#metoo!

[mymelodic-chapel]

Film School- Brilliant Career (Noise Pop, Shoegaze, Slowcore) Released: April 8, 2001 [Metoo! Records] Producer(s): Krayg

[do-angels-dream-of-starry-seas]

"Ccs only spoke up now and were gonna let him continue this behavior" do you have any fucking understanding how manipulative people work, you ignorant cunt?

Not to mention most of those who are speaking out were fucking children when they met him

[foolishfantasia]

People who still think Infinity Train got cancelled because they, sanded a character to bits, cremated a conscious white man, and okayed a monster with severed arms make me laugh because Owen, the man, Dennis has already confirmed that CN & HBO had no problem with their insane deadly ideas. If anything they were pretty quick to approve them.

Yah wanna know what didn't get approved so quickly/approved begrudgingly? Jesse's American Indian/Native heritage and the Rymin's heartfelt conversation about how it isn't easy to be Asian American/Asian Canadian in any creative industry. Why did Jesse being himself take 7 months to be approved? What did Dennis mean when he said a similar thing happened with Min and Ryan?

[redwinterroses]

to go along with that poll though... you should try rereading, as an adult, books you hated in high school or college. like. i cannot stress how much more sense they will make. (sometimes. personally i don't think i ever will understand the appeal of Moby Dick but that's probably more a me-problem.)

you change. you see things. you learn things. you start to understand what empathy actually is and see things from other people's povs. and suddenly that book you thought was so incredibly dumb becomes an "oooooh" moment because you realize it was bigger than your developing 8th grade brain could realistically process.

we force kids to read books too young -- like, yeah. you should be forced to read things that bore you or that you don't fully understand. that's how we grow. but also Romeo and Juliet was written about teenagers, not for them. no book that has been long considered a standard part of The Literary Canon should be tossed because college freshman find it boring. they're freshmen. they do that. they also think all-nighters, keg parties, and a steady diet of pizza and ramen are good ideas lol.

reread books you didn't get. there's a good chance you'll see why it was required reading.

[jensorensen]

The Great Regression

Like many Americans, I marvel at the speed with which we went from the historic election of Barack Obama to the brink of fascism. Clearly these events are not unrelated; racial resentment exploded in reaction to Obama's presidency. But this moment of reactionary politics goes well beyond that historical first and now seems to permeate every aspect of life, anywhere some degree of social progress has been achieved.

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[icedsodapop]

I'm so fucking sick of this. Will Smith bitchslaps Chris Rock on camera one time and gets called an "assailant" by Jimmy Kimmel. Meanwhile, the actual assailants, the actual harmful and dangerous pple (e.g., James Franco, Shia LaBeouf, Casey Affleck, Kevin Spacey) have been slowly coming back on stage like fucking cockroaches

[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.

[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

[verypersonalscreencaps]

"Frigid bitches". CAREY MULLIGAN & ZOE KAZAN as Megan Twohey & Jodi Kantor and a guy as the as*hole SHE SAID (2022, dir. Maria Schrader)

[bojackbuffy]

“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.”

― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

[theconcealedweapon]

When the MeToo movement happened, they struggled to be taken seriously.

But when the "narcissistic abuse" trend happened, suddenly everyone's a victim of narcissistic abuse, and they got sympathy from society easily.

So many people are also worried about LGBT people being sexual predators.

People love to bring up abuse when it's blamed on a scapegoat that they're trying to demonize, but they hate actually listening to victims of abuse and actually changing society to stop abuse from happening.

[theremina]

Sup, TERFs?

Sorry not sorry to burst your lil consensus bubble, but right now there are trans folk all over the Internet crying out "not in our name", heartbroken beyond words over what these young women allegedly went through, and calling for justice.

Let's give other reputable investigative journalists a chance to do their work before dismissing "that crowd" as a bunch of unfeeling, subhuman ghouls, shall we?

Personally I'm certain there are more people out there who are still too afraid (understandably) to speak out publicly against one of the most powerful, wealthy, well-loved living authors of the past century.

How is your own behavior helping these survivors to feel safer about disclosing? You really think your bottomless irrational revulsion towards transgender people, not to mention Johnson's, should be centered ahead of them?

[thewoodbine]

I cannot express the depth of my disgust that people on the left are saying Israeli women are lying about being r*ped by Hamas.

How hard is it to believe that women could be caught in the middle of this? What happened to me too? War and violence have ALWAYS had a history of sexual assault occuring by both sides in nearly every conflict you can find. Women have always found themselves suddenly the victims of these power struggles, made examples of.

With all the proof they have too? Some of them filmed and posted online? What happened to listening to women? It doesn't really matter your feelings on who is right or who is wrong, these women HAVE been r*ped and it is disgusting you'd not only not believe them but go out of your way to call their experience into question. This isn't a what-about, this isn't a who-has-it-worse. I would never claim Palestinian women have not endured the same hardships, I know they have.

My point is no women anywhere of any nation should have to endure that trauma and have people go out of their way to call it fake.

Israeli and Palestinian women deserve better. You owe them, if nothing else at all, the ability to heal in peace without interrogation. Where is your humanity?

[sluttynurse]

france is crazy where else can you have a renowned actor say to a magazine "yeah i raped several women" and still let him have a career for literal decades afterwards. clown country that pretends to be peak civilization along with italy