\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHey I didn\u2019t want to hijack argumate\u2019s post but since I\u2019m discussing the concept of \u201cyou wouldn\u2019t want to ruin his life over one mistake\u201d:
\nPriest (the MC at defcon for 20 or so years) asked if I\u2019d be willing \nto let myself be used as bait and get assaulted at DefCon because months\n of threatening emails weren\u2019t reason enough to ban Stever, a dude who \nhad repeatedly said he was going to follow me home, told me he\u2019d see me \nat defcon, and (charmingly) asked when he could taste my pussy.
\nI \nwaited years to go public and start naming names because \u201cit would \nreflect badly on the conference\u201d and \u201cmight make it seem like DefCon \nwasn\u2019t safe\u201d and \u201cthey were working on fixing things behind the scenes \nbut didn\u2019t want to draw attention to the changes.\u201d
\nDon\u2019t go to \nDefCon. They\u2019ve got a crisis line now but if you getting hurt there has \neven the tiniest chance of making the con look bad they\u2019re more than \nwilling to try to discredit you or ignore you and will pretend you never\n said anything (once again, in spite of lots of emails; i save my \ndocumentation, fuckers).
\nAlso if you do go and you hear anything \nabout former security goon Flea being nearby make sure you\u2019re wearing \npants because he has no problem shooting upskirts and publishing them.
\nI totally want to ruin these lives. They kind of ruined mine. They made it hard for me to be part of the scene and destroyed a lot of friendships and kind of tore apart my support network and dismissing me as a crank or a crazy bitch with an agenda has worked really well for them.
\nSure. I do have an agenda: I\u2019d like it if there was never another 20-year-old at a conference having Flea yell at her that her panties ruined his photo and I\u2019d like it if there was never another 20-year-old at a conference being fed a tremendous amount of alcohol by the goons and getting heckled into taking her tits out. I\u2019d like it if every asshole who ever sent an email that said \u201cI\u2019m going to follow you home from the meetup and there\u2019s nothing you can do to stop me\u201d regretted sending that email.
\nThat\u2019s my agenda. Yell until that doesn\u2019t happen at these things anymore.
\nSupport the Fuck Those Guys agenda.
\nalso inb4 \u201cbut wimmens r 2 sensitive and can\u2019t take a joke\u201d
\nDefCon also spent decades covering up the sexual assault of teenage boys because John Draper AKA Captain Goddamned Crunch was too important to the community to listen to \u201crumors.\u201d
\nWhen SIX dudes finally were able to put together a united front and say \u201cUh, hey, this actually happened and we told you\u201d DefCon claimed that they\u2019d never gotten any sort of formal reports so they couldn\u2019t do anything.
\nWhich is when I stepped in saying \u201cyou didn\u2019t do anything about these very specific formal reports that I made either, and also you don\u2019t have a formal reporting process listed anywhere - what I did was based on the specific instructions given to me by your head of security, who never acted on them.\u201d
\nDefCon has a LONG history of ignoring reports of sexual assault and harassment from all sorts of people.
\ngiven that few organisations are going to have a zero percent rate of bad actors, a zero percent rate of punishing bad actors suggests they\u2019re still at large.
\n
I guess what hangs me up here is\u2026 I just can\u2019t imagine taking my or my low-ranking friends\u2019 side against a celebrity\u2019s desire? Like I grew up in the 80s-90s when \u201ccelebrity!\u201d was apparently the new thing
(Think of it like \u201csure there\u2019d always been an [X] fandom but\u2026\u201d and start with \u201cMarvel\u201d to calibrate yourselves today and then imagine \u201cmovies and rock & roll\u201d)
But that was the real heirarchy, the one that mattered, the one things should be lined up by, not the old square \u201cFaMiLy VaLuEs, huh-hyuk let\u2019s care about normies who are trying to repress people to have a proper domain they didn\u2019t earn and want to give up and settle in for life rather than keep struggling\u201d
(this, and the sense of \u201cperforming celebrity exempts you from normie-level shit\u201d explains the things that followed in the \u201800s \u2013 party photographers and Studio 54 pastiche, reality TV, blogs and early influencers)
And from there the idea of subcultures, everyone could be part of their own scene and rise to the top and earn the deserts of a celebrity at a local level
Which were apparently more prima nocte than I thought? But I guess I accepted that, I remember a time in LA a girl kept urgently telling the story of bugging out from Jack Nicholson\u2019s hot tub and we were like wait you turned down sex with Jack Nicholson?
And yeah he was wrinkly and I thought it wasn\u2019t fair that only girls were expected to bear that burden so I made a point of hacking myself into the mindset of committing to go down on an unattractive Stevie Nicks if she ordered me to even though there was no spark on my end because she was Stevie fucking Nicks and she outranked me
And that still strikes me as the correct response, that brings about the good world
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