Category: you asshole

To keep the internet free — while becoming richer, faster, than anyone in history — the technological elite needed something to attract billions of users to the ads they were selling. And that something, it turns out, was outrage. As Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, points out, anger is the emotion most effective at driving “engagement” — which also makes it, in a market for attention, the most profitable one. By creating a self-perpetuating loop of shock and recrimination, social media further polarized what had already seemed, during the Obama years, an impossibly and irredeemably polarized country.

“The Internet Apologizes…” by Noah Kulwin, 4/13/2018

A dickwad said what?

I hate that I am expending time and energy on the latest (and hopefully last) controversy generated by a person who gets way more attention than a garden-variety bully with an acute case of potty-mouth like him deserves.

And yet it sickens me to see not only the usual apologists for predatory male sexuality, but people who should know better, defending this shitsack.

So yeah yeah, the right was totally fine with his ongoing, virulent misogyny, racism, and other sickening trolling for attention. Honestly, is it news to anyone on the left that conservatives are overwhelmingly misogynist and racist? If it is, y’all have seriously not been paying attention. But now that they have dumped his sorry ass, you’re mad at them for taking issue with support for pedophilia? It’s a low bar, sure, but honestly I was relieved to see they had one.

Dickwad claims he was misquoted, his words were taken out of context, even that he was guilty of “sloppy phrasing.” But watch this interview (if you can stand to). He’s unambiguously arguing that gay and straight sex between adults and young teens is fine. Maybe that’s because he is an abuse survivor, maybe that’s not what he really thinks, maybe he reconsidered later watching his career go down in flames, but the fact remains that those words, in a public broadcast widely available on the internet, provide support for pedophiles and pedophile apologists, of which there are plenty on both the right and the left. Male sexual predation on girls and teen women is a huge problem. I personally know many women whose psychological, social, and sexual lives have been severely damaged if not ruined by males who felt entitled to abuse them sexually as girls or teens. One quantifiable aspect of this problem is the fact that sixty percent of the fathers of children born to females aged 15-17 were three or more years older.

And I hate to tell you, but gay people doing it doesn’t make it OK. I had an intense emotional entanglement with a high school teacher at age 17, and believe me, I was in no way psychologically prepared for a sexual relationship with someone in her 30s.

Despite how people love to focus on the motivations of the victim where sex is concerned (“those shameless unwed mothers!” “women have a right to sell their bodies!” “children have sexual feelings and who are we to deny them that!” “the bottom controls the scene!”) pedophilia and sexual abuse are about power, not about the desires or actions of children or teens. In a culture that fetishizes youth and still struggles with a legacy of puritanism about sex, it’s true there’s little healthy discussion of adults’ inappropriate desires towards teens. But rational adults know that you don’t take advantage of young people’s desires for your own gratification. Young people need and deserve time to explore sexuality on their own or with peers, if they want to, before they can honestly choose a relationship with someone several years older than them. If you’re a 29-year-old who believes a 15-year-old is a viable sexual partner for you, you are a predator, full stop. And anyone, gay or straight, who says differently deserves to lose their public platform, even if the ones who take it away only do so because they think gay sex is icky.