Hermeneutical Injustice, Not Gaslighting

Tags

abuse tw, language, neurodivergence, not feminism go away, speshul snowflake trans

I have regularly complained about misuse of the term “gaslighting.” Gaslighting is a form of abuse in which a person you trust manipulates you into distrusting your own perceptions, memories, and judgments.

Unfortunately, the Internet has decided that instead “gaslighting” should be used as a synonym for concepts like “lying” or, in particularly irritating cases, “disagreeing with me.” As someone who was abused by gaslighting, I find this incredibly upsetting.

It is not gaslighting when someone contradicts you, or intentionally causes you to doubt your beliefs, or leaves you uncertain of what you believe, or even makes you think that they think you are crazy. Gaslighting is about someone lying to you in a way that causes you to lose trust in your own capabilities as a rational person: your ability to reason, your competence to figure out the truth, your capacity to remember things in a broadly accurate fashion even if you are sometimes fuzzy on details, your knowledge of your own feelings and thoughts and desires. And if your mind is unreliable… well, you’ll have to rely on someone else.

Gaslighting is already confusing and difficult to identify by its very nature, even when people haven’t decided to make the only word we have to refer to this very important concept mean “lying, but like I’m really upset about it.” If “gaslighting” refers to “lying,” it is difficult for people to name their abuse and recognize that what is happening to them is wrong.

(Honestly, using “gaslighting” to refer to someone disagreeing with you is itself kind of gaslight-y. Might want to check that out.)

Many people who want to misuse the term “gaslighting” should just suck it up and use a phrase like “blatantly lying” instead. However, I think sometimes people are gesturing for a concept that really isn’t covered by words like ‘lying.’ They’re gesturing for something structural, a harm done by society rather than by an individual; they’re gesturing for something oppressive, a dynamic related to their presence in a marginalized group; they’re gesturing for something that causes harm to your ability to reason and come to conclusions and trust your own self-knowledge, similarly to how gaslighting does, even if less severe and not perpetuated by a person.

In the name of not striking terms from others’ vocabulary without suitable replacement, I would like to suggest an alternative: hermeneutical injustice.

Hermeneutical injustice is a term invented by philosopher Miranda Fricker in her book Epistemic Injustice. Hermeneutical injustice is the harm caused to a person when they have an experience, but do not have the concepts or frameworks they need to make sense of what their experience is. For example, a man who falls in love with a man, in a society where homosexuality is conceived of as a disgusting perversion with no true affection or love in it, experiences a hermeneutical injustice. A woman whose boss keeps plausibly-deniably touching her breasts and telling her that she has a great ass, before the invention of the concept of sexual harassment, experiences a hermeneutical injustice. A man forced into sex who has no concept that men can be raped experiences a hermeneutical injustice.

(Of course, not all cases of hermeneutical injustice are related to a social justice topic: trypophobes of the world suffered a minor hermeneutical injustice before we had a cultural understanding that, for some people, that particular pattern of holes is just horrible.)

The primary harm of hermeneutical injustice is, of course, that you can’t express your feelings or experiences. If you don’t have the concept of “transness” or “sexual harassment” or “misophonia,” you are going to sound like an idiot when you try to explain why something hurts you.

You: “That sound is just BAD, okay. It makes me want to KILL SOMEONE. I want to STAB OUT MY EARDRUMS.”
Them: “This is a kind of unreasonable reaction to forks scraping against a plate. Why do you feel that way?”
You: “I don’t KNOW it just SUCKS.”
Them: “Well, are you sure you’re not just exaggerating?”
You: “AARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH.”

Hermeneutical injustice also makes it harder to understand your own experiences. If you don’t have the concept of gender dysphoria, it’s hard to put together your body image issues, your depersonalization, your deep-seated jealousy of women, your desire to wear skirts, and the fact that you never play a male RPG character. Those will all seem like discrete unrelated facts that don’t point to anything.

But the harms of hermeneutical injustice go deeper. There are harms to the individual as a knower: you feel stupid or crazy because you can’t articulate your experiences, and that makes you feel stupid and crazy in general; it is hard to cultivate certain epistemic virtues if you can’t understand yourself and your own mind. And quite often– especially in more serious cases of hermeneutical injustice– there is a harm to your identity. The harm of growing up conceptualizing yourself as a sodomite rather than a gay person; the harm of thinking of yourself as a person who freaks out about normal flirtation instead of a victim of sexual harassment; the harm of having your very sense of self shaped by narratives and concepts that were developed by people who don’t understand people like you at all.

And if you’re harmed by hermeneutical injustice– if the concepts and narratives available don’t describe your experiences, and this makes you feel stupid and crazy and hysterical, and you internalize as descriptions of yourself statements that aren’t true because you don’t have a way of saying the things that are true— well, you might reach for the word “gaslighting” to describe the way it makes you feel. As a way of expressing that this is a very serious harm, that it’s driving you crazy, that your problem is not just lying or disagreement but something more fundamental.

And if you’re in that situation, I hope this essay resolved that piece of hermeneutical injustice, and therefore you can stop perpetuating hermeneutical injustice against me.

Abuse Is Who You Are In The Dark

Tags

abuse tw, ozy blog post

[cw: slurs]

There’s one particular abusiveness pattern I’ve noticed that I think is worth talking about.

In this pattern, a person is, most of the time, not abusive. They understand and respect boundaries; they are not controlling of the behavior of those around them; they are capable of having perfectly healthy relationships. You wouldn’t necessarily get any red flags from them.

And then the worst thing in the world happens.

It’s different, for every person of this sort, what causes them to break. For one person, it might be their spouse seeking a divorce and actually meaning it, or refusing to have sex with them for years and years, or deciding that they do or don’t want to have children. For another, it might be fear of becoming homeless, or their child not wanting to talk to them, or a sexual partner having an abortion, or any number of other things. But the point is that their back is up against the wall, and they’re desperate, and they don’t know what to do, and not getting what they need is unthinkable—

A man’s girlfriend is going to have an abortion, and he’s pro-life; from his perspective, his girlfriend is going to murder his baby. What will he do? Where is the line he draws of “no, that’s not okay, I would rather my baby be murdered than I do that”? Does he promise that he will love her forever if she has the abortion even though he plans to leave her? Does he call her a stupid murdering cunt bitch for even thinking about it? Does he put a GPS tracker on her phone so that he knows if she gets close to an abortion clinic and can stop her? Does he hit her when she says she’s made the appointment? Does he tell her that if she goes through with the abortion he’ll kill her?

I don’t mean to criticize pro-lifers; anyone can find themselves in desperate straits, regardless of political beliefs. Pro-lifers are no different from anyone else. When someone doesn’t know what else to do to prevent the worst thing in the world, much of the time, they will answer “yes” to many more of the questions on that list than you’d expect they would if you observed their normal behavior.

I suspect some number of more pervasively abusive people are, in fact, similarly wired. It’s just that for them ordinary events, such as a partner coming home late or not being in the mood for sex, get processed as existential threats, the way other people would process being about to become homeless.

To be clear, it’s not okay to abuse people, no matter what. It’s wrong to threaten people with murder or to call people stupid murdering cunt bitches or to put GPS trackers on their phone without their consent, and it is almost always wrong to hit people. And there are many, many people in equally desperate situations who found out that, no matter how desperate they are, there are things that they would not do. There are many people who, no matter how desperate they are, will never commit rape or threaten someone or hit someone.

But the list of people who would, if just the right set of things happened, is much longer than you would suppose.

I am not sure how to deal with people who are dangerous but only when they are very very desperate. It seems unfair to punish people for having been once in their life very desperate, when there are other people who would behave similarly but simply have never been in the same situation. And… they’re safe, people like this, most of the time. Our hypothetical pro-lifer would not abuse anyone if they didn’t have an unwanted pregnancy they planned to end in an abortion.

It is important to take care when you declare someone to be safe. I had conversations before the Brent Dill events went public where people said that they felt like Brent was safe as long as he didn’t talk to any conventionally attractive women in their early twenties. Of course, we now know both that Brent was completely unwilling to avoid women in this category, and that he was not safe to people outside that category. But I have met people who are totally safe to be around as long as that one thing doesn’t happen, and I think it is important to acknowledge that this is a thing.

But… you can never be certain that that one thing isn’t going to happen. If you’re having sex with someone, you might have an unwanted pregnancy; people who will abuse you if you want to have an abortion are very dangerous to have sex with if you think you might have an abortion. In some ways, perhaps, people of this sort are more dangerous, because they lull you into a false sense of security, because most of the time it is okay.

Brent Dill Is An Abuser

Tags

abuse tw, brent cw, ozy blog post

Brent Dill (who goes by the handle Ialdabaoth, and in some cases frustrateddemiurge) abused and sexually assaulted two people I know, Persephone and T. You may find their stories, as well as the story of T’s partner Jonathan, here.

I have been friends with T for many years and can vouch for her reliability and the consistency of her story. Many details of both Persephone and T’s stories have been confirmed by people who were present. Documentation, including text message conversations and “slave contracts”, has been shown to trustworthy people.

This is what Brent Dill looks like:

There is at least one other Brent Dill, who lives in Texas, likes basketball, and tweets here. If you are a different Brent Dill who has not abused anyone, I would be happy to include a description or your photo so that you are not mistaken for the abusive Brent Dill. If you are uncertain whether your Brent Dill is the correct Brent Dill, please contact me.

I thought for a long time about whether I should post this. I am hesitant to link someone’s legal name and photo to their online accounts; I am aware this may cause him to lose jobs, which in our society may mean hunger or homelessness. However, the rationalist community is not the first community where Brent has abused people. He has shown no sign that he will refrain from abusing in the future. I think that informing future victims is more important, at this point, than protecting Brent’s reputation and employability.

Further, Brent Dill’s Google results already include a discussion of his abusiveness. Unfortunately, the discussion is of a sort that, I’m afraid, Brent could easily twist to support his own narrative of persecution. I hope that a factual description of his actions is harder for him to spin as an attack. I also worry about splash damage onto innocent Brent Dills, which I tried to minimize by including a photo of the non-innocent Brent Dill and a description of the innocent Brent Dill I know about. The other discussion also (through no fault of its own) includes no contact person for people who are concerned about Brent’s presence in their community.

If Brent Dill is part of your community, or if you or a friend are dating or considering dating him, please email me at ozyfrantz@gmail.com. I can provide corroboration for T and Persephone’s stories that is not available publicly and talk with you about next steps. If you know about a publicly available story of Brent abusing someone or other reliable information about his abusiveness, please post it in the comments here, email me, or email Mittens Cautious, so that future people can make informed decisions.

Whisper Networks, Callout Posts, and Expulsion: Three Imperfect Ways of Dealing With Abuse

Tags

abuse tw, but ozy where's the part of the post with solutions?, fucked if I know, ozy blog post, rape tw

[Commenting Note: This post is absolutely not a place to host discussion of certain recent events in the rationalist community. Comments referring to those events will be deleted and the commenter banned.]

Let’s say you have a community. Like most communities, it has harassers and abusive people in it. For whatever reason (the actions don’t rise to the status of ‘crime,’ the victims would prefer not to bring the police into it, or your community is leery of the police), you can’t go to the police. What do you do about the problem?

There are three primary ways I’ve seen people I know respond to the problem, and all of them– while suited for some problems– are imperfect.

Whisper Networks

A whisper network is when someone pulls you aside and says “hey, watch out for Alice– she’s a rapist.” When you see Alice flirting with someone new, you pull them aside and warn them.

There are three big problems with whisper networks.

First, whisper networks are often inaccurate. Sometimes people make false accusations, for various reasons, including most tragically an abuser accusing the person they’re abusing of abuse. Sometimes the accusation itself is not false, but gets changed or exaggerated as people gossip: I myself have seen an accusation of harassment transform into an accusation of rape. Sometimes people hear “so-and-so is a harasser” from three or four different people and conclude that they’re a serial harasser, when in reality the person fucked up one time while they’re drunk. Neither the accused nor people who might have witnessed the event have the chance to give their own perspective on events.

It’s not just inaccurate in the “false accusations” direction, either: whisper networks can make it really fucking hard to put together a pattern. Many people won’t bring up an interaction that made them feel somewhat uncomfortable but isn’t a big deal, unless they know it happened to a dozen other people. Sometimes there are four or five events, each individually somewhat minor, that together add up to a pattern of serial harassment– but no one knows about all five of the events.

Second, whisper networks never get to everyone. New people, relatively marginal members of the community, and people who are widely disliked will almost never hear the accusations. These people are likely to be some of the most vulnerable to abusers and harassers. Whisper networks might protect the well-connected, but they do so at the expense of those who are less well-connected.

Third, whisper networks have a major missing stair problem. Even if you manage to warn everyone to stay away from Alice, the result is that Alice continues to be part of your group and you have to put constant effort into making sure that everyone is aware of Alice’s bad behavior. Eventually you’re going to think someone else told the new person, eventually someone’s going to not believe you and decide to give her a chance, eventually someone is going to forget to assign her her Rape Babysitter…

And then someone gets raped.

Callouts

A callout is when someone publicly posts– perhaps on social media or a blog that many members of your community read– a list of all the misdeeds a person commits.

Callouts get a bad rap. Partially, this is because a lot of callouts are about genuinely trivial issues, and many callouts that aren’t about trivial issues pad themselves out with a bunch of trivial issues. (“Alice not only commits rape, she’s also an aphobe!”)

But there are also lots of problems even with callouts about genuinely serious issues.

A callout is inherently public. That’s its advantage over the whisper network: new and marginal people can see the callout and the accused can write up a defense. But that also creates a whole host of new problems.

It is really, really unpleasant to be a victim making a public callout. You have to think about an experience that might be painful or traumatizing. People will be passing judgment on your reliability. Sometimes people will send you hate, or dig through your past to find reasons you’re a Bad Victim, or deny your pain and trauma. You can lose friendships. For sufficiently public callouts, it may show up on Google for your name, and you can find yourself explaining the situation to future employers. (You can use a pseudonym sometimes, of course, but then you have to worry about being doxxed.)

Because the experience is so unpleasant for the victim, many victims refuse to participate in public callouts. It’s generally considered unethical to share private information against someone’s will, particularly if it causes them misery. If you anonymize the accusations to protect the victim, they’re less credible. If you just say “I’ve investigated it and Alice is a rapist,” it’s less credible still.

If the accusation is false, it can be really hard to retract the accusation.

If the accusation is true, it may follow the perpetrator for the rest of their lives. That might be a desirable outcome for some misdeeds, like rape or abuse. But if you harassed someone when you were eighteen, and it was ten years ago, and you’ve changed and haven’t harassed anyone since, the callout might still be in the first page of Google results for your name. (Some victims, aware of this, will refuse to participate in callout posts because they don’t think it’s fair to punish someone forever for harassing them; then you get the problems I discussed with public callouts.)

Some communities, such as the kink community and the feminist community, have counter-communities of unpleasant people who hate them. Members of these communities can access public callout posts and use them to smear the entire community. In addition to being unpleasant, this makes victims less likely to want to participate. Similarly, the callout post may be a subject for voyeuristic gossip on the part of uninvolved people, which the people involved may find very unpleasant.

Expulsion

Expulsion is simple. You investigate the claim. In some cases, you might have a designated point person whose job is to investigate claims of rape, abuse, and harassment; in other cases, this might be part of the job of the moderator, store owner, party host, or other person who gets to decide who’s allowed in a particular space. If the person in charge finds that the charge is validated, that person is no longer allowed in the space.

Assuming the person doing the investigating is honest, capable, and willing to expel harassers and abusers, expulsion is absolutely the best method of dealing with harassment, rape, and abuse accusations. It protects future victims and allows past victims to participate fully in the community.

However, it only works for relatively centralized communities. If you’re no longer allowed in a game store, a church, an online forum, or a club, you can be successfully expelled from the community built around that game store, church, online forum, or club. On the other hand, some communities are relatively decentralized: they’re extended groups of friends, and the community spans dozens of meetups, parties, events, knitting circles, and book clubs.

There’s a word for communities where the leaders can say “no one talk to this person anymore” and that immediately causes everyone to stop inviting them to every meetup, party, event, knitting circle, and book club. That word is “cult.”

In non-cultish communities, sometimes a person is going to decide that Alice is her friend, she believes Alice and not some silly community leader, and Alice is absolutely going to come to every one of her parties. That’s actually good: it’s an important protective factor against Alice being expelled from the community because she brings up uncomfortable truths or says things popular people disagree with or defends abused people. But it means that expulsion is inherently limited as a tool to protect against abusers, harassers, and rapists.

Language Policing: Gaslighting

Tags

abuse tw, american politics is the best reality show, language

I recently saw someone characterize Mike Pence lying about what Trump said as an attempt at a “mass public gaslighting,” which I think is the final lump of dirt thrown into the grave of the good and useful word ‘gaslighting’, which used to describe a specific form of abuse and is now apparently a synonym for “lying” or “disagreeing”.

First of all, gaslighting is about observable, physical facts. Here is an example of things that could be gaslighting: “no, I never hit you”; “we didn’t go to that restaurant yesterday”; “you think that painting is blue? no, it is definitely purple”; “don’t be ridiculous, you never went to Yale, you went to Harvard”; “that table has always been there”; “two plus two is five”. Here is an example of things that are not gaslighting: “white privilege doesn’t exist”; “as a man, you can’t experience sexism”; “the minimum wage increases unemployment”; “I think that argument was your fault”; “you are lazy and entitled.” You can’t take a video of laziness and entitlement or of white privilege; these are abstractions used to explain a particular situation. You can, however, take a video of someone hitting someone else; those are observable facts.

To pick another example: if someone says “you’re a man, therefore your experience of being forced into sex while you said ‘no’ isn’t rape”, they’re not gaslighting, they’re just being an awful rape apologist fuckwit. If someone who was not present says “you didn’t say ‘no'”, they may be mistaken (perhaps they believe the rapist). If someone says “I was there while you were being raped and you didn’t say ‘no'”, they are gaslighting.

Second, gaslighting is a pattern. If you think that the painting is blue and I think it is purple, there are lots of possible explanations. Maybe it’s a weird color that’s kind of blue and kind of purple depending on the light. Maybe one of us is colorblind. If I think that we went to the restaurant on Tuesday and you think that we went to the restaurant on Wednesday, probably one of us has a shitty memory. Now, if every time I think that something is blue you think it is purple and every time we go to a restaurant we disagree about when it is, we might have an issue.

Not only is gaslighting repeated, but it also doesn’t involve an alternate explanation. If I’m colorblind, you and I may disagree a lot about what color the painting is, but this also isn’t gaslighting, because I know perfectly well why we disagree. It’s because I’m colorblind. If we both have terrible memories, we will probably go “eh, who knows when we went to the restaurant.” It is only when the conversation repeatedly descends to “you are insane and incapable of determining when you went to the place” that it is gaslighting.

I don’t want to go hardcore “all gaslighting is intentional,” because that sounds like I’m saying “all gaslighting is a deliberate attempt to make someone think they’re crazy.” While that does happen, sometimes gaslighting is “I don’t want to take responsibility for my actions so I will deny them in face of all evidence” or “I am in total denial of my shit memory and therefore assume that it must all be your fault.” But it is nonetheless true that gaslighting is not really a thing reasonable people do.

Third, gaslighting is taking advantage of a position of trust. For instance, you might trust your parents, your friends, and your partners. If some random stranger comes up to you and whacks you in the face and then says “I didn’t hit you, you imagined that”, your thought process is probably going to be something like “crazy fucker, I should call the cops.” If your parent comes up to you and whacks you in the face and then two days later when you confront them about it they say “I didn’t hit you, you imagined that”, your thought process is probably going to be something like “wait, did I imagine that? Was that a dream or something? I couldn’t have been making it up… I remember it! Maybe it was a hallucination? What’s going on?” Repeated over a long enough period of time, it can cause you to doubt your perceptions of reality.

(This, incidentally, is why gaslighting is much more dangerous for crazy people than for sane people. Many crazy people rely on their friends, family, partners, and caregivers for reality checking on everything from “does everyone secretly hate me?” to “is there an enormous monster in the corner of the room?” If someone is in a position of that much trust, they can abuse their power, and since the crazy person’s perceptions are much more unreliable, it’s that much harder to catch.)

This is why Mike Pence is not gaslighting anyone. He is a politician. Most people above the age of six do not rely on politicians to be accurate reporters of empirical facts. Indeed, many people expect them to lie as much as they can get away with. If a politician telling a lie causes you to distrust your perceptions of reality, that is probably more about you than about the politician.

Thoughts On Cults

Tags

abuse tw, ozy blog post, there is no justice and there is no judge

[content warning: descriptions of spiritual abuse]

I prefer the phrase “spiritual abuse” to the word “cult” for several reasons.

First, spiritual abuse is less discrete. Either a religion is a cult or it is not; however, the same religion may be spiritually abusive to some people in some contexts while not spiritually abusive to other people in different contexts. For instance, some Alcoholics Anonymous groups isolate their members, tell them not to take psychiatric medication, and pressure them into sex; however, a lot of people find AA an invaluable resource in getting sober. The Catholic hierarchy covered up pedophilia, and a lot of people are faithful Catholics whose lives have been tremendously improved by the church.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s okay to go “well, we’re not literally one hundred percent always spiritually abusive, so there’s no problem here!” Part of one’s religious or spiritual organization being spiritually abusive ought to be an enormous wake-up call to examine what led to the spiritual abuse and how it can be prevented in the future. But I also think that you can say “wow, spiritually abusive AA groups are horrifying, I wonder how we can prevent thirteenth-stepping in our groups” while also saying “my AA group is great”. You can’t say “wow, AA is a horrifying cult” and also say “my AA group is not a horrifying cult.” It does not work that way.

Second, “cult” tends to be applied disproportionately to new religious movements.

Now, there is a good reason to be suspicious of new religious movements. The Catholic Church has been around for a long time and although it has caused quite a bit of harm it is also a known quantity. We know the circumstances in which the Catholic Church directly causes mass murder and have secularism laws in place to prevent this. A new religious movement might unexpectedly lead to mass murder in a way we don’t have laws to prevent.

On the other hand, it is not exactly like the Catholic Church has never been spiritually abusive, between the coverup of the sexual abuse of children, the Magdalene Laundries, churches in which women are pressured into having far more children than they can handle to prove they don’t have a contraceptive mentality, traditional Catholics who teach that it is a sin to refuse sex, and relationships in which Catholic teaching on Hell and sin is used as a tool of abuse. Even if mainstream religions are less likely to be abusive than new religious movements, spiritual abuse in the former affects more people than the latter– after all, they’re bigger! I think “cult” gives a mistaken idea that old religions that aren’t New Agey are safe from spiritual abuse, when in reality every religion has been touched by spiritual abuse.

(I suspect this is historical– “cult” originated from the Christian countercult movement which conflated spiritual abuse and heresy, while “spiritual abuse” originated from survivors of fundamentalist Protestant spiritual abuse. Naturally, the latter is more willing to admit that mainstream religions can be spiritually abusive.)

Third, “cult” is a word which a lot of times gets used against harmless weirdos.

I actually find the broad use of the term ‘cult’ wildly offensive. Like, you do realize that people get PTSD from spiritual abuse, right? “Cult” is not a cool shiny term to use about every group you don’t like. Here are some things that are not, in and of themselves, spiritually abusive:

• Normal groupthink and ingroupy behavior.
• Donating money that you can afford to spend to charities other people in the group approve of.
• Weird but consensual sexual behavior.
• Fervently holding beliefs that outsiders think are weird.
• Having rituals.
• Having group houses.

Here is a list of things that are actually spiritually abusive:

• Isolating people from friends and family who aren’t members of the group.
• Requiring people to make financially unsustainable donations to be part of the group that go solely to finance the group leader’s lavish lifestyle.
• Coercing people into sexual behavior they don’t consent to.
• Not letting people disagree with the orthodoxy.
• Encouraging people to think of themselves as evil, wrong, or shameful.
• Physical assault.

The difference between these two lists is whether it causes harm. A person who thinks they were abducted by aliens who gave them a message of peace and love to share with the Earth: weird but harmless to themselves and others. A person who spends hours screaming insults at people who like the peace and love message but are skeptical of the aliens thing: very damaging to other people! Like, honestly, if you can’t see the difference between “lots of people in this group live in housing situations which are kind of like cult compounds if you squint” and “people who disobey in this group are physically assaulted,” I am kind of worried about you.

A lot of people who sling around the word ‘cult’ have a missing mood. You’d think they’d feel sad that people have been deceived into an ideology that hurts them; after all, the primary people that any spiritually abusive situation hurts are, you know, the people being spiritually abused. Instead, a lot of people’s response is something like this: “Ha ha! I think you’re a victim of psychological and possibly physical abuse! I have so much contempt for you! I’m going to laugh at you for being terrible now!” I am not sure whether these people enjoy laughing at and blaming victims of abuse, or they know perfectly well that the people they’re talking to aren’t spiritual abuse victims but they enjoy making light of the experiences of actual victims in order to insult people they don’t like. Neither one speaks very well of their moral character.

Dysfunctional vs. Abusive

Tags

abuse tw, ozy blog post, sex positivity

Not all relationships that are life-sucking, soul-crushing, spirit-draining pits of misery are abusive.

By “abusive”, I mean that one person in the relationship is attempting to maintain nonconsensual dominance and control over the other, taking away their autonomy. They may do this through physical violence, through making the person think they’re insane, through breaking down the person’s self-esteem, or through innumerable other tactics. In an abusive relationship, there is a single bad actor.

But it is totally possible to have a relationship that makes you utterly miserable and isn’t abusive. In fact, anecdotally, it seems like about half of utterly miserable relationships aren’t abusive.

It’s possible that the soul-crushing misery comes from a fundamental incompatibility. For instance, Alice is extremely introverted, which means she only wants fifteen minutes of interaction with Bob a day, of which preferably ten would be silent; Bob, on the other hand, is extremely introverted, which means he wants to spend all his free time with Alice and talk to her for at least a half hour a day, because she’s his only serious emotional relationship. Alice and Bob both have pretty extreme preferences, but if they were both dating the same kind of introvert, they wouldn’t have a problem. If they date each other, Bob will feel tremendously lonely and like Alice doesn’t really care about him (if she did, why wouldn’t she want to spend time with him?), while Alice will feel resentful of Bob because she feels like he doesn’t want her to relax or spend time on her hobbies.

On the other hand, the soul-crushing misery may result from both people lacking particular relationship skills. For instance, Alice responds to stress by breaking into tears, Bob responds to stress by getting short-tempered, Alice responds to other people’s short tempers by crying, and Bob responds to other people’s crying by getting irritated. Any routine life problem (the sink breaks, they get stuck in traffic, one of them forgets an appointment) becomes a huge drama in which Bob slams doors and Alice sobs herself to sleep. Again, either of them could be in a functional relationship– if Alice dated someone calm and easygoing who didn’t mind comforting her, or Bob dated someone with a thick skin and a sense of humor that defused his irritation. Lacking particular conflict-resolution skills does not mean all your relationships are doomed.

Sometimes people can just trigger other people’s mental health issues. Bob– through no fault of his own– has traits that make Alice feel really insecure: maybe he has a PhD and she dropped out of high school. Alice has never been particularly great about dealing with her insecurity: she tends to repress it, then project it at Bob, accusing him of continually laughing at her ignorance and thinking that she’s stupid. Bob feels confused and upset, because he intended to do no such thing. While dealing with triggers in a controlled environment can help, being constantly triggered by one’s husband’s innocuous decision to read Anna Karenina for fun in a place that is supposed to be a safe refuge is not great– and Bob himself can wind up feeling ashamed of his education and like he is being continually attacked for no reason.

(Of course, there’s no law that says that a miserable relationship has to have only one horribly dysfunctional dynamic, and in my experience it’s quite common for them to have several.)

One of the worst parts about miserable relationships is that they’re self-perpetuating. You feel defensive every time your partner talks, bracing yourself for the fight; every time they mention a movie or a story they saw on the news, you start preparing your defense of how it never happened, it wasn’t your fault, and it wasn’t that bad anyway. You develop an increasingly long list of Subjects That Must Not Be Talked About; eventually, you’re left with nothing but “please pass the salt” and “nice weather we’re having these days”. You dread date night and start taking steps to avoid having to spend time with your partner. It becomes hard to remember what you saw in them in the first place. Even if the underlying problem is fixed– if Alice goes to therapy and learns better coping mechanisms for stress and insecurity, and Bob takes an anger-management class and gets other friends so he isn’t relying as heavily on Alice– the patterns can keep going, poisoning the relationship.

Why do people stay in miserable relationships? They might feel like they’ve made a commitment to stick with the relationship through better or worse; they might have nowhere else to go, particularly if they’re disabled or a stay-at-home parent (or their partner is!). Many times, they genuinely love their partner: they recognize that their partner is a good person who is trying their best, even when the relationship is making them miserable. They feel like they might be able to make it work: they might think, all I have to do is learn to keep my temper and stop feeling so insecure and the relationship will be fine. Maybe they’ll even think of it as an opportunity for personal growth.

The distinction between ‘abusive’ and ‘non-abusive but still miserable as hell’ is not particularly useful when you’re assessing whether you should leave a relationship that’s a life-sucking soul-crushing spirit-draining pit of misery. (Yes.) But I do think it’s useful for afterward.

It can feel really alienating for people who’ve gotten out of miserable relationships. A lot of times, people wind up thinking like there are two kinds of breakups: either the relationship was abusive, or the breakup was totally amicable and you’re still friends and you talk all the time and you’re totally up for a conversation about how much everyone loves your ex-boyfriend’s band and isn’t he the most brilliant musician of all time. People can feel a kind of pressure to identify the relationship as emotionally abusive, even when it wasn’t, just to get some validation of how much it fucked them up. But if you recognize that your partner is a good yet flawed person, and that you both played a role in how bad the relationship was, there’s not a whole lot of space for you.

Abusive and non-abusive relationships should be treated differently in a lot of ways. In general, abusive people continue to be abusive; however, I have often seen people in dysfunctional relationships have healthy relationships with other people that they’re less incompatible with. The appropriate ways to respond to these relationships are different. It’s fair to warn someone that they’re about to date an abuser; it’s not really fair to tell someone that they’re about to date someone who cries all the time. That’s an invasion of privacy that isn’t outweighed by the value of the information.

But in some ways they’re similar. You can have emotional issues about a relationship that wasn’t abusive! It is possible for dating someone to really, really fuck you up– without that person having necessarily done anything wrong! You can have trouble setting boundaries, distrust your future partners, or feel like you have nothing to offer anyone, even though the relationship wasn’t abusive. It happens! And while obviously certain things should be reserved for survivors of abusive relationships, such as domestic violence shelters, compassion, support, and validation should be available to everyone.

On Supporting Borderlines

Tags

abuse tw, mental illness, ozy blog post

[content warning for discussion of abuse, self-injury and suicidality]

There is a problem with advice for the loved ones of people with borderline personality disorder.

If you google, you’ll find websites like BPD Family and Out of the FOG. On Reddit, there’s bpdlovedones; on Amazon, one finds books like Stop Walking on Eggshells.

The problem is this: imagine describing the behavior of someone with borderline personality disorder from the perspective of her partner. You might come up with a description like this:

My partner has absurdly huge negative reactions to relatively small triggers. Sometimes it feels like I can’t do anything right; whatever I do, she gets upset. Sometimes she even threatens to kill herself! She’s tremendously afraid that I will leave her, and sometimes that makes her want to kill herself. Half the time she puts me on a pedestal and acts like I don’t have any flaws, while at other times she seems to despise me. When my partner fucks up, she apologizes so much– and, of course, wants to kill herself– that I feel guilty for criticizing her. She has these fits of negative emotions where she seems completely out of control. When it’s good, it’s really really good– she’s tremendously sweet and loving, the most romantic person I’ve ever dated, and great in bed– but I’m not sure if I can put up with the bad times anymore.

You know what that’s also a description of?

An abusive relationship.

Of course, most borderlines are not abusive. But the things that make a relationship not abusive… well, we sort of take them for granted. They’re part of the minimum basic expectation for any relationship. And so you don’t mention “my partner was legitimately horrified when she found out that apologizing so much made me not want to say when something’s bothering me, and while she still apologizes waaaaaay too much I can tell she’s trying”. Or “my partner cares about my feelings and preferences; even when she’s having a bad day, she wants me to be happy”. Or “while disagreeing with my partner involves a lot of giant meltdowns, and that’s a pain in the ass, eventually we come to a compromise that satisfies both of us”. Or “my partner encourages and reassures me when I’m upset.” Or “my partner understands that I have boundaries and would never invade my privacy.”

And so when someone who has an abusive partner reads those descriptions, quite naturally, they conclude their partner has borderline personality disorder. And this is particularly true for people who are being abused by a woman, because the majority of borderlines are female, and our culture still has no concept that a woman can be abusive.

However, a borderline and an abuser are two completely different things. As Lundy Bancroft writes in Why Does He Do That?:

Yet the great majority of my clients over the years have been psychologically “normal.” Their minds work logically; they understand cause and effect; they don’t hallucinate. Their perceptions of most life circumstances are reasonably accurate. They get good reports at work; they do well in school or training programs; and no one other than their partners—and children—thinks that there is anything wrong with them. Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.

A borderline may have mood swings, or psychotic episodes, or dissociation issues. A borderline may have truly awful relationship skills: I know I’ve more than once attempted the Telepathy Method of setting boundaries. A borderline may be seen as manipulative: for instance, if she gets so distressed that she cuts, and her partner presumes that this is an attempt on her part to manipulate them into preventing her distress. A borderline may even be manipulative: if the only way a borderline knows to ask for attention is to cut, of course she’s going to cut.

But there is a step you do not cross unless you also have fucked-up values: unless you believe, in your heart of hearts, that you are entitled to certain things, that you deserve to be able to control your partner, that it’s okay to disrespect your partner, that abuse is a good way of expressing love. You might have overwhelming emotions, but you don’t decide that it’s your partner’s job to handle your emotions and keep you from ever feeling bad unless you have a fucked-up value system. You might have poor relationship skills, but that doesn’t mean you have contempt for your partner, that you think of them like they’re dirt. There is an important difference between someone who cuts because they don’t know how else to tell people they’re upset and who wishes they had some other strategy but who doesn’t, and someone who cuts because they’ve figured out it’s a great way to keep their partner from ever sticking a toe out of line.

(This is not to say, of course, that abusive borderlines do not exist. Of course they do.)

I think conflating the two is terrible for abuse survivors, for borderlines, and for the partners of nonabusive borderlines.

The harm it causes to abuse survivors is obvious. Most people feel pretty bad about leaving a partner who’s mentally ill; it feels like abandoning her, like not being supportive. They might also be optimistic about their partner getting better. The rate of recovery for people with borderline personality disorder is quite good: about fifty percent of borderlines recover within ten years, and the rate is higher for people who are in DBT. Unfortunately, while DBT is very good at helping people regulate their emotions, it’s absolute shit at getting people to fix their value systems. If you put an abusive borderline through DBT, you wind up with someone who can tolerate distress, regulate their emotions, and stay mindful– and still believes that she is entitled to you preventing her from ever feeling upset.

A lot of websites provide advice about how to deal with people with borderline personality disorder. Providing advice for dealing with abusive partners is good– not everyone is ready to leave their abusive partners, and harm reduction is important. But by presenting this advice as a cureall, survivors may believe that if they just validate their partner’s emotions enough, if they just set the right boundaries, if they just do everything right, their partner will stop being abusive. And that’s simply not how it works.

The partners of nonabusive borderlines are also harmed. Many people are interested in learning how to better support their partner with borderline personality disorder. However, all of the advice for dealing with people with borderline personality disorder is this cockamamie combination of advice for supporting a borderline and advice for coping with an abuser. In a shocking turn of events, these aren’t actually the same problem, and the same advice doesn’t work for both– meaning that partners of borderlines are left figuring out what works by trial and error.

Furthermore, a lot of the advice aimed at partners of people with borderline personality disorder begins and ends with “leave”. Partners are warned of the dire fate that will happen if they stay with their borderline: physical violence, false accusations of abuse, gaslighting, and on and on.

I want to be clear. Dating a person with borderline personality disorder is not for everyone. In fact, it probably isn’t for most people. The most essential skill for having a healthy relationship with a borderline is the ability to say “I understand that me going to a party tonight makes you want to kill yourself; however, I’m still going to the party, because I want to and it would make me happy.” If you can’t do that, your relationship with a borderline is going to be short and miserable. It is totally okay to decide that you, personally, do not want to date borderlines.

However, some people are okay with that. Some people can feel compassion for their partner’s pain while simultaneously caring about their own needs; some people don’t mind endlessly reassuring their partner “yes, I do still love you”; some people love their borderline partner very much and are willing to do whatever it takes to keep them. And that’s okay.

Finally, this situation is pretty shit for borderlines. First, because no one likes having a bunch of websites devoted to how they are totally awful and all their relationships are abusive. The participants in such websites often conclude that borderlines who get upset are “having rages” and “splitting”, despite the obvious fact that most people get insulted when you say they are inherently abusive. And I worry about the effects such websites have on people I disclose my disorder to– will people conclude that I’m an abuser?

The “just leave!” advice is pretty bad for borderlines as well. If you advise everyone in a close relationship with a borderline to leave, you’re essentially saying that people should not have close relationships with borderlines– which means that you’re saying we should not have a basic human need fulfilled. Humans need socialization, intimacy, and love. There’s a reason solitary confinement is literally torture.

This is different from “leave an abusive relationship!” If you’re in an abusive relationship, you’re being hurt, by definition. If you’re in a relationship with a borderline, you may or may not be hurt. Abusers are capable of being perfectly pleasant to people they don’t feel like they own; borderlines are borderline at everyone. If everyone left abusive relationships, abusers would never date and probably sulk on incel forums a lot; if everyone refused to befriend borderlines, we would be alone for the rest of our lives.

And yet most of the people who give this advice don’t want us to be dead– they often add “be sure to call the hospital if they’re suicidal!” Ought we to struggle through recovery with no support besides our therapists (if, that is, we can afford one– borderlines have sky-high unemployment rates)? You know what the odds are against figuring out how to cope with your mental disorder without any intimate relationships? It’s a setup for disaster.

I suppose in theory borderlines could just be friends with other borderlines– but that kind of screws us over too. While of course borderline/borderline relationships can be healthy, in my experience relationships for borderlines work best with someone calm and low-neuroticism, so you don’t wind up triggering each other or trapped in the delightful “when I’m avoidant you’re anxious, when you’re anxious I’m avoidant” struggle.

And then you add in that most borderlines are not abusive. We do not hit, we do not rape, we do not gaslight, we do not isolate our partners from their friends, we do not threaten. Dating us is stressful, certainly. But if someone decides they want to shoulder the burden of that stress– of their own free will, without anyone pressuring or manipulating them– that’s okay.

In conclusion: abusiveness and borderline personality disorder are two different things. While borderlines are more likely to abuse (and to be abused, something that is always lost in this sort of conversation), most borderlines are not abusive and most abusers are not borderline. And while people have a right to refuse to date people for any reason or no reason– and borderline personality disorder is a particularly good reason– the idea that no one should be in a relationship with borderlines is wrong and evil.

BDSM Questions, Answered

Tags

abuse tw, disability, mental illness, ozy blog post, rape tw, sex positivity

[Commenting Note: I am trying to be as charitable as possible to radical feminists in this blog post and I would greatly appreciate it if my audience would do the same]
[Content warning: extensive discussion of sex, BDSM, abuse dynamics, and sexual violence; brief, approving discussion of self-harm]

I recently read an article by a radical feminist asking five questions about BDSM she had never heard satisfactorily answered. And, you know, how else does one respond to a temptation like that?

1. How would you teach women that they are owed bodily integrity, freedom from violence, and mutually pleasurable activities if they are also taught that it’s normal for sex to be degrading, painful, and non-mutual?

I want to turn this around into another question: how would you teach women that they are owed bodily autonomy, freedom from domination, and activities they find pleasurable, if they are also taught that those rights only extend to activities no one finds sufficiently gross or incomprehensible?

My thoughts here are closely tied to neurodiversity activism. One concept arising from the intellectually and developmentally disabled people’s rights movement is dignity of risk. Even today, a lot of people decide that intellectually and developmentally disabled people should be protected– other people should make their decisions for them, because what if they make the wrong decisions? But if you’re not allowed to make bad choices, you’re not actually allowed to make choices. Actual autonomy involves the ability to take risks, to decide what costs you’ll accept for what benefits, to make decisions your guardians or peers disapprove of, to make mistakes, to fail, to fuck up. Otherwise it’s meaningless.

The policing of nondisabled women in our society is, of course, not nearly as bad as the policing of disabled women. But I still think a lot of sexism takes the form of “don’t worry your head about that, little lady. Just let someone else think about it for you. We’ve already decided what’s good for you.” So I think we should, at the very least, default to the position that, when a person’s choice is not directly hurting other people, you don’t have to like what they choose, you don’t have to understand it, you don’t have to want it for yourself, but they are making understandable choices given their own life circumstances, and you shouldn’t limit their choices without a damn good reason.

“Hey, wait!” you might say. “I have a damn good reason! Those women are hurting themselves!” The Icarus Project, in their excellent workbook on self-harm, gives examples of things that could reasonably be thought of as self-harm: running a marathon; not exercising; getting tattoos; working when you’re sick; skydiving; even undergoing psychoanalysis. The point, of course, is that it’s pretty hard to draw a hard line between the intentional infliction of damage on one’s body that we accept and even approve of, and the intentional infliction of damage on one’s body that we pathologize. Therefore, the line shouldn’t be drawn around acts, but around the relationship people have to particular acts. If someone wants to not work while they’re sick but has panic attacks whenever they try to stop, or it’s making them unhappy or making it harder for them to reach their goals or harming their relationships, then they have a problem. If someone cuts, and it calms them down and is a useful tool in their emotion-management toolkit and generally improves their life, and they’re taking appropriate safety precautions, then they’re fine. The best thing is to provide nonjudgmental, harm-reduction information that allows individuals to make the best decisions for themselves.

The same thing applies to BDSM. If someone wants to stop having kinky sex but feels compelled to do it anyway, or it makes them feel like shit, or it harms their ability to reach their other goals, then we have a problem. If someone is having kinky sex and it makes them feel happy and at peace, or more connected with their partners, or even just gives them some good orgasms and no other consequences– there isn’t a problem. It doesn’t matter what the act is. It matters what the individual’s relationship to the act is.

2. How do you expect to prosecute and prevent domestic violence when you promote controlling relationships, sexualized abuse, and psychological and physical abuse as part of “healthy” relationships?

The Conflict Tactics Scale is a commonly used method of measuring interpersonal violence. It typically finds that men and women are equally likely to abuse each other, and that a substantial number of relationships are “mutually abusive”.

Why? Because the Conflict Tactics Scale looks at individual acts of violence. If a man hits his partner because she burned the dinner, and she hits him back in an attempt to get him to stop, the Conflict Tactics Scale will record it as each partner having hit each other once, and therefore both the man and the woman are abusive and the relationship is mutually abusive.

The context of the relationship is not a minor detail. It is not something you can handwave past. It is not something you can leave out for simplicity. It is literally the entire difference between an abusive relationship and a nonabusive relationship. Abuse is not a particular set of behaviors. You don’t get two abuse points for name-calling and five for gaslighting and ten for shoving and if you get more than twenty-five the relationship is abusive. Abuse is, at its core, the act of maintaining power, control, and domination over your partner; hitting is just a popular strategy for doing so. If no one is trying to maintain power, control, and domination over anyone else, it ain’t abuse.

Now, this does get into the thorny issue of 24/7 relationships. As it happens, I tend to get decision-fatigued very easily. Therefore, I sometimes ask my partner to order for me at restaurants, or decide what task on my to-do list I’m going to do. I feel like this is fine. If I said “partner, I am going to be decision-fatigued for the next while, so just order for me at restaurants until I say for you to stop”, I think that would also be fine. It seems implausible to me that this setup would suddenly become unethical if I added collars or boners.

The important difference here is between my partner taking power and control and me giving power and control. In a healthy 24/7 relationship, the submissive is deciding, of their own free will, to do what their dominant wants; if they decide that they don’t want to do that anymore, then they can just stop. If you could stop abusive relationships by going “nah, I don’t want to be abused anymore”, there would be a lot less need for domestic violence shelters.

Look, I agree with you that consent is not enough. Consent is the bare minimum standard. “Enough” is that the sex contributes to the happiness and flourishing of everyone involved. But I don’t think you can strip a particular act from the entire context of the relationship and the people involved and be like “that! That is clearly harmful to the people involved!” People are more complicated than that.

3. How would you teach men to respect women and want to engage in mutually pleasurable activities if they are also taught that it is sexy to hurt, dominate, and coerce women?

Well, uh, to begin with, I don’t support teaching men that it’s sexy to hurt, dominate, and coerce women. I think one of the great things about the Internet is how polymorphously perverse it’s allowed human sexuality to be. I want there to be balloon fetishists and dragons fucking cars and knotting and Comstock Films and dendrophiles and transformation fetish and inflation and wetlook and feederism and giantesses and 200,000 word fanfics where they don’t fuck until word 180,000 and the Hydra Trash Party. The faster we get out of this vanilla/BDSM binary where the only alternative to cunnilingus and cuddles is bondage and flogging, the better, I say.

But even in that polymorphously perverse world some people are going to be enjoying the Hydra Trash Party, and therefore some men will get off on the idea of hurting, dominating, and coercing Sebastian Stan their sexual partners. However, in my experience, this is not related to actual abuse.

People in the BDSM community are probably at higher risk of experiencing sexual violence, although it’s confusing. However, the BDSM community also has a lot of casual sex. In a monogamous community, Jane Rapist will get married and rape her wife; in a casual-sex-heavy community, Jane Rapist will rape three, or four, or a dozen sexual partners– greatly pushing up the percent of people who have survived rape. In addition, the plausible deniability offered by such communities makes them extremely attractive to rapists. Does the BDSM community have a higher rate of rape than, say, the vanilla bar scene? I don’t know. But I suspect the answer is “no.”

To be honest, this is a hard question for me to answer, because of how absurdly distant it is from my own experience. The sex partner I’ve had who fantasized about the most objectively horrifying things is also someone I’ll be forever grateful to, because they were the first person to notice that I had a hard time setting sexual boundaries and deliberately teach me how to say “no” to things I didn’t want. My current primary is pretty fucking kinky, and also tremendously understanding about and patient with my disabilities in a way I’d never expected a neurotypical to be. Conversely, the partners I’ve had who most blatantly disrespected my preferences, limits, and boundaries all fantasized about sweet, loving sex with attractive women. I admit I am only one person, and this is only anecdote, but you understand why this question is much less satisfying than the others. I have no experience to draw on.

4. How do you expect to teach men about affirmative consent when BDSM practices themselves do not embody affirmative consent — including situations where consent is physically impossible?

I want to emphasize that we’re on the same side here. I agree that the BDSM community all too often fails to embody affirmative consent, and I agree that we should work on fixing that. In fact, the author’s very own FAQ quotes from an extended series of essays by a kinkster about preventing rape in the kink community.

If we applied the same standards to non-BDSM sex that this question applies to BDSM, we are all going to be celibate for the rest of time. The vast majority of rapes are not BDSM-related. The vast majority of rapes are oral sex, manual sex, anal sex, and PIV, because of the simple fact that most sex is oral sex, manual sex, anal sex, and PIV. Forced electricity play is essentially a rounding error.

Earlier in the FAQ, the author gives a more extensive idea of what she means by the BDSM community’s poor consent practices and situations where consent is physically impossible. She says, describing the former:

The author described the rapist’s grooming behavior (subjecting his victim to other forms of penetration and lying about what he was doing) thusly: “It’s not a bad way, this sort of mind game, to move towards opening up a limit.” [emphasis mine]. Respecting a boundary is to take the boundary as an absolute limitation on behavior; not something to be pushed, or worn down, or (euphemisms again!) “opened up.” The author condones the grooming because the victim “didn’t say no,” in spite of the fact that the victim was uncomfortable with the perpetrator’s behavior. Insofar as they condone grooming, manipulation, and coercion to violate boundaries (and this author apparently does), BDSM practitioners cannot claim that they respect consent.

On the same blog, this author dismisses unwanted torture and assault, as well as resulting permanent trauma, as “shit happens” (which sounds disturbingly like the oft-cited dismissal that various forms of sexual violence or abuse are simply “bad sex”). Some of this, he claims, is due to “miscommunication” and the fact that a “good top” is not going to do simply what has been explicitly discussed. A very flimsy excuse — if there is the slightest ambiguity about whether a partner is uncomfortable with a sexual activity, one can always ask.

I think these passages greatly misrepresent Millar’s points. First, it is a very unusual definition of “lie” which includes “I am going to put my fingers inside you and claim that it’s a knife. Is that okay?” Normally, “lie” implies that you are misleading people about facts. Do you also think that reading fiction to your partner is grooming behavior?

Second, I think this passage confuses you pushing my boundaries and me pushing my boundaries. If I say “no, I don’t want to do that” and you say “please please please please”, you are clearly being an asshole. However, if I say “I’m uncomfortable doing that, but I’m going to do it anyway. Can you help me work my way into becoming more comfortable?”, that is perfectly ethically fine. If it wasn’t, I would be morally obligated to never leave my house. (It’s true that Millar’s essay leaves it ambiguous which one is happening, and if it’s the former it’s obviously unconscionable.)

Third, the author fails to mention that what Millar calls “shit happens” are technical errors and emotional landmines. While those may have awful emotional and physical consequences, they are clearly not the same thing as actual rape. Millar does not dismiss the consequences of those acts; he compares the effect of an accidentally tripped emotional landmine to a tsunami. He simply points out that it’s no one’s fault, which is true.As someone with a hell of a lot of emotional landmines, the idea that my partner accidentally triggering me is the same as rape is absurd. And both of those are also issues in vanilla sex: the broken condom, the rape flashback.

I agree that people don’t check in enough during sex; a “can I pull your hair?” saves a lot of trouble and guesswork. However, people are still not perfect at reading each other’s signals. The problem comes exactly when from one person’s perspective there isn’t any ambiguity and no need to check in. Fortunately, most cases of miscommunication aren’t particularly disastrous, because in a healthy sexual relationship you can just say “actually, that’s not my thing”; legitimate sexual-violence-by-miscommunication is probably even less common than forced electricity play.

Next, she discusses cases when, to her mind, people cannot consent:

A submissive may be in such a state of fear, pain, or disassociation she is unable to give or withdraw consent: “Lots of bottoms, especially subs, are not really in a state of mind mid-scene to advocate for themselves… Some folks just can’t use safe words at all because they can’t access them in scene: they have to negotiate up front and then trust.” But if there is no consent if someone is in such a state of pain, fear, or disassociation — or for any reason feels unsafe expressing her feelings — that she cannot withdraw consent or communicate (certainly no one could claim that someone in such a state is actively giving consent).

First, this is clearly a misrepresentation of Millar’s point. Millar is not talking about “feeling unsafe expressing her feelings”– he would most certainly agree that making someone feel unsafe expressing their feelings so they can’t say “no” to sex with you is an act of sexual violence. What he’s talking about is that for many people BDSM induces an altered state of consciousness. For many people, altered states of consciousness make them vulnerable– think of it like having sex with someone who’s drunk.

(Tangent: nonverbal people are capable of communication. Everyone is capable of communication. When I go nonverbal and point to something, or make an upset noise, or bring someone a movie I want to watch, that’s communication. All you need to be able to communicate is the ability to move at least one (1) muscle. The idea that nonverbal people can’t communicate is regularly used to ignore the preferences and consent of disabled people, and you should not put it in your feminist blog post.)

Now, it is a defensible position that it is unethical to knowingly have sex with someone in an altered state of consciousness. Indeed, many people have a similar position with alcohol: if your partner is sufficiently drunk, you shouldn’t have sex with them. In that case, you don’t have to condemn all BDSM, you just have to condemn BDSM that puts people in an altered state of consciousness such that they are more likely to agree to sex acts that, in the cold light of morning, they wouldn’t approve of. However, I disagree. I believe that if I say to my partner “honey, when I’m really drunk, you can have sex with me if you want”, and my partner respects my limits and my drunken “no”, then this sex is ethically fine. And I believe that if I say to my partner “honey, I get very deep into subspace, but I’m okay with doing a scene with you”, and my partner respects my limits and my subspacey “no”, then that sex is also ethically fine. Riskier? Perhaps. But I don’t think it’s a risk that it’s wrong to knowingly take.

5. How would you prevent emotional and social coercion into these practices?

Now that’s one difficult as hell question!

I don’t think anyone has come up with a satisfying answer about how to prevent emotional and social coercion into sex. But that’s the thing– there’s nothing special about BDSM. The feeling of being socially coerced into a flogging you didn’t want is really not a whole lot different from the feeling of being socially coerced into cunnilingus you didn’t want. If you rule out BDSM but allow cunnilingus, you’re not going to solve the problem of social and emotional coercion into sex, any more than you’re going to solve it if you rule out cunnilingus and allow BDSM.

One important step, I think, is to get rid of the bullshit status games around sex. The quality of your sex life is measured in how much enjoyment you and your partners get from it– whether that means celibacy, missionary-position penis-in-vagina intercourse once a week, quadruple penetration while being suspended, or all of the above at different points in your life. Not being into kink doesn’t make you a prude. Not being interested in penis-in-vagina sex doesn’t mean you’re being unreasonable. Not wanting to orgasm doesn’t mean you aren’t liberated. And not wanting sex at all is perfectly fine– for whatever reason you don’t want it.

We should also get rid of the idea that certain sex acts are something we ‘owe’ our partners. Of course, we should strive to find partners we’re sexually compatible with: it’s tremendously convenient to have a partner who isn’t interested in the sex acts we aren’t interested in. And there’s nothing wrong with trying something out if you’re not sure if you’ll be into it, or doing a sex act because you like making your partner happy. But in the event that your sexualities change, or you discover new things about your sexuality, or perhaps you or your partner were not quite as open in communication as one would hope– you don’t have to engage in any sex acts you don’t want to. Period. End of story. If you decide to let your partner finger you, or fuck you bent over the desk, or diaper you, when that’s not your thing, it’s a favor you’re doing for them. There is nothing your partner is entitled to.

Finally, in a linked article, a person argues that widespread BDSM creates a form of social coercion. A woman who doesn’t like BDSM may have a choice between BDSM and celibacy. However, ending BDSM does not solve this problem. I myself have a hard limit around receiving oral sex. Let me tell you: there are a lot more people who will sulk when you say “please don’t touch my genitals” than people who will sulk when you say “please don’t tie me up.” I think there are about three solutions here. First, you can argue that being socially coerced into bondage is far, far worse than being socially coerced into a sex act that makes me dissociate from gender dysphoria, in which case, uh, good luck with that. Second, you can support mandatory celibacy for everyone. Third, you can support a diversity of sexual preferences, so both I and people who aren’t interested in BDSM can find sexually compatible partners.

Why Are We Supposed To Believe Shia La Beouf?: An Article Brought To You By The Disability Rights Current

Tags

abuse tw, disability, my issues with sj let me show you them, not feminism go away, rape tw

[cw: rape apologia. This will probably make more sense if you read this first.]

I don’t have any particular opinion on Shia LaBeouf. I don’t particularly like him or dislike him. I really haven’t given him much thought. Based on a quick internet search, he seems, like many actor-types, to be overly self-involved and, like many other abled people, to maybe have issues with substance abuse and aggression/dickbaggery. But that impression has nothing to do with whether or not we should or should not believe he was raped.

After the actor claimed, in an interview, that he was raped by a woman during his February performance art piece #IAMSORRY, Lindy West wrote, for the Guardian, about her disappointment at “expressions of doubt, scorn and outright rage from people across the ideological spectrum – some fellow disability rights advocates included.” She seems to believe that many of these reactions were due to his unlikeability and his history of strange behaviour. West goes on to say:

A victim doesn’t have to be relatable or reliable or likable or ‘normal’ – or even a good person – for you to believe them. You can be utterly baffled by someone’s every move and still take their victimization seriously. LaBeouf’s bizarre behaviour and his sexual violation are in no way mutually exclusive, nor are the latter and his ability. ‘He was asking for it.’ ‘Why didn’t he fight back?’ ‘Why didn’t he say ‘no’?’ ‘He must have wanted it.’ ‘He seems crazy.’ These are flat-out unacceptable things to say to a person of any ability status. In a culture where abled victimhood is stigmatized as weak and overemotional (toxic ability is, above all, an extension of disableism), believing abled victims isn’t oppositional to disability rights, it is a disability rights imperative.

But to say that “believing abled victims” is a “disability rights imperative” isn’t actually true. As some disability rights writers have pointed out, this kind of analysis fails to understand or acknowledge what disability rights actually does. Disability rights explicitly and necessarily is about understanding the fact that, and the way in which, abled people, as a class, oppress disabled people, as a class. There is no equivalency in rape because abled and disabled people do not share similar experiences of ableist oppression… because abled people do not, in fact, experience oppression because of their ability status — disabled people do.

West argues that LaBeouf’s ability status is irrelevant to his victimization and the narrative surrounding victimization which is also decidedly false. Of course the way we perceive and discuss victimization and sexual assault is related to disability— victimization and sexual assault are related to disability.

This is not to say that abled people cannot be raped — certainly they can and do experience sexual assault (generally at the hands of other abled people). At the same time, it isn’t clear what exactly happened to LaBeouf and whether or not it constitutes “rape.” As Sarah Ditum wrote, for New Statesman, “Rape is generally understood as sex that the victim resists (not least under English law). Disability rights advocates have labored for decades to point out that disabled people can’t be held to the same standards of resistance that abled people are. But LaBeouf could have resisted. Why didn’t he?”

LaBeouf doesn’t say he was restrained, threatened or otherwise placed in a disabled position by this woman. He says, “One woman who came with her boyfriend, who was outside the door when this happened, whipped my legs for ten minutes and then stripped my clothing and proceeded to rape me…” For all we know, he just sat still because he didn’t want to ruin his performance art project.

What does that mean? What happened? We don’t really know… Why are we obligated — specifically as disability rights advocates — to believe him point-blank? As Ditum notes, the point of believing disabled victims is to right a long history of wrongs — because disabled people have long been ignored or blamed or painted as crazy when they speak out about their experiences of abuse and assault.

…there is no extended cultural history of disbelieving abled people in any case: ‘believing them’ simply means granting the default authority to abled words, in a situation where it is impossible to know what they signify. If ‘I believe them’ has become totally detached from the analysis of abled violence and disabled oppression, then it has also become meaningless.

A blogger at Root Veg writes:

This difference underpins a disability analysis of rape. It is how rape – aka penetration the victim resists – is used by abled people to control the free movement and behavior of disabled people in every single society on earth. The converse scenario where disabled people oppress abled people as a group via rape has literally never happened, and it never could. Can we envisage a world where abled people are given drugs that make them quiet so they can’t report their abuse? Do we think a society has ever existed where abled people have to choose between staying with their caregiver-abuser and losing the ability to leave the house, eat a meal, take a piss? If not, why not? Do we think a disabled person who is raped during a meltdown and was unable to communicate their lack of consent technically ‘raped their partner too?’ If not, why not? We lack explanatory answers to any of these questions if we genuinely entertain the position that the power of an abled person and the vulnerability of a disabled person are equivalent. This ability-based power differential bleeds into all relations between abled and disabled people, and it is the very foundation of disabled people’s oppression. This is why, when the article asks ‘would we ask the same questions of a disabled person?’ the answer is a very obvious ‘no.’ Because disabled people are not, in fact, the same as abled people. To pretend otherwise elides reality and functions to the detriment of disabled people.

West and others who say that we must believe LaBeouf, because “disability rights,” are pretending as though abled and disabled people are equal in this world — that we can simply reverse things like abuse, rape, institutionalization, and lack of accommodation. But we can’t. Abuse, rape, institutionalization, and lack of accommodation are not ability-neutral. Abled people simply can’t be institutionalized in the same way disabled people are because abled people are in a position of power in our society. Abled people experience a three-day stay at the hospital with no complaints worse than bad food; disabled people experience months or years of powerlessness, lack of autonomy, other people making decisions for them ‘for their own good’, and impoverished care. This is also why there is no such thing as reverse ableism. It is simply not possible to be ableist  “against an abled person” because there is no history of or context for such a thing. Ableism doesn’t just happen on an individual basis — it is systemic, as is abled violence against disabled people.

We believe disabled people because, well, sadly most disabled people do experience abuse, rape, and harassment. Their abusers are, for the most part, abled people. This is because we live in an ableist society. Not because of some fluke. Not because people, in general, are awful and violent and because disabled people just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, over and over again. We also believe disabled people because there is nothing to be gained from lying about such things. A disabled person who talks about their abuse is met with disbelief that someone who is so kind and self-sacrificial as to interact with a disabled person could possibly have committed abuse. Doctors who see disabled people get abused don’t bother to report the acts of abuse and neglect. Throughout history, abled voices have been represented and viewed as voices of authority — we call abled people “dumb”, “stupid”, or “crazy” when we disagree, as if being disabled is proof that your viewpoint is incorrect.

So my arguments here have nothing to do with liking or not liking, trusting, or not trusting LaBeouf. They have to do with my understanding of ability-based violence and oppression, which I have developed through my understanding of disability rights. Which means that, as disability rights advocates, we are not obligated to believe abled people, point-blank — we are obligated to understand the context and dynamics of abuse and sexual assault as attached to ability-based power imbalances and to understand that, in an ableist society, abled people have, in fact, typically been the ones who are believed — not disabled people.

Maybe LaBeouf was actually raped, I don’t know. What I do know is that he wasn’t socialized his whole life that his pain and his needs were an unreasonable burden on those around him; that if he was in the company of people who make him uncomfortable, he could not easily choose to move elsewhere; to believe that abled people always have his best interests at heart, even if they want to cause him pain or kill him; that someone choosing to share their life with him is a disadvantage to them; and that he must fear institutionalization, bullying, and violence from abled people at all times. He didn’t learn that his life doesn’t matter, nor was he insulted, dehumanized and assaulted as a child, while adults stood by and told him it was his fault for not being normal enough. Certainly he hasn’t watched communities and families and friends and employers turn on abled people who talk about being abused by their disabled spouses. He hasn’t watched abled people be humiliated, harassed, verbally abused, or threatened because they came out publicly against a powerful disabled person who sexually abused them.

Because this doesn’t happen.

There is no global epidemic of disabled children killing their parents or disabled people raping their caregivers. Abled people don’t rely on their abusers for toileting or food. Abled people don’t have painkillers to be hidden, TTY phones to be sabotaged, or life-threatening conditions that can be exacerbated by yelling. Abled people’s victimhood isn’t handled through social service agencies, as if violence is a crime except when a disabled person is the victim. Disabled people don’t bathe abled people and use this as a plausibly deniable setup for sexual assault. Abled people aren’t hit or raped by their partners and then told that it’s their own fault, because caring for a disabled person is very stressful. There is no industry wherein disabled people are coercing abled people into institutions where adults can’t microwave a burrito at 3 AM without being punished.

These are the facts. I know these things to be true because this reality is impossible to ignore if you pay any attention to media at all, because I am a disabled person and this is my life, and because I am a disability rights advocate and I understand the devastating impact ableism has on disabled people everywhere. And that is why, as a disability rights advocate, I believe disabled people.