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eventidespirits · 3 years ago

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Name: Laci Lydia Brighton-Lee

Nicknames/Aliases: None.

True Age: 41

Apparent Age: 22

Emotional Age: 6-22 (average of about 13-17)

Concept: Age Sliding Oracle

Species: Vampire (Revenant)

Gender: Cis Girl

Sexuality: Asexual Heteroromantic

Birthday: January 8th 1976

Death Day: October 31st 1998

Residence: Santa Marta, California

Universe: Primarily Original Universe but also Vampire the Masquerade (where she is Clan Malkavian).

Appearance:

Height: 4'7

Build: Petite and quite thin, Laci looks almost frail to most people and can be easily mistaken for a teen or preteen. She has a short torso and long limbs for her height.

Face Shape: Laci has a rounded face with a pointed chin, full cheeks and high cheekbones.

Eye Color/Shape: bright amber/Hazel. Deep-set with heavy, almost droopy eyelids and very thick lashes. Laci usually has a sort of sleepy look to her eyes, accentuated by her permanent dark circles and under eye bags.

Hair Color/Style: About shoulder length with a natural 2B/2C curl pattern. Her hair is naturally black but she has a badly bleached portion in the front that looks bright orange. Has very short, somewhat uneven bangs and her hair is a little shorter in the front than the back. Usually worn up in pigtails or twin buns.

Skin Tone/Texture: Unnaturally smooth and pale with an under-saturated yellow undertone. Doesn't look particularly healthy.

Distinguishing Features: Laci is very short and this is usually the first thing people notice about her -- she also has very large, expressive eyes. She has both eyebrows pierced, a nostril piercing on her left side and snakebites. Both ears have triple lobe piercings and two helix piercings.

Posture: Depends on her current emotional age but as a general rule, Laci's posture is somewhat folded in on herself, somewhat shy and insecure. When she's at an older emotional age, her posture is more confident and open. Laci's body language is dreamy and distant, her steps usually slow and unsure. She walks through the world like she's in an endless dream.

Voice: Somewhat nasal but with a distinct huskiness/vocal fry -- her actual pitch is somewhat higher and definitely comes across as a little bit childish.

Clothing Style: Laci is very much a goth -- she's almost always wearing at least one piece of clothing with mesh or fishnet (she doesn't like lace as much) -- the primary colors in her wardrobe are black, charcoal gray and purple, with occasional hints of neon green. She prefers pants and shorts with tights over skirts and dresses. She tends to prefer lays -- wearing tank tops over mesh shirts under hooded sweat shirts and so on. She has a fondness for collars and very high platform boots. An average outfit for Laci would be a pair of shorts with striped tights and knee-high socks, 4 inch platform boots, a mesh shirt under a tank top and a short sleeved hoodie with several bracelets, fingerless gloves and a collar of some sort.

Notable Mannerisms: Laci is often chewing on her lower lip or playing with her piercings. She often curls her hair around her fingers or plays with the hem of her short. Despite being a vampire and getting no real benefit or harm from it, Laci still smokes clove cigarettes (a habit she had as a human). Laci also has a tendency to sort of bounce in place when she's bored.

Skills:

Physical: Self-Defense, gymnastics, pickpocketing, small firearms

Social: Social Media, Bullshitting, Sweet-talking, Blame-Shifting, Persuasion

Talents: breaking & entering, stealth, being cute, dancing

Knowledges: Santa Marta Underground, Streets & Back Alleys, Hacking, Computers, Social Media manipulation, explosives, Revenant Signs & Grafitti

Hobbies: Pickpocketing assholes at cafes/coffeeshops, preventing the apocalypse, clubbing, coloring books, dancing, photography/instagram

Special: The Sight, precognition, increased speed & strength, darkvision/nightsight, some minor telepathy/empathy, some emotional influence, "immortality"

Psyche

Strengths: Clever, quick-witted, good at lying, adaptive, quick-learner, strong sense of justice, compassionate, sweet, dedicated/tenacious, in touch with her emotions, good with kids, generally empathetic

Weaknesses: overly-emotional, immature, irresponsible, stubborn, impatient, overly curious, has trouble understanding rationality, has difficulty understanding the motives/perspectives of others even if she can understand their feelings, hot-headed, prone to fits of mania and/or depression, way too fucking blunt at times, bad at explaining herself, bad at understanding her own motives at times.

Mental Health Issues: Bipolar Disorder, Age Regression, Hallucinations, Anxiety, Possible ADHD?

Goals: Stop the God-Damned Apocalypse, have fun, make friends, help people

Guiding Philosophies: Do your best to preserve life but know that in the end you'll have to hurt people to stop the apocalypse, try your best to make people laugh and improve their lives, make the world a better place, punish evil whenever you see it, offer help to the helpless and compassion to the weak and downtrodden of society, bash the fash

Sense of Humor: Laci delights in pulling pranks on her friends or making absolutely random, inane comments that leave others confused. She also likes puns and dumb memes.

Overall Personality:Chaotic and trickster-ish. Laci is an enigma to most of the people around her, often including herself. She is bright and spontaneous most of the time but can become somber and serious at the drop of a hat. Her general mood and energy are frantic, high energy and unpredictable. When she comes to care about someone, she's incredibly protective of them to the extent that she can be and will do about anything to make them happy or keep them safe.

Deep down, Laci is frustrated with her inability to remember most of her human life and desperately wishes she could regain it -- however, most of her efforts are currently focused on preventing the Awakening of a being she knows only as The Myriad Eyes, which Laci believes will cause the end of the world if it does wake from it's slumber. Her methods of doing so are...erratic and often nonsensical due to her lack of general knowledge about the thing, seeing only glimpses of it through her precognition and sight.

Little Laci: Mostly the same as Big Laci (described above) but less able to focus on her goals, more dependent on others and more emotional.

-In Love: Laci can't remember being in love. She knows vaguely that she was dating someone who had broken up with her just before she became a vampire but more than that is blurry. When she does crush on someone (which is rare) she's usually very shy around them, having difficulty speaking and becoming very awkward (think moe anime girl)

-Under Stress: Erratic, irritable and far more emotional than usual. Laci becomes inconsolably upset when under stress very quickly -- prone to lashing out in anger and having complete breaks from reality of the stress is severe enough. Stress is also the number one trigger for Laci's age regression, the more intense the stress, the further back she slides.

-Alone: Laci doesn't really get to be alone due to being haunted by her best friend as a human who she accidentally killed after her Change...When it's just Laci and Amy, Laci can be very quiet and withdrawn, just focusing on whatever task is at hand and desperately hoping Amy doesn't decide to cause any problems.

Life

Best Memory: Becoming part of the Revenant Vampire Community under Santa Marta

Worst Memory: Waking up after being Changed and killing her best friend.

Biggest Accomplishment: Hitting 100 cellphones stolen from assholes at Eventide Coffee

Prized Possession: her spiderweb mug

Favorite Color: Black, Purple, Lime Green

Favorite Food:

-Mortal Food: Mocha Frappe, Triple Chocolate Muffins, Cherry Soda, Monster Energy, Tiramisu, Fried Oreos

-Blood: She doesn't care, all the bagged stuff tastes like shit anyway.

Favorite Scents: Cloves, Cotton Candy, Bubblegum, Gunpowder, Fresh Coffee, Freshly Baked Bread, Coconut, Vanilla, Lime, Grapefruit

Favorite Songs: Hunger - Ayria, The Girl Anachronism - Dresden Dolls, I'm So Sick - Flyleaf, Counting Bodies Like Sheep - A Perfect Circle, Looking Glass - The Birthday Massacre, Placebo Effect - Siouxsie and the Banshees, Amnesia - Mind.In.A.Box

Can’t Leave Home Without: Her phone, her cigarette case, a few packets of blood

History

Birthplace: Santa Marta, California

Childhood:: Laci can remember her fifth birthday where she had her first vision of the future and of the party being ended prematurely. She also remembers starting therapy at twelve.

Adolescence: Laci remembers her first day of middle school -- which went rather badly, remembers going to anti-prom and getting kicked out of her parents' house at 18.

Adulthood: What little Laci can remember of her adulthood, she was working as a barista at a local coffee shop while working with a group of friends on a local anarchist zine. She was dating one of the editors on the zine until he cheated on her and broke up with her on October 20th 1998. During a manic episode that followed, she cut her hair and bleached her bangs (with the intent of dyeing them purple). She and her best friend were kidnapped by a vampire outside a local goth club on Halloween.The vampire would turn Laci and leave Amy in the room with her to kill during her first feeding. The trauma of her change (which occurred fully within only three hours) and subsequently murdering her best friend seems to have induced age regression and severe amnesia in Laci. She cannot recall the name or appearance of her Sire or even the majority of her life, outside of small snippets from here and there.

Recent: Laci has been living in Santa Marta in the Revenant Community since they found her in 2002. It's not sure if she's actually part of the Revenant bloodline or not but they don't really care about that. She's got a small apartment in Bram Park, not far from the Sidetracks bar, which contains one of the main entrances to the Underground.

Relationships

Family: Sanity (Adopted Sister, a fellow vampire)

Lovers: None

Friends: Art ??? (a local hacker and vampire), Alex Hyde (Revenant Vampire, clubbing and goth buddy), Louis DeFantome (Siren Vampire, local goth artist), Maggie Rodriguez (Local Witch)

Enemies: Amy (Ghost, haunting), Ella DuChamps (Local cultist), The Myriad Eyes (???)

Acquaintances: ???

Resources

Income: Working Poor

Vehicles: None

Residences: A 1br/1ba apartment in the attic of a Victorian house that's been converted into a triplex in the Bram Park neighborhood.

#about: laci #laci #laci tag #muse profile #original lore rp #rp character #vampire #vtm

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writingvampires · 5 years ago

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A Different Cinematic Monster: The Cult of Midsommar

Maybe I’m writing this article because Midsommar (2019) is one of my favorite films of 2019 or maybe I was traumatized by the film and need to put the nightmares it gave me onto page. From the trauma Dani (Florence Pugh) experiences in the opening minutes to the trauma induced on the viewer over the course of roughly two and a half hours, Midsommar never shies away from causing severe discomfort. The monsters at the heart of the film are the traditions of the Swedish society the American travelers are subjected to as they try to maintain sanity amidst what may be a murderous cult.

Dani’s mental health has been negatively impacted by the suicide of her sister and death of her parents. Her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) is the textbook definition of a toxic boyfriend and may know this himself, but he still fears leaving Dani alone in her emotionally vulnerable state. Christian decides to tag along with his friends Josh (William Jackson Harper), Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), and Mark (Will Poulter) to a ritualistic festival in Sweden. They’re in college so of course they’re largely in it for drugs and the chance of having sex with international women. Christian and his friends allow Dani to join them out of pity and Midsommar kicks things off from here. The first section of the film does a great job of setting up the characters and developing a sense of dread within the viewer.

A traumatized young woman accompanying her emotionally abusive boyfriend and his college friends on a drug-filled trip to a ritualistic festival just sounds like a recipe for disaster. Writer/director Ari Aster is highly aware of this and utilizes this with his cinematic choices. As the group of college students arrive to Sweden, the camera flips upside down and stays there long enough for one to wonder: what have these people gotten themselves into?

At the Midsommar celebration in Sweden, tradition runs king. (major spoilers follow) Can the elderly die a more peaceful death than falling to their demise over a cliff before having their head smashed in to ensure the deed is done? Nobody questions it because it is simply an accepted tradition to the Swedish while the Americans are justifiably horrified. Why is a physically-deformed person who doesn’t speak making sacred texts for them? Without any reasoning or explanation for why these traditions are honored, they become even more haunting.

Upon subsequent viewings of Midsommar, it becomes even more apparent that Pelle is a monster in his own way. He invites Christian, Dani, Josh, and Mark to the Swedish festival with little warning of what they are about to experience. Pelle never really commits any acts of violence on screen, but his complicity is just as harmful. Josh (William Jackson Harper) is somewhat complicit as well since he knew more about the ceremonies than Mark and Christian. Sure Josh has a pretty valid reason to lie to his friends (his senior thesis), but subjecting your friends to a suicide ritual is pretty irredeemable.

The suicide ritual is one of the most disturbing parts of the entire film. This scene was so disturbing that I watched it through my eyes during a re-watch. Having the elderly die in such horrific fashion reminds me of an episode of the 1990’s sitcom Dinosaurs, although this episode was a lot more comedic in tone (coincidentally, the age the elderly fall to their death is also 72 in Dinosaurs). In this episode, the elderly are thrown off a cliff instead of jumping themselves. Unlike Midsommar, Dinosaurs has a moral compass in the character of Robbie who questions this strange practice.

Another troublesome practice by the Swedish people at the festival is their liberal use of psychoactive drugs. We are fully exposed to their abuse of these drugs through the cult’s treatment of Christian. Eventually he’s drugged into a state of complete immobility after he’s forced into impregnating a young woman. Dani becomes so under the influence that she begins to enjoy dancing around in a circle for hours in the hot sun. Josh, Connie (Ellora Torchia), and Simon (Archie Madekwe) seem to escape completely falling victim to the drugs, but meet violent demises as the cult uses them for sacrificial purposes. In the end, the cult lets their intentions be known: join us or else.

Unfortunately for the American college students, the trip to the Midsommar festival is doomed from the start. If Pelle had been honest with his friends about the true nature of the ceremonies, they may have cancelled the trip all together. I have seen a few opinion pieces online suggesting that Pelle knew Dani would become the May Queen all along. I certainly can believe this and I’m sure another watch will make this more evident.

A lot of horror films have characters that make consistently questionable decisions. In Midsommar, a lot of the characters’ decisions actually make sense. Josh meets his demise because of his dedication to writing a compelling senior thesis. Connie and Simon react like normal human beings to the suicide ritual and decide to leave. The viewer knows the couple’s vocal reactions may be their downfall, but any sane person would probably react in the same way.

Even Christian and Mark, the film’s two most unlikable characters aren’t tossed into the “let’s make these characters a**holes so the audience doesn’t care when they die” trope all too common in horror films. Christian is shown to be too dissociated from the drugs to make any rational decisions and Mark acts like a dumb, horny college student so his immaturity becomes comic relief from the film’s anxiety-inducing horror.

As I watched Midsommar for the first time, very rarely was I scared in the same way a mainstream film like It: Chapter Two can scare me. However, as I walked home and began thinking about what I just saw, the horror of the film began to settle. Eventually, I fell asleep in the later hours of the night, but the damage was already done. I felt like the American travelers who were subjected to this terrifying cult. The only difference is that I got out alive.

Monster Rating: 10/10

The Monster: The Swedish cult in Midsommar is a terrifying force. What gives it a 10/10 for me is the fact that it’s almost impossible to stop. People like Josh who wish to expose all of the cult’s secrets (whether for personal or professional reasons) are killed. Since the cult remains secluded, people like Josh would be scarce and the cult would have few problems remaining the terrible force that they are. For these reasons, Midsommar is one of the most frightening films of 2019.

What did you think of Midsommar? Let us know in the comments below!

#Midsommar #Movie Review #Mike C. Wilson

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nothingman · 7 years ago

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Laurie Penny | Longreads | October 2017 | 13 minutes (3,709 words)

We’re through the looking glass now. As women all over the world come forward to talk about their experiences of sexual violence, all our old certainties about what was and was not normal are peeling away like dead skin.

It’s not just Hollywood and it’s not just Silicon Valley. It’s not just the White House or Fox News.

It’s everywhere.

It’s happening in the art world and in mainstream political parties. It’s happening in the London radical left and in the Bay Area burner community. It’s happening in academia and in the media and in the legal profession. I recently heard that it was happening in the goddamn Lindy Hop dance scene, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Men with influence and status who have spent years or decades treating their community like an all-you-can-grope sexual-harassment buffet are suddenly being presented with the bill. Names are being named. A lot of women have realized that they were never crazy, that even if they were crazy they were also right all along, and — how shall I put this? — they (we) are pissed.

“It’s like finding out aliens exist,” said a friend of mine last night. He was two gins in and trying to process why he never spoke up, over a twenty-year period, about a mutual friend who is facing public allegations of sexual violence. “Back in the day we’d all heard stories about it, but… well, the people telling them were all a bit crazy. You know, messed up. So nobody believed them.”

I took a sip of tea to calm down, and suggested that perhaps the reason these people were messed up — if they were messed up — was because they had been, you know, sexually assaulted. I reminded him that some of us had always known. I knew. But then, what did I know? I’m just some crazy girl.

* * *

The process we are going through in our friendship group and in our culture as a whole is something akin to first contact. Abusers, like little green men in flying saucers, have a habit of revealing their true selves to people nobody’s going to find credible — to women who are vulnerable, or women who are marginalized, or who are just, you know, women. But abusers don’t come from any planet but this. We grew up with them. We’ve worked with them. Admired them. Loved them. Trusted them. And now we have to deal with the fact that our reality is not what it seemed.

So who’s the crazy one now? To be the victim of sexual assault is to fall down a rabbit hole into a reality shaped by collective delusion: specifically, the delusion that powerful or popular or ordinary-seeming men who do good work in the world cannot also be abusers or predators. To suggest otherwise is to appear insane. You question yourself. Even before anyone calls you a liar — which they will — you’re wondering if you’ve overreacted. Surely he couldn’t be like that. Not him. Anyway, it would be insanity to go against someone with so much clout. The girls who do that are sick in the head. At least, that was what we used to think.

Something important has changed. Suddenly women are speaking up and speaking out in numbers too big to shove aside. The public narrative around abuse and sexual entitlement and the common consensus around who is to be believed are changing so fast you can see the seams between one paradigm and the next, the hasty stitching where one version of reality becomes another. Now, instead of victims and survivors of rape and assault being written off as mentally ill, it’s the abusers who need help.

The public narrative around abuse and sexual entitlement and the common consensus around who is to be believed are changing so fast you can see the seams between one paradigm and the next, the hasty stitching where one version of reality becomes another.

“I’m hanging on in there,” said Harvey Weinstein, in the wake of revelations about a pattern of abuse that has upended the entertainment industry, tipping all its secrets out. “I’m not doing OK, but I’m trying. I’ve got to get help. You know what — we all make mistakes.”

Days earlier, Weinstein emailed other Hollywood higher-ups frantic not to be fired, asking for their assistance convincing The Weinstein Company board to keep him, begging to be sent to therapy as an alternative. The same pleas for mercy on the grounds of mental illness have been issued on behalf of powerful predators in the tech industry. Here’s 500 Startups’ statement on the actions of its founder, Dave McClure: “He recognizes he has made mistakes and has been going through counseling to work on addressing changes in his previous unacceptable behavior.”

The social definition of sanity is the capacity to accept the consensus of how the world ought to work, including between men and women. Anyone who questions or challenges that consensus is by definition unhinged. It is only when the abuse becomes impossible to deny, when patterns emerge, when photographs and videos are available and are enough to lead to conviction — then we start hearing the pleas for mercy. It was just twenty minutes of action. He’s got such a bright future. Think of his mother. Think of his wife. He couldn’t help himself.

These excuses are never just about the abuser and his reputation. They are desperate attempts to bargain with a rapidly changing reality. They are justifications for continuing, collectively, to deny systemic abuse. Suddenly, it’s Weinstein, not the women calling him a rapist and a pig, who gets to be the one with “demons.” He needs to see a therapist, not a judge. He’s a very unhappy and very sick man. And so is Bill Cosby. And so is Woody Allen. And so was Cyril Smith. And so is that guy in your industry everyone respects so much, the one with the big smile and all those crazy ex-girlfriends.

What’s the word for what happens when a lot of people are very sick all at the same time? It’s an epidemic. I’m not sure what started this one, but there’s a lot of bullshit in the water.

* * *

The language of mental illness is also a shorthand for the articulation of truths that are outside the realm of political consensus. Anyone who challenges that consensus is deemed mad by default, including women who dare to suggest that predators in positions of power might have to be accountable for their actions.

There’s a long, grim history behind the idea that women lie about systemic sexual abuse because they’re mentally unwell. Freud was one of the first to look for a psychiatric explanation for the number of women patients he saw who told him they had been molested or raped. To report that such things were going on in polite society would have outraged Freud’s well-heeled and intellectual social circles. So in the course of his later writings, the father of modern psychoanalysis found alternative explanations: perhaps some of these girls were unconsciously obsessed with the erotic idea of the father figure, as opposed to an actual father figure who might have committed actual abuse. Or perhaps they were just hysterical. Either way, no reason to ruffle whiskers in the gentlemen’s club by giving too much credence to unhappy young women.

A century later, in absolutely every situation like this that I have ever encountered, the same rhetoric applies. Women are over-emotional. They cannot be trusted, because they are crazy, which is a word patriarchy uses to describe a woman who doesn’t know when to shut her pretty mouth. They are not to be believed, because they are unwell, which is a word patriarchy uses to describe women who are angry.

Well, of course they’re angry. Of course they are hurt. They have been traumatized, first by the abuse and then by their community’s response. They are not able to express righteous rage without consequence, because they are not men. If you had been assaulted, forcibly penetrated, treated like so much human meat; if you had sought justice or even just comfort and found instead rank upon rank of friends and colleagues closing together to call you a liar and a hysteric, telling you you’d better shut up — how would you feel? You’d be angry, but you’d better not show it. Angry women are not to be trusted, which suits abusers and their enablers just fine.

This is what we’re talking about when we talk about rape culture — not just the actions of lone sociopaths, but the social architecture that lets them get away with it, a routine of silencing, gaslighting, and selective ignorance that keeps the world at large from having to face realities they’d rather rationalize away. If everyone around you gets together to dismiss the inconvenient truth of your experience, it’s tempting to believe them, especially if you are very young.

More to the point, predators seek out victims who look vulnerable. Women and girls with raw sparking wires who nobody will believe because they’re already crazy.

Ten years ago, when I was raped and spoke out about it, I was told I was toxic, difficult, a compulsive liar. I was told that so consistently that eventually I came to accept it, and I moved away to heal in private while the man who had hurt me went on to hurt other people. In the intervening decade, every time women I know have spoken out about sexual abuse, they have been dismissed as mentally ill. And yes, some of them were mentally ill — at least one in four human beings will experience mental health problems in their lifetime, after all, and violence and trauma are contributing factors. More to the point, predators seek out victims who look vulnerable. Women and girls with raw sparking wires who nobody will believe because they’re already crazy.

The thing that is happening now is exactly the thing that the sanity and safety of unnamed thousands of women was once sacrificed to avoid: a giant flaming fuss. It is amazing what people will do to avoid a fuss. They will ostracize victims, gaslight survivors, and provide cover for predators; they will hire lawyers and hand out hundreds of thousands of dollars under the table and, if pressed, rearrange entire social paradigms to make it seem like anyone asking for basic justice is a screeching hysteric.

In decades gone by, women who made a scene, who made the mistake of confronting abusers or even just closing the door on them, were carted off to rot in the sort of hospitals that featured fewer rehabilitation spas and more hosing down with ice water to get you to stop screaming. Now it’s the abusers who are seeking asylum. Asking to be treated as sufferers of illness, rather than criminals.

The language of lunacy is the last resort when society at large cannot deny the evidence of structural violence. We hear the same thing in the wake of a mass shooting or a white supremacist terror attack. He was always such a nice boy. Something broke. We couldn’t have seen him coming. He was depressed and frustrated. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen, so instead we pretend that there’s no pattern here, just individual maladaption. A chemical imbalance in the brain, not a systemic injustice baked into our culture. Harvey Weinstein is not a rapist, he’s a “very sick guy” — at least according to Woody Allen (who may or may not have special insight, being famously interested in both psychoanalysis and recreational sexual harassment).

Woody Allen feels at least as sorry for Weinstein as he does for the forty-plus women and girls who, at the time of writing, have come forward to claim they were assaulted or raped by the movie mogul. We’re now supposed to feel pity for rapists because they’re messed up. Well, join the queue. All of us are messed up, and having low self-esteem and a dark obsession with sexually intimidating the women around you aren’t excuses for abuse. At best, they are explanations; at worst, they are attempts to derail the discussion just as we’ve started talking about women’s feelings as if they matter. In fact, according to researchers like Lundy Bancroft, who has spent decades working with abusive men, abusers are no more or less likely to be mentally ill than anyone else. “Abusiveness has little to do with psychological problems and everything to do with values and beliefs,” says Bancroft. “Abusers have a distorted sense of right and wrong. Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.”

At the end of the day, we’re now encouraged to ask, aren’t these men the real victims — victims of their own demons? Come off it. We’ve all got demons, and baggage, and all of the other euphemisms we use to talk about the existential omnishambles of modern life. The moment I meet someone who has arrived at something like adulthood psychologically unscathed by the nightmare fun-house of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, I assume they’re hiding something, or on enough tranquilizers to fell a small elephant, or both. We’ve all got broken hearts and complicated childhoods, and survivors have spent too long being quietly directed to seek therapy rather than justice.

The abusers who are now being excused as mentally ill are not monsters, or aberrations. They were acting entirely within the unhealthy value system of a society which esteems the reputation and status of men above the safety of women. Many abusers, on some level, do not know that what they are doing is wrong. They believe that they are basically decent. Most men who prey on women have had that belief confirmed over the course of years or decades of abuse. They believe they’re basically decent, and a whole lot of other people believe they’re basically decent, too. They’re nice guys who just have a problem with women, or booze, or their mothers, or all three.

* * *

Pleas for mercy on the grounds of emotional distress are surprisingly effective when it’s men doing the pleading. Right now, all around me, I see women working to support men, as well as each other, through this difficult time. It’s not just because we’re nice and it’s not just because we’re suckers, although it’s probably a little bit of both.

It’s because we know how much this is going to hurt.

We should. We’ve carried it all for so long in private. We know how deep the damage goes, how much there is still unsaid. Even as we come together to demand an end to sexual violence, we worry that men are too weak to cope with the consequences of what they’ve done and allowed to be done to us.

I have for the past three months been nursing intermittent jags of panic at the knowledge of what was about to be revealed (and has now been revealed) about a person I once cared for deeply and, because I am a soft-hearted fool, still care about very much. A person who, it turns out, has hurt more women than any of us guessed when we started joining the puncture wounds in our pasts to make a picture. Panic because none of us want him to hurt himself. Panic because we worry that he might. We want him to be safe, even though none of us have been. Isn’t that just delicious? As more stories of private pain come out, it is still the men we’re supposed to worry about.

The threat of extreme self-harm is a classic last-resort tactic for abusers who suspect that they’re losing control, that their partner is about to leave them or tell someone, or both. It’s effective because it’s almost always plausible, and who wants to be the person who put their own freedom and safety ahead of another person’s life? Not a great many women, certainly, given the bone-deep knowledge drilled into us from birth that we were put on this earth to protect men from, among other things, the consequences of their actions. We’ve been raised to believe that men’s emotions are our responsibility. Even the men who hurt us.

We’ve been raised to believe that men’s emotions are our responsibility. Even the men who hurt us.

As the list of names grows longer, the plea for mercy on the grounds of mental illness is being deployed in exactly the same way. These guys are suffering, too. If you carry on calling for them to come clean and change their behavior, well, that might just push them over the edge. And you wouldn’t want that, would you? You’re a nice girl, aren’t you?

I’ve been told several times by controlling partners that if I left them, they might break down or even kill themselves. Each time, I stayed longer than I should have because I loved them and wanted them alive, and every time, when it finally became unbearable, they were absolutely fine. Not one of them made an attempt to carry out their threat. That doesn’t mean they didn’t mean it at the time. But the demand that even as we attempt to free ourselves from structural or specific violence, women prioritize the wellbeing of men over and above our own, is a tried-and-true way of keeping a rein on females who might just be about to stand up for ourselves. We are expected to show a level of concern for our abusers that it would never occur to them to show to us — if they’d been at all concerned about our well-being in the first place, we wouldn’t be where we are. And where we are is extremely dark, and very difficult, and it’ll get darker and more difficult before we’re done.

* * *

I’m worried about a lot of people right now. I’m worried about the several men I know who have hurt women in the past and who are now facing the consequences. I’m worried about the men who are analyzing their own behavior in horror, who stood aside and let it happen, and who are suddenly realizing their own complicity — and struggling to cope with the guilt, the shame of that knowledge. That’s allowed. Empathy is not being rationed here, and we can worry about whoever we like — as long as we worry about the survivors first. We were not liars, or hysterical. We were telling the truth. And if the men are a mess today because they finally have to reckon with that truth, we must not let that stop us from building a world where love and sexuality and gender hurt less, a world where this does not have to happen again as it has happened, in silence, for so many generations.

Reframing serial abuse as a mental health disorder stashes it conveniently on the high shelf marked “not a political issue.” The trouble is that sickness does not obviate social responsibility. It never has. Sickness might give a person the overwhelming urge to act in repulsive ways but sickness does not cover for them during business meetings or pay off their lawyers or make sure they get women dropped from films: it takes a village to protect a rapist.

I am perfectly willing to accept that toxic masculinity leaves a lot of broken men in its maw. That culture conspires to prevent men and boys from being able to handle their sexuality, their aggression, and their fear of rejection and loss of status in any adult way; that it is unbearable at times to exist inside a male body without constant validation. But very few men — very few people, period — grow up with wholly healthy attitudes towards their own gender. Not everyone with fucked-up ideas about women goes on to do fucked-up things to women. Toxic masculinity, as Bancroft observes, is a social illness before it is a psychological one.

So what about the rest of us? People say that they are shocked, and perhaps they are. But shock is very different from surprise. When was the last time you were really, truly surprised to hear a story like this? The truth is that a great many of those surrounding Weinstein did know. Just as the friends and associates of most sexual predators probably know — not everything, but enough to guess, if they cared to. The reason they didn’t say or do anything is simple and painful. The reason is that nobody had enough of a problem with what was going on to make a fuss. They thought that what was going on was morally acceptable. Polite society or whatever passed for it in their industry told them that this was all normal and par for the course, even if your heart told you otherwise. Polite society hates a fuss. Polite society can be a very dangerous place for a young girl to walk alone, and on this issue, most of us have been. Until now.

It is easier to cope with the idea of sick men than it is to face the reality of a sick society; we’ve waited far too long to deal with our symptoms because we didn’t want to hear the diagnosis. The prognosis is good, but the treatment is brutal. The people finally facing the consequences of having treated women and girls like faceless pieces of property may well be extremely unhappy about it. That’s understandable. I’m sure it’s not a lot of fun to be Harvey Weinstein right now, but sadly for the producer and those like him, the world is changing, and for once, cosseting the feelings of powerful men is not and cannot be our number-one priority. For once, the safety and sanity of survivors is not about to be sacrificed so that a few more unreconstructed bastards can sleep at night.

Previously: “The Horizon of Desire”

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Laurie Penny is an award-winning journalist, essayist, public speaker, writer, activist, internet nanocelebrity and author of six books. Her most recent book, Bitch Doctrine, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

Editor: Michelle Weber

via Longreads

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