wtelf

[wtelf]

“Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are a 22-year-old college student in Kampala, Uganda. You’re sitting in class and discreetly scrolling through Facebook on your phone. You see that there has been another mass shooting in America, this time in a place called San Bernardino. You’ve never heard of it. You’ve never been to America. But you’ve certainly heard a lot about gun violence in the U.S. It seems like a new mass shooting happens every week. You wonder if you could go there and get stricter gun legislation passed. You’d be a hero to the American people, a problem-solver, a lifesaver. How hard could it be? Maybe there’s a fellowship for high-minded people like you to go to America after college and train as social entrepreneurs. You could start the nonprofit organization that ends mass shootings, maybe even win a humanitarian award by the time you are 30. Sound hopelessly naïve? Maybe even a little deluded? It is. And yet, it’s not much different from how too many Americans think about social change in the “Global South.” If you asked a 22-year-old American about gun control in this country, she would probably tell you that it’s a lot more complicated than taking some workshops on social entrepreneurship and starting a non-profit. She might tell her counterpart from Kampala about the intractable nature of our legislative branch, the long history of gun culture in this country and its passionate defenders, the complexity of mental illness and its treatment. She would perhaps mention the added complication of agitating for change as an outsider. But if you ask that same 22-year-old American about some of the most pressing problems in a place like Uganda — rural hunger or girl’s secondary education or homophobia — she might see them as solvable. Maybe even easily solvable. I’ve begun to think about this trend as the reductive seduction of other people’s problems. It’s not malicious. In many ways, it’s psychologically defensible; we don’t know what we don’t know. If you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving problems that seem urgent and readily solvable. Of course you’d want to apply for prestigious fellowships that mark you as an ambitious altruist among your peers. Of course you’d want to fly on planes to exotic locations with, importantly, exotic problems. There is a whole “industry” set up to nurture these desires and delusions — most notably, the 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the U.S., many of them focused on helping people abroad. In other words, the young American ego doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Its hubris is encouraged through job and internship opportunities, conferences galore, and cultural propaganda — encompassed so fully in the patronizing, dangerously simple phrase “save the world.””

—

“The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems” by Courtney Martin

(via

dietcokebisexual

)

Capitalism can’t save the world, but it can simulate the experience and sell it to you.

(via newwavenova)

[wtelf]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[wtelf]

<3 Krystal, so much.

Put down the mace! Put it down!

[wtelf]

Scene:    I’m reading some fat fantasy book set in Yet Another Faux Medieval Europe. Nothing in this story jibes with my understanding of actual medieval Europe. There’s no fantasy version of the Silk Road bringing spices and agricultural techniques and ideas from China and India and Persia. There’s been no Moorish conquest. There aren’t even Jewish merchants or bankers, stereotypical as that would be. Everyone in this “Europe” looks the same but for minor variations of hair or eye color. They speak the same language, worship the same gods — and everyone, even the very poor people, seems inordinately concerned with the affairs of the nobility, as if there’s nothing else going on that matters. There are dragons and magic in the story, but it’s the human fantasy that I’m having trouble swallowing.    It doesn’t matter which book I’m reading. I could name you a dozen others just like it. This isn’t magical medieval Europe; it’s some white supremacist, neo-feudalist fantasy of same, and I’m so fucking sick of it that I put the book down and open my laptop and start writing. Later people read what I’ve written and remark on how angry the story is. Gosh, I wonder why.

N. K. Jemisin, “How Long ’til Black Future Month?”  (September 30th, 2013)

This essay definitely stands the test of three years, and I highly recommend reading the whole thing. It’s spectacular.

(via medievalpoc)

N. K. Jemisin has a Patreon now and you should really check it out.

(via medievalpoc)

[wtelf]

... This sounds like me and my sister.

[wtelf]

<3 power and mojo to you, zoe quinn. 

I won.

Oh boy it’s another totally unedited blog post about my legal proceedings because apparently I don’t learn!

Last time I wrote about my legal entanglement with Eron Gjoni, the man who started GamerGate after I walked away from him, it was after asking the DA to drop the criminal harassment charges that the state wanted to bring against him.

I touched on the ongoing appeals process for the restraining order, and how it ironically tied me to my abuser even more, and became another tool for him to control my life and send the mob after me. The detective on my case had warned me that this might be an outcome with someone as chronically abusive as he is. While I had successfully persuaded the DA to drop criminal charges because the courts involvement was making everything worse, his appeal was still going. Despite his flat out refusal to abide by it (he actually started actively siccing people on my partner at the time immediately afterward), and despite my move to vacate my own restraining order to get him to finally fuck off, he was determined to milk it for everything he could - both the attention from GamerGate, the renewed harassment against me and my family, and the money he was soliciting. 

What this meant for me is that for the last year or so, despite having relocated and completely reorganized my life to keep him and his new friends away from me, I’d have to deal with the legal proceedings. This essentially turned this man I had spent two years trying to get away from into a pop-up ad in my life. This is really bad news for someone with PTSD who has to take pills to stop having nightmares about their abuser. It constantly interrupted any kind of recovery or closure I could make for myself, and a call from a lawyer about some new bullshit he was pulling, or a flood of gross links to his diatribes on Kotaku in Action from his new best friends in my mentions would hamstring whatever I was trying to do. Just before I had to take the stage at XOXO, I had to talk with my lawyers about asinine legal moves that he was pulling. I was on the other side of the country and I still couldn’t get away from him. 

I’ve been in a holding pattern since the appeals court heard oral arguments on a restraining order that had not only been destroyed, but would have already expired on it’s own months prior. My pro-bono counsel was optimistic, since the courts seemed to see that my ex was using them as a talking point since he had long since had any legal relief they could have granted him. I was told to expect a phone call, probably, in the next 3 months, though sometimes courts take longer. I’ve been holding my breath ever since.

The good news is that it’s finally over. The courts ruled that I acted within my rights, and dismissed his appeal as moot. I had gone into this asking that the court drop this and let me move on with my life, and they reassured my legal right to do so. My ex wanted to use me to set first amendment case law - what happened was a ruling that reassured the rights of domestic violence survivors to modify and terminate their restraining orders if they’re causing more harm than good. This was the outcome I wanted - not just for myself, but for anyone else that’s tried whatever they could to get away from their abuser without fully realizing how the legal system might make everything worse.

Quoth the court:

“We agree with Quinn’s argument that this rule does not apply in the sui generis context of c. 209A abuse prevention orders. Pursuant to statute, an abuse prevention order that has been issued can be modified “at any subsequent time.” … This provision serves to protect victims of abuse by allowing them to tailor the terms of abuse prevention orders as (often rapidly) developing circumstances may warrant… “A victim of [domestic] abuse is in the best position to decide what course of action will provide more safety. At a given time, an abuse prevention order might exacerbate the plaintiff’s danger”. With the parties having a recognized statutory right to seek modification of existing orders, it follows that a pending appeal of a 209A order does not deprive the trial court of its ability to modify the order.”

The courts found the “deluge of harassment” to be “uncontested”, that despite my ex’s constant bullshit claims “nothing in the record suggests that Quinn committed a fraud on the court”, and that my ex still has to obey court orders even if he doesn’t agree with them.

I’ve uploaded the court’s opinion here. It’s not too heavy on the legalese, and has a pretty good tl;dr of this last of the legal battles.

Naturally, his fan club is trying to spin this as a win because of a single footnote that lower courts should generally care about free speech, despite the court stating that the entire appeal is moot. I find my ex and his ilk clinging to a single footnote as a victory in a 12 page document detailing his complete failure to be nothing more an apt metaphor for his role in the last two years. 

They’re trying to claim it a a loss because I’m choosing to walk away from a legal battle that hasn’t protected me, but an end to this is all I’ve ever wanted from the beginning.

I cut contact with Eron because I wanted an abusive creep out of my life, so he launched GamerGate. I didn’t retaliate against him because I wanted an abusive creep out of my life, so he invaded every digital space that I occupied to spread his hate & yell at my friends and fans. I got a restraining order because I wanted an abusive creep out of my life, so he used it to solicit funds from GamerGate while promising them more nonsense about me while “joking” in their raid IRCs about breaking into my house while I couldn’t go home. I dropped charges and gave up on having to see or hear him ever again because I wanted an abusive creep out of my life, and he doubled down in spite of that. 

Now that the courts have said “no thank you”, I’m hoping that this is finally the end, and that maybe we *both* can move on with our lives. I’m hoping that I finally have the abusive creep out of my life, even if it won’t undox my friends and family, cure my ptsd, undo the harm caused to my friends and the industry, or fix the fact that to this day, strangers still claim that I fucked a writer at a press outlet that I *already had written for* simply to obtain coverage (that never existed) of a free game about mental health. 

But it’s a pretty fuckin big milestone in the healing process. 

By all signs, this marks the end of nearly two years of having to bag and tag my ex’s abuse against me for courts, judges, and law enforcement officers who have a loose understanding (at best) of what they’d even be looking at, and a seeming lack of resources to obtain any of that themselves. I don’t have to plan my life around court dates anymore, or get calls about what new stunt the man who ruined my life is pulling this time that I absolutely have to respond to or face legal repercussions. That alone is a tremendous weight off my shoulders. The Abusive Ex Popup Ad feature on my life is hopefully disabled - or at least this aspect of it is. His abuse is still a perpetual motion machine, and the threats and harassment is still the background noise of my life and likely always will be. I still have a way to go before I’m what I’d consider out of the woods, both in terms of unfucking my personal situation, healing the mental and emotional scars the last two years have left, and fully being able to talk about GamerGate in a past tense way. Creep Throat can still file for additional appeals, and after the last two years I’m not going to assume anything is impossible.

I can’t unfuck the last two years, not for me or anyone else he’s hurt. But this is at least one win. This is regaining control over my life and being able to finally ignore bargain bin Kilgrave. This is me being able to joke about how shitty my ex is without being afraid of how his lawyers will use it to justify what he’s done to me as they have previously. This is reaffirming the rights of domestic violence victims to walk the fuck away when they choose to. This means more energy for Crash Override and my ridiculous comedy games and the people I love.

Finally, I can move on from this ridiculous legal battle and focus on my energy on my ridiculous unicorn smut games. 

What more could I possibly want?

[wtelf]

I love Cosima so much. My heart was breaking for her during this scene, and I just want to hug her so much. 

Turn around, love. Turn around. Good girl!

[wtelf]

Every so often I think I should stop reading novels to comfort myself, and then I see another amazing book and can’t stop.

Maybe I’ll write a thing about them? Or maybe I’ll just keep reading.

[wtelf]

“I’m not a fucking genius. I work my ass off. Hamilton could have written what I wrote in about three weeks. That’s genius. It took me a very long time to wrestle this onto the stage, to even be able to understand the worldviews of the characters that inhabit my show, and then be able to distill that.” — Lin-Manuel Miranda

[wtelf]

I give up.

I now tweet. 

Tweet tweet tweet, tweedly deet deed. 

https://twitter.com/wteverlovingf / @wteverlovingf . Come say hi!

[wtelf]

In case you wanted to read an argument about how Aaron Burr’s portrayal in Hamilton the Musical feels very feminized, such that I identify with him strongly, well, go read it on the blog. 

[wtelf]

Being Female in Public

Originally posted on my other blog, because WTELF, why not. 

So, as an opening salvo here on WTELF, I figure I’ll write about Zoe Quinn. Nice, quiet topic, eh?

I, like so many others this week, am reacting to Quinn’s blog post on dropping the harassment charges against her abuser. And, honestly, my first reaction (and current sentiment) is that my heart hurts for Zoe Quinn.

Harassing and abusing women because they’ve rejected you is nothing new. Using the legal system to draw out that harassment and abuse is nothing new. And while using the internet to abuse your victim by proxy is somewhat new, in so many ways it’s only the medium that’s changed. For so long we’ve persecuted women who stand up for themselves, scorned them and let ourselves make accomodations for their abusers but not for the women abused. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that not supporting victims of abuse is really our default state, as a society. And it sucks. And it sucks so much more, now that there’s this medium that allows for instantaneous communication and information sharing and immediate response (and thus harassment).

And as my heart goes out to Zoe Quinn, I find I’m reevaluating things I never thought I’d need to reevaluate- Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, how people in my life responded to that scandal, and the disturbing parallels between these reactions and those of the twitter mob that has been making Quinn’s life hell.

It started, oddly enough, with an offhand comment made by Rachel Maddow on a podcast (full episode here), in which she said that Clinton should have resigned the presidency for his impropriety during this scandal. This shocked me- it just ran counter to the whole liberal consensus that had surrounded me as a twelve-year-old child, and yet was coming from someone whose liberal credentials I trusted. And, since, y’know, other than trying to read the Starr report as a child and failing miserably (not even the promise of titillating information was enough to make twelve-year-old me slog through that), I didn’t really knowwhat had happened.

And now that I’ve tried to learn- well, let’s just say that ‘shaken to my core’ is an apt cliche. The idea that the President of the United States would have an affair with an intern in his employ- and then would lie about said affair under oath, and also have the support of much of the democratic party in vilifying the women he took advantage of- just turns my stomach. That so much of our world took gleeful part in vilifying Lewinsky, in slut-shaming her and mocking her, in making a joke of the mere mention of her name- how did we do that? Lewinsky’s spoken eloquently about what that abuse did to her, and my heart hurts for her as it hurts for Zoe Quinn, as it hurts for so many women who have been betrayed and abused by our world because of their romantic decisions.

Perhaps more disturbing is that conducting an affair with an intern whilst President isn’t the worst thing Bill Clinton’s been accused of- there are some fairly serious allegations of sexual assault out there as well. And while this wasn’t as well known at the time, the idea that a powerful man who’s had multiple charges of sexual assault and sexual misconduct laid against him was supported by so many liberals is powerfully upsetting. Have we really progressed so little?

I suppose there’s an argument to be made that we have, in fact, progressed since the 90’s, and that Bill Cosby’s demolished reputation is a better counterpoint to Clinton than GamerGate. However, I’d argue that the true counterpoint is Lewinsky and Quinn, and that the power of those who wish to harass women into silence hasn’t truly diminished in the past twenty years.

I don’t know how to move forward, beyond in my own heart and mind. I know and understand that, for the women at the center of these controversies, retreat is not only understandable but rational. I know that I can offer only love and support to those who face these shitstorms, and while it may not be enough, it’s what I can offer and maintain my own ability to stand, and I can only hope that there are enough others like me who can offer their support, until we form a glorious, loving net to catch those falling from the ridiculous high-wire act that is being female in public life.

And so yes, Zoe Quinn, I support you, and I hope you do what you need to do to get through this, and know that you don’t need to perform victimhood or femininity “right” to have that support- you’ve got it. I hope that someday, that high-wire gets wider and wider and easier to walk, until it’s just as easy to be female in public as it is to be male. I don’t know when or if we’ll get there, but all I’ve got is hope.

[wtelf]

Poor Person: I need food stamps so I don’t starve.

Conservative: That’s lazy. Get a job.

Poor Person: Fine. I got a job, but it doesn’t pay enough. The minimum wage needs to be raised.

Conservative: Still lazy. Go to college so you can get a better job.

Poor Person: Fine. But I’ll need financial assistance to afford college.

Conservative: Still lazy.

Poor Person: Fine. I went to college, put myself in debt, and got a degree. But the only jobs I can get without experience are unpaid internships. Businesses should be required to pay their interns.

Conservative: …

Conservative: Still lazy.

Poor Person: How the hell do you expect me to get out of debt?

Conservative: It’s your own fault. You choose to go to college even though you couldn’t afford it.

Poor Person: But you’re the one who keeps telling poor people to go to college. Are you saying that I’m lazy if I don’t go to college, and lazy if I do?

Conservative: Yes.

Poor Person: Then what the hell should I do?

Conservative: Be born rich.

[wtelf]

Bernie Sanders, The Late Show, February 10, 2016

[wtelf]

I think my biggest “huh” moment with respect to gender roles is when it was pointed out to me that your typical “geek” is just as hypermasculine as your typical “jock” when you look at it from the right angle.

As male geeks, a great deal of our identity is built on the notion that male geeks are, in some sense, gender-nonconformant, insofar as we’re unwilling or unable to live up to certain physical ideals about what a man “should” be. Indeed, many of us take pride in how putatively unmanly we are.

Viewed from an historical perspective, however, the virtues of the ideal geek are essentially those of the ideal aristocrat: a cultured polymath with expertise in a vast array of subjects; rarefied or eccentric taste in food, clothing, music, etc.; identity politics that revolve around one’s hobbies or pastimes; open disdain for physical labour and those who perform it; a sense of natural entitlement to positions of authority (“you should be flipping my burgers!”); and so forth.

And the thing about that aristocratic ideal? It’s intensely masculine. It may seem more welcoming to women on the surface, but - as recent events will readily illustrate - this is a facade: we pretend to be egalitarian because it suits our refined self-image, but that affectation falls away in a heartbeat when challenged.

Basically, the whole “geeks versus jocks” thing that gets drilled into us by media and the educational system isn’t about degrees of masculinity at all. It’s just two different flavours of the same toxic bullshit: the ideal geek is the alpha-male-as-philosopher-king, as opposed to the ideal jock’s alpha-male-as-warrior-king. It’s still a big dick-measuring contest - we’re just using different rulers.

[wtelf]

Why I Just Dropped The Harassment Charges The Man Who Started GamerGate.

I’m not editing this, so I apologize if it’s long and rambly and messy. It needs to be. I’ve been measured and silent and obedient for so, so, so long, but if I’m going to write about denied humanity it needs to be like this. You need to see unsanitized, reckless honesty just as much as I need to write it. Targets of mob abuse take a risk every time we’re brutally honest in public, so we usually don’t, but I’m too frustrated to give you PR and I’m working against the clock. If I’m gonna get hurt for an update in my court case, it’s about fucking time it happens on my terms instead of his.

I just hung up from what I hope will be my last phone call with the District Attorney assigned to my case, and I choked back tears as she told me that I’d conducted myself with grace through this whole nightmare. I don’t know why I’m crying. I’m writing this and examining it as I go through the fog of someone with PTSD. I don’t know if the tears are out of frustration of having sunk a year and a half into this awful system for seemingly less than nothing, or if it’s out of relief.

My ex, who we’ll call Creep Throat because seeing his name makes a knot of anxiety rise in my throat, will be notified soon that the charges were dropped, but not why. I’m sure he’ll launch another salvo of flat out lies and spun truths to make it seem like the last year and a half was a byproduct of me “asking for it”, that the courts saw through it, while making him seem like a downtrodden hero of free speech. He managed to do that with previous court dates, leaving out things like a judge flat out stating that she believed he had physically assaulted me during the last time we had sex, and that he’d gone through my friends social media feeds of the day afterward to prove that I wasn’t “acting like a victim” by spending time with friends.

So, instead of just watching this happen for the who-knows-how-manyth time, I’m going to talk about it. It’s not really about me as much as it is an attempt to dispel some common bullshit assumptions the average person has about the justice system, and what it means to “press charges”.   

One of the biggest myths that needs to die is that your first response to being abused should be to go to the police and seek justice. Leaving aside the fact that the police flat out murder unarmed citizens for their race all the time, and that sex workers are likely to be incarcerated when reporting crime done to them, and a myriad of other things I can’t get into, I have a certain amount of privilege and a well-documented case. I have one of the most public abuse cases out there, it started a hate movement that’s swept up my industry and hurt dozens of bystanders, and got international media attention. A lot of people don’t think of it in terms of domestic violence, they forget where the flashpoint of GamerGate came from - you might not even know the man responsible’s name. To make matters worse, I was unable to speak up during that time period out of fear of reprisal from the judicial system (more on that later) and watched as he was washed out of history (along with a lot of other people targeted). I was on my own on this front, until the Boston Magazine article was posted by a journalist who had been following everything and speaking with my ex. Shortly after, I got a call from the DA telling me that I shouldn’t have been told to simply go offline, and that she knew we had a very strong case worth prosecuting.

So why am I dissolving it then?   

Ironically, getting a restraining order against Creep Throat was the least effective thing I could do in terms of getting him out of my life for good, and for protecting myself. I’ll discuss the hot mess of problems around that experience at a later time. Without getting into a long, complicated blow by blow, every time something happened or the case was updated, he’d run back to the mob and make promises and jokes and pleas for more money. The mob would respond by going after me, my family, and anyone else they decided was involved. The mythology surrounding me would expand, conspiracy charts would “prove” I am secretly rich and really deserved it all along, and inspire more threats, stalking, and abuse. The cycle repeated itself endlessly. People kept getting hurt for being close to me, for a poorly worded restraining order that did nothing.

This cycle was so vicious that I even vacated the order myself once he appealed, hoping to make it end. I gave him the legal relief that he’d asked for. It might sound weak but I’m not made of stone, I’m a scared person trying to escape her abuser in spite of the fact that he’s created a self-perpetuating faction within my own industry to continue to punish me for walking away. It wasn’t about him fighting a powerful evil woman, or gaining his oh-so-crucial right to sic a mob on me, it’s always been about punishing me. It was about using it as a way to hurt me further, so when I gave him what he ostensibly wanted he actually *showed up to object to my motion to vacate the order and hand him a win*. The court dismissed him, and the order has been dead for months, and yet he’s back on Kotaku In Action chumming the waters about the oral arguments they’re hearing on a nonexistent order next month.

He gets paid, he gets attention (he even brought a date to court once), and the cycle continues. All the while, shit gets worse and worse for me and my family. The simple fact of the matter is the criminal justice system is meant to punish, not protect. I don’t care about seeing him punished - I would rather he get better. And they’ve done nothing to protect me - it’s only made things worse and become another weapon in his arsenal, and the arsenal of the people out there way scarier than him.

This is the last email I sent to my DA.

It was a reddit thread that showed up in my Google Alerts for my name, that I had set up to help grow my indie dev business before all this started like so many people in my industry. The title was “if eron goes to jail, I will hunt zoe quinn down and rape her”. Alerts and direct contact like this, specifically discussing the court case, was only escalating and becoming more common. I’m used to things like this at this point, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t effect me. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t effect anyone close to me who becomes collateral damage in this sick crusade my ex started against me. The continual escalation only ever increases the chances that someone will make good on something like this. Trying to get the law to protect me has only continually put me in harm’s way.

Why, then, would I ever want to sign up for more years of my life spent flying back to Boston, a place where it’s not safe for me to be, to continue another chapter in this nightmare? Why would I want to keep digging at a giant scar?

“Establish legal precedent!” you might think. I did too. Then Elonis v United States offered little hope that a court wouldn’t skirt the issues of how domestic violence manifests online. Then Steph Guthrie and her co-defendant lost their case, the transcripts showing equal parts “she was asking for it” and “how did this get in there i am not good at computers”. Going to court is like rolling the dice, the precedent you established isn’t up to you, and I didn’t want to risk becoming a tool in the next Creep Throat’s arsenal if we lost. I have have worked with enough lawmakers, law enforcement officers, lawyers, and judges at this point through our work with Crash Override to know that education is sorely lagging behind on these issues, not to mention the cultural biases that come with any cases like that.

You probably know that judges and juries can be biased and hold backward views and assumptions, given that you’re a human in 2016 reading this blog and have probably seen at least one news story about a cop getting away with murdering an unarmed black citizen without so much as a trial. You may have seen it in any reporting on how unlikely it is for rape survivors to see justice combined with how backward everyone is about talking about it. This is at least partly because the US has a very specific idea of who is worth protecting, doubly so when the person in question is being victimized while marginalized.

When you seek charges, you’re on trial as much as the other person, if not more. The “asking for it” defense is alive and well even in 2016, and you have to be a “good victim” in order to give your case the best shot it has. “Good victim”, when it comes to women in domestic or gendered violence cases like mine, tends to mean a lot of loaded, even conflicting things. The courts do not favor a lot of women simply for being who they are - women of color, trans women, sex workers, I could go on. Even beyond that, you have to be well behaved and silent about the proceedings, or risk pissing off the judge and giving the defense attorneys ammo to work with. Even my Cracked article was waved around in court by my ex’s lawyers, citing it as “the most disgusting thing that happened during GamerGate” despite my almost one foot stack of threats and photos of me that people had printed out, jizzed on, and sent to my family. The defense, so far, had hung a hat on trying to prove I deserved all of this.  

I have been open about my depression and my history in sex work. I have not gone out of the public eye during all of the abuse, and I don’t regret that. I believe in standing up for sex workers and people living with mental health concerns and anyone else I can, and I don’t know what would have happened if I had kept my mouth shut when I was targeted two years ago. But this comes with a cost - everything I have said and done will be held against me and spun by my abuser. The cost of being who I am in defiance of the abuse was sacrificing being a good victim.

The spin is even more successful in these cases, because of how disconnected judges, lawyers, police, and juries often are from the internet. One told me to simply give up my career and stop going offline if I didn’t like the abuse. He barely bothered to look at my huge stack of evidence before declaring he had no idea what the internet was about and didn’t want to know.

All the while, it’s hard to explain the indignity of having to sit through this and try to be a “good victim”. To sit in the same room as the man who did this to you and so many others and not appear too emotional or shaken, because the last time you said “uh” too much it became “proof” that you were lying instead of reliving trauma on command. To hide your anger and your outrage and your hurt so you don’t look like you’re seeking revenge, but to also not hold back TOO much because then you look robotic and unaffected like you haven’t been in fear of this man or in fear for your life for almost two years. To have to sit silently while everyone messes up basic facts of the case because they can’t tell the difference between usernames. To leave little bloody half moons in the palms of your hands from squeezing your fists tightly to try to look like you aren’t shaking from being in the same room with him.

What good does any of this do for anyone? It’s been almost two years now, and I desperately want to move on with my life. Even if I did win, I doubt locking Creep Throat away would do anything. Even putting aside my huge misgivings with the US prison system, he’s not going to change. The people who support him would see him as a martyr. I’d probably be looking at years of appeals and court dates and apologizing to my family for MRAs screaming at them in the middle of the night.

I’m tired. I have been trying to pick up the pieces of my life for almost two years at this point, and I’ve done a lot of healing, a lot of building what I feel like are more workable pushes to improve the lives of people being abused online, and a lot of self-improvement. I’m getting to a place where I’m kind of ok even while the abuse hasn’t slowed down. But every time I have to touch this festering part of my life, it drains the energy out of me. I have less energy to do casework at Crash, less energy to meet with tech partners to tell them how to do better and the ways they’re fucking up, less energy to make my goofy video games about feelings and farts, less energy for my friends and family and loved ones that have been helplessly watching me torn apart by this man for years.

In my opinion, it’s not time yet. I’m not the right person to win this fight or set this precedent. It’s too early, and I’m a messy complicated artist who has a hard time keeping her mouth shut while she watches other people hurt. I’m not the platonic ideal of a good victim because I’ve had a long past. I don’t even have any faith in the system to not totally fuck it up every step of the way even when it’s working as intended. The simple fact of the matter is that I’m less useful to the world as someone who fought this case, win or lose, than someone who can throw all hope of winning away to be honest with you, to educate you, to try and call for reform so I can set the next girl up for a spike instead of falling on my face. That’s even assuming the process doesn’t kill me - I’m still someone who was already living with depression, that now has complex PTSD on top of it.

I’m scared of posting this, but I’m tired of hiding and keeping my head down and plodding along. I know it’ll kick some shit up, everything does, but I also know he’s going to try to twist this stuff like he always has. I’m tired of letting him control me. I’m tired of being afraid of being honest. I’m tired of watching people hand out “just go to the police they’ll protect you” while I silently scream and bite my tongue, because I know the advice-giver is giving horrible, ignorant advice. It’s so much more complicated than that, and if someone decides to go to the cops about their abuser they should be doing it with a more informed and prepared plan than I ever did. They shouldn’t have to have their lives hijacked for years to find out that that’s what they were even risking in the first place. I wish I had those two years back. The least I can do to make that right is to be honest and open with the world while trying to reduce the cost of maneuvering through these systems. The least I can do is try to succeed at getting my life back where the courts have utterly failed.    

I won’t ever get my life back, but that doesn’t mean I can’t live in the meantime. Hopefully the next girl won’t have years stolen from her in the first place.

And again, sorry if I’ve put my foot in my mouth through any of this unedited brain dump. It’s been a really, really long 2 years and I am more than a little tired. 

[wtelf]

”CJ, If we’re going to do this, why not do it right?”

OMG, Offerman, you were Ron Swanson before you were Ron Swanson. (Except you proposed a $900,000,000 wolf highway to be funded by the federal government, so maybe you’re not totally Ron yet here. Foetal Ron, in need of some more facial hair and breakfast foods).

Ron Swanson, Peggy Olson, and Ted the Laywer all in one episode of The West Wing.