In light of the bullshit the xkit guy went through, I needed to get my feelings out about callout culture via a wordy comic. I am so, so tired of the culture of fear Tumblr raises - if you don’t take literally everything the underdog victim says 100% as truth, then you are horrible trash? It’s bullshit.
It’s good to believe a victim! But it’s also good to exercise a bit of scrutiny, and to make sure you understand the other side of the story. People take advantage of and manipulate the willingness to believe victims, and that leads to a lot of misinformation spread at lightning speed with social media. Caution absolutely needs to be undertaken when serious claims are presented. Do you really want to be responsible for ruining someone’s life before you couldn’t take half a fucking second to try to verify the information? Verifying it doesn’t automatically mean you’re taking the side of a potential abuser! It means that you care about the truth - which, to me at least, is pretty important.
When callouts happen, especially ones made in spite, what people rely on is for the subject of the callout to be ostracized and for people to revoke their support. That was explicitly asked for in my case. In the community of artists I have worked so hard to make myself known in, well-known artists encouraged people to not even talk to me, to not ask “what the fuck is the deal with this huge callout, can you actually explain this or what’s going on”. They encouraged accepting it without question, and if you didn’t? You’d be picked off next, as an “abuse apologist” - because that’s it, isn’t it? Once you got half the story, that’s all you need on Tumblr if it sounds bad enough. Even better if it’s about someone “popular”.
Instantly, the subject of the callout is dehumanized, and people treat it like it’s A-OK to send tons of horrible messages in the person’s inbox, to spread the gossip as far as they can– because it’s deserved, right?
And once people breach that threshold, there’s not often any coming back. People don’t often apologize for being a piece of shit to someone they think deserves it. Which, you know, means they don’t actually want to find out what might have really happened in a situation where they’ve already made some very polarizing statements. Because then they’d have attacked a person who didn’t deserve that, and that’s… why, that’s abusive, isn’t it? But it’s definitely not abusive if the person deserves it. (That’s sarcasm.)
I’m just tired of seeing it. I’m tired of existing around people who do this. I’m tired of moderately known artists abusing their own power and their own audience for the sake of making their followers too afraid to try to think for themselves. A question like “was there actually any abuse?” becomes unthinkable, and so a bunch of young people suddenly are finding themselves encouraged to not rock the boat. Or they’ll be next.
It’s all fucked up. Sometimes I’m kind of bad at communicating, but I try very hard. Sometimes it takes me a while to get a message across. I’d like to think I try as hard as most people at being a good friend and a good person. I like learning ways in which I can do better, as a friend, and as a person. I expect a lot of others around me because I expect even more of myself.
So it killed a lot off inside of me that’s taken months to cultivate again, months ago. Artists I admired, people I was friends with - in an instant, they decided the thing to do was go “yep this must be true, sounds horrifying and once I had a bad vibe”. Very few people actually asked me about what happened. A lot of people were too scared to even say anything because they didn’t want to be labeled a fucking abuse apologist.
And that’s pretty fucked up. This is why callouts are not to be thrown around, especially with regards to abuse. I was so angry about it at the time because I had tried so hard to be as supportive as I could during that relationship. You can ask the other two people who I’m still dating about how much I cared about that person. They were around every step of the way, through all of my happiness and sadness over the situation. My big fucking mistake was venting in a public place about all of my feelings to do with the breakup. That was my huge “communication error”, but I couldn’t even talk to my ex at that point anyway because I’d been blocked, so I had no way of communicating it to him. Regardless, writing post-breakup feelings, no matter how true I find them still, is a really bad idea to stick anywhere public. Even on my side blog I didn’t realize anyone read.
I don’t know. Finally I feel strong enough as a person to talk about this. I’m so tired of people hiding behind anon to spread the same tired “PK is an abuser” line - heaven fucking forbid they attach their words to a name that can be held accountable for its actions.
I don’t really know what more can be expected of me than I already give. I am pretty blunt and literal and I like being that way because it means I’m putting all of my feelings out there - so what’s really hard for me to deal with is people reading my words with insincerity. Please don’t - nothing riles me up more than insincerity.
Anyway, for the sake of everyone in the future, don’t fucking mash reblog on a post calling someone out without putting time and effort into research. Seriously. It takes literal seconds to start the snowball of ruining someone’s life, so please hold back from an instant reblog.
Please don’t rebuke people for trying to figure out the truth of a situation, either. It’s always a good thing to get both sides of a story. Sometimes you’ll find that the other half of the story only confirms what you originally thought, but sometimes you’ll find you would have been acting like a complete fucking jackass if it had been wrong.
Recently, my husband and I burned through S1 of Orphan Black, which, as promised by virtually the entire internet, was awesome. But in all the praise I’d seen for it, a line from one review in particular stuck in my mind. The reviewer noted that, although the protagonist, Sarah, is an unlikeable character, her grifter skills make her perfectly suited to unravelling the mystery in which she finds herself. And as this was a positive review, I kept that quote in mind when we started watching, sort of by way of prewarning myself: you maybe won’t like Sarah, but that’s OK.
But here’s the thing: I fucking loved Sarah. I mean, I get what the reviewer was trying to say, in that she’s not always a sympathetic character, but that’s not the same as her actually being unlikeable. And the more I watched, the more I found myself thinking: why is this quality, the idea of likeability, considered so important for women, but so optional for men – not just in real life, but in narrative? Because when it comes to guys, we have whole fandoms bending over backwards to write soulful meta humanising male characters whose actions, regardless of their motives, are far less complex than monstrous. We take male villains and redeem them a hundred, a thousand times over – men who are murderers, stalkers, abusers, kinslayers, traitors, attempted or successful rapists; men with personal histories so bloody and tortured, it’s like looking at a battlefield. In doing this, we exhibit enormous compassion for and understanding of the nuances of human behaviour – sympathy for circumstance, for context, for motive and character and passion and rage, the heartache and, to steal a phrase, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to; and as such, regardless of how I might feel about the practice as applied in specific instances, in general, it’s a praiseworthy endeavour. It helps us to see human beings, not as wholly black and white, but as flawed and complicated creatures, and we need to do that, because it’s what we are.
But when it comes to women, a single selfish or not-nice act – a stolen kiss, a lie, a brushoff – is somehow enough to see them condemned as whores and bitches forever. We readily excuse our favourite male characters of murder, but if a woman politely turns down a date with someone she has no interest in, she’s a timewasting user bimbo and god, what does he even see in her? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen some great online meta about, for instance, the soulfulness and moral ambiguity of Black Widow, but I’ve also seen a metric fucktonne more about what that particular jaw-spasm means in that one GIF of Cumberbatch/Ackles/Hiddleston/Smith alone, and that’s before you get into the pages-long pieces about why Rumplestiltskin or Hook or Spike or Bucky Barnes or whoever is really just a tortured woobie who needs a hug. Hell, I’m guilty of writing some of that stuff myself, because see above: plus, it’s meaty and fun and exactly the kind of analysis I like to write.
And yet, we tend overwhelmingly not to write it about ladies. It’s not just our cultural obsession with pushing increasingly specific variants of the Madonna/Whore complex onto women, such that audiences are disinclined to extend to female characters the same moral/emotional licenses they extend to men; it’s also a failure to create narratives where the women aren’t just flawed, but where the audience is still encouraged to like them when they are.
Returning to Orphan Black, for instance, if Sarah were male, he’d be unequivocally viewed as either a complex, sympathetic antihero or a loving battler with a heart of gold. I mean, the ex-con trying to go straight and get his daughter back while still battling the illegalities of his old life and punching bad guys? Let me introduce you to Swordfish, Death Race, and about a millionty other stories where a father’s separation from a beloved child, whether as a consequence of his actual criminal actions, shiftless neglect, sheer bad luck or a combination of all three, is never couched as a reason why he might not be a fit parent. We tend to accept, both culturally and narratively, that men who abandon their children aren’t automatically bad dads; they just have other, important things to be doing first, like coming to terms with parenthood, saving the world, escaping from prison or otherwise getting their shit together. But Sarah, who left her child in the care of someone she trusted absolutely, has to jump through hoops to prove her maternal readiness on returning; has to answer for her absence over and over again. And on one level, that’s fine; that’s as it should be, because Sarah’s life is dangerous. And yet, her situation stands in glaring contrast to every returning father who’s never been asked to do half so much, because women aren’t meant to struggle with motherhood, to have to try to succeed: we’re either maternal angels or selfish absentees, and the idea that we might sometimes be both or neither isn’t one you often see depicted with such nuance.
I think this is best piece on Orphan Black and Sarah that I have ever read. Seriously. I see them fandom going “Yeah, Sarah is cool, but that one time she lied/ran away/tricked people/shot someone” and I am like “shit are you even paying attention to this wonderful complex deep character?” And this just explained why that bothered me so much
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