; it’s known as “linkbombing” and it’s a propaganda technique.
For a direct example of this, here’s a point where courteousmingler writes:
anyway, here’s catandkitty saying that denying someone sex is an abuse tactic by itself. (x)
now, in that post, notice she didn’t say “saying no to sex isn’t abusive by itself, but making your partner feel unworthy of sex and ashamed of wanting sex is abusive.”
she believes the quote above is true! she definitely believes shaming your partner and making them feel unworthy of sex is abuse.
but in the post i linked, she clearly states that “withholding” sex is an abuse tactic all by itself- without rape or manipulation or shame being necessary to make it abusive.
That would be pretty damning - IF the post linked actually said anything like that. In actual reality, the post in question reveals catandkitty directly taking issue with someone claiming that she said that “withholding sex in any situation is abuse”, actively disagreeing with them and clarifying that she did not say that at all. Here’s what catandkitty actually says in that post, in direct response to someone accusing her of saying that withholding sex is abusive on its own:
this makes it pretty clear that she was specifically talking about withholding sex in the context of a pattern of abusive behavior, specifically her own abuser’s.
Since a number of people have pointed out that a lot of the links courteousmingler used as “evidence” of rape apologism like this did not say what she claimed they said, she has gone back into the post and reformatted it, removing links and then claiming that she removed them because catandkitty deleted the posts in order to “bury evidence”.
Except catandkitty hasn’t deleted anything! For example, here is a post that courteousmingler claims that she deleted - it’s still there and hasn’t even been edited. What IS revealed in that not-deleted link is @asexualnataliaromanova stating in very clear terms that she believes, based on the language catandkitty used, that catandkitty’s rapist was in fact a victim being raped by her - she refers to catandkitty saying that her rapist “controlled when and how” they had sex as “victim blaming someone who couldn’t give enthusiastic consent”. This directly contradicts courteousmingler’s claim that no one called catandkitty a rapist, which is probably why she’s claiming the post was deleted.
Claiming that catandkitty deleted this post and others creates confusion about who said what and muddies the waters so that it’s harder to call courteousmingler out for lying directly. But she’s still lying.
courteousmingler goes on in her response to this ask to ignore the fact that anyone who has followed this debacle would know exactly what language clara-the-slytherin-graduate is referring to, in order to accuse clara-the-slytherin-graduate of having a problem with her “calling out rape apologism”, which is a) arguably not even what she’s doing, and b) definitely not what was being addressed in the ask. This is what we in the industry call a “lie”: claiming that someone is saying one thing, when they are explicitly saying something else.
The idea that your desire to communicate your hatred of another person’s rapist should not come at the expense of the person that rapist directly abused is a simple matter of ethics, and apparently it’s completely beyond courteousmingler’s comprehension. We’ll see more evidence of how she feels like retraumatizing other survivors is right, fair, and necessary in future posts - I’ll be starting with her most recent fuckery and working my way back on this blog.
Regardless of what you were wearing. Regardless of why you were there. Regardless of if you were drunk or high. Regardless of if you are queer or gay. Regardless of whether it was oral, anal, with a finger or object. Regardless of whether you fought back or called out. Regardless of whether your rapist was your friend, boyfriend, husband.
>>There is no excuse for rape.<<
END the victim blaming! Print, Paste, and Pass Along! <3 <3 <3
Rape culture is not just the amount of rapes that occur. It’s a social conditioning that that happens culturally, implicitly. It’s the violence, sexual assault and rape that is joked about and otherwise trivialized. It’s the reasoning given when a person that has been assaulted or attempted sexual assault that their trauma is meaningless.
Rape culture is not trivializing any rape that happens in the prison system or in other places. We are all aware that in other countries, you can be sentenced to death for being raped. However, this realization is not constructive for what is happening here. Rape exists. They are horrible acts of violence that occur to people all over the world. It is a serious crime not to be taken at face value. Unfortunately, as much faith as I’d like to put in our legal system for bringing all rapists to justice, and separating “fact from fiction,” you would have to be under the assumption that all rapes are reported. In fact, an astounding 1 in 6 American women have been the victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. Over 17.7 million American women have been victims of rape or attempted rape. Rape exists. Also men get raped. However, the reason it is not the focus of every rape awareness article is because females make up a significant part of the population (9 out of 10 victims were reported female).
It’s not a guilty until proven innocent situation, the amount of strength it takes for a person to come out and say they were raped and being put into the public sphere is humiliating. To accuse someone of rape is an incredible ordeal. Don’t you think the victim considers this? That is one of the reasons why so few rapes are reported. We have been taught to look out for our abuser, that they are otherwise a “good person” that don’t need their life ruined because of this. Other women fear the social stigma that goes around people being raped. Even if our country, if no woman will get sentenced to death for reporting her rape, in many communities, a raped woman is stigmatized as tainted. At the very least, she will be treated differently. When accusing a person of a rape, you are not only outing the rapist, they are outing themselves as a victim.
Since we were talking about college students earlier, I will continue using them as an example:
“Women ages 16 to 24 experience rape at rates four times higher than the assault rate of all women.
Fewer than 5 percent of college women who are victims of rape or attempted rape report it to victims tell someone, often a friend (but usually not a family member or college official). In one study, over 40 percent of those raped who did not report the incident said they did not do so because they feared reprisal by the assailant or others.15 In addition, some rape victims may fear the emotional trauma of the legal process itself. Low reporting, however, ensures that few victims receive adequate help, most offenders are neither confronted nor prosecuted, and colleges are left in the dark about the extent of the problem.16
Many acquaintance rape victims (using the legal definition of rape) do not label their assault as rape.† Perhaps it seems unimaginable that an acquaintance would rape them, and victims often initially blame themselves. Acquaintance rape victims offer a range of reasons for not reporting the rape to authorities:17
† One of the largest studies of the problem found that in nearly half the incidents legally categorized as completed rapes, the women did not consider the incident to be a rape (Fisher, Cullen and Turner 2000). [Full text]
embarrassment and shame,
fear of publicity,
fear of reprisal from assailant,
fear of social isolation from the assailant’s friends,
fear that the police will not believe them,
fear that the prosecutor will not believe them or will not bring charges,
self-blame for drinking or using drugs before the rape, self-blame for being alone with the assailant, perhaps in one’s own or the assailant’s residence,
mistrust of the campus judicial system, and
fear that their family will find out.”
If you see the reasoning for the underreporting of rapes committed, you will see the rape culture there. Rape culture is women not wearing heels or mini skirts outside at nighttime for fear and EXPECTATION of getting assaulted. Rape culture is the necessity of consent campaigns. Rape culture is the explicit fetishization of assault in the porn industry as creative expression.
Rape culture does exist. I think precisely the reason we disagree is because we are not on the same page for what it actually is. Rape culture is not just RAPE. It is the treatment that goes into trivializing sexual assault and belittling the victim.
You can always make the argument that talking about rape culture is trivial in comparison to all the other types of violence and oppression that exists in the world. However, that doesn’t mean that you should belittle it. This isn’t the oppression Olympics. Horrible things happen to people. Rape culture is a topic of conversation because its something that exists in our culture. No one is outwardly saying I SUPPORT RAPE, IT IS GOOD. If you think that’s what rape culture is, then you are missing the point.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the condescension I detected in your message reeks of insecurity of a constructive argument. We can debate, but sometimes cattiness can take away from the issue being discussed. Here are some sources and information regarding rape culture including some citations for statistics I’ve mentioned in this post. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
