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TheModestBloggist

~ The opposite of a regret, is a story.

TheModestBloggist

Tag Archives: Trump

Hey Survivors – Let’s Form a Faction.

07 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Confessions of a Buried Survivor

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#ImasurvivorAnd, #metoo, #TrumpSexualPredator, 14, 16 women, 32, abuser, abusers, accusation, accused, accuser, ACORN, Al Franken, Alabama, allegation, allegations, alleged, allies, ally, attack, Black Lives Matter, BLM, buried, Chris Hansen, codeword, coding, community, David Hall, Democratic, dog-whistle, dogwhistle, Donald Trump, due process, evidence, fact, faction, facts, feminism, Feminist, find each other, Franken, gaslighting, Girl, harassed, harassment, help, Ijeoma Oluo, Intersectional feminism, James O'Keefe, journalism, justice, Leeann Tweeden, legal, legal departments, liberal, Los Angeles radio anchor, Mel Gibson, movement, news, NPR, O'Keefe, picture, Planned Parenthood, Political, politicizing tragedy, Politics, Privilege, programming, Project Veritas, proof, R. Kelly, Rape, rape culture, reckoning, restorative justice, Roy Moore, safety, scandal, Sexual assault, supposedly, Survivor, survivor-lead, Survivors, survivors leading, teenage, The Establishment, the reckoning, trauma, Traumatized, Trump, Tweeden, tweet, Twitter, USA Today, video, Washington Post, white supremacists

Hey survivor – pay attention.  We are under attack.

I know right now you think it’s not that big a deal.  You probably think, like I did once, that you can shrug it off forever.  But you’re wrong.  We all have our limits, and I don’t want you waiting around to find out what they are.  Believe me when I say that you could die.

It wouldn’t be an accident.  It’s what the world expects.  In movies, news, and whispering gossip, we learn that survivors don’t exist – but victims do.  Suicides, and drug addictions.  Jail, and mental wards against our will.  Death row just for men – what petition of mercy for a killer did you ever hear (designated terrorists excepted) that didn’t include every gritty detail of his molested childhood?

They are waiting for us to die, and we know it.  For as long as you’ve been a survivor, this is a weight you have carried.  Remembering, privately, words like “except,” and “anyway.”  Living for us means defying, and thriving is beating the odds.

Think about what they make us go through – the polite society of normies all around us, with their shocked panic whenever one of us announces being in the room.  Think about the weight of fitting in, pretending we aren’t who we are just to make them feel at ease.

We lack the privilege of community.  We have no automatic allies and we’re randomly distributed.  But it is hard to find each other, because we lack the privilege of even group identity.  We don’t dare throw parades to celebrate being alive; our joy can and will be used against us, even in the court of law. Can’t be that traumatized if you went to a party.

And because we’re not a group, and because we’re not in the open, we don’t get to lead on any issues that affect us.  The burden of doubt (thanks, society) keeps us so busy defending and proving and playing the part we think will be accepted that taking political command is practically taboo.  Can’t be that traumatized if you’re able to talk about politics.

And we are under attack.  We’ve always been under attack – we’re used to it.  But suddenly, right now, it feels like we’re getting somewhere.  If we don’t join together and learn how to defend ourselves, as a group, #metoo will fade into thin air, like so many other reckonings.  We all know there’s nothing this world of normies would rather see than for us to get buried again.

Think about the ways they’re trying to shut us down.  Think about Project Veritas.

This is a think-tank founded by James O’Keefe.  Donald Trump is among its many funders.  The latest project it pursued was named, “To Catch a Journalist” – as an apparent diametric to Chris Hansen’s Dateline NBC program, “To Catch a Predator.”  Hansen’s show had investigators catfishing child-molesters to help police arrest them before real children could be harmed.  O’Keefe’s project was instead supposed to catfish investigators so as to discredit molested children and help a child-molester win a Senate race.

Project Veritas accordingly sent a woman to the Washington Post with a made-up story about having been raped by Roy Moore, impregnated as a teenager, and forced to have an abortion.  It didn’t work, of course; the paper followed the woman back to Project Veritas headquarters and wrote about the failed attack on journalism.  So, great.  One attack against us didn’t succeed.  But, my people, think about – just think about – the depth of the ever-present media attack against survivors.

O’Keefe was able to fool NPR.  He fooled ACORN.  He fooled Planned Parenthood.  He didn’t fail in fooling the Washington Post because they’re better detectives.  He failed because this time the story he was trying to sell was rape – and that’s a story nobody wants to buy.

Anyone who thinks doubt is a rational response to a news story relating to rape just has no idea what the world is like for survivors.  Even O’Keefe, who made a conscious decision to lead a smear campaign against us, was not able to prepare for that denial – and he controls a billionaire-funded think-tank.

Every time we get the slightest bit of traction toward a preferential option, the powers invested in rape culture pivot hard to take us down.  They’re not even subtle about it.

In a series of tweets dated November 29th, editor-at-large Ijeoma Oluo of The Establishment described an email exchange, followed by phone call, from USA Today.  They wanted her to write “the opposing view” to a piece that would argue that, though it’s good victims of sexual abuse are now coming forward, due process must still occur.

Oluo responded that, um, she also believes in due process – but she could write a response: “I’ll happily write about how their priorities are skewed and that the due process that’s missing is the due process for the women coming forward.”  She continued that, “if anything, these stories of years of abuse are testament to men getting more than due process.  And maybe instead of immediately trying to recenter the concerns of men because, like, 5 white dudes got fired, we should wonder about the countless women whose careers never even got off the ground because when they were harassed, there was NO process, let alone due process.”

After a few minutes’ conference with editors, the low-level representative from USA Today again called Oluo, explaining that they wanted her response to focus on how she just doesn’t believe in due process and is fine with a few innocent men losing their jobs to expedite the reckoning.

Oluo refused.  Her November 30th article describes the same incident, and the thoughts that ran through her mind after the call had ended.

“Did this really just happen? Was I seriously just asked by the third-largest paper in the nation to write their ‘feminazi’ narrative to counter their ‘reasoned and compassionate’ editorial? Was I just asked to be one of the excuses for why this whole ‘me too’ moment needed to be shut down?”

Oluo asks us, in the end, to consider how often we are suckered into supporting this kind of narrative.

If we count the ways that journalism works against survivors, we find ourselves in the thick of a pervasive gaslighting campaign.  No one bats an eye when we come across a sentence like, “Los Angeles radio anchor Leeann Tweeden made allegations that Al Franken groped her as she slept.”  Allegations made by Tweeden are referenced on internet, TV, and printed press as the subtitle or introduction to the picture in which we clearly see Al Franken groping her.

Similarly, one teenaged girl among several made allegations that R. Kelly raped her.  Allegations – despite there being a widely-viewed and mocked video of it happening.  Things that we see with our own eyes are generally called facts, not allegations.  As the news, you should know the difference.

And yes, I’m aware that publications have legal departments requiring the insert of such disclaimers.  That’s my exact complaint: this isn’t accidental.  How have we allowed judges who rule in favor of rapists who sue, lawyers who believe certain truths are impossible to defend, and papers that fear telling hard facts about abusers, but think nothing of telling us, impulsively, over and over, that survivors could be lying – even when we can’t be?

The word that other groups of people might use for these events is “defamation.”  We survivors are, publicly, constantly, and by conscious decision disparaged.  “Allegation,” “accusation,”
“supposedly,” “accuser” – these have become codewords.  Some are hardly used outside the context of sexual abuse, and never replaced within it. Articles don’t introduce survivors as “plaintiffs,” “indicters,” or “statement-givers.”  We don’t read about “reports,” “cases,” or “accounts” of sex abuse, nor reference to “facts in question” or “disputed testimony.”  It is important, in the news, to signify that special kind of justice that only has to do with rape.

The coding is more than just widespread – it’s active programming.  In response to Roy Moore’s abuse of a teenage girl, David Hall, chair of  the Alabama Marion County GOP, offered: “It was 40 years ago. I really don’t see the relevance of it. He was 32. She was supposedly 14. She’s not saying that anything happened other than they kissed.”

The injection of doubt here has to be kneejerk; Hall’s usage of the word “supposedly” serves no legal or rational purpose.  He literally isn’t saying that he doubts the woman’s story, and in fact by his downplaying the severity of sexual abuse in the next line we’re given to understand that he has no problem with believing she was kissed.  What the adverb tells us literally is that Hall doesn’t believe in  her – the survivor – as a living human being.

Supposedly she was fourteen when Moore was 32.  How can we really know?  What makes us so sure she moves through time at the typical rate, or that she’s existed alongside other people who counted her years as she grew?  She could be any sort of creature, who cares what Moore did.

Hall’s efforts to mythologize are unconscious, and are unconsciously accepted by a society that has forever been subject to systemic gaslighting.  We are trained, all of us, to doubt survivors claiming to be ordinary, while at the same time to believe survivors capable of impossible monstrosity.  I have seen better people than Hall reflect the training.

Immediately after 2016’s election, I took to facebook, posting furious screeds against the president-elect and the people who handed him power.  I came closer to some of my friends, who shared my anger, and blocked many others, who didn’t.  One acquaintance who became a closer friend asked permission to copy-paste some of my messages (my security settings compromised the “share” feature).  I said yes, and saw many of my messages re-posted on her wall.  But once, I noticed a very long post had been edited.  The change was subtle – just one word.  Instead of a “KKK-endorsed child-rapist,” the message now called Trump a “KKK-endorsed accused child-rapist.”

Though she’d credited me by name as the author of the message, and used quotation marks at the beginning and end to make clear that they weren’t her words, my friend included no note on the edited portion.  I did a double-take; I had to revisit my original message to check if I had actually used that word.  I hadn’t.

I don’t think the revision was a conscious enough decision on her part to consider asking my permission or explaining to her audience that there had been an edit.  But it was a change she went out of her way to make – on her own, no legal departments forcing her.  This is the self-replicating power of steady programming against us.  My sensible, smart-mouthed friend thinks the word “rapist” so dangerous that it can, if written once over the internet with no disclaimer, do more damage to the President of the United States of America than she would wish on her very worst enemy (who is, at this moment, the President of the United States of America).

It’s no wonder that we aren’t a faction.  In poisonous moments, we have been told that the most dangerous thing in the world is for us to open our mouths.  Now everywhere we go that message plays on repeat.

The irony is that, when it comes to sex-crime, survivors are the only group with a vested interest in justice.  People act like we’re out here trying to kill you.  We are the ones who can save you.

In a world where survivors’ voices lead our responses to sex abuse, I predict a great emphasis on restorative justice.  This is because, from experience, we are the only ones who seem to realize how normal is a rapist and how overlooked each survivor.  We’ll figure out quicker than the rest  that the sheer scale of rape makes any other kind of justice logistically impossible.

Justice to a survivor also has to be restorative, because the special stigma that sex crimes carry for us becomes a toxic obstacle to healing.  We need to be supported and believed.  And we’ve seen time and time again that unless our abusers stand up in public and admit what they’ve done, no amount of evidence will be enough to make most folks believe us.  We don’t have the luxury of prioritizing retribution.  Our survival requires that we center concerns on our own immediate safety and the safety of our communities.  We want to know that these crimes won’t keep happening, to us or to anyone else.

Can you, who are not survivors, decide for us under what conditions we might begin to feel safe?  If not, then I suggest you stop doing what you do in trying to defend us: stop controlling what we say.

It is notable, and not surprising, that #metoo became a big movement at the urging of non-survivors.  I mean, I don’t know what your twitter feed looked like when it first took off, but I remember so many tweets asking us to come out of the closet, now, as a demonstration of the scale of sexual abuse – written by people who identified being unable to do so themselves, due to their lack of personal victimhood.

I’m not saying allies don’t have a place in our movement.  What enabled us to come out en masse was the sudden societal permission, after all.  Guilty as survivors always are about everything, it made sense to speak out when it was for a good cause – not just us being selfish thrusting our nasty problems in other peoples’ faces.  But I couldn’t participate.  Just weeks before I’d written out a full disclosure on my blog, and I wasn’t yet in a place emotionally where I could brave another outcry.

This is not something many allies seem to understand; wanting to be believed does not mean our stories should be available on-demand, much less for the satisfaction of those who need to be showered with personal proofs of statistics we told them already.  And this is not the point of our movement – it’s not our job to save the normies from their own programming they haven’t done work to dismantle.

For a non-survivor who has nothing to add to our conversation, the right thing to do is stop talking.  Those willing to do the harder job of being our allies can use their own stories instead of demanding our proof.  We’ve all seen sexual abuse, harassment and gaslighting.  Assault has occurred at awards shows, on gameshows, and improvised moments during mainstream comedies, without much or any an uproar.  Did you even see it, normies?  Did you, and did you know that it was wrong, and yet say nothing, to keep things nice and polite?

That is the proof you were asking for.  Use that in our defense.  And good, if it’s hard for you to share it.  Learn from that shame what it’s like to be in our shoes.  Learn the feeling of being powerless and out-of-place, and bring that up next time you hear someone suggest there are people crying rape for attention.  Nothing about you is so much bigger and more dignified that you would have reason to fear speaking up where we would be spared embarrassment.

It’s telling, and typical, the form of #metoo.  Across the internet, survivors were given the job of divulging raw, personal data.  And institutions were given the job of deciding what to do with it.  In the void between us – scattered, providing survivors on the one hand, and on the other hand the looming keeps of power – our allies have been stepping.  Directing political winds, proclaiming on our behalf what they want our movement saying.

It’s a problem.

I didn’t think so at first.  It excited me to read in tweets, “Let’s get #TrumpSexualPredator trending!”  “16 women accusing Trump of misconduct deserve justice!”  I thought, finally.  They’re getting it.  Days passed, and I noticed people saying, on mentions of Roy Moore and other predators, “Don’t forget, this is also true of the President!”

Yup, I thought.  Don’t forget.  Within a week, the hot take had become, “Every liberal celebrity accused has already lost his job, and Al Franken’s under investigation.  When are we going to see Trump held responsible?”

Suddenly, I could see the conversation shifting.  In the hands of well-meaning non-survivors, we’re steering away from the topics we started with.  We’re sidestepping rape culture and systemic abuse to paint our targets on the biggest bad apple.

Do the normies realize, do you think, that a rich-and-famous man without a job can still assault people?  Do they understand that we have more work to do in each of the cases they labeled “dealt with” – that the institutions allowing those with power to abuse for all these decades must not be labeled “better” because the faces of scandal are gone?  Have they wondered whether these abusers will return, quietly, gradually, after six years, in the slithering way of Mel Gibson?

Today, with eight survivors having come forward against Al Franken, and Democratic Senators suggesting Franken should resign, I am on Twitter reading: “Franken shouldn’t step down until Moore and Trump resign.”

These people are not our allies.

If I thought there was a chance in hell that non-survivors appropriating our momentum could actually bring Trump down, I’d keep my mouth shut.  But, being a survivor, I know this tactic is the very least likely to work.  It was tried and failed in advance of Trump’s election.  Exactly nothing is different.  We’re watching it fail again as we speak in Alabama.  Using survivors to shame a sex-offender out of office is just the kind of bright idea that only occurs to the normies who, due to movies, attribute to the rape-whistle mythical magical torch-wielding-mob-summoning powers that seriously don’t exist.  I’m telling you.  Sexual abuse is institutionally protected.  You can’t take down the abuser in a seat of power without challenging the institution.

Survivors need to start leading.  We can’t depend on allies to speak for us; we are a huge and diverse community.  We have more to accomplish together than non-survivors have ever considered.  To help with finding political allies in each other, I propose a new hashtag: #ImasurvivorAnd.  Because declaring our existence is only the beginning of our movement.  We are the ones who should get to decide what comes of it.

Try it out:

#ImasurvivorAnd I don’t know who raped me because I don’t have legal access to my records of time in state custody.

#ImasurvivorAnd I want to know the names of some famous male survivors who did better things than serial-killing.

#ImasurvivorAnd I want the Catholic Church to recognize marital rape.

If you can’t start a sentence that way, you need to take a backseat to those of who can.  If you can start a sentence that way but don’t want to because your circumstances keep you in the closet, we can still ensure your political inclusion with a movement designed to identify the politically active among us.  The conversations that occur in private will inform the causes we pursue as a faction.

Victimization is a spectrum.  So too, we should expect a spectrum of identity in a survivor-lead movement.  It is for each of us to decide how closely we identify as survivors and how deeply invested we are in what happens to us as a group.  The most inclusive data reports that one in three women and one in six men have at some point in their lives been assaulted sexually, and I’d bet my life real numbers are higher.  Non-physical forms of sexual abuse involve even greater numbers.

As with any invisible identity, there are no external qualifications to determine who is one of us.  A survivor movement is bound to promote consent culture over patriarchy and the rape culture that springs from it.  Structural sexism enables rape.  It doesn’t follow that an insignificant number of men and non-binaries are survivors, or that women are excluded from the pool of rapists.  Language that is inclusive of all genders is important, because all survivors are important.

For those who felt inclined to shout down men using #metoo, I recommend taking Black Lives Matter for a model.  Though white supremacists still point at white people shot by cops as evidence that there’s no such thing as racism, BLM has no problem going to bat for white victims of police brutality.  No one’s forgotten for a second that this is an anti-racism effort.  If supporting male survivors undermines some element of our movement, we need to make our movement better.  We will only work as a faction if we work as a community that supports and hears each other.

We need to stand strong against derailers and doubters who try, time and time again, to control the narrative around us.  We need to feel within our rights to tell our tone-deaf allies to back it up and stay in their own lanes.  Right now, the ball’s in our court.  Let’s never give it back.

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Allegations ARE Coming Out Now Because of Politics

13 Monday Nov 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Confessions of a Buried Survivor, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bill Clinton, Blue, Child-Molester, consent, feminism, Hollywood, Inter-sectional Feminism, Molester, Moore, No Moore, Politics, Rape, Resist, Roy Moore, Sexual assault, Trump, Weinstein

I get pissed when I read threads on twitter patiently explaining why survivors take decades to tell our stories.  I get pissed because, as true as it is may be that fear and trauma and societal pressure can keep survivors from speaking, there is a greater pressure no one wants to mention.  It’s the pressure that keeps you from listening.

The first time a survivor’s tale goes viral is never the first time it was told.  It’s only the first time someone who couldn’t be dismissed heard the story and decided to do something with it.

It’s a one-in-a-million story that everybody cares about; a lottery of supply-and-demand.  Politics are currents, happening everywhere, always.  They are at work when a 14-year-old girl gets molested and her friends tell her she’s making a big deal out of nothing.  There are politics in the small town mothers and fathers and pastors who gaslight and downplay, and in the journalist who, in the right place at the right time, will hear that resonating rumor and decide to follow up.

If it takes tens years for a political tide to swell in the right direction and make the stories finally go somewhere, it can’t fall on survivors to explain why.  It falls on us, on all of us, to ask why, suddenly, we heard.

It is true that Roy Moore’s child-molestation only matters to most of you because of this election.  I know that for a fact because most of you aren’t calling for criminal charges.  “If Moore is guilty, Moore should step aside as Senate candidate,” is the faux-heroic stance of admired liberal after liberal politician.  Thanks so much, farmer-with-a-shotgun, for suggesting the fox kick himself out of the henhouse, but it ain’t gonna happen.  When the best you can do with your power is to suggest a child-molester remove himself from your line of vision, you’re not protecting or supporting survivors.  You’re using the waves created under them to forward your career.

Trump is a rapist and he should be in jail.  So the fuck is Bill Clinton.  And I refuse to believe that saying this will work against the movements seeking to expand healthcare or put a halt to Nazism.  The political tides that brought Hollywood-hating republicans and feminism-studying liberals together as two ears, hearing buried stories, have given me reason to hope.  That, in this perfect storm, we have made room for reckoning.

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You Hate Kim Kardashian Because Sexism, The End.

19 Tuesday Sep 2017

Posted by shieldingc in General, My Incessant Bitching, Stories Women Never Tell

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aloha, break the internet, Brian Moylan, Caitlyn Jenner, Cameron Crowe, consent, Crazy Stupid Love, cultural appropriation, Easy A, Emma Stone, feminism, fucking, Jean-Paul Goud, Kim Kardashian, La La Land, Melania Trump, Michelle Obama, Paper Magazine, patriarchy, pimps up hoes down, Privilege, rape culture, sexism, slut-shaming, Time Magazine, transgender visibility, Trump, whorephobia, woke, Woman of the Year

When I say hate, I don’t mean, “You find her irrelevant and over-rated.”  I don’t mean, “You recognize racist implications in Jean-Paul Goud’s photography and you think she needs to do more privilege-checking.”  I mean that she was robbed at gunpoint in Paris last year and you were giddy-glad.  Every time a celebrity dies you meme-plead with God on the internet to take a Kardashian instead. You hate her with a red-hot, searing, personal malice you really can’t explain.

I can, though.  You hate Kim Kardashian- hate, hate, hate her – because misogyny.

You don’t think so, I’m sure.  You think it’s something else.  Fine.  Let’s talk about Kim’s “break the internet” photos featuring her bare ass.  And let’s remember, the most influential commentary didn’t mention photographer Goud’s racial fetishism.  Brian Moylan’s Time magazine response specifically declares it impossible to consider anything of social significance while perusing these photos.

Unlike other celebs who posed nude, Moylan explains, Kim never had to struggle against the patriarchy.  That makes it impossible to think about anything while looking at her ass other than “how it looks like a glazed Krispy Kreme donut.”  He concludes: “We want there to be something more, some reason or context, some great explanation that tells us what it is like to live in this very day and age, but there is not.  Kim Kardashian’s ass is nothing but an empty promise.”

http://time.com/3581618/kim-kardashian-butt-paper-magazine-empty-promise/

So, we should remember that with great ass comes great explanation.  Moylan doesn’t say who made him this “promise” that any woman on display would martyr herself to some great social cause.  But he’s watching Kim. K. reap all the fame and reward for herself and calling foul.  In his estimation, the great moral failure of this nudey pic is that he isn’t himself entitled to some form of profit.

There’s something Kim K. does that you don’t like, and it’s because of patriarchy.  She knows what her image is worth.  She owns it.  She sells it.  Her name in your mouth is a product, for good or for bad, so you buy it.  Kim K. is subverting the societal expectation of a self-apologizing female sexuality.  It’s a status quo insisting that the sexy woman can’t sell her sexiness without also having to sell, like, beer.  Or deodorant.  Anything, really, that benefits some dude in a suit.  One might say, pimps up hoes down.

When America complains that Kim does nothing, what you mean is that she’s done nothing to advance your personal interests.  If you cared about a greater social good, you’d remember that she survived a physically and verbally abusive marriage, and made herself an icon in the wake of a leaked sex tape.  You’d mention her advocacy for recognition of the Armenian genocide.  You’d have something to say about the fact that without Kim’s spotlight, we would not have been celebrating our first trans Woman of the Year in 2015.  Which marked a huge historic shift in transgender visibility, on a global scale.

I’m not saying you’re some anti-trans asshole.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m saying you’re an asshole who takes it as betrayal that a woman’s nakedness didn’t happen on your terms.  You want Kim’s ass throwing its weight behind a cause that you’ve selected.

Go ahead and keep pretending we’ve all been reasonably judging one more privileged white lady making bank on aesthetics invented by women of color.  Go ahead and tell me, “cultural appropriation” as your cincher, your one big final reason Kim K. is hate-fodder conscientiously-approved.  Then explain how it is that when you talk about Emma Stone, you don’t sound like, “Haha, maybe she’ll die next year.”

There was one joke one time that sounded like “Stone can play any race” – and then you were talking about Cameron Crowe apologizing for casting her in Aloha, since after all it was his fault, and jamming out to La La Land like nothing ever happened.  Everyone’s just like: dear sweet, silly Emma.  How could she have known that she wasn’t cut out to play a character named Allison Ng?  How could one faux pas make us love her any less, after we saw her in Crazy, Stupid, Love kiss her boyfriend on the forehead and then go to sleep without banging?

If you give a damn that her ignorance cost some Asian actress a career-launching role, it was muted by the greater concern that your daughters grow up wanting to look like Emma Stone, and gluing references to required reading on their chests while not having sex during high school.

God forbid your girls start to emulate Kim.  God forbid someone call slut in the hallways and they take a bow instead of run home weeping.  Hello, Rape Culture, were you here the whole time?

Let’s talk about the sex tape.  2007.  The debate – all in an angry voice – that perhaps the video was leaked on purpose.  Her hair and makeup were done so well, the scene professionally-lighted, film-quality up to porn-industry standard.  Men who watched the video told me so.  And that was a reason why they said nobody likes her.  After all, who could enjoy a bedroom scene that wasn’t really stolen?  Why did she have to go and maybe, just maybe, consent about it?

Be scared of what Kim has to teach your daughter, ok.  Don’t at all be terrified of what your father taught you.  Keep screaming that you’re woke in the era of Trump, and trade memes of a naked Melania.  Calling slut and shaking your head.  Keep pinning her to your wall.  There’s no connection in hating Trump with all your heart and looking at his naked wife.  It’s all in defense of Michelle.  Mrs. Obama would surely it as a compliment.

There’s this thing about A Woman Who Lets You Watch we figured out a long time ago.  The thing is that you want to, even though you know it’s wrong.  And we’re all in agreement that when you just can’t stop yourself from watching, it’s her fault for being such a dirty worthless whore that she won’t fight tooth and nail to make you look away.

Time magazine was pleading: Explain your ass, Kim Kardashian.  We know that it’s wrong to objectify and brutalize and demean, but damnit.  If this object won’t make the effort to convince us it’s a person, what other choice do we have?

It’s terrifying to meet a slut who simply doesn’t care.  When you can call her any name you want, watch her gunned-down bloody on an episode of South Park and laugh when the same thing almost happens in real life.  When you can spread her naked pictures over the internet, and her image in your hands is yours to do with whatever you will.

You need her to try and stop you.  Because, you realize, maybe what you want to do is violent, sadistic, brutal.  And you tell yourself it doesn’t count – that it’s just her type of woman.  You tell yourself this isn’t you, this isn’t you – this is all on her.  It’s a tale as old as time.

The truth is, and always has been, that you hate Kim Kardashian just because you can.

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