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Fun fact: these two douchebags knowingly allowed scumbag violentacrez/Michael Brutsch to create subreddits like r/jailbait, r/n*ggerjailbait, r/rapingwomen, r/beatingwomen, etc. and fill them with child pornography and horrifyingly violent, racist, and misogynistic material. Brutsch brought Reddit a ton of traffic in its early days. Reddit eventually got bigger, but all the pedophiles and assorted other scumbags remained on the site. It was only after intense public pressure and a media campaign that Reddit agreed to take down r/jailbait and other child porn subreddits. Brutsch was also involved in moderating r/creepshots, which was also the subject of much controversy a few months ago.
Look at these smiling motherfuckers. Erik Martin and Alexis Ohanian got their start with the degradation and exploitation of children and women (and these things still exist on Reddit—the administrators refuse to remove anything unless forced). Yet media outlets continue to write laudatory pieces about them and their terrible website. Fuck the whole lot of them.
Here’s what I think about that, right now. I’m a science fiction writer, and one of the great stories of science fiction is “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” which was written by Ursula K. LeGuin. The story posits a fantastic utopian city, where everything is beautiful, with one catch: In order for all this comfort and beauty to exist, one child must be kept in filth and misery. Every citizen of Omelas, when they come of age, is told about that one blameless child being put through hell. And they have a choice: Accept that is the price for their perfect lives in Omelas, or walk away from that paradise, into uncertainty and possibly chaos.
At Pennsylvania State University, a grown man found a blameless child being put through hell. Other grown men learned of it. Each of them had to make their choice, and decide, fundamentally, whether the continuation of their utopia — or at very least the illusion of their utopia — was worth the pain and suffering of that one child. Through their actions, and their inactions, we know the choice they made.
Besides horror, my immediate reaction is pure WTF. You should always report any criminal behavior you see to the police first. Don’t tell your coworkers. Don’t report it to your boss. Just go to the police.
Stories about institutional cover-ups nearly always begin with some well-meaning dummy witnessing a coworker or boss committing a crime, then reporting it to a higher-up in the organization first….as if the folks in HR or a manager are really capable of conducting a criminal investigation!
I know that women are trained to never say that we’ve done something because that is what we wanted to do (from the available options), but if we don’t reject that and claim what agency is available to us, we will end up repeatedly assisting in our own victimization. Recognizing and claiming what agency we have and respecting how it is limited by personal and social factors are two things we flatly have to do.
Pretending that we’re putting our daughters in bikinis because it’s the only thing that makes sense is, in isolation, a fairly low level of willful blindness to our choices. A far more important, critical I’d say, one is something I’ve seen tossed out every time the marriage/name change thing comes up. I have to say, my general reaction to that conversation is usually: Oh look, the straight people are fondling their VIP choices again, I can’t wait to hear what they have to say! Because I’m a bitch, and I don’t fucking care.
There is one response though that usually effects me for days, that I can’t tear my mind off of, that I think I can say to some degree literally hurts and scares me. I was abused by my father, so of course I will take my husband’s name.
When I was in my early 20s I seriously (gravely seriously) considered changing my last name for similar reasons. During that time, I met a friend who was in the process of changing her name for similar reasons. Literally the first time we hung out, for breakfast, she was on her way to file the papers for her last name change, later her sister did the same but chose to change only her first name (the one she’d heard her father say most often). Ultimately, I didn’t change my name; I couldn’t find one that l liked; I couldn’t find one that when I said it felt like I was even a little bit freer. I decided it was a better process for me to learn to see the name I had as my own, no one else’s, and go from there. Fifteen years later, all three of us are still satisfied with our decisions.
If you are a heterosexual woman who is certain of one day finding a man to marry and a name to take, that still isn’t your only option for recovery. You can change your name now, you can save yourself in at least a few ways, and you don’t have to wait. You might say that if you do so you will have to explain, that it will be difficult and awkward, and you are still embedded with abusive family. That’s all OK, because recovering your life from an abusive childhood is messy, and anyone who demands that you to do it cleanly is probably someone to move away from. But the thing is, part of becoming whole after that kind of childhood is admitting those things too. It’s being able to say, “I want to change my name in the most socially acceptable way possible, so that I don’t have to deal with anymore of their shit than I do right now.” That is a reasonable choice to make.
To define that as something other than a choice you are making is to risk remaining a victimized child, one who is waiting for a rescuer, and still not realizing that you are the person who will save you from that history. We move away from the ugliness of our childhoods through acts of acknowledged agency. Our options are limited by the world, and by our own abilities, which shift as much as the world around us, and what we can do one day sometimes isn’t there the next. But even if we can’t make the best choices for ourselves, or even recognize our agency, it’s extremely important that we stop actively burying our own agency.
Emphasis added. As usual, thehighshelf hits it square on the head.
shortest episode of mtv cribs ever
Every time I see this picture, I’m still shocked by how easily our culture was willing to accept the story of an eleven-year-old boy forced by his guardians to live for…
Whoa. Are there seriously people out there who think that a kid being forced to live in a closet is beyond belief? Have they not been paying attention to just the news in the past few years alone? Remember the woman who was trapped by her abusive father in a motherfucking dungeon he built for her and their children for years and years? Remember the girl who was buried in a living tomb for years by her captor? Ever heard of A Child Called It (which was at the top of The New York Times bestseller list for years)? And those are just the stories that have been extensively reported. There are thousands of children in this country alone who are undergoing abuse even more horrific than being shut in a closet, badly fed and beaten up regularly.
(Source: carouselinparis)
