#because I know conversations about kindness tend to revolve around empathy

[wastelesscrafts]

Just wanted to say thank you for working so hard on this blog and making it as accessible as possible. I've felt really guilty about about the talk of clothing consumption, especially since I'm not confident in my sewing skills to make my own clothes for the most part, so seeing solutions to promote longevity and reuse for things you already at all different skill levels really inspired me! Thank you for not being judgmental and instead super helpful with this blog

Fashion, guilt, anger, and love

Thank you for your kind message! It's important to me that this blog is accessible regardless of skill level, so I'm glad to hear you feel that way.

I was originally planning on keeping this reply short, but I then realised there were a few more things I wanted to say about the topics you touched on, so I apologise for the wall of text.

Guilt:

You mentioned feeling guilty.

You can't choose what emotions you feel or what thoughts pop into your mind when those emotions crop up. That's a fact. What you can do is choose how to act on them.

A lot of us feel overwhelmed when hearing about the effects of the clothing industry on both our planet and the workers who make our clothes. Guilt is a common feeling to go along with this. After all, we wear those clothes! Doesn't that make us the cause of all this suffering? We have to take action!

Sounds familiar, right?

The thing is: guilt can be a tricky starting point for action. It's easy to get burned out if your motivation is feeling guilty over the system you live in. I would suggest focusing on two other emotions that this overwhelm often evokes, instead: anger and love.

Anger:

It's not your fault you're stuck in a broken system. You couldn't have done better in the past if you didn't know what was going on. You didn't personally invent this system, either. You're probably stuck in a situation right now where you know the impact of the goods you consume, but you can't just quit (and there's plenty of valid reasons why that might be so).

Doesn't that piss you off?

We often portray anger as a negative emotion: it can have dire consequences when it's aimed at the wrong people. But as any fellow Discworld fan will know, anger can also be a power for good.

Don't get angry at yourself for the stuff you bought in the past. Don't chastise that one friend who threw away a shirt because they didn't know how to sew on a button. Get angry at the industry!

Does fast fashion deserve to decide what clothes you get to wear, or what sizes are socially acceptable for your body to be? Is it okay for them to normalise selling shoddy clothes that were made in unethical circumstances and only last a few washes? I don't think so.

Let that anger motivate you to regain agency over your wardrobe. The industry doesn't get to decide what you wear, you do! Ignore the trends they try to push. Learn how to make, mend, and customise your own clothes. Buy second-hand, trade clothes with friends, start give-away groups and repair cafés,...

They also don't get to set norms like "single-use fashion is fine" or "abusing textile workers is a normal way to make clothes". Tweet at unethical companies, mail them, write articles about them, spread the word about their practices, support initiatives like the Pay Up movement, contact local policy makers,...

Use your anger in constructive ways to work against the injustices that made you feel angry in the first place. Punch up, never down.

Love:

You know what emotion lies at the source of all that anger and guilt? Not to sound like a stereotype, but it's love. You love your fellow humans, your planet, and the clothes you wear.

This system we live in is not normal. Humans are social creatures, even if we don't always feel like it. Our brains thrive on kindness, on making others happy, and on taking care of each other. We can't stand the knowledge that someone else is suffering: the drive to help others is literally a survival mechanism for our species.

The type of society many of us live in is pushing us in the opposite direction, so we have to push back and be kind to others and to ourselves. Being aware of this is an important part of fighting climate change, too.

I highly recommend the book "Humankind" by Rutger Bregman if you'd like to dive deeper into this topic (or his lectures on YouTube).

All in moderation:

Did this reply make you want to take action? Good!

Does this mean I want you to give it your all? No! Remember what I said about kindness? That goes for you, too.

Guilt can sometimes push us beyond our limits which will burn us out eventually. Be kind to yourself, stick to your boundaries, and take baby steps. Figure out what you can and can't do, be realistic, and make habits stick before you start a new one.

Would it be cool to become zero waste overnight? Sure, but it's not very realistic. But you know what else is a great first step? Helping that one hypothetical friend to fix the button that fell of their shirt so they don't have to go out and buy a new one.

To quote one of my favourite fashion podcasts: strive for progress, not perfection.

[imagine-loki]

Atlas: Space, Mercury

TITLE: Atlas: Space

CHAPTER NO./ONE-SHOT: 2/12

AUTHOR: fanfictrashdump

ORIGINAL IMAGINE: Imagine narrating episodes of Loki’s life with the Avengers based on the songs from Sleeping At Last’s “Atlas: Space” album. 

RATING: T-M

NOTES/WARNINGS: Welcome to my Sleeping At Last’s Atlas: Space challenge, aka Another writing project I do not have time for, but my brain insisted on doing.

This series will be less like a multichapter fic and more of a one-shot compendium, but that they all interconnect in one way or another. It will revolve around Loki and Becca’s relationship (Taking Turns, Glow, Helmet Heists–don’t worry, more Loki-Charlie stuff will be along) and I will use those one-shots as reference to the timeline. Each chapter will be one song, used as inspiration for the story.

Warnings include: language, maybe, and morally grey debates about killing bad guys, angst (so much angst), and a thoroughly confused Loki.

Chapter 2: Mercury

Summary: Becca did not expect to feel this way after her first official mission. Loki did not expect to care how she felt, one way or another. Takes place after Helmet Heists.

=

“Heya, Lokes. How’s it going?”

Loki looked up, brow furrowed in a calculating expression. Tony Stark was not one to casually strike up a conversation with him unless it was of the utmost importance and he had no other choice. Therefore, the almost cheery way he had plopped himself down beside him on the couch was a matter of extreme curiousness.

Loki was having none of it.

“What is this?”

“I only asked how you were?” Tony sounded unsure, put looked all around innocent until he let out a long puff of air that made his cheeks inflate. “OK, I wanted to ask you how Becks was.”

Loki rolled his eyes and turned the page on his book, his attention now on the tight script before him. “I daresay she’s your employee, Stark, not mine. Why would I know?”

“Maybe because she’s the only person you talk to, and you’d be able to tell if she were OK. And the fact that you’ve been sticking to her like glue since we got back from the Hellhole. I don’t know, it gives me the inkling that you do, indeed, know.”

Stark wasn’t wrong.

Rebecca was the only human that Loki seemed to find bearable most of the time. She wasn’t loud or brash or mindless. Her taste in literature wasn’t half bad, either.

But she was human. And mortal. And beneath him.

For the longest time, he had tried not to get too attached, but this last mission certainly became a turning point in their relationship. It wasn’t bad, per se. They understood each other’s body language in a way that only two introverts could, and they worked together well as a team, but… she was so soft and innocent and everything he was most certainly not. Loki tended to scoff and ridicule humans such as this, not attempt to ensure their safety and their ongoing wellbeing, even after the fact.

Those eyes, though…

“Lokes?” Apparently Loki had been silent for much longer than was considered normal. He tended to do that a lot, as of late, always in relation to that dreary mortal.

Loki shifted uncomfortably at the memory of Becca’s eyes on the jet ride back. “I would say she takes issue with the moral ambiguity of killing an enemy. Regardless of whether or not they deserved it.”

Rows of houses Sound asleep Only streetlights Notice me

He nearly wanted to laugh at himself. Taking issue was probably the understatement of the year.

More than once, while he was doing his nightly walks, he would find Becca on the roof, staring at the world below–at the forests, the darkness, at the nothingness. She would stand, shivering in the night air, as she tried to make out shapes in the inky black abyss. It would take him two or three mentions of her name to rouse her from contemplative stupor. And, even then, Loki could tell she was not all there.

She always smiled, pushing through the oppressive chaos in her head and ask him about his day. As if she had not been fixing to fall apart a second before.

Damn her and her empathy.

I am desperate If nothing else In a holding pattern To find myself

I talk in circles I talk in circles I watch for signals For a clue

More than once he had swallowed whatever irritation would bubble to the surface in an effort to get her talking. Instead of his usually acidic demands for her to get on with it, he simply nodded in what he hoped was an encouraging manner and waited for her to spill her thoughts, as repetitive as they were. Not that he could blame her.

He remembered the first time he had killed something. He was seven. It had been a rabbit while on a hunt. He cried for three days, afterwards, until an Einherjar had scoffed and told him that was how life worked and he needed to accept it. Loki hadn’t cried when that particular soldier did not come home from a siege in Vanaheim a hundred years later. Nor for the hundreds that had been lost in battles, since. What was the point? Creatures lived and died, sometimes by his blade. That was life.

How to feel different How to feel new Like science fiction Bending truth

“Why do you keep asking that, Loki?” She had whined, pulling the edges of his cloak, which he had laid over her bare shoulders to shield her against the wind. He had asked if she was doing alright. “You know I’m physically fine. You made sure of that.”

He had not meant to inquire after her physical well-being, and Becca very well knew that. She also knew that he would die a fiery death before insisting “but, how do you feel?” Loki had made an annoyed noise and stormed off with the intention to hide in his room. He had doubled back, halfway there, only to watch her wipe away tears from the corners of her eyes when she thought herself alone. He still went back to his room, but he felt like a rock was lodged in his stomach all the way there.

“Could you do me a favor and keep an eye on her? She’s been really jumpy and anxious at work, but she keeps telling me she’s fine.” Tony sighed. “I just worry about her, man.”

Loki offered a sympathetic look, despite his initial reaction to sneer back at the Iron Man. Breaking old habits was hard. “I know. I will.”

No one can unring this bell Unsound this alarm, unbreak my heart new God knows I am dissonance Waiting to be swiftly pulled into tune

The Asgardian prince had found his friend in a hidden corner of the library. It looked like she had started to read one of the many tomes on Asgardian technology he had lent her, before her mind betrayed her. Becca was staring straight in front of her, brown eyes empty of any emotion yet full of doubts and insecurities.

“Rebecca.” His whisper clapped like thunder in the eerie silence of the library.

She snapped out of her trance and offered him a smile. “Sorry, did you say something, Lo?”

Gods above, help me.

Loki sighed, pulling a chair beside her and sinking down. Even seated, he was still significantly taller than her, but she found that she felt a little less nervous when he tried to get on her level. It was a kindness, she knew, but the concern buried deep in his gaze did little to make her feel better. If anything, she felt worse. If she had stayed in the jet, if she had followed directions, who would she be today? Could she be able to sleep? Could she stop waking up in cold sweats at all hours of the morning?

“Dearest, talk to me.” The use of pet names were few and far between with Loki. He much preferred calling anyone “hey, you” or “imbecile come here”. So the use of a term of endearment…

Did she really look in that dire a state?

“Tony sent you, huh?” Becca thought she might as well deflect until he felt uncomfortable. That usually worked.

“No, I sent myself,” he assured, frowning. The expression he received in exchange screamed you’ve gotta be kidding me. “Though Tony expressed interest in also knowing how you were,” he admitted and Becca rolled her eyes. Swallowing whatever shard of emotion that was attempting to convince him to let the whole thing go, he craned his neck until his gaze  could easily fix on hers. “You cannot go on like this, you know it. You cannot keep replaying scenarios in hopes of finding a loophole to villainize yourself with.”

I know the further I go The harder I try, only keeps my eyes closed And somehow I’ve fallen in love With this middle ground at the cost of my soul

Becca groaned, the sincerity in his voice making the pit in her stomach grow larger. The edges of her perfectly crafted calmness began to fray and she was sure that the god could easily feel it unraveling under his stare. “It can’t be this simple, Loki.” She couldn’t live her life without feeling guilty, she meant. Surely, she had to spend the rest of eternity purging herself of these demons before she could allow herself even a morsel of comfort. If not, was she not just a monster? 

Loki chuckled drily, placing a hand on her shoulder and its weight felt like a welcome balm to her shot nerves. “Who said anything about simple? You took lives. Nothing about that is simple. Believe me, I understand. But, on rare occasions, the ends do justify the means.”

Her head fell, hanging between her shoulders in a sign of defeat she should have never had to deal with. Stark shouldn’t have asked her to come on the mission, but she saved ten of the two dozen from dying in battle due to faults in their equipment. She saved him from what she thought was certain death (and might have been). Her heart was too good for this dark, sludgy world of his, he knew.

He wanted to hate it, to scoff at her naivety, at her hopefulness for the rotting lump that was her world. He couldn’t. He craved it, instead, and wondered how he had ever lived his thousand plus years without that little beacon of hope.

His chest hurt. Loki supposed that was the place his heart was meant to be, and the phantom organ had clenched at her tears, once she had managed to face him again.

She sniffed. “I don’t know if I can live with that.”

Yet I know, if I stepped aside Released the controls you would open my eyes That somehow, all of this mess Is just my attempt to know the worth of my life In precious metals

“I can,” he said simply. The surety of his voice and the clear lack of remorse made her something inside her feel warm like lava, rather than a fireplace’s hearth. She shuddered at his set expression and the glimmer of bloodlust in his stare. “I would have killed a hundredfold more, if it meant bringing you back safe. I will never live to regret that.” Loki was surprised to find that none of these words were a lie. He didn’t want her dead. He wanted her to thrive. He wanted her not to feel this gnawing emptiness that followed the taking of life. “You are my friend and you’re worth many more than that.”

“I don’t think that’s true, but thanks, anyway,” she muttered.

“Would I lie to you?” Never in his life had he wished for someone to ignore his nature and reply in the negative, than he did right now.

Becca’s mouth twisted in a reluctant smile. “Absolutely.” His heart clenched again, and this time there was no doubt about it. “But I don’t think you are.”

A long stretch of silence encompassed them.

“I want to return.”

“Return?” He frowned.

“To the field.” She sighed, pulling her shoulders back and sitting up straight. He had seen that pose before, when she was resolute to solve an issue or dissect a conundrum. He saw it when she had run from the jet and skidded to a stop beside him. “The reason I’ve been feeling so miserable is that fact that I feel awful about what I’ve done, but I can’t ever leave you guys out there alone, again. Not after what I’ve seen. And I’ve never felt this conflicted.”

“It’s what we signed up for, dove,” he assured, tucking a strand of her long brown hair behind her ear with incredible gentleness. “You needn’t worry about us. We’ll be perfectly fine as long as you’re there to greet us back.”

“That’s like telling me I don’t have to worry about the sky suddenly turning green. I’m going to do it, anyway.” Becca wasn’t sure why, but she followed up his silent question. “I’m going to get my training certifications back up-to-date, log in some time on local raids, and I’m joining missions.”

“Darling, you don't–”

“I’m going back! That’s final!” Becca snapped so loudly that Loki jumped, startled, and leaned back ever so slightly.

He blinked a few times to live down his surprise and offered her a nod. “Then, I will dutifully follow.” He smirked, nudging her side playfully. “Someone has to keep you alive.” Lest I attempt to destroy this pathetic planet, once more. 

He hated that this was his first thought, but he knew he would follow her to Helheim and back to see her through. He needed to protect that light, that shine, that glow. 

I’ll go anywhere you want me

[residentgoodgirl]

Chances are that you know what made Lorena Bobbitt famous in 1993, even if you aren’t old enough to have experienced it in real time. Just over 25 years ago, Lorena — who now goes by her maiden name, Lorena Gallo — cut her husband’s penis off in the middle of the night, driving away with it and throwing it into a field. The trial and media coverage were sensational, as you might expect them to be around any penis-chopping case — and Lorena’s story became a punchline, an oddity, a way to consider supposedly hotheaded Latina women.

Amazon is now premiering a four-part docuseries about her, aptly called Lorena. The documentary, produced by Jordan Peele, covers the trial, of course, but also explores the context around it that people have largely forgotten, or never learned to begin with: the ways Lorena’s husband, John Wayne Bobbitt, allegedly abused her; the cruel treatment she received from the media, her tender age (she was 24 years old); and how this case brought the issue of marital rape to the forefront for the American public.

The timing is excellent, if a total bummer. The embers of the #MeToo movement are still burning, marital rape continues to be a surprisingly controversial topic for the courts to grapple with, and everyone is still afraid of immigrants. Lorena is compelling and well-made, a narrative that focuses both on the salacious details of the case (wanna see a severed dick? Girl, you got it) and Lorena’s activism in preventing domestic violence and sexual assault. It acts as both a historical primer for those who didn’t live through Lorena’s trial and a rectification for the way she was treated, not just by her husband but by late-night talk show hosts, journalists, and the public. “The media was focusing only on the penis, the sensationalistic, the scandalous. But I wanted to shine the light on this issue of spousal abuse,” Lorena told Vanity Fair in an interview this past summer.

As a documentary that reassesses a notable ’90s scandal with the benefit of a couple decades’ hindsight, Lorena is one among many recent examples. And these retrospectives tend to fit a similar pattern: We are asked or encouraged to reconsider a woman whose public image was linked inextricably with a man’s bad behavior, whose reputation was destroyed while the man got away relatively consequence-free.

2013’s Anita was a reconsideration of Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against then–Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. The documentary recast her not as an angry black woman trying to keep a man from his deserved job, but a reserved, smart attorney who merely told the truth about a man about to be given a tremendous amount of power. (Sound familiar?) 2014’s The Price of Gold gave Tonya Harding room to tell her version of the story of her career and the 1994 attack on Nancy Kerrigan, replete with class context and details about her own abuse.

The 2016 documentary O.J. Simpson: Made in America, though primarily about Simpson, also forced audiences to rethink how his murdered ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson was treated by him and by the press. And 2018’s The Clinton Affair included an interview with Monica Lewinsky herself about her affair with President Bill Clinton — long considered a salacious sexual scandal, with Lewinsky cast as a slut trying to fuck a powerful man — and reframed the incident as one in which a young intern was seduced (and then thrown under the bus) by the goddamn president, who should’ve known better.

These reconsiderations aren’t limited to documentaries. In June, journalist Allison Yarrow published the book ’90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality, which includes Hill, Harding, Lewinsky, and Lorena in telling “the real story of women and girls in the 1990s, exploring how they were maligned by the media.” Podcasts like Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes’ You’re Wrong About… also serialize reassessments of history, often focusing on women mired in scandals. They’ve done episodes on Amy Fisher (the “Long Island Lolita”), televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton (the “dingo’s got my baby” woman, who never actually said that), Courtney Love, and Lorena herself.

“America is going through this period of realizing how much we misread what was right in front of us,” says Marshall. “We came to the realization that we elected a reality TV president. We elected someone whose image was made by reality TV. That kind of understanding can allow us to go back and say, “What else did I just swallow that I was sold?”

Documentaries that revisit scandals are no doubt valuable in that they can profoundly change the way we consider the past and hopefully, the future. But they also pose a certain temptation to get too comfortable: There is some risk that we might watch something like Lorena, pat ourselves on the back for figuring out who the bad guy really is, and walk away thinking that the past is the past and we won’t make the same mistakes again. But what Lorena Bobbitt’s story meant in 1993 “is not that different from what it means today,” says journalist Kim Masters in Lorena. “It’s the same story.”

Then, too, there’s the reality that these reconsiderations tend to revolve around trials or public hearings, which provide a clear way to revisit the past through criminal records and court transcripts and recorded interviews. These were big, splashy stories that now get big, splashy reappraisals. But the world is filled with smaller, more mundane injustices and oversights, and most of those who suffer will never make it to court or Congress, or receive a high-profile opportunity to seek vindication.

Watching something like Lorena feels important, but it also feels lousy, because not enough is different now. Reconsiderations like these can’t be antidotes if we ignore the cure — if we continue to dismiss women and other marginalized, vulnerable people when they’re being abused, or taken advantage of, or otherwise maligned. Lorena receives a tremendous amount of empathy in Lorena, as she should. But why can’t we extend that kind of empathy to more people like her today, instead of waiting two and a half decades to rethink how we’ve behaved?

Apology tours for sexual misconduct are practically rote at this point: Transgressors get plenty of airtime to beg for forgiveness for touching butts, to come out of the closet, to recommend a supposedly great pizza dough cinnamon roll recipe. Meanwhile, victims or survivors are largely forgotten after the accusation becomes public. It’s relatively new that women like Lorena or Hill are getting some space to tell their stories on their own terms, and still rare that the opportunity is afforded to women of color in particular.

Lorena is timely not only in the sense that conversations about sexual abuse and assault have taken center stage over the past year, but also because anxiety about immigrants taking advantage of the system and of poor, unwitting white Americans is currently at a fever pitch. When Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt got married in 1989, she was 20, and in the US on a student visa. “There’s women who are opportunists, gold diggers, they use you as a stepping stone to advance their career,” Bobbitt says, referring to his ex-wife in an interview in Lorena. “These women, they know that their backup is [to] use law enforcement to their advantage by saying, ‘You know what, if you leave or you fuck up this relationship or you don’t get my citizenship, I’ll call the cops.’”

Despite Bobbitt’s own laundry list of arrests — many of which are for domestic violence against past partners — he still uses Lorena’s citizenship (or lack thereof) as supposed proof that she was unstable, demanding, and manipulative. “She was obsessed with having her American dream, her American dream, her American dream,” Bobbitt told Vanity Fair. “She just wanted too much, too fast.” And even in a supposedly silly reality series like 90 Day Fiancé (a show about bad American people marrying other, noncitizen but still-often-bad people), it’s clear that many of the same biases against immigrants that were at play in the Bobbitt case are alive and well today.

Lorena takes great pains to draw similarities between then and now, reminding viewers that domestic violence is still a secret shame for countless women, and that it’s still incredibly challenging to get away from your abuser. The last episode of the series is called “The Cycle of Abuse” and opens with a slideshow of women’s bruises and scars from domestic violence. “This is about a victim and a survivor and this is about what’s happening in our world today,” Lorena recently told the New York Times.

And that may be true of what Lorena experienced at the hands of the media, as well as her husband. “If Lorena’s story hit today, Fox News would take the place of Howard Stern, and the 24-hour news cycle would focus on what she did, rather than what he did,” says Kim Gandy, the president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. Documentaries like Lorena are timely for a reason — a bad reason — and instead of feeling smug for finally listening, 25 years later, it’s worth taking the opportunity to see what we can do better now.

While the outrage around Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court this past fall might have sounded deafening depending on who’s inside your political bubble, the result is ultimately the same as it was for Clarence Thomas after Anita Hill’s testimony. He’s in, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Meanwhile, Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who came forward to detail Kavanaugh’s alleged assault, was left unable to work and in need of a security detail.

I was 3 years old during Lorena Bobbitt’s trial. I was 7 during the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. I was a few months old for Anita Hill’s hearing. When Blasey Ford testified late last year, I was 27. And yet somehow her testimony still felt like unbearable déjà vu, as if I had lived through this already and already knew the inevitable conclusion.

Today, though entertainment industry figures like Harvey Weinstein and Les Moonves are facing some long-overdue music for accusations of sexual assault and harassment, it’s taken decades for that to happen. For figures like Bryan Singer and R. Kelly — both the subject of recent reporting that details sexual abuse allegations stretching back many years, both of whom continue to deny any wrongdoing — it remains to be seen what lasting consequences, if any, they will suffer. Their accusers, like Lorena, have been vulnerable people from already marginalized groups — in these cases young, primarily queer boys and black girls — who have been either painted as liars and manipulators or outright dismissed.

What’s upsetting about these stories is not just the abuses they describe, but the public indifference they often get in response; the rumors and allegations around Kelly, for example, have done astonishingly little to tarnish his celebrity or dim public affection until very recently, following the release of the Lifetime documentary series Surviving R. Kelly. And it’s taken 10 years since Michael Jackson’s death for a significant documentary about the allegations of child molestation against him, HBO’s Leaving Neverland, to crack through the surface.

Ten or 20 years from now, will we be watching a heartbreaking five-part docuseries on the alleged victims of Bryan Singer? On the many accusations against him, on how they were ignored for years, on how they sort of broke through in early 2019, how they quickly petered out, and how he continued to get work — and watch his movies win awards — even after the allegations were made public? (Hopefully not.) Is years or decades of hindsight the only way any of us can begin talking about things like domestic violence or sexual assault? The distance might make it feel safer to discuss, especially when powerful people are involved, but it also means the conversation starts far too late.

Lorena also reminds audiences that she was the subject of wild cruelty from the media and comedians during and after her trial. “David Letterman used to call me his girlfriend,” Lorena says in the docuseries. “The jokes did bother me, because I didn’t know to handle it. People were talking about my background. They were saying I was just a hot-blooded Latina woman. It hurts my heart. It hurts my brain. It hurts my whole body.”

Howard Stern practically made a career out of promoting Lorena’s ex-husband — he had Bobbitt on his show repeatedly and during his 1994 Rotten New Year’s Eve Pageant special, raising money for Bobbitt’s medical expenses. During the pageant, Stern airs a mocking reenactment of Lorena’s crime. “A penis is a terrible thing to waste,” Stern says, holding two pieces of a fake member, cut in half, aloft. The Bee Gees performed a parody song that included the advice “Don’t ever piss off your wife.” The metaphor is so blatant it’s embarrassing: A man’s penis is his power, and this woman had the audacity to try to take it away. She needed to be put in her place. “To me it was just cruel,” Lorena told the New York Times. “Why would they laugh about my suffering?”

In hindsight, jokes like these may seem to be in such bad taste that it’s a wonder Stern still has a career. But jokes at the expense of victims and marginalized people haven’t gone away, and neither have most of the comedians who make them. Amy Schumer used to crack jokes about Mexicans being rapists; she apologized for it years later. Sarah Silverman did blackface in 2007; it took her until 2015 to apologize for it (sort of??). Louis C.K. is, currently, mocking the Parkland shooting survivors and joking about his history of masturbating in front of nonconsenting women, all to applause from comedy club audiences. Every Saturday, Michael Che and Colin Jost turn Saturday Night Live into a Statler and Waldorf sketch where they complain about having to learn a few new gender pronouns. None of this will age well, but even in the moment, plenty of us don’t find these “jokes” all that funny to begin with.

The only tangible thing to learn from watching Lorena, besides the full facts of her case, is that the strongest advantage people like Lorena have on their side is time. You just have to wait. You have to wait out the cruel late-night jokes and the sexist media coverage about you and the gossip and conjecture and slut-shaming and mockery. You have to wait two and a half decades, and then maybe, if your case was a big enough deal, someone will make a movie about you, and you’ll get a chance to wear a nice blouse and trousers and sit on a couch and tell your story from the beginning, without interruption, for the first time in your life. The world will turn in your direction, and your abusers will look worse and worse with every passing day (even if they’ve evaded any concrete kind of consequences), but first — you have to wait.

Scandalous stories like Lorena’s are also undoubtedly complicated by the fact that they don’t only boil down to a bad man and a woman wronged. Even in light of widely publicized and well-produced reconsiderations, not all viewers will be on board with Lorena, who did commit a crime, just as Lewinsky is far from a fully redeemed figure now in the public eye. And both women will always be punchlines to some people; even for the few who do get their turn to reframe the stories of their own lives, not everyone is going to listen.

“We always want to find a victim, a villain, and a hero,” says Marshall. “We accept the story we’re told. Having everyone filed away as a certain kind of person and every event filed away as a certain kind of story is how we impose order in the world.” But if you’re able to turn away from that tidy story, and hear what the people who lived it are really saying, “you get closer to the truth.” ●

CORRECTION

February 19, 2019, at 6:34 p.m.

The name of the Michael Jackson HBO documentary Leaving Neverland was misstated in an earlier version of this post.

[myfriendpokey]

Morality Play

What does it mean to have a videogame tell you you're a good person? It doesn't know me, can't see me. I don't know if you can be *immoral* in a single player game outside of some very inventive custom controls. Why should I care what a game says? Any inner moral life that a videogame or a painting might possess would be more alien to me than that of a bug or a starfish. Of course videogames and paintings are made by humans, and shaped by the moral opinion of humans.. but we might make a distinction between what the human says and the object says, we might still feel the latter is more important, somehow. 

The moral authority of an artwork or object comes from the fact that it's not quite human, that it comes to us from outside humanity to an extent, is distinguished from the unreliable back and forth of human consciousness in motion. But this distance is exactly why you might expect those moral verdicts to be unintelligible to us, or at the very best, to be untrustworthy, an imitation. So what's the appeal – that of having a human voice which speaks with the gravitas of an immortal object? The pleasant conceit that the general shape of our minds is universal, like all those Star Trek aliens that are just regular guys with slightly weirder ears or foreheads? The void speaks, and turns out to sound like a computer engineer.

But maybe not necessarily, maybe in fact it's sometimes not universal authority and moral support that we seek from the object: maybe a certain jankiness of verdict around the way these things communicate in human terms is itself part of the appeal. I think of paper fortune tellers, magic eight-balls, "love tester" machines that return a romantic prognosis based on palm temperature. The entrancing bathos of the chance-driven or mechanistic judgement that still speaks with a human voice: I’m sorry, I cannot answer right now. Please shake me, so I may try again. How different is that to the widely beloved and magnificently broken romance system in Dragon's Dogma, where, spoilers: your "soulmate" is not a matter of direct moral choice, but of variables being tracked over the course of the game including who you talked to and what sidequests you completed - which means it could arbitrarily turn out to be the weapons merchant, or a grandpa npc you found a potion for. Which is goofy, but only in a slightly more blatant way than "accidentally unlocking the romantic option in a dialogue tree from just clicking around" or "having your morality score drop 5 points because you pressed the wrong button and accidentally hurled a rock at someone's head while trying to equip shoes". 

I think something I appreciate about videogames is the kind of insectlike moral life that they tend to portray, the sense of value systems which are in some way recognisable but which have mutated in conversion to something alien and horrifying. Lara Croft shooting a wild eagle is unfortunate, Lara Croft shooting a thousand wild eagles is bizarre – but really those thousand eagles are just the one eagle, the one self-contained pulp encounter fantasy, which has been extended, extrapolated, systemised as result of being placed in this machine. The latter may be more egregious but it’s still composed of repeated incidents of the original encounter - and part of the strangeness in these games is just the uncomprehending machine effort to systemise the half-formed gunk substance of our terrible fantasy lives, which only bear a vague and halfhearted relation to any notion of ethics in any case.. We can contemplate with envy and excitement the possibilities of running more realistic, recognisable emotional and moral situations through the meatgrinderof the format in this way. How about a solemn middlebrow videogame about divorcing 50 different wives, each one larger and more powerful than the last (excluding sprite recolours)? 

All this is not to say that the casual political and moral stupidity already in videogames should simply be excused or exist outside of critique. But in addition to the body of discourse  around "moral commodities" - commodities invested with moral  or political meaning independent of any brutal labour practices they might entail or monopolistic accumulation of private  wealth they might support – I think it's also worth considering the purpose of the "moral object" itself. The alienation intrinsic to the object form can be a way to think, and also a way to avoid thinking. To project moral beliefs away from the specific context of a creaturely human existence can be a way of expanding that existence, but also of denying it. The paltriness of the human can itself be problematic next to the splendour of the object, and the reflected moral superiority of those with the means of producing such objects.

*****

There's a famous line in the Spiderman comics that with great power comes great responsibility. But it's also kind of a weird line because, while obviously applicable to Spiderman, the person it's actually delivered to is Peter Parker - who is, for all his uncle knows, still a physically awkward and friendless nerd with no immediately visible "great power" to speak of. He does like nuclear physics, though - maybe the advice was intended as a friendly intervention to keep him from turning into the next Edward Teller? Or possibly it's just a kind of unconscious, pulp-writer-trance-appropriation of the muscular liberal rhetoric of the then-current Kennedy administration. Or maybe, and stretching a bit, it's a line that relates more to the conditions of pulp culture manufacturing itself, to the awareness that the stuff you make will be printed thousands of times and sold to kids around the country, poured raw into the national subconsicous. With great sales figures comes great responsiblity.

I mention it because I think it connects to an issue with the kind of cultural criticism that emerged, like it or not, from the specific context of an age of mass media. With great power comes great responsibility - but conversely, to execute your great responsibility you also need great power. And what are you meant to do if you don't have it? Does no power mean having no responsibility? It's possible, but i feel like most people would be dubious about this as a moral lesson - and the inescapability of heavily-financed blockbusters in the culture means that an assumption of already "having great power" sometimes becomes a critical starting point. If you don't have power you should get it, so that you can then have great responsibility and contribute to the discourse. The effect can sometimes be like climbing a mountain of corpses to get a better platform for your speech about world peace.

A good essay on jrpgsaredead.fyi points out the way that certain industry conversations on "accessibility" revolve specifically around access to whatever mainstream AAA action games are currently dominating the news cycle. And the related effect where both problems and proposed solutions are particular to these games, the audience they have, and the resources they can bring bear: More consultants! More characters! More romance options! Better character creators! If you're speaking to an (essentially captive, given the marketing monies involved) audience of five million people you'd better be sure your ideas are, at least, not actively harmful, and in fact should ideally be improving - - fine. How about an audience of 50 people? Or an audience of 0? Does that mean this work is less moral than what speaks to a larger crowd - in effect, that it's worse? And what about the relationship to audience that this kind of teaching implies? i can think of several occasions where people from different subcultures or minority groups were reprimanded because something in their own experience might read differently, or problematically, when presented to a presumably white/cis/affluent etc audience - which is of course the audience that matters, because what's the value of presenting work from an alternative perspective to an audience already familiar with that perspective, to whom it has no automatic moral significance (might, in fact, merely be 'aesthetic')? Compare the complexity of a specific local audience which can think for itself to the easy win of the alternative:  a phantasm audience of moral blanks to whom rote lessons in hypothetical empathy can be tastefully and profitably imparted over and over, forever.

****

If the ethical act is that which we'd be willing to posit as universal law, perhaps we could say: the ethical artwork is that which we'd be willing to mass produce. Small or hobbyist developers are encouraged to work from the perspective of a mass-productive capacity they do not in fact possess; their successes and inevitable failures are hoovered up alike by the industry proper for later deployment in the form of cute dating sim or inspirational narrative with similar but sanitized tone or aesthetic. In essence a kind of moral QA testing, with all the job security and recompense that this implies. 

The hobbyist is, by definition, not universal: they are enclosed within the local and the material. What time do you get off work? What materials do you have to hand? Are those materials always legal? The entire western RPG Maker community exists as result of widespread bootlegging; the entirety of videogame history and preservation essentially depends on stolen copies; we find out about it through ROMs, videos and screenshots which mostly depend for their continued existence on copyright holders either not finding out or choosing not to pursue these debateable violations.  It's a complicated discussion whether this stuff can be justified on a general, universal level - but also I'm not sure we can do without it. When Fortnite uses dances from TV and music videos of living memory they're considered to be in the public domain; but Fortnite itself is not in the public domain, even though it's so inescapable that even I have a pretty good idea of what it looks and plays like despite having made a pretty determined effort to not find out anything about it. It's "public culture" in that sense, and it includes public culture within it, but both game and imagery are privately owned and aggressively policed (suing teenage hackers, etc). What does it mean for art to emerge from an ever more privatized sense of public life?

In 2007 the RPG Maker game Super Columbine Massacre RPG was added to, then removed from, the Slamdance festival following complaints; it was a minor cause celebre at the time following concerns about censorship and the lack of protections for expression in the videogame format specifically following the Jack Thompson media crusade in the United States. In 2019 the same festival retrospectively changed their reasoning: now the game had no longer been removed on the basis of questionable taste, but on the basis of questionable compliance with copyright law, since it included music from the likes of Smashing Pumpkins without paying for licensing fees (and also because the author generally "hadn’t created several of its elements" - asset flips!!!). There's some humour in the fact that a benign-sounding concern with "artist's rights" could just be swapped in as a more respectable-sounding surrogate for general prudery with exactly the same result. But also, in this instance, what does it mean about the game? As facile as SCMR is, the bootleg use of graphics and music was its most interesting element: the game was a bricolage of American pop culture at a specific point in time, as were the killers, as are we. The nearness and recognisability of that culture, the sense of not being able to get enough distance from it to properly fictionalise or think about what happened, is what stands out. An "ethical" version of the same game which used original music - Nirvanalikes, some tastefully copyright-adjacent Marilyn Manson clones - would not just be diminished, it would be actively insulting in the false distance it implied.

I don't mean this at all as a request for more edgelord-ism. But it's worth remembering that videogames themselves are not ethical; are, in fact, colonized materials assembled with exploitative labour and dumped aimlessly into public life by electronics corporations looking to make a buck. The bizarre and haphazard ways this long dump of poor decisions has manifested, warped, been adjusted into culture is part of what's worth attending to about the format – I think it's worth looking closer into all these pools of murkiness, before ethical  landlords can come drape a tarp over them as part of the process of divvying up the property.

(image credits: youkai douchuuki, quiz nanairo dreams, trauma center: under the knife, espial)

[thequietuptown]

How do you deal with it all? How is anyone not overwhelmed by everything that's going on? I don't know how I'm going to survive this latest disaster.

My dear friend, It’s a lot. I think most of us are getting tired of historic events that are happening in our lifetime. Our society appears to be collapsing around us, and it’s hard to think about making something new from the rubble, when you’re not even sure how to survive the fall. These past few years, feeding on division, especially have been pulling all of us down. When you have to lift the Earth just to take a step, it makes sense that you’re tired. I’m tired, too.

That being said, I do think there are things you can do to help mitigate that stress. First, none of this is your fault. I’m not going to say it’s not your responsibility because I think at this point we all have a responsibility to work towards a better tomorrow, and when society develops cancer, we all must seek treatment. But it is absolutely not your fault, and no one expects a single person to change the world. It’s okay to feel tired. It’s okay to feel like giving up. You have to take care of yourself. Know your role. Help out how you can. Know that not everyone is needed on every front line. Carry your share on your terms. Allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling, and listen when your body needs rest. Fighting through exhaustion will only leave you broken.

Along the lines of knowing what is your responsibility, take stock in what is not your responsibility. I know the concept of gratitude gets thrown around a lot, but so much of the conversation around it revolves around things that bring you joy, and when you’re feeling down and out, that’s not always helpful. “I can’t imagine getting off the couch, but my cat sure is cute.” That’s all well and good, and practicing gratitude consistently is absolutely a valid form of cognitive behavioral therapy, but as self-care isn’t just bubble baths and quiet, meditative walks in nature (it’s also about doing the hard work of establishing boundaries and being emotionally honest and vulnerable), gratitude isn’t just the things that bring you a modicum of happiness. What are the things you don’t have to worry about? It’s not even about prioritizing. Think huge to start with. You don’t have to worry about the sun being there. You don’t have to worry about the planet spinning. This kind of focusing can help find out where you can redirect energy, and eventually you can maybe start thinking about things you can delegate, or things that you can prioritize.

When you’re starting to feel a little more up to it, that’s when that gratitude and those basic, in the colloquial sense, self-care techniques become valuable. Meditate. Breathe. Do whatever you need to do so that you feel stable and grounded. If mantras work for you, find one that serves to center you. It’s not always about moving forward. Sometimes it’s about needing to take in your surroundings just to know where you stand. And that’s okay!

When you do find yourself needing to stand still, that is often the best time so look for those around you. Talk about what you’re feeling, and actively listen to what others are saying. Not only are you probably going to find someone who can offer you empathy and validation, when you feel like you cannot do those things for yourself, but you can return that incredibly valuable service, and you may learn something. Different perspectives tend to see different things, and if everyone in the conversation is only seeing part of the picture, it’s going to be hard to see what’s going on. You may have valuable information for someone else. Someone else may excel at something you’re struggling with. Real systemic change simply cannot happen from the top down in a living society that has its own survival instincts. More than ever, community is what matters.

Thank you for talking with me, friend. Please know that I am here to listen and help however I can. You are not alone in this.

[rhodrymavelyne]

Here’s Parts 1 and 2 of Let’s Just Talk. A prompt from P.T. Wyant involving a blood splatter, a dust bunny, and a heat wave turned into an encounter between a reluctant medium and a ghost who won’t leave her porch...

Let’s Just Talk

The air was hot, moist, and damp, making her russet blouse cling to her arms and full skirt stick to her legs. Aware of her own physicality in a slimy sense, Caitlin chased a dust bunny from the porch with a broom, grimacing at the amount of grime and filth which had managed to gather.

It was a never ending battle between Caitlin and the dust, must, and other elements of entropy, one she could never win.

Contemplating the hopelessness of it all, she saw the blood stain, clinging to the stairs.

Wonderful. More chaos and death. Just what she needed.

“You can see it?” A hushed voice, warm and wet as the air murmured in her ear.

“You’re too close.” Caitlin stepped back before realizing she’d just let the ghost know she’d heard her.

Marvelous. Another deadbeat stalker to follow her, desperate for the help of a ‘medium’. Not that Caitlin was any kind of medium. She kept her back to the ghost, refusing to give it any more attention than she had already.

“Get lost.” She attacked another dust bunny with her broom, only to have it skitter away through the bristles. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Why are you talking to me, if you don’t believe in them?” Exasperation colored the spirit’s voice, leaking into the air.

Some of the plants shivered and drooped at the sound.

“Because you’re a menace to the few flowers I have. If you had any regard for plant life while you were alive, I’m hoping you’ll show some consideration!” Caitlin transferred her broom to one hand and pointed at the pot with the bent stems. “Because once I show any sympathy for one of you, an entire of army of ghosts show up, all demanding help with their unresolved issues!”

She whirled to face the ghost, jabbing her broom at the despoiler of the virgin plants. “This is all your fault. Why didn’t you try to live a more meaningful life instead of waiting until after death to figure out you were a mess?!”

The ghost’s lower lip, or what looked far too much like a lower lip began to tremble. Maybe that had been a bit harsh, even if it was true. Truth was only too often the harshest thing out there. Most people weren’t ready for it.

Especially restless spirits.

“You’re right.” This particular spirit’s face sharpened, lines of care appearing above her rounded cheeks, straight, dark hair falling forward across her forehead, the image of a smiling, sprightly pink haired girl with a sword standing proudly in the middle of her black t-shirt.

Caitlin found herself softening a little more at the sight of that image. Restless spirit or not, she couldn’t knock this one’s taste.

“I should have led a more meaningful life. It’s not the sort of the thing you realize, right? Make the most of the time you’ve got or else you’ll be stuck in an incorporeal state on a grumpy medium’s porch.” The girl raised an eyebrow at Caitlin.

“I’m not grumpy! Just because I’m not all smiles and seances doesn’t make me grumpy!” Caitlin drew the broom in close against her chest. “Besides I’m not a medium! Not everyone who can see spirits decides to make her whole life revolve around that single ability!”

“Defensive?” The ghost raised hands which Caitlin could no longer see through. “I didn’t mean to wither your flowers. I honestly didn’t. You may find this hard to believe, but the last thing I want to do is antagonize a human who can actually see me.”

The ghost lowered her head, fixing large, dark, almost soulful brown eyes upon Caitlin. They were entirely too much like a puppy’s, the puppy that stares at you silently, pleading with you to take her home.

Trying to ignore them made Caitlin feel as if she’d kicked said puppy.

“All right. Fine,” she relented. “What’s your name and what do you want?”

“I’m Minae. All I want is to talk to someone. Anyone.” Dark hair fell forward, shimmering and transparent around her face. “Just for a little while.”

“You couldn’t talk to anyone while you were alive?” All she wanted was conversation. This was almost pitiful. Especially when she had such great taste in anime.

“Not with anyone who listened or was interested in the same things I was.” Minae made a half hearted gesture toward her shirt.

Sympathies locked and engaged. Any misgivings Caitlin might have had evaporated in the heat of her fangirly scorn for anyone who couldn’t appreciate that anime.

“You didn’t have any friends who shared your interest?” Caitlin bit her lower lip, trying not to relive lonely school days past.

“I didn’t have any friends.” The ghost’s round shoulders slumped, concealed by comforting folds of shirt.

This stirred further empathy. Caitlin also favored baggy clothing which hid an ample figure, whether said clothing was fashionable or not.

“Not real friends.” Minae exposed small white teeth in a mouth which looked only too solid. “Just people I spent time with in order not be alone.”

This brought back memories Caitlin could no longer shove into the back of her mind, memories of surrounding herself with a crowd. Joining in with a group of other girls, smiling, laughing, not really touched by anything which was said.

She hadn’t disliked any of those girls. Smiling at them, laughing at their terrible jokes had been easy. Almost natural. Perhaps even a little fun. Caitlin enjoyed acting. Here she was playing the part of someone like everyone else.

Someone who wasn’t her.

This wasn’t something she’d understood at the time. Not until she met someone who truly looked at Caitlin for the first time.

***

Smiling and talking was easy, so easy it was almost natural. Nothing she said mattered.

“Look at the peace sign.” Someone nudged her, grinning a bit. What was her name again? “Along with the crucifix, the jade hat, and the mouse ears!”

Caitlin glanced at the girl with the purple streak in her short dark hair, wearing all of those things.

“Some people will do anything for attention,” she muttered under her breath, turning her back on the spectacle. Caitlin walked in the opposite direction, while the rest of the ground smirked and giggled over Purple Hair.

Whatever. She was already bored.

By the middle of the day, she’d forgotten about it. This was her time alone, to stride across the park at high noon.

Yes, it was hot. Spirits tended to be sleepy and dormant. It was the one time of the day Caitlin dared to be alone. She didn’t need a crowd of people around her, she could walk alone, listening to the wind in the trees, smelling the flowers.

Plants were so much more pleasant than people. Prettier, too.

Caitlin strode at a brisk pace until she came to the garden. At which point, she slowed down, strolled past lillies, snapdragons, plum trees, Japanese maples, breathing in the air.

If only she could be like this all the time.

She stopped at the bench which offered a great view of a cluster of purple flowers she didn’t know the name of. At first, she didn’t even notice the person who dropped onto the bench next to her.

After all, this person gave her plenty of space.

“I can never make up my mind.” Her voice was soft, inobtrusive, mingling with the winds and smells.

“What?” Caitlin turned to look at the speaker, only to see the purple haired girl who’d been mocked at school.

“Do I feel spiritual? In what way?” The stranger didn’t turn or look at Caitlin. She kept her gaze fixed upon a distant group of rose bushes. “Do I want to wear jade or my pentacle? Am I Christian? Am I pagan? I myself am not sure.” Gray green eyes, slightly slanted darted in Caitlin’s direction, direct and serene. “Sorry if I bothered you with my confusion.” She fingered with each symbol around her neck, eyeing it. “It’s my normal state of being.”

“One you have to express? It seemed like you were trying to make an impression.” Caitlin leaned back against the bench, arms spread out behind her. “You certainly caught the eye of the people with me.”

“Completely unitentional. An unfortunate side affect of being myself.” The girl smiled, giving Caitlin a sideways glance. “We can’t all blend it.”

“Can’t you?” Caitlin asked, putting an unintentional edge in your voice. She herself blended in, every day, making an art of not standing out.

“Not in a way which wouldn’t drive me completely mad.” The girl smiled, transforming her rounded cheeks and snubbed nose into something unique. Almost sagelike. “Doing what you do every day looks exhausting.”

“You’ve been watching me?” Caitlin raised an eyebrow, wondering if she shouldn’t feel uneasy. Wondering even more why she didn’t. “Why?”

“I’m curious.” The girl brushed a lock of purple hair off her brow. “Why spend time with people you don’t really care for?”

“I don’t dislike them,” Caitlin protested. “They’re all right.”

“Are they?” The stranger withdrew her arms from the bench to hug herself. “They’re not your friends. Not really.”

“Why do you care?” Caitlin asked, getting a little irritated. This girl was pushy. What’s more, she was intruding on Caitlin’s alone time. “Why don’t you stop analyzing me and tell me what you want?”

“To talk to you.” The girl dropped her arms, stretching them out in front of her. “I’m Micki, by the way. Like the mouse.” She pointed to the hat she wore. “What’s your name?”

“Caitlin.” She wondered if she should have given her name so readily. She wasn’t sure if this stranger should have it. “Why do you want to talk to me?”

“I’ve seen you visit this garden, noon after noon.” Micki gestured to the purple flowers ahead of her. “You seem like a very different person when you’re here. Someone worth talking to.”

“Picky about whom you converse with, aren’t you?” Once more, Caitlin surrounded herself with a barrier of old fashioned words. Anyone who was frightened off by them wasn’t worth the time of day. “Why me?”

“I’m not sure.” Micki smiled, once again transforming her face into a human landscape of curiousity, pain, intelligence, and serenity. “Perhaps if we converse, I’ll find out.”

To be concluded next Wednesday! If you want to read Part 3, it’s already posted at the Forbidden Cauldron. 

[theruyak]

To Survive

I’ve stopped and started this thing probably a dozen times at this point.  For someone like me, notoriously opinionated and always spewing words this way and that, you can imagine how troubling that is.  Words, for me, have always come easily…and when they don’t it feels like I've lost y grip and been carried out to sea.  For this, at least, I guess I will just let myself get carried away.

When I was a kid I was molested by a priest.  I couldn’t have known at that time how much my life would change, the nuanced ways in which my identity would be, to some extent, shaped around such a dark time in my life.  Now, I’m 31 years old and I've been grappling with this for over half of my existence.  To be a survivor of a sex crime…you have no idea until it happens to you what that even means.

I’m not writing about this out of the blue.  Last week, a guy that I knew in one of my college support groups for abused people, committed suicide.  He is the 6th person in our group of 11, tipping the scale to a place where the majority of people in my original cadre of misfit toys have taken their own lives.  Sadly, this is a known reality for those who are survivors.  I remember in college one of my psychology professors so cavalierly pointing out “molested kids tend to take their own lives” - as though it was just another statistic and as if no one in the room would one day fall into that collection of data.

I’ve been pretty quiet about all of this for a myriad of reason.  Shame is the most obvious, although as I will describe in the following collection of words I am relatively inoculated from that experience these days.  Concern that sharing this story would reopen the old wounds of people who suffered greatly during my tenure as the most reviled person in my little high school community - teachers, students, innocent families, even the people who made my life a living nightmare.  You learn pretty quickly that the collateral damage when you come forward about sexual abuse tends to be quite extensive - and that is before you even start to look at the remnants of your tattered old life.  Mostly…I have built a life that is devoid of the effects of the affirmation or condemnation of others - and when you share hard things like this people always have an opinion that they feel the need to share with you, and I am not here for that.  I am not here to be called a hero, or a villain, for sympathy or for rage.  Therefore, sharing this stuff always just seemed needlessly exhausting.

So…while there is a lot that I am going to be unpacking here, I do have several intentions around why I a writing this.

1) If my words, and the way in which I have been able to save myself from falling to suicide, can help just one person, I believe it is obligatory for me to share it.  I have tried to distance myself from the experience of suicide and from the suffering of my fellow survivors but things have changed for me recently - we do not know if we are here for another century or just another day, and I do think some of these “truths” need to be shared.

2)  To give people who haven’t had this experience a comprehensive understanding of MY journey through this nightmare in the hopes that it will inspire empathy when considering the survivors or sex crimes.  The reality is, until it happens to you there is no way for you to understand the many tortures of a life being a formerly abused human being in our society.  To be stripped of dignity, made a monster simply because of something that happened TO you…it is a special kind of hell.  And the stain.  You are forever stained.  You cannot pretend these things didn’t happen to you, our world won’t allow it.  Forever we walk through life seen as broken or defective at best, complicit or degenerate at worst.

3) To honor those who are struggling with this.  Abuse is something where even when you meet other people with similar experiences, we don’t talk about it.  It reminds me of women who suffer miscarriages.  I hope that by sharing a few painful details of my life, I can bring a sense of relief and solidarity to you if you have been bearing this burden alone.

Ok…well let’s dive in.

—

When I was in high school at Georgetown Preparatory School, I was sexually abused by a Jesuit priest.  He ran the theatre program at Prep, was as close to a mentor as I had had at that time, and was deeply loved by the community.

Leading up to this moment, I do not recall being happier.  I was a precocious, affectionate, loving kid who had found his niche in the theatre.  I had more friends in that program than I had ever had in my life, and for the first time was coming to understand what it meant to really love other people.  I think I loved them, my friends from that time…I don’t really remember anymore.  I had been cast as the lead in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which I was tremendously excited about…and then everything changed during a one on one rehearsal with (then Father) Gary Orr.

I didn’t tell my family right away.  I didn’t tell anyone, actually.  I was confused, enraged, and terrified of losing all of my friends and of losing this community — a community which revolved around a man who had sexually assaulted me.  It seems silly now when I look back…thinking that I had a choice as to whether or not I would lose all of that.  I lost them all the second I walked into that rehearsal.  Our society spends so much time treating sexual predators like animals, when they are actually people.  Sometimes intelligent, almost always wholly self-absorbed.  However, the rabbit hole of “what makes a monster” if a whole other 50 page journal entry that I don’t think I have the strength to dive into today…the only relevant point is that events had been put into motion over which I had no control, and they were beautifully orchestrated by this priest.

I did come forward about the abuse eventually.  I went to a young priest who was a close friend of my family…and also a close friend of the priest who had attacked me.  He told me he would go to the administration and would go to the provincial, who is the head of the jesuits in that particular “province”.  He said the police had to be notified, and that he was on my side.  I was called in by the interim headmaster the next day and questioned for about 5 minutes.  He told me the school would be contacting the police (which at the time was compulsory by law within 24 hours of any child making an accusation of abuse.)

Learning number 1 - never trust the institution responsible for the offending party.  I loved Prep, but they time and time again committed illegal actions in an attempt to discredit the accuser and protect this priest, who a decade later we would find molested over a dozen kids over his time at this high school.  They NEVER went to the police, and I later discovered had multiple conversations, over the phone as well as through email, where they expressed that they knew full well their obligation to go to the police and actively chose not to.  Prep as an institution is wonderful…but every institution is only as “good” as the people running it, and my high school decided to do everything they could to protect this priest, regardless of the accusation or the veracity of it.  As a matter of fact, I later was told by a Jesuit priest who had been tasked with investigating Gary Orr that the provincial often floated the question 
“how do we get the troublesome faggot expelled?” - If you decide to come forward, which is your decisions alone, you must always go first to the police.  Orr finally was brought to justice because a man who he had raped weekly for months while he was a 14 year old freshman boarder at Prep in the early 90s came to the Montgomery County police at the age of 36, and my complaint and accusation were on the books.  Only then did the avalanche of accusations that would crush the molester came rushing in.

After I came forward, I thought naively that things would get better.  I thought the school that I loved would protect me, my friends in Theatre would believe me, and that the world would come together to vanquish this great evil in our midst.  After all, why would Eric Ruyak…top of his class, well adjusted, well-liked, never in trouble Eric Ruyak…why would he make something like this up?

I didn’t understand people then as I do now.  “The truth” and “my truth” are two very, very different things.  It wasn’t long before Orr unleashed his trap, accusing me of being mentally disturbed, claiming that I had told him I had some sort of psychological problems.  He claimed I had come to him and confessed not just to being gay but that I was sleeping my way through every other gay man in the western hemisphere.  His two best friends on the faculty, one a US History teacher and the other a woman who taught “human dignity in the modern world” of all things, began a campaign to discredit my accusation.  The history teacher fed some story to an alumnus that I was a sexual deviant who was struggling with AIDS, had been raped by family members and was projecting my trauma onto an innocent priest who had done nothing but befriend me, a very troubled child…oh, and also this pathologically lying sociopath had recanted but the school refused to announce any of this because they were scared of my family.  I found out about this email because this alumnus sent it to every alumni in his graduating class from several years back, among whom was one of my friend’s older brothers.  My buddy came to me and told me about the email and showed it to me…and I knew I was in over my head.  I wasn’t equipped to deal with adults making up brutally vile fantasies in an attempt to attack a child.  They later created a fake blog that they claimed was mine, in which I was supposedly planning to kill the academic dean.  My father was called and told I was not going to be welcome back to the school pending an investigation into my “death threats” to the administration.  

Those were just two of dozens and dozens of attempts to discredit me and get me expelled from Prep, and many people I have met in the subsequent years who came forward had similar stories.  To make matters worse, the provincial had concocted a lie to protect Gary Orr…he had a letter sent to the entire Prep community that said Orr was being treated for Parkinson’s disease and that all of the rumors about him are ludicrous lies that are completely unfounded and untrue.  Mind you, in open court a decade later, I learned Orr was not being treated for Parkinson’s in St. Louis (which I already knew) - but he was in fact in a rehabilitation program for Jesuits who had raped children.

On and on and on and on and on and on it went.  So…how?  How do you survive this?  I had an entire community actively, and successfully, making me out to be a psychopath hell bent on destroying their community, and even the leader of the jesuits at my school was creating false narratives in an attempt to save face for the society and the school.  I was somewhat well protected…but I still was going to school every day, suffering insults and attacks, knowing that the faculty at my high school was split between people who hated me with a burning passion and those who silently believed me but thought standing by the sidelines while a 16 year old was called a sexual deviant and a pathological liar was the correct course of action.

I had no escape.

“Please, don’t make me wake up.” That was what my prayers had become.  I didn’t understand how something horrible could happen TO me and that I would then lose everyone I had come to love and everything I had come to know.  My parents were tireless in their efforts to defend me…but they loved that school.  We were all trying so hard to do as little damage to the school while making sure I survived this experience, but what ultimately happened is that I was thrown too the wolves by everyone in an attempt to keep the situation as quiet as possible.  Every morning that I woke up I was disappointed.  I have nothing and no one, that was all I felt.  I was no fool, I understood why this had happened and knew my part in it.  I could have said nothing, I could have let him go forth and molest more kids and continue to have the life I had, just diminished by a couple dark secrets.  That, however, has never been my way.  And so, I knew what I had lost and why I had lost it and it was unbearable.  The guilt and the shame and the deep grief was crushing me, a child whose charmed life had been devoid of any of those things until then.

It was not long after I had been accused of conspiracy to murder the academic dean (which had been quickly thrown out with a little IP address search leading us back to Orr and his friends), that I had my first compulsions to kill myself.  It was a funny feeling, really.  I didn’t feel despair when I thought of it.  I felt relief.  I was withering, every bit of me dying as I went day after day after day back to the lions den.  I was getting several death threats a week, I had become the most reviled person in our community.  In a nutshell, I am intimately familiar with the desire to die.

So now we get to my point in all of this.  We often talk about asking for help in these moments.  Call a suicide hotline, talk to loved ones, reach out to your family.  Well, I wasn’t interested in being told not to die, and I felt like I couldn’t go to my family as I had hurt them enough already.  I had convinced myself that this was a final kindness toward an innocent group of people that didn’t deserve to have me destroy their lives.  “Life-ruiner.” - that is what my old friends called me.  They called me other things as well…but that is the one that to this day I won’t forget.  I remember in my mind standing at the proverbial cliff’s edge, letting myself come closer to it, getting ready to let my mind fall into that dark chasm where I could go and forget and be forgotten.  I remember so vividly this moment, the moment when a hand, strong and confident, firm and kind, unyielding and unrelenting, took hold of me.  The hand that grabbed me and said “I’ve got you” and brought me back from the edge was not a friend’s, it wasn’t a parent’s…it was my own.

Learning 2 - you are your own hero.  Listen to me - I am speaking to those of you approaching that cliff.  People are going to disappoint you.  We are all messy, horrible creatures that are not capable of being as perfect as you will need us to be as you go forth to fight this battle.  YOU are the only person who will not you down.  YOU are the person who will love you unconditionally and will never leave your side.  I love my family, I love my friends, but I don’t need them.  In this battle, this war, I am all I need.  When you go to sleep at night and pray you don’t wake up, when you walk into the courtroom to testify against your rapist, YOU are there.  We cannot wait for anyone to save us because no one can save us…we can only save ourselves.  Ask for help - always.  But the help we need is not to be saved, it is to help give us the strength to save ourselves.

In that moment, the moment where I chose to live, something in my changed.  The little boy, so cheerful and goofy, was gone.  He had been gone for a while now, but I couldn’t seem to say goodbye.  In his stead stood a storm.  I knew in that moment that there was no longer anything anyone could do to me.  I had accepted the reality of who I was to the world, and I had embraced the reality of who I am to me.  Everyone I knew could scream their hatred for me to the heavens and back and I would be unmoved, for those things no longer mattered.  Regardless of what happened from that moment forward, I had my back.  Armed with that, I was ready to go to battle and take down a pedophile.  I had finally found God, and I found him not by looking up but by looking inward.

So what ultimately happened?  Well, when it came time for Orr’s trial, the Jesuit released all of the information they had on him to the police.  Volumes of false identities, hidden bank accounts, secret lovers, and most importantly other possible victims.  The moment the authorities had that, he pled guilty on all counts (yes, I know what you are thinking…if they had all this information why didn’t they give it to the police in the first place??  Please refer to learning 1).  I flew out to Maryland because I wanted to present my Victim impact statement to the judge herself in person, with Orr in the room.  I wanted to look him in the eyes one final time, prove to myself that I had forgiven the monster that hides in the closet, and make a point of saying in open court that more than anything it was the system, and Georgetown Prep, that I felt were culpable in my abuse and deserved the real blame.  Now that I know many of the other victims and their stories, let me tell you even the “best” of institutions still like to reduce anyone who threatens their reputations to ash, no matter the cost, no matter the circumstances.

So what happened afterward?  Well…not much changed.  The people who had hated me for “falsely” accusing Orr now hated me for “mishandling” the situation, the man who was at the time the President of the school had bene advised not to talk to me or any of the other victims, and so we were barred from communication with the administration…meanwhile, the school sent out a letter saying that they were shocked that this happened and did “everything required of them” in handling the situation.  What you come to understand when you are in our situation is that the lying never ends, for with all institutions the end justifies the means because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

Where do we go from here?  HA, that is the beauty.  Life.  In all of it’s exquisite tortures, and beautiful joys, you get to go and live life.  And you will live it with a deep understanding of humanity (a true gift) and an even greater appreciation for the joyful times in life, as only those who have suffered can truly understand.

To those of you who haven’t experienced this sort of disaster: I hope I have given you some things to chew on.  I can’t speak from a place of absolutes, no one can…but let me share with you something to think about.  If you are faced with this happening in your community, there are only two options: 1) the accuser is telling the truth, or 2) the accuser is lying, and in that case has some sort of severe issues.  Both are worthy of compassion.  The later sucks a lot because it makes things horribly hard for the rest of us who have actually been abused, but still…we must try to make the world a kinder place even in the face of adversity.  Please don’t attack accusers, even if you don’t believe them.  Those who ARE telling the truth are going through enough, and you never know when your unkind words may be the thing that ties the noose.

To my abused brothers and sisters: You have to get through these few moments and then you will see that “it gets better” is not just a slogan, it is reality.  I am not saying that you won't be marked by this experience…I am saying you will be and it will be ok.  Look, I have my issues, do not think for a second that I am trying to tell you I am walking through life some empowered perfect human being.  I am, and always have been, complicated.  I have a fierce love of others, and I have a great relationship with myself…and yet I can’t bring myself to read my birthday cards.  Seriously, not one.  As a matter of fact, if you try and make me read one in front of you, I will pretend to and then say “awww that is so sweet thank you.”  And it isn’t even conscious.  That, my friends, is weird as fuck…but tells you a lot.  I know I would sacrifice everything I have to protect the people I love, but will slap away their hands when they extend them to help ME.  That isn’t their job in my eyes, it is their job to go forth and live and my job to take the hits because I KNOW that I can.  I mean I could go on and on but I don’t want to discredit myself by dumping out ALL of my crazy, but you see what I mean.  At the same time, I am incredibly happy.  I have a beautiful life, very hard at times, but nevertheless I persist.  You can too.  Do it for yourself and everyone you love, and everyone who loves you.  Oh, and by the way, I see you, and I love you.  We got this.

Allllllllll right, I know that was all so terribly dark, but for those of you in the midst of this struggle, understand: I cam through horrific times and I am so deeply happy with life.  All the dark bits, all of the light bits…You will be ok.  It’s funny, now that I've finished driving down the shittiest of memory lanes, things have kind of coalesced for me in this way - after all of the crazy shit I went through, the insane, INSANE attacks, the loss of so many things that at the time seemed to mean so much…I took my hands off my eyes, looked around at the devestation, picked myself up and realized that these people could do nothing to me.  The Jesuits, the school, these people who hated my guts…they were completely and totally impotent.  The only thing that mattered was that small divine part of me that I had discovered, and nothing could touch it, and through it I was able to walk away with eyes and heart wide open.  They could only hurt me if I let them, and the second I understood that truth, I was invincible.  Let them hate and say horrible crap, they still do all the time.  I am free.

FURTHERmore…I have a life now filled with so many people that I love so deeply, in a way I never would have been capable of had I not survived that darkness of that terrible time.  Let me tell you, boys and girls, there is so so much to look forward to once you come out the other side of your harrowing.

LEARNING 3 I’ll end it on this note…forgiveness.  A lot of people define it a lot of different ways, but let me explain it to you from where I am standing, because it is the most powerful tool in my arsenal.  Forgiveness is NOT condoning, or reconciling, or forgetting, or placating, or denying the facts or even pretending you haven’t been brutally wronged.  Those things have nothing to do with it.  Forgiveness is the simple act of saying “You have no power over me, and I am letting go.”  You don’t need to say anything to anyone, you don’t need to confront someone, they could be dead for all the difference it makes.  Forgiveness is about YOU, and it is a choice.  Make it.  Make it every time.  If they have no power over you, they cannot push you off the cliff.

Jesus take the wheel that was the never ending shit storm of words.  I’ll end things here, since even I am getting sick of my poetic waxing around abuse haha.  So much love to you all.  

And if you are struggling and need someone to talk to, I am here.  I am always here.

Love, Eric