Noli Irritare Leones

The story: this guy named Kyle Payne has set himself up as a male radical feminist, activist against porn, works on rape prevention. And then it turns out that, while a resident advisor in a dorm, he sexually assaulted a woman who was passed out drunk. Not, sexually assaulted as in, he’s accused of that, but innocent until proven guilty, and the accusation may turn out to be wrong. Sexually assaulted as in, he apparently filmed himself doing stuff with her breasts and the like, while she was unconscious, and the evidence was found on his laptop hard drive. Sexually assaulted as in, he actually pleaded guilty to an invasion of privacy charge, something people tend not to do if the evidence wasn’t there.

And also, not, he sexually assaulted a passed out drunk student that he was supposed to be assisting as a resident advisor as in, he did this years ago, and he’s deeply repentant, and it’s his deep realization of the wrong he did that makes him realize the importance of working against all kinds of sexual assault. But rather, as in, he sexually assaulted a passed out drunk student as in, he was arrested for the incident in February, just pleaded guilty, and is still blogging away about his work to protect women against the sexual depredations of those other evil predator men, as if nothing happened.

So, super creepy.

But what I wanted to talk about was something belledame said, in the Eleanor’s Trousers thread about the incident, because it’s something that’s come up before.

see, this is what happens when you deny the shadow. and are an enormous fucking bastard person, of course. ugh.

There’s a story that has stuck in my mind, one of many told about the Catholic priest sex abuse scandals. A woman wrote that she was listening to a priest talk, and someone asked him if he had any difficulty keeping to his celibacy vow. And he hesitated, then confessed, with a catch in his voice, that sometimes it was hard to see other people raising children, and to know that he’d live out his life childless. Touching. The audience was moved. But no difficulty with celibacy that had anything, you know, to do with finding it difficult to do without sex. And the woman said that alarm bells had gone off for her – this guy is lying – and that, sure enough, he was later exposed as an abuser.

belledame quotes from a post by Kyle Payne about anger.

For as long as I can remember, I have been told that I do not get
angry – as an activist, a friend, a lover, and as a colleague. I
assure you now that this perception is simply not true….

Only, it turns out, his version of anger is to be moved to piteous tears at other men’s abuse of women. A version of anger about which belledame is skeptical.

Well, okay then, I…tend to find people of any gender who disown anger as such (no, really, tears of sorrow aren’t anger) kind of creepy, but…whatevs, get down with your sensitive self, I guess….

And, though it definitely doesn’t, of itself, set up the kind of warning bells for me that say, “hey, this guy is going to turn out to have assaulted a woman and videotaped it,” yeah, the whole tears of sorrow entry does strike me, too, as a kind of denying the shadow, oh, I’m ever so sensitive, I don’t really get angry the way the rest of you non-saintly folks do (even if he does start it off by saying, yes, I get angry like the whole rest of the world).

And yet, I’ve been at the receiving end (when I was younger, anyway) of, you don’t get angry the way you’re supposed to. Or you don’t express anger that you must have. And my reaction sometimes was, no, I’m really not angry. Except maybe at you, for insisting I have to be angry about this other thing. No, I’ve examined myself, and I’m really not angry about this. I’m not going to have you make me be angry about this. And I imagine that kind of pressure is worse for men who genuinely are more readily moved to tears of sorrow than the average man, and less readily moved to a more masculine display of anger.

It’s tempting to expect other people’s shadow to be exactly our shadow, or at any rate to include everything we ourselves think or feel that might be not altogether on the socially approved list. And if you don’t want that, you’re in denial. Small things, sometimes, other times large. Come on, loosen up, have some fun, have a drink (but I’m not being a prude and I don’t need to loosen up, I just don’t enjoy drinking the way I enjoy chocolate). Or, from a guy, in an online chat, you say you prefer brains in a man, but come on, admit it, if you met a really cute, but dumb guy in a bar you’d go home with him (no, I don’t admit it, I’ve never gone home with a guy I met in a bar, and I’ve never slept with anyone I thought to be cute but dumb). And, sometimes I just don’t like the things you like, or just don’t feel the things you feel, in a particular situation, and it’s not because I’m afraid to admit to being bad, or because I’m claiming to never be angry, or never lustful, or never interested in any sort of shallow pleasure – it’s just that I’m not you.

And then there are the times you’re skeeved out by something someone says, that sounds like major denial, and that “he’s lying” (or “she’s lying”) intuition turns out to be right. There are the times when you think, as belledame put it

That the flip side of all this is, well, something a lot darker and uglier. That I just don’t trust someone who goes on and on and ON about how TERRIBLE and ALL PERVASIVE all the misogyny in the world is, specifically the -sexualized- misogyny, of course; and only a handful of feminist celebrities and their adoring male acolytes can put things to right….

and the flip side turns out to be something darker and uglier even that whatever you vaguely suspected. Today it’s a guy presenting himself as an earnest and sensitive male radical feminist. Another time it’s a guy presenting himself as a good churchgoing soul. It could be Father Geoghan, or it could be Ted Bundy, working on that suicide hot line. People who present as one form or another of good or noble, sensitive or helpful or pious, who perhaps make their way into helping professions or volunteer work or church activity, but in fact, there’s a much more predatory side than they’re showing.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 7:03 am and is filed under Feminism, News and Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.