[ SECRET POST #6426 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6426 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.



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02. [SPOILERS for House of the Dragon season 2]




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03. [SPOILERS for The Boys season 4]




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04. [WARNING for discussion of sexual assault]




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05. [WARNING for discussion of medical abuse]




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06. [WARNING for discussion of underage sex]




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07. [WARNING for discussion of sexual assault]




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08. [WARNING for discussion of sexual assault/rape]
























Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #918.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

There was a case at a university some years back where a young white woman was smoking weed with a young black man. They started making out. She asked to give him a blowjob, and he consented. As she was blowing him, she realized she was more high than she thought, and decided to stop. He accepted that she wanted to stop, asked if they could hang out again, and bid her good night.

The next day, she was talking to a friend about it. The friend told her she'd been assaulted. She thought about it, and, well...she had been high, and she had started to feel really uncomfortable. Ultimately, she came to agree with her friend, and reported the man for assault. He was kicked off campus.

The first paragraph, by the way, is not his description of the encounter. It's hers. By her own admission, they were both high, she initiated the sexual contact, and he accepted her wish to stop without complaint. But she was inebriated and felt uncomfortable, so as far as her friend was concerned, she had been assaulted -- and the friend managed to convince her of this.

An unfortunate fact about women is that we are really, really susceptible to social suggestion. We empathize, we ruminate, and we talk ourselves into things, and we actively try to talk others into things, too, in the mistaken belief that we're helping them overcome their denial. So, yeah, I don't think lots of women coming forward means that someone did something. I think it can just as likely mean that a lot of women have been reading about how this guy is now Bad and a Rapist and a Groomer, etc etc etc, and are spending a lot of time sitting and thinking about whether that fun time they had was actually sinister, and whether they owe it to other women to reconceptualize it as sinister.

[(Anonymous)]

Your comment gives me the ick. IMO, it's far more likely that women in his past are "ruminating" and thinking, you know, that situation was really skeevy and all the uncomfortable feelings I tried to ignore wasn't just me being paranoid.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think that's the far more likely explanation at all. It's definitely the explanation that feels better, sure. But the way we perceive events, the way we feel about ourselves and our lives, is socially mediated. We often look to others to figure out what we're supposed to think and how we're supposed to feel about the things that happen to us, and this can lead us to conclusions that are at odds with our actual experience, and even induce mental health problems (I will admit I have personal experience with this. I firmly believe the anxiety disorder I developed in my early 20s, and the brief aversion to sex that I had, was due to someone I trust convincing me that all sex is degrading and exploitative, causing me to doubt whether I'd ever had or ever could have consensual sex). Combined with all of this is the fact that social contagions almost exclusively affect women.

[(Anonymous)]

Uh. You know that one of his victims who came forward after the initial reports was his tenant along with her husband and three daughters, and after she and her husband divorced, Gaiman forced her to pay her rent with sex, right?

And one of the first women to accuse him was his nanny, and he climbed into the bath with her and jerked off on her and stuck his fingers up her ass, after she told him she wasn't interested, less than a day after hiring her?

This isn't "racist regrets her weed goggles," anon.

[(Anonymous)]

And you know that one of those victims was sending gushing texts to him, right? And asking him to get her into a hotel where David Tennant was staying so that she could try to fuck him?

But even if those reports are true, that doesn't mean that any and all reports are, or that none of them could be from someone whose perception of a past encounter has been changed by the reports. Hell, the worse the reports are, the more likely I'd say it is for someone who otherwise viewed an encounter positively to start to view it through a different lens, regardless whether anything wrong actually occurred in their case.

[(Anonymous)]

Man, the reputation-laundering firm Gaiman hired won't even be necessary with all the caping you've done for him here. The best-faith interpretation of Gaiman's "relationship" with his nanny involved his refusal to pay her her agreed-upon, promised wage for months, until after she'd signed an NDA backdated to her hire date.

He'd be a shitty person just for that, even setting aside all the rape.

It would be nice to think that the five women who have come forward so far are his only victims and every other sexual partner he ever had was never anything less than fully into fucking him. But I seriously doubt it. It seems like he wasn't so much into consensual BDSM as he was humiliating his unwilling victims.

I liked a lot of his work and even more of the adaptations of his work. I stood in his autograph lines. I'm sad to think a lot of adaptations I was looking forward to may be shortchanged or cancelled, but that's not the fault of the companies or casts or artists who worked with him, or fans who are horrified by him. It's his fault. If he wanted an untainted artistic legacy, he shouldn't have become a rapist.

[(Anonymous)]

Man... I don't know what to say. For one thing, I feel like you are ignoring a LOT of details of these cases in order to come away with your preferred reading. For example, in the case you talked about in your first paragraph, the woman in question distinctly remembered telling Gaiman she didn't want to have sex because she was in extreme pain. For her "I don't want to have sex" probably didn't mean "I don't like you" or "I'm not attracted to you" or "this relationship is nonconsensual" -- it meant she just didn't want to have sex with Gaiman at that particular moment in time. Gaiman had all these facts (she had an infection, she was in pain, she didn't want to do PIV) and had PIV sex with her anyway. This is clear-cut rape. Why does it matter that she was sending cutesy texts to him before or after or that she kept up a friendly correspondence? The facts of the matter are that he raped her, AND he had all the information he needed in order to know it was rape, and he just didn't care. Whether she cared or how she thought of it afterward does matter, BUT even if you set all that aside because you think her feelings about that incident are unreliable, if you just look at the facts of the case, they are INCREDIBLY damning of Gaiman, and that should be obvious from space.

So, why are the details that she was sending loving texts or that she is a celebrity chaser relevant to evaluating Gaiman's behavior? I am seriously wondering what is going on in your head that you think it matters. Are you saying it is impossible for celebrity chasers to be raped or mistreated by their celebrity crushes? Or that what Gaiman knew about a woman's physical condition and her telling him outright she didn't want to have sex with him just doesn't matter when evaluating rape as long as she was in love with him? Because that is really what you sound like you're saying, and that is such a weird view where love/infatuation is such an important fact of a case that it eclipses all other facts and considerations including a person (Gaiman) having a clear indication that sex was unwanted and doing it anyway, and how that reflects on him as a person and how people should treat him given that history of behavior.

Rape and consent ARE complicated, I acknowledge. There are a lot of grey areas and uncertainties, and the victim's attitude DOES matter when evaluating rape and consent, and attitudes are slippery things. But ironically, with both of the cases you mentioned -- the Gaiman one above and the story in your original comment -- I think the facts of the cases are WAY more clear-cut and *different* than just the "the attitude of the victims is ambiguous" feature that they share. For example, in the Gaiman case, it DOES matter that he knew his partner was in pain and didn't want to be penetrated. Regardless of her attitude, what he did was rape. And in the story you wrote up, it DOES actually matter that the woman initiated it and both people's accounts agree on this fact. Regardless of what the woman's feelings on it were afterward, you and I both recognize there is something off about dinging this person for rape when the facts of the case don't seem to support it. So it seems to me that you even acknowledge that you are relying on something "objective" because you feel uncomfortable with relying purely on the woman's attitude because you view it to be unreliable. But what is baffling to me is that, in the presence of this ambiguity in terms of the victim's attitude, you have chosen to say this case and the Gaiman case are exactly the same/similar, when factually-speaking, they are miles apart! I am curious why? The only thing they seem to share is the superficial similarity of it being *possible* that the woman simply "experienced regret", and you seem to be using this as a rationale for throwing away all other facts of the case that have been put forward in favor of an "innocent by default" verdict.

[(Anonymous)]

Since the human mind is startlingly malleable, there’s always a possibility that someone's memories don’t entirely match what really happened, or that they've changed their mind about how they feel about something, but at this point it's extremely unlikely that nothing untoward happened at all.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow. There is so much in this.

You are a terrible person. That you sound take the time to type this, that you think it’s reasonable? That you have used the kind of “flippant but matter of fact” tone.

If you have chosen this hill to die on you will be dead.

[(Anonymous)]

everybody that disagrees with you are terrible people and unreasonable and should die.

Ok, you sicko.