Slate’s review (by Katy Waldman) of Bad Feminist (Indiebound | Amazon | Buy the Shirt) GETS IT:
The peculiar and gracious back-and-forth in which Gay specializes—exposing faults in order to embrace that which is fallible—works on movements too. For all her loyalty, Gay allows that feminism itself is “bad” sometimes. She rightly suggests that one of its biggest failures involves not taking women of color, queer women, and transgender women seriously. Her delicious, tour-de-force takedowns of The Help (“There is not enough height in the atmosphere for us to suspend our disbelief”) and Django Unchained (“My slavery revenge fantasy would probably involve being able to read and write without fear of punishment or persecution coupled with a long vacation in Paris”) are in part correctives to the centering of white people in social justice crusades. But even there, Gay wants to complicate things: “My real problem is that The Help is written by a white woman,” she admits, despite an earlier essay arguing fervently that writers of all backgrounds should be permitted to imagine and talk about experiences of all stripes. She isn’t oblivious to the hypocrisy—she wants to disclose her own weak spots. “I think constantly about connection and loneliness and community,” Gay confides in “Feel Me. See Me. Hear Me. Reach Me.” She bares her faults because faults make you human, and humanity means you belong.
On being stalked (absolutely chilling, I literally have chills):
This may be completely unnecessary. Or it might not. The Women’s Freedom Center of Brattleboro, Vermont has advised me to leave at once for my mother’s home in DC: ‘We don’t know what’s going on in his head.’ The director of victim services at the Vermont Department of Corrections says: ‘Oh, the Women’s Freedom Center … people imagine that someone getting out of jail has been ruminating all this time; most of the time the last thing they want is to see the victim again.’ My village takes a vigilantist line. One neighbour says if she saw him by the road at night she would run him down. Others tell me to get a gun and shoot on sight. Look at it this way: if there were a high risk of attack I wouldn’t be staying in a cottage in 11 acres of woods, scene of the ‘reckless endangerment’ which sent him to jail in the first place, half an hour from the state police. The problem isn’t really that we don’t know what’s going on in his head.
This bummed me out, but I’m also happy that lovecraftzine.com got to break a news story.
THE SELFIE BELONGS TO THE MONKEY COME AT US BRO
PHOTO CREDIT: A TERRIFYING NON-HUMAN PRIMATE
Kate Harding on why she supports but loathes supporting the Detroit Water Project:
You’ll note I didn’t say I resent the people who ask for such help. What I actually resent is the situation we’ve gotten ourselves into, as a nation, where a substantial portion of the voting public and our elected representatives believe that things like running water and health care—let alone arts funding—are luxuries some of us can do without.
I am so pleased and grateful that a reader sent me Juliet Jacques’ incredibly long and good piece in the New Statesman (it’s sparked by, but not really “about” the recent New Yorker article on the radfem/trans situation) and I really really hope you read it:
As a writer I’m obsessed with language, constantly trying to address the legacy of 20th century sexology and its lexicon. I’m intrigued by the resistance that trans people’s attempts to define our own terms has met, and wonder what’s behind it: part of the problem is that the project launched in the 1990s, when liberal-left opposition to ‘political correctness’ was at its height, before people began to see it as a tool to help minorities make it harder for their oppressors to harm them.
OH, and
The endless circularity of all this is most dispiriting – seriously, if you’ve not worked out if you can be a feminist and wear high heels yet, perhaps it’s time to ask something else – and what irked me most in Goldberg’s piece was its airing of autogynephilia, and Jeffreys’ accusation that Julia Serano, the trans theorist who besides Stone has done more to shape my writing than any other, is an ‘autogynephile’. Looking at my notes on ‘What is a Woman?’ every other paragraph is annotated with historical facts, theoretical points and personal recollections, but this just has ‘FUCK OFF’ next to it, underlined, which is all it deserves. In a world where left-wing politics have often derided LGBT identities as ‘bourgeois’ and then accused us of splitting the movement, it infuriates me that I’ve had to take a break from writing a piece on the Tories’ ‘liberation’ of the NHS to write 8,500 words to debunk a sexological concept that was shown to be untenable before the start of the First World War.
A profile of Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa, who will hopefully be the woman who sends abusive murderer Oscar Pistorius to jail for the rest of his miserable life for abusing and then murdering Reeva Steenkamp:
Since the trial began in March, Judge Masipa has sat at the crosscurrents of two powerful forces in South Africa: violence against women and racial tensions. She has listened to Mr. Pistorius’s lawyers knit together a defense that rests in part on white South Africans’ deep-rooted fear of black men invading their homes. She has sometimes chided the white men in her courtroom, who address her with the honorific “My Lady” – a still extraordinary scene a generation after the end of apartheid.
DID YOU READ the CIA rendition piece Gawker ran?? Holy crap:
Two very different flights landed at Mitiga military airport in Libya just over a decade ago. The first was organized by the CIA and MI6. On board were a family of six surrounded by guards, the frightened children separated from their parents, the father chained to a seat in a rear compartment with a needle stuck in his arm. The second flight, only a couple of days later, carried Tony Blair in comfort, on his way to shake hands and do business with Colonel Gaddafi.
I know about the first flight, because I was one of the children. I know about the chains and the needle because Sami al-Saadi—a long-time political opponent of Colonel Gaddafi—is my father and I saw him in that state. I was 12 years old, and was trying to keep my younger brothers and my six year-old sister calm. The guards took us to see our mother once on the 16-hour flight. She was crying, and told us that we were being taken to Gaddafi’s Libya. Shortly before the plane landed, a guard told me to say goodbye to my father, at the front of the plane. I forced myself ahead and saw him with a needle in his arm. I remember guards laughing at me. Then I fainted.
I keep thinking about Elena Palmer’s “Morning Bereavement Report” piece.
I checked, and I only block nine users on Twitter, but I am FIRMLY PRO-BLOCKING. Pro-block, pro-unfriend, pro-mute.
Here is a very good article on how and when and why masturbation became bad.
If you’re bored, Rainbow Rowell and I had a no-holds-barred fight on Twitter last night about Harry Potter, which ended here:
That stalking article. Brrrr.
I was stalked for a little while. It started off creepy and annoying and became frightening. Fortunately I never had to get the police involved, merely had to refuse to leave work without male company for two months and walk home by increasingly ridiculous routes. (Sickens me that he wouldn’t accept my ‘I’m not interested’ but left me alone on seeing my then boyfriend (now husband))
I’m so sorry you went through that. And what an infuriating, extreme example of the whole phenomenon of women needing to claim we’re somehow taken before men will take “no” for an answer.
It was frightening. basically he started by bugging me at work until my boss stepped in and tried to get him to leave me alone. At which point he started sitting outside the coffee shop opposite, all day, watching for me to leave. Then he would try to strike up conversation as I left, and follow me through town.
I started sneaking out the back (with bosses permission, since I was so frightened) and going home in really complicated routes. The problem is my home city is so small that avoiding him was almost impossible.
Oh man, stalking is damn terrifying. I was stalked in college-he told the dorm mom that I was suicidal, which caused her to call my parents (I was 19) and force me into therapy. Nobody believed my side of the story. Later he stalked me online and in person, and campus police did not take me seriously at all. He started threatening me, saying that I had to leave the university “or else”, and I gradually realized that to be safe, I had to be around a male friend at all times. I used to be deeply ashamed of this. I thought it was my fault for dating this guy in the first place, when now of course I realize that’s absurd. I had no idea he would turn out to be so creepy. But it took a long time for me to realize this.
TL;DR stalkers fucking suck and I’m glad you’re safe now!
I’m glad you’re safe, too!
I started feeling unsafe in my own home, and whenever I went to work he was there, watching me. My job involved being on the shop floor.
RRRRRGH. Reading how many people down here in the comments have had or know someone who has had a stalker! RRRRRGHHHH.
In college I went out very briefly with this guy. Maybe about 2 months tops and we only saw each other on weekends. We never discussed being exclusive. One night we were hanging out and I went to the bathroom, then messed around in the kitchen a bit, leaving him in my room. When I came back he was acting really weird and hostile. I was like, “what is the deal dude?” and he kept saying, “I don’t think I can trust you.” and finally I was like, “ok then you can leave or tell me what this is about.” He tells me he’s been counting the condoms I keep and there’s one more missing than the number of times we had sex!
Oh man did I read him the riot act! 1. I gave one to my roommate. 2 those were in a drawer. 3. He’s been counting them the WHOLE TIME? 4. We haven’t discussed exclusivity. 5. WHAT THE FUCK.
So I kick him out. After many apologies I agree to let him come hang out one more time, and that last time really decides me on never seeing him again. I go home for thanksgiving. I decide not to call him while I’m gone because its thanksgiving and his birthday- I’ll just say something like, “talk to you next week!” While I’m home he sends me a thing that’s like “I’m going to jump, wish you would have called”, which made sense sort of because he said he was going skydiving, but really….
I come home, I tell him its over. On the phone, not at my house.
He starts sending me texts, “all my behavior was bad because I was afraid I was falling in love with you.”, etc. Then anger at me, “you never gave us a chance” etc. Then he sends flowers.
That’s the point where I start looking up stalking. I tell him that I will not be responding to any further texts, and if he keeps contacting me I will call the police. Thankfully that ended it. But I always think, here’s a guy who was TERRIBLE with normal boundaries, wildly insecure, owned guns. It makes an “oh how crazy” story, but also… it’s how I could have died.
And he justified invading my privacy with the fact that he had been cheated on before. So I have to imagine the next poor woman who dated him probably got blamed for the mean things I did to him.
@eegghh that dude sounds super creepy! I’m glad you got away from him. The dudely sense of entitlement is a big factor in the stalking a lot of us have experienced, I think.
I was too young to know how creepy it was really. I was just outraged, not aware of how fragile my precious human vessel truly is.
Now I know.
Yeah, the guys who are most likely to try to trick you into a relationship are the least likely to let it go at a reasonable point.
You are wise. You handled him well.
It has long been my opinion that every woman who dated more than 3 people has had a stalker or at least has endured some stalkerish behavior. Do you think my opinion needs adjusting? It’s one I want to refine. What do you think?
None of my exes (of whom I have roughly 6) ever stalked me or behaved in threatening ways. (I am lucky, I know.) The guy who stalked me (discussed downthread) seemed to think he was in some sort of twisted love with me, but unless talking on the phone about Nirvana in 8th grade in 1993 counts, we never dated.
I was not clear. Not that a woman would eventually date a stalker. That a woman with a presence in the dating world would have a stalker. E.g., the only reason my sister never had a stalker is because she lived like a nun, only went out with 2 men. Also excluding women who married their high school sweetheart without sampling the dating world much.
Amongst my peers, stalking no, but acting in a dangerous/dubiously legal way, aka so we can include assault, threats, violence etc, yes, that about fits your statistic. And we’re young, early 20s, so that’s really chilling.
Being in the dating world maybe increases the risk, but my stalker stalked me when I was in high school, before I ever dated anybody.
Sweet baby deity! High school girls. I am so sorry you had to deal with that so young.
Thank you. I want to say it wasn’t that bad, because I never felt violently threatened, and at the time it consumed my every thought only when I was at work, and it was dealt with very cleanly once I finally told somebody. But I’ve reexamined the experience in the past year or so, and I should have been more scared. Maybe I was a bit of a naive teenager, maybe I actually was that scared and I’m just repressing it now, I don’t know.
Basically, this guy made some unwanted advances to me while I was at work. Well, actually, I can count our interactions on one hand, but he was just always there, and he stared at me a lot, and libraries are public spaces in weird ways, and I was 17 and had no idea how to handle it. So I ignored him. Or rather, I was hyper-aware every minute of my twice-a-week four-hour shifts for about three months, until my boss read the comment card the guy had written about me and asked me about it. I told him what had happened, then I went home and told my parents, and the guy never came back to the library. I guess they banned him or something? I didn’t ask. The fact I keep coming up against now and feeling scared in retrospect, is that he knew where I lived.
I concur; my stalker was the second person I dated and my sister’s stalker was the first person she dated. 🙁
I haven’t had a stalker yet and I’ve made out/talked to/flirted/been in a relationship with lots of guys. I don’t know if the word “dating” really applies to what I do, though. I mean, I don’t usually go out with one single person I might (or might not) fancy. The closest I’ve had to a stalking experience is some random stranger talking to me in a creepy way. Which is totally not stalking, so I’m just gonna stop babbling now.
You are awesome for having the confidence and self-possession to read him the riot act and kick his ass to the curb when he started behaving that way, especially as a college student. I think it took me at least 10 more years to get to the point where I’d be able to do that in the moment, rather than just freezing or stammering in shock.
I think it came from not having a lot of time to think and the fact that I was already not that into him. if I’d liked him more…who knows what kind of foolish behaviour I might have tolerated?
BRB, just writing some fanfiction about Thokozile Matilda Masipa and Ruth Bader Ginsburg teaming up to fight crime/dispense justice.
I would read the comic, gift the book, buy the tee shirt, attend the premiere on opening night, and adorn my car with the bumper stickers.
I made you a thing.
YESSSS. This is my favorite Thing.
Stalking is horrible and the police do almost nothing. My sister fled her abusive spouse while he was at work, walking to town with her baby, renting a van, driving home, throwing whatever she could carry for the baby and her in it and then driving nonstop from PA to VA where I had just moved the week before. She had been waiting until we got to the East Coast to make her escape. Then she had to live w us for three years because he told the judge she had postpartum depression and wasn’t in her right mind. It was hellish. He did very scary things. We had to do everything in in my husband’s name for her so he couldn’t legally interfere. Seriously, the woman in VT should have just shot him. Really. I have zero sympathy for stalkers.
I can totally see her hesitation to shoot, though… I’d like to think I’d have no qualms about shooting someone who threatened me but I honestly can’t say whether that’s really true.
I can understand it because she is a good person, and not violent, but after what people I love have been through I know I could do it now.
I’ve heard that training with your weapon makes you more likely to be able to use it. So… After I move to VA, I will probably buy a gun and go to the shooting range. But I will not become a gun nut!
Yesterday I listened to the “How to Disappear” episode of CBC’s How to Do It, and the last expert, Frank Ahearn, offers a service helping people to disappear. In the course of the interview, it became clear that most people he helps are starting over in order to evade a stalker. That segment made me feel sick, imagining being pursued so relentlessly that you have to kill everything you are, every connection you have to the world, in order to go on living — in unending dread. We need to do more to help stalking victims. Ending their current lives and living in fear as a stranger shouldn’t be their only option.
Cannot agree more strongly with your last sentence (and everything else before that, too).
What infuriates me most about a lot of accounts of stalking I’ve read (elsewhere and here in the comments forum) is that so many victims are not taken seriously. I’ve been known to overreact to stuff, you know, a little—my ma saw a bear a few times walking her dogs and I was pretty adamant that she start walking with a gun, for example—but it’s hard for me to imagine police/people in a position to help someone being stalked being like, “You sure this isn’t just in your head, little lady?” But it seems to happen with unnerving regularity.
The stalking is frightening enough, no one should then have to feel like they have to prove they aren’t just creating this creepy narrative.
Wow, this is all some very heavy stuff and it’s not even 10 am. Also, I went to get Bad Feminist from the library yesterday and it was either out or on hold at all of the libraries in the tri-county area. So while this clearly means that they have like 2 copies between all of them, clearly people want to read it, so yay! And then I just went on Amazon (Medusa) and bought the book.
The entire Toronto Public Library system has 7 physical copies and 5 digital. For perspective, the Toronto library system has 100 branches. I am unimpressed.
That is unimpressive. I don’t know how Toronto works, but my library if a bunch of people put a book on request, we order more of them. Then they know to buy more of her books next time, since Roxane Gay is still a relatively new author.
I’m going to request it now, so they get the hint. C’mon Toronto!
it is still “on order” in the Chicago library system so I just bought the ebook. MORE MONEY FOR ROXANNE
THAT MONKEY
I am actually terrified of monkeys and think they’re gross and not cute? (although I guess this one is)
I think my fear probably stems from the fact that monkeys make me realize that we as humans are only a few evolutionary steps from flinging our poop around constantly.
I’m with you on the lack of monkeylove. They give me the wiggins.
Agreed about monkeys being terrifying. My girlfriend got bit by a monkey in Bali. She is fine now but it caused a whole lot of hullabaloo at the time, including an overnight hospital stay.
Monkeys are indeed the worst. They are a terrifying combination of aggressive and smart. A bunch of them broke into my house when I was on the coast of Kenya and ate all my food and rooted through my things.
YOU WERE LOCKED IN JUMANJI!!!!
oh god that explains a lot…
Apparently there are monkeys in tourist areas that have learned how to use vending machines. They will steal your wallet, take the coins, and buy chocolate with it. We should really stop pretending that we’re alone in the whole tool-using thing.
I mean, we used to chuck it out the window into the street, so I wouldn’t give us that much credit evolutionarily.
Excellent point.
Monkeys, and pigs too. A little too human. A little too smart. A little too gross.
Oddly I don’t feel that way about cats and dogs; on the contrary, I admire them when they assimilate into human culture, like sitting in chairs and having conversations.
I quite like pigs. A friend has some and we had a hilarious afternoon doing pig agility, and then seeing if we could ride the bigger ones. (We couldn’t.)
Pigs are awesome! In my fantasy farm, I’d have two just wandering about the place, rooting around in the pastures, tilling and fertilizing the fields, etc. I appreciate their intelligence, their amiable personalities and cute widdle snouts.
Yeah, I definitely got a soft spot for pigs.
Agreed. I despise monkeys. I don’t find them cute in the slightest, except for baby spider monkeys–which look more like cute aliens than monkeys.
Monkeys are super creepy. I rank them ahead of clowns on the creepiness scale
He’s got better selfie skills than a teenager on myspace.
I think it’s a female monkey?
Any “awww” feelings I had for monkeys got stamped out by a freshman class on Primate Ecology. I mean, I now find monkeys and apes really interesting, but my god so many of them are essentially unchained ids. The highlight (lowlight) was watching our professor’s field videos of chimpanzees (not monkeys, but whatever). We watched one chase a tiny Colobus monkey, catch it, and then break its neck with its teeth. Aaaaaaaaah. Friends who’ve visited family in India have other, similarly not-awwww-inducing stories of Incredibly Frightening Packs of Monkeys.
Other animals I can’t find cute any more: Dolphins and Ducks. Goddamn rapists and murderers the lot of them.
…dolphins? :-/
I’m sorry. 🙁
I watched a show about dolphin sex just last night! (I felt like I needed to share that.)
“only a few evolutionary steps from flinging our poop around constantly”
Um. No steps. Just visit the comments section of, oh I don’t know, any blog except The Toast. If the ugliness bigots spew there is not just humans flinging their own shit, I don’t know what else it could be.
I don’t mind monkeys, but a friend of mine doesn’t like them, because as a child, in Pakistan, he was a bit chubby, so his dad bought an aggressive monkey to chase him around for exercise. He still has scars and a well-defined aversion to primates.
Oh my god! That’s horrible! (This is what happens when DADS! go bad.)
My roommate grew up in India, and her mom tells a story that not once but TWICE when RM was a baby, Mom came into the nursery and found monkeys in the crib with RM. Supposedly a monkey was actually holding her on one of the occasions. Supposedly there were enough monkeys around where they lived that this is not a totally implausible scenario.
??!
RM also swears her mom isn’t the type to make up stories, and THAT I believe, so the monkey thing could be legit: My roommate was almost kidnapped by monkeys as a baby.
Please tell me this is a different roommate. I want to believe that your roommates sit around, swapping interspecies babysitting and babynapping stories, and you just sort of sit in the corner, quietly nodding.
WTF?!
Nic Pizzolatto is definitely a tool, but plagiarism is too strong a word. Having you character, whose entire existence is meant to reflect a particular philosophy, paraphrase those philosophers without also reciting AMA-formatted citations isn’t really cheating. David Haglund rebuffed this pretty convincingly at Slate: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/08/06/tr…
Or, to paraphrase some dumb show: What is that, Ligotti? Shut the fuck up!
I found the not-talking about Ligotti until people brought it up and then over-compensating persuasive, also the more direct lifts seen in the original script.
It’s definitely a little clunky (something clunky on TD? Why I never). I just think the bar for plagiarism in works of fiction is a little higher.
Also, lovecraftzine.com is definitely getting bookmarked.
I agree! I also never saw True Detective or read Ligotti, so I am perhaps the least qualified person to speak on this matter, but I will not let that hold me back.
Right. I think none of this would’ve even been an issue if Rust had somehow referenced Ligotti at some point (probably during one of those world-weary, self-important diatribes set in present day), or if the camera showed Conspiracy Against the Human Race sitting on his pile of books (in the past), or SOMETHING.
I also find Haglund’s defense kinda unconvincing because yeah, TD‘s not a philosophical treatise… except, isn’t it, at least in part? Isn’t the fact that it transcends “cop show” the reason we all like it so much?
I dunno, I mean, maybe “plagiarism” isn’t the exact right word, but it seems less than ethical, and seems like there were enough non-clunky opportunities for the show or Pizzolatto to cite their sources, but they didn’t.
The problem with that is that most of TD takes place in the 70’s, and CATHR wasn’t published until 2010.
I think not acknowledging influence is perhaps impolite, but plagiarism is an actual serious thing that this doesn’t fall under. Using genre tropes is not plagiarism, paraphrasing is not plagiarism. Pizzolatto directly lifts from The King in Yellow, but nobody says he’s plagiarizing Robert Chambers, even though Chambers is not mentioned a single time, and within the show’s universe Chambers’ book doesn’t even exist.
TL;DR agree with PunnyDreadful that the bar for plagiarism in fiction has to be higher than simply “similar words and ideas.”
(90’s, not 70’s)
Are there more direct lifts somewhere? I looked at the Lovecraftzine piece and Gawker and saw two examples: one where both writers used the phrase “should not exist by natural law” (which is a phrase I honestly suspect two writers could have generated independently), and the example where both Ligotti and Pizzolatto riffed on the concept of thinking you’re a somebody when you’re actually a nobody.
If you put “somebody nobody” into Google you see that approximately 102,000,000 other people are also riffing on that idea.
I read a YA book as a kid called Nobodies and Somebodies. Didn’t devolve into weird horror, unfortunately.
I completely agree with people who feel that Pizzolatto could have so very easily escaped these claims of plagiarism by very simple means, many good examples of which John notes above.
My definition of plagiarism doesn’t really count what Pizzolatto did as plagiarism, per se, but it doesn’t really exonerate him either. I’m a huge fan of stories (in novels, films, television, etc.) drawing from philosophy, other works of fiction, etc., but… you have to make some gesture, even just out of respect for the works you are citing/paraphrasing/riffing on, to the works/people/ideas you are borrowing from.
I guess for me it’s not a matter of stealing ideas or ripping people off, it’s a matter of respect for those ideas.
That said, I’m sure if I watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master with a friend of mine who has her doctorate in philosophy, I’d learn that there was more than just a sprinkling of Heidegger’s ideas peppered in with the Scientology-esque themes, and that PTA didn’t bother to put Being and Time on a bookshelf anywhere, so then I’d have to yell at PTA, too, which I have no desire to do.
So… yeah, I’m not sure what to do with all this, other than to personally make sure that when HBO picks up one (or more) of my TV pilots, all the characters who become mouthpieces for others’ ideas have those books on their bedside tables (so that the audience can see them during all the sex scenes HBO will insist I have to add in order to conform to their house style).
God, that stalking piece. So well done, and so incredibly frustrating to read. Esp. this:
“If I can be driven out by any man in the grip of unrequited attachment, if I can be driven out again for seeking legal redress, equality under the law is a fiction: I may need to pay twice for housing and lose a year’s income, maybe more, at any time.”
It is just so viscerally unfair that someone can do that to another person, and the steps that she can take to stop it are so slow and so often ineffectual. RAGE.
I have a Facebook stalker – someone I knew in middle school, lost touch with when he moved, and who, after being arrested on drug charges, started trying to track me down. When I was in college, he mailed some bizarre items to my parents’ address from jail after being arrested. After that I didn’t hear from him again until a few years ago, when he found me on FB. He can’t see my profile on FB, but he was able to send me some terrifying messages (rape threats, gun threats) before I realized I could change my settings to prevent people I’m not friends with from messaging me. He still periodically tries to friend me. But luckily, the ONLY way he can stalk me is on FB, because he got deported after he served his sentence. I was able to confirm this with the dept. of corrections. So there’s no way he can come near me physically.
All of which is just to say that I had the most mild, not-actually-dangerous form of stalking possible, and it was still really, really scary and distracting from work/life. So for people whose stalkers actually DO pose physical threats, I can only imagine how scary and infuriating it must be.
I had an internet stalker too, in college. This was pre-Facebook so it on a forum I participated in, then moved on to emails, ICQ (YEAH! that long ago) and chat rooms. We were initially friendly, but he got really obsessed with me for literally no good reason whatsoever. Next thing I know he’s found my phone number and dorm assignment by contacting someone he knew went to the same university I did (I did not think to not tell people what university I went to, cause I was 19 and the internet wasn’t real!). He was constantly insisting to me he was going to drive down from where he lived to come and see me or date me or whatever fantasy he’d created in his brain. He broke up with his girlfriend “for me” even though I had repeatedly and vociferously told him that no, not ever, NOT EVER IN A THOUSAND YEARS. I was always very, very, profanely clear about that. This went on for months and months. It was ridiculous.
He sent a trojan to try and steal my passwords (jokes on HIM, I used a dorm communal computer!) and various other creepy things. Initially I stopped going to the forum and changed my email and ICQ numbers but somehow he always got them again. It never occurred to me to contact law enforcement cause…it was all on the computer, it wasn’t real, right?? Anyway, I ended up enlisting other guys from that very same forum to gang up on and threaten him, and then he got banned. One guy lived in his city and threatened to beat him up (would he have? Probably not, honestly, but I guess it’s the thought that counts). It worked for a while, then he’d pop back up again for brief periods. I stopped using certain online aliases and emails. Eventually he just disappeared or couldn’t find me anymore. But I remember this overwhelming “what the fuck do I even do??” feeling because yeah it was JUST online but he’d call me and send creepy letters and he knew my full name and where I lived. I felt stupid for being worried, but I also felt stupid for…I don’t know, ever mentioning my university or being friendly to some dumbass on a forum. I honestly think the only thing that kept him from coming was having a shitty car and a 900 mile drive. Thank god for shitty cars I guess.
I cannot imagine having to deal with the same shit with someone who’s in your town and does not have 900 miles and a shitty car to overcome before they can terrorize you live and in person. And I have seen first hand how amazingly ineffective our legal system is regarding stalking. IT IS INCREDIBLY STUPID.
ICQ! I remember ICQ. I bet we are around the same age.
More to the point. I’m really sorry you had to deal with that. And honestly, if you had gone to the police, they likely wouldn’t have done shit. They’re STILL terrible at dealing with internet threats/stalking; there was a long piece about this about a year ago, I don’t remember where. But it was about how difficult it is to get law enforcement to do anything about online stalking/harassment/threats to women.
Back in the 90s I went to the Attorney General’s office in Philadelphia for help about a stalker. The nice attorney they assigned to me listened so well. He really did. I was pleasantly surprised.
When he was sure I was finished, he assured me none of this was my fault. My goddess, an enlightened man in the 90s. Ask us older Toastfolk how rare that was. He said he had a sister who has been through similar and worse. He said the law was next to useless in real terms. He gave me great advice, including making me understand what he could not say out loud. I allowed a group of my largest male friends to “visit” my stalker and “explain” in physical terms how he should behave.
And a few years later I went apeshit on my idiot coworker who published my name on the new company website without asking first. That man got a fast and loud lesson in the lengths women must go to in order to avoid stalkers.
Older Crowd hi five! *hi fives, breaks hip* I kid, I kid! Hopefully!
Up until recently, I STILL used ICQ! Me and like three other people I think. Just us few, shouting into the darkness.
It’s all depressing, honestly. How ineffective it still is in a lot of cases.
Haha, I am actually having hip problems these days, I am an Old. But I high five you anyway!
Well damn it, I’m sorry to hear that! We’ll hi five with great care, and then I’ll sit back down and make that “ugggnhhh” noise that I so often make now when I sit down/stand up. And it will be great.
Anyone up for forming a human chain at a respectful distance around Helen DeWitt’s house so the lady can work in peace and safety?
I read that stalking piece last night and I can’t stop thinking about it. It even seeped into my dreams. How thoroughly terrifying.
To go along with Juliet Jacques’ piece, a list of questions not to ask your friendly neighborhood transsexual (or any trans person).
I see Rowell won the prizefight. Where is the Storify for that?!
SHE DID NOT. We started in on a second round bc thebestjasmine showed up and then my food came. Then I ate it and watched Starship Troopers again and tweeted about it for several hours.
Well I caught THAT part but the newborn souls line seems like a _very decisive_ first-half goal out of context and I still want the whole thing in an article. Wants! Wants and needs. snrk.
Still waiting for information re: the best cuts on a baby, Nicole.
thighs
excellent
Face cheeks. Especially the dimpled ones.
That stalking piece makes me so fucking furious.
“The prosecutor thought my deposition had weakened the case, showing ‘absence of fear’….My victim advocate insisted that financial and professional catastrophe were obviously not devastating because trespass was not a serious crime. A man breaking in and waving a weapon is the kind of thing that should be devastating; I had failed to convince as damsel in distress.”
FUCK THAT RIGHT IN THE EAR. Trespassing is ILLEGAL. It doesn’t matter how much fear the victim does or does not evince. What the hell?!
This hits close to home right now because one of my high school friends just posted on Facebook about how her coworker is creeping her out because he is stalking her (showing up at the end of her shift, even when he isn’t working, to “walk her home”; showing up on her street (he lives NOWHERE nearby; asking her out on dates in front of clients). I left a very long comment telling her to report, report, report. Ack.
My head exploded about here:
E’s landlord: ‘You’re a very attractive woman. He can’t help himself. I’m sorry you can’t live on your property.’
That part made my head explode, too. “I’m sorry you can’t live on your property” Like, dude, did you hear what just came out of your mouth? That doesn’t tell you something is very, very wrong here?
I really wish that landlord could be held liable for at least a portion of her lost earnings/ income lost. I feel like “I’m sorry you can’t live on your property” is an admission of SOME kind of culpability. This is to say I hate him almost as much as the actual stalker dude.
I actually think she should consider suing her neighbour.
Fuck yes, Kate Harding. Although I want to read a continuation/response about how this is BY DESIGN, that the people who hate government programs and taxes and wax their dicks rhapsodizing about the power of charity WANT IT THIS WAY. They want to see the groveling. They want the unfortunate to beg. They get off on the power to pronounce who is undeserving and see them denied.
Yeah, I get frustrated to the point of tears about this stuff because people just don’t GET IT. Even a lot of people who would describe themselves as progressive lack the basic historical context to understand why things are so fucked up. Starting at least with Reagan, there has been a deliberate, calculated effort to annihilate public infrastructure and what little social safety net we have, through demonization in the media and relentless defunding (“starving the beast”). THEY WANT GOVERNMENT TO FAIL. None of this is accidental! Look at the VA scandal. “OMG, government can’t do anything right!” Yeah, because you assholes have cut their funding over and over again at the very time the demand for services is skyrocketing! And they know this, and they LOVE seeing it. Because then everyone goes, “BOO BIG GOVERNMENT.”
But in the meantime, there are real, live people who need help! So we form charities to help them, because you just have to. And that feeds into the anti-government crowd’s message. “Looook, see how much more efficient private enterprise is?” YEAH BECAUSE YOU FUCKERS HAVE UNDERMINED IT FROM WITHIN!
…sorry for all the capslocky rage.
God that NS piece was long, though it’s chock full of context. I thought at the time that Goldberg’s article would have been much more accurately titled It’s hard out there for a TERF.
Crap I didn’t mean to read that whole Juliet Jacques piece. It was just too interesting and thoughtful. 🙁
Ugh so many feelings about many of these things.
I am also still thinking about the Bereavement Morning Report, mostly because my dad is not doing so well, and it just keeps bringing up mortality-related things that I don’t want to deal with. Which obviously means I’m dwelling on them.
In more positive news, I was reading a different website yesterday, and was greatly confused about the headlines and the subsequent article content. Why wasn’t it side-splittingly funny and thought-provoking? Where was the insightful, intelligent commentariat?? Oh right. It wasn’t The Toast.
Best wishes to you and your dad!
Thank you!
Nicole, how could you mention your Twitter fight with Rainbow Rowell without also covering Mallory’s terrible internet massacre of poor, poor Anne Helen Peterson?!?!?!
That was a sprightly discussion! I am not mentioning it bc I want them to discuss it on our site, so we can make money from it.
I hope they do!
Ugh, read that stalking story and then checked my facebook to find a message from a man I have never seen before ruminating on my name and appearance 🙁
There’s so much great stuff in this links roundup (maybe even more than usual!) The New Statesman article is really, really good, and really, really well timed because I was having a discussion about trans rights and feminism with my Mum this morning. She’s great, but of an older generation and she’d heard a feminist say some anti-trans things on Women’s Hour which she agreed with, and I didn’t want to just go “NO NO NO YOU ARE WRONG” because it didn’t seem like an approach that would really change her mind, but I wasn’t super-coherent in trying to explain why I disagreed with her, plus I’m cisgender so I can’t really appoint myself as an expert. Anyway, I might try sending her the link, it says things much better than I can.
I WILL RIDE INTO BATTLE FOR OUR LADY THOKOZILE MATILSA MASIPA.
I have never seen that combination of sounds to make a name before, but now I’m imagining shouting it while holding a banner as my horse gallops, and it is very satisfying.
“….every other paragraph is annotated with historical facts, theoretical points and personal recollections, but this just has ‘FUCK OFF’ next to it, underlined.”
This was a significant portion of my assigned reading material in college. Thoughtful note, thoughtful note, FUCK THIS FUCK YOU BURN IT ALL DOWN.
I was just remembering a senior seminar I had in undergrad where I would variously mentally explode, blur out, or mercifully spare the heads of my fellow seminar attendees for their variously nauseating, irritating, or interesting comments. Not the same, but I definitely was like “BURN THESE PHILOSOPHY MAJOR DUDES” down a lot.
On another note, the “have nicer thoughts” self-improvement project of my 20’s appears to have succeeded, so yay!
As someone who used to teach philosophy, I can say with ABSOLUTELY INDUCTIVE CERTAINTY (sorry, bad Hume joke) that 19 year old white male philosophy majors are completely terrible down the last man. In my final year of undergrad I remember a seminar got hijacked by three dudes who got really offended when the prof made a joke about bronies.
But good job on having nicer thoughts! I have yet to try that.
I was recently in South Africa and some friends there said that Pistorius is legally entitled to his blades. But the blades are not allowed in prison, and therefore there is a loophole that basically means there is no prison in SA that can hold him. They think he’ll get house arrest or something equally infuriating.
The FUCK you say?
Set up the stocks; everything below the knee is out of prison, everything above inside.
Of course if you spend the year with only 5/6 of yourself in prison it only counts 5/6 of a year towards your sentence, mind
I saw Helen DeWitt in New York the evening after she laid charges against E for breaking in with the gun. She asked us to excuse her for being a little frazzled. She said that she had wanted to bring her chainsaw with her, but that the Amtrak people had made her leave it in a locker; she wanted to show us the chainsaw because it was beautifully functional and an example of how much more sensibly we use hardware than software. She talked about gyms and restaurants as potential models for language-learning, and about check-out lines as social machines; also Perl, R, and football. The last thing she talked about was bridge, and she seemed to say that, if only there were as clear a system for signaling sexual interest as there is for signaling plays in bridge, the whole situation with E could have been avoided. I wondered at the time if that was really the case, since in my experience people who don’t want to read signals don’t read them, no matter how clear they are, and having read this piece — I really don’t think that the clarity of signals was the problem.
Correct. Clarity of signal is not the problem. A stalker hears what he wants to hear. “So she ‘never wants to hear from’ me again. Well, until her mood changes. I’ll check with her again next month.”
Hey guys Nic Pizzolatto doesn’t care that True Detective treated women terribly, he has a friend with a vagina who said don’t worry so it’s all fine.
“Such criticism incenses Pizzolatto. Those who hammer the character of Marty’s wife, Maggie, played by Michelle Monaghan, for being flimsy are missing the point. If her point of view had been shown and she had remained a lightweight, he acknowledges, then those jibes would have more validity. But the first season, he argues, was conceived as a close point-of-view show, wholly told through the eyes and experiences of the two male characters. “You can either accept that about the show or not, but it’s not a phony excuse,” he says, unable to hide his frustration.”
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/true-detect…
Being in the dating world maybe increases the risk, but my stalker stalked me when I was in high school, before I ever dated anybody.
It is a good hour past the time I was going to go to bed, so I will just leave this here, re: Ligotti, and go away. (Nick Mamatas is an author and editor and I understand his blog has generally been considered a good source of writing industry gossip. That is at least part of the reason why I follow it, anyway.)
I don’t know if this has already been mentioned, but Helen DeWitt (the woman with the horrifying stalker and the LRB essay) is GREAT. Her book The Last Samurai is 1) totally unrelated to the Tom Cruise movie, and 2) amazing.
(90's, not 70's)
Thank you. I want to say it wasn't that bad, because I never felt violently threatened, and at the time it consumed my every thought only when I was at work, and it was dealt with very cleanly once I finally told somebody. But I've reexamined the experience in the past year or so, and I should have been more scared. Maybe I was a bit of a naive teenager, maybe I actually was that scared and I'm just repressing it now, I don't know.
Basically, this guy made some unwanted advances to me while I was at work. Well, actually, I can count our interactions on one hand, but he was just always there, and he stared at me a lot, and libraries are public spaces in weird ways, and I was 17 and had no idea how to handle it. So I ignored him. Or rather, I was hyper-aware every minute of my twice-a-week four-hour shifts for about three months, until my boss read the comment card the guy had written about me and asked me about it. I told him what had happened, then I went home and told my parents, and the guy never came back to the library. I guess they banned him or something? I didn't ask. The fact I keep coming up against now and feeling scared in retrospect, is that he knew where I lived.