#MeToo

[2mo3cm-man]

[justinsentertainmentcorner]

Amanda Marcotte at Salon (06.02.2025):

History will no doubt look upon the outcome of the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard with the same skepticism now applied to O.J. Simpson's 1995 acquittal after charges of his killing his wife and her friend. The 2022 trial, in which Depp sued Heard for defamation after she made anonymous allusions to domestic violence in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed, was a farce — by design. Depp hired publicist Melissa Nathan, who famously bragged she could "bury anyone," to seed social media networks with misogynist rumors about Heard, who had been 25 when she started dating the 48-year-old movie star. The New York Times later reported on Nathan's alleged tactics, based on court documents from a similar campaign against actress Blake Lively. The strategy, according to the Times, is "waging a largely undetectable smear campaign in the digital era," which succeeded when "online criticism of the actress skyrocketed." The evidence in Depp v. Heard, in a sane world, should have favored Heard. His claim to damages was that Heard's op-ed led to him losing his lead role in "Pirates of the Caribbean." A Disney executive denied this on the witness stand, and Depp's longtime talent agent testified that Depp's erratic behavior was what soured his reputation on set. As Jessica Winter at the New Yorker wrote during the trial, Heard produced "a trove of text messages, witness statements, and photos of injuries — which, she says, corroborate her allegations of abuse." Depp had previously sued a British tabloid for calling him a "wife-beater," and he lost, even though British law favors plaintiffs in defamation cases to an outrageous degree. The judge described Heard's side of the story as "substantially true."

[...] As that last sentence suggests, the case ended up being tried in the court of public opinion, where the preposterous story that Depp was the real victim took hold. Instructions to the jurors to ignore the crescendo of support for Depp outside the courtroom didn't matter, leading to a $15 million judgment in his favor. It's not clear how much of the pro-Depp clamor was seeded by his hired guns, but in the end, they were pushing on an open door. As journalist Kat Tenbarge reported for NBC at the time, content creators for TikTok and YouTube found that spreading sexist rumors about Heard was like printing money. There was an immense amount of public hunger in 2022 to forget all the lessons of the #MeToo movement, and instead fall back into the comfortable belief that sexism is a myth, women just make up stories for attention, and it's accused men who are the real victims. 

This week is the third anniversary of the day that a jury favored Depp over Heard. Looking back, the whole situation can be read as a portent for the 2024 election of Donald Trump. The public outpouring of support for Depp reflected a widespread willingness to choose self-delusion over facing hard truths, especially about the dangers of male domination. For a lot of people, it's exhausting hearing about how many women are beaten, raped, killed, harassed, and otherwise oppressed. It can feel much easier to believe it's all just made up. It's simpler to believe that ours is a just system, even as men still hold the lion's share of power and money. It's comforting to imagine that men react to all their privilege with grace and gratitude, and ignore the reality where all too many abuse women because they can. Trump was selling the same message to his voters: Wouldn't it be easier to live in a fantasy where patriarchy is all kittens and rainbows? Isn't it easier to live in the lie than confront the hard truth?

[...] The far-right website Daily Wire spent an astonishing amount of money promoting anti-Heard propaganda during the trial, which confused many people at the time. The Daily Wire is a political outfit, so why would they care about celebrity gossip that doesn't seem to have any partisan value to it? But they understood that Heard v. Depp did benefit Republicans, especially Trump. The entire circus was useful for convincing people that it's okay to choose disinformation over the truth, especially when the facts make you feel bad. It all goes back to George Orwell's insight with the "two-minute hate" in "1984." Self-delusion takes practice. Defending Depp was boot camp for the real test: supporting the lie that Donald Trump would make a fine president. 

The Depp v. Heard trial ended up being a decent predictor of the increased support for Trump in 2024 among young males.

[girlactionfigure]

Scoring # 1 in hypocrisy.

[badaziraphaletakes]

Friendly reminder that "separate the art from the artist" does not mean "don't talk about the allegations".

[kenyatta]

As the writer Gary Baum at The Hollywood Reporter noted in January, “For those on the right, [Justin Baldoni represents] that most sympathetic of figures in contemporary American life: the canceled man. Meanwhile, Lively is a liberal who has received publicity for repeatedly donating to left-coded Indigenous causes and is perhaps best known for her close friendship with Taylor Swift, an enemy of President Donald Trump.” Most importantly, conservatives have recognized that the case, much like Johnny Depp’s crusade against Amber Heard, can be weaponized to dismantle support for the #MeToo movement, which conservatives have long sought to roll back.

[ollies-station]

Everyone in the ghost fandom to the Papa’s:

[rpallavicini]

Rincoglioniti, non svegli

I sedicenti “svegli” o “svegliati” dall’inglese woke si lamentano del flop del recente film di Disney che ha stravolto la storia di Biancaneve. Per empio esempio su rivistastudio.com titolano «Biancaneve non è un flop ma una vittima delle guerre culturali». Non sono svegli, sono rincoglioniti. Perché se avessero avuto un minimo di intelligenza avrebbero raccontato una storia nuova, senza per…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Kylie Cheung at Jezebel:

The day after Election Day, calls to the Trevor Project’s crisis services hotline for LGBTQ youth surged by 200%; online searches for abortion pills and emergency contraception skyrocketed, too. Queer youth, women, and girls were clearly concerned about what a second Trump presidency meant for their safety and their futures. But the country has been largely apathetic to their fears. Instead, we’re being called to consider young men’s suffering—real and imagined—and the insidious forces that seemed to shift this demographic to the right. A sampling of post-election headlines includes, “We Asked Young Men Why They Voted for Donald Trump—Here’s What They Said,” “The ‘Lost Boys’ of Gen Z: how Trump won the hearts of alienated young men,” “What’s the Matter with Young Male Voters?” and “Trump Offered Men Something That Democrats Never Could.” Of course, Jezebel is now adding to that list, but what’s missing from some of these stories is the manosphere as an increasingly powerful political arm.

Exit polls show Trump received a larger proportion of voters under 30 than any Republican presidential candidate since 2008. In 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump by 11 points among men under 30. Last week, Trump beat Kamala Harris by two points. (Among young white men without college degrees, he beat Harris 56% to 40%.) Some of this should be taken with a grain of salt: Youth turnout dropped sharply from 2020, so these stats offer an incomplete snapshot of an entire generation’s views. But, as journalists, organizers, and the Democratic Party scramble for answers, one concern that’s come to the forefront is the manosphere—a fast-growing, unrepentantly hateful community of men’s lifestyle influencers, podcasters, and media personalities who glorify and preach misogyny to a new generation of young men. Think: serially accused rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate, hate speech-platforming Twitch streamer Adin Ross, or misogynist streamer Sneako, who once slapped a woman on camera as a “prank.” There’s also TikTok star Bryce Hall, who joined Trump on the campaign trail about a year after collaborating with proud neo-Nazis, including Sneako. One video from December 2023 shows Sneako laughing as he’s approached by young fans who yell, “Fuck the women” and “All gays can die.” He half-jokingly asks the camera, “What have I done?”

On Election Night, Trump handed the mic to UFC President Dana White (who, like Sneako, also slapped a woman on camera) at his victory party, and White directly thanked Ross, as well as the Nelk Boys and Theo Von, more popular manosphere influencers and podcasters who also supported Trump’s campaign. Over the last several months, Trump made numerous appearances on their shows and streams and hosted them at his rallies. And, because this seems to have worked, those who didn’t see Trump’s victory coming are now trying to understand this chilling sphere of influence that’s seemingly been radicalizing young men right under our noses.

It may be annoying, even disturbing to have to take this increasingly mainstream underworld seriously, but Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America (MMFA), tells Jezebel that understanding the manosphere is important to understand “what future generations are going to look like.” Carusone says MMFA researchers tracked at least 20 times that Trump appeared on manosphere podcasts—including those of Von, Hall, the Nelk Boys, and Jake Paul—since May. In 2023, Ross and other popular manosphere creators including JiDion, Steve Deleonardis, Jorge Masvidal, and alleged rapist DJ Akademiks, appeared with Trump at a UFC event. The meet-and-greet was set up by right-wing video platform, Rumble.

MMFA has been closely following manosphere stars for years now, watching them and the social platforms that host them profit off of mocking rape survivors and trans people, or joking about and openly celebrating violence against women to their impressionable, mostly teen and tween boy audiences. Young people who might turn to them for apolitical interests—weightlifting, video games, MMA fighting, dating advice—are increasingly inundated with out-of-context stats and arguments about how much easier it is for women to get jobs, or minorities to get into college, or trans people to succeed at sports. These audiences are radicalized to believe a liberal, feminist world order is crushing them. Now, thanks to social media algorithms, content about weightlifting, video games, MMA fighting, and dating has become a pipeline to the right.

[...] Nicole Regalado, vice president of campaigns at Ultraviolet, told Jezebel her organization has been tracking online misogyny campaigns since Gamergate in 2014, which saw an outbreak of rabid sexism, racism, and queerphobia against perceived feminist progress in the video game industry. But she’s been alarmed by sharp rises in online harassment against women in recent years. It doesn’t help, Regalado said, that at a time when the manosphere is surging, with the help of anti-MeToo backlash and a golden age of media illiteracy, “social media platforms are gutting moderation, trust, and safety teams,” while “platforming and profiting off hate.” A lot of this came to a head with the outcome of the 2024 election, Regalado said, which “followed months of disinformation and racism-misogyny about Kamala Harris” from popular right-wing, manosphere-type influencers. Trump’s victory has only emboldened this toxic stew of misogyny, culminating in the viral “your body, my choice” slogan.

I understand the importance of Democrats and progressives figuring out how to “reach” young men—the electoral stakes are high, especially for the most marginalized among us. But in the last week, I’ve often found myself frustrated, even disgusted by the idea that young men are uniquely suffering because they’re young men, that they deserve outsized sympathy and attention at a time when women and other marginalized communities are on the brink of perhaps one of the severest rollbacks of our rights in modern times. Teen girls and young women suffer from endemic sexual violence and misogyny, and many still find it in their hearts to not elect a fascist. 

Carusone says he’s struggled with this, too. But he’s made sense of it by understanding the manosphere and its toxic, mass appeal as a youth issue. “The 30-year-old men who are upset, the Tucker Carlsons of the world, they need to get over it. They’re not who I’m talking about,” he said. But manosphere content is poisoning the minds of children, shaping them to become violent toward other children, to grow up and inflict violence on marginalized people. “We have to think about this as it relates to kids. If we don’t do something about this now, we’re messing up kids,” Carusone explained. “As these boys and young men grow, they’re going to build and organize political power, and even worse, as they move into maturity, they’re going to be more violent and abusive than previous generations.”

Jezebel does an excellent report on how the cadre of manosphere influencers such as the Nelk Boys, Sneako, and Adin Ross-- who helped push young men to the right and push Donald Trump over the finish line and how they’ll shape politics.

[judith1614]

Obviously a lot of people are just being straight up shitty and also- I think what a lot of people are struggling to verbalize is that whenever a powerful man who’s publicly supported oppressed people is reveled as a sexual predator, there is a loss of trust in your own perception. There’s a loss of trust in your ability to determine who is and isn’t safe.

And as much as he may have been problematic prior, by and large he expressed values that led people to think he was on the right side of things and an overall good guy. It’s disorienting when you find out you can’t trust something you thought you could, and that’s gonna take processing.

[ritchiepage2001newaccount]

Project2025 #TechBros #CorpMedia #Oligarchs #MegaBanks vs #Union #Occupy #NoDAPL #BLM #SDF #DACA #MeToo #Humanity #FeelTheBern

JinJiyanAzadi #BijiRojava WATCH Women rally for equal rights in Syria after Assad's fall to Islamists [UPDATES]

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/women-rally-equal-rights-syria-after-assads-fall-islamists-2024-12-23/

Thousands of women rallied in the northeastern Syrian city of Qamishli on Monday to demand the new Islamist rulers in Damascus respect women's rights and to condemn Turkish-backed military campaigns in Kurdish-led regions of the north…

RELATED UPDATE: Solidarity Activists Are Raising Alarm Over Impending Turkish Attacks on Rojava

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FURTHER READING:

[shinjihi]

今マスコミがすべきなのは遅すぎるジャニーズ叩きじゃなくて

芸能プロダクション全般やヤクザ、半グレの行なっている女性や男性への性加害を調べて報道すること

小林麻美や藤原紀香など噂になった人も多い

たとえ国会議員や地方議員、名士、財界大物や子弟などに火が広がっても報道しろ

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Mirion Malle’s “So Long Sad Love”

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In Mirion Malle's So Long Sad Love, a graphic novel from Drawn and Quarterly, we get an all-too-real mystery story: when do you trust the whisper network that carries the fragmentary, elliptical word of shitty men?

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/so-long-sad-love/

Cleo is a French comics creator who's moved to Montreal, in part to be with Charles, a Quebecois creator who helps her find a place in the city's tight-knit artistic scene. The relationship feels like a good one, with the normal ups and downs, but then Cleo travels to a festival, where she meets Farah, a vivacious and talented fellow artist. They're getting along great…until Farah discovers who Cleo's boyfriend is. Though Farah doesn't say anything, she is visibly flustered and makes her excuses before hurriedly departing.

This kicks off Cleo's hunt for the truth about her boyfriend, a hunt that is complicated by the fact that she's so far from home, that her friends are largely his friends, that he flies off the handle every time she raises the matter, and by her love for him.

There's a term for men like Charles: a "missing stair." "Missing stair" is a metaphor for someone in a social circle who presents some kind of persistent risk to the people around them, who is accommodated rather than confronted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair

The metaphor goes like this: you're at a party and every time someone asks where the bathroom is, another partygoer directs them to the upper floor and warns them that one of the stairs is missing, and if they don't avoid that tread, they will fall through and be gravely injured. In this metaphor, a whole community of people have tacitly decided to simply accept the risk that someone who is forgetful or new to the scene will fall through the stair – no one has come forward to just fix that stair.

The origins of this term are in BDSM circles, and the canonical "missing stair" is a sexual predator, but from the outset, it's referred to all kinds of people with failings that present some source of frustration or unhappiness to those around them, from shouters to bigots to just someone who won't help do the dishes after a dinner party:

https://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2012/06/missing-stair.html

We all know a few missing stairs, and anyone who's got even a little self-reflexivity must wonder from time to time if they're not also a missing stair, at least to some people in their lives. After all, friendship always entails some accommodation, and doubly so love – as Dan Savage is fond of saying, "There is no person who is 'The One' for you – the best you can hope for is the '0.6' that you can round up to 'The One,' with a lot of work."

And at least some missing stairs aren't born – they're made. Everyone screws up, everyone's got some bad habits, everyone's got some blind spots about what others expect of them and how others perceive us. When the people around us make bad calls about whether to let us skate on our faults and when to confront us, those faults fester and multiply and calcify. This is compounded in long-tenured relationships that begin in our youth, when we are still figuring out our boundaries – the people who we give a pass to when we're young and naive can become a fixture in our lives despite characteristics that, as adults, we wouldn't tolerate in someone who is new to our social scene.

To make all this even more complicated, there's the role that power plays in all this. Many missing stairs are keenly attuned to power dynamics and present a different face to people who have some authority – whether formal or tacit – to sanction them. This is why so many of the outings of #MeToo predators provoked mystified men to say, "Gosh, they never acted that way around me – I had no idea."

These men aren't necessarily clueless. There's a predator who once traveled in my circles, and when he was outed, it wasn't just men who were shocked. My professional and personal life includes a large cohort of socially and professionally powerful women to whom this "missing stair" presented an impeccable face on every occasion. None of the people this guy looked up to ever witnessed his behavior firsthand, and for complicated reasons, none of the lower status (younger, less experienced, and not exclusively female) people whom he preyed upon came to us.

Which brings me back to Cleo and Charles, and the mystery of what Charles did to Farah in art school, many years before. The people in Charles's circle have an explanation: Farah was Charles's first heavy crush, and he courted her in ways that crossed the line into harassment. But – according to Charles's friends – this was a temporary condition that Charles outgrew, and it was only later, when Charles was in a healthier relationship with someone who reciprocated his affections, that Farah retaliated by attacking him to their small art-school circle.

This is just plausible enough – Charles was young, still figuring stuff out, he made a misstep – that Cleo is able to console herself with it. But as Charles grows more irritable and belittling of her, and as Cleo's friends gently encourage her to dig further rather than burying her lingering doubts, a much uglier truth comes into view.

Malle handles this all so deftly, showing how Cleo and her friends all play archetypal roles in the recurrent missing stair dynamic. It's a beautifully told story, full of charm and character, but it's also a kind of forensic re-enactment of a disaster, told from an intermediate distance that's close enough to the action that we can see the looming crisis, but also understand why the people in its midst are steering straight into it.

This transitions into a third act where Cleo leaves Montreal and finds herself in the midst a very different social dynamic of people who have figured out a far healthier way to manage their interpersonal problems. This short conclusion is powerfully satisfying, showing how it's possible to live without missing stairs and without the immediate expulsion of anyone who has a "problematic" moment.

The missing stair phenomenon would be so much easier to deal with if every missing stair started out as an irredeemable monster. We could fix all those stairs and declare ourselves done. But – as Malle illustrates – there's a reason it's so hard to fix those missing stairs. Every good friendship has some give and take – but every missing stair takes too much. Knowing the difference is a skill you learn through hard experience, not one you're born with. Learning when to call someone out, and when to call them in, is a hard curriculum – and it's even harder to know when to keep trying to help the people in your life be better selves, and when to protect the other people in your life from their worst selves.

Malle's book is packed with subtlety and depth, romance and heartbreak, subtext that carries through the dialog (in marvelous translation from the original French by Aleshia Jensen) and the body language in Malle's striking artwork.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/25/missing-stair/#the-fog-of-love

[azspot]

Americans tend to see forgiveness as a one-and-done rather than a process. We tend to think that forgiveness is the product of someone asking for it and that you always give it, every time someone asks, no matter what. And in some strains of white American Christianity, it becomes a failure when you don’t give forgiveness to someone.

Kaya Oakes

[khalemchurstcomics]

CIGARETTES

WARNING: This comic suggests the occurrence of s3xual vi0lence, although nothing is actually shown. Please read with caution.

I have done a lot of work on processing my capital T Traumas. The big stuff, the kinds of things you do EMDR sessions on. That stuff takes so much focus and time and it just takes so much energy and time and MONEY to slowly unpack and process everything. I am constantly doing that work.

But surrounding the big Traumas, the kinds of events I write about in comics (@triggeredcomic) there are so many of these little things that happened. Things that maybe mean nothing but maybe mean something. Things I mostly don't remember because when I was young, when I felt threatened I would often just black out. There were a bunch of times I regained consciousness in a bed and asked someone what had happened and they wouldn't tell me.

I guess the point is, when you're a traumatised person, somehow the things just keep happening. For years I thought there was something deeply defective about me, that I kept ending up in these situations, that I couldn't make them stop. Part of that is about how perfectly trained I was by the cult to be submissive and polite and a perfect victim. But part of it was just my trauma replaying again and again.

If you have had small encounters like this that maybe don't feel important enough to labelled as Traumas, I want you to know that they still matter. These experiences inform you and how you navigate the world. You deserved better. So did I. We still do.

This was originally posted to my IG @khalemchurst

[ritchiepage2001newaccount]

Project2025 #TechBros #CorpMedia #Oligarchs #MegaBanks vs #Union #Occupy #NoDAPL #BLM #SDF #DACA #MeToo #Humanity #FeelTheBern

JinJiyanAzadi #BijiRojava

The Brave Women Fighting ISIS [UPDATES]

Last February, soon after the Islamic State Group, also know as ISIS or ISIL, raided the Christian villages around Tel Tamer, Syria, it was clear to Seeham that it would be up to the women to lead the charge to take back their community…

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